Chapter 11
“Sure.” I gestured to the chair across the table.
Piper sat with a sigh, tired from her long shift at the diner. I moved some of the paperwork out of the way while she poured tea for herself and for me, and took a sniff or two to see if I could smell anything god-like about her.
She smelled like fried foods and something sweet like honey and cinnamon. She took a sip of her tea and I watched her, listening for the song of power within her.
There was no song. Maybe it was because she was off her shift and therefore wasn’t keeping up the waitress face, but there was something sort of...glowy about her. Something that reminded me of the sea, or of a sunset on it.
“Why did you write the letter?” I asked. “You know you could have come to me or any of my sisters and we would have listened to you. Kept you safe.”
“I don’t know that. I don’t know any of you. Didn’t even really know your father.” She picked up her fork and started on her pie, eating it from the wider back edge of the crust first.
I followed suit and took a bite of the blueberry crumble, starting tip first. “I can promise you, you can trust us. My sisters and I are here for every man, woman, god and creature in town.”
Her lack of reaction to that made it clear that she knew about god powers, gods, and creatures in town.
“Why didn’t you come to us?”
“You’re the police. The law was broken. I didn’t think you’d be happy with the things I had to say.”
“If you know who took the god powers, I can assure you, I am very happy with what you have to say.”
She paused, watching me with eyes much older than they had been just moments before.
“Powers?”
“Powers. And before you act like you don’t know what I’m talking about, I know you are more than mortal. What are you, Piper?”
“What do you think I am?”
“At first? Maybe a witch. Or a precog.”
She laughed, a light, happy sound. “Really? You thought I could see the future?”
“You know every order before anyone tells you what they want to eat. You know how many people are coming through that door before they’re out of their car. You know where people want to sit before they make up their mind.”
“I’m—that’s just being observant.”
“You knew I wanted the number five with a half turkey on sourdough. I’ve never ordered that here and you had already written it down before I asked for it. Don’t kid a kidder. Can you see the future?”
She exhaled and went back to eating pie, not looking at me. “Not really see it, no. I just get certain flashes of things. Like I saw that I had written the order on my pad, so I wrote it. Turned out it was right. And I saw a flash of showing you to the table, of getting the highchair for that family earlier, all those things. I’ve always thought of it as an overactive intuition. Lots of people have strong intuition.”
“It’s more than that. Trust me, Piper. Tell me.”
She put her fork down even though there was only a small triangle of chocolate pie left just begging to be eaten.
“This isn’t something I’ve ever shared.” Her eyes darted up to me, then down to her pie again. “I need to know you will give me amnesty.”
Well, well. That was unexpected.
“There are rules in Ordinary. Laws set by the gods and mortals who have been here long before me. I have to follow those rules, Piper, because those rules were set into place to keep everyone—all the mortals, all the gods, all the creatures of Ordinary—safe. Are you in danger?”
She glanced up at me, her eyes wide, two bright spots of color flaming her cheeks.
“I’ll take that as a yes, you’re in danger.”
I pushed my pie to one side, which was a shame since I’d only gotten through half of it and it was really good pie. “Okay. I’m here to help you. Whatever it is, I will do my best to make sure the laws of Ordinary protect you. My sisters and I will do our best to protect you. I swear it on my family’s name. Talk to me, Piper. I promise I’ll make this better.”
She bit the inside of her cheek, and from how stiff she held her shoulders this wasn’t an easy decision for her.
“I’m...I’m not just human.”
I thought we’d already established that. But I nodded encouragingly.
“My mother was human. And...um...my father wasn’t.”
So far so good. I nodded again and gave her a little smile.
“My father is a god.”
Okay, I’d been ready for almost anything out of her mouth. And yes, Jame had said she smelled like a god. But for some reason I hadn’t thought she could be the child of a god. A demigod. I’d never met a demigod. We didn’t have any in town. I wasn’t even sure what the rules were for a demigod to live in town. Were they half on vacation? Did they have to carry a part-time mortal job? Did they have power? Was that power great enough to need to be stored away? Half stored away?
I couldn’t hear a god power in her. If she had a power, she wasn’t currently carrying it.
“Terrific!” I said.
She startled.
That came out with a little more force than I’d expected. “Good. Good,” I said a little more quietly. “You’re a demigod. You do know you are wildly over-qualified for diner work.”
She gave me a hesitant smile. “It pays the bills. And the free meals aren’t so bad.”
“You’re really good at it, by the way.”
