29. Pax

M y pack had never made me feel like I was limited because of my vision. Even back when the world was pretty shitty as far as accommodations for blind people, they never made me feel that way. The world had caught up a good bit. It still sucked, but I had braille, text to speech, and audiobooks when I wanted to read and I could get a dog to help me get around. The only reason I didn’t have one right now was because the puppy I picked was training. Eventually, I’d go train with her, but she wasn’t there yet. And my dogs always seemed super happy with two shifters in the house.

I couldn’t help but feel limited sometimes and it wasn’t just because of my blindness. I was a smith. I’d never have a brute strength of a shifter. After living with two of them that long, I ruminated on that a lot at night. I always told myself I was the weakest link.

But I wasn’t. I just had different strengths. It was because of my magic all the silver at New Eden got neutralized. And I hadn’t even been trying to take the angel’s magic away. I just got the feeling they were really proud of those wings and I wanted to ground them.

Medusa slid into my lap as I told everyone my plan and Benji started nuzzling my shoulder. I’d been living with shifters long enough to be a little more tactile than the average smith. I even craved it.

My plan was a little crazy, but I thought it could work. Everyone was nodding like they agreed with me until I finished.

“That could actually work, but you’d need a power boost to pull it off. There’s still some ambrosia in your fridge. I could get it. This should give them pause to regroup. They are worried about Medusa and the furies since they can’t banish them, but Pax can utterly fuck them up,” Dionysus said.

Yeah, I could. I didn’t know if I was capable of doing everything I’d planned, but I had a good chance with the ambrosia. I was pretty sure I’d accomplished a lot of what I did because of the boost I’d gotten with what I’d previously eaten.

“The amount he’s going to need to eat is going to make him sick,” Persephone said.

“What if we did a smoothie?” Medusa asked.

“That could work,” Hades said. “We should make some for everyone that isn’t a god if there is enough. If there isn’t, I suppose I can go to Olympus and steal some. Pissing Zeus off is still my favorite thing.”

Did we really need a pissed off Zeus in the mix? Like, we had Yahweh here and all his angry angels. It seemed like a really bad idea to add another god to the mix. Especially one that no one really liked.

“No, we should have enough. Athena was always on Medusa’s side and when she found out Medusa needed it, she brought a lot with her just in case.”

“Uh, y’all?” Benji said. “There’s an angel in my DMs. I think it’s Jeqon.”

Angels on social media. What was the world coming to?

“Don’t let them know we got our wings and powers back,” Fart Wings said.

Fuck me. Once Benji gave someone a nickname, their real name just flew right out of my head until Benji decided they earned their name back. I honestly couldn’t remember what his name was. In all fairness, I only got it once. When that happened, I generally tried to avoid calling that person by any name unless I also hated them and used the nickname. I had no problem calling Athena Sugar Tits because of what she did to Medusa, but I could admit things were complicated with these angels and they were trying to do the right thing now.

“Shh,” Benji said, putting his entire hand over Fart Wing’s face. “My channel is spoiler free. Someone ruined a television series I was watching in my comments, so I ruined their life. Go stand in the corner while I deal with this.”

I had almost forgotten about that. Someone spoiled that Benji’s favorite character died in a show he was watching about a women’s prison and he utterly lost his shit like the person who spoiled it for him personally killed that girl.

“Okay, show of strength, gather around me and everyone take their shirts off except Gabriel, Ariel, and Jophiel. Someone hand me my fez.”

“Um, why are we taking our shirts off?” Michael asked.

Benji looked annoyed like that wasn’t a completely reasonable question.

“Because my channel is spoiler and shirt free. Do try to keep up.”

“Why are three of us exempt?”

“Because it’s my channel, and I said so.”

“Actually, it’s because we’re all women,” Gabriel said. “Things weren’t exactly friendly for female angels for the longest. You didn’t take us seriously, and you thought we were weaker just because we didn’t have a penis. We stayed hidden during the war because both sides were doing awful things to women and that was why we offered to be the ones to search for the Father.”

Angels must not have supernatural senses at all. Benji would have known and was trying to cover for them. I could guess from their auras that they were women and keeping it a secret. The gods would have known, but this was the first time any of these angels had actually met one. I could appreciate that Yahweh knew and basically told them they could reveal that when and if they wanted to without tipping off their comrades, they were keeping secrets.

The Powers in the room looked like they understood why the secret was kept because they’d seen some shit, but the other archangels looked utterly gobsmacked they’d kept that secret even from them.

“We can discuss that later,” Gabriel said. “There’s bigger shit we need to deal with.”

“You’re right,” Michael said. “But I want to apologize that you didn’t feel like we were safe to tell before this. Let’s do this.”

I sighed. We might as well listen to what Jeqon had to say. I pulled my shirt off because Benji could be fucking ridiculous and it was the only way he’d let me be a part of this.