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It is easy to ignore her, the first time, the second time, the third, even. A flicker of the lights and the stretch of shadows. Monsters are everywhere and the evening likes to make a home in the nooks of the porch. She might still, if not for him, those parched bloody lips uttering his first words in days, “There’s someone waiting for you.”
She didn’t even check to see if his eyes were dilated first. Didn’t press her grease-stained fingers into the soft flesh beneath and force them open, plucking the lid up and staring into that milky white expanse. The throbbings veins that had been popped and smeared a dozen times now—or no, popped just once. It had just been all of them. She didn’t check, again, to be sure he’d taken his meds or go through their list: who he was, where he was, what he did for a living, what was the month and year and which wars they had survived.
She stepped out onto the porch with a shotgun in her hands. Between one finger, there was a normal bullet and the other the glint of celestial bronze. Orange light cut against her check, obscuring her vision for just a moment. A moment, and the figure had stepped so close in that one second that it was nearly in range to get its head blown off and never come back.
“Private property, you fucking skank.”
But ghosts never abided by the rules of the living, did they? Those sick fucks did whatever they wanted when they got past their tomb. They roamed without a care, without giving a single fucking shit about what they were haunting.
She loaded the shotgun with the mortal bullet, heavy metal sliding into place. She felt for the grooves of her gun without taking her eyes off the ghost. Fingers finding the notches like old friends feeling each other up. She heard the bolts slide, the steady ke-ke-awk of everything righted and ready.
She fired a warning shot right through the ghost, watching it jerk back as the bullet pierced through its chest, landing with a hard crackle to the gravel below. It was too close to the surface to remember that it was dead, too far from the body to feel pain. But ghosts didn’t like reminders of their situation outside of their own terms. They didn’t like being slid through, ignored, shot at as though they could be vanquished again and again and again.
The ghost looked up at Clarisse, looked up and then vanished. All that remained was the casing, the shell that told her it had in fact gone off and hadn’t just been left in the yard.
She spat into the grass. It came out pink. She spat again, tongue feeling for her teeth for the gums weeping their sorry trail. She spat and turned back towards the house with a loaded gun.
Every window housed one box air conditioner, at least one for every room whirring on like a godsdamn cacophony. But Chris was a poor Minnesotan boy; Arizona had tried to scoop out all his insides to ferment on the boiling pavement and leave them for the buzzards to eat.
It came in handy, she supposed, when she straddled him on the couch. Their hands pressing into each other’s soft flesh. Some days, they could not stand this contact from one another. Some days, looking the other in the eyes was enough to have them recoiling, turning to their own silent corners of the house to pretend the other was dead, or otherwise indisposed.
His teeth latched onto her throat, biting into her collarbones like he could tear off the flesh there and gnaw on the marrow. She pressed herself into him bodily, pressed and pressed until there were no borders or boundaries. Their clothes rucked off somewhere on the floor. Tape still stuck to their chests and soft parts exposed. Light cut in through the bay window, fire season sunset shining on their bodies. Cutting stripes along Chris’ brown skin, illuminating the scars decorating his hips.
Clarisse covered them with her hand, cupped his body in her hands. Gasped when his canines dug into the hollow of her collarbones, holding the delicate flesh so tightly it nearly bled. They had done this on the floor, before they bought the furniture. Rucked against each other on the hardwood, slamming their bodies into it without remorse and clinging at the mess they left. The bruises they made.
Eventually, they loaded a couch into the back of the pickup—moth eaten and spilling stuffing in the ditch off the highway. A dark stain on the back of one of the chairs, where a head was supposed to be, the rest a faded old blue that was nearly gray.
They’d never planned to get furniture, it had seemed impossible enough to afford a house. To convert their damchas for real, human currency, to put a bid on the place and get approved. The terrible joy in the four of them, that reckless fucking hope that echoed that night.
Chris moaned, bucking, and she chased his lips as he squirmed. Her collarbone burned.
“I wanna—wanna,” he moaned, turned his face away from her and stretched. “Want to stay here forever with you.”
They could pretend everything was fine when they got like this. They could pretend it was someone else's body, that their home was full and someone would rattle the keys in the door and join them.
Clarisse pushed herself up, some involuntary noise tumbling out the side of her mouth. She caught its eyes, standing in the corner. It was more material, now. Distinctly humanoid instead of blobish. There was a sword cradled in their hands, the hilt clutched, the end digging into those hardwood floors Charlie had gushed about.
Blood dribbled down from the sword, pooling there and spreading out to its corporal body. Clarisse stared right where its eye sockets were supposed to be—they say the soul is behind the eyes but souls don’t have fucking eyes so where did that logic go?—and pressed a hard kiss on him one last time.
Technically, she wasn’t supposed to bring her gun home from work. It was meant to stay on the base in the locked room. Technically, it wasn’t supposed to be brought out unless they were training. A lot of things were technically true, but that was the problem with them, they were only true in the semantics.
So she kicked off her sand-worn boots on the porch and lit up on the swing. Chris ambled out a few moments later, his hands clasped around a vat of grease and a shitty old rag. He took the other end, gesturing for her to hand him a smoke.
He set it in his mouth, didn’t light up, didn’t ask her to. He wasn’t allowed to have lighters after— “You’re not in combat.”
“Where the hell would I be in combat in Arizona?” The gun was heavier than it should’ve been, made to hold both kinds of metal in its cartridge. The result was more compartments than normal and a punishing kickback for such a little gun.
Chris shook his head, scoffed. Stupid question, Rue, she could hear in that, in those curled lips, stupid fucking question. “Still haven’t kicked his ass.”
“He’s my fucking boss.” Which hadn’t meant anything before—she’d gladly kick Prissy down and rip him a new one. She’d scream at Chiron until her lungs were empty and her body existed only so far as it was about to explode. “Don’t work like that no more.”
The gun had an extra cartridge located just before the normal one. A spring behind them connected to a tiny level on its handle. One flick, and the ammo would change. The cartridges would switch places almost instantly and the trigger could be pulled. Too soon, and the whole thing would be jammed, but that hadn’t happened in years. Not since Charlie tried and blasted a hole through his palm when he undid the mechanism, all that kinetic energy shooting out in one fatal crack, splattering his hand against the workbench and retaining wall.
Clarisse's cigarette burned to near nothing and she stubbed it out in the crystal ashtray, Chris continued to roll the wet end of his between his teeth. The night pressed in and the mosquito nets kept the worse of it off of them. The oiled her gun, kept it clean and shiny, clear of that fucking sand. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote was on the hunt. Or it had been, its ears pressed flat against its head—something bigger was coming.
The weeks were numbered. It was a hard thing to believe, in war the first thing soldiers forgot was the time. It was just after that battle or before the next. Time slid off its kilter, Kronos was good at that. Slowing the world down by a millisecond, speeding it up by two. Just enough that they could feel the unease in the air, the shift of losing time or wading through it too slowly.
The fucker had liked that. Liked the way it made their skin crawl. She remembered Silena pressing her hand against her sternum, wound up and beautiful. Buoyed some bloody girl that was no good for her and said, “Does it matter if it’s fleeting? We’re here now.”
A part of her, even then, wanted it to be Silena’s words that took root. That secured her to the worth and that trot of time. But it was Chris and his T that had done it in the end.
Couldn’t miss a dose, could they? So the weeks were anchored in the time it took for his voice to deepen and for the needle to peirce the fleshy skin of his thigh. They had fought through hades to get those needles and she’d be damned if the war got in the way of them. If the slip of time took it from him.
So they sat, sweating their asses off on the kitchen floor. Too exposed in their boxers, somehow worse than sliding naked against each other. Here, they could see each other. Here their flesh was sticky with the heat from outside and not each other and everything chafed against her skin.
