Lore Read online

In the end, she didn’t finish her thought. Athena shut the bathroom door, leaving Lore standing alone in the hallway. She reached into her pocket again for the necklace Gil had given her. Her palm curled over the feather charm, and, for a moment, she did nothing but stand in the dim hallway, waiting for her heart to steady.

  Not lost, she thought. Free.

  Once this week was over, and Athena had held up her end of their deal, Lore would be truly free. Of the Agon. Of the gods. Of the hunters.

  She wasn’t surprised to find Miles already in her small room, sitting at the edge of the bed. He was the most interesting thing in the otherwise plain space.

  “All right,” she began, “I know you want to stay, but—”

  Miles was suddenly in front of her, wrapping her in a tight hug. Lore froze, her arms limp at her side.

  “Why didn’t you leave?” he whispered. “You could have left last week. I would have helped you.”

  Lore squeezed her eyes shut and pulled back out of his embrace to move toward her dresser.

  “If something happens while I’m gone, or you see anyone suspicious out on the street, I need you to leave Athena and run,” Lore said.

  “I’m not going to leave,” he insisted.

  “You can’t fight hunters, Miles. They’re trained to kill gods and anyone else that stands in their way. I would never even find your body.”

  He gave her a strange look.

  “I’m not going to fight them,” Miles said. “I’m going hide in the basement and call nine-one-one like a normal person.”

  Lore allowed herself a small smile as she carefully set the necklace down on the dresser and methodically pulled an oversize white shirt, black leggings, undergarments, and socks from the drawers.

  “Do you want me to try to fix that for you?” he asked.

  “Could you?” she asked, passing it to him. “I don’t have a chain to replace it, and I don’t want to risk losing it by using string.”

  He examined the place the thin gold chain snapped. “I can definitely try.”

  “Thank you,” Lore said. She had so few things she cherished. Everything she’d had in her old life had been lost.

  Not Castor, her mind whispered.

  She drew in a deep breath, allowing the small bit of warmth to spread through her at the realization. She still had Castor. The Agon had taken so much, but it had given him back.

  “You know, I get why the hunters want immortality,” Miles said, looking up from the necklace. “And I get what it can do for them and their bloodlines. But even that doesn’t feel like enough of a reason when they know they’re going to be hunted, too.”

  The initial panic of telling Miles everything had worn off to a kind of exhausted relief. A small part of her even felt grateful for the fact that she’d been able to choose how to tell the story.

  “It all comes down to kleos,” Lore said, her hand lingering on the picture frame. “That’s really what they’re after. That’s the only thing they’re allowed to want. You can gain immortality by becoming a god, but you can also gain it through glory. Kleos is the honor that comes from becoming a legend—someone others keep alive through stories and songs. Your body can die, but your name will live forever.”

  “That’s it?” Miles said.

  “It wouldn’t make sense to you,” Lore said. It wouldn’t make sense to anyone who was raised outside their world. Sometimes it didn’t even make sense to her.

  The sharp wail of Miles’s phone made both of them jump.

  “You have to change that,” Lore begged.

  He mouthed sorry as he got up and headed to the door. He answered the call with a slightly pained “Hi, Ma . . . Yeah, no, I have time. What’s up?”

  Lore listened to his voice as he made his way down the hall to his own room.

  “No, no—you’re thinking of the wrong place,” Miles was saying. “It’s where we used to play soccer, not at the school. . . .”

  The bedroom door shut, making his muffled words inaudible, but his voice still hovered in her mind, ringing clear as a bell.

  It’s where we used to play. . . .

  Of course. Apodidraskinda. Hide-and-seek. The game they used to play as kids.

  “Clever, Cas,” she whispered. His message hadn’t been a challenge at all.

  It had been instructions on where, exactly, to find him.

  AMAZINGLY, LORE HADN’T REALIZED she’d developed a fear of heights until she found herself three stories off the ground, balanced on a narrow cement ledge of a former warehouse in Tribeca.

