25. Dionysus

I could admit it was pretty cool watching angels appear to mortals. It was a big show of power. Gods usually kept their magic close to the vest unless they were showing off. We pagan gods usually had multiple powers and domains, but the monotheistic gods were different.

They were technically the one god over their whole pantheon, so their powers were a mixed bag. I knew Yahweh could smite, but he hadn’t exactly revealed any of his other powers yet. I was dying to sit him down and just talk, if I ever got the chance. He was on his own path, though. When this was over, he intended to take on the entire system.

Honestly, good for him.

Except when we got back to my house, there were about twenty angels fighting on my front lawn and they were getting feathers all over the beautiful garden I’d planted with Medusa. I swear to shit, if they damaged any of her flowers, I’d traumatize Benji and pluck all their feathers like when Cas was making chicken.

I was calling them celestial chickens from now on. I was going to make that happen.

The archangels were outnumbered but not by much. There had been about sixty angels at the prison. Medusa turned seven of them to stone. I had to wonder if these angels ate some kind of celestial paste when they were younger or they hadn’t figured out lead paint was bad in their realm.

Because we showed our cards and they could feel their Father was in this realm and they didn’t send all their soldiers. Yeah, they had that sigil that could banish all the gods, but my mate and her new sisters could fuck them up without putting a finger on them.

But still, I hadn’t been in a good brawl in ages and the archangels might have been weak and beaten down from their captivity, but they were also pissed. Meeting their Father had revitalized them. They were giving the other angels hell and keeping them too occupied to fingerpaint on the walls of my multimillion-dollar house with blood to banish me.

Also, gross.

Alecto, Tisiphone, Megaera, or Yahweh could have ended this in seconds, but Yahweh didn’t like smiting and the furies wanted to play a little first. Nah, none of them used their fury magic at all. All three of them let out a battle cry and jumped on the backs of any angel who wasn’t fighting in the air.

Benji just shrugged and shifted into this monstrous wolf made out of shadow. Shit. I’d heard about it, but I’d never seen it before. That was terrifying. Nyx would have been proud. If other shadow demons saw this, they’d be romancing every shifter they could find and trying to figure out how to teach their kids to do this.

I wanted to join the fight, but I just sat back to watch Benji for a minute. He’d gotten some of his closure when Athena found his mom and I just knew she’d get answers about his dad. Benji was getting revenge at this point.

Shit, a giant polar bear barreled into an angel and started mauling his wings. Pax didn’t want to be left out. They’d hurt his mates and took his eyesight. Pax was brutal. As a smith, he could transfigure anything and right now, he was changing angel wings to sand. Pax was focusing on the angels who were getting the upper hand on the archangels that were on our side.

The angels shrieked in horror as their wings just dissolved into a pile at their feet. It seemed to zap every ounce of strength and magic from them. I would have thought rebelling and fighting a civil war this long would have bonded these angels, but I guess not.

The angels who still had their wings portalled out of my front lawn like the fires of Hell was after them and they just left their wingless comrades behind. Their wings really were their weakness. The angels that lost theirs couldn’t portal, and they weren’t stupid, either.

Never run from a predator and we had two of those with us. Cas and Benji would give chase. Bears were pretty fast and half of Benji was a werewolf, so he could use that to easily catch them. They knew they were beat and lost their magic, but self-preservation was a powerful thing. They didn’t want to lose their lives, too.

They held up their hands in surrender and fell to their knees.

“We surrender. You’ve taken everything from us. You don’t need to take our lives.”

Benji and Cas shifted in an instant. They towered over the angels with Pax. Oh, I really wouldn’t want to be an angel right now. They took from me. They’d hurt the woman I loved. Pax and Benji were mine, too, and these angels were responsible for hurting them as well. But they took a lot more from these three men.

“You took my entire childhood and my parents. You hurt two of my mates,” Benji snarled.

“Because of you, humans took my eyesight, and you hurt several of my mates,” Pax snapped.

“ We didn’t do that. You want Jeqon. He was the leader when the watchers were attacked and their children slaughtered. His ideas bordered on insane, so everyone elected Samyaza. Samyaza wanted to work with the archangels on having trials if we could get the rest of the choirs to listen about the hierarchy.

“Jeqon didn’t want that. He wanted everyone to pay. The civil war started when Samyaza was murdered. If you were a Power, you either thought it was one of the upper choirs or you thought Jeqon did it to get his way. Thing is, no one was willing to say anything because if you were against Jeqon, you’d have the upper choirs and your own people after you, so a lot of us just went along with it. Why do you think they sent us? We’re expendable because we don’t believe everything Jeqon says.”

This was giving me a headache. We had good angels and bad angels and now we had good angels and bad angels among the bad angels. Luckily, these weren’t my monkeys, I’d just gotten pulled into their circus.

Yahweh finally let himself be seen, and these angels hadn’t met him, either. They were expecting wrath, fire, and brimstone, so they prostrated themselves and started begging for forgiveness. It was probably because of the whole smiting thing.

“Rise!” he boomed.

Fuck, was I about to witness my first smiting? Would it even be as cool if it came down on these five powerless, wingless angels who went along with a lot of awful shit out of self-preservation? It would just ruin the whole thing for me.

“I can restore you, but I need your vow that you will do the right thing with your wings once you get them back. Jeqon has made a mess of your home and he spilled it into this realm. Help us fix it. You have to have insider information.”

“Or at least the location of all those sigils back home,” Michael said.

“No. Those sigils are going to be a bust. The hardcore Jeqon supporters were still painting them until we left. They were scared of all of them being destroyed and facing the Father’s wrath.”

“But they started all this here to get a response from him?” Medusa asked.

“It’s different in our realm than it is back home. Back home, it’s all angels and souls. It’s different here. Back in our realm, it would be easy to just kill angels and leave the souls if he wanted to start over from scratch. On this realm, it would involve killing a lot of innocents. They are counting on him not wanting to do that.”

Yahweh waved his hand and their wings reappeared. Maybe it was a bit soon to do that. We hadn’t really made any type of agreement, but I suppose if they broke it, Pax could just take them away again.

“I suppose we have a lot to talk about.”

Yeah, we did. Like why we were giving wings back before we could trust these angels. Still, this was his circus and monkeys, so I guess we should let him take the lead.