Page 22 of The Call of Monsters
Wow. Tryphon was seriously going to go there right in front of her fuckingdad.Barbatos was pretty chill, and he’d been pretty understanding so far about all of us being with her. I didn’t care how many cool dad points someone might have. They probably drew the line at tentacle choking. Fuck, I drew the line at that, but my baby bird was into it, so I hadn’t killed Tryphon.
Even that didn’t faze Barbatos. Seriously, what kind of place was Hell? We were eventually going to do something that offended him, but at the rate we were going at things that should offend your mate’s parents, we’d hit several major points by now. We’d have to do something pretty fucking extreme to piss him off, and with Pavlina, Tryphon, and Demos in this relationship, it was eventually going to happen.
Barbatos just laughed.
“She could have felt threatened, or she might have just wanted to come out and play. A lot of demons in Hell consider it an honor to be taken to the bed of Hell royalty because sometimes they get to play with a demonic form. You should talk to Solron.”
I liked Solron. She came in handy several times when we were dealing with Demeter, but I kind of didn’t want my baby bird getting bedroom tips from her. Solron was probably into more fucked up shit than getting choked by tentacles. River just shrugged.
“I need to be focusing on how to use all this so I can help get Hephaestus back. I can’t have my demonic side popping out in Olympus until I want her to. I’m guessing we are going to have to go undercover to get close to Zeus, and I can’t sprout a cat head and wings every time I get startled.”
Barbatos just pat her hand.
“You’re friends with a ton of monsters, River. Now, you need to make friends with your demonic side too, so you can work together.”
We all frowned. What did that even mean? She was in a relationship with us because she could communicate with us when we were trapped as monsters. None of us really understood it at the time, and I still really didn’t understand everything she could do. I just accepted it, and the fact that I now knew there were other realms out there with things like demons in them. I still hadn’t gotten an explanation as to what a Fae was, but I knew they were friendly with demons. Baby bird could talk to animals, and that’s why she could speak to us, but as far as I knew, her demonic form wasn’t some separate entity she could have conversations with.And I was right.
“How? She’s never spoken to me before. Is she supposed to?”
Barbatos just shook his head.
“It’s different for you since no one was ever around to teach you how to do this, and circumstances right now mean you don’t have a lot of time. Deal with your shit, River. The less unresolved issues you have, the easier it will be. Being a teenager is usually hard on demons, but you aren’t dealing with raging hormones like they are. You just have more life experience to deal with.”
Barbatos had been extremely helpful so far, but what the shit? If you forgot everything she might have dealt with before she ended up here, she’d had alotthrown at her recently. Barbatos himself could be an unresolved issue for her. The demon fucked her mom, stole her dog, then disappeared. Baby bird didn’t just meet her absent dad. She met a Duke of Hell with an army of demons, and she hadn’t even ripped him a new asshole for not being there for her until now.
Baby bird just sighed and looked at Charley.
“I don’t suppose there’s a spell for that?”
Charley just giggled.
“If there were, I’d be a fucking millionaire right now and would have dealt with my own shit.”
“Meditate, River. Talk about anything with us, and we’ll try to help. For instance, is there anything you’d like to say to me? Technically, I was a deadbeat dad, and that isnotthe demon way. We are normally highly involved in our spawn’s raising, even if you are no longer with your partner.”
River just gave him this crooked grin, and I realized something. I think Barbatos was more upset about his absence in her life than she was. She told us several stories about her mother and stepfather on several nights when we were snuggled in bed. Her stepfather sounded like an amazing man, and she always thought of him as a father. I disagreed with her mother and stepfather, putting her on medication she didn’t like because of her abilities, but they couldn’t have understood what she could do. Still, neither of them missed a single school performance, and she said they threw her epic birthday parties.
“I’m not angry with you,” she said. “Being in an entirely different realm where travel is restricted and the fact that you stole my mom’s puppy and snuck out before breakfast was just a recipe for you never knowing about me. You brought an entire army when you learned I existed, and that means a lot.”
Barbatos pulled her into this massive hug. She wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her head on his chest.
“You don’t understand the danger you were in growing up alone like that. Not all witches and warlocks are like Charley and Finn. The bad ones love to experiment with demon parts. The prison Charley and several of our residents were in had to be entirely shut down because the warden and her coven were diverting funds for upgrades towards experimenting on the supernatural community. They were framing elementals and doing horrid things to the prisoners just to gain more power. It was a horrible scandal, but they faced Hell justice.”
“Seriously, Scorchwood Supernatural Penitentiary was worse than the jail I visited here the first time,” Charley said. “I know we were all criminals, and they sent us there to rot, but that was above and beyond cruel and unusual punishment since Warden Skinner was taking all the funds to make things more comfortable. I helped Serafina and Solron plan her execution.”
They had jails worse than holding cells in Tartarus? Everyone in the Underworld avoided Tartarus at all costs. It was just a dire, shitty place. Hades had a palace built by the Underworld's previous residents, but he never went there unless he had to. Demeter forced him there, and we all got stuck in that jail, but they kept people in worse places than that in other realms? I wasn’t the only one thinking either.
“A witch kept you in worse conditions than that jail?” baby bird asked. “What a bitch.”
“Olympians don’t have the market cornered on being shitty, River,” Barbatos said. “Every realm and every supernatural community have shitty people. That jail we were talking about was originally for the Fae simply because they didn’t want to leave their families and return home when the Fae king recalled them and closed the gate. Shifters and Vampires aren’t exempt, and I haven’t personally met any like this, but I’ve heard the elementals are practically unbearable. None of them inserted themselves as gods and goddesses in a different realm, but there are people in every species in every realm who totally would. The demons who tried to take over Hell would have if they were a little bit more creative.”
I knew there were shitty people in the world, but now I had to process there were entire realms of beings with superpowers that were just as bad as the Olympians. I’d met a few demons. River explained Vampires and shifters to us, but she couldn’t say what they were like. Apparently, they were a popular subject for fiction she liked to read, but she said she was almost certain they didn’t sparkle, whatever that meant.
River was thinking the same thing I was.
“Hades wants to open the gates to Olympus. Are some of these people just going to do the exact same thing?”
“Hell has a vetting process, and so do the Fae. That was part of the reason I’m okay with Hades’s plan of not killing everyone. Genocide is just ugly. Olympians might have done some bad things, but someone needs to tell their stories and make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. Someone needs to make sure Olympus changes, and I’m sure not every Olympian is awful. They can vet who they let in.”
