by Sierra Dean
“Okay, sure. I’m fine. Pres is fine. Todd Matheson probably has nothing to worry about.” Like the cleric of Ares ever had to fret about much. He was a human tank who was all but impervious to physical harm thanks to his liege god. “But what about the Infatuates? This guy killed their initiate already, and I’m supposed to believe they’re going to be safe from him? They can’t exactly seduce him to death.”
This made him smirk, and I wanted to smack him because I was trying to make a legitimate point. “I’m just saying, the opportunities for him to get the upper hand here are a lot fewer,” he said. “There are more eyes watching everywhere. More protection for those who can’t protect themselves.” Cade placed his hand on my thigh, and a rush of excitement shot through me. “We’ll take care of everyone, I promise.”
Except he really couldn’t promise me that.
We didn’t know who this guy was, how he was killing these kids, or what he planned to do next. As for the eyes of the world being on us, I was fairly certain that was precisely the kind of attention this killer was hungry for.
What was the best way to show the gods were uncaring and ineffectual?
Kill the people who were supposed to matter most to them.
“I don’t like this at all.” I wanted to take his hand in mine and squeeze. I wanted to curl against his side and breathe in the smell of him, until I could pretend we were the only two people left alive on Earth and nothing else mattered.
I didn’t dare.
A cautious knock at the door drew our attention, and a moment later, Sawyer let herself in with Leo right behind her. I shuffled a few inches away from Cade so his hand was lying innocently on the couch cushions. We hadn’t been doing anything, but I felt guilty all the same.
“You guys all caught up?” Leo asked. I wasn’t sure if he was implying we’d done more than talk, but forty minutes sure wouldn’t have been enough time for that.
“I told him about what happened in Seattle. About the kids.” My gaze darted to Sawyer, and I hoped Leo would know better than to say anything that might spook her.
“What about the kids?” she asked.
Oh, right. Teenagers could still hear.
“It’s nothing,” I lied.
Cade watched the girl with curious, open interest. “Who is she?” He didn’t even try to pretend like she belonged here, which was both infuriating and so very Cade I couldn’t fault him for it. “Did you adopt a street urchin?”
“Does anyone under the age of sixty still say street urchin?” Sawyer retorted.
She flopped down on the end of the couch and kicked off her Doc Martens. Sure, make yourself at home, kid.
“No, seriously, who is this? Did she follow you up from the casino? I can have security remove her.” Cade looked as if he was trying his damnedest not to laugh. Sawyer, meanwhile, was acting like she didn’t care, but her gaze kept moving from me to Leo as if she thought one of us might jump in to help her.
“I have no idea who she is,” Leo said. “Are you here to rob us?”
“Is she your illegitimate child?” I asked Leo.
He clucked his tongue at me. “While there is a family precedence for those, no, this tiny blonde thing doesn’t belong to me.”
“This isn’t funny,” Sawyer countered. “Tallulah, stop.” She pouted dramatically, and I realized the last thing I wanted to deal with for the rest of the night was a surly teenager, so I mimed zipping my lips.
“Sawyer is a stowaway,” I told Cade honestly. “She’s also an initiate, but we have no idea who to. We brought her with us so she could maybe figure it out.”
He gave her an assessing look. “Mystery cleric? That’s one I’ve never heard before. She’s in good hands, at least.”
Truth was, I didn’t think Sawyer was safe with us anymore. When we’d arrived, I was absolutely sure this was the best place for her and we could look out for her no problem. Now I wasn’t sure we could guard her against the dangerous wheels I’d set in motion. I’d never forgive myself if I let something bad happen to her. She might be annoying, but she was only a kid, and I’d sworn to Yvonne I would protect her.
And yet, if this nutjob had been watching me—which he must have if he knew I’d been investigating the girl’s death in Seattle—there was a chance he knew about Sawyer now too.
Could I just put her on a bus alone and hope for the best?
It seemed like there was no right answer. At least if she was with us I could keep an eye on her. I was seriously regretting the decision to bring her along, and was more than a little angry with her for climbing into the back of my car in the first place.
She’d been safer back in Lovelock when the whole town was at risk of burning down.
I chewed the inside of my cheek to keep myself from saying anything else.
“And who are you?” Sawyer replied. “Some sort of pit boss?”
“How do you even know what a pit boss is?” Leo asked.
“I’ve watched Ocean’s Eleven.”
I snorted at this. “Well, Cade does help keep money in the casino, I’ll give him that.”
“What does that mean?” Sawyer gave me a dubious look, clearly not liking that she wasn’t in on the joke. Maybe I should try being nicer to her.
Too bad being nice wasn’t one of my skill sets.
“I’m the Luckless One. I’m Ardra’s priest,” Cade told her.
“Ardra…” She seemed to be going through her memory banks, matching a goddess’s name to her power. There were a lot of gods. It was sort of like state capitals. You were supposed to know them all, but sometimes your brain was like Who the fuck cares about Delaware?
“Goddess of bad luck,” I offered.
Sawyer’s eyes widened, and she stared at Cade with a new kind of appreciation that hadn’t been there before. “So you can…?”
