Chapter 24

The vibes in the basement were different today. Hannibal didn’t come down at all. There seemed to be several people down here I’d never heard before. They seemed to be here in just short shifts and none of them wanted to be in the basement.

They talked about us like we couldn’t hear everything they were saying. I was behind a triple-reinforced steel door with just a slot for food and I heard everything. I wasn’t one of those people who thought entire groups were bad.

I’d been brutalized and cursed by two gods, but I was also very close with several of them. A demigod tried to cut off my head, but some of them were kind of cool. Humans weren’t all bad either. There used to be a time thousands of years ago when they lived side by side with us and we had this copacetic relationship.

But these Coalition bitches? There used to be a part of me that thought some of them were just confused and there might be some good in them if they could just see reason. Yeah, I thought Sister Mary Eugene was a sadist, but I kind of thought she was the only one.

I was pretty sure none of these people actually believed in their god. They’d been shown all kinds of proof they’d been lied to by the angels. Their highest authority on Earth admitted they had been wrong.

They weren’t clinging to this because they still believed any of the angel’s lies. They liked hurting people and with the Coalition, they could do that legally. They were terrible. They were even making fun of some new priest who just got here.

“Let the blind one come down here and deal with them. He seems pretty friendly with the ones upstairs considering they took his eyesight back in Ireland. If one of them permanently disabled me, I wouldn’t be nice to any of them. I’d blind the lot of them if I got my hands on one for treatment.”

Bitch.

“He’s the Monsignor’s little pet now. The rest of us get stuck down here with the double possessed while the blind one is up there with his demon friends.”

It was so idiotic that they thought hybrids had two demons in them. Everyone down here was either a hybrid or a demon. Which led to a shit ton of questions about Benji. He wasn’t just a hybrid. He was a wolf-demon hybrid. We all got caught because we slipped up in public. A Coalition-sympathizing cop usually disabled us and got us to one of their facilities. Jezebel and I talked. Whatever they used, we couldn’t remember how we were caught.

And my good friend Jezebel had a mouth on her since she’d been here long enough to know that her lure was now repelling anyone from taking her out of her cell to torture her and she had enough experience as a sex worker that she could probably flirt her way into food if they decided to starve her, even if it wasn’t enough to get me fed.

“If the two of you nasty bitches want to see true evil, just look in the mirror. A demon would never make fun of a blind person or blind someone who didn’t do anything to them,” Jezebel hissed.

Good for her. If I had enough energy to get off of my mattress, I’d be taunting them, too.

“I read your file, whore. You should be ashamed of yourself for what you made this poor woman’s body do.”

Jezebel threw back her head and laughed.

“I was born this way. You should be ashamed you haven’t done half the shit I’ve done. You probably have vagina spiders from all the cobwebs.”

I fell out laughing and then started coughing. My immune system was shot to shit from this dusty basement and lack of food. The fake nuns stormed out, and I didn’t know who would replace them.

I didn’t know how my mates were going to get food like they promised, but if Di didn’t find me soon, I hoped they came through.

I wasn’t going to last much longer.