by Sierra Dean
“She’s dead.” Sawyer started chewing on her fingernail.
Her interest in me and her desperation to come along suddenly made so much more sense. Of course she wanted to follow another cleric. Of course she’d latch on to the first person she met who could connect her to that world. And here I was heading to the one place she might be able to find out where she belonged.
I couldn’t even be mad at her anymore. It was exactly the kind of thing I would do if I was in her shoes.
I wrestled my phone out of my pocket and held it in front of her. “Call Yvonne.”
“Tallulah, please—”
“She’s probably worried out of her mind about you right now. Call her.”
I guess my voice had just the necessary amount of command because Sawyer stopped arguing and took the phone from me, dialing a number she knew by heart. She paced nervously while it rang, and I knew the second Yvonne answered because Sawyer’s face went ashen and she said “Hey” in a trembling, uneasy voice.
I could also hear Yvonne screaming through the phone, which helped.
After a few minutes of back and forth, wherein Sawyer continued to apologize and insist she was okay, and Yvonne continued to yell at her—“nearly gave me a heart attack” was said several times—Sawyer handed the phone to me.
“She wants to talk to you.”
“I bet.”
When it was my turn to speak, Yvonne was much more calm, but the edge of hysteria still gave her a slightly higher pitch than I remembered her having in Lovelock. “I am so sorry about all this, Tallulah. I honestly don’t know what got into that girl’s head.”
“It’s okay.” I wondered how much Yvonne knew about Sawyer’s history. I had a hard time believing she’d let the girl talk to me if she knew how much the cleric connection would mean to her.
“I’m not sure how we go about handling this. I know how busy you are and how valuable your time is…” She drifted off.
Time for a very bad, very poorly thought out idea. “Yvonne, I have a proposal.” I doubted she would like it, but I was hoping she might agree that it was pretty smart, all things considered. “Leo and I are going to Las Vegas for the convention. How about I take her along to Vegas and introduce her to a few people. She can find out how things really are for people like me. Once she sees what it’s like, I don’t think she’ll be so interested in following the next cleric who rolls through town.”
Sawyer’s already cartoonish eyes had grown at least six sizes as I spoke. Leo, too, seemed to not believe what he was hearing. That made three of us, because even though I was saying the words, I could barely fathom that they were coming out of my mouth.
Yvonne was quiet for a minute, then said, “Don’t you think that’s rewarding her?”
I laughed humorlessly. “Trust me. By the time we’re on our way back to you she’ll never want to see another cleric in her whole life. Depending who I introduce her to she might never want to leave Lovelock again.”
This resulted in a small hmm sound on the other end of the phone. “You’d keep her safe, right?” For the first time I was starting to sense that Yvonne really did care about Sawyer, as more than just a state-sponsored ward. There was something genuinely motherly in the way she was asking me to protect Sawyer, and I hoped the girl might come to appreciate how lucky she was to have that kind of woman in her life.
Mothers were a rare prize, especially ones who honestly cared. They didn’t need to be the ones who gave birth to you.
Maybe this trip would make Sawyer understand what it was she was trying to run away from.
“I swear to you nothing will happen to her except a rude wake-up call.”
It took Yvonne another minute, but she finally said, “Okay. But please make sure she calls me every day.”
“Will do.”
I hung up and pocketed the phone. My guts were swirling with apprehension. Was I insane to be taking a teenager along for the ride when a madman was out their killing initiates?
What had I just gotten myself into?
Chapter Fifteen
We pulled into the lot for the Lucky Star Hotel and Casino about three hours later.
The name in and of itself was a bit of a joke, considering it was also the temple for Ardra, the bad-luck goddess and Cade’s boss.
She made an absolute killing in tithes from people desperate not to lose everything in the gaming pits. Truth be told, the Lucky Star was no more or less unlucky than any other casino on the strip. The only difference was that people thought their tithes might save them from bad luck here. Everywhere else people understood a gamble was a gamble.
Sawyer had been mostly quiet the whole trip, alternating between staring out the window or playing with Fen. I think she was worried if she said the wrong thing or reminded me she was still there, I might change my mind on this entire plan and drop her at the nearest Greyhound station.
She wasn’t totally wrong.
The Convention of the Gods wouldn’t be taking place at the Lucky Star. It would be too much of a conflict to be seen favoring Ardra’s establishment. But I liked the suites the hotel offered clerics.
It had nothing to do with my desire to bump into Cade.
Nothing to do at all.
Of course, any plans I had to bump into the bad-luck priest—perhaps repeatedly and in a horizontal position—would have to be put on hold now that I had a petite sidekick who would be sharing my room with me.
Guess Sido didn’t need to send Leo along as my chaperone after all.
The Fates were probably laughing their asses off over this. Seemed like the kind of thing they’d get a real kick out of.
We registered at the front desk, getting side-by-side rooms for Leo and me. I suspected from her exaggerated pout that the kid was a bit disappointed she didn’t get her own suite, but fat fucking chance of that. Simply because the rooms were discounted didn’t mean I was made of money. And getting her a little party suite of her own wasn’t on my to-do list.
