Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

  “Why? Why them and not any of the other bloodlines?”

  “Because of me,” she said. “And what I did during that last Agon.”

  Castor gave her a questioning look, waiting for her to elaborate.

  “And I thought . . . if I could stop Athena and take her out of the Agon . . . if no one could have the aegis . . .” Lore shook her head. “But the binding oath wasn’t real.”

  Castor brought her hand up, pressing a soft kiss onto her callused palm. He seemed to sink into his thoughts as his power faded around them.

  “Even if it had worked, wouldn’t you have just taken her power?” he asked finally.

  “No,” Lore said. “Not according to the stories. I think I would have had to use the blade on her, but I was . . . I was in bad shape.”

  Her hand curled at the memory.

  As her nerves jumped and her thoughts sharpened, Lore suddenly remembered the first question she should have asked.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Your phone,” he said.

  Lore stared at him, not understanding.

  “Miles did a friend . . . tracking thing?” Castor repeated, suddenly looking uncertain. “He had to accept your request. We all found one another near the brownstone after the flooding and spent most of today looking for you. Cell service was restored about a half hour ago. Van and Miles went to regroup with the Achillides and find a safe place for us to shelter.”

  And you came here, she thought, overwhelmed with gratitude. You came to find me.

  “Miles is okay?” she whispered. “You’re all okay?”

  “Everyone’s okay,” he promised.

  She lifted herself up just enough to slide the device out of her back pocket. The screen had cracked, but the message and missed-call alerts were still visible. There was a string of panicked texts from Miles.

  Are you there? Just tell us you’re ok.

  She fumbled with the phone, her hands trembling as she responded to that message with:

  am ok. text when safe.

  The responses were immediate, making the phone vibrate and sing a familiar high note.

  Ding.

  k. Will send new address to meet.

  Ding.

  Be there in 2 hours. Need to hire a boat back.

  Ding.

  What happened?

  The chimes. The sounds that she’d heard had been real, not hallucinations. But then . . .

  Had everything else been real, too?

  She looked around them, only to realize she was a few feet away from the ladder leading back up to the street. Deeper in the tunnel, in the cell, there wouldn’t have been reception.

  Castor followed her gaze down the length of the path behind them.

  “Tidebringer’s body is down there,” Lore said haltingly.

  She knew that the mortal remains would disappear at the end of the cycle, but the goddess deserved more than to be left to rot.

  He nodded, helping her to her feet. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Castor made his way down the winding tunnel, disappearing at the first turn. Lore leaned against the wall, imagining she could see the golden glow of his power as it released Tidebringer’s body to ash. Sooner than she would have expected, his footsteps were coming toward her again, splashing in what was left of the standing water.

  He shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like this. . . .”

  “I hope to never see anything like it ever again,” Lore said. “I’ll tell you everything—just not here.”

  “No arguments from me,” Castor said, starting toward the ladder. “I’ll go up first, in case anyone’s waiting. Step back—there’s still some water.”

  She tucked her dagger between her teeth. The trapdoor groaned open. Dim light and water poured in. Lore turned away, letting it fill the tunnel around her feet.

  “All clear,” Castor called down. “Ready?”

  Lore nodded, gripping the first rung until her hands stopped shaking. There was a hollow ache in her healed leg, but even that faded as she reached up for the next rung and, bit by bit, drew herself up toward Castor and the fiery sunset that crowned him.

  THE NEW ADDRESS CAME in just as they fought through the floodwaters and barriers around Central Park to cross to the west side. It was a vacant office space situated above a boarded-up clothing store, not far from Lincoln Center.

  Castor melted the lock on the door, prying it open, then sealed it shut behind them. Lore looked around. Judging by the city seal etched on its glass, it was likely being renovated to become some sort of government office. The smell of new paint and the plastic tarp covering the stairwell seemed to confirm it, even before they found the spread of empty cubicles upstairs. Toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, all papered over, was a small sitting area, complete with a table, couch, and chairs.

  Unoccupied and unguarded by security, it was a good choice—and all thanks to Miles and the access he had at his internship. She hoped he and Van would be back sooner rather than later. She needed to see with her own eyes they were both all right.

  Castor removed the plastic covering the couch, guiding Lore over to it. She sat heavily, exhausted. As night fell, and the city’s power remained off, her eyes began to adjust to the growing darkness. The new god squeezed his hand into a fist, gathering a faint glow around it.

  “Very impressive, big guy,” she told him.

  “I’m getting better at controlling it,” he told her. “I can now take it from zero to thirty instead of zero to a hundred.”

  Her smile slipped as she watched him explore the kitchen area, then disappear into a back room. When he emerged, Castor carried a five-gallon water bottle, clearly destined for a water cooler, on his shoulder and a package of brown paper towels under the other arm.

  He knelt in front of her, wetting some of the towels. Lifting Lore’s hand from her lap, his sole focus turned to wiping away the dirt and grime and blood. She hadn’t realized how cold she was until the warmth of his skin spread over her again. She tried to help him by lifting her arm as he rolled up her shirt at the shoulder, but her body wouldn’t obey her.

