In a matter of seconds, the hidden wing was obliterated. Bodies were littered across the floor. Truly dead bodies. Black lightning twined with green in a brilliant arc that rippled and tore through the air as Persephone screamed.
I could sense the way she radiated power, but I didn’t need to. Not while it was visible in the way the air around her shimmered. Her hair floated in a bright light she seemed to produce. I followed her agonized gaze to where Hades lay still as death. Beside him, Aphrodite had crumpled to the ground.
Her glamour had dropped. Even in the midst of chaos and panic, the split-second glance I had of her burned in my brain. Vibrant red hair fell over cream colored skin on a perfect figure. I was so stunned that it wasn’t until I heard Ares’s voice go hoarse with panic that I realized she was beyond saving.
Poseidon yelled something, trying to stop Persephone’s reign of destruction, but she flicked him aside like he was nothing.
“You should run,” I told Neleus, glancing over my shoulder.
“Yeah,” he said after a moment, walking backward. “You should come with me.”
Shaking my head, I scanned the room for Otrera. Be okay, be okay, be okay. I spotted her crumpled form, and rushed to her side, tearing through residual traces of a shield with an unfamiliar power signature.
Thank gods, I thought, pushing her box braids to the side to lay my hand on her back. The shield had kept her safe. But we wouldn’t be for long.
I could feel the charge in the air as Persephone came completely undone. This island, the people on it, and possibly even the Pantheon I’d dreamed of joining was doomed. Even if they survived somehow, they’d never accept me. My people had killed both Hades and Aphrodite. Suppressing a sob, I took one final look at Aphrodite, still unresponsive in Ares’s arms.
Then I pulled Otrera to me and teleported away.
Chapter XLVII
Aphrodite
REVERBERATIONS FROM three realms crashed together as Persephone lost control. She blazed somewhere to my left, a white beacon of sheer power, but worse than that was the power channeling through me. I thought I’d been a puppet beneath the burden of Zeus’s commands. Now that I was completely out of control of my own life and limbs, I realized how naïve I’d been. I was reduced to a vessel. A container.
And I was breaking.
Even without the poison coursing through my veins, my body wasn’t meant to hold this much raw energy. I wasn’t strong enough. Screams tore from my throat. The fact that the world was literally breaking into pieces around me should have demanded more attention, but I couldn’t focus on that. Not with the pain crashing through me. So much pain. White-hot and indescribable in its intensity.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” Poseidon threw himself between me and Persephone, though he made no move to harm her, thank gods. “You’ll kill us all, you stupid girl!”
Didn’t he realize that she couldn’t stop it? Couldn’t he feel her panic permeating the room? Seeing Hades’s corpse must have cracked her already tenuous control, and now all hell was breaking loose.
Power pushed me to my feet, hands outstretched, body rigid. My glamour shredded into pieces as I crashed to the ground.
“Aphrodite!” Ares was right beside me. His lips were moving, but I couldn’t understand him. But the fear and panic blazing in his eyes? That I could understand just fine.
Agony coursed through my veins as my body tried to combat the Steele responding to Persephone’s power. But I didn’t have enough power left to heal. I could feel it.
My body was shutting down.
Finally. How many times had I been on the brink of death? How much pain had I pushed through? It’s not that I wanted to die, but I couldn’t help feeling relief that the hurting was almost over.
Hephaestus said something, his voice frantic. “. . . consent,” he said. “She has to . . .”
Marriage. If I married Hephaestus, I’d become immune to Steele. Cheating death via a technicality. But I was so tired of cheating. And I was tired of reducing other people to tools to do it.
I was never meant to survive this long. Zeus had planned to kill me and absorb my power, but I’d gotten out of that by joining the Pantheon. Then I was frickin’ poisoned and charmed to death, but Ares kept me alive by sheer force of will. Plus, there were the near drownings and beatings and now this?
Maybe I should just take the hint and die already.
“You have to do something.” Ares’s voice broke. “At least try.”
Survive, I remembered him urging me.
I lay still as death as my body fought for the privilege of shutting down. I hurt people, and I get hurt, and I run away from fights I can’t win, and I’m tired of it, I remembered telling Adonis back on the cruise. I want to do more than survive, even if it kills me.
Marry me, Hepheastus’s thoughts whispered to mine as his twisted mouth brushed against my lips. I know it’ll never mean anything. I know I’m not who you’d choose. I know that you’ll never love me, but I promise it’ll be better than death. Please, Aphrodite. Live.
I could have stopped the surge of power that flowed between us with a thought. That much was still in my control. But I didn’t.
Yes, I consented. I’d chosen to sacrifice myself for the people I loved. Now, I chose to live. For Ares?
No.
This choice could never be for him. If I did this, it needed to be for purely selfish reasons. It needed to be a decision I could never regret or credit to anyone else but me. This was my life. It was time to start living it.
I let the old Aphrodite die. The puppet, the girl with the box. That disguised demigoddess who always sought glimpses of herself in others. I’d spent too long allowing others to define me, too long practically begging them to. Steele burned her away, but in truth, she’d been dying ever since I took that first sip of water. From this day forward, I was going to be someone else. Me.
