Accidentally…Evil? (Accidentally Yours #3.5)(17)
Author: Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

“I just opened it.”

“Ah! But you see, it only opens once every ten or so cycles on the Day of the Dead, when the sun is just-so in the sky and a tiny frog hops from one lily pad to the next just as he’s gulping down a fly born precisely twenty-six hours earlier when the temperature of the air is exactly seventy-two point three degrees and the wind blows at five miles per hour due east, just—and I mean just!—as a man with a black soul is nearly decapitated by a deity who is in love with his daughter, and the blood pours on a virgin, lying directly over the tablet, on an altar at the mouth of a giant black jade cave.” Cimil sucked in a deep breath and then scratched the corner of her mouth. “Or something like that. But I can’t be sure.”

Did she think this was one of her f**king little games?

Chaam threw Cimil against the slimy stone wall and clamped his hand around her neck. Her legs dangled several feet above the ground. “Stop. Fucking. With me,” he growled.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she croaked.

“Tell me! How do I reopen the portal?” He knocked her against the wall several times.

“I told you! It’s some mystical algorithm—planets aligning, virgins, blood, tiny creatures eating…. You heard me!”

He thumped her against the wall once more.

She pointed at the altar. “I’m telling the truth. Look at the tablet! The instructions are right there in Maaskabese. If you can decipher it, you can go anywhere! Backward, forward, side to side, the other side, the outlet stores. Even The Rack. Fabulous, right?”

He released her, and she slid down the wall like butter on a heap of hot pancakes.

Chaam moved to the altar where the young woman—Maggie had called her Itzel, he thought—lay unconscious, bathed in blood—not hers, thankfully. He slid the tablet out from beneath her head and examined the shimmering black artifact. “Black granite?”

“Jade. From the mine.” Cimil pointed to an opening about four feet in diameter under the stairs. “It’s powerful stuff. I think you’ll find it… useful for what comes next.”

Chaam’s eyes made a quick sweep. “This is an entrance to a mine?”

Cimil nodded. “The Maaskab’s best kept secret.”

His attention moved back to the tablet. The writing appeared to be Mayan, but he did not recognize the symbols. “What does it say?”

“I told you what I know.”

Perhaps she told the truth, perhaps not. But he’d known Cimil for seventy thousand years, and whatever information she might have, she wasn’t going to share. Yet.

“What’s the second option?” he asked.

“Oh boy. After the wall-thumping you just gave me, not sure I want to go there.”

“Tell me!”

“Okaaay, but it’s big. It’s bad. It’s glamorous and icky. Are you suuure you’re willing to do anything to get her back?”

“I’d tear apart the whole f**king world stone by f**king stone.”

“Oh goody!” Cimil jumped up and down, clapping. “This really is my lucky day! Because that is exactly what I had in mind!”

Why would she want that? She hadn’t been singled out by the universe for this cruel, horrible fate, for this unbearable, unjust punishment.

“What’s in this for you, Cimil?”

Her face turned into a tundra of icy starkness. She grabbed him by the arms and sent paralyzing shock waves of searing pain through his system. “See, brother. See into my eyes. See what the dead have shown me.”

Chaam leaned down and met her gaze, but he would find no visions of the dead. Not today, she thought.

“Let the darkness in, brother,” Cimil commanded with hypnotic waves that burrowed into the depths of his soul. “That’s a good boy. Just let it in. Think of your precious Maggie, of how much you love her and how she was so cruelly ripped away. Yes, that’s right. Let all that pain in. Feel the darkness consume you.”

“Yes,” he said with a vacant stare to match his vacant heart. “I will let the darkness in. I understand now.”

Cimil sighed, pushed her head to his chest, and embraced him with teary eyes. “There will be much suffering ahead, brother. And for this, I am sorry,” she whispered. “But I promise, when this is all over, your soul will be washed clean and Maggie will be waiting for you.”

Gods, she hoped. This journey would not be an easy one and could backfire a million different ways. One wrong turn, one mistake, and her plan would go up in a not-so-dramatastic cloud of smoke. Boom. Dead. Everyone. But the dead had shown her what was to come, and there was no choice but to march forward. In the meantime…

She’d always loved doing bad things! Now was her chance to truly enjoy it; vicariously through Chaam, of course! Because unlike her, his deity-do-gooder bond with the universe had broken.

Cimil released him. “Fabulous! You’re going to have so much fun! Evil is the new good! We’ll pretend it’s a game—’kay? Evil Cimi Says.”

“When do we start?” he murmured.

“No time like the present,” she said. “Let’s go find some evil Maaskab and have an evil chat.”

Epilogue

Approximately Eighty Years Later

Blood trickled from Maggie’s pale clenched fists as she stared at Chaam’s shivering body through the dense smoky film separating her from the physical world. Too many years she’d watched helplessly as he suffered. His incarceration was a hell no living being should have to endure. “Hang on, my love. This will all soon be over.”

Maggie knew from the moment she’d entered this realm that she would find a way out. And when she did, there would be hell to pay. Because while Cimil had orchestrated her chaos, forcing Chaam to commit vile, evil acts in the name of her sick-and-twisted amusement, Maggie had been watching, listening, and learning the gods’ tricks and secrets. And with the scalpel-sharp precision of a vengeful, mad surgeon, Maggie tweaked and manipulated and pulled and tugged on every invisible string within her grasp until the tides of fate had eventually shifted.

“Please don’t give up, Chaam. Please. I’m almost free and soon, you will be, too. Don’t give up.” She needed him to hang on to that last piece of his soul just a little longer. Without it, he would be lost forever. If only he could hear her and know she was there. Just this once. Just this once. Please hear me just this once…

She threw back her head to fight the tears and gazed up at the pristine blue sky—it was her favorite mirage. Anything that reminded her of Bacalar and her time with Chaam gave her comfort.