Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

  Lore changed into them quickly, dumping her soiled clothes into a trash bag. She took several steadying breaths until the chemical reek faded and her panic had given way to renewed anger.

  Dragging herself up the inner staircase, she stepped back into the silence of the first level of the house. Some of the tension in her back and shoulders eased as she took a look around, and she almost managed a laugh. Miles had cleaned the blood from the hallway and switched off the lights in the living room, and he’d left a glass of water and bottle of aspirin beside Athena.

  Helpful, Lore thought with a surge of affection for him.

  She glanced to her left. Miles hadn’t just locked the door; he’d also reinforced the knob with the back of a chair—like that would stop the hunters from setting enough explosives to blow off the front of the house.

  Athena’s head turned at the sound of Lore’s approaching steps. She opened her eyes again; they glowed in the room’s relative darkness. Her hand held the towel against the wound.

  The air was so still around her, the silence so unnatural.

  “You want me to help protect you, and, I’m guessing, to hide you from the same people that would happily kill me, too,” Lore whispered. “But you already know that. That’s why you came here, isn’t it?”

  Athena gave a slight nod.

  “So exactly what’s in this for me?” Lore said, taking another step closer. “I realize this is a new experience for you, but even if you heal faster than the average mortal, you’re not exactly doing well. So why would I tie my life to one that might not make it a few hours, let alone a few days?”

  “I heard . . . what had happened to you . . .” Athena said. “The years between . . . Searched . . . for you . . .”

  The hair on Lore’s body rose.

  At the end of each Agon, the gods, new and old, regained their immortality, but they remained in the mortal world, unable to return to whatever home they’d once known.

  The new gods, brimming with power, manifested physical forms and lived lavishly, manipulating the workings of the world to fill the vaults of their mortal bloodlines. But the old gods, with their power ever-waning, usually chose to

  remain incorporeal. It made them untraceable as they set about the world, trying to plan for contingencies for the next hunt or seeking retribution against those who had tried to kill them. The threat of that vengeance was the reason hunters always wore masks.

  “You searched for me?” Lore said. “Why?”

  “I believed . . . you could be . . . persuaded to aid me. . . . I heard your . . . name . . . from the other bloodlines. . . . Your family . . . murdered. Mother . . . father . . . sisters,” Athena said, her breathing labored. “They called you . . . lost. Some believed . . . dead.”

  Lore’s throat locked until she almost couldn’t speak. “What do you know about that?”

  Athena looked to her again, this time with the expression of someone who already knew they’d won. “I know . . . who killed them.”

  THE MEMORY ROSE SHARP and true, cutting through all the barriers Lore had built around it. The way the door to her family’s apartment had looked as she came toward it that morning. The chilling silence inside. The smell of blood.

  Lore drew in a deep breath and pressed a hand to her eyes, hard enough that light and colors danced beneath her lids. It distracted her mind from the dark trail it had started down again, but only for a moment.

  She didn’t know how she kept her voice so calm as she said, “I already know who killed them. Aristos Kadmou of the House of Kadmos.” The new Ares, as of the last Agon.

  “The false god may have . . . ordered their deaths . . . but who held the blade?” Athena pressed. “For it was not he. He was only a newborn god. . . .”

  Lore’s body tightened to the point of pain.

  “It doesn’t matter. He was the one who gave the order,” Lore said. “He was the head of his bloodline, and then became their god. They are all responsible, every last man, woman, and child who kneels before him, but only he had the power to put it all into motion.”

  And his bloodline had obeyed his command, murdering her parents and two little sisters so savagely that it had taken the Kadmides weeks to clean the apartment enough to hide the evidence. In the end, they’d still had to purify it with flames. According to the New York City Police Department, the family had set the fire themselves after a rent dispute and left town, never to be heard from again.

  No one in the House of Kadmos had ever claimed responsibility for the murders, or ever would. The hunters had taken a blood oath centuries ago to never intentionally kill a hunter of another bloodline between the cycles of the Agon. It had been the only way to ensure peace between them.

