Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

  She would be. For him. For herself.

  For Gil.

  “Ready to go?” she asked as Mel returned from the kitchen with their orders.

  “Promise me you’ll be safe,” Miles said, catching her hand before she pulled it back. “I don’t care if you need to keep fighting, I just don’t want to see you hurt.”

  Too late for that, Lore thought.

  They ducked back out into the dim light of the street, clutching their breakfasts and coffees. The storm had turned into a shroud of fine mist. New York City was one of the few places in the world that looked dirtier after it rained, but Lore loved it.

  As they made their way home, Lore decided that she would tell Miles she was going to spend the next few days traveling, even if that meant catching a bus and sleeping rough out in the woods where no one could find her.

  Right then, though, nothing sounded better than spending the rest of her Sunday morning in bed. Lore looped her arm through Miles’s as they made their way down their sleepy street, Miles humming a song she didn’t recognize. She tried not to think of anything at all.

  They were a block from the brownstone when Miles suddenly stopped, jerking her back a step.

  “What?” she asked.

  He leaned closer to the wall of Martin’s Deli, the place that had banned Lore for complaining about their shamefully stale bagels, and brushed his fingers through a smear of some dark substance. Lore pulled him back in horror.

  “Okay, I think you need a refresher on the rules of New York—one, do not take anything someone tries to pass to you in Times Square; two, do not touch mysterious substances on the ground and walls—”

  “I think it’s blood,” Miles interrupted.

  Lore’s hand fell away from him.

  He spun, searching the ground. “Holy shit. There’s so much of it. . . .”

  There was. Lore had mistaken the splattered drops on the cement for rain, but now she could make out the dark blood washing down the gutter as the storm began in earnest.

  Miles lunged forward, swinging his head around to look for the person bleeding. Lore caught him by the back of his shirt with one hand and, after passing him her food container and coffee, pulled out the pocket knife on her keychain with the other.

  “Stay behind me,” she ordered.

  It was like tracking wounded prey. The victim seemed to have been staggering, moving from support to support—a street light, a banister, a parked car. With a growing sense of dread, Lore realized they were headed in the direction of the brownstone.

  Lore’s grip on her dull blade tightened as they approached it. The bloody path turned toward their door and the cheerful flowerpots Gil had placed along the front steps.

  Miles gasped, and Lore followed his gaze.

  A woman sat with her back against the old brownstone’s stoop beside the empty trash cans. Her sky-blue robes were drenched with rain.

  Lore felt the air quicken around her, like the moment before a lightning strike.

  “Show me your hands,” Lore choked out, raising her own pathetic blade.

  The goddess’s eyes were the color of sacrificial smoke, flecks of gold glowing in the irises, drifting like embers. The only hint of suppressed divine power.

  They called her the gray-eyed goddess, but Lore understood now that it wasn’t for their color. It was because when she stared at you, the way she stared at Lore now, her true age was revealed. Wars, civilizations, monsters, death, technology, exploration—those eyes had watched millennia pass by, and measured them the way Lore would casually note the hour of the day.

  Strands of burnished-gold hair were splayed across the goddess’s face like well-earned scars. Even in her current form, she was unsettlingly flawless, her features bold and perfect in their symmetry.

  The goddess leaned back, pulling her palm away from where it had been pressed to her opposite hip. As it fell into her lap, the long, elegant fingers curled like claws.

  The hand was empty, but stained with blood.

  Lore stared, half-aware that she’d lowered her own arm.

  The goddess leaned forward, causing the tear in her side to gush with hot, reeking blood. Too big and jagged for an arrow or bullet. A blade, then. That wound had to have come from a professional.

  Her thoughts were all logic, but Lore felt like she was moving through a dream.

  “Someone clearly had your number,” Lore choked out. “Bad luck with the landing?”

  “Attend to me.”

  Lore jumped. Half-dead or not, each of the goddess’s words rang out like a sword striking a shield. They vibrated along Lore’s nerves until every hair on her body rose. It had been so long since she’d heard anyone speak such a pure form of the ancient tongue, it took her mind a moment to translate it.

