Love & War

by Kaitlin Bevis

  Adonis snorted. “Figures. You guys nearly get us killed and you’re the ones demanding answers. What did he tell you to ask?”

  “We’re just trying to understand what happened.” I infused my voice with as much sympathy as I could muster. “Jason’s put together bits and pieces, but we’d like to hear it from you. From the beginning.”

  He fell silent. His gaze snagged on one of the machines near Elise, his eyes studying the rise and fall of the numbers and lines moving across the screen as though they meant something to him. After a long moment, he cleared his throat and said, “I think Tantalus panicked when he saw Aphrodite walk on the boat.”

  “Who?” I didn’t recognize that name.

  “She’s a new goddess. I met her last year when everything went down with Zeus.”

  I nodded, shifting in my seat in a futile effort to find a comfortable position. Jason had been excited to recruit Adonis, a demigod who’d actually met most of the Pantheon. We need to know more about them, Jason insisted when I said we should be cautious. He’s not on their side. He hates the gods, almost more than I do.

  “Tantalus wanted to kill her as a precaution. And he had the weapons to do it. She didn’t deserve that.” Adonis cleared his throat. “She’s not—she’s not—evil. She’s . . .” A small smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “She’s incredible.”

  I raised an eyebrow at that. He sounded a hell of a lot more sympathetic to the gods than Jason had indicated. “Did she charm you?” Adonis should have been several generations’ immune, but the sheer affection in the way he spoke raised all the red flags I associated with charm.

  “She tried once.” He shrugged. “But this isn’t charm talking.”

  Well, then. I glanced at Elise, but she slept on, undisturbed by her boyfriend’s apparent devotion to the goddess. “Do you know why she was on the ship?”

  “The Pantheon’s known for a while now that demigods are going missing. At first, they attributed the disappearances to Zeus. But when they kept happening, Aphrodite volunteered to investigate.”

  Footsteps echoed down the hall beyond the closed, wooden door. I lowered my voice. “Why?”

  “She considers me a friend. We got pretty close back when the Pantheon joined forces to kill Zeus. When she heard demigods were going missing, I guess she got worried.” The poor guy sounded like he believed that, but the gods didn’t have much use for friends, only pawns.

  “Okay.” I worked hard to keep skepticism out of my tone. “So that’s why you volunteered to keep an eye on her.” I’d gotten that much from Tantalus’s reports, though he’d left off the bit about killing her off as a precaution. “Then what happened?”

  Adonis hesitated. When he spoke again, his words came so slow, I wondered if the painkillers the nurses gave him for his stitches were wearing off. “There was . . . something in the water designed to divert or take out her powers.” His eyes flashed. “I’m not certain to what extent it worked, but when she and Poseidon were attacked by charmed passengers, she got spooked.” He shook his head, face twisting in anger. “Those passengers died, you know. DAMNED charmed innocent people into a situation that ended in their death.”

  I closed my eyes against the accusation in his tone. Using humans like puppets hadn’t been an easy call, but how many shots at a realm ruler were we going to have? Plus, it was Poseidon. If even half the stories could be believed, the sea god was the biggest threat left to us. Before I could say a word in my defense, the door cracked open.

  “Just checking in,” the nurse said with a smile, lingering in the doorway.

  Fear sparked in me as I laid eyes on the nurse, but I forced it down. Forced my voice to a calm, even tone. “I’m almost done. Come back in ten minutes.”

  She’d been charmed to obey my every command. Not by me, of course. Charm was one of the few powers I lacked. But I still enjoyed the way the tables turned. Just not enough to subject myself to being in the same room with any of them unnecessarily.

  Adonis’s face darkened when the nurse complied. “She might need—”

  “I’ll only be another minute, and I’ll send her back in on my way out,” I promised. “Elise had nothing to do with that attack, so when did she get involved?”