Chris cleaned a patch of skin, lined his supplies up on the tile. They couldn’t do it in the bathroom, the patch of mold growing behind the showerhead seemed counterintuitive if they were to avoid infection.
His hands didn’t shake when he filled the syringe anymore, but Clarisse held off from lighting up anyway. Watching as the clear liquid filled to the line. He handed it to her, a grin pitching across his face, “Clarisse, the light of my life and the jewels on my crown, will you do me the honor of making me into a real man?”
“Cheesy fucker.” She ripped the needle, too aggressively, maybe. But that’s how they’d always done this. She wouldn’t start treating him with child gloves, she’d promised him that. “Drop ‘em.”
Chris rolled his eyes, hiking up his boxers so she could insert it. She’d gotten good at this part, she didn’t even have to look to know where it was supposed to go. She did anyway, watched the tip tear through flesh and the plunger go down. He didn’t even wince.
She set the dirty needle aside, pushed him up and pressed a bandaid over the tiny wound just because. They were allowed that, now, the infirmary wasn’t running out of supplies all the time. These were theirs alone and they could go to CVS at two in the morning to pick up more if they liked. They could do anything they wanted.
It was too gentle—all of it. The unwrapping of the bandaid and the pressing of it. A part of her thought she was possessed, a puppeted creature used just one last time by her. One last kindness.
She thought she’d give anything for that to be true, carve out her heart for Hades and tell him to point at the love in it. Tell him to find the love in the daughter of war’s heart and he would. He would and it would be so fucking ugly. So, so rotten because it’d be stinking with it. Soaked in that pulposus thing Silena was convinced could be felt in their vital organs. If not the heart then the nerves, if not the nerves then the limbs and their instinctual patterns, their wear and nooks meant for another body to slide in. But she was no Orphesus, she hadn’t even dove down far enough to glance back.
“Your turn,” And he crawls into her lap like he belongs there. Straddles her and plucks the shaver from the counter where it’s pulled in between the garbage disposal switch and the toaster. “Close crop or fade?”
“All of it,” She grunted, like she always did, “I want it gone.”
“Got it,” He said, like he always did. Flipping the blades down to their shortest setting and getting to work. Clarisse’s hair was hardly off her scalp as it was, but to have it any longer would be a travesty. Would have her tearing it out in clumps with her hair hands, throwing it at the floor like an abomination.
Chris hummed as he worked, something long and deep in his stomach twining his vocal cords like a guitar. He wouldn’t stop when he first came back and she remembered, weeks after, weeks of sitting by his side and listening to that noise, wanting to deck him so hard it knocked all the noise out of him. She never had—would never—but it remained tar sticky on her soul as tobacco.
This wasn’t the same, though, it was the tune of something new on the radio she’d heard when they were grocery shopping. Little hairs tickled her jaw and itched going down her shirt. But he was the best barber she’d ever met, it didn't matter if it had to be a little intimate. After, they’d put the dirty needle in a milk jug underneath the sink and drive it to a drop off center four hours away. Where no one knew the sex on Chris’ birth certificate or her job. After, they’d sweep up her tiny straight hairs because she never grew them long enough to curl anymore. After, they get in the car and drive to the only worthwhile pizza place. Complain—like always—about ordering a whole pie instead of a slice. Of the grease and the crust that clearly wasn’t made to order.
It was a good day and they were doing better. Those were things she had to remember: that his hands didn’t shake today and she hadn’t tried to kill anyone and that was progress. That was something. She didn’t turn around, didn’t ruin it all by taking a look at the heavy presence that made the remaining hairs on her neck stand.
Sometimes, they shared a bed. Clutched each other until sleep came for them one way or another. Sometimes, she took the keys out of the dish and he knew to put his shoes on. They’d drive until the light glinted off the windshield and she was going to be late for work. They drove until the gas ran out in the desert and they had to walk to the nearest pumps. Body aching later, burning in their joints and burning on their skin from the heat. But moving all the same, existing in that fatigue.
Sometimes, Chris told her about the labyrinth when they walked. About the endlessness of it, the repeating halls, the corners that he was never sure if there was something behind. “Sometimes, when it really wanted to fuck with me. All the walls became curves.” He angled his finger, pointing it into the air as an initiation of a gun. “You can shoot around curves but not corners. It knew that.”
She didn’t tell him that nothing in their world would have guns. She didn’t tell him that he was talking about the place as an it again. As a thing that could breathe and haunt and thrive. Sometimes, she told him about the Sea of Monsters, never about Ares but sometimes about the fear.
“I don’t think it ever went away,” She muttered one night, so fragile, so quiet it nearly broke on her teeth. “I think I’ve been afraid since I was fourteen years old.” It's a different fear than the one in childhood. A cloying consequence to it, rested thickly in the back of her throat like a billiards ball. The fear of childhood feels like how it's supposed to: like tears, like animal panic. The rest of it…fuck the rest of it was some different emotion in a masquerade outfit with too many godsdamn feathers.
Most of the time, though, the truck stays silent in the driveway and their rooms stay firmly shut. Their beds are too big for themselves or maybe it's more true to say that they are too small for two people but that was the only solution to fill the void. To have tangled limbs and heat and pieces of themselves tipping over the edge.
Clarisse didn’t turn on the radio when she was in the truck alone. Chris liked it sometimes, the obscure channels that played rock from the previous decade interspliced with sports commentary on the local high school teams. Her coworkers cranked the volume in the rig as high as it would go and feigned ignorance when they couldn’t hear the crackle of the car radio over the thunder of their sub-par sound system. “Must’ve been outta range, Warden. We’ll keep an ear out, take her into maintenance when we dock.”
She’d never cared much for the radio, music had been a distraction for so long, she didn’t know how to listen to it without fearing something. A missed command or a monster bursting from the forest. The ticking of a bomb beneath her feet, the crumble of another life blocked by all that noise.
She liked the truck though, its steady rumble beneath her. The clang of parts not put together quite right, a rattle somewhere deep and guttural within. It was good to build the thing with her hands, rescued from a scrap yard and cobbled together without the help of the Hephaestus kids. It was good to have something she had made run this smoothly. Just enough hitch to tell her it was alive, still, breathing on.
She liked the click of the gearshift, just a moment, a jump in the exterior like it wouldn’t catch and the whole thing would shudder to a stop. It never did, but for a brief moment, the world existed like Scodinger's cat: broken and not. Leaving her to die and rumbling on.
She liked tearing through those empty roads at night, so flat and endless that she could swerve into the desert and drive on forever. The ghost seemed to have the same idea. Her hole-ridden body strewn across the passenger seat. Her sword laid across the back like another passenger. Ghost blood that emanated from the blade seeping into the upholstery. She had half a mind to make a shitty comment about bloodstains but she had dealt with enough of those over the years to know what to do without pause.
“Your baby doesn’t need a carseat then.”
Correction, if she were in the place to be making corrections for metaphysical beings, it was her sword, her baby, leaking its blood all over the upholstery that had taken hours to install. That sword she had spent hours polishing and sharpening, testing the weight against dummies before stuffing it away beneath her bed. She’d loved it so much that she hadn’t dared take it out for just any fight. The metal was a thin, flat blade and too much fucking heat could ruin it. She refused to bring it out at camp, nearly killed the Stolls when they tried to touch her shit.
Clarisse hadn’t intended to take it into the way. Or maybe she had. Maybe that’s how she knew, before she ever got to the battlefield, her hand groping beneath her bed. Coming away with dust bunnies and old pens that had rolled under and no sword. No sword at all. Perhaps she’d known what Silena had done then.
Or maybe it was kinder to believe that thing—was it a lie? Was it true because she had believed it? Had she believed it?—she’d told herself. That the Stolls had taken it, because they were pricks who could never learn their lesson. Even though they weren’t fighting with swords, they were setting bombs along the border between Kronos’ Army and Olympus and why the fuck would they need a sword for that?
