Page 38 of The Goddess is Angry
I knew it wasagod, but I couldn’t figure out which one or why they were doing this. We could do a lot of things, but we couldn’t override free will. We were also the Queens of gaslighting and manipulation with words, but actually messing with people’s minds using divine magic tended to melt their brains.
Narrowing the gods down to someone who might have been given that power was difficult. We weren’t all friends. Some pantheons were vast with gods of totally minor things. Some of them had a lot of sex with each other and produced a ton of children. Some of those families were toxic as fuck, but were more about petty curses.
So, yeah, I was lost. I didn’t know who decided to violently murder a witch or who could cover their tracks like that.
And it happened again under my watch. I needed another god’s eyes on this, but I couldn’t go to my old friends. Loki and Freya didn’t really get involved with the other families. Reyson destroyed their societies, but he found a lot of the other gods insufferable. He wouldn’t know, either. No, I needed George because she was a student and might know something about the victim.
Problem was, there was a moon orgy going on and Drake was with her this time. I was happy for them. George was good for Drake. I was crazy about George, but if Drake wasn’t okay with it, I’d step back.
I was throwing my clothes on rather than magick them on because I was putting off crashing the moon orgy. I’d actually been napping. There was a knock on my door. It was everyone. Even Mags, Matilda, and Mina were there.
“Dodgeball field again?” Matilda asked.
“Shrieking Woods.”
“Oh, fuck no,” Matilda said. “That’s where all the deranged ghosts hang out. How do we know the Banshee in Shrieking Woods didn’t get someone who got drunk and wandered away from the moon orgy? The junior shifters have been brewing moonshine in some of the empty faculty cabins. It was pretty potent. At least one pixie got super drunk and started a brawl with some older vampires. I get that you can disrespect ghosts and not get dick punched like Church, but can you control an entire fuckingforestof serial-killer ghosts?"
"Exactly," West said. “I don’t know what’s worse—getting murdered or getting punched in the dick.”
This conversation would be so much funnier if there wasn’t a dead body in Shrieking Woods. I laughed when I heard about the ruse because it was very much my old friend. It wasstillamusing now that I was on campus and hearing how the legends grew since this campus was founded.
“Truth time and this cannot leave this cabin. Shrieking Woods isn’t more or less haunted than the rest of these grounds. The rest of the ghosts didn’t banish all the bad ghosts there, and the Banshee is an urban legend. There are a ton of rare and delicate plants that grow in Shrieking Woods that don’t need to be trampled on by students. A lot of them are used in healing potions, but many college students are going to rip them up, roll them in a joint, and smoke them because they can also get you high.
“There’s a cabin with a caretaker who deals with the rare plants. If it’s a student and not the caretaker, they might have seen something and hid. The cabin is hard to find unless you know where to look. Of course, the person doing this might have already figured that out and done this when they were traveling for work. Though, most of you don’t work when the moon is full.”
The caretaker wasalwayssome type of Fae or green witch. Someone with a deep connection to nature, but could also handle it if someone was in the forest who wasn’t supposed to be. They also had to be level-headed enough toscarecollege students and not maim them. None of them were dumb enough to take on a god. They would have called for backup.
No one called me, so they were either dead, completely out of the forest for the night, or for some reason called the Paranormal Investigation Bureau when a god crashed their woods instead of another god. The caretaker could have been invited to their own moon orgy since that’s what most of the faculty was doing tonight.
I didn’t know what I was going to find when I brought all these college students straight to a dead body in a forest Beatrix Halliwell built up such an urban legend about hundreds of years ago, students were still scared to go in.
Another witch with her heart surgically cut out. Fleur wasn’t in my history class, so I didn’t know much about her. This one, I knew. Saffron Dukes was a brilliant history student who challenged me in class with these amazing questions. She was a junior who told me after class once that she was doing independent study in potions. She’d already come up with a brand new healing potion for the common cold when she was a sophomore.
“Damn,” Mina said. “Saffron was just as well loved as Fleur was. Some of her healing potions were more effective than what they give you at the infirmary or you can buy at the supernatural market. She never charged the students for them because she said it was a learning experience. Some of the legacy students tried to pressure her into making them unaffordable so she’d have a cushion when she graduated. Saffron was a scholarship student. She could have used the money, but then the rest of the scholarship students couldn’t afford it.”
Two victims. Two beloved witches who were so insanely talented in their chosen fields, they were doing things most people their age couldn’t do. I had a pretty good ideahowthey were choosing their victims, but not why.
“Does it smell like the same person did this?” I asked.
West shot me a withering look.
“You know damned well it’s the damn person without asking me to sniff a murder victim.”
West complained, but West, Mags, and Matilda did the shifter thing. The MO was the same, but a second strong witch as a victim had just put another theory in my head. The shifters agreed it was the same killer, but the second theory was still pretty strong.
Before I could even voice it or call Saffron from the void to find out if she knew anything, I had the same pissed-off detectives from the Paranormal Investigation Bureau as the first time this happened kickingmeoff a murder scene like this wasn’t my domain.
I portalled them all back to my cabin and conjured some food. They probably ate before the moon orgy, then built up a sweat and might be hungry again. I ate my feelings when I was thinking, so I needed the food.
I needed details about Saffron that I wouldn’t be privy to as her teacher, but they would as her classmates. The Paranormal Investigation Bureau was going to summon her and traumatize her spirit. I’d be able to swoop in to take her to the Aether when they did the rites, but I didn’t trust the Paranormal Investigation Bureau to be delicate with her before she got to me.
The caretaker never came out, so I was guessing they were at a moon-orgy celebration. If there were cameras out here, one of George’s dads could hack anything with a Wi-Fi connection and could get me the footage.
But first, food and questioning the living.
george
Iwas nowhere near as smart as Azren and I could only use their power when they were close to me. They’d been teaching me, but their board kept stealing Azren, and my private lessons kept getting canceled. I was just a stupid eighteen-year-old, even if I happened to be a god.
