Lore

Lore’s jaw clenched. Castor trusted him, but that didn’t mean she had to. “Martha’s Diner, Harlem. Wait there.”

Van nodded, slipping back out into the hallway. The locks clicked into place, one at a time. The metal blast door snapped back down, cutting them off from the rest of the house. Castor stared at it, the muscles of his shoulders bunching with his horror and frustration.

Lore was overwhelmed by the speed of the seconds slipping by. “Come on. This is a fight you’re not going to win. Sometimes you have to forget about honor—”

“This is not about honor,” he told her sharply. “It’s about the people I’m leaving to die.”

She released her hold on his arm, feeling as if he’d burned her with his words. Lore moved to the edge of the fractured wall again, turning her gaze down onto the dumpster.

“Shit,” she swore.

The fall was no longer their biggest problem. Hunters wearing the Kadmides’ serpent masks were gathering around the debris from the wall, looking and pointing up. She leaned back, avoiding an arrow fired from a metal crossbow. The beat of helicopter wings forced her attention back up to the roof. Thunder coursed through her veins at the sound of the heavy footsteps walking toward the open skylight.

Castor was suddenly beside her, holding out both arms.

It took her a moment to understand exactly what he wanted.

“You’re joking,” she said.

“And you’re afraid,” he said. “Do you think I’ll drop you?”

“No, I think I’m going to have your scrape your mortal body off the cement,” she said. “Are you serious? We’re four stories up.”

“Trust me,” Castor said.

The voices were loud enough now that she could make out fragments of what they were saying.

“He’s just below us. . . .”

Lore scowled. “If you do drop me, I swear I will come back as one of the Keres and leave you nothing more than ash and blood.”

Castor nodded, his expression grim. “I’d definitely let you try.”

Lore reluctantly stepped up beside him, rising onto her toes to loop one of her arms around Castor’s neck. He reached down, lifting her with irritating ease, his own strong arms wrapping around her shoulder and under her knees without the smallest quiver of effort.

Castor glanced down at her face. “Ready?”

He didn’t wait for her answer as he stepped up to the edge of the wall. Ropes dropped down from either side of the wall and the last clear thing she heard was a deep, familiar voice snarling, “Take him! Don’t let him get away!”

Castor freed one hand and sent a blast of power at the hunters scaling the walls from below and firing up at him from the ground.

Lore turned, pressing her face against Castor’s shoulder as the stench of burnt hair and skin and metal flooded her nostrils.

“Ready?” he asked again.

She nodded. Then Castor tightened his hold on her, gripped one of the dangling ropes, and stepped into the air.

The drop robbed Lore’s heart of several beats, and seemed to yank the oxygen out of her lungs. It was the only reason she didn’t scream.

Castor grunted as the rope gave a sharp jerk, stopping them. Lore’s eyes snapped open. They had landed in the melting, smoldering trash heap that had once been the dumpster.

“You okay?” she gasped, dragging herself out of his grip. Castor’s hand was flayed open by rope burn. He grimaced as a glow emanated around his palm and the skin mended itself.

Lore took a big jump down to avoid the charred bodies that surrounded them. “Let’s go—Cas!”

Castor looked back one last time, even as bullets and arrows rained down again from above them.

Lore grabbed Castor’s wrist, dragging him away from the building, and didn’t let go until he matched her pace. She led him back around the other dumpsters, through the fence, toward the parking garage—one of a thousand secrets that had knotted their lives together.

“Don’t lose sight of me,” Lore warned. “I’m not stopping for you.”

“I’ll do my best to keep up,” he said, still visibly upset.

Lore accepted a boost up from him into the elevator shaft’s window, then turned back, offering him a hand in return. “I’ll definitely let you try.”

He took it, even though she knew he didn’t need to, and they set off again.

Lore’s blood raced through her body as they ran, coming alive with the flush of heat through her muscles and the familiar rhythm of Castor’s steps, just behind her. Their old, hidden route still waited for them, as if they had never left, and had never lost one another.

In that moment, the past became the present, and the present the past, and it was just the two of them in the shadows of their city, the way it had always been.

The way it should have been forever.

THE SUMMER HEAT LINGERED in the city, drawing out the worst smells Manhattan had to offer. As they made their way west, toward the Hudson, Lore felt like she was trapped inside a damp garbage bag.

She’d stripped off the hunter’s cloak, but Castor was another story. New York was one of the few cities in which a man in full ancient costume wouldn’t be even the third-strangest thing people saw while going about their day. And yet everything about him, from his height to his physique to that face, conspired to catch the eye.

Lore instructed the cabdriver to drop them off a few blocks from her town house. She still had the cash from the fight in her pocket and struggled to part with it, counting out the fare from her dwindling stack of twenties. She wasn’t sure what she was more anxious about—being spotted by one of the bloodlines, or the reaction she’d get walking through the door.

Castor hadn’t said a word since they left Thetis House. He didn’t need to.

The pulse of the city had slowed with late afternoon. Now and then they’d pass someone on the way to the grocery store or laundromat, or kids relishing the spray of an open fire hydrant, but as she hurried them along, Lore was relieved not to see anyone she knew. The fewer lies she had to concoct, the better.

Some of the pained tension bled from Castor’s face as he watched Lore stoop to pick up stray Duane Reade bags fluttering along the sidewalk like aimless ghosts.

“What?” she asked, defensive. “I don’t like litter.”