“I can make anyone have a very, very bad day,” he replied.
“And you like spending time with him?” she asked me.
“I have terrible taste.”
Cade held his hands to his heart and mimed being shot. “Ouch.”
All this faking of good spirits for Sawyer’s benefit had the added bonus of making me feel the tiniest bit better. If we could still sit here and make jokes and act like ourselves, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Whatever lie got me through the day, right?
Chapter Nineteen
The next two days passed in a haze of anxiety and uneventfulness.
We—Leo, Sawyer, and I—kept ourselves busy by annoying the staff at the Luxor Hotel, where the convention was scheduled to take place. Each morning after a tense, quiet, room-service breakfast, we’d leave the Lucky Star and shuttle down to the Luxor to watch as things were set up for the festivities.
It took a small army to turn the old Egyptian-looking hotel into a space fit for the servants of gods to mingle with one another. Watching things take shape was fascinating and kept us busy for part of each day.
Of course, every time someone sneezed I was sure they were about to kill me, which made me a lot more high-strung than I typically was. Whenever one of the workmen building a stage or hanging banners would accidentally drop something, I’d practically jump out of my skin.
All around the lobby of the Luxor were signs bearing the sigils of different gods. Attempts were made to not favor any one god over the others, but it was obvious some of them had more pull. Not every god could have a banner up, and it always led to bickering among the clerics when they arrived. Yet every year, like clockwork, up the banners went.
I spotted Seth’s storm-cloud sigil near the reception desk, between Hecate’s three faces and Aphrodite’s heart. Part of me wondered if maybe the gaming commission in Vegas was trying to suck up to certain gods. If so, Aphrodite made sense, but Hecate, not so much.
The three of us were sitting at a makeshift indoor café built in front of the hotel’s Starbucks. We had a good view of the main stage area that had been constructed in the lobby, whe
re all the public addresses would be made.
The Convention of the Gods was a weird week, consisting of several different aspects. Clerics made public speeches on behalf of their gods. This was great for PR. People tuned in by the millions to hear what the clerics had to say because for a lot of folks it was as close as they ever got to hearing the voice of a god. I imagine I’d have found it riveting if I didn’t speak to one regularly.
For the clerics, this was also a great way to bolster tithes to their temple. October was routinely the highest donation month of the year since people were more compelled to empty their bank accounts right after the big speeches.
Nationally televised live streams in an open lobby would also be a perfect opportunity for our killer to strike when the most eyes were on him. My gaze raked up the inside of the lobby walls, which towered up hundreds of feet. There were any number of places the man could hide and go unnoticed if he wanted to use a sniper rifle or something similarly stealthy.
Yet part of me knew he didn’t want to be stealthy about this at all.
If he was going to kill someone on national television, he’d want everyone to know why. He was done with mysteries.
I hated that I understood him. That through one conversation he’d made his motives so well-known I could imagine exactly what he wanted to do and why. I didn’t want to have this much insight into the mind of a killer.
Aside from the public speeches, there were less-well-known aspects of the convention. There were seminars and panels, about everything from careful use of social media to how best to budget if you were a traveler—like me and Cade. Some of the clerics, like the Infatuates, stayed close to the temple their whole lives, while the rest of us were constantly moving. In recent years they’d even added sessions about how to properly give interviews to the press, and what to do should you have to interact with law enforcement on anything.
We also had opportunities to sit down either one-on-one or in small groups to help iron out grievances between our liege gods. Say Seth was on the outs with Apollo—not an unlikely possibility—I could choose to sit down with Sunny and work out a way for the deities to come to common terms. The peace rarely lasted long, but for a brief time it could make the world more harmonious.
And of course there were parties.
Lots and lots of parties.
For a group of people whose daily lives were bogged down in some of the worst stresses imaginable and who had no personal autonomy, we needed an outlet. And Vegas gave us one. The events weren’t officially sanctioned by the conference, but they happened anyway. Private parties in hotel suites. Dozens of clerics descending on dance clubs. Raucous groups of drunk priests at the blackjack tables until all hours.
This was our one opportunity every year to let our hair down.
And while obviously forbidden, it was also a chance for a lot of illicit sex to go down.
Temple purity was a big deal, but it was one of those pretty illusions that we all talked about but rarely lived up to. I knew very few clerics who actually maintained their purity past eighteen. Most of them shacked up with other clerics because it was mutually assured destruction. That was what made Vegas so dangerous.
I sipped my coffee and watched as a plump woman pinned a sign to the front of a folding table, indicating early registration. She started to unload something from a big cardboard box.
“Ooh, tote bags,” I announced. Last year we’d been given water bottles, and I accidentally ran mine over when it fell off the top of my car in Idaho. I still had my travel coffee mug somewhere.
I am a simple woman, and I love free shit.
I took another sip from my coffee, which had now gotten cold, and scanned the room. There were a lot of things I wanted to say, ideas I wanted to bounce off Leo, but with Sawyer there I didn’t have the same amount of freedom I normally would.
