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“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m investigating them…” Man, just how fast had news of my meeting with Detective Stowe made the rounds? It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours yet, but here she was like the femme fatale in a film noir, ready to bring a world of trouble down on my little P.I. head.
Except I wasn’t a P.I. I already had a job, and it had nothing to do with solving murders.
“You will help me find out who killed my cleric, Rain Chaser. Have you any idea how long it’s been since I have had a new initiate?”
I did not. “A while?”
“I have not had a new cleric since the final days of the second World War, pet. I would like to know who has taken this gift from me because I will have my vengeance on them and everyone who has ever smiled fondly upon them. Am I understood?”
“It’s a bit more complicated than—”
“You humans.” She sneered as she spoke the word, like it tasted bad. “There are always a million excuses to do nothing. Your lives are so short they border on meaningless. You’d think you might like to make something worthwhile out of the little time you’re given.”
Ouch.
It’s not like I was just sitting around on my ass stuffing my face with bonbons every day. That shit was reserved for the scant few off days I got every year. I bristled at her implication that I was being lazy instead of jumping at the chance to play Nancy Drew for her.
“Solving murders isn’t really what I do,” I explained.
“And while I’m sure making water fall from the sky and finding Seth virgins to deflower is all very taxing on your schedule, you will also do this.”
I was about to remind her that she wasn’t my boss, but the retort stuck in the back of my throat. Speaking up might be a bit too confrontational, and my sense of self-preservation suggested I might want to rethink pissing off the goddess who brought wars in her wake.
“I’ll do what I can.”
“This isn’t pure selfishness. There are others who want to know. These deaths cannot go unanswered. It makes us look…” She drifted off before she said weak. Such an admission would be impossible to confess to me. “It makes us look uncaring.”
I almost laughed.
Because the gods wanted to maintain their all-loving, sunshine-and-rainbows public image? Yeah, okay, sure.
“I’ll do what I can,” I repeated.
“I will be back in two weeks, Rain Chaser. If you don’t have an answer for me by then, I will find myself someone more useful who can.”
I wasn’t sure if she was implying that she would kill me if I failed, or just that she’d find someone less useless to solve the mystery.
Given the choice, I didn’t want to find out.
Chapter Eleven
Five hours later I’d slept, eaten, and was looking at a bright and clear morning, with only the haze of smoke to detract from what would have been a perfectly blue sky.
Not a cloud in sight.
“Fuck me,” I grumbled.
I was standing on a ridge, overlooking the encroaching fire. Leo stood beside me yawning, and we had been joined by Yvonne—the motel owner—and Rhys Carmichael, the town’s mayor. The firefighters had left before the break of dawn, but one of them had come to join us on the ridge. I could tell by the way he was looking at me that he was dubious I could do anything to help.
Given the current weather conditions, that made two of us.
“It’s at about fifteen thousand acres right now,” the firefighter said, taking a long pull off his water bottle. “And if we work all day and get the water bomber we asked for, and the wind stays low, we might be able to keep it at fifteen. But we can’t stop it. It’s so dry, might as well light a match in a newspaper warehouse, you know?” He shrugged, looking resigned.
I wasn’t sure if he didn’t care about Rhys’s and Yvonne’s feelings or was oblivious to the fact he was crushing their hope with every added word. They’d pinned all their remaining expectations on me, and I was standing here grimacing at the skyline.
I needed a fucking cloud. Just one. Even a fluffy wisp of white would do the trick. There was so much I could do with that, but I couldn’t give them their miracle without something to get the ball rolling.
