Dead.

A small flame grew at the center of her chest. She held on to that, she let it burn, because it was something in that numb nothingness. Lore held it until she recognized it for what it was.

Fury.

She seized the knife and stood, keeping low among the brush. Every part of her was straining to rush forward and cut the killer’s throat. To punish Iro. It would be justified. Demanded, even, by the rules of their hunt.

Iro and the hunter who had fired the killing shot stepped over the ledge of the pond and trudged forward through the relentless rain. He dropped his bow and unsheathed a sword slowly, his gaze fixed on Castor’s dark shape face-down in the water. Iro had a dory in her other hand, and used it to check her balance as they made their way across the pond’s unseen basin.

Weapons they had taken from the Kadmides, at Lore’s insistence.

And they had repaid her by doing this. By taking Castor from her.

Her head pounded with the blistering force of her thoughts. Lore reached the lower level of the park, riding the river of mud, rain, and loose rocks down to the edge of the pond.

“Iro Odysseos!” she shouted, her voice hoarse.

Iro spun as Lore jumped into the water, raising her dory. She waved back the other hunters hovering by the pond. “Stay back, Lore!”

“How could you?” Lore snarled. “After everything we did for you—”

Her foot slid against something long and thin in the soft bottom of the pond. An electric trill moved up her spine when she realized what it was.

Athena’s dory.

She pulled it up with her foot, lifting it from the water with relish. The length of the spear would give her the biggest advantage over the hunter.

“We need a god in our bloodline,” Iro shouted back to her. “You’ve turned your back on this world, but we haven’t! If we’re to ever repay Wrath for what he did to our line, we need our own protector!”

Lore turned the dory in her hands, still striding toward her. The hunter beside Iro shifted, uncertain of what to do.

“You couldn’t even do the dirty work yourself,” Lore snarled. “You let a man kill him for you.”

“I had hoped it would be Artemis, or Athena,” Iro said, fighting for a measure of calm in her voice. She didn’t back away, even as Lore threw the knife in her left hand, flinging it into the other Odysseide hunter’s throat.

He went down with a startled gasp, choking on his own blood. Iro whirled back to Lore, shocked.

“You’ll—you’ll ascend,” Iro managed to get out. “Why hasn’t the power taken hold . . . ?”

The words washed over Lore as if they had been spoken in a language she couldn’t understand. There was nothing else in her world aside from the weapon in her hand and Iro.

Lore whipped the dory’s sauroter up, catching Iro under the chin and slicing the right side of her face. She might have split the girl’s eye like a grape if Iro hadn’t leaned back, slamming the staff of her own dory against Lore’s to drive it away.

You took him from me, Lore thought, letting her pain feed the explosion of hatred building in her mind. You’re not going to touch him.

“He might not be—” Iro pressed a hand to the blood streaming down her face, spitting a wad of it from her mouth. “You are not my enemy, Lore!”

“You’ve made me your enemy!” Lore spun the dory high overhead, allowing Iro to block her strike so she could kick the other girl in the chest. The water saved Iro’s balance, but slowed her advance on Lore.

She leaned right as Iro thrust forward—Lore tried to stab the sauroter down onto Iro’s foot, but it was almost impossible to see anything beneath the frantic shivering of the water. Rain poured over them. Iro stooped, pulled the knife from the dead hunter’s neck, and threw it. Lore repelled it with the metal body of the dory with enough force to cause a spark.

The rhythm of the fight set in, and Lore disappeared into the strength of her body, into the past, until she found the little girl who would have clawed the heart out of her opponent to claim victory.

Then she unleashed her in all of her ferocity. Every agonizing loss, every humiliation, every memory of that suffocating hopelessness raged in her like a tempest.

Iro finally landed a hit, splitting the skin of Lore’s upper arm as she parried her attempt to shove the head of the spear through Iro’s chest.

She deserves to die, Lore thought viciously. They all do.

Let her become the monster who haunted their legends. Her kleos would be glorious infamy.

Lore feinted a low hit to Iro’s stomach to skim her hand beneath the water in order to pull up the knife again. The whites of Iro’s eyes flashed as Lore stabbed it through the girl’s thigh and flipped the dory to bring the sauroter to Iro’s throat.

Athena’s form appeared at the edge of the pond, not far from where the bodies of the other Odysseides were now scattered.

Iro was struggling to back away with her wounded leg, looking for a quick escape. Blood ran down her face. Lore had the distant thought that Iro’s wound could be a twin to the scar the Odysseides’ archon had given her the night of his death.

Lore stalked toward her again. The wound wouldn’t have a chance to scar.

Iro held out a dory to ward her off, struggling to stand to her full height.

The weapon began to turn a molten red. Heat seemed to radiate from its tip, turning the rain around them to steam. Iro stared down at it as the heat spread, the steel becoming soft in her grip. She flung the weapon away into the water before it could singe her hand.

Lore turned.

Castor rose slowly from the water, his face expressionless, his eyes burning gold.

THE AIR SHIMMERED AROUND Castor, alive with power.

As the dory slipped from Lore’s fingers, she lost all sensation in her body.

Not real. This was . . . It was impossible.

She had watched him die. Her gaze dropped to his chest, to the place the arrow had pierced his heart. Beneath the bloodstained tear in his shirt was new, unmarred skin where the wound should have been. Which meant . . .

The light and power around Castor intensified. He took in the sight of the dead hunter, then Iro.

“Leave,” he told her.

“What—is—this,” Iro gasped. “Who are you? You were . . .”

“Leave,” Castor thundered.

This time, Iro had the sense to run. She struggled through the rain and water, clutching her wounded leg. Castor paid no attention to her, but looked again at the body of the hunter.

“Did you do this?” he asked softly.

Lore’s jaw clenched painfully at the distress in his voice. “Yes. And I would do it again.”

His eyes closed and slowly opened again, as if waking from a dream.

“It doesn’t matter what happens to me—you can’t do this to yourself.”

The brief joy she’d felt turned to ashes in her mouth. How dare he—how dare he pass judgment on her like this, like they were children again and she didn’t know right from wrong?

“I can do whatever I want,” Lore said coldly.

“But you’re not,” he said. “I don’t believe this is really what you want—to kill people, to be a hunter.”

“I make my own choices,” she said. “You’re the only one who won’t play by the same rules as everyone else. It’s not complicity. It’s survival.”