Chapter One
Okay,so the truth was things had gotten a little out of hand. Tell one god about an under-planned, under-decided, not-even-scheduled-yet wedding, especially if that god was Crow, and suddenly another god wanted to know when they’re getting an invitation. And then another god. And then a dozen.
I’d muted my notifications and refused to look at that message string for weeks. Things were better that way. Well, not for the wedding. Or the gods. Or my fiancé, Ryder Bailey, who was doing all the heavy lifting on the wedding planning. But it sure made me panic a lot less if I didn’t have to look at the invitation list growing by the minute.
“How many gods, Delaney?” Ryder asked over piles of paper strewn across the breakfast counter. He’d been dragging his fingers through his light brown hair, and now it stuck up sideways away from his ears.
I shook my head like I was lost in cooking breakfast. “Oh, you know,” I said, going for vague.
He narrowed those green eyes. “Delaney?”
“Gods?” I asked, like I’d never heard of such a thing. I poked at the white part of the egg hoping I looked really busy.
“Most of them?” he asked.
I made a noncommittal noise and clicked the hood fan up a notch.
“All of them?” he said over the noise of the fan. “Did you inviteallthe gods in Ordinary to our wedding?”
“Technically, no.” I clicked the fan up one more notch.
“I need a list,” he shouted over the jet engine roar. “Gods and, you know, everyone else. All your people. You said you’d get me a list. Hey. Hey, Chief Reed, I know you can hear me.”
I leaned in and frowned harder at the egg. It had gone brown at the edges surprisingly quickly. It was starting to smell, and I wasn’t sure it was a good smell. I dug at it, trying to get the spatula under before it burned.
My sister, Myra, had taken pity on me (again) and walked me through breakfast (again): eggs over easy—and if that failed, scrambled—sausage in a different pan, and toast.
Add some fruit and coffee, and I could officially claim I knew how to cook a breakfast.
I wanted to do this right for once, for Ryder. He’d been doing all the wedding planning since I’d been putting in extra hours at work.
And by “putting in extra hours”, I meant I’d been hiding out at work so I could avoiding planning the wedding.
I didn’t know why, but every time I worked myself up to do something for the wedding: flowers, food, guest list? I just froze and all the worst-case scenarios of every possible choice ran through my head like a video stuck in fast-forward. A minute or so of that was traumatizing enough to make me back away from making even the smallest decisions.
Ryder had put up with it for six weeks before he pulled all the neglected tasks to his side of the To Do list, told me he had it under control, and that was that.
I knew I wasn’t pulling my weight on the wedding. Breakfast was my attempt at an apology, and now even that was going up in smoke.
I jiggled and scraped, flipped the spatula upside down to get some leverage and pushed harder. The egg popped free, half of it soaring over the edge of the pan before landing with a plop onto the burner.
“Crap!” I yanked the pan off the burner but there was so much egg everywhere. On the burner, down the side of the pan, in the pan. Egg goo stretched, more of the whitish-yellow snaking across the burner and going black in an instant.
Smoke plumed in a ropey spout, a tiny reverse tornado, the stink and greasy gray of it sucked up by the fan. The sausage wasn’t doing so hot either. It curled in on itself protectively, exposing pink on the top, purple-y on the sides.
I was pretty sure Myra’s sausages hadn’t been purple.
I could fix this. I could do this.
“Oil!” I grabbed for the green bottle by the toaster, and realized I’d forgotten to push the bread down and smacked at the lever with one hand. I picked up the oil with the other, ready to pour it over the eggs to unstick them. But instead of pushing the bread down, the toaster bucked and clanged over onto its side.
“Crap!” I lunged for the toaster. My shirt caught the handle of the egg pan, ramming the whole thing into the sausage debacle like bumper cars going ninety.
I slapped at the toaster and grabbed for the pan.
Strong, steady hands stopped me. One on my hip, holding me in place, one reaching for the pan but catching my wrist instead.
“The eggs,” I said.
