Page 21 of The Demigod

“Sorry? Love that orange and cream scent, sweetness.”

Those words, as innocent as they were, had heat flooding my body once again, creating an ache deep in my core that I desperately tried to call anything other than desire. Because that was the last thing I could afford when dealing with such a life-or-death situation.

“It’s, uh, lotion,” I told him, suddenly wishing I’d been more generous with it after my shower. And considering actually taking a trip into town to buy more so I didn’t run out.

“So, you’re telling me you smell like that all over?” he asked, and there was no mistaking the heat in his miraculously un-swollen and un-bruised eyes.

I decided to sidestep that.

“How are you? You know, mentally?” I asked.

On the drive back to my hotel room, all I’d been able to think about was how his body might recover; his mind could be a different story.

“Worried you might have just freed a feral demon, shadow girl?” he asked, finally pulling up to his full height, doing a cat stretch that said whatever injuries that had been hidden by his shirt were healed. “Don’t worry, seems like it was Moros today, not Oizys again. Gloom is rough, don’t get me wrong, but not quite as debilitating as depression and anxiety.”

“That’s good,” I said. “But Moros did all of that?” I asked, waving at his now-healed body.

“No. No, I don’t know who did this. They were… different.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t have the same energy as the gods. They didn’t feel as powerful to me. Just violent.”

“Did they look… human?” I asked. I’d been concerned about the gods eventually bringing some of the monsters back with them.

“Shit. What could they have looked like?” Daemon asked.

“I’m kind of waiting for the monsters to return.”

“Monsters?”

“Yeah, you know. Like the Minotaur, Typhon, Gorgons… I mean, a lot of the monsters were confined to the water. The Sirens, Charybdis, Hydra…”

“But there are ones you worry about on land too?”

“Yeah.”

“Like who?”

“The Harpies were pretty bad. They were creatures with the body of a bird and the head of a woman. They abducted and tortured people.

“The Minotaur was awful. A human and bull hybrid. He ripped people apart piece by piece and ate them.

“And Lamia is, objectively, terrifying.”

“Why her?”

“Lamia was a Libyan queen who had an affair with Zeus. And Zeus’s wife, Hera, was notoriously jealous of all his philandering.And she was, well, a bitch. So she murdered all of Lamia’s children. In her grief over her loss, Lamia transformed into a child-eating monster.”

“Shit,” Daemon said, looking appropriately horrified.

I imagined that since his job was to punish the evil, and that children were inherently innocent, he felt something similar to human disgust at the idea of them being harmed.

“Okay. We need to get going,” I said as the frivolity above us grew louder.

“You gonna cloak me?” he asked when I went to charge ahead without him.

“Right,” I agreed, waiting for him to catch up. But he didn’t just sidle in beside me. He reached for my hand.

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