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The blood had not yet crusted over, nor had the dirt fully stained her palms and knees by the time she found Clarisse. More than drunk and swaying too near the fire. The rubber of her boots were melting, the stitches catching and sealing themselves. It was too close to the smell of burning flesh.
She crawled up the hill, rocks pressing into her elbows and gasping for air. Dragging along her paralyzed legs, her too heavy chest over the ridge. Everything was hazy, distorted as an old photograph collapsing in on itself. She was so terribly tired, but Clarisse was strong, she could carry her to bed, could clean the dirt off her knees. She could make this right.
Silena curled into her back, hanging her arms over her front and holding, holding tight.
When she crawled out of her grave, where else was she supposed to go except Clarisse’s side? There was nowhere else in the world for her.
Why are you running? I love you, why are you leaving? She tried to scream but nothing came out. She is holding a gun and there is a bullet in the dirt and there is no mistake to make. And Silena cannot lie and say she is incapable of it of course she is, she always has been. That girl would’ve put a bullet through her four years ago if she’d known. That girl would’ve dragged her bloated corpse like a trophy.
Clarisse spat at the ground, made the dirt moist but didn’t form a body for her to slip into. “Private Property, you fucking skank.”
That is out of order, of course. And this is a lie.
You—me—it—she—Silena looked at her and there was something wrong. Something in the set of her brows was just a little off—she hadn’t plucked them right and now, the left one was a bit shorter along the bridge than the right. She shaved her head until only the whisper of dark curls remained and there was something to her arms, to her collarbones. Hooked and interlocked tattoos laced over her front, darted beneath her shirt and came up the other side. She is older, which can’t be right because Silena is not. So this is all a lie, all something to scrap and misplace in another body.
Blood weeps from Silena’s chest and she cannot feel a thing. Blood leaks from Clarisse’s gums and she snarls in the way she has always known and always loved.
Who was Orpheus? Then, more truly, who was haunting who? What the fuck did he ever save?
Get away from him. Get away. She made a wide arch with the sword, trying to ward off the coyotes from the bits of him. She was unsteady at the best of times and her soaking clothes bogged her down. Besides, animals were not afraid of ghosts like people were.
She ran at them, hands latching around their haunches before slipping right through. Her sword back in her hand, never really out of it. Cutting down into its flesh. It yowled into the night, limping off while the others dug their muzzles into him.
She took a breath, throwing her body over Charlie. It was easier to think of him by a name, as a person, because it kept her from noticing the spreading blood across her chestplate or the squish of meat into the earth. Or the fact of his bones—the ones that had not disintegrated, jutting through her.
The coyotes nipped at her arms and legs, sinking their teeth into any exposed flesh. Her sword laid by her head, hands enclosed on its hilt, as though she’d fallen when praying.
I’ve got you. I’m here, Charlie. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.
The coyotes tore at her and the tears fell onto his exposed flesh. She hoped it didn’t sting in death, hoped her body shielding him wasn’t hurting him any more than their teeth. She wished she could lay it all out and apologize for killing him. Wished she could tell him the options Luke had given her.
She’d only tried to work out why she’d done it all once since she’d died. Trailing the sword in the sand in the hopes of making a list. Of literally spelling it out for everyone. But that was never going to work. The wind kept blowing it away.
Silena had always prepared for Clarisse’s death. It was an inevitability they’d never managed to acknowledge. Clarisse was always on the front lines—because the Ares Cabin always was, because she was their best fighter, because she would not let anyone else die for her.
When they were thirteen she took an arrow to the shoulder to prove that. “Nobody gets hurt for me. It’s my own shit. I make my own fucking downfalls.” She’d spat it so harshly as she pulled the arrow out. Threw it onto the ground and stomped on it so it shattered. Her blood flicked across the grass, the tip had taken some tendons as a souvenir.
Nobody thought Clarisse would live to see twenty, least of all Silena.