This wasn’t a vacation. This was supposed to be a life lesson, and maybe, just maybe, an opportunity for her to discover where she really belonged. Part of me hoped she wouldn’t find the temple she had been destined for because then she could go back home to Yvonne and live a normal life.
But I also knew that if I hadn’t made it to Seth’s temple, I wouldn’t be the person I was today. I might be happier, or I might not be, but the temple had become my home, for better or worse. The Fates had meant me for this life, and they’d meant for Sawyer to have a home too. If I could help put her on that path, I had to believe it was the right thing to do.
In any other situation I’d have never considered bringing her along. A normal job for Seth was so dangerous even I tended to fear for my safety. No way would I put a teenager in that position. Plus, with all these murders it would be foolish to put her in the spotlight, potentially risking her life. Especially now that I knew she was meant to be an initiate.
The convention was different.
I couldn’t think of a safer place for her to be. It was the one time of year every cleric was required to be on their best behavior, and the security surrounding the event was second to none. We were important people, and our safety was everyone’s top concern.
There weren’t many more secure places in the entire country for Sawyer to be right then.
We got upstairs, and I showed her into our suite, and all the shoe-scuffling and scowling from the lobby vanished.
The room was huge, divided into two sections by a partial wall in the middle that gave the illusion of the one large room being two smaller ones. On one side was a pale gray sofa sectional, a desk, and a wall-mounted TV. On the other side of the wall were two luxuriously appointed queen-size beds with overstuffed pillows and duvets, and another TV set.
The bathroom was a whole other story in over-the-top. It had a soaker tub and a walk-in shower decked out with smooth river rock and a rain showerhead.
Someone had come up before us and p
ut a fancy dog bed next to the couch, giving Fen his very own place to crash.
Spoiled.
Him and me both.
I dropped my duffle bag on the bed by the window and pulled my black dress out. Jersey might be durable, but it was probably a good idea to hang the thing up anyway. Sawyer was busy going from one room to the other and back again announcing the different things she was discovering. “There’s a built-in stereo!” she exclaimed, wrestling through her bag for her iPhone.
“I know.”
Before I could stop her, the sound of a funky soul track started playing through the in-room surround sound.
Stevie Wonder.
I’d been expecting some terrible boy bands or pop acts, the kind who would be headlining shows at the nearby casinos all week. Instead the kid had to go and surprise me by playing something decent.
Maybe I should stop being so judgmental.
Nah.
I deposited my dress and heels in the closet at the entrance and filled a glass tumbler with water from the sink. The room-service menu was on display, showing enough delicious-looking twenty-five-dollar cheeseburgers and steaks to make my stomach rumble.
If forced to pick something I loved most about Las Vegas, I would tell you it was the buffets.
The glorious, never-ending buffets, where you could load your plate with king crab and melted butter, then go back for pecan pie, then finish it off with twelve different kinds of cheese.
Buffets were how the gods blessed the hungry, and Vegas was where the blessings came endlessly.
My stomach growled a little louder.
“If you’re hungry, this fridge is filled with food,” Sawyer announced, staring into the minibar.
I slammed the door closed, almost taking one of her fingers with it. “You will not, under any circumstances, including starvation or threat of death, eat anything out of the minibar. Am I understood?”
She stared at me. “But there were M&M’s in there.”
“Do you have seventeen dollars for those M&M’s?”
“Seventeen dollars?”
“Yes.”
“Whoa. But aren’t you, like…rich? I mean, doesn’t the temple pay for everything for you?”
I cackled ruefully as I ushered her away from the ticking money-bomb that had been planted in our midst. “Do you know what a per diem is, Tiny Entitled One?”
She shook her head and took a seat on the couch. In the background Stevie Wonder sang to us about superstitions.
“It means I have a very small amount of money the temple provides me every day when I’m on the road. And from that money I now have to feed both myself and you. So no. Seventeen-dollar candy is not in your future.”
A forty-dollar all-you-can-eat was in mine, however.
“I just assumed you guys had bottomless bank accounts.”
“Yeah, that’s why I was at Yvonne’s motel. All my heaps of money.” I sat next to her and kicked my feet up on the coffee table. It felt like I was relaxing for the first time this month. Maybe I was. “A sixty-dollar-a-night room with clean sheets is a pretty nice treat for me. You should see some of the places I’ve stayed. If they have an ice machine and a shower with no cracked tiles, I consider myself lucky.”
She made a face. If she was living with Yvonne, I had to assume she already had her fair share of motel horror stories. Everyone did. There was no way she could think a life of bouncing from one rat heap to the next was anything resembling high class.
“This place is nice though.” She indicated the suite.
“This is my once-a-year splurge. And I’m only allowed to do this because the Convention of the Gods is mandatory for all clerics and liege priests. I have to be here, so they let me pretend I’m fancy for a week a year.”
Sawyer pulled her legs up to her chest, contorting herself into a little bundle. She looked very small and very young. I empathized with her in a lot of ways. She must have felt so lost, and in meeting me she thought she’d glimpsed a lifestyle that seemed exotic and glamorous. I had to bust that bubble as quickly as possible.
