Blood of Hercules (Villains of Lore, #1)

Content Warning: This section includes descriptions of child abuse and neglect, violence, death, and forced marriage.

Alexis (later revealed to be Hercules, the long-lost daughter of Hades and Persephone) is the protagonist and primary narrator. She is also Zeus’s goddaughter. Lost in infancy, Alexis spends most of her childhood with abusive human foster parents in a trailer park in one of Montana’s Spartan Federation Militarized Protection Zones. There, she meets her foster brother, Charlie, for whom she feels a deep familial bond and protective instinct. She also bonds with Nyx, an invisible echidna who becomes her best friend; she is the only one who can see him and speak with him. In her final confrontation with her foster parents, the beating they give her is so severe that it permanently deafens her left ear and blinds her left eye, causing it to go from black to white. Her body is also littered with scars, fractures, and cigarette burns from years with her foster parents, as well as a stabbing scar on her chest that she’s had since she was a baby.

After unintentionally killing her foster mother and intentionally blaming her foster father for this death, she and Charlie are unhoused, so they are forced to live in a cardboard shelter with their adopted husky, Fluffy.