“You know where I’ll be.”
Then the back door opened and Crow bulleted into the seat, slamming the door behind him. “Can we stop for food? I’m starving.”
“No,” Odin and I said at the same time.
Crow gave an offended sound, and caught my gaze in the rearview mirror.
“I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday.”
“If you behave yourself, I’ll stop for coffee before we head in to the station.”
“Fine.” He crossed his arms over his chest and frowned out the window like a petulant child. With a parasol on his head. Those things were never going to catch on.
“Suck it up, Crow,” Odin growled.
One grouchy god.
Check.
One pouty god.
Check.
Silver lining? Starting a Monday out this bad meant it couldn’t get worse.
~~~
It got worse.
I’d dropped Odin off at his property, and Crow had claimed the passenger seat. He spent the next twenty minutes complaining about the rain, the gods accusing him of losing their powers on purpose, and having skipped dinner and breakfast.
“You’re going to complain about how hard things are for you today, when you are the one who has made every god in town angry, lost their powers—lost, Crow—which is something no one has ever done in the history of Ordinary, and doubled my workload? Not to mention that you broke the contract with Ordinary by picking your power back up and then not leaving town for a year. I can not start to explain just how angry I am at you for that.”
And even more, for making me think that his trickster power should be allowed to do that. I should not have trusted him.
He chewed on his bottom lip while I navigated the rain and traffic. “Buy you an Egg McMuffin with extra cheese?” he said quietly.
I sighed, trying to rein in my anger and worry. It had taken three months before anything bad had happened from him breaking the rules. Maybe we could fix it before anything else bad happened.
“Why didn’t you eat dinner?”
“I was busy.”
“Doing what?”
“I...was out of town. Picking up some things for my shop.”
“You going to come up with a receipt for these things with a date stamp on them?”
He rubbed at the bridge of his nose again. “I was out of town at a movie. I have the ticket for that.”
That seemed a little more likely. We had a three-plex here in town, but it didn’t always get the newest blockbusters. Driving into the valley to Salem or even Dallas, where they had bigger movie theaters, was pretty common. So was taking an extra hour to drive up to Portland and catch a show at the Imax big screens.
A mortal god leaving town wasn’t outside the rules, though it was expected that the trips would be short, and that the majority of a god’s vacation time was spent firmly inside Ordinary’s boundaries.
“Why didn’t you just tell me that?”
“I don’t...I don’t know.” He groaned, his hand falling away from his face. When I glanced over, I could see the tremble in his hands. “I lost the powers, Delaney. I’m not an idiot. I’m not forgetful. I’m not careless. But I lost them. How does that even happen?”
