Thunder Road (Rain Chaser Book 1) (3 page)

The wee fox might not be able to speak my language, but he managed to communicate with me just fine when he was unhappy about something.

I got off the bed and shucked my jacket, wanting to take a look at the damage before I headed out again.

In the too-bright light of the tiny bathroom I turned my back towards the mirror and peeled off my black tank top. Glancing over my shoulder, I sucked in a breath. Certainly not the worst I’d ever had, but the marks were there.

Whenever lightning strikes, be it the ground, a tree, or in my case a person, it leaves behind a calling card. The official sciency phrase for them is Lichtenberg figures or fractal scarring. Fun fact: lightning itself is actually a Lichtenberg figure. Which was why the scars it leaves behind so closely resemble what made them. Winding, forked branches etched their way across my back from my left shoulder down to my right hip. They were an angry red color that made the pattern stand out obscenely in contrast to my skin.

I let out a small grunt. My whole body felt sore and wrung dry, worse than if I’d run a marathon or done a high-intensity workout. A low-level throbbing ache was working its way through all my muscles. My skin buzzed faintly.

This was what I’d been trained for. What I’d been born for, depending on who you asked. Anyone else who’d taken a lightning strike like that would be dead, but not me. I’d channeled it and used it like a weapon.

Harnessing the power of Seth was one of the perks that went along with being his Rain Chaser. It’s the perks that they love to talk about in the news and in magazine features. The media makes it seem like being destined for a life of servitude to the gods is a special treat.

Those of us indentured knew differently.

They never talked about this side—the ugly, painful, scary side—where we almost die or are left permanently scarred.

Who would drop their kids off at the temples then, if they knew?

I touched the mark at the back of my neck, still perfectly black twenty-seven years later. A cloud with three drops of rain and a black lightning bolt. They used the same image on the weather network to depict a coming storm. To my family it meant that I’d been predestined for a very specific kind of life.

On the bathroom counter my phone buzzed. I answered, turning on the speaker.

“Rain Chasers International. You bring the pain, we bring the rain,” I said cheerfully.

“Funny,” Sido’s familiar voice replied. Judging from her tone, she didn’t find it funny at all. Go figure. “What in Seth’s name did you do now, Tallulah?”

“Uh, my job?”

“So why am I fielding calls from Manea’s temple suggesting you attempted to kill her cleric?”

Prescott had ratted me out already? What a dick.

“I had a job to do.” No sense in pointing out they’d been trying to drive me off the road at the time. Sido didn’t care much for semantics. “And I got the idol Seth wanted.”

The line was quiet for a moment. “He’ll be pleased to hear that. It might make things…easier.”

A chill crept down my spine. “What do you mean?”

“He’ll explain himself. Make sure you stay where you are.”

Oh, crap. If Seth wanted to see me in person, things were not going well. I thought I’d done my job and that would be that until I got back to the temple.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“Manea is unhappy.”

Manea was always unhappy. A chipper death goddess would have been super unnerving. “I was doing what I was asked.”

“Things have gotten complicated. Just wait for Seth.” She hung up without waiting for me to acknowledge the order.

Tugging the hem of my shirt down again and ignoring how much it hurt my sensitive flesh, I went back into the main room and grabbed my jacket. I could stay here and worry, watch Comedy Central until the inevitable
South Park
reruns started, and find cheap vending machine candy, or I could get out of here and find some real food.

My body knew the latter was the only option.

A god might be able to wield the power of the heavens to no ill effect, but I was mortal and I was
starving
.

Chapter Three

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any small town in possession of more than five hundred residents must be in want of a Chinese food restaurant. This need meant almost every time I stopped somewhere, I could count on finding chow mein and Kung Pao chicken.

I was a woman of simple needs.

Whitefish was a town after my own heart. They had not one but
two
Chinese restaurants in the span of a few blocks. I stopped at the first one I saw, a place called China Wall with a red dragon painted on the glass. My maps app told me the one down the block was a chain, and much like motels, I preferred my restaurants more homegrown.

