I’d forgotten how intimidating he looked. Uneven, dark bangs hung over eyes that seemed to burn with rage as he recovered. When he struggled to his feet, the faint scent of burning cinnamon filled the air. He stood a head shorter than Poseidon, but his bulging muscles looked positively herculean in comparison.
A leather jacket appeared in his outstretched hand, and he shrugged it on, relaxing visibly when the folds of fabric touched his skin. His token, I remembered Aphrodite telling me.
Tokens were objects from a god’s home realm that could act as a kind of conduit. Instead of struggling to draw power while in a foreign realm, a god could channel their power through their token. Ares was back in his home realm, but his jacket must have still helped with the pain.
“You.” His eyes flared when they landed on Poseidon, and his voice darkened with the fires of rage. “You left her.”
“She’s still there?” My voice rose in panic, and the power clawing beneath my skin surged, seeking an outlet. A metallic taste filled my mouth, and I realized I’d clamped down on my tongue.
“I tried to get her!” Frustrated waves churned in miniature against the pupils of Poseidon’s sea-green eyes. “That demigoddess must have taken her when she teleported the whole island. I—”
“When she what?” The lights above my head flickered.
Poseidon’s fist clenched with irritation when the ground began to rumble. He drew in a breath, no doubt ready to say something scathing, but then he caught the look on my face.
I wasn’t doing this on purpose. My teeth ground together as I struggled to regain control, blood thick on my tongue. Aphrodite was gone. Trapped on an island with my husband while the demigods did gods knew what to them. An island we no longer knew the location of, because no one had stopped to ask if demigods could teleport. Including me!
How could I have been so stupid? The rest of the gods made their assumptions out of arrogance, refusing to believe anyone mortal could ever reach their level. I was supposed to be different.
“Easy.” Poseidon stretched his hands in a soothing gesture.
“Easy?” Ares surged toward Poseidon. “Easy! Do you have any idea what they’ll do to her? What you’ve left her to?” What—” He paused, seeming to notice the dishes rattling inside the white cabinets.
I sucked in deep breaths of rose-scented air. A lightbulb shattered above my head, glass raining down on the wooden floor.
“Persephone . . .” Poseidon was beside me in an instant, reaching out, but I jerked away before he could touch me.
I hated him. I hated him for hurting my mom all those centuries ago. For staying alive and strong when so many other gods died. For being one of the only people she could turn to for help during the final months of her life. For not stopping her dying. For looking at me the way he did. Like I was the only thing he had left of her. Like I meant something to him. He wasn’t allowed to grieve my mother.
Wood groaned and glass shattered as every door in the kitchen flew open in a gust of damp wind. Oh, gods, I was ruining it. The one place I could still see her. Gasping for composure, I took my hatred for Poseidon and buried it. Like it or not, he was one of the only gods left, and I needed his help. “What do I do?”
“Focus.” Poseidon’s voice was certain though his mind couldn’t have been. I had more power coursing through my veins than any god had seen since the days when the Primordials had ruled the ether. This was new territory, even for Hades, so Poseidon couldn’t have a clue.
The air rippled with teleportation energy. Poseidon waved his hand, setting the kitchen back to rights before any of the other gods could materialize. “Not a word,” he cautioned Ares, his voice dark.
Ares looked between us in disbelief. “Persephone . . .”
Suppressing a sob as I tried to pull myself together, I looked around the restored kitchen. I knew why he’d fixed it. Athena and the others couldn’t know how close I was to completely losing control. But his power signature would always taint this place now. The faint smell of the ocean drowning her floral fragrance. All because I’d broken it.
Athena, Artemis, and Hephaestus appeared in the room with an audible pop of distorted space. They were the last of the once-great Pantheon. There were other gods left, scattered throughout the world, but they were minor deities. We left them out of these meetings to avoid draining what little power they had left.
“Where’s Aphrodite?” Athena demanded, pulling Mom’s chair back from the kitchen table and sitting down like she owned the place.
I let out a long breath and sought control all over again while Poseidon explained.
“She moved an entire island?” Athena demanded, glancing at Ares as if he would contradict Poseidon. “How strong is this girl? Who are her parents?”
“Demigods,” Ares said with a shrug. “Going back generations. She’s got Hecate and Apollo in her gene pool, maybe more. Near as we can tell, her bloodline has been going a generation or two longer than Adonis’s.”
“Unbelievable.” Athena muttered the word like a curse.
Ares waited until she and Poseidon were chatting logistics before finding his way to my side. “We’re going to find them.” His warm arm clasped my shoulder. “The ocean’s a big place and all that, but you can’t move an entire land mass without some noticeable ripples. We’ll get them both out of there.”
“That is a good point.” Athena perked up when she overheard our conversation. The goddess of wisdom wore a gray power suit the precise shade of her cold eyes. Her brown hair was, as usual, pulled into a bun so tight I could see it stretching her pale skin. “Poseidon?”
The sea god gave me a nod and stepped back, power crackling around him as he prepared to teleport. “I’m on it.”
“Wonderful.” Athena lifted her brows in question at me. “Where’s the demigod who was left behind?”
