Love Stinks, Inc., an Uncollected Anthology story by Annie Reed Page A

mortal once upon a time and Dad had fallen in love with her .
    A threat from the God of Love had been enough to scare Christopher away. Brokenhearted, Dyte had thrown a tantrum like only an immortal could, then she’d run away.
    But before she’d left, she’d tried to ruin her dad’s company.
    Out of spite.
    Which, she supposed, only proved that she really was Aphrodite’s granddaughter after all.
    But it had been so easy! Eros International, a subsidiary of CupidCo., Inc., produced the bulk of the Valentine’s Day products that made their way to store shelves throughout the world. Her dad had put Dyte in charge of Eros International because he said she had a better head for business than anyone else in the family.
    And she did.
    She also knew how to run a company into the ground. She’d made sure the chocolates in all those heart-shaped Valentine’s boxes Eros sold had been spelled to taste bad, and the stuffing in the cutesy stuffed toys spelled to smell like real skunks. She’d misprinted the Valentine’s Day cards headed for gift shops, and doubled the amount of spicy seasoning in the Valentine’s Day red-hots.
    Stores around the globe had returned the (purposefully) defective products in droves to her dad’s company. The returns were accompanied by strident demands for reimbursement of the full purchase price, and orders for new products ceased.
    By the time the detectives her dad had hired finally found her, she’d nearly succeeded in driving Eros International right out of business.
    Then she’d come up with a better way to get even with her dad: start a company of her own whose sole purpose would be to compete with all the Valentine’s Day stuff that carried her dad’s image.
    And thus Love Stinks, Inc.,had been born.
    It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.
    Her dad made a ridiculous amount of money licensing his image for all sorts of Valentine’s Day products. She hadn’t been around back in the days when mortals worshipped statues of the old gods (in god-time, she was just barely out of her teens), but her mother had told Dyte that licensing his image for profit was about as close as her dad could get to the good old days of tithes and offerings and willing virgins.
    Dyte didn’t know about tithes and offerings, and she certainly didn’t have any experience with willing virgins, but she liked the idea of creating an anti-Valentine’s Day business to produce products for people like her who didn’t have anyone to sped Valentine’s Day with. Building the company from the ground up made her feel good. The fact that her company was making enough money now that the old gods had started to take her seriously, almost like an equal instead of just her dad’s daughter, felt really good.
    Really, really good.
    Or at least it had.
    Now she felt like a fraud.
    Because she didn’t hate Valentine’s Day, not really. Except for the stupid image of baby Cupid holding a cute little bow and arrow that was printed on almost everything Valentine’s Day related (her dad looked nothing like a baby, and he wouldn’t be caught dead in a diaper), Dyte had always liked the fact that a whole day every year was devoted to love.
    Love was grand. Love was glorious. Being loved had made her feel special and important, even more important than being immortal, because for once in her life it hadn’t mattered what she was. She’d been loved for who she was.
    She missed that.
    She wanted it so much at times that her heart ached.
    And thanks to her success, she’d never get it again.

 
     
     
     
     
    2
     
    Hermes himself had delivered the missive.
    Just that morning the H Man, as he called himself these days, had breezed into her office on the tenth floor of Anti-Love Central, as her employees referred to the Love Stinksoffice building smack dab in the middle of the City Center district of Moretown Bay. He didn’t have an appointment, which flustered Dyte’s assistant Stewart more than usual, but little