Lore froze. “You were jealous of me?” she said, turning back toward Van. “Was it the poverty, the endless cycle of ostracism and humiliation, or the ongoing threat of extinction you coveted?”
Van clasped his prosthetic hand with his other, letting both rest in front of him. It would have been a relaxed posture if he hadn’t been gripping it so tightly. “You always knew exactly who you were and who you were meant to be. Everything seemed to come easily to you because you wanted it so badly,” he said. “I used to think that if I could find a way to want it as badly as you did, I could find something buried deep in me. Something that would make me run as fast, hit as hard. To want to pick up that sword.”
“I was a stupid kid,” Lore told him. “I thought I knew everything, but I knew nothing.”
Van gave a faint smile. “And you know what the truly ironic thing is? Even as I ran after you, trying to catch up, you did the one thing I wanted more than I wanted my next breath. The thing I told myself was impossible. You got out.”
Lore drew in a sharp breath, her stomach giving a painful clench. “I did it because I had to.”
“You did it because you’ve never known fear,” he said. “Because you wanted to live.”
“I know fear,” she told him. “I know it better than my own reflection.”
“I don’t know what happened to you,” he said. “I used to wonder about it all the time, but I never doubted that you were still alive.”
Van moved toward the room’s attached bathroom, likely to the waiting shower. It released her from the quiet pain of the moment before it suffocated her.
“You know, some people get so used to looking out at life from the edge of their cage that they stop seeing the bars,” he said. “I’ve never forgotten them, I’ve just learned how to live inside on my own terms. Don’t . . . don’t let your friend get trapped in here with the rest of us.”
Her throat tightened at his words. She reached up, smoothing a loose piece of hair away from her face, unsure of what to say.
Van had grown up with financial comforts, but he had never completely fit in as a hunter. She felt guilty for the way she had judged him for it, both in the past and even a little in the present. His attitude toward Miles made more sense to her now, and a part of Lore wondered if what she had sensed as a kid wasn’t a dislike for her, but his own frustrations—with himself, and with their world.
“It’s just one job,” Lore said finally. “After tonight, I’m going to figure out how to convince him to leave.”
“Good,” Van said.
But just before he closed the door to the bathroom, Lore heard herself say, “You can still get out. It’s never too late.”
“I chose to stay in,” he told her. “I’m not leaving before I get the ones who caged me.”
The words followed Lore back downstairs, all the more unsettling for the way they echoed her own circumstances. She thought about going back upstairs, about telling him what the last few years had taught her—that the cage was only as strong as your mind made it.
She had chosen to make the vow to Athena. She had chosen to step back inside the cage this one last time to get to the man who had taken everything from her.
Not lost, Lore told herself. Free.
Lore reached the bottom step and stopped.
Castor had taken the settee, stretching his long body out over it and letting his feet hang off its edge. He’d laced his fingers together and rested them on his chest. Now they rose and fell with each deep, even breath.
Athena stood over him, watching. Her hands rested open at her sides. Her face wasn’t cast in its usual mask of hatred. What Lore saw there now scared her more.
Curiosity.
“What are you doing?” Lore asked sharply.
As Castor opened his eyes, Athena made her way over to the line of makeshift weapons she’d neatly arranged on the wall. He sat up, looking between them.
“Making preparations,” Athena said smoothly. She held out one of them—Lore’s former curtain rod, she noted with a grimace. “Have you been trained to fight with such a weapon? I won’t let you dishonor it with incompetence.”
Castor snorted at the question, rubbing a hand over his face. “I’ve never known Lore to be incompetent at anything she’s tried.”
“Potential incompetence aside,” Lore said. “We are at least a thousand years past when it was socially acceptable to casually carry one of these around on the street.”
“You will not leave this sanctuary without a weapon with which to defend yourself,” Athena told her. “Not while our fates are bound. So I ask again, have you been trained to fight with this weapon?”
It wasn’t a mere spear—it was a dory, the weapon carried by the ancient armies of Greece, and many of its greatest warriors. Athena had created the leaf-shaped spearhead out of some shred of metal, but she’d balanced the weight of the weapon using another metal spike as the sauroter. The construction was crude, but thoughtfully made. Lore had no doubt that the weapon would feel as solid and deadly in her hand as any that had come from a trained blacksmith.
“Yes,” she said, letting her annoyance drain with the word. “I trained with one for over six years. I will take care of it.”
Athena eyed her, two silver flames burning in her gaze. Whatever she saw in Lore’s face convinced her. She passed the weapon to her.
Lore tested the weight and grip, hating how familiar and good it felt in her hand.
“It is not a gift born from the anvil of Hephaestus, he of many devices,” Athena said, “but I will hold you to your word.”
“How are we going to get around with these?” Castor asked, retrieving the dory Athena had given him earlier from where he’d left it near the door. “Are we supposed to tell people we’re going spearfishing in the Hudson?”
That wasn’t half bad, actually.
“I think I have a plan,” Lore said. An extremely stupid one, maybe, but a plan nonetheless.
She took the stairs to the basement two at a time, only to reel back a step when she realized she wasn’t alone.
Miles was pacing down a narrow pathway between the boxes, hands on his hips. He seemed to be muttering something under his breath.
“You okay there, buddy . . . ?” she asked.
Miles spun, nearly knocking over a stack of tubs. “What? Sorry—yes, I mean—”