Lore

“All right,” Miles said softly.

“No—” Van said. “Don’t do that. Don’t feel sorry for me. It’s just the way it was. Unlike everyone else, he never looked down at me for not wanting to fight, and for being relatively bad at it. He didn’t—still doesn’t—like fighting either.”

“I was going to try to draw an analogy to me in PE, but I’m going to rescind that,” Miles said. “Given that your physical education involved learning how to murder people.”

That got a soft laugh out of Van. “I know you think I’m being . . . hard. But all I care about is protecting him and making sure he stays alive this week. I couldn’t help him before, when he relapsed and his cancer came back. I couldn’t convince him to stop going to training when we spoke on the phone, even though it was exhausting him.”

“Why did he stay in training if it was that bad?”

“Because of Lore,” Van said. “He didn’t want to let her down, because she would have lost her training partner and had to leave the program. But more than that, he always wanted to see her. He always wanted to follow her, even if it was right into trouble.”

“Hey now,” Miles said. Lore’s heart swelled at the edge of warning in his voice. “That’s my friend you’re talking about.”

Van blew out a long breath. “I was always a little jealous of how much attention she got from Castor. It sounds stupid now that we’re grown. . . .”

“Oh,” Miles said. “So you’re in love with him.”

Van choked on his milk.

Miles rested his chin on his palm and waited, eyebrows raised expectantly.

“It’s not like that with Cas,” Van said.

“As if you’d be the first guy with a secret, unrequited crush,” Miles said. “Mine was a high school quarterback who was so painfully straight he was practically a pencil. Well, a pencil with bulging muscles and the tendency to answer anything anyone ever said to him with dude.”

Van laughed. Miles grinned.

“I don’t have those feelings for him,” Van said, finally. “I never have.”

Miles let out a soft, knowing hum. Van took a sip of his milk. Miles did the same with his tea.

“And anyway, why are you so loyal to Lore?” Van pressed. “You barely knew anything about her past, and what little you did know was a lie.”

“Not all of it,” Miles said. “I always knew her family had died, but none of the details about how, or what happened to her in the years after. It took a long time for her to open up to me at all. Like . . . months after Gil let me rent the spare room. I had to dig little by little, and it was worth it, because I love the soft heart I found under the somewhat surly surface. That part was never a lie. It’s really rare to find someone who accepts you completely, and I try to give that back to her.”

“So you do understand,” Van said quietly.

Miles nodded. “I know you think I’m being a reckless idiot—”

“I don’t think you’re—”

Miles didn’t let him finish. “And maybe I am. But I’m in this for her.”

Lore leaned back against the wall, closing her eyes.

“That was a good speech,” Van said, a smile in his voice.

“Thank you,” Miles said, sipping his tea. “I thought you might like it. Everything is life and death and epic stakes with you people. I need to get on your level.”

“It would be a far better world,” Van said, “if we all got on yours.”

The sounds from the TV changed, becoming louder and more pronounced as it trumpeted out the breaking-news-alert tone. A moment later, Miles’s and Van’s phones vibrated and chimed.

Lore went straight for the living room, scooping the television remote off the coffee table. There were footsteps on the stairs—Castor coming down, and Athena coming up from the basement.

The local news channel flickered on. This time, instead of being posted at the security perimeter around Rockefeller Center, a familiar-looking reporter—this one a middle-aged white man—stood in front of a gorgeous stone building. People milled around him, crying or visibly stunned. Their faces flashed red-blue-red-blue with the lights of a nearby police car. Smoke wove out through the dark air like silver snakes.

Lore leaned closer. The chyron streamed with words that stopped the blood in her veins.

The bodies of two children discovered inside vandalized Charging Bull statue . . .

Miles sank onto the couch slowly, his hand pressed against his mouth as the newscaster spoke, clearly distraught, “Police made the gruesome discovery when witnesses called nine-one-one after noticing first smoke and then fire beneath the statue. It—it appears that the statue, which is hollow, had a panel cut out of it so that the bodies could be sealed inside. There are several unconfirmed reports by other eye-witnesses that they heard screaming once the fires began, but the NYPD has not yet determined if these children were alive or dead when they were placed in the statue.”

Castor hung back, his face turned so he wouldn’t have to watch. But Lore refused to look away. She already knew that, whoever the children were—Blooded or Unblooded—they were two little girls.

“Oh God,” Miles said. “They’re just . . . they’re just kids.”

Lore had known Wrath would retaliate for what she did to Belen, but she had made the mistake of assuming he would strike back at her physically. Directly. Not emotionally. Not like this.

She wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

Athena moved closer to the television, studying the images flashing across the screen. The sight of her blurred in Lore’s vision, and the newscaster’s voice disappeared beneath the pounding in her ears. Her whole body flamed with rage.

Miles might not have recognized it, but every other living soul in that room knew that Wrath and the Kadmides had turned the famous statue near Wall Street into a brazen bull—an unspeakably evil torture device from the old country that roasted its victims alive in the belly of a bronze bull.

“Police have erected tents around the crime scene, but an eyewitness gave us this exclusive photo taken moments before they arrived,” the newscaster said. “Please be advised that this image will be upsetting, and that the NYPD has asked us to blur a message left by the perpetrator until they’ve gathered more information.”