But not even the Stolls could figure out how to get into her cabin. Not with all their tricks and their spying. Their missteps were too great, it was designed that way. Designed to only let in the people they wanted it to let in.
And when had Silena ever been a threat? When had she ever wanted her to go away?
So there was a girl in her passenger seat and she could pretend that this was the life they wanted. She could pretend that this girl was alive, and the junction of her shoulder was still connected. That it was not split open like rotten fruit, leaking blood onto the seat. Smearing itself there, determined to stain, to be firmly cemented there no matter how Chris and her scrubbed. That she could not see her insides—which were not really her insides because her body was burned. Burned with the rest of them with drachmases on her eyes. She’d made sure of that—pouring from the gaping wound of her body.
Clarisse's clothes had been unsalviable, and they clung to her without all that armor. Bloody stomach, a claw tore through the fat there like a cat batting its paw at a gnat. A disconnected shoulder, held together by some spirit shit and, before they’d burned her, Clarisse’s own hands. She would not leave her behind, not one piece of her. If they’d let her, if she could, she would’ve spent the rest of her life scraping her from the streets of Manhattan. Soaking up the blood from the pavement, putting back the organ matter that had escaped, the spittle that had run from her lips.
If the ghost were responding, she’d ask about the rest of it. Why that fuck did she have to wear Clarisse’s sick hoodie? Was it just because it was the biggest one? Added the most padding to her flat stomach and slim shoulders to make it just believable enough to fill out the extra space in her armor. Did she have to slip into her ratty jeans, cinch it with the nice, Italian leather belt Silena had bought her just because?
She swallowed the hard pit in her throat. That had either formed when she was fourteen or formed when Silena died or formed, like a black fucking pit inside her, when she was born and only continued to grow. Some massive tumour not yet visible, sapping all her nutrients and killing her. Ruining everything—making it hard to breathe, harder to speak.
Did she have to put on her boxers? The red ones she’d hated and had told Clarisse to trash two years before. With the holes near the bottom hem and one square in the ass that had Silena cackling. And really, really the worst offense was taking Clarisse’s best bra. The sports bra that actually worked like one, that pressed them flat as they could go and didn’t make her want to throw up every time she stood in front of a full length mirror.
But the ghost wasn’t talking, so she didn’t get to find out why what was under the armor mattered. Or why she had to pick the undergarments too, which she must’ve known, no one would see. Which there was no purpose in putting on, not even a little bit and instead of getting her sick day hoodie in all its bagginess and her favorite bra and the underwear she’d kept far longer than she should’ve—she had to throw it away. To slip her pale, cold body into her favorite summer dress and clean her. Staunching the blood, cleaning the shit that had come out of her after the bowels relaxed. Making her look whole again.
It hadn’t worked, not one fucking bit. Clarisse had wanted to ram her fist into the side of her face until it cracked. Wanted to tear her dagger through her middle and watch her really fall apart. Poke the tip between her vertebrae and watch the spinal fluid fill her inner cavities, watch the last structures of her body fall apart. Because that, that is something that is really dead. Not their mostly put together thing on the table. Not the ghost in her passenger seat that would fucking talk to her, that wouldn’t look.
If she didn’t do something, she was going to crash the car with both of them inside. If she didn’t do something, she was going to kill a ghost. Which had too many implications for her to run through, too many risks for her to consider. If she were two years younger—Hades, if she were a year and a half younger—she’d do it. Run the car off the road until it was smoking, burning up in glory.
“Don’t have anything to say to me, huh?”
She kept her foot steady on the gas, kept her hands at ten-and-two, kept her eyes on the road. She wasn’t like that anymore. She had fought for so fucking long not to be.
Dinner stunk up her car with grease, the brown baggy nearly tipped over in the passenger seat and deposited itself on the floor. The same seat that now had a brown stain on the upper left side, too deep for their best chemicals to get it out. The ones in the back had taken to it nicely though, only the cigarette burns were left and those had been there long before Clarisse called the car her own.
Her eyes hung low, body beaten into exhaustion by her superiors. Sometimes she thought mortal generals were idiots, chickens with their heads cut off clucking around their white-picket-fence yards. Had any of those men—because all her superiors and most of her coworkers were men—ever actually fought on the battlefront? Did they understand how it became animalistic? Did they understand that these drills, these regulations didn’t mean shit when a monster came bearing down on you and all you could do was swing. Swing to live, swing and hope it hits home.
When she pulled into the driveway, the lights cut across the porch, splintering the figure on the stairs in half.
“Fuck,” She threw the car door open before she full hit the brakes, scrambled out to him. “Fuck. Fuck.” Checked his wrists, his head, his hands. Nothing, good, there was nothing. He shook in her arms like a damn leaf and there was something wrong with his eyes but when wasn’t there? Was there something more? Something bigger now?
It hadn’t been a good morning when she left. His body curled on the couch with the TV flicked onto The Bachelor re-runs. He hadn’t noticed when she slipped through the door, when she purposely stood in front of the TV to get his attention. Or maybe he had, maybe he had and that scared the shit out of her.
“You’re late,” He rasped. Good, good he was still talking. That was good.
“I know. Some of the guys had to fuck up the drills—thought they were real fucking slick—Segerant made us do them over. Twice. Didn’t even get overtime. I stopped for dinner on the way back.”
Chris seemed to take it in and not. He existed in some liminal space his brain tried to escape to. Too fractured to stay in one time, to understand his surroundings. Some days were worse than others. Some days he screamed at the walls, told her they were bleeding, told her there was a monster around the corner and they had to get out, out, get out. Let me out! Let me out! Let me out… Some days he forgot how his tongue worked, that his vocal cords weren’t worn from screams and his throat wasn’t raw and blistered from the air in the Labyrinth. They wrote those days and when he forgot his fingers were no longer broken, when he forgot how letters were formed, they worked in silence. What else was there? How else could they live with this thing neither of them knew how to tackle?
Some days…some days he was almost like that kid she knew before the Labyrinth. The fourth corner, the scrappy little boy who wasn’t on testosterone yet and made his voice sound comically deep to pretend he was. Who liked scrabble and poker and blackjack. Who ate fucking trailmix by the handful. And didn’t mind when his knees got muddy or when noises got too loud or when someone touched his shoulders when he wasn’t expecting it. Who didn’t care when someone touched his throat at all.
Chris hummed and she snapped her fingers in his face. No, no, none of that shit. They were not backsliding, they—they couldn’t. “Hey, hey with me now. I got birra tacos and those fries you like. We could stop at redbox, find something trashy.”
Chris shook his head violently, shook it further and further, like he could twist his head off if he spun it far enough. Clarisse pressed one of her nails into the skin of his wrist, held it there until he looked back at her. “We could get a movie, go for a drive, or stay home and eat. What do you want to do?”
He did better when the choices were laid out like that. He’d been denied a choice for too many months, had forgotten what the word no meant. The first time she’d offered him a choice of juices—orange, cranberry, or getting a goblet of whatever the fuck he wanted from the dining pavilion—he’d looked so confused. Blinked up at her without understanding, without comprehension of the very words themself. Not in that order, at least.
“Eat.” He shook his head again, “Fuck, yeah let’s eat outside, no movies.”
“M’kay.”
They set out the consumé between them on the steps, laid out the tacos on greasy paper and swatted flies coming in overhead. Somewhere in the distant, dead bushed, a girl dragged her sword behind her. They watched, in the near nonexistent light, as she chased off starving coyotes.
They didn’t say her name, they didn’t talk about the blood on the upholstery. What could they say about her? About this figment that was not her, that was not their girl. And what could they do with that fragmented piece? To hold her and not Charlie with her? She would never forgive them, more than that, there wasn’t enough of Charlie left for his soul to cling to.
