A/N- Here you go! I was in a writing mood…

Disclaimer- Insert unique and witty disclaimer here. I'm too tired to think of one myself.

Chapter 12: Day 6: No

Erin

For a couple seconds, I literally could not believe my eyes. It seemed impossible that Lief was lying in a pool of his own blood and was very possibly dead. It took me a couple seconds just to take the whole possibility in. Then, I snapped back to reality and into commander mode. "Get a move on, people! Lief could still be alive!" I yelled at Theo and Noah.

"Okay, okay, we're going already," Theo grumbled, stepping down from the van. That was when he saw Lief and stopped dead in his tracks. "Noah! Get your lazy butt out of there and follow me!"

Noah tumbled out. "Holy orc spit!" he yelled when he saw the pool of blood.

"Orc spit?" I asked.

"Yes, orc spit. It's an obscure Lord of the Rings reference," Noah explained.

"Never mind that, we've got to see if Lief is still alive!" Theo exclaimed.

To say we ran is the understatement of the century. We sprinted like we were in the Olympics and only the winner survived. In other words, we were fast. Reaching Lief, we saw that he was covered in a thin film of monster dust and laying sideways over a girl's body. The girl happened to be clad in silver. A silver arrow lay nearby. "What happened?" Noah asked.

"I don't know. Maybe Lief was kissing this random Hunter, and then Artemis saw and got mad, and then she killed them?" Theo offered.

"That's impossible," I scoffed. "First off, while this girl may or may not be a Hunter, Lief definitely did not have a romantic affair with anybody."

"How do you know?" Theo asked.

"Because I do!" I snapped, brushing away the monster dust and laying my ear to Lief's chest, hoping for any sign of a heartbeat or even a breath. There was nothing. Nothing at all. Until- I felt a ragged, slow breath go through him, half choked out. There was a long pause. Another breath. Another pause, longer this time. Another breath, sounding more choked off then the previous two. I lifted my head, ignoring the blood that was now on my face. "He's breathing!" I exclaimed.

Noah's face was grim. "Yeah, but he's still bleeding. Look," he pointed to the blood still flowing from three stab wounds. He pulled a dagger out of one of them. The blood was a trickle now, but judging from the blood around us, I guessed that Lief had lost a lot of blood. Perhaps too much.

"What should we do?" I was starting to panic now. "He's not going to die, is he?"

"I don't know, Erin. We've got to get him to a hospital," Theo answered for Noah.

"How would we pay for that, though? Treatments cost money, and even I haven't figured out how to rip off a hospital."

"Well, to camp then. We've just got to keep him relatively still and try to stop the bleeding," Theo explained. "Noah, help me carry him. Erin, you're driving. Get the van started." I ran ahead and turned the van on, then had a thought. I ran back and grabbed the girl's body, dragging her to the van.

"Why'd you do that?" Noah panted, trying to gently lift Lief into the back seat.

"I thought her body might be important," I said.

Noah grunted a reply. "Theo, hand me the bandages. No, the other ones. The ones to the left. Now, help me bandage him up. Press on it. We've got to stop that bleeding. Erin, what are you waiting for? Drive! Quickly! Lief's life is at stake here." Well, that snapped me back to reality. I scrambled into the driver's seat and floored the gas. I didn't bother looking at the speed, but I was pretty sure that it was way over the speed limit. Fortunately enough, nobody tried to stop me. I'm not entirely sure I could have stopped.

I screeched into camp as the van sputtered and died. "Is he still alive?" I shrieked.

Noah looked down at his shoes. "Erin, I really don't know how to tell you this…"

Theo looked at Noah. Noah looked back. "You say it," Theo said.

"No, you do it."

"No way."

"Fine," Noah said. "The thing is, Erin, he's not breathing anymore, and we can't feel a pulse. Erin, he's dead. Erin? ERIN?" I had stopped listening. My brain was trying to wrap around the concept of Lief's death. How can Lief be dead? It didn't seem possible.

"ERIN!" Theo and Noah's combined shout startled me out of my thoughts.

"Huh?" My brain was totally blanking now, completely unable to process the messages it had received.

"Erin, snap out of it," Theo snapped. "He's- he's d-dead." With that, Theo looked at Lief and started crying. Noah looked between Lief and his twin and also started crying. I looked at the three of them, two crying twins and a dead body, and ran out of the van, tears blurring my vision. Of course, I ran smack into a tree. Rubbing my head and pondering the pain in my heart, I walked the rest of the way to the Hermes cabin. Walking in, I climbed to my bunk and flipped down the trapdoor leading to the second floor. I climbed up into my favorite place at Camp Half-Blood.

Sitting down on the floor, I realized that Matt was right. It really was too dusty up in the second floor. Even looking around, though, reminded me of Lief. I really don't know why, Lief didn't even know about the Pranking Loft, as I called it. Somehow, the place didn't seem right to me, like I shouldn't be there. I climbed back down into the empty Hermes cabin, shut the trapdoor, and walked out. I wandered aimlessly around the camp for a while, just thinking. Okay, okay, fine. I was crying, too. While I was sitting on the dock, the idea hit me like an atom bomb. I had seen Lief looking at something which he'd pulled out of his boot…my Hermes kid curiosity kicked in, and I absolutely had to see what was there. I sprinted back to the van. Theo and Noah were gone, but they had draped Lief -no, not Lief, Lief's body- with a sheet.

Peeling the sheet back from Lief's feet, I yanked off one boot. Nothing there. I checked the other one and found a well-wrinkled piece of paper at the bottom. Intrigued, I sat down on the floor and unfolded it. A faint scent of pine needles, one which I had come to associate with Lief -it seemed to follow him wherever he went- rose from the paper.

