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SUMMER 2010
The warmth of summer stands no chance against the chill Drew Tanaka carries with her like expired perfume, but the sun sure seems to put up a fight, if the sweat plastering her hair to the back of her neck is any indication. Or maybe it’s the fires burning in the center of the amphitheater, reducing cloth and flesh and bone to ash.
No amount of shrouds would be not a lot , because the shrouds cover the bodies of children Drew’s age, swaddling them like a mother should swaddle her newborn. At least, Drew thinks that’s what a mother should do. She supposes her own isn’t a great example, but that reality was not uncommon among her kind.
So, yes, there are still too many shrouds burning into the afternoon air, but not nearly as many as the last summer. None of them fill the air with the scent of jasmine and regret.
None of the bodies burning are her sister’s.
She thinks herself pathetic, watching without seeing as the mourning siblings huddle together. None of them are hers—somehow, whether by luck or mercy, no children of Aphrodite perished this time. It’s practically the opposite; one of them is one of the heroes , one of the saviors.
Silena was a hero, too , a voice that sounds suspiciously like Clarisse la Rue taunts Drew.
Yes—a hero. But also: a spy, a liar, a sister, a traitor a traitor a traitor—
No matter how beautifully and tragically Silena Beauregard died, Drew can never let go of the charred piece of her heart that had thought the world of her sister, burned in the knowledge that Silena had been working against them all along.
She knows it isn’t fair, but neither is being betrayed by your hero, so she no longer tries to stop the thoughts, no matter how poisonous. She’s learned to keep them inside, though, if only to avoid seeing Lacy’s doe eyes flood with tears, Drew’s venom tainting the blurry memory the little girl has of her oldest sister.
No matter how charred, Drew Tanaka still had a bit of a heart left.
No one speaks as the fire eventually dies, the ashes that aren’t carried off by the wind settling on the amphitheater floor, coating the stones. The words have already been said and carried off, too.
All there’s left to do now is grieve.
And doesn’t Drew know all about grieving.
The earth isn’t trying to rise against them anymore, but the ground still feels unsteady beneath her feet. Maybe that’s just her not-so-new normal. Maybe she’s just being dramatic. Either way, she follows her siblings back to their cabin, their new head counselor’s comforting words going in one ear and out the other.
She doesn’t hate Piper McLean, but she reminds her so much of Silena it hurts—so maybe she does hate her, just a little.
The day isn’t over; there’s still dinner and the campfire and whatever other activities Chiron has planned for the Romans’ last days at Camp Half-Blood, but all Drew wants is to lay down and pretend it’s two years ago, before she came to know war so intimately.
She wonders how her mother can love war so much. Maybe it’s the adrenaline that comes from every battle, or the tragedy that paints all the best love stories in shades of red and blue. Maybe she stopped loving war a long time ago, but hasn’t learned yet how to untangle her threads from his.
Maybe there is no escape. Maybe her mother does not want one.
All Drew wants is to close her eyes against this terrible day, this dreadful year, but she can’t. She can’t break because she is the oldest, the one who is supposed to set an example. She hasn’t done that very well this past year, but she is not incapable of change. She is trying.
She wishes that was enough. For her siblings, maybe it is, but will never meet the sky-high standards she reaches for endlessly.
Instead of wallowing, she sits down on her carefully made bunk and grabs her nail polish from the top of her dresser. She has learned to channel her restless energy and endless sorrow into action, so she pours all of her focus into coating each nail in bubblegum pink paint. She lets her siblings’ muted chatter muffle the funeral song in her chest, echoing off of every edge of the cavern. She pretends she is not made of crumbling porcelain. She fools herself into believing she will, in some way, be okay.
There is a reason so many of Aphrodite’s children go on to have lasting careers in acting.
FALL 2010
Drew loathes autumn the way a burning forest loathes rain. A sick part of her wants to keep burning, to keep hurting, as if the pain will keep the best parts of her sister’s memory alive. She knows it won’t, but she’s gotten good at pretending there’s hope.
