The Call of Monsters (My Beautiful Monsters #3) - J.B. Trepagnier Page 0,68

their heads like they agreed with her. I didn’t take fucking Hestia for stopping another revolt, but I wasn’t complaining. She finally turned to us with a smile on her face.

“Who’s first?”

We all demanded she heal River first. I kept moving myself to the back of the line because there was a part of me that expected another cage and being stuck here as her pet. When there was no one left to heal, I couldn’t put it off anymore. I looked at her warily.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Demos. I’ve done that enough. I regret what I did to your family, but I can’t change the past. I apologize to you profusely. If you still have family, please pass this on to them.”

She looked serious about her apology too. Was the great Hestia sorry for trying to keep us as pets? It looked to be so. I didn’t have to be a petty bitch all the time. Even though she had done horrible things to us, she’d blessed me in some ways. I wasn’t angry about the change, and neither was my family. We considered being phoenixes a gift because we were just so superior to anyone else.

I could be a grown-up and accept her apology. Maybe I didn’t need to kill her. Perhaps I just needed to hear her say she was sorry.

“Apology accepted. Being turned into phoenixes is amazing. Everything that happened after that wasn’t, but you turned us into superior beings.”

Pavlina snorted.

“You’re such an arrogant fuck.”

Hestia just grinned and defended me.

“I created phoenixes, and they have every right to be arrogant fucks. They are pretty spectacular.”

She knew right where to hit me in the feels. Compliments were totally the way to my heart. And my ribs felt much better.

Yeah, this was the closure I needed. Sometimes, talking was better than killing.

Chapter 27

River

H

oly shit. I’d never been punched in the face before in my entire life. My first time was by some weird Olympian magic, and it fucking hurt. How did my monsters do this all the time? I knew they picked their share of Underworld pub fights. I had all this bravado coming here, and I liked a little pain with my pleasure, but I was going to avoid getting punched again, whether by magic or by fists.

Still, I knew how much it hurt when I punched Aphrodite right in the face, and I did it anyway. I was pretty sure I broke my hand before Hestia healed me. Why did so many people pick fights in bars if getting punched hurt and punching people hurt too?

Still, it was super satisfying to feel her nose break right along with my hand as I knocked her through my portal back to Earth. We didn’t need those awful shrieks coming out her mouth nor her getting the crowd out there angry at Hephaestus for making the weapon. Ares alone maimed every last one of us when he started flinging magic. We could have lost Solron and Finn. Those of us that weren’t Olympian could die if it were more than one throwing magic.

Demos had told me all about Hestia when we were alone. No one brought her up at all when we met allies and started plotting. Demos didn’t even bring up wanting to kill her when Pavlina and Tryphon wanted their revenge. We hadn’t had alone time for us to really talk about why he didn’t ask. I needed to get him alone because he seemed enraged when he saw her again, but they seemed to make peace with each other.

I needed to get Tryphon and Pavlina alone. Athena and Poseidon were dead. Did they get the closure they wanted? For that matter, how was Hephaestus? The man who maimed him and the man who tormented him were dead. Hephaestus wasn’t a bloodthirsty Olympian. He was so kind and gentle. If he could have avoided all this, he would have. Was he okay?

We didn’t have time to talk about anything. We couldn’t be alone just yet. Hestia healed all of us, but there was still unrest. I realized what Zeus’s law about not having children had done to their entire race. There were enough of them here to kill all of us that weren’t Olympians, but as an entire race of people who had enslaved humans here, their numbers were flat out dire. They’d created more monsters in the Underworld than there were Olympians here in Olympus. If the humans here had the means to kill