  Her family had been murdered the morning after the Agon’s completion, when that oath should have protected them. The Kadmides had broken a sacred vow, but no other house was powerful enough to challenge them, and no gods had ever listened to her prayers.

  “Why did you . . . not avenge them?” Athena panted. “These many years . . . you have done nothing. . . . You . . . do not recognize your . . . moira. . . . You never sought . . . poiné . . . only fell . . . to . . . the worst aidos. . . .”

  Lore sank to the floor, her legs folding beneath her. She braced her hands beside them, fighting the familiar pressure expanding in her chest. Her moira—her lot in life, her destiny.

  “Those words mean nothing to me now,” she said hoarsely. But hearing them felt like scars being cut open.

  Poiné. Vengeance.

  Aidos. Shame.

  A life without the excellence of areté and the earned possessions of timé. Of never attaining kleos.

  “I was just a little girl,” Lore said, barely hearing her own words. “They would have killed me, too. I wasn’t strong enough to fight them all. And I knew I could never get to him, not after he ascended.”

  In the years since, she’d killed to keep from being killed. She traveled by foot, by boat, by air, only to arrive back at the city that had raised her. She’d escaped the labyrinth of oaths that had been designed to trap her until the day came when the Agon called for her to sacrifice her last heartbeat.

  But Lore had done nothing to avenge her family.

  Athena’s lip curled. “Excuses . . . These lies you tell yourself . . . You were never . . . a mere . . . little girl. I heard . . . what the others whispered about you . . . that you were the best of your generation . . . that it was a shame . . . you had been born to a different bloodline. . . .”

  “You’re lying,” Lore whispered, unable to stop the involuntary shiver that moved through her. Years ago, those words would have meant everything to her—she’d craved recognition from the very people who had refused to give it to her.

  “The Spartan . . . they called you,” Athena breathed. “Little Gorgon . . . I searched for you . . . chose you . . . knowing that skill . . . knowing that you are no longer one of the hunters. . . . But you have . . . never been weak . . . never powerless. . . . So I ask . . . why did you do nothing . . . to avenge your family?”

  Lore drew her arms close to her chest, throwing out Gil’s words like a shield. But there was no protection against the truth. “It’s not— You wouldn’t understand. The only real thing in this world is what you can do for others. How you can take care of them.”

  The goddess snorted with derision.

  “All you know,” Lore continued, hating the thickness in her voice, “all you have ever cared about is power. You don’t know how to want anything else, and because of it, you won’t believe me when I tell you that I don’t want to claim his power, either. I don’t want any part of this sick game.”

  “Then what is it . . . that you desire?” Athena asked.

  The words burst from Lore, wild and pained. “To be free.”

  “No,” Athena said, her voice labored. “That is not it. What do you . . . deny yourself?”

  A vision bloomed in her mind, blazing and pure, but Lore shook her head.

/>   “Lie to . . . yourself . . . but not to me,” Athena said. “You know . . . you shall never be . . . free while the shades of your family . . . suffer and wander. . . . Never at rest while he lives.”

  Lore pressed her fists to her eyes, trying to find the words to protest.

  “You deny your heritage. . . . You deny honor. . . . You deny your ancestors, and your gods. . . . But this, you cannot deny,” Athena said. “This, you know to be true. Tell me . . . what you desire.”

  The truth finally escaped its cage. “I want to kill him.”

  Lore had denied it for years—forced the truth down deep inside her. All in the name of being good, of deserving the new life she’d been given. She wasn’t ashamed of how badly she wanted it, or how often she dreamed of his death, but of how ungrateful it made her feel for the second chance working for Gil had given her.

  “But I can’t,” Lore continued, her throat aching. “Even if I could get close enough to try, killing Aristos would mean taking his power. I don’t want to be a god. I just want to live. I want to know my family is . . . at peace.”

