Venus Rising: Book 3 Aphrodite Trilogy (The Daughters of Zeus 6)

by Kaitlin Bevis

  Jason straightened, crossing his arms. “I think you wouldn’t be sitting at this table if that was the case.”

  The sea god barked a surprised-sounding laugh. “Oh, trust me, son. The only reason your pathetic little island isn’t twenty leagues under the sea is because she lacks a thirst for bloodshed. There is literally nothing stopping us from destroying every last one of you, except for her request that we try another way.”

  Poseidon was convinced that if we’d only let him suck the island beneath his waves, Aphrodite, Ares, and Hades would be fine. They were gods, after all. He really didn’t seem to grasp the fact that the demigods had made us vulnerable. Fortunately, the rest of the Pantheon wasn’t quite as bull-headed.

  “So why are you letting her speak for you?” Jason demanded, sounding thoroughly unimpressed by Poseidon’s outburst.

  “Power,” Medea whispered. The dark-haired waif flinched beneath my gaze.

  Could she sense power? That fear in her eyes, was it because of me?

  “Boredom,” Poseidon said with a yawn, slouching back in his newly restored, gleaming metal chair. “You think you’re the first group to go against the gods? You stand on the bones of civilizations so lost, your archeologists will never uncover them. We’ve been there. Done that. It gets boring after a while. We’d like to see what happens if we let you live.” Poseidon gave him a nasty smile. “Could be interesting.”

  Jason’s throat bobbed nervously at that. “You can have Adonis. He already knows you. Anyone else I send would be terrified. I won’t put the others through that. Go ahead and summon him,” he said, motioning to the girl at his side.

  “Summon?” I glanced at Poseidon for clarification, but he looked as confused as I felt. “What do you mean, summon?”

  “Something’s off.” Medea’s eyes closed and sweat beaded on her forehead. “It feels different. Hang on.” Her fingers folded around the edge of her chair, soot staining her pale palms. “This’ll just take a minute.”

  “What is she doing?” Poseidon leapt to his feet, a salt-filled sea breeze sweeping through the cafeteria with his motion. “If you try something, then this entire—”

  “She’s just bringing you your demigod,” Jason said, his voice calm.

  Medea could do that? I looked behind the camera to Orpheus, but his shoulders lifted in a shrug. If any demigods could teleport, it was news to him.

  Jason smirked at the sea god. “You didn’t think we were going to let you set foot on our island to take him, did you?”

  A figure with silvery hair and paper-white skin materialized in the room. Not Ares. The real Adonis.

  “What did you do to him?” Medea leapt to her feet so fast, her chair fell to the tile floor with a clang.

  I sat, stunned, a feeling like ice spreading across my chest. She could ‘port people across realms without permission. That was . . . that was . . .

  “He’s a god,” Jason said in a hushed whisper, “They turned him into a god.”

  Aphrodite had turned Adonis into a god after one of DAMNED’s generals ordered his execution. But somehow, I didn’t think that distinction would matter much to Jason.

  Adonis stumbled into the table, his expression mirroring my shock and horror. “She didn’t see them take me.”

  She? Oh. Aphrodite. He was covering for her, assuring the demigods that Aphrodite, or Elise as far as they were concerned, hadn’t been complicit in sending Ares in Adonis’s place. I fought back a wave of nausea as I realized just how bad this was. If Ares’s cover was blown, Aphrodite’s wouldn’t be far behind, no matter how carefully Adonis phrased her involvement. She was helpless. Powerless. Injured.

  Oh gods. I’d killed them both.

  “She wasn’t even conscious.” Adonis spoke so fast he practically tripped over the words. Gods couldn’t lie, so he had to choose his truths carefully. “Elise had nothing to do with this.”

  “Shut up, half-breed!” Poseidon’s yell echoed through the wide room. He looked to me, as though begging me to do something, anything to control the damage, but I sat rooted to my chair, stunned into stillness as our entire plan fell to pieces.