“Jason?” I leaned against the pine countertop. “He’s safe. I put him under guard in the Underworld.”
Athena’s forehead wrinkled in puzzlement. “Well, bring him back. We need to question him.”
Torture him, she meant. “He was left in exchange for time to think over the terms of the truce,” I reminded her, cracking my knuckles in a deliberate show of calm. “I can ask him any questions you like, but I’m not going to interrogate him.”
“They didn’t meet our terms,” Athena argued. “You asked for a male and a female demigod in exchange for giving them time to think. It is absolutely within our right to question that demigod and to stop allowing them to die, as promised.”
“As their leader, Jason is worth more than two demigods.” I forced my voice to stay casual, disinterested, as I crossed the kitchen, pulling open the fridge door. “Does anyone want anything to drink? Water? Tea? Lemonade?”
“I’ll have some water, please.” Artemis propped her arms on the table top. The goddess of the hunt was petite, almost as short as I was, but our similarities ended there. Where I was more on the soft and curvy side, Artemis was hard and lean. Her hair was as dark as mine was light, her eyes as deep as mine were bright, and her rich amber skin made mine look pallid in comparison. Oh, yeah, and she’d been Hades’s very best friend for like, millennia, long before I even existed.
But I wasn’t jealous or anything.
“You know we don’t actually care about taking prisoners, right?” The scarred half of Hephaestus’s face twitched in agitation, something like electricity twisting his already warped features. “That whole request was just a ruse to get Aphrodite and Ares off the island. It failed. We don’t owe the demigods anything. Let’s get what we can from Jason and get our people back. Right, Ares?”
The war god glanced between me and Hephaestus then let out a volley of curses in a half-dozen languages. “Obviously, I want to get back to her as soon as possible. But we need to consider our goal here
. Getting our people back is priority one, but from their point of view, they left us with a pretty valuable hostage. If we lay a finger on him, we lose all the good will Aphrodite has spent months trying to gain. All we may get in return is an entire island full of armed, angry demigods who can kill us all with a scratch.”
“An island we can sink without much effort,” Athena argued, defecting to Poseidon’s side now that the sea god wasn’t around to hear her.
“You are unbelievable!” I snatched a glass out of the cabinet and jammed it beneath the ice maker. “Ares just told you he thinks we have a chance to de-escalate this, and you want to commit mass murder? No. They met our terms. Now it’s time to meet ours. We give them time to think. In the meantime—” I raised my voice to drown out their arguing “—Hephaestus, what have you learned about their weapons?”
“It doesn’t appear to be as strong as the Steele I made when Olympus still stood,” Hephaestus explained. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not deadly. I don’t exactly have a way to test it.”
Well that was kind of good news. I set the glass of water on the table in front of Artemis. “Any idea how they used it to create that poison?”
“I’m working on it,” Hephaestus assured me, propping his feet up on the spare wooden chair when it became obvious no one else was going to take it. “Since it’s derived from Steele, I don’t think we’ll have much luck with an antidote. But I might be able to find a way to flush it out before it does too much damage.”
“If it’s Steele-based, how are they—” I motioned toward Artemis and Ares “—not already dead?” Hades had ripped off my arm (it grew back) over a single nick of the stuff, explaining it could kill me with a scratch. How could they possibly be walking around after swallowing it?
“It’s not—” Hephaestus tried to explain and let out a long-suffering breath. “They altered it. On a chemical level, it’s not pure Steele anymore. They’ve—It’s—”
“Think of it like a vaccine with a live culture,” Athena interjected. “It’s been altered, diminished so the immune system attacks and forms antibodies of the right shape, but the illness itself isn’t ravaging the body at full potency. Like smallpox and cowpox. They are derived from the same base—one is deadly, one is not.”
So in this case, our powers were acting as our immune system? Okay, that made sense. “So, it can’t kill us?” I clarified. “It just keeps our powers busy healing us as long as it’s in our system.”
“Oh, it absolutely can kill us,” Athena corrected. “Cowpox could kill a human; a common cold could kill a human if their immune system is run-down enough. The same goes for our powers.”
“But Aphrodite doesn’t have her powers right now. How is she—?”
“Because it attacks powers. Think of it as an autoimmune disease. The poison attacks the powers, the powers flare up to fight it, the poison has more to attack, and on and on the cycle goes until either the poison is spent or the powers are spent. Without the powers present, there’s nothing in the body for the poison to latch on to. Do you understand now?”
If I didn’t say yes, she was going to summon a chalkboard and start drawing molecules, I just knew it. “As well as I need to, for now. Hephaestus, you’ll keep working on it?”
He nodded.
“Great. Ares?” I waited until the war god met my gaze and willed myself not to flinch beneath the heat in his eyes. “I need to know everything you do about the island. Every single detail.” I glanced at Athena. “I’d like us to have a plan of attack. Just in case.”
Chapter V
Aphrodite
I BOLTED FROM nightmare to reality as the ground dropped away from me. Sand coated my glamoured skin, obscuring the gold. Squinting against the morning sun glaring off the brilliant white sand, I tried to get my bearings.
