Lore

Artery, she thought viciously, and lunged for his leg.

It was a stupid mistake, a clumsy one. She knew it, even as her body wouldn’t listen, and kept attacking. Belen caught her arm and slammed it against his thigh, sending her blade flying through the air. Lore dove for it, but Belen tackled her with a guttural cry. He dug his knees and full weight into her lower back until she thought he would break her pelvis.

Lore bucked, kicking and screaming. She stretched her arm toward the knife. It glinted like a claw, just beyond her fingertips.

Belen’s weight lifted just enough for him to turn her over roughly. His chest was heaving, blood running down his arms from where she’d brutalized him. They rolled over and over, grass sticking to her face and arms as Lore grappled, struggling to pin him down. She took a chance, reaching down toward his boot to feel for a hidden knife, and found one. Gripping the hilt, she slashed it across his forehead.

He released a choked cry—it wasn’t a deep cut, but it sent a curtain of blood down into his eyes. The distraction gave her enough time to grip his wrist and fingers, breaking his hold on his own knife. She jammed it into his left calf muscle. This time, Lore was satisfied to hear him scream.

With a burst of strength, she flipped their positions, trapping him beneath her. Belen tried to twist enough to throw her off, but Lore had locked her legs around him and tightened their pressure on his arms. His spit flew like a rabid dog’s. Lore lifted the knife again, watching the rapid rise and fall of his chest, where his heart would be beating beneath the armor, skin, and bone.

Lore would have driven the blade in, if it hadn’t been for that whisper of logic that slipped through the more animal part of her brain.

Killing him won’t be enough.

It wouldn’t. Wrath deserved to know the pain of losing family again, but killing Belen would do nothing but bring Belen glory. Kleos came through battle, and there was no greater kleos than for those who died bravely.

There was another message she could send his father. A better one.

“You ever heard the one about Phaethon?” she asked, leaning close to his snapping teeth. Blood covered his face like a second mask. “How he was desperate to prove his divine parentage—so desperate that he demanded to drive his father Helios’s chariot across the sky?”

“Shut up, bitch,” Belen growled. “Shut up—”

“He was warned he wouldn’t be able to control the chariot’s wild horses, but his hubris demanded he be able to try,” Lore continued. “Do you know what happened to him?”

Belen hissed, trying again to rock her off him through the brute force of his body.

“He couldn’t control them. The horses climbed too high. The earth began to grow cold as the sun god’s chariot grew too distant,” Lore said. “Zeus had to strike him down with a lightning bolt. He paid the price for his desperation and pride with his life.”

Lore released some of the pressure around his arms; she let him think she had slipped up, that he had an opportunity. Belen’s hands rose with a tremendous scream from his chest, reaching for her—to shove her, to strangle her, she didn’t know. Half-blinded by his own blood, he didn’t see the angle of her blade until it had sliced off both of his thumbs.

Belen howled in pain and rage.

“You may live,” Lore sneered. “But good luck holding a blade.”

She had cut him with a knife, but her true weapon had been the Agon itself—all its cruel realities that men like him and his father relished inflicting on others. Now he would know them himself.

Belen would never gain kleos, not from this Agon, and likely not from any other. Maybe one day they could fit him with prosthetics and he would be back in the hunt, but he would always carry the scars of losing to her. He would know what it meant to be followed by whispers. Beaten by the Perseous girl, the last of her name. Beaten by a gutter rat who should have died years ago. Beaten.

She had written his story for him.

“Lore!”

Castor stood a short distance away, his face pale with shock.

She pushed away from Belen, rising to her feet. Her chest tightened at the way Castor was looking at her. He brought the world into sharper focus: The brightening sky as the hours tilted toward morning; the blood on her hands, arms, and jeans; the breath flaring in and out her.

Lore saw herself through Castor’s eyes, how she must have looked half-wild to him. As if she were a monster.

Something in her stirred, angry and frightened.

A branch snapped and she turned back toward Belen. He was crawling, struggling to his feet. He choked on every breath, hugging his arms in tight to his chest, his hands still gushing blood.

Castor started after him, but Lore stepped in front of him. He took stock of the cuts on her arms, half of which she hadn’t noticed or felt, and reached out to heal her. Lore resisted, not wanting to be touched just then, or to feel anything gentle.

“Where are the others?” she asked.

“Going back to the house. Lore, what did the Reveler say to you?” Castor asked. “What could have caused . . . this?”

His words rankled her. “This? You mean actually doing something?”

“Lore,” he began again, with a new intensity to his expression. “What happened? What’s going on?”

Lore said nothing. He moved to get around her, only for her to block him again.

“Was that Belen Kadmou?” he asked her. “Why did you let him get away?”

Lore shifted, blocking his path for the third time.

Castor’s expression turned from shock to anger then, in a way she’d never seen. “We could have interrogated him. Why did you let him go?”

“He’ll make a better message than a body,” Lore said.

Castor shook his head, releasing a sound of frustration. “Except you’re not just risking yourself by enraging Wrath,” he told her plainly. “You’re risking all of us, including Miles.”

The trilling was back in her mind, turning the air to static in her ears. Her pulse jumped as the edges of her vision darkened. Miles . . .

She hadn’t even thought of Miles.

“What did the Reveler say to you?” Castor asked. “What made you so angry that you’d do this after everything you told me earlier? This isn’t who you are!”

“Maybe it is,” she shot back.

“No,” Castor said. “You are a good person, Melora Perseous. You’re not what they tried to make you, or even what you tried to be for them. Neither of us is.”