Prologue
At exactly four o’clock on a dreary Wednesday, Ember Michaelson ran up a narrow staircase to her bedroom. Her home—if you could call it that—was crooked, yellowing, and appeared to have been dropped from the sky by a Kansas twister. It sat pathetically on a dead-end street named Shycan which every clever person in town referred to as... Shitcan.
Tears had been streaming down Ember’s face for the better part of two minutes, having been the victim of her very first heartbreak. Knowing exactly how to make herself feel better, she’d pulled her window open and shouted out into the street where a bewildered Tyler Finn—newly appointed ex-boyfriend—stood. A heart-shaped box of half-eaten chocolates clutched in his right hand.
With the naive assumption that the boy two stories below knew what he had done, Ember screamed through her open window, swearing that she would never love him or any man ever again for as long as she should live.
Little did she know, someone was listening, and not just Tyler or the twenty annoyed inhabitants of Shycan Street, but someone far more important, someone who loved a challenge.
Celebrating her twenty-ninth birthday for the 9,071st time... or was it the ten-thousandth?
Nevertheless, Aphrodite, goddess of fertility, love, and beauty drunk on happiness and wine, (red wine, not that bitter white wine Hippocrates had invented and dubbed a cure-all, he was a strange man.) had heard the lovesick declaration of a teen girl. She’d heard it clear as day, even though Dionysus had been talking her ear off for almost an hour and just couldn’t find it in himself to shut up.
For Aphrodite, a statement with such disdain for love could not go unchallenged, especially not on the day of her birth. It was time to get to work. Love could be bitter, but it could also be as sweet as wine.
