Smoke unfurled from my fingertips, and steam rose from my skin. I was breathing hard, and all I wanted right then was to eat five thousand calories and nap forever.
“Tell Manea if she wants the idol, she can get it from Seth.”
Pieces of the wreckage crumbled into the mud with a loud, grinding sound. The rumble of thunder had lessened, but the rain was still pounding down around us. I glared at Prescott, ignoring the three henchmen. I wanted him to acknowledge me, so I could drive off without having to look over my shoulder.
“This isn’t over.” His voice was surprisingly cool, given that he was slick with wet dirt and I’d almost blown him up.
I scoffed. “It never is.”
Chapter Two
Whitefish, Montana, was like most of the small towns I’d driven through in the last decade. It was charming, deeply all-American, and postcard pretty. The buildings were old brick or built to resemble housefronts. Even the Ace Hardware looked like it had been extracted from an Old West village.
Located at the base of Big Mountain—an accurate if somewhat too literal name—the town was removed enough from big-city life they still practiced some of the old rituals. In the center square was a statue of Khione and Oreithyia. The mother-daughter pair were depicted naked but for robes made of snow and wind, which provided them the illusion of decency.
Oreithyia, the goddess of mountain winds, and Khione, goddess of snow, were popular totem deities in ski-resort areas, though Ore had her detractors among serious slope junkies. It wasn’t uncommon for those doing climbing expeditions up Everest to make offerings in order to keep her away.
Seth and Ore had a complicated relationship, as did most gods. He felt she sometimes took attention from him and that as god of the storm the winds should be his as well.
Seth would love to be the god of everything, if he had his way.
Blessedly, Ore had infinite patience and didn’t seem to let Seth’s outbursts bother her much. Khione, on the other hand, had a feisty temper. More than once I’d had to deal with rainstorms turning to sudden flurries because she and Seth had butted heads over one thing or another.
In spite of the warm August night, trinkets were laid out on the statue, offerings to the goddesses for a good season to come. This practice had fallen out of favor in larger cities, where offerings would often be stolen. Home shrines and small outlet temples had become much more popular since the eighties.
I loved the look of elaborate public shrines. It meant the people of a town were still friendly with the idea of gods and hadn’t yet become embittered.
Making a quick detour from the main street, I stopped at the Cheap Sleep Motel, liking the straightforward simplicity of the name. I had yet to find a Best Western that was actually best, so I tended seek out the most interesting and vaguely terrifying small-town motels I could.
Plus Sido loved to lecture me about my expense accounts, and chains were often outside my per diem costs.
I slipped my jacket on before going into the main office, hoping to get through the entire encounter without giving away what I was. While the town appeared to be amicable to worship, there were always those who wanted to voice displeasure, and I was in no mood to hear about the time someone’s roof caved in because of a particularly bad storm.
They seemed to think I, personally, did that sort of thing for fun.
You crush an ex-boyfriend’s car one time and suddenly everyone thinks you’re a monster.
I paid a sleepy-eyed middle-aged woman for one night’s stay and pretended not to see the enormous No Pets sign. As long as Fen could keep his chirrups to a minimum, we’d be fine. No sense in drawing attention to rule-breaking.
The woman didn’t even glance up at me as she processed my credit card. “Check out time is eleven. But if you want to stay until noon, that ain’t no trouble, okay?”
“Thanks.”
“Continental breakfast starts at seven.”
“Is it any good?”
“Do you like stale muffins and cereal?”
I smiled, taking my card back from her. “I like anything that isn’t a McSomething in a brown paper bag.”
“Then sure, you’ll like it just fine.”
Thanking her, I took the key for room ten and drove around the back of the building, where one other car was parked.
A black 1970 Dodge Charger.
I sucked a breath in between my teeth and pretended not to see it. Of course, it was parked in front of room eleven, which made it pretty hard to ignore.