“Happy birthday. Not the big twenty-one, but I’m not taking any chances.” As though they had not used that excuse when they snuck a beer at thirteen. Split it between them and stayed up all night trying to get the damn thing down. Silena swore to herself that she’d never drink anything but top shelf liquor “I deserve it, I won’t live long enough for it to catch up.” And Clarisse agreed, but she’d only ever gone for bottom of the shelf shit.
Fucking tire-fire down her throat. But it's what being alive tasted like—gasoline and a hangover that hated her.
She cheersed their beers, smiling out into nothing. Silena sat heavy beside her, tried to grasp the drink and only succeeded in blowing the top off it. Bubbling beer pouring down the slides of the glass and into the rotten bottom step of the porch.
By the time they were fifteen they stopped using it as an excuse. They drank, they partied. When Clarisse was incapacitated, Silena slipped into the night and wriggled out information. People were so forthcoming when they were mourning drunk. It was so fragile and so easy to get them sobbing, saying things they swore they’d never tell a soul about.
“It was supposed to be symbolic. Didn’t have to make a mess.”
Silena hadn’t meant to. She’d wanted to share it again.
Clarisse took a swig, setting it aside and Silena grasped it. Carefully now, so it didn’t come apart. She brought it to her lips but nothing poured out, nothing let her drink it.
When she pulled away, a bloody lipmark was left on the top. The liquor colored a darker brown where it had slipped in the top, taking it from her gums. She must’ve lost some teeth when she fell.
Clarisse sloshed the liquid around while the other beer still bubbled. She put it to her lips, meeting Silena’s eyes as she swallowed it all down. It was not until she set it back, letting it get sticky in the spilled beer, that Silena saw smeared bits of blood remaining on the rim. Clarisse licked her lips, cleaning off the red stamp they had left.
Happy birthday, she tried, but it just sent splinters down the glass, I’m so glad you’re still alive.
Chris squatted beside the bathtub, dipping his hand in the water but not quite reaching for either of them. Just…letting it hang there. Half-in, half-out. Silena sunk deeper in the water, pieces of Charlie floating around her. She’d hoped he’d stopped bleeding last December but that was her own fault, Charlie’s heart was too big to quit in death. Of course it could survive being blown apart, of course. Silena pointed out the bits of it, pulsating in the water. Chris tilted his head, following her gaze.
“Oh. Oh fuck.”
Charlie’s heart was mostly clean of blood. The off-white mass threaded with thin red veins, his arteries bleeding out for a body that was no longer in-tact enough to need it. Tinging the water a strange pink the longer it sputtered on.
It had taken all morning to carry his body from the dirt and into the tub. To will her body forward to grasp the handle and push it on. Throwing her weight into the decision. It’d taken even longer for her to regain the strength to shut it off. Evident by the puddles surrounding the grout by the tub, and the puddles leading out to the front door.
She’d taken in armfulls of him at a time. Spent hours scouring the earth for each bone fragment worn and hidden in the sand. But here he was, not quite together but as close as he could be.
Bruises trailed down Chris’ cheek and continued on his clavicle before they disappeared beneath his shirt. He’d never looked good with bruises. Not in the way they fit along Clarisse. It was all a little ugly on him, if she were being vain. It looked far too much like he was in the Labyrinth's fighting ring. Nothing but pulp beating monsters, a living bruise.
“He hasn’t lost a round yet.”
“He’s your brother.” She’d said, horrified that he was down there and not in the viewing box with them. Horrified that he’d been so brutalized and Luke was smiling about it. Or perhaps it was the pride in his voice that got under her skin so badly.
He nodded down to Chris on his knees, his short-sword lifted up over his head to block a blow from the monster. It looked like he was praying for help. “That’s exactly why he’s here and not on the battlefield, Silena. You don’t know how ugly war can get.” Then, belatedly, “Uglier without you.”
Luke had hugged her then, tucking her under his broad arms to cradle her. She’d let him, of course she’d let him. He rocked her and pressed a hand to her hair, stroking it slightly. “The way we protect the people we love can look like we’re killing them to the uninformed. You’re saving them just as much by being here. I convinced him to join through your knowledge.”