  For the first time in days, Lore felt safe enough to stop pretending she could keep pushing through the pain and fatigue.

  This is why, she thought. Athena had worked a slow, methodical manipulation. Each suggestion was designed to separate her from the others, who might have been able to recognize what was happening, and deepen Lore’s belief in her and her alone.

  Castor gave her a small, reassuring smile as he retrieved a new paper towel and began on her other arm, gently dabbing at the dark stains on the hand Athena had broken and he’d healed. Lore watched him, her heart full to bursting.

  The goddess wasn’t mortal, and she didn’t have a human’s understanding of the world. Emotions were nuisances to a purely rational mind, but even Athena had recognized the threat the others posed simply by being near. A person alone could be controlled, but a person loved by others would always be under their protection.

  Lore had been angry for so long—at the world, at the Agon, but most of all at herself. It wasn’t that anger was inherently good or bad. It could lend power and drive and focus, but the longer it lived inside you unchecked, the more poisonous it became.

  Even now, every fiber of her being was straining to head back down the staircase, to go out into the city with nothing but a blade and the image of the god it was meant for burning like a star in her mind. The impulse shoved at her from all sides, and her whole body shook with the effort of forcing herself to stay still.

  Castor brought a fresh towel along her neck, and there was a brief flicker of distress in his expression as he ran the cool water along the curve of her jaw. Lore wondered, for a moment, if Athena had broken it, and if the pain elsewhere in her body had been so tremendous she hadn’t noticed it.

  He gave a playful flick of water against her cheek, startling her out of her thoughts. Lore let out a faint laugh. To her surprise, he moved next to
her hair, running damp fingers back through the tangled mess of it with as much care as he could. He braided it over her shoulder, but had nothing to tie it off with.

  Finally, he turned his attention to the tear in her shirt, stiff with dried blood. The place she had driven in the blade.

  Lore loosely grasped his forearm with both hands, stilling him. “I need to apologize to you.”

  He shook his head. “Lore, really—”

  She pressed on. “I’m sorry for the way I treated you. For not immediately siding with you about searching for Artemis, even though I knew why you wanted to find her, and for not fulfilling my promise to help you find out what happened to you.”

  “It’s all right,” he said quietly.

  “No,” she interrupted. “It’s not. If there’s only one thing I’ve been certain of for most of my life, it’s that you’re always on my side. That I can always trust you.”

  She drew in a shuddering breath.

  “You said something before that I didn’t completely understand,” Lore said. “Not at the time. That the reason you needed to know how you killed Apollo was because you needed it to mean something. You needed it to be for a reason, and not just chance.”

  His fingers curled around the soft skin of her inner arm, stroking it.

  “I couldn’t recognize it in myself,” she said. “I told myself I didn’t believe in the Fates, but some part of me always hoped they did exist—that they were the reason it happened. Because otherwise, my family died as a result of a choice I made.”

  “What?” he whispered.

  “I blamed the Agon. I blamed Aristos Kadmou and the Kadmides. But it was me. It was—” Lore felt like she was carving the words from her heart. “It was my—it was my fault.”

  “No,” he began, “I know it might feel that way—”

  Lore shook her head, her throat tightening. “It was my fault, Cas. My parents came home from the Agon and told me that we were leaving the hunt. That we were leaving the city. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t understand. I thought they were weak and cowards, but—”

  Castor let out a soft noise, already knowing where her story was headed.

  “They knew that once Aristos had ascended he would punish my father for refusing him me,” Lore said. “And they knew that if he discovered that he still couldn’t use the aegis as a god, he would find a way to force us to use it for him, or give it to him of our own free will. So I thought, it doesn’t belong to him. It’s ours. It should be ours. I was so convinced that if my parents had it again, it would be enough to make them stay.”

  “You did take it,” Castor breathed, half-amazed at the thought. “You stole it.”

  She nodded, gripping his arm. Needing to hold on to something steady before the riptide of her regret and grief carried her under. “I did. I was just a stupid kid, and I wanted so badly to be fated for something bigger. For something more.”

  “That’s not stupid,” he told her. “It’s how they raised us. It’s not a thing you just get over.”

  She nodded, taking in a shuddering breath.

  “I took the aegis and I was so . . . excited. So proud.” The memory filled her with shame now. “But then I started thinking about how badly the Kadmides outnumbered us, what the punishment for theft was, how cruel Aristos Kadmou had been to my father. . . . I thought, I’ll bring it back. I’ll bring it back and they can punish me, not my father, not my mother, not Damara, not Olympia. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give them back our inheritance. So I hid it in the one place I knew they wouldn’t think to look.”

  Her whole body heaved. She forced herself to continue.

  “By then, it was morning. The Agon had been over for hours.”

  “And then you went home,” he said softly.

  “And then I went home.” Lore shook her head. “I . . . found them.”

  Her eyes burned. She pressed one hand against them. “I thought that the Kadmides must have seen security footage of me and sought permission from their new god to kill my family outside the Agon. A part of me always knew the timing didn’t line up, but I was so sure it was him—all of them. But it was her. It’s always been her.”

