Page 29 of Winners, Losers, and Champagne Kisses
“Yes,” Hades said. “You’d actually be able to tell as well. Humans would just think it was a spree of natural disasters. It would feel like a dark omen to everyone else. It hasn’t happened in averylong time and it would take a bunch of people self actualizing a being with enough power to take on a god. A sigil to keep us out is one thing, but containing us or killing us is another story. Only another god is powerful enough for that.”
“Well, bro, no offense to everyone in this room because I guess you’re kind of cool, but you kind of set yourself up as the grand poobah, said all the other gods were false, and stole their believers. How do we know Jeqon isn’t working with another god?” Benji asked.
That was a damned good question. The gods I’d met so far had been decent and they all seemed interested in meeting the new god, but Medusa, Dionysus, and Persephone were living proof that not all the gods were decent. The birth and death of religion depended on the believers.
“Not any of the gods from this realm,” Dionysus said. “Between various college courses, the reemergence of paganism,and fuck, even paranormal smut a lot of us are getting belief again. We’re older and wiser and we understand the cyclic nature of things. If they found someone, it’s not anyone living in this realm.”
“None of the afterlife realms ,either,” Hades said. “They just aren’t interested. Their realms are a little more manageable without the influx of souls. They are enjoying themselves.”
“Some of the other god kings would. Zeus would do it and so would a few others if they thought it would make them powerful again,” Persephone said.
“Old-school Zeus would. Same with some of the other gods. Not in the modern day. We understand belief and self actualization better. They haven’t yet, but if they wanted revenge on one of us for killing their deity, theycouldself actualize a new race of god killers. They still could, but none of us are dumb enough to give them a reason,” Hades said.
We needed to be working in facts, not theories because based on what I’d heard so far, some of the godswerethat dumb. I needed to redirect all of them because I hadn’t gotten this far helping Coalition victims by running with random theories. Any ideas I might have had about any of this had been totally wrong.
I needed to redirect because we were wasting time.
My old friends had hung out with most of the great philosophers and would have sat here theorizing about gods murdering other gods and what the consequences of what that would be all night. I usually loved joining, but we really needed to move on. Cas was the one who redirected us.
“How many angels are we dealing with?”
“The Powers used to be the biggest choir because they were the most like humans,” Yahweh said. “They were created, but they weren’t like some of the upper choirs. They took partners and had plenty of babies. Some of the upper choirs thought sex was a dirty thing only humans did, so their numbers didn’t grow as much. They only started having children when they worriedthe Powers would upset the status quo with their numbers, but they never did have as many babies.
“Two hundred of the Watchers left to live on Earth. I asked that a team of the same number be sent to talk to them one on one and ask them if they were happy. If they weren’t, they were welcome to come back home. My message got polluted and five hundred Powers went down and caused a mess. If there were sixty of them at the prison like you said, that was only a tiny portion of their numbers when I was banished.”
Fuck me. That was a lot of angels and if we had to divide up, our numbers would be smaller. They could banish our gods if they could get to blood and something to paint on with it and they could glow bright enough to banish Benji. They’d be gunning for the furies and for me because we could take care of a lot of them from a distance.
“There are fewer angels than when you were there,” Ramuel said. “No one is having children because they can be used against you. We slaughtered each other for centuries before eventually dividing the realms into territories. Nothing is settled. Both sides want the Father’s estate because you can watch this realm in there. Both sides are down to less than two hundred angels.
“I can’t speak for the other side, but their leader is Seraphiel. I’m guessing they are just as divided as our side. The team you saw at the prison was all the people not in the inner circle. The ones that attacked this house are the ones they’ve been trying to get rid of, but we haven’t done anything obvious, so executing us might turn people against them and if they have their enemies do it, we might take a few of them out.”
“How many are we dealing with?” Cas asked.
Because, yeah. I got shit was complicated, but this was going to come down to a fight and we needed to know how many angels we were going to be up against.
“There’s two hundred and fifty of us here. You could probably convince a little over a hundred to surrender and fight with you. The rest are with Jeqon. They want to watch it burn. None of us completely understand how belief and self actualization works, but they think if no one is around to believe anymore, then no one can control them.”
Ugh. That wasn’t how it workedat all.Belief could do a lot. It was responsible for gods and supernaturals, but once we were out into the world, our choices were our own. The Fates manipulated us to a certain extent, but we still had free will. How we reacted when the Fates were messing with us was completely up to us. Fate had a way of self correcting if you made the wrong choices after you were tested. Fuck, they made me a fury just to deal with this shit.
“If you went back with your wings restored, could you turn those who would be turned?” Yahweh asked.
“Not without losing them again or dying. No one who is against the status quo talks about it. We get tested all the time. You never know if you’re being asked if you’re against Jeqon by someone who is actually against him or by one of his spies.”
That was a crazy idea. I didn’t particularly care for the fact that none of these angels made a stand before now, but now that they had, we couldn’t ask them to be cannon fodder again. Honestly, I was pretty sure the only reason Benji hadn’t ripped them apart after Pax took their wings and magic was because he wanted them to suffer. Several of us knew what it was like to be cut off from your magic. Some days, it felt worse than death.
“These are your monkeys, so I’m not going to tell you how to run your circus, but if you send them back with their wings, they are going to know these angels met you and you were the one that gave them back. They kept and tortured your archangels. They are just going to use them as bait or collateral and you’ll have to make a shitty decision,” Dionysus said.
I mean, that’s what most people would do and there were only a few gods it would actually work on. Even the more reasonable ones didn’t take blackmail very well. And they could only keep it up so long before someone died.
“No, I won’t risk it. There are too few angels left, even if some of them have gone bad.”
Benji threw up his hands.
“Bro, they’veallgone bad. I get these are supposed to be your people, but you’re going to bat for shitheads you haven’t even met. Those shitheads hurt a lot of people in this room. You might not want to hurt them, butIdo.”
“They aren’t all?—”
Benji put his entire hand over the angel’s face.