Silena died grotesquely beautiful. A darling Ophelia lain on the pavement. They blew Charlie up so badly they couldn’t differentiate between the charred bits of him and the hissing metal in the water.
She doesn’t ask what sent Chris spiraling and for his part, she doesn’t think he has an answer. Sometimes he just gets like that. Dionysus said there was nothing to be done about it, that sometimes mortals crack so deeply and fundamentally that they couldn’t be repaired.
He had been so serious, then, more serious than the wars. She’d wanted to punch him in the fucking face, to shake his shoulders and scream to fix him. To keep sitting on the edge of the bed in the Big House like he had been each night. Hold his hand up and tweak the synapses in Chris’ head until he remembered how to be human, until he put down the knife and stopped shivering like a godsdamn animal.
But he was a God and she was a fifteen year old girl and there wasn’t anything that could change that fact, was there? Didn’t matter that most of the time she could hardly believe that poor fucker was a God. Didn’t matter that he’d seen her stumble, spit, bleed and all those gross mortal weepings since she was a child. When it came down to it, she couldn’t demand anything from him.
Silena brought Clarisse’s sword down on the coyote, tried to hit its skull. It was a terrible shot, and if the sword was made of metal, it would’ve twanged off the calcium and sprung back up into her abdomen. Who ever thought she could pass as Clarisse? Who ever thought that was how you used a sword that delicate.
Some childish part of her, the part she thought had died and shrivelled when she was fourteen and didn’t need anyone, wanted to call out to her. To yell, “what the fuck do you think you’re doing, Beauregard?” Because Silena loved it when she used her last name, the roughness of it in her mouth. Nobody called girls like Silena by their last names—they were too delicate for that, too well known. Beckendorf could be Beckendorf to the rest of the world, but he had to be Charlie for them. Silena had to be Silena to the rest of the world, and she could barely be Beauregard to them.
Chris’ eyes followed her and that was enough confirmation that she was there. She had asked him, once, just after the battle, if he’d known. If he was a liar. She’d nearly killed him before he got the answer out. Nearly believed he’d lied, wished that he would’ve, that she could’ve skinned him down. Blamed him for it all and been alone—one true and loyal to the cause, living and breathing still.
He had shook his head, hands shaking but eyes clearer than they had been in days, “Silena was his secret.”
And how could you keep a woman like her a secret? She was bursting with life, too big for her body, which had tried to accommodate but only came out short. She splattered her colorful makeup and owned an amount of riding boots that Clarisse thought was both impractical and absurd. She wore acrylic nails and preferred her hair long and flowing. For a while, she could hand Clarisse a sealed can and she’d open it without a second thought. She’d plant herself on Clarisse’s bed, hairbrush extended, and somehow a braid would appear down her back. It wasn’t like she hadn’t had agency in it, it was just that Clarisse had never considered saying no to her before.
You couldn’t keep people like that a secret.
“I might be wrong, someone might know something.” Chris looked out over the lake, staring at the reflection of the stars in the water. Another woman his brother had killed gleamed back in all her supernova glory. “I don’t remember a lot of what happened. No—” He sucked a breath, “It’s like, it’s like it’s all muddled. I can’t tell what was real. It’s just this mash of memories—a blur of things and places and people. Sometimes they’re clearer, but everyone is out of focus. It’s like, I watch my memories and it’s all these things being done to me. Like I’m not in them, like they’re not mine.”
So Chris had cracked something fundamental and Silena pranced across the desert protecting them from coyotes and their pet rabbits. Because, really, what was a pet if not prey they had come to conquer?
Once, Silena had promised that she never had to see her mother again. They were children and Clarisse was already bloody. Maybe Silena had been too, but she hadn’t known that yet. Hadn’t known when she went from child to spy.
Clarisse’s transition had been so clear—child to soldier. A sword in her hands and something terrible in her eyes. A shake in her whole body that she could convince everyone else was an adrenaline hum, not fear. Never fear.
It had been stupid to display herself like that. Because she hadn’t known a thing about Silena back then. She thought she had, Silena was so fucking good a lying. At making you think you knew more about her than she did. But looking back, Clarisse hadn’t even known her father’s name. Hadn’t known if she went home from September to February or if she romped through the streets of Paris, letting the French on her tongue guide her way.
When she’d asked, Silena had flicked her sunglasses down and cleaned her lipstick off her teeth. Grinning that fucking smile that had Clarisse on her knees. That clouded everything, made the whole world unreal, except for her beauty. “It would be a waste of sun to be away for Spring.”
And Clarisse hadn’t pushed. Why? Why hadn’t seen shrieked that’s not a fucking answer, Beauregard. Tell me something real, Silena, tell me who you fucking are. You liar. You bitch. But Clarisse had always been so pliant in her hands, a thing to be held and to be molded. And she had believed her, everything about her, with everything Clarisse had.
It had seemed so obvious when she laid it out, that Clarisse never had to see her mother again. That Clarisse could die in New Orleans, be just another missing persons case. A child who’d slipped off of the streets, who disappeared in the crowd.
She had not imagined herself, at nineteen, standing in the kitchen of her mother’s shared house. It all looked the same on the outside. Mosquito netting wrapped around the porch, torn in places so it let the bugs in anyway. Useless, but no one took the responsibility to take it down. It had been there before any of them had moved it and would stay, probably, until they all died. The paint was sunstained and peeling off the siding, the shingles dotting the yard like gravestones.
She remembered breaking her arm trying to climb the tree in the front yard. She had tried not to stare at the bikes clustered at the bottom of the steps. She had tried not to stare at the kitchen appliances, all old and half-broken when she had been living there—still plugged into the walls. Still stacked with three out-of-date clustered planners and magnets and chore lists.
Her mother sucked a breath, drank her coffee black, and when Clarisse had her back turned, with liquor. She supposed she couldn’t judge it for it anymore, she did the same. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
But it sounded like, I thought you died when you were twelve years old.
Once upon a time, it had been a halfway house for recovering addicts and crazies. Somewhere along the way, the system had given up on them. They were too crazy or maybe they’d relapsed too many times. Or maybe, it was the sex workers unionizing or fent being passed on the street like candy. Can’t save them all, can’t even save the recovering ones.
It had seemed inevitable, prophesied that the kids there, the ones she’d grown up with—not her siblings and not her friends, but something rough and beautiful in their understanding of each other—would end up just like their mothers. Dead in a ditch or otherwise occupied by their delusions.
“Yeah, well, dreams do come true.” Someone tumbled down the banister, took one look at the kitchen with wide, animal eyes, and slipped through the door. She remembered a boy twice her age putting his cigarette out on her there. She remembered asking for it, wanting to feel that sting. The paradox of a wound cauterizing itself.
Her mother looked better. Which was to say, her eyes were not entirely unmoored to the world around her. Which was to say, she wasn’t as high as she could be or as drunk as she smelled like. The terrible thing about it was that Clarisse’s mother had always been beautiful. Clarisse had never understood her to be an addict until Silena pointed it out. Beautiful women were not addics—addicts were all bones and pale, warped skin. Glassy eyes and trembling hands. No, that could not be her mother. Not with her large, round curves, the extra fat around her stomach. With her bronzy skin and eyes so dark they were nearly all black, all pupils. Her mother had full lips and her nose was all intact and there were no weeping wounds on her upper arms.
Men had told Clarisse that her mother was all boobs and ass. It had made her stomach roll then, made her want to throw up or punch them in the face now. They had that hungry grin to them when they said it. And when they said it, it was so plain, like a fact of the world. An undeniable thing that her mother was to be desired and for that sin she would suffer their stares.
It was not that Clarisse had an unhappy childhood. She had a childhood that she did not understand that only clicked and morphed into tragedy upon reflection.
“How have things been?”
