He stared at her in disbelief. “Do you hear what you’re saying? Do you think this is what your parents would want—for you to lose yourself avenging them?”

“Don’t you dare use them as a weapon against me!” Lore snarled.

Whatever Castor would have said next vanished as Athena stormed toward them.

“What are you, imposter?” Athena demanded. “You are not mortal, which means you are no god. What are you?”

“I’m . . .” Castor looked down at his hands, tendrils of power still wrapped around them like golden rings, then touched the place the arrow had passed through him.

Artemis had asked the same question. What are you?

“How do you live?” Athena demanded. “What are you keeping from us?”

“Nothing,” he said, looking to Lore. “I can’t explain this—I don’t remember what happened that day—”

“What do you know about the Agon that we do not?” Athena continued. “I do not believe that you remember nothing. If you are immortal these seven days, you have learned something—done something—and you have withheld it from us, your allies.”

“I don’t—” Castor’s voice was low, rough. “I don’t remember. There was pain, and then darkness—and then I woke up.”

“You lie,” Athena told him. “You are here, but not part of the hunt. Not truly. Tell me what you are. My sister was correct—your power feels different, somehow. It always has—it flows through you, but is not born of you.”

Lore turned to her in shock. “What does that mean?”

The goddess only stared at Castor until, finally, Lore looked back toward him, too. Her pulse spiked and she suddenly felt like she was drowning in the air as one clear voice emerged.

None of this is real.

“Your lost memory is a convenient lie to cover the truth of how a god might escape the hunt,” Athena said. “Is that why you did not present yourself in physical form these last seven years? Were you even in this realm at all?”

None of this is real.

Not Gil, not her life here, not even Castor and the shelter his familiar presence had given her heart.

Castor didn’t acknowledge the goddess, but tried to catch Lore’s gaze again. “You don’t believe me.”

Lore couldn’t be caught in another god’s deception. She couldn’t surrender to becoming a game piece moved against her will. But this was Castor.

Wasn’t it?

“We are just trying to figure out what’s going on,” Lore said.

He watched Lore, his devastation clear.

“We,” he repeated.

Lore replayed her own words in her mind. Athena’s presence was steadying behind her. It bolstered her, giving her one last bit of strength to keep from unraveling.

“We,” she confirmed.

She and Athena would do whatever was necessary, whatever was justified, until the last breath left Wrath’s mortal body.

Castor had never wanted to help them see this plan through. If he truly didn’t know how he ascended and that he couldn’t die . . . If he truly had no ulterior motives for working with them . . . Lore needed him to prove himself to her now. It would be her last offer: join us, or leave.

With one last look at her, he turned and walked away.

He crossed through the water, his head down and shoulders hunched. Panic seized Lore at the sight of him growing smaller and smaller and the rain engulfing him.

Lore took a step forward, but Athena lowered an arm, blocking her. The sound of emergency sirens blared toward them, growing in intensity and pitch as they neared.

“He is not needed,” the goddess said. “We were chosen for this, you and I.”

Lore’s body felt wooden as they climbed the stairs toward the quiet of Morningside Heights. As they reached the lookout point, however, Athena suddenly pivoted back toward the park, her face strained with concentration. She studied the red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles as they appeared below, racing down the street.

“We need to go,” Lore said.

Athena held out a hand to silence her.

A tremor moved through the ground like a serpent through sand. The vibration raced up Lore’s legs and along her spine, setting every nerve ablaze. Thunder let out a low murmur of displeasure.

Only, it wasn’t thunder.

It stormed through the streets with a monster’s roar, overpowering everything in its path as it charged forward with a violence that stole the breath from her lungs.

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.