Despite being his brother, Silena knew Chris better. She’d told Luke all he had to say to rope him in. She’d put him there.
Chris reached out, cupping her cheek that flopped open and holding the skin in place. He smiled, “There. Now you look like yourself.”
He held it there for an eternity and her lips ghosted over his thumb. Perpetually moving and oh so slow, but she did it. She watched the goosebumps erupt over his arm, felt his hand twitch and the meat of her cheek flopping over his fingers.
He backed up leaving for a moment and coming back with a small black bag in his hands. He dumped it in the puddle outside the tub. Tubes of Silena’s makeup fell across the tile, her second favorite lipstick rolling under the cabinet. Chris braced himself against the ledge of the tub, hoisting himself in. He pushed away Charlie so he was sitting in the water across from her, holding out her mascara which was entirely the wrong step to start with.
“Can I?” He asked, so softly Silena nearly broke down. Everything hurt and she was so disgusting like this. Like this: as a half-rotten ghost. Like this: after hauling Charlie’s corpse inside for hours and letting the dirt get in the crooks of her. Like this: bare-faced in her death.
She nodded, which took minutes but eventually swung. He stayed waiting, holding it upright without moving. The incredible patience was a side affect of the torture, she knew, but for a moment she pretened he’d grown up and let himself relax, to take the slow moments in stride.
In this reality, she decided, he was helping her get ready for a date. The bathtub would be drained and Charlie was sitting on the closed toilet lid beside them, regaling them with the story of Cabin Nine’s missing dragon turned urban legend. Or maybe something even more mundane, like his shitty coworkers at the welding yard he had planned on working up until he saved enough to open his own restoration shop.
“I’m sorry, I’m really shitty at this. Yikes, B, you’re gonna kill me. Actually, can you promise to not kill me with the sword before you see this?”
He didn’t wait for an answer before handing her a handheld mirror. He was right, it was shit. But a choked sound came up her throat at the sight. It was shit, but he’d tried, and he’d made her feel so beautiful for it.
“Oh, don’t cry. I know I couldn’t have done that badly. I’ll bet Charlie still thinks you’re hot.”
She rushed at him all at once. Most of the water spilling over the sides of the tub, she wrapped her arms around him. Holding him in a way she believed she’d never be able to do again. Holding him, pressing her face into his neck. She held on as long as she could, before her body remembered it was not a body and began to slip apart around him.
She found her makeup spilled in the dirt where the coyotes had torn open their garbage bags. Her eyeshadow pallet and open trays of powders all soaked through. Useless now.
“Stop doing your paranormal bullshit,” Clarisse growled when she caught sight of Silena in the mirror. “It’s creepy and it’s getting old.”
Clarisse planted her boots on the bed to lace them tight. The US Army uniform looked terrible on her, in part because it spelled death in a few more letters. Silena sent a splinter down the mirror, willing it to shatter to a million pieces but she called out, “Hey! I said quit it.”
She’d done all she could to pull Clarisse from the front lines and when that hadn’t worked, she’d made sure it wouldn’t kill her. Sometimes she thought Ares’ Blessing was a thanks for keeping her alive. He’d shown her that someone would keep her alive a little longer.
Most of the time, she remembered Clarisse allowing herself to come undone in her arms. The shaking, hysterical sobs that she’d never be good enough for anyone if she could not first be good enough for her father. She remembered Clarisse pressing her hand against her cheek, where her father had slapped her. Fitting her palm where the mark would be, Clarisse gently splaying Silena’s fingers until it was exactly right.
Blood seeped from the sword edge, finding the grooves in the worn floorboards and spreading out, out, out. She thought, like a child, if she made Clarisse’s uniform look like a mess that she wouldn’t leave. That if she held her tight enough, she could root her in place until she died and then drag her soul into the underworld with her.
