Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

  Instead, death was only numbing. Her mind shut itself down to protect her from the shock of the steel parting her skin and scraping across bone.

  Her hand slid from the makeshift weapon, falling limply into her lap.

  There was a terrible scream, like the screech of a saw against metal.

  Look, Lore thought. Open your eyes.

  It was the gray-eyed goddess.

  “Oh, you fool,” Athena snarled. “I will not let you do this—I will not allow you to take it from me!”

  “You won’t need it . . .” Lore got out, “where . . . you’re . . . going. . . .”

  One hand closed around Lore’s neck, tightening as if to break it. Athena’s face was rigid with fury, her teeth bared. Undaunted, and unbowed by the weakness of impending death.

  “You truly believed it all,” Athena said, her voice grating. “You thought I would be so foolish as to bind my life to an impetuous mortal. To you? You have done this for nothing!”

  Horror sliced through Lore. She stared up at the goddess, struggling to focus as blackness stained her vision. Soon, she could only see the maelstrom of sparks swirling in Athena’s eyes.

  Not for nothing, Lore thought, the words faint in her mind.

  It hadn’t just been to kill Athena. Lore had wanted to ensure no one could ever possess the aegis again. She had done that, at least—that one thing, after so many mistakes, she had done right.

  Athena pulled back, drawing in on herself. She remained there, her gaze bearing down on Lore. The intricate machine that was her mind whirled until she found control once more.

  “I will force the false Apollo to heal you,” Athena said. “And you will take me to it.”

  No—

  Lore dragged herself away, digging her nails against the rough ground to claw her way forward. The goddess had leaned her dory against the wall; Lore could reach it if she could will her body to move. Not before I kill

  you—

  Athena gripped her by the hair, ripping chunks of it from her scalp. She dragged Lore toward the door and the tunnel beyond it.

  But a moment later, the goddess released her. Lore fell to the wet ground. The impact split her chin open. Blood poured down over her throat, hot against her cold skin.

  “No . . .” the goddess said, taking a step back and reclaiming her dory. “I think . . . not.”

  Lore’s lips parted, but the words she wanted to say sank into the growing darkness in her mind and disappeared. Ice flooded her veins where her blood had once been.

  “There is another way,” Athena said slowly, as if unwinding her own reasoning.

  Lore let out a strangled roar—of rage, of anguish.

  The goddess turned to leave, but paused in the doorway of the cell. She cast one last look over her shoulder, making a noise of false sympathy. “It is a shame you did not even possess the courage to drive the blade through your heart.”

  “I’ll kill . . . you . . .” Lore whispered, but there was no answer.

  There would never be an answer.

  There was only the dark air, and the silence, and the waiting.

  SOMEHOW, DESPITE THE HOUR, the moon was still up in the sky, even as it faded with the arrival of the pale dawn. Lore had kept her gaze on its milky crescent to avoid having to look at the streets of her neighborhood. Now, as she stood in front of her family’s apartment building, she forced herself to look at the window she had slipped through a few hours before.

  It was closed.

  She let out a soft breath, fear biting at her again. Her father and mother were up.

  She balled her fists and pressed them against her eyes, forcing herself to breathe and not cry.

  The lies were so easy—she went to see Castor, she wanted to watch the last few hours of the Agon, she thought about running away but came back—but the truth made her feel like she had stabbed a knife into her belly. She had to tell them. Their punishment would never be as bad as the Kadmides’ would be. Her parents would know what to do.

  Lore didn’t bother climbing to her bedroom window. She used the building’s front door.

  Squaring her shoulders and swallowing the sour taste in her mouth, she made her way up the many flights of stairs, to the sixth floor. Already, the previous night was starting to feel more like a dream than a memory.

  Their apartment was at the very end of the silent hallway. Lore’s heart hammered in her ears. They were going to be so angry. She would have to try to find a way to make them understand, to convince them to stay in the city despite what had happened. She didn’t want to leave Castor or New York City. Not like this.

  Lore paused outside their apartment’s door, pressing her forehead against its smooth surface and closing her eyes. She listened for the sound of her parents inside. Making their coffee, feeding Damara, talking quietly as they listened to the news.

  But she heard nothing.

  Something wet soaked through the toe of her old tennis shoes. Lore opened her eyes at the sensation.

  Dark blood seeped out through the crack below the door and pooled around her feet.

  OLYMPIA WAS WAITING FOR her in the night’s shadows.

  She sat at the edge of the bed they shared, her hair rumpled by sleep, her eyes too tired to focus. Lore claimed the space beside her, watching as the wind sneaked through the nearby window and ruffled the drawings of Olympia’s that Lore had taped to their wall.

  Her sister turned toward her. Lore began to cry.

  “Don’t fight, Lo,” she whispered, clutching at the front of Lore’s shirt. “Don’t fight. Go to sleep.”

  Lore closed her eyes, but the tears wouldn’t stop.

  Go to sleep.

  It was so easy. Such a simple thing. But just as she was at the edge of it, she was pulled back by the smell of something sharp and metallic.

  Don’t fight.

  She opened her eyes to find the dark hollows of her sister’s empty sockets staring back.

