Aphrodite

by Kaitlin Bevis

  I spent the night alternating between freezing and burning as I shook beneath Ares’s jacket, taking small sips from my bottle of water. When I ran out, I didn’t have the energy to get a new one. My head felt full of molten lava, and my veins seemed as if they were filled with granules of sharpened glass. Each heartbeat seemed to slice through my body with a wave of pain.

  Delirium. Fragmented thoughts and memories played through my mind as the sun lightened the horizon.

  “It’s so cold,” I moaned to Adonis, though the rational bit of my brain knew he was upstairs and I was not. What the hell, at least now I had someone to talk to. “How are you not cold?”

  Adonis’s gold eyes popped open. “You don’t feel cold at all, you’re—Gods!” He sat up in the bed, his hand brushing my hair from my forehead. “Aphrodite, you’re burning up.”

  I couldn’t stop shaking. “Feels like freezing.”

  “Well, here.” He pulled the feather duvet back onto the bed and draped the cool fabric around me. “Better?”

  Now I felt too hot, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him, so I pulled him to me and kissed him instead. “That’s better.”

  “Mmm,” he agreed. His hands cupped my face, his thumb stroking my cheek as the kiss deepened. For a few minutes, I did feel better.

  Then I shifted positions and the friction of the carpet beneath me brought me jerking upright in confusion. I wasn’t on the bed. I was downstairs. “I should fix that,” I murmured. My lips cracked when I spoke. I climbed to my feet, Ares’s jacket sliding to the floor.

  Clothing would be good. Persephone and the others would be checking in on us soon. I grabbed the jacket and managed to make my way to the suitcase beneath the stairs.

  I blinked at the clothing scattered across the floor in confusion for a few moments before I urged my heavy limbs to cooperate with my efforts to get dressed. Once I pulled on a green dress, I raised the water bottle to my lips. Empty. With a sigh, I lurched to my feet, donned Ares’s jacket, and shuffled toward the kitchen. Now that the sun was up, I could see the suite was a mess. When the boat tilted last night, everything fell. Including my massive stack of papers on the kitchen counter. A manila envelope with Adonis’s name and old room number caught my eye from beneath the fridge.

  Rooms, room numbers, empty rooms. Feverishly, I combed through the drawers, searching for Olympian Steele. Wait, no. I closed the drawer, trying to get my bearings. I wasn’t searching the ship. I was in my room. There was nothing to find here.

  Dozens of empty rooms. No luggage, no people. Something about the empty rooms stuck with me, so I paused to scrawl myself a note on the manila envelope below Adonis’s name.

  There are no other rooms, Adonis’s voice snapped. Miguel had tried to escort him off the ship because they were at capacity.

  “Augh!” I clamped a hand to my forehead, taking measured breaths. I couldn’t . . . think. Gods, my head felt ready to explode. I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears, and the thought of blood pumping through my veins was almost too much for my nauseated stomach to bear. A whimper caught in my throat. I felt worse, so much worse. Why did everything hurt so badly?

  What was I doing? Why were all these papers on the floor? I spotted our room key and knelt to grab the plastic card. I couldn’t lose mine because Adonis had borrowed my spare. Upstairs, Persephone moved around. I could hear her feet treading on the carpet above.

  Wait. No. Persephone wasn’t here. That was Adonis moving around upstairs. My mouth felt as dry as dust. Right, water. The fridge didn’t feel cold anymore and the light didn’t flip on. Power’s out, I remembered, moving to twist the cap the rest the way off the last water bottle.

  I paused, hand poised and ready to open the bottle. Did I break the seal or was it already broken? I glanced at the empty water bottles littering the room, struggling to remember.

  No, that was just something Adonis always did for me. Something nice and gentlemanly. Good thing, since these stupid plastic ridges hurt my palm.

  “Water?” Adonis had asked, holding out a bottle. Over and over and over again. Always offering me drinks.

  “Okay,” I whispered, bringing the bottle to my lips.

