Aphrodite (24 page)

“No!” Adonis’s face contorted with fear. His fingers bit into my shoulders, yanking me into his arms. Then everything went black.

Chapter XXXI

“COME ON!” A familiar voice cried, hands pushing down on my sternum with bruising force. His mouth covered mine, and he exhaled. My hands twitched in a pathetic attempt to grab his shoulders and push him away. There was something about that voice, something important.

“Look, she moved!” Another voice came from my right side.

Elise?

“Can you hear us, Aphrodite?”

I managed to pry my eyes open, squinting against the harsh fluorescent light. Elise’s gold eyes flicked over me, so full of concern, I opened my mouth to reassure her. But opening my mouth brought on a whole new world of pain. Oh, gods, every bit of me hurt.

Another face entered my field of vision.

Tantalus! I clamped my eyes shut and tried to scramble back but only managed some weak twitching.

“Is she seizing?” Elise demanded.

“Aphrodite?” Tantalus demanded. “Aphrodite? Look at me.”

“N-no,” I whimpered, panic flooding my chest as his hands closed on my shoulders. “No!” I batted weakly at his arms. He would control me, remake me, hollow out my insides and turn me to a living doll. There’d be nothing left of me, nothing left. “Please, no!” A hysterical sob caught in my throat. I wouldn’t go through that again.

Elise sounded truly panicked now. “Is she—?”

“No, she has”—he sounded distracted as he gathered me to him—“nightmares, sometimes. It can take her a minute to come out of it.” He made soothing noises and stroked my hair, warmth radiating from his fingers. “I’ve got you, love.”

“Ares?” I whispered, not daring to open my eyes.

His arms tightened around me. “I’ve got you.”

“Oh, gods,” I gasped, clinging to him for all I was worth.

He held me just as tight. “I thought you were dead. I thought—”

“You
were
dead.” The voice belonged to Elise, but the tone was all Artemis. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You had almost no power baseline, without CPR, you wouldn’t heal. Every time we stopped—”

“Your heart stopped.”

“How long?” I managed to ask.

Ares shook his head, but couldn’t seem to manage a response.

“Hours,” Artemis replied. “Glad you pulled through.” She gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze before she stood. I felt her move away from us, but couldn’t manage to turn my head to see where she went.

Hours. They’d kept me alive for hours. I drew in a deep shuddering breath. “Thank you.”

Ares grinned. “Anytime.”

With effort, I raised my head from his shoulder, taking in the metal walls and the barred doors of what appeared to be a prison cell. The entire cell looked maybe as long as two queen-sized beds from base to headboard, and wasn’t much wider. Three of the walls were solid metal, and the fourth was made up of actual prison bars. Through the bars was a small hallway, empty except for a wooden desk shoved up against a cell identical to ours on the other side.

“I can’t heal him.” Artemis’s whisper drew my attention to the corner opposite mine where she knelt over a blood-soaked Adonis. “Are we shielded? I’m not sensing anything.”

Adonis. Blood matted his gold hair to his head. The skin splitting along his cheek, temple, and jaw seemed more the result of the swollen tissue bursting free than blows. I remembered the look of horror on Adonis’s face when Tantalus told me to drop dead. Based on his injuries, I could guess what happened next.

The pressure of Ares’s arms around me eased as he pushed to his feet. “I don’t sense anything either.” He knelt down and placed his hand on Adonis’s forehead, then frowned. “That’s weird.”

I stayed cemented to my corner, unable to tear my eyes off the demigod. He’d drugged me, betrayed my trust, lied to me, and gods knew what else. But this? I never wanted this.

I must have made a sound, because Ares glanced over and flashed me a reassuring grin. “He looks worse off than he is. Demigods heal, too. It just takes longer. We can speed that up—” He glanced around the cell furtively. “He’s not as bad off as you were. Once we get out of here, he’ll be good as new.”

Artemis paced the cell, running her hand along the metal wall. “Last thing I remember before waking up here, was settling into the room. Someone must have ’ported in behind me, but—” She pitched her voice so low, I almost couldn’t make out what she said. “I thought the rooms were shielded against teleportation.”

“They were,” Ares confirmed, dropping down to sit beside me. “Same thing happened to me. Whatever this is, shields don’t stop them.”

“Well, it definitely got a lot more up close and personal with you two.” Artemis looked at me, her eyebrows arched in question. “You guys must have put up one hell of a fight.”

