“Are you okay?” Lore asked.
Miles hugged a water bottle to his chest. “I should have listened to Castor and stayed outside. . . .”
Athena shifted uneasily behind her.
Lore looked through the windows of the entrance’s two wooden doors, startling at the sight of two security guards sitting in high chairs, their backs to her. Castor stood between them. His grave expression turned Lore’s lungs to stone.
She smelled it as soon as she pushed the door open. Stale air and decay and blood. The hair on her body rose.
“Do you want to wait for Van outside?” Lore suggested to Miles.
Miles shook his head. “He’s not coming. He texted Castor to say he’d meet us back at the house.”
“Why don’t you go meet him?” she said. “You don’t have to go back inside.”
“No,” he said, forcing the words out. “I can handle it. I don’t need to leave.”
“I don’t want you to have to handle it,” she told him.
But Miles moved past her, heading inside.
Athena’s breath came light and quick behind Lore as they stepped into the entry. The goddess approached the guard on the right. The young woman’s hair had been braided down her back, much like Lore’s own. Her head rested against the wall, as if she’d merely dozed off.
Lore saw the truth as they came to stand by Castor’s side.
The woman’s throat had been cut so deeply, Lore could see the white bone of her spine through the gaping flesh. It would have been a quick death, but a brutal one. She wouldn’t have been able to scream.
The other guard’s face had been battered, but whatever suffering he’d felt would have been over as soon as he’d been stabbed through the heart.
“A léaina?” Castor guessed. “The Kadmides might have beat us to the punch again.”
“Or a desperate god,” Lore said.
She wasn’t sure which would be worse.
There were four more bodies. One police officer and three more uniformed security guards. The killer had brought them into the Garden Court and arranged them in a grotesque pattern around the dry fountain. Their lifeless eyes watched the heavens through the domed glass ceiling. There were no signs of blood or struggle anywhere else in the museum, and the monitors in the security booth seemed to be on some sort of loop.
Which meant the likelihood of hunters being behind the deaths went up significantly.
Miles leaned against one of the nearby pillars, hugging his arms around his body.
Maybe this will be enough for him, Lore thought. Maybe Miles would see that Unblooded mortals weren’t spared from killing when they stood in the path of the Agon.
“They’ve all been”—he seemed to be searching for a nicer word to describe the small massacre in front of them—“cut up. Do hunters not use guns?”
“Some do,” Lore told him, giving his shoulder a quick, comforting touch. “Mostly on other hunters. Gods are killed with arrows or blades.”
“Why?” Miles asked.
“Zeus’s words at Olympia were interpreted as a command,” she said. “I will reward you with the mantle and the deathless power of the god whose blood stains your bold blade. No one has been willing to risk losing out on a god’s power by testing other methods.”
She watched as Athena used one of the security guard’s batons to thread through the door handles, reinforcing their busted locks.
“Based on their condition they’ve been dead for a few hours,” Lore said. Castor nodded. Aside from the color of their blood darkening as it oxidized in the air, and the faint smell of death that clung to them, there wasn’t any noticeable decay. Rigor mortis hadn’t set in.
Miles gave her a look that was half-amazed and half-horrified.
“No museum staff or construction workers . . . this has to be the night shift,” Lore said. “Otherwise someone would have come looking for their loved ones, right?”
“Do you think the Reveler is capable of doing all of this?” Castor asked, astonished. “Alone?”
“Yes,” Athena said, gripping her dory. “He has not survived this long because he possesses a gentle nature.”
“Can’t wait to meet him,” Miles said, pained. “But we should probably get on that now, before the next security shift comes in.”
Lore and the others had pulled the chairs with the security guards away from the doors, wiping their fingerprints from the seats, and Castor had melted the door’s locks shut, but Miles was right. Every moment they wasted standing around was another opportunity to be caught surrounded by bodies.
If the Kadmides were responsible for these deaths, one of their crews would be by before sunrise to clean the scene—in a strange way, she hoped they would. While she and the others wouldn’t have DNA or fingerprints in the system, there was every chance Miles did and could be linked to the scene.
“You will keep an eye on the entrance, imposter,” Athena said. Her eyes shifted to Lore. “You and I will start searching below and work our way up.”
Castor looked as if he wanted to protest, but acquiesced. “All right, but if you do find him, don’t approach him yet. We need to see what kind of state he’s in before making a call on how to use him as bait.”
Athena gave an unfeeling smile. “Imagine lecturing one such as me on strategy.”
“You’re with us, Miles,” Lore said. “Now—how do we get downstairs?”
The lower levels were as still and dark as the upper one had been. Lore reached out a hand, feeling along the walls. The corridor there would have been pitch-black if it wasn’t for the light of an emergency exit sign.
Lore pulled the phone from her back pocket and turned its flashlight on. She led the group as they moved into the first of two galleries connected by the long hallway. Paintings and documents had been removed for the renovation, leaving empty walls and small information plaques behind.
Outside the lower galleries and the vestibule connecting them, there was no signage to help direct them, just doors leading into some kind of administrative area.
Doors that had been kicked in by force.
Athena moved one of them aside, lifting her dory like a spear. Lore motioned for Miles to stay farther behind her. Her phone’s light passed over an office and a storage room. Both looked like they had been gutted, and had bled out with storage boxes and scattered papers.