The pain faded instantly as his immunity extended to me, and my connection to Persephone snapped. Marriage bonds superseded vows of fealty like the one I’d sworn to Persephone. The healing warmth of power crashed through my body. My eyes, already opened, regained the ability to process what I was seeing.
I took in Hephaestus’s maimed face, the muscles in his cheeks twitching more spastically than I’d ever seen them before. He was beautiful. A terrible beauty to be sure, but suddenly I understood why he never covered up with a glamour in a way I hadn’t before. He’d described it as pride, wanting to recognize himself in the mirror, and that I’d understood.
But it was more than that. Hephaestus had earned those scars by doing something incredible and self-sacrificing. And now, he was sharing that with me. Even though he didn’t love me, he was willing to link himself to me for life to protect me from his own creation.
“Thank you,” I gasped, feeling better than I could remember feeling in . . . weeks? Months? Far too long. I could feel a tentative link to his powers, only a token amount, really. Just enough to make it official.
He shrugged. “You’re annoying, but that doesn’t mean I want you dead.” His good eye flickered over me. “Good to see you back.”
Ares pushed past Hephaestus and swept me into a crushing hug. For a second, I ignored the destruction and the frantic voices of the other gods across the room and relaxed in his arms.
But the lurching ground beneath me and the crackle of power in the open air above brought me back to the present.
I had to stop Persephone before she destroyed us all. Her three realms slammed against each other, creating cracks and schisms in jagged streaks of uncontrolled power. The gods could teleport any time, but if she broke the realms, we’d have nowhere safe to run to.
Hades’s obol felt ice-cold in my palm. Somehow, I’d kept my fingers curled around it the entire time. Persephone’s powers raged on, battering
against the ineffectual shield Athena and Artemis had thrown up.
Adonis stood inside the shield, shouting for Medea and Otrera, but the girls were nowhere to be seen. Poseidon alone remained outside the shield, trying to get through to the grief-stricken goddess.
He was going to fail. But I could reach her.
I looked over Ares’s shoulders and met Hephaestus’s eyes, waiting until his pupils widened, then I let my charm spread along the length of the shield, enveloping Athena, Adonis, and Artemis beneath my control. Gods, using my powers felt good. “Get someplace safe and stay there until Poseidon gives you the all clear.”
The deities ‘ported away with an audible pop. Charm was my superpower. I held more than any other deity in the entire Pantheon, and while I couldn’t use it on immunes like Adonis or realm rulers like Poseidon or Persephone, everyone else could fall beneath my sway.
Ares’s arms tightened around me. “Don’t you dare,” he murmured, his breath hot against my ear.
Once, under the influence of Tantalus’s charm, I’d promised Ares anything. An unconditional vow. And he hadn’t thought twice before releasing me from that dangerous promise. We’d gone through hell and back, put one another together again—not to mention, he’d just watched me marry someone else and didn’t even seem to mind since it meant my survival. He’d given me everything, time and time again. Mind control, even for his own good, felt like a slap in the face.
“I can fix this,” I gasped, fingering the obol. “But I need to know you’re safe.”
Ares studied me for a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity. “Okay,” he said at last. He took off his jacket and slung the black leather around my shoulders. The familiar scent of burnt cinnamon enveloped me in a wave of warmth. “But you’d better bring this back to me.”
I slid my arms through the sleeves. “I’ll do my best.”
He tilted my chin up, kissing me long and hard before whispering a single word in my ear.
I gasped as a strange new power filled me. Something bright, optimistic. Something that had me believing in the impossible. “Why?”
A lazy grin spread across his face. “Someone once told me I’d need hope more than anyone. They were wrong.” Without another word of explanation, he vanished.
Five down, one to go.
“Poseidon!” I tugged strings of power around me to form a full-body glamour. “I’m calling in a favor.” I waited until his ocean eyes met mine and fought back the urge to drown in them. “Get out.”
Chapter XLVIII
Persephone
“PERSEPHONE.”
Hades’s voice cut through the wave of power crashing through me. And suddenly he was there, standing among the broken bits of the observation room. Weak sunlight filtered through the thick dust of shattered cinderblock, bathing the room in a brownish haze. Hades cut a dramatic dark figure in the midst of my maelstrom. Warmth flooded his ice-blue eyes as he took me in.
“I can’t make it stop.” My powers raged out of control, shattering the realms, but I couldn’t rein them in. I’d tried hard, so hard to keep everything together since I found out I was a goddess, since becoming queen of the Underworld, since Zeus captured and tortured me, since my mother died, since I killed Zeus, since becoming de facto queen of the Pantheon, since Hades disappeared, since Aphrodite got hurt, since everything. But the hits just kept coming. Seeing Hades lying lifeless on the floor had just been one hit too many.
I couldn’t do this.
I’d broken, and I could feel myself pulling everything in creation down with me, but I couldn’t make it stop. It wasn’t that I needed Hades to be strong, it was that there was only so much strength to have.
I should have divided my powers. Not because Athena or Poseidon had done anything to deserve them, not that they could even be trusted with them. But because there were some burdens a person should never try to carry alone.
