“Rude.” His eyes flicked over my shoulder at the room full of angry.
“Okay. Okay.” He stepped out to stand beside me, though still back far enough I was between him and most of the room. He raised both hands, pleading for his brethren to stay calm.
“I broke the rule. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I had my power back and that high, that invincibility of being filled with power...” He bit his bottom lip and shook his head a little. “You all know what it’s like. I hadn’t picked up my power in years. Decades.”
Lightning strobe-lighted the room. Thunder cracked and growled.
“I let it get away from me. The temptation. The possibilities of what I could do with my power, and what my power could do...if I let it.”
Someone, I thought maybe Ares, swore.
“This isn’t my fault. Not really. Not me, Crow. It’s my power, Raven’s power’s fault. Three months with no backlash? It tricked us. I’m as much a victim as you are.”
The room dissolved into the bingo-hall shout-down again.
I let them all get it out of their systems.
Crow sidled sideways to get more of me between them and him.
“Nope.” I pressed my hand on his upper arm and felt the damp heat of his fear radiating through his thin shirt. “They’re not going to kill you. That would get them kicked out of Ordinary for good. They, apparently unlike you, follow the rules in the contract.”
I turned. “None of you will kill Crow, because if you do, I will haul you in for murder and then banish you from town for the rest of your existence.
“Since you all know he’s complicit in the misplacement of your powers, I will consider each and every one of you a suspect if Crow shows up dead, injured, or sporting so much as a new hangnail. The law is here for a reason, and I’m here to enforce it.”
A few feet shuffled. A few voices swore. Finally, Frigg spoke up. She was just under six feet tall, yellow hair pulled back in a single ponytail that fell against her heavy flannel jacket. Her jeans were frayed near the knees, and a smudge of grease streaked one thigh. Her shirt had her towing company’s logo over her heart: Frigg’s Rigs.
“All right, Delaney,” she said calmly. “We know how to follow the rules. And the rules say since Crow picked up his power, he gets kicked out for the next year.”
“I agree.” Crow made an offended noise. I ignored him. “But first we’ll have to find his power so that he and it are out of Ordinary. Was your power in that oven too, Crow?”
He nodded.
“Then we have to find the powers before we can kick him out.”
Frigg inhaled, exhaled. “Well, crap.”
My thoughts exactly.
“So what we all need to do now is stay calm and start looking. Where could the powers be? Who might have taken them or,” I held up my hand to cut off speculation, “could the powers have moved on their own accord, or been drawn away by some other natural or supernatural force?”
The silence was worse than the grumbling. Thunder rumbled, quieter this time. Maybe Thor was done drowning us with his displeasure of having to stay out of town for a year.
Zeus sighed. “Where do you suggest we begin searching, Delaney?”
A few of the gods threw deadly glares toward Crow, but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t fire up the murder wagon.
Yet.
“We start with Crow staying with me.”
“What?” he protested.
“Under protective custody, if you come with me willingly. Under arrest if you don’t.”
“Well, seeing as I have so many choices...”
“No choices,” I said. “You have no choices.”
“And then what?” Frigg asked.
“I’d like all of you to let the police handle this. No tearing this town apart on your own.”
The room exploded into complaints and groans, and a few outright strings of curses in languages I didn’t know.
Was someone swearing in Pig Latin?
I spread my stance, hands tucked on the front edges of my belt.
“We’ll look for the powers. We’ll question any creatures who might know where the powers could be. We have the resources of the entire town, mortal and creature at our call. You all have businesses to attend. As long as the powers remain in Ordinary, you continue your vacations just as if we knew where the powers were.”
“You expect us to do nothing?” Hades spoke from near the back of the room. Hades was built like an ex-football player, wide at shoulders, thick through the chest. Even in slacks and sweater vest pulled over a pale orange button down shirt, he looked like he could break someone in half with a pat on the back.
He ran the frilly little beachside bed and breakfast where each room was decorated in literary themes: romance, mystery, western, historical, fantasy. For a god who ruled the cool, impersonal underworld, he was a happy, I’d dare say even soft-hearted man.
The contrast between what his god power represented, and what he preferred to do on vacation made me wonder once again just how much the gods held on to their mortal personalities even after millennia as deities. Or maybe just how much the gods delighted in doing the exact opposite of their normal god-power duties while on vacation.
“If you think of anything, tell me. If you see anything that could lead to your powers, tell me. If you have a vision or hunch or dream, I want to know. Ordinary is a small town. It shouldn’t take us very long to cover it.”
Of course I was massively simplifying the problem. It wasn’t just finding the powers that was the problem. Whoever or whatever had taken them would need to be dealt with too, even if it was only Raven’s own power that had hidden the rest of them away.
I had no idea what sort of creature or person in existence could not only sense god powers, but could also handle them and physically move them.
I made a note to look back over the list of current and past creatures who had called Ordinary their home. Who in town could touch a god power and not be destroyed by it?
There was another possibility, of course. That the powers had been drawn away by some kind of supernatural force instead of some kind of supernatural being. It was a long shot, since I’d think any number of creatures and deities would feel something hinky going down in town, but it wasn’t completely impossible.
But then almost nothing was completely impossible in Ordinary.
We’d need to check in with anyone sensitive enough to the forces, magics, and powers in the town who might have felt a shift.
Which pretty much meant I’d be going door-to-door asking people if they’d felt a disturbance in the Force.
Terrific.
“Well then,” Ares, who looked like a twenty-something computer geek and owned the nursery and garden center, clapped his hands together to break the silence. “We have our battle plan. Crow stays with the Chief, the rest of us go back to our daily lives and wait for our powers to show up in the local lost-and-found. Easy.”
But of course, the way Ares said it made everyone grumble again.
Just because he wasn’t currently the god of war didn’t mean he could resist stirring up trouble amongst his neighbors.
I glared at him, and he gave me an angelic smile.