Page 14 of Whiskey, Thieves, and Bastards
“Everyone thinks I’m cosplaying as Dionysus and I’m not really me. They call themselves my Maenads. It pisses off my actual Maenads and pro tip since we’re sharing a mate—neverpiss off the Maenads. They either want to kill or fuck and half the time, they are moody about which one so it’s hard to predict which direction they are going to go. I’m the only thing stopping them from doing either.”
“Noted. I’ll get my shit. I know how to light Pax and Cas because I make them do videos with me sometimes. You’ll have to light yourself until I learn.”
“Oh, I’m going to have to learn to light you, too. Crossover episodes areterriblebut guest starring on each other’s social media is going to be lit.”
Benji just nodded.
“I knew I liked you even when you were lying about your name.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. I thought if we led with that, you’d say no, but we really couldn’t have even seen the building until you destroyed that sigil. I don’t even know how the angels found it. It was one of those things that got self-actualized to protect people from the monstrous gods they also self-actualized. Some of them were nasty business and a generic sigil that will hide someone from a god works on all of us.”
“Everyone has a kryptonite. Mine is wolfsbane, too much light, and genuine poutine that I have to poof myself to Canada to buy. Here’s my assortment of lights.”
Yeah, Benji and me were going to get along just fine. Poutine was also my weakness.
Dionysus and the rest of my friends didn’t just bust us out of New Eden. They got our shit, too. It was like jail, but with less consent. We were brought to them after we’d been hit with some heavy-duty tranq that messed up our short-term memory. Someone stripped us and changed us into their clothes or a strait jacket if they were worried about us. They took anything on us, too.
I had some jewelry I’d always worn. Some of it was given to me by my mother thousands of years ago and some was made by Hephaestus. The necklace from my mother was precious to me because she got it from my grandmother. My grandmother was my only family member that didn’t think if Athena cursed me for getting raped, she probably had a perfectly logical reason for it.
My mamme was the only one who had my back, but I could only talk to my grandmother through the door. She wasn’t safe around me, so I left. I never really forgave my parents, but I did miss my grandmother. I felt better when I was wearing her necklace.
They also gave everyone their phones back. I felt even more violated when I realized someone had unlocked my phone with the biometrics while I was knocked out, disabled it, and some little fake nun or priest had creeped through it to add anyone in it on their watch lists.
But I had my phone back. The only people who followed Dionysus that didn’t call themselves his Maenads were in this room. I quickly found Benji, Cas, and Pax to send them requests. Yeah, it had been Dionysus and me for thousands of years. We predated the internet, social media, and the post office.
I was with him when he first created his social media accounts. He didn’t just do humorous videos. Dionysus’s life was fucked up before he met me.
Zeus catfished his mom and pretended he wasn’t Zeus. Hera took it out on Dionysus and his mother. Hera tookeverythingfrom Dionysus. She took his life and when Zeus brought him back, she took his mind. Zeus only stepped in when there was nothing left of him but his heart and he never really did tell Hera to knock it off.
Dionysus did a lot of posts about people abusing power and hurting kids. He called them out with snark and he was usually working behind the scenes to bring them down. I knew he’d been stressing about the Coalition, but they were just so vast. Between Di and Benji, I knew whatever they were cooking up back there was going to beamazing.
I was sitting in Cas’s lap while he rubbed my shoulders and Pax was rubbing my feet.
“Should it be legal for the two of you to be so good at massages?” I asked.
“Well,Ilike massages and so does Pax, but double teaming a traumatized hybrid with massages so he didn’t poof himself halfway across the country was how we soothed Benji once he let us touch him. He’s mostly okay now except for his birthday or he sees someone in a nun or priest frock acting a certain way. Benji didn’t react to Father Nathan at all, so we knew he was a good person.”
“And you let him go to New Eden not knowing I was there?”
I wasn’t being ungrateful that they rescued me. I wassohappy to be out of there, but not at Benji’s expense. It was different for Pax and Benji than it had been for me. They starved me, but they couldn’t exactly get anywhere near me. Benji was just a kid, and they had blinded Pax. Cas and Pax just chuckled.
“One thing you’ll learn, little monster,” Pax said. “No oneletsBenji do anything. He does what he wants. Those big brown eyes aren’t part of his inherited magic, but they are basically a deadly weapon. It might be dangerous and stupid, but you’ll help him do it if he turns the puppy dog eyes on.”
“He’s also come a long way and is perfectly capable of telling us what he needs. Benji said he needed this for closure. Feeling you down there stabilized him and gave him a reason to fight instead of shutting down. He’s going to be going full shadow demon in there with Dionysus,” Cas said.
“I’ll bet he’s magnificent,” I whispered.
“For what it’s worth, I am glad you finally found them.”
I shot daggers at Athena. She looked like she meant that but I wasn’t ready to hear it. I don’t know about being her favorite but we were friends once. She had been a mentor to me. Athena was probably the strongest of Zeus’s children because of her intelligence and having her choose me as her mentee had been this amazing opportunity.
I hated feeling like this, but shecouldhave said something to me and we figured this out together. Athena didn’t really get people emotions because she’d never been a child. She sprouted fully formed from one of Zeus’s thoughts, but come on. She’d been alive long enough to figure out why I was pissed.
Cas let out a low growl and squeezed me.
“I’m okay,” I murmured.
Because Athena might not whip out the curses at the whole Sugar Tits thing and Cas and Pax might be her chosen heroes, but she would have opinions about getting attacked by a giant polar bear.
