29. Medusa

I didn't have a ton of girlfriends. Persephone was my ride or die bestie, mostly because she knew I was that Medusa and Hades couldn't be turned to stone because of me. Gods were immune. Most of them ghosted me after I had an incident with my glasses. It wasn't always Athena. Someone would bump me and they'd fly off. I'd have to run again.

Or, sometimes, they didn't get why I couldn't wear contacts to do certain things or just take them off. I had to say no to a lot of things because it either involved taking the glasses off or there was the chance or them getting knocked off. They got tired of asking and me saying no, so they just stopped asking.

But I had a feeling I was going to get to keep these girlfriends. We were trauma bonded, and the furies called me sister right away. I knew I was supposed to be learning tonight, but that didn't mean we couldn't have fun.

I didn't know what to expect from the bar until we got there. It looked like the kind of place that served cheap beer and watered down drinks. There were people of varying ages on the patio chain smoking and I could make out someone getting a blow job in the alley. There were way more men at this bar than there were women.

Jezebel inhaled.

"There're lots of stupid drunk boys in there doing mating rituals. About two hours in there and my succubus side is going to be so well fed, my siren half could probably explode someone's head with my song."

"That's my new kink," Kat said, pulling her into a kiss.

Calamity shot some stink eye at some drunk frat boys who were hooting, hollering, and probably had some ideas about threesomes in their head. People tended to be possessive of unwanted attention towards their mates.

Calamity was an imp, so she could subtly mess with them without them ever knowing. I was guessing for the rest of the night, their drinks and cigarettes were going to taste awful, mess up their stomach, and when they tried to drive home, their tires would be flat. They'd probably never even know they'd been punked by a demon for hooting at her mates.

"Focus," Alecto said. "There are a lot of people here who have done bad things and they aren't here tonight with good intentions."

"You can spot them by the backwards baseball caps," Kat said.

"No, some of those guys with backwards baseball caps are himbos and totally harmless. They are the ones stepping in if they think a girl's drink has been drugged. I can feel it," Jezebel said.

"But…the backwards cap is science!" Kat sputtered.

"My cousin wore his cap backwards, and he was awesome," Calamity said.

"Didn't you say your parents wouldn't let you alone with him and he chafed his dick up fucking a gargoyle when she was shifted?"

"Oh, that was my cousin, Rodney. I was talking about my other cousin, Dante. My mom has ten siblings, so I have a lot of cousins. Rodney is the only one who ended up fucked in the head and you can't tell by looking at him or by how he's dressed. I think you have to have super senses like a succubus or a fury."

"I do. I can smell it in their blood, but I have to be close with so many people here. I can admit when I'm wrong. I guess the backwards cap isn't science."

"So, we need drinks," Persephone said. "I like the pink fruity shit because it gets you drunk faster and tastes good. Medusa is a margarita girl. I feel like we need to make this a regular thing, so I need to learn what you drink."

"I am also a pink fruity drink girl," Jezebel said.

"Whisky," Kat said. "Something tells me this place doesn't have the good stuff."

Probably not.

"Um, I don't know. They took me right before my twenty-first birthday, so I've never been able to buy it myself. I've only been able to drink what was available at parties. I know I don't like beer or vodka."

"We have a project," Megaera announced. "Go grab a table and we'll get drinks. Before we start punishing the wicked, we have to find out Calamity's signature drink."

We managed to get to our table with minimal groping from the frat boys. One tried to grab Persephone's ass. Big mistake. Her husband was the God of the Underworld and he got the shades of the best warriors to teach her to fight. I also felt bad for the guy when she whirled around and twisted his hand back. She had god strength, so he fell to his knees and looked a little panicked.

"Boy, did you try to grab the wrong ass, Milton."

"My name is Dillon," he stammered.

"I don't care. Your name is Milton now. Listen, Milton, we're going to have a chat about boundaries. Girls don't like it when you grab their ass. At no point do we say, yes, I'm going to fuck that guy. Most of us don't say anything because we're worried you're going to murder us for asking us not to touch you, but I'm not most people."

One of his friends stepped forward and Kat blocked him. Kat was long and lean. She definitely looked like you didn't want to fuck with her even if you didn't know she was an original vampire. I cracked up laughing because this giant man took one look at Kat and just left his friend with Persephone. I saw Calamity wriggle her nose, so I was sure after Persephone was done ruining his day, some demon-related fuckery was going to follow.

Jezebel was humming something and if the furies joined in, too, I might kind of feel bad for this guy. I mean, not really. He needed to learn to keep his hands to himself and he groped the God of Rebirth and her very powerful friends.

