Page 33 of Beggars, Sin, and Wine

“Do you think any of us could have kept fucking them if that was the case? I’m gay and I thoroughly went down on my angel lover. Supernaturals had kids with them, too. Nephilim tears don’t affect us because people got cried on by their children.

“I don’t think they knew about that until they tried to take the Grigori back home. They were ripping families apart and murdering children. The Grigori and their partners fought, and the angels wept as their families were slaughtered. None of us actually knew how a lot of us ended up magicless, but that explains it. I don’t actually know why.”

I felt bad for the Grigori and all those kids, but some group of angels who were less likely to scare mortals started this web of lies and got my kind tortured.

So, there was really just one question on my mind because it was inevitable.

“How does one kill an angel?” I growled.

Because really, the Coalition wouldn’t have hurt everyone I cared about if the angels hadn’t lied to them and set them on this mission.

Iknew damned well my new mates were magical. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t. But they weren’t the same kind of magical creature that Di was, so I didn’t know how they were pulling any of this off. Di was the only person I knew who was capable of any of the shit they’d admitted to and the shit I’d highly suspected was them.

They usually only fed the basement once a day. It was generally much less for me. They’d bumped the whole basement up to twice a day. My portions were still tiny, and they were only feeding me once a day, but it was still so much better than it was before, even if they were just giving me the equivalent of what I ate when I was broke and hiding from demigods back in the day.

I usually just fancied up what I could forage with herbs I grew with my magic. It was generally a lot healthier than slapping butter on cheap toasted white bread and sprinkling it with parmesan, but this tasted amazing after the bologna sandwiches and nothing for so long.

And I knew my mates did this, I just didn’t know how. I also didn’t know how Benji had avoided the basement. I was glad he wasn’t down here, but hybrids and demons came to the basement by default and Benji was both.

And another ward broke. My magic was creeping back. Everyone’s was. Jezebel and I managed to spread the word to the rest of the basement that it might but to pretend like it wasn’t until they got a sign. I didn’t really know what the sign was, but I was guessing it would be big.

There were cracks in the floor and it was pretty dank down here. I almost had enough magic to coax a weed through the crack. Everyone thought green witches were weirdos who cared more about plants than people and that our magic was kind of useless aside from helping crops and making healing potions.

But it wasn’t. My curse wasn’t the only deadly thing about me. I could snap a neck with a vine I grew. I could split the earth and have it swallow someone whole. If I was fully charged, I could force tree roots through the floor of the basement, rip the doors off of our cells, destroy the door to the basement, and kill anyone down here who tried to stop us.

Except that was me being the heroine who saved her own ass, and that definitely wasn’t what was going to happen. I couldn’t save the entire basement because I could barely stand up. Yeah, they started feeding me again, but it wasn’t enough to undo the damage they did by starving me as punishment.

And as a green witch, I had certain dietary needs. Every single person in this place did. The extra portions would definitely help and give most everyone else a fighting chance, but it wasn’t really what we needed.

I’d come to the realization Di probably wasn’t going to find me before my mates did their thing. My mates were going to come for me. The mate bond was stronger than me asking them to stay away.

I was a little more motivated to fight it than they were because I didn’t want to kill them.

And I didn’t even have the strength to fight my own way out of this basement and go on the run again.

Kat was like the cohort we didn’t know we needed. She was this treasure trove of little nuggets about angel weaknesses and she could easily point out flaws in our plan because she’d been in this exact facility before and had broken out before.

I mean, she turned us all into vampire snacks, but she had a damned good point. Everyone here had specific dietary needs that Hannibal was just ignoring, or the Coalition hadn’t bothered figuring out yet. The parasitic races had extra specific dietary needs and then you had vampires.

The Coalition had their vampires on an Edward Cullen diet long before Twilight was even conceptualized. Then you had the writers who did the blood bag vampires, but that also wasn’t how vampires worked. It would stop them from desiccating but it was like living off white sugar. Bagged or animal blood would keep them alive, but not in optimal condition. They needed fresh from a vein and they couldn’t drop fang for the longest because of the wards.

They didn’t need a ton of blood. All those stories of humans drained of blood were propaganda. The human body had about a gallon and a half of blood in it and they could lose fourteen percent of that before bad shit started happening. A vampire didn’t need nearly that much. Humans banned Everclear because they couldn’t handle Vodka and they thought a vampire could handle an entire body’s worth of blood. The whole thing was fucking stupid.

Anyway, Kat had a damned good point. Pax, Cas, and I were still healthy and strong because we hadn’t been here long. So was Kat if we could be her sippy cup. There was pretty much nothing we could do about getting everyone else here at full fighting strength, even with the extra calories, but we could help the vampires if we let them get a little bitey in a dark corner where some fake nun wasn’t going to clutch her pearls.

And Kat had another damned good point. She said pig’s blood was nasty. I didn’t drink blood, but it sounded like it was just as morally reprehensible to vampires as dino nuggets and bacon on pizza should be to literally everyone with taste buds.

Everyone was doing a damned good job keeping a lid on our magic creeping back. The Coalition kidnapped me when I was seven, so I didn’t exactly go to regular school and do the whole group project thing. I did know getting a large group of people to cooperate and keep a secret was pretty fucking hard.

We were doing so well so far and a vampire who had a tiny bit of fang now could blow it all up biting a fake priest because someone gave them pig’s blood.

Like, I couldn’t promise I wasn’t going to blow this and go on a killing spree if they gave us dino nuggets again, but I digress.

I was getting impatient. My magic was almost back. I could shift into my shadow wolf and have a little poof to the basement to get our mate. I could get her back home right before all the chaos started. I knew why I couldn’t, but I just wanted a little peek.

“I don’t suppose you remember when your magic came back the last time you dealt with angels?”

Kat cut me a scathing look.

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