“They chose to live in their own camps.” For once, I was grateful for her questions distracting me.
“Huh. I can understand that,” Bella nodded. “If I was a slave, I wouldn’t want to live under rock. You’d feel more trapped wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“What do you mean you don’t know? Think about it, if you were told you had no freedom at all, and you had to do everything someone else told you to, including fight for your life, you’d already be pretty miserable, right?”
“I- I don’t know. I have never considered it.” She gaped at me.
“Your realm allows slavery and you’ve ‘never considered it’?”
“Well... No.”
“Then consider it right now! Consider a life where you are somebody’s damned toy! How can you never have put yourself in their shoes?”
“I don’t need to. I’m a God.”
“You’re a ruler. These people are your responsibility.”
“That is not how my world works. I let every King or Queen rule as they wish. It is not easy to earn a kingdom and it is even harder to hold on to one. They deserve to rule as they like.” I folded my arms, satisfied with my answer.
“Survival of the fittest,” she said thoughtfully. “I think it’s wrong.”
Anger surged through me. “You have been here two days! How can you possibly think you know more than me about my own world?”
“I don’t, but it appears you’re incapable of empathy. So you’re not fit to rule.”
Red tinged my vision. “You dare to tell me I am unfit to rule?”
“Until you consider what it is like to live the life your subjects do, yes. If you can imagine what they go through every day and still decide to rule that way, then that’s different. I mean, you’d be an asshole, but a better ruler.”
“Stop calling me that.” Every time she used that word a frisson of energy moved all the way down my spine. I thought it was anger, but somehow the fact that she felt strongly enough about me to use such a word was oddly satisfying.
I didn’t like it at all.
She shrugged and finished her drink. “I’m just saying, in a world like this you wouldn’t have a problem filling the fighting pits with people who actually wanted to be there. Slavery is not necessary. You’d see that if you could understand what it would be like to be someone’s slave.”
Her words buzzed loudly in my mind. Sometimes, on my dark days, I did feel like someone else owned me. And I hated it. I instantly dismissed the thought though. Aphrodite loved me, she did not treat me as a slave. I made her happy when we made love. That was not the relationship of slave and master. I shook my head.
“You are infuriating,” I said.
“I’m feeling better,” she answered.
“Knock knock,” called my sister’s voice from the open doorway, before she strode in. “Not interrupting, are we?”
“How do you make your hair stay up on top of your head like that?” asked Bella, cocking her head at Eris’ mountain of curls.
“How is that important?” I asked her incredulously. The girl was insane. “Will you ever stop asking questions?”
Eris laughed. “I’ll show you one day. If you survive this.” I heard the undercurrent of nerves in her voice. And she was right to have them. Bella didn’t seem to be aware of how unlikely it was that we could defeat a magical creature without any power at all. More guilt and shame trickled through me. It was my fault. Getting so caught up in that blissful feeling of her magic might cost us our lives. And now I had asked her to join me in a fight I wasn’t sure we could win. If she died, it would be my fault completely.
But I’d seen her fight and the truth was, I had a better chance of winning with her than without her.
When I’d had my power I would not have mourned the loss of one human in a bid to strengthen myself. I had to be strong, like I used to be. I had to win back Aphrodite’s respect.
And besides, if Bella found out how she became human, I would have to kill her anyway, before she killed me.
23
Bella
The doubt in Eris’ eyes was seriously unsettling.
“Surely we can defeat whatever Pain throws at us?” I said, my usual bluster and confidence returning now that I’d finished my second cup of nectar. Thank god.
“It will be a creature or being with power, designed to face a god. Fighting with no power at all will be... difficult,” said Ares. To hear doubt in his voice was far, far more worrying.
“Then we’ll have to be smart as well as tough,” I said. “If you’d listened to me last time-”
He cut me off. “Then I would have got the sword easier, I know!”
“Christ on a cracker, calm down armor-boy,” I said, giving him a look.
“I must say, it’s more fun to see you get pissed with your helmet off,” said Eris with a smile. “Your jaw does this excellent twitching thing.”
“You’ve seen my face many times before,” he grunted.
“Yeah, but not with someone else around who riles you as much as she does. It’s fun.” She grinned and hopped up onto the stone table swinging her legs. Her enormous boobs were squished into a leather wraparound thing that she must have been sewn into, it was so tight.
“Look, my point is that I don’t think Pain’s tests will just be about brute strength. He embodies pain, they will be endurance tests, that will hurt. In the last test, it was about taking the pain of smashing the staffs to get ahead. We can handle that without magic, right?”
“I can handle any pain,” said Ares, standing straighter.
“You’re about to find out what it feels like to be human, little brother,” drawled Eris.
By the time I was following Ares through a maze of rock tunnels, heading for the sandy stage and whatever foe awaited us, I was feeling much better. I didn’t know if I would get any of my usual focus, or accelerated speed or strength, but the sheer volume of adrenaline buzzing through me would hopefully make up for that.
Knowing that Eris and Ares, ancient all-powerful deities, were worried about our ability to win this fight was only spurring me on. I had a point to prove to both the crowd and the godly siblings.
The thing about years of fighting people much, much bigger than myself was that I’d had to develop a confidence in the skills I had that they didn’t. If it weren’t for my inexorable need for confrontation, I would never have stepped into the ring with most of my opponents. On paper, I should have lost every single fight. And that’s why people came to see me. It took four or five fights in every shady shithouse I found to compete in before the bookies realized what they had on their hands.
I’d smash my first opponent to bits and they would think it was a fluke, a lucky break. They’d pitch me against somebody harder, and when I made short work of them, the odds against me would decrease just a little, but I would still be far from the favorite to win. After seeing me knock out another three guys twice my size, pumped up to the eyeballs on steroids, the odds would finally tip, and I would become the favorite. At which point I always left, to find a new challenge, a new group of lowlifes and adrenaline junkies to shock and delight.