High school feels too mundane for someone with the trauma that coats her skin, but the therapist her father pays for but has never met says normalcy can help with symptoms of depression. The therapist knows nothing of the real cause of Drew’s PTSD, so she’s learned to take the doctor’s advice with more than a few grains of salt, but even she isn’t cynical enough to think school would have a negative effect on her.
Either way, it isn’t like she has a choice. She’s nearly seventeen, still two years away from graduation, and with no impending or ongoing wars to worry about, she has no excuse to put off her sophomore year a second time.
Summer ends, as all things do, and she finds herself in English, her head aching and her lips mouthing silent curses at the school administration for not putting money into the accommodations budget. One little audiobook could save her from the ache, but no dice.
She’s learned to live with it.
This is a new school, with kids who have known each other for years now, and Drew is already at a disadvantage as a student who’s been held back a grade. When she catches one of her new classmates whispering about it, she wants to yell at them that she isn’t stupid, she isn’t lazy, she’s traumatized , and gods forbid she catches a break once in a while.
Mrs. Bradford is a ball of energy to rival both Stolls put together. She begins the first day of class with one question that sinks into Drew’s skin and digs its claws in, refusing to be ripped back out without inflicting lasting damage.
“What did you do over the summer?”
It’s a writing assignment, which is the only silver lining. Drew makes up stories, weaving in just enough truth that it makes her heart feel both heavy and light.
I went to summer camp, she writes. I hung out with my family. I watched the earth itself try to rise up and destroy the world. I learned how to embroider by hand. I watched kids my age and younger die for gods who never seem to love us as much as we love them. I missed my sister. I taught my little sister how to French braid. I lost another part of myself that’s probably at the bottom of the River Styx by now.
She deflects and makes things up. She bites her lip so hard against the urge to cry that she tastes blood. She remembers the blood dribbling from Silena’s mouth.
She writes lie after lie, and wishes it could be the truth.
WINTER 2010-2011
Winter burrows into Drew’s bones and leaves her in constant search of a sweater warm and soft enough to shield her from its icy grasp.
She’s spent her winter breaks at Camp Half-Blood since she first came to camp, because her father sends all of his employees home to spend the holidays with their families but never considers doing the same with his own. She knows he never wanted to be a father, knows her birth and existence are a blip in his otherwise perfect life. She’s long since stopped mourning a relationship that was never there.
Cabin Ten feels haunted this winter. Only Drew, Lacy, Fiona, and Teddy are here, the latter two being year-rounders and the former two at the same boarding school outside of Manhattan. Piper is spending break with her father, leaving Drew in charge.
She does not wield her power as easily as she once did.
Her siblings are at the dining pavilion still, finishing off their lunch and bickering with the Ares cabin—at least, that’s what they’d been doing when Drew left, promising to meet them at the archery field for their afternoon activities. For now, Drew and the cabin are alone.
She misses the noise.
She also misses the warmth of summertime. Even in the magical borders of Camp Half-Blood, the cold has found Drew and curled up in her bones for hibernation. She has been shivering since she woke this morning.
The chill defeats her desire to lay on her bed and do nothing, so she stands on sock-clad feet. She pads silently to the closet that everyone takes clothes from. A year ago, Drew would have balked at the idea of a communal closet, but she doesn’t mind the idea anymore, in theory or practice. She rifles through the sweaters and comes up with one that feels thick enough to exorcize the cold from her bones.
When she pulls it out, the cold turns to frost. The berry-red fabric is as familiar as it is painful, the knit so familiar under her fingers she can imagine an arm already in the sleeve, warmth radiating from the inside.
The cardigan is Silena’s, and everything in Drew aches.
She considers it for far too long, just staring at the piece of clothing like it’s an ancient artifact from a world lost centuries ago. A part of her thinks it will only make her colder, drive the chill into hypothermia.
But she pulls it on anyway.
The color clashes with the orange of her camp t-shirt, and Silena’s voice echoes familiar complaints about the color in Drew’s ear. We should put it to a vote, she would rant to her half-siblings, pacing back and forth along the floor of Cabin Ten. Clearly this orange is so outdated—besides, it’s like we’re announcing ourselves to the monsters! I’d settle for green at this point!
