Chapter Forty-Eight Aphrodite
Chapter Forty-Eight
Aphrodite
Aphrodite stared, transfixed, at the lightning crackling in the air around Zeus.
Sometimes she forgot that he was the most powerful of the gods: strong enough to split open the very sky, to gouge great canyons in the earth, to annihilate whole cities with a single blow.
And she had never seen Zeus in a rage like this.
He was glowing with a white-hot light, so bright that it hurt to look at him.
Aphrodite averted her eyes. She could feel Zeus’s power pushing against the very walls, which seemed to bend against the onslaught.
The metal shutters on the window snapped into a dozen pieces and flew out into the howling storm, glass panes shattering into jagged shards.
Rain began to hurl into the room, but so did a gust of heat—singeing Aphrodite’s skin, burning the flowers on the ground to ash.
“Hera. I cannot forgive what you did.” Zeus wasn’t shouting, but his voice ricocheted through the room like gunfire.
Hera didn’t flinch, didn’t say a word. Perhaps this was why she was queen of the gods, Aphrodite thought dazedly. She had a backbone of steel. In her own absurd way, she deserved Zeus. No other god or goddess would have dared stand up to him like this.
Aphrodite had a sneaking suspicion that if she were in Hera’s shoes, she would fall to her knees and weep for mercy.
But then, she would never be in such a position.
Hephaestus would never raise a hand against her no matter what she did.
He was powerful, yet he used his magic to build things, to make the world a better, more beautiful place. Never to hurt or intimidate.
She felt so lucky, suddenly, that Hephaestus was the god who’d found her on that long-ago beach. She shifted closer to him, wanting the reassuring bulk of his presence in the face of this earth-shattering power—
A crack of thunder burst through the room, so loud that Aphrodite’s immortal eardrums hurt from it.
“You should never have dared to touch a mortal under my protection,” Zeus shouted at his wife. “Beg my forgiveness, now.”
Insanely, Hera stood her ground. “I will not apologize for protecting our marriage. I will always fight for our life together, for our family.” She added softly, “I will always fight for us, Zeus, whether or not you give me reason to.”
Something flickered in his deep blue eyes at her words—guilt, perhaps, or regret.
But the sparks emanating from him vibrated hot and bright, eager to destroy, and the part of Zeus that loved Hera seemed to melt away before the part of him that was Zeus the Earth-Shatterer. Zeus the Thunderer. Zeus the Destroyer.
Up until the very last moment, Aphrodite thought he would stop. Surely he wouldn’t strike his wife. He was trying to scare her, to reestablish the balance of power between them, to make her bow before him. The second Hera yielded, the second she became soft and pliant and contrite, he would cease.
Just cry, Aphrodite silently willed Hera. Give him what he wants. He needs to see you brought low, needs to punish you before all of us.
But Hera stood there as calm as a statue of herself. Proud and regal until the bitter end.
For a long moment, everyone in the ballroom was utterly still—Aphrodite, Ares, Athena, Hephaestus.
Even Hermes, who lurked a few paces behind Zeus, his eyes wide.
None of them dared to breathe. They were all waiting for Zeus to stand down, even as a fork of lightning sliced through the air above his head.
This was a standoff. Hera would close her eyes, and Zeus would stop his attack—
Zeus lowered his hands to his sides in something like resignation.
But it was too late.
The vast wave of his power flooded the room, ringing in Aphrodite’s ears, shaking the air around them until she felt bruised from the force of it. There was a resounding crack, like bones shattering, like lightning gathering to strike the earth.
And then, a blur of motion beside her. Hephaestus.
Aphrodite had never seen her husband run so fast; he moved with the swiftness of Hermes, darting reflexively toward his mother. “No!” he shouted. “Father, stop!”
Before any of the rest of them could react, Hephaestus flung his body before his mother’s, intercepting the thunderbolt that leapt toward her.
A scream sliced through the air as Hephaestus shot back like a bullet from a gun. His divine body slammed through the wall of the hotel, exploding dust and fragments of wood and stone outward. Then he was in the air, buffeted by the winds as if he weighed nothing at all.
Aphrodite wasn’t aware of her own movements as she sprinted forward.