  Blood flowed around them on the bed, coating Lore’s skin, filling her mouth as she screamed. She rolled out of bed and hit the floor, but it was there, too, running between the bars of Damara’s crib. A wail pierced the silence, cutting deeper with each of her frantic heartbeats.

  The door to the bedroom was open, and a single spark of light was visible in the blackness of the space beyond it.

  Lore staggered forward. She couldn’t look around her, not when she knew what she’d find—her mother stretched out by the door, slashed from belly to throat, her father in the kitchen, his back broken, his skull crushed. She had been here before. She had seen this before.

  The light—if she could just reach the light . . .

  Go to sleep.

  Her mind fell silent and her body went still as Lore passed through the door of her bedroom. A cool mist brushed against her cheeks.

  The light was still there, just beyond the veil of silver fog, but now it was many. Now it was seven, and the lights had forms, faces that watched, expressionless, from the other side of a river. One broke away from the others and floated toward her, growing larger and brighter with each of her slow heartbeats.

  The gray world seemed to breathe, as if trying to inhale her. Cold water lapped at her toes.

  Melora. The damp air whispered her name, until it became a question with no answer. Melora?

  A heavy hand fell on her shoulder. She turned slowly.

  Her body came alive with a pain that sawed at her. Her limbs contorted into agonized shapes. She gasped for air and clawed at the ground. She was cold—so cold—cracking like ice. . . .

  The dark world of the river flickered in and out of the underground cell, until Lore could no longer tell one from the other.

  “Steady, Melora,” the same voice said. “The worst, I’m afraid, is yet to come.”

  A glowing face hovered before her own. He was young and beautiful, his lips cast in an impish line. His hair curled almost sweetly; above it, wings fluttered on either side of his helmet, keeping time with her pul
se.

  “You . . .” she whispered. “No . . .”

  The figure shifted in the strange light. His form unraveled like ribbons, the layers of him pulling apart to reveal what was hidden beneath.

  Someone else.

  Lore lifted a shaking hand, swiping it against her eyes to clear the haze from them. An old man hovered before her now, his feet not quite touching the ground. His silver hair seemed to rise, shimmering like waves around his head, above his long face. His white skin was lined with age and veins, his shoulders stooped. His green eyes sparkled as he looked her over.

  “Hello, darling,” Gil whispered. “Are you all right?”

  “You’re not . . .” Lore began, unable to catch her breath at the sight of him. He was perfect, in his familiar tweed jacket, that knowing look on his face.

  “Real?” he finished. “Stand up and discover for yourself.”

  Lore’s eyelids were too heavy. They drifted shut as she gave a single, small shake of the head.

  “No,” Gil said sharply. “Look at me. I need you to look at me.”

  Lore tried.

  “Do you want to live?” Gil asked. The words echoed through Lore’s mind, twining with memories.

  Lore took in a slight breath. The others . . . the city . . . She wasn’t finished yet . . . but her body . . . she couldn’t . . .

  “You already know that you are enough,” Gil told her. “Stand up, Melora. Come on. Prove me right.”

  She had thought she was enough to hunt, to save her city, to protect her friends, and avenge her family. And now there was nothing left. Everyone who loved her was gone.

  Not everyone.

  Not everything had been a lie.

  “Do it for yourself,” Gil said, his voice a balm to Lore’s confused mind. “Not to get back at her. Not out of anger. For yourself.”

  Humiliation and rage and betrayal had all fused in her, but there was something else. She could . . . There was something left in her . . . something . . .

  “You have to stand up on your own. I can’t carry you the way you once carried me,” Gil said. “And I can’t take you far, only to the boundary, as he’ll permit. Only as I am meant to do. You must stand up on your own and follow me to it.”

  That—she had enough left in her for that. To stand. To get to the others. To warn them . . .

  Lore reached out, bracing her hand against the wall behind her, feeling for something to anchor herself. Her fingers hooked into a depression the uneven drilling had left behind. Her shoulder and arm ached as they absorbed her weight, but she set her jaw. She hissed with the effort it took to get her feet beneath her.

  “Good,” Gil said, sounding relieved. “That’s it, darling.”

  Her right leg was fine, but her left, the one Athena had impaled, was broken. The smallest bit of weight sent white-hot agony shooting through it. Lore’s knee buckled as she took an experimental step, but she braced a shoulder against the wall.

  Hot blood escaped the wound in her chest as she bent, forcing her to press a hand there to stanch the flow. She shivered; the pain was so bad now, she felt almost drunk with it.

  “Follow me, darling,” Gil said. “Keep your eyes on the light.”

  Lore limped forward, one shuffled step, then the next. Water sloshed at her feet. The world of the river and the world of the tunnel bled into one another until everything was darkness and stone. But there was light ahead of her now. She could see it—that spark.

  Her right hip swung forward again and again, her muscles seizing up with the effort it took. Forward. Forward. Their progress was excruciating and slow.

  Gil knew the way, as he always did, taking each curve and turn with confidence. Lore let him lead, her eyes fixed on the light emanating from the torch that now appeared in the man’s hand.

  Its flame was hypnotizing, playing tricks on Lore’s eyes. Making them see things that weren’t there.