“Fucking stop! I don’t have time for this Silena. I need to get to work to pay the bills and keep fucking—living. Let go, you’re not even here. Why would you care if I died out there?”
She thought wildly, I was never as brave as you wanted me to be! But her jaw was wired shut and all that came out was some garbled noise. The windows rattled in their sockets because this was a shitty house, but it was one they could afford. Clarisse flinched and stared her down, Silena felt her blood curling around her arm and dripping to the floor in a puddle. She reached forward—to hold her wrist, to keep her here and maybe, maybe they’d find a way to communicate.
Silena would tell her how sorry she was and how she’d never meant it. But she had—but, but not in this way. Not like this. Clarisse was so headstrong, she’d break the boundaries of time and space and death, she just knew it. She’d figure out a way for Silena to speak, even if it was just an apology.
Clarisse flinched back and she realized she’d positioned the sword over her heart. Straight out, aiming for the unprotected flesh of her chest. She couldn’t let go of the sword. She had to—a noise finally made its way out her lips and it was just a long wail. The guttural sound of a dying coyote lodged deep in her esophagus, echoed out to her again.
“How many times do I have to tell you to just fucking leave!” Clarisse screamed. Not yelled, there is a difference. It was in the shrillness, in the wetness around her eyes and the jab of her finger as she approached Silena. The sword intended her shirt, pressed in until it was stopped by flesh. All she had to do was push and Clarisse would be with her.
It was so very simple.
“Just get out! Get the fuck out. What do you not understand about that? What am I not making clear to you? I did everything right. I gave you a hero's funeral so you could rest. You weren’t supposed to—” Her voice shattered, gathered again for one final command. “Leave. Please.”
Clarisse had never been one to beg. Silena folded the sword under her arm and let her feet unmoor.
“How far would you go to protect the people you love?”
Lee had just hung up his coat and shut the lights off for the night. He stood in that darkness just staring at her. She tried to lean against the counter, to give some faux-bordem. Luke had ordered her to get a healer on their side and Lee—well he had so many buttons to push.
He had the second largest cabin to take care of, he had the whole camp if she counted his patients. Lee was the last face anyone lucky enough to die safe and warm in bed got to see. Didn’t he want them to live? Wouldn’t he do anything for them to see a future?
“Depends. But that’s not what you’re asking.”
Silena did not become a spy by flinching at the slightest insinuation. But there was this look in his eyes, he laid a hand on the counter, pushing himself up to full height in front of her. The scene would’ve been intimate to anyone looking in, but she could see the strain in his position. She could see that he’d boxed her in.
“Drew asked me to go on a fetch-quest instead of her. She said she was too afraid of being killed. Would you go?”
It diffused the situation slightly, shoulders releasing enough for her to see the exit. “Of course.”
“But it's the Gods’ will that she completes the quest. How could I possibly intervene, plenty of demigods are afraid to die.”
“She’s fourteen. I’ve seen way too many kids get cocky at her age. If she still has some fear then she’s smart, she might actually make it through the next few years.”
As in the war. As in maybe, almost to adulthood. Aphrodite Children were prone to surviving, if only for weaker scents. She’d taught them how to bend the mist and bending—dulling—the scents was the same mechanism to the left. They were steeped in misdirection, in getting what they wanted so often even the Fates were on their knees.
“But shouldn’t she get to live longer?”
“She will if she’s smart.” He didn’t budge, but he let her move past. He knew, of course he knew, but he never brought it up at a meeting. He never exposed her, but he never made a move to join, either.
When Luke decided it was too dangerous for him to live, he made sure the Army targeted him. Made sure he died far away from anyone else, so if he had any last words they’d be taken by the wind.
She remembered not being able to look anymore in the eyes that night. How Clarisse had wrapped an arm around her and brought her close, “You’re alive. Fucking—you’re alive, Beaureard.”
