army when you learned I existed, and that means a lot.”
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