Driving Rain: A Rain Chaser Novel

by Sierra Dean

  I stuffed the pizza in my mouth. Ta-da!

  When I finished chewing the bite, she still hadn’t moved. She was sitting on the chair backwards, her chin resting on her folded arms, looking so comfortable I worried she intended to stay for a while.

  “Uh, hello?” I was wary of saying too much more.

  There was clearly something important on her mind, which usually wasn’t a great sign for me. Expectations were my least-favorite thing a person could put on my shoulders. No matter what happened, someone was going to be disappointed.

  My money was on the wide-eyed teenager sitting beside me.

  “I’m Sawyer.” She said it so matter-of-factly it almost felt like she was offering it as an explanation rather than a greeting.

  When I didn’t reply right away, Leo took the lead. “I’m Leo. The human garbage disposal is Tallulah.”

  Sawyer was nodding, her attention entirely for me. “I want your help,” she announced.

  I set my pizza on my plate and wiped the grease off my fingers, then gave Leo a quick a little assistance here glance. He pretended not to know what I was silently commanding and sat back in his chair, watching the Sawyer and Tallulah show unfold.

  “Look, kid, I’ll do my best, but I’m not sure there’s much I can do for you. I can’t strike down people you dislike with lightning or anything.”

  I could. But I wouldn’t.

  She made a face, and something told me I’d insulted her with my suggestion.

  “I want to come with you. When you leave.”

  Leo let out a bark of laughter before I was even able to process what she was saying. “Trust me, kid, you don’t want that. Being on the road with her is not at all the great time you’re imagining for yourself.”

  I’d be offended if he wasn’t totally right. “You can’t come with me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Off the top of my head there are about a hundred thousand reasons. One, I just met you. What if you’re a psycho? Two, you’re a teenager. Go to school. Three, what about your mom?”

  “Yvonne? She’s my foster mom. She’s nice and all, but she’s not, like, my real mom.” This sort of information might be painful for some kids to admit, but Sawyer just spouted it off the way some people talk about the weather.

  “What about school? Friends? You have a life here.” Again I looked at Leo, hoping he might jump in and save me.

  “I want to do what you do,” she said, and the earnestness in her voice almost broke my heart in half.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do. I saw you put out that fire. You help people, I want to help people.”

  How could I best explain to her that last month, at Seth’s urging, I had made it rain so hard in Florida that a road was washed out, that people’s homes were destroyed? I did that because the god of storms was in a rage and demanded I make the world tremble in his presence.

  Whether or not I helped people was entirely incidental most days.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking. You have no idea what this life is, Sawyer. And more importantly, you can’t do what I do. Clerics are predestined for their roles.”

  She gave a huge sigh. “But—”

  “No.”

  She looked about as hurt as if I’d kicked her puppy, but she didn’t move. Instead she fixed her eyes on Leo. “He’s not a cleric.”

  Suddenly aware he was now her focus, he grew visibly uncomfortable under the weight of her stare. “I’m not.”

  “But you still get to go with her.”

  It was his turn to silently beg me for assistance.

  Fat chance, buddy.

  “My situation is a little bit different.”

  “How?” Man alive, this girl was like a dog with a bone, absolutely relentless.

  “Well, for starters, my dad is her boss.”

  “Like, he’s temple management or something?”

  “Uhhh.”

  “His dad is Seth,” I said. There was no sense in dodging the truth. This girl was out for answers, or at least excuses she believed. “Leo is with me so he can see for himself what it is Seth has me do. And, Leo, would you say I spend a lot of time on humanitarian work?”

  “No.”

  “No,” I repeated. “Look, Sawyer, you seem like a good kid, I think. I’ve only known you for five minutes. But this isn’t the kind of life where I can just bring along a fifteen-year-old, you know?”

  Except that was exactly how old I’d been when I started learning my role firsthand. Why did Sawyer come across as so much younger to me?

  Because she was still innocent, in spite of how terrible her life may have been up until now.

  “I want to do something that matters,” she whispered. There were tears in her eyes, and I could tell she was fighting hard to keep them from falling.

  Shit.

  “You can’t come with us,” I said firmly. “And you can never be a Rain Chaser. But if you think you want to be part of a temple, you’re allowed to join as a trainee priestess when you turn eighteen. Honestly, the priestesses do more work to help people than anything I do on a daily basis.”

  This was true too. The temple worked with local charities and did a lot of donations within Seattle using the surplus income from tithes that wasn’t needed to support Seth’s lackeys and keep the temple in good shape. Giving back to the community helped with his reputation in ways he couldn’t possibly understand.

  That was what the temple was for, after all. Maintaining the illusion Seth was a god of the people and could be appealed to in times of need. A false sense of approachability was what kept people tithing their prayers. It kept me working.

  It kept him relevant.

  There was nothing scarier than a god who fell out of popularity. No one prays to forgotten gods. No one gives them gifts or promises of obedience. The only power a god had was in the belief that others project onto them. When gods are forgotten, they become Shades. Immortal creatures without name or shape, just the sensation of menace.

