Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

  She kicked viciously, trying to hit his kneecaps. Somewhere in the background, she was aware of barking, of the dark blur behind her opponent snapping and lunging.

  Lore bashed her forehead against Castor’s, letting the bronze mask do its work. He groaned, blood bursting from a cut across his forehead. Castor staggered back and she tackled him, all broken nails and raw, desperate strength. His weight was impossible—suffocating as it settled over her—but he was still flesh and blood.

  She wrapped her legs around his torso and flipped him over so that she was on top. Lore brought the screwdriver to his throat, but Castor gripped the metal and pushed the tip back toward her face. His blood sizzled on the steel as it heated in his hand, turning molten gold. The scalding intensity of it was so near to her eye that it finally broke Lore out of her frenzied haze.

  Chiron was all but howling, gripping the new god’s other arm in his mouth. He didn’t seem to feel the fangs or the brute force of the massive dog. Castor’s pupils were dilated, ringed by the gold embers of his power. He was looking at her, but not seeing her, even as he tore her mask off.

  “It’s me!” Lore choked out, trying to twist away from the burning blade. “It’s me—it’s Lore!”

  The transformation that stole over the new god’s face was like the slow unfurling of a wing. Fury spread to shock, then horror.

  He released his hold on her, and Lore scrambled off him, dropping to her knees, panting. The screwdriver fell to the carpet. The smell of singed wool quickly filled the room. Lore had enough sense to kick it toward the tile in the bathroom.

  The silence that followed was almost as painful as the heat had been. For a long time, Castor did nothing but stare at her as she leaned forward over her knees, trying to gulp more air into her lungs. Her blood was still drumming in her veins.

  Chiron trotted over to her on stiff limbs, and for a moment she did nothing but press her face into the fur of his neck. The weaker part of her wanted to disappear into it.

  Finally, Lore forced herself to turn around.

  “Surprise?” she said, because Lore had never met a situation she couldn’t make even more painfully awkward.

  “I could have . . . I could have killed you,” Castor said hoarsely. “I thought . . . I was confused, and the assassin—”

  No. He would have killed her. Her arms were throbbing with the effort it had taken to hold the screwdriver back.

  “I seem to remember being the one on top, big guy,” she said.

  He closed his eyes, releasing a long breath. Castor rubbed at his forehead, which reminded Lore of how much her own hurt.

  “Should have known it was you from that first hit,” he said. “Only you would immediately go for the head. Do I want to know where you got that mask?”

  Chiron licked Lore’s chin, comforting her.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Castor said, shooting the dog a dark look. “Give the dagger a little twist, why don’t you?”

  Lore stroked the dog’s head in silent thanks, then pointed back to the bed. He lumbered off, giving Castor a wide berth.

  “Not that I didn’t enjoy almost being impaled by a screwdriver,” Castor said. “After your reaction at the fight, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again . . . but you came.”

  “Actually, I was escaping before you rudely interrupted me,” Lore said. “And, for the record, I had no idea this was your room.”

  The dog probably should have been a strong hint, but never mind that.

  “If you didn’t come to help me,” Castor said slowly, “then what are you doing here?”

  “I think I did just help you. Should we move on to the fact you just stood there while your would-be assassin fired at you?” Lore jerked a thumb back toward Philip. “I hope I don’t need to tell you who it is.”

  He sucked in a sharp breath between his teeth, eyeing the man’s crumpled form. “I didn’t . . .”

  “You didn’t what?” Lore prompted, feeling the first licks of anger on her heart. “Stand there and let him try to kill you?”

  Castor looked away. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Well, I definitely won’t if you don’t explain it,” Lore said. When he still didn’t look at her, she added, “What’s going on? Don’t tell me you just wanted to see if he would actually go through with it. We both know the kind of person he is, and you weren’t exactly building bridges with that act you put on downstairs.”

  “How much did you see?”

  “I saw enough,” Lore said, crawling toward him. “Even when you were . . . Even when you were at your sickest you kept fighting.”

  That hadn’t been the real Castor downstairs, with all his bravado. This was Castor.

  “Did . . .” she began. “Did you want him to do it?”

  His hesitance was answer enough.

  “No,” he insisted. “It was just a mistake—I wasn’t being careful.”

  Lore shook her head. “You’re always careful.”

  He rubbed at the knee he’d hit earlier. “Not lately. It feels like . . .”

  She waited for him to finish.

  “Like I’m in a body that doesn’t belong to me,” he said, finally. “I haven’t had to move . . . or feel . . . or . . .” Castor drew in another breath. “I just wasn’t sure what to do, or how to avoid killing him.”

  “Would that really have been so bad?” Lore asked.

  “During this week, when the Achillides need leadership?” he pushed back. “Without any proof of him attacking me first? There are no cameras in here. I already checked.”

  “Aren’t you their leader?” Lore asked, plainly. “Don’t they serve you, even over the archon?”

  “They never wanted me,” he said. “Not as a child, and certainly not now. Maybe I did think, just for a minute, they would be better off if Philip were to ascend. That he would—”

  Lore flinched at the rawness of Castor’s words, but he didn’t finish his thought.

