Page 8 of Whiskey, Thieves, and Bastards
Athena bowed her head. Hephaestus had her pegged. It was low-key weird because she was a god. If I wasn’t fucking with someone, I was getting blamed for fucking with someone. Even if it wasn’t me, I looked that person in the eye andownedit. Sugar Tits should have nutted up and faced Medusaagedago.
“It was terrible,” Athena said. “I asked them to use their magic through me to make her stronger and they didthatto her. I couldn’t face her because even though I know shecanturn it off, and she has the powers of a fury, no one actually knows anything about that except Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera. I’ve been researching, but barringaskingthem and actually gettingthem to cooperate, I don’t know how to teach you how to do this. Ihatenot knowing something. I was researching this entire time.”
I had some opinions about Sugar Tits and her secrets, but I wasn’t going to speak for Medusa. This was her life. It wasn’t up to any of us to tell her how to feel or react to this. Cas stole her and had her in his lap because that was just him. Pax and I hadn’t started eating yet. Pax squeezed her hand, and I nuzzled her shoulder with my cheek.
“I can’t deal with this shit,” she said, standing up and leaving.
We all moved to go after her but Persephone stopped us.
“Girl talk. You coming, Jezebel?”
“Fuck, yeah.”
Persephone saw me sulking and pinched my cheek. Should she be doing that when her husband was a God and looked like he wanted to murder me for that?
“You’re adorable. You need to stay and find out your part in all this.”
Yeah, yeah.Aftermy mate was okay.
Persephone came flying after me like a shade trying to escape Tartarus. Jezebel was with her. I was sitting in Pax’s beautiful garden trying not to cry. I’d just found out my entire adult life was a lie. And even worse, it didn’t have to be like that at all if Athena had justtoldme so I could figure shit out.
Jezebel and Persephone plonked on either side of me and wrapped their arms around me.
“Sorry, danger noodle. My half-sister is usually the smartest person I know or the dumbest.”
I was fighting a smile. Persephone heard the term ‘danger noodle’ and that was her pet name for my snakes and me. It still made me smile even now.
“I never got to tell you about that time I tried to seduce Isaac Newton,” Jezebel said. “I offered him anal, and he decided to invent calculus.Calculus!I will have you know men paid extra for that and I was going to give him a freebie. He was brilliant, and I admired that about him. I tried to show him that the way a succubus would. I could have rocked that man’s world,” Jezebel sighed.
“Hades also wanted to get his hands on Newton, but for his mind. The afterlife doesn’t work like that.”
“Is this one of those things where I’ll go insane if you tell me? Because I’ve got the badass Queen of the Underworld here and I spent enough time in the next cell from the nope rope to know you have to distract her before she’ll talk about her shit.”
“Yeah, you both have snake jokes,” I laughed.
“She’s not wrong either. Jezebel has you pegged. Anyway, whether you go insane with this information or not is completely up to you. You could either find it peaceful or rage against the machine about cosmic conspiracy theories.”
“I don’t believe most of them, but I love reading about them. Do go on.”
I thought Jezebel could handle it. My friends didn’t actually figure any of this out until I’d known them for a while and then they had to put their heads together with some of the other gods.
“Okay, so we used to think it was just us. We thought Chaos and Gaia created the universe and everything was new. Everyone who died came to the Underworld. There are different sections and rivers that do different things.
“Charon would ferry their souls to the Underworld, but whether they ended up in Asphodel Meadows, Elysian Fields, or continued to torture themselves drinking from one of the rivers was completely up to them.
“We thought we got every living soul, but then they started to trickle to barely nothing. Hades and I thought somethingwas wrong and people were cheating death, so we looked into it. Mortals were still dying. The difference was, they believed in different gods and a different afterlife.
“So, we went out and finally found other gods. They had different creation myths, and some noticed the same thing with their afterlives. The younger gods were booming.
“It was the Romans that tipped us off. Their empire was booming and their gods seemed pretty fucking familiar. Like, Hades and Pluto were the same and Baccus and Dionysus were nearly identical. Their concept of the afterlife was similar. Elysian Fields became the Isle of the Blessed, where heroes went when they died.”
“I remember reading all that,” Jezebel said. “It was before my time, but not Kat’s. We haven’t had time to talk about all that. I don’t remember reading where any of you put them in their place.”
Yeah, they couldn’t. My friends were just as fucked up over what they found out as I was. In fact, they might have been more fucked in the head over it as I was right now over what Sugar Tits just dropped on me. And seriously, I adored everything about Benji calling her that to her face when she was outnumbered by gods and couldn’t do anything about it.
“We couldn’t. Pluto and Proserpina were technically Hades and me, so can you imagine the total mind fuck when we saw them face to face? They even had their own version of my damned dog.”
“No!”
