Sun God Seeks…Surrogate? (Accidentally Yours #3)(45)
Author: Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

I huffed. “I’ve got a black belt in karate, the ability to throw fireballs with my hands, and I can light the interior of extremely expensive sports cars on fire with my ass. I can handle myself.”

Emma and Guy exchanged glances with Gabrán, who was smiling.

“Not a word out of you!” Guy pointed to Gabrán, and then turned his irate gaze at me. “No. You will be a liability to my men. We cannot risk—”

“Honey,” Emma chimed in. “I think you should consider her wish. It’s her mother, she should have the right to put her life on the line if she wants to.”

“No! I’ve already gone head-to-head with Niccolo on this matter because he insists on saving Viktor himself—which I refused on the grounds of Niccolo’s strategic, military value. So he would consider it an insult if I let her go on the mission, but not him.”

“Honey,” she argued. “This is different. Cimil has prophesied that we can’t win the Great War if Niccolo isn’t leading the army. If he dies, it would mean an apocalypse.” She turned toward me. “No offense Penelope, but the world wouldn’t end if you met yours—not that I want that to happen.”

Morbid. But true. “No worries.” I flashed a quick smile. “I understand.”

Guy growled. Like any man, he likely didn’t appreciate being cornered. “She’s never been in a battle, and we do not have time to train her.”

“I will train her,” Brutus said in a deep, scratchy voice.

Guy’s mouth fell open. So did Gabrán’s. Now, as for Emma…

“Oh fine!” she griped. “You’ll speak to help out Penelope, but you won’t even give me the courtesy of one lousy ‘hi.’ It’s one syllable, Brutus! One!”

One corner of his mouth curved upward.

These “people” were truly bizarre. Sweet and powerful, but bizarre.

“Thank you, Brutus. When do we start?” I said.

He stared at me without so much as an acknowledgment of my question.

“Okeydokey, then. I don’t know how this silent training thing works, but I’m an open-minded gal. Let’s start now.”

Guy, obviously not aligned to my involvement, but knowing he’d lost the argument, turned to leave, grumbling, “You have one day, Karate Kid.”

Hey. That name sounded kind of cool, but wouldn’t something snazzier make me feel tougher? Something like Fire Balls or Smoky Pants?

Hmmm…maybe not. I’d need to work on a handle. Maybe get myself some red tights and a blue, waist-high half leotard.

Pen! You’re not a superhero. You’re just crazy. And apparently contaminated with the DNA of a supernatural serial killer.

Lucky me.

“Hey, Guy! Wait up.” I ran down the hallway after him, and when I caught up I couldn’t help but shiver in my smoky pants. He was so damned huge. “About this mission…”

He crossed his mammoth arms. “Let me guess, you want to right the wrongs for all who have suffered. You wish to make the Maaskab pay for every evil they’ve committed. You want to wring their necks one by one and watch them choke on their own sick, but not before you’ve extracted their fingernails with a pair of rusty tweezers and removed their eyes from their sockets with a hot poker.”

Oh my God!! Yes! That’s exactly it!…If I were a sick, depraved, revenge monger hung up on violence and acts of meaningless retaliation.

What the hell was wrong with these people?

“Um. Not exactly. Though, that is an excellent suggestion. By the way, you’re the god of what, exactly?”

“Death and war.”

That explained it.

I smiled stiffly. “I am getting the impression that your policy is to exterminate any priests you come in contact with, but they’re the only ones who know what’s wrong with Kinich.”

“Ah. I see. You want us to take prisoners for interrogation.”

“Yes,” I replied.

“This is very challenging; we must kill them quickly or knock them unconscious before they sift away. We typically choose killing.”

“Sift?” I asked. Wasn’t that something you did to flour?

“Teleport. Although they travel only short distances, they are difficult to contain.”

Oh. Well, that explained how that Maaskab who’d attacked me at my apartment kept popping up on the street.

Then I remembered how Viktor appeared out of thin air. “It’s pretty weird that the priests have the same abilities as vampires.”

“At first we thought so, too. But then we discovered they had aligned with the Obscuros; we imagine they’ve been learning from each other.”

An idea hit me. “Can we use that black jade stuff somehow? I hear it has some magic juju something or other to absorb power.”

He scratched his chin. “Perhaps. I will consult my chiefs and give it consideration.” Guy peered over my head in the direction of Kinich’s room. “Emma! What are you waiting for, woman? It is time for our evening lovemaking!”

Classy.

Emma came skipping out of Kinich’s room and made a little wave as she passed by and disappeared into one of the guest rooms.

Well, at least I wasn’t the only one who had a bizarre relationship with a deity, punctuated by the word “woman.”

CHAPTER 25

I wrapped my favorite blue scarf around Kinich’s neck and kissed his icy forehead, wishing he knew that I would do everything possible to help him. It killed me to see this magnificent male reduced to a lifeless-looking shell, so pale, so vulnerable. This is why I’d made the insane decision to go on the mission; I couldn’t bear to sit one more day at his side, hoping a miracle might wake him up. I couldn’t stand one more day wondering what those vile cretins were doing to my mother. And bottom line, Emma was right: I had to step up and fight for what I loved. I only prayed it wasn’t too late.

I pushed away the dark thoughts, trying to remain positive; because if they had harmed a hair on her beautiful, already fragile body, I would jump on Guy’s strangulation, rusty tweezers, hot poker bandwagon so fast that they’d piss their…Well, they didn’t wear pants. No. They wore the icky, leathery-looking bikinis made from human skin.

Psychos.

“They’ll piss their icky, psycho man-kinis and wish they were never born.” I closed my eyes and sighed. What a turn my life had taken. Only a few short weeks ago I’d been worrying about money for my mom’s treatment, thinking about how I’d make ends meet for Christmas.