The waitress showed me to a table in the back of the nearly empty restaurant. The only other people around were a teen couple who were awkward and adorable, likely on their first date given all the blushing and nervous shifting, and an older man sitting alone reading a newspaper.

I sat down, pulled out a copy of Karen Robards’
Morning Song
, and set it on the table for after I ordered. The cover was torn and the spine broken, with several dog-eared pages inside. The cost of relying on used bookstores meant I had to deal with
very
well-loved books.

The waitress returned, and I ordered my two must-haves as well as sweet and sour pork, honey garlic balls, and beef with broccoli. She gave the seat across from me a quick glance as if I
must
be expecting someone else.

“Oh, and Chinese fried rice,” I added defiantly. “And a Coke.”

She wrote down my order and scurried off without a word. Had this been a dim sum restaurant I really could have blown her mind with my capacity for face-stuffing.

Using your body as a conduit of pure electric energy burns a fuckton of calories. It was the only reason I was still thin, because my eating habits could best be described as…bachelor.

I had just opened the book and started reading when the chair on the opposite side of the table scraped against the floor and a large body settled into it.

My stomach was doing flip-flops and my pulse hammered about a mile a minute, but I pretended to ignore him.

Not all that easy when he was sitting two feet across from me.

To his credit he didn’t clear his throat or shift uncomfortably. He did nothing to get my attention except for exist within close proximity. In the end, that proved to be enough. I set the book down and looked up.

Where Prescott could best be described as beautiful, this new arrival was far from it. Which wasn’t to say he was ugly, by any means. He was…ugly handsome? Was that a thing?

If it was, it was looking right back at me, with intense whisky-brown eyes and a frown.

“Cade.” I played it cool.

“Tallulah.”

The waitress returned and asked Cade for his drink order. She was about to walk away when he asked for a menu. I didn’t bother telling him he hadn’t been invited to stay. He was already sitting here. I might be a dick, but I wasn’t enough of one to make him eat alone.

Plus I secretly didn’t mind that he was here.

As he perused the menu, I gave him a once-over. I hadn’t seen him in a couple months, and in that time he’d changed in subtle ways. His typical crew cut had grown out slightly, letting his dark brown hair show that it could become curly, given half the chance. This also told me he hadn’t been back to his temple since we’d last seen each other. Cade only trusted the temple to cut his hair.

He wore an olive-green military-style jacket and a plain black T-shirt. Stubble darkened his cheeks, and his broad nose resembled that of a seasoned boxer, as if it had been broken several times and never quite healed right. Seth help me, but he looked good, and though I’d never admit it out loud, I was glad to see him.

He ordered BBQ duck and Szechuan noodles.

When the waitress was gone, his attention gravitated back to me, and we stared at each other across the table.

“How did you find me?” I asked, when I felt like I was starting to blush.

He made a dismissive, snorting noise and glanced around the restaurant, his gaze pausing on the red lanterns and mural of a Chinese pagoda. “Give me a little credit.”

He knew me well enough to be aware of my habits by this point. The kind of motels I’d gravitate towards. The restaurants I usually frequented. His showing up at both was a not-so-subtle way of telling me he’d been paying attention.

Cade was a few years older than me and had been out in the field before I’d left my temple. We’d seen each other in passing, but it wasn’t until I was out in the real world that I’d actually gotten to know him. His job and mine often intersected, unluckily for me.

Literally.

“How’s Ardra these days?” I picked at the corner of my book’s cover, trying to ignore the knot of hunger gnawing away at my stomach. If my food didn’t get here soon, I might start eating the pages.

Cade’s mouth formed a narrow line, and he nodded, agreeing with a statement I hadn’t made. I used to love poking fun at the unfortunate hand he’d been dealt, but after a while the jokes had stopped feeling so funny. I wasn’t a teenager anymore, and I knew a lot more about the burden he carried than I had back then.

Ardra, the goddess of bad luck and misfortune, was not a popular designation, for obvious reasons. While Cade himself was not particularly unlucky, bad news tended to follow him around like a cloud.

