Accidentally in Love With a God (2012) (19 page)

“The bond.” His eyes drifted off momentarily. “You and I are bonded.”

“Bonded? Thanks, that just made as much sense as an inflatable dartboard.” Yes, those really exist.

“It means...we are connected and you are under my protection,” he elaborated.

For once, I finally understood why I needed protection, but…“How did we get ‘bonded’?” I asked.

“You inherited it from your grandmother. We met in 1940. She was just a child, but I bound myself to her light. It followed her lineage.”

“Why her?”

“She was special. I thought it would protect her. It didn’t.”

This conversation was moving way slower than I liked and my patience was over. “Guy, Votan—whoever you are…”

Anger flickered across his face. “Who gave you my old name?”

Cimil had said it, but what was the big deal? “Are we playing Rumpelstiltskin now? Unbelievable! Just tell me! What are you?”

He said, “Over the centuries, humans believed us to be many things: fae, aliens, even vampires—since we can’t really die—but you’d call us…gods.”

“Sorry. Did you just say ‘gods’?”

He nodded stiffly.

I was definitely going to need to take up drinking. “Like as in Zeus or Aphrodite?”

“More like Erebus and Gaia—the original primordial gods. But we were never overthrown from Mount Olympus, because there isn’t one, and there are only fourteen of us. We also don’t marry or have children, except for—”

“Sorry, but did you say ‘gods?’” The idea wasn’t digesting. Not at all.

“We are very similar to you; we are made of energy; however, our control of it is highly evolved. Like comparing a tree monkey to an ape, if that makes it easier to understand.”

Was I supposed to be the tree monkey? Well, at least he was the ape. Fitting. “Where did you come from?”

“We don’t know. One day we were here, conscious of our existence but without any knowledge or recollection of how. As best as we can determine, we’re simply another species, another miracle of life just as you are. Only, we’re far superior in terms of our abilities, our domain is energy based, and we never die.”

“Huh?”

“Emma, I can’t give you a physics lesson right now.”

“Huh?” My mind reverted back to the word “god.”

He released a slow breath. “Everything in its most basic form is energy. Energy is our realm, our plane of existence. As a result, we can manipulate and use it in many ways. We don’t even require bodies to live, although to do our jobs here, we sometimes have to take a form.”

“Jobs?” They had jobs. Why wasn’t there anyone else here to listen to this?

“Like any living creature, we have a purpose,” he elaborated. “Ours happens to be keeping humans from destroying themselves. You wouldn’t believe how tiresome it is. Your species is very determined. But even if I wanted something different for myself, I couldn’t have it. My role is hardwired, instinctual.”

I walked across the room and ran my hands through my wild curls. His answers had just led to more questions. To top it off, my relationship with Guy, only now we were calling it a “bond” of all ridiculous things, felt more horrifying, like I was handcuffed to another planet I didn’t want to live on.

There was a light knock at the door. “Mr. Santiago, I’ve got everything loaded in the truck.”

“Thank you, Tommaso. We’ll be right there,” Guy said without shifting his eyes from my face.

“Why does he call you ‘Mr. Santiago’?”

“We have many names, more than I can remember sometimes. And I grew tired of Votan, so changed it.”

“Why?” I asked. It seemed odd that after—well, I don’t know how many years, actually—that he’d stop using one name and adopted a new one.

“We have to go now.”

He wasn’t going to answer? Fine. I had other more important questions. “You didn’t finish,” I grabbed his arm to stop him from leaving. A jolt of energy shot through the bones in my hand. “What am I?”

“Your grandmother’s father is one of us. So, I supposed, that makes you a little like us, just diluted. However, unlike the gods, your form appears to be entirely anchored in the physical world as normal human. We remain separate species.”

“Oh,” was all I could manage to say as my mind digested. I knew when Arturo called me a half-breed, it wasn’t going to be something good. But I kind of expected I was part gypsy or clairvoyant, maybe even a circus freak. But part supernatural deity? What the heck did that even mean? The only references I had were from Greek mythology or Latin American anthropology.

Could I spit fire?

Or grow corn?

Wait. Come to think of it, nothing good ever happened to the gods in those stories. They were always at war, killing each other, getting broken into a million pieces to become constellations...

All right. This was no time to crumble. I’d been through an excessive amount of terrifying events. So I needed to take that scary little rabbit hole I was about to dive down, fold it neatly in the palm of my hand, and shove it into my pocket, my Can’t Deal With This Now Pocket. Later, when I could process this, I’d take that journey. Until then, I wouldn’t try to comprehend, rationalize, or analyze.

Just get the answers, Emma, so you can survive this, so you can save your family.
“So, why did that Scab call me a Payal?” I asked.

“Scab?”

“My new nickname for the witchdoctors. Maaskab—Scab.”

Guy looked utterly…indifferent. “Payal is Mayan for ‘key’. I supposed it likens to calling you ‘the missing link.’ Or, perhaps, it means the link between gods and humans. In any case, we don’t know why they want you.”

Missing link? How rude. “Whatever the reason, it can’t be good,” I said.

He nodded. “The Uchben report that the priests have been busy for decades, taking females. We’re guessing these women are other Payals or were my brother’s mates. And since there are accounts of the priests killing women, we can only guess the ‘Scabs’ are trying to eliminate our offspring.”

“Why? It’s not like we’ve done anything wrong.”

“Emma, Maaskab are evil. They’re our enemy. The last thing they want is more of us roaming the planet. Even demigoddesses like you.”

I shook my head; this was all too surreal. “That’s why they wanted my grandmother?”

Guy frowned and grabbed my hand. “Come, Emma. We should leave before they return. I need to get you somewhere safe.”

It was a simple gesture, holding my hand, but I couldn’t help but marvel at it. For so long, he’d been just a voice. Now he was real, standing next to me, touching me. A real, live god, no less.

“Hey. You’re touching me. Why doesn’t it hurt?”

“When I focus and keep my emotions in check, I can turn the volume down.” He smiled wickedly. “Or way up if you don’t behave.”

Great. He had built in Emma-Control.

“What happens when you lose focus?” I asked.

He raised one brow as if he was considering saying something flirty, then decided against it. Good choice. I wasn’t in a laughing mood. “When the energy inside me flows at full-strength, I could kill a human by touching them with my pinky.”

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.