Clarisse grunted, it was a ridiculous question but then her mother hadn’t been around to know that. Where was she supposed to begin—with the blood or the pride? Where one ended the other began, which was a worse way to open? Which made her more monstrous?
“I want you to know that I’m getting better. I know it doesn’t matter to you, but—I’m sober now. I found a good guy, baby, he’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. He promised me we’d move down to Florida once he gets a job secured. I’m going to start all over, I want you there with me.”
Natalia La Rue had her fair share of boyfriends. A string of men that she never distinguished. She was sleeping with them and if they stuck around for some amount of time—sometimes just a night, laid beside her when she woke, sometimes months and months of those strange encounters in the hall with strange not-mom’s-boyfriends—they became her beau.
She had loved to tell people that she’d slept with a God. Had slipped it into her little routine, loud enough that Clarisse could hear through the paperthin walls. Loud enough that the men's laughter rattled down the phone line. At twelve, Clarisse had learned her mom was a barracks bunny, worked at a club just outside of a military base and had her hands in the pockets of privates to generals. Somewhere along the way, she’d met his father.
Not even Gods could resist something beautiful and tempting. Or, maybe, they couldn’t resist a beautiful mortal, there were so many of them. Clarisse was nothing to her father, he had never been in love with her mother. To him, she was a spawn meant to be aborted. A bastard that would’ve brought shame to any ancient Greek family.
But this wasn’t Greece and Clarisse had always known her mother was a whore.
“We could’ve done this over the phone,” She said. She didn’t know why she’d made the drive. Didn’t know what she was doing here after all this time. Maybe the only thing keeping her from her mother’s side was Silena’s insistence that she was better than this place. That she was going to be someone, in the little time they had.
“Baby—”
“I have a life now, mom.” She pushed away Natalia’s hand. The inverse was of course, not with you in it. Clarisse was a self-sustaining machine, a brutal child born into a violent woman.
Clarisse was afraid of her father in the straightforward way most girls without father were. They learned to throw a punch, to survive under pressure their mothers would crack and splinter under. To fight, and fight well. To make themselves into the scariest thing in the room.
And then there was a man who could take them down so easily. That was the most disturbing thing about Ares. It took no effort at all for him to stand taller, stronger, better than Clarisse in every way. She loved him for it, hated him for it. So many people thought having a big, strong man around made little girls feel protected. What a fucking joke.
Ares had hit her only once. How many people could say they’d been hit by a God? Maybe every child who’d been hit by their father and survived. Maybe it always felt like that—the blistering spark of betrayal and the weak echo of pain chasing after the sting.
She was afraid of her mother in the way girls were afraid of their own reflection. A corpse staring back at them, a twisted thing reaching out to seal their fate. Clarisse would not stomach brutality against her, but her mother took a slap with a smile.
At least she could be honest about herself, with the drinking and the cigarettes and the shitty food. At least she could admit that she wasn’t sober most of the time. Her mother couldn’t even do that. Fuck—her own mother couldn’t look her in the eyes.
When Clarisse batted her hand away, her mother flinched, and she hated her so viciously for it she thought she might kill her. More than she had ever hated her father for his violent hands, more than she had ever hated her slippery boyfriends. The nights the lock of her door was tested and the bat beneath her bed curled in her hands, sitting at the ready.
They never broke the threshold. For that reason, Clarisse had bashed her first skull in at fifteen instead of seven.
She knew that when her mother looked at her, she saw her father. Or maybe a blur—a mix of men she had slept with. Because, really, what was her father but a God in a sea of men? What made her father different, when they all went crawling back to the same woman. To her, her father was only significant in that sleeping with a God made her seem powerful when she was so obviously not.
What had Silena said?“Pretty creatures are so easy to break”? At the time, it had been about her beloved pegasus, Phoenix, limping across the pasture. Pegasi were creatures of inexplicable strength, they were also peacocks made to transport demigods to war. They were useless once their wings tore. They were not arrowdynamic like a bird, when something went wrong they plummeted to the earth like a stone. So often, things went wrong.
“You had your chance,” She said stiffly, she’d done this too many times to count. Annabeth glaring at her over the Roman’s fancy fucking debate table for her tone. Wrangling the bits of her that wanted to strangle them all. That wanted to scream, do you even know what war is? Let me show up at your doorstep and blow up your homes, your grave? Tell me what you think of debate then?
Really, it had been about the table being too new. Too clean for comfort. She wanted the lopsided, chiseled thing she’d grown up at. The hearts and names and swears carved on the surface. Proof of life, proof of death. The Romans kept their shit clean. Nobody died a person, they died a Roman.
“I have to get home, mom.”
Her mother did not fight for her, she never did. Clarissse couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or not. Only that the ghost in the corner had not let her blood soak in the floorboards, and for that she was grateful. Explaining a dead girl’s blood was a difficult thing.
“You look like a clown.”
Chris balked, turning slowly in the mirror. “It’s not that bad. Right? Right?”
“Not if you want to resemble a traffic cone that got lost.”
“I do not!”
“Some sleep deprived fucker is going to think you grew legs and ran away from a pothole.”
“Fuck off,” Chris shoved her shoulder, jostling her on the bed. The uniform really was ugly. The reflective strips caught the meager light coming from the bug-gut smeared window. The orange was a color somehow more offensive than the one at camp. The black uniform shirt underneath was slightly less offensive, though the placard nametag came close. “Besides, I only have to wear it when I’m outside.”
“Where everyone can see you.”
Chris smirked, “Can’t miss me.”
“Should get hit by a car, would help with the fuckin’ bills.”
They didn’t talk about the mortgage being too high—made for four incomes. Three, actually, because they’d learn how to cook and that would save some money, surely. It wasn’t like any of them knew how to cook to begin with. It was just one of those things all adults knew how to do, some inherent talent that would be imbued when they turned eighteen. Like taxes and negotiating with a mechanic. Like knowing how to clean the scum that was growing out of the shower moulding or how to fold a fitted sheet.
They didn’t talk about how wrong they were. They didn’t know how to do shit. If she were at camp, she’d throw herself into the Athena cabin and bully Malcolm until he sent one of his siblings to give her a lecture. Or he gave in and did it himself. Little fucker could never resist a lecture.
Now what? Go to a library, shift through information she could barely read until she made sense of what they were supposed to be doing? No, fuck that. Pretending was working just fine. They were making their payments with her salary, they were fine.
Clarisse popped the cap off her beer on the edge of the nightstand. The shitty wood had begun to intent with the pressure, chipping away the veneer and leaving the gritty masonite exposed to the world. She thought of Charlie’s ghost balking at the poor craftsmanship, because no matter how woodwork wasn’t his thing, he still appreciated a well made table. The way his face would twist, never quite rude but a near thing. Charlie could never get angry, could he?
If he found out Silena was the spy, she thought he’d just stop talking forever. That was better than being angry.
How had he fallen into their trap: angry, angry, crazy? Stuck in the middle of spitting, fighting kids. Some harborer of all their peace. At least, Silena hadn’t seemed angry had she? Not to the world, not to her siblings or to Chiron. But to anyone watching, of course she had been. It wasn’t even a question. Silena couldn’t make it through the world without gritting her teeth so hard they chipped.
Chris fumbled with his high-vis coat, his black shirt and shiny nametag. It was something, at least. It made him look a little more human, marginally more alive. A patchy beard had begun to grow on his cheeks, so terribly that it looked like a hacksawed razor job.
Like they were still children, she said, “If anyone fucks with you, I’ll kill them.”
“I don’t doubt that,” he said, like that was something he could still believe.
“What were all of you, really?” Will asked, because he was the only person brave enough and stupid enough to do it. She remembered the brutality of it, the sharp dig that came with being moonshine drunk. The coldness creeped in on them as the fire burned down to embers barely glowing in the night.