“Take a deep breath.” Hades took both of my hands.
He felt wrong. His voice wasn’t quite right, not the tone, but the cadence. “You’re not him,” I realized, tears burning my eyes.
“No.” Aphrodite dropped the glamour, aquamarine eyes glistening with sympathy. Her red hair tumbled around us in the wind of power that I’d created. “I just needed to get your attention.”
A relieved sob tore through my throat. “I thought I killed you. Oh, gods, Aphrodite, I didn’t mean to. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not mad,” she assured me. “I could never be mad at you for this. I know what it’s like to completely and utterly lose control, Persephone. I practically live there. But we can fix this, together.”
“I broke it,” I gasped. “Mom trusted me with her entire realm, with all her power, and I couldn’t—I didn’t—I can’t do this without him. He can’t be gone. Mom, Hades—they can’t both be gone. What—”
“Breathe.” She sucked in a deep breath, her aquamarine eyes latching on to mine.
Despite myself, I followed suit.
“Don’t let it out until I squeeze your hand, okay?” She had to shout to be heard over the chaos I’d created.
I nodded, holding my breath. The maelstrom of power swirling around us died a little with every breath she made me hold then release.
“Now, we’re going to set everything back to normal, okay? I want you to imagine a box . . .”
Aphrodite’s pale hands never left mine as she walked me through unpacking my powers. Between the two of us, we restored the rifts between realms and steadied the ground beneath our feet. When it was over, I collapsed to my knees, dragging her with me.
“I’ve got you,” she gasped, pulling me into her arms. We clung to each other in the midst of the death and destruction that was our birthright, and everything else faded away.
I don’t know how long the two of us sat there, clinging to one another, but she never once told me it was okay. Never tried to stop me from crying. She just held me while I cried into her shoulder, her arms firm around me. Only when my wails had faded to silent sniffles did she pull away.
“He wanted you to have this.” She pressed Hades’s token into my palm.
A familiar sensation surged through me when my fingers wrapped around the misshapen coin. Drawing in a sharp breath, I released the soul trapped inside.
Hades’s power, power we’d divided equally between us, rushed within me. If I hadn’t been sitting down, I would have been knocked over by the sheer force of it. But that wasn’t what had my breath hitching.
His soul stood before me, sharper than reality. He hadn’t shattered like my mother. Hades wasn’t alive, but his soul was still intact. I could still see him, feel him, talk to him.
He wasn’t gone.
“Hades,” I gasped, throwing myself into his arms.
He rocked backward, but stabilized, his arms wrapping around me in a tight hug. To anyone else, his touch would be incorporeal, but I was queen of the Underworld, fully vested in my powers, so to me, his grip was firm.
Of course he was still dead, and I was still alive, and I wasn’t so naïve that I didn’t think that would bring a whole slew of complications, but by the Styx, we ruled the Underworld. If anyone could make it work, it would be us.
Chapter XLIX
Aphrodite
AFTER MUCH DEBATE, Persephone returned the island to its original location and restored it back to its former glory.
While the demigods who’d been inside the hidden wing were beyond saving, there’d been wounded and not-dead demigods caught in the rubble across the island.
Poseidon wanted Persephone to leave them injured and unable to die. “Let them suffer for their rebellion until their bodies rot away,” he’d grumbled.
But Persephone wanted to heal them.
Destroy them, she’d argued, and we’d once again prov
e what kind of Pantheon we were, and create a new group of innovative enemies in the demigods who’d watched from afar, never joining DAMNED, but trading and communicating with the group. Show them mercy, and they’d forever remember what we were capable of.
Athena saw the sense in that, so Persephone healed the demigods and laid out our terms. The demigods were allowed to move back and forth from the island to the rest of the world. But now a sanctuary they could return to. We’d check in to ensure it stayed stocked, and, of course, to make sure the demigods weren’t up to anything we wouldn’t approve of. They all agreed without hesitation.
Hopefully, their promises weren’t lies.
Afterwards I sat on the warm, pristine beach, looking out at the sea. Hades and the rest of the Pantheon debated hotly behind me about what Persephone had done in the moments she’d lost control.
“ . . . too dangerous,” I heard Poseidon shout.
“Any luck finding the demigoddesses?” Persephone asked as she settled in beside me. Her shoulders were drawn in and tight, like she was trying to make her already petite frame smaller.
“You didn’t kill them,” I assured her, knowing where her worries lay. It was surreal sitting on this beach. So similar to the one I’d walked every day I’d spent with the demigods, but so different. I’d grown accustomed to the splashing, the raucous jokes, and the laughter of golden people drifting from the volleyball nets. This had been such a paradise once. But now they huddled in the dining hall, too afraid to venture out and risk offending the Pantheon.
I took a sharp breath of clean, ocean air. “Their bodies weren’t among the fallen. I’m guessing Medea managed to ‘port Otrera away.”
“We’ll find them,” Persephone promised, squeezing my hand.
“Of course we will.” Medea could dreamwalk and my powers were fully restored. I’d find her.
Venus Rising: Book 3 Aphrodite Trilogy (The Daughters of Zeus 6) Page 24