Vampires Need Not...Apply? (2 page)

Yum. Nothing like gargling with blood to really freshen your breath.

“Then,” Granny said, “we shall kill both men—yes, even your precious Votan; we have the means—and the end of days will begin. It is what Chaam would have wanted.”

Granny had conveniently left out the part about killing her and her friends before she departed this room. Why else would the evil Maaskab woman have come in person when an evil note would have done the evil job? Or how about an evil text?

No. Emma’s grandmother would kill them if the offer was rejected. She knew it in her gut.

Penelope didn’t blink.
No fear. No fear.
The powerful light tingled on the tips of her fingers. She was ready.

“Then you leave us no choice. We agree.” Penelope held out her hand. “Shake on it.”

The Maaskab woman glanced down at Pen’s hand. Pen lunged, grabbed the woman’s soot-covered forearm, and opened the floodgates of heat. Evil Granny dropped to her knees, screaming like a witch drowning in a hot, bubbling cauldron.

“No! No!” Emma screamed. “Don’t kill her! Don’t, Pen!”

Crackers!
Penelope released the woman who fell face forward onto the cold Saltillo tile. Steam rose from her naked back and dreadlock-covered skull.

“Grandma? Oh, God, no. Please don’t be dead.” Emma dropped to her knees beside the eau-de-charred roadkill. “She’s still breathing.”

The room suddenly filled with Penelope’s private guards. They looked like they’d been chewed up and spit out by a large Maaskab blender—tattered, dirty clothes and bloody faces.

That explained what had taken so long; they must’ve been outside fighting more Maaskab.

The men pointed their rifles at Emma’s unconscious grandmother. Zac, God of Who the Hell Knew and Penelope’s right hand since she’d been appointed the interim leader of the gods—yes, yes, another long story—blazed into the room, barking orders. “Someone get the Maaskab chained up.”

Zac, dressed in his usual black leather pants and tee combo that matched his raven-black hair, turned to Penelope and gazed down at her with his nearly translucent, aquamarine eyes. “Are you all right?”

Penelope nodded. It was the first time in days she’d felt glad to see him. He’d been suffocating her ever since Kinich—

“Oh, gods!” They’d completely forgotten about Kinich!

Her eyes flashed up at the clock.

Tick.

Sundown.

A gut-wrenching howl exploded from the other room. Everyone stiffened.

“He’s alive!” Pen turned to rush off but felt a hard pull on her arm.

“No. You’ve had enough danger for one day. I will go.” Zac wasn’t asking.

Penelope jerked her arm away. “He won’t hurt me. I’ll be fine. Just stay here and help Emma with her grandmother.” She snatched up the two bags of blood from the floor where Helena had dropped them.

“Penelope, I will not tell you again.” Zac’s eyes filled with anger. Though he was her right hand, he was still a deity and not used to being disobeyed.

“Enough.” Penelope held up her finger. “I don’t answer to you.”

Zac’s jealous eyes narrowed for a brief moment before he stiffly dipped his head and then quietly watched her disappear through the doorway.

She rushed down the hallway and paused outside the bedroom with her palms flat against the hand-carved double doors. The screams had not stopped.

Thank the gods that Kinich, the ex–God of the Sun, was alive. Now they would have a chance to put their lives back together, to undo what never should have been—such as putting her in charge of his brothers and sisters—and she would finally get the chance to tell him how much she loved him, how grateful she was that he’d sacrificed everything to save them, about their baby.

This was their second chance.

She only needed to get him through these first days as a vampire.
And orchestrate a rescue mission for the God of Death and War and the General of the Vampire Army. And deal with the return of Emma’s evil granny. And figure out how to stop an impending apocalypse set to occur in eight—yes, eight!—months. And deal with a few hundred women with amnesia they’d rescued from the Maaskab. And manage a herd of insane egocentric, accident-prone deities, with ADHD. And carry a baby. And don’t forget squeezing in some time at the gym. Your thighs are getting flabby!

“See? This Kinich vampire thing should be easy,” she assured herself.

She pushed open the door to find Kinich shirtless, writhing on the bed. His muscular legs and arms strained against the silver chains attached to the deity-reinforced frame. He was a large, beautiful man, almost seven feet in height, with shoulders that spanned a distance equal to two widths of her body.