  Adonis glanced at the door, then at the machines monitoring Elise. His eyes roamed over the numbers. “A bunch of gods searched the ship that night looking for the weapons and questioning the passengers,” he said, speaking fast. “Elise is immune, so she didn’t forget the search. Once she realized that Aphrodite was trying to help, she said she didn’t want anything to do with any of this.” He moved his arm to take in the whole room. “She just wanted to go home. The next morning, we docked on the island, and Tantalus started talking about gods following him. He snuck more of that stuff into Aphrodite’s drinks and charmed her into going off alone with him.”

  “He charmed her?” I leaned forward, interested. “Was that a result of the compound?”

  “Not every god is immune to charm,” Adonis reminded me. “And Aphrodite’s only been around a few years. From what I understand, it can take time to build up resistance. Happy now?” He glanced at the door, as if he could summon the nurse back just by thought.

  “Almost.” I closed my eyes, dreading the answer to this question. “What did Tantalus do to the goddess?”

  He sighed, and glanced down at Elise, moving his hand next to hers. “I wasn’t there when he got her alone, but from what I’ve gathered, nothing good. By the time I found them, there was another god there who had the teleportation rights to take Aphrodite out of the realm.”

  “Teleportation rights?” How did that work? Curiosity bubbled up within me, but I suppressed it, focusing on the more important matter at hand. “Never mind,” I said cutting off Adonis before he could answer. “What other god?”

  “Um . . . some blonde.”

  “Persephone?” I leaned forward in my chair, unable to suppress my curiosity. A couple of years ago, a famous demigod named Orpheus had returned from the Underworld and talked to every media outlet he could find about a brand-new goddess named Persephone. No one believed him, of course. But later, when tabloids linked her to some teenager from Athens, Georgia, anyone who knew anything about the gods recognized the divine look about her. Before we could find out more, the girl had disappeared. Everyone who should have known her, other students in the school her photo had surfaced from, the employees at the flower shop the tabloids claimed she worked for, had been charmed into forgetting her. All we knew was that she was new, possibly benevolent, and extremely powerful. If we could get her on our side . . .

  Adonis gave a helpless shrug. “She wasn’t at Demeter’s when I got there last year.”

  I blinked at the familiar way he referred to the realm ruler. Her name wasn’t just a word to him, it represented an actual person. Wrapping my head around that wasn’t easy. “But Aphrodite was?” When he nodded, I frowned. Two new goddesses in as many years? I’d thought the Pantheon was dwindling, not growing. “So, they just teleported away and left you?”

  “I’m pretty sure the gods have figured out that the people they were looking for weren’t disappearing involuntarily. I shouldn’t have been in any danger. Besides, one of their people went missing. Most of their focus was on that.” He glanced away from Elise for a fraction of a second. “You know anything about that?”

  “Why were you in danger in the first place?” I demanded, ignoring the ridiculous question. If he thought we were strong enough to abduct gods, I wasn’t going to shatter his delusion. “What happened? We never expected to find you guys like this.”

  “Everything kind of went crazy that night. The ship lost power. She got scared . . .” he motioned to the woman in the bed. “And went to Tantalus’s room for help. Instead, he tried to beat her to death. He was convinced she was a goddess at the time, and he thought I was work
ing with her. Hence . . .” He motioned to his swollen face. “When I came to, we were in this prison cell, and she wasn’t breathing. I tried CPR, I tried—I tried everything I could. Then Tantalus came in and started monologuing about how the gods weren’t natural and how they shouldn’t exist and how he promised some scientist a cadaver and the next thing I know, he pulls out a frickin’ spear.” Adonis glanced down at the bandage on his side. “I couldn’t stop him. I tried.”

  “I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” I murmured, my mind reeling. Tantalus had promised a scientist a cadaver? What scientist? We didn’t have scientists. “He, um, he wasn’t on the island when we picked you two up.”

  “I stabbed him. That spear could cut through metal, so I got out and—” Adonis gripped Elise’s hand in his. “He shouldn’t have been able to walk away from that.”

  “Tantalus isn’t exactly normal.” He couldn’t be killed, thanks to an immortality curse served along with a nasty side effect of crippling insanity every few years.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t see where he went. I was kind of busy trying to keep her from bleeding to death.”

