“But it’s important. The words someone chooses say a lot about them. And people who say cinema are pretentious.”

He rolled his eyes. “He’s a god. He’s allowed to be pretentious.”

“Not my god. No, thank you.”

Phil scrolled through Anubis’s profile. “He’s a pretty good find. I think we should sign up with him while we can.”

Teri looked at him coldly. She didn’t use the look a lot, but it meant there was no changing her mind. He didn’t feel like fighting about it anyway. There were plenty of other gods. Somewhere in the hundreds of listed profiles, there had to be one she couldn’t find anything wrong with.

She was right. It wasn’t a decision to be taken lightly. The string of events that had led him to peruse the digital pages of Pantheon.com, the Internet’s second-largest deity matching service, hadn’t made him forget that.

First had been the promotion. Another one passing him over. The fourth opening in as many months. Instead, that kiss-ass Bob had taken Phil’s step up the corporate ladder. Phil had been practicing his brownnosing and was damn good at it. Better than Bob. So good in fact that Phil had actually swallowed his outrage and walked up to Bob’s new corner office to congratulate his new boss.

He’d found Bob, chanting in Sumerian, hunched over a small altar.

“Hey, Phil.” Bob, his face covered in black and red paint, smiled.

“Hello, sir,” replied Phil, trying his damnedest not to sound annoyed. “Didn’t mean to interrupt. I’ll come back later.”

“Oh, please. Don’t worry about it.” He made a casual sweeping gesture at the altar. “Five minutes won’t kill the old boy.”

Phil leaned in against the doorway, perched on the edge of Bob’s corner office with its plush carpeting and obnoxiously large desk clearly made from some rare and expensive wood that Phil couldn’t recognize but still resented. He tried not to notice the lovely view of the park just below.