Chapter Text
The house was empty and abandoned. The cold reached every corner of it. In the bathtub, a thin layer of ice had formed. She had gotten a blue-ish skintone.
She was like a princess, lying there. An ice princess.
The floor he sat on seemed to be made of snow, but it didn’t bother him in the slightest. He lifted his hand and touched her.
The blood on her wrists had long since dried.
His love for her had never been so strong. He caressed her arm, as if stroking the soul which had now left her body.
He didn’t turn around when he left. It was no farewell, but a goodbye.
Frank Zhang was no happy man. His breathing was staggered and drifted in the air like white clouds before disappearing. Even then, he didn’t think of his health as his biggest misfortune.
Cynthia had been so beautiful, all those years ago, it had taken most of his patience to wait for the wedding night. She had seemed kind, adorable and a bit shy. Her true nature didn’t take long to show up, though. With a controlling hand she’d kept him on her leash for almost fifty years. He was grateful for the one secret he managed to keep from her. In the autumn of his life he had finally found the chance for a bit of freedom, and he would not allow it to be taken away from him.
He’d worked in the fishery his whole life long, and the salary was just enough to support Cynthia and the kids. After his retirement they lived of his pension, and they managed pretty well. But it was not enough to support his own plans. Without money, the possibility of starting over somewhere else was as good as nonexisting. He thanked every godly deity he could think of for Mrs Silena. If she wanted to pay fair of money for a couple hours of work, he wouldn’t think of complaining. The stack of drachmas in the box in the hole behind the fridge had grown to an impressive amount, and he would soon have enough to fulfill his dreams.
He paused for a second on the last hill to catch his breath, and rubbed his freezing hands together in an attempt to warm them. Sparta, Athens or maybe even Troy would do a splendid job of curing the frostbite on his hands. Frank assumed he had at least ten years left to live, and he wished to enjoy those years, far away from Cynthia. Not one time did he even consider spending them with that shrew.
The daily hike in the early morning was the sole moment of rest of the day, and never failed to give him the needed dose of exercise. He always used the same route, and the people who knew about his habits often stopped him for a chat. He particulary enjoyed talking with the young owner of the house on the hilltop. She was only at home in the weekends, always on her own but nice to talk with.
She was also interested in the earlier Halfblood Camps, Mrs Silena, and that just so happened to be one of Frank’s favourite subjects. Quite beautiful, too, she was. There might have been rumours about her, but if you’d take the time to listen to those, it would quickly become clear they held very little truth.
About one year ago, she’d asked him if he would be so kind to do some chores for her when he came around on Friday morning. The house was old and the boiler not exactly trustworthy. She preferred not to enter a freezing home on the weekends. He would receive a key, so he could enter the house whenever he found it to be necessary to check on it. There had been some burglaries in the past, so he was asked to check on the doors and windows too.
It wasn’t a very heavy task, and one time a month there would be an envelope with his name on it in her mailbox, containing a rather large sum of money. Plus, he enjoyed being able to work again. It’s hard to do nothing after having worked your whole life long.
The fence was rusty and creaked when he swung the gate open. The snow wasn’t cleared and he considered asking his kids for help. He decided against it, glad to be on his own.
He clumsily reached for the key in his pocket, careful not to drop it in the snow. If he had to crouch, there was no way he’d get home before dark. The steps to the door were frozen and slippery, so he held onto the railing. Frank was just about to put the key in the lock when he noticed the door wasn’t completely closed. Thrown off guard, he opened it further and stepped into the hall.
“Hello? Someone in there?”
Maybe she’d arrived earlier today? There was no answer. He could see his breath leaving his mouth, and realised it was cold as ice inside the building. Suddenly, he didn’t know what to do. Something was wrong here, and he had a hard time imagining it would only be a broken boiler.