  The need to be remembered was why gods let themselves manifest however people wanted to see them. Seth was Seth, but also Thor, Tlaloc, and Iya. He had so many names I could barely keep them all straight. Wherever he went in the world they imagined him differently, and that was how he appeared to them. The beautiful Nordic blond. The strong, imposing Egyptian. For every name there was a face, and for every face there were those who worshipped it, drew it, turned it into statues and paintings and idols.

  If you had a hundred names, there was a good chance at least one of them would live on forever.

  “But I want to see the world. I don’t want to be in a temple.”

  This made me laugh, and I knew right away it was the wrong thing to do, but I couldn’t help it. “See the world? Sawyer, I spend about eight hundred hours a year in my car. Whenever I see anything, it’s raining. I regularly get struck by lightning, and it hurts so badly it leaves scars all over my skin. I’m not allowed to have a boyfriend. I’m not allowed to have any life outside what Seth and the temple-minders want from me. I’m a glorified hand puppet. You don’t want my life. Stay here until you’re eighteen, then go somewhere else. Live a real life. Have real problems. Fall in love. Move around. Be free. If you think what I have is freedom or a life worth living, you’re out of your mind.”

  This was a little hyperbolic, but I was trying to scare her off. She didn’t need to know about my sweet apartment.

  When she didn’t move, I added, “I spend every night on the road staying at shitty motels. I eat shitty food. I have no friends. Sometimes I go a whole week and the only conversation I have is with Fen.”

  “You could have me, then.” Her face brightened, as if this was going to be the argument that finally won me over to her side.

  “Go home, Sawyer.”

  “Tallulah, please.”

  I slapped my hand on the table, and the sound was so loud it made her jump. I had tried to be nice about this. I’d given her the honest approach and e
xplained that what she was asking for wasn’t the dream life she expected. I’d even attempted using a simple no. Nothing was working.

  “This life isn’t for you.” I kept my gaze locked on hers and maintained a cold tone. She couldn’t think there was even a flicker of sympathy in me, or she’d never let this go. “I don’t want you with me.”

  Without another word she pushed her chair back, wooden legs squealing loudly against the tile floor, and ran out of the restaurant. She got out before the tears started to fall.

  “Real nice.” Leo watched her go.

  “Shut up.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next morning the sky was a perfect, untouched blue on the road to Las Vegas.

  It was the kind of stunning, gorgeous fall sky that I spent nights dreaming about, where the sunshine warmed your skin and the color on the horizon was a cerulean that should have been impossible outside of a paint tube.

  My world was so often colored in shades of slate, gunmetal, pewter, and silver. Blue was a rarity. Now that I didn’t have any literal fires to put out, I could actually enjoy the bright sunshine and open road.

  We’d be a couple days early for the convention, but I honestly preferred the idea of going ahead to Vegas rather than returning to Seattle to make the trip all over again on the weekend. I’d saved enough money by getting the motel in Lovelock for free that Sido couldn’t complain about me going over my per diem. Plus the hotels in Las Vegas offered great rates for visiting clerics. I guess they wanted to look extra accommodating to the gods?

  Not sure who that benefited besides me.

  Fen made a slightly discomfited chirrup noise from the backseat, something he’d been doing every half hour or so since we’d left the town in our rearview. Now, however, he was getting noisier and noisier about it.

  I pulled in at a small, dusty gas station and turned off the car, lifting his carrier over the seat and onto my lap. “You okay, buddy?”

  He whined.

  “Okay, break time,” I announced. “I think he has some business to attend to.”

  “That makes two of us.” Leo climbed out of the passenger seat and moved towards the little store.

  There were two restrooms on the outside, and I would have rather been struck by lightning twelve times in a row than go pee in one of them. We were only about three hours away from Vegas at this point, so if I played my cards right, I could avoid using rest stops for the whole trip.

  A fancy hotel bathroom with sparkling white tiles and no secret peepholes for video cameras was far more my style.

  I’d recently watched a special report on the things that went on in highway rest stops and no longer had any interest in setting foot in one again.

  I walked a short distance from the car and let Fen out of his carrier. He might be as hyper as a toddler in a sugar factory, but I also knew he’d be smart enough not to run onto the highway. He did have some common sense.

  He sniffed around a bit, did his business, then before I could get him back in the carrier he bolted for the car.

  “Sonofa…” I chased after him. He was small, and he wasn’t going very far.

  In fact, once he got to the Charger, he stopped at the back, hopping slightly, trying to jump up on the rear fender. He was still making the little worried whining noise he’d been making in the car, which I was starting to realize had absolutely nothing to do with having to pee.

  My heart sank into my stomach the longer he whined at the trunk.

  “No.” I wasn’t sure who I was talking to. It didn’t really matter. I already knew what I’d find. “No no no.”

  I grabbed my keys from the ignition and came back to the trunk, holding my breath while I fiddled for the right key on my ring. If you count to five, it’ll be empty when you open it.

  One.

  Two.

  Fen whined again, scratching at the leg of my jeans.

  Three.

  I took a deep breath and realized I was holding the keys so hard they’d started to dig into my palm.

  Four.

  Leo had returned from the store with a coffee cup in hand and a puzzled expression on his face. “What are you doing?”

