Hammer Time

by M J Marstens

  The thought of Val playing with my ass spurs me to get up and get moving. The sooner we can figure out this sun-ball thing, the sooner she can try that biting thing again with her human teeth.

  I magic up a fireball twice the size of the one I just dropped. It’s roughly the size of one of the compact cars we rode over in. I toss it in the air, trying not to hit the ceiling. I keep my eyes on it as I run and jump over some more stacked mats.

  But right as I grab it, Val shocks me in the ass.

  Fuck!

  I drop the fireball and know immediately that it’s too big.

  This place is gonna go up in flames. Fuck. I try to put it out by stomping then rolling on it. But I’m a sun god, not a water god. We should have brought Raiden The Concussed along.

  I grab Val’s hand and we book it toward the door. I hear a whoosh behind us as the flames climb the walls. We duck outside.

  I turn to look back at the blaze. Since Incans never minted money, and I’ve basically just been released from jail I hope they’ll take payment in the form of beautiful sunshiny days.

  “Shit!” Val looks distressed. “It’s a goner.”

  “Don’t think shit’s gonna help with that,” Khepri’s arrogant voice behind me says.

  We turn to see the other three guys staring at us. All three of them have glazed looks and massive boners.

  How did they even get here? Why isn’t Raiden putting the fire out? But he doesn’t even lift his fingers.

  “What are you doing—” my question trails off when I see what’s behind all three guys. Or, I guess I shouldn’t say what. I should say who.

  Guess practice is over. Ready or not, the fight just came to us.

  17

  Val

  “Fuck sticks,” I curse as I see the golden-haired woman floating on half a clamshell in midair behind my guys.

  Aphrodite glares at me in a way that makes my pussy shrivel and grow dry.

  Her hand is extended in midair, her fingers curled like she’s grasping something, but nothing is there. She jerks her hand forward and all three of my guys lurch forward, groaning as their hands reach for their rock-solid cocks.

  She’s leading them around by their dicks. Literally.

  Fury fills me along with a strong sense of possessiveness. Those dicks belong to me.

  Aphrodite ignores the three car pileup that happens because she’s blocking the road. But I can’t.

  The furious goddess is attacking us in human territory.

  I turn to Raiden, whose unfocused gaze is far more normal and less heartbreaking it’s been for the past several days. “Can you blow us out of here?”

  “No blowing!” Aphrodite screeches.

  But, Raiden’s been working on a glass-half-full for awhile now and he quickly whips up a tornado that sweeps us out of the city and into a cornfield. The stalks are nearly to our shoulders, and the bright scent of fresh dirt fills my nose as the tornado dissipates, leaving us standing in a crop circle of decimated stalks when we land

  Aphrodite’s screech of fury as she nearly falls out of her shell reminds me of a cat in a catfight.

  I have a feeling that’s exactly what this is going to be. The love goddess hates being humiliated.

  As Aphrodite struggles to her feet, Dev turns to me. He looks like a guy about to come, jaw sagging, face blank and brain switched off, but underneath that flat gaze, he manages to mutter the words, “I’m sorry. This is my fault.”

  His fault? How can he possibly blame himself when I’m the one who asked for his help?

  I don’t have time to protest, because seconds later, Aphrodite straightens. “I’m going to make you rue the day—”

  Tupac holds up a hand, like this is school. “I’m sorry. Aren’t you the Greek love goddess? I’m from another continent and all, sister, but aren’t you supposed to be all ‘make love not war?’”

  Aphrodite’s growl of fury is interrupted by a honk overhead as a pair of swans fly by. Khepri lifts a hand and suddenly two streaks of swan shit plop onto Aphrodite’s face.

  I take a step backward. “Crap. That was a mistake.”

  “No it wasn’t,” says Khepri, his face still dull but his voice furious. “It was a shitty decision.”

  “I thought it was pooptacular,” Tupac quips.

  Aphrodite growls as she lifts her dress to wipe her cheeks. She changes her hand position and that releases my guys from their hard-ons. They all sigh, in relief or disappointment I’m not sure, as their dicks deflate.