  “Fantastic plan as always,” she muttered.

  Her body shook from the strain of the climb, and her fingertips were raw from clutching the brick. Lore angled her head to the right one last time, making sure she was still outside the nearby camera’s frame.

  While the Achillides owned other properties in the city, this building, known as Thetis House, had been the only place she and Castor had ever played apodidraskinda.

  When they were kids, Castor had shown her how to approach the building from behind without being spotted by the security cameras and snipers on the roof—a feat that involved sneaking into a service elevator in the separate parking garage to the rear, crawling through a disguised hole in an electrified fence, and using a line of dumpsters as a shield.

  After that, there was only the small, death-defying matter of free-climbing the corner of the building using the decorative brickwork as grips and footholds. But there was one significant difference in this climb compared to the last one she had made seven years ago.

  Now Lore knew to be afraid—not just of falling, but of what she would find inside the building’s walls.

  She drew herself up another four bricks, passing the third-floor balconies and windows. Before she could continue to the next floor, her ears picked up something else. Airy music, accompanied by the clink of crystal and a low rumble of excited voices.

  Lore shifted her weight, glancing up, then down, before leaning to her left to peer through the blacked-out windows of the balcony’s door. Someone had left them cracked open.

  You have got to be kidding me, she thought.

  A party.

  Inside the building was like a dream of another, ancient life. Lore caught glimpses of it as the Achillides passed by the balcony. Women glided through the space, their bright silk gowns made in the ancient style of the chiton and peplos. Their glittering jewels were complemented by crowns of laurel leaves, real and gold.

  The men mingled with one another around the ample platters of food and cascading towers of champagne and wine glasses, all wearing either a chiton or more modern robes over loose silk trousers.

  Parties, the kind that turned into hazy revels of wine and ritual, were common enough—what good, after all, was a glorious destiny if you were never allowed to luxuriate in it? Some involved ceremony, such as the favor-seeking sacrifices to Zeus in the days leading up to the Agon, and more rituals later, after its completion, when it was time to bury the dead.

  This was neither.

  You’d better be here, Cas, Lore thought, annoyed, though she was surprised to feel a jolt of eagerness, too.

  Inside the brick walls were countless rooms—bedrooms, training facilities, conference spaces—and closets and cabinets to get lost in. Officially, Lore had only ever been invited to the third floor, a vast open space filled with weapons racks, and where she had trained with the Achillides young.

  While both her mother and father had tried to train her to fight as a child, they had struggled to find the time between the jobs that paid their rent and kept food on the table. Lore had never thought about what it must have cost her father to approach the archon of the Achillides about her training—the true price wouldn’t have been the cash exchanged or favors promised, but the loss of pride that came with needing to ask.

  Lore drew in another breath as she finally reached the fourth floor. In the past—and hopefully still—the top story had been used for storage, and with hunters p
atrolling the roof just above it, it had never had the same level of security as the lower, more accessible levels. That included the not-quite-secret underground entrance from the building immediately to the right of Thetis House.

  There was a half-inch ledge that ran from the edge of the building to the closest balcony. Lore held her breath as she shifted the very tips of her toes onto it. Her shoulders and arms screamed in protest, but it was her fingertips she worried about now, numb from the strain of clawing at the brick.

  Before she could allow herself to truly think about how incredibly stupid this was, Lore quickly shuffled along the ledge over to the balcony.

  The late-morning sun burned against her back. As it had climbed up from the horizon, it had brought the city’s thick, damp heat to a boil, leaving her light-headed. Lore blinked away the sweat dripping into her eyes as she stretched a hand out for the stone railing of the balcony.

  She was trembling by the time she hauled herself over it, dropping softly onto its narrow block of concrete. Lore drew herself close to the doors, out of the sight of anyone patrolling above, and knelt there for several moments, waiting for feeling to return to her upper body.

  You don’t have time for this, she thought. Get going.

