Wow, important milestone! First double digit chapter!

Since this story has taken a way darker turn than I thought it would, I decided to kind of go with that theme.

If you guys have any ideas for dark elements to add to the story, put them in the reviews, and I'll see if I can find a weave to weave them in.

Also, if you don't do it, I will find you.

And I will fill your pillowcase with horseshit.

That might be kind of comfortable, actually.

Still. I want to know what you guys can come up with.

And I got hella horseshit.

Also TRIGGER WARNING—This chapter contains self harm

Have you ever seen burial shrouds used in bodies before?

No?

Me neither. I thought it would be kind of pretty and peaceful, like cremating a pet in the blanket they loved sleeping on.

I take it back. There is nothing pretty or peaceful about cremating a pet.

Same goes for bodies, by the way.

We had a massive funeral pyre in the middle of the amphitheater. It was lit by Pollux, one of Dionysus's two sons. He had lost his twin brother, Castor. He tried to say a few words, but it was useless, he couldn't force them out, so he just set fire to the pyre. (Hey, Apollo. I rhymed something. Proud yet?)

We stood in respectful silence, watching the flames. They leaped, hissing, from one level of the pyre to another. The thing went as if it had been doused in gasoline. The flames cast flickering shadows across several dozen (though less than before) somber faces.

Nobody roasted marshmallows. Nobody sang songs.

I think the dead campers would have liked it if we did, but no one asked me.

I was standing apart from my cabin, not that my cabin was together. All the cabins were interspersed throughout the crowd as if scattered by a tornado. I hadn't talked much to them.

None of them, not even Michael, knew the details of Lee's death.

I would, though. Talk to them. I missed talking to them. Almost as much as I missed Lee.

Not quite. Lee was Lee. But I did miss them.

I didn't blame them. They didn't kill Lee.

Lee did.

The gods did.

I did.

I hadn't decided whether I would tell my cabin that part yet. I thought I would. I had to tell someone. But at the same time, I was hesitant.

What if they blamed me?

I know I did. How could I fault them if they did too?

There was one person I wanted to talk to, though.

I squeezed through the crowd until I found Jake, standing alone near the front. He had lost two siblings. A sister and a brother.

Same as me. But I didn't really know Hope.

"Hey," I whispered, pressing myself against his side. "How are you holding up?"

He gave me a half-amused, half-exasperated look. "How am I holding up. Really."

His words were dry, but there was an undertone of deep sadness. I wound an arm around his shoulders. He didn't object, which gave me an inexplicable feeling of satisfaction. "Did you know them? Your siblings, I mean?"

He blinked. It was the first time I had asked him that. Shithead, I told myself. "The girl, pretty well. Keira. The boy, Brandon…not so much. He was a summer camper. I never really talked to him. But…a good guy."

I nodded. The girl. He had known her, then. A girl he may have been incredibly close with, similar to me and Harper. "It's the reverse, for me. I knew the boy. Not the girl."

He nodded too, his head leaning on my shoulder. I tried to ignore the weird clench in my gut. "Right. Your head counselor. I'm sorry."

"Don't be. You didn't kill him." That special honor was reserved for me. I fixed my gaze on the fire. Smoke burned my eyes, but I didn't close them. Embers drifted to the ground to die in the grass.

He lifted his head, his eyes drifting to my neck, noticing the thin gold chain that hung around it before disappearing under my shirt. "You're wearing a necklace. What's up with that?"

"Oh, this?" I tapped the chain. "Don't worry about this. This is nothing."

The cabin was quiet that night.

I think it was partly because of shock, partly because everyone was exhausted and couldn't muster the necessary energy for talking.

Michael didn't call for lights out. Nobody did. I don't think anybody wanted to stay in the darkness. I know I didn't. It felt creeping, suffocating. Light was warm, like a blanket. Even-especially-light from the colorful strings of Christmas lights several campers had strung all over their bunks.

I'd put up colorful lights. But I don't have any.

I didn't go up to my bunk. If I did, I'd start gnawing on my mouth again, and I still had blood between my teeth, as well as a throbbing ache that spread across my tongue and the inside of both cheeks.

Instead, I crossed the cabin to Michael's bed.

He wasn't in it. He was sorting through Lee's stuff, putting most of it in a box, the same way you would with a dead relative's. He and Lee had been bunkmates. Now, he was alone. Same as me.

"Hey," said, noticing me. He tried for a tired smile. He failed.

