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.