“Kinich!” She rushed to his side. “Are you okay?” She attempted to brush his gold-streaked locks from his face, but he flailed and twisted in agony.

“It burns!” he wailed. “The metal burns.”

“I know, honey. I know. But Helena says you need to drink before we can let you go. Full tummy. Happy vamp—”

“Aaahh! Remove them. They burn. Please,” he begged.

Oh, saints.

He would never hurt her. Would he? Of course not.

“Try to hold still.” She went to the dresser, pulled open the top drawer, and grabbed the keys.

She rushed to his ankle and undid one leg, then the other.

Kinich stopped moving. He lay there, eyes closed, breathing.

Without hesitation she undid his right arm and then ran to the other side to release the final cuff.

“Are you okay? Kinich?”

Without opening his eyes, he said, “I can smell and hear everything.”

Helena had said that blocking out the noise was one of the hardest things a new vampire had to learn. That and curbing their hunger for innocent humans who, she was told, tasted the yummiest. Helena also mentioned to always make sure he was well fed. Full tummy, happy vampire. Just like a normal guy except for the blood obviously.

Penelope deposited herself on the bed next to Kinich with a bag of blood in her hands. “You’ll get used to it. I promise. In the meantime, let’s get you fed. I have so much to—”

Kinich threw her down, and she landed on her back with a hard thump and the air whooshed from her lungs.

Straddling her, Kinich pinned her wrists to the floor. His turquoise eyes shifted to hungry black, and fangs protruded from his mouth. “You smell delicious. Like sweet sunshine.”

Such a beautiful face
, she thought, mesmerized by Kinich’s eyes. Once upon a time his skin had glowed golden almost, a vision of elegant masculinity with full lips and sharp cheekbones. But now, now he was refined with an exotic, dangerous male beauty too exquisite for words.

Ex-deity turned mortal, turned vampire.
Hypnotic. He is… hypnotic.

He lowered his head toward her neck, and her will suddenly snapped back into place. “No! Kinich, no!” She squirmed under his grasp. Without her hands free, she couldn’t defend herself. “I’m pregnant.”

He stilled and peered into her eyes.

Pain. So much pain. That was all she saw.

“A baby?” he asked.

She nodded cautiously.

Then something cold and deadly flickered in his eyes. His head plunged for her neck, and she braced for the pain of having her neck ripped out.

“Penelope!” Zac sacked Kinich, knocking him to the floor. “Go!” he commanded.

Penelope rolled onto her hands and knees and crawled from the room as it was overrun with several more of Kinich’s brethren: the perpetually drunk Acan; the Goddess of the Hunt they called Camaxtli; and the Mistress of Bees they called—oh, who the hell could remember her weird Mayan name?

“Penelope! Penelope!” she heard Kinich scream. “I want to drink her! I must drink her!”

Penelope curled into a ball on the floor in the hallway, unable to stop herself from crying.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

Helena appeared at her side. “Oh, Pen. I’m so sorry. I promise he’ll be okay after a few days. He just needs to eat.” She helped Penelope sit up. “Let’s move you somewhere safe.”

Penelope wiped away the streaks of tears from her cheeks and took her friend’s hand to stand.

The grunts and screams continued in the other room.

“I can’t believe he attacked me, even after I told him.” Tears continued to trickle from Penelope’s eyes. Why hadn’t he stopped? Didn’t he love her?

“In his defense, you really do smell yummy. Kind of like Tang.”

“Not funny,” Penelope responded.

“Sorry.” Helena braced Penelope with an arm around her waist and guided her to a bedroom in the other wing of the house.

Helena deposited Penelope on the large bed and turned toward the bathroom. “I’ll get you a warm washcloth.”

Ironically, Penelope’s mind dove straight for a safe haven—that meant away from Kinich and toward her job, which generally provided many meaty distractions, such as impending doom and/or anything having to do with Cimil, the ex–Goddess of the Underworld.

“Wait.” Penelope looked up at Helena, who’d become her steady rock of reason these last few weeks. “What happens next?”

Helena paused for a moment. “Like I told you, Kinich needs time to adjust.”

Penelope shook her head. “No. I mean, you heard Emma’s grandmother; without Niccolo and Guy, we can’t defeat the Maaskab. We have to free our men.”