"Hi." I sat down on Lee's bed, picking up a case of earbuds. "I never noticed him wearing these." Come to think of it, I really hadn't noticed Lee being one of the more musically inclined kids, like A.J. or Harper. Archery was more his thing.

Michael tossed a few books onto the pile. "Oh, yeah. He used to have one all the time. Same as A.J. does now. Listening to Imagine Dragons, They Might Be Giants, Chainsmokers, you name it."

I placed the earbuds on the pile, then, on second thought, picked them back up and slipped them into my pocket. "What, no Red Hot Chile Peppers?"

"That, too. He had to give up tuning out the world when he became head counselor." He nodded toward the overfull box. "Take anything you want. I have a feeling Lee won't mind."

I picked one of the books up. "Everything's Eventual? Wow." I wasn't much of a Stephen King fan, but I kept hold of the book anyway. Maybe I'd even read it.

"He loved those." Michael sat on the bed next to me, his hands fidgeting. "So…I'm assuming you're not here for book club."

My gaze drifted to the book in my lap. A picture of a fancy wine glass on a table of cutlery. The picture of sophistication and elegance. But, no, there was a drop of blood in the glass. I flipped the book over.

The glasses and cutlery had been upended, at least the ones that hadn't been shattered. The tablecloth was soaked with blood, the cutlery smeared and the glasses full of the stuff. Not just one drop, but thick, red blood that swirled in the water, poured over the edge of the table, and smeared along the rims.

I turned the book back over. A single drop of blood, but not so easy to ignore. Not against a pale blue and white background.

"He loved that story."

I jerked my head up. "What?"

"Lunch at the Gotham Cafe. Everything's Eventual is a collection. The cafe story is the picture on the cover. It's about a maitre d' that goes insane. Lee's favorite story, out of the fourteen in here. I still say 1408 is the scariest, but…"

"Oh." I felt slightly sick as I regarded the front cover. Somehow so much more disturbing than the back one. I imagined Lee, reading the story over and over, maybe with a flashlight, after lights out. Chills down his spine every time, because a good horror story never gets old.

I flipped the book over, taking in the carnage. Maybe Lee read this story so much that he could quote parts of it. Recite them in his head throughout the day to keep himself from going insane. Telling himself the story of the blood, the screaming, the psychotic waiter.

I was wrong, by the way. Maitre d's aren't waiters. They oversee busboys and waitpersons, and handle reservations. But I had no way of knowing that then.

I tore my gaze away from the book and finally brought out the words I had been running from.

"Why did he do it?"

Michael's expression became guarded, masklike. "You were with him, I take it?"

I nodded.

"He killed himself, didn't he?"

I didn't answer. The silence was good enough.

"Poor Lee," my head counselor said quietly. "I can't believe…did he know you were there?"

I glared at the book, wishing the blood would spread to the front too. Then the single drop would stop taunting me. No one would drink from that glass any more than they would from one of the glasses on the back.

It was just one drop of blood, but it was enough to leave it tainted.

No, that wasn't the word.

Blighted.

I didn't know why that word popped into my mind. I'd never said it before. I'd never heard anyone say it. I'd never read it. I didn't even know how I knew it. But I did.

"Oh, he knew. He said goodbye, told me not to forget that he cared about me…" I blinked fast, hoping to keep away tears. "Walked straight in front of a giant." I rested my chin on my hand.

Michael let out a sigh that sounded as bitter as venom. "And he left you alone?"

"I was fine," I said defensively. Then I blinked. Was I defending myself or him? Did it matter? "I tried to stop him, but I…I couldn't—" Was I crying again. Christ, I was a mess.

Michael let out another sigh, although this one just sounded sad. He was silent for several moments, moments filled with the deep breathing and snoring of our cabin mates. I hoped they were free from guilt and nightmares. They deserved it.

There was something Michael wanted to say, I could tell, but he didn't seem to be able to bring the words out. I waited patiently until he finally said, "Did we ever tell you about Claire?"

That pulled me up short. "N—no?"

Michael wrapped an arm around his shoulders, in one hand clutching a strange, dull gray sphere. It looked like a hard plastic ball. What had Lee wanted with that?

"Claire was…" he sighed again. "She was the head counselor when Lee first came here. We actually came here only a month apart, did you know that?"

I shook my head. No, I hadn't known that, but it really wasn't surprising. Lee and Michael were—had been—about the same age.

