21. Pax

Y ou could tell a lot about someone by their aura. I had a lot of opinions about angels and this particular god before all of this. They went away a little after I met Michael. I could see from his aura that he was telling the truth and that he’d been through a lot. Even Lucifer didn’t have a dirty aura.

Their god had a fairly peaceful, if conflicted aura. I got it. Lucifer couldn’t clear things up because everyone thought he was the devil, and he’d been letting that stand for a very long time. Michael couldn’t do anything because he’d been held prisoner. Their god legitimately didn’t know because he’d been trying to do the right thing with his afterlife.

I was very curious about other realms, but now that I was around everyone who had been, I got why we couldn’t go to Hell. The stench of Sulfur was stuck to all of them and it was making my lungs burn. I wasn’t going to say anything because we really needed to get down to business, but we had two shifters with us and it had to be unbearable to them.

“Dudes, you stink,” Benji said, wrinkling his nose. “You’ve got to smell worse than Riddle’s house after I broke in and hid shrimp in his curtain rods. Your stink is going to haunt me for months. It’s morally reprehensible.”

I mean, I was just going to politely suggest changing clothes because it really was bothering me, but Benji had adopted the phrase ‘morally reprehensible’ about forty years ago after some street preacher was screaming it in the French Quarter when we were visiting Louisiana trying to find more clues about his parents and this was the first time he used it on anything that anyone else would find morally reprehensible.

“Oh, yeah, sorry,” Lucifer said. “I usually try to get the Hell stink off me as soon as I get back, but you get a little nose blind to it and I got distracted. Josephine hates it. She’s going to piss on my bed later for letting it go on this long.”

“ I’m tempted to shift and piss on your bed,” Benji said. “I can taste it.”

I couldn’t even shift and if they didn’t get rid of that stench, I was going to piss on some beds, too, and I liked to think of myself as above half the shit Benji got up to when he was mad about something.

Persephone waved her hand and I guess everyone was clean and wearing new clothes because the smell lessened, but wasn’t totally gone. It was lingering in the air a bit, but then my limited vision could pick up a multitude of flames. There would have been scented candles everywhere because of Medusa and Dionysus lit all of them with his magic.

“Before we go to Cassandra, we need the big picture,” Medusa said. “Before, we just wanted to discredit the angels, so they knew the angels lied about us, but it’s much more complicated than that and we don’t want to completely kill their belief. We need to figure out what their reaction was to Cas and Benji’s video. And I don’t think we should tell them that the angels are having a civil war and lied to them about something like this because they were trying to get their Father’s attention, but we need to let them know the archangels are against this. They know them the best out of all the angels.”

“We’ll have to wait for Gabriel. He’s the best at public speaking and he’s the least traumatized out of all of us,” Michael said.

“Well, we don’t have to wait long, because they’ve answered my summons. They are on the front lawn and a little nervous to come in because they’ve never met me and they can sense other gods here.”

“I’ll go meet them because they know me. I’ll fill them in,” Michael said, disappearing.

Well, shit was about to get a lot more complicated and we were about to blast an archangel on Benji’s social media. I hoped we knew what we were doing.