  “What happened isn’t your fault,” Castor said, his voice full of intent. “You were only a child. You couldn’t have known.”

  Lore began to cry, letting the tears come fast. “They must have been in so much pain. The girls would have been so scared. . . . I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m worried that one day it’s the only thing I’ll remember about them. When I lose their faces, their voices . . .”

  Everything her family owned had been destroyed, including photographs, journals, and heirlooms. There was nothing left.

  Castor leaned forward, wrapping his arms around her. She leaned into him, listening to rain patter softly down the windows.

  “I spent the last few days lying to you about taking the aegis,” Lore said. “To all of you. I told myself that as long as it was hidden, Wrath couldn’t have what he wanted—if we had found it, I would have done everything to make sure only you saw the poem. That you would be the one to win and escape the Agon. But in the end, I almost went and got it for her. That’s how much I wanted Wrath dead.”

  She looked up at him, the words trembling as they slipped from her. “Do you think they hate me?”

  Castor shook his head, pressing his lips to her temple.

  “No,” he said fiercely. “They love you. They will always love you.”

  Tears slid down her cheeks. She wanted to believe him. “I should have gotten the shield for you, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t face it.”

  The inheritance she had wanted more than anything became the weapon that destroyed her life.

  “Neither of us can change what happened,” he whispered. “I wish it had all been different. I wished that a thousand times these last seven years. But your parents wanted to leave the Agon because they wanted you to be safe. To be happy. You still have that chance. That’s what matters to them now.”

  Her grip on him tightened, and she tried not to picture her family there in the gray gloom of the Underworld, forever trapped by what she had done to them. She breathed in the scent of him and closed her eyes again, waiting for the clench of pain in her chest and skull to ease.

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned this week, it’s this,” Castor began after a while. “When we can’t change the past, the only thing left is to move forward. I need to do the same. I need to stop questioning a gift that’s let me protect the people I care about most.”

  Lore pulled back. “You deserve to know what happened to you.”

  “But what’s the point of a selfish god?” he said. “Or . . . whatever it is that I am.”

  “I don’t think you could be selfish if you tried,” Lore said.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” he said. “The truth is, I wasn’t completely honest with you either. I don’t remember how Apollo died, but I do remember the moments before it happened. Everything after that is gone, right up to the moment I woke up and realized I had no body and the life I’d known was over.”

  The pain in his voice made Lore’s chest clench.

  “I didn’t see him at first. He knew how to play with the shadows and light.” Castor drew in a breath. “I was bedridden. Barely alive at that point. Thetis House had been emptied as the hunt went on, and my father had left, just for a little while, to run an errand. I woke up and Apollo was there, standing at the end of my bed.”

  Lore’s lips parted in surprise.

  “He looked . . .” Castor’s voice trailed off. “He was covered in blood. There was a wound in his side.”

  “What did you do?” Lore asked. “You couldn’t have been armed.”

  He shook his head, turning his palms up to look at them. “I wasn’t. I asked him if he needed help.”

  Lore stared.

  “I know. It’s ridiculous to even think about. A twelve-year-old, believing he could help a god?” He let out a faint lau
gh. “I should have been terrified. All those years we’d been taught to hate them, but I saw him and I just thought, He looks sick. I saw something in him, in his face, in his eyes, that I’d seen so many times in the mirror. He was aníatos, like me.”

  Aníatos. Incurable.

  “He asked what my name was, and laughed when I told him. It was a horrible sound, like a clarion. But there was this pull to him. It was . . . It felt like all those times you’re told not to look into the sun, but something tells you to try, just once,” Castor said. “He asked why I had offered him help. I told him that he looked like he needed rest.”

  Castor finally looked up at her. “That’s all I remember. I wish it was a better story. I wish that I could tell you that I was brave and strong, and that I deserved this power, but I can’t, and even though I know I might have to let that go, the thought kills me. I would do anything to prove myself to you.”

  “You have nothing to prove to me,” Lore said. “Why would you think that?”

  Castor turned to look at her, a faint smile on his face. But his eyes blazed with power, and with that same wild, irrepressible feeling she was drowning in.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked quietly. “I wanted to be worthy of you.”

  “Worthy of me?” she began. Her words often came out too quick, too clumsy, too sharp, and she didn’t want that. Not this time. “Cas.”

  “Lore.” He kept that same soft tone. “I was born knowing how to do three things—how to breathe, how to dream, and how to love you.”

  Lore began to tremble. Her breath turned shallow, as quick and light as her pulse as it caught fire in her veins.

  How did she say this? How did anyone say this? It was like untying her armor, setting aside her blade, and exposing every soft part of herself to the world. Yet the moment he’d said it, Lore had recognized that sense of inevitability that had woven through all their moments together, old and new. How she’d been stumbling toward him, even as she pulled back against the tether between them.

  Tears dripped down her face, curling over her cheek. She had always been that girl, her feelings unbearable, her hair wind-matted as she ran through the city. But then, Castor had always been that boy who ran alongside her.