Daughter of the Hunt

Book 0: Oath of Fire

by K Arsenault Rivera

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Romantic Fantasy; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Fantasy Romance

Synopsis

When a God falls for her sacrifice, can their love survive in this lush, haunting reimagining of the myth Iphigenia and Artemis, sure to enchant readers of Katee Robert and Rebecca Kinney!

Iphigenia Pelops lives to serve her family. It is her responsibility and privilege as the Heir, as well as the only safeguard against the family curse. So when Artemis, queen of the Court of the Wild, demands a sacrifice in exchange for her blessing in a dangerous power struggle, Iphigenia is the natural choice.
 
However, Artemis is horrified that Iphigenia's family, and not Iphigenia herself, made the final decision. As recompense, she takes Iphigenia under her wing and teaches her the ways of the hunt—and soon, the ways of the body, as feelings blossom between them.

But can their bond survive the weight of the Pelops curse? 
 

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 384

Sample

In most cases we would start the story on the day I died.

This isn’t most cases. We have to start a couple days beforehand.

The scene of our fair play will be my family’s high-rise in Sydney. I know what you’re thinking: A high-rise? Didn’t know you were rich. And we are. I won’t deny that. Nothing you’re about to hear about my upbringing is normal.

Everywhere you go these days there’s a Pelops Corp. logo. Not that it’s very welcoming. A terrifying obsidian mask hardly leaves a warm and cozy impression. Our analysts have tried to get us to change it for years, and still it persists. Generations of my family have refused to change it.

That snarling mask is who we are.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We’re starting in the high-rise at seven in the morning. I was awake not because I’m an early riser but because I hadn’t gone to bed. The blackout curtains in my room were doing their best to help me maintain my awful sleep schedule; only a tiny sliver of light filtered in between them. That sliver of light happened to fall precisely across my monitors. I’d set it up that way on purpose. A cold cup of coffee and a YouTube LetsPlay were my only company at the time, but as the clock ticked over to seven, I braced for an onslaught of work emails.

Pelops Corp. was a complicated business with complicated needs, and most of them had to filter through IT at some point or another. Offices around the world meant tickets coming in at every hour of the day. I dealt with the American office overnight—but as dawn came to Australia I knew my headaches were just about to begin.

Sure enough, I saw the little red dot of a new ticket on my taskbar. Picking up my cold coffee, I opened it up and braced for another request.

You’ve got to help me, I was chatting with a coworker while I entered a purchase order and I accidentally added three extra 0s and if I don’t get this sorted out before the transaction is finalized we’re going to lose so much money—

Some tickets made you smile. Not all of them, of course; some were just so frustrating that you groaned under your breath imagining what steps you’d need to go through to fix them. But this one?

This one was funny. I couldn’t help but imagine the guy on the other end of this pacing up a storm. No worries, mate. Got your back.

This sort of thing wasn’t usually in my wheelhouse, but the good thing about being the eldest daughter of the CEO and president of Pelops Corp. is that you can make nepotism work for you. I picked up my coffee cup. Processing was two floors down from me. I might as well take a walk. Good for the old mental health, they said. Take a walk outside for ten to fifteen minutes a day! Reap the benefits!

The thought made the corner of my lip twitch. They had the big windows on the business floors. Maybe that would count for sunlight—but not in the way anyone meant it when they said you should take a walk. Still. It was all I had.

Out I went. The top few floors of the high-rise were penthouses for my family: my parents, then mine on the floor beneath, then my siblings sharing one below that. The tippy top of the building was my father’s office. The gods—we liked to call them Guests while on the property—liked to be as close to the sky as possible in most cases.

The living area of my penthouse wasn’t really mine. Not in the ways that mattered. My father’s old things still littered the room: mounted fish he’d never caught, grassland vistas he’d never visited. My grandfather’s bronze horse casts. Nothing I’d bothered changing when my father took over the company and I inherited the heir’s room. It didn’t feel right. Dad had spent all that time putting it together, after all, and it wasn’t like we could make a quick trip outside to pick up new décor. Anything we wanted had to be ordered specifically for us. That fish up there on the wall meant something to him.

