Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

  “Let’s start with what would have spooked the Reveler enough to break an alliance with Wrath,” Castor said. One of his hands gently cupped the back of Iro’s head, but the girl showed no signs of waking up, even as he healed her.

  “The death of Hermes,” Van said.

  Castor sighed. “That would do it.”

  “Why?” Miles asked.

  “They were lovers for decades,” Lore explained, leaning her good shoulder against the doorframe. “They lived it up in the years between the hunts, enjoying themselves at parties, traveling the globe, visiting old relics of the ancient world in museums. Supposedly they managed to steal a few of them back.” She glanced at Athena. “You said you hadn’t been able to feel Hermes’s presence these last few years—do you think it’s related?”

  “Hermes would never agree to an alliance with the false Ares,” Athena said. “I find it more probable that the false Dionysus’s choice to do so created a rift between them and Hermes had to seek shelter away from his known hiding places.”

  “Didn’t help him in the end,” Lore said. “Well, regardless of what happened between the two lovebirds, if Wrath is looking for the Reveler we need to find him first. I think we can rework our last plan and potentially get a do-over in setting a trap.”

  “Indeed,” Athena said, having already thought of it. “The imposter Ares will not suffer him to live after his betrayal.”

  “That’s only if he agrees to help us,” Van said.

  “He does not need to be a willing participant,” Athena said. “He does not need to know we are there until the false Ares arrives and the trap is sprung.”

  “We’re assuming that Wrath hasn’t caught on to what we’re trying to do,” Castor pointed out. “And that he won’t see this coming.”

  “No . . .” Lore said slowly. “I don’t think he will. Not this. He may know we’re coming for him, but he has no idea that we know about the Reveler bailing on their alliance. Even Van hadn’t heard they were allied, and he apparently has sources everywhere.”

  The Messenger looked displeased at being reminded of that fact.

  “Okay,” Miles said. “But how are we supposed to find the Reveler first when Wrath most likely has hundreds of hunters out searching for him?”

  Castor glanced back at Van, seeming to convey a question. Van said nothing, only shook his head in answer.

  “What am I missing here?” Lore asked, looking between them. The towel was growing heavier, and so was her head. She had to lean her temple against the doorframe to stay vertical.

  “Wouldn’t it be faster?” Castor asked him.

  “It could take forever,” Van told him. “We’d be too late.”

  He dragged the backpack over to Castor, retrieving the laptop from it. Rather than plugging it in or booting it up, he used a small screwdriver to remove its back panel.

  Both Miles and Lore leaned forward, intrigued, as he removed a small silver gadget from beneath the battery. It plugged into the base of Castor’s last burner phone.

  “This is a copy of the Kadmides’ tracking program,” Van explained, waiting for it to load. “The one they use to note sightings of the other bloodlines and the gods. I’ll see if they’ve posted anything about the Reveler, but I can’t stay logged in for too long without their Messenger or someone else noticing.”

  “What else do you know of the false Dionysus?” Athena asked.

  “Almost nothing,” Van said, “beyond what’s common knowledge. He ascended a little over a hundred years ago. He was known as Iason Herakliou in his mortal life, son of the archon, Iason the Elder. He killed his entire family once he ascended and destroyed all of their records to make it harder for the rest of us to hunt him.”

  Miles looked genuinely shocked. “All of them? Everyone in his family?”

  “All of them,” Lore confirmed. “The Purge of the Heraklides remains as gnarly as ever.”

  “And yet totally in character for that bloodline’s brutal nature,” Van noted. “They celebrated all of their ancestor’s worst traits. It’s amazing they survived as long as they did.”

  “He’s had a long run as a new god,” Castor noted. “I suppose it helps he no longer has a bloodline to punish him for being a kin killer.”

  “On top of that, he’s been the least enterprising new Dionysus we’ve seen, meaning we can’t try tracing him through business affairs,” Van said. “No vineyards, no new mind-altering substances, no cults, religious or otherwise . . . I can’t predict how he’ll react to us, but we need to be prepared for anything. Don’t forget his power can induce a feeling of intoxication and frenzy. He’s been known to cast illusions in hunters’ minds in order to escape.”

