Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

  “And yet here we are,” Lore said. “Seems he doesn’t care much about what you think.”

  Belen’s expression darkened. “You are a distraction. It is a distraction. All I need to do is blame it on the gray-eyed bitch. She’s loyal to no one but herself. And once you’re dead, it disappears forever, and he can focus on what he should be doing.”

  “Which is?” Lore asked.

  Belen only smiled, then lunged.

  Lore blocked his jab with her free arm, dropping onto a knee and spinning away before he could lock her into a vulnerable, bent-forward position. She righted herself again, keeping her own weapon moving to avoid letting him get too close.

  He’d have another blade slipped into the top of his black boots, and likely another strapped to his back or other hip, but both were hidden by his hunter’s robe. She drew a breath, trying to settle the rapid rise of her pulse. The problem with knife fighting was that so much of it was grappling. There was no way to escape unscathed.

  But Lore had never been afraid of getting cut.

  “I don’t know how you slipped away the first time, but it won’t happen again,” he said. “I heard they took the little girls’ eyes first, but kept them alive long enough to hear their parents die, just so they’d know that no one would be coming to save them.”

  Lore surged toward him, slashing, forcing him to keep one hand high to protect his neck and chest. Her mind disconnected from her body, and all she was left with was the deep well of raw pain that had simmered inside her for years.

  Artery, she thought viciously, and lunged for his leg.

  It was a stupid mistake, a clumsy one. She knew it, even as her body wouldn’t listen, and kept attacking. Belen caught her arm and slammed it against his thigh, sending her blade flying through the air. Lore dove for it, but Belen tackled her with a guttural cry. He dug his knees and full weight into her lower back until she thought he would break her pelvis.

  Lore bucked, kicking and screaming. She stretched her arm toward the knife. It glinted like a claw, just beyond her fingertips.

  Belen’s weight lifted just enough for him to turn her over roughly. His chest was heaving, blood running down his arms from where she’d brutalized him. They rolled over and over, grass sticking to her face and arms as Lore grappled, struggling to pin him down. She took a chance, reaching down toward his boot to feel for a hidden knife, and found one. Gripping the hilt, she slashed it across his forehead.

  He released a choked cry—it wasn’t a deep cut, but it sent a curtain of blood down into his eyes. The distraction gave her enough time to grip his wrist and fingers, breaking his hold on his own knife. She jammed it into his left calf muscle. This time, Lore was satisfied to hear him scream.

  With a burst of strength, she flipped their positions, trapping him beneath her. Belen tried to twist enough to throw her off, but Lore had locked her legs around him and tightened their pressure on his arms. His spit flew like a rabid dog’s. Lore lifted the knife again, watching the rapid rise and fall of his chest, where his heart would be beating beneath the armor, skin, and bone.

  Lore would have driven the blade in, if it hadn’t been for that whisper of logic that slipped through the more animal part of her brain.

  Killing him won’t be enough.

  It wouldn’t. Wrath deserved to know the pain of losing family again, but killing Belen would do nothing but bring Belen glory. Kleos came through battle, and there was no greater kleos than for those who died bravely.

  There was another message she could send his father. A better one.

  “You ever heard the one about Phaethon?” she asked, leaning close to his snapping teeth. Blood covered his face like a second mask. “How he was desperate to prove his divine parentage—so desperate that he demanded to drive his father Helios’s chariot across the sky?”

  “Shut up, bitch,” Belen growled. “Shut up—”

  “He was warned he wouldn’t be able to control the chariot’s wild horses, but his hubris demanded he be able to try,” Lore continued. “Do you know what happened to him?”

  Belen hissed, trying again to rock her off him through the brute force of his body.

  “He couldn’t control them. The horses climbed too high. The earth began to grow cold as the sun god’s chariot grew too distant,” Lore said. “Zeus had to strike him down with a lightning bolt. He paid the price for his desperation and pride with his life.”

