Page 18 of Monster Song
“You know I’m banned from that pub!”
How could I forget that? She got into a brawl with a satyr. He deserved it, and we all joined in. We were all going to get banned, but Pavlina knew this was our favorite pub, so she took the blame so we could still come. I couldn’t believe I was that insensitive. Even if we weren’t banned, we had stopped going in solidarity with Pavlina.
“Sorry, Pavlina, I wasn’t even—”
“Oh, I think you should have a boy’s night out,” she interrupted. “I’ll stay here with River.”
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Demos growled.
“No, I think it’s a good idea,” River said. “I haven’t had alone time with any of you. We need to do that. Just make sure you don’t get banned from that pub because we can’t let Demeter know you are free.”
“She’s right,” Hephaestus said. “As much as I want to, we can’t be seen in public.”
Tryphon threw his green painted nails into the air.
“We don’t have to go to the cyclops pub. We can just go downstairs.”
Yeah, he was right. Hades had a parlor and servants in this palace. We could get shit-faced here. I stood and pointed to the door.
“To beer, men!”
We all filed downstairs to Hades’ parlor. Hades kept a good stock of cyclops ale too. A nymph brought us all a bottle, and I raised a toast to Hephaestus.
“To the man who brings us God killing weapons.”
“It’s pretty spectacular,” Tryphon said. “I didn’t know it was possible.”
“How do you know it will work?” Demos asked.
Hephaestus was finally in his element. He could talk about the toys he made. And a weapon that would kill an Olympian was the best toy ever. Hades and Hephaestus were cool, but the rest of them were just insufferable assholes that expected respect, or they would curse you.
Hephaestus grinned and knocked back his ale.
“My people have their little curses. Everyone thought they were super creative when they were roaming the Earth and handing them out, but it’s just magic. They were combining various forms of magic in Olympus that weren’t meant to hurt people to do just that. If they can twist our magic that way, so can I.”
Tryphon leaned forward and eyed Hephaestus. He was usually easy going, but he looked intense tonight.
“You need to know something, Hephaestus. Some monsters in the pit might not be ready to admit this, and some of them have different stories, but they created a lot of us to be slaves to your family. If you hadn’t stuck a weapon in the hand of one of their children, they wouldn’t have had to send us to the Underworld. Things are so much better for us here. Or, it was until Demeter tried to take over.”
“It’s true,” I said, clinking bottles with Tryphon. We all had this conversation in the pub all the time, but we never gave Hephaestus the credit he deserved because we didn’t know him. We thought he was like the rest of them.
“I would never have gotten out of that labyrinth otherwise, and I was losing my mind in there.”
Demos never drank ale. He always drank wine, and he had to sit there sniffing it like a pretentious asshole, even if we were in a cyclops pub, and the grapes were probably stomped on by a one-eyed monster’s feet. Demos swirled his wine in the glass and gave it his signature sniff.
“Hestia created the phoenixes, and if she could have gone back and took away our free will, she would have. She would never have left us alone until we were her slaves. Hades isn’t like that.”
Hephaestus just gave us a shy smile.
“Hades has never been like them. It’s the entire reason he ended up in the Underworld alone. He was a bit of a revolutionary for an Olympian, and they didn’t want his ideas to spread, so they pretended to make him lord of his own realm he could run as he saw fit.
“When my father opened a portal and threw me across several realms to Earth, every single bone in my body broke. I was in agony, and it ripped my entire left leg straight from the socket. Hades found out and brought me here. He helped me heal myself. He offered me a home, but I was a little afraid of him then and didn’t take him up on it. All I’d ever been told about Hades at that point was that you should never trust him.
“It was agonizing growing an entire leg back, but no matter what Hades tried, I still had a limp. He said nothing about it, but he tried to convince me to stay in the Underworld. He didn’t come right out and say it, but he tried to warn me in his own way how the Olympians would react to one of their own that wasn’t physically perfect in every way.
“I still thought he had some ulterior motive, so I left and realized how ugly my family was. I couldn’t go home because they wouldn’t have me because of my limp. I didn’t think I could go back to the Underworld because Hades tried to help me, and I just ignored him and left. I believed the worst about him, despite everything he did to help me. I set up my forge in a volcano and tried to just be left alone.”
If anything good could come out of this mess with Demeter, it would be us finding a way that Hephaestus didn’t have to be alone anymore. It wasn’t just because it was what River wanted. I didn’t care if it meant another man in her bed. This needed to happen.