  Clarity burst through my feverish delirium before the cool liquid could relieve my parched throat. I backed up into the countertop staring at the water bottle in disbelief. Oh, gods! Something was in the water. My powers hadn’t failed until my first night on the boat. After I drank the water. Then, every time I drank another bottle, they got worse. How many bottles had I drunk? My mind flipped through every single time Adonis passed me a water bottle, every single time I’d raided the fridge. The bottle shook in my trembling hand as I studied the water, searching for some trace of. . . . What? What could hurt a god, but leave a demigod unharmed?

  A violent shudder wrenched through me, setting my entire body ablaze with pain. I gasped, mopping the sweat off my forehead with my free hand. My body sagged against the counter because I couldn’t support my own weight anymore. I grimaced, clutching my stomach. I was missing something, a piece of this puzzle that would make everything else fall into place. But I couldn’t think clearly enough to—

  There! Tiny, almost microscopic, flakes of silvery specks inside the bottle caught the sunlight. What the hell was that? Steele? Impossible. A single scratch could kill me in a matter of heartbeats. Water made it to the human blood stream within five minutes of consumption. I’d have been dead days ago.

  “Aphrodite . . .” Adonis stood at the entry of the kitchen. I looked up at him, dread filling the pit of my stomach when I saw the guilt written across his face. “Don’t drink that.”

  Chapter XXIX

  I DROPPED THE water bottle. The weak plastic dented upon hitting the floor and water sluiced free from the unsealed top. “What have you done?” My voice sounded weak and brittle, and my mind screamed for me not to ask. Because whatever he said next would be bad. So bad there would be no going back. That much seemed obvious by the look on his face and the twist in my gut. “Adonis, what have you done?”

  He closed his eyes. “They told me it wouldn’t hurt you.”

  Oh, gods. My breathing quickened as my feverish mind put the pieces together for the thousandth time in as many minutes. Only, this time, I couldn’t breeze past the obvious. Couldn’t blame someone else. Couldn’t deny the one thing that would make this entire situation worse. He knew. “You . . . poisoned me? Why?”

  “Aphrodite.” Adonis moved toward me, papers crinkling beneath his feet as he crossed the threshold into the kitchen. “Take a deep breath.”

  “Don’t!” I jerked away from him, but didn’t have far to go with my back against the white cabinets. “Don’t touch me. Don’t come anywhere near me. Don’t you dare.” The room spun around me. Gripping the edge of the countertop, I fought to keep myself on my feet.

  Adonis backed off. “Aphrodite, I’ll explain everything, I swear. But you’ve got way too much of that stuff in your system. I have to get you to Jason so he can—”

  Jason. I filed the name away to explore later. “I don’t know how you missed this,” I snapped through gritted teeth, “but we can’t go anywhere. And even if we could, I wouldn’t go with you. You drugged me! I’m—I could be dying.”

  “They might have an antidote, or something.” Sunlight filtered in from the floor-to-ceiling windows. The pale beams leaked across the white carpet, invading the wide, open room to outline Adonis’s frame, lighting up his golden features in a way that, to my feverish state, seemed menacing, unnatural. He glowed with malice. “I can get us to Jason, you just have to trust me.”

  “Trust you?” Was he serious?

  “Aphrodite, it wasn’t supposed to hurt you, you have to believe me.” Adonis’s gold eyes met mine, pleading.

  “Oh, gods, this wasn’t even your room, was it?” More pieces I’d refused to put toget
her fell into place, my mind suddenly clearer than it’d been all night. I haven’t had any water for hours. Maybe I’m healing a little? More likely, shock had snapped me back to my senses. I’d be a wreck when the adrenaline wore off. But for now. . . . The room number, the empty rooms, Adonis’s “lost” key. “You lied to keep us in the same room, and then you were a complete jerk about me being here. And then you poisoned me. Why?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to—”

  “Then what was it supposed to do?” My heart slammed in my chest as adrenaline pulsed through my veins, making me dizzy and numb, yet hyperaware all at once.

  Adonis rubbed the back of his neck, looking so contrite, so frickin’ remorseful, I felt like throwing something at him. “Take away your powers.”

