Chapter Forty-Five Aphrodite #2
“Immune to magic?” Athena repeated, glancing from Aphrodite to Ares.
Well, apparently Athena hadn’t tried to cast any spells on Julia. She might have been the only one.
Aphrodite had tried again last night, casting her magic toward Julia in an effort to draw the woman toward Ares’s room. Just as before, it hadn’t worked.
So she’d done the next best thing, enchanting a mortal to make him want to break into Julia’s room. She’d assumed that once Julia was spooked, she would go looking for Ares. And she’d been right.
“Immune to magic?” Ares repeated. “What are you talking about?”
Hera cut in again, her voice gentle. “It’s true, Ares.
I also attempted a bit of magic on Julia—nothing serious,” she added quickly, “I just tried a bit of mending, that morning in London, when the poor thing looked so hungover after her bachelorette party. But it didn’t work.
Hermes can back me up,” she added. “He tried to enchant her too, without success.”
Hermes squirmed guiltily but nodded. Aphrodite noticed that he didn’t elaborate as to why he’d tried to enchant Julia.
Ares stared at his family, one after the other. “So you’ve all been trying to cast spells on the woman I love,” he said slowly. “The woman I proposed to, who should have been under my protection? You do know this was a direct challenge to me?”
He was right, of course. There was an implicit understanding among the gods that they would not meddle with, or enchant, one another’s mortals. Historically, when mortals were caught between two gods, those mortals were the ones who ended up hurt—or dead.
Zeus surprised them all by taking a step forward, chuckling.
“Ares, calm down. No one here has hurt Julia. Though I am surprised to hear she was impervious to magic.” He looked at Hera.
“What was the name of that young man, the one whose mother dropped him into the Styx by his heel? Wasn’t he impervious to magic, too? ”
Achilles had been impervious to harm from mortal weapons, not magic, but no one dared to correct Zeus.
There was a beat of silence; then Ares whirled back to Aphrodite. “I don’t know anything about Julia resisting magic. All I know is that you’ve made her feel unwelcome from day one. And now she’s gone!”
“I have no idea where she went,” Aphrodite insisted, which was true. “Maybe Julia had second thoughts. Maybe she had decided that forever was too long.”
At once, Aphrodite knew that she’d made a terrible mistake. She’d said something similar last night, when she’d visited Ares wearing Julia’s body.
Aphrodite had slipped out of bed, tiptoeing around Hephaestus’s slumbering form, and walked to the front desk, where a young man was dozing by the light of a candle. She’d asked for a master key—one that opened every room in the building. It had barely taken any magic at all to make him say yes.
By the time she reached Ares’s room, Aphrodite was wearing Julia’s body.
“It’s me,” she’d whispered when she slipped inside.
Ares sat up, blinking in confusion. “Julia? Are you okay?”
Aphrodite nodded. “Sorry, I just…I needed to see you. I love you.”
“I will love you forever,” Ares had replied huskily, to Aphrodite’s vast annoyance. He still planned on making this mortal woman one of them. On displacing her.
“Forever is not long enough,” Aphrodite had replied.
She’d peeled off her plain gray sweatpants and cotton T-shirt, the most casual clothes she could find in her closet, and placed his hands atop her bare breasts.
He didn’t question whether this was Julia, and why would he?
Aphrodite had matched the real Julia in every painful detail, down to the awful red nail polish on her toes.
She’d closed her eyes and tried to kiss him, but Hephaestus’s face popped into her mind.
She couldn’t go through with it.
Aphrodite had intended to make Julia walk in on them in the act, but this plan could still work, even if she didn’t actually sleep with Ares. She just needed Julia to think that she had.
First, she reached into Ares’s mind for the tangled knot of his desires. It wasn’t easy; enchanting another god required exponentially more magic than enchanting a mortal. But he was distracted, and Aphrodite was determined.
As he reached to pull off his sweatpants, she felt her magic click into place. Suddenly, he was filled with an overwhelming, all-encompassing need to rest.
He fell back against the pillows like a man drugged.
Aphrodite shifted back into her own form with a grateful sigh of relief.
The sensation of wearing Julia’s skin had been uncomfortable, like shoving her feet into a pair of shoes that didn’t quite fit.