"Well, we did. The difference between us is, Lee got claimed right away, same as you—" he nodded to me, and guilt clenched a fist in my gut. "—while I got put in the Hermes cabin. So I didn't know Claire like Lee did. But I still knew her. She was…amazing, Will. I know there's not necessarily 'good' and 'bad', but damn, Claire was close to the first one. People would stop by our cabin or the music room all the time, to borrow five dollars or a hundred thousand, or even just to talk. And she was always open to talking with people."

"She was Lee's first kill," I said quietly. It wasn't a question. I already knew.

My brother wasn't surprised. He understood. "I knew you'd make a good healer," he said sadly. "She was sent on a quest…by the gods. I don't know the details," he added, anticipating my next question, "But when she got back, she was alive, but…not really."

"And Lee tried to save her," I said. My voice was thick and strangled.

Michael nodded. "He did his best, but Lee…he wasn't good enough. None of them were."

I dropped my gaze back to the blighted book. "And the two others?"

"One survived," Michael said. "The other…well DOA is what the real doctors say. It can mean all kinds of things—bled out, choked to death, severe heart attack. But it still always means the same thing. That day it meant we would only have one person to heal.

"After that, I got claimed."

"After THAT?" I exclaimed angrily. "You guys went through all that and Apollo didn't claim you till AFTER?" I didn't even know why it surprised me.

"Shh!" he said, and nodded toward the rest of the cabin. "They're trying to sleep." But there was no anger or annoyance in his voice. "And of course Lee was head counselor after that." His gaze seemed to drift away, and I knew he was imagining a younger Lee, desperately trying to hold everything together when it had already been ripped apart.

"Lee's not a bad person, Will, but his mom…when Lee was younger, she beat him for everything he did. Every time it wasn't perfect…which was every time…" He blinked and shook his head. "He couldn't do this anymore. He couldn't stand seeing people die, his family, and knowing it was because he couldn't save them…but he didn't kill Claire, or Ean, or Sami. They did." And we both knew who they was.

"But it wasn't you. I can't promise you a lot of things, but I can promise you that. He was going to become an agent of Kronos, and he knew he couldn't be that. He hated the person he was becoming and he didn't want you to hate him too."

I buried my face in my hands. I hadn't heard of Ean and Sami before, but it was easy to guess who they were. As for Lee's abusive mom…I couldn't imagine that. My mom might have her parenting problems, but she would never hurt me. Intentionally.

"You're wearing his necklace," my brother said sadly.

I smiled. "I am."

"For Lee?"

"For us. And for him." I nodded toward the globe. "What's that?"

"Oh, this?" Michael flipped a switch I hadn't noticed on the side of the globe. It lit up like a miniature sun. "It's a sun globe. You can keep it, if you want." He held it out to me.

I reached over and took it. It filled me with warmth, color, a sensation I hadn't felt in a while…hope, maybe?

I wasn't sure what to say. The words thank you didn't mean enough.

The words first kill can have many meanings. Almost as many as DOA.

It can mean a hunter shot their first rabbit, a murderer silenced their first victim, a half-blood slayed their first monster.

For us, it meant—and still means, even now—that we failed at our job.

I don't know everyone's first kill—it's kind of a personal question, and besides, not everyone has one. Harper didn't. Well, she said she didn't. I really didn't know what to believe.

It wasn't hard to figure out who Ean and Sami were. A little asking around, and I learned that Sami was our best archer (former best archer). She had been killed by several telkines while on a quest. Michael's second kill.

Ean was a medic, same as me. He had died during a training accident. It wasn't archery. It was the damn climbing wall. Gracie's first—and only—kill. For now.

I was sitting alone in the back room of the infirmary. It was a land of many names (simple but elegant No Man's Land being the most popular), and the place where we kept sheets of gauze, old scissors, to-be-filled jars and tubes—oh, you get the idea.

I was wedged between a bin full of old gauze and a pyramid of tiny salve jars. The thing looked as if it had been set up around the end of Nixon's presidency, and it was leaning to the side like an old, broken down horse. I was eyeing it with trepidation, wondering when it would topple over and bury me. My mind, stupid thing, gave me a very vivid picture of me digging my way out of a bottomless pit of salve jars and arm slings and bandages. Then it filed it away in the box labeled Ugh, Stupid Metaphors Again? Yeah, Just Dream About It Later. And Try Not To Scream Too Loud.

