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“Aren’t I supposed to be dead?” Silena asked. “This isn’t-”
“Don’t worry,” the man in the uniform with the name tag Hunding said, “You are. Welcome to the Hotel Valhalla.”
Clarisse didn’t give a speech at Silena’s funeral. It wasn’t even her own funeral. There were too many dead, they hadn’t even retrieved all the bodies by the time they had to start building the pyres, and piling the bodies high. A body needed to burn all day to be cremated properly, at least traditionally, and they’d depended on a blessing from Hestia to have enough wood to burn for enough time to do it.
It was even worse than the funerals at the end of last summer. Even more campers, some defected, some killed by friendly fire, and some with their faces melted off by drakon acid.
But that wasn’t why she didn’t speak. She just couldn’t. Anytime she tried to say anything about Silena, a eulogy, a condemnation, a useless wail, nothing came out. No noise emerged from her throat, only the harsh exhalation of warm air, and the less than faint feeling that nothing would ever be right again.
Chiron said words, both about the campers themselves, as well as well hewn blessings for the dead, and she saw him cry in a way someone who’d been crying over the same thing for several millennia cried. With resignation, and insurmountable grief. His words sounded familiar, and somewhere in the back of her head she wondered if he had ever known Thucydides, or if they’d just been reading from the same script at some point of their lives. He’d probably taught him at some point or something like that, millenia ago.
Chiron had seen nearly all of his students perish, or heard of their deaths many years later. He was an old hand at this, older than Clarisse, who only wished she was less familiar with it too.
Jackson came up to her afterwards, when he was finally done cuddling or whatever with Chase, “Clarisse, I’m-”
“Don’t fucking start,” she was ashamed of the lump in her throat, and how she couldn’t summon a modicum of anger for him. “Just-”
He moved in for some inane reason, and she ran. Just her, and her spear, right into the woods at Camp Half-Blood.
It had been crawling with monsters they’d never fully been able to get rid of in the last year. She could find something to kill there.
She found many things in fact. She was practically glowing in the still-burning light of the pyres of her friends (and personal enemies) when she returned, only injured by a bruise against her shoulder, and a gash on her cheek, which Will Solace had only glared at her for, before handing her a little cup of nectar for. She downed it like a shot. She didn’t want any comfort now, not from anything, even the drink of the gods.
Her belt hung heavy with her new trophies. Scales from two, and three horns from minor beasts she didn’t even know the name of. She didn’t need to know their names to spear them through, or catch their spinal cord with a single blow. She’d thought - somewhere - that she’d be tired of fighting after the war was done and she didn’t have to fight for her life, at least most days. But it was all she had known.
As a demigod, her life had consisted of: trying to please her father (by fighting well), trying to survive (by fighting well), and spending time with Silena.
The third one was gone now. She only had fighting left, and also fighting.
At least she was good at it.
She packed everything she had. All her army jackets, emergency supplies, old photographs, ambrosia and nectar supply, clothes, and weapons, whetstones and scabbards. She looked back, up at Thalia’s tree with the glowing fleece nestled in its branches, a far off reminder of her old quest, back before everything got so damn hard, and a soft pit settled into the base of her stomach. She knew, objectively, like she’d been cursed with prophecy for just one second and only for one thing, that she wasn’t coming back again. This was the last time she was going to see Camp Half Blood.
Then she turned and left, the sound of metal on metal ringing in her ears, even though the only thing she could hear was birdsong.
The first monster got her in the arm. She’d been careless, left her guard wide, when a noise it had made sounded just like Silena had, and the next thing she knew, there was a talon stuck right through the muscle of her bicep. She killed it, using that leverage to draw it into her blade rather than reaching out for it, and then tore the thing out, once she’d gotten everything she needed to stem any bleeding, and prevent infection before it sank in. It hadn’t hit an artery at least. That was the only blessing, since sliding it out of her arm, feeling the way her muscle had been gouged for it hurt almost as much as being stabbed with it had. Moreso, actually, if she was being honest with herself. Her adrenaline had started to wear off, and ambrosia was designed for healing not as any kind of painkiller. It helped, but only a little. She still suffered.