Though she was nearly drained, Aphrodite forced the tendrils of her magic upward.
Since she still couldn’t access Julia’s desires, she’d made do with the nearest hotel employee, wandering the hall in search of a leak.
She reached into his mind, filling him with the urge to break into Julia’s room.
Then she fell back onto the pillows and closed her eyes, exhausted.
As she’d expected, Julia had come downstairs in search of Ares. Where she stumbled across the tableau that Aphrodite had so painstakingly arranged for her.
Now Ares stared at Aphrodite in utter horror. “No. It wasn’t Julia who came to my room in the middle of the night, was it? It was you.”
“You went to Ares’s room?” Hephaestus had been watching their exchange; everyone had. His features were etched with hurt. “Are you sleeping with him again?”
“No,” Aphrodite said swiftly. “It’s not like that!”
“You impersonated Julia and came to my room in the middle of the night.” Ares put his hands over his eyes and groaned. “Julia must have walked in on us! That’s why she ran off, risked her life in a deadly storm, because she thought I was cheating on her! And with you, of all people!”
All sets of eyes in the room whirled on her, angry, accusatory. But Aphrodite cared only about Hephaestus. She took a step toward him, but he flinched.
“Hephaestus, please,” she said helplessly. “This isn’t about Ares.”
“How can you say that when you’re sneaking to his room in the middle of the night?” he asked, his voice rough with hurt.
Athena laid a supportive hand on her brother’s forearm, her gray eyes flashing angrily in Aphrodite’s direction.
“You swore.” Hera’s words were as loud and angry as her husband’s thunder. “Aphrodite, you promised that you wouldn’t touch Ares again! You broke an oath!”
“I didn’t touch him!” Aphrodite exclaimed. “All I did was make him fall asleep, then climbed into the bed next to him so that Julia would see us together. Nothing happened between us.”
Hera closed her eyes as if praying for strength. “How dare you stoop to this. After everything you put this family through the last time—”
Aphrodite threw up her hands. “You should be thanking me! You’re the one who said we needed to drive Julia off using any means necessary. But once the wedding was back on, you were nowhere to be found. I stepped up and did what needed to be done!”
Athena gasped. Hephaestus stiffened. Ares went completely still, then turned slowly to his mother.
“Mother? You were behind this?”
Hera held her ground. “I will admit, I had my reservations about Julia—”
“So you collaborated with Aphrodite? Summoned a storm of this magnitude, just to keep me and Julia from getting married? Why?”
“Because that woman is all wrong for you!” Hera’s emotions, normally contained behind a stiff veneer of etiquette, had finally burst out. “Yes, I called up the storm, and I’m not going to lie, I’m glad Julia is gone! But I do not condone Aphrodite’s whoring herself out to do so!”
“Don’t talk to my wife that way.”
They all turned, having half-forgotten that Hephaestus was present. He was staring down at his shoes, pointedly refusing to meet anyone’s gaze, but his words fell like stones into the silence.
“Hephaestus,” Hera said incredulously. “You can’t honestly mean to take her back, not after she cheated on you. Again.”
Hephaestus looked up at his mother then. “This is between me and Aphrodite.”
Aphrodite blinked sudden tears from her eyes, tears of relief, at what might be a reprieve.
Thunder boomed outside, so close it sounded as though giants were out there, about to knock down this hotel with their massive fists.
But of course, giants weren’t real. There were only mortals, and the gods who resembled them, and the chaos and destruction they wrought.
The infinite ways they had found to hurt themselves and one another.
“Thank you, Hephaestus.” Aphrodite turned to him eagerly, putting a hand on his elbow. “Please, let me explain—”
He gently detached her hand from where she gripped him. His expression was shuttered, unreadable.
“I do want to talk about this, but I’m not ready,” he told her. “I need some time alone. I’m heading out to look for Julia.”
“Please, just—”
“My brother’s fiancée has gone missing in the middle of a freak storm. Isn’t anyone worried for her safety?” Hephaestus raised his voice, his words directed at all of them. “I’m going out there, and you should all join me.”
Wind rattled at the windows like an angry guest demanding to be let in. Rain drummed harder against the roof. Aphrodite barely registered any of it.
She couldn’t just stand there, helpless, and watch her husband walk away from her. Not this time.