Lore

“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.