Immortal Rider_ Lords of Deliverance Series_ - Larissa Ione [43]
“So you want me to play Horsemen jockey.”
Val choked on his coffee, and Kynan came close to doing the same on his own tongue. “That,” Val wheezed, “is incredibly accurate.”
Regan huffed. “Spit it out, people. What are you saying?”
“We need you to be more than just a middleman. We’ll arrange for you to stay with one of them.”
“Who?”
“Thanatos,” Kynan said.
Lance jumped in before Ky could soften the coming blow. “And we want you to seduce him.”
Regan sucked in a harsh breath, and her normally bronze skin turned pale. “You… what?”
“You need to get him into bed.”
She shoved to her feet. “What the hell is that scroll? Some sort of Aegis romance novel? Underworld erotica? Screw you all.”
“I told you she wouldn’t do it,” Lance said. “She hates men.”
“Just because I shot you down doesn’t mean I hate men, you asshole.”
Lance’s face turned red. “You turn down everyone.” He glanced around the table. “Have any of you ever seen her with a guy?”
No, Kynan hadn’t, but he didn’t give a shit about her love life or lack of it. “Calm down, both of you.”
“I just don’t understand why it’s so important that I climb into bed with… with… a Horseman.” She practically shuddered out the last word.
“Because,” Val said quietly, “that’s the only way you’ll get pregnant with his child.”
Pregnant. Her colleagues wanted her to get pregnant with Death’s kid.
Regan’s first instinct was to start yelling. Or to maybe storm out of the room. But twenty-five years in The Aegis had given her more discipline than that, and she tamped down her angry instincts the way she’d been taught since the day she’d come to the demon-hunting organization as a newborn infant still covered in her mother’s birth blood.
“My answer is no, but tell me why you think Thanatos needs a roll in the hay, and why you think I’m the one who should give it to him.” Jesus. Sleeping with a fucking Horseman?
Val sat back in his leather chair, a signal that a lecture was about to begin. “According to the scroll, after the An s afat tonine Plague that killed upwards of five million in the ancient Roman Empire and was blamed on Pestilence, one of the first Aegi prophets, Marcus Longinus, recognized that if Pestilence was that dangerous before his Seal broke, he’d be a million times worse after.”
Malik nodded. “We know that The Aegis’s focus has long been on Pestilence. But until now, we didn’t know that any concrete plans had been made in the event that the Horsemen’s Seals started breaking.”
“Why would the focus be on Pestilence?” Regan asked, tucking her fingers into her jeans pockets to tamp down her tendency to talk with her hands, which made her appear excitable and stupid.
“Because the Daemonica told us that his Seal would be the first to break,” Kynan said. “The dagger, Deliverance, was forged to kill the Horsemen. But Pestilence has the dagger, which means that none of the others can use it to kill him. That’s where our buddy Marcus Longinus comes in.”
“He secluded himself in a meditation cave and wrote down his visions,” Val said.
Lance snorted. “Of course, we now know that meditation caves were filled with natural gasses that caused hallucinations, so Marcus could be full of shit.”
Regan hated to agree with Lance about anything, but that was exactly her fear. In ancient times, everything was thought to be an act of God—or the gods, depending on the time and the religion. So some dude all hopped up on cave air could see all kinds of crap and think the visions were sent by a deity.
“Okay, so what ‘shit’ did Marcus dream up?”
Val pushed his glasses up on his nose. “He had a vision that the only hope for the world, should the Daemonica’s prophecy come to pass and all the Horsemen turn evil, would be a secret child conceived by the joining of an Aegis warrior and a Horseman. That child will be the savior of mankind.”
“Ah… couldn’t any of the Horsemen