"Fuck you, Eddie!" he shrieked at his friend. "Bros before hos. I'm getting you kicked out of the fraternity."

"I think Eddie understands you stepped in some big shit, bro. What did we learn here today?"

"Blondes with pink highlights are fucking crazy?"

Jezebel started humming louder and got right in his face.

"Blondes have nothing on redheads. I think the point my bestie is trying to make is that you were eventually going to grab the ass of someone who fought back. You might have just gotten slapped or gotten a drink thrown in your face, but you happened to grab her ass. We all have various stories where someone violated our consent, and we learned to fight back. So, I suggest you leave this bar with your buddies and think twice about touching a woman without her consent because we aren't trying to get violent tonight. We're trying to enjoy a girls' night out."

He scurried away, and we managed to get our table. We were laughing because Jezebel was right. He really chose to grope the wrong person. As soon as we sat down, I turned to Jezebel and Calamity because I was dying to know.

"Okay, I know both of you did something. Spill."

"Benji and me are completely different types of demons, but finding out it was him that kept Hannibal out of the basement and why gave me a little inspiration."

"Girl, I love you so much. I sirened him to get stabbing pain in his left testicle every time he thinks about doing anything without a woman's consent. It'll eventually wear off, but hopefully, he learns his lesson."

Alecto and Megaera had come back with our drinks while Jezebel and Calamity were talking about what they did to the ass groper. They had a wide array of cocktails and shots for Calamity since she already knew she didn't like beer.

"Everyone, drink up. The ass groper was fun, but there are people here with much worse intentions. The men and the women. We have to teach Medusa to sense that kind of thing and the different levels of fury," Tisiphone said.

"Furies trap people in their own worst nightmare. We turn their fears against them, but we were really pissed for a while and if people are really awful, we like to play with our food first. You can give them nightmares with a side of sleep paralysis or daytime hallucinations. You don't have to trap them in their worst torment until their body shuts down. We save that for the really bad ones nowadays," Tisiphone said.

"There are four people in this bar with bad intentions. Not all of them are men. You're still a green witch who has mastered that, so I think I know how to teach you. You know how you dig deep to feel that spark of life when you're dealing with the earth? You can do that with evil. Reach out with the same senses until you can feel it and then latch onto it. Instead of making it grow, you can sense the intention," Alecto said.

I tried that. I could feel roots underneath the bar and some poor half-dead plant behind the bar. Being a green witch was second nature by now. But evil? I'd been running from that my entire life. I knew what it felt like. Hannibal had been radiating with it. I never wanted to get near it.

Was that what I'd been feeling this entire time? My fury magic was letting me know and instead of digging in and exploring it, I ran from it. Witches were pretty good at intuition. I thought that was what it was the whole time. I was pretty young when Poseidon raped me. I thought it was just something that kicked in after him.

There was a low, pulsing menace in here. It wasn't a lot, and it didn't trigger my fight or flight. I reached out to it and my mind just started filling with images. I'd done it!

"The man in the corner doesn't like how his girlfriend smiled at the bartender. He's planning on hitting her when they leave. There's a man with a hat on sitting at the bar who is hoping to spike someone's drink. He's just waiting for the opportunity. The group of girls over there is getting annoyed with one of their friends. One of them is going to suggest leaving her here because she wants her to get attacked and leave school. That's going to happen by the guy playing pool. He's here with bad intentions."

They all beamed at me. Persephone held up her neon-pink drink so we could toast my success. We clanked glasses, but I wasn't done here. I still had to stop all that. I got why the furies lived in the Underworld now. How was I supposed to function in public? It was like I traded worrying about my glasses to worrying about stopping bad things from happening.

Because I knew myself. I'd always want to stop it.

"So, what do I do from here?"

"So, you could do a lot of things. You could send the girlfriend a sense of foreboding that something bad will happen if she goes home with that guy. It's up to her to act on it or you could terrorize the boyfriend. You've got choices. You can warn the people they are about to hurt so they can't hurt them or you can punish the bad people."

"If I warn the victims and they get away, doesn't that just leave them open to taking new victims?"

"Yes. It's complicated, no? This is where being a fury is both hard and an art form. It's not either or. It's pretty easy to do both. You also have to consider if someone is acting on an emotion that's fleeting and they are about to do something they can't take back and they are going to regret their actions for the rest of their life. Everyone has bad moments and does something without thinking. That something could have really bad consequences."

"You mean like a substitute teacher yelling at what she thinks is a nonverbal human boy who is in the foster system, but it turns out he's a siren that doesn't know it and fell through the cracks at getting him with supernatural foster parents?" Jezebel said.

"That's oddly specific," I said.