Even though I hated the way its beady little eyes stared at me, I’d never get rid of it.

Past the living room was the entrance to the lift. I swiped my card and waited for the private one to come up and get me. When it did, I braced myself for terrible music. Dad was the one who picked what played in the private lifts my family used and he always chose—

Yeah. Terrible, forty-year-old rock music.

I groaned my way through a band of men playing guitar solos about wanting to date teenagers and hit the button for processing. Chances were no one would be in, but I could leave a note.

Except that when I thought it would go down to the business floors, it went up instead.

The door opened on my mother. She raised a brow and sighed. “Is it business that’s got you out of your room so early?”

“Yeah,” I said. I waved my mug. “And, you know, stretching my legs. Going on a heroic journey and all that.”

She leaned forward. My mother had one of those faces people always thought of as severe. I didn’t think so, though. She just felt things intensely. And what she felt right now was…

“Iphigenia. How old is that coffee? I can see rings inside the mug.”

I winced. “Oh, it’s…”

“You can’t remember, can you?”

“No.”

She sighed. After kissing my forehead, she took the mug from my hand. “I’ll have someone deliver a new one to your room.”

“But, Mum,” I whined, “it’ll mess up my sleep schedule.”

She stepped into the lift and pressed the Close button. “I’m your mother, not an idiot.”

Well. She had me there.

But as the doors whirred shut I realized that I, too, was no idiot. “Wait a second. What are you doing up so early?”

My mother’s eyes—the pale blue only my sister Elektra had inherited—stayed on the lift console.

“You’re in full makeup, even,” I said. “And that’s one of your new gowns, isn’t it?”

Like the opening of a switchblade, her eyes flicked over to me. “Taken an interest in more than just hoodies, have we?”

I pouted. “They’re comfy, and it’s not like anyone is ever going to see me outside of a meeting,” I said. “I dress up for those. No need otherwise.”

A pause. The pieces fell into place.

“You’re meeting with someone, aren’t you?”

The lift continued its slow descent; the rock music kept right on going. I lost track of which song’s guitar solo we were listening to.

My mother let out a breath. “Your uncle is in town.”

“Menelaus?” I said. My voice shot up about an octave. “Really? I haven’t seen him in forever, I wonder if he brought any souvenirs—”

“If you would like, you can come along to greet him,” said my mother. “I thought you might be busy with other things and, well…”

There was a strange pause that hung in the air, punctuated by snare drums and wailing. A couple of years lived in that pause. My shoulders went tense.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “Really, I don’t.”

She hummed. “It shouldn’t be a matter of whether or not you mind, Iphigenia.”

So many of these conversations. Was meeting up with my uncle really the only reason she was up so early? Ellie and Ori said Dad was skipping breakfast lately. The older I’d gotten, the more rumors I’d seen in the press about my mother. The lives of the rich should always be criticized, sure, but our family was odder than most. That meant more scrutiny… which meant reading more gossip about my parents’ marriage.

I took a breath. Not here. Not in the lift, which might open any second, where people might hear. Being the Heir of Pelops wasn’t something I could just change.

“… But if you would genuinely like to see him, I suppose it wouldn’t do any harm,” she said at length.

I smiled. Good to have the tension break. “I’ve got to stop first, but I’ll head down right after.”

A nod from her. “There’ll be photographers. His new wife is…”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. It was the top thread on, like, every single gossip community. I could not tell you how many memes I had seen wondering what my new aunt saw in my uncle. Even I had to admit they were a little… unevenly matched. “I’ll pull the hoodie up.”

My mother sighed, but I wasn’t sure it was a sad one. She pulled me in and kissed the top of my head. “Never change yourself for someone else’s sake.”

What a weird thing to say to someone in a lift.

