“Tallulah, please.” Suddenly she was at my side, gripping my arm, and that pleading, pathetic look she’d given Leo moments earlier was all for me. “Don’t send me back. I need your help.”
I stood next to my car door and stared at her as impassively as I could manage. I was beyond angry. I wanted to shake her until some common sense rattled free. But I also felt for her, and she was only a kid. There had to be a way to handle this without being cruel to her.
“Does Yvonne hurt you?” I asked, my voice level and emotionless.
“What? No.”
“Are you being used for slave labor of some kind? Is the town filled with cultists who sacrifice goats to the dark gods? Or sell off the organs of people passing in the night? Or otherwise do anything that’s so fucked up you can’t possibly spend another day of your life there?”
Her cheeks flushed bright red, and she stared at her shoes again. “No.”
“Did I tell you that you could come with me?” I shrugged her hand off my arm.
“No,” she whispered.
“So what gave you the idea that I would be so over the moon to find you in the trunk of my car that I would change my mind?” My anger was bubbling to the surface now. I couldn’t help the short fuse I had, it was all part of what made me who I was, and a Rain Chaser was always going to be temperamental and a little me
an.
The gods made me this way. She was just going to have to deal with it.
Better she learned now that this wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows and adventure. Sawyer had it in her head this was a better life than the one she’d left behind, and maybe what she needed in order to get that out of her system was to see what my life was really like.
Instead of answering, she lifted the hem of her shirt and showed me a red scar, about two inches in diameter, on her hip.
“What is that?” All of my bluster faded, replaced with a sudden wave of nervous curiosity. Something about the size of the scar was bothering me.
“You want to know why I’m in foster care?” She let her shirt drop. When I didn’t answer, she continued anyway. “My mom was a junkie. Prostitute. Whatever. You’ve heard the sob stories I’m sure. Point is I wasn’t born in a hospital, I was born in some shitty bathroom at a place like this.” She gestured towards the gas station.
“Sawyer, you don’t need to expla—” Leo didn’t get a chance to finish. Sawyer went ahead.
“She saw something on me when I was born.”
My breath caught in my throat. I didn’t need to be psychic to know where this was going. I’d heard stories like this before.
“I had a mark on me.”
Leo hadn’t quite gotten there yet, because he asked, “A birthmark?”
“A god’s mark,” I whispered.
Sawyer nodded. Her defiant expression had wilted into one of sadness. “Apparently she didn’t want any temple to get its hands on me, so she cut it off.”
My heart dropped into my stomach. I tried to imagine the scenario. Sawyer’s strung-out mother, alone in a public bathroom, giving birth to a baby only to find it bearing the mark of a god. She evidently hadn’t seen a bright future for her daughter when she saw that sign.
“Did you find out what it was?” I asked.
She shook her head. “She came out of the bathroom holding a bleeding newborn, and they took me. I never saw her again. I only know about this because I saw some court records in my case worker’s office once.”
“Can you ask her?” Leo was fidgeting, and I could tell the discussion about absentee parents was getting to him a little. “If you saw her again?”
“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.”