Page 23 of Winners, Losers, and Champagne Kisses
“Good answer,” Hades said.
“So, gather the archangels and find Cassandra?” I asked.
“She’s right where I left her. Cassandra has figured out all the loopholes in her curse. She’s super rich from the stock market and if shetellssomeone the winning lottery numbers, they aren’t going to believe her. If she buys the ticket and drops them off guerilla style, she can help people and organizations that need money.”
Sounded like Cassandra. She’d only ever wanted to help people.
“Uh, y’all? If the angels weren’t pissed before, they are now. It’s not going well for them on the internet right now,” Benji said.
I think we all whipped out our phones because we wanted to see.
You could tell a lot about someone by their aura. I had a lot of opinions about angels and this particular god before all of this. They went away a little after I met Michael. I could see from his aura that he was telling the truth and that he’d been through a lot. Even Lucifer didn’t have a dirty aura.
Their god had a fairly peaceful, if conflicted aura. I got it. Lucifer couldn’t clear things up because everyone thought he was the devil, and he’d been letting that stand for a very long time. Michael couldn’t do anything because he’d been held prisoner. Their god legitimately didn’t know because he’d been trying to do the right thing with his afterlife.
I was very curious about other realms, but now that I was around everyone who had been, I got why we couldn’t go to Hell. The stench of Sulfur was stuck to all of them and it was making my lungs burn. I wasn’t going to say anything because we really needed to get down to business, but we had two shifters with us and it had to be unbearable to them.
“Dudes, you stink,” Benji said, wrinkling his nose. “You’vegotto smell worse than Riddle’s house after I broke in and hid shrimp in his curtain rods. Your stink is going to haunt me for months. It’s morally reprehensible.”
I mean, I was just going to politely suggest changing clothes because it really was bothering me, but Benji had adopted the phrase ‘morally reprehensible’ about forty years ago after some street preacher was screaming it in the French Quarter when we were visiting Louisiana trying to find more clues about his parents and this was the first time he used it onanythingthat anyone else would find morally reprehensible.
“Oh, yeah, sorry,” Lucifer said. “I usually try to get the Hell stink off me as soon as I get back, but you get a little nose blind to it and I got distracted. Josephine hates it. She’s going to piss on my bed later for letting it go on this long.”
“I’mtempted to shift and piss on your bed,” Benji said. “I can taste it.”
I couldn’t even shift and if they didn’t get rid of that stench, I was going to piss on some beds, too, and I liked to think of myself as above half the shit Benji got up to when he was mad about something.
Persephone waved her hand and I guess everyone was clean and wearing new clothes because the smell lessened, but wasn’t totally gone. It was lingering in the air a bit, but then my limited vision could pick up a multitude of flames. There would have been scented candles everywhere because of Medusa and Dionysus lit all of them with his magic.
“Before we go to Cassandra, we need the big picture,” Medusa said. “Before, we just wanted to discredit the angels, so they knew the angels lied about us, but it’s much more complicated than that and we don’t want to completely kill their belief. We need to figure out what their reaction was to Cas and Benji’s video. And I don’t think we should tell them that the angels are having a civil war and lied to them about something like this because they were trying to get their Father’s attention, but we need to let them know the archangels are against this. They know them the best out of all the angels.”
“We’ll have to wait for Gabriel. He’s the best at public speaking and he’s the least traumatized out of all of us,” Michael said.
“Well, we don’t have to wait long, because they’ve answered my summons. They are on the front lawn and a little nervous to come in because they’ve never met me and they can sense other gods here.”
“I’ll go meet them because they know me. I’ll fill them in,” Michael said, disappearing.
Well, shit was about to get a lot more complicated and we were about to blast an archangel on Benji’s social media. I hoped we knew what we were doing.
Ididn’t know much about what kind of magic the angels had. Lucifer kept that tightly under wraps. He liked being mysterious. Michael had only given us a brief overview. We were going to have to sit down and have a better talk because I knew this was going to come down to a fight.
I had way more senses than I would have before the fates got involved. I had my fury powers, but I still had my snake senses. When the rest of the archangels came in, I instantly knew that Michael and Lucifer were wrong about something major. Ariel, Jophiel, and Gabriel were all women. I could sense that with my snakes.
I could tell with my fury magic that they chose to keep that a secret from everyone because they didn’t want to betreated differently. Things had been different when they were self actualized and they never really had the chance to get better because of the civil war.
Benji and Cas could tell because they were shifters. Pax probably could because of their auras. Dionysus and the rest of my god friends would know and they wouldn’t say a damned thing because it wasn’t their place. There was only one god I was worried about outing them.
“My children, I apologize things ever got to this point. I’m sorry for the secrets you felt the need to keep. You don’t have to go back when we fix this. My particular afterlife is broken. Satan agrees with me. When I’m done here, I intended to put measures in place to try to fix it.”
I appreciated what he said and what he didn’t say. I was guessing Ariel, Jophiel, and Gabriel agreed. His intentions were good, but I wasn’t sure how much he could do about the system. He had no control over it. It was up to the masses to change things and the individual where they ended up. It would take a seriously talented therapistdecadesto convince someone they didn’t belong in Hell when they thought they did. And convincing the people who self actualized themselves to Heaven when they would have ended up in Hell if the system actually worked the way everyone thought it did? Yeah, those people weren’t going to believe. They had a vested interest innotbelieving that.
“Thank you,” Gabriel said. “Michael said I was needed to deliver a message. I haven’t done that in a very long time and I’ve never been given one straight from you. What do you want me to say?”
“And I’m sorry for that. If I needed you to deliver a message to this realm, I should have had the courtesy to give it to you in person. In this case, the message should be yours and not mine. Ididn’t live through any of this. I’d never presume to tell you what to say or feel about it.”
“You want to change the afterlife, but what about us?” Raphael demanded.
“Well, none of you are technically my children. I didn’t create you and I didn’t sire you. We fell into this role with me as the disapproving Father who controlled your lives. I tried to be what I thought a father was, but I was too controlling. Lucifer rebelled and it hurt. I tried to change things and made it worse.