Drew remembers balking, along with most of her siblings. She remembers Silena’s smile spreading as she took it back, said, No, no, maybe not green. But gray could work, right? A decent neutral? Or is that too boring?
She brought it up at every counselors’ meeting, but the color never changed. Drew didn’t understand why until the battles—until she could spot every fallen demigod in their traffic-cone orange, announcing to the world: Here I am, orange and red and gone .
Drew wraps the cardigan tighter around herself. She does not cry.
She isn’t sure she has any tears left.
SPRING 2011
In spring, when the flowers bloom to their fullest potential, Drew smells jasmine and wants to scream.
Like winter break, Drew spends spring break at camp. There is a beach, a canoe lake, and more than enough sunlight to bring color to her skin after a winter of cold and cloud.
It’s the usual crowd—Drew, Lacy, Fiona, and Teddy—and a handful more. Mitchell’s mother and step-family are going to Italy for the break, and Rome still isn’t safe for demigods, giants or no giants; Piper’s father’s on location filming another movie; and Zahra’s missed her half-siblings bad enough to convince her mother to let her go to camp for spring break.
And though she’ll never say it out loud, Drew’s missed them all, too.
On Monday, Piper announces a spring-break-project, because she is the kind of person who apparently can’t take a break from doing something. Drew watches with an unimpressed expression as the rest of their half-siblings listen happily.
A flower garden, Piper decides. Cabin Four doesn’t have a monopoly on plants, she says teasingly.
Drew privately disagrees, but her argumentative nature’s taken a bit of a hit over the school year, so she says nothing.
Whoever says that Aphrodite children refuse to get their hands dirty has never met them, Drew decides. No one complains about the dirt getting under their nails when it’s for a cause as aesthetically pleasing as a flower garden.
Piper brought flowers from the mortal world, which Drew thinks might be sacrilege to the Demeter kids, so she vows never to let them know. She nearly starts planting them randomly before Drew and Teddy stop her and take over organizing. Gods forbid they plant yellow dahlias and purple violets next to each other.
Piper, who has no clue about color coordination, lets them take over, following their instructions with only a bit of teasing complaints and eye-rolls.
As the garden slowly comes together, Drew eyes it carefully. “Hand me one of the white flowers,” she orders, seeing the perfect spot for a splash of white.
Piper hands over one of the plastic flower pots housing a small shrub with tiny white flower buds, ready to be planted so they can bloom fully. Drew starts to cut the plastic away when the smell hits her.
She isn’t in a garden anymore—she’s in the cabin, in her big sister’s arms, in the amphitheater as the perfumed smoke spreads.
Her heart crawls into her throat and makes a home there.
“Drew?” Piper prompts. Drew isn’t sure how long she’s been frozen—she hopes not long. “You good?”
Drew swallows around her heart. “You got jasmine?” she asks, her voice uncharacteristically quiet.
Beside her, Piper shrugs. “Yeah,” she said. She frowns. “Why, is someone allergic?”
“I—”
She could lie. She could say, yeah, I’m allergic, and Piper wouldn’t think to question it. There would be no jasmine in the garden—Silena wouldn’t haunt Drew more than she already did.
But Drew wasn’t the only one haunted, was she?
And haunting was better than forgetting, right?
“No,” she finally says. “No, I just—haven’t smelled jasmine in a while.”
“Oh,” Piper says. “It smells nice, right?”
Drew blinks. “Yeah,” she manages. “It does.”
SUMMER 2011
Summer comes, as it always does—warm and loud and full of life.
Spring is the season of rebirth, but Drew has never been good at following directions. She does not bloom with the honeysuckle, or wake with the hibernating animals, or fall with the dying leaves. She heals like scar tissue over a bullet left lodged in one’s body, both rough and tender, too dangerous to remove.
The cabin is full again—fuller, even. They have a new half-sibling, Declan. He’s the youngest, just a few days shy of five, brought by a satyr protector straight from the police station. He’ll be a year-rounder, because his mortal mother was in a car accident and there is no other family to take him in.
