It was one of the shows she’d vowed to give up on the mental list of things she’d made as she’d packed her bags in a flurry to come home from Greece while Nina barked orders about sharp objects and no more than two ounces of fluid per flight.
“Yeah. When these two fuc…nitwits make me. I do a lot of Monday-night shifts at OOPS, and they always force me to watch under the label ‘girls’ night.’ There’s popcorn and wine and all sorts of shiz I can’t eat or drink. There’s crying and wadded-up tissues and big, girlie sighs when those heifers are chosen like cattle at a 4H fair.”
Marty sighed a raspy escape of air. “We come to keep you company. That we happen to watch The Bachelor while we do it is pure coincidence. And I hate to say it, Quinn, but I agree with Nina. This is your thing! Your moment to shine. If what Ingrid tells us is true, who knows more about romance than you?”
Oh, just everyone on the planet? She knew when to quit, and after Igor and the humiliating debacle of his infidelity with Shawna Sutter, it was blatantly obvious she didn’t know real love from a boil on her ass.
Dropping back to the couch, Quinn shook her head. “I think my record stands for itself at this point. I can’t find my own soul mate. How can I be trusted to find someone else’s? So maybe there’s a way we can pass this power off to someone else. Maybe knock down a better candidate and make them bite the apple? I’ll hold ’em down if you steamroll.” She held up a fist to Ingrid to encourage her help. “You in, buddy?”
Khristos slid forward on the coffee table then, bracketing her face with his big hands. “Quinn, look at me and listen to my words. There is no handing this off to someone. This is forever. The second you nicked that apple with your teeth was the second you gave up your mortality and became Aphrodite. Period.”
Mortality? “I’m immortal now, too?”
Khristos nodded his dark head. “Just like Dracula.”
“I don’t like this turn of events.”
“I don’t get this sudden change of heart. Back in Greece, you were all eye of the tiger.”
That’s because Ingrid had been right. She’d been in shock. Now that shock had worn off, and quite frankly, she wanted out.
“Your motherland does something to me I can’t quite explain. Plus, I’m sure I had a touch of heat stroke. I mean, my boobs did inflate. All that pumping me up must have in turn deflated my brain cells. Something clearly had to give. But I’m back on my turf now and my turf says I’m the minimum wage of Aphrodites.”
“On the contrary, darling,” a disembodied voice scolded, though it was tinkly and light.
Quinn’s heart began to race as her eyes scanned the room. The air grew still again, much like it had back at the Parthenon. Which meant she was in line for a Nicki Minaj ass.
Immediately, she was on her feet and tripping over Khristos’s shoes to get to Nina. Scooping Buffy and Spike up, she huddled them close and hopped in Nina’s lap before wrapping her arms around her neck and burying her face in the vampire’s thick cloud of hair.
And then the voice spoke again while the air crackled with fissions of electric blue and pink and the room rumbled all around them. “You will perform your duties as Aphrodite, Quinn, and you will perform them well, or my son will suffer the wrath of the gods!”
Chapter 5
Ah. There she was. He’d known it wouldn’t be long until word made it to her that her power had been taken.
Perfect.
“Get off me, Lite-Brite or I’ll give you a real reason to freak,” Nina ordered, attempting to pull out of Quinn’s hold on her. “Jesus H, you’re like a damn octopus.”
Nina lifted Quinn up off her lap and stood her in the corner of the room, but Quinn wasn’t letting go. She clung to Nina’s hand, her legs visibly shaking as the other women rushed to her side.
Khristos looked heavenward, hands on hips, ready for third-degree verbal lacerations from his mother’s sharp tongue. But he wouldn’t allow her to frighten Quinn. This wasn’t her fault.
“Mom, knock off the big, scary disembodied voice thing, would you?” he ordered. “Delicate flower here. If you want to rumble, show yourself. But you’ll do all the rumbling with me.”
Silence. Deafeningly so.
He was getting the silent treatment—which was just as well, considering the vocal treatment involved things breaking and sometimes a slight shift in Mt. Rushmore. But it also meant she was pretty damn pissed. And to be fair, she should be.
She’d just lost the power to do what she loved to do best. Meddle. Mythology told the story of Aphrodite, the master at evoking love and lust in men, and while that much was once true, the game had grown cold for his mother—whose real name was Esther-Lou.