  But that’s the only relief they get before Aphrodite is screaming across the field, “I curse all four of you to be attracted to gods damned swans!”

  Her curse is met with silence.

  Until Raiden giggles. Khepri smacks him in the chest, and mutters, “Shhh.”

  But the goddess can clearly see her curse doesn’t have its intended effect. With an unattractive snort of fury, she bends and grabs something inside her clamshell.

  She holds up a gleaming golden triangular thingie—I have no idea what it actually is—and says, “By the power of Ra, I command you! Come attack them!”

  Seconds later, the sky fills with shadows. And it’s not full of birds or planes … or superheros. It’s full of falling mummies.

  The sound when they hit the ground and their bones crack makes me wince. The fact that they pull themselves up to their spindly feet afterward? That terrifies me.

  All around me, the guys take up fighting stances. Devin runs to the edge of the crop circle, grabs a cornstalk, and tries to break it, but after several frantic pulls, he can’t.

  “A little help?” he asks Tupac, who tosses his mullet behind his shoulders and then burns a clean line across the base of several stalks.

  Dev grabs one and wields it like a spear with a furry end. It reminds me a little bit of one of those feather tipped toys people make for cats.

  Only, these mummies aren’t cats. With glowing red eyes, and horrific moans, this feels like a moment out of a cheesy scary movie.

  When the first mummy touches my arm and I feel its bony hand encircle my wrist, I quickly upgrade from cheesy scary movie to full-on horror film.

  I stare at the mummy’s rotten nose for a second before self preservation instincts kick in and I transform into my swan.

  The mummy’s hands slide off me and I take to the air.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Aphrodite screams. “You had no powers four days ago. I change my curse—”

  I cuff her with my wing before she can finish her sentence.

  She ducks and starts crying. “No birds in my hair! No birds in my hair!”

  I’m not sure what that’s about but I’ll take it, because my guys and I have enough to worry about with the mummies she has conjured up. There have to be at least fifty of them.

  Tupac has torched a couple, and is using a fire shield over his arm, like the shield of some great medieval knight, to hold them off.

  Dev’s bonking them ineffectively with his corny spear.

  Khepri’s pulled his shitsand trick again and is trying to coax several into it, but they seem to trace his footsteps rather than go directly at him, which is making his technique rather ineffective.

  Raiden is … I think he’s trying to conjure up a storm. But the mummies that he shoots water at just swell like water balloons before latent molds and bacteria bloom between their bandages like pustules.

  One of the swollen fuckers turns to go for Dev and he smacks it with his corn stalk. It pops. The mummy collapses but the smell it releases leaks out over the field.

  Tupac immediately turns and shoots a jet of fire at it, which just adds the smell of smolder to the mix.

  “Don’t touch the wet ones!” Khepri orders, stepping up and taking charge. “Tupac, burn them up! Raiden, I need another windstorm!”

  Aphrodite struggles upright and I immediately open my beak. Orange lightning sizzles through her and her body jolts around as her hair stands on end. I pull back my power before it can m
ake her bald, because I think if I do that, the feud between us will never end.

  Instead, I flap my wings so I can get a bit higher and I focus on her minions. Raiden is struggling to make a second windstorm, possibly because a mummy has tackled him to the ground.

  I honk, and I shoot creamsicle-colored lighting at the mummy, grateful that Raiden won’t be hurt by it.

  The mummy immediately stops attacking and stands. It raises its arms so that they are shoulder height, wrists dangling limply. It looks … like Frankenstien’s monster.

  Holy crapola! Did my lighting somehow reprogram it? I open my beak and send out another wave of lightning, hitting at least five more mummies, who all assume the same position.

  I fly over to Tupac and land behind his fire shield.

  “You look so damn PHAT!” Tupac declares. “Pretty hot and tempting, get those feathers over here.” I transform into my human body, ignoring him.

  I turn to the mummies and yell, “Go grab Aphrodite!”

  The six mummies that I zapped immediately turn in the opposite direction and stomp toward the goddess of love.