“I’m alive,” She gave a watery smile. Silena was never going to die and neither would Clarisse or Charlie. They were her’s, that was the trade. Clarisse pulled her back in, holding her with that iron smell on her skin. But all her wounds were cosmetic, they missed the sensitive flesh of her stomach and neck.
Clarisse was always the first person on the battlefield, so early it was like she never left. She’d had no time to put on armor. It should’ve killed her. Looking at the tattered, protected bodies on the ground proved that fact.
She put her nose against her neck, rested her lips there in what could be called a kiss but wasn’t. “You’re alive,” She said in wonderment. She looked at Lee’s crumpled body, forced herself to recognize its beaten form over Clarisse’s shoulder.
The giant had beaten him until he was splattered parts. No hope of revival and no way to collect his organs for other injured demigods to use. They’d killed him and made him completely useless.
Selling your soul to protect the people you love wasn’t much of a compromise after all.
Clarisse had proclaimed that she didn’t give a shit about the war. That she’d kill anyone if it meant she’d protect them. But those were all words.
Perhaps that was the defining thing of them; Clarisse, for all her anger, all her hatred snarling in the corner of their lives, loved them in a way that would not protect them. For all her righteous fury, Clarisse La Rue wanted to live and she wanted to be loved within her rigid bounds.. Silena had never doubted that and she thought she was the only person in the world who hadn’t. For all she could give, for all that Silena was delicate and lovely and tripping people with devotion, she was nothing if not her anger. And that was going to kill her, she knew, she’d known since she was a child, that she could not live and be angry at the world. That had worked for a while—the pretending, that is—but it could never be sustained.
When Luke placed his hand on her shoulder she was his weapon and loved for it and for a while those two pieces could exist as one. But only if she killed everyone to do it.
Silena was never going to be a person, but she could save something who came close to seeing her as one. And wasn’t that the point? If she could never be loved, she could be a useful savior.
It mattered that she did it for love. It had to. Because Luke had done it for love too.
Sometimes, on their better days, Silena could sneak behind them when they were watching a movie on the couch. She stood perfectly still, holding the sword just right so it wouldn’t clatter. Letting it stab into her foot so the blood would take longer to begin to pool and ruin their evening.
She watched as they curled into each other like cats, their bodies half-undressed and hooked. The TV blaring something cheesy and the takeout scattered on the floor because they never actually bought any furniture. She watched them love each other and laugh.
Sometimes, she watched when Clarisse dipped down and kissed Chris’ jugular. When she bit into the junction of shoulder and neck where her teeth used to dig into her skin. She longed to hold them, or to allow her to lay with them there. To feel them and their sweat and their gross human noises just a little bit longer. To pretend the flesh wasn’t rotting and the body wasn’t cold.
On their worst nights, on most nights, Silena stayed far from their home. Roaming the Arizona wilderness, carrying as much of Charlie in her arms as she possibly could. He had loved seeing new places, but hated traveling. It was too claustrophobic—planes gave him panic attacks, trains were too unpredictable, the subway was a no on too many levels to count, and cars were better gutted and repurposed than a thing to take them from place to place.
She hoped carrying him was alright. She had no way of getting him anywhere else. Besides, he always said he liked when she held him.
She’d forgotten that time was passing somewhere outside of the desert. Clarisse and Chris remained so similar, day-to-day. Their routine was nearly unchanging and their appearances changing so marginally that Silena had not noticed them getting older. But Annabeth—gods what had happened to Annabeth?
From her vantage point, she could see the scars lacing her exposed skin. Her hair let out of braids, cut as short as it had been when Silena first met her. At some point, the sun hung its head low over the horizon and they shuffled back inside, leaving Silena and her coyotes on the hill.
She’d gotten better at warding them off of Charlie. They’d almost learned to leave him alone. “Well, I’ll admit it’s not the route I would’ve gone.” Luke’s voice echoed out and her head snapped up to find him sitting on a low flat rock. He pushed himself up and came towards them. “But if it works, right?”