  “Then I will kill him for you.”

  Lore looked down at the goddess in disbelief.

  “I will kill the false Ares in your name,” Athena said, struggling for breath. “If you swear . . . you will aid me . . . if you vow . . . to bind your fate to mine until . . . this hunt ends . . . at sunrise . . . on the eighth day.”

  Lore’s heart began to race again, galloping in her chest.

  This was something. It wouldn’t just destroy Aristos Kadmou, either. A god could not take another god’s power. Athena would be effectively removing Ares’s dangerous power from the Agon—and the mortal world—entirely.

  “Bind your fate to mine,” the goddess said again, offering her bloodied hand. “Your heart . . . it aches for it. . . .”

  Gil’s face, his usual toothy grin, drifted through Lore’s mind.

  I’m sorry, she thought, agonized.

  Then she nodded.

  Athena’s teeth were stained with blood as she bared them. “You know what it means, do you not? What the oath entails?”

  “I do.”

  Her own many times great-grandfather had been a cautionary tale, having foolishly bound his fate to the original Dionysus. The old god had needed protection from the descendants of Kadmos. Though he himself had been born into that bloodline through his mortal mother, Dionysus had cursed his kin—and Kadmos himself—when they refused to believe he had been fathered by Zeus.

  The instant the old god died, cornered and slaughtered like a boar, Lore’s ancestor’s heart had stopped dead in his chest.

  The strongest of his generation, gone in the time it took to blink, remembered forever by his kin as a blade traitor—and, as her own father believed, the true cause of the centuries-old animosity between the Houses of Perseus and Kadmos.

  Lore would be agreeing to protect Athena with her life, to shelter her, and to bank on the hope that the goddess didn’t die from this wound or any other. It was a risk she would have to take. An oath was, after all, a curse you placed on yourself—she would be damned if she failed, and damned if she succeeded. But she would never have an opportunity like this again.

  Lore tried to remember the words her father and mother had always used to make their oaths, but couldn’t bring herself to invoke the name of any gods.

  “I will help you survive this week, and you will destroy the god once known as Aristos Kadmou, the enemy of my blood,” Lore said quietly. She took the goddess’s cold hand in her own. “If that’s the bargain, then I swear by the powers below that I will uphold my vow or face the wrath of the heavens.”

  The goddess nodded. “Then I bind my mortal life to yours . . . Melora, daughter of Demos, scion of Perseus . . . Should I fall . . . you will join me. Should you die in the Agon . . . I, too, will perish. That is the vow we make to each other.”

  Warmth wrapped around their joined hands, chased by a chill along the ridges of Lore’s spine like the tip of a knife. How perfect that Athena’s power came only in the form of steel and pain.

  “Is it done?” Lore asked.

  Her answer was the goddess’s cruel, bloody smile.

  Lore pulled back, rising unsteadily to her feet. A sensation of sparks scattered across her skin like stars in the sky, sinking into the marrow of her bones.

  “We need to stop the bleeding,” Lore said, looking at Athena’s wound. “I don’t know if I have thread to stitch it.”

  The goddess shook her head. “Burn it shut.”

  Lore rose, feeling half-removed from her own body, and went to the kitchen. She held one of the carving knives over the fire on the gas stove until the metal glowed as gold as the flecks in Athena’s eyes.

  Miles, she thought distantly. She needed to check on Miles once this was finished.

  But he had already come down to check on her.

  Miles sat on the stairs, his gaze still fixed on what he could see of the living room through the old wood banister. There didn’t seem to be a drop of color left in his face, and Lore knew, even before he looked at her and the knife in her hands, that he had heard everything.

  “I think,” he said finally, his voice hoarse, “you’d better tell me what the hell is going on.”

  THEY SAT IN SILENCE for several minutes after Lore had finished giving Miles a ruthlessly pared-down explanation of the Agon, the nine gods it had been created to punish—including the one whose wound she had seared shut in their living room—and the nine bloodlines descended from ancient heroes chosen to hunt them.

