Accidentally in Love with…a God?(Accidentally Yours #1)(36)
Author: Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

Imagine the obituary on that one: Emma Keane, killed by a deadly pinky. How embarrassing. Then I wondered, with so much power, why did he even need the Uchben? Maybe he just liked having people to boss around. Yeah, that was it.

“I don’t get it, Guy. You had the Uchben at your beckoned call all these years. Why didn’t you just have me go to them to spring you from the cenote?”

“The thought had entered my mind as a last resort only. When I realized there’d be no rescue from the other gods, I began to groom you for the task—toughen you up, mentally. I also needed to wait until you were old enough. I thought, perhaps, in another year or two, you’d be ready. Then you pulled that stunt with the cab, and I had no choice.”

“I didn’t pull anything,” I reminded him. “But you shouldn’t have waited so long; you weren’t the only one suffering.”

He nodded and stared at the floor. “I had no idea that when I bound myself to Gabriela, that I’d be condemning you to a life with me.” He suddenly sounded angry, or perhaps, resentful. “You didn’t even exist yet. But had I known, I would have made another choice.”

He was lying again. I could feel it. “And if I hadn’t been able to jar you lose from the cenote, what then?” I asked.

“I would have sent you to the Uchben. But I’m not sure they could have helped; they don’t have our blood, and therefore can’t open the portal. Second, they’re not as strong as you or I, not even your precious Tommaso.”

He was still jealous? Figured.

Then I began digesting what he said. He thought I was stronger than someone like Tommaso? I’d punched him as hard as I could in his stomach and all that did was double him over. On the other hand, I clocked Cimil and she flew—I mean she really, really flew across that room. Incredible, but it didn’t make any sense.

“Honestly,” he continued, “I was afraid what might happen if you came into contact with the Uchben. They might’ve thought you were a Maaskab spy if you just showed up claiming to be my spokesperson. They aren’t the most trusting people; they’re warriors.”

“So? What would they have done?” I asked.

“They would have tortured you to find out the truth,” he said flatly.

Torture? His backup plan was me getting tortured? Nice.

Midway down the hall, he abruptly stopped. I collided with his broad back. It was like a brick wall. “What? What’s wrong?” I asked, expecting him to say the Scabs were back.

“I forgot something important.”

He darted back into the room, reemerging moments later with that enormous, ancient cookbook. “Let’s go.”

Cookie baking gods?

“Pocket. Put in your ‘can’t deal with it now’ pocket, Emma,” I said.

Chapter TWENTY-THREE

Guy was relieved to find Tommaso had removed the bodies from the stairs and placed sheets over the others lying about the house.

Emma was strong, after all she had the blood of the gods flowing in her veins. And to her credit, she’d taken the news of her heritage rather well. But ultimately she was still human. Bound to the physical world. Fragile. Mortal.

And more news was still coming—the gods were trapped and Emma was the only one who could free them. Guy had to pace himself, allow her time to process. Human minds were extremely hardy and adaptable if you didn’t overload them. The poor female was close to the precipice.

So when the time comes, he wondered, how will she take the news?

Would she agree to help, or buckle under the pressure? He himself barely tolerated the situation. This coming from someone who’d seen it all over the course of tens of thousands of years: the rise and fall of dozens of empires, entire civilizations disappearing—some into the ocean—countless genocides and wars, the birth of gangster rap and reality television.

Yes. Terrible, awful things.

But nothing was as awful as one of his own helping the Maaskab and teaching them to manipulate dark energy, which was the only explanation. How else could the priests have learned? The power was known only to the gods and sparingly used. When fully employed, the energy didn’t simply hover like an acid rain cloud; it rippled and circled the globe until it ran out of steam. The last time they’d employed it—ironically, when fighting the Maaskab—the ripples completed ten entire earthly laps. Plagues and famine broke out on every continent. Civil unrest was rampant for hundreds of years.

Guy and the other gods worked around the clock for decades simply to course correct—preventing humans from annihilation—but they were never able to undo the damage completely. That would’ve required traveling back in time, something they dared never do. Even primitive humans understood Newton’s law of motion: for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. And this law particularly applied to altering past events. Move one piece, all of the other pieces must shift to accommodate. Chaos. The outcome, they’d determined, would be unstoppable chaos.

It made what the Maaskab were up to look like child’s play; although it clearly was not. They’d developed honest-to-gods weapons: the jar that he’d experienced firsthand on Pizzaro’s ship that could devour flesh. And adding an extra-clever diabolical twist—which he had to envy the deviousness of it—the priests had figured out how to modify the chemistry of the cenotes, creating an almost inescapable deity-prison. If the captured god were lucky enough to escape, as Guy had, well, the portals were now impassable. The gods were trapped in the human world, inside human-like bodies. Much less powerful.

Damned brilliant, evil bastards.

Gods, he wished he could return to his dimension. He’d produce a massive earthquake right now and open a fiery fissure in the Earth’s crust directly beneath the Maaskab. He should have just done that in the first place long ago and lived with the civilian causalities. If he had, Gabriela might still be alive and he might not have the constant pang of emptiness in his chest.

But he wasn’t going to undo the past, and he wasn’t going anywhere, not until he released the others—well, until Emma released the others, since he couldn’t go in that water—repaired the portals, and located Cimil.

Cimil, he thought. Is it truly she who turned on us?

He sincerely hoped he was wrong, but the evidence was mounting. She knew about the jars and never told anyone. She even hired Pizzaro to steal them. Yes, she must have been working with the Maaskab. Then they turned on her? Then she tried to cover her tracks?