He checked every room. Everything appeared to be untouched. The house was just as clean as usual. The TV was still there, so a burglary probably wasn’t what happened. After checking on the ground floor, he walked upstairs. The staircase was rather high, and he was panting when he reached the end. First, he went to the bedroom. It had a slightly feminine but neat design and was just as clean as the rest of the house. The bed was made and there was a suitcase placed next to the bed table. It looked like she hadn’t unpacked yet.
It made him feel a bit stupid. Maybe she’d arrived a bit earlier, had discovered the boiler had broken and went out to look for someone to fix it. Though he didn’t believe that explanation. Something was wrong. He could feel it in his bones, just like he could feel an upcoming storm nearing. The next room was an attic, but not dusty and full of old stuff like most. It had been made into some sort of relaxation room, with couches and a small coffee table.
He went down the staircase again. Everything looked right. Nothing unusual in the kitchen, nor in the living room. The only room left, was the bathroom. Something made him hesitate before he opened the door. There was nothing but quiet. He halted for a heartbeat, realised he was being an idiot, and opened the door.
Not a second later he stormed out of the house, as fast as his legs allowed him to go. At the last moment, he remembered the frozen doorsteps, and narrowly avoided falling down in the snow face first. He forced his body through the thick snow on the driveway and cursed the rusty old fence. When he’d finally reached the sidewalk, he stood still, helpless. Somewhat further he noticed someone walking in his direction. He quickly recognised Thalia, Beryl’s daughter. He called to her to stand still.
She was tired. Positively exhausted. Thalia Grace turned off her laptop and walked to the kitchen to make some coffee. She felt like she was being pressured from all sides. Her publisher wished to receive the first concept in August, and she’d only just started. The book, her fifth biography about a Greek author, was supposed to become her best one yet, but all motivation had left her.
About one month ago, her mother had died. Despite never being close, she still felt her absence. The clean up of the house didn’t go as fast as planned either. Everything awakened memories, every single box she packed brought her back to a past she didn’t even know she remembered.
Her apartment had been temporarily hired by someone else, so she spent the time writing in the home of her childhood. It stood proudly just out of Halfblood Camps’ center, a quiet, peaceful town.
Thalia sat down in the rocking chair on the porch, and glanced at the lake in the distance. The view was as breathtaking as usual. Each season brought a new, spectacular vista. That day, the blinding sunbeams were reflected by the thick layer of ice on the water. A small part of her ached to go skating.
She swallowed the lump in her throat, and decided to go for a walk. The thermometer indicated it was -4°C, so she left the house dressed in various layers of clothing. She still shivered when she stepped outside, but it took only a few minutes of moving to warm up again.
It was amazingly quiet outside. No one else was out for at this hour, and the only thing she could hear was her own breathing. A great difference with the summer months, when the town sparked with life and joy. Thalia didn’t enjoy the summer in Halfblood Camps. Despite knowing it was mostly because of tourism the townspeople survived, it always created the impression of being caught in a blizzard, with people as the snowflakes. A multiheaded creature swallowing the town surrounded by hectares of strawberry fields, buying old houses and leaving them empty for nine months a year.
The strawberry fields had been Halfblood Camps’ greatest source of income for decades. The dependence on the weather had hardened its people. It had stayed strong and picturesque, a great bait for tourists with money, while the fields lost their importance to the youth. The younglings left, and the elderly dreamed about long gone days. She was one of many to leave the town.
She sped up her pace and turned left at the road to Minerva Academy, the local high school. While Thalia walked uphill, she could hear Frank Zhang yelling something inaudible. Wildly waving with his arms, he met her halfway through.
“She’s dead.” Frank’s breathing was staggered and shallow.
“Frank, calm down. What happened?”
“She’s there. Dead!” He pointed to the huge, white mansion on the top of the hill.
It took a while before Thalia realised what he was saying, but as soon as the words sunk in she marched to the fence, pushed the gate open and made her way to the front door.
Frank hadn’t closed it after him, and she carefully entered the hallway, unknowing as to what she was about to find. For some reason, she simply forgot to ask.
