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She wasn’t acting like herself.
“They’re so soft,” she mused to herself. “I can’t think of what to compare them to, but they’re super soft. And warm,” she added.
Having her wrapped up in one of them was the warmest I’d felt since I’d been forced out of Hell. That realization, that hope, mingled with the almost bone-deep certainty that, eventually, she was going to reject me for good, had the pain shooting through my system, nearly doubling me over.
“What is it you want to know about the old gods?” Arick asked, and I got the feeling he did so to try to distract me from the pain.
“What you think is going to happen, I guess.”
“Chaos. As you are already seeing. But then in greater amounts. Wars. And with wars always come the usual. Extremists. Recessions. Famines. I predict a very uncomfortable lifetime or two.”
“Do you think you’re in danger?” Charlotte asked, but she wasn’t attempting to try to move out of my wing, or even see over it.
Instead, she stayed exactly where she was, her shoulder brushing my side, the flat of her hand pressed against my wing.
“Yes. And everyone else the gods might find interesting or threatening.”
“The gods have always been known for being super prideful and vengeful. Very human traits. Which is sort of silly for some omnipresent beings. Sorry,” Charlotte said. “I keep talking about them like they don’t actually exist. This is taking some getting used to.”
“In your defense, darling, none of us knew. Not even those of us who have access to powers greater than ourselves.”
“That does make me feel a little better,” Charlotte admitted. “I met one, you know. A god. Goddess, actually.”
“Can you stop shielding the woman for five seconds?” Arick grumbled, and those tattoos of his started slithering around way too quickly. Agitated? I wasn’t sure anyone had ever mentioned Arick being agitated before.
That agitation made the beast inside of me only want to pull her closer, but the part of me that was starting to, at least a little bit, understand how humans interacted, understood that he wanted to see her face.
So my wing slid down, but stayed around her from the neck down.
“What do you mean you met a goddess?”
“Well, it’s kind of funny. She was working at my job. Making a male professor suffer. But she was screwing with me too. I thought I was losing my mind.”
“Who was it? Atë?” he asked.
“Yes! Very good,” she said, and I couldn’t help the way my lips twitched at that. She sounded very much like the teacher she was right then.
“What did she say?”
“Just that I was sort of… in danger because of my knowledge. Which I don’t get. A lot of people have a lot of knowledge about the old gods now.”
“Humans know what their blockbuster movies tell them about the gods these days and that’s about it,” Arick said.
“Yeah, I’ve had to… undo a lot of damage done by some of those movies,” Charlotte agreed. “But I still don’t understand why they care if some of us know. Isn’t that what they want? To be known?”
“I’m not so sure. The world is different now. Humans are a lot different now. If they were expecting to wake up and have people still using sponges for toilet paper and writing on scrolls, they have had a swift reality check. They might be looking to show themselves in a different way than you and I may have been expecting.”
“But they’re already doing so much damage.”
“Yes. But have you seen any of them trying to claim it?” Arick asked.
“No,” Charlotte agreed.
“So what are you thinking?”
“That they don’t want everyone to know. So any expert who might, eventually, as things get worse, start to put the pieces together, they want to silence. Fuck, maybe they’re having a re-branding,” Arick said, sighing as he reached up and raked his hands down his face.
“Are you worried for yourself?” Charlotte asked, and I could damn near feel the empathy emanating from her. Hell, I could almost… feel it burrowing in and becoming a part of me.
