Accidentally Aphrodite (Accidentally Paranormal Novel Book 10)

by Dakota Cassidy

  Quinn’s eyes met Khristos’s as the position of her arms, stretched to an abnormal width, tore her tendons and the nerve endings in her hands burned as though she were on fire, begging for relief.

  “Go!” She mouthed the word, unable to explain, incapable of making her vocal chords cooperate.

  But Khristos, this amazing, incredible, wonderful man, rushed at her rather than listen. Climbing over the bed blocking the entrance to this monstrosity, he knocked the pillows to the floor, spanning the short distance between them in seconds, his handsome face a mask of fury and concern, his eyes locked on hers.

  He reached for her instantly, obviously afraid to touch the spikes nailing her to the wall. “Who?” he seethed, his rage clear as his hands fluttered over her, not knowing where to help first. “Who did this, Quinn?”

  “Please, go. Please, Khristos,” she murmured, knowing the woman was lurking somewhere in the massive space she’d created with a snap of her fingers.

  She would never forget how the woman had turned her tiny bedroom into this vast venue Quinn had only seen in pictures. The room had transformed—walls lengthening, the ceiling rising to stratospheric heights, pillars erupting from the ground like seeds sprouting in fast-forward.

  Chunks of rock had spewed and kicked up pebbles until everything clicked into place. All that remained of her bedroom were the furnishings, minute as dollhouse furniture against the new backdrop.

  Nina flew up and over the bed, her eyes narrowed, her nostrils flaring as she saw what had happened to the bedroom and Quinn. “Holy fuck!” The vampire was across the coliseum in the blink of an eye, horror on her pale face.

  “Go, Nina! Take Khristos. I’m…begging,” she tried to whisper, her eyes pleading with them, her body shaking with violent tremors.

  “Not gonna happen, Goddess-Lite!” she said, but her confusion about how to help, what to do next, was clearly written on her face.

  A howl, a rush of furious rage, breathed through the coliseum, kicking up more wind tunnels of dust, and screeching through her ears.

  The still unknown woman rose from the farthest corner like a serpent, bending, bowing, slithering upward and toward them. She morphed, changed, her head elongating, her body following suit, stretching until she was scaled, her tongue forked, slipping in and out of her transformed mouth.

  A hiss omitted from her throat, sizzling and hot, swishing around the open space, growing louder, picking up speed. Her mouth opened wide again, just like it had before she’d broken all the glass in the apartment. She lashed her tongue at Quinn, a ribbon of crimson unfurled, flapping in a grotesque wave aimed directly at her head.

  In those seconds, as she watched helplessly, her death imminent, she thought of only one thing—Khristos, who was as powerless as she was. He would feel the lash of that tongue if he didn’t move.

  “Look out!” Nina screamed, making a run to rush the woman, only to trip over a chunk of fallen pillar and hit the ground made of crumbled rock, leaving a cloud of dust in her wake.

  But Khristos refused to move anyway. He placed himself between Quinn and the warp speed of the tongue.

  To protect her.

  And the last thought she had just before she used all her might to pull her knees to her chest, as sweat dripping down her face and the flesh of her hands tearing when she levered herself with them and kicked Khristos out of the way was, even in the throes of battle, he was a good guy. So, so good.

  Khristos fell, his head hitting the post on her bed, crumpling to the ground as the tongue rippled toward her.

  There was nowhere for Quinn to go, pinned to the wall, but Nina leaped up and forward and managed to wrap her arms around the neck of the python, yanking its head to the left with a scream of uncontained fury.

  Then Marty was there, like a flash of motion and sound, with Wanda hot on her heels, tearing at this woman who’d become a slithering python of howling rage. They’d reached Nina just as the grotesque python attempted to strike again and the thunderous pound of hooves reverberated, shaking the structure.

  In her sheer panic, as gold-bridled horses with flames shooting from their mouths appeared out of nowhere, set to trample right over Nina and the girls, Quinn wildly wondered how many more mythological creatures were due to make an appearance.

  What was next, a chariot?

  Which was exactly the moment she heard more hooves. Naw. No way!

  More golden horses—attached to a chariot—melted through the walls, their galloping shaking the earth. The concrete starting to crumble while the python danced, twisting, turning, mesmerizing.