  “Do you have a picture of him, Van?” Lore asked. “I’ve never seen one.”

  While the Kadmides program loaded on the burner, Van turned to his real cellphone and, after a moment, pulled up a grainy photo from an old newspaper clipping. It showed a man with one hand tucked into the vest beneath his old-fashioned suit. His round face was half-hidden beneath a magnificent mustache as he posed, stone-faced, between two bowling lanes.

  “Is that a man or a mustachioed pug in a suit?” Miles asked carefully.

  To Lore’s surprise—and even, it appeared, Van’s—Van let out a sharp bark of laughter. He recovered quickly, pressing his lips together as if to completely erase the smile.

  “There have been rumors he was an architect,” Van said. “I’ve also heard he lived here, in the city, but there’s nothing left to substantiate that. As I said, we know next to nothing.”

  “Well, we do know one other thing,” Miles said. “He’s standing in the Frick.”

  Lore had been so focused on trying to study the man’s face she’d barely paid attention to the room around him. “The what-now?”

  “The Frick Collection,” Miles repeated. His eyes went wide and his face lit up with delight as he took in Van’s look of surprise. “You didn’t know? Really?”

  “Clever,” Athena said. “Once again, the mortal’s knowledge of this city far outstrips what the rest of you bring.”

  “How can you be sure?” Van asked, his tone sharp.

  “The bowling alley—those arches, the distinct honeycomb ceiling,” Miles said, trying not to crow. Van truly looked at a loss as he zoomed in on the ceiling. “That’s the Frick. It used to be an old mansion belonging to a Mr. Frick who used his endless stacks of sweet, sweet industrialist money to buy art. They turned it into a museum after his death. The bowling alley is in the basement. I would bet money on it, and if it’s true the Reveler was an architect, it wouldn’t surprise me if he worked on it.”

  “How the hell do you know all of this?” Lore asked.

  “You would know it, too, if you had come with me when I asked if you wanted to go last month,” Miles said pointedly. “I get free tickets through my internship, remember? You said, and I quote, ‘Real New Yorkers don’t play tourist.’”

  “That sounds nothing like me,” Lore said indignantly.

  “That sounds exactly like you,” Castor said. “It’s like your whole thing about how ‘authentic’ New Yorkers don’t get their bagels toasted.”

  Lore was aghast. “Only monsters toast their bagels.”

  “This means nothing,” Van cut in. “Just because he was photographed there over a hundred years ago does not make the information relevant to us today.”

  “It is all relevant,” Athena said. “For it is very near to where the Awakening took place, and familiar to him.”

  “Which would make it feel like a safe place to hide,” Lore finished. “He might not still be there, but it’s worth investigating.”

  “Oh, I didn’t even tell you the best part,” Miles said, pausing for dramatic effect.

  Lore gave him a look. He smiled.

  “It closed two weeks ago for renovations,” he finished. “The museum won’t reopen until January.”

  “Well, damn,” Lore said. “I think we should start searching th
ere.”

  “Agreed,” Miles said.

  “I’m still going to check the Kadmides’ program,” Van said flatly. “We can’t bet on one hunch.”

  “Good,” Castor began. “And while you do that . . .” He carefully released his hold on Iro. “She should come to in a few minutes.”

  He turned toward Lore, eyebrows raised. Lore pressed the towel to her wounded shoulder and, just to make Castor feel better, allowed him to help her down the hall, toward the miserable-looking employee bathroom.

  “Make it fast,” Van called after them. “We’ve got ten minutes before we need to move.”

  Only, Lore thought, if Wrath doesn’t find us first.

  LORE HAD ALMOST FORGOTTEN what it felt like to be looked after by another person.