  Lore released some of the pressure around his arms; she let him think she had slipped up, that he had an opportunity. Belen’s hands rose with a tremendous scream from his chest, reaching for her—to shove her, to strangle her, she didn’t know. Half-blinded by his own blood, he didn’t see the angle of her blade until it had sliced off both of his thumbs.

  Belen howled in pain and rage.

  “You may live,” Lore sneered. “But good luck holding a blade.”

  She had cut him with a knife, but her true weapon had been the Agon itself—all its cruel realities that men like him and his father relished inflicting on others. Now he would know them himself.

  Belen would never gain kleos, not from this Agon, and likely not from any other. Maybe one day they could fit him with prosthetics and he would be back in the hunt, but he would always carry the scars of losing to her. He would know what it meant to be followed by whispers. Beaten by the Perseous girl, the last of her name. Beaten by a gutter rat who should have died years ago. Beaten.

  She had written his story for him.

  “Lore!”

  Castor stood a short distance away, his face pale with shock.

  She pushed away from Belen, rising to her feet. Her chest tightened at the way Castor was looking at her. He brought the world into sharper focus: The brightening sky as the hours tilted toward morning; the blood on her hands, arms, and jeans; the breath flaring in and out her.

  Lore saw herself through Castor’s eyes, how she must have looked half-wild to him. As if she were a monster.

  Something in her stirred, angry and frightened.

  A branch snapped and she turned back toward Belen. He was crawling, struggling to his feet. He choked on every breath, hugging his arms in tight to his chest, his hands still gushing blood.

  Castor started after him, but Lore stepped in front of him. He took stock of the cuts on her arms, half of which she hadn’t noticed or felt, and reached out to heal her. Lore resisted, not wanting to be touched just then, or to feel anything gentle.

  “Where are the others?” she asked.

  “Going back to the house. Lore, what did the Reveler say to you?” Castor asked. “What could have caused . . . this?”

  His words rankled her. “This? You mean actually doing something?”

  “Lore,” he began again, with a new intensity to his expression. “What happened? What’s going on?”

  Lore said nothing. He moved to get around her, only for her to block him again.

  “Was that Belen Kadmou?” he asked her. “Why did you let him get away?”

  Lore shifted, blocking his path for the third time.

  Castor’s expression turned from shock to anger then, in a way she’d never seen. “We could have interrogated him. Why did you let him go?”

  “He’ll make a better message than a body,” Lore said.

  Castor shook his head, releasing a sound of frustration. “Except you’re not just risking yourself by enraging Wrath,” he told her plainly. “You’re risking all of us, including Miles.”

  The trilling was back in her mind, turning the air to static in her ears. Her pulse jumped as the edges of her vision darkened. Miles . . .

  She hadn’t even thought of Miles.

  “What did the Reveler say to you?” Castor asked. “What made you so angry that you’d do this after everything you told me earlier? This isn’t who you are!”

  “Maybe it is,” she shot back.

  “No,” Castor said. “You are a good person, Melora Perseous. You’re not what they tried to make you, or even what
you tried to be for them. Neither of us is.”

  “We are exactly what they made us,” Lore said, not caring that her voice had cracked, that the words were trembling with long-held pain. “We’re monsters, Cas, not saints. And, no, killing Wrath won’t change what happened, but it’s the only thing I know how to do. It’s the only thing any of us were taught to do.”

  Her hands turned to claws against his chest, but his grip on her wrists remained light, as if daring her. The heat of him burned away the cool air and the smell of the grass. He blotted out the rest of the world. He created his own eclipse.

  “I want Wrath to suffer,” she whispered. “I want him afraid, and I want to be the one that steals the life from his body.”

  “We’ll find other ways to deal with him,” Castor said softly. “Better ways. Don’t let them take that hope from you.”

  Castor drew closer. This time Lore did step back. That seemed to alarm him more than anything else. He pulled away, giving her distance when Lore didn’t want that—when Lore wasn’t sure what she wanted.