  The hard surface at her back suddenly shifted and her right hand began to pull away from the wall with an agonizing rip of her flesh, making her bite her lip bloody to keep from screeching. And then her right hand was free—the spike still deeply embedded in her palm.

  Quinn fought a scream of unimaginable, searing pain, fought the horror as Khristos lie at her feet with the walls falling all around them. If she didn’t get to him, he’d be pummeled to death.

  While madness raged around her, while every creature she’d ever read in her beloved books appeared before her eyes, she cooled on the inside. Found some strange focus she didn’t know she possessed and, with a single-minded act, began to use her right hand to free her left, yanking, tugging, loosening, fighting the dizzying wave of nausea and fear tearing her hand from the wall produced.

  The spike in her left hand loosened with a jolt, a white-hot rip of agony. Quinn used that to her advantage, clawing to pry her hand free.

  Almost there, Quinn, almost there! It’s gonna hurt, but pull!

  With one last grunt of effort, her eyes scrunched tight, sweat pouring from her brows, horses and pythons and chariots whirling around, she ripped her left hand free with a long howl.

  She hit the ground hard with her knees, unable to even brace her fall with her hands for fear she’d drive the spikes further back into her flesh. The velocity of the drop took the wind right out of her, but she was still capable of rolling.

  She tucked her knees and turned toward the bed, where Khristos lay half under it, unconscious. Using her feet, she backed up against the crumbling wall for leverage and shoved him directly under the bed.

  Nina’s yowl of anguish had Quinn fighting to stand. As she rose, using the heels of her hands and the bed to do so, she saw the battle waging before her and felt a moment’s helpless panic. So deep in her soul, so dark, she winced at the black talons scraping her insides.

  How could she help? Her hands were torn to shreds, her knees so bruised she almost couldn’t stand up, and she had nothing but gumption on her side.

  And as if the whirling dervish of Greek mythology come to life wasn’t enough—flying serpents took to the ceiling, their wings creating such a whoosh of wind it almost knocked her over.

  One went directly for Marty’s head, his webbed wings slashing the air, his tongue flicking debris out of his path.

  Quinn grabbed the nearest thing she saw, her nightstand lamp, and hurled it upward, blood dripping from her open wounds and into her eyes. “Marty! Loooook out!”

  Marty reacted by rolling her head then shaking out her arms and shifting into her werewolf form.

  Oh God, oh God, oh God! Quinn had only heard from Ingrid about Marty’s ability to shift, and after what had happened to Quinn, she had mostly believed.

  But to see it, to see her bones melt and reshape themselves, to see hair sprout from her body like some sort of weird time lapse video, was amazing and frightening, rooting Quinn to the spot.

  But the serpent kept flying straight for Marty. “Marty!” she screamed, hoarse and raw, her throat on fire.

  Wanda knocked Marty out of the way, steamrolling her to the ground as Nina round-housed the python woman, landing a punch square on her head. Nina’s fangs flashed, her arms landing punch after punch, the motion so rapid it left Quinn dizzy.

  But from the corner of her eye, Quinn saw Carl at what was once the bedroom door, now
a gaping hole, his gait slow, his eyes wide in his pale, greenish-tinted face.

  Oh God! Carl was too slow, too awkward to move quickly enough to get out of harm’s way. “Carl! Run, Carl! Ruuuunnnnn!” she screeched into the latest tornado-like wind.

  But Carl kept moving forward, kept fighting the force of the air pushing him back. She fastened her eyes on him, forgetting the sharp stabs of pain in her knees, as she jumped up onto the bed, bouncing with her weight.

  “Carl—get out!” she warned again, her head down to avoid being blown off the soft surface.

  All at once, as though someone had sucked the air from the room, everything appeared to slow. Carl’s determination was clear on his face, but his eyes were no longer fixed to hers. They were on something behind her.

  She whirled around to see a cyclops running toward her, grizzled and thick-skinned, his eyeball rolling—his horn aimed directly at her chest.

  Carl raised his hands high in the air, the effort clear from the grunt of pain his stiff joints must have caused, and he was holding something in them—something she had no time to identify as he head-butted her out of the way and brought his hands downward with a scratchy, uneven yell.

