This Immortal Heart: A Novel of Aphrodite(70)

“You said he’d agree to your request.” Ares’ voice is silky smooth, deceptively calm.

I fold my arms across my chest. “How do you know if he has or hasn’t?”

Ares walks toward us, his strides long and measured, and stops a few paces away. “He hasn’t,” he says.

My breath hisses between my teeth.

“I told you, Aphrodite,” he says. “I knew it wouldn’t work.”

“So what are you going to do?” I ask. “Try to beat him into submission? That’s stupid. It’s not the solution.”

He’s not even looking at me. His glare is fastened on Hephaestus, his eyes cold and black, fathomless depths of yawning hunger I’ve never seen before. He could be a stranger—ancient and powerful, beautiful and terrifying, intent and unstoppable.

“Ares,” I say, “stop.”

“It looks like he won’t listen to you either,” says Hephaestus. His voice is level, but next to me his body is locked and rigid.

“I won’t make you marry me, Aphrodite,” Ares says, advancing again, step by slow step. “When I’m finished with him, and he’s let her go, I’m the only god who won’t collect that oath.” Now he looks at me, a flicker of the man I know in his face. “I’d never force you to do anything you don’t want.”

“I don’t want this,” I say. There’s no point reminding him that what he’s suggesting is just as bad: if I don’t marry the winner, I break a Stygian oath. He’d be condemning me to exile.

“He doesn’t care,” Hephaestus says, and Ares casts him a murderous look. I swallow a scream of frustration, before trying to appeal to Ares again. “You can bring this whole volcano down on his head and you still won’t change his mind.”

“Good idea,” he breathes. Menace ripples from him; barely held wrath on the verge of breaking free. He takes another step, and another, and Hephaestus can’t help but step backward. For a second, I think that’s it, that he won’t break the habit ingrained into him over thousands of years. Hera was right. He can’t stand up to his brother. Ares has called his bluff.

But he catches himself. He doesn’t retreat any further. Instead, he plants his feet solidly on the ground and lifts his chin, looking Ares directly in the eye.

“You’ll free our mother,” Ares says. “You’ve always been spineless when it comes to her. You know as well as I do that you can’t keep this up; it’s already destroying you inside.”

Hephaestus doesn’t flinch, but I do. The contempt that drips from Ares, his arrogance and superiority, isn’t as lacerating as the undeniable core of truth wrapped within it.

It must be agony for Hephaestus, even in his victory. It goes against everything he’s ever been. And the irony that at last he’s doing what Ares once blithely told me he should do—standing up to Zeus and Hera, refusing to give way—makes it all the more unbearable that it’s Ares who is taking him apart, piece by piece, for doing it.

“Why would you think it’s destroying me?” Hephaestus says. “Don’t you think I enjoy seeing them floundering? Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t care enough about them for it to give me any satisfaction,” says Ares.

Hephaestus snorts. “You care enough to come here. Nothing else would have brought you to my home.”

“I’m not here for them.”

“Oh, you’re here for Aphrodite. But she’s told you to go. She told you not to come at all.” Hephaestus shrugs.

There’s a burning in Ares’ eyes; a wild longing about him with an edge so keen I can feel it humming in the air. “How many times,” he says, “did I hold back the worst of my impulses?” There’s a hypnotic rhythm to his words, the slither of a snake’s underbelly on the ground, a deceptive softness before the strike. “How many times did I rein myself in, walking out of Olympus so that I didn’t bring the house of the gods tumbling down to earth?”

Ares stormed from our palace so often it became legend. Evidence among the gods of his uncontrollable rage, his volatility and the danger he posed to us all. The way he describes it now makes each occasion sound like an act of preternatural self-control, a restraint that went against every one of his instincts.

“You were never with me then,” Ares goes on. “You cowered in your forge, making trinkets to please them.”

In the furnace on the back wall of the cave, the molten rock rears up, hissing. The reflection of the burning river glimmers in Hephaestus’ eyes.

“I challenged Zeus and Hera alone,” Ares is saying, “and everyone hated me for it. But I put only myself in harm’s way, not anyone else. I was never so foolish—never so selfish and blind—as this.” The contempt in his voice is devastating, but Hephaestus doesn’t bow his head, doesn’t stumble back or try to appease. Ares gets louder, the reverberations bouncing from the rock. “But now you finally decide to stand against them, and this is how you do it? With a drunken jest, a child’s trick, an act of idiocy that gives Zeus exactly what he wants?”

“It doesn’t matter to me if he gets what he wants,” Hephaestus says. “This is what I want. For the first time, I’ve done what I wanted.”