“This isn’t my first time on the floor. But I like this place.” She looked around at the diner and I wondered what she saw in it. The Blue Owl had been remodeled several times over the years and had been several kinds of eateries. They had expanded their hours for the summer, and seemed to be doing brisk enough business with their 1950s decor and atmosphere.
But I thought maybe it wasn’t just a diner Piper was looking at. It was a moment in time, an era that no longer existed. An era in which she had been young.
“Do you know who took the god powers?”
She nodded and turned her attention back to me. “About that.” She twisted fingers together and placed both hands on the table, wrists close together as if she were already in handcuffs. “I know who. And I know why.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s perfect. Can you tell me who first?”
“Yes. Me.”
It was really good that I wasn’t drinking tea at the moment because I would have spit it out. “Wow. Okay. So that’s why you were looking for amnesty. Right. Can you tell me why you did that?”
“I’m not proud of what I did.”
“But?”
“I...owed someone. And I didn’t owe them money.”
“Who?”
“A god.”
“You’re going to have to narrow that down a bit.”
“Mithra.”
God of contracts. Judiciary. All-seeing protector of truth. Not surprisingly, someone who had never vacationed in Ordinary.
“You owed Mithra the powers? All the god powers in town?”
“What? No! No. I owed him my life.”
“He was blackmailing you? Was he blackmailing you? Why was he blackmailing you?”
She tipped her chin up and I saw the strength of her. Definitely demigod. I didn’t know how I had missed it before.
“He negotiated the situation between my father and mother. For my life. He was the only one who cared. The only one who helped when my mother needed help.”
I inhaled and a low, throbbing headache took up residence behind my eyes. Maybe I had a skewed perspective on gods—okay, certainly I had a skewed perspective. But sometimes getting a god involved in a mortal matter only made things worse.
Surprisingly, mortals were generally pretty good at getting out of messes on their own.
“Okay, I think you need to take it from the top. Which god is your father?”
“Poseidon.”
I bit my teeth on a groan. Of course it was Poseidon. The god who couldn’t even vacation without killing himself over it. Crow would be giving me a big fat told-you-so right now.
“How many years ago was that?”
“Seventy-six. He met my mother while he was vacationing here. She was the daughter of the grocer.”
I did some math. Piper looked like she was in her early thirties, not well past retirement age. Poseidon had a habit of dying while vacationing in Ordinary, and the current Poseidon was only a few years into his godhood. So the Poseidon who was her father would have been in town when my grandpa was acting as the bridge for god powers.
I really wished Myra were here since she kept track of the history better than I did.
I glanced over at the door. And wouldn’t you know it? Myra strolled up and knocked quietly on the glass.
Just when she was needed most. I really wish I had that gift.
Piper looked less impressed. “What is she doing here? Did you call her? Are you arresting me? Is she arresting me?”
“Settle down. No one’s arresting you.” I stood and walked over to the door. It wasn’t locked because the diner was never closed, but it was easy to forget that in our closed-by-eight-o’clock town. I opened it for Myra and started back to the table. Piper had slid out of the chair and was standing with her arms wrapped around her ribs like she was trying to protect her vulnerable bits.
“Hey, Piper,” Myra said. “Is everything okay?”
Myra didn’t always give off the warmest vibes, especially when she was in cop mode. Even though she was wearing jeans and a sweat shirt, she was still giving off that stern cop body language.
But out of the three of us Reed girls, I had always thought she was the most nurturing. Her voice, when it softened like that, reminded me of Mom. Myra could soothe a kitten who’d been locked in a tumble drier if she had to.
And thanks to Jean, she’d had to.
Twice.
Maybe that’s why that cat of ours was always getting stuck in weird places: Jean. I made a mental note to grill her about it.
“You said you wouldn’t tell anyone. You said you didn’t.” Piper’s eyes were tight, her eyebrows dipped in a hard scowl.
Whatever trust I’d been building with her over pie was about to be blown to bits if I didn’t say something soothing, something comforting and trustworthy right this minute.
“Piper is Poseidon’s daughter and she’s in a bit of a jam we’re going to try to help her out of.”
Myra blinked, rockabilly eyeliner winging at the edges of her wide blues making her eyes even more pale. But that was the extent of her reaction to me blurting out that we had a demigod in our midst.
“We can do that. Is there any more of that tea? It smells wonderful.” She walked past Piper, snagged a cup off the counter, then took my seat and poured tea. “You two want a little more while you catch me up?”
She held the pot over Piper’s cup.
“What do you say, Piper?” I asked. “Three heads are better than one?”