  He was angry. Of course, he was angry. Swallowing hard, I backpedaled. “I never meant to imply you should have been keeping track.” Gods, I was making such a mess of this. “This whole situation is insane; we’re just trying to make sense of it. I’m sorry you two had to deal with the fall-out.” We should never have sent Tantalus recruiting. But it was kind of hard to say no to the immortal being financing our entire existence. “Really. I’m so sorry.”

  He glanced up from Elise, and the anger burning in his eyes sent a shiver up my spine. “You should be. You trapped her on a boat with a madman, you tried to poison and kill a god, you attacked a realm ruler with Steele, and you took one of their people. How did you think this was going to end? If she doesn’t pull through, if she—” He broke off.

  “She’s going to be fine,” I assured him, shaken by the rage I saw in his eyes.

  “She’d better be.”

  Chapter V

  Aphrodite

  FLASHES OF IMAGES passed through my mind. The stuff of nightmares and memories both. But just flashes. As if my brain couldn’t work up to a full-scale dream.

  “I didn’t have a choice.” Adonis’s voice echoed through my mind, pleading with me to understand as his poison scorched away my powers.

  “We just want to know what happened.” A girl’s voice, soft and sympathetic, tugged at my awareness just enough to pull me from the dreamscape with Poseidon and Persephone, but not enough to fully wake me.

  Consciousness hooked its claws into me and tried to yank me to the surface, but it was beaten back by the oblivion of medication trying desperately hard to do its job.

  “Please,” Persephone gasped as my nails dug into her chin. “Don’t do this. Stop!”

  My stomach lurched. I didn’t want to hurt her, but my hand moved of its own accord. I didn’t have a choice. Her scream echoed through the clearing and the scene shifted to Poseidon crushing me to him, his arms biting into my skin.

  I hovered, just beneath the edge of consciousness and dreams, yanked back and forth between the two as my body tried to figure out what the hell it should be doing. Machines beeped from somewhere to my left, and a strange smell burned at my nose. The pillow beneath me felt thin as cardboard and all I wanted to do was bunch it up behind me and move to a more comfortable position.

  “When I’m done!” Tantalus growled as his fist slammed into my stomach.

  “Water?” Adonis offered, bleeding to death in my arms.

  “Swear fealty.” Zeus’s words fell from my lips and Ares crumbled to dust.

  All around me, people crumbled and died as I jerked through them, like a puppet being yanked by its strings. Zeus followed, his breath hot on my neck.

  “I didn’t have a choice.” Adonis gasped, his mouth moving against mine.

  A shell of a girl carrying a small, ornate box exhaled, plunging the world into darkness and pain.

  Pain seared my side and I fought to keep back a groan. My arm moved without thought to the source of the pain, but a strange pressure on the top of my hand stilled me. An IV?

  When I tried to get up, dreams gripped me, pulling me back beneath the murky surface of wakefulness.

  A cry of pain ripped through Adonis’s throat as Ares’s spear pierced through him and into me.

  The charm forcing Ares’s hand broke, and his eyes filled with horror as he realized what he’d done.

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  A throat cleared. “I think Tantalus panicked when he saw Aphrodite walk on the boat.”

  Ares. Well, Adonis’s voice, but I was with it enough to remember that Ares had been glamoured to look and sound like Adonis. My dreams scattered in a burst of clarity. I worked to keep my breathing even, ignoring the chill of the room the thin blankets didn’t even begin to compete with. If he was giving our cover story, I needed to pay attention and stay “asleep” so I wouldn’t screw it up.

  As I listened to Ares talk, I realized with a shock that he was good at this. But then, I guessed he’d had a lot of practice at equivocation. When his hand brushed mine, I couldn’t keep my fingers from twitching against his.

  Ares faltered, voice stumbling. “Um . . . some blonde.”

  “But why were you in danger in the first place?” the girl demanded. “What happened? We never expected to find you guys like this.”

  You guys? Was Ares hurt?