It would be a lie to say Silena’s body wasn’t already cold. It would be the truth to say it remained just beside them, lingering in the night. She swore she felt her eyes on her, she swore there was an arm looped around her body, bracing her up. “Just because they knocked off your family doesn’t make you special.”
Those last few hours with Micheal in a blur of shouting matches. In trying to kill the other or at least make them hurt. Micheal in his scrubs, that fucking bow abandoned at the bottom of his chesterdrawers because the infirmary was short staffed again. He was a coward who wouldn’t stand on the front lines, he’d rather take her cabin’s chariot than dig out that bow and do what needed to be done. She remembered the feeling of his cheek under her first, the weight of him barreling into her and knocking the air from her lungs.“Hippocratic oath my ass.” She’d shouted, there had been blood running down her nose.
“I didn’t promise anyone shit!” It was the first time she’d heard him swear. As invigorating as it was spiteful. She’d wanted to pin him to the dirt, she’d wanted to put an arrow through his heart. Everyone is dying and you’re hiding behind those fucking walls. Fix my siblings, my siblings are on the front lines where you’re supposed to be and yours are all hiding.
Was it about a chariot? Did it matter? That all felt like so long ago, it was the most pathetic argument in the world.
Will laughed, buckled over and swayed on the log he was perched on. The poor kid was gone on his brother’s moonshine. She saw that he’d torn off his nails, scrubbed them down until there was nothing but nubs. He clutched the jug like it was the only thing tying him to the mortal plane.
She knew that it was. Gods, she knew.
“I always thought you two were in love. But…” He shrugged.
“But?” Clarisse prompted, because she was drunk or because she could feel the soft pads around her stomach, manicured nails pressing into her abdomen. She felt breath hot and heady on the back of her neck, someone’s hair brushing her chin. One person’s hair, it could only ever be one person.
“Silena started dating Beckendorf, figured we had it all wrong.” He hicupped, the alcohol spilled onto the ground and she swore the grass started wilting.
He was right, of course. Silena had her beau and Clarisse had her friends and that was enough.
Silena Beaureguard was also a liar, only Clarisse had never considered that she’d lie to her. It was simple—Clarisse was a piece of her, surely, a neuron clinging to the electric fissures of her brain, a gushing vein pushing against her skin, revealing some vital area to exploit.
She was the most alive person Clarisse had ever met, which of course meant she was going to die young. Clarisse had grown up around too many breathing dead people to think anything that vibrant could last. Gods, she was the most terrible thing alive. Gods, she was the only thing alive.
They were best friends—which sounded so small now, so childish. How could someone boil down all those years into two words? How could that encapsulate the feeling of Silena wiping the blood from her cheeks after her first quest, kissing her square on the mouth so hard her teeth ached. The instinct to wrap her arms around her and lift her high into the air after she won a pegasus race, her whole body jittery with adrenaline and soaked in sweat. The physicality of her, looped around Clarisse or Clarisse standing sentinel behind her, waiting for someone to start shit.
“We were the best of friends,” Clarisse sing-songed, tilting her head back to look at him. Like joking about it would wrap back around into severity, like she could make it more serious if she laughed. Had she wanted this kid on the front lines with her siblings? Was that all it had been about? Maybe it was Silena’s insistence that Phoenix would look grand pulling a chariot like that. “Real pals.”
Someone’s body pressed into her back, heat curling where it faced the night.
Chris tilted his head towards the sliding glass down, the faint glow of a fire shining through the night. She got up to follow, palming a pack of cigarettes. They hadn’t smoked all night and she was beginning to feel the dull itch under her skin burn into grotesque desire.
The door slid shut behind them, blocking out the buzzing of the TV and chatter of voices neither of them knew all that well. Chris sat behind the pool, just out of view from the patio, his knees tucked up against his chest. Clarisse extended a lit cigarette without a word.
“Can you believe this place?” Chris said, half-awe, half-digust. “Mom was an art thief, an art thief,” He repeated in a whisper. “They don’t fucking—I don’t know, people like that don’t settle down in suburbia.”
The house was picture-perfect. All neat trimmed yards and two story houses with roaming sidewalks for joggers and not much else. They had a patio without mildew, a trampoline, and an above-ground pool. The whole thing made her teeth hurt. “It looks like a cartoon.”
Chris huffed, which might’ve been as close to a laugh as he could’ve gotten that night. “Fucking sales consultant. My Gods.”
Chris had told her about their old life—he and his mother sharing a one-bedroom apartment in Minnesota. His mother running a forgery business out of their kitchen, teaching him her signature and then the signatures of his teachers and his principal. Art thief was an overexageration—she circulated fake pieces to buyers. A thief, yes, but not in the traditional sense. The distinction had never mattered much to anyone outside the Hermes Cabin, though, so she let it lie.
“She got her shit together.” Natalia was probably singing in a club in New Orleans, somewhere. Her beau long gone to Florida by himself after scooping out all the money he could from her. She wondered if she’d relapsed, she wondered why it was a question at all. “That’s something.”
Chris didn’t say a word, he flicked the ash off his cigarette. “She won’t help with the paperwork, says she left all that shit behind. Won’t risk everything she’d built.”
“She’s a coward.”
“I get it. I just—I didn’t even need her to, y’know? I didn’t even ask her for it and she just assumed that’s the only reason I’d come back.” He sighed, “And she just keeps looking at me like I’m…not even here. Like I killed her real kid or something. She told my brothers I died, did you know that? I have a plot and everything, we could go see after they go to bed.”
When Chris first got back and no one thought he’d get better, Clarisse was supposed to call his family to tell them the news. Back then, she hadn’t known shit about them. Parents were skirted by topic, a blister none of them could pop. She knew he returned to each Christmas and came bearing so many gifts Charlie had to build him a new storage chest. That he lived with them until things really went to shit and disappeared one night to join the army.
But she was always more bite than bark. She’d rather have shown up at Melissa Rodriguez's doorstep with her disfigured, insane son behind her than call to tell her the news. But back then, Chris couldn’t leave the room and they cuffed him to the bedframe when there wasn’t anyone to watch him. To stop his episodes, Mr. D had said, he’s taking longer to respond than it should.
They really fucked him up, huh?
Mr. D didn’t laugh, didn’t say anything for a long moment and maybe that’s when it really set it. Because he was supposed to be fixable, supposed to come back together like severed limbs after ambrosia and ice. Yeah, Carmen, they did.
Snow had begun to fall in powdery white flecks, melting the instant it touched their skin. Clarisse looked up to the night sky, but it was smoggy here. Blocked by the streetlamps and the lights spilling from the dozens of houses around them. She missed her desert, she missed the seclusion of camp.
“I think they’d rather I be dead,” Chris admitted, so softly she thought she’d missed it until she saw the look stretched across his face.
“Yeah,” She agreed, “Yeah they probably do. Easier for them that way.” Chris wasn’t their little girl anymore, he was some strange other shaped like the child they’d known. He was an amalgamation of parts that he managed to remember and bits the war reshaped. It had taken him seven months to remember his favorite color—liliac purple—and twice that long for his favorite food. What was she supposed to do? Tell him what his personality was supposed to be? Tell him who he was?
This was her Chris—not the same, but fuck neither was she. A little bit more jittery and a lot more fucked in the head. But he was the only person she’d ever let hold her hand and he’d remembered that when he was still screaming bloody murder in the Big House. He’d remembered that when it was just the two of them left. She loved him as much as a person like Clarisse could love anyone; with devotion more than emotion, with more bite than necessary.
Of course it was easier to pretend that Chris was dead, he was so much harder to swallow now.
She stubbed out the cigarette in the grass, crushing it under her foot until it was a faint smudge.
“They’re scared of you.”
