Driving Rain

Chapter One

Dead bodies are a dime a dozen until you realize they’re all priceless to someone.

Wind lashed rain-soaked tendrils of black hair into my eyes, momentarily blinding me, until I pulled up the hood of my jacket, giving myself enough of a reprieve to really drink in the scene laid out at my feet.

Hate it when they’re kids, Detective Sheldon Stowe mumbled around a big wad of gum. He’d confessed to me that he once preferred chewing tobacco, but the force had forbidden him to use it on the job. Now he crammed his mouth full of grape bubblegum instead, and spent much of his time snapping it mindlessly. Snap.

So you’re cool with it when they’re over eighteen? I hadn’t taken my eyes off the blue tarp on the rocks that covered a distinctive shape I had no desire to get a closer look at.

Soon I’d have no choice. Stowe hadn’t brought me here because of my charming personality.

Some of them are harder’n others, s’all I’m saying. Snap.

I wanted to ask him what made this one worse, but once the tarp got lifted, I’d figure that out for myself.

Say, Miss Corentine? Stowe bumped me with his elbow, and I turned my head so I could see him better from the confines of my hood.

Hmm?

You think you can do somethin’ about this rain? This is killin’ my crime scene.

This is Seattle, Detective Stowe. When Seth’s at home, the rain has nothing to do with me. Now, if you wanted to pay a tithe…

He snapped another purple bubble, and his brow creased, showing a deep trench next to each of his eyes. I gathered Stowe frowned a lot. Maybe it wasn’t always because of me.

Seth thinks we should pay him for blue sky?

Respectfully, Detective, Seth doesn’t think about you at all.

Seth, god of the storm and my de facto boss, wasn’t terribly interested in the goings-on of mere mortals. If they tithed him a decent amount, he might let me intervene, but it would probably cost more than the Seattle PD’s annual operating budget for me to shut down storms in the Pacific Northwest for one little murder.

This was Seth’s home base after all, the location of his North American temple. And when Seth was in residence, there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about the rain.

Frustrating?

Tell me about it.

But you’ll have to take a number.

Snap.

The rain pattered loudly against my hood. A few of the cops milling around were carrying umbrellas, but I didn’t bother with one anymore. Rain was such an integral part of my life, I spent more time wet than dry in any given week. And not in a fun way.

Drops of cold water were starting to pool in my rain boots, soaking my jeans and socks bit by bit. I sighed and imagined my apartment, where I’d left the fireplace going. If I could keep that image in the back of my mind, I might be able to get through this without saying anything really nasty to anyone.

Was worth askin’ I guess, Stowe said.

Never hurts.

Eh, Kepler, you wanna take the sheet off? Let’s show Tallulah what we dragged her out here for.

It wasn’t often the SPD needed my help. Sometimes they wanted to know if a lightning strike was an accident or an act of god. Insurance paid out for accidents, but righteous smitings weren’t covered. The rule of gods superseded that of mortals, and that went for policy payouts as well. The police, in cases like that, were often little more than bureaucrats, signing off on official paperwork. I was pretty sure this would be more of the same, but Stowe had sounded shaken up when he called me earlier this morning. Enough that I’d come down before even getting my coffee.

That was my first mistake.

Kepler, a middle-aged female officer with round, friendly cheeks, pulled up the blue tarp, holding it in place so whatever was underneath remained protected.

In that moment I knew two things with absolute certainty: this was no normal dead body, and Kepler was a mother. There was something about the tender way she looked down at the corpse, and kept it guarded against the elements that made me sure she had a child waiting at home for her.

Aw, man. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the damp air or cold water in my boots. I wiped a droplet of rain from my nose and sniffed. The air was salty from the ocean and carried the distinctive smell of storm. But there was no lingering electric buzz, and I couldn’t feel any lightning in my blood. We were safe out here.

Which was more than I could say for the little girl lying still and white on the smooth beach rocks.

I took a few steps closer and crouched beside her body, trying to avoid dripping water on her, as if it might add to her discomfort.

She was nine or ten years old, with chestnut-colored curls that were matted and dirty from her time exposed to the elements. Her skin was so pale she looked more like a porcelain doll than a real girl. She was completely dressed, wearing jeans with flowers embroidered on them and a striped sweater under a light rain jacket. The pants had been well loved during her life, with a hole worn through one knee and ratty threads at the cuffs.

Her fingernails were painted blue, the polish chipped and nails ragged, like she might have chewed them a lot.

A bubble of nausea built in my throat.