“Well—”

“I know what you’re going to say,” Pen interrupted. “We can’t release Chaam, but—”

“Actually,” Helena broke in. “I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”

“What?”

“We’ve been looking for another way to free them, and I think we found it.”

“Found what?” Penelope asked.

“A tablet.”

New Year’s Day. New York City

“Save me. Please save me.”

“Dammit. Where are you?” Thirty-four-year-old Antonio Acero frantically searched the dark, empty, cavernous room, helplessly listening to the woman’s cries.

“Time is running out. You must work faster,” she wailed.

“I am doing everything I can,” he called out, his voice bouncing off the bare, smooth walls. “But I can’t get to you. If you just tell me…” Two catlike eyes punched through the darkness, sucking the words from his mind. He wanted to see more of her, to touch her. He felt like he might become the one who needed saving if he did not.

“Save me. Please save me,” the woman repeated. “Time is running out. I have the answers you need, but you must work faster. Destiny—”

Antonio catapulted from his deep slumber, dripping in cold sweat. “
Puta madre
, ” he whispered and flipped on his stainless steel reading lamp. It had been the same damned nightmare every night for the last month. Ever since he’d found that fucking tablet in Mexico. Or had it found him?

Doesn’t matter. It’s what you were looking for, the answer to your prayers.

“Everything all right, baby?” A silky arm slipped out from beneath the steel-gray satin sheets and rubbed his bare thigh.

“Uh… yeah. Sure.” He looked down at the mop of brown hair. Her face was as obscure as her name.

Mierda.
What was he doing? It didn’t matter how many women he brought home, he couldn’t wash her—the woman in his dreams—from his mind.

He slid from bed and plucked his discarded tee and boxer briefs from the floor. On his way to the kitchen, he slipped them on and tried not to punch something.

Dammit.
The dreams were only getting worse, more vivid, more frantic with every passing night.

He yanked open the fridge, pushed past the Odwallas and beer, and grabbed the soy milk. He knew this madness didn’t make sense, but what the hell did that matter? The dreams kept coming. Scotch—the good stuff—sex, hypnosis didn’t matter. Every night she came. Every night he woke. Every day he worked and didn’t stop until his mind reached exhaustion. And even then, he couldn’t stop thinking about the tablet.

Or her…

Shit.
What was happening to him?

He went to his lab, a room at the back of his sparsely decorated apartment, and flipped on the phosphorescent lights, stopping briefly to remove the black stone tablet from a rat-filled cage. He carefully unwrapped it from the plastic sleeve and shook his head. The damned thing was like a goddamned Mayan Rubik’s Cube.

“You think you can win, don’t you?” No fucking chance,
pinche jodida
tablet. He laid it down and stroked its rough surface. “You and I, we finish this tonight.”

Yes. He was close to unlocking its secrets. And when he did… then what? Would she be there? The woman with the haunting eyes? The woman he knew in his soul he was destined to meet?

Goddammit, he fucking hoped so.

He placed a welder’s mask on his face and leaned over the tablet, a pair of long tweezers in hand. He reached up and adjusted the overhead light, focusing the powerful beam on the corner of the object. This had to be it, his last test to prove out his theory.

“Steady hand,
coño
. Steady hand.” He carefully scraped off a tiny particle and placed it on a glass slide. He removed the mask and wiped his brow.

“Coming back to bed, baby?” a silken voice purred from behind. A soft pair of arms reached around his waist and a set of full breasts pushed against his back.

Is she still here? Doesn’t she have her own bed to sleep in?
He placed the slide under his microscope. “Yeah. Be right there.”

Yes. Just as he suspected. The black jade had again transformed. He’d left it encased for ten hours with his two most aggressive rats. The day before that, he’d exposed it to his goldenzelle orchid. The day before that, frogs. Each life-form, plant or animal, rearranged the configuration of the microscopic crystals and the hieroglyphs.

“It’s like the damned thing is alive,” he muttered to himself. And now he knew for certain his hypothesis held water. Subjecting the tablet to the right combination of elements would unlock its power and, hopefully, open the portal. A portal that could access any dimension at any point in time.

“I’m alive, baby. And if you come back to bed, I’ll show you how much,” Betsy—or was she Brenda?—whined. He hated whiny women. They were so… whiny.