Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

  “Did you hear the one about the turtle on Broadway?” he said softly, touching a finger to one of the tears.

  Lore gave up on words and kissed him.

  Castor drew in a sharp breath as her lips touched his, uncertain at first. Lore pulled back, holding his face in her hands as she studied him and his bright, burning eyes; she wondered if it would be her last kiss, or if any of that mattered when this was now, and they were here, and the growing wind was singing through their city’s streets.

  Castor wrapped an arm around her waist, carefully drawing her into the heat of his body. He ducked his head and found her mouth again, brushing her lips with his smiling ones, like a challenge.

  When had she ever refused a challenge?

  Lore kissed him again, meeting him there, pace for pace, touch for touch, until she became lost in it, rising and falling with the push and pull, the advance and retreat. She’d acted on instinct in the park, giving in to the pull of him, but this—this was intention.

  Lore had kissed others before. Almost always drunk and in the dark, letting alcohol become the barrier between her and the emotions she hadn’t wanted to feel, and the things she wanted to forget. What had happened that night in the Odysseides’ home was like a phantom tide that swept in and out of her mind, etching deeper into the sand with each return. Sometimes she could go weeks without thinking about it, sometimes days, sometimes only hours. But then it would come again: disconnection from the body she fought so hard to strengthen, the suffocating feeling of powerlessness.

  Maybe it would always be part of her, but she was learning how to move through it and reclaim herself with choice. Right now, with Castor, she didn’t feel powerless. She felt triumphant. Like everything in her body had suddenly connected and electrified.

  His lips were soft as they brushed against hers, capturing the last of her tears, but grew insistent, harder, at her urging. It wasn’t enough. She wanted to touch him everywhere, to melt into the warmth pooling low in her body that was desire, and the tender ache in her heart that was love.

  A peal of thunder finally broke them apart. Lore started to drift back, but Castor held on a moment longer, running his hands down her arms, absorbing the feeling of her skin against his.

  She pressed her face to the warm curve of his shoulder, breathing in the scent of him. Her hand trailed along his chest to the place where he’d been shot.

  “What’s going to happen to you when the Agon ends?” she whispered.

  Lore felt him smile against her skin. “You gonna miss me, Golden?”

  “Maybe I like having you around,” she said. “You’re easy on the eyes.”

  She was tempted to stay there forever, listening to the storm, imagining a different life. But as thunder broke over the sky again, Lore made a decision.

  “I’m going to the Phoenician,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

  His eyebrows rose. “The old Kadmides place? Why?”

  “Because,” Lore said. “I left something there, and it’s finally time to go pick it up.”

  “CAN’T SAY THEY DIDN’T improve the place . . .”

  Lore glanced at Castor, allowing herself a little laugh. “I got a big hit of nostalgia being up here again.”

  A day after the ill-fated meeting between her father and the Kadmides, Lore had brought Castor into the Murray Hill neighborhood to spy on the Phoenician with her. They’d climbed the fire escape of the building across the street, the exact way they had that evening. Back then, Lore hadn’t told Castor the truth of how she’d found the location—she just said that they were on their own kind of hunt.

  After the Kadmides sold the property, it looked like it had become a fitness boutique, which also closed. In the months between then and now, rats had invaded, it had been bombed out with pesticide, and now a pita restaurant was being put in. A true New York City circle of life.

  Lore looked over to Castor’s face, his striking profile outlined by the night-stained clouds. The air had taken on a warm, drowsy quality as humidity settled back over the city. If it hadn’t been for the reek of stale water and rot, she might have felt like she was dreaming.

  The floodwaters had been slow to recede after Tidebringer’s death. To Lore’s eye, everything was starting to look as if it had been painted with watercolors; edges were softened and colors stained darker.

  Lore pushed up from where she’d been flat on her stomach at the roof’s edge and scanned the nearby buildings one last time. It was just shy of midnight and the start of the Agon’s fifth day, but there were no New Yorkers out and about—or, it seemed, hunters.

  Castor straightened as well, letting out a soft hum of thought. His hair was curling and glossy in the damp air.

  He really was beautiful. Lore had wondered, from the moment she’d found out what he’d become, how much of the old Castor was left—as if their years apart hadn’t dismantled and remade her, too. She had asked her father once if inheriting a god’s power meant absorbing their beliefs, their personalities, and their looks.

  Power does not transform you, he’d said. It only reveals you.

  From what she had seen, immortality turned back the clock on the older hunters who claimed it, returning them to their physical prime and imbuing them with more power, more beauty, and more strength. But it couldn’t fix what was broken or missing inside them.

  The same was true for Castor, but power had only strengthened the good in his heart. Each time she met his gaze, she saw all those things she’d lost when he left her life. Things she never thought she’d have again.

  Things that would be taken from her once more at the end of the Agon.

  It was too painful to think about, so she didn’t.

  “I have to admit,” Castor said, “I’m a little sad it’s gone.”

  For a moment, Lore wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

  “The last time we were here, I imagined us older, sneaking inside the bar under all of the Kadmides’ noses and ordering a drink,” he said. “Do you remember the serpent mask they hung in the window?”

