by Sierra Dean
Cade, on the other hand, appeared to have no interest in fun and frivolity. He was sitting on the opposite end of the booth with a tumbler of whiskey in his hand, surveying the crowd with a grim expression on his face.
“Hey,” I shouted, trying to get his attention over the throbbing thump-thump-thump of the bass. Sawyer was too busy dancing in her seat and trying to spot celebrities to bother listening to me. I grabbed an ice cube from the bucket on the table and hurled it at Cade. “Hey.”
He swiveled his head towards me, and I offered him my best, most apologetic smile. I felt a bit guilty for dragging him here, knowing full well that if Cade had his own personal version of the underworld, this was probably it.
“Can you do me a favor?” I was practically screaming, and even then he furrowed his brow in confusion. He obviously couldn’t hear me.
I scooted a little closer but kept some distance all the same. Out here in public there were too many eyes, too many chances for someone to spot us if we slipped up. I didn’t want to risk getting in trouble.
“Can you do me a favor?” I repeated when I was near enough to speak at a normal volume.
“That depends.” He sipped his drink. “Is it a personal favor?” His foot grazed mine under the table, and my heart tripled its beat, stuttering wildly from even such a small touch.
I found myself momentarily unable to speak, my breath caught in my throat while I tried to decide if he’d done it intentionally or by accident. His eyes had a faintly glassy sheen, so this wasn’t his first drink of the evening.
I traced my toe along the line of his shoe, testing the water.
His sour expression changed slightly, almost imperceptibly, and he nudged me back.
“What’s the favor?” he asked, leaning a bit closer under the pretense of being unable to hear me. He smelled impossibly good, like bergamot and fresh linen.
The bass thrummed, bright lights flashed, and the world around us was an undistinguishable mass of bodies and laughter and noise. But in that instant all I could see was his whiskey-brown eyes, which matched the shimmering amber liquid in his glass.
Remembering myself, I cleared my throat and leaned back a bit. “Can you maybe use a little of that hoodoo of yours on Leo? He’s got some pretty smooth moves, and I don’t think my sister will be able to resist them for long.” I nodded to where they were dancing, Sunny’s arms draped lazily around Leo’s neck, her head tossed back as she laughed at something he said.
I’d met Leo. He was not that funny.
To be honest, Sunny could be dancing with Louis C.K. and I doubted even he would be funny enough to account for all the laughter coming from their two-person dance circle.
I didn’t actually want him to fuck with their mojo, and I doubted he really would. I just needed an excuse to move closer and to talk to him.
My sister—whether by chance or by random twin magic—looked over and busted me staring at her. She beamed widely, her white teeth almost glowing under the blue club lights, and made a beeline for Cade and me, waving with such exaggeration I had no doubt she was feeling the liquor.
“Talluuuuuulah,” she gushed, pulling up next to the table with Leo in tow. “Come dance with us. You too, mister.” She poked Cade’s shoulder.
“No, you guys go.” I had scooted a little farther from Cade’s side. I didn’t think either of them would be an issue, but I was paranoid that my flushed cheeks and goose bumps would be a dead giveaway that Cade and I had been up to something.
“Dance,” Sunny demanded.
“Here I thought you were the bossy twin,” Cade replied, sipping his drink. His gaze was still all for me, vaguely hungry and hot enough to make my breath hitch.
He shouldn’t be allowed to lob seductive looks at me after telling me we had to keep our hands to ourselves. This wasn’t fair play. If he told me we just had to wait until we were on the road, I could do that. But if he was going to give me a look designed to vaporize my panties, he was partaking in some serious unsportsmanlike conduct.
I was slowly coming to realize that this was how Cade flirted. It wasn’t overt, with cheesy lines. It wasn’t direct. Instead he said it all much the way he did everything else—with loaded silences and meaningful stares.
How many of those innuendo-filled glances had I missed because I was too stupid to watch for them? How long had he been trying to tell me things without words, only to find I wasn’t listening?
Gods, I was such a fool.
“Ugh, stop staring at each other and come dance.” Sunny grabbed Cade’s arm and hauled him up with surprising strength. He appeared so bewildered by her power that he got to his feet without argument. She looked at me with an expression that clearly said You’re next.
“I can’t,” I repeated. “Someone needs to stay with Sawyer.” Yes, I was shamelessly using my temporary ward as an excuse to get out of dancing. Sue me.
“I can do it,” someone interjected. I glanced over and saw Ana had taken a seat at the booth near Sawyer and was dabbing her sweaty brow with a cocktail napkin. “I need to sit down anyway.”
I wanted to argue, wanted to find any excuse not to go, but Sunny wasn’t having it. A new Justin Timberlake song was playing, and that was the only excuse she needed. She took hold of my arm and dragged me out of the booth, herding me and the boys out onto the floor.
My hesitation was short-lived. I wasn’t sure if it was Sunny’s enthusiasm, the beat of the song, or the other gyrating bodies around us, but within seconds I found myself dancing. I let go of everything. The worry, the tension, the fear, and the obligations. It all dropped away, and soon I was bouncing along to the beat, laughing just as loudly and pointlessly as Sunny had been earlier.
