Sun God Seeks…Surrogate? (Accidentally Yours #3)(64)
Author: Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

Belch plucked Cimil off the floor.

“Yes,” Cimil replied. “That is correct. Kinich is now mortal.” She attempted to smooth down her frazzled red hair and then picked up the armchair and sat back down, clasping her hands in her lap.

“So, you knew?” I asked. “You knew this would happen?”

Avoiding eye contact, she gave a nod.

Guy stepped in closer to the coffee table, looking like he was going to launch himself over at Cimil. “Then you will tell us how to restore him. Immediately! Or I swear by my brethren, Cimil, I will drag you to Mexico by your innards and shove you down that hole with Chaam.”

Kinich turned to leave.

“Wait! Where are you going?” I asked.

“To finish packing,” he replied.

I began to follow, but Zac grabbed my arm. “Let him go, Penelope,” he whispered. “You are needed here to keep the order. We cannot afford to have the gods divided by another petty spat. We must remain united.”

“Kinich, please,” I whispered.

He glanced over his shoulder, but then kept moving.

My anger won out over all other emotions. “Tell me how to fix this!” I commanded Cimil.

She shook her head. “I cannot.”

Oh, I had so had it with her cryptic bullshit and this entire chaotic circus. “Yes! You can and you will.”

Her eyes darted around the room. “No. You’re not listening. I can’t. That’s the problem.”

“Sorry?”

She wiggled in her chair. “I can’t tell you what to do.”

“But—but—you have to! This is all your f**king fault.”

My mind shuffled between fear and anger. I’d hoped and prayed all along that Cimil would return, help us figure out how to fix this giant mess, and get my mother back. After all, she was the one who’d orchestrated the events that got my mom trapped in the first place—the fake medical center and treatment for her illness, the need for money that had gotten me mixed up with all of them.

“Holy shit! Did you make my mother sick? Was that part of your twisted plan?”

Her eyes lit up. “No. I would never do something so horrible. I cannot harm humans…unless your name is Gunther and sing the ‘Ding Dong Song.’ Then you’re fair game.”

I shook my finger at her. “But it’s still your fault she was captured. You have to know how to get her back!”

Cimil bobbed her head and then shook it from side to side. “Yes. No.”

“What do you mean, ‘Yes. No’?” I was going into full-blown panic mode.

Cimil stood and bit down on her lower lip. “It’s my fault! Yes. She was supposed to be rescued by Viktor—a good thing, trust me—I’ve taken that bicycle for a ride and rarrrr! But that went all wrong, too. It’s all one big f**king mess! Just like the time I wore the red glittery platform shoes, when I should’ve worn blue!” She threw her hands in the air. “Of course, my date changed his tie to red—gotta match—which made the bull very, very angry.” Her head sagged. “Poor, poor Estevan. La vida es tan corta.”

She looked up at the ceiling. “I told you! Shut it or I’ll take you down, bitch!”

All heads rotated toward the tiny black spot on the ceiling. Oh for heaven’s sake. A fly? Not this again.

I stomped my foot. “Oh. My. God. Would you focus! Tell us how to undo this mess.”

“That’s the problem. I can’t. I can’t see a thing. It’s all gone.”

Within the span of a heartbeat, Guy was holding Cimil up in the air by her shoulders. She reminded me of a tiny rag doll about to be demoted back to a rag. “Cut the crap, Cimil. What is going on? Where the hell have you been?”

“Consulting the Book of the Oracle of Delphi, trying to understand where it all went wrong. But now the pages are blank. Blank!”

Guy asked why she, of all people, would be consulting a book that foretold the future when she had the gift of sight, but she simply mumbled something about retracing her steps. “I think it happened when I was watching that Love Boat marathon. I was entranced by Isaac’s pearly white smile and witty humor. I couldn’t stop watching,” she said. “That’s when I must’ve missed something I was supposed to do, a step I was supposed to take to keep everything on track—a letter I was supposed to write? Or! Maybe it was that Hungry Hungry Hippos tournament I needed to schedule. I don’t know! Then they stopped. Just”—she snapped her fingers—“like that. Every last one of them, gone! It’s been weeks now.”

“The Love Boat reruns?” I asked.

“No! The dead! The dead!” She began to cry, which literally freaked me out. Because if someone like Cimil was upset, that meant something bad, very, very bad, was going down.

“Mind elaborating? Some of us are new to the deity club.”

“I can’t see the future. I never have! I need them and they’re gone!”

Guy’s eyes went wide along with everyone else’s. “Wha-what are you saying?” He set her down.

“I lied.” She pressed her hands to the side of her face. “That’s what I’m saying. I can’t see the future—well, not the way you think. I see snippets, little clues, but they are usually meaningless.”

“Then how, how do you always known so much? For Christ’s sake, you even watch television in the future,” Zac asked.

“I am Goddess of the Underworld—not that there really is an Underworld. Although, there is the Short Hills mall near the Jersey Turnpike; they have Chanel and Dolce! That’s why the dead like to hang out there. Fashion never goes out of fashion. Yunno?”

Holy mother of broken brains, this goddess is so bat-shit crazy. How in the world did she get this job?

“No! We don’t know, Cimil! We have no clue what you’re talking about!”

Her eyes darted around the room in a paranoid manner. Then she whispered, “I look after the souls of the dead, and they see everything: future, past, present—the dead exist in the place beyond time or dimensions. Everything they knew, I knew. Everything they saw, I saw.”

Hands down, this had to be the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. In fact, if they took every episode of the Twilight Zone, put them in a blender and simmered them for ten hours into a condensed soup of weirdness and the unthinkable, that wouldn’t come close to competing with this funky concoction.