  “That he would what? Become even more insufferable? Abuse even more power?” Lore pressed.

  “He’d at least be able to control it,” Castor said. “He wouldn’t . . . They would believe in him.”

  “In no world is it better for you to die and for Philip Achilleos to become a god. Tell me you understand that. That you believe you deserve to live.”

  It didn’t make sense to her—why would Castor have killed Apollo, if not for his power?

  The thought came to her suddenly. To heal himself. To be born again in a new, healthy body.

  He’d fought an aggressive form of leukemia from the time he was four years old, pushing through chemotherapy, radiation, and stem-cell transplants throughout the years. It had returned with a vengeance just before the start of the last Agon, and everyone, including Castor himself, had believed he’d die from it.

  Everyone but Lore.

  “Please stop looking at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” she said. “I’m worried. I’m trying to understand what’s happening and how this”—she gestured to him, all of him—“happened.”

  Until now, Lore had never thought about how overwhelming it might be to suddenly bear the brunt of your bloodline’s needs, or to lose the person you’d once been. Maybe that explained the heaviness she saw in him now, and the reluctance to accept what he was. But there was something else, too—something she couldn’t put a finger on.

  “What a coincidence. I’m also confused,” Castor said, dodging the opening she’d given him to explain. “How did you get in the building to begin with? They locked it down and posted men everywhere. I checked. Don’t tell me you turned yourself into a spider.”

  She made a face. “I got into the building the way I always used to.”

  “No, you didn’t,” he said, staring at her under his fringe of dark hair. “There were hunters all along the fire escape. You couldn’t have used it.”

  “Good thing I didn’t use th
e fire escape, then,” Lore said.

  “You didn’t. . . .” He sat up straighter. “You told me you used to come up the fire escape!”

  Oh, Lore thought. Right.

  She had told him that—just like she’d told him that the Furies preferred the taste of tender boy flesh and that hunter initiation involved drinking satyr piss and running naked beneath the moon.

  Not for the first time, Lore realized she’d been kind of an asshole as a child. This, however, had been the one possible exception.

  “I didn’t want you to worry,” she said gruffly.

  Castor had worried over everything—the trees in the park, stray dogs, if she’d be punished for sneaking out to see him, if the cancer would kill him, and if his father would be all right without him. This had been the one worry she could relieve him of. “It was the only way inside when you were . . . when they stopped letting me come to see you.”

  The medicine had compromised his immune system, but Lore couldn’t stand the thought of him being alone, day after day. She had always been so careful not to touch him, knowing the kind of city grime she brought in with her. Most days, she had just sat by his bed as he slept and kept watch over him with Chiron.

  He shook his head in disbelief and no small amount of horror. “That’s a four-story fall. You wouldn’t have walked away from that!”

  Lore waved her hand, turning back toward where Philip was still flat on his back, his breathing shallow.

  “You said you didn’t know who you could trust,” Lore said. “Is this what you meant?”

  “Yes.” He drew in a deep breath. “But I also just . . . wanted to see you, and warn you about Aristos—about Wrath. Van brought me to you instead of coming straight here from the Awakening in Central Park.”

  “Why?” Lore hated the ragged edge that crept into the words. “You had seven years to come find me before then. Did mortality make you feel particularly nostalgic, or were you just in the mood to ruin my night?”

  “I tried,” he said. “I tried to find you for years, but it was like you vanished. There was no trace of you left.”

  “Yeah, that was kind of by design,” Lore said, her heart giving a hard kick at the memory.

  “I thought you might be dead, but Van managed to track you down yesterday,” Castor said. “He was worried about Philip, and he thought—I thought—you might be willing to help hide me, or get me out of the city.”

  Was she wearing some kind of sign on her back that offered shelter to all immortals in peril?

  “But you’re right,” he said. “You’re right. It wasn’t fair to put that on you. I suppose I just thought—”

  “What? That we’re still friends?” she finished, before she could stop herself.

  He flinched and tried to hide it by rising to his feet. Lore stood, too, not liking the feeling of being caught in his shadow.

  “Then why did you come here?” he asked quietly. “You told me in no uncertain terms you had no desire to help me, so why risk it?”

  The question hung like a sword above her neck. Lore turned her back to him, struggling to answer that herself.

  Because you’re the only one in the world I thought I could trust.

  “Desperation,” she heard herself say, cutting the truth down to its core. Her eyes caught the glimmer of gold on the ground and, ignoring the pain in her body, she bent to pick up one of the fragments of his crown. The lie came easier than she’d expected it to. “To see if you know anything else about what Wrath’s been searching for.”

  Lore held the piece of the crown out to him, keeping her eyes on the intricately shaped laurel leaves and not his face.

  “I see,” the new god said softly. “I caught some of his movements in the years between, but I could never pinpoint what he was looking for, and neither could Van. I wish I had more of an answer for you, Golden.”

  “Don’t—” Lore forced her voice to steady. “Don’t call me that.”

  It had been stupid of her to choose it for Frankie’s ring, but it was the first thing that had sprung to mind, and Frankie had liked it too much to let her change it the next week. It was a play on the endearment her parents had used, my golden, which itself had been an ode to honey. Lore had been named for both of her grandmothers, Melitta, meaning bee, and Lora.