  There wasn’t a script for this.

  The demigods edged away from us, fear and betrayal written all over their faces. They were going to leave. I couldn’t let them leave.

  “Wait!” I leapt to my feet, my arm stretching across the table. If I could just reach them, I could keep them there. “We can explain. Just—”

  Medea glanced at me, something flashing in her violet eyes. Hope, maybe? I could all but see gears turning in her brain. “How’s this for an exchange?” she spat, letting go of Jason’s hand.

  Shoving the table to the side, I sprinted toward her. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I could have teleported the distance in an instant. But powers didn’t come instinctively for me, and by the time I realized what I could have done, she’d grabbed Adonis and vanished, leaving Jason behind.

  “Go,” I shouted to Poseidon, aiming a blast of power at the camera.

  He ‘ported to the island in a whoosh of salty wind to fetch Aphrodite and Ares. Gods, let him make it before the demigods kill them both.

  I drew in a deep breath and turned to face Jason, his face pale with horror as he realized he’d been left behind.

  “What are you going to do with him?” Orpheus asked, cautiously stepping over the remains of the shattered camera.

  There’s still hope for a truce, I tried to reassure myself, my fingers brushing against the flaky, ash-covered floor where Medea had just stood. She left him, after all. That’s an exchange. Not the one I’d asked for, but I’d take it.

  “Persephone?” Orpheus’s worried voice reached my ears. “They’ll tear him to pieces.”

  He was right. I had to make sure my people didn’t eviscerate Jason before Medea had a chance to see this through. “I’ll take him to the Underworld.”

  “No!” Jason’s feet scraped white lines into the scorched ground as he threw himself against the shield I’d cast to keep him from running away.

  “This is for your own good,” I assured the thrashing demigod before ‘porting him away.

  Chapter II

  Medea

  I LEFT HIM. Scrubbing my hand over my face didn’t make the words go away. I should have teleported back to the dining hall immediately after the peace negotiations went wrong. Everyone was waiting for me while those seconds ticked by. Seconds where the gods could descend on this island and destroy us if I’d misinterpreted their promises.

  Instead, I’d returned to the small cabin I shared with Jason to write in my journal. I curled up on my bed with its fluffy white comforter in my familiar room that always reminded me of the inside of a tree with all its wooden accents. Sunlight poured in from the floor-to-ceiling windows, offering an unrestricted view of the ocean beyond the cliff the cabins backed up on. I felt safe here. My reaction made less sense the more I thought about it, so I just stopped thinking about it. Maybe I was in shock. Maybe not. All that mattered was that I needed to think, to process what had just happened. And I thought best by writing.

  My stomach twisted into knots as I wrote the words again. I. Left. Him. Jason deserved it. He deserved worse. Once upon a time, he’d been my knight in shining armor. My savior. But then he turned out to be a worse captor than my mother had ever been. She might have farmed me out for magical parts, but at least she was honest about using me. He’d pretended to love me, to trust me, to respect me—all while tampering with my birth control and cheating on me with one of my only friends.

  Well, I showed him. She was dead, his children aborted, and now Jason was in the hands of his worst enemies. What a week.

  I burst out laughing, glad Adonis, the only other person in the room, was unconscious, because man, I sounded nuts. My peals of hysterical laughter bounced off t
he textured walls, becoming ever more shrill.

  Mad.

  I’d worried for months that my misgivings about Jason were proof of insanity. Paranoia brought on by a childhood where I’d never learned to trust. And now I lost it? Hell, no.

  Struggling to compose myself, I leaned against my wooden headboard and returned my attention to the journal. At first, the meeting seemed to be going well. The gods were reasonable. The only thing they wanted was for my people to stop trying to kill them. Oh, and to return the gods we locked up for medical experiments.

  Made perfect sense to me, especially since their leader, Persephone, had the power to destroy the earth and make it new. We didn’t stand a chance against them.

