Page 72 of Apollo

That definitely answered both questions, didn’t it? Whether she liked it or not.

Because if she were a fresh-in-love yakuza lackey who wanted frisky times with a new love toy, wouldn’t a cozy rental cottage in a corner of Lucifer’s kingdom be the totally perfect call?

Before they came to a full landing, she squirmed against Apollo’s hold. “Damn it. Damn it. Where is he? Where is he?”

“Irowen.” Glow Worm’s tone vibrated through her skull via her forehead, as stern as his continued grip. “Wait until the ride comes to a full and complete stop before disembarking, Sweetheart.”

Such a huge part of her senses craved the perfect retaliation, just to find out what he’d do about it. Dip his head to teethe her neck? Slide his hold down to tweak her ass? Maybe alter his grip to pinch one of her very braless breasts?

But despite all the tingling temptations, she grimaced and shoved away. “I can take the bump, Fancykins.”

Except the ground really was farther away than it looked.

Thankfully, she figured out the fact before she crashed down in full. At the last second before impact, she managed to crouch her knees and hunch her shoulders.

“Oof!”

Didn’t stop the goddess Gaia and her pal, terra firma, from reminding her who was truly in charge of bossing gravity. She lay still, struggling to recover her breath for a few seconds, before registering her left shoulder would resemble an aurora borealis by tomorrow morning. Maybe she could charge admission to bolster the soon-to-be challenged bank account . . .

Nothing like the enraged roar of a sun god to temper a girl’s financial fantasies.

“Irowen!”

Sure enough, as soon as she rolled back up to her haunches and lifted her head, her furious Phoebus on high blew her back onto her ass with a shout that might as well have been a dagger to the chest.

“Glow Worm? What the—”

“Fuck?” he cut in, stomping over like one of the lizard monsters to which he kept comparing her. “Are you insane? And are you even fucking listening to a word I’m saying?”

“Honest take?” She managed to wobble her head, uncaring if it committed itself to a nod or a shake. “Not really.”

“Right. Of course not,” he spat. “Because you just thought I was another swinging chandelier, eh? Not Your Godship, channeling the power of the sun and the light to get you here in minutes? Damn it, Irowen. If you’d unhooked yourself a second sooner, you’d have landed—”

“Where?” She wasn’t pulling a kill-bill-gotcha on him; the interruption would’ve emerged eventually. Now, at the height of her brittle confusion, was just as good as good a second as any. “Here? Really?”

He had the tact to expose a little color, his jawline turning ruddy. “All right, I didn’t exactly stick the landing.” But his color heightened as his glower reemerged. “Because you’d started fighting me, damn it.” The solar rockets, still not powered down all the way, blazed at the center of his greens. “Wriggling and writhing like—”

“A girl waiting to be dropped there?”

She wasted no more time about pointing at the black and red plaster sculpture, easily seventy-five feet high, behind him.

Yes, it was a scarily accurate replica of Godzilla’s head and shoulders.

Ohhh, yes; that Godzilla.

Eyes bulging. Spiked humps rising. All sixty teeth bared. Black skin rippling and even glowing in several places.

The illumination was clearly just stage lights beneath textured windows in the plaster, but was the guy going to blame her for feeling skeeved about it? He’d evoked half the Kaijuverse for nicknaming her in the last fifteen hours, so what the hell was this? His version of a cute side quest, instead of taking her straight to Genny?

“And where is here?” she went ahead and muttered. “How far off did you ‘not exactly stick the landing’, Apollo?”

He rolled his shoulders and peered around, gazing over the trees surrounding the wide paved path next to the gigantic fake monster. She did the same, only to startle when a pair of yellow objects flew past at screaming velocity.

Whoa. No.

Not objects.

The flying flashes were people, clothed in costumey yellow trenchcoats and dangling from a zipline that led into the prop Godzilla’s mouth. And their “screaming velocity” was real, since they laughed and shouted at each other until touching down on the zipline platform inside the looming sculpture. According to the Katakana letters on the chain link fence along the path, they’d just completed their Godzilla Interception Mission, complete with a cinematic soundtrack and dramatic lights that flashed inside the big lizard’s maw.