Page 50 of The Goddess is Fierce
“What is Hedylogus’s power?”
I couldn’t even remember that, there was so little written about that particular Erotes.
“Sweet talk and flattery. Aphrodite said his brothers never gave him a hard time, but some of the other gods thought it was kind of a lame power. Mortals did, too. They never wrote any legends or stories about him, and he only ended up in a few pieces of art with his siblings. Any time his family tried toassure him that his magic was just as special as anyone else’s, Hedylogus would get upset and think they were patronizing him. No one has seen him for a very long time. She didn’tsayhe might be a psycho serial killer now, but she seemed uncomfortable talking about him.”
I needed tothink, butI also needed a lot more information to put together all the pieces.
“You’re the only one of us who has been to Olympus and met him. He’s hunting at a building that has significance to you and as soon as you came back, he’s been leaving you his trophies. What happened when you met him in Olympus?” Baldur asked.
Yes. Good question. He was taking the hearts because he was an Erotes. It was all part of the lore. We’d been trying to figure outwhythe Academy of the Profane. Balthazar checked, and he wasn’t killing anywhere else. He was sporadically showing up to this college, butchering a few witches, stealing their hearts, and then disappearing.
Asmartgod would have run when they realized I was here looking into the murders. I was pretty sure he had been waiting for Freya. Whether the murders had been to draw her out this entire time, I had a feeling all of this was connected to what happened in Olympus when Freya was looking for her ex.
“Honestly? I don’t remember him. When Aphrodite was talking about her kids, I remembered little interactions with all of them except him. Which is strange. We’realljust vain little monkeys with a lot of power. I remember everyone who gave me pleasure or made me feel good about myself. If I met a god whose power was sweet talk and flattery, I’drememberhow they made me feel, even if they were just lying to me.”
I was starting to get a pretty good idea of what went down in Olympus thousands of years ago and it all boiled down to some really lousy sex I had back when the universe was maybe two weeks old.
“You’re forgetting when you were just a baby god and had to figure your shit out. Back when we made the universe and went there with our new vessels, we had to figure out what our magic was. We were also experimenting with sex and trying to figure out who and what we were into until most of them got scared of me.
“Eros is literally the God of Sex. He’d probably show up and threaten to beat my ass if he heard me saying this, but Eros wasterribleat sex with men and women until he bothered learning to get better at it. We’re immune to our own magic. I can’t do a damned thing with my own essence. Hedylogus can gift other people the ability to be good at sweet talk and flattery, but he might have been terrible at it when you met him. Like, so bad you completely forgot about him.”
“That’s surprising because I fucked Eros, too, and that man knows alotof tricks,” Freya said. “Aren’t our powers just kind of inherent to our personalities? Everyone I’ve met so far has been like that.”
“Hello, I’m not,” George said. “I’m stupid awkward. I couldn’t even figure out what to wear to the speakeasy and when the vampire part of my mimic powers kicked in, I nearly killed someone.”
“George, you know I love you, but you’re basically a fetus. You’resupposedto be awkward and not have your shit figured out yet,” Freya said.
Freya wasn’t wrong there.
“He could be a late bloomer, especially if some of the other gods tried to make him ashamed of his magic. I can’t figure out why you not falling for it thousands of years ago started this attachment. If there had been a scene between you and him, you would have remembered. Idoknow after he left Olympus, he’d managed to figure out how to use his magic in a way that spits in the face of the Fates,” I said.
“Explain,” Odin said. “Because I don’t see how any of this is possible, especially from a god that doesn’t have a single story written about him and a lot of his own family didn’t think he was that strong.”
Odin knew. If he thought really hard about it, he’d figure it out.
“His power is pretty words. You know the saying the pen is mightier than the sword? Words have alotof power. Everything dies unless you write it down. Every dictator who ever came to power feared words and ideas over people because you can’t kill an idea. Pretty words have convinced people to die in someone else’s war or vote criminals into office. Hedylogus is actually dangerous as fuck if he left Olympus to come to Earth and prove to everyone his powers weren’t useless. Because they very much aren’t.
“That’s why the Fates didn’t create more of him in other god families. I think some of us are just to see what will happen. They just fuck around and find out with creating gods and it ends up being this massive mistake. A lot of people end up dying and the rest of us end up having to fix it. If it’s Hedylogus and we aren’t completely off base about the entire thing, he was given this awesome power he could have done great things with. He chose this.”
“Fuck,” Odin said, mopping his face with his hands. “He might be even more dangerous than you are. I still don’t get what that has to do with Freya. Everyone has always been in love with her. She always lets them down gently unless they are troglodytes who don’t ask her directly and come to me instead. I could be a bit of an idiot back then, too, and went the long way around telling them no so the men wouldn’t feel bad. Looking back, I should have just let her do it. She was better at it than me and we wouldn’t have needed Loki to bail our asses out so many times.”
George just shrugged.
“One of those times produced my Uncle Sleipnir, so it wasn’t all bad.”
Odin fell out laughing.
“If you think that boy wouldn’t have shapeshifted and fucked a stallion anyway, you just need to spend more time around him.”
I started laughing. It was so fucked up with everything going on, but I’d known Loki as long as Odin had and he wasn’t wrong.
“That’s actually fair, but I need to concentrate. Freya, did Aphrodite say anything about the arrow?”
“Yes, and all of youoweme because she didn’t want to talk about it. Usually, I would use a little love magic to soften her up a bit, but since that’salsoher magic, it cancels mine out. I had to do it the long way.”
“Freya,” I warned. “Don’t bullshit us. You lived countless lifetimes as a mortal witch without that kind of magic and you stillalwaysmanaged to get what you wanted.”
“Bullshit doesn’t work on Aphrodite!” she yelled, throwing up her hands. “It doesn’t work on me either. You get a really astute bullshit filter when some of your magic is love and beauty and everyone is trying to get into your pants. I got what we needed, but I’m going to need everyone to kiss my ass and tell me I’m pretty for at least two weeks for getting that information without completely imploding my friendship with Aphrodite.”