  Meanwhile, Dev flips his cornstalk around like a baseball bat and decapitates a mummy, whose head pops off and slowly unravels down his front until a skull lands at the figure’s feet. The headless body tumbles sideways into Khepri’s quickshit and slowly sinks.

  Raiden finally gets his tornado going and it sucks in at least thirty mummies straight off, but with the quickshit nearby, it makes the entire field smell like a giant fart. I gag and cover my nose with one hand, waving the other in an attempt to get Raiden to hurry.

  Unfortunately, he misreads my signal as a direction to make the dustdevil go left, directly through the quickshit. The windfunnel quickly sucks up the liquid feces and turns into a literal shit storm.

  I point straight at Aphrodite and Raiden turns the F-1 in direction. Actually, now that I think about it, it should be called an F-U.

  The love goddess is fighting off some of the mummies I sent after her, but when she sees the brown whirling mass, she forgets about the mummy whose skeletal hand is stuck on her boob. She grabs the edges of her shell and tries to make it fly backward.

  She’s too late. The pull of the tornado is already drawing her in. The mummy attached to her breast is wrenched away into the wind. Aphrodite ducks low and clings to her shell.

  “Oh no you don’t!” Tupac calls and shoots a flame at her ass that makes her yelp and lose her grip.

  And that’s how the goddess of love becomes a shitshow.

  As soon as she is sucked into the storm, Tupac flames the remaining mummies on the ground.

  I just watch the chaos as Raiden slowly moves the tornado across the field away from us.

  Dev comes over to stand beside me. “Thought she was hot shit, didn’t she?”

  Tupac walks over and gives him a high five. “Pretty sure she’s got shit for brains, though.”

  “We kicked the shit out of her,” Khepri waltzes over, a huge grin on his face. “I’m loving these crappy jokes.”

  Raiden drops the tornado at the far side of the field, letting Aphrodite and the jumble of shitstained bones fall in a heap. The goddess of love disappears in a bright flash of light as Raiden joins us and squints, biting his lip, his face contorted in what looks like pain. I rush forward and grab his bicep, sliding my hand down his arm. “Are you hurt?” I look him over

  He shakes his head and stutters. “Now, Aphro… Aphro… she’s shitfaced.”

  I laugh and sweep the hot-as-sin god into a hug as the puns continue all around me. I laugh until my ribs hurt and Raiden sweeps me into his arms because I can’t stand anymore.

  I laugh until I see a fascinating, hesitant look in his eyes. Then I pause, breathless, as he leans forward and places the tiniest kiss on the corner of my lips.

  18

  Raiden

  “We make a great team,” I compliment my best friend once we are safely back in the house. Dev and Tupac wander off ahead of us, muttering things like ‘showers’ and ‘brush my teeth ‘til my tongue falls off’ as they climb the stairs.

  Khepri gives me a funny look before softly smiling.

  “Yeah, I guess we kind of do,” he agrees, scratching at his chin.

  “And don’t get me started on you,” I say to Val, who is currently becoming the center of my universe.

  She’s dressed in tight athletic clothes that show off every curve. And it doesn’t matter that bits are ripped or singed or smelly, because underneath all of that are luscious curves and a kami1 that’s more beautiful than any I’ve ever seen.

  “That bad?” she jokes.

  “That amazing,” I correct. “I. . . worship you,” I announce fervently, falling to my knees in front of her.

  She appears startled at my admission, but Khepri gives me a frown.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” he commands, dragging me to my feet.

  “What?” I ask in confusion.

  “Uh-oh, Bi-Polar is jealous,” Val laughs tauntingly.

  “Bi-Polar?” I wonder.

  “It’s my nickname for him. You have one, too.”

  “I do? What is it?!” I blurt out in delight.

  This vision gave me a nickname?

  Thunder rumbles in my chest, like the start of a beautiful rainstorm.

  “Kung-Fu.”

  “I like that much better than Mulan,” I confirm and Val chuckles.

  “You’re really a fun guy, Raiden,” she observes, placing a small pale hand to my chest.

