AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And stealing credit cards is a step up?”
“Whatever pays the bills, right?”
“I hear they have these wonderful things calle
d jobs.”
“I have a job. You think living in New Orleans is free?”
I grunted. There were plenty of sassy suggestions I could make, but he hadn’t asked for them, and his financial situation wasn’t my primary concern. Or any of my concern. Besides which, as soon as he was under Seth’s wing, he wouldn’t have any more financial worries for the rest of his life. Temple tithes kept Sido living in style, and I wasn’t about to complain about my own downtown Seattle apartment. Except that I never got to see it.
If that was the card I needed to play to convince Leo to come with me, I’d play it, but for right now it felt like too much of a bribe. Common sense and a desire to stay alive should be the only real motivation the guy needed.
Anyone who didn’t have a proper survival instinct and the ability to listen to reason probably deserved to die.
I licked sugar off my finger and tapped my pockets before remembering my phone was three hundred miles away, sitting in the same room as the person I wanted to call.
“Can I borrow your phone?”
Leo gave me a funny look. “Why?”
“Because I didn’t get to bring mine along when I got sucked into an unearthly road populated by the spirits of the dead. Why do you ask so many questions?”
“You present a lot of things that demand questioning.” He handed me his phone, a shiny new iPhone with a custom gold case bearing the initials MCH.
“Guessing this was an unplanned gift from someone?”
“I bought the SIM card.”
Leo was interesting, I’d give him that. Two days ago I thought I was coming here to rescue a little boy. As it turned out I was going to be saving the life of a ne’er-do-well small-time con artist with sticky fingers and a finely tuned sarcasm gene.
Peachy.
I stared at the phone in my hand stupidly before I realized I hadn’t the faintest bloody idea what Cade’s phone number was. Who knew anyone’s number anymore? Wasn’t the whole point of smartphones to clear up human memory space for more important information?
I knew the number for my own temple, but if I started asking them for favors, it would create too many questions I wasn’t ready to answer. As far as they knew Hecate wasn’t involved in this situation at all, and I’d like to keep it that way. The less Seth knew about my arrangement with the goddess, the better off I was. And the temple priestesses were terrible at keeping secrets.
I opened up the iTithe app and paged through the various deities, most marked as active, some with orange dots next to their name to indicate an anticipated delay in answering prayers, and went all the way to the bottom of the page where black dots marked deities not currently accepting paid prayers. There, instead of the names of the gods, were their universal symbols.
Because Seth was not called Seth everywhere he went, the symbol carried more meaning. Thus, the same system could be used worldwide without causing confusion for travelers.
Next to the storm cloud that matched the mark on my neck was a black dot and an expected return date of the following week.
How generous of them.
Similarly, next to the black cat icon of Ardra, was a return date the same as my own. I tapped on her icon and opened the tithing screen, where a banner across the top warned me my prayer would go unseen until the god was returned to an active status.
Below the drop-down menu for selecting the type of prayer I wanted and the comment box was a “Contact Temple for Assistance” option.
“You’re clicking an awful lot of buttons. Is that long distance?” Leo craned his neck to spy on what I was doing.
“I’m not even dialing a number. Have you ever used a phone before?”
Taking another sip of his coffee, he sneered at me. “You should be nicer to me. I didn’t see you pulling out your wallet to pay.”
Without looking up from his phone, I asked, “And which empty wallet around here should I be thanking for my seven-dollar meal?”
When he didn’t answer, I tapped the Las Vegas temple’s number and glanced up briefly, checking if I’d managed to offend him for real. The broad smile on his face suggested I was managing to do quite the opposite.
