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Hades had to admit, though he’d always known something seething lingered beneath the surface of Hephaestus’s calm and quiet exterior, seeing it in person was another experience entirely. He understood that the god was not proud. If anything, he seemed even more devastated that he had not been able to control his anger.
“Hephaestus, you don’t really believe—”
“I believe what she says, Hades,” Hephaestus said quickly. “I have nothing else.”
Hades did not know what to say.
These two gods had loved each other for most of their immortal lives, and yet they had never managed to learn how to speak the same language.
“She should have left me long ago.”
“Do you not know the woman you married?” Hades asked. “If she wanted to leave, she would have.”
“Then her only pleasure must be my misery,” Hephaestus said.
For the second time tonight, Hades did not have a response, and the hardest part was that he could not disagree with Hephaestus. It truly did seem that Aphrodite enjoyed misery, but not for the reason her husband thought. She chose to pine after him, to love him from afar.
The irony of the Goddess of Love was not lost on him.
“Does she know your anger?” Hades asked.
“No,” Hephaestus said. “No, I cannot let her know. What if I…what if I…” He could not seem to finish his sentence.
“Do you think you will ever hurt her?”
“I am not good, Hades,” said Hephaestus. “I never have been.”
Hades wasn’t sure what the god was recalling as he spoke, but whatever the memory, it still haunted him.
“Maybe you aren’t,” said Hades. “But neither am I, and tonight, another person close to Aphrodite has been attacked. One is already dead.”
“If you do not think I am aware…” Hephaestus said, he curled his bloodied hands into fists, his knuckles white, though Hades was not certain which thing fueled his anger—the knowledge that the victim of the first attack was Adonis, Aphrodite’s favored and lover, or that it seemed she was being targeted somehow.
“Adonis was stabbed with Cronos’s scythe,” Hades said, and he pulled out the tip he’d kept in the pocket of his jacket.
He handed it to the god, who ran his thumb overthe metal. It was not smooth, the surface etched with delicate designs.
“First this and now Harmonia’s horns,” Hades said. “These people have weapons that can wound gods, Hephaestus. It’s only a matter of time before they find something that can truly kill us…and given this pattern, who do you think they will come for first?”
Hephaestus met Hades’s gaze, his eyes stormy.
“You do not have to remind me of the threat to my wife to convince me to help you, Hades,” Hephaestus said and then looked at the adamant tip again. “Who are they? These people you speak of.”
“I suspect they are Impious,” Hades said. “But in truth, I do not know. Perhaps when Harmonia wakes, she can give us clarity. I’m certain now that they have her horns, they will flaunt their victory publicly.”
When favored mortals were killed, it often hit the media, and many Impious were willing to take responsibility for those murders. They saw it as a way to prove that the gods were not as powerful as they claimed and at the very least did not care for their mortal worshippers.
But obtaining a set of horns from the head of Harmonia—the sister of an Olympian—was entirely different. It illustrated just how close an everyday mortal managed to get to a god of relative power.
It demonstrated that the gods had weaknesses.
“And where did this come from?” Hephaestus asked, holding up the end of the blade.
“I suspect Poseidon,” Hades said, relatively certain of the source. “There is one other issue at hand that makes the threat against us even more troublesome,” said Hades. “The ophiotaurus has been resurrected.”
Once again, Hephaestus met Hades’s gaze, and his fingers closed over the end of the knife. The god had not yet been born when the Titanomachy took place, but he was well aware of the implication.
“Have you found it?” he asked.