  My body tightens at the sight of her touching me and I groan. She’s like a banquet—a delectable feast—and I’m starving.

  Val’s eyes meet mine and I swear I see the same hunger reflected there. Without thinking, I lean down and capture her lips with mine—they are as petal-soft as I imagined.

  I groan even louder and I hear Khepri growl.

  I quickly break my impromptu kiss and step back from Val, feeling guilty for some reason that I can’t explain. Until I can. I realize where my guilt stems as I stare into Khepri’s blue eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologize to Val. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “You didn’t want to kiss me?” Val queries. She looks a little disappointed.

  I rush to grab her hand and stroke it. “No, I did—I do, but Khepri doesn’t like it ... I think he likes you, too. Actually,” I whisper conspiratorially, “I think we all like you.”

  I shoot Khepri a nervous glance to find him glowering at me. Yep—he definitely likes her, too, and clearly doesn’t want me kissing her. But how come Dev can kiss her? Why isn’t Khepri mad at him? Is it because he and I are best friends? I pout a little at how unfair it is, but Val soothes me.

  “I like all you guys, too,” she confesses and my heart soars.

  As does my dick.

  I give her a clumsy hug, trying not to rub my erection against her long legs, but fail miserably. It’s just they are so smooth and perfect and those thighs. I pull back.

  The look on her face is one torn between amusement and arousal.

  “Sorry,” I apologize again. “I’ll think of something else … lima beans ... rodents … forest fires … sex—no! Not sex. Ahhhh!”

  Now, Val and Khepri are covering their mouths, laughing at me and I hang my head in shame.

  I’m nothing but a joke to them. I walk off feeling like a raincloud is looming over my head. I look up to see there actually is one! My sadness must have created it. I go into my room and shut the door, trying to make the cloud go away—it starts raining on me, instead.

  I hear a soft knock on the door and Val pokes her head in when I don’t answer.

  “Kung-Fu? Are you ok? We’re sorry,” she says and I see Khepri standing behind her.

  He doesn’t seem as repentant as Val, but her words help make the rain slowly ebb away.

  “Can we come in?” she asks.

  “Are you going to laugh at me some more?”

  “No. Raiden—don’t be upset.
It was just the jump from forest fires to sex. I just … the logic of that ...'' She trails off, aware she is digging herself into a hole.

  “Everything leads back to sex thoughts when I’m around you,” Khepri says. “So, it’s an easy mistake to make.”

  Val ignores his confession, focused on me. “Raiden, I need you to forgive me. I’m so sorry. Nearly every other thought I have around you is hot and bothered too. I mean, look at you,” she gestures to my near-perfect physique, hewn by centuries of exercise and magic, “I promise you that I find you very attractive.”

  For some reason, a streak of vindictive triumph fills me at her words and I send Khepri a gloating look. His dark face instantly becomes shadowed with rage and I shake my head in confusion. Why am I taunting my best friend? It is most dishonorable of me—and the one thing I definitely remember about myself is that honor is everything.

  Val sends Khepri an exasperated glare. “You know I find you equally good-looking, so stop your sulking,” she orders to the surly Egyptian god. “I like you both in equal measure.”

  “Then, we should have sex together, all three of us,” I announce without really thinking of what I’m saying.

  Both Val’s and Khepri’s face go blank.

  Perhaps it is not honorable to propose this? I cross my arms over my chest in worry. I can’t remember.

  Val’s mouth opens and closes a few times before she can get the words out, “Did ... did he just suggest we have a threesome?” She looks up at Khepri, who is subtly adjusting his hard dick as he nods.

  “A threesome?” I inquire, rolling the unfamiliar word around my head.

  “It’s when three people have sex,” Khepri clarifies dryly for me.

  “Oh!” I exclaim in understanding.

  Clearly, if there’s a word for it, it is not dishonorable—I just didn’t say it correctly! Cheer brightens my mood and my rain cloud, which had stopped leaking, completely disappears.

  “Apologies, Val and Best Friend Ever, I meant, would you like a threesome to keep everything equal?”

  I beam at them proud that I have come up with such a sound plan.