Accidentally…Evil? (Accidentally Yours #3.5)(15)
Author: Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

It had been a very dark hour for the gods. They should have intervened; they should have taken the Maaskab down, but their laws prohibited influencing the evolution of humanity unless the path led to complete destruction. At the time, it had not.

Chaam looked toward the early morning sky. Above him perched a black and yellow toucan with a red-tipped beak, staring with needy eyes. “For f**k’s sake. Fine! I’ll help you with your mate, but you will tell me where to find Maggie’s father.”

The bird squawked.

The ruin wasn’t far. Just a few minutes northwest. “Lead the way, Romeo.”

The toucan fluttered off its branch and flew to the next tree and to the next. Chaam’s angry march continued along with his mental rant.

Perhaps the Creator didn’t exist and there was no such divine intelligence in the universe. Perhaps he and all gods were simply creatures of evolution, instinctually wired to rescue humans. Perhaps there was a way to break this compulsion. Dammit. He deserved to live freely, without the toxic albatross of humanity driving his every move. He was tired of this torment. And now the one brilliant light at the end of his tunnel had been shut off.

Images of Maggie infiltrated his mind, exacerbating his rage. How could she turn out to be Maaskab, of all things?

Chaam’s rational mind clicked and began tamping down the barrage of irrational emotions. Idiot. There are no female Maaskab—only female slaves and sacrificial victims waiting to happen.

Maggie could never be anything but innocent and loyal.

Fucking hell. How could you accuse her of being a Maaskab? He’d seen her soul. It was pure light.

He stopped in his tracks. “Where the f**k are we?”

The toucan fluttered to a small dirt hill, flapped its colorful wings, and flew off.

To the untrained eye, it appeared as a giant mound, overgrown with vines and small trees. But to one side a dark doorway, about four feet high and three feet wide, stood.

Chaam stared at the entrance for several moments while the gravity of his behavior positioned itself into a stranglehold.

It had been his fear talking earlier. He’d succumbed to it. He’d let it pollute his mind.

Gods dammit. He’d f**ked up, plain and simple. Maggie was his destiny. She had been brought into his life to help him find comfort in his eternal role as a deity. And who gave a shit if his ability to touch her and hold her came from a dark Maaskab relic? Dammit. It didn’t matter.

Maggie said her father had given her the necklace as a gift. It probably came from this very spot, which might very well be an ancient Maaskab temple. Her father likely thought it was a meaningless rock.

Point was, he could figure all that out later. Fate had brought the necklace to Maggie and Maggie to him.

So why the f**k was he standing there staring at an old decaying ruin? He needed to find her and beg forgiveness. Then he would take her through the cenote and fill her with the light of the gods, making her immortal. The rest could—

A gut-wrenching female scream exploded from the temple.

What the hell? Adrenaline charged through his humanlike body. He bolted inside only to find an empty, dark, wet chamber, corroded with tree roots, spider webs, and the dank smell of…

Holy hell. Death. It permeated every wall. And the narrow stairway to the right of the tiny chamber reeked with it. This was the unmistakable scent of Maaskab.

Another scream echoed through the air.

He quietly neared the narrow opening that led to a set of slippery, mold-covered stone steps. With his wide shoulders, he would barely fit into the passage.

The violent scream turned into a muffled moan.

Shit. Chaam squeezed his way down and saw what he’d hoped he would not.

The scrappy-looking man had the tip of a knife buried into the young woman’s chest just above her heart. He had tied her to a slab of stone, with a rag jammed in her mouth.

“Let her go,” Chaam commanded.

Startled, the man jumped and turned the blade toward Chaam.

Chaam held out his palms. “Dr. O’Hare?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I know your daughter Maggie. She sent me to look for you.” Sort of…

The man tilted his head. “You know my Maggie?”

“Yes. And she’s very worried about you. Drop the knife, and we can go find her.” Sweat trickled down Chaam’s back. He’d never been so nervous in his entire existence. Not when he’d faced an entire army of evil vampires. Not when ten legions of Roman soldiers, hell bent on slaughtering him and his brother Votan, barreled down on them. No. Not even then. But now, in this cold, dark chamber, he felt like a sizzling pig on a hot campfire spindle. Maggie’s father had gone mad from sorrow; he stank of it. But could Chaam save him? Curing erectile dysfunction was not the same as mending a broken heart; although both were powerful organs that responded well to sex.

“I said, drop the f**king knife, you idiot. I’m a god. You can’t kill me. At best you’ll stick me with the blade, piss me off, and end up dead. Neither of us wants that.”

The man stood silent, his wild eyes accessing Chaam. From the smell of it, he hadn’t been washed in weeks and neither had his grimy khaki trousers and matching shirt.

“How the hell do you know what I want?” the man finally said.

Funny, he hadn’t commented on the god thing. That usually provoked one of two responses in others: They either believed him and became as scared as shit, or they thought he was crazy, which also scared the crap out of them. Neither was the case today.

“Of course, I know what you want. Your wife,” Chaam replied. “You want her back. But whatever you’re doing won’t work. By the way, what the hell are you doing?”

The man’s veins bulged on his wrist and the dagger trembled. “You’re wrong. The tablet can bring her back.”

Tablet?

Chaam noticed a black tablet the size of a tombstone lying under the woman’s head. Likely it was a remnant of some twisted Maaskab decoration.

Chaam nodded. “If what you say is correct, then we will find a way to bring back your wife without taking the young woman’s life.”

The man ran his free hand through his short greasy hair. The torches mounted to the wall flickered, illuminating his dark, empty eyes.

Fuck.

In that brief moment, Chaam peered into the man’s soul. Black. Fucking black. Not brown. Not grey. Black. No redemption. Kill on the spot. This was law.

Dammit. The man must have been f**king around down there for weeks. Who knew what sort of dark Maaskab bullshit he’d found?