“I noticed,” That was a good feeling, really. It protected her at the least. As long as she was biting, as long as someone flinched when they saw her coming then she could always hit first. She knew she could always hit harder. If Chris wasn’t made for these people, she certainly wasn’t. All that anger didn’t look good, more obvious than that, neither did the scars or the fucked up hands and nose. “I’m ready to go home. How much longer do we need to be here?”
Chris shrugged, “We’ll leave in the morning, I don't have any more PTO.”
“You don’t have any PTO to begin with, fuckwad.”
“Fair point. We’ll order pizza and watch The Bachelor. By the time we get back, those gummy worms you like will be a day over expiration, we get them discounted.”
“Then they’ll know you’re not on vacation.”
Chris grinned, snaggle-tooth looping over his lip, “Covert mission, then.”
“One last hurrah.”
“It will require disguises,” He folded his fingers together, looking more like himself than he had all evening. It wasn’t like the Rodriguezes were bad people, exactly. It was just that they’d never tempered their expectations for them. They kept glancing at him like Angela was in the corner of their eye, just out of reach. Like Chris hadn’t built a whole new family and watched them crumble one by one. “You could be an out of towner, I’m thinking…overalls and a wig.”
“That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” She thumped down beside him, looping her arm around his shoulders and jostling them both.
“Come on, it’s not like you’d even need a hair net.” He rubbed a hand over her freshly-shaven scalp and she knocked back into him, sending them tumbling out in the grass.
“Motherfucker.” He laughed, rolling in the grass until he could kick his foot up and hook his ankle around her hip. Bringing him weight down and pushing her left side into the dirt. She buckled, rolling with him in the grass until they were both damp with melted snow and out of breath.
She glanced up to the pool’s ledge where Silena dangled her feet in, still in Clarisse’s nice leather hiking boots. It was such an idiotic move to take them—only someone like Silena would notice if she wore her own shoes instead of Clarisse’s. But she would’ve known, which meant she had to be an absolute idiot and switch them. She could’ve run if they were three sizes too big. She could’ve reacted if the armor hadn’t been so heavy.
Her face was hollow—her cheeks and eyes indented where the squelching rotten skin had folded in on itself where there were no bones to cling to.
There was the faint rumble of Christmas music spilling from the house, the door cracked open cutting a beacon of light across the lawn. Ms. Rodriguez’s laugh followed her before her voice, a boisterous thing that reminded her too much of Chris. “There you two are! We’re about to open presents.”
“We’ll be in, in a minute, Mom.” Chris called, but didn’t make a move to push himself up, he gazed towards the light then pinned them back on the stars. Snow fell on his cheeks, melting near-instantoniously into faint water droplets.
“Oh look—kids, Ryan, it’s snowing.”
Silena stared at the snow dotting the top of the pool, sitting on the surface for a moment before being consumed by the water. It fell into her hair, on her frozen arms, piling into little mounds in her stillness. Bits of it fell into her eyelashes and Clarisse swore it was light reflecting back, some bit of soul in the dead thing following them. But she blinked and the snow fell away and she was only a ghost.
Clarisse blinked, staring harder at the water then. She elbowed Chris, “Is that…?”
“What?” Chris followed her gaze to the murky water, to the shape churning in the artificial blue. The chunks of rotten meat and bone fragments swirling. “Oh fuck, it’s him.”
Her whole body shook and her breath rattled, sharp and puffy shapes in the night air. “Merry Christmas, guys.”
Chris raised his hand in a small wave and Silena raised her own back, the sword balanced in her lap just above the water. Her hand didn’t move exactly—one moment it was folded around the hilt and the next it was in the air. There was no way to cartograph the movement. Only the change in the air, the rigor mortis of her body.
“We love you,” Chris said, pushing himself up. He dipped his hand in the pool water, feeling for a bit of Charlie. He cupped his rotting ghost-flesh in his hands and pressed a soft kiss to the most intact piece of him. “We love you. We’re so sorry.”
It took them both too long to stare at their dead. To digest the fact of Charlie—a swarming mass of flesh and bone fragments. Less human without a body and less dead without the smell of rot. He had always been Silena’s before he had been theirs and still…and still Charlie was one of them. Their little group meant to leave this all behind.
If Silena was her heart then Charlie was her limb—severed off and phantom aching where he was meant to be. A part of her wanted to be closer to him, to love him in the same way Silena had. But she couldn’t, not ever, and he would ache and ache and ache.
Chris slid through the glass door, opened just a crack so they didn’t let in the cold. That house was too warm and smelled like cinnamon in the oven. Some unrealness, some cartoon family bullshit.
Clarisse gripped the door in one hand, let it bite her palm, and turned back to her people in the pool. She had not moved from her frozen wave, Charlie continued to float atop the water. “You better not corrode my sword with that shit.”
The spring brought dead things to their door, or at least half-feral girls from their childhood, which were almost the same thing. There was Annabeth on that cheap, stained couch in her costume. She looked almost-adult and almost-put together but Clarisse had seen this act from her too many times before to believe it.
She opened a beer on the side of the kitchen counter, passed it to her. She knew she’d seen the inside of their fridge, could see her cataloging the takeout boxes and booze and testosterone. Some life they were living, such terrible, trashy people they were.
There was a gun on top of the fridge for intruders and a sword in its sheath hanging off their only full length mirror—a sprinter running from the top corner to the center. Dirty laundry was scattered across the floor because the washer had broken the month before and neither of them had gone to the laundromat in town for a week.
She knew how she looked—like she had let go, like she was living in trash, like she was becoming her mother. Annabeth didn’t have to say a word but a part of her dared her to say something about it. To look her in the eyes and tell her all the terrible things she’d been harbouring. Instead, she said, “I shouldn’t drink this. I won’t be able to drive home.”
Clarisse tilted her head to the side, considering. “You won’t make it back to San Francisco tonight.”
Annabeth looked out the window, or tried to, the fogged glass really fucked that up. “I should go home.”
Prissy’s old prius baked in the afternoon heat. Clarisse should take her keys, she should park it under the cover so it doesn’t overheat at a standstill. She should keep her from going home.
The second button on Annabeth’s shirt had come off, the white fabric frayed and hitting her exposed skin. Her suit jacket had a colossal stain on the bottom right side and her leather shoes were built. Sculpted for a wider foot, like she’d plucked them from the men’s dress section.
If their home was her version of getting it together then this was Annabeth’s version of falling apart. It was cataclysmic. It was nothing at all. Annabeth tipped the beer back and drained the first few inches in one go.
They drink. They don’t talk. At one point, Clarisse called Chris’ work and told him to bring back a twelve pack. He told her that they were underage and she told him to bring back candy bars too. Finally, she propped open the door, let in the mosquitoes that never died in the Arizona desert, “I need a smoke. You comin’?”
Annabeth moved automatically, grasped the necks of both bottles between her fingers and followed her into the dying light. Clarisse lit up, offered her a drag but she shook her head, staring out into the wasteland.
“Driving all the way here for an identity crisis seems like a waste of gas,” She said, because no one could call Clarisse La Rue tender, least of all the people she grew up with. Because she could not look at Annabeth fucking Chase without seeing a trail of bodies following her car in the desert. “I thought you didn’t have a license anyway.”
“I don’t.”
Never let it be said that Annabeth Chase was tactful. She never learned how to be. She supposed none of them had—the Year-Rounders, the bunch of kids who, for the most part, had no supervision and next to no formal education. Clarisse, Annabeth, Connor and Travis. She guessed Silena’s little sister, Drew, counted too, but she had always felt too young for them. Too far away from their Year-Rounders to be counted as one of them, she was someone new, someone who had ended up getting raised by them despite being only a few months younger than Annabeth.
To look at Annabeth was to see a graveyard. All those kids were buried or away—the Stolls fucked off to who-knows-where. Untraceable bastards with no IDs from birth, they might as well have not ever existed. Some of the older Demeter boys joined a commune; the real world was too rough for them apparently, and currency was strange when favors were far more valuable at Camp.
