AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I can make anyone have a very, very bad day,” he replied.
“And you like spending time with him?” she asked me.
“I have terrible taste.”
Cade held his hands to his heart and mimed being shot. “Ouch.”
All this faking of good spirits for Sawyer’s benefit had the added bonus of making me feel the tiniest bit better. If we could still sit here and make jokes and act like ourselves, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Whatever lie got me through the day, right?
Chapter Nineteen
The next two days passed in a haze of anxiety and uneventfulness.
We—Leo, Sawyer, and I—kept ourselves busy by annoying the staff at the Luxor Hotel, where the convention was scheduled to take place. Each morning after a tense, quiet, room-service breakfast, we’d leave the Lucky Star and shuttle down to the Luxor to watch as things were set up for the festivities.
It took a small army to turn the old Egyptian-looking hotel into a space fit for the servants of gods to mingle with one another. Watching things take shape was fascinating and kept us busy for part of each day.
Of course, every time someone sneezed I was sure they were about to kill me, which made me a lot more high-strung than I typically was. Whenever one of the workmen building a stage or hanging banners would accidentally drop something, I’d practically jump out of my skin.
All around the lobby of the Luxor were signs bearing the sigils of different gods. Attempts were made to not favor any one god over the others, but it was obvious some of them had more pull. Not every god could have a banner up, and it always led to bickering among the clerics when they arrived. Yet every year, like clockwork, up the banners went.
I spotted Seth’s storm-cloud sigil near the reception desk, between Hecate’s three faces and Aphrodite’s heart. Part of me wondered if maybe the gaming commission in Vegas was trying to suck up to certain gods. If so, Aphrodite made sense, but Hecate, not so much.
The three of us were sitting at a makeshift indoor café built in front of the hotel’s Starbucks. We had a good view of the main stage area that had been constructed in the lobby, whe
re all the public addresses would be made.
The Convention of the Gods was a weird week, consisting of several different aspects. Clerics made public speeches on behalf of their gods. This was great for PR. People tuned in by the millions to hear what the clerics had to say because for a lot of folks it was as close as they ever got to hearing the voice of a god. I imagine I’d have found it riveting if I didn’t speak to one regularly.
For the clerics, this was also a great way to bolster tithes to their temple. October was routinely the highest donation month of the year since people were more compelled to empty their bank accounts right after the big speeches.
Nationally televised live streams in an open lobby would also be a perfect opportunity for our killer to strike when the most eyes were on him. My gaze raked up the inside of the lobby walls, which towered up hundreds of feet. There were any number of places the man could hide and go unnoticed if he wanted to use a sniper rifle or something similarly stealthy.
Yet part of me knew he didn’t want to be stealthy about this at all.
If he was going to kill someone on national television, he’d want everyone to know why. He was done with mysteries.
I hated that I understood him. That through one conversation he’d made his motives so well-known I could imagine exactly what he wanted to do and why. I didn’t want to have this much insight into the mind of a killer.
Aside from the public speeches, there were less-well-known aspects of the convention. There were seminars and panels, about everything from careful use of social media to how best to budget if you were a traveler—like me and Cade. Some of the clerics, like the Infatuates, stayed close to the temple their whole lives, while the rest of us were constantly moving. In recent years they’d even added sessions about how to properly give interviews to the press, and what to do should you have to interact with law enforcement on anything.
We also had opportunities to sit down either one-on-one or in small groups to help iron out grievances between our liege gods. Say Seth was on the outs with Apollo—not an unlikely possibility—I could choose to sit down with Sunny and work out a way for the deities to come to common terms. The peace rarely lasted long, but for a brief time it could make the world more harmonious.
And of course there were parties.
Lots and lots of parties.
For a group of people whose daily lives were bogged down in some of the worst stresses imaginable and who had no personal autonomy, we needed an outlet. And Vegas gave us one. The events weren’t officially sanctioned by the conference, but they happened anyway. Private parties in hotel suites. Dozens of clerics descending on dance clubs. Raucous groups of drunk priests at the blackjack tables until all hours.
This was our one opportunity every year to let our hair down.
And while obviously forbidden, it was also a chance for a lot of illicit sex to go down.
Temple purity was a big deal, but it was one of those pretty illusions that we all talked about but rarely lived up to. I knew very few clerics who actually maintained their purity past eighteen. Most of them shacked up with other clerics because it was mutually assured destruction. That was what made Vegas so dangerous.
I sipped my coffee and watched as a plump woman pinned a sign to the front of a folding table, indicating early registration. She started to unload something from a big cardboard box.
