6. Medusa

P ersephone came flying after me like a shade trying to escape Tartarus. Jezebel was with her. I was sitting in Pax's beautiful garden trying not to cry. I'd just found out my entire adult life was a lie. And even worse, it didn't have to be like that at all if Athena had just told me so I could figure shit out.

Jezebel and Persephone plonked on either side of me and wrapped their arms around me.

"Sorry, danger noodle. My half-sister is usually the smartest person I know or the dumbest."

I was fighting a smile. Persephone heard the term ‘danger noodle' and that was her pet name for my snakes and me. It still made me smile even now.

"I never got to tell you about that time I tried to seduce Isaac Newton," Jezebel said. "I offered him anal, and he decided to invent calculus. Calculus! I will have you know men paid extra for that and I was going to give him a freebie. He was brilliant, and I admired that about him. I tried to show him that the way a succubus would. I could have rocked that man's world," Jezebel sighed.

"Hades also wanted to get his hands on Newton, but for his mind. The afterlife doesn't work like that."

"Is this one of those things where I'll go insane if you tell me? Because I've got the badass Queen of the Underworld here and I spent enough time in the next cell from the nope rope to know you have to distract her before she'll talk about her shit."

"Yeah, you both have snake jokes," I laughed.

"She's not wrong either. Jezebel has you pegged. Anyway, whether you go insane with this information or not is completely up to you. You could either find it peaceful or rage against the machine about cosmic conspiracy theories."

"I don't believe most of them, but I love reading about them. Do go on."

I thought Jezebel could handle it. My friends didn't actually figure any of this out until I'd known them for a while and then they had to put their heads together with some of the other gods.

"Okay, so we used to think it was just us. We thought Chaos and Gaia created the universe and everything was new. Everyone who died came to the Underworld. There are different sections and rivers that do different things.

"Charon would ferry their souls to the Underworld, but whether they ended up in Asphodel Meadows, Elysian Fields, or continued to torture themselves drinking from one of the rivers was completely up to them.

"We thought we got every living soul, but then they started to trickle to barely nothing. Hades and I thought something was wrong and people were cheating death, so we looked into it. Mortals were still dying. The difference was, they believed in different gods and a different afterlife.

"So, we went out and finally found other gods. They had different creation myths, and some noticed the same thing with their afterlives. The younger gods were booming.

"It was the Romans that tipped us off. Their empire was booming and their gods seemed pretty fucking familiar. Like, Hades and Pluto were the same and Baccus and Dionysus were nearly identical. Their concept of the afterlife was similar. Elysian Fields became the Isle of the Blessed, where heroes went when they died."

"I remember reading all that," Jezebel said. "It was before my time, but not Kat's. We haven't had time to talk about all that. I don't remember reading where any of you put them in their place."

Yeah, they couldn't. My friends were just as fucked up over what they found out as I was. In fact, they might have been more fucked in the head over it as I was right now over what Sugar Tits just dropped on me. And seriously, I adored everything about Benji calling her that to her face when she was outnumbered by gods and couldn't do anything about it.

"We couldn't. Pluto and Proserpina were technically Hades and me, so can you imagine the total mind fuck when we saw them face to face? They even had their own version of my damned dog."

"No!"

"Cerberus was much cuter than their dog," Persephone sniffed.

Persephone was deranged about that fucking dog. It had three heads, spikes on his tail, and if she slipped him people food, he farted fire. And she always snuck him food from her plate. She told everyone she couldn't help it because she wasn't just dealing with one set of puppy dog eyes. She was dealing with three.

He was a great dog. Playful, loyal, and good at his job but he definitely wasn't cute. Cerberus guarded the entrance to the Underworld for a reason. If you weren't someone he liked and didn't know he had a weakness for belly rubs and pig's feet, he looked like your worst nightmare.

"Yes! I had no idea what an existential crisis was back then, but we all had one. We traveled around and realized Earth is a giant place with many gods and a ton of different origin stories. They all have different concepts of what happens after death, too.

"That's when we figured the self-actualizing thing out. We got all the Greeks because that's where they believed they went. Their behavior once they were there was based on what they thought they deserved.

"It's the same with everyone. You go where you think you should end up. Paradise is full of shitty people who think they did nothing wrong and the unpleasant places are full of good people who obsessed over one thing. If you think your soul returns to nature, it does. The people who believe they are going to be reincarnated do get reincarnated and what they come back as is something deep in their subconscious only a good therapist could drag out. Did I blow your mind?"

"So, like, if I wanted an afterlife with Kat, Calamity, and the entire Portuguese rugby team where Kat was also cool with that, it could happen?"

I fell out laughing. Jezebel was the best person I ever could have been stuck in the basement next to. She was right. I did need to be distracted so I could calm down before I could have a rational conversation about what was bothering me. She was always the best at that outside of Persephone and Dionysus. My mates would get there.

"Kat would be okay with it because she'd be using your eye candy as sippy cups," I laughed.

Jezebel gasped.

"The Portuguese rugby team is too hot to snack on to death."

"They are technically a snack and you'd be doing it, too," Persephone pointed out.

"You aren't feeling the mate bond to share snacks with them?" I asked.

"You're both terrible and trying to bring logic into my fantasy. We're supposed to be sexually objectifying the rugby team right now."

"Actually, we're supposed to get back in there and face Athena now that my two best friends have done the best friend thing."

"Give her hell, Danger Noodle," Persephone said, squeezing me.