  I’m going to have to ask you to stab me, I remembered Ares saying to Poseidon. Maybe seeing “Adonis” walk out of that cell uninjured while I lay half-dead on the floor would raise too many questions. Questions Ares couldn’t answer, because gods couldn’t lie. But he couldn’t heal any better than I could, thanks to the demigod’s poison. So if he’d gotten hurt—

  Ares touched my arm and I realized I’d gone rigid. I forced myself to relax. Fortunately, the girl didn’t seem to notice.

  “Everything kind of went crazy that night,” Ares explained in the understatement of the century. His arm brushed against mine again. As he spoke, I could feel tension fill the room. His voice grew taut, anger barely restrained beneath a thin layer of courtesy.

  “She’s going to be fine,” the girl assured him.

  “She’d better be.”

  The girl didn’t stick around long after that. But Ares still waited a few minutes after her footsteps faded down the hall before addressing me. “You get all that?”

  “Yeah.” My eyes fluttered open.

  I looked at the tube, secured by a piece of tight tape protruding from a slim, golden hand. Elise’s hand. The incessant beeping coming from my left accelerated. Glancing around, I tried to make some sense of the machines surrounding me, then changed my mind and settled back into the bed. Everything throbbed, blazed, or screamed with pain. “Well done.” I swallowed hard, trying to get my voice to stop rasping.

  “Thanks.” He flashed me a grin that even on Adonis’s face was all Ares. “Water?” he offered, holding out a pink plastic cup.

  I flinched.

  He closed his eyes. “I didn’t think that one through.”

  “It’s okay.” I reached for the cup and took a small sip. “Thanks. You—” My voice cracked, so I took another sip and tried again. “Stabbed—”

  Ares flinched. “I’m sorry. I’m so—”

  “Were stabbed,” I clarified, already impatient with his apologies.

  “Oh. Yeah.” Ares lifted his shirt, revealing a crisp, white bandage. “Looked worse than it was. They patched me up with a few stitches.” He hesitated. “Did you want to see . . . ?” He motioned up and down my body. “I can get a mirror.”

  “Not yet.” Tantalus had done a number on my face, I could feel that much, and the rest of me hadn’t fare
d much better. But that wasn’t why I was afraid to look. I didn’t want to see a stranger’s eyes staring back at me from my reflection.

  “You should, sooner rather than later.” Ares dropped back into the seat beside my hospital bed, and pulled it closer, lacing his fingers through mine.

  Tightening my grip on his hand, I changed the topic. “Thank you for staying with me.”

  Ares could have teleported away with Persephone and the others, but I needed help, and divine healing would do more harm than good, thanks to Adonis’s poison. By being here, Ares was putting himself at serious risk, and I wasn’t an idiot. I knew why he’d stayed.

  He gave me an easy grin. “Anytime.”

  “You didn’t have to.” I gripped the thin blanket, trying to find a way to make those words convey everything I wanted them to mean. That it wasn’t his fault. I knew what it was to be controlled, to have your hand forced, and to hurt the people you cared about most.

  He brushed a strand of hair off my face, tucking it between my ear and the pillow. “I meant what I said in that cell. Leaving you was one of the worst mistakes I’ve ever made. I don’t want to do it again, if I can help it.”

  I searched his face and found echoes of my nightmares in his eyes. “Are you okay?”

  He sputtered a surprised-sounding laugh. “Am I okay?”

  “Ar—” I caught myself before I said his name, stupidly covering the mistake with a cough that turned into a gasp.

  Ares lurched toward me. I maintained a death grip on his hand until the pain abated. Beside me, a new beep sounded and a cooling sensation spread from my hand up my veins.

  “Morphine pump,” Ares explained. “And no, I’m not okay. I’m not okay with what happened to us. I’m not okay with the fact that I hurt you.”

  “That wasn’t—”

  “I’m not okay.” He drew his hand away from me. “I’m not okay on a lot of levels. I’ll work through it. But I can’t—” He broke off, jaw working in frustration. “I hate this. I hate saying this. But . . . I meant the other thing I said back in that cell, too. I can’t—there are things I can’t separate in my head. And it’s stupid. I want to just get past it, I do. But . . . I can’t.” Exhaustion frayed his voice. “I don’t expect you to wait while I sort it all out.”