That was why our paths crossed so often. When storm water broke levies, when trees crushed roofs, or lightning struck a home…that was usually Cade. Unlike me, who typically answered prayers to end droughts, the prayers Cade answered were often for third parties. People wished for terrible things to befall their friends and neighbors, and Ardra loved to fulfill those prayers. The dirty work of which often fell to the man sitting across from me.

Typically he bore it well, but today he looked tired, with dark circles under his eyes.

“Sorry.” Though I hadn’t teased him, I felt bad for bringing up Ardra when he was so obviously worn down.

The waitress returned with our food, giving us a reprieve from the awkwardness. I’d worked adjacent to him for twelve years, but sometimes he felt like a stranger to me. He was so quiet and withdrawn I never knew if he actually enjoyed spending time with me or if I was merely a familiar face he gravitated towards. I liked having him near me when he did show up, in spite of his unlucky nature. There was something about being around Cade that reminded me I was a
person
instead of a cleric. He brought out the Tallulah side of me, beyond my Rain Chaser title.

My dinner was delicious. I scarfed down the whole plate of sweet and sour pork before bothering to look up at him again. He was watching me appraisingly, barely half-finished with his plate of noodles. I’d never learned to be ladylike, and I wasn’t about to start now. If he was disgusted by me, that was just too bad.

A small smile twitched the corner of his lips. “You eat like you’re the last of fifteen kids. I’ve never met anyone who could eat like you.”

This sounded so close to a compliment I stuffed a honey garlic chicken ball in my mouth and smirked. Once I was done chewing, I said, “It’s the all-carb, all-fat, all-MSG diet.”

“It’s doing wonders for you.”

Heat suddenly swelled inside me, a faint, dizzying sensation of pleasure and awareness. I blushed and started eating again so I didn’t need to answer him. Was he flirting with me? Yet another thing I hadn’t been taught at the temple. All we’d learned there was
No boys, stay pure for your god
.

Yeah, right.

Cade took a bite of duck and chewed, but kept staring at me. I didn’t want the heaviness of his gaze to disarm me, but he was making me feel self-conscious, which in turn was making me eat more out of sheer rebellion.

I hardly tasted my Kung Pao chicken.

Once I was down to the beef and broccoli, and fried rice, I combined the two on one plate and pushed them around with my fork.

“You’re not here to burn the restaurant down, are you?” I gave him a serious look, and this time he smiled for real.

“No, I’m already done with what I came to do.”

“Oh?”

The smile vanished. “I was at North Valley Hospital on an official invite.”

I waved my hand between us, dismissing any further comments. Neither he nor I wanted to talk about the kind of bad tidings he could bring to a hospital.

Cade’s job and Prescott’s often went hand in hand as well.

What a fine trio we made.

I stole a piece of duck off his plate and popped it in my mouth. The salty, fatty skin practically dissolved on my tongue, and I made a happy
mmm
sound in appreciation.

The previous tension had vanished, and he shoved his plate towards me. “Finish it if you want.”

“No, I just wanted to see if it tasted as good as it looked.”

Cade gave me a look that suggested he was going to say something, and I realized a beat too late how my comment might be reimagined as a double entendre.
This
was why they should have taught us about flirting in the temple. I managed not to blush and met his gaze defiantly, as if I’d intended the second meaning all along.

“It does,” he said.

“But you can keep it.” I nudged the plate back at him.

This was new. Cade and I typically had a professional, cordial relationship of mutual respect and occasional admiration. Honestly, until tonight I had assumed Cade had no interest in women. Or men. I thought he existed on a plane of asexual indifference, married to his job and devoted only to Ardra.

The heat of his gaze and the way it knotted me up inside was making me question everything I knew about our association.

Did he like me?

Perish the thought.

I’d long harbored a bit of a schoolgirl crush on Cade Melpomene, but because of his typically distant behavior I had never believed he might return any of my affection. So I stuffed those feelings deep inside me and was mostly able to ignore them. Except when he looked at me like he was right now.