Lore

“I will try to protect them,” Castor said.

“Try?” Philip repeated with derision. “Try! Don’t think I don’t know that you had planned to abandon us—to leave the city and your bloodline behind. You have always been weak, but now your selfish spinelessness has shamed us all.”

Castor flinched. Lore gripped his arm, hoping to steady him.

“I will offer this but once,” Philip said. “I will release you from this life with a quick, clean death. You know this is the only way. Try? You will never be enough.”

Lore gripped the book tighter, debating which soft spot on the old goat she should hit. She saw the flicker of fear in Castor’s face—the worry that what Philip was saying was right, and that he wouldn’t be enough—and settled on two strikes: throat, then loins.

Philip lowered into a fighting stance. “I will never know how you, a dying whelp of a boy, killed an old god, but I’m certain of one thing: if I allow you to live, you will fail them, and they will all die cursing you.”

A thin band of sunlight slashed across the carpet near Lore’s feet. She glanced down, confused, and missed the arrow as it tore through Philip’s heart.

The old man stared at Castor, his eyes bulging as one hand came up to touch it. He was dead before he even hit the floor.

Castor instinctively moved to catch him, but Lore swung her gaze up, toward the open skylight. Another arrow appeared in the sliver of blue and released without so much as a whisper—ripping through the air, flying straight toward the back of Castor’s neck.

LORE LUNGED, SWINGING THE heavy book up into the arrow’s path.

Her arms shook as they absorbed the impact of its strike. Instead of bouncing away, or catching on the leather cover, the steel head pierced through the hundreds of wafer-thin pages and tore out through the back. It hit the reinforced doorframe and finally stopped.

The book fell from her hands.

“Get back,” she heard Castor say. When she didn’t move, he gripped the front of her robes and spun her behind him. There was a heavy slam against the floor as someone jumped down from the skylight; it rattled the furniture and Lore’s unsteady legs.

A voice rose like a cold night wind through trees. “Godkiller.”

The woman—the being—looked as if she’d been carved from the darkness of a deep and ancient wild. The goddess’s blond hair was matted with leaves and caught in pale, almost snow-white clouds around her dirt-streaked face. Even dulled by mortal blood, there was a pearlescent quality to her ivory skin, as if she radiated moonlight.

It was Artemis.

The goddess bared her teeth, but Lore’s gaze fixed on the way her fingers were curled into claws around her compound bow. Stolen from a dead hunter, most likely.

Chiron leaped down from the bed, growling. The goddess turned as he lunged at her, her eyes flashing. The dog suddenly stilled, as if hit by a tranquilizer dart. His body relaxed as he rolled onto his side, exposing his soft belly to her.

“Lady of the Hunt,” Castor said, neutrally.

Artemis gave him a baleful look as she prowled forward. Each step revealed a new, horrifying detail.

It wasn’t dirt on the goddess’s face, but dried blood. It had doused her front, speckling the sky-blue fabric of her robes. Lore’s gaze fixed on the quiver strapped to the goddess’s back—the one held in place with a strap not of worn leather, but of braided human hair. All different colors and textures, all sticky with blood and flecks of scalp.

Lore’s stomach churned violently.

Artemis raised her bow. Another arrow was already notched. “You must have known that I would come for you. That I would hunt you, into the House of Hades, into the deepest depths of Tartarus, into whatever infernal darkness you hoped would hide you.”

Without thinking, Lore put a warning hand on Castor’s shoulder and felt the muscles there tighten in response.

“Please,” he said. “You are not my enemy, and I’m not yours. I need to ask you something. If you were there that day. If you saw what happened.”

Lore’s gaze shot to the locked door behind them, and she knew.

No one is coming, she thought.

Lore began to search the room in earnest, her eyes landing on a floor mirror. She could knock the glass out of the frame, use the shards. All she needed was to get close enough to cut one of the tendons or arteries in the goddess’s leg. That would at least buy them some time to escape.

“I’ve waited seven years for this moment,” Artemis seethed. “My brother’s death is your ruin. An evil fate is upon you now, Godkiller. When I am finished, there will not be enough left of your mortal corpse for the carrion birds.”

The twins had been two halves of one soul, in a constant ebb and flow around each other, like night shifting to day, and day into night. They had jealously guarded and protected each other, rarely separating in the Agon if they could help it. Now the goddess looked as if Apollo’s death had shredded the last bit of her sanity. Her eyes blazed with the embers of her power.

“Were you there?” Castor asked, a note of pleading in his voice. “Answer me.”

“Leave, girl,” the goddess said, addressing Lore directly. “I have no quarrel with you. Yet.”

Lore felt the words like cold drips on her skin. She didn’t understand why Castor hadn’t attacked the goddess yet, why he kept asking her that question.

“Let me get her out,” Castor said, slowly walking them backward toward the door. “Like you said, you have no quarrel with her.”

It was a horrible parody of the way they used to drill, mirroring each other’s steps. Castor reached for the goddess’s arrow, splintering the wood of the doorframe, pulling it free. As he returned his hand to his side, he twisted his wrist so that the arrowhead pointed up at his woven gold belt—to the small knife he had tucked there, against the small of his back.

Lore drew in a deep breath, knowing exactly what he wanted. She stepped in close to him, her fingers curling around the hilt. It had absorbed the heat of his skin and now burned her fingertips.

“You’ll choke on your own blood before I hear another word from you—”

Castor bent forward and Lore moved faster than she ever had in her life, sliding the blade free and throwing it.

Either because the knife was slightly bent, or because Lore was simply out of practice, the blade winged farther to the right than she’d meant for it to go. It spun toward the goddess’s arm instead of her shoulder. Artemis jerked her bow up to block it. The knife rebounded onto the floor, spinning away.