There was a light rapping on the door, and I got up, opening it for Leo.
“Hey, I’m going to take Sawyer downstairs to get a bite to eat,” he announced. “We’ll be gone for at least forty minutes.” He didn’t say anything else or wait for me to ask what he was talking about, just held open the door and led the girl into the hall.
I was hungry too, so why didn’t I get to eat?
I stepped out after them, ready to yell at him to bring me back something, when all the words got stuck in my throat.
Cade Melpomene was leaning against the white textured wallpaper, a thin smile curving up the corner of his mouth.
Suddenly my hunger was entirely different, and no food from downstairs was going to satiate what I was feeling.
Chapter Sixteen
“Cade.” His name sounded breathless and impossibly girly coming out of my mouth, like I had suddenly become a Marilyn Monroe impersonator.
He licked his lips, and my whole body tightened.
Up until now, right up to this second, I had told myself this man had no power over me. We’d barely spoken since leaving New Orleans two months earlier, and I had convinced myself I was okay with that.
Like a dumbass, I’d thought I could come here and play it cool, pretend it didn’t bother me that I’d been away from him so long.
I was the stupidest woman alive.
This was the man who had kissed me in a way that made me feel like he was drowning and I was the last breath of air in his lungs.
This. Fucking. Man.
Cade looked different. Out in the wild, he was all about beat-up denim and T-shirts that showed off his muscular chest. He wore military jackets and kept his hair styled in a no-fuss crew cut.
Right now, however, he looked like he’d rolled out of the movie Goodfellas. He wore a simple, impeccably tailored black suit over a white button-down shirt that did almost as good a job of highlighting his abs as his T-shirts had.
With the suit on I couldn’t make out any of the tattoos that covered both his arms, which was a shame, because those tattoos were a symbolic history of what made Cade who he was, and I desperately wanted to solve the riddle.
His usually short hair had grown out a bit in two months, and there were waves in the dark brown that I’d always assumed were there but had never gotten to see.
He smiled at me again, the flash of white teeth breaking up his typically stern visage. Cade wasn’t a handsome man, not the way Leo or Prescott were. He’d never qualify as beautiful. He looked like a boxer who had taken one too many hits to the face and the bones hadn’t healed quite right. Everything was a little crooked, the bridge of his nose a bit too flat.
To me, he was perfection in human form. Every quirk, everything that made him him, was one more detail to etch onto my memory to carry around with me until the day I died. I wanted to remember him, standing in the hall like a gangster, smiling at me as if I were the sun and I’d risen just for him.
“You look surprised to see me.” His voice rumbled inside me, taking a direct path from my ears to my groin.
It was all I could do to not jump him right there.
I was actually afraid of getting any closer to him.
For the longest time I’d honestly believed Cade was indifferent to me. Like I was a creature who existed in his periphery that he only took notice of when our paths crossed. Everything had changed this summer. We had changed. There was a we now. A him and a me. And I knew by the way he was looking at me right now I hadn’t imagined that.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” I said. “How did you know I was here?” Dumb question. This hotel was his temple.
“Please. Like you didn’t come here specifically so I’d know when you showed up.”
“Oh man, did the inflated ego come with the suit, or have you always been this full of yourself?” I tried to sound cool and casual, but I wasn’t sure I pulled it off. I was probably
grinning like an absolute maniac.
I inched a little closer, feeling like it might be safe to get near enough to smell him. Or see the whiskey hue of his eyes better. The lights out here were really terrible, after all, and it was only one step. Maybe two.
Be cool, Tallulah, don’t let him know how much you missed him.
He mirrored me, taking a few controlled steps in my direction, then stopped while we were still a few feet apart. His black dress shoes were polished to a high shine. He looked incredibly expensive.
“I’ve only ever been insufferable,” he said. “You were just too distracted by your overwhelming attraction to me to notice how terrible my personality was.”
I let out a little laugh. “Please.”
A smile ticked at the corner of his mouth. “Are you saying you aren’t attracted to me or that you like my shitty personality?”
I ignored the question. “So, which version is really you?” I nodded at the suit. “The pit boss or the guy who eats terrible Chinese food with me?”
He glanced down at his suit, smoothing his hands over his stomach. It was a cruel thing to do, forcing my eyes to follow that gesture, trailing along as he touched each button. Stopping at his belt.
My breath hitched. Amateur move.
“They’re both me.”
I was thinking about those buttons, wondering if they would fly off if I ripped the shirt open or if it was too well made for me to get away with something like that. I wondered about his belt too, about the way it would sound as I pulled it free from the loops of his pants.
“Eyes up here, Sparky.” He chuckled. “You’re drooling a little.”
“You’re looking a little edible,” I responded, before I could think better of saying it out loud.
Cade’s laugh filled the hallway in a merry, genuinely amused way. “Come on. I want to show you something.” He kept his hands in his pockets, like he didn’t trust himself with them. I could relate. If I touched him, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to stop.