“I’ve got her.” Narcissus’s self-assured voice sounded strained as he lifted me to my feet.
“She’s freezing.” Otrera tucked her arm around my other side.
I left a coat of sand on the skin of her dusky, gold arms. Goosebumps rose along her toned flesh in response to the frigid wind whipping in with gray, choppy waves. But I was long past feeling the cold.
“Hey,” she said with a smile when she noticed me looking at her. “You gave us quite a scare. What happened? He ditch you when he didn’t need a hostage anymore?”
I opened my mouth to reply, but the second my lips parted, I hissed in pain. They felt beyond dry. This was something like desiccation. Mummies retained more moisture.
“We’ll get you some water from the hospital. Don’t try to talk,” Otrera said, casting a worried glance over my head. “Not now.”
I followed her gaze to Narcissus in time to catch a scowl as the fastidiously dressed demigod wiped away a speck of sand from his designer jacket. He noticed me looking at him and tried to correct to a more appropriate expression, but the reassuring smile on his face didn’t reach his eyes, and the suspicion I found there set my heart thudding in my chest.
I was completely alone here and without powers, thanks to the demigod’s poison. I had no way to communicate with the gods and no strength to fight back if the demigods realized who I really was. They had every reason to ask the questions that would reveal my divinity, and I couldn’t lie.
“Come on,” Narcissus said with a pained grunt when fear pushed my legs out from under me.
He and Otrera half-dragged, half-carried me toward the familiar hospital. “Let’s get you taken care of.”
REHYDRATING AND pulling up my temperature took precedence over patching up the cuts and scrapes, but eventually the nurses got around to the worst of them. Afterward, they left me hooked up to an IV for fluids and rest.
“Don’t wanna rest,” I murmured, fighting to keep my eyes open. With rest came the nightmares. And Ares wasn’t here to push me into a dreamscape.
Narcissus and Otrera hovered, her smiling sympathetically, him glancing at his watch every five seconds.
Finally, he gave a loud sigh. “I have things to do. Don’t leave this room.” He jabbed a finger at me. “Not until we talk.”
I held up my arm, indicating the IV. “How far do you think I could get?”
He rolled his eyes and left.
Otrera offered me a weak smile. Tall, toned, and with a build that would fit into any fitness magazine, Otrera had all the golden features that marked her as a demigoddess. She kept opening her mouth and closing it, as if she wanted to ask me a question. But she refrained, and eventually I drifted off into a blessedly dreamless sleep.
I felt like I’d barely closed my eyes before an annoyingly peppy red-headed nurse came in to disconnect me.
“Where’s Otrera?” I asked, glancing around. I felt fuzzy, unsteady.
The nurse hesitated. “She was needed elsewhere. Here we go.” She stuck a length of medical tape over the cotton ball she’d pressed against my arm when she removed the IV. “Now, let’s stand up and get you on your way!”
“I didn’t think I was supposed to leave,” I objected as she guided me down the hall. The last time I’d been admitted to this hospital, they’d held on to me so long, I thought I’d never be free. Now they were rushing me out?
That’s not a good sign.
“Nonsense,” she said in an upbeat tone. “Your friend is here to pick you up.”
“What friend?”
A shadow fell over me when I reached the door leading to the lobby. I turned, my stomach sinking when I took in the tall, well-built demigod looming over us. Calais. He’d always been friendly, flirtatious even. Not anymore. He glared down at me as if I were an aberration he wanted to remove from this earth.
“Come with me.” He grabbed my arm.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, shocked by the rough handling. “Hey!”
I looked at the nurse
for help, but she only blinked, smile unwavering. Charmed, I realized. But why? They’d taken me to the hospital and patched me up. Why do that if—?
Calais yanked me along at a pace that sent me stumbling.
Otrera left, I realized. Narcissus was maintaining appearances in case he was wrong about me. But he absolutely suspected foul play where I was concerned. Otherwise, why would he send this brute to drag me to—?
Where were we going?
We went through a door I’d never noticed, entering a wing I’d never seen in my previous explorations of the hospital.
What? I’d explored every inch of this place during my extended stay. When I slowed to glance around, Calais shoved me forward until we reached a door with two demigods stationed on either side of it.
Something told me I did not want to go in that room.
“Let me go!” I shouted, trying to claw his hand free from my arm.
Calais spun me around and knocked me into the door so hard, I saw stars. “Touch me again, you pantheon whore,” he growled. “I dare you.”
Something slammed on the door behind me, causing it to shudder. “Hey!” A familiar voice yelled.
Adonis. Oh, gods, he hadn’t gotten away either.
My breath caught at the hatred swirling in Calais’s golden eyes as he reached behind me to push open the door and shoved me inside.
“Keep it down, Eros,” Calais growled, referring to Adonis by his last name.
I guessed after months of getting to know Ares, calling Adonis by his first name would seem weird.
Adonis steadied me before I could fall and then surged forward, protesting the rough treatment. But Calais shut him up with a rough punch to his gut that had me doubling over in pain. The door slammed, the click of the lock echoing through the small room.
Venus Rising: Book 3 Aphrodite Trilogy (The Daughters of Zeus 6) Page 4