  He closed his eyes. “Lore—”

  The way he said her name . . .

  The storm broke open inside her. Lore struck at him with her arm and he blocked, as she knew he would, leaving his center open, the way he always did.

  Anger became confusion became instinct became need—she gripped his face and pulled him down to bring his lips to hers.

  Castor went still as stone, his lips parting. He didn’t pull away. Neither did she. Her fingers slid into his thick hair, curling. “Lore—”

  She wanted him to keep saying her name that way, like it was the only word he knew.

  She was clumsy and raw and wild, but so was he. His hands covered her, the same hands that had helped her up from the ground countless times. The same hands that had lifted her up to reach higher as she climbed. The same hands she’d held as he lay dying.

  Lore didn’t want to think. She wanted to disappear into the sensation of him. Lightning wove down her spine as he groaned.

  Castor overwhelmed her until there was nothing else in the world but his lips and touch. The heat inside her rose, absorbing the feeling of his skin and turning her body soft against the hard lines of his own. His tongue stroked against hers and he drew her closer, until she felt his blatant need for her, and a heaviness settled low in her stomach in response.

  In the years they’d trained together, Lore had come to know his body as well as her own. But every part of him felt like a revelation to her now, something she needed but hadn’t known to want. They were back to sparring, trying to gain control, to drive the kiss.

  “Lore,” he murmured. “Lore—”

  Castor pulled back so suddenly it left her unsteady on her feet.

  Lore was still reaching for him, disoriented and desperate, when he held up a hand to stop her. There was something almost heartbreaking in the way he looked at her then.

  “Do that again when you mean it, Golden,” he rasped. “When it’s not to distract me.”

  He didn’t wait for her response; he set off, searching for Belen. Lore tried to catch her breath, dragging her hands back through her hair and gripping it.

  “Shit—” she breathed. “Shit.”

  She ran after him.

  Belen had crossed down and out of the park and was heading into midtown. He was moving faster than she expected—then again, the body could do amazing things under the influence of adrenaline.

  Lore and Castor followed the trail of Belen’s blood to Fifth Avenue, eerily empty without tourists shopping and a crush of New Yorkers trying to get into office buildings.

  She carefully avoided looking at Castor as they ran, too confused, too flushed with stinging embarrassment and longing at what she—they—had done. It felt like she had broken a bone and it hadn’t been reset in the right way. For a moment, she was terrified that it would feel that way between them forever. That she had done something that could never be taken back.

  Belen was a good four blocks ahead, but still staggering. His phone lit in his hands as he struggled to hold on to it.

  Castor clenched a fist until it glowed with power. He raised it, as if to send a blast of it toward the hunter, but stopped. The crackling light faded as he eased his grip.

  “What’s wrong?” Lore asked, hesitating behind him.

  “He’s too far,” Castor said. “And I—I can’t be sure I wouldn’t blow out the block.”

  He was right to worry. As they approached Rockefeller Center, several people were already heading into work, or out of it after late shifts. The massive bronze statue of Atlas, struggling with the weight of the world on his shoulders, watched them come and go.

  There was a faint whirring like bees nearby. Lore turned, spotting Belen standing directly across the street.

  “Hey, Melora,” he called, his voice ragged. “You ever heard of the one about the Stymphalian birds?”

  A drone dropped down in front of them, feathers etched into its silver wings. A small arm dropped from beneath it and released something—a device, a streak of silver—

  The air around Lore roared, exploding into a wave of pressure and heat that devoured everything in its path and dissolved the ground beneath her feet.

  Lore jumped in front of Castor. The blast slammed into her and she was flying, falling, down into the raging light.

  SOMEWHERE, JUST BEYOND THE high whine ringing in her ears, Lore heard a sound like the rushing of sand. With her next breath, she realized she was still alive, and that her back was burning.

  Lore reared up with a gasp, her back slamming into the wall of flames hovering above her. Sparks of color and light burst in her vision.

