and otherwise torment her, but I didn’t think reminding Hades of that would do much good.
“Where is she?” Hades’ voice was as tight as his grip. But he didn’t look like he wanted to kill me anymore, so that was a plus.
“I don’t know. And I can’t help you find her. It’s not that I want to help him, I just don’t have a choice.”
He stared at me for a minute, the words seeming to penetrate his rage. “Can’t,” he said finally. “Why not?”
Gods can’t lie. So if a deity says they can’t do something, you better pay attention.
“He’s my father.”
I could almost see the pieces click into place in Hades’ head when shock, rage, and disgust flickered across his face in quick succession. It wasn’t directed at me. Zeus made me an abomination by creating me without an ounce of free will. Even the Titans gave their children that much.
Hades let me go and stepped backward. “Can I trust you?”
I shook my head. “But I wish you could.”
He closed his eyes. His entire body looked tense, desperate to be in motion, but something stopped him. After a minute that seemed to stretch out for all eternity, he sighed. “All right. Let’s go tell Demeter.”
“What good will that do?” I demanded, trying not to sound as hopeless as I felt. “He’s long gone from this realm. There’s no stopping him now that he has her. You know she’s going to break, and then he’ll have access to this realm and the Underworld.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
I jerked my head up. He couldn’t have just said that. Gods can’t lie but… “That’s not possible.”
Hades opened his eyes and gave me a look so dark I got chills. “I’m well aware of the rules, Aphrodite. I was one of the six who decided which rules to keep and which ones to toss when we created these realms. It’s time for them to be rewritten.”
I gulped. So long as he had a majority of the original six to push the new reality through, he could rewrite the rules of creation. All to save one girl. Demeter would side with him because she would be as desperate to save Persephone as he was, and Hades could easily coerce Hera and Hestia into doing his bidding. Their souls were at his mercy.
But there was a balance. If he tipped it too far to one side…”You could unravel the world.”
He didn’t care. I could see that in his expression before the sentence even left my mouth. One of the most powerful deities in existence was an emotional wreck who wasn’t thinking clearly.
For the first time, I realized how dangerous Persephone was. There’s a reason gods are so ambivalent about their children and that divine marriages are mostly political and not based on affection. Love is a human luxury. A being with the power to destroy everything with a word shouldn’t place more value in one individual than the entire world, but Persephone had that effect on people. Zeus looked at her and saw power he could gain. Demeter loved Persephone with all the fierceness a mother could muster, and Hades…Hades would break the world for her. She meant too much to too many people.
I had to find another way to kill Zeus.
And failing that—I hated myself for even thinking this—but remove her, and there was no threat. I’d have to kill Persephone.
Chapter VI
Persephone
Zeus grinned. “Good morning, sweetheart.”
Lashing out, I shoved him away from me and rolled out of bed, hitting the ground with a thud. I sprang to my feet. Pain washed over me, causing the room to swirl worse than a Van Gogh painting. Jaw clenched, I waited for the room to stop whipping around me, but when the room stopped spinning I discovered a whole new level of disorientation. There was no floor, no walls, no nothing. Through the trapped and hardened writhing gray mist beneath my feet, I could see a brilliant blue sky.
Swallowing hard, I took in the transparent, cavernous ceilings with a blink, keeping one eye on Zeus. How high in the air was I? Sunlight streamed through the walls of mist bathing the room in a strange gray-tinted light. This wasn’t Olympus. The majestic mountain fell to the Underworld way before my time, but this place had the same feeling of awe-inspiring power.
“Nice place, huh?” His voice was smug.
Seriously? He’d hit me with lightning and taken me to…wherever the hell I was…and now he was fishing for a compliment? “Excessive.