Page 36 of Winners, Losers, and Champagne Kisses
They were fast, but it wasn’t enough. Benji was poofing in front of them, stealing their knives, and coming back to us to give them to Hephaestus to destroy. Dionysus and I were both connected to the Earth, so we called roots from the ground to bind the angels for the furies and Pax to get them.
I could literallyseethe divide among the angels. Some of them stopped to cut their friends loose from the roots because if the furies didn’t get them, Pax did. Obviously, they could get their wings and power back because their friends did, but I didn’t know if anyone could restore their minds once a fury got ahold of it.
Adolf Shitler was having a meltdown that some of his troops were helping their friends instead of fighting us. Which was fucking up because he wasn’t even fighting. He was standing on the porch barking orders.
I started focusing my earth magic and gaze on the angels that weren’t detained or didn’t stop to help and so did everyone else. I could tell when the furies did their thing because some of the angels turned on each other with those knives.
After I saw what those knives did, I knew no matter what, I couldn’t let my shield down. It was like the blade was poisoned. If it broke the skin in any way, the wound started festering and turned black.
It wasn’t safe for Benji to get in between two fury-crazed angels with those knives, even if most of his body was shadows. He had to solidify his hand enough to grab the knife before he disappeared and I couldn’t risk him.
Instead of using my earth magic to bind people, I started calling vines to yank those knives out of their hands to make it safe for Benji. Dionysus started doing the same thing.
I was pretty sure the magic the angels were flinging would have utterly fuckedmeup. It probably would have just pissed Dionysus and the other gods off. It only seemed to cause minor damage to the angels, which was surprising because it could blow a hole through a house and incinerate a Jaguar.
I’d sent everyone a message through the mate bond to get the knives away from the angels who were fury crazed, which was the majority of them. The only angels who were still of sound mind were either bound with roots, trying to cut them loose, or Pax had turned their wings to sand and taken their magic.
The armed angels who were fucked in the head were the most dangerous right now. After they were done fighting each other, they’d turn on us.
But I couldn’t find Benji anywhere and none of the knives we’d taken were disappearing off of the ground. Some of the angels were picking them up and going after their friends with them again. I didn’t want to risk yanking them back here with a vine and cutting anyone with them.
“Where’s Benji?” I yelled hysterically.
What if he got nicked and was dying in a bush somewhere? As a green witch, I knew the antidote to most poisons, and the bladeactedlike a poison, but it wasn’t. I wouldn’t know how to treat it. And since the weapon was self actualized to kill a god, I doubted a god could heal an injury for it. This might even be above vampire blood when it came to healing.
I felt panic through our bond coming from several different directions and then I felt Benji.
“Adolf Shitler is going down. It’s the only way.”
Jeqon was out of Pax’s range. Pax probably could, but he’d expend so much magic, he’d faint. The rest of us were throwing everything into keeping the rest of the angels away from us, so we couldn’t get to him. Benji was right that if Jeqon was dead, the remaining angels that weren’t fury touched would probably stop fighting and we wouldn’t have to wipe out almost an entire choir of angels.
But I didn’t want Benji anywhere near that knife and I already knew he was going to do this, anyway.
Adolf Shitler was mine. Maybe he was the one person I needed to kill to feel better. Mom and Dad were alive, but were they okay? The Coalition’d had them for a very long time. None of us would have gone through any of this if it weren’t for the angel on the porch steps. It might not make me feel better in the long run, but it would make me feet betterright nowso I was going to do it.
He wasn’t paying attention to me. He was glowering at Yahweh and having a one-person stand off because Yahweh was justnotinterested in his stink eye. Everyone was a little too worried about the psycho angels with god-killing poke sticks to pay attention to little Shitler throwing a tantrum.
The angels were either powerless, fucked in the head, or helping their friends. The plan was for Pax to turn as many angels mortal as possible while siccing the furies on them until they surrendered, but I guess everyone was more afraid of the angel who couldn’t be bothered to fight than they were of us.
Pax was still turning wings to sand and rendering angels mortal. Medusa and Dionysus were yanking knives away with vines. We’d kind of emotionally manipulated some of the other angels to fight with us by having the furies fuck up their friends so they attacked them.
If I could take Adolf Shitler out, I had a feeling the angels who didn’t want any of this would stop fighting and rat out the ones who were complicit. I didn’t know if any god could fix it once a fury infected someone’s mind, but I was hoping Yahweh would spank his wayward kids by breaking out the whole smiting thing.
He didn’t seem willing to break it out on Adolf Shitler, even thoughallof this was his fault, so I was going to take care of it. I just needed to surprise him because he had that really annoying glow power that could kick me right off this battlefield.
I had to be all sneaky like, but luckily, both halves of my DNA were built for that. I dissolved into the shadows and since this fucker was just waiting on the porch like there wasn’t all this shit going down on the lawn, there were plenty of places for me to hide.
See, I’d been watching and learning. They had some neat magic and those stupid wings, but they didn’t have extra senses. He couldn’t scent me and angels couldn’t feel auras. If he sent everyone to fight and never did it himself, he might not even have the fighter’s reflexes to figure out I was creeping.
I shifted into my shadow wolf and got ready to pounce. I wriggled my butt a bit because I spent way too much time around degenerate cats and then I jumped. Yeah, called it. He’d gotten lazy having other people fight his battles.
I grabbed his wings where they joined his shoulder and focused on ripping them off with my teeth. He roared and tried to buck me off, but yeah, dog with a bone. I remembered what every angel told me about their wings being that sensitive and had a working theory that this fucker would be in too much pain to light up like a Yule tree.
And I was right. Unfortunately, so was Michael about how tough their wings were. I mean, I wanted all the fried chicken, but I wasn’t going to be the one to kill one of the chickens and pluck it. I’d named all of them and couldn’t do that to them.
Plucking chickenshadto be easier than this or Cas would let me keep the backyard chickens as pets and buy the chicken we ate at the grocery store. If it was, I owed Cas all the blowies when he made me fried chicken.
I was yanking, and it was super annoying that it was harder to rip an angel apart than other supernaturals. Usually, my canines ripped through them like butter. Ugh. My theory that he couldn’t glow in that much pain was a sound one, but he was bucking like a little bitch.