His hand snapped around the muzzle of the coyote where it tried to take out a piece of his thigh. Blood ran down his side, leaking from his armpit and down his ribs to his pant leg. Trailing ichor-gold before being replaced by deep, mortal red the closer it got to the wound.
“You chose the armpit? Really?”
He shrugged, “Who is going to aim there?”
Silena remembered Lee shooting his arrows with enough force to go through the bullseye targets. He’d aimed at strange angles, in the event he ran into Geryon on a quest. “To get it through all three hearts.”
Charlie laid between them. Luke sighed, picking him up. “I never meant for him to die, you know. I never thought he’d actually try to bomb the boat.”
And Silena sighed too, because Charlie was too afraid of the prospect of dying to tell her about their plan. Which of course led to his death. Luke knew why she did what she did. She made herself valuable enough that no harm could come to them.
Charlie’s death had been an accident. But she couldn’t quite stomach that, he was supposed to be a Titian, he was supposed to keep him alive. In no world could she believe he didn’t have the power to prevent it.
He hadn’t even been betrayed when Silena was on the battlefield. Luke knew just as well as her how deals worked at camp.
She tried to see the remorse in him, but found none. Charlie was after his time and they’d long since learned to stop caring about people outside of their circle. It was the only way to stop going to funerals on the weekend.
“Why’d you come back for her?”
Luke looked at her oddly, “I didn’t mean to. I just appeared in her apartment.”
Silena tore her body from the earth. Silena crawled to Clarisse and stayed with her at camp. Bidding time until she formed enough to follow her from New York to Arizona. Silena would walk a thousand miles if it meant she saw Clarisse for just five more minutes.
“Doesn’t seem like she wants you around.”
“No. She doesn’t. She hated me.”
“I do too.”
He set Charlie back in the dirt, eyeing the coyotes that surrounded them. “You have to understand that I was trying to build a better world for them. It just got out of hand.”
She nodded. Silena never deluded herself enough to believe a better world was possible. She just wanted one where the people she loved got to live.
He pulled the knife from under his arm and the blood began gushing out. The coyotes lapped it up at his feet, but she was more focused on the fact that it was Annabeth’s. “Her knife is gone. This is the last remnant of it existing.”
She held Clarisse’s sword, her very favorite, in the same way. They were dead and the blood was soaking between them. They were all dead and she could do nothing to protect Charlie even now. Luke took Annabeth’s knife to the bottom of the coyote’s throat and slit it before it could react.
“You’re gonna have to do more if you want to keep them safe.”
He slid the knife back into himself and made for the horizon. She had not realized until he’d disappeared that Luke was the first person she’d spoken to in years.
Silena crawled into bed with them one night, clutching the pieces of Charlie’s heart to her chest and Clarisse’s sword in her heart. She’d wedged herself between them before they could flinch. Clarisse opened her eyes wide, staring at her in this unfathomable way. Like they were thirteen again and Silena refused to sleep without Clarisse for three months after her quest ended. This old familiarity, this astonishment that she was there, in her bed, that never faded.
There wasn’t enough room for Clarisse and Chris, even less for all four of them. But Chris threw his arm over her stomach and pulled her in. Clarisse laid Charlie’s heart in the little space between them so he wouldn’t be squished. She reached out for Silena’s hands, feeling along their gashes for her fingers in rigor mortis around the sword.
One by one she pried Silena’s fingers from its hilt. It took hours, eternities maybe, to get her to let go. She laid the sword on the floor beside the bed, out of view. She held Silena up and the two of them slid the chestplate over her head, they unlaced the metal bracers and shin guards. They left her bare right there in Clarisse’s bed.
Silena was light without the armor too big or sword in her hands. Clarisse slid down to the floor on her knees and reached up to untie her boots. Some old instinct must’ve taken over, because she massaged her calves and wrists, kissed her pulse point. Chris drew her back and Clarisse boxed her in.
For a night, Silena got to pretend she was alive. And wasn’t that the greatest joy in the world? To feel alive for as long as they could, to be loved despite it.