Chapter 13 Timothy
TIMOTHY
Aaron clutched the edge of the toilet. A sheen of sweat covered his face as he sat against the tub, eyes closed, exhausted.
I remained standing, eyes fixed on him, every instinct screaming to intervene while discipline locked me in place.
“We didn’t bond,” I said, confirming the obvious. My words were far away from my own ears.
“What did I do wrong?” he asked, clenching his eyes tight as if bracing himself.
I swallowed hard. The puncture wounds on my neck throbbed with pain and need that radiated throughout my entire body, but it couldn’t erase the terrible realization.
“Nothing.” It came out a harsh whisper. “It’s not…it’s not you.”
His turquoise depths opened to reveal a much darker, deeper ocean. “Then it’s…”
I turned away and reached for a book left out on a table and put it on the shelf. To ground myself. To keep from going to him. To stop myself from touching him, from screaming, from demanding he bite me again.
“Timothy, don’t leave me.”
His words slammed into me, and I turned as he stood on shaky knees.
“Talk to me, Timothy. What the fuck is happening?”
I clasped my hands to keep from grabbing him and helping him stand.
“I couldn’t do it.”
His brows quirked in confusion. “You stopped me somehow? Why?”
I shook my head. Get the words out, man.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve known of something like this to happen,” I forced myself to speak, though it hurt.
The words hurt before they even hit the air.
“But there was an account of a god attempting to forcibly take a Sekhor from their master. He forced the vampire to drink his blood, but the goddess the vampire was bonded to was far stronger. The god could not break their bond, she kept her hold over her slave.”
Aaron shook his head, as if not comprehending. “You didn’t force me to do anything. And you are the God of the Dead. You are the most powerful of them all.”
His words only drove the pain of the truth deeper into me like hot spikes.
“Apparently not.” I met his eyes.
Seth was stronger than me.
Despite having power over all the souls of the undead, that dick pickle had more power than me.
The shame, the disgust was almost too much to bear.
“Timothy, we can fix this—”
“No!” My voice boomed through the room. “I can’t have you, Aaron. We can’t be together. I’m not strong enough. We failed. Seth owns you, and I can’t save you. We tried to break the rules, and it didn’t work.”
That crack at my center split wide open.
We were stuck like this. Even when I broke down and abandoned all the rules meant to keep things in order, I was forced to face how inadequate I was. To face that I didn’t really possess a lick of control under the circumstances.
“I never wanted you to save me,” he said, his voice low and hoarse. “I wanted you to love me.”
My lungs burned with the need for oxygen, but I couldn't force them to work until the door slammed shut behind him, the sound cracking through me like a gunshot.
I walked to my office on wooden legs—an automatic motion.
What to do in crisis?
Work. Organize. Research.
My eyes landed on the neatly organized pens, tablet set just so, various decorative items of Egypt to remind me who I was.
The numbness inside me made way to a heat that started low and insistent before it flamed through me with a fury I couldn’t control. With a powerful sweep of my hand, everything on my desk went flying. Objects cracked and slammed into the bookcase.
More décor and books shuddered and rocked under the onslaught.
The sounds of things breaking gave me a millisecond of relief, so I chased it.
I punched into the bookcase, kicked at the desk until wood flipped and crunched under my fury.
I followed the outburst until I was standing in the middle of my ruined office, chest heaving and knuckles bleeding.
You’re not strong enough.
You are just playing like you have control.
Seth’s deplorable words slithered around between my ears, biting relentlessly at my gray matter.
Yet I couldn’t deny that the one time I broke the rules, it didn’t even matter.
Suddenly, the rules I relied on to keep order in the world became a noose that tightened around my neck. Falling to my knees, I dropped my head into my hands and screamed in frustration.
Steam wafted off the mug of coffee Miranda set in front of me.
“I’m sorry to bother you so early,” I said without looking up from the twisting vapors. My words were flat, emotionless, though I was anything but.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Even as she spoke gently, there was a challenging bite in her tone. “This is exactly where you come. Now take a sip and tell me what happened.”
I wrapped my stiff fingers around the warm mug.
It seemed to take forever to bring it to my mouth, but when I did, I finally looked up at my friend.
She was awash in warm pink from the predawn light filling her kitchen.
The usually hard-edged woman looked softer sitting across from me at the small breakfast table, legs crossed in her robe, braids wrapped up in a silk scarf with a coffee of her own.
Unlike the sleek, streamlined decor of Sinopolis, her house was cozy, lived-in, and well off the Strip. Driving away from the hotel, it got a little easier to breathe with each mile I put between me and it. My responsibilities, my failures.
I forced myself to drink the hot, dark liquid. Miranda made a strong cup, which I appreciated.
“I tried to take him.” The words came out softly.
“Aaron?”
I nodded numbly. “I told him to bite me, but it didn’t work.” Despite the sickly churn of the coffee in my stomach, I took another long pull from the mug.
She hesitated. “It didn’t work?”
I shook my head. “It has been recorded that in very rare cases, a Sekhor cannot transfer from one god to another.”
Transfer. I had to resist the need to snort at my own description of the situation. What an elegant, inadequate word for what I tried to do. I tried to rip Aaron from Seth and claim him as my own.
