It was time to go.
I stood and Piper stopped by the table. She set down two slices of pie and an extra pot of tea. The plate in front of me had blueberry crumble, her plate was the chocolate mousse I’d seen so many diners rave about tonight.
“I know it’s not midnight,” she said, “but since you’re here, and I’m here, and no one else is, how about if we just do the meeting now?”
“Meeting?” But then it hit me. She was the anonymous letter writer.
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.