  When she did, her voice was a thin whisper. “What did you say?”

  The goddess’s eyes were unfocused now, quickly losing some of their steel. There was no fear in her face as she returned her hand to her side to press against the wound, only bitter disbelief. Rancor. When she spoke again, her words were labored but the command seemed to echo across Lore’s soul.

  “Attend . . . to me . . . mortal.”

  Then gray-eyed Athena slumped to the cement, and slipped out of consciousness.

  “OH MY GOD!”

  Miles’s panicked voice pulled Lore out of her own shock. When she turned to him, his face was already illuminated by the glow of his cellphone. His hands shook as he thumbed in numbers.

  Lore tore the phone out of his hands, ending the call before it could connect.

  “What are you doing?” he cried. “She needs help! Ma’am? Ma’am, can you hear me?”

  “Stop!” Lore said sharply. “Keep your voice down!”

  “Do you know her?” Miles looked like he was about to start clawing on his face. “Oh no, the blood— I just—” He gagged, coughing into his fist.

  Lore spoke without thinking. “I— Yes. She’s like— She’s a fighter, too.”

  “She has to—” Miles gagged again. “Sorry—I just— Hospital. She needs the hospital. And the police.”

  Lore swore, her mind racing. If they brought the goddess in, the police would want to question Lore, putting her name and possibly a photo into their system. And the bloodlines always posted at least a few hunters at each hospital, in the hope a Good Samaritan might unknowingly call emergency services and deliver a god right to them. But Athena had trailed her scent and blood here for any of the bloodlines’ dogs to track, right to Lore’s sanctuary. Putting Miles at risk, and forcing Lore to do something about it.

  Lore kept her fingers pressed against the goddess’s neck, checking for a pulse. Right now, the goddess’s ichor ran as red as any human’s blood, and it was pooling around Lore’s knees and sneakers.

  Shit, she thought, feeling helpless for the first time in years. She had to bring the goddess inside. Now.

  “No police,” Lore said quickly, struggling for a reasonable excuse. “No, she’s— She doesn’t have insurance. Can you go unlock the door and help me carry her in?”

  Lore struggled to hook Athena’s arm over her neck. Even in mortal form, the goddess was over six feet tall, and as Lore and Miles quickly discovered, her body was slick from both the rain and the blood.

  They made it into the entry before dropping her onto the black-and-white-checked tile. Lore left Miles behind as she ran for the linen closet upstairs, pulling out extra sheets and towels and dropping them over the banister.

  When she came back down, Lore closed the shutters of the bay window in the front room, sealing it off like a fortress. Miles switched on the ceiling lights.

  The TV screen above the fireplace was a black mirror as Lore cleared the coffee table out of the way. Miles spread out the dark bedsheets, and Lore realized with a pang that they had been Gil’s.

  “What is going on?” Miles asked as they dragged Athena’s prone form over. “Lore—seriously, what the hell is happening?”

  The go
ddess moaned. Lore glanced toward the entry, the blood smeared there, and remembered that they had another very big problem.

  “I need you to do something,” Lore told him as she knelt down beside Athena. “I need you to go to Mr. Herrera and ask for as many containers of bleach as he has— Wait. Not the regular bleach, the oxygen bleach, unless the regular bleach is all that he has.”

  “Oxygen—what?” Miles asked helplessly.

  “Oxygen bleach, as many as he has,” Lore said. “Tell him to put it on my tab.”

  “Bodegas have tabs?” Miles asked.

  “Go,” Lore said, throwing her arm out toward the door. “And hurry.”

  Miles seemed too stunned to do anything other than what she’d asked. He jumped over the blood, gagging one last time before the door slammed shut behind him.

  The house’s usual smells of sandalwood and old books vanished beneath the hot stink of blood. Lore’s stomach gave a violent lurch as she turned the goddess onto her back. She tore the fabric of the ruined tunic, trying to get a better look at the wound. Blood spilled over her fingers.

  “Damn,” she whispered.