Her brow knitted. “Why not?”
I licked my lips, not relishing saying it out loud again. When I did, it came through clenched teeth. “Because Seth is stronger than me. I am incapable of taking what’s his.”
It galled. It galled so terribly that I wanted to smash this mug against the wall and scream like an angry, wounded animal. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t make such a scene in my friend’s home.
Instead, I brought the coffee to my lips once again, hoping to drown my feelings.
Miranda leaned back in her chair as if needing a moment to absorb the news. She crossed her legs in the opposite direction as she looked out the glass door that led to the backyard where Assirak and her dog were running and leaping about, playing with each other.
Not that she could see Assirak still, but he had insisted on coming. He’d waited outside the shower, sensing my distress, and the moment Miranda texted back that I could come over—even this early—he was already at my side.
The lump that had formed in my throat watching Aaron reject my blood hadn’t gone away, but it ever so slightly shrunk. For a moment, I could pretend I wasn’t a god, that Miranda wasn’t an immortal-slaying warrior. We were just two regular friends drinking coffee and talking about our problems.
“Do you think he’s really more powerful than you?”
“If this happened, it must be true.”
She shook her head. “Timothy, you are your own worst enemy. Now I’ve only been walking among the immortals for five years, but from what I’ve seen, you’ve been trying to think your way to power. Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s how you can rule over other powerful ancient gods.”
“I’m the god of wisdom, of writing, recordkeeping, and science. Of course, I think my way through problems.” I couldn’t help the testiness creeping into my tone. I was getting sick of being told my way was not the way to do things.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t depend on your strengths,” Miranda countered, unfazed by my attitude. “I’m saying, you’ve been relying on the rules instead of yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“You and I both know that Seth is undermining you. That he’s up to something we haven’t pinned down yet,” she said quietly.
The danger of the situation more apparent, it felt imminent, though neither of us could figure out what he was doing.
“Why haven’t you done something to stop him? To put him in his place?”
“Aside from the fact he’s more powerful than me?” I snorted into my coffee with disdain.
“Aside from that,” she affirmed.
“Because there isn’t sufficient evidence yet and I have to abide by the proper process before I can—”
“You give your power away to the rules,” she leaned in as she interrupted, “to a system that is made up. You have the power to remake them, whether you’re God of the Dead or not.
“You sound like the other gods. That’s what I’m trying to prevent. From any of these upstarts taking this world and reshaping it to what they want.”
“Why would you doing that be a bad thing? No, seriously, don’t look at me like that. You have been technically ruling this world alongside Grim for a long time. You’re not some jackass trying to throw everything over for their convenience.”
“That’s what I tried to do with Aaron,” I mumbled.
“That’s different.”
“How?” I demanded.
“You love him,” she said. “And he loves you. You didn’t tell him to bite you so you could take a slave, so you could serve your own ego.
You want him because he makes you a better man, a better god.
And I know he feels the same and would trust his life and his will to you.
Stop apologizing for it and bending to the rules and semantics that don’t apply here. ”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you’ve been holding yourself back. You are in charge of your life, of this world, but you keep giving your power away to the rules, to Seth. You need to stop. Trust yourself, Timothy. The rest of us already do.”
Before I could even gather my wits to process, Jamal shuffled into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes.
“Morning, Mom,” he greeted, his voice still rough with sleep.
“Morning, baby,” Miranda said, accepting a kiss from her son. He was so tall that he had to bend over to reach her cheek.
“Oh, hey, Timothy,” he greeted with a sleepy smile before crossing the kitchen to grab a cereal box and a bowl. His pajama pants rose several inches above his ankles, showing he likely went through yet another growth spurt recently.
Despite seeing him regularly, I was always surprised by how fast he grew up. At fifteen, Jamal had more character to him than most men I encountered. Not to mention a kind of precocious intelligence.
“Whoa,” Xander said, his eyes widening when he entered the kitchen next, catching sight of me. He wore a pair of boxers and a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt left open. His hair was a wild mess that stuck up in all directions.
My brow furrowed. “What?”
“You look like shit.”
“Language,” both Miranda and Jamal chided in chorus.
“Thank you, Xander,” I said flatly.
Xander’s mouth curved in a smile as he opened the sliding door to the yard. Assirak and their dog bounded in, smelling of morning dew and fresh-cut grass. Both went directly to Jamal, where he avidly petted them.
Miranda snorted.
“Don’t be jealous,” Xander said as he poured a cup of coffee.
“Yeah, Mom,” Jamal said, “I may be able to see the reapers, but you have Bob.”
Assirak’s eyes closed as he leaned harder into the head scratching Jamal gave him.
At a young age, Jamal had died for a short while. When Grim pulled him back from the Afterlife, he was able to see reapers, and I suspected he’d been graced with a few other extra senses.
Miranda huffed this time. Xander leaned down to kiss her cheek too. “Who’s my fussy morning grump?”
She playfully thwacked him on the chest while my thoughts turned to what Miranda had said, properly chewing on her words.
Did I trust the rules and protocols more than myself?
“So,” Xander said as he leaned against the counter, casually sipping his coffee. “Are we going to kick Seth’s ass yet, or what?”