I needed a breather. Ever since I had gotten up that morning—at the crack of dawn, no less—I had been in the infirmary. Not that I was complaining—A), it was easy to bury my guilt and misery in the work, and B), some of my siblings had had to get up at three AM.

And I was still working, ripping a sheet of gauze into usable pieces with my bare hands. The scissors back in Ye Lande of No Return were extremely old, extremely rusty, and extremely creaky. They might have worked better than my hands. They might even have worked better than a wet houseplant. But I would rather not need a tetanus shot.

Besides, the infirmary workers wouldn't need me. Although Apollo kids were the only demigods who actually had healing magic (and not all Apollo kids at that), many other campers were helping, doing jobs that didn't require magic or even special talent, just patience and following direction.

It was nice to be able to take a break.

My uncanny medic-sense knew it wouldn't last long.

Sure enough, a girl came into Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here, looking around nervously as if an old, empty bottle of formaldehyde might come to life and try to gnaw her face off. This room tended to inspire that feeling in people. Even Apollo kids. It looked like a haunted attic.

"Uh, are you Will Solace?" Probably a Demeter girl; they always seemed the most out-of-place in the infirmary. I nodded.

"Your brother told me to come get you."

I sighed, standing up and brushing dirt and cobwebs off my pants. "Is it the dead mice in the walls again? Because I told Gracie to stop autopsying them, it's gross, and we'll just put in some traps and let them go in later."

She looked even more nervous, as if I had suggested that we might be dining on the unfortunately deceased rodents. "Er—no. Nothing like that. One of your brothers—Kingsley, I think—wanted your help fixing a dislocated shoulder."

I grimaced. Shoving a shoulder bone back into its socket was difficult, gruesome, and painful. For the patient, of course. It was generally not painful for the medic unless the patient, being a nine-year old child, bit them like a ferocious chipmunk.

Please don't ask. I'd rather not relive that experience.

"Okay, I'm coming," I said. "And by the way, you can stop looking at that tube of ointment like it's going to bite you."

She jumped, then looked slightly embarrassed at being called out. "Uh—okay. I guess you know what to do, so I'll just…" She promptly vanished.

I rolled my eyes. Some people need to grow spines before we have to surgically implant them.

Fixing the dislocation? Yeah, I'd rather not talk about that. My ears are still ringing.

Some people wonder why I suddenly started wearing a necklace.

They can't see the charm, obviously—I keep it well hidden under my shirt. Weirdly enough, my body heat never can warm it up like it could a normal necklace. It just stays how it is, freezing cold, occasionally sending chills up my spine.

Nobody asks, though. Why I wear it. Not even my cabin. But they don't have to. They know. Many of them wear them too. I know all of them have them. They just don't want to brand themselves as traitors.

Little late for that, really, but as usual, no one asked me.

I'd never had to work so hard in my life. Nearly everyone had been injured, ranging from sprained arms to concussions of varying severity to being cut clean in half.

The guy that happened to, we managed to sew his legs back on. Well, one of them. We don't actually know what happened to the other leg, but that's beside the point.

And we all really found out the meaning of night calls. For three straight nights, I was called out at least twice every few hours for urgent calls of fevers or concussions or massive vaginal hemorrhaging. But the less said about that, the better.

One particularly memorable occasion was on the second night. According to Michael, for some reason, the second night is always the craziest, even if injuries were more plentiful the first night. (He called it subsequent psychotics.)

I didn't believe him until I was called out at 2:00 A.M. to deal with a child of Hermes who had gotten herself turned into a soybean plant. I had to explain that I don't do botany and call the Demeter cabin over to take care of it.

But I digress.

Healing was starting to fuck me up, and I don't mean that it took more out of me. Every time I set a broken arm or convinced a bleeding wound to close itself, it just felt…dirty. Like I was somehow screwing myself over, helping them instead of us. Or was it us instead of them? I couldn't tell at this point, and although I might have brought myself to ask, I was afraid of the answer.

I had become a traitor, not just to my camp, but to myself.

Nico showed up again on the third day.

He actually had an injury—a broken finger. A real one, not like Jake's. I took care of it easily.

I thought about asking him why he looked like he was about to infiltrate a black metal concert, but I didn't.

You're a healer, but you can't fix everything.

His darkness hadn't lessened—if anything, it had grown. Healing him sent chills erupting across my spine, worse than the ones from my necklace. But I knew better than to let it show.

