Page 35 of Winners, Losers, and Champagne Kisses
“You are aware once you unleash the furies on a battlefield, nothing goes according to plan, right?” Alecto said.
Which was exactly why I was contributing zero fury magic to this fight. I couldn’t control it and I’d end up fucking everyone up.
“I’m aware, but the furies and Benji off book is just a little too much chaos,” Cas said.
“You’re fine with it when he’s naked,” Pax snorted.
Ugh. Now I had the mental image of all of them naked when I needed to be focusing on this fight.
“Element of surprise. Portal in and start breaking stuff.”
Yeah, sometimes, I enjoyed fucking shit up, too.
Before Medusa and Dionysus, I’d been the oldest member of our pack. That came with certain responsibilities, but I enjoyed cutting up and throwing down, too. I just usually did itfaraway from the towns I owned. Everything was on the up and up with both of them, but I didn’t need attention on the human town anymore than I needed it on the supernatural one. There were good people living in both.
But this? This wasn’t a random bar fight. This was justice and revenge. My job was to protect Pax, but I could beat down some angels to do that. We appeared on the lawn of an enormous house. Thankfully, we had some angels on our side and they were pissed. Michael threw a ball of light at the house andblasted a hole in it. I wasn’t sure whose Jaguar that was parked out front, but Gabriel incinerated it for good measure.
The angels came spilling out, and that’s when I knew we were fucked. Cassandra told us they were up to something, but since they hadn’t made a decision, she couldn’tseeit. They made that decision and made it a reality pretty quickly with their angel powers, which I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure about.
We weren’t fighting off a bunch of angels while Benji stole the two historically accurate spears and got them to Hephaestus. There wasn’t a single angel holding a spear. They all had a knife. Jeqon was smart. He had no way of knowingweknew about the Spear of Longinus, but if you had four spears and didn’t know which one worked, you had to be smart. Because your enemy would try to get their hands on those spears before you figured it out.
Fuck me. I could almost appreciate the genius if all the people I cared about weren’t now at risk. They’d smelted the spears down and made knives with them. None of the tips we’d gotten were going to work now. Thankfully, every single angel paused when they realized Yahweh had personally showed up to this fight. They might not have met him before, but they couldsensehim. It was enough of a pause for Dionysus to get a text from Cassandra.
“Fuck. Since they didn’t know which spear was the right one, they melted them all down and made knives out of all four spears combined.Allthe knives can kill a god.”
I could almost appreciate the next level genius of that plan if it wasn’t putting my mates and several of my new friends at risk. If the Spear of Longinus could kill a demigod, I didn’t want to think about what it would do to any of us.
Our plans to get the spears away wouldn’t work. Pax’s plancouldstill work, but it might not. Jeqon was standing in the back with all the angels between him and us. Yeah, he might be prettysmart at strategy with the knives, but he was a coward. He was going to let most of his angels die to soften us up before he joined the fight, if he even did.
“Angels, attack!” he yelled.
“Or don’t and live,” Yahweh boomed. “This is foolish and you still have time to do the right thing.”
Yeah, I already knew where this was going to go when they turned to check with Jeqon. Their father had been gone a long time, and they’d never known him when he was around. Jeqon stepped up to that role. I could tell that now. They either followed him blindly and he could do no wrong or they followed him because they were scared of him.
We weren’t going to be able to talk them into changing sides. It didn’t matter what anyone had to say. This was going to come down to a fight.
“We don’t answer to you anymore,” Jeqon sneered. “Angels, finish this!”
I wore clothes I didn’t care about shredding because I knew I’d probably have to shift fast. So did Benji. Well, Benji borrowed sweats from Dionysus because he liked all of his clothes, paid way too much money for them, and didn’t want to ruin them. RIP Dionysus’s designer sweats.
I shifted, too, and placed myself between Pax and Medusa and the angels. Dionysus stood by my side, even with those knives in play.
We were doing this. We were outnumbered by angels who were all carrying weapons capable of killing a god. We didn’t even know enough about the original Spear of Longinus. Could you die from a scratch or did you need to be stabbed in just the right place?
I didn’t know enough about that weapon, but I braced myself because this fight was starting.
We had to change everything about our strategy, but we could still work with this. When we found out about the knives, we told the other angels not to engage and to protect Yahweh from the air. Several of us were built-in long-range weapons and we could use that.
Pax usually had to touch things to transfigure them, but could do it from afar with enough concentration. It would just drain him faster. The ambrosia would keep him going longer. Hopefully long enough to do what we planned.
The archangels and the angels we stole took to the air and started throwing magic at the other angels who took flight. We didn’t need that anywhere near us, so I threw up a shield. A shield this big that was sustaining that kind of damage woulddrain me faster, but I’d also been eating ambrosia, so hopefully, it was enough.
They knew too much about us and what kind of magic we were working with. We still didn’t know the extent of their powers because we were trying to figure out if they had something capable of killing a god. But they knew we had several people here capable of messing with their minds, one that could turn them to stone, and another who could essentially make them human.
They were gunning for us harder than they were the gods. I braced myself because their magic was slamming into my shield. They weren’t rushing us with those knives. They were creeping forward and trying to take out my shield so they could get us with their magic first.
Which was both smart and stupid. They’d need to get my shield down to get to us, but I guess angels didn’t have that ability. They had speed and wings and I guess when they were self actualized, no one thought they needed it.