  The liver and kidney had been pierced. Lore knew this work; it was an expert cut by a léaina—one of the young women sent out by the bloodlines to hunt gods and bring back the wounded prey for their leader to kill.

  She pressed a towel to it, trying to stanch the flow of blood. “Wake up. Wake up!”

  Athena’s eyes rolled beneath her closed eyelids.

  Lore did the only thing she could think of. She slapped the goddess across the face.

  Her gray eyes snapped open, blinking rapidly.

  “I’d say sorry,” Lore managed. “But you deserved it.”

  The air in Lore’s lungs suddenly felt scalding. She was surprised at her fear in that moment, the flash of regret she’d had as she’d struck Athena. Years of conditioning to hate the old gods faded away as she saw the sparks of power burning in Athena’s gaze.

  You could only convince yourself something was prey until it turned around and showed you its teeth.

  The goddess let out a wet cough, her head rolling against the floor. Even in a mortal body, there was something cold, almost alien, about her appearance up close. Her body was an unnatural container. One made to be killed.

  Lore pressed her hands against her thighs, trying to stop the involuntary tremble in them. She wouldn’t kill her. She didn’t want a god’s power. She didn’t want any of this.

  “Feels bad, doesn’t it?” Lore asked, letting a wild recklessness sweep in to replace her fear. “Man, mortality. What a bummer. Dare I ask who got you?”

  This moment had been over a thousand years in the making. Athena had survived two hundred and eleven cycles of the Agon only for number two-twelve to get her.

  The honey tone of Athena’s skin paled as death found its way in. The goddess was one of the last of the originals still in the Agon, the others being Hermes and Artemis, and, maybe, Apollo. She had been an impossible target. She was too strong, too quick, too clever.

  Until now.

  They studied each other. If Athena was trying to gauge Lore’s worth, her strength, Lore would have been the first one to tell her not to bother.

  “I’m out.” There were plenty of pretty words Lore could have used to flatter the goddess. To grovel and appeal to her kind’s exhausting vanity and pride. Lore didn’t care to remember any of them. “And I’m not going to let you or anyone else pull me back in.”

  The goddess stared, the stern line of her mouth never once relaxing. Lore expected nothing else. There would be no bending; like a blade, Athena would hold, or she would break.

  “I know you speak this language,” Lore said, refusing to give the goddess what she clearly wanted. The ancient tongue was a mixture of many ancient dialects that had eventually become Modern Greek, but Athena’s version was epic in quality.

  “Whatever you came here for, there’s nothing to find,” Lore continued. “If this is a trick and you’re here for revenge, you’re too late. Everyone else who bears my name is dead. I’m the last of the Perseides. The House of Perseus is gone.”

  The expression on Athena’s face told Lore that the goddess already knew exactly who she was.

  Fear tore through her. Lore had stopped believing in Fate and the old crones tending to it years ago, but this was too much to be mere coincidence, especially after Castor’s warning.

  Attend to me, she’d said. Help me.

  “You found me,” Lore said, proud of how steady her voice sounded. “Tell me what you want, and make it fast. I know this is a difficult concept for you, but your time is running out and my plans for this morning don’t include an awkward staring contest with a deity. Why don’t you start with who tried to kill you?”

  Athena met her gaze again as she said, her voice weaker now, “My sister.”

  A cold dread slithered through Lore’s body. “As in, Artemis?”

  The goddess glowered. Her other sister, Aphrodite, had been taken out by a hunter a century ago, and a new god with her powers had been born. That new god had lasted only one cycle before another hunter killed him seven years later. It was a morbid sort of marathon relay, with immortal power as the baton being passed between bloodlines.

  “I thought the two of you always worked together,” Lore said. “What happened to that fun little alliance you used to terrorize everyone with?”

  “Turned . . . on me,” Athena said, pressing her palm to her side again. “Betrayed. The Ares imposter . . . he . . . came after me . . . at the Awakening—Artemis slowed me, escaped.”

  “That’s cold,” Lore said with mild appreciation. “Even for her.”

