Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

  “What do you mean?” Lore leaned toward him, staring up into the sparks of power glowing in his dark irises. Her hand opened at her side and started to rise, as if needing to smooth away the harsh lines setting into his face.

  “I couldn’t manifest a physical form.” Castor let out a dark, humorless laugh. “It turns out that I’m just as weak and useless as a god as I was as a mortal.”

  Lore frowned. Acantha had said as much during the ceremony. The estate we built for you in the mountains remained empty, your offerings untouched.

  “You are not useless,” she told him. “And you’ve never been. Not ever, no matter what anyone in this horrible bloodline told you.”

  Castor looked as if he desperately wanted to believe her.

  “I couldn’t even save my father.” He looked down at his hands. “He’s dead now, did you know that? I saw it happen—I was there, drifting between the places I used to go and the people I wanted to see.”

  “I didn’t know,” she said softly.

  “A heart attack. I watched it happen.” Castor’s hands curled into fists. “And the thing I can’t get over, the thing I can’t accept, is that I had the power to heal him. To save him. But back then . . . it was too new. At least I’ve learned how to invoke my power, but controlling it . . .”

  Lore pressed her hand to her chest. In her mind, the final image she had of her father’s body braided with the last moments she imagined for Castor’s. She had to close her eyes and breathe deeply to keep from being sick.

  “I came back for answers,” he told her, his voice as intent as his gaze. “It’s reason enough for me to stay alive. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  Lore tried to gather her thoughts as she bent down to pick up a thick leather-bound book that had tumbled off a nearby table. She caught sight of the door out of the corner of her eye and Lore stopped. Her grip on the book tightened.

  “What’s wrong?” Castor asked, coming toward her.

  “The guards,” she began. They should have heard her and Philip fighting. They should have heard her and Castor fighting. They should have heard Chiron the way he’d been carrying on. She shouldn’t have been able to land one hit on him without a bullet or blade slicing through her. “Where are they?”

  “There were never any guards, Melora,” a ragged voice said.

  Philip rose, clutching the knife in one hand and the wound on his head with the other. He advanced toward the new god.

  “I’ve always remembered you as a stupid child,” Philip continued, “but I never thought you would be foolish enough to show your face here.”

  “Funny,” Lore said, “I’ve always remembered you as an asshole, and I definitely thought you’d be foolish enough to try to kill your new god.”

  The archon spat at her. Castor took a step forward, furious.

  “Leave now,” Castor told him. “No one has to know what happened, and you’ll run no risk of the kin killer’s curse.”

  “I will gladly curse myself,” Philip told him. “I will welcome it, if it means that this bloodline will survive. You know it, as do I. You are too pathetic to bear the mantle of Apollo, and you will never have the respect of the Achillides. If I had known what would become of you, I would have spared us all and smothered you as a boy.”

  The words landed, a perfect echo of what Castor himself had said. The new god’s hands curled into fists at his side, but he didn’t deny it.

  “I will try to protect them,” Castor said.

  “Try?” Philip repeated with derision. “Try! Don’t think I don’t know that you had planned to abandon us—to leave the city and your bloodline behind. You have always been weak, but now your selfish spinelessness has shamed us all.”

  Castor flinched. Lore gripped his arm, hoping to steady him.

  “I will offer this but once,” Philip said. “I will release you from this life with a quick, clean death. You know this is the only way. Try? You will never be enough.”

  Lore gripped the book tighter, debating which soft spot on the old goat she should hit. She saw the flicker of fear in Castor’s face—the worry that what Philip was saying was right, and that he wouldn’t be enough—and settled on two strikes: throat, then loins.

  Philip lowered into a fighting stance. “I will never know how you, a dying whelp of a boy, killed an old god, but I’m certain of one thing: if I allow you to live, you will fail them, and they will all die cursing you.”

  A thin band of sunlight slashed across the carpet near Lore’s feet. She glanced down, confused, and missed the arrow as it tore through Philip’s heart.

