Page 14 of Winners, Losers, and Champagne Kisses
“The whole story about him intending for his son to die was false. He loved that boy and had plans for him. From what I’ve been told, it shattered him when he was murdered and he was angry with humans. If he ended up in a different realm, he may have chosen to stay there. I’ve never met him, but back when things were functional, he would have sent the archangels to deal with it if someone was killing in his name. I have to think he doesn’t know.”
So, all of this was because a few angels had some daddy issues? That didn’t make any of this better. What happened to them was terrible. Kat was there, and she told us how awful it was. It was even worse now that we knew it wasn’t even supposed to happen like that. The shitty system they had allowed it to go down and I could even see wanting to change it.
I got not trusting a god you’d never met would have your back in a dispute like that. I’d actually met a ton of gods andthere were only a select few I’d trust with my plants, much less anything major.
“That’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard. I got kidnapped when I was seven and I still don’t know if my parents are alive or dead. They blinded Pax, starved Medusa, and tortured Calamity. Do you know what a shit hole those places are? They don’t just cut us off from our magic. They don’t even feed us appropriately for our race and we all have certain needs we didn’t get! This is stupid. It’s all so fucking stupid!” Benji yelled.
I felt the exact same way and I’m pretty sure all of us did, but we didn’t need a hybrid to lose control. Michael wasn’t our enemy. He was also a victim of the other angels. We didn’t need Benji tearing him apart. I wrapped my arms around him.
“I know. But now that we know why and we have Michael, maybe we can fix this for good. Athena and Hera are looking into their victims. They will find out what happened to your parents.”
Because making the Coalition illegal and changing the humans’ minds would make things better for a lot of people, but Benji wasn’t going to fully heal until he found out for certain what happened to his parents.
Now that we’d made peace, I knew what Athena was like when she got her teeth into something. I could tell she liked Benji because he wasn’t afraid of her.
We needed to come up with a plan because we could fix this for everyone, but as soon as we did, we were focusing on Benji.
Iusually went straight to disassociating because if I didn’t, my demon half just really wanted to kill the shit out of people. I couldn’t manage to do that at all right now and I knew I couldn’t kill Michael, either. It wasn’t just that he was on our side and was trying to help us. The poor fucker had never been in a Coalition facility, but he had the same look in his eyes as anyone who had and with our preternatural healing, it was very difficult to cause the amount of scarring he had.
He was just like us. I used to hateallthe angels and told myself if I ever saw one, I’d tear them apart. Apparently, they were all dicks except the archangels. I needed to do something because what I really wanted to do was start a nice bar fight.
“They don’t have a plan. Do you?” I asked.
“I said there were only twelve archangels, but that’s not necessarily true. There were seven that rebelled and fell, and then twelve were created. They are supposed to be in Hell and I can’t go there, but they could help.”
Every single god grinned.
“Oh, they are here. I’ve got Lucifer’s cell and I’ll bet he’d be willing to gather them and bring them if we agreed that doing this is how he pays back all the money he owes us,” Dionysus said.
“We don’t even give a shit about the money. We have more than we know what to do with. It’s the principle of the thing. He makeseverythinga wager, and he’s terrible at it,” Hades said.
“To be honest, I’m only asking because I’m desperate. He’s a bit of a boogeyman back home. If anything goes wrong, they blame him. There are angels blaming him for the current civil war because he started the first one, but that’s nonsense. Lucifer was the first angel. The majority of us never met him.”
“He’s harmless,” Persephone said. “He revels in his whole ‘fallen angel’ identity and so do the rest of them. They flirt with anything that moves, but they are great with consent. I’ve seen Lucifer get completely shut down at a bar and he doesn’t get violent or think there’s something wrong with them for not liking him. He just assumes he’s not to their tastes and goes about his business. Lucifer is just as rich as us and even though he makes wagers and never pays, he’s generous with his money when it comes to good causes. His bark is worse than his bite. He’s a complete dick, but he doesn’t mean any of it.”
Lucifer sounded like my kind of dude, but I didn’twantto like any more angels. I wanted to kill all the bad ones until I felt better. Honestly, how many more Coalition people was I going to have to kill before this gaping hole in my gut filled up? I hadn’t killed an angel yet. It was science. I probably just needed to kill some angels because they started it. That should do it. Ifit didn’t, I might have to do therapy again. I should probably do that, anyway. It helped before.
“Wait, so you can watch this realm in yours? Do the angelsknowthat Saul and Hannibal were arrested for sex trafficking?” Kat asked.
“Yes, they do. They had me in that room because they wanted me to watch everything. Believe it or not, no one in our realm ever had any problem with supernaturals before. If the archangels had to come here to do something and there were supernaturals in a village, we were to leave them alone and not expose them if it was a secret.
“We were supposed to treat them like any other potential believer. It was never a forced thing. We weren’t supposed to sit them down and tell them their gods were wrong and that they’d burn if they didn’t believe in our Father. We were to earn their belief through good deeds. It wasn’t this wrathful thing like you read about.
“Anyway, they know. They were watching when you all made the Coalition go away. They were planning to appear to Hannibal and Saul with a plan to make you all seem violent and dangerous so that it would look like a mistake. Then, they saw them get arrested and just lost it.
“They were breaking things and throwing them. They broke a locked chest that had my feather in it and then they all disappeared. You can’t control an angel without their feather. It’s considered unspeakable for an angel to do that to another angel, but we crossed that line in our realm a long time ago. I found the other archangels they were keeping prisoner, found their feathers, and we got here just in time to watch you stop the prison break. They are here, but they are in worse shape than me. They are getting what they need to heal and join the fight.”
“I’ll get Lucifer,” Dionysus said, disappearing.
Ugh. More angels. As soon as Dionysus disappeared, Athena appeared at our table. And she had someone with her whose face I’d been trying to hold onto. I hadn’t seen it since I was seven. She was thinner, scarred, and she had that look in her eyes that every Coalition victim had, but that was my fuckingmom.
I couldn’t even wait for Cas to scooch his giant bear ass out of the booth and let me out. I poofed straight to my mom. The last time I saw her, she was taller than me, but now I towered over her. I scooped her up and just squeezed her. We were both sobbing, and I didn’t care who saw me or what they thought.
“Dad?”
“We’re still looking. If they take families, they separate them by several states and use the distance to torture us. I never knew if either of you were alive or dead. You were so young when they took you, Benji.”
“They had me twelve years and then I escaped. Cas and Pax took me in and took care of me. They are my pack. We just met Dionysus and Medusa, our center, when Dionysus hired us to infiltrate one of their facilities and break her out. We’re trying to take them down. We made them illegal and we’re going to stop the angels. The last piece was finding you and Dad.”
