Seduction (Curse of the Gods #3)(4)

“Put me down, you giant pain in my ass!”

So much for stealth-mode. My shrieking alone was enough to draw the eye of every single dweller in the kitchen area we had just entered. Rome ducked his head so that both of us weren’t clobbered by the large rack of cast iron pans hanging from the ceiling, before he continued to deftly manoeuvre through the room. We broke out into a garden outside, and passed through it, into another one.

“I know where your dweller-Emmy is.” His words penetrated through my annoyance, and mild panic.

“It’s Emmanuelle now,” I said, all snooty like.

“I don’t care,” he replied smoothly. Which didn’t surprise me at all.

The Abcurses weren’t big on giving a crap about dwellers or sols. Which made sense, since they were gods.

Without my link to them, I would die. If I died, I would maybe become a Beta god of Chaos, which would give the current main god of Chaos a lot of power—power that he would most likely use to take over Topia, the world of the gods; and Minatsol, the land of mortals.

“It’d just be better all-round if I didn’t die.” I must have muttered the last part out loud without realising it, because Rome ground to a halt and lowered me down to my feet.

“No dying,” he growled.

I was about to quip something back at him, but it died off when I finally noticed where we were.

“This is where Emmanuelle is?” I took a step closer, the freaky eyes of the god-statues most definitely following me.

Rome shrugged, before he pointed across to a sol hurrying toward the Sacred Sands arena. “I’m sure enough that I would bet that guy’s life on it.”

I followed the sol for a beat, before turning back to Rome. “So you have no idea, and you aren’t sure at all.”

He tilted his head to the side and hit me with that smile again. The one which should have been banned anywhere near a Chaos sol, or Chaos dweller … or whatever I was now. The point was, if he didn’t stop looking at me like that, Chaos was going to start happening. That was the only explanation for the tight pressure suddenly assaulting my chest.

Just when I was sure I couldn’t take another moment of it, Rome gently shoved me along the path, and we were walking beneath the statues of the gods outside the temple. Just like the last time, I could feel prickling across the back of my neck, and I had the same sensation of being watched. One of the statues was … paying attention. My first guess would have been Rau, the Chaos god, but he wasn’t the only god who was now paying attention. It could have been Abil, the Trickery god—and the father to my Abcurses—or even Staviti. Sure, Staviti was the great Creator and probably had a really busy life making new flowers and other things, but for some reason I felt like he might have been very interested in all of this new stuff going on between both of the worlds.

Cyrus. His name brushed across my mind, and with a heavy shove, I locked it back down again. The Neutral God … was an enigma, and I didn’t have time for one of those.

Rome led me along the same path we had taken to the secret dweller meeting last time, and we were both silent as we descended the stairs. This time I managed to stay on my feet, which was a bonus. Low voices filtered through to me the moment I landed on the lower level, stepping out into the darkness.

“How did you know she was here?” I murmured, knowing his god-hearing would pick it up.

His voice was as low as mine, his breath brushing across my cheek as he leaned down. “We’ve been keeping an eye on her for you, she’s been seen around the temple a few times.”

My heart warmed at those words, because I knew how much they would have hated ‘lowering’ themselves to spying on a dweller.

He then straightened, and his hand wrapped around mine, lacing our fingers together as he started leading me. Ever since I had been hit with the curse from Rau, my senses had become heightened, and when Aros and Coen had stirred the Chaos into exploding out of me, my senses had improved even more. This meant that I could see where we were going just fine, but there was really no need to tell Rome that. Most probably he held my hand so that he wouldn’t trip and fall over. I was the one doing the guiding, so I needed to keep holding his hand just in case he had any accidents.

Once I had finished reasoning that out in my head, I felt much better about tightening my grip and clinging to his strength.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but judging by the direction of the voices, whoever was down here was back in the same secret meeting place that everyone seemed to use. Rome and I squeezed in behind the shelves that we had used to spy on the previous secret dweller meeting; he was forced to contort himself into a painful-looking shape to fit inside, but he managed it. Standing on my tiptoes, I found a nice little gap to peek through, and if Rome hadn’t managed to slip his free hand over my mouth, the gasp which I released when I saw the scene would have definitely blown our cover.

It was Emmy. And Fred. And Scrawny Dweller Number Two. Plus Slimy Dweller Number Three.

Emmy plus three guys? What the hell was happening? What were the worlds coming to?

Okay, so they weren’t having four-way sex or anything, and I was in no way curious about how she was going to manage sex with three guys at all. I mean, why would I need to know that?

My eyes strayed to Rome and my heart began to perform a complicated pattern of stopping and starting. He was so huge he was like three guys all on his own. Which made sense, since you don’t get to be the god of strength at a hundred pounds soaking wet. Which was definitely all that Scrawny Dweller Number Two was.