I raised an eyebrow at her. “I’m sorry, what? What directions did they go?”
She shrugged. “I think there’s plenty of money to be made by legitimately supplying humans with what they want and need. Owning corporations, merchants, employing people was a way that we made gold hand over fist for millennia. The replacement Primus, the one who ran Omega until his son Rick took over a few days ago, was a servant of my late husband. His right hand man, if you will. He considered organized crime to be the last frontier for increasing the margins and the control Omega exercised over people, and so he took them into a very different place.” She leaned toward me. “Now understand, we were gods. Our hands were not clean, by any means. We killed people, sure. I tried not to, but it happened from time to time, usually while I was avenging some wrong done to one of my followers. It’s not as though they had a very good criminal justice system back then, and crimes on women tended to go unpunished.
“But I tried to steer us hard away from the course of being bloodthirsty killers,” she said with narrowed eyes. “That was what Hades was. What his little triad did, those Cerberus boys. They were the scum of our kind, and most of us didn’t want to sink to their lows, didn’t want to be compared to them. Hell, some of us had even died trying to bring his ass down. But that was all lost on Rick’s father.”
“Who was he?” I asked, interrupting her. “The Primus? Who was he in the old myths?”
She shrugged again. “His name was Gerasimos, but the only way you would have heard him mentioned in myth was as Alastor, which was a nickname way back, a sort of curse that mortals wished on each other to signify what he had done, which was carry forth vengeance for Zeus, to strike down those who offended him for whatever reason.” She rolled her eyes. “Often nonsensical and fueled by alcohol. Anyhow, he took over after Poseidon’s death, and we had a bit of a clash, he and I. He earned that name by killing people. I didn’t approve, but it didn’t matter so long as Zeus was in charge. Which is another reason I hate that man to this day. Poseidon had reason, less ego, would at least hear you out.” There was something behind her eyes that was akin to longing. “He shouldn’t have died. He was the one who united the old-world gods, brought us together, expanded influence from Europe to Asia, even made inroads to South America.” She shook her head again. “I don’t suppose this all matters, but you know why I’m telling you all this, don’t you?”
It was my turn to shrug. “Because I asked?”
“That’s close enough to true,” she said with a smile. “I’ve heard that Erich Winter tended to feed you a little at a time and keep the rest to himself, doling it out whenever he felt like it. I expect after what happened, it might have made you a little suspicious.”
“So you want me to trust you?” I asked and sent a canny look toward Reed, whose face was neutral. After that, I looked to Breandan, who wore a poker face of his own. “You’re drowning me in exposition so I won’t think you’re keeping things from me?”
She wore a maddening fragment of a smile, and I watched her tap her fingers on the side of her legs while she seemed to contemplate something. “Is it working?”
I thought about it for a second before answering. “It’s not hurting your cause. What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard the tales?” she asked, watching me for a reaction. “I call them tales, but they’re more like rumors, straight from the fields of west Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, from people who have seen things like you found in that church basement.”
“You mean about how death is coming for them?” I asked, drawing a nod from her. “About how death is reaching out his hand for the metas, again? Just like what happened before.” Her expression was carefully guarded, but her lips were upturned just the slightest in the corners. “They talked about it like it was Hades, right? Like it was him all along, back again?”
She finally broke into a smile. “So you have heard.”
“Janus said he’s dead,” I replied. “So did you, just a few minutes ago.”
“And so he is,” she said and glanced at Reed. “Get the car ready, will you?”
He nodded and brushed his way out of the room, his ponytail swinging behind him. He didn’t even protest or ask her why, just did it. I wondered at that but only for a moment before Hera got my attention again.
“I’m having him get the car because I think it’s time you learned what use I would have for you,” she said, almost quietly. She gave a nod to Breandan. “You can bring your friend with you if you’d like, but the next lesson I’ve got for you is going to require a little trip back in time, and I can’t do that here. I need a little help.”