  “The one that supposedly belonged to Damen Kadmou?” Lore asked. The first new Dionysus. “Yeah, why?”

  Castor had a faint smile on his face as he said, “I imagined us stealing it to check if the stories were true and the inside was still stained with his blood.”

  “I really was a bad influence on you as a child,” Lore said.

  He winked at her. Lore flushed, turning her head away so he wouldn’t see the wash of pink spreading over her face. She lay down again beside him, her fingers brushing where his gripped the cement ledge. Castor shifted his hand, curling his pinkie finger over hers.

  “You really thought about that?” she asked quietly. “Us going together?”

  Back then, Lore had mostly thought about setting the place on fire and watching the Kadmides flee like rats from their dark booths—probably more than was strictly healthy for a child of ten.

  “Stupid, I know,” he said, “considering how little time I had. But you were like this invincible force to me, even then. You were a safe place to hide my hopes.”

  Her lips parted and her body flooded with sensation and sudden awareness. She didn’t know what to do with it, so she looked out onto the street again.

  “Come on, big guy,” Lore said, pushing up off the roof. “I just hope it’s still there.”

  They climbed down the fire escape. Lore kept herself alert, one hand on her small blade, as she crossed the street.

  The gate protecting the narrow path to the courtyard behind the old restaurant was blocked by trash bags and fallen scaffolding. Castor broke the padlock on it with ease.

  Filthy water swirled around their ankles as they trudged forward. The stench of trash instantly brought her back to this same place, seven years ago.

  Lore searched the wet ground, making her way toward the piles of construction supplies in the courtyard. Dread ran a cold knuckle across the back of her neck.

  Where is it?
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  “What’s wrong?” Castor asked.

  “The storm drain—” she began, only to notice that the water was slanting down, toward the stack of plywood lined up against the restaurant’s wall. “Can you help me? We need to move these out of the way.”

  They made quick work of it together. As they removed the last of the wood, water rushed around her feet, pouring through the rusted iron grate covering the storm drain.

  When she tried to lift the cover, it wouldn’t budge.

  “If you’re not too busy standing there looking pretty . . . ?” she said, gesturing to Castor.

  He pretended to push up his sleeves. The movement only highlighted how his shirt clung to the ridges of his shoulders and chest. A warm thread curled low in her stomach as she watched him bend over to grip the grate.

  He grunted, bracing his feet. The muscles of his arms strained as he pulled at it, until, finally, he used his power to heat the rust seal that had formed. Castor set the cover aside with a look of relief. “How did you lift this as a kid?”

  “Panic,” Lore said, crouching beside the opening. The force of the water flowing by her nearly pushed her in.

  She shifted, sitting at the edge to lower herself into the drain.

  “Wait,” Castor said, suddenly serious. “You’re actually going down?”

  It wasn’t much of a drop; the darkness made the drain pipe seem much deeper than it actually was. Water roared around her, racing down to meet the bigger drain it connected to. It was fuller than the last time she had done this, but she wasn’t afraid.

  Lore looked up, shooting a visibly worried Castor a reassuring look.

  Instead of following the path the water took, Lore went the other way, crossing through the waterfall created by the drain. There was a small alcove-like space where the drain met the wall of the restaurant’s basement. She stopped, staring at the dark garbage bag resting there, exactly where she had left it.

  There was a sound like whispering, a thousand silky voices talking over one another, urging her forward.

  Lore moved, and the world fell silent. Power seemed to burn through the bag, making her fingers spark where she touched it.

  “Lore?” Castor called.

  She shook herself out of the stupor. “I’m going to pass it up to you.”

  Lore fought the rushing water to lift it into his hands. Castor let out a small gasp of surprise as his arms locked and he nearly tipped into the drain.

  “What did you put in here with it?” he asked, struggling to draw it the rest of the way up.

  “Very funny,” Lore said, accepting Castor’s help as he hauled her out, too.

  She sat for a moment, trying to force her breathing to settle.

  “I’m serious,” Castor said, giving the shield an accusatory look. “It must weigh close to a thousand pounds. How did you lift it?”

  Lore shot him a look of disbelief, reaching over to untie the knot in the garbage bag. She pulled it down to reveal the curve of the round shield and the gold key pattern inlaid into the leather.

  Then, with another breath, she pulled at the bag until Medusa’s ferocious face glared back at them from the center of the aegis.

  I remember you, it seemed to say.

  The first time she looked upon the aegis, Lore had seen a monster made into a god’s trophy. Now, as Lore met Medusa’s sightless eyes, she only saw herself gazing back.

  Castor did not seem to be breathing. “You put Zeus’s shield in a trash bag.”

  “And hid it in a storm drain,” Lore confirmed.

  “You . . .” he began, only to let the words die off with a strangled “How?”

  “I told you,” Lore said. “I put it the one place they would never think to look—the same place I had taken it from. Well, on the other side of the wall.”

  Lore touched the edge of the aegis, feeling that same buzzing sensation move through her fingers, to her hand, to her heart.

  It was hers. How she would use it now was up to her, and her alone.

  Castor said nothing, but she felt his eyes on her all the same.