He’s so young it breaks most of their hearts, Drew’s included. She has never considered herself a soft person, but even the toughest children of Ares treat Declan with kid-gloves. Drew has even seen Sherman Young promise to teach him how to fight with a sword when he’s old enough to hold one.
He doesn’t look like Silena, with his corkscrew curls and eyes the color of black coffee, but there is something about him that Drew remembers from Silena. Maybe it’s the way his eyes shine with optimism, regardless of how cruel the world has already been to him at four years old.
Or maybe Drew’s just projecting.
Despite being the head counselor, it becomes clear quickly that Piper is not the best with children. It isn’t that she’s bad with them, necessarily—Delcan listens to her as well as the rest of his new siblings—but when it comes to comfort, he always looks for Drew first.
Piper teases favoritism; Drew attributes it to practice. Lacy had been young when she came to camp, too, and though their bonding was more conscious on Drew’s part, it was as easy as anything for the sisters to become close. Even Silena had teased that Drew had stolen her spot as the favorite sibling.
Declan’s too young to participate in most of the camp activities, so the children of Aphrodite take turns doing other things with him. No one complains really, because hanging out with a cute little kid is a nice break from archery and lava-rock-wall climbing.
Today is Drew’s turn, and it’s a clear-sky kind of day, so she sits with Declan on the front steps of Cabin Ten and watches him build something tall and multicolored with his homemade Legos (courtesy of Cabin Nine, of course).
She’s filing her nails while Declan plays, because as it turns out, he’s a bit of a control freak when it comes to his Lego-building. Drew would say she’s surprised if most children of Aphrodite were not just a little bit of a control freak—herself included.
Declan gets bored eventually and walks down the steps and into the flower garden, which is coming along nicely (if Drew says so herself). She watches him, both to make sure he doesn’t take off running—as he is prone to do—and to make sure he doesn’t tear up the delicate flowers. He does neither, thankfully, bending to poke at one of the jasmines before standing back up and coming right back up the steps. Drew watches, amused, as he marches right back into the cabin like he’s on a mission.
Drew gives him until the count of ten before getting up and following. He’s managed to climb up onto Drew’s bunk, which is nearly as tall as he is, so Drew’s privately impressed. He’s standing on her made bed with shoes on, which makes her grimace, but he’s still too cute to outright scold. Maybe when he’s five.
“What’re you doing, Dec?” she asks, coming over to join him. He’s staring wide-eyed at the pictures above Drew’s headboard.
“Who’s that?” he asks, pointing at one of the polaroids.
Drew looks at the picture in question, and her chest hurts a little. It’s a picture of her and Silena, taken by one of their half-siblings, the summer before the Battle of Manhattan. Silena had been spying on them for a while at that point, but you wouldn’t know looking at her smile in the picture.
Drew’s throat feels tight, but she answers. “That’s—that's Silena,” she says. It takes effort to say the name without her voice breaking.
“Silena?” Declan repeats.
Drew nods. “She was my older sister,” she says.
“Where is she?” Declan asks, as innocent as ever.
Drew stares at the picture a moment longer. She could make up a lie and Declan would believe it, because there is no reason for him not to. He’d probably forget all about Silena in a day or two.
But she wants him to know.
She sits down on her bed, and Declan immediately drops down to sit next to her, looking up at her with wide, curious eyes.
“She’s not here anymore,” she explains softly. “She’s… she’s where your Mama is.” She knows Delcan doesn’t really understand where that is, not yet, but they’ll explain it better when he’s a little older. For now, he understands that his mortal mother is gone, and that it’s okay to miss her.
“Do you think they’re friends?” Delcan asks.
Drew’s mouth spreads in the idea of a smile. “Yeah,” she says. “I think so.”
“Do you miss her?” Declan asks her. “Like I miss Mama?”
“Yeah,” Drew whispers, admitting it out loud for the first time in—ever, she realizes. “Yeah. I miss her.”