The debate over whether or not I should send her home was one I had fought internally. It took me a full day, but I finally decided she was safer under the watchful eyes of me and the boys than she would be alone on a bus. Cade had assured me he’d get a Lucky Star security officer to stay with her whenever Leo and I couldn’t be by her side.
I got the sense Cade found the entire Sawyer situation sort of hilarious. Considering I was not the nurturing type, I could see how it might amuse him.
I didn’t find it nearly so funny.
This might rank among the top-five dumbest things I’d ever done in my life. What kind of moron had entrusted me with the life of a child? Gods, it was a good thing I never had any intention of having children of my own, because I couldn’t handle a relatively self-sufficient fifteen-year-old.
“I’m bored,” Sawyer declared, yawning for dramatic effect.
“Yeah, that’ll happen.”
“There’s a ton to do in this city. Why do we keep coming back here? We could go ride the roller coaster at New York, New York. Or go eat something. Or go shopping.” She emphasized this last one like it should be the most obvious choice in the world. Like, come on, guys, what could possibly be better than shopping?
“Do you have any money?” I glanced at her over the top of my coffee cup.
“No.”
“Then I guess we’re not going shopping.”
Leo chuckled softly. “You had to see that one coming, kid.”
In truth, I was glad she was bored. That was exactly why I’d brought her along on this ride. My life wasn’t all fun and games. In fact it was rarely either. It was usually just a lot of agonizing pain followed by long naps and more driving.
As if Seth could sense my internal lack of gratitude, my phone vibrated in two short pulses in my pocket. The stupid app.
I scrolled through a couple easy-to-ignore requests, things I could deal with later or not at all, and found the starred request that had caused the phone to buzz. I groaned out loud and slapped the phone facedown on the table, hoping the app might go away forever.
Sawyer perked up immediately because my negative reaction had to mean something interesting was happening.
“What is it?” She grabbed for my phone, which I snatched out of her reach before she was able to get a hold of it. I smacked her outstretched fingers.
“That’s mine.”
“Yeah, but, like…what are we doing?” Her voice revealed so much eagerness it was almost endearing. Or it would be if I didn’t know this was precisely the kind of job that would convince her my life was super cool.
Slipping the phone into my jacket pocket, I raised my coffee to my lips, then thought better of it. The last thing I needed was one more bitter taste in my mouth.
I glanced over to Leo, whose expression was only slightly less intrigued than Sawyer’s. “Well?” he asked.
“Looks like your dad wants to put on a little light show.”
“Oh?” He quirked up an eyebrow.
“Over the Grand Canyon.”
Chapter Twenty
It wasn’t uncommon during the convention for gods to use their clerics to put on impressive displays of power. With every eye in the world already glued to the proceedings, it was the ideal time to remind mere humans of the sheer might possessed by the gods.
One year Khione, the goddess of snow, brought down six inches over the unsuspecting Strip. Apollo melted it the next morning. Another year the god of wolves, Fenrir—who I’d named Fen after—sent packs roaming through the streets, nearly scaring the population half to death.
My favorite was the year Hypnos, the god of dreams, gave everyone in the city the most lucid sleeping fantasies of their lives. Every touch and taste and smell was so real I remembered that dream better than many of my actual memories.
Sunny and I had been eating my mother’s homemade cinnamon buns, sitting on a porch swing in the late-summer heat. The sky had been a dappled pink, with clouds casting irregular shadows across the ground. We sipped fresh lemonade, the flavor so tart my lips had puckered, and listened to the sound of cicadas humming, turning the air around us into a
living thing.
Fragments of this were taken from reality, which made the dream all the more potent. That swing probably still existed on my grandmother’s front porch in Kentucky. My mother might still bake those cinnamon buns. She always used too much icing, and it would drip off in rich, white blobs, turning my fingers into a sticky mess.
Maybe she’d stopped making them after Sunny and I were gone.
Whenever I remembered that dream, I felt a pang, thinking of the life my sister and I might have had if not for the stupid marks we’d been born with. I hadn’t even had a chance to imagine being something else because I’d known my whole life this was my fate.
In a way I hated that dream as much as I loved it.
This year, Seth was the one who wanted to show off, and he was going to use me to do it. What better way to prove how extraordinary he was than to use me as a lightning rod?
I had a headache just thinking about it.
The cab we’d caught at the Luxor pulled up to a small, private heliport, and Sawyer’s eyes had grown so wide I worried they might pop out of her head. “Are we going on a helicopter?”
“I’m afraid so.” I preferred to keep my feet on solid ground. It was part of the reason I never flew. If you didn’t go too high, there was a much smaller distance to fall.
“Amazing.”
Leo was eyeing the waiting helicopter with the same uneasy expression I probably wore. “I could just stay here.”
“You afraid of heights?” I teased, elbowing him in the ribs.
“I’m afraid of crashing and burning in a fiery husk of twisted metal at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.” He glanced over at me, like he was waiting for me to mock him about his confession.
I wouldn’t dare.
Sawyer was already at the door to the helicopter, waiting to be given access. She danced from one foot to the other. “Do I get a headset?” she asked a man in sunglasses standing next to her.