Page 27 of The Goddess is Fierce
Problem was, now I needed toaskthose people why one of them was butchering witches and an entire Basilisk family, and Hades was the only one I liked. Hades didn’t care much for them either and made his own realm just so he didn’t have to share Olympus with them. I was guessing he didn’t know much about Aphrodite’s kids and I wanted this answer for Drake.
“Develop the film,” Freya said. “I can’t promise anything, but I might be able to recognize who it is in the photo. We might all be divine beings, but we have several things in common with mortals. For instance, if someone is misbehaving and you need to pinpoint who, you go talk to their momma to find out whichof their kids is secretly a psycho and what’s so important about those arrows that they’d murder a family over one. I’ll probably miss Baldur getting his memories back, but this is important.”
“Go,” Baldur said. “If it’s not me, I’ve been wanting to stop this for a long time.”
I would have gone to Olympus and made nice for Drake and to stop witches from dying, but it was kind of public knowledge I punched Zeus in the face and threatened to put him in god time out if he didn’t stop raping mortals. You would think Hera and some of the female gods would have had my back on this, but they called me a big, mean bully. They probably hadn’t forgotten that.
Freya wasmuchmore diplomatic than I was, and she at least had friends in Olympus. Freya was the type of person who could get all the information we needed without damaging her friendship in the slightest.
george
. . .
Iwas glad Drake finally opened that box. The art program at the Academy of the Profane had a photography studio. Magical film couldn’t be developed just anywhere or by anyone. There were special materials that reacted to the magic in the film and if you didn’t know what you were doing, the whole thing caught fire and ruined the film.
We didn’t need to hunt down an older art student to develop the film. Oscar was a versatile artist. He learned how to do it in high school. We just needed to find my dad to let us in. Gabriel had always had keys to the photography studio. He could have set up a dark room at home in his art studio, but he decided notto because he always wanted to be accessible to us if we needed him.
Oscar, Ren, Azren, and Drake were in the photography lab developing photos over the weekend. The rest of us were at my mom’s library researching the Erotes. The library was technically closed on the weekends, but I knew the librarian. We’d been in a deep dive for hours until my mom made us stop.
“Take a break and come eat. Your dad made sandwiches and Felix made chips.”
I moaned. My dad didn’tjustmake sandwiches. And it was always a treat when Felix made chips. He cut them super thick with vinegar and salt. I set my book down and dragged everyone upstairs. Michael and Dexter were with us since we’d filled them in on what we were doing and they wanted to help.
“Those are the most beautiful fries I’ve ever seen,” West said.
“Those are chips,” Felix said. “If you’re going to date our daughter, show some respect.”
“I’ll call them whatever you want as long as you gimme.”
Felix smiled and slid them over. Felix liked my guys. All my dads did, but they were going to have to give them a hard time first.
“You’d better compliment my sandwiches, too, or I’m going to be butt hurt and you don’t want a butt hurt God of Chaos.”
“Is that pimento, bacon, and avocado?” Church asked.
“Yeah, it’s amazing,” Matilda said. “If you don’t have that one, grab the BLT where the tomato is a fried green tomato. Reyson picked it up when we were in New Orleans.”
“Yoink. That one is mine,” Dexter said, snatching it. “I’vealwayswanted to go there.”
My dad just shrugged.
“We’ll take you all when you graduate. I’m sorry I can’t help with the research, but I couldn’t stand Zeus any more than Azrencould. Did you find anything before your mom did the ‘mom’ thing and made you all eat?”
“Oh, hush. You were all in here cooking because you knew they needed to eat, too.”
“None of us are complaining about that,” Belladonna moaned. “I like to pretend when a god made it, the calories don’t count.”
“Ooh, good call,” Dexter said. “We won’t have to run an extra mile in the morning.”
Belladonna was jogging buddies with Dexter and Michael. Matilda and I both enjoyed running because it kept us in shape for dodgeball and cheerleading, butnotat stupid o’thirty in the morning when the three of them did it. We’d probably never be morning people.
“There’s not a lot written about them,” I said. “Some seem to be more popular than others. There’s a lot about Eros and Cupid. We found art and the basics of who most of them were, even if there weren’t epic stories like there were with Eros. Some of them barely got an honorable mention. We know what their main power is, but it’s like the people didn’t care enough about them to record their stories, make statues, or put them on pottery.”
“That’s enough to make a god go on a killing spree if they are petty enough,” Dad said. “But we have shitty attention spans since we live so long. They’d do all that while people were actively worshipping them and it wouldn’t be limited to just one race. It would beeveryonethey thought was snubbing them and they would have been bored with it when their whole family was getting snubbed, too. It still doesn’t make sense.”
“What if it was another god?” Mina asked. “The killer has only been going after witches and he’s leaving the hearts for Freya. Freya didn’t create witches, but haven’t they left offerings out for her, too?”
My dad just shrugged.
