Barbatos pulled her into this massive hug. She wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her head on his chest.
“You don’t understand the danger you were in growing up alone like that. Not all witches and warlocks are like Charley and Finn. The bad ones love to experiment with demon parts. The prison Charley and several of our residents were in had to be entirely shut down because the warden and her coven were diverting funds for upgrades towards experimenting on the supernatural community. They were framing elementals and doing horrid things to the prisoners just to gain more power. It was a horrible scandal, but they faced Hell justice.”
“Seriously, Scorchwood Supernatural Penitentiary was worse than the jail I visited here the first time,” Charley said. “I know we were all criminals, and they sent us there to rot, but that was above and beyond cruel and unusual punishment since Warden Skinner was taking all the funds to make things more comfortable. I helped Serafina and Solron plan her execution.”
They had jails worse than holding cells in Tartarus? Everyone in the Underworld avoided Tartarus at all costs. It was just a dire, shitty place. Hades had a palace built by the Underworld's previous residents, but he never went there unless he had to. Demeter forced him there, and we all got stuck in that jail, but they kept people in worse places than that in other realms? I wasn’t the only one thinking either.
“A witch kept you in worse conditions than that jail?” baby bird asked. “What a bitch.”
“Olympians don’t have the market cornered on being shitty, River,” Barbatos said. “Every realm and every supernatural community have shitty people. That jail we were talking about was originally for the Fae simply because they didn’t want to leave their families and return home when the Fae king recalled them and closed the gate. Shifters and Vampires aren’t exempt, and I haven’t personally met any like this, but I’ve heard the elementals are practically unbearable. None of them inserted themselves as gods and goddesses in a different realm, but there are people in every species in every realm who totally would. The demons who tried to take over Hell would have if they were a little bit more creative.”
I knew there were shitty people in the world, but now I had to process there were entire realms of beings with superpowers that were just as bad as the Olympians. I’d met a few demons. River explained Vampires and shifters to us, but she couldn’t say what they were like. Apparently, they were a popular subject for fiction she liked to read, but she said she was almost certain they didn’t sparkle, whatever that meant.
River was thinking the same thing I was.
“Hades wants to open the gates to Olympus. Are some of these people just going to do the exact same thing?”
“Hell has a vetting process, and so do the Fae. That was part of the reason I’m okay with Hades’s plan of not killing everyone. Genocide is just ugly. Olympians might have done some bad things, but someone needs to tell their stories and make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. Someone needs to make sure Olympus changes, and I’m sure not every Olympian is awful. They can vet who they let in.”
And there was the rub. I hated most of them, but not all of them were evil. Some of them didn’t create monsters and curse people. Some of them didn’t design things like phoenixes to stroke their ego. Some of them taught humans all kinds of arts and new crafts. They made society better. They could make Olympus a better place.
But was all that going to mean anything when they found out there was now a weapon that could kill them?
Chapter 12
River
M
y parents did the best they could with a child who said they could hear animals, then later started liberating pets from their owners. I loathed all the medication and therapists that got thrown at me, but it paid off as an adult. For a while, I thought I was crazy too and was a model patient. I carried over many coping skills I learned in therapy to my adult life, even after I realized I wasn’t crazy and accepted what I could do.
My favorite therapist ever was Doctor Woods. I started seeing him when I was thirteen, and I asked to keep seeing him well after I got better at lying and breaking into people’s houses to re-home the pets they were abusing. Since I was pretending I couldn’t hear animals anymore, we talked about life and dealing with high school.
And high school was pretty fucking traumatic. I was skinny, awkward, and went through my goth phase pretty hard. The fucked-up thing was, not even the other goth kids liked me. It was weird having so many lovers right now when not a single person in my high school would piss on me if I were on fire. They were seriously not very nice to me.
But having someone to walk me through how to deal with life when nearly everyone in your high school just couldn’t let you be weird in peace was a tremendous help. I was using many things Doctor Wood taught me to deal with all the shit that had happened since I got kidnapped. Doctor Woods wouldn’t have been very proud of me for losing my temper and setting Hades’s trousers on fire, but high school bullies didn’t exactly kidnap me to an entirely different realm and throw me in jail with monsters. He deserved it. It was probably a good thing I didn’t know I could set things on fire in high school.
So, I didn’t have a lot of unresolved shit to process, so my demon side didn’t go popping out all the time. I had years of learning skills, so things didn’t fester, and I learned not to dwell on things I couldn’t change.
Still, there was that entire issue of feeling threatened now that I’d accessed my demon side, and therapy didn’t prepare me for this. I didn’t even know if that was what it was. I wasn’t scared when Tryphon wrapped his tentacle around my neck, so she either popped out because she was or she wanted to play with my men.
I didn’t feel any different when I was using my demonic side aside from being a lot stronger and more powerful, so it wasn’t like I could have a conversation with her and tell her to stay put unless I called for her.
We were all sitting around talking about my feelings, and I have to say, Doctor Woods was a much better therapist than a demon, four monsters, and a witch. Doctor Woods would listen to everything I said before he gave his input. No one listening to me talk about anything I thought I might still need to process could do that. There was a lot of growling and threatening to eat people. Even my father, who had the best resting bitch face of anyone I knew, was offering to bring people to his dungeon and torture them.
We weren’t getting anywhere, and I was so relieved when Hades interrupted us. I pretty much adored knowing everyone close to me would cut a bitch if someone hurt me, but some of these people I still considered dreaded foes were now in their thirties with a picket fence and 2.5 children. They’d long forgotten teasing the weird girl in high school. They put me through some shit, though, and I wouldn’t mind my monsters giving them a little scare for some payback.
Hades looked intense, and Persephone was with him this time. I had seen little of her lately. Her bodyguards were jobless at the moment. Persephone was glued to Hades’s side, and I didn’t blame them. I could tell they were deeply in love, and after they had been forcibly separated, they didn’t want to be apart.
“Hephaestus made allies, but they are super vague. Honestly, I’m shocked the Fates even revealed as much as they did. Many Olympians and demigods have asked them about their strings and what’s in store for them, and they are super anal about revealing any spoilers. Hephaestus said Zeus has been visiting them every day for answers.”