  I didn’t answer, and instead slid the key into the lock.

  Five.

  I popped open the trunk, and she made a little eep noise, trying to make herself invisible while shielding her eyes from the sun.

  Leo came to stand beside me, peering into the trunk, where Sawyer was curled up in a ball, pretending she wasn’t totally busted.

  “Shit.” He sipped his coffee.

  “Shit indeed.”

  We both stared down at the girl—the stowaway minor we had technically kidnapped—and I debated how I should react. I ultimately landed on offering her my hand and helping her climb out. She’d made herself a little nest among our bags, which meant she must have jumped in when we went to return our keys to Yvonne that morning.

  A million angry thoughts swirled around in my head, but given how terrified and guilty she looked right then, I decided to hold off on the yelling. At least for a few minutes.

  “Do you need any water?” I asked instead. It had to be over a hundred degrees in that trunk. She was covered in a film of sweat, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the heat or her fear over having been caught.

  She nodded.

  Leo didn’t wait to be asked. He went back into the store and returned a moment later with a few chilled bottles of water. As soon as Sawyer had hers she drank it back with an unmasked thirst, taking swallows that were so hard they must have hurt her throat. When the whole bottle was gone, she sat on the open mouth of the trunk and stared at her boots.

  “Please don’t send me back.”

  “Fine. I’ll leave you here.” I nudged her out of the way and shut the trunk lid again, securing it firmly.

  Fen was furiously sniffing at Sawyer’s boots, a pair of scuffed Doc Martens identical to ones I’d owned at her age.

  What was it about being a teenager that made every generation rebel in the same way? Weird haircuts, ugly clothes. So much of her was a mirror of who I’d been when I was fifteen and wanted to spit in the universe’s eye.

  “You can’t leave me,” she squealed, her voice edging into an octave of pure panic. “Leo? She can’t leave me, right?” She gave him an imploring, desperate look. The kind that made men do really stupid shit because they felt compelled to save someone.

  “She won’t leave you.” He patted her shoulder comfortingly.

  “I’ll leave both of you,” I corrected. “I didn’t ask for him to join me in the first place. I can live without both of you just fine.”

  “Tallulah, please.” Suddenly she was at my side, gripping my arm, and that pleading, pathetic look she’d given Leo moments earlier was all for me. “Don’t send me back. I need your help.”

  I stood next to my car door and stared at her as impassively as I could manage. I was beyond angry. I wanted to shake her until some common sense rattled free. But I also felt for her, and she was only a kid. There had to be a way to handle this without being cruel to her.

  “Does Yvonne hurt you?” I asked, my voice level and emotionless.

  “What? No.”

  “Are you being used for slave labor of some kind? Is the town filled with cultists who sacrifice goats to the dark gods? Or sell off the organs of people passing in the night? Or otherwise do anything that’s so fucked up you can’t possibly spend another day of your life there?”

  Her cheeks flushed bright red, and she stared at her shoes again. “No.”

  “Did I tell you that you could come with me?” I shrugged her hand off my arm.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “So what gave you the idea that I would be so over the moon to find you in the trunk of my car that I would change my mind?” My anger was bubbling to the surface now. I couldn’t help the short fuse I had, it was all part of what made me who I was, and a Rain Chaser was always going to be temperamental and a little me
an.

  The gods made me this way. She was just going to have to deal with it.

  Better she learned now that this wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows and adventure. Sawyer had it in her head this was a better life than the one she’d left behind, and maybe what she needed in order to get that out of her system was to see what my life was really like.

  Instead of answering, she lifted the hem of her shirt and showed me a red scar, about two inches in diameter, on her hip.

  “What is that?” All of my bluster faded, replaced with a sudden wave of nervous curiosity. Something about the size of the scar was bothering me.

  “You want to know why I’m in foster care?” She let her shirt drop. When I didn’t answer, she continued anyway. “My mom was a junkie. Prostitute. Whatever. You’ve heard the sob stories I’m sure. Point is I wasn’t born in a hospital, I was born in some shitty bathroom at a place like this.” She gestured towards the gas station.

  “Sawyer, you don’t need to expla—” Leo didn’t get a chance to finish. Sawyer went ahead.

  “She saw something on me when I was born.”

  My breath caught in my throat. I didn’t need to be psychic to know where this was going. I’d heard stories like this before.

  “I had a mark on me.”

  Leo hadn’t quite gotten there yet, because he asked, “A birthmark?”

  “A god’s mark,” I whispered.

  Sawyer nodded. Her defiant expression had wilted into one of sadness. “Apparently she didn’t want any temple to get its hands on me, so she cut it off.”

  My heart dropped into my stomach. I tried to imagine the scenario. Sawyer’s strung-out mother, alone in a public bathroom, giving birth to a baby only to find it bearing the mark of a god. She evidently hadn’t seen a bright future for her daughter when she saw that sign.

  “Did you find out what it was?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “She came out of the bathroom holding a bleeding newborn, and they took me. I never saw her again. I only know about this because I saw some court records in my case worker’s office once.”

  “Can you ask her?” Leo was fidgeting, and I could tell the discussion about absentee parents was getting to him a little. “If you saw her again?”