Lore tried to remember the words her father and mother had always used to make their oaths, but couldn’t bring herself to invoke the name of any gods.
“I will help you survive this week, and you will destroy the god once known as Aristos Kadmou, the enemy of my blood,” Lore said quietly. She took the goddess’s cold hand in her own. “If that’s the bargain, then I swear by the powers below that I will uphold my vow or face the wrath of the heavens.”
The goddess nodded. “Then I bind my mortal life to yours . . . Melora, daughter of Demos, scion of Perseus . . . Should I fall . . . you will join me. Should you die in the Agon . . . I, too, will perish. That is the vow we make to each other.”
Warmth wrapped around their joined hands, chased by a chill along the ridges of Lore’s spine like the tip of a knife. How perfect that Athena’s power came only in the form of steel and pain.
“Is it done?” Lore asked.
Her answer was the goddess’s cruel, bloody smile.
Lore pulled back, rising unsteadily to her feet. A sensation of sparks scattered across her skin like stars in the sky, sinking into the marrow of her bones.
“We need to stop the bleeding,” Lore said, looking at Athena’s wound. “I don’t know if I have thread to stitch it.”
The goddess shook her head. “Burn it shut.”
Lore rose, feeling half-removed from her own body, and went to the kitchen. She held one of the carving knives over the fire on the gas stove until the metal glowed as gold as the flecks in Athena’s eyes.
Miles, she thought distantly. She needed to check on Miles once this was finished.
But he had already come down to check on her.
Miles sat on the stairs, his gaze still fixed on what he could see of the living room through the old wood banister. There didn’t seem to be a drop of color left in his face, and Lore knew, even before he looked at her and the knife in her hands, that he had heard everything.
“I think,” he said finally, his voice hoarse, “you’d better tell me what the hell is going on.”
THEY SAT IN SILENCE for several minutes after Lore had finished giving Miles a ruthlessly pared-down explanation of the Agon, the nine gods it had been created to punish—including the one whose wound she had seared shut in their living room—and the nine bloodlines descended from ancient heroes chosen to hunt them.
She distilled over a thousand years of history into mere minutes, feeling more and more insane as his face remained carefully blank.
It wasn’t like Lore could blame him; hearing herself say the words “For seven days, every seven years, the gods walk on earth as mortals. If you can kill one, you become a new god and take their power and immortality, but you’ll be hunted in the next Agon as well” had left her stomach in knots, and not just because she had been taught, from the youngest age, never to reveal their world to outsiders.
To Miles, these names—Athena, Artemis, Apollo, Poseidon, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Dionysus, Hermes, and Ares—were ancient stories, not living, breathing monsters who had refused to fade away once a more prominent god rose in their lands.
The way the hunters told it, they had attempted to force their worshippers back into submission by stoking chaos at the fall of Rome, by having Apollo create deadly plagues, including the Plague of Justinian, which alone killed tens of millions of people. All in the hope that mortals would beg them for protection and refuge.
“And, when Zeus commanded them to stop,” Lore finished, “the nine, led by Athena, tried and failed to overthrow him in order to continue their work.”
Gil had always made tea when they’d needed to talk about something, and Lore found herself doing the same thing now—only, as if muscle memory had taken over, she skipped the tea bags and made a very different kind of brew.
As a joke, the hunters called their tea nektar, the drink of the gods. They used thyme—the herb for courage—ginger, lemon, and honey to fortify themselves during training and the Agon.
But both mugs had gone cold, untouched where she’d set them down on the table.
The window AC unit wheezed on, flooding the kitchen with cool air. Lore had drawn the curtains on the window above the sink, and she could tell by the way the sun was still trying to intrude on them that it was already late morning.
“Say something,” she whispered.
“I mean . . .” he said, smoothing a hand over his hair. His gaze was fixed on the table. “Your name isn’t even Lauren.”
“You get why I couldn’t use my real one, don’t you?” she asked. It wasn’t just about lying low, though. Lauren Pertho was the alias on the papers and passport her mother’s bloodline had forged to get her out of the country after her family’s murder. It was the only documentation she had to use.
“I don’t know what I thought,” Miles said. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight: every seven years this . . . hunt happens. And the location changes—sort of like the Olympics, only with more murders?”
“Basically,” Lore said. “The hunters figured out that they could control the location of the Agon by moving something called the omphalos—a large stone that once resided at Delphi and marked what they believed to be the navel, or center, of the world.”
“The ‘navel’ in the poem?” he clarified.
She had recited the English translation of the account of Zeus giving the original command for the Agon. The original version, in the ancient tongue, had been lost.
“Yes. The leaders of the bloodlines gather the year before the next Agon and vote on where it’ll be, which is usually where they each have the most resources and power,” Lore continued. “They have to move the omphalos without the gods seeing its destination, to keep the gods from strategizing. Lately it’s been here, but they also tend to focus on cities in island nations, like London and Tokyo, because it makes it harder for the gods to escape.”
And rarely, in the cycles they truly wanted to torment the gods, they would bring the omphalos back to the old country, so they could be hunted among the ruins of their temples and the people who had once feared them.
“The nine families—” Miles began.
“There are only four bloodlines still participating in the Agon,” Lore said. “The others have died out.”
“Like yours?” Miles clarified slowly. “Because you’re . . . the last of your line?”
“The last mortal,” Lore said. “The new Poseidon, Tidebringer, was once part of the Perseides—the descendants of Perseus.”
“What are the others?”
“The Houses of Kadmos, Theseus, Achilles, and Odysseus are the only other surviving lines,” Lore said, “but there were also the Houses of Herakles, Jason . . .” Then she added, because no one ever seemed to know who they were, “And Meleager, who led the Calydonian boar hunt, and Bellerophon, who slayed monsters and rode Pegasus. Those were actually the first two bloodlines to die off.”
Their annihilation had come shortly after the bloodlines had decided upon unified surnames to meet the changing legal needs of the sixteenth century. Both houses had been viewed as unworthy of the hunt, even by Jason’s cursed line. Meleager’s because the remaining descendants originated from an illegitimate child, and Bellerophon’s because their ancestor had died hated by the gods, and only Zeus himself would have seen the fallen hero redeemed.