  The old man stared at Castor, his eyes bulging as one hand came up to touch it. He was dead before he even hit the floor.

  Castor instinctively moved to catch him, but Lore swung her gaze up, toward the open skylight. Another arrow appeared in the sliver of blue and released without so much as a whisper—ripping through the air, flying straight toward the back of Castor’s neck.

  LORE LUNGED, SWINGING THE heavy book up into the arrow’s path.

  Her arms shook as they absorbed the impact of its strike. Instead of bouncing away, or catching on the leather cover, the steel head pierced through the hundreds of wafer-thin pages and tore out through the back. It hit the reinforced doorframe and finally stopped.

  The book fell from her hands.

  “Get back,” she heard Castor say. When she didn’t move, he gripped the front of her robes and spun her behind him. There was a heavy slam against the floor as someone jumped down from the skylight; it rattled the furniture and Lore’s unsteady legs.

  A voice rose like a cold night wind through trees. “Godkiller.”

  The woman—the being—looked as if she’d been carved from the darkness of a deep and ancient wild. The goddess’s blond hair was matted with leaves and caught in pale, almost snow-white clouds around her dirt-streaked face. Even dulled by mortal blood, there was a pearlescent quality to her ivory skin, as if she radiated moonlight.

  It was Artemis.

  The goddess bared her teeth, but Lore’s gaze fixed on the way her fingers were curled into claws around her compound bow. Stolen from a dead hunter, most likely.

  Chiron leaped down from the bed, growling. The goddess turned as he lunged at her, her eyes flashing. The dog suddenly stilled, as if hit by a tranquilizer dart. His body relaxed as he rolled onto his side, exposing his soft belly to her.

  “Lady of the Hunt,” Castor said, neutrally.

  Artemis gave him a baleful look as she prowled forward. Each step revealed a new, horrifying detail.

  It wasn’t dirt on the goddess’s face, but dried blood. It had doused her front, speckling the sky-blue fabric of her robes. Lore’s gaze fixed on the quiver strapped to the goddess’s back—the one held in place with a strap not of worn leather, but of braided human hair. All different colors and textures, all sticky with blood and flecks of scalp.

  Lore’s stomach churned violently.

  Artemis raised her bow. Another arrow was already notched. “You must have known that I would come for you. That I would hunt you, into the House of Hades, into the deepest depths of Tartarus, into whatever infernal darkness you hoped would hide you.”

  Without thinking, Lore put a warning hand on Castor’s shoulder and felt the muscles there tighten in response.

  “Please,” he said. “You are not my enemy, and I’m not yours. I need to ask you something. If you were there that day. If you saw what happened.”

  Lore’s gaze shot to the locked door behind them, and she knew.

  No one is coming, she thought.

  Lore began to search the room in earnest, her eyes landing on a floor mirror. She could knock the glass out of the frame, use the shards. All she needed was to get close enough to cut one of the tendons or arteries in the goddess’s leg. That would at least buy them some time to escape.

  “I’ve waited seven years for this moment,” Artemis seethed. “My brother’s death is your ruin. An evil fate is upon you no
w, Godkiller. When I am finished, there will not be enough left of your mortal corpse for the carrion birds.”

  The twins had been two halves of one soul, in a constant ebb and flow around each other, like night shifting to day, and day into night. They had jealously guarded and protected each other, rarely separating in the Agon if they could help it. Now the goddess looked as if Apollo’s death had shredded the last bit of her sanity. Her eyes blazed with the embers of her power.

  “Were you there?” Castor asked, a note of pleading in his voice. “Answer me.”

  “Leave, girl,” the goddess said, addressing Lore directly. “I have no quarrel with you. Yet.”

  Lore felt the words like cold drips on her skin. She didn’t understand why Castor hadn’t attacked the goddess yet, why he kept asking her that question.

  “Let me get her out,” Castor said, slowly walking them backward toward the door. “Like you said, you have no quarrel with her.”