  His words hit me like a punch in the stomach. I felt as if I’d been thrown off a cliff and could feel the ground rushing toward me at a million miles an hour. “That will kill me.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Adonis held his hands out. “I figured without your powers, you would just . . . be human. Alive, but on a leveled playing field. It wasn’t supposed to be dangerous.”

  “You have powers. It’s not a level playing field if you’re uphill! And you can’t just”—I waved my hands for a second, searching for words—“turn me human. It doesn’t work that way. And gods without powers aren’t human. They’re dead! Power isn’t all that separates us from humanity. We’re . . . we’re a different species. We’re wired differently. You can’t just . . . you can’t—”

  “Play god?” Adonis tilted his head and gave me a pointed look.

  My mouth dropped open. “Are you seriously making puns right now? Is this . . . is this funny to you?”

  “No!” Adonis’s eyes widened. “Of course not. I’m telling you exactly what they’re doing. They’re playing at being gods. And unfortunately”—Adonis looked up at the ceiling and let out a deep breath—“they aren’t much better at it than you guys. Innocent people got hurt, and they promised that wouldn’t happen.”

  “You guys? Innocent people? Not much better? I was attacked, assaulted with deadly weapons, brainwashed, poisoned, lied to, tricked, and betrayed. They’re not much better than we are? We are not a collective. Neither are you, Adonis. You don’t get to hide behind this group, whoever the hell ‘they’ are. You drugged me.”

  “I didn’t have a choice!”

  I gritted my teeth against the pain and brought myself to my full height, channeling every bit of righteous indignation I could muster. “You’re going to tell me who ‘they’ are, or so help me, Adonis—”

  “There’s no need to threaten me.” Adonis’s foot crossed from carpet to tile as he stepped into the kitchen, his hands in the air in a gesture of surrender. “I want to tell you everything. I’ve started to a thousand times. Last night before we. . . . On the beach, before you went off with Tantalus, after Poseidon went off on you in the club. I’ve tried, Aphrodite.”

  Not hard enough. We were rooming together, and had been with each other nearly twenty-four hours a day. He’d had dozens of opportunities. He’d just chosen not to use them.

  Oblivious to my thoughts, Adonis continued. “And even before that, I tried as hard as I could to get you to leave the ship. I stopped giving you the water the night you stopped breathing, the minute I realized stripping you of your powers would actually hurt you. I poured all the water bottles out and everything. I didn’t even know they replaced them. And Aphrodite . . .” He took a deep breath. “They knew, they knew I wasn’t giving it to you. That’s why Tantalus gave you so much last night. I know you’re mad right now, and you have every right to be, but I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I swear, if I hadn’t done what I did, they would have killed you.”

  My head spun, and I touched my hand to my forehead, trying to sort through everything he’d said. Screaming at him felt so much easier than trying to puzzle this out, but I wasn’t the only one at stake here. This information mattered. “Tantalus?” What did he have to do with this? “Adonis, who are ‘they’?” I edged away from him when he pulled the fridge open.

  “The demigods. We’re not missing.” He looked at the empty fridge, his face paling. “How many did you drink? How many were there?” Adonis looked me up and down, his eyes wide with alarm as he seemed to take in my sweaty skin and trembling limbs for the first time. “Aphrodite—”

  “Yeah, I’m probably as good as dead,” I snapped. “Do you think you could get as skilled at answering questions as you are at murder? ’Cause I asked you a few. What do you mean, the demigods aren’t missing?”

  He swallowed hard and bent to pick up the water bottle on the ground. I resisted the urge to kick him in the gut, but only because I wasn’t sure I could remain standing. “We’re being recruited. The demigods you’re looking for left of their own volition.”

  “What?”

  “When Tantalus and the others saw you charming your way on board, they got spooked, and . . .” He walked around the suite, picking up empty water bottles as he went. I could see the alarm growing in his features as he tallied the bottles. “I knew they had the weapons, okay. I didn’t want them using them on you, so I promised you weren’t a threat, and swore to keep an eye on you. They agreed to leave you alone, so long as I gave you this stuff that would strip you of your powers for a while. They didn’t want you charming them because they aren’t all immune.” Adonis pushed the empty water bottles into the trash.

