Bonds of the Vampire King (Blood Fire Saga Book 7), Bella Klaus [best classic books .TXT] 📗

impenetrable barrier between my body and the monster protruding from his crotch.

Bending all the way to the side, I pressed a palm on his bony shoulder, trying to hold him back. “Can we at least go somewhere more romantic?”

“The pool of Zeus is not arousing?” he asked.

Kresnik’s agonized scream tore through my eardrums, making me shudder.

“Not particularly.” I jerked my head to the side, where the eagle stood over Kresnik’s struggling form, holding him down with its yellow talons and bobbing its head up and down.

“There’s a chamber behind the stalactites we can use.”

I gaped into his manic amber eyes. “For what?”

His face fell slack, and he stared back at me as though the answer was obvious. “You are to be my bedmate.”

Bile rose to the back of my throat, and I resisted the urge to spit. Maybe if I’d spent thousands of years cooped up in a realm with no better company than an eagle and a snake, I might also assume that I was entitled to the next member of the opposite sex who fell into my lap. But Epimetheus needed to remove himself, his beard, and the appendage poking into my side.

I clenched my teeth. “Where I come from, a man buys a woman dinner and has a bit of conversation before they have sex.”

His eyes narrowed. “There is no food in the Realm of the Gods.”

“Are you going to tell me there’s no conversation, too?”

His lips tightened, as did the corners of his eyes. He stepped back, folding his arms across his chest as if I was spoiling his fun with irritating demands. “What do you want to know? I will answer you three questions, after which, you will retreat behind the stalactites and bend over.”

My skin tightened, and I pushed all my anger and frustration and outrage down my meridians. There was enough grease on that beard to set Epimetheus on fire… If only I could just squeeze out a spark. As soon as my magic reached my fingertips, pressure from outside pushed it back.

“Ask now, or I will lift you off your feet and take you where I stand,” he snapped.

The words hit me like an icicle through the heart. Every muscle in my body stiffened, and questions churned through my mind. If I didn’t phrase them right, I would get a first-hand look at what lurked beneath that beard.

“Alright.” I licked my dry lips, trying not to shudder as Epimetheus mirrored the movement. “How do we get out of the Realm of the Gods?”

His thick brows rose. “We?”

I ran a fingertip down his matted beard. “If you can’t buy me dinner, I may as well take you home and make you a sumptuous meal before our night of passion.”

His eyes widened, and he swept his gaze down to the arm I’d pinned over my breasts. “A generous and most tempting offer, but such a feat is impossible. There is no way out.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He flashed me a smile of brilliant white teeth. “That’s your second question.”

Shit.

Epimetheus waggled his brows and bounced on his feet, his scratchy beard rubbing against my skin. My nostrils flared. If being covered in the digestive fluids of a python wasn’t bad enough, now he was coating me with trails of beard grease.

Under any other circumstances, I would snap and ask if he was going to give me an answer. Then he’d smirk and say that I’d asked my third and final question.

In the panic of the eagle’s arrival and the ensuing revulsion, I hadn’t focused on being caught out by cheap tricks. Now, I was a question away from being ravished by a Greek god who couldn’t even keep himself clean.

Kresnik’s screams turned to whimpers, and wet slashing sounds of the eagle’s meal made my flesh tighten into goosebumps. He’d probably fallen into a state of deep trauma and couldn’t muster the strength to fight against both his brother’s ward and his worst fear.

“Well?” Epimetheus snapped.

“I asked you two questions already, and you failed to answer.” I glared into his amber eyes. “You strike me as the type to leave a girl unfulfilled.”

His features twisted into a rictus of rage, and he leaned toward me, his hot breath filling my nostrils with fumes that reminded me of nail polish. “What was your second question?”

I would have stepped back, but he was still clutching me around the middle.

“Actually, it was a follow-up from the first incomplete answer you gave me for my first.” My brain stuttered. If I repeated those two questions, he might count them as four and demand something even more horrific than sex.

Slowing down my words so he wouldn’t catch me out, I said, “I wanted to know how to escape the Realm of the Gods, but you said it was impossible.”

“True.”

“Then I wanted you to elaborate, and you didn’t.”

Forming his lips in a tight line, Epimetheus exhaled a harsh breath through his nostrils. “Leaving this realm is impossible because the last phoenix disappeared eons ago.”

I raised my brows, nodding at him to continue.

“After the Great Divide, gods could no longer leave the realm. Those who lived in the Human World could return, but they became stuck here forever.”

I bit down on my lip, forcing myself not to ask that third question. If I remained silent, he might give me more information.

“Phoenix tears became the most potent source of magic in this realm, but only if you could capture one and coax it to cry. A wish upon its fresh tears is powerful enough to permit a single god to exit.”

Warm triumph surged through my chest, filling my heart with hope. Kresnik’s peculiar behavior now made sense. He needed me to be awake and compliant, so I would cry on demand and help him return to the Human World.

“Does that answer satisfy you?” he asked.

I raised a shoulder. “Not really.”

Epimetheus rolled his eyes. “Some gods used the creatures to escape, others scattered their ashes so they wouldn’t regenerate and cause a mass exodus,”