  Blackout curtains obscured whatever and whoever might be in the room. Lore pressed her ear to the door’s hot glass to listen for movement, but heard only the party downstairs and her own pounding heartbeat.

  The glass panels on the doors were bulletproof, but the alarm attached to them posed the bigger problem. Or would have, if an eleven-year-old Castor had been even slightly more resistant to a ten-year-old Lore’s diabolical strategy of only making bets she knew she’d win.

  There was a single loose brick just above the doorframe. Lore used her pocketknife to ease it out and gave silent thanks to that lovesick hunter—the one Castor had spied using this trick to meet the man he’d been forbidden to marry.

  Lore pulled out the Wheelz 4 Totz magnet from the pocket of her jeans, unwinding the shoestring she’d taped to it. Carefully, she dropped the magnet down through the opening in the wall and used the string to move it back and forth until she heard the telltale click of the magnet kissing the alarm’s sensor.

  Please work, she thought. Please let this one thing be easy.

  The alarm sensors had always been magnetic and were triggered when the magnet on the door was separated from the stationary half. It was a simple system that was usually effective, so hopefully they hadn’t upgraded to new laser-based devices.

  Lore reached back into her pocket for the thin piece of plastic she’d cut from an empty Pepsi bottle. It took her a moment of maneuvering to wedge it in between the doors and pop the lower, weaker lock. She had to wait for the hunter to pass by overhead again before she inserted the blank bump key she’d bought from her neighborhood hardware store into the dead bolt. Wrapping the brick with the bottom of her T-shirt, she hit the key, forcing it in enough to be able to turn it, and, mercifully unlock the door.

  Lore stood off to the side, her back flat against the other door, and pushed it open into the heavy curtain behind it with a satisfied smile. “You predictable idiots.”

  For all the millions these families spent on security systems and weaponry, they still couldn’t bring themselves to seal these doors, or brick them up the way they had the windows. It would mean cutting off their own potential escape routes if another family or god ever attacked them here.

  When it was clear no silent alarm had been triggered, Lore slipped inside and quietly shut the door behind her. She welcomed the caress of the AC and the relative darkness as she drew the shoestring through the hole, removed the magnet, and replaced the brick.

  As she’d expected, the room was still being used for storage. It was a maze of boxes and old trunks, all smelling damp, as if they’d barely escaped a basement flood. Lore pawed through them until she found a moldering set of black hunter’s robes. She secured them around her ripped jean shorts and sweat-soaked black tank.

  At the bottom of the trunk was a chipped mask. Lore stared at it, hating that she still felt sick at the thought of wearing something other than her family’s own mark.

  You need it, she told herself. Take it. Just in case.

  The one thing she hadn’t been able to find was some kind of blade or weapon.

  “Well,” she muttered, as she pulled a lone screwdriver out of an abandoned toolbox. “It’s pointy.”

  Lore slipped it into the hidden inner pocket of the robe. She pulled the hood up, then back down as she realized how ridiculous it would look.

  “Come on, Perseous,” she whispered. “Let’s go seek.”

  The layout of the hallway was exactly as she remembered it, with the exception of a few keypads that had been installed on a number of its doors. She glanced up, searching the ceiling for disguised cameras.

  A voice cut through the quiet like a blade to the back of her neck.

  “What are you doing up here?”

  LORE SPUN AROUND. A man she didn’t recognize, wearing robes identical to her own, stood at the end of the hall, just at the top of the staircase.

  “I—” she began, saying the first thing that came to mind. “I thought I heard something.”

  The man’s gaze narrowed. Lore instinctively slid a hand inside her robe, toward the screwdriver, but forced herself to stop. She’d only look guiltier if she didn’t move toward him, so she did.

  “Did he sound like he was in some kind of distress?” the man asked in the ancient tongue. A note of anxiety rang through the words. “I thought he had attendants with him.”

  Attendants?

