Page 115 of Ungodly Rich

“She’s your fiancée, and you didn’t even realize that she’s immune to magic?” Aphrodite snapped.

“Immune to magic?” Athena repeated, glancing from Aphrodite to Ares.

Well, apparently Athena hadn’t tried to cast any spells on Julia. She might have been the only one.

Aphrodite had tried again last night, casting her magic toward Julia in an effort to draw the woman toward Ares’s room. Just as before, it hadn’t worked.

So she’d done the next best thing, enchanting a mortal to make him want to break into Julia’s room. She’d assumed that once Julia was spooked, she would go looking for Ares. And she’d been right.

“Immune to magic?” Ares repeated. “What are you talking about?”

Hera cut in again, her voice gentle. “It’s true, Ares. I also attempted a bit of magic on Julia—nothing serious,” she added quickly, “I just tried a bit of mending, that morning in London, when the poor thing looked so hungover after her bachelorette party. But it didn’t work. Hermes can back me up,” she added. “He tried to enchant her too, without success.”

Hermes squirmed guiltily but nodded. Aphrodite noticed that he didn’t elaborate as towhyhe’d tried to enchant Julia.

Ares stared at his family, one after the other. “So you’ve all been trying to cast spells on the woman I love,” he said slowly. “The woman I proposed to, who should have been under my protection? Youdoknow this was a directchallengeto me?”

He was right, of course. There was an implicit understanding among the gods that they would not meddle with, or enchant, one another’s mortals. Historically, when mortals were caught between two gods, those mortals were the ones who ended up hurt—or dead.

Zeus surprised them all by taking a step forward, chuckling. “Ares, calm down. No one here has hurt Julia. Though I am surprised to hear she was impervious to magic.” He looked at Hera. “What was the name of that young man, the one whose mother dropped him into the Styx by his heel? Wasn’t he impervious to magic, too?”

Achilles had been impervious to harm frommortalweapons, not magic, but no one dared to correct Zeus.

There was a beat of silence; then Ares whirled back to Aphrodite. “I don’t know anything about Julia resisting magic. All I know is that you’ve made her feel unwelcome from day one. And now she’s gone!”

“I have no idea where she went,” Aphrodite insisted, which was true. “Maybe Julia had second thoughts. Maybe she had decided that forever was too long.”

At once, Aphrodite knew that she’d made a terrible mistake. She’d said something similar last night, when she’d visited Ares wearing Julia’s body.

Aphrodite had slipped out of bed, tiptoeing around Hephaestus’s slumbering form, and walked to the front desk, where a young man was dozing by the light of a candle. She’d asked for a master key—one that opened every room in the building. It had barely taken any magic at all to make him say yes.

By the time she reached Ares’s room, Aphrodite was wearing Julia’s body.

“It’s me,” she’d whispered when she slipped inside.

Ares sat up, blinking in confusion. “Julia? Are you okay?”

Aphrodite nodded. “Sorry, I just…I needed to see you. I love you.”

“I will love you forever,” Ares had replied huskily, to Aphrodite’s vast annoyance. He still planned on making this mortal woman one of them. On displacing her.

“Forever is not long enough,” Aphrodite had replied.

She’d peeled off her plain gray sweatpants and cotton T-shirt, the most casual clothes she could find in her closet, and placed his hands atop her bare breasts. He didn’t question whether this was Julia, and why would he? Aphrodite had matched the real Julia in every painful detail, down to the awful red nail polish on her toes.

She’d closed her eyes and tried to kiss him, but Hephaestus’s face popped into her mind.

She couldn’t go through with it.

Aphrodite had intended to make Julia walk in on them in the act, but this plan could still work, even if shedidn’tactually sleep with Ares. She just needed Julia to think that she had.

First, she reached into Ares’s mind for the tangled knot of his desires. It wasn’t easy; enchanting another god required exponentially more magic than enchanting a mortal. But he was distracted, and Aphrodite was determined.

As he reached to pull off his sweatpants, she felt her magic click into place. Suddenly, he was filled with an overwhelming, all-encompassing need to rest.

He fell back against the pillows like a man drugged.

Aphrodite shifted back into her own form with a grateful sigh of relief. The sensation of wearing Julia’s skin had been uncomfortable, like shoving her feet into a pair of shoes that didn’t quite fit. Though she was nearly drained, Aphrodite forced the tendrils of her magic upward. Since she still couldn’t access Julia’s desires, she’d made do with the nearest hotel employee, wandering the hall in search of a leak.