  She had taken care of Gil for years, and had grown used to playing that role. The strangeness of being looked after—the reluctance she felt—reminded her of something Gil had told her three years ago, on the night they’d met.

  Lore had walked day and night after leaving the Odysseides’ estate, trying to reach Marseille and start begging for enough money to travel back to the United States and set up a new life. Once there, her forged papers would at least give her some choices about school and starting over. Gil, then eighty-seven, had been mugged on the outskirts of the city, and she had found him beaten half to death with a broken arm and leg. He’d been hoarse from calling out for help that hadn’t come.

  Lore had been outraged, and despite her own fear and exhaustion, she had carried Gil on her back to the nearest hospital and felt compelled to stay there with him, not wanting the vulnerable man to be alone. She pretended to be his granddaughter to sign him in, and she listened as he told her about himself—how he was an unmarried professor from New York City, and he had known this would be his last trip abroad. By the time the doctor had stitched up Gil’s wounds, and tended to the cut on her own face, the idea was fully formed in Lore’s mind.

  Gil wasn’t from her world, and he was alone in his. What Lore proposed was purely business: she would travel back to New York City with him and work as a caretaker until he no longer needed a wheelchair. He’d mulled it over with enough obvious reluctance that Lore had steeled herself for disappointment. As they waited for him to be discharged, Lore asked him why he’d changed his mind. Sometimes, he’d said, the braver thing is to accept help when you’ve been made to believe you shouldn’t need it.

  Lore held the words in her heart, using them to ward off the last measure of her reluctance as Castor brought her into the laundromat’s dingy bathroom.

  He had to duck to accommodate its low ceiling. Lore’s thoughts became warm and small as she watched his throat bob and his fingers become unsure of where they should rest on her hip as he supported her.

  He really is beautiful, she thought. Not just for what he’d become, but in a way that was undeniably Castor.

  In one swift movement, he lifted her so she was sitting on the narrow edge of the counter surrounding the sink. Like many bathrooms in the city, it verged on inhospitable, most likely to discourage people from spending too much time in it.

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

  He gave her a quelling look as he took the towel from her hands and dropped it on the floor. Carefully, without disturbing the wound, he pulled the collar of her shirt over to better see it. “Can we focus on the traumatic injury in the room?”

  His attention was as earnest as it was anxious. It reminded her of when they were young, the quiet way he’d watch her after sparring as if needing to reassure himself she was fine.

  “Easy, tiger. It’s hardly traumatic,” she informed him. “Stupid on my part, but not traumatic.”

  He shook his head. “I swear, you are truly the only person I know who would pick a fight at a time like this.”

  “That’s because, unlike you, I can multitask,” she said with a wink. “What’s the prognosis, doc? Am I gonna live?”

  All at once, she realized how that would sound to him. “Sorry—Cas, I’m sorry. Me and my big mouth.”

  He seemed to brush the comment aside, but she could tell that something about it had landed. “Can I rip the shirt to get it out of the way?”

  She nodded, cringing as he carefully split the fabric from the collar to the edge of the sleeve. It was only then that she saw the full extent of the deep, jagged wound. Several small pieces of glass were embedded into the muscle there, and for all the many gruesome wounds Lore had witnessed in her short life, this one still turned her stomach.

  Her bra strap was in the way, stuck to the crust of one of the more shallow wounds. His fingers hesitated on it, hot against her slick skin. The bleeding had slowed, but the cold she felt gathering beneath her skin was setting in deeper.

  She nodded, swallowing. He snapped the strap, watching her face the whole time.

  “It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she told him. “That has to be good, right?”

  “That is the opposite of good,” Castor said, his voice tight. “Who managed to get you?”

  “Why? So you can avenge me?” She tried to look down at it. “Is it really that bad? It doesn’t seem that bad.”

  “I think you’re in shock,” he told her. “Who was it? I lost sight of you once the dust and smoke got too thick.”

  “I don’t know,” Lore admitted.

