Page 10 of Whiskey, Thieves, and Bastards
“Like I said, I’ve been researching this for ages. I don’t think the furies were bornfrom Nyx. I think they were also created by the Fates to stop some kind of evil and they just kept punishing evildoers. I’m pretty sure there’s some truth to the whole curses personified. The rest of you found the whole self-actualizing thing ages ago. I think that plays into all of this.”
Medusa tensed in my arms, so I squeezed her and started rubbing her back. Honestly, with everything we knew, what Athena was about to say was probably true, but it was probably going to hurt. I had a feeling I knew what she was about to say, too. So did Dionysus, apparently.
“Let me take this one. You’d just been through a horrifically violating experience, love. The fates hit you with magic and made you a fury, but they let you choose how it manifested. The other furies appear differently. You thought you were being cursed, but you also wanted to protect yourself from being hurt again.
“You manifested the snakes and the gaze to keep people away from you. You probably didn’t even know you were doing it because you thought Athena was cursing you. Which means IthinkAthena is right and you have the power to turn it off.”
Which is exactly what I had been thinking, and I hadn’t even been alive then. I just paid attention. I wasn’t excusing Athena for not telling her thisagesago but it would mean the world to Medusa if she could turn her snakes and gaze off when she wanted to.
“It’s true,” Hades said. “Ipersonally haven’t because they’d fuck me up, but my wife has seen Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera without their makeup on.”
“Don’t be gross. What he means is that I’ve seen them with regular faces on. We might be able to convince them to comehere if you don’t want to go to the Underworld, but Cerberus misses you.”
“That dog is a menace,” Dionysus said.
I could tell he didn’t mean that, and he actually liked the three-headed dog that guarded the Underworld.
“You shut your damned mouth. My dog is a perfect angel.”
“You keep slipping him food from your plate and he farts fire.”
“That’s badass,” Benji said. “We should totally go to the Underworld with some burgers. Right, Calamity?”
“It would be cool, but Ihateghosts. My dorm room was haunted by some pervert who would hang out in bathrooms and watch everyone shower with his hands down his pants.”
Hades swooped in and explained what happened after you died. Ghosts were kind of people who had unfinished business like the movies. The pervert in Calamity’s shower stuck around because he wanted to creep on women. Kat was on her phone trying to look up how to kill a ghost. Jezebel thought the whole thing was funny.
It was a total mind fuck.
“The shades in the Underworld are totally different,” Hades said. “They stick to the areas they think they belong in and don’t really wander near my house. You’d be safe. It’s one thing when the livingbreakin. It’s totally different when they are my guests. Cerberus won’t eat you.”
I was cursing the Coalition blinding me because I really wanted toseethe Underworld if that was what we were doing. Cas’s phone went off, but he didn’t put it on speaker. He had a brief conversation and then hung up.
“Father Nathan was sitting on his nuclear bomb until he knew Hannibal was about to make himself known to the public. He said Hannibal is about to make a statement and he’s going to push the information to the reporters in the middle of it. I wantto see the Underworld and Medusa needs those answers, but we also need to be dealing with the fallout from New Eden since Hannibal runs the Coalition,” Cas said.
“I don’t know if you can get a cell phone signal in the Underworld, but couldn’t you take Medusa to find out what she needs to know and let us handle it up here? I’m an original, Jezebel has her lure, and Calamity is a demon. We’ve got alotcovered and you could leave one of the gods behind just in case.”
“Hephaestus and I will stay,” Athena said. “I have a good relationship with the furies, but not as good as Persephone.”
At least Sugar Tits was finally making herself useful. Cas grabbed the remote.
“We’ll go after we see what’s going on with Hannibal.”
Father Nathan was a good friend of mine. I was probably closer to him out of all of us. He was motivated to bring down the Coalition even before he knew the leader had his hands on Oberon.
If Oberon had gottenanythingoff of his chest, we were about to witness retribution from a real priest on a fake monsignor.
Isnuggled into my mates and started eating the fruit salad with the ambrosia in it. I might have mixed feelings on whether I wouldeverforgive Athena, but I wasn’t stupid. When I was much younger, someone would have gutted you for ambrosia. It wasn’t just that it tasted amazing. It tasted like the juiciest, sweetest fruit you could only get in one place.
It gave your magic a boost, and it tended to make you physically stronger. Athena usually gave it to her heroes. Perseus was roided out on it when he came to chop off my head. Now, I didn’t know if it was Athena or the Fates who intervened to fake my death. I didn’t want to ask because I wanted to be mad at her a little longer. She could have told me thisagesago.
I told my mates to eat up, too. If the fates had thrown them into one of Athena’s hero quests, then they were going to need it. I wanted them protected because if we were taking on the Coalition, we were probably going to have to take on the angels, too.
But for now, I was going to watch Persephone’s plan unfold. I met her long after her father hurt her and she became the Queen of the Underworld. People might be afraid of Hades, but he was an amazing partner. He knew exactly what she needed when she broke into the Underworld and Cerberus fell in love with her.
Persephone didn’t need a big powerful man to fight her battles. She needed Hades to teach her how to protect herself because her mother wanted her to be this virginal god who made flowers with her.
Hades helped her fully explore being a God of Rebirth. He was the one that taught her sometimes, for things to be reborn, you needed to burn the old shit down. They were perfectly simpatico and understood each other’s magic better than anyone I knew.