“Except for Cerberus,” Myra said. “Just...dumbest dog ever.”
“Oh, please. He’s not dumb, he’s just easily distracted.”
“All three heads are easily distracted. And they all have a different idea of what the body should be doing. It’s sad.”
“It’s kind of funny.” I sat down next to Myra and made a grab for my pie, but she had already commandeered the plate, my unused spoon and the last half of my blueberry crumble.
Jerk.
“Going to have a seat?” I asked Piper.
She glanced at the door and the escape it offered.
“Come on. You’d know if we were a threat, wouldn’t you? You could tell?”
She slowly unwound her arms from her rib cage and brushed at strands of hair that had gone a little wild around her head. “Yes. I can tell if I’m in danger. Although you Reeds aren’t very easy to read.”
“That makes me curious as to what kind of powers you have.” Myra licked the last of the blueberry off the spoon. “I’d like to record them in our histories sometime if that’s okay.”
“She keeps the books on Ordinary.” I pulled the plate away from her and pressed the tip of my finger into the remaining crumbs of crumble. “But we can do that later. What we really need is to hear the rest of your information about the god powers.”
“Power,” Piper said.
“You know something about the missing powers?” Myra asked.
“She gave them away.”
“To whom?”
“Mithra.”
Myra’s eyebrow ticked upward, but she just sipped her tea. Then: “He’s never liked us much. I take it we’ll need to negotiate with him to get them back?”
“I figure. Think he’ll go for an offering of goats this time? Cute goats?”
“Last time we had to get him tickets to the national 4-H Skill-A-Thon, didn’t we?”
“Yes. And a subscription to a chocolatier magazine.”
“He does like judging pralines and young people with livestock. If only there was a chocolate goat contest. He’d love that.”
“You bribed him?” Piper looked like she couldn’t decide on being shocked or amused as she finally took the seat across from us.
“Not a bribe,” I said. “It’s just that Mithra has a certain way of conducting business. He is big on action and reaction, cause and effect. And equality. If we want something from him—the god powers—he will expect something of the same value from us in return.”
“Tickets to a livestock show is equal to god powers?”
“Maybe?” Myra shrugged. “It’s hard to get a read on him sometimes. What did he give you in exchange for the powers?”
“Power. Singular. One. And it wasn’t like that. I owed him for helping my mom.”
“No, it’s still an exchange. He gave you peace of mind. Stability. In return, he asked you for the god powers—very plural. How is it he thought you would be able to get them?”
“He didn’t ask. Not exactly.”
We waited.
“My mother passed away a few years ago. It was...hard to watch her age, to see her lose so much of her vitality, her mind. They said it was Alzheimer’s there at the end, but...I don’t know, maybe it was. She said she could see things. Angels.
“Three months after her diagnosis, she was gone. The last thing she said to me was that I had to go to Mithra. Pay him back. She said if he hadn’t answered her prayers, I wouldn’t be alive.”
“Do you know if your mom got pregnant while here in Ordinary?” I asked.
“I think so.”
“And Poseidon was on vacation at the time?”
She nodded.
“That’s the problem then. The contract the gods sign when they first come to Ordinary states that they can’t procreate while here. It’s not usually a problem. Deities aren’t really fertile while they take on a mortal life. So for your mother to get pregnant, Poseidon would have had to have been carrying his power. If he was carrying it while vacationing in Ordinary, that’s against the rules.”
“Mithra is all about following the rules,” Myra said. “I’m sure he knew what happened.”
“But...she said he hid her away to make sure she could have me. Isn’t that breaking the rules? Isn’t my life breaking the rules?”
“Technically,” I said. “But it was Poseidon who broke the rules, not your mother. If you had been conceived outside of Ordinary, there would be no problem, no rules would have been broken. Honestly, the rule is there more to protect the mortals than the deities. The punishment for breaking that rule is the god has to leave Ordinary for ten years—not exactly a hard sentence on an all-powerful, immortal being.”
“She thought I was going to be taken from her.”
“That’s not the way it works,” I said, trying to use Myra’s motherly tone. From the weird look on Myra’s face, I didn’t quite stick the landing on that.
“I promise you, if your mother had gone to the Reed in charge, the worst that would have happened is that she and Poseidon would have had to settle down outside the city limits.”
“Oh,” she said. I watched as years of doubts, years of worry crossed her face and then faded away, leaving her more human, and a little tired. “I thought I’d be killed. Or she would.”
“No.” Both Myra and I said that at the same time.