  The room spun around me, and I couldn’t pull enough air into my lungs. The demigods? Really? We weren’t looking for a god or a Titan or a primordial or anything we’d ever considered to be consequential in terms of power? I thought of the charm, woven together from hundreds, hundreds of different power sources, forging an unbreakable link to the passengers.

  Alone, the demigods were nothing, but together . . .

  Especially when there were demigods like Adonis.

  He certainly can lie. Elise’s voice echoed in my thoughts. How did we miss this? How did I miss this? Gods, the Olympian Steele. I knew exactly where the rest of the weapons were. The only room I’d never finished searching. Tantalus’s.

  Assuming they aren’t in Adonis’s luggage. I’d never thought to search there, either.

  I remembered the look of horror on Elise’s face after Adonis explained we were trying to help find the missing demigods. I’m not a part of this, and you shouldn’t be either.

  “They call themselves the DAMNED. Demigods Against Major Nymphs, Elementals, and Deities.”

  “Nymphs?” Nymphs were all but extinct, and they’d never been powerful.

  Adonis shrugged. “They were mostly fishing for something to complete the acronym. ’Cause they might change things on the surface, but they know once they die. . . . Well, you know. Hades.”

  Yeah, they’d be damned all right. The Lord of the Underworld wouldn’t look too kindly upon members of a group that sought. . . . What exactly? Our extinction?

  “Where is Hades?” I asked, remembering Adonis’s offhand comment last night. Persephone could always find Hades unless they got separated by extreme circumstances, like Zeus’s lightning and an entire realm of distance. Or a bunch of bloodthirsty demigods armed with Steele? No, if Hades died, Persephone would know instantly. There wouldn’t be a reason to search.

  Adonis shrugged. “Probably with the others by now. I told you; last I heard, they were looking for Echo and Narcissus. I’m sure they’ll all be back soon.” He paled. “I’ll tell them everything.”

  Echo? Did he mean E? “Poseidon was right.” I quelled the hysterical laughter bubbling up within me. The demigods were a threat. They were working together, and they were armed; they’d tricked us. All because we were too proud to consider that we might be dealing with lesser beings. “I should have let him sink the boat.”

  Didn’t that just figure?

 
Adonis didn’t seem to have heard me, because he continued trying to explain, his voice growing desperate. “They swore it wouldn’t hurt you. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but I didn’t have a choice.”

  Gods, Poseidon was right about Adonis too—he was a professional victim. “You could have told me.” My enraged shriek echoed across the room.

  “And then what?” Adonis demanded, frustration giving way to anger. “You would have told Poseidon, and he would have killed us all the minute he realized we were armed.”

  We? Only a moment ago, he’d said they. How deep into this was he?

  Adonis backed away, moving across the tile line dividing the kitchen from the living space. “I couldn’t be responsible for anyone dying. They’re good people, just scared and angry, and they have a right to be. I . . . I didn’t want anyone to die, you included.”

  “They attacked me.” Or did he forget about the passengers wielding Olympian Steele?

  “That was an accident. You’d already left the club and they didn’t know you were coming back. Once I realized you’d left the room, I tried to warn you. I tried, but you didn’t hear me. They weren’t trying to get you, you were just in the way. They were trying to get to Poseidon.”

  “People died.”

  Adonis winced. “Do you think I’m not aware of that? I’m not on their side anymore, Aphrodite. No one was supposed to die.”

  “Except Poseidon, obviously.” I stared at Adonis in disbelief. “Like that’s somehow better?”

  “Poseidon deserves it.”

  I shook my head. “We’re an endangered species, Adonis. If any of us die, it hurts us all.”

  “I thought you weren’t a collective.”

  “That’s not what I—” Why explain anything to him? “Gods, you really hate us.” I’d known that from the get-go, but I’d had no idea how deep his hatred went.