I got it now, I understood. It wasn’t about jokes or even about the people. I laughed because for the first time in weeks, maybe even in years, I felt light and relaxed. I was just a twenty-something girl dancing with my friends.
The song ended, and the tempo shifted dramatically into a slow, steady rhythm. Sunny and Leo fell into step, swaying side to side like middle school kids. His smile was big enough to light up the whole room. Maybe he was feeling that easiness the same way I was.
This was all pretend, we would leave here and still have our big, scary lives waiting for us outside, but for now, for a song or two, we could fake our way through normalcy without anyone getting hurt.
I turned to go back to the table and walked right into Cade, who had been dancing behind me.
His hands were on my waist, steadying me, and he seemed unsure of how to proceed. My pulse was so loud in my ears I couldn’t hear the music anymore.
The way he was looking at me asked a question, and I gave the slightest nod. Here, with all the others like us, this one moment was safe. We could have this.
He pulled me closer, and I shivered, wrapping my arms around his neck. At this distance his smell was sensational. I wanted to press my nose to his skin and snort him like a drug.
Cade kept one hand on my waist, his other sliding slowly up my back to where the end of my ponytail hung. The faint tug on my hair told me he had wrapped the tresses around his fingers.
I explored the loose curls at the back of his neck and swallowed hard.
Surely someone would come up to us and tear us apart. They’d scream, We see you, and put an end to it. This was too perfect to last. The other shoe had to drop soon.
His cheek brushed mine, and he cupped the back of my neck with one wide palm.
Could we get away with it? Could I let him steal one kiss here and not fall blindly into his open mouth like a trapdoor, desperate to get everything I needed in one brush of the lips?
One kiss would never be enough.
It would take years to read the pages of his body, to decode the language of his glances, to drink him dry and fill him up again, over and over and over.
A thousand kisses on a thousand perfect nights wouldn’t be enough.
I tipped my head back, looking at him with the lights f
lashing all around us.
But it might be a nice place to start.
He lowered his head.
Just as my eyes closed and my lips parted in expectation, the other shoe dropped. Someone screamed, and a half-second later I smelled smoke.
Chapter Thirty-One
Sawyer was standing on the table in our VIP booth, and Ana was nowhere to be seen.
I forced my way through the dense crowd with Cade, Leo, and Sunny in tow, my pulse still throbbing in my ears and my heart hammering a mile a minute.
Sawyer spotted me, and her expression changed from panic to guilt in an instant. “I didn’t mean to.”
I didn’t need her to explain what she meant.
The entire side of the booth was smoldering, flames licking along the leather cushions, smoke furling into the air. Our bottle-service waitress materialized out of the shrieking crowd with a fire extinguisher, and as quickly as the blaze had started, it was out.
Ana reappeared then with a drink in hand and a what the fuck expression on her face.
“Where did you go?” I snarled, breaking from the group and grabbing the cleric by the arm. “You were supposed to watch her.” This was my punishment for letting my guard down for even a second. How could I have been such a dumbass?
I was out dancing, and Sawyer almost got burned alive.
I was literally the worst guardian since Bruce Wayne.
Leo helped Sawyer down from the table as if she weighed nothing, and she immediately latched on to him in a fierce hug, as if she were a barnacle and he was the side of a boat.
“I just went to get her a drink.” Ana held up the glass, showing me the orange and cherry inside. Shirley Temple. “I wasn’t even gone two minutes.” She looked over at the ruined booth. “What happened?”
That was the million-dollar question. There weren’t any candles on the table and nothing to easily start a fire of that size anywhere within reach. If Ana had honestly been gone such a short time, how had the blaze gotten started so fast?
Which was going to have to wait, because a beefy security guard with no neck and arms bigger than my waist was elbowing his way through the crowd towards us. I’d already gone out on a limb to get Sawyer into the club. I didn’t feel like spending the rest of my night explaining to management how she’d almost burned it down.
I pushed my group towards the patio exit, where most of the patrons had gone when they realized the place was on fire. We’d blend in easily.
“We’re going,” I announced.
Sunny, still a bit drunk, took the longest to realize what was going on, so I ended up dragging her by the arm through the crowd until we were well out of sight of the guard.
Out on the Strip we walked a few blocks before I stopped abruptly and grabbed Sawyer, pulling her free of Leo’s protective grip and forcing her to look at me.
I wasn’t angry so much as I was full of adrenaline that I had no idea what to do with.
“What happened in there?”
She blinked at me, bewildered. “I don’t know.”
“You do know. Don’t bullshit me, kid, I invented that game. What happened?”
Sawyer glanced around, but when no one immediately jumped to her rescue, she said, “When Ana went to get my drink, this guy started talking to me. I don’t know where he came from, he was just at the booth suddenly, asking me all these questions.”
“What questions?”
She was pale, and under my palms I felt her body tremble. I hated myself for forcing her to do this, but at the same time I felt like she had answers I desperately needed.
“He asked me if I was with the convention. Asked me if I was a cleric.” She looked at me dead on, her eyes huge and shiny with unshed tears. “He asked me if I knew you.”
My blood went cold. “Did you get a good look at him?”