  They could tear through the weak shield protecting our island in a second. I had. A sense of urgency thrummed through my body, changing my writing to a hastened scrawl. The feather comforter stuck to the back of my sweaty legs as I shifted position so I could hunch over the journal and write faster.

  But Jason asked for time to think over their terms. What was there to think about? They could unmake us! Instead, they were sitting across the table, offering us all the assurances we wanted.

  The gods couldn’t lie. That knowledge kept me sitting on my ridiculously soft comforter instead of teleporting into the dining hall. I’d made an exchange. They wouldn’t attack. Hopefully.

  I hadn’t actually bothered to stick around long enough to see if they accepted my exchange. But why wouldn’t they? Jason was our leader. He was easily worth two hostages.

  No, I wasn’t worried about the gods descending on us. That was just a lie I told myself to avoid the truth. I wasn’t afraid of facing the gods. Not really. I was afraid of my own people.

  Were they my people? Or were the gods?

  I glanced down at the person lying on my wooden floor. Silver-white hair covered a colorless face. But if I ignored his coloring and the overall sense of wrongness permeating from his unconscious frame, I recognized him. I’d seen that face every day in the dining hall for the past few months.

  Then again, the gods were always performing experiments of their own. I rolled my neck, stuffing another pillow behind my back as I wondered why that surprised me.

  Demigods were the offspring of mortals and gods. Some of us inherited powers, some didn’t, but until recently, we all got the semi-divine coloring, like a giant “Kick Me” sign that only the Pantheon could read.

  Generations ago, Tantalus made a deal with Zeus, offering his seven daughters in exchange for a tolerable immortal existence. Zeus bred with Tantalus’s daughters, creating a set of demigods that he slept with the moment they came of age. And then he slept with their children, and their children’s children for generations, ever since ancient Greece. Now his science experiment was paying off. The line between demigod and god blurred more with every generation. Demigods were self-perpetuating now. Most of the demigods on this island didn’t even have a divine ancestor within several generations.

  I was the first full-blooded demigod born without the golden markers. I’d thought I was what came next. Then I saw what they did to Adonis.

  Turning him into a god should have been a good thing. A promotion of sorts. If we’d been told that was an option, I’m sure negotiations would have gone a lot better. But what they’d done instead? Turning one of our people and then sending a glamoured version of Adonis to spy on us?

  Glamours. I glanced down at the silver-haired demigod passed out on my wooden floor. Gods could make themselves look like anything, anyone. It was an age-old trick, responsible for countless births of demigods, when gods disguised themselves as some unfortunate woman’s husband for the night.

  I refused to believe Elise had been tricked into sleeping with some stranger disguised as her boyfriend.

  Elise was my best friend. She’d arrived on the island severely injured, with Adonis, the fake one, begging us to help her. I’d seen the way he looked at her. He’d cut his own heart out before hurting her.

  Dullness weighed against my chest. I tore my attention from him and back to my journal, scowling when I saw my pen had left a mark on my white blanket. Elise knew exactly what he was. The real question is, who or what is she?

  No, the real question was, what were the demigods going to do to me for abandoning Jason? Jason was beloved here. They wouldn’t understand that I’d done it for them.

  I could leave, I wrote, glancing toward the wooden door to my room as if the treasonous thought could summon the others. The shield was weak enough. No one could stop me. I never had to come back here in the first place.

  But where else could I go? I didn’t exist on paper. I didn’t have money. I didn’t have any family left. What could I possibly do to survive away from this insular community we’d created—where my powers and lineage guaranteed me a place?

  Jason was the problem, not this island. I loved it here. I knew every inch of this island, from the cabins backing up to the sheer cliff all the way down the steep hills, and through the jewel-toned tropical groves, too small to be considered true forests. I knew every crystalline stream, every auxiliary building, every grain of sand on the sun-filled beaches. This was my home.

