I disconnected to cut off her cackle.
Chapter Four
Hatter and Shoeshowed up at the station around two-thirty to take over. I usually worked later, but everyone insisted I get out of there.
“Perhaps,” Than said as we both walked out of the building into a September late afternoon that was still clinging to summer, “you would provide me a ride?”
I glanced around the parking lot, then pointed at his gold pimp-mobile. “What’s wrong with your car?”
“Nothing that I am aware of, Reed Daughter.”
“Delaney,” I corrected absently. “You aren’t avoiding anyone are you? Leaving the car here so they think you’re not at home?”
“I didn’t ask you to take me home,” he said primly.
“That wasn’t a no. Who are you hiding from?”
“May I remind you I am the god of death?” One long, boney hand rested on the passenger door handle of my Jeep. “There isn’t anyone from which I hide.”
“Is it Talli? I haven’t seen her around lately. Did you break up with your girlfriend?”
“Perhaps we could continue this discussion never.”
He delivered that so dry and flat, it took me a second before I realized it was a joke.
“Oh, no. If I have to deal with gods paying too much attention to me and my love life, then turn about is about time. If you want a ride, you’re gonna talk.”
I opened the door. He opened his and folded gracefully into his seat. “You will be late for your dress event,” he noted, before buckling the seatbelt.
“Trust me, if I don’t show up, they’ll find me and throw dresses at me. It won’t matter if I’m a couple minutes late. Spill. What’s going on between you and the vacationing goddess of morning and the evening star?”
He folded his hands in his lap and gazed out the window. “Do you know one of the things that convinced me to sample the experience of setting my power down and vacationing here?”
“Other gods were bragging about it? Plus, that ancient vampire Lavius was here, and you had vowed to extinguish his non-life?”
He hummed. “The gods don’t, as a matter of fact, brag about vacationing in Ordinary. Quite the contrary. In the larger world, in the larger universe, Ordinary is very rarely mentioned. Not, I think to hide it, but instead because to understand it, for a god to understand it,” he clarified, “it takes some very human thinking.”
“Gods vacation,” I argued. “There are plenty of stories of gods lounging around doing whatever they want.”
“There are very few stories of gods willingly putting their powers down to take time off from being a god.”
“Well, Odin,” I said, “Frigg.”
“In those tales they appear as human. That does not mean they gave up their god powers.”
“Okay,” I said, taking the Jeep out of the parking lot and heading north on the main drag—Highway 101. “So giving up your power isn’t a thing most gods think about.”
“No,” he said, “it is not. It does, rather, fly in the face of being a god.”
“The power is pretty much the thing,” I said, “right?”
“Yes. The power is ‘the thing,’ as you put it. We gods like to keep our power. It is the most important thing to us. Wars may wage and planets may fall, but gods will hold their powers above all.”
“This is going somewhere?”
Than blinked, then turned to stare at me.
I tried to keep the smile off my face.