  It was a horrible parody of the way they used to drill, mirroring each other’s steps. Castor reached for the goddess’s arrow, splintering the wood of the doorframe, pulling it free. As he returned his hand to his side, he twisted his wrist so that the arrowhead pointed up at his woven gold belt—to the small knife he had tucked there, against the small of his back.

  Lore drew in a deep breath, knowing exactly what he wanted. She stepped in close to him, her fingers curling around the hilt. It had absorbed the heat of his skin and now burned her fingertips.

  “You’ll choke on your own blood before I hear another word from you—”

  Castor bent forward and Lore moved faster than she ever had in her life, sliding the blade free and throwing it.

  Either because the knife was slightly bent, or because Lore was simply out of practice, the blade winged farther to the right than she’d meant for it to go. It spun toward the goddess’s arm instead of her shoulder. Artemis jerked her bow up to block it. The knife rebounded onto the floor, spinning away.

  Lore didn’t hear or see the arrow until its razor tip was hissing through the air toward her, but she was already falling, only registering the force of Castor’s shove the instant before she hit the hard floor.

  Blood ran down into her eye from where the edge of the arrow had sliced along her temple and scalp. She swiped it away against her shoulder and stood, ignoring Castor’s worried glance.

  The goddess turned back toward the bed, hissing. Her eyes fell on Chiron, who’d tried his best to squeeze his massive body beneath the bed to hide.

  “Don’t,” Castor began, “please—”

  Chiron whimpered, then yelped as if she’d pierced him with a blade. The dog went rigid, his hackles rising to spikes. He bared his fangs, and his growl rolled across the room like thunder.

  “Chiron, no,” Lore said. “No!”

  The dog barreled toward them with a sound unlike anything Lore had ever heard before. Strings of spit flew from his snout and foaming mouth. His eyes glowed gold with the goddess’s power and there was no awareness there, no understanding—just rage.

  Hunger and rage.

  LORE’S VIEW OF THE dog disappeared as Castor stepped between her and Chiron. A blast of power exploded from his outstretched hands, bleaching the air white as it raced toward Artemis.

  Lore threw an arm over her eyes, shielding them. Cement and brick splintered and the wall of the bedroom roared as it was blown out.

  Somewhere nearby, Chiron whimpered. Lore felt blindly for him, clutching his fur and drawing him closer to her, behind the protection of Castor’s body.

  As quickly as it had come, the immense light was gone. Lore lowered her arm. The room cooled around her as the power disintegrated into hot, drifting sparks.

  Castor was already at the smoldering hole in the wall, his face grave. Lore scrambled up, staggering slightly as she came to stand beside him. She leaned over the edge of the building, searching for the body.

  There was a large indentation in a dumpster’s lid where Artemis had struck it and rolled off. The goddess was on her feet again, melting back into the shadows of the side streets. Shouts rose from inside the house, chased by the screech of emergency sirens.

  “You missed,” Lore said hoarsely.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t.”

  Castor’s jaw tightened again as he turned to look down at her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, running a soft touch along the outer edge of her eye. She pulled back from him.

  “Why didn’t you just do that before?” Lore said, feeling like she was gasping for every word.

  He looked at her as if the answer was obvious. “Because Chiron was in the way.”

  The dog whined from beside the bedroom’s door, scratching and digging at it to get out.

  “Artemis will be back,” Lore said. “Generally speaking, whenever carrion birds enter the conversation it usually implies a level of certainty about the slaughter.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Lore,” he said with a sad smile. “I’m not some stag she can run to ground.” Castor gestured to the missing wall. “And at least I’ll see her coming?”

  “One, not funny.” Lore dragged a hand back through the snarled mess of her hair. “Two, that’s not what I meant.”

  The door rattled as someone pounded against it from the other side. Lore stepped in front of Castor as the locks scraped, ignoring an agonized muscle pull in her lower back, and the warning trilling in her mind.

  What are you doing? she thought, furious at herself. You can still get out if you go through the skylight.