Dear Erin,

If you are reading this letter, then I am dead. It's a strange thought, me being dead. I wonder what it feels like…Well, I guess I know now. I almost laughed at this part. It sounded to completely Lief-like. Anyways, back to the topic. I'm dead. If I'm lucky, nobody's that sad. Knowing my luck, though, I'm guessing that you are probably rather sad. It feels so strange writing a letter for you to read when I'm dead…Of course, maybe I won't die yet and you'll never need to see this letter, but it's always best to be on the safe side. So, if you're reading this, I'm dead, you're probably sad, etc. Don't be. Really. Don't be sad, go on with your life, get a boyfriend, prank people, just don't you dare start dwelling on me. If I'm dead, I probably deserve it. I didn't do much good and I'm probably better off dead. That way, my curse doesn't take effect and nobody else gets killed. So…what else is there for me to say? Other then what I said, I just want you to know that…well, maybe Hermes kids aren't so bad after all. Thank you for everything you've done. Seriously, though, get over the fact that I'm dead. Okay?

-Lief

P.S. Thanks. I mean it.

I slammed the letter down on the floor. "Dang it, Lief, why'd you have to die?" I asked. There was no answer. Of course there wasn't. Lief was dead. Gone. Forever. For some reason, I couldn't handle that. I pulled the sheet back down over Lief's feet, but uncovered his face. I reached down, tracing his scar, and on a second thought, tucked my last drachma in his pocket. His body was already cold and growing stiff.

As I was turning to walk out, a thought occurred to me. It was rather rude for me to just leave Lief in the van. The very least I could do was to bring his body into the Big House. I had picked it up and was stumbling out of the van when the Hunters emerged from the woods.

Lief

I seemed to be floating. As if in a dream, I saw a van pull up, Theo, Noah, and Erin jump out. They lifted my body into the van. Then I was floating again, through space and time. I went whirling through what could have been centuries or minutes. Eventually, I saw a man sitting at a desk, asking for a coin. I looked around for a way out, but there was none. I searched my pockets and found nothing. Checking once more, I found a drachma that seemed to have suddenly appeared there. I set it on the desk and boarded an elevator. This elevator then turned into a boat, taking me across the River Styx. I couldn't seem to speak. It was like someone was holding their hand over my mouth, and I didn't like it. Being a child of Apollo, I sometimes just get the urge to talk, or recite a poem, or sing a song, or other such nonsense.

Stepping out of the boat on the other side of the Styx, I looked up. I'm not sure what I was expecting to see, but what I did see was disappointing. The blackness seemed to stretch on and on, upwards for what seemed like forever. Then and there, I decided that the thing I'd miss the most would be the sun and the stars. I then looked down at my hands. They were translucent, almost transparent. Fascinating. I shuffled my way past Cerberus and into a line for judgment. I mean, the Fields of Asphodel is the easy way out. I want to be judged for what I did, whether it be good or bad.

I couldn't help but think about Erin. Had she found my note? Had she read it? Did she miss me? I tried to banish the thoughts from my head, but they stuck around. After what seemed like an eternity, I was pushed into a small room by a pair of grinning skeletons. There were three judges wearing gold masks seated on a balcony above me. The middle one took out a thin file and laid it on the table before him. He cleared his throat rather loudly. "We have here the file for Lief Harrison. Is that you?" he asked. I nodded, still unable to speak.

"Well," the first judge said, scanning the notes, "he certainly didn't do much good in his life. Look at all those people who were killed because of him."

The second judge shook his head. "He didn't kill them directly, though. There wasn't much direct good or bad at all."

The third judge spoke for the first time. "He did more good then you credit him with. He didn't directly cause a death, and he acted for what he considered the best for others."

The first judge still shook his head. "He didn't do enough good to outweigh the evil. He turned his back on those who loved him. The Fields of Punishment." My heart was racing at the mention of this. I hadn't been that bad, had I? Wait- 'those who loved him'? There were people out there who still loved me? Even after all the terrible things that seemed to follow me everywhere I went?

The second judge disagreed. "He didn't do enough good or enough evil. The Fields of Asphodel."

The third judge spoke again. "He did more good than evil in his life. Elysium." The judges continued to argue. It felt unusual to be talked about as if I weren't there.

After what seemed like an hour but could really have been days, the judges fell silent. "We have reached a conclusion," the third judge said. "You have not done enough good to deserve Elysium, nor enough evil to deserve Punishment, but you have done enough that you would not fit in Asphodel. You are a unique case, and we may make a unique ruling." He looked to the other judges for approval, and they nodded. "We have decided to send you back to the living. A chance to prove your worth, so to speak. We will not set a time limit on your time with the living, but we will not make this ruling again. The next time you die, it will be final. We wish you the best of luck." For a moment, I thought I may have detected a smile beneath the mask.

"However, we can not let you simply go back," the first judge stated. "There will be -how shall I phrase this- a test, so to speak. A test for those who truly care for you."

A question was burning in my mind, and I suddenly realized I could speak. "What is this test?" I asked.

The first judge snorted. "It wouldn't be much of a test if we told you, now would it?"

I shook my head. "No, sir, I guess not."

"Do you understand what is expected of you?" the second judge asked. "There will be no third chances."

"Yes, sir, I think I understand."

"Then go," the judges said in unison. "Return to the life you have left." There were more words after that, but I heard none of then as I faded into a black mist. There was a sharp pain in the back of my skull, then nothing.

A/N- Well, that was interesting. Thoughts? Opinions? Maybe a review?

-Smartone101