Extract: This Immortal Heart by Jennifer Saint
From the #1 bestselling author comes an epic story of love and war as two opposing deities find themselves drawn together against the odds. Because when Aphrodite and Ares fall in love, sparks are bound to fly . . .
PROLOGUE
The Sky shatters, and an unearthly howl rings through the air.
Ouranos, the god who spans the horizon, splits apart. The adamantine sickle, given to his treacherous son by his treacherous wife, falls to the ground. Its blade gleams with golden blood.
The essence of Ouranos, the primal root of him, has been sheared away. It sinks beneath the waves that pound the rocky shores of Cyprus.
He is unmanned. A ruined king, a devastated god.
The droplets scatter across the earth, and, where they land and mingle with the soil, the last of his children arise. Monsters born of his agony: wild giants and terrible girls.
First come the spear- wielding Gigantes, who will one day wage war against the gods who succeed Ouranos and his son. Next, the three Furies, a trio of blood- born sisters whose immortal lives will be dedicated to the unrelenting pursuit of the most brutal justice.
But the final daughter – the youngest and strongest of his offspring – will step forth not from land but from the churning froth of the sea.
Her head breaks the seething surface, then her shoulders, smooth and bare in the awful light. Her hair, the colour of a burnished sunset, clings in dripping ropes to the curves of her body, the seawater glistening on her flesh.
Behind her, the sky is a white void, hollowed out and inert.
Emptied of the divine power that had crackled through it since almost the dawn of time.
There is a humming in the earth, a thrill of anticipation, as the goddess strides forwards, the waves foaming around her thighs. The spray against the jutting rock behind her is still tinged with the gold of her father’s blood.
The water gasps at the shore, hissing over the stones of the bay. The sigh of the wind rises into a soft moan, tortured with longing, as the woman looks around her, taking in the island that is to be her first home.
Where her feet touch the ground, tiny star- shaped flowers bloom, their purple petals quivering in the air. The breeze carries the languorous sweetness of their scent, her trailing perfume, as she walks on.
The world has never seen anything so dazzling, and, even though her existence is brand new, she knows it. She can feel her power awakening in every glorious inch of her body.
Aphrodite smiles.