They didn’t know. Panic flooded my chest as I realized why they were still in their glamours, why they were whispering. They thought the plan had worked. They’d impersonated their demigods and been captured. Now they were waiting to see what information they could glean before calling in the cavalry or ’porting out. They didn’t realize they were trapped.

Adonis groaned, and I jumped. Ares followed my gaze to Adonis and his eyes narrowed. “Aphrodite?” Ares tilted my chin up, wincing at the blood and bruising on my face. “What happened?”

“He—” I struggled to form words to explain that Adonis had betrayed me. But he’d tried to save me, too. There were two conflicting images of him in my mind—one reaching out an arm to embrace me, the other offering me poison—and I couldn’t reconcile that they were both true.

Taking a deep shuddering breath, I adjusted Ares’s jacket and recounted everything that happened since I got on the boat.
Everything.
The clues and warnings seemed glaringly obvious to me now, but I’d missed them before, so I didn’t dare leave anything out.

“Well, crap.” Artemis rocked to her feet. “
That
changes things. Drop your glamour, Ares. If we don’t make it out of this, we don’t need them using our bodies to justify their war.”

Ares dropped his glamour, but didn’t say anything. He hadn’t said a word through my entire story, though his arm around me went rigid about midway through.

“This is still Poseidon’s realm,” she continued, circuiting the cell, searching for any weakness in the structure. “So we can’t teleport out. If Poseidon could trace us, he’d be here by now.”

Realm rulers could typically sense an unauthorized deity in their realm. Given how sparsely populated Poseidon’s realm was, and our general need to breathe, finding us shouldn’t be hard.

“They’re not responding to casual summons, so either the others are preoccupied,” Artemis continued, “or we’re off the map. I guess the only way to call in the cavalry”—she stopped in front of Adonis and knelt down—“is to use a summons they can’t ignore.”

A divine cause of death. “Don’t,” I protested.

Artemis looked up in surprise. “Are you kidding? He completely took advantage of you. He
drugged
you. He lied and—”

“I know,” I managed to whisper. Gods, moving hurt so bad. “But . . . look what they did to him. They aren’t treating him like an ally. If he’s really against them, we need to know what he does.”

“For all we know, they can heal,” Artemis argued. “I know it looks like he tried to help you in the end, Aphrodite. I get that. But he didn’t tell you about the poison until after you found it. He didn’t make it to Tantalus’s room until
after
you were under his control. They. Can. Lie.” She met my eyes. “I know you want to believe in him, but we can’t risk it.”

“Let him live.” There was no inflection in Ares’s voice. No emotion at all.

“But—”

“He could be a trap either way, Artemis. We can’t summon Persephone into this until we know what we’re dealing with.”

“She can teleport right back out,” Artemis protested. “
With
us.”

“Not with all of us.”

With a twist of my stomach, I realized he was right. The last time Poseidon had teleported with me, I’d stopped breathing. And at that point, I hadn’t consumed a fraction of the poison I had in my system now. Every time I used my powers, I got worse, and anytime anyone else used their powers on me, worse didn’t even begin to describe it.

But Persephone would never leave without me.

Artemis narrowed her eyes as she thought over everything I’d just told her, letting out a string of curses when she realized Ares was right. “Okay, new plan. I’m going to try to dreamwalk, see if I can reach anyone. If anything here changes . . .”

“I’ll wake you,” Ares promised.

Chapter XXXII

ARES FLEXED HIS arm behind my back, groaning as he stretched. We sat in the corner, angled so we could see the whole cell and the hall outside. A few feet to our right, Artemis slumbered, trying to dreamwalk.

I winced, scooting forward so Ares could shift positions, but he stopped me, his hand falling back over my shoulder. “You don’t have to keep—” I paused, trying to find a way to say the right words without implying I didn’t want him touching me. “I mean—”

“Sorry.” Ares dropped his hand from my shoulder. “It’s just . . . my token.”

“
Oh.
” I slipped my arms free of the jacket with a pained hiss, but Ares’s hands shot out to stop me.

“No.” A thinly veiled undercurrent of panic laced his tone. Ares tugged the jacket back over my arms. “For all we know, it’s the only thing—” He started to move away from me, but I stopped him.

“Don’t. Please? I didn’t—I didn’t mind. I just thought . . .” Bracing myself against the pain, I turned my back to him, angling myself into the corner so the entire length of the jacket pressed against him, then wrapped his arms around me. “Is that comfortable?”

I felt the smile in Ares’s voice. “Yeah. It is. Thank you.”

