Lore

Dark water. So much of it—more than Lore had ever seen, rushing, rushing, rushing from the nearby river, tearing through the streets. The ambulances and cop cars along the park disappeared beneath the surging wave, rolled like toys, their lights suddenly gone. The officers and emergency workers ran, but they weren’t fast enough to avoid being carried away.

And still, the water wasn’t satisfied.

It rose higher with each passing second, swallowing signs, streetlights, and buildings—drowning the city whole.

HIGH UP FROM THE lookout point, Lore watched helplessly as the punishing crush of water broke through brick walls and carried the debris like prizes of war. She heard screaming and started for the stairs. Athena caught her wrist in a steely grip, stopping her.

“We have to help them!” Lore said, trying to extract herself from Athena’s impossibly strong hold.

The goddess looked out onto the rising waters, taking in the sight and smell of it churning and churning.

Lore closed her eyes, but the cataclysmic sounds of the water smashing through windows, the honking and crashing of cars, the small, distant voices begging for help, drilled into her mind until Lore thought she would scream, if just to drown it all out.

Athena’s face was inscrutable. There was none of the horror Lore felt, or the helplessness. If anything, there was recognition. She had seen bigger, worse floods—floods meant to wipe humans from the face of the earth. Floods meant to begin life on Earth again after the failures of the doomed men of the Silver and Bronze Ages.

“This can’t just be a storm surge,” Lore choked out. “There’s too much water, and it’s not stopping—this has to be unnatural. And the people who live on lower levels of the buildings and town houses . . .”

Lore couldn’t bear to finish the thought aloud. None of them would have had time to get out.

All along Manhattan and the outer boroughs, evacuation zones for hurricanes and other superstorms would be flooding. Manhattan’s natural elevation rose the further inland you were, but the lower-lying waterfronts—the neighborhoods along both rivers—and their southernmost reaches up through Thirty-Fourth Street were prone to flooding.

If it was this bad here . . .

All of those people, she thought, desperately.

Fear sliced through her, stinging her down to her soul. If Van hadn’t gotten Miles far enough away, to higher ground . . .

Lore pulled out her phone, but there was no service. Shit.

“This is not the rivers,” Athena said, her face shadowed. “It is a god.”

“Tidebringer,” Lore whispered.

The goddess nodded. “Evander of the Achillides was mistaken. The false Poseidon lives, and she is allied with our enemy.”

Lore let the venom of anger burn in her again at the sight of the dark water pouring through the streets. At the destruction the Agon had brought to her city.

“You are certain there is no chance the false Ares has found the aegis?” Athena asked again. “As one of the Perseides she would be able to decipher the poem—”

“No—I mean, I don’t know.” Lore’s fear grew fangs at the idea that she hadn’t been as careful as she thought she had. “It could be worse than that. Even as a god, she could be able to wield the aegis on Wrath’s behalf.”

And the flood might be only the first phase of Wrath’s plan to win the Agon.

Lore forced herself to take a deep breath. “I don’t think he has the aegis, at least not yet. We still have time to kill him and end this.”

Maybe a part of her was beginning to believe in the Fates again, and that there was a pattern to this. One that had always called for her and the goddess to finish this together.

Lore turned back toward Morningside Heights, her body straining with the need to move. “So we hunt.”

“So we hunt,” Athena echoed, and followed.

 

Lore had always taken a certain comfort in the unseen movement of her city.

Even when the streets were empty save for a handful of early-morning cabs, she knew they still had a pulse. That there was water rushing through the pipes below. That trains were pulling their empty cars from station to station. Buried power lines hummed a song that only the cement could hear.

Now the city’s stillness brought a feeling of decay.

From six stories up, Lore had a clearer view of the flooded city blocks and those New Yorkers brave enough to try to wade through waist-high water. City crews were trying to pump it out of the streets, but the rivers—both the East and Hudson—continued to swell. The stagnant water was so deep in some places that the NYPD and Coast Guard were using boats and helicopters to rescue those people who had become stranded, or to deliver supplies.

Lore could no longer feel the city’s heartbeat.

She and Athena had collected scraps of rumors on their slow crawl downtown, braiding them together to create the bigger picture of what the city had become. A historic storm. Mistaken weather predictions. Rising sea levels. A freak convergence of events. Everyone had a different theory.

Emergency workers and city officials were issuing directions over the radio while cell towers were down. Hospitals were being evacuated first as their backup generators failed one by one. Whole sections of Central Park were being turned into relief camps. Red Cross volunteers, along with the National Guard, tried distributing supplies, but as the hours passed, they were overwhelmed by demand.

Convenience and grocery stores were being pillaged by desperate city dwellers, and there was nothing anyone could or would do to stop them. Subway tunnels were inaccessible, and no trains could get in or out of the city. Bridges were closed to traffic. A constant buzz of police and news helicopters flew by overhead, crowding the skies.

New Yorkers were some of the best people in the world, but even Lore recognized they had their limits. The isolation had been instant and devastating.

This is what Wrath wants, Lore thought. To put the city on edge, to strain its resources.

She closed her mind and heart off to the flooded streets, the sight of injuries, the sobbing. She closed her heart off to anything but what needed to be done now.

She and Athena had spent the entirety of the night searching for Wrath’s hunters, continuing into the morning. Around ten o’clock, Lore had spotted a Kadmides lioness near the Empire State Building, recognizing her from the assault on Ithaka House. They had tracked her uptown until she’d disappeared into a small boutique hotel on the Upper East Side. Now they watched the entrance from the roof of the building across the street, waiting for her to finally reemerge.