Fixing our coworker’s little fuck-up didn’t take too long—not for someone like me. Once you know what a database looks like and understand the arcane whispers they use to communicate, you can get them to do things pretty easily. On some level coding and programming were always easier for me to understand than the business stuff. If something went wrong in your coding, you sat there and you figured it out, all on your own, explaining every little piece of it out loud until you found the problem. If you needed help, there were plenty of people on the internet who had usually had the same problem. You could talk with them if you wanted, but you didn’t have to.

Didn’t have to leave your little desk, your little world.

But the board meetings? Oh, I hated those. The new faces filing past. Lot of numbers talk was fine—I liked it, even—but everything about business felt so abstract to me. Other offices. Products I’d never see or use. Despite growing up in all that luxury, there was a whole world out there that just… wasn’t for me. Couldn’t be for me.

The second the Heir of Pelops left the land the gods allotted for us—the land on which our high-rise had been built—it was all over. All our fortune turned to misfortune.

I sent off an email to my panicking coworker. As I did, I wondered what it was like over in his corner of the world.

And I did something I maybe shouldn’t have.

Remotely accessing a PC is easy if you know what you’re doing. Easier if you happen to be part of the IT department and understand precisely who can access what. A few more keystrokes happened before I could summon the will to stop.

I found myself on his PC. His desktop. Staring back at me from the wallpaper were him and his husband, arm in arm, wearing matching suits against a dazzling blue sky. A lake opened up around them, too—blue as far as the eye could see, cut only by the intrusion of beautiful columns.

Faces I’d never meet. A place I’d never go. What did the breeze feel like on their faces?

I wondered where it was, and then—as my senses came to me—I closed out of the remote session.

I heard the photographers before I saw them. The private lift left me toward the back of the building. In theory, that was where anyone except my father and I could make discreet exits or entrances if we wanted. That was true, mostly, as long as you timed things to arrive in the middle of the night. It was absolutely not true today. The chatter of the cameras was like the clatter of swords against shields. With every step you could feel it. Camera flashes rendered what little daylight there was into a dazzling dawn.

The lift let out into the green room for special guests. Just outside of it was the hallway that led to the secret entrance. My mother was there when I stepped out. Some last-minute adjustments to her makeup, it looked like.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

I flipped my hood up and drew the strings as close as I could. Between that, a pair of sunnies, and an N95, I was pretty sure no one could reasonably deduce that I was human at all, let alone the wealthy heir to an international conglomerate. I liked it that way—I didn’t feel like a wealthy heir most of the time.

“Got my armor on,” I said.

A small, sympathetic smile. She gave me a hug. “Do you want to come out with me, or with him?”

Her bodyguard, Aegisthus, touched a fingertip to the bud in his ear. Aegisthus was in all the family photos, pretty much. My mother never left the high-rise without him—and sometimes he even followed her around within it. With his cauliflower ears, buzz cut, and lumbering frame, he was a lot like an action movie goon in the wake of my mother’s refined socialite. When he tried to smile at me, it always felt like he’d only learned how to do so by watching movies. This smile was no exception.

“He’ll be there anyway. Might as well be the two of us,” I said. Photos of me didn’t sell very well. If I was walking with Mum, it might make the photos of her less valuable, too.

Together we went down the hall. Aegisthus led the way. He always stood in front of me, when he could, to block me from view. I’d asked him to do it once when I was a child and the cameras had scared me.

He’d never forgotten.

“Ready?” he asked at the threshold, as if my mother had not just asked me the same thing. She smiled whenever he did things like this.

Still, it felt good to be looked after. I nodded again. My sunnies slipped down my nose, and I frantically shoved them back into place.

The door swung open. Aegisthus blocked a lot of the light but not all of it—for a moment he was this blazing halo of a man. Then came the shouts from the crowd. Our names, mostly.

I should say my mother’s name.

“Clytemnestra! You’re up early!”

“Who are you wearing?”

Dozens of versions of that echoed against my skull. If it wasn’t for the sunnies and the hoodie, I’d want to crawl into a pit somewhere to hide. Sort of still did. But I didn’t want my mother to have to face all of this without some moral support, and—to be honest—I really was looking forward to seeing my uncle. His new wife had a kind face.