  Gil’s tweed jacket broke apart like dashed embers, revealing an ivory tunic below. In his left hand, a winged staff with gold snakes twining around it appeared. Their small scaled heads stroked against one another, then turned to watch her.

  Help me, Lore thought, because she could not say the words. Stay with me.

  As if she had called them to her, shadows appeared along the walls of the tunnel. The silhouettes of a man and woman, of two small girls, glided beside her, keeping her tortured pace. Faces she knew. Faces she loved.

  Lore reached out a hand toward the woman, her fingers skimming her face.

  Stay with me, she thought. Stay with me. . . .

  Gil’s form blurred as Lore’s vision failed. She leaned heavily against the wall, using the last of her strength to draw herself forward with her uninjured hand, crawling through the cold water. Fighting to keep her head above it.

  Maybe it was her punishment for what she’d done. She’d be forced to make this journey in the darkness, to live in the small eternity of it, for all time. Repeating the agony, repeating the realization she would never make it back to the entrance of the tunnels, or find the strength to climb the ladder out.

  A small chime sounded sweetly somewhere behind her, then another, until it became a song, like birds in the morning.

  Gil stopped, turning back to her. “That’s far enough, then.”

  Lore took in a shaking breath, her back pressed to a rough wall. She tried to grasp at the shadows, to pull them to her, but the sight of them had faded with her vision.

  Stay with me.

  “For my part in this, I am sorry,” Gil said, his voice near. There was a gentle, warm touch on her forehead.

  Lore could no longer tell if her eyes were open. Her body drifted beneath her, her mind untethered. When Gil spoke again, the words bloomed inside her mind, his voice melting into a clearer, deeper one. The eyes of the gods are upon you.

  The dim light of the torch vanished, but the presence of those around her lingered.

  Stay with me, Lore pleaded, aching with desperation. Stay. . . . Don’t leave me. . . .

  The shadows curled around her, and when her thoughts turned to cinders and the world disappeared, she was no longer afraid.

  A HEARTBEAT FOUND HER in the darkness.

  Lore followed the sound of it the way Orpheus must have looked to the light above him as he tried to lead Eurydice out of the Underworld. She knew that if she glanced back to search for the face of the cold presence lingering behind her, she would be lost to it.

  Instead, she drifted toward the growing warmth—toward the familiar power that wrapped around her senses.

  Her eyelids were crusted with grime, but she forced them open.

  Castor’s eyes were shut, his face tilted up to reveal the sharp line of his jaw. His power pulsated around them, burning away the bleakness of the tunnel. It had turned the standing water into a thick haze that clogged the air.

  She was draped across his legs, lifted from the rough floor. One of his arms was wrapped around her shoulders to support her weight, and the other hand rested against her side, where the blade had cut her.

  Tears slid down her face, catching in her hair as she looked up at him. Her body felt like it was filled with air and sunlight, too insubstantial to move. Castor barely seemed to be breathing.

  She reached up with her free hand, tracing a light fingertip down his cheek. Castor reached up to press the hand against his chest, right beside where his mortal heart was beating.

  He met her gaze. He said nothing, but, then, he never needed to. His face was a book that had been written only for her. Its story unfolded while he watched her watch him.

  But as the gentle, drugging feeling of his power eased through her, knitting together skin, mending bone, she began to remember.

  Shame wove through her confusion and her anger, until she was crying again, this time in earnest. For not seeing the truth about Athena. For the knowledge of how close she’d come to leaving this world and everyone she loved.

  For the mistake she had made that could never
be fixed, and the precious lives it had cost.

  Lore looked to the walls around her, searching for the shadows again. But it seemed they’d stayed only until Castor’s light could replace them.

  Castor smoothed the hair away from her wet cheeks, easing the curls back around her ears. She wanted to tell him what had happened, to explain it herself, but he already knew. As easily as she could read him, Castor had always had the measure of her.

  “You were ice-cold,” he said, the words halting. “I didn’t know . . . I wasn’t sure . . .”

  She pressed her forehead to his shoulder. “This is fine. A nice change, even. Our reunions usually involve a lot more punching.”

  “Not always,” he said softly. “Sometimes we chase our enemies.”

  “Variety,” she said, “the spice of mortal combat.”

  Castor blew out a hard breath, pulling back slightly to examine the wound on her leg and the new, pink skin there. Lore’s hand rose, feeling along her ribs.

  It is a shame you did not even possess the courage to drive the blade through your heart.

  “Hey,” he began softly. “Are you still in pain?”

  She shook her head, wondering how to tell him everything that had happened.

  “I shouldn’t have left, but I thought it was the only way to get through to you. . . . I should never have left you alone with her.” Castor released a shuddering breath. He closed his eyes again, but this time, when he opened them, there was a look of cold intent there.

  “I’ll kill her.” The words were low, without any varnish, without any hesitation. And so unlike him.

  “No,” Lore said.

  “What she did to you—” he began again.

  “No,” Lore continued, her voice hoarse. “It was me.”

  Lore saw the exact moment he figured out what she meant. His shock deepened to horror.

  “She was the one,” Lore whispered. “All this time, she was the one who killed them.”