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I’d been expecting the guy to pull a gun on me, or if he was a cleric, he might have been bold enough to try a magical whammy, depending on who his liege god was.
In this particular situation however, I had the advantage. It was raining, it was cloudy as shit, and I controlled the weather.
I could have jammed a lightning bolt up this guy’s ass without so much as a second thought. But I’d rather not. For one thing, it hurt a lot to use my powers. Like, getting-hit-by-a-dump-truck levels of pain. And it was way too fucking early for me to be feeling like that, especially for some poor schmuck who hadn’t actually done anything to me yet.
I grumbled, lifting my gaze skyward briefly, asking Seth Why me, and not for the first time in my life. Here I’d thought the worst thing I’d need to deal with this morning was seeing a dead body before I’d had time for coffee. Now I was going to have to chase this idiot with my boots filled with water.
Awesome.
I took off after him, ignoring the slightly annoyed looks of the pedestrians on the sidewalk wondering what on earth I was doing. Hey, I was wondering the same thing.
The distinctive olive-brown shade of his coat disappeared around the corner of the next block, and I picked up my pace, hoping I wouldn’t lose him now that he was out of sight. When I caught up to where I’d last seen him, he was a few blocks ahead. His hood had come down, and his black hair was sopping wet.
He glanced back over his shoulder and must have spotted me because he immediately ducked into an alley.
I’d never seen him before, of that much I was absolutely certain. Which meant he couldn’t have been a cleric for any of the North American gods. We all met annually, and unless he was a late-blooming replacement for one of the existing priests, he wasn’t from around here.
There was always the more obvious explanation, that he wasn’t a cleric at all and was just the totally human scumbag who had killed a girl and left her body on the beach without any compassion or decency. If that was the case, pain be damned, I was going to turn this guy into a one-man lightning rod.
And I could too. The laws of the gods superseded the laws of man, and the girl on the beach was destined for life as a Rain Chaser. Seth would want his retribution, and I was well within my rights to be the one who delivered it on his behalf.
But I had to be sure this guy was guilty first. It wouldn’t exactly look great for the gods if their clerics were running around murdering people willy-nilly and making mistakes about it.
So first: catch him.
Second: see if he was guilty of anything.
Third: sizzle.
I reached the mouth of the alley only seconds after he’d ducked in, but of course he was nowhere to be seen.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
It was a direct path down to the next block, no fences or walls to corner him. I ran to the other end, scanning the streets, but there was no sign of him anywhere. The sidewalks weren’t exactly crowded at the moment, so there was no way he had just gotten lost among the bodies. If he’d been there, I’d have seen him.
I kicked the brick wall and immediately regretted it.
The pain had barely dulled in my foot when someone punched me in the back of the head.
I stumbled to my knee, the sharp, sudden agony like a hot poker at the base of my skull. He—I had to assume it was the guy I’d been chasing—grabbed my hair and yanked me backwards, hauling me away from the mouth of the alley and any passersby who might stop to help.
Just peachy.
He dropped me and came to stand over me, looming with the kind of menace people were able to exude only when they’d gotten the best of you with a cheap shot. Sure enough it was the same guy, his broad shoulders blotting out the gray overhead light.
“Why are you chasing me?” he snarled.
“Why are you running?” I spat back, wincing against the pain in my head. I couldn’t quite rest it against the concrete without it hurting, so I was left straining my neck, keeping my skull elevated. It was an uncomfortable position to say the least, but with him standing above me I didn’t have much hope of getting to my feet.
He must have thought my lifted head was a sign I planned to stand, though, because he kicked me hard right in the ribs. My breath shot out in a sudden burst, and I rolled onto my side, the punch to my head no longer my focus.
What was this guy’s deal?
“Fuck,” I growled, resting my forehead against the wet concrete, trying to focus on getting my breath back.
My rage was simmering nicely now,
but common sense still held me back. One whispered oath and this guy would be a smear of charcoal and bone on the sidewalk, just waiting for a poor street cleaner to hose him off.
