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I’d never forgive myself if something happened and I hadn’t tried to stop it.
I figured if anyone could appreciate the gravity of the situation, it would be Imelda. As the High Priestess of Chronos, she would know all about the dead initiate, even if her cleric did not. I hoped that might make her sympathetic, or at least willing to listen to what I had to say.
Finding her turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. The minute I entered the Luxor lobby I spotted her pristine bob at one of the Starbucks café tables and made a beeline right for her. I didn’t wait for her to acknowledge my presence or invite me to join her, I just took the seat across from her quietly until she looked up from her laptop.
She kept right on typing as if I wasn’t there, but did say, “Good morning, Ms. Corentine. You’re here early.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Any panel suggestions for next year should be submitted to me via email.” She continued typing, not missing a single keystroke. I wanted to reach
across the table and shake her but suspected her lecture about physical violence probably applied to me as much as it did Todd.
“I need to talk to you about your dead initiate.”
Her finger slipped. She stopped typing and peered at me over the rim of her red reading glasses. “What did you say?” Her voice was cool, but I sensed the slight tone of a threat. This topic wasn’t one she wanted me to bring up.
Too fucking bad.
“The initiate bearing the mark of Chronos that was found dead on his way to your temple. That’s what I want to talk about.”
She closed her laptop and folded her hands neatly on top of it. Now that I had Imelda’s attention, I found I didn’t want it anymore. Her gaze was too sharp, too aware. I felt as if she was looking right inside me and seeing everything wrong about me.
“Talk.”
“The person who killed your initiate has killed eleven others. Including a would-be Rain Chaser,” I said. She made no moves, nothing to let me know she was already aware of this or that I was surprising her with these new details. “I did some digging, maybe a bit too much digging, and he called me.”
“The initiate?” This time her brows knit together in confusion.
“No, the killer.”
I saw the gears of her mind going while she tried to come to terms with what I’d just said. The words clearly made sense, but she was having trouble turning them into something she could understand.
That made two of us.
“What do you mean?” she asked finally.
“He called me. The killer called me on the phone. He told me if the gods wouldn’t pay attention to what he’d done to the initiates, he would move on to adults.” I gestured to the stage behind me. “I don’t know if we’re safe.”
Imelda snorted, a little annoyed exhale. “Of course we’re safe. I can’t imagine one place on this earth safer for us to be right now.” For a minute she looked like she might dismiss me and go back to her laptop, but after a long pause she removed her reading glasses and set them on the table, rubbing the bridge of her nose as if I was giving her a headache.
I sometimes had that effect on people.
“You think he’d actually be stupid enough to try something here?” Imelda asked. “With this much security and all these clerics?”
“He’s desperate to show the whole world how little the gods care about humans. And if he has to kill someone on national television to make that point, I think he’ll try. Up until last night I thought it would be impossible. I still can’t imagine how anyone would be able to attack us here, not with all this security and power. But we aren’t watching everyone all the time. The previous evening, everywhere I looked there were clerics out in public. We assume we’re invincible, and sometimes that makes us forget we’re still human.” I hadn’t expected myself to say quite so much and found I was out of breath at the end.
Imelda listened to me, the open hostility gone from her face.
“I wondered why Cade was so adamant about the extra security when we spoke late last week. It would have been nice of him to share a few more details, but I suppose he thought he was doing what was right.”
She leaned back in her chair. For a moment we were both quiet, and the buzzing sounds of the morning lobby were the only things that filled the silence.
“Tallulah, I can’t cancel the convention. I think you know that. The public fallout would be extraordinary. We’d never be able to explain it. People look to us as human proxies for the gods they love, and that means we cannot show fear or weakness. It would give people reasons to doubt, and you know full well doubt is the frost that kills the harvest of belief.”
I’d heard those words tens of thousands of times since my childhood. If there was anything meant to brainwash our little cleric minds, it was that. Doubt is the frost that kills the harvest of belief. It meant no matter what, we couldn’t give the regular citizens of the world an excuse to believe the gods were indifferent to them.
Our whole lives existed solely so people believed they mattered to the gods. Take away belief and we were left with nothing.
