On the bathroom counter my phone buzzed. I answered, turning on the speaker.
“Rain Chasers International. You bring the pain, we bring the rain,” I said cheerfully.
“Funny,” Sido’s familiar voice replied. Judging from her tone, she didn’t find it funny at all. Go figure. “What in Seth’s name did you do now, Tallulah?”
“Uh, my job?”
“So why am I fielding calls from Manea’s temple suggesting you attempted to kill her cleric?”
Prescott had ratted me out already? What a dick.
“I had a job to do.” No sense in pointing out they’d been trying to drive me off the road at the time. Sido didn’t care much for semantics. “And I got the idol Seth wanted.”
The line was quiet for a moment. “He’ll be pleased to hear that. It might make things…easier.”
A chill crept down my spine. “What do you mean?”
“He’ll explain himself. Make sure you stay where you are.”
Oh, crap. If Seth wanted to see me in person, things were not going well. I thought I’d done my job and that would be that until I got back to the temple.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“Manea is unhappy.”
Manea was always unhappy. A chipper death goddess would have been super unnerving. “I was doing what I was asked.”
“Things have gotten complicated. Just wait for Seth.” She hung up without waiting for me to acknowledge the order.
Tugging the hem of my shirt down again and ignoring how much it hurt my sensitive flesh, I went back into the main room and grabbed my jacket. I could stay here and worry, watch Comedy Central until the inevitable South Park reruns started, and find cheap vending machine candy, or I could get out of here and find some real food.
My body knew the latter was the only option.
A god might be able to wield the power of the heavens to no ill effect, but I was mortal and I was starving.
Chapter Three
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any small town in possession of more than five hundred residents must be in want of a Chinese food restaurant. This need meant almost every time I stopped somewhere, I could count on finding chow mein and Kung Pao chicken.
I was a woman of simple needs.
Whitefish was a town after my own heart. They had not one but two Chinese restaurants in the span of a few blocks. I stopped at the first one I saw, a place called China Wall with a red dragon painted on the glass. My maps app told me the one down the block was a chain, and much like motels, I preferred my restaurants more homegrown.
The waitress showed me to a table in the back of the nearly empty restaurant. The only other people around were a teen couple who were awkward and adorable, likely on their first date given all the blushing and nervous shifting, and an older man sitting alone reading a newspaper.
I sat down, pulled out a copy of Karen Robards’ Morning Song, and set it on the table for after I ordered. The cover was torn and the spine broken, with several dog-eared pages inside. The cost of relying on used bookstores meant I had to deal with very well-loved books.
The waitress returned, and I ordered my two must-haves as well as sweet and sour pork, honey garlic balls, and beef with broccoli. She gave the seat across from me a quick glance as if I must be expecting someone else.
“Oh, and Chinese fried rice,” I added defiantly. “And a Coke.”
She wrote down my order and scurried off without a word. Had this been a dim sum restaurant I really could have blown her mind with my capacity for face-stuffing.
Using your body as a conduit of pure electric energy burns a fuckton of calories. It was the only reason I was still thin, because my eating habits could best be described as…bachelor.
I had just opened the book and started reading when the chair on the opposite side of the table scraped against the floor and a large body settled into it.
My stomach was doing flip-flops and my pulse hammered about a mile a minute, but I pretended to ignore him.