This Immortal Heart: A Novel of Aphrodite(38)

A large bird, black-feathered, swoops down to land on the wall, cocking its head at me, unimpressed. Its shoulders are hunched, its beak hooked and its eyes yellow and beady. A vulture. It holds me in its cold gaze, sizing me up, as though it knows any plans I might have to conquer this strange and silent land are futile.

I feel a pair of arms slide around me. “Come back,” he murmurs, his voice husky with sleep.

I turn around. “I wanted to see where you live,” I whisper.

“I’ll show you.” He leans down, kisses me, and, despite myself, I respond like the flowers blooming on the branch, my body melting against his. “Later,” he promises.



* * *



—

And it is later, much later, when, under the mist-veiled starlight, we hear the clash of cymbals and distant chanting from far below. The scent of roasting meat weaves through the black pillars on tendrils of sacred smoke.

“A sacrifice,” Ares says. “My people are mourning their dead.”

“You don’t mourn with them?” I ask, thinking of the sacrifice I witnessed where he walked among them. I suppose that was a celebration of victory. Maybe he feels differently about the losses.

A fire burns low in the hearth, the reflection of the flames leaping in his dark eyes, the amber light bathing his skin. I still can’t quite believe I’m in this strange and sinister place; in Ares’ bed, as though it’s not the most distant and alien place that I could be. “The dead belong to Hades. They’re gone.”

“And that’s it?”

He leans over me, cupping the side of my face in his hand. “They’re beyond both of us.”

I don’t like this melancholy thought; it’s not something I let trouble me very often. I deal in joy and hope, not morbid brooding.

“What would you do, march down to the Underworld? Make all the ghosts in his halls desire one another, cause chaos in the spirit realm?” He laughs.

“Perhaps Hades should know what it’s like.” I sit up, the idea of it a sudden flash of color, a butterfly in my mind, an antidote to the sadness of the conversation. “If I could reach him, I’d show him. I’d make him fall desperately in love with someone, a goddess of something beautiful, someone happy and sweet and full of optimism. I’d find someone who would make the God of the Dead feel alive again.”

“You could,” he says.

“If he’d ever leave the Underworld.” Since Hades took the realm of the dead, he never comes to Mount Olympus, rarely surfaces at all from his silent, gray halls. I try to change the mood to something lighter and more playful. “You know, it doesn’t seem fair that there’s one god who can withstand my power.”

“Only because you can’t get to him,” Ares says. “All the other gods know they’re at your mercy.”

I can’t resist the opportunity to flirt. “Even you?”

He pulls me back down, holding me against his chest. “What do you think?”

I trail my hand down his body, following the scattering of dark hair to his navel. “I don’t know,” I say. “You seemed fairly immune to my persuasion before.”

“I didn’t give you what you asked,” he says, and his voice sounds serious and thoughtful now. His heart beats under my cheek. “But I was far from immune.”

“Come on,” I scoff.

“You don’t believe me?” He loops my hair between his fingers, stroking it.

“I can usually tell that sort of thing,” I say. “It’s who I am, after all. It’s what I do.” And I had never detected anything in Ares but brooding hostility.

He shifts onto his side, propping himself up on one elbow and looking down into my face. “I’m usually good at keeping things hidden from the gods. All of them. That’s what I do.”

A warmth flushes through me. “What were you hiding?”

“How much I wanted to see you again.” He smiles slightly. “You didn’t think I kept coming back to Olympus for councils, did you?”

I laugh. “That, or an argument.”

“I thought you knew,” he says. “Or suspected. When you came to the sacrifice—”

“You were furious that I was there!” I remember all too well how brusque he was, how deeply unfriendly.

“Furious with myself,” he says. “For how I felt when I saw you.”

Ares here, his skin bare and golden in the firelight, is nothing like the haughty god who ordered me away from his rites. “How did you feel?” I ask.

“Like everything else faded away. There was only you.”

It makes me marvel that he could conceal it so well under his armored coldness. But there’s a ring of truth that I can’t deny. I felt the jolt between us when I touched his breastplate, when I let the delicious threat of my stoking his desire linger over him. “Why then?” I ask. “And never before?”

“I thought you were aligned with Zeus,” he says. “But when you came and asked for your mortal to be spared, when you were so angry that I wouldn’t—even after he was dead and there was nothing you could get from me, you were still so angry.”

“Ares,” I say, “gods are angry with you all the time. You must be used to it by now.”