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As it turned out, former con artists pack about as light as clerics. He had a backpack and little more.
“You fit a suit in there?” I asked, hoping to catch him off-guard.
“I fit a no-limit American Express in my wallet. I think I can use that to buy myself one.”
I picked up my duffle bag and slung it over my shoulder, then gently eased Fen’s carrier off the floor. It barely weighed more with him in it than without.
“Settling into that playboy demigod lifestyle already, are you?”
“If the expensive shoe fits…”
If clerics had a measure of celebrity, being the child of a god was a whole different stratosphere of social importance. As of right now, Leo’s connection had stayed on the down-low, but after next week, there’d be no hiding him from the world.
By the time we got back from Vegas he’d most likely have Hollywood agents beating down the temple doors for product endorsements—forbidden—or to pretend he was dating an up-and-coming starlet on their roster—encouraged.
Sido would have to be the one to hold his hand through all that. I could easily show him how the bottom-feeding cleric life went. Someone else was going to have to offer tips on being well-loved and famous.
Yet, in the little time I’d spent with Leo, I didn’t think fame was really what he was after. Absolutely, money was a big win for him, but he was the kind of person who had lived his life beneath the radar. To suddenly become fodder for supermarket tabloids probably wasn’t on his wish list.
We were on the road a half hour later, heading south towards our destination. I’d barely bothered to look at the tithe. Instead I focused on where I was needed. The why could be figured out en route.
I handed Leo my cell, then pulled a small box out from under my seat, rifling through it until I found what I was looking for. After slipping the cassette into the Charger’s tape deck, the opening chords of Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” started to play.
Leo snorted. “A bit on the nose, no?”
I turned up the volume and ignored him. I had yet to meet a person who didn’t have their little ticks and routines. For me, it was blaring the eighties hair-metal anthem as I left the Seattle city limits.
Here I go again, indeed.
“You follow a temperamental god across the continent for your whole adult life and then you can pick the driving music. ’Kay?”
He gave me a faux salute as the guitar kicked into high gear and the chorus started.
It was close to three in the afternoon when we left Seattle, with a twelve-hour drive between us and the quaintly named town of Lovelock, Nevada. With stops for gas and food we’d pull in sometime before dawn, which didn’t give me high hopes of a motel being open. We could both sleep in the Dodge if need be, but it wouldn’t exactly be cozy. Even in Nevada the October nights would be pretty chilly.
Once the song ended I nodded to my phone, which he was still handling. “Care to do a little Google-fu for me?”
“Fire when ready.” He held the smartphone up, awaiting my command.
“Priority one, above all else: Lovelock Nevada Chinese food.”
Leo typed away, then frowned, then typed something else, and frowned again. “How set are you on Chinese?”
I was afraid he was going to say something like that. “Nothing?”
He shook his head. “Looks like in town we’ve got pizza, Mexican, and something bearing the adorable name of The Cowpoke Café. If you really want Chinese, it’s another hour drive to a place called Fernley, where they’re kind enough to have two different options for you.”
“Ain’t that just the way?” I passed a slow-moving RV with a bumper sticker that said Apollo is the sunshine of my life with a drawing of a cartoon sun on it. I made a mental note to tell Sunny about it.
A shiver of excitement I’d barely let myself feel before coursed through my body. In all the years I’d been going to the convention as the representative of Seth, I hadn’t seen my sister once. She had, for the last twenty years, been on an arduous climb through the ranks of Apollo’s clerics. Some other gods only got one cleric, or none, but it seemed there was no shortage of Sun Worshippers.
So, unlike me, my twin was among a large group of other initiates. She wasn’t Apollo’s only cleric. And up until this year, she hadn’t been his first cleric either.
Except now she was.
Which meant in a week’s time, I would be seeing my twin sister for the first time in five years.
I hadn’t let myself dwell on it too much up until this point. If it was too apparent that either of us was looking forward to the trip for personal reasons, Sunny could easily be replaced with another cleric. Sido was less likely to pull me out of the convention because it would mean going herself, and she’d already attended more than her fair share.