  Athena needed her, and Lore needed Athena to stay alive. She had to find her a doctor, or some kind of off-the-books health center to treat whatever internal injuries she still had—and soon, if they wanted to catch Wrath as he emerged from hiding to strike at Castor and the other new gods.

  Cas . . . Lore stole a glance. Uncertainty clawed at her. She didn’t like the thought of leaving him, but what else could she do? Try to reason with Athena, to show her the logic of accepting help from a bitterly hated enemy? Lore would have a better chance of soothing Cerberus.

  The room’s metal blast door lifted, allowing the wooden one to open and slam against the smoldering plaster of the nearby wall. Van hovered in the doorway, his dark skin ashen and his mouth tight with worry.

  “Castor?” he called into the drifting clouds of smoke between them. Chiron pushed past his legs, finally escaping the rubble of the room. “Where are you?”

  “Here,” the new god answered.

  Van whirled toward them, dagger in hand.

  Castor held out an arm in front of her. “It’s all right, Van. It’s just Lore.”

  “Lore,” Van repeated, taking in a small breath.

  Lore saw the growing accusation in his eyes and bristled with a familiar annoyance.

  “This is not my fault,” she insisted. Then she added silently, For once.

  Van lowered the weapon. “How did you get in here?”

  “Here’s a better question,” Lore shot back. “How the hell did Artemis? Why wasn’t the skylight bricked over?”

  “Artemis?” Van looked between them, the stray arrows, the upturned furniture, and the hole in the wall. His gaze landed on the hidden door, and Philip’s body sprawled nearby. “Something tells me he didn’t die valiantly defending you from her attack . . . ?”

  “No, he did not,” Lore said. “Did no one even think to check for hidden entrances—?”

  Van held up his hand, stopping her. “While I’d love to stand around and argue, there are at least two hundred Kadmides heading this way, and half of our hunters are out searching for our dead. Castor, you need to leave. Now.”

  Lore’s pulse jumped, but her feet still wouldn’t move.

  Castor set his jaw. A shadow passed over his face, and Lore could only guess that Philip’s words were playing through his mind again. You will fail them, and they will all die cursing you.

  He might hate the Achillides, he might hate the Agon, but he
wouldn’t be Castor if he left knowing that death was coming for them and he could prevent it.

  “You don’t have anything to prove to them,” she tried.

  “I’m not going to leave,” Castor said. “It doesn’t matter what I think of them, or what they think of me. I do have a responsibility to them.”

  “Are you a complete idiot,” Lore asked seriously, “or has the smoke gone to your head?”

  “Charming as always, Melora,” Van said. “Dare I ask what you’re even doing here? You wouldn’t help him before.”

  “I came for the food,” Lore said. “You?”

  But even then, her mind was screaming at her to go.

  You need to leave before he and his serpents get here, she thought, a cold fear slipping through her. You have to get back to Athena. You have to tell her about Hermes and Artemis and Tidebringer and Wrath. . . .

  Van turned a cool, assessing look on her now. Lore fought the urge to duck away from that close scrutiny or demand to know whatever it was he was looking for. That look, and that stillness, even as a kid, had always made her feel loud, dirty, and simple.

  “She came to find out if we knew anything about another version of the origin poem, one that might explain how to win the Agon,” Castor told him. “Someone warned her that’s what Wrath is looking for.”

  “Who told you that?” Van asked.

  “That’s my business,” Lore said.

  “You haven’t heard anything about it?” Castor pressed him. Lore felt a strange sort of guilt that, even now, he was still trying to help her, to put her needs first, the way he always had.

  Van shook his head. “No . . . if—and I mean if—it exists, it could be something the Odysseides know about. They have the most in-depth archives of all the families. I’ll talk to my source there, but you need to go, Cas. Immediately.”

  Shit, Lore thought. She should have thought of the Odysseides’ archive—then again, she generally made a point to avoid thinking about the House of Odysseus at all.

  “I have a duty to help this bloodline,” Castor insisted. “I still have some sense of honor, apparently.”