He stayed for a minute or two after I fixed his finger. I didn't ask about that, either. We just lapsed back into compatible silence.

He wasn't what he had been. Then again, neither was I.

After the third day, the craziness died down and I could finally get a breath of fresh air.

The logical Apollo kid thing to do would be to find a patch of sunshine, flop over, curl up, and cry with joy. That was, in fact, what most of my siblings were doing.

But I had somewhere else to be.

The forges were as loud and overwhelming as ever. The Hephaestus kids had been extremely helpful in the infirmary—specifically, building prosthetic limbs that could do all normal limbs could do and more. Missing Leg Guy was pretty happy about that.

Jake was back in his corner, using percussive maintenance to get a machine to work. (And I use the term percussive maintenance because Jake is still ragging on me to learn mechanical terms. I mean he was whacking a machine with his fist.) He looked up at the sound of my footsteps (every noise was like a hammer blow on the concrete floor), sprinted over, and nearly knocked me over backwards with the force of his hug.

"Where WERE you?" he demanded. "It's been days! You can't possibly still have work!"

I tried to ignore the butterflies that being hugged by Jake gave me. "Uh, actually, you have no idea how much work we have. We've only got a few patients, so most of us are allowed to take a break. If you want to speed up the process, please do haul ass over there and clean the rat shit out of the Slum Of Shit–Filled Sadness."

Jake pulled away and rubbed his forehead. "Christ. Is that slang for something I don't want to know about?"

"No, it's a literal—it's the old storage room. In the infirmary. If you've ever heard of it, it's been called No Man's Land. It—never mind." I switched the subject before I had to explain that we kept ourselves sane by inventing insulting names for the probably–haunted back room. "Have—have you ever read Lunch at the Gotham Cafe?"

He gave me a guarded look. "This…is a weird conversation."

"That it is," I agreed. "It's one of Lee's old books—well, a short story in a collection. I took it after he died. But horror fiction isn't really my thing, and I'm looking for reviews that don't come from—" I snapped my jaw shut before I could say a suicidal supporter of Kronos. "—one of my siblings. I don't trust their judgment."

He shrugged. "Sorry. Never read it. It was your brother's?"

I nodded. "A bunch of his old stuff was up for grabs. Did they do anything like that with your siblings?"

"No, my cabin melted the metal stuff down for scrap metal and gods know what they did with the rest of it. A fucking shame, considering some of it might have had fair market value."

"Ah." That made sense, for Hephaestus's kids. "Well, I brought you something." I pulled the earbud case out of my pocket and tossed it to him. "I was gonna ask if anyone in my cabin wanted it, but they all spend too much time with earbuds in anyway. So I thought you might want them. You can use them, or melt them down for scrap metal, or sell them at fair market value, or whatever."

He reached for my hand and squeezed it. It was easy to tell it was just a friendly gesture, but it sent a jolt up my spine anyway. Shit. I pushed my thoughts aside.

"Thank you."

For once, he didn't sound sarcastic.

Great.

Fucking GREAT.

My skill at ignoring uncomfortable issues was deteriorating into nothingness.

Despite my stubborn insistence that nothing was happening, I couldn't deny the jolt of pleasure I had gotten when Jake slipped his hand into mine…or leaned his head on my shoulder at the funeral pyre…when he showed me a million other tiny signs of friendship.

I wasn't by the rocks—I wasn't sunk quite that low—but I was hiding in the back corner of Never–Fucking–Ever–Land, ripping gauze into bandage strips.

It was fine.

Nothing was happening, nothing was happening on my end, at least, but the thought that something might be happening on his end—

No, nope, absolutely not, I would not go there, I would not even THINK about it.

But you—

I jabbed a fingernail into my arm, right on top of the vein. It broke the skin—I don't know if I meant it too or not—but the drops of blood welled out of a finger–shaped crescent when I pulled my hand away.

Jabbed myself again. More blood.

My mouth was bleeding again, although I hadn't realized I had been chewing it.

There, I thought, somewhat triumphantly. How you like THAT, huh? Ready to listen now?

I liked it.

It hurt.

I liked it.

I didn't think about Jake Mason again for the rest of the night.

Just to be clear (since I know a lot of you might stop reading from this) I don't ship Jake and Will. I ship Will and Nico. BUT what fun would that be if they were the only ship in this thing?

Guess I just gave it away that Jake and Will aren't getting together.

But I got some crazy shit planned for them too.