  “It turned out to be nothing,” Lore said lightly, keeping out of the faint pool of candlelight from a nearby table. She gripped the mask tighter, wishing she’d just put the stupid thing on. “The floor is secure.”

  Before she’d left the house, Lore had taken a sharpie and drawn the letter alpha, along with the bloodline’s mark, on her left wrist. It was a design she’d seen inked onto the chests and arms of the Achillides who had trained her. She idly pushed the sleeve up, pretending to scratch at some phantom itch.

  The lines of the man’s face relaxed as he noticed the fake tattoo.

  While there were always spies willing to do whatever was necessary to slip past another bloodline’s defenses, the hunters were superstitious enough to believe that putting another house’s mark on your body would anger your ancestors, causing them to abandon you.

  Seeing as misfortune had been Lore’s constant companion for the last seven years, she was sure her own couldn’t possibly hate her more than they already did.

  “Good,” the hunter said. “Let’s go downstairs. We should be able to get some food before they’ll want us back on watch. You’re one of Tassos’s girls, aren’t you?”

  “Got it on the first try,” Lore said, letting her face relax into a smile. “How’s—”

  A door at the other end of the hallway opened, and several small girls, no more than five years old, were ushered out of one of the rooms.

  Lore’s heart clenched like a fist.

  All the girls wore simple white tunics detailed with gold embroidery that matched their sandals, and belts. Different styles of diadems and ribbons had been woven into their braided hair.

  A woman, her own dark curls in tight ringlets, emerged behind them. The violet silk of her long, draped gown had been printed with ancient symbols and illustrations, including one of Achilles poised for battle.

  The woman motioned to the girls, and all of them, every last one of the nine, fell silent and still, their small bodies rigid with what Lore knew to be fear-honed obedience.

  A man emerged from the room across the hall like a clap of thunder. Lore’s nostrils flared at the sight of him.

  Philip Achilleos had gone silver-haired, and his permanent scowl only deepened with age. His scars seemed more pronounced than ever on his pale face, and while the old goat was still barrel-chested, the body beneath hi
s deep sapphire robe had clearly thinned as he’d left the prime of his life.

  His wife, Acantha, trailed behind him, poised and perfectly coifed. She had always been the better hunter of the two—practically legendary by the end of her first Agon cycle. But her marriage, and the temporary alliance it had brought to the Houses of Achilles and Theseus, had clipped her wings.

  “Patér,” the woman in violet began, bowing to Philip. “May I present—”

  He circled the girls with a look of disgust. One of them risked a glance up at him. The back of his hand whipped against her temple.

  Rage swelled in Lore. She took a step toward them, but stopped as the girl straightened again, her face carefully impassive as she lifted her chin.

  You have to find Castor, Lore reminded herself. Don’t give yourself away so easily.

  But the girls . . . these children . . . She couldn’t stand it. Being back inside Thetis House had been momentarily disarming, but now Lore remembered her hatred—for the hunters, for this life. It shot through her like a bolt of lightning.

  The sight of the girl bowing before that pig with respect he didn’t deserve, in the hope of nothing so much as pleasing him, made her want to scream.

  Philip didn’t care about these children, just as he hadn’t cared about Castor. The fact that the archon had personally denied Castor’s father the funds to continue the boy’s medical treatment was enough for Lore to hate him in this life, and for all eternity.

  “These are the best you could do?” he hissed to the woman in violet. “I told you to select beautiful girls. Where did you find these, crawling in the subway tunnels with the other rats?”

  “Patér?” the woman said, her voice smaller now.

  “Perhaps,” Acantha said, placing a soothing hand on her husband’s arm. She shared a covert glance with the woman, tilting her head until the string of diamonds dangling from her ears glowed with candlelight. “Perhaps, Patér, the sight of them would be less offensive to your gaze if she were to paint them gold?”

  Philip Achilleos let out a low growl before barking out, “So be it. Remember, it is not my disappointment alone you should fear.”