  She turned it around so the inner curve of the shield faced them. Feeling along the edge of the soft, worn leather that covered the interior, she found a small catch and pulled it away. There, just as Tidebringer had said, was the inscribed poem, written in the ancient tongue.

  Castor let out a soft gasp at the sight of it, pulling closer to read it over her shoulder.

  “It’s almost exactly the same—” she began.

  Except for the final lines.

  “So it shall be until that day,” Lore read, loosely translating them, “when one remains who is remade whole and summons me with smoke of altars to be built by conquest final and fearsome.” She glanced up at his pensive face. “What do you think that means?”

  “I have no idea,” Castor said. “But I don’t like the sound of conquest final and fearsome.”

  “Summons me . . .” Lore read again. “Athena said the aegis could be used to call down lightning. I wonder if Wrath wants to hedge his bets when it comes to summoning Zeus, and use the shield to call on him to witness whatever he has planned?”

  “Maybe,” Castor said. He drew in a long breath.

  “What is it?” Lore asked him.

  “I don’t know. . . . This has given me even more questions than I had before. I’m still stuck on whether or not there can only be one of us left alive,” Castor said. “And how can a god be ‘remade whole’ if they don’t have access to their full powers even while in their divine form? And is this act—whatever it is—something only one god can perform to win the Agon? Or do all of the surviving gods have to individually perform it to release themselves and the hunters from the Agon?”

  That last thought scorched her with the kind of blistering hope Lore hadn’t been sure she was capable of anymore. Free. All of them.

  Athena had seen the secret longing in her to be more. Lore had only ever been kidding herself when she thought she’d be able to shake off this week and return to the life she’d created. The Agon was an addiction, and only its true end would purge it from her—and not just her, but all the others who fought and killed for centuries in the search for that same more.

  Even if Castor was forced into the realm of gods and separated from her again, he would be alive. The pain of knowing what she would gain and lose made Lore feel as if she’d torn her own lungs from her chest.

  In time, she could accept it, though. She could be content knowing he was out there. . . .

  Well, maybe not content.

  “In that case, you’d think Zeus would have been a little more specific,” Lore groused.

  “Not if the Agon was meant to be more than punishment . . .” Castor said, trailing off. “Never mind. I have no idea what I’m talking about. We’ll take this back to Van and Miles. I’m sure they’ll both have thoughts.”

  She nodded.

  “You know,” Lore began, something else occurring to her. “Athena wondered if you were somehow a true god, or another god in disguise—but that would mean you were somehow borrowing Apollo’s power, and wouldn’t he have to be alive for that to be true?”

  “Artemis said something similar,” Castor said. “That I had his power, but that I was different . . . I’m limited in the same way they are, though, even in full immortal form. I don’t have all of his abilities, only the ones I’ve used.”

  She gave him a thoughtful look. “Do you think Apollo figured out the meaning of this and escaped? Maybe he did need you to help him in some way, and you can’t remember because Zeus wants all of the gods to unravel it for themselves.”

  Castor looked down at his upturned hands. “But then why do I have his power? Athena wasn’t wrong. When I call on it, it’s more like . . . dipping a hand into a warm river and pulling from it. Or . . . there’s always a candle inside me, but I can feed it with more fire if I reach for it. Am I making any sense?”

  “You are,” she reassured him. “The little shred
of good news is that we don’t have to figure all of this out right now. I think we have to focus on stopping whatever Wrath has planned. Cas, he still has to die. We can’t let him regain his immortality and come back for Van or Miles or any of the others.”

  “Athena is still a problem, too,” Castor said. “She won’t hesitate to punish you and the others.”

  Lore rubbed her forehead, trying not to imagine her family. What the goddess had done to them.

  “I can do it,” Castor said.

  “Cas—” she began.

  “I can kill them,” he insisted. “That way, no mortal can claim their powers. And if I really can’t die myself—”

  “Can we please not test that theory again?” Lore asked.

  “There’s no other choice,” he said. “When they’re gone, and the week is over, we’ll have seven years to figure out the riddle of the inscription before the start of the next hunt.”

  And seven years to figure out how to lose you forever, Lore thought, miserably.

  Castor took her hand, giving it a squeeze. “Did Athena give you any sort of indication about her plans now?”

  She shook her head. “She doesn’t even know I’m alive.”

  Thunder boomed overhead, shaking the buildings around them. Lightning traced a path across the clouds, illuminating Castor’s face.

  Lore picked up the shield, sliding her arm through its leather straps. Somehow, she knew what to do.

  She slammed a fist against the front of the shield, and the roar that burst from it was deeper than thunder—it was primordial.

  It raged through the air, bellowing through the quiet streets. She struck it again, and again, until her ears rang and she heard the call echo back to her from distant buildings. The power blazed through her. She felt invincible.

  Castor turned and turned, as if the noise was a monster to be chased. He paled as he took in the sight of the aegis again, pulling away from it. Lore drew it closer to her.

  Stop, she thought. I don’t want him to ever be afraid.

  Yes, a voice seemed to whisper back. He is not our enemy.

  He rubbed a hand against his chest as he faced her again. This time, his posture and expression relaxed.