  The cyclops screeched, arching his short neck, spewing his anger and going straight for poor Carl, charging him with so much fury it stole the very breath from her lungs.

  But Carl just stood there, and as the mattress sank beneath her feet, she began to topple over, helpless to right herself.

  Until, with a booming, “Nooooooo!” someone hard and heavy rammed into her, in turn hurling her into Carl.

  They fell on the floor in a tangle of limbs and grunts of pain, her battered body thunking to the ground.

  Khristos. It was Khristos! He reached for them both, his head bleeding, his body covering them, protecting them from falling debris.

  “Enooough!”

  Yet another voice, male and rumbling, ripped through the space, stopping everything on a dime. Concrete blocks hung in the air, particles of her shredded comforter and pillows floated motionless.

  “Eris! What have you done?” the voice boomed, bouncing and thunderous.

  What was it with these people and the disembodied-voice fixation? It was damn jarring.

  “Eris, explain yourself. Now!”

  Oh, shut up.

  Eris? Like, the Eris, Eris? The Goddess of Strife and Discord?

  Talk about living up to your myth.

  Khristos rolled from her, grunting as he did, pulling himself to his feet and reaching for her, scooping her up in his arms to tuck her tight to his chest.

  That was when she saw Carl.

  “Carl!” she yelped, looking down at his broken body, sprawled and still. She tried to squirm from Khristos’s arms, but Nina was on the ground in a flash, her hair covered in dust, her clothes torn.

  She hauled Carl up, pushing his face from his hair, running her fingers over his head. Standing, she draped a limp Carl over her shoulder and headed straight for the cause of all this discord and strife.

  “You fucking, fucking, motherfucking, stupid, dicklick, dumb, motherfucking bitch!” she hollered in the face of the woman who’d abandoned her serpent form and returned to still one of the most beautiful women Quinn had ever seen. “I’m going to make you bleed buckets, you crazy, out-of-control, motherfucking piece of mythological shit! And when I’m done, I’m going to do it again. You fucked with my zombie! You—hurt—my—zombie—twatcicle!”

  Nina jammed her face closer to the woman, who now paled. “You know what that means? You have to die, and it’s gonna hurt. Oh my God, it’s gonna hurt like nothing’s ever hurt your fucked-up, warped, pretty face before!”

  Marty, in a scrap of what was left of Quinn’s sheets, and Wanda, her face dewy with sweat, rushed to the vampire, pulling her back, but Nina, who’d fought so valiantly not to swear, was clearly on the cleanse plan.

  “Get the fuck off me!” she growled at her friends. “I will kill this bitch! I’ll rip her damn face off—eat my way through her delicate little intestines while she watches. Do you hear me, you batshit, boil-on-my-fucking-ass, chariot-driving olive-lover!”

  “Nina!” that voice bellowed again, sharp and with a hard warning. Only this time, as though the very air in the coliseum had a rip in it, a man—an enormous man—slipped through the folds.

  A beautiful, dark, enormous man dressed in a stark-white polo shirt and plaid golf pants.

  Khristos’s chest heaved in relief as he cradled her close. “Zeus. Jesus Christ, damn glad you showed up, man.”

  Zeus? Seriously? Zeus was in her apartment turned coliseum in lower Manhattan? Oh, this day was shiny-shiny.

  Crossing his arms over his wide chest, he approached Eris with a frown that could only be described as deep disappointment. “So what do we have here?”

  Eris lifted her head, her sapphire eyes flashing and wild, her creamy breasts rising and falling beneath the silky white gown she wore. “You know damn well what you have here, you scourge of the universe!”

  Zeus’s chuckle vibrated the entire room as he grinned. “Are you still angry with me, Eris? Did you do all this in my honor?”

  Quinn’s head ached, her hands throbbed, but not so much that she was going to miss this chance to find out why her apartment looked like a Sherman tank had driven through it. She squirmed in Khristos’s arms, using her wrists to push off his broad shoulders and forcing him to let her slide to the floor.

  He kept his hands protectively at her waist as she wobbled when her knees buckled. “Quinn.” He muttered a warning in her ear. “Let Zeus handle this.”

  “The hell I will. You, you crazy—although I admit, utterly gorgeous—nutbag, just hold on. Just all of you hold right the hell on!”