"Blame your boyfriends. While we were out here doing mean things to stupid boys so you could fury up, they decided to get pie and address Benji's fanbase. The girl at the diner is related to the owner, and it's her sister's foster child. She wants to adopt him because he's an amazing kid. They want me to do siren 101 with the kid and educate the sister on raising supernaturals if Aidan wants to stay with her.

"I actually adore kids and want to do it, but she got him riled up, and he sirened her when he told her to shut up. She can't talk again until another siren tells her she can speak again, or it wears off. Since Aidan didn't even know he was a siren and has no training, there's no telling how hard he hit her or when it's going to wear off. They want me to let her speak again because apparently, she was going through shit and bullying kids isn't like her."

Alecto shrugged.

"She could have been. I was an empath witch before I became a fury. We all were. When people hated us because they thought the gods cursed us, we could taste it because we're empaths. It took a very long time to learn to use those abilities instead of hating them. Like, that girl over there that wants to leave her friend behind and hopes something bad happens to her so she drops out of school?

"She doesn't mean it. They aren't really annoyed with her. They are jealous. I'm not sure why, but I think she won something they all wanted. They all love her. I can feel that. They don't want her hurt, but if she left school, they'd have a better chance of winning the things she always does.

"They don't actually want her gone and would feel terrible if anything happened to her. But at this moment, they are all feeling jealous enough to put her in a situation where she could get attacked. This substitute could be the same."

Which made figuring out how to use my fury magic a little easier. I could send images to those girls to make them rethink leaving their friend behind. I didn't know how to handle the girl who was going to get abused by her boyfriend, the guy with date rape drugs in his pocket, or the man hoping to get a girl alone.

This was complicated.

"So, I'm not an empath. I can sense they intend violence tonight but I don't know if this is their first time. That doesn't change anything, but I'm thinking of how I'm going to handle the girlfriend. I don't know if he's never abused her before but she's noticed red flags or this is a regular thing. I don't want to traumatize her any further than she has been, but I also know she needs to make the decision to walk away on her own."

"That's why you rely on your sisters. She doesn't feel afraid of him. She feels a little annoyed, so I think she's been noticing the red flags. A little subtle nudge should get her away from him. But him? He radiates malice. He might not have hurt her yet, but he's hurt other women."

"So, we get her away and punish the other three. How do we do that so they don't do this again?"

"Baby steps. We weren't exactly subtle when we were brand new. We're trying to avoid all that with you. We've also been doing this a lot longer. Sometimes, we have a knee-jerk reaction with people, but most of the time we come up with a plan and majority rules. We've been gifted an enormous responsibility," Tisiphone said.

"How do you want to play this, baby girl?" Alecto asked.

"Can I play, too?" Persephone purred.

"Well, I don't want them to do this again. Jail isn't a deterrent. I just need?—"

Before I could say another word, the girlfriend abuser went to the bar to get a drink and crashed into the guy with date rape drugs. He slammed into the guy waiting to get a girl alone. They all started punching.

The girlfriend just rolled her eyes, grabbed her purse, and walked out. Something just exploded out of me. All three men fell to the floor shrieking and holding their faces.

"Shit, was that me?"

"Oops, I made them crash into each other. I felt like you needed a little imp push," Calamity said.

Alecto just shrugged.

"You kind of sharted fury all over them. This is setting ten, not one. You can leave them or cure them. I'm betting they learned something from this."

The girls who were going to leave their friend looked over in horror.

"Is that the guy who was looking at you funny, Stephanie?"

"Yeah. He was creeping me out."

"Let's get out of here before the shit hits the fan. Sorry your celebration got ruined."

I guess the girls bonded and decided not to leave their friend. The girlfriend also decided to leave. That left the three men.

"How do I turn it off?"

"You just pull it back in."

Except I didn't know how I let it out. It was an accident. While I was trying to concentrate, the bouncer tossed all three guys outside and the cops came and got them.

"Uh, oops?"

"It's a learning curve. You aren't going to learn overnight."

"Are those guys going to be okay?"

"Probably not. Maybe. If they can fight through it and learn to be a better person, it will wear off. If they continue to think they are a good person who doesn't deserve what they are going through, they'll die."

"And you!" I said to Calamity, pulling her into a hug. "That was brilliant."

"Sorry, I am definitely drunk and a pi?a colada girl."

Yeah, I was going to make her all the pi?a coladas. Yeah, I couldn't figure out how I turned it on and I couldn't turn it off, but she figured out how to get through to the innocents without me having to terrorize them.

I didn't know what kind of fury I wanted to be, but it wasn't the kind that sent nightmares and hallucinations to someone to save them.