Frank followed on her heels, and without uttering a word he gestured to the bathroom on the ground floor. Thalia turned to him, a questioning look in her eyes. The older man was pale, and his voice hoarse when he said: “She’s in there.”
It had been a long time since Thalia had been in the mansion, but she had known it well once, and she knew it was the bathroom. She shivered once more, despite the amount of clothes she’d put on. The door to the bathroom swung open slowly and she entered the room.
She didn’t know what to expect based on Frank’s information, but nothing would have prepared her for the blood. The whole bathroom was tiled in white, only magnifying the effect of the blood in and around the bathtub. A fraction of a second, she admired the contrast. Then she realised there was an actual person lying in the bathtub.
Despite the unnatural white and blue shades of the body, Thalia immediately recognised her. Silena Beckendorf, born Beauregard, daughter the family who’d once owned the mansion. They had been friends when they were younger, but that had been ages ago. The woman in the bathtub was a stranger now.
Her eyes were closed, but her lips had turned blue. There was a thin layer of ice floating around her torso, completely hiding her lower body from sight. Her right arm hung off the edge of the tub, with red stripes connecting the finger tips to a small, dried-up puddle on the floor. On the floor was a sharp razor, lying next to her hand. Her other arm was only visible above the elbow, the rest was hidden away by the ice. The knees, too, reached above the frozen surface. Silena’s long, dark hair was draped over her shoulders like a curtain.
Thalia stared at her for a long time. The cold and the loneliness of the scene made her shiver. Slowly, she backed away from the bathroom.
After that, everything happened in a blur. She’d called 911 and she and Frank had waited for the ambulance together. Her mind was just clear enough to recognise the signs of a shock condition, and as soon as she got home she poured herself a decent glass of brandy. Probably not something the doctor would have prescribed, but it helped her.
Seeing Silena had given her a flashback to her youth. It had been fifteen years since they’d been best friends, and despite meeting new people and leaving old friends behind, Silena was still important to her. They were freshmen when they met, juniors when they stopped talking. They hadn’t known each other as adults.
Still Thalia couldn’t fathom the idea of the other woman committing suicide, which had to be the only acceptable explanation of the scene she’d witnessed. The Silena she knew was one of the most lively, confident people she’d ever met. A clever woman with self-confidence and an appearance that made people turn around.
According to rumours Thalia had heard, life had been good for Silena – just like Thalia herself had always suspected. She was the owner of an art gallery in New Rome, married to a handsome succesful husband with whom she lived in a house that looked like a manor. But apparently, something had been wrong.
She sensed she needed some distraction, so she picked up her smartphone and dialed her brother’s number.
“Did I wake you up?”
“You’re kidding, right? First Nico kept me awake from 3AM, and when he finally falls asleep at 6AM Bianca wakes up and wants me to play with her.”
“Couldn’t Drew entertain her for a change?”
Silence at the other side. Thalia could cut her tongue out.
“She has an important meeting today so she needs to be rested. Plus, at the moment it’s very busy at her work. The company is facing a critical strategic phase.”
Jason didn’t raise his voice, but Thalia knew her brother well enough to recognise the slightly hysterical undertone. Drew always had a perfect excuse, and Jason probably had told her the exact quote. If there were no important meetings, then she would be stressed by all the heavy decisions she had to make or she was exhausted, caused by being such a succesful businesswoman.
That left all responsibility of taking care of the kids with Jason. With a lively toddler of three years old and a baby of ten months, the Jason on their mother’s funeral had looked way older than twenty-eight.
“Honey, don’t touch that.”
“Be honest, don’t you think you should stop prohibiting things to Bianca? She’s a child, she’s just curious.”
“Drew thinks we should raise her more sternly. She wants to move back to Othrys before Bianca goes to kindergarten.”
Thalia had grown tired of that little sentence: ‘Drew thinks, Drew says, Drew likes…’ In her eyes, her sister-in-law was a straight-up bitch.
