Extraits

Les questions fusaient et je les posais les unes à la suite des autres, réalisant avec étonnement que j'étais en réalité inquiète.

Pourtant, ce devait être une bonne chose d'être immortelle ?

Mais quelque chose me perturbait. Quel intérêt allais-je trouver aux choses en sachant que tout serait toujours là pour l'éternité ? Comment vivre l'instant présent, si l'instant était éternel ? Non. Je ne voulais pas être immortelle !

There was nothing. “Would any of my jewelry be heavy enough, do you think?” I asked him, touching the complicated headdress.

His eyes darkened, and I saw a flame spike in his irises as his eyes swept over me. “Your dress would be heavy enough.”

“I am not taking my dress off,” I said, giving him a hard look. “I’m already barefoot; if we get caught I’d rather I wasn’t in my underwear.”

“Then we test it with my life,” he shrugged, and I could hear the teasing lilt in his voice.

“You’re seriously saying that your life depends on me getting naked?”

“It would appear that way.”

“Because we do not know the cost!” he roared back at me.

“Who cares? You’re a fucking god, what can they take from you? You’ve already lost your power, and the Lords can’t kill you - the Olympians wouldn’t allow it! What cost could be too high?”

“You!”

I blinked at his shouted word, the fire in his irises burning fierce with emotion. “Me?”

“You.” His voice was ragged, like the word had been torn forcibly from his throat.

“I have power over love,” she whispered. “I know when two people are attracted to one another.” Her mouth was a hard line.

“Thank you.” She didn’t mean the gratitude. I could feel her annoyance. “She made a fool of you in the last fight. I thought I would find you more rage-filled than this.” Her perfect eyebrows drew together in a frown. “Are you now a wolf without fangs or claws?”

Indignant anger leaped to life at her words, but as I opened my mouth to defend myself, a thought bore into my mind, in a voice that I was sure belonged to me, but had been absent from my brain for a very long time.

She doesn’t love you.

It was the part of me that had always known that Aphrodite didn’t love me, but that had I refused to believe because when I was under the influence of her power, the screaming insatiable restlessness was quieted, just for a while. It was the voice inside me that centuries of never getting enough, never finding the thrill, never reaching the point I knew I was destined to reach, had silenced. The voice that had been replaced by a louder one that led to an unending cycle of pushing the limits of everything around me, all other things in my life unimportant when compared to trying to reach that climax, that place where the thrill and adrenaline peaked, and bliss took over.