The Call of Monsters (My Beautiful Monsters #3) - J.B. Trepagnier Page 0,13

the Horae to see if Hephaestus left before he called me. He knows the Horae told him Hephaestus never passed through the gates to Olympus, but it’s also thrown him for a loop that Hephaestus could create that weapon in the first place. He doesn’t know if Hephaestus escaped without going through the Horae.”

“The Horae guard the gates to Olympus like Cerberus guards them here?” River asked.

Hades nodded.

“There are three of them, and they hate Zeus. He wanted them to lie to Hera when he would sneak out to visit a human woman. Hera always knew, and she would take it out on them instead of him. This is where we have an in. The Horae hate Zeus and Hera, but they’ve always loved Hephaestus, even after Zeus permanently injured him.

“You could say they were the only people in Olympus who were ever kind to him, so he was kind right back to them. He made them special gifts in his forge, and he would bring them food before he left. None of the other Olympians ever treated them that way. They treated them more like bellhops at a hotel. Hephaestus thinks they will help us sneak you in if it means killing Zeus. He’s working on it.”

It didn’t shock me Hephaestus’s kindness was going to be our in to Olympus. I’d seen him around the castle servants, and he so never acted like he used to be worshiped as the God of Metalsmithing. He thanked them personally for every refill, and he always smiled at them and made them feel seen. That was one thing I liked about him. He treated everyone the same and like they were his friend, despite the way people always talked about him to his face.

Pavlina just started laughing.

“I love the fact that because none of the Olympians can be nice to anyone they think is beneath them is how we are going to sneak in. Present company excluded, of course.”

Hades held up his hand.

“You don’t have to tell me how bad my family is. They are horrible to everyone, including each other. I tried to change things, and they banished me here. Hephaestus and the rest of you need to think long and hard about something. If you kill Zeus, the Olympians will look for someone to tell them what to do.

“I think the only reason they haven’t overthrown Zeus is that they like being told what to think and what to be upset about. They’ve been alive for a long time, but they are stagnant. They don’t like thinking for themselves, and they are more comfortable being herded like sheep. They didn’t like me because I was saying things that conflicted Zeus, and it confused them. Rather than consider what I was saying, they just sent me away so they didn’t have to deal with it.”

Well, shit. There were only two gods I trusted to run an entire realm. Hades was busy with the Underworld, and I didn’t think Hephaestus wanted to be Olympus's supreme ruler. The rest of them, I flat out couldn’t stand. There wasn’t a single one that hadn’t hurt someone in the Underworld in some way.

“Can we just kill all of them?” Pavlina asked.

“I agree. Can’t I just eat them?” Tryphon asked.

“They aren’t exactly innocent,” I pointed out. “Everyone in the Underworld is here because of them.”

“I’m on board with what the rest of the team decides,” Demos said.

What the fuck? Since when was Demos a team player? He always had an opinion, and it was usually different from what the rest of us wanted.

Barbatos cleared his throat.

“I get that they have wronged you, but you realize you are talking about genocide, correct? Does the entire Olympian race deserve to be wiped off the planet? It sounds to me like they followed Kronos, then Zeus. Have they ever really been challenged and given a chance to think for themselves?”

River cocked her eyebrow at her father.

“I thought Hell was all about torture and killing when people did something wrong?”

I’d like an explanation for that too because it seemed like everyone had some sort of dungeon there and got off on it. Why wasn’t he more gung-ho to get them somewhere he could strap them down and peel their fingernails off?

“I have so much to teach you, my dear. We don’t torture everyone. That’s just cruel. Some people were merely following orders, or they lack basic intelligence and got tricked into something. We find that out and go for the