Jason had met her when he was studying in Othrys, heavily flattered by the attention of the seven year older, succesful CEO Drew Tanaka. He’d given up his studies to become the perfect, attentive husband. The problem was that Drew was never satisfied, and ever since being together with her, Jason had, whereas he’d been perfectly capable of taking care of himself, erased his own personality. Until the kids came Thalia had hoped her brother would come to his senses, leave Drew and live his own life. But when Bianca was born, and later on Nico, she had to accept her sister-in-law as a permanent presence.
“Let’s talk about something else than Drew and her ideas of raising kids. How did those little angels behave since I last saw them?”
“Oh, nothing special… Bianca had a moment of madness this morning, and she managed to cut up a small fortune of kids clothes before I noticed. Nico’s been sick and has been crying and puking for three days now.”
“Sounds like you could use some change of environment. Why don’t you and the kids stay over here for a week or so? I could use your help. We need to go through some papers together.”
“Yeah, that was something we wanted to talk about with you.”
Jason’s voice possessed a tremble, a telltale sign he was about to say something he preferred not to talk about. Thalia leaned a little bit forward in her chair. The ‘we’ was a sure sign of impending doom. As soon as Drew had a say in something, it would be benefitting for her and not so much the same for others.
Thalia waited for Jason to continue.
“Drew and I want to go back to Othrys as soon as she’s handled everything at Olympus, and we’d rather not have to worry about managing the house. You don’t need such a big house either, I mean, without a family and such…”
He stopped talking. It was quiet for a minute.
“Cut to the chase, please.’ Thalia tugged on her ear piercing, a nervous habit she had gained ever since she cut off her hair.
“Well… Drew thinks we should just sell the house. We can’t handle it, and we want to buy a house in Othrys when we go back, anyway. And even though Drew earns more than enough, selling the house would make a big difference. City people love towns like Halfblood Camps, and…”
Jason kept on rambling, but Thalia stopped listening altogether and hung up in the middle of a sentence. She’d been distracted, alright.
She had always been more of a mother than an older sister to Jason. From the moment he was born, she protected him. Jason had been a very venturous child, always trying to find ways to solve problems or arguments, quickly nominated by the other children to be their leader of sorts, something he took very serious. Drew had completely erased that part of him, and that was something Thalia would never forgive her.
When she woke up next morning, everything that had happened seemed like a dream. Thalia had slept a dreamless sleep, but still felt like she hadn’t been asleep for days. She was so tired her whole body hurt. Her stomach rumbled, and after a quick check-up on the fridge she headed out to Ceres for groceries.
The town was quiet, and save for the occasional passersby stopping her to chat, Thalia reached the supermarket rather early. One of the comments had been stuck in her head ever since she’d heard it. Silena’s parents had come back from their citytrip last evening. Thalia placed the bags on the table, tuned out her thoughts and put the groceries away.
It was amazing to look at the old trusted view, but she wasn’t quite used to the silence in the house yet. Of course it had been quiet every so often, all those years ago, but that had been different. Back then there was still Jason or their mother to walk in. Now it just felt lifeless.
Thalia’s relationship with her mother had always been strained. When the woman hadn’t been severely influenced by the copious amounts of alcohol she drank each day, she was either staring at the walll, eyes distant, or lecturing Thalia and Jason about how ‘proper children’ should behave. They would nod, agree, and shake off everything their mother said from the moment she’d turned around. No, Thalia’s childhood hadn’t been a happy one. It had barely classified as childhood, her having to be more of a parent to Jason than her mother was. Then Jason got into middle school, and they both parented their mother. Well, Jason did. Thalia had stopped caring and instead threw herself into having fun, experimenting with drugs, and partying. Then she graduated, moved out of Halfblood Camps, into Olympus and started writing. It had worked out pretty well, all things considered.
Thalia shuddered, shook her head as if to remove the thoughts from her head, and impulsively decided to go visit Silena’s parents. Losing a parent was hard, but it was somewhat natural. Losing a child must have been horrible. And she and Silena had been friends once. Even if it had been fifteen years ago, they had been friends, and they had been happy together.