So, really, it was all bog standard stuff until I heard the question that started the slow collapse of my old life. The first arrow through the armor of who I used to be.

“Where’s Agamemnon? What’s he think of his brother’s allegations?”

My head whipped around. Allegations? Uncle Menny got into his share of bar brawls, but it was never anything serious. And definitely not something the public found out about—my father usually buried all of that in the wee hours right after it happened. When he was asleep, that responsibility fell to me.

A weight that was beginning to feel heavy. What had he done this time? And how had anyone else heard about it? He was supposed to report that stuff the second it happened. The whole point of having an Heir of Pelops is so that the other members of the house don’t have to worry about the curse; we take on the entire burden of the family. We serve. It’s what we do.

So why the fuck had Menny left us out in the lurch?

I looked toward my mother. She ignored the question—kept right on walking to the curb, where she awaited my uncle’s ride.

But I couldn’t follow her there. The very border of the high-rise was a few steps past the exit. A bronze horse inlaid within the marble marked it. If I stepped past its head, the curse would come for us all.

My mother and Aegisthus, though? They continued right ahead. And for the most part, the cameras followed them. Only a couple lingered behind to get photos of Pelops Corp.’s mysterious future CEO.

I stood, my foot on the horse’s chest, and I swear to you that I tasted something on the air. That I felt something. Animals—I’m going to talk a lot about them, so I need you to brace for that—have better senses than we do. They can feel storms coming because they have a better understanding of air pressure; some snakes can perceive infrared.

I don’t know what I felt then, watching my uncle’s car pull up, but I can tell you that it was an animal feeling. That it lived somewhere in the deep forests of my chest. A cold ran through me, deeply at odds with the heat around me.

A flash went off right in my face just as the car pulled up.

“Miss Iphigenia Pelops, are you worried for the future of the company?”

My throat swelled. I swallowed. Whatever I said would be reported to the world within minutes, and I had no context for anything that had happened.

I glanced toward the car. Uncle Menny’s driver was already running to open the door for him. The second he got out, all the cameras would shift to his new wife. Could I hold out that long?

“N-no comment,” I stammered.

“Your father is already in his fifties. Surely you’ve thought about how your Pelops Corp. would differ?”

No, not really. I tried not to think about the business side of things at all. Very little of our business was our own decision, anyway; the gods gave us direction on how to influence the human world, and we carried it out as best we could. But I couldn’t say that. Oh, yeah, all those pagan gods are real, and that’s how we can get you the finest chocolate in the world while keeping it ethically sourced.

Uncle Menny got out of the car. Small for a man, but broad, he always reminded me of one of those Bruce Timm superheroes. All width and angle until you got to his waist, and then everything got suspiciously tube shaped. His red beard was thick except for a slash across his cheek. I didn’t have the full story on that scar. A bar fight injury probably.

For all his violence, I never feared my uncle. He had that boisterous charm about him. Often I would hear him across the halls before I knew he had come over for a visit: a loud bwa-haha! that seemed to echo through the whole high-rise. His ear-to-ear grin often swallowed up the scar. When I was little, before I had siblings, he would scoop me up and take me right to the very edge of the horse’s head. He held me up there, my feet dangling above the bronze, perilously close to the real world.

“See? It’s not so far,” he said. And when my father inevitably came over to yell at him for doing this, Menny would scoff. “Let the girl have a handful of reality every now and again.”

It meant so much to me. Not being able to attend his wedding killed me. I spent the whole day scowling. Though there was a whole company in the high-rise, it felt like it was only my father and me when it came down to it—the two heirs, trapped as usual.

But Uncle Menny took the time to FaceTime me. Not just my father. He took the time to say hi to me, personally, on the most important day of his life, and to tell me he wished I could be there to tell him all about whatever game I’d gotten into lately.

And now, as he got out of the car, he was dark as a storm cloud. My mother tried to greet him, and he gave her only a glare in return. The chorus of photographers became a horrible blaze of voices and lights; Aegisthus blocked them while my uncle and my mother walked the whole way back to the bronze horse.