  The explosion . . .

  “Lore,” came the strained voice above her. “It’s—all right—”

  Pain flared in her, coming alive with her mind. Her palms were skinned raw, and her jeans and shirt shredded. There was a dull ache throughout her body, but it was nothing compared to her skull, which pounded like it had been cracked open.

  “What . . . ?” Her mouth was coated in dust and ash. Lore coughed, struggling to remain upright, to escape the heat billowing behind her. She couldn’t understand what she was seeing.

  Heaps of dark asphalt, the mangled yellow remains of a taxi, and blocks of concrete had fallen in a ring of destruction around her. The chaos was just outside a circle of intense, crackling light that surrounded her like a protective barrier.

  Lore craned her head back. She knew this power.

  “Cas?” she choked out.

  Castor stood hunched over her, his arms up, his palms outstretched. Above him, trying to drive down through the new god’s barrier, was a massive slab of concrete.

  It bobbed in the air, riding the blasting heat and light. It was the source of the sound she had heard before, not rushing sand. The concrete was being incinerated to a fine dust. It poured down along the edges of the barrier and piled up around it.

  “Don’t. Move,” Castor got out between gritted teeth.

  The tendons in his neck bulged with the effort of keeping his power stable. As the concrete burned away, patches of morning sky and smoke were revealed just beyond Castor’s broad shoulders. His body was taut with strain, as if he truly held the whole of the heavens on his back.

  Sweat dripped from his chin, and Lore realized her own body was drenched with it.

  The word whispered through her. God.

  Lore stared up at him, her thoughts in chaos. He met her gaze for a second, the embers of his power brighter than she’d ever seen them, then squeezed them shut, turning his face away.

  “Stay. Close.”

  The burning ring of light shrank closer to her, flickering like a flame on the verge of going out.

  Lore turned so she faced him and drew close enough to rest her cheek against his shoulder and wrap her arms around him.

  Belen.

  They shouldn’t have gone after him.

  “All of those people—” she began, ch
oking on the words.

  The explosion flared in her mind again, searing with terrible detail. The bystanders who slowed to stare at the drone. The ground erupting like a wound. Shattering glass. The bellow of metal being tortured and bent.

  Castor shook his head. “Tried—”

  The light quivered around them again, sweeping in closer.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “Are you hurt?”

  “Fine,” he promised, turning to rest his cheek against the top of her head.

  Lore forced herself to breathe in and out, hoping to steady her heart. Or was it his she felt now, beating hard and steady for the both of them?

  Alive. Somehow, he’d— Lore tried to imagine it, how he’d crossed that distance and shielded her, not just from the blast, but the fall as well. She pictured it a dozen ways, but each made less sense than the one before it.

  The sand kept slithering down the light barrier. A faraway siren wailed. Lore fixated on the familiar sound, using it to ground herself back in the moment. They needed to get out of there before any emergency services arrived.

  That fear, at least, was a tool. Lore turned it into her ballast as the terror finally released its grip on her mind.

  “Can’t.” Castor sounded pained. “Please.”

  The last few feet of the cement block broke in half over their heads, slamming into the debris around them. The protective barrier vanished like a breath in the air.

  Castor slumped forward, his arms wrapping around her, burying his face in her hair. Lore swayed, absorbing the enormous weight of him.

  “Can’t,” he began weakly.

  “Cas?” she said, her throat aching. When he didn’t respond, she gave him a hard shake. “Cas!”

  Her knees buckled, but Lore fought it, searching for a way out of the crevasse and back up onto whatever remained of the street.

  “Don’t make me drag you, big guy,” she said hoarsely.

  Lore tried to shake him again, but he was gone. For a terrifying moment, she was worried that the power she’d been so in awe of had burned out his mortal body.

  Castor’s weight was impossible, but Lore didn’t have a choice. She pulled him toward the left, where there was a more obvious, if unsteady, way up and out through the collapsed rubble.