6. Pax

T here were definitely bonuses to finding our center and completing the bond. Like, I was still getting used to Dionysus being a part of our pack. It wasn’t that he didn’t fit in. He slid in with ease. It was more the whole, holy shit, he’s a god, and he’s ours.

I was dying to know what his wine cellar looked like, but unlike before, where I cursed the Coalition and kept it to myself that I was unhappy, I could just talk to Medusa telepathically and she could show me through her eyes. I could do that with all of them now.

I thought I knew what to expect, but I didn’t. It was massive, with floor to ceiling shelves of wine covering every wall. Damn! Dionysus came back before Medusa and her friends did. I’d never met a maenad before, but I’d been hearing a lot about them lately.

Wow. That was honestly one of the most chaotic auras I’d ever seen in my entire life and I’d now met gods and furies. It didn’t set me on edge in the sense that I felt Melina was going to hurt any of us. She felt a lot like if you smashed an imp and a shadow demon together and gave them drugs. There was this sense of complete inhibition and lack of fucks given for what anyone might think about that.

Honestly, good for her.

“Wine?” Melina asked.

Dionysus hadn’t even introduced anyone yet, and she was already looking for the wine. Maenads were wild. Thankfully, Medusa and her friends came back carrying way more wine bottles than I thought anyone could drink, and Dionysus introduced everyone.

Melina got into the meat of things as soon as she had a giant tumbler of wine in front of her. Maenads didn’t want their wine in wine glasses. She was drinking it in once of those giant forty-eight-ounce tumblers that Benji liked his coffee in.

“Okay, so I’ve already started looking into this because of what was all over the news and I’ve long been inside their headquarters. They are tricksy. As soon as something comes in electronically, it gets moved to an offline external drive and then deleted.

“They don’t do anything incriminating online, anyway. Everything is coded, so it sounds like business speak. They use fax machines for the bad stuff and not the kind of fax machines that send things to email. It’s all paper and most of it gets immediately shredded or filed in a room with biometric locks. Their security cameras are good, but not enough for me to read any of the text on the faxes.”

Oh, holy shit. Cas had endless connections who had been trying to do exactly what Melina had already done for a while now. I could tell from Cas’s aura that he had drastically perked up. He’d wanted eyes on the inside of that building for the longest. We weren’t about to ask anyone to walk inside because it probably had the same precautions as a Coalition facility.

Lucky couldn’t use his contacts because we didn’t need anyone looking into his team and finding out they were supernaturals. Father Nathan was probably the best hacker I knew, and he was pretty motivated to take them down. They’d kidnapped his best friend, and they made him look bad because he was a good priest. Father Nathan hadn’t even been able to get eyes inside that building.

“I have people watching the outside. We think the angels that landed are headed there.”

“Oh, angels have been coming and going for a while. There’s some kind of circle on the roof. It’s not a pentagram, but I guess it’s the angel equivalent. There are two angels that always appear on the roof with a briefcase. It’s always the same angels, and they are dressed in suits, not like how they are dressed in the videos on them crashing to Earth now. There’s also no big light show when they appear on the roof. They never talk to anyone. They put the briefcase by the door and disappear.”

“I knew it,” Benji said. “I knew the big-ass light show and kicking puppies was because they are pretentious assholes. I’d never kick a puppy, but sometimes, I was a pretentious asshole, too, and made it as dramatic as possible when I was popping out of the shadows when I wanted to make a point. Making someone shit their pants was my favorite thing, and it was not always as easy as gaslighting someone into drinking a double laxative. Though that was my best work.”

“It doesn’t make sense, though,” Medusa said. “We’re talking about creatures who are old. They are old enough to learn strategy and clearly, there was some kind of original plan with all of this. It was well thought out because they even found a very old sigil from a long-dead religion that would make it impossible for any gods to even find these facilities to swoop in and save the day.

“Why would they go from that level of planning to this? I get falling from the sky with the lights. It’s a show of power. Everyone who saw them thought they were the good guys and rushed to them. I don’t know. I just think that the beings who went as far as researching how to keep gods from interfering in their plans wouldn’t mess up like that when they got here. They might have been dumb and violent several millennia ago when Kat first interacted with them the first time, but I don’t think anyone in this room who is over a thousand years old is as dumb as they were several thousand years ago.”

“I’m the youngest person here aside from Calamity and I’m not even as dumb as I was five years ago,” Benji said.

“Aren’t you feuding with your sheriff over a Pokémon game?” Kat asked dryly.

“Yeah, but you should have seen me five years ago, cupcake.”

“No, Medusa is right. None of this makes sense. Kat said based on their armor, we’re probably dealing with the same angels that attacked her village, but a few thousand years had passed before they showed up and convinced people to start the Coalition and another two hundred years until today. We still don’t know who or what we’re dealing with. Melina, what’s going on with the building?”

“Nothing. I don’t know where the angels went, but it’s not there.”

“Lucky would have called if he needed backup. Especially since we have gods with us,” Cas said.

What the fuck? If the angels didn’t go for Pepper or gather forces at Coalition headquarters, then where were they?