Page 60 of The Goddess is Awakened

“I’m not trying to get dick punched or anything, but—”

“Don’t,” she said, putting her hand over my mouth. “I need all of your dicks in working order. There’s another moon orgy coming up.”

“Did someone say moon orgy?” Ren said, catching up to us.

“Yeah. You and Oscar should join us next time.”

Ren swooped in and just kissed the shit out of her. She looked a little surprised. He pulled away and booped her nose.

“I’ve been wanting to do that. If there’s a serial killer on campus, I’m definitely doing it now.”

Oscar was just standing there smirking while I signed everything.

“We’ll definitely be there, little witch. And we really need to help Azren because that was terrible. Don’t let Azren cut us out of this.”

“It could be dangerous,” she pointed out.

“Exactly. And you have a good team here. You’ve got supernatural noses, a brujo, an energy vampire, and Ren can sprinkle some Kistune trickery on it to get answers,” Church said.

We were all looking at her like puppy dogs. We weren’t gods. We’d never be gods. But we had our abilities, and we wanted to help. She just smiled at us.

“That’s because all of you are perfect. We can stop this from happening again.”

Whoeverdid this was going down.

sol

It happened again. Most of the staff didn’t live on the grounds anymore. I did because sometimes shit broke overnight. My cottage was a few down the way from the new god professor. I thought the God of Death might have answers, but I was avoiding them. They seemed nice, but they could probably kill me.

The campus ghosts knew I’d been here before, but they mostly left me alone and hadn’t ratted me out to anyone. That was at least a hint none of this was me. I’d been here much longer than usual. The pull was much more intense than it ever was, but then I woke up in my garden.

I woke up in my garden with no knowledge of what happened on Samhain night. I remembered breakfast and going to clean the dining hall after lunch and then nothing. I had no idea what I did from lunch until about four in the morning when my cell phone woke me up and I saw it had been ringing for about fifteen missing calls from my boss. There was mud caked on my boots, so clearly, I went somewhere.

“Hello?” I groaned.

“Sol, get your useless ass over to the dodgeball field. I’ve been calling for twenty minutes and this is an emergency.”

Everything was an emergency to a college kid. If they overloaded the outlet in their dorm room and couldn’t flat iron their hair for class, it was an emergency. If their mini fridge broke and the beer was warm, then the world was ending. I really hoped someone had just defaced something, and the university was flipping out about it since they were about to get a dodgeball team. I didn’t even know which god created me to fire off a little prayer to them that this was one ofthoseemergencies.

“What am I dealing with?” I asked.

“An epic amount of shit. A student got brutally murdered. They’ve got that god teaching history and apparently, the dead are their domain, but they brought a bunch of college students to a crime scene. The Paranormal Investigation Bureau is pissed and so is the board because they don’t want the students knowing. The idiot god even told the dead girl’s coven. This needs to be kept a secret while the Paranormal Investigation Bureau does their thing so people don’t panic. Get your ass to the dodgeball field and hose all the blood off. The last thing we need is students taking photos and posting them on social media.”

These people wereterrible,but they looked down on me. I’d never had this conversation over cell phone before, but it went down about the same in different eras with bosses who were now very dead. The only thing different was that the God of Death was here and actually seemed to give a shit about the students.

I didn’t knowwhythey brought them to the crime scene, but the students couldn’t protect themselves if they didn’t know a monster was out there. It was always witches, and they never gave their coven the courtesy of closure if she had picked her coven. They didn’t tell her friends either. They let everyone think she left and never wrote to them.

I never knew what they told the parents. I wasn’t important enough for that. I kept my ear out. It wasn’t likeIcould warn the students. They all thought I was creepy. The witches would take that as a threat and either hex me or have the Paranormal Investigation Bureau arrest me.

I didn’t know if it was me murdering these witches. A dead witch generally showed up when the blackouts started. I was always responsible for cleaning up the blood when the Paranormal Investigation Bureau was done so the students didn’t see. There was always a ton of it and when I came to, I might have mud on my boot, but there was never a drop of blood on me.

The God of Death was a wild card that hadn’t been thrown into this endless cycle before. I couldn’t die. I never aged. And I couldn’t explain it because there was absolutely no magic in my veins that should have made that possible. I also had no memories of my childhood.

A primordial would have either known exactly what I was or thought I was an abomination. I was betting the God of Death knew how to kill me. I was also pretty sure that dead witch on the dodgeball field was actually why they were here and not because they had a bug up their ass to teach history.

My long life had been misery, but I didn’twantto die. I also didn’t want a bunch of brutally-murdered witches on my conscience when I knew things that could help. I knew damned well The Academy of the Profane had buried them so deep, the current board might not even know about it.

So, I was going to have to get over my fear of dying and possibly being looked at with revulsion by a being that helped create the universe and get up the courage to talk to the God of Death.

Maybe dying wasn’t so bad if it put an end to this and I got answers first. Maybe Death was could be a kindness.