I closed my eyes. He was thanking me for sharing his token with him. “This is all my fault.”

“Hey. No, it’s not.” Ares moved in front of me so he could see my face. “I’m going to do everything I can to get us out of this, okay?”

“I keep
hurting
people. Gods, no wonder—” I swallowed hard.

“No wonder what?”

I couldn’t stop shaking my head. Every word I said to him tore out of me from some deep, painful place I didn’t want to acknowledge. I didn’t want to care this much. I didn’t want to
be
this needy. But I couldn’t seem to pull myself together.

“No wonder what, Aphrodite?”

“You left,” I whispered, hating how broken and pathetic my voice sounded. “What I am—What I did—I told you everything, Ares.
Everything
Zeus did to me. Everything he made me do and—”

“
No.”
Ares shook his head. “You were a tool, Aphrodite. You had about as much agency as a loaded gun in the hands of a killer.
Nothing
he made you do was your fault. I don’t blame you.”

“—and you left.”

“It wasn’t you.” The heat of his hands burned through the jacket. “I promise, it wasn’t you.”

“I know. It was him. But it’s like you said, I can’t—It’s not something I can fix. And it hasn’t stopped with his death. I keep—People keep using me to hurt my friends. You’re stuck here because of me
.
If I’d figured this out faster, if I’d let Poseidon—”

“None of us saw the demigods coming. Hey, hey. Look at me.” He waited until I made eye contact before continuing. “What Adonis did to you, what Tantalus did . . .” A muscle twitched in his jaw. “That’s on us. You took a risk, and walked into a situation none of us understood, to protect
us.
You could have left when things got scary, but you didn’t. For
us.
You’ve done your part. Now it’s our turn. And if we fail, if this ends badly, that’s on us.”

He touched my chin to stop me from shaking my head, careful to avoid the worst of the bruising. “You got to the bottom of this, something none of the rest of us managed, at
great
personal cost. And as for Zeus . . . you keep focusing on what he made you do, not what you
chose
to. You turned on him, knowing he could kill you with a word. You resisted him, knowing he would retaliate.” Ares’s throat bobbed when he swallowed. “You are bold, and beautiful, and
brave.
And leaving you that night was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. But it wasn’t because of you.”

“Then why?” My voice sounded hoarse.

“I left because—” He broke off, his hands falling away from me, and when he spoke again, I heard centuries’ worth of pain and baggage weighing down his voice. “Zeus destroyed us, Aphrodite. The way he used us, the things he made us do. They weren’t our fault. But if you let them haunt you, if you can’t make them stop, then eventually, they change you. Make you someone you’d never recognize. But you’re new.” He pulled away from me. “You had a chance, Aphrodite. To heal. You were just starting to piece yourself back together again.”

“Ares . . . ,” I breathed.

“I couldn’t do that to you. I couldn’t hurt you. Because, when I look at you, I see everything he did to me. And I can’t make that worse for you. It feels like I—” He drew in a deep breath. “I break everything I touch. I couldn’t—I didn’t want to hurt you.”

I closed my eyes, remembering all the myths that said how disgusted Zeus was with Ares. I remembered all the horrible visions I’d seen when Ares first introduced himself. The battles, the bloodshed, the screaming people with melting faces. Zeus made him War. He took his kindest, gentlest son, and he made him War. “Gods,” I whispered, horrified.

Persephone and I had been at Zeus’s mercy for what? A year? Two, between the both of us? Ares and the others had suffered at his hands for millennia; thought Zeus was dead for centuries. Then, all of a sudden, he came back again to terrorize the gods. Killing his children left and right, and forcing them to bow down to him. I’d been so focused on what Persephone and I had gone through, so focused on what we’d survived, I’d never considered what a nightmare Zeus’s return was for the others. What his death brought back to the surface.

I think,
Persephone’s voice echoed through my mind,
maybe he doesn’t feel like he has a right to be . . . upset, or whatever, because what I went through was worse. Only it doesn’t work like that.

Gods, I was such an idiot. Such a selfish idiot. I leaned into Ares, tucking my arms around him, and tilted my chin up so I could whisper in his ear. “You could never break me.” I was done giving anyone that kind of power. “But it’s okay if you’re not ready for this. For us.” I kissed his cheek.

He turned his face toward me, his lips brushing against mine. He kissed me gently, his motions featherlight to let me know I could draw back at any time. And I did what he’d done so many times for me—held him until he could pull himself together enough to stand on his own feet.