Hades

Fury tore me up from the inside.

Persephone was missing. Cerberus was presumed dead. And the entire horde of gods believed I’d done it.

Themis stood before me, carrying a set of golden scales in her hand, with a white cloth tied around her eyes. Completely blind, she was also the Goddess of Justice.

She was cold, unmoving, and little more than a statue until the moment she handed down judgment.

I growled, looking at a glowering Demeter.

She stood before me, a regal beauty dressed in silks stained the colors of wheat, earth, and grass. Her nut-brown hair was coiled tightly about her oval face. She was not classically beautiful, but there was a sturdy handsomeness about her that had always attracted me.

Of all the gods on Olympus, I’d often thought her the most levelheaded of the bunch.

Until her daughter had turned up missing.

Rich brown eyes turned aside.

Clenching my jaw, I glanced elsewhere. My last hope had been a sign of goodwill from her.

Sneering, I stared down my arrogant brothers Zeus and Poseidon.

“It is not enough that you’ve cast me into this festering Hell; now you threaten torture! Do it, then. Do what you’ve always wanted to do anyway, brothers.”

Seeing as how a god could not be killed, the Olympians had almost created a sport of inventive ways to torture, be it being racked and laid out for the vultures to pick at my eyeballs for the next hundred years or being shut in a box and tossed into the ocean to continually drown and awaken over and over and over again.

The skies above suddenly opened with rain.

Rain in the Underworld never happened.

I glanced at Zeus and then at Poseidon (as the God of the Seas); he had the ability to control rain, too. But they both looked as puzzled as I felt.

Then Poseidon sneered, “Consort, show yourself.”

Consort?

That could only mean one thing. But Calypso never left the safety of her waters.

I sucked in a shocked breath when the droplets formed into the image of a woman more lovely than even the Goddess of Love herself. She sparkled like dew in the soft morning sun.

Hair of the softest green cascaded long and thick in waves down her back and front. She wore no clothes. And each time she shifted, I caught just a glimmer of tight, firm, rounded flesh.

As if unaware of the spectacle she’d made of herself, Calypso planted her hands on her hips and cocked her head, causing a tiny array of golden seahorses to glimmer like copper pennies in her hair.

And her eyes, when she turned them on me, burned like hottest flame.

“Your ghosts are fouling my waters, Dead Boy.”

Everyone gasped.

But not I. I was too devoid of thought to even think of uttering a sound. In all the years I’d known Calypso, two things were constant. One, she never wandered far from her home, preferring instead to live life as a water elemental rather than take on fleshy form. And two, she never spoke.

Not to those above land.

I couldn’t seem to pull my eyes away from the sheer beauty of a body I’d never quite imagined she’d possessed.

Poseidon was the first to shake the stupor off. “What are you doing here, woman?”

A long time ago, the two had been engaged.

A long, long time ago.

Around the dawn of time, to be precise.

Poseidon had called her a bitch with a heart of ice, and she’d caused a worldwide flood in return. Needless to say, the two didn’t get on.

Aphrodite curled her lip. Practically six foot, with a body built for sin, blond hair that fell past her knees, blue eyes that could rival the color of a cloudless sky, and a face that’d caused many a man to beg for death at the chance of having just one taste of her lips, she gazed calculatingly at a very naked sea goddess.

Suddenly the already sheer gown she wore turned completely translucent, and a wave of her power bowled through men and women alike. She hardly cared who worshipped her so long as they worshipped her.

I panted beneath the strain of a now raging erection, as did most of the others around me.

Even Artemis’s—the Virgin Huntress’s—eyes had gone wide, and her pupils dilated.

Calypso crossed her arms, pushing her already voluptuous mounds upward, prominently displaying them, and inclined her head as though in acknowledgement of Aphrodite’s prowess.

The Goddess of Love was a passionate, sometimes volatile woman and was known to have bouts of intense jealousy and rage when she felt in the slightest bit threatened by another.

It was a shock to see her lips twitch with what seemed more like amusement than disdain.

Turning a mercurial gaze on me, Calypso lifted a brow and tapped her foot.

“Well,” she snapped, “have you nothing to say to me?”

“Calypso, what is the meaning of this interruption?” Zeus shook himself as if coming awake after a numbed stupor, his grizzly bear–sized form intimidating to all but the main pantheon of gods.

As far as the gods went, Calypso wasn’t one of us, and that was mostly due to her hermit nature, even though her powers were equally as formidable—some even whispered superior. But instead of cowering in Zeus’s presence, she leveled her chin.

Where she’d been bristly just a moment before, now she seemed contemplative as her intelligent gaze quickly took us all in. Her moods were said to shift as quickly as the turning of the tides.

“Why is Death in chains?” she asked calmly but with a tone that brooked nothing less than immediate answers.

I couldn’t help but smirk when Zeus’s eyes bulged and his lips tightened to a razor’s edge.

Lightning cut jaggedly through the sky.

“Strike at me, and I’ll flood your hairy ass.” Heavy drops of rain punctuated her statement.

Her words were measured, even, without the slightest pause for dramatic effect, which made the threat all the more believable.

Zeus was Zeus, but even he knew not to further anger a crazy woman.

“They believe I’ve committed treason.” I finally spoke to her, my cadence as calm as hers had been.

Turning on her heel so that she faced me head on, she lifted a brow. A gentle breeze stirred the strands of hair hanging over her breasts, revealing tantalizing glimpses of shell-pink nipples. The weight of her stare felt heavy, almost oppressive. Had I been a mortal, I’d be dead now.

“And did you?”

Themis cleared her throat, looking directly in Calypso’s direction. “He is being tried now, Goddess of the Sea.”

Calypso’s laughter reminded me of the roar of waves slapping against wet sand.

“I know your methodology of justice, blindy. I am not amused.”

I couldn’t hide my grin.

I’d always thought of the seas as being deep but placid—impenetrable and at times terrifying, but also awe inspiring. I’d mistakenly attributed those traits to Calypso as well, and I could not have been more wrong. Oh, she was awe inspiring, but there was nothing placid about this woman.

She had the tongue of a shrew and a body built to inspire odes.

“You have no purpose being here,” Hera snapped, her cow eyes flashing furiously as she took a threatening step in Calypso’s direction.

The raindrops that’d been little more than an annoyance suddenly increased in strength.

It was Zeus who stopped Hera, placing a restraining hand against her chest. “Don’t,” he warned.

Poseidon’s dark-blue hair began to coil and writhe like charmed sea snakes about his head.

Calypso rolled her eyes. “Oh please, fish butt. We’ve danced this tango before.”

“Enough!” Zeus held up his hands as the skies cracked. “The worlds cannot survive another one of your spats. Put your pricks away, if you please.” He stared at both Poseidon and Calypso.

“He started it,” Calypso murmured, curling her nose in utter disgust and defiance.

Poseidon shook himself, causing a trail of hermit crabs to drop from his hair to the grassy floor and scuttle off in a mad bid to hide.

Aphrodite laughed as though wonderfully delighted by the sudden turn the day’s events had taken.

But it was Demeter’s gentle presence that calmed our moods.

“I only wish to learn of my daughter’s fate,” she whispered. “Tell us where she’s at, Hades. Where did you hide her body?”