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I shook some rain off my hood. “I need your harbinger booth.”
This gave the man a brief pause, and he gave the two of us another serious once-over. “You in some kind of trouble, ma’am?”
“Every day of my life.” I was glad the hits I’d taken from my assailant earlier were all in places the bartender couldn’t see. Chances were he would have assumed I’d gotten them from a domestic dispute as opposed to a street fight.
Thankfully, I doubted the bartender would worry about my safety with my partner in crime. Leo and I looked more like siblings than a couple. The demigod’s skin was a rich, warm shade of brown, with his blue eyes the only thing that made him appear unusual. My complexion was the result of my pale blonde mother and my half-black father, giving me the kind of skin tone that made strangers ask wildly inappropriate questions like, “So what are you?”
My sister, Sunny, looked so much like my mother, with blonde hair and a permanent summer glow, I doubted anyone ever asked her to classify herself for them. We were twins, but the only similarity in our skin was that we both freckled easily in the sun.
More than one person had implied I was secretly Seth’s daughter and that was the real reason I’d been chosen to be a Rain Chaser.
The last person who suggested that to me lost his two front teeth as a result.
The bartender must have decided I wasn’t in serious danger or that he didn’t care if I was, because he pointed me towards the back corner of the bar where a curtain was drawn across a doorway.
“You’re going to need a sip of something to warm your insides,” he said. “Any requests?”
“You have any Redbreast?” I eyed the shelf behind the bar. If I was going to have to drink on the job, I was going to drink something good.
“I’ve got a twenty-one-year-old single pot.” A gleam of mischief shone in his eyes, and I was too afraid to ask the price.
“Make it two,” Leo added.
The bartender moved around to the back of the bar and pulled a handsome green bottle from the top shelf, pouring each of us a finger of the amber liquid into low glasses and pushing them across the bar.
“Those’ll be forty each. On your way out.”
“He’ll pay.” I jerked my thumb back towards Leo, collecting my whiskey. “His dad is a god.”
“Not the god of unlimited credit card balances,” Leo retorted, grabbing his own drink.
That was enough to make me snicker, because for all intents and purposes all of the deities were so loaded they wouldn’t have to worry about money for the next forty generations. Not that money was ever their primary concern, but temples weren’t free, and someone had to pay for my apartment.
We crossed the empty pub and into the curtained-off back booth. Once we were closed in, Leo and I sat side by side in the booth, our drinks on the scarred wood table in front of us. It looked like any of the other booths in the bar, with old red leather on the seats and fifty years’ worth of beer stains on the table.
A harbinger booth was different though.
The idea was, no matter where you were in the country, you could take a drink into the booth and ask for death to come. It used to be a way for the downtrodden to ask for their appointed hour of death to be spe
d up. These days it was usually a way for anyone with a misguided sense of adventure to ask when they were going to die, or if they were really bored and really rich, they might ask for Manea to end someone else’s life for them.
Of course, those requests didn’t go to Manea herself.
I raised my glass of whiskey to Leo, who clinked his own against it. We both took a long sip in unison—because you do not shoot twenty-one-year-old whiskey—and set our glasses down again.
“Sláinte,” I added with a grin, before rapping the table three times.
Saying good health while inviting death into your company seemed somewhat morbid to me. But it was death, after all.
Nothing happened.
Leo shifted uncomfortably next to me, but I just took another sip from my glass. The whiskey was dark, smoky, and a little peaty. It burned the whole way down my throat.
Just as I felt certain Leo was about to say something, the curtain rustled and Prescott McMahon stepped into the room, sliding into the booth across from us.
As usual, he was impeccably dressed. His dark-blond beard was trimmed low, and his hair was brushed back in a stylized pompadour. He wore a three-piece gray suit and a green paisley tie almost the same color as my sweater.
“Well, well.” He folded his hands on the table, and Leo recoiled reflexively. I didn’t move. “You might be the last person I’d expect to see here, Tallulah.”