  She distilled over a thousand years of history into mere minutes, feeling more and more insane as his face remained carefully blank.

  It wasn’t like Lore could blame him; hearing herself say the words “For seven days, every seven years, the gods walk on earth as mortals. If you can kill one, you become a new god and take their power and immortality, but you’ll be hunted in the next Agon as well” had left her stomach in knots, and not just because she had been taught, from the youngest age, never to reveal their world to outsiders.

  To Miles, these names—Athena, Artemis, Apollo, Poseidon, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Dionysus, Hermes, and Ares—were ancient stories, not living, breathing monsters who had refused to fade away once a more prominent god rose in their lands.

  The way the hunters told it, they had attempted to force their worshippers back into submission by stoking chaos at the fall of Rome, by having Apollo create deadly plagues, including the Plague of Justinian, which alone killed tens of millions of people. All in the hope that mortals would beg them for protection and refuge.

  “And, when Zeus commanded them to stop,” Lore finished, “the nine, led by Athena, tried and failed to overthrow him in order to continue their work.”

  Gil had always made tea when they’d needed to talk about something, and Lore found herself doing the same thing now—only, as if muscle memory had taken over, she skipped the tea bags and made a very different kind of brew.

  As a joke, the hunters called their tea nektar, the drink of the gods. They used thyme—the herb for courage—ginger, lemon, and honey to fortify themselves during training and the Agon.

  But both mugs had gone cold, untouched where she’d set them down on the table.

  The window AC unit wheezed on, flooding the kitchen with cool air. Lore had drawn the curtains on the window above the sink, and she could tell by the way the sun was still trying to intrude on them that it was already late morning.

  “Say something,” she whispered.

  “I mean . . .” he said, smoothing a hand over his hair. His gaze was fixed on the table. “Your name isn’t even Lauren.”

  “You get why I couldn’t use my real one, don’t you?” she asked. It wasn’t just about lying low, though. Lauren Pertho was the alias on the papers and passport her mother’s bloodline had forged to get her out of the country after her family’s murder. It was the only documentation she had to use.

  “I d
on’t know what I thought,” Miles said. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight: every seven years this . . . hunt happens. And the location changes—sort of like the Olympics, only with more murders?”

  “Basically,” Lore said. “The hunters figured out that they could control the location of the Agon by moving something called the omphalos—a large stone that once resided at Delphi and marked what they believed to be the navel, or center, of the world.”

  “The ‘navel’ in the poem?” he clarified.

  She had recited the English translation of the account of Zeus giving the original command for the Agon. The original version, in the ancient tongue, had been lost.

  “Yes. The leaders of the bloodlines gather the year before the next Agon and vote on where it’ll be, which is usually where they each have the most resources and power,” Lore continued. “They have to move the omphalos without the gods seeing its destination, to keep the gods from strategizing. Lately it’s been here, but they also tend to focus on cities in island nations, like London and Tokyo, because it makes it harder for the gods to escape.”

  And rarely, in the cycles they truly wanted to torment the gods, they would bring the omphalos back to the old country, so they could be hunted among the ruins of their temples and the people who had once feared them.

  “The nine families—” Miles began.

  “There are only four bloodlines still participating in the Agon,” Lore said. “The others have died out.”

  “Like yours?” Miles clarified slowly. “Because you’re . . . the last of your line?”

  “The last mortal,” Lore said. “The new Poseidon, Tidebringer, was once part of the Perseides—the descendants of Perseus.”

  “What are the others?”

  “The Houses of Kadmos, Theseus, Achilles, and Odysseus are the only other surviving lines,” Lore said, “but there were also the Houses of Herakles, Jason . . .” Then she added, because no one ever seemed to know who they were, “And Meleager, who led the Calydonian boar hunt, and Bellerophon, who slayed monsters and rode Pegasus. Those were actually the first two bloodlines to die off.”