Page 42 of The Call of Monsters
Good. I would be too because I had a feeling she had her sights on killing Ares.
“Between River and I, we could just roast them,” Demos said.
Barbatos just clucked his tongue.
“I have fire too, but I saw what the two of you did to your bedroom. I doubt Zeus takes the same precautions with his house like Hades does housing a phoenix. I know Hera intends to live on Earth, but she might want to keep this house as a vacation home. Plus, too much can go wrong with fire, and several people with us are not immune.”
“If someone would just hit the lights, so there are shadows in the room, I could take them all out in five minutes,” Solron said.
“I know several dark magic spells they don’t teach witches anymore, and I’ve taught them to Finn. It might not kill them like it would anyone else, but they will totally notice when one hits them.”
I wished this was going to be as easy as everyone seemed to think it was. Because it totally wouldn’t be.
Chapter 23
Tryphon
I
tried not to hold grudges and keep this sense of inner peace after they gave me a new lease on life once they sent me to the Underworld. I tried to forget everything Poseidon forced me to do while I was his slave, just like I had forgotten my entire life before he made me his monster. I’d done a pretty decent job of moving on, but I could still be a petty little bitch when I wanted to be, and I wasn’t about to pass up the chance at killing Poseidon. It wasn’t just about what he did to me. He wiped out entire villages for no logical reason. He needed to pay for that.
Hermes had already riled Athena up. I’d never met her, but apparently, she had an excellent resting bitch face. I already knew she wasn’t a rational person, or Pavlina wouldn’t be a spider, and the Gorgon sisters wouldn’t be so angry all the time, but apparently, she could fake it like the nymphs faked orgasms if you were rotten in bed.
Hermes reported she didn’t lose her cool or give anything away, but she suddenly had a necessary hair appointment or something she needed to get to that she shooed Hermes out of her house really fucking quickly. I liked Hermes and was glad he was on our side. He had this innocent face, so everyone trusted him, and the Olympians were so ass-backward, they didn’t take him seriously because he was gay.
And that was just so fucking stupid. No one cared about that in the Underworld, and based on River and everyone in Hell’s response, at least three realms wouldn’t have forbidden them from being together like Zeus was doing. I’m sure there were judgey people in every place who were super interested in thinking their opinion mattered about what went on behind closed doors among consenting adults. Still, there wasn’t one man preventing it like in Olympus.
None of the Olympians were fucking around. Now that Artemis knew she’d get her handmaidens back, she was contributing more than just her bow and arrows. Despite the massive number of women she had sent to the Underworld, she still had more here. She had them scouting Zeus’s place. They were much better scouts than the servant Athena sent to watch his palace. They could see him, but he couldn’t see them.
They were reporting back to Artemis and Hermes via an earpiece. It was like some fucked up game of spy whack-a-mole. One of those handmaidens was literally right up the ass of Athena’s servant, and he didn’t know. So, we all knew when Ares came back to Olympus, knocked on Zeus’s front door, and we knew when Athena knew that too.
Just like the Olympians predicted, Artemis’s handmaidens reported her flouncing up Zeus’s front steps with Poseidon in tow, and they both looked ready for a fight. That was our cue. Everyone who was going to fight was in Dionysus’s sitting room and armed to the teeth. Everyone who fought with us from Hell used blades. Finn was the only one with some device that was noisy and caused a ton of damage. When I asked, he explained it was called a gun.
We didn’t have those in the Underworld, but Hephaestus was familiar with them. He made something called bullets for them. Finn kept insisting that if Pavlina and I didn’t need our revenge so badly, he could take the entire room out with just a few pulls of the trigger on that thing. Maybe he was right, but I trusted weapons I knew more than shiny toys I’d never seen before.
I was ready. I had blades strapped all over my body, and I’d always have my tentacles. Still, I wasn’t going into this blindly. I think we all made sure River could quickly get to her weapons. I knew Pavlina, and I could get our closure because Demos, Kimon, and Hephaestus would protect her. I’d lay odds Barbatos told the witches to make sure she was protected too. We all knew she wanted to kill Ares. No one was going to say to her she couldn’t either. As far as we were concerned, River could kill anyone who pissed her off, and we wanted Ares dead for hurting Hephaestus too.
“Remember, total silence,” Dionysus said. “Artemis only has one shot at getting her arrow into Zeus and taking him out of the equation. Zeus is a total shit, but he’s powerful. We need to get rid of him. If he knows we are in the secret passage with the weapons he wants so badly, he’ll use every trick he knows to get his hands on them, and we are all dead. I know some of you need your revenge, but it’s not going to be all that easy to take out Ares, Poseidon, or Athena. Now, not another word. We are ending this.”
My blood was pumping, and my heart was racing. Poseidon created me and used me because he thought there would be no consequences. I’m sure he thought he’d never see me again. Well, I was going to be the last fucking thing he saw before I killed him for good.
We all stepped through the hole in the air back into the secret passage. We loved our banter. We could argue about anything. Trying to figure out dinner between all of us was literally impossible. But we knew when to shut the fuck up too. The only sounds in the secret passage were what we could hear through the wall.
There was a lot of shouting. Poseidon was being Poseidon and threatening Zeus for answers. Through a two-way mirror, we could see that Athena was just sitting back and letting the men do all the fighting, hoping Zeus would reveal something. Ares was also shouting for Zeus just to tell them because he could use their help.
Zeus wasn’t foolish. He held onto power this long, and he could see they might take it away from him with that weapon in play. Most of the evil things he had done were to hold on to power and meet his desperate need to have his ass kissed. He was smart enough to know he’d made some enemies along the way. I just don’t think he realized how many and that we knew about his secret passages. He probably had no idea, after everything he’d done to them, that Hera and Hephaestus were with us actively trying to bring him down.
We were packed like sardines in front of the mirror in the room, but we still hadn’t made our move. No one was asking questions because we all knew why. Artemis would have to step out of the passage to get Zeus with the arrow from where he was sitting. I may have still been a little pissed about that army of handmaidens that kept trying to kill us, but I understood she was on our side. We all realized we were wrong about her, and we didn’t want her hurt for helping us.
We just needed Zeus to get up from his chair and move into the line of fire. I was counting on Poseidon to lose his temper and make that happen. As far as god tantrums went, I’d witnessed him have total meltdowns about a broken fingernail.
There we were. There was that temper. Poseidon flung his chair back and swept everything off the table.
“You’re plotting with Ares, and we all know it has something to do with Demeter! I demand to know what you are doing, Zeus!”
Poseidon accentuated this by flinging magic at Zeus. I saw a cut appear over his eye. Olympians couldn’t fight with fists like ordinary people. They relied too much on their magic. I was counting on that to take Poseidon down.
Zeus stood and glared at Poseidon.
