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“I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“You can understand why I might not believe that, right? There’s something of a precedent for you wanting to kill me.”
He reached across the table and put his hand over mine, and I winced rather embarrassingly. The guy could kill me with one touch, and I’d just let him take my hand.
Of course, Prescott’s gift wasn’t constantly running like King Midas’s golden curse. It was entirely up to him whether or not his touch would end a life, and right now he evidently had no interest in ending mine. Was he trying to prove he didn’t want me dead or show me how quickly he could have killed me if he wanted to?
Either way his hands on mine left me feeling deeply uneasy.
He registered my discomfort and pulled back, but left his hands flat on the table near mine. I didn’t withdraw. I hoped Prescott and I were past the point where he might take me out like that. It was a cheap if pain-free way to go, but not at all the death I had in mind for myself.
If I had my way, it would either be a blaze of glory or quietly in my sleep at age one hundred.
Scorched earth after taking too big a hit of lightning was far more likely. But at least that way I’d leave my mark, I guess.
“Look, the thing with the idol this summer…” He stared at the curtain, knowing how much this had to do with Leo. “That wasn’t my proudest moment. I was pissed off that you took advantage of our history, and you put me in a pretty dangerous situation by taking something that belonged to Manea.”
“Except it didn’t belong to her. It was from one of Seth’s children.”
The fact that we were arguing over who had ownership over the decorated skull of someone’s dead child was a fairly messed-up example of how weird our jobs were. But he was right, I had taken advantage of him in order to win the skull, and he was just as right to point out how much trouble I’d probably gotten him in with Manea.
That he was still alive and moving around with all his limbs was a testament to how good he was at his job, because a lesser cleric would have been obliterated for what Prescott had done.
If I thought of it from his perspective, no wonder he’d acted like he hated me. I’d have hated me too.
He went on. “I don’t want to hurt you. That wasn’t why I asked that man to track you for me. I didn’t ask him to follow you, please believe that.”
“Give me a reason to believe that, and tell me why you were keeping an eye on me in the first place.”
“Manea told me about the girl.”
I froze. I wanted to pull back, to get myself as far from him as possible, but I seemed totally incapable of moving an inch.
“What?”
“Seth’s girl on the beach. And the eleven others.”
“Eleven…” I had only read about nine bodies total. He was telling me there were three more I didn’t know about yet. Twelve in total. This was veering into deeply frightening territory very quickly. “Are you saying this to cover your ass?”
“Cover my… Gods, Tallulah, you think I did this?”
“Who else can just bounce from city to city on a whim, Pres? I don’t know many clerics who can kill someone without leaving a single mark on them and then vanish in the blink of an eye.”
“Of course you’d blame me.” He withdrew his hands and gave me the most pathetically hangdog expression I’d ever seen on his face before.
“Are you really surprised?”
He sighed, running his hands through his thick hair. “I guess I just want to imagine our history might have meant you believed I was a better person than that.”
“We’re clerics. The kind of people we are is entirely secondary to the whim of the gods we serve. You of all people should know that.”
“And why would Manea want to kill a bunch of future clerics?”
I opened my mouth to answer, then shut it again when I realized I didn’t actually have a ready response for his question. I’d been so willing to heap all the blame on him, I hadn’t really thought through why Manea would be asking him to do it. And she would have to be the one commanding it, because the second she learned he was using his gifts for his own agenda, he’d be a corpse himself. Just another member of her entourage of the animated dead.
“I don’t know,” I said finally.
“She wouldn’t. She knows how the system works. And it’s not like Death’s Hands are a dime a dozen. Of any god, she knows how precious and rare an initiate is.”