  “Alliances form from need . . . break in fear. . . .” Athena struggled for the words. “Now . . . need . . . protection. Until I . . . heal. Bind your fate . . . to mine.”

  Bind your fate to mine. Lore shuddered.

  “Why the hell would I ever do that,” Lore said, “when I can sit here and watch you die instead?”

  Despite temporarily losing their immortality, the gods did retain a sliver of their might to defend themselves. In their prime, their true powers had been all-encompassing; what remained must have felt like a sad pantomime, and, worse, only Apollo seemed to have been left with the ability to heal himself and others. Athena might have been physically stronger than the other eight gods in the Agon, capable of leveling whole buildings, but it wasn’t going to do her any good now.

  Miles’s quick steps pounded up to their front door. Lore jumped to her feet, giving the goddess one last hard look. Athena visibly bristled at the impertinence of it.

  “Don’t say a word to him when he comes in,” Lore said. “Pretend you’re asleep.”

  “Do not forsake me,” Athena said weakly. “I forbid it.”

  “Yeah, well, I forbid you to die right now,” Lore said, her pulse jumping. “I have to go clean up after you before the bloodhounds find your trail and lead the hunters here.”

  Athena’s gaze flickered.

  Shit, Lore thought miserably. The goddess could bleed, she could slip into unconsciousness, but she would never have forgotten such a crucial strategic detail if she were not in absolute dire straits.

  The front door burst open. “I’ve got them!”

  The goddess’s nostrils flared, but she did as Lore asked.

  “Thank you,” Lore told Miles. “Now go upstairs and go to bed.”

  “Wait—what?” he asked, trying to follow her back outside. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to clean up before someone sees the blood and calls the cops,” Lore said. “And you’re going upstairs to bed.”

  Miles glanced at Athena’s limp form.

  “Listen to me,” Lore said, her voice steel. Miles flinched, but she couldn’t feel sorry, not for this. He had no idea what he’d been drawn into. “Go upstairs. Don’t answer the door. If you see anyone suspicious outside, call me.”

  She left before he could lodge anoth
er protest, or, worse, ask another question. She bounded down the front steps of the brownstone, curving around to the gate that led into the basement apartment she now used for storage. There’d be almost no time. The sun was rising behind the curtain of clouds, and so were New Yorkers.

  Lore dumped two containers of the oxy bleach into a bucket and carried it back outside to mix in water from her neighbor’s hose. She used a wire brush and the power of her own terror to scrub the pool of blood Athena had left near the trash cans, until her head was light and her hands stung from the chemicals.

  Lore started to toss the bucket’s bloodied water in the gutters . . . only to stop. She watched the rain run along the sidewalk and into the storm drain.

  She wouldn’t be able to mask the scent of blood, or the stench of the goddess herself, and now she was covered in both. The best Lore could manage was to confuse the hunters with too many trails, and hope they ran themselves ragged before they ever found their way to the town house, and to Miles.

  Lore followed the path Athena had taken, cleaning and rinsing until the rain washed the visible stains mostly clean and everything trickled down into the gutters. She traced a wide, arcing trail around the neighborhood, leaving splashes of the bloodied bleach water here and there.

  When Lore was finally within sight of Central Park, she stripped off her soiled shoes and socks, her face twisting in disgust as she stepped barefoot onto the cracked sidewalk. She took off before she could let herself think too hard about what she’d be picking up, and she set on a random, weaving path through the streets, stopping only to dump the shoes and socks one at a time in scattered trash cans and dumpsters.

  As she neared the brownstone again, Lore tossed her light jacket into the back of a moving garbage truck and stuffed her jeans and shirt into the undercarriages of two different delivery trucks parked near Mr. Herrera’s bodega.

  Instead of going through the front door, Lore entered through the basement. The smell of Gil’s sandalwood cologne was everywhere, along with faint mildew and dust. Searching through the storage tubs she’d abandoned down there, Lore set aside a box containing Gil’s vast collection of holiday-themed bow ties and found an old pair of pull-on shorts and a T-shirt in the container beneath it.