  “I think I know what it is,” she told him. “What he’s looking for.”

  Castor’s hand hovered alongside hers. A hint of warmth brushed her bruised knuckles a heartbeat before he did. The touch was soft, hesitant, gone almost as soon as she’d felt it.

  “What?” His eyes were on her. She couldn’t say what it was that kept her there, waiting, her hands still outstretched. But then the touch came again, the very tips of his fingers drawing down from her wrists, over the curve of her thumbs, until, finally, they hooked around the piece of the crown and Lore remembered she was supposed to let it go.

  “Another version of the origin poem,” she said. “One that explains how to win the Agon.”

  Castor’s grip noticeably tightened on the thin band of gold. She couldn’t bear the thought of looking up at his face for his reaction. “Why do you think that?”

  A rattling dread passed through Lore as the reality of her situation sank in.

  Before coming here, Lore had wanted to find the new poem for two reasons. One, because she knew Wrath was searching for it himself, and would risk venturing out of hiding for it, giving Athena the rare chance to cut him down. The second, to keep it from falling into the hands of any god, new or old, who could use it to become a true immortal with unimaginable power to crush or subjugate humanity.

  Now, it seemed, she had a third: for Castor.

  If the poem revealed the Agon could only end when a single victor emerged, it would have to be him.

  But she had already allied with another god. One who wouldn’t hesitate to kill Castor at the first opportunity.

  “Lore?” Castor prompted. “Why do you think that?”

  “It was another warning I got this morning,” Lore said. “From someone else.”

  “I’ll see if Van’s heard anything,” Castor assured her. “This will at least help focus his search.”

  When she risked a glance beneath her loose strands of hair, Castor was looking at her jaw. At the long scar that ran down her face.

  Her lungs felt like they had been wrapped in burning steel. They spasmed painfully as she took in her next breath.

  Scars, her father used to tell Lore and her sisters, are tallies of the battles you’ve survived. But Lore hadn’t earned this one; she’d been branded with it.

  “I don’t remember that one,” he said.

  She ignored the question in that.

  “I heard about your family,” Castor began. “Your parents . . . the girls . . .”

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” she said sharply. “Isn’t one of the perks of godhood that you get to stop caring about the lives of pitiful mortals outside your bloodline?”

  His jaw tightened. “Lore, I’m still Castor.”

  She shook her head with a sad laugh, even as her whole chest seemed to clench.

  “I am. I am.” The crown fragment fell to the ground again as his hands closed over her wrists, as if the touch could somehow make her understand. It seemed to spread through her blood, sparking her nerve endings, and was more than enough to prove the lie in his words.

  As if just realizing what he’d done, he released his hold on her and took a step back.

  This was Castor, but somehow it wasn’t. She only had to look at his eyes to know that for sure. He may have retained some of Castor’s genetic destiny with his looks, but he’d been . . . enhanced. The imperfections that had made him as messy a human as the rest of them had been smoothed over, and the result was devastating, in more ways than one.

  Then again, she wasn’t the Lore he had known, either.

  “I’m sorry,” Castor said, an edge of desperation in the words. “Just . . . talk to me. Why do you want to know w
hat Wrath’s plans are?” His eyes widened. “Tell me you aren’t going after him. . . .”

  Silence hung between them, dividing the distance between past and present. It was the only line in her life that Lore had no idea how to cross.

  He closed his eyes, his whole body strung tight. “Why did he have them killed?”

  Lore wondered, then, if it was possible the Kadmides had kept what she had done a secret all this time. She supposed pride might explain that, too. Sometimes, when the memories of that night surfaced and she replayed it all in her mind to punish herself, Lore took comfort in knowing how humiliating it would be for Aristos Kadmou—to all of the Kadmides—to know he had been bested by a little girl.

  “Van thought you might be with your mother’s bloodline, but no one was willing to say,” Castor said. “No one would risk the Kadmides punishing them for protecting you. But why would he come after your family in the first place?”

  They had risked it, and she’d repaid them with blood. Interesting, too, that Van’s searching hadn’t turned up that gruesome story, either.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Lore said. “Wrath wanted to finish what his grandfather started. He wanted the House of Perseus taken out of the hunt.”

  “Why wouldn’t he have ordered it before?” Castor asked. “Why wait until he ascended? Why not come and do it himself as an immortal?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” Lore said sharply. “I don’t know why he did it, okay? Because my father rejected his offer. Because my father embarrassed him. Because he just felt like it! All I know is that the Kadmides took them from me. They took everything.”

  But that wasn’t true, and she had the proof of it in front of her. They hadn’t taken Castor. The Agon had.

  Her throat thickened, but Lore wasn’t a little girl anymore. She would control her emotions. “And I thought . . . I thought you were dead, too.”

  “I’m sorry. Gods, Lore,” Castor said quietly. His voice slipped into a tone she’d never heard before, one of anger and self-contempt. “I couldn’t help you. I couldn’t help them. I couldn’t do anything, for years. Even if I had found you, you never would have known.”