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.”