  Adonis groaned, pale silver eyes fluttering open on a face too beautiful for words. “Where—” His voice sounded rough from disuse as he sat up, rubbing at his head. “What—”

  And I was out of time. I glanced at my watch, surprised to find my entire detour, scribbles and all, had taken less than five minutes. No wonder my writing wasn’t legible. Drawing in a deep breath, I braced myself for the inevitable. I had to face them eventually. We had to talk about the Pantheon’s terms and figure out what to do with both the real and fake Adonis. I hopped off the bed, grabbed Adonis’s hand, and ‘ported away.

  As the dining hall materialized around me, an island full of golden faces stared at me with identical expressions of shock.

  “Grab him!” Narcissus, an immaculately dressed man in his forties, demanded.

  I stepped out of the way, bumping into one of the long wooden tables in my haste, and allowed two demigods to pick up Adonis by either arm. His head lolled. He was still mostly unconscious, though his mouth worked and his eyes fluttered as if he was trying to communicate something. But they paid him no mind, marching him past Narcissus with a quiet efficiency.

  There were three leaders of DAMNED. Tantalus, the mostly insane demigod who had a few hundred lifetime’s worth of money to fund our island; Jason, the charismatic people person; and Narcissus, the paperwork guy. Narcissus spent most of his time off-island, meeting with potential recruits.

  “Where are you taking him?” My voice echoed off the high ceilings as I pinned the older demigod down with a stare.

  Narcissus had all the standard coloring of demigods I lacked. Demigods looked good by nature, but some of us looked better than others. And Narcissus liked to believe he looked the best.

  “The hospital,” Narcissus said. “We need to figure out what they did to him.”

  “They turned him into a god.” Wasn’t that much obvious?

  “What about Jason?” Calais, one of Narcissus’s most recent recruits, demanded, jumping up from the table so fast his folding chair clattered to the floor. “Go back for him! Quick! Before they hurt him!”

  Like the gods would still be waiting in the torched hospital. If the Pantheon had half a brain between the lot of them, the gods would have taken Jason and left for a secure, shielded location the second I left.

  “We can have him back when we accept their terms.” I spoke quickly, glad I’d stopped at the cabin long enough to work out what I should say. “I know it sounds bad, not having weapons anymore, but you guys, those weapons aren’t going to help us. The Pantheon can flatten us in an instant if they want to. You weren’t there, you couldn’t feel their power. But the air was crackling w
ith it.”

  A glance around told me they didn’t understand. Was my accent getting in the way again? I’d grown up speaking English and Greek. Apparently, I was difficult to understand sometimes. I repeated myself, slower, clearer, but they still looked confused. Maybe I was the only one who could feel power. That would explain why Jason thought we had a chance in hell against the gods.

  “We need to regroup, to think over their terms, to figure out what the hell to do. But we couldn’t do that if Jason turned them down flat. Don’t you understand?” I looked around at their merciless faces. “They would have killed us! I bought us time!”

  “But . . .” Neleus, one of the youngest demigods on the island, said, still sounding shocked. “You just left him there. They’re going to kill Jason. They’re going to—”

  “They promised not to,” I reminded them, trying to ignore the way my palms had gone slick with sweat. “And they can’t break their word. If we return their people to them, and accept their terms—”

  “We don’t have their people!” Otrera, an athletic demigoddess who happened to be one of my last remaining friends, burst out.

  “Yes.” I met the eyes of the assembled demigods, holding them long enough to get a good idea of who knew about the hidden wing of the hospital and who didn’t. “We do.”

  In the stunned silence that followed, the way they looked at me made me shiver. They were so angry. At seventeen, I was the youngest person on the island. Between that, an accent many of them found strange, and the fact that I looked different than the rest of them, I’d always felt like a bit of an outsider. My black hair, violet eyes, and pale skin served as a physical manifestation for what sometimes felt like an insurmountable number of differences.

  But because I was married to Jason, those differences elevated me. I wasn’t like them, no, but I was above them in both power and position. I’d felt lonely before, but never hated.