“Do not forsake me,” Athena said weakly. “I forbid it.”
“Yeah, well, I forbid you to die right now,” Lore said, her pulse jumping. “I have to go clean up after you before the bloodhounds find your trail and lead the hunters here.”
Athena’s gaze flickered.
Shit, Lore thought miserably. The goddess could bleed, she could slip into unconsciousness, but she would never have forgotten such a crucial strategic detail if she were not in absolute dire straits.
The front door burst open. “I’ve got them!”
The goddess’s nostrils flared, but she did as Lore asked.
“Thank you,” Lore told Miles. “Now go upstairs and go to bed.”
“Wait—what?” he asked, trying to follow her back outside. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to clean up before someone sees the blood and calls the cops,” Lore said. “And you’re going upstairs to bed.”
Miles glanced at Athena’s limp form.
“Listen to me,” Lore said, her voice steel. Miles flinched, but she couldn’t feel sorry, not for this. He had no idea what he’d been drawn into. “Go upstairs. Don’t answer the door. If you see anyone suspicious outside, call me.”
She left before he could lodge another protest, or, worse, ask another question. She bounded down the front steps of the brownstone, curving around to the gate that led into the basement apartment she now used for storage. There’d be almost no time. The sun was rising behind the curtain of clouds, and so were New Yorkers.
Lore dumped two containers of the oxy bleach into a bucket and carried it back outside to mix in water from her neighbor’s hose. She used a wire brush and the power of her own terror to scrub the pool of blood Athena had left near the trash cans, until her head was light and her hands stung from the chemicals.
Lore started to toss the bucket’s bloodied water in the gutters . . . only to stop. She watched the rain run along the sidewalk and into the storm drain.
She wouldn’t be able to mask the scent of blood, or the stench of the goddess herself, and now she was covered in both. The best Lore could manage was to confuse the hunters with too many trails, and hope they ran themselves ragged before they ever found their way to the town house, and to Miles.
Lore followed the path Athena had taken, cleaning and rinsing until the rain washed the visible stains mostly clean and everything trickled down into the gutters. She traced a wide, arcing trail around the neighborhood, leaving splashes of the bloodied bleach water here and there.
When Lore was finally within sight of Central Park, she stripped off her soiled shoes and socks, her face twisting in disgust as she stepped barefoot onto the cracked sidewalk. She took off before she could let herself think too hard about what she’d be picking up, and she set on a random, weaving path through the streets, stopping only to dump the shoes and socks one at a time in scattered trash cans and dumpsters.
As she neared the brownstone again, Lore tossed her light jacket into the back of a moving garbage truck and stuffed her jeans and shirt into the undercarriages of two different delivery trucks parked near Mr. Herrera’s bodega.
Instead of going through the front door, Lore entered through the basement. The smell of Gil’s sandalwood cologne was everywhere, along with faint mildew and dust. Searching through the storage tubs she’d abandoned down there, Lore set aside a box containing Gil’s vast collection of holiday-themed bow ties and found an old pair of pull-on shorts and a T-shirt in the container beneath it.
Lore changed into them quickly, dumping her soiled clothes into a trash bag. She took several steadying breaths until the chemical reek faded and her panic had given way to renewed anger.
Dragging herself up the inner staircase, she stepped back into the silence of the first level of the house. Some of the tension in her back and shoulders eased as she took a look around, and she almost managed a laugh. Miles had cleaned the blood from the hallway and switched off the lights in the living room, and he’d left a glass of water and bottle of aspirin beside Athena.
Helpful, Lore thought with a surge of affection for him.
She glanced to her left. Miles hadn’t just locked the door; he’d also reinforced the knob with the back of a chair—like that would stop the hunters from setting enough explosives to blow off the front of the house.
Athena’s head turned at the sound of Lore’s approaching steps. She opened her eyes again; they glowed in the room’s relative darkness. Her hand held the towel against the wound.
The air was so still around her, the silence so unnatural.
“You want me to help protect you, and, I’m guessing, to hide you from the same people that would happily kill me, too,” Lore whispered. “But you already know that. That’s why you came here, isn’t it?”
Athena gave a slight nod.
“So exactly what’s in this for me?” Lore said, taking another step closer. “I realize this is a new experience for you, but even if you heal faster than the average mortal, you’re not exactly doing well. So why would I tie my life to one that might not make it a few hours, let alone a few days?”
“I heard . . . what had happened to you . . .” Athena said. “The years between . . . Searched . . . for you . . .”
The hair on Lore’s body rose.
At the end of each Agon, the gods, new and old, regained their immortality, but they remained in the mortal world, unable to return to whatever home they’d once known.
The new gods, brimming with power, manifested physical forms and lived lavishly, manipulating the workings of the world to fill the vaults of their mortal bloodlines. But the old gods, with their power ever-waning, usually chose to
remain incorporeal. It made them untraceable as they set about the world, trying to plan for contingencies for the next hunt or seeking retribution against those who had tried to kill them. The threat of that vengeance was the reason hunters always wore masks.
“You searched for me?” Lore said. “Why?”
“I believed . . . you could be . . . persuaded to aid me. . . . I heard your . . . name . . . from the other bloodlines. . . . Your family . . . murdered. Mother . . . father . . . sisters,” Athena said, her breathing labored. “They called you . . . lost. Some believed . . . dead.”
Lore’s throat locked until she almost couldn’t speak. “What do you know about that?”
Athena looked to her again, this time with the expression of someone who already knew they’d won. “I know . . . who killed them.”
THE MEMORY ROSE SHARP and true, cutting through all the barriers Lore had built around it. The way the door to her family’s apartment had looked as she came toward it that morning. The chilling silence inside. The smell of blood.
Lore drew in a deep breath and pressed a hand to her eyes, hard enough that light and colors danced beneath her lids. It distracted her mind from the dark trail it had started down again, but only for a moment.
She didn’t know how she kept her voice so calm as she said, “I already know who killed them. Aristos Kadmou of the House of Kadmos.” The new Ares, as of the last Agon.
“The false god may have . . . ordered their deaths . . . but who held the blade?” Athena pressed. “For it was not he. He was only a newborn god. . . .”