Why am I here? I didn’t bother to glance up at Stowe.

The girl showed no signs of a lightning-strike death. She wasn’t covered in the Lichtenberg figures that marked my own skin every time I was struck. Nothing about this appeared like a death I needed to be involved in, so why was he making me look at this dead girl?

Stowe stood on the opposite side of the girl while Kepler did her best to keep the body dry. The detective crouched to mirror me, groaning as his knees creaked and popped. He turned the body and moved her wet hair out of the way so I could see what he was trying to show me.

On the back of her neck was a black mark, like a tattoo. It was in the shape of a storm cloud with three drops of rain coming from it. Instinctively my hand went to my own neck. I couldn’t see the mark on my skin, nor feel it, but I knew it was there all the same. It had been since the day I was born.

This girl was supposed to become a Rain Chaser.

And now she was dead.

Cover her up. I got to my feet again, offering Stowe a hand to get him back to eye level, which he took without complaint. This wasn’t Seth. You know that right?

Unless gods are suddenly in a habit of killing temple brats before they come of age, I didn’t think it was him. Snap.

Normally the gum popping would drive me nuts, but right now it was oddly comforting, anchoring me to the real world, rather than giving me too much time to think about the dead body nearby.

Were you expecting any new kids at the temple? he asked.

I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. I don’t deal with the onboarding. That’s all Sido’s job.

You mean Head Priestess Sidonie? He was jotting something down in a notebook.

Yes.

She might know who this girl is, then, if she was anticipating a new recruit.

Probably. I didn’t know much about how clerics were brought in once their parents surrendered them. My only direct experience with the process had been when my own family dropped me off at the temple when I was seven years old. Mostly I remembered how heartbroken I was to be separated from my twin sister, Sunny. Not much else about those first days really stuck with me. Presumably, though, someone had brought this little girl to Seattle for her promised life of greatness, serving a god.

She got what we all get in the end, just a lot sooner.

Part of me—an ugly, bitter part—thought the girl had gotten off lucky.

Chapter Two

I wasn’t even back to my car before I saw the guy.

It was his absolute plainness that drew my attention. He was an ordinary man, standing on the sidewalk a block away from my 1970 Dodge Charger, staring at his cell phone.

Only he wasn’t really looking at it.

He held it, scrolling idly, but it was obvious to me when I gave him a second glance that he wasn’t actually doing anything. Rain was dripping down the edge of his raised hood and landing right on the phone’s screen. I had lived in Seattle long enough to know that rain on a phone screen rendered the touchpad all but useless. Yet this dude was still scrolling away.

A chill crept up my spine that I couldn’t blame on the weather.

I paused, still a few steps away from my ride, and sucked in a breath.

The man hadn’t done anything, hadn’t threatened me, hadn’t even looked at me yet, but my whole body was poised like I was about to be attacked. Every internal alarm bell I had was ringing off the hook.

This situation was all wrong.

In my line of work, where every decision I made could literally mean life or death, I had learned a thing or two about trusting my gut instincts. If my intuition said this guy was bad news, there was a reason.

I sized him up, hoping he hadn’t spotted me yet. It seemed likely he was standing where he was to better see me when I returned to the Charger. He was young, probably mid-twenties, and his black hair hung in his eyes. His build was lean, but his shoulders were wide, suggesting he was strong, or at least well-muscled under the rain jacket.

The coat itself was expensive looking, as were the brown leather shoes currently being ruined by the puddle at his feet.

He sniffed and lifted his gaze, his eyes locking on me.

Shit.

I wasn’t anticipating his reaction, however. Instead of coming at me or doing something else threatening, his eyes went wide, and he fumbled with his phone, almost dropping it. Once he caught hold of it again, he took off running in the opposite direction.

Wait…what?

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.

Not yet, though.

So, what, you want to kill all of Seth’s Chasers, is that it? My lips were against the concrete, and there were discarded concert posters and bits of garbage and debris mere inches from my mouth, but I couldn’t quite force myself to move.

What?

I flopped onto my back, and my ribs and head sang out in a perfect choir of discomfort. Now everything was coming into focus again, and in spite of the rain falling into my eyes I looked right at him.

You killed the girl on the beach, and now you think you’re going to get a two-for-one special and take me out too?

His expression was one of absolute befuddlement, and had I not been cultivating a garden of bruises along my abdomen, I might have found it funny. Under different circumstances the gesture might have been downright charming. He had the kind of inoffensive handsomeness that could have made him appealing.