“Uncle Menny—” I started.

But he walked past me. My heart sank into my stomach. Whatever was going on, I had to find some way to help. My uncle didn’t deserve to suffer like this. That was my father’s place, and it was mine.

Our siblings were supposed to have normal lives. That was always the deal.

As I walked back to the hallway and then to the green room, it was all that I could think about. We had crisis management. Of course we did. If I told you how much we spent retaining two different agencies around the clock, you’d cry, and you’d be right to. It was more money than any company should ever rightly have. I could contact them and figure out what to do next—

But Uncle Menny had those numbers, too, and he hadn’t used them. Ugh. Maybe it was something personal? Something private?

As the door closed behind us, a piece fell into place for me. It wasn’t one I liked. Uncle Menny was alone. No bodyguard, no attendants, and, most worryingly, no wife.

“I’m going to kill him, Cly, I swear I will,” he said. He didn’t even wait until one of us asked him. “Who does he think he is?”

“Be careful what you swear upon, Menelaus. Our Guests are always listening,” my mother answered. Despite my uncle’s face going as red as his beard, she was cool and collected.

I had to back her up. “Besides, we don’t need their help to solve our problems, right?” I said. “Tell me who we’re arguing with, and I’ll get it sorted, Uncle Menny.”

He looked to me and set his jaw. “Iphy, doll, this isn’t something we can fix with money.”

I tilted my head. He couldn’t be serious. You could fix everything with money. There had never, in the entire course of my life, been a problem that we did not solve with money. Whether we paid for expensive solutions or paid for the people who could come up with them, in the end it all came down to cash.

That’s the thing about money, by the way—it doesn’t really buy happiness. It buys peace of mind. It buys time. It buys leisure. All of those things, combined, make it a lot easier to be happy. But it all comes at the cost of letting yourself go as dull as worthlessly as an unused knife.

But back then—no, I couldn’t think of anything that money could not solve. So I stood there and gawped at him a little when he said that, saved only by my mother knowing far more about the world than my gilded cage could ever teach me.

“It’s her place to help,” she said. “That’s all she’s trying to do.”

My uncle rolled his shoulders. Normally he’d help himself to some of the sparkling water or the snacks in the green room. Today he made no such motion. “I’m glad to see you,” he said to me without an ounce of gladnesss, “but this is something that needs to stay between your parents and me.”

There was a lot I wanted to say to him. I mean, I had so many questions, just to start. What was it that had happened? Why was it so hard to solve? To be blunt: How fucked were we? Above all of these was the thing I really meant when I asked them: How can I help?

And there were the nonquestion items, too. I have to be responsible for all this eventually. I should know. Whatever this is, everyone already knows, so it doesn’t make sense to keep secrets.

But looking at him, and looking at my mother, I could still hear the din of the crowd outside. They had the same questions I did. They hadn’t gotten any answers. Why should I be any different? He wanted to handle this with my parents. Well, wasn’t that helping, too? Wasn’t it helping to get out of the way?

So I swallowed my own wants and needs, my own fears and concerns, and nodded. “All right,” I said. “It was nice to see you.”

He flinched, as if I had hurt him, and reached for my shoulder. Bruises stained his knuckles, and scars etched lines across his hands. “It was nice to see you, too. Really.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. Ignoring what I wanted out of the conversation felt like the right thing to do—but what would I do then?

“I think Ellie and Ori are going to class soon,” I said. “I’ll make sure they’re all right.”

I didn’t need to think about it. Even then.

My siblings, thankfully, were at the age where you could have an actual conversation with them that didn’t involve dinosaurs. Not that dinosaurs aren’t cool. Just that for a solid two years there, maybe more, it was all Ori could talk about.

He still liked dinosaurs. But these days he liked video games about them, and I could meet him there. I found him sneaking in a cheeky Minecraft session when I stopped to check in on him.

“Oi, Ori,” I called, knocking on the door. “The driver will be here to take you to class in a half. How . . .