Bets were still open as to whether or not it was a cult. Bets were still open as to whether or not Camp counted as a cult.
The rest fizzled—disappeared or died, nobody was themselves and nobody lived. Wasn’t that fucked? Wasn’t that what they’d always prepared for?
She remembered the last time the world was mostly normal in fragments, most of which were retold from Chris. Most of which didn’t make sense. When it was already shattered but not yet swept away. That she smelt like smoke for days after and she refused to shower. She wore the blood of her enemies like a cloak and slept beside the dead with her sword laid over her chest. When Chiron said it was irresponsible to burn her with the Camp’s fallen, she had apparently screamed so loudly that the whole valley shook. She had taken her sword and pierced his horse-chest, had threatened to take his eyes, take his hand, take everything until—take everything.
She remembered none of this, of course. Apparently, she had not eaten for days, she spent every waking hour surrounded by corpses. She became more animal than girl, snarled and threatened anyone who came too close to her. Apparently, the exhaustion and deprivation had overcome her in a final moment of rage. Apparently, Chiron had tucked her into bed with blood running down his legs.
Clarisse remembered the funeral. She remembered that no one wanted to touch Silena, so she had to do the preparations herself. Clean the blood and change her. She was never very good at makeup and Chris had never picked it up. So they were hopeless and no one else was willing to touch her. They tried. Gods, they tried. And she would’ve hated it because it looked deplorable, but she would’ve hated not having it even more.
It was funny to think that Camp had thought Annabeth was the traitor. They’d almost barred her from her home. Clarisse would’ve been the one to do it too. She was stronger, bigger, than Annabeth even then or maybe especially then.
And if anyone were to call her fragile—let that word slip out instead of feral—that year would’ve been the time. When everyone was dying or about to die, when their whole world was coming apart at the seams and their protection was nothing but a veil to be torn with claws too big to imagine.
Silena had believed it, so Clarisse had too. Had that been a lie? A way to cover her own tracks? Or was Silena so sure that Luke had employed another, that she wasn’t alone in her deception. She hadn’t known about Chris, but they’d never been able to decide if she had joined after his time or not. If she had been kept secret from everyone on purpose or if her spy work bloomed short and bright.
Clarisse pointed at the horizon, that sweltering orange that burned everything it touched. A shadow cut across, swinging her sword in the air like it weighed nothing at all. Maybe it did, in death.
Annabeth sucked a breath through her teeth, “How long’s she been here?”
“She comes and goes. Since we moved, September or October. I’m not sure.”
“Have you ever…” Annabeth swallowed, drained the rest of her beer and reached for Clarisse’s cigarette. She gave it over easily; she’d never seen her smoke before. “Spoken to her?”
“No, she doesn’t speak.” Doesn’t or can’t were close, the two works brushing against each other on her tongue until sparks flew. She looked at Annabeth squarely for the first time all afternoon. Took in the disheveled clothes, the blood on her knuckles.
Annabeth stared at Silena swinging that damn sword. Slice up, then down in the air in front of her. She stopped short, spun it around her body, threw her weight into it so it almost looked like a dance. Clarisse had taught it to her. If you’re not going to use a sword on monsters at least know how to get the fuckers to back off.
“Do you think they were lying about everything?”
Down to her right side. The other far too open.
“Yes.”
“Do you think they ever loved us at all? Even a little?”
“I’m not drunk enough to answer that.” She sighed, ran a hand over her scalp, pushed her fingers into the rippled scar tissue. Pressed an unwelcome hand into the oozing scabs on Annabeth’s knuckle. “Does it matter?”
Annabeth shrugged, some attempt as nonchalance, as if she hadn’t driven a day away. As if there wasn’t a ghost on the horizon. As if they were talking about anyone but them, who were probably the hardest people someone could love.
“I don’t think it does. Doesn’t change what they did, or who they hurt…or who they killed.” Really, how was she supposed to stomach that question. To think of her—that girl who she had loved, that girl who was the biggest liar she’d ever known—as not loving them at all. To believe that made her want to leave the gas on the stove and suffocate in that house. To meet a ghost with her sword and demand answers.
But that would be a setback, a step back, and she was no longer an angry teenager. She was an adult, she had a mortgage and a job. She could not go around fantasizing about killing herself to meet her lost love.
She was not Orpheus; no one would sing her praises when she held the rotten body of her lover in her arms. When she refused to stop looking into her eyes.
“That’s a bullshit answer and you know it. Whether or not—” She took a breath, drank her beer. “Whether they did or not changes why they did it. One is out of love, the other is just…”
So Silena might’ve been playing her the whole time. So Luke may have always been a liar. Did it matter? Did the semantics of it have to mean anything? Clarisse thought she had, she believed it. Didn’t that mean more than the truth of it? To hold love on the back of her tongue for a few years.
“Okay, Annabeth.” There was no use arguing with grief. Maybe the war took all the fight out of her, maybe it was the dead, but Clarisse didn’t care. Didn’t want to know, really, didn’t want either of them to be right. If they could live like this, at least they could pretend. Could justify the hate and the love in equal measure. Could make every slight and every press of their body make sense.
“I’m going crazy,” Annabeth laughed into her drink, a shaky huff of air. She righted herself, took a long drink. “I saw him.”
“Pot. Kettle.”
“Do you know what’s doing this?”
“Haven’t thought of it much.”
Annabeth gave her that baffled look all the Athena kids got. The owlish offense for someone’s lack of curiosity. “Do you think it’s really them?”
Up, swing back. She broke the cycle.
“Has to be, no one’s that shitty with a sword,” She tilted her beer to the shadow, to the ghost of a girl who might have loved her and might have used her.
“That’s…a fair assessment.”
“How long has he been kickin’ around?”
“Saw him on our balcony last night.”
“Our balcony,” Clarisse mocked. “Bougie motherfuckers.”
“Hey,” Annabeth bumped her shoulder and they both pretended her voice wasn’t thick. It was a courtesy more than a kindness. Their dead were a delicate topic, after all. “We can’t all have our own apocalypse house in the sticks.”
She cleared her throat, went on: “He let me fight him and just scream and scream at him. It felt like hours, I don’t know. And then he just opened his arms like nothing's happened and I fell right into them like nothing’s happened. He kissed my forehead, again.” She pressed her fingers, featherlight to the spot between her brows. “I never thought I would have that again. Fuck, I didn’t have that when he was alive I just hadn’t thought of it in so long.”
Clarisse grimaced, wondering what Annabeth’s apartment’s phone number was. Maybe Wonder Boy could appear and fill in the world for her. Take the girl they’d known for most of their lives and make it better. But Percy hated Luke, what was he supposed to do with this? Besides admonish them, besides hating them for all the times Annabeth couldn’t. “I’m a shitty person to come to with this kind of stuff. You came here to talk about love and all I can give you are more ghosts.”
“I had a theory on the drive up here that I had loved Luke for too long to let him go. Paranormal logic, unfinished business of the living. I needed to confirm my suspicions.”
“Glad we could be adequate lab rats.”
“And hosts.”
“And hosts.” She agreed, there were no easy answers for them or their ghosts. There was no logic to Annabeth’s theory other than coincidence, than hanging on to the bits of them that loved their complicated dead.
The truck rumbled across the desert, turning into their driveway under the shade. Chris hung out the driver’s side door, eyeing Annabeth, “Hey, Know-It-All.”
“Missed you too, Chris.”
Her boy brought a box of day-over expired candy and the cigarette flashed in her hand like instinct. He called her a slob and she called him a bitch and her chest ached something fierce from missing him.
Silena was there and she was dead and she was never going away. She was there and they were still going to take care of each other still, they had to.
The girl in the distance planted her feet, swung her sword, and walked towards the porch.