That feral scream was still echoing in her ears, and she wanted whoever was doing it to shut up, except that she was the one wailing.
Blindly, she reached the jagged hole that Hephaestus had blown in the wall.
The rain fell in stinging sheets, so thick that she could barely see. Where was her husband?
“I’ll take you down.” Ares had come to stand next to her. The last thing Aphrodite wanted right now was to touch Ares, but she nodded and let him pick her up, one arm beneath her back, the other looped beneath her knees.
Ares leapt to the grass far below, holding Aphrodite in his arms. He landed easily, without even breaking his stride, and kept running forward—a championship hurdler racing for the finish line.
When they reached the beach, he slowed, and Aphrodite squirmed from his arms. Ares let her go, and she staggered forward.
It took a moment before she recognized the bundle of clothes and limbs on the ground as Hephaestus.
He was crumpled up in the rain, his white dress shirt in sodden ribbons around his chest, where a burn mark blossomed over his heart.
His skin was black and singed and crumbling in places, as if it had already turned to ash.
Aphrodite reached out to press her palm to him, then hissed and drew it back. He was painfully hot to the touch.
“He’s burned,” she said uselessly.
Ares knelt next to her, rocking back on his heels. He was staring at Hephaestus’s legs.
The left one looked all wrong. It stuck out an odd angle, like a toy that a child had flung into a corner and abandoned there.
Aphrodite had never felt so agonizingly useless. Everything felt wet, and cold, and numb.
For so long, she had cherished her magic, her love spells and shape-shifting, her ability to read into mortals’ desires.
It all felt so cheap now, so pathetic. She would have traded every ounce of it in a heartbeat for Apollo’s ability to heal broken bones, or Ares’s strength, or Hermes’s speed.
Anything to have prevented this horrific accident.
But she hadn’t prevented it. Hephaestus had tried, by being the only one brave enough to stand up to Zeus.
And he hadn’t even used magic or strength.
All he’d done was wield his body like a shield, throw it before his mother, whom he had always adored, preventing her injury—and thereby, insuring his own.
He would have done the same thing for Aphrodite, she knew. Even after the heartless way she’d treated him.
To think that Hephaestus, the gentlest soul among them, was the one struck by Zeus’s power. It should have been Ares, or Hera, or Aphrodite. They deserved to be punished. Not her kind, gentle husband.
“I’m so sorry,” Aphrodite kept saying over and over, clasping Hephaestus’s hand. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
She was apologizing for all of it: for taking Hephaestus for granted, for waiting so long to open up to him, when he had been there for her all along.
Dimly, she was aware of the other gods coming to join her.
Hera was shouting that someone needed to find Poseidon and get him to call off the storm; Zeus sent Hermes to fetch Asclepius, the god of medicine, because this sort of injury was beyond Apollo’s abilities.
Athena and Ares stood together, staring down at their brother’s crumpled form, their faces drawn and pale.
Aphrodite wasn’t sure what condition Hephaestus would be in, if he even survived. To be hit by the full force of Zeus’s power…
She didn’t know how much time had passed before Asclepius arrived.
He was the same as ever, an old man with a white beard and kindly eyes, but those eyes were very alarmed when he took in the sight before him.
Someone—Ares, she thought—peeled Aphrodite away from Hephaestus so that Asclepius could kneel at his side.
The rain had stopped at last; the sky overhead was a bright, incongruous blue.
Aphrodite scooted away, her Carolina Herrera gown wet and stained with sand.
She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, tears streaming down her face, mixing with the streaks that the rain had left there.
All her emotions felt tangled together: anguish, guilt, regret.
Fear. But in the midst of it all, one thing was abundantly clear.
Hephaestus loved her. He always had. She had just been too preoccupied to see it.
“I promise things will change,” she whispered, watching as Asclepius bent over Hephaestus’s broken body. Hera stood nearby, weeping desperately. Zeus’s expression was a flat mask. Whatever anger or regret he felt, he kept hidden.
“I promise,” Aphrodite repeated. She willed her husband to hear her, reaching her mind toward his, though she knew he was far beyond her petty desire magic.
“Please, Hephaestus, stay alive. For our son’s sake, if not for me.
I promise you, everything will change, now that I know I love you. Please. You just have to stay alive.”