  In one quick movement, Castor had gripped the biggest of the glass shards and pulled it out. The pain was so scalding, Lore couldn’t draw a breath deep enough to scream, even as he removed the remaining pieces.

  But then his hand was there, pressed tight to the blood pouring from the wound. Lore felt heat, a sharp burn that faded into a numbing warmth.

  “Son of a—” she managed to gasp out.

  “Don’t speak,” Castor said. “Just try to breathe.”

  “Could have . . . warned me . . .” she said.

  “You would have tensed the muscle, and it would have been hard to remove the glass,” Castor told her. “I do remember a few things Healer Kallias taught me, it seems.”

  She knew he was right, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t going to be bitter about it for a few minutes.

  “Just breathe,” he told her.

  So she did. And with each breath she felt his power stitch her torn flesh back together. His power had an almost drugging quality to it. It wrapped around her body and mind, lulling her with its softness.

  Castor caught her hand in his. Lore shut her eyes and leaned her head against the mirror behind her. She held on to him, wanting to stay in the moment, wanting to steady herself with something real before his power turned her mind soft.

  “Was it me?” he asked quietly. “Did I do this to you?”

  Lore forced her eyes open. The gold in his irises swirled, bright in the dingy bathroom’s darkness.

  “Did I do this because I couldn’t control the force of it?” he asked her again.

  “No,” she told him. “It was one of the Kadmides.”

  Castor didn’t seem convinced. She squeezed his hand again, pulling on it until he looked at her.

  “This power is a new skill,” she said. “And just like any skill, you have to practice in order to master it, right?”

  His thumb began to absently stroke along her collarbone as he healed her, leaving a warm, shimmering trail on her skin. She leaned into the touch.

  “I wish it were that easy,” he said, “and I could explain this better, but . . . ever since I regained physical form, it’s like I can’t fully catch my balance. There’s a disconnect between what my mind expects and what my body actually does.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me that before?” Lore asked.

  “You confuse me,” he said plainly. “It’s always been this way. I want to tell you everything, but there’s a part of me that’s still afraid of seeming weak.”

  Lore gripped his wrist. “I’ve never seen you that way.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I was weak, for a long time, and it wasn�
��t the fault of anything or anyone. It was just my body. Strong or weak—I hated those were the only things we were allowed to be. I wanted to be defined by the life I lived.”

  The life he’d lived. The one that would have been cut unmercifully short, if it hadn’t been for his ascension. She could almost feel the story he was holding back. The way it rippled beneath his skin, as if desperate to be told.

  “Cas,” she said softly. “How did you kill Apollo?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. He seemed to be debating something, and Lore almost wished she hadn’t asked. For all the things that had changed between them, she wasn’t sure if she could take him lying to her for the first time.

  “I don’t know.”

  Lore’s gaze shot up. “What?”

  Castor glanced at the door, as if worried someone might be listening. “I don’t know. I have no memory of what happened.”

  Her mouth opened, then shut.

  “I know,” he said, strained. “There were no cameras in my bedroom. Van told me that the other security cameras malfunctioned when Apollo entered Thetis House. I was alone when it happened.”

  “Van knows?” Lore asked. She had no reason to feel hurt by the revelation, but she was.

  “Van doesn’t know about the lost memory,” Castor said. “I can tell he’s been fishing around, trying to figure it out himself. I just . . .”

  “That’s why you were trying to talk to Artemis?” Lore said, finally putting it together. “You think she might know?”

  He nodded. “I don’t know what their connection was like, or if she saw what happened. Athena doesn’t seem to know, though. Would Artemis have told her if she witnessed Apollo’s death?”

  “Artemis tried to stab her no more than five minutes into this Agon, so let’s not bank on sisterly love for anything here,” Lore said.

  Castor’s smile was small and fleeting. Lore took his free hand in hers again and squeezed it.

  “I need to figure it out,” he said. “I have to. I can’t . . . This has to have happened for a reason. It has to mean something that I have this power.”

  Lore felt something in her chest crack open at the quiet desperation in his words.