“The laws of Ordinary are here to protect children. Even children of gods. Maybe especially children of gods.”
She nodded and picked up her cup, her gaze turned inward as she took a drink.
I wanted to give her time to digest all this information, but I had a town full of anxious power-naked gods, and a murderer to catch.
“Did Mithra want all the god powers in payment for him keeping the secret of your parentage?”
“You keep saying all the powers. He only asked for Raven’s power.”
I pressed back against the vinyl of the booth. I had a good idea of why he wanted Crow’s power.
Crow had broken the rules. But he’d said because he was a trickster, his power would allow that. I had foolishly thought that was true.
Mithra knew Crow had broken the contract with Ordinary. Had probably been watching and waiting for a chance like this. Mithra was a stickler for contracts.
Plus, Crow had somehow pissed off every god I’d ever met. I couldn’t rule out a little bit of spite figuring into this.
“Mithra knew the power would be near Crow,” she said. “I knew it was in his shop.”
“Is that one of your abilities?” I asked.
“If I’m close enough, I can sense that god power is near. It’s like feeling electricity in the air. It took me a little time to figure out it was in the old glass-blowing furnace. When I had that figured out, it took me some time to get to it.”
“How did you get to it?” I asked.
“Pablo at the gas station has the key to Crow’s shop. I went in the front door and out the back. But don’t blame him. He didn’t know what I was doing. I told him I was going to check Crow’s shop for him while he was gone. I told him Crow said it was okay.”
So that would be breaking and entering. Now on to the burglary. “How did you transport the powers?”
“What do you mean?”
“Most people—creatures or otherwise—can’t touch the powers. How did you physically carry them?”
“An empty water bottle.”
“What?”
“A water bottle? It’s what I had handy.”
“You put all the god powers in Ordinary in a water bottle?”
“No, I put Crow’s power in a water bottle.”
“All the powers are missing, Piper.”
“All of them?” She blinked hard, and went a shade of green I hadn’t seen since Jean was in kindergarten and licked the bottom of her shoe on a dare.
During the field trip. To the dairy farm.
I really shouldn’t have been so proud of myself for making her fall for that.
“All of them?” she asked again.
“All of them.”
“I was just trying to get Crow’s.”
“You did,” Myra said. “And you also took the power of every other god in town.”
“Oh, crap.”
Oh crap, indeed.
“I didn’t mean to. You have to believe me. I never meant to take all the powers. Just Crow’s.”
“We believe you,” I said. She opened her mouth and I reached over and patted her hand. She waited, probably expecting words of wisdom or comfort.
“You done screwed up.”
Myra sighed.
Hey, I never said I was good at this kind of thing.
“But,” I said, “there were extenuating circumstances. You aren’t the only one who screwed up. Technically, Crow broke one of Ordinary’s rules. So technically Mithra could be considered correct for stepping in. Though technically, Ordinary is outside his influence and we’d rather he’d let us handle our own business just like all the other gods outside Ordinary do. We have rules for that too. Don’t worry. This could be much worse.”
“He wants to meet you,” Piper blurted out.
“Who?”
“Mithra. I just gave him the powers on my afternoon break. He said he wants to talk to you, Delaney, tomorrow. About the rules. About power. And he wants you to bring Ryder Bailey with you.”
I could not have been more shocked if a fish had suddenly ridden by on a bicycle. With an umbrella hat on its head.
“Ryder?” I finally said. Or thought I did. It came out more like a squeak.
“Did he say why he wanted to see Delaney and Ryder?” Good ol’ Myra. Nothing knocked her off her footing.
“He said it was Delaney’s job to make sure the rules of Ordinary aren’t broken. And he said he has questions he wants Ryder to answer.”
“Ryder doesn’t even know about the gods,” I said. “Or god power. He wouldn’t believe Mithra is a god. He is so not coming with me. No. No way.”
“I promised he would,” Piper said.
I groaned. “Why?”
“I thought he knew! He’s on the police force, and Myra and Jean and Roy know. Why wouldn’t he know about the gods?”
“Because we don’t share that kind of information easily,” Myra said.
“This is officially worse,” I muttered.
We were all silent.
“Has this ever happened before?” Piper asked in a small voice. “Has anyone ever screwed up as badly as this?”
“Oh, honey.” I gave her a firm pat on her hand. “You have no idea.”
“Right. Now. We’ll need a few more details.” Myra pulled out her tablet and tapped it to life. “About everything.”
“Then what?” Piper asked.
“Then we fix this,” I said with a lot more confidence than I felt.