  Zeus caught sight of Quinn and winced, his tanned face pained. He lifted her hands with gentle fingers, examining the spikes embedded in them. “Gods!” he shouted. “Are you responsible for this, Eris?”

  Quinn fought a whimper when he touched them, but that wasn’t going to stop her. “You’re damn right she is. This is my apartment, for the love of Pete! I’m not going to have anywhere to live. I’ll never get my deposit back. Not to mention, I have spikes—spikes—in my hands! Cheese and rice, you people are insane! What the hell is going on?”

  Zeus looked over her head to Khristos. “So this is the one?”

  “She is indeed,” Khristos answered with a hint of amusement in his tone.

  “Aw, Quinn. Welcome to the fold!” He gathered her up in his bulging arms, making her cry out. “So sorry! Hang tight. I’ll fix this right up.” He took her fingertips and ran his lips over them, making the spikes and gaping holes in her palms disappear. With another snap of his fingers, her knees no longer felt as though someone were driving nails through the caps.

  He cocked his head, looking down at her with sparkling green eyes. “Better?”

  “So much,” she uttered, then pulled her hands away, feeling guilty for admiring his beauty.

  Cracking his knuckles, Zeus turned his attention back to Eris. “What is this about, Eris?”

  Eris’s eyes narrowed, her luscious lips thinning. “You know what this is about, you goddess-loving lothario!”

  Zeus gave them all a sheepish look before he grabbed Eris by the throat, so fast her body jerked like a limp ragdoll from the upward swing. “What does this have to do with Quinn?” he hissed in her ear.

  Eris’s hands went to his thick wrist, struggling against it. “She has the power of Aphrodite now!” she cried. “If I could have gotten my hands on it, I would have made you—”

  “Oh, I know!” Quinn jumped up and down, her arm in the air, everything making complete sense in a rush of understanding. “You wanted my power so you could make Zeus fall wildly in love with you and steal him from Hera! Am I right?”

  “Yes!” she wailed a sob, her head falling back on her neck. “She doesn’t deserve you! I do! Don’t you remember all the things you told me that night on the Aegean, Zeus?
Do you remember the sailboat and our lovemaking? You told me you loved me!” She let out a sob. “I’ve waited lifetimes for Khristos to become distracted enough to get my hands on that ludicrous apple. Lifetimes!”

  Zeus clucked his tongue at her in admonishment. “Tsk-tsk, Eris. You know Hera’s my one true love. I made that clear from the start. And now look what you’ve done. You’ve made a mess of everything.”

  She clawed at his wide hand, tears streaming down her face. “Let me go!”

  Zeus made a sad face at her, puckering his lips. “I can’t do that, Eris. We don’t subscribe to the old ways any longer, and you know that quite well. You can’t go around creating this kind of havoc anymore. Remember what I told you the last time you took it upon yourself to react out of spite when your candidate didn’t win and you almost wiped out the White House with Talos? And what will Ares say when he sees you’ve stolen his horses—again? Unacceptable, Eris. You must be punished. Our new Aphrodite is to be celebrated, not nailed to a wall like some cheap art.”

  Carl stirred on Nina’s shoulder then, slipping to the ground and landing on his feet, currently pointing outward to either side of his legs, his left hand completely torn off.

  “You’d damn well better make her pay, Zeus, or I swear on all that’s fucking holy, I’ll hunt you and her down, and drop you both from the top of that damned mountain,” Nina growled, cracking her neck by rolling her head side-to-side.

  Zeus dropped a jovial kiss on her cheek, clearly not at all fazed by her threats. “As pleasant as ever, Nina! I assure you, punishment will be meted out appropriately. Let’s do a Save The Date for another round of Vampires vs. Gods, yes? I’ve had some time to think up our line of defense.”

  Nina huffed at him, pulling Carl close to her and hissing up at Eris.

  Khristos moved in closer to the dangling Eris and looked up at her, his face a mask of rage, an emotion that almost startled Quinn. “Let me make myself perfectly clear. If you ever, and I do mean ever, come near my woman again, I’ll hunt you down, Eris. I’ll hunt you down, I’ll flay you alive. I’ll kill you myself.” And then he smiled, his expression light and easy as he held out his hand to Zeus. “Thank you for showing up. Sorry to bust up your golf game.”