Sawyer shook her head. “It was so dark, and he was wearing a hat. He was a little fat I guess? White. I don’t know.”
“Did he try to hurt you? With the fire?” My hands were on her face now, trying to comfort her, even though I felt like I might rattle apart I was shaking so much.
She went quiet, her gaze dropping and her cheeks flushed red. “That wasn’t him.”
“What do you mean it wasn’t him?”
“Th-that was me.”
My hands fell away from her face, and I grabbed her wrists, inspecting her palms. There was no sign of soot or ash anywhere on her fingers. “What do you mean?” I asked again.
“He sat down, and I got scared…and sometimes when I get scared…” She withdrew her hands from me and stuffed them in her pockets.
“Sometimes when you get scared, weird stuff happens,” Cade finished for her. “Right? Sometimes you get mad, or excited, and things happen around you that you didn’t mean to do.”
She was staring at him now, her mouth open a little wide.
The explanation hit me a second later than it must have gotten to Cade. “You started the fire.”
Sawyer nodded.
A wash of sickness churned in my belly. “Sawyer, did you start the fire in Lovelock?”
Her silence and refusal to meet my eye were all I needed for confirmation.
I guess we knew whose cleric she was now.
“She’s one of Pele’s girls,” Sunny whispered, lifting her hand to her mouth in surprise. “Gods, that’s remarkable.”
“W-why?” Sawyer looked absolutely panicked.
Cade was the one who answered. “Because Pele hasn’t had a new cleric in over a hundred years. Not since…” He stopped, obviously unsure if he should go on.
“Not since 1883,” I finished for him. “Since Krakatoa.” Pele’s clerics were almost an urban legend among our community. Generations had passed since this last one had been buried alive during the Krakatoa catastrophe. People were beginning to think that Pele, like Hecate, was a goddess who simply had no need for an earthly vessel.
Sawyer had apparently been paying attention in history class, because at the mention of the famous volcanic eruption, she just said, “Oh.”
All this time she’d been hoping to find a destiny that was romantic and exciting. She’d wanted so badly to help people.
Turns out she was just another hand of disaster.
At least she was in good company.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I got to the Luxor early the next day and went on a hunt to find Imelda.
With what had happened at the club and how easily the strange man had sniffed out our group, I had realized something very important. It didn’t matter how safe we thought we were at the convention, because every single night the clerics left the security of the heavily guarded hotel and headed out into the Las Vegas night with giant targets on their backs.
We weren’t safe, and Sawyer’s close encounter had proven that.
I wasn’t sure what I thought Imelda could do, but I hadn’t been able to shake the sense of dread looming over me since we’d gotten back to the hotel last night.
I’d never forgive myself if something happened and I hadn’t tried to stop it.
I figured if anyone could appreciate the gravity of the situation, it would be Imelda. As the High Priestess of Chronos, she would know all about the dead initiate, even if her cleric did not. I hoped that might make her sympathetic, or at least willing to listen to what I had to say.
Finding her turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. The minute I entered the Luxor lobby I spotted her pristine bob at one of the Starbucks café tables and made a beeline right for her. I didn’t wait for her to acknowledge my presence or invite me to join her, I just took the seat across from her quietly until she looked up from her laptop.
She kept right on typing as if I wasn’t there, but did say, “Good morning, Ms. Corentine. You’re here early.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Any panel suggestions for next year should be submitted to me via email.” She continued typing, not missing a single keystroke. I wanted to reach
across the table and shake her but suspected her lecture about physical violence probably applied to me as much as it did Todd.
“I need to talk to you about your dead initiate.”
Her finger slipped. She stopped typing and peered at me over the rim of her red reading glasses. “What did you say?” Her voice was cool, but I sensed the slight tone of a threat. This topic wasn’t one she wanted me to bring up.
Too fucking bad.
“The initiate bearing the mark of Chronos that was found dead on his way to your temple. That’s what I want to talk about.”
She closed her laptop and folded her hands neatly on top of it. Now that I had Imelda’s attention, I found I didn’t want it anymore. Her gaze was too sharp, too aware. I felt as if she was looking right inside me and seeing everything wrong about me.
“Talk.”
“The person who killed your initiate has killed eleven others. Including a would-be Rain Chaser,” I said. She made no moves, nothing to let me know she was already aware of this or that I was surprising her with these new details. “I did some digging, maybe a bit too much digging, and he called me.”
“The initiate?” This time her brows knit together in confusion.
“No, the killer.”
I saw the gears of her mind going while she tried to come to terms with what I’d just said. The words clearly made sense, but she was having trouble turning them into something she could understand.
That made two of us.
“What do you mean?” she asked finally.
“He called me. The killer called me on the phone. He told me if the gods wouldn’t pay attention to what he’d done to the initiates, he would move on to adults.” I gestured to the stage behind me. “I don’t know if we’re safe.”
Imelda snorted, a little annoyed exhale. “Of course we’re safe. I can’t imagine one place on this earth safer for us to be right now.” For a minute she looked like she might dismiss me and go back to her laptop, but after a long pause she removed her reading glasses and set them on the table, rubbing the bridge of her nose as if I was giving her a headache.