Lore

Lore nodded. “Yes. Exactly.”

“I didn’t tell you this before,” Iro said when she reached the door to the street, “when you asked me about her. My mother is alive after all.”

“What?” Lore breathed. “You’re sure?”

Iro nodded.

“She wrote to me at the start of the Agon. In her letter, she told me that she could not stay within our world, that it would have strangled the life from her,” Iro said. “She knew she could not take me with her without the Odysseides coming after us. I suppose I did not understand how I felt about it until this week, maybe not until you told us about your own family wanting that same thing. To me, she hadn’t achieved freedom, but shame. How could I believe that about my own mother?”

Lore let out a soft sigh. “That hits close to home.”

“All I can do now,” Iro said, “is tell you that I am sorry for everything that’s happened, and come when you call.”

Lore drew in a deep breath. “The other bloodlines won’t willingly give up the Agon.”

“It’s a good thing, then,” Iro said with a small smile, “that neither of us has ever been afraid of a fight.”

She opened the door, only to turn back. “By the way, that sword has a name. Mákhomai.”

I make war.

Lore smiled.

LORE SLEPT AND DREAMED of death’s gray world.

A river drifted lazily by. Memory bled into reverie as she made her way forward over shards of stone that littered its banks. The air turned to ice in her lungs and assaulted her bare arms and legs. A simple shift, the kind the hunters used when burning their dead, scratched at her skin.

She heard a soft voice, a whisper of her name, and looked up. Across the waters of the river were seven golden forms, their outlines blazing against the bleak, craggy landscape.

Lore sat straight up, ripping herself out of the dream. The word echoed through her. Seven.

Their faces had been indistinct—more impressions than anything else, but Lore had recognized them all the same. Hermes, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Poseidon, Artemis, Ares, and Dionysus . . .

If they were truly the gods of the Agon, if it hadn’t all been a hallucination . . . there should have been eight. But that would mean—what? That she’d been right, and that Apollo had somehow escaped death?

Lore shook her head, pressing a cool hand to her temple. It took her a moment to remember where she was. She scanned the office space, her eyes landing on where Van sat awake in one of the chairs.

Castor slept on the ground beneath him, his fingers woven through one another and resting on his chest, but Van’s gaze was fixed on where Miles slept sprawled out on the couch. As Lore’s eyes adjusted to the low light, Van’s look of longing developed like an old photograph in the darkness.

Finally noticing her, he stiffened. After a moment, he seemed to decide something and rose, motioning to her to follow him across the room, to the far window.

Lore approached slowly. As she came to stand in front of him, she leaned her shoulder against the glass and crossed her arms. In the end, she was the one to break the silence.

“Listen,” she began. “I know . . . I know things between us have always been hard.”

“That’s one way of describing it,” he murmured.

“I’ve never been that good about talking about feelings—” she began.

“Or listening,” he interjected quietly.

She gave him a wry look. “Or listening. But I respect you, and I don’t want things to be that way between us anymore. We care about the same people, and regardless of how you feel about me, I care about you, too. I’m sorry if I’ve ever made you feel that I didn’t.”

He sighed. “It’s not like I’ve ever been that fair to you, either. Though, for the record, you still have an unhealthy relationship with trouble.”

Lore let out a soft laugh, and followed Van’s gaze as it turned back toward Miles.

“It’s okay to want good things,” she whispered. “And to believe that you deserve a good life.”

Van shook his head slowly, his left hand adjusting his prosthetic one. “I don’t know about that. I’ve never let myself consider it—maybe in those few moments where I believed the Agon could really end, but then there was always more work to do.”

“I only got a glimpse of it before,” Lore said. “I see that now. I was happy, but the past, the Agon—there was always something that held me back from fully embracing what I have here, and seeing how truly good it is. Don’t make that same mistake.”

Van shrugged, but his eyes instinctively drifted back toward Miles, who was murmuring softly in his sleep.

“I had a weird dream just now,” Lore whispered. “A memory, maybe.”

Zeus had blocked the flow of prophecy, but hunters had always believed that dreams could bring omens and messages. She wasn’t at all surprised when Van said, “Tell me.”

“You think the missing god might have been Apollo?” he asked when Lore had finished.

“They might not have been gods at all,” she reminded him. “Blood loss is a hell of a thing.”

“There’s something else I’ve been thinking about,” he began.

“While you’ve been gazing at Miles? Do I want to hear this?” Lore shut her mouth at his look.

“It’s the idea of sacrifice,” Van said. “I don’t know if we’re thinking about the new lines the right way.”

He worked his jaw back and forth in thought. “Summons me with smoke of altars to be built by conquest final and fearsome . . . A sacrifice has to mean something. It entails something necessary. . . . Couldn’t you argue that it’s the act of giving that necessary thing up to the gods that makes it worthwhile?”

Before she could answer, Lore’s phone vibrated against the external battery Miles had given her to charge it. The cracked screen glowed as she opened Iro’s message.

Confirmed—attack at sunset tomorrow.

She and Van exchanged a look.

“Up to you,” he said. “We’re going to need a few hours to find some last supplies.”

Lore wrote back one word: Noon.

 

The hours passed at a slow, steady march. Lore thought she might be able to doze off, if only to pass the time, but her nerves were jumping too hard beneath her skin. She drilled with Castor, careful as they used their real swords. Even that wasn’t enough to steady her.