Were he not trying to beat the shit out of me.

Of course, his confusion was my opportunity to strike. Given that he was willing to hit me while my back was turned and literally kick me while I was down, I was going to play just as dirty.

I sat up in one swift motion, ignoring the swelling migraine and the complaints of my ribs, and threw a sharp uppercut right into his groin.

Normally with such a low blow I’d have gone a little easy on him, trying to make a point rather than cripple the guy. However, given our current situation, I put all my strength into the hit, and it showed.

He made a gurgled eep noise and bent double, then fell to his knees. His eyes were watering, but he still managed to shoot me a betrayed look. What? We were supposed to be sportsmanlike about this? Dude had played about as dirty as possible, and I was the kind of girl who liked to give as good as I got.

I wriggled backwards away from him and managed to get myself up on both feet before he was able to catch his breath again. Now that we were on even ground, I felt considerably better about my chances.

I didn’t kill anyone, he wheezed.

Bullshit. If you didn’t kill her, why did you run?

I ran because you saw me.

This gave me pause. Huh?

I was just supposed to wait until you got back to your car and text this number, but when I looked up, you were staring right at me. Like you knew what I was doing. I panicked.

This had to be the most insane story imaginable for him to cook up on the spot. It was so stupid it almost sounded believable.

Give me your phone.

I expected he might argue, but instead he reached into his back pocket and held the smartphone out to me, before sitting down in a puddle, still wincing.

I snatched the phone out of his hand and danced back a few steps. It might seem like he was down for the count, but then again he could be faking the whole thing. I wasn’t about to take any other dumb chances.

Is it the first one here? I asked.

He nodded.

I copied the number into my own phone, before using the man’s to hit Call. The phone rang twice, then a smooth, deep voice answered.

I thought I told you to text. Is she on the move?

My blood turned to ice, and instead of a quick comeback, I simply hung up. I knew that voice all too well.

Prescott McMahon, the cleric to the goddess of death, was having me followed.

Chapter Three

I hung up my jacket on the rack just inside my door and kicked my boots onto the plastic tray. I had my wet jeans off before I even got out of the front entrance, leaving the denim in a heap on the hardwood floor. The air was warm and inviting from the fire I’d left on in my hurry to meet the detective.

My apartment was the only cushy perk of my otherwise deeply unglamorous job. And oh boy was it a perk.

Which was almost cruel, given how little time I got to spend in it.

The front hall opened into a huge open-concept loft, with floor-to-ceiling windows giving me a perfect view of downtown Seattle and Mt. Rainier in the background, a crown of mist encircling its peak. I’d seen apartments on other floors and knew this had once been several one-bedroom units that were converted into a single, giant space. There was a balcony that gave me uninterrupted glimpses of everything from the Space Needle to Puget Sound. It was the kind of place a millionaire would sell both kidneys for.

I got to sleep here about sixty nights a year.

The walls were painted a soft glacier blue meant to mimic the early light of morning, and the furniture and fixtures were clean and modern. Sido had decorated the place for me when I moved out of the temple, and I’d left most of it exactly as she’d set it up. The only thing I had changed was the art, which was all photographs I’d bought during my trips crisscrossing the country. Portraits, landscapes, postcards from one-stoplight towns. There was a little bit of everywhere I’d been displayed on the walls.

Hanging on one wall was a neon sign I’d bought for fifty dollars from a motel that had been undergoing renovations when I stayed there. They were going to throw the old sign out, and I couldn’t bear the idea of the thing just becoming garbage. I had an affinity for motels with the dumbest, kitschiest names. Which was how a blue-and-orange sign for Rest for the Wicked Inn had come to find a home on my living room wall.

It had been turned into a Motel 6.

Rain was falling steadily outside, turning the skyline a slate-gray color to match the water.

I climbed over the low back of my charcoal sofa in a daze and pulled a knit blanket onto myself. A small chirrup sound came from the folds of the soft material, and a little canine head with enormous ears popped out. Fenrir, my fennec familiar, squinted at me with bleary eyes. He yawned wide, showing off his needlelike teeth.

Sorry, Sleeping Beauty, did I interrupt your hard work?

He snuffed, then curled up in the crook of space behind my knees. Clearly napping was more important to him than making a big stink. I couldn’t blame him.

I stared at the coffeemaker on my counter, wondering what mattered more to me: caffeine or sleep. Neither was going to blot out everything I’d been through today, but a nap would help me ignore it awhile longer. Coffee would pull everything into laser focus, and I wasn’t sure I