A few years ago, hades, a few weeks ago, she would have burned with shame from being hit like that, allowing herself to be wounded so stupidly . It was hard to care now. She just sat there, in the dirt and monster dust, clutching her arm, and remembering that noise. There had been something in the pitch, or maybe it was the tone, but it had taken her right back to how Silena had sounded in those last seconds of her life. Clarisse could feel her in her arms again, and the putrid smell of acid on flesh wouldn’t leave her nose.
She didn’t remember how she’d gotten up to go, but she had moved her legs, and forced her body up when all it wanted to do was curl up and let the next monster get her. She was too tired of this now. She just wanted it to be over.
Clarisse La Rue was ready to be done with all of this.
The next monster she killed wasn’t technically a monster. It was a man. She’d been hitchhiking her way from New York back to Arizona, and he’d offered up his truck. She’d taken it without thinking, but when he’d started to try and take off her clothes, she’d struck. Right in the carotid with a pen knife. It was the only thing she had on her that worked on mortals. She didn’t exactly go around planning to kill them, it was just luck that he’d bent over her instead of doing anything else, and exposed such a big artery to her. Lucky for her.
Also the blood spray had gone away from her, which was also good. She didn’t exactly have the supplies to clean that up right now and wandering from a place where a body had been found like she’d killed a person (because she had) would be… more suspicious than she’d been aiming for. The Mist wouldn’t cover for her there. This was a mortal crime. There were no demigod protections for her here.
She dragged his body behind a dumpster, and left his truck. It wasn’t much good to her. She couldn’t drive. She just caught a bus to the next state, and went from there, trying not to dwell on it.
The cyclops had sounded just like Silena. She didn’t know how, maybe it had escaped the Battle of Manhattan, but she didn’t let it live long enough to ask.
Her dad appeared in the room when she’d killed it though, while she was wrapping up another injury, and munching on donuts at the same time with her head bent to the table so she didn’t have to use her arms. “You need to be more careful. Keep this up and you’ll be joining your friend the daughter of Aphrodite pretty soon. I didn’t watch you survive a war just to see you die from a regular monster attack.” He looked worried. She felt nothing. Once she would have given anything to have this, proof her dad cared and him to just talk to her. She didn’t care one whit about that now.
She didn’t say anything. He disappeared as quickly as he’d appeared to start with.
The last one got her, right in the gut. Right outside her mom’s house. She hoped this wouldn’t traumatise her too much. Or the neighbours’ kids. Because she was pretty sure this was it. She was going to die here, from something so mundane as a talon in her essential organs. Yuck. It burned her from the inside out, and as much as she’d been interested to see the inside of monsters when she’d been younger, she was a lot less interested in looking at that gash in the middle of her body, and the flecks of organ matter speckled with blood around her. Gross.
She’d expected to hallucinate Silena when she died or maybe her mom would open the door to say goodbye one last time, and kiss her forehead as she went. Neither of those things happened. She did see someone, but she didn’t recognise this girl, dressed in weird armour, on a horse, watching placidly.
She was still clutching her spear when everything went black.
“What the fuck, Clarisse?”
Huh? She came to, in the middle of a walled courtyard which she didn’t recognise at all. This wasn’t Charon’s Crossing to the Underworld at all . And Silena was in front of her. She looked pissed. It was the best thing Clarisse had ever seen.
“Hey.” She picked herself up. Her arm, which had never quite healed, didn’t hurt anymore, and she wasn’t bleeding from a hole in her body anymore. “What’s up?”
“How dare you?”
“How dare I what exactly? Just so we’re on the same page.”
Silena turned at least three separate shades of red, “How dare you fucking die , Clarisse.” She heaved in breaths like she’d just run a marathon, “How dare you die when you were supposed to live. And so easily! You were reckless. And you let it happen. You barely fought back. Your father came by to tell you not to die stupidly,” how did she know that? “And you did anyway.” She started walking towards the door, an entrance to… somewhere. Not that she recognised it. Clarisse followed obediently.
“You have no right to tell me whether I should live or die,” she said quietly. “No fucking right.”
“I have every right!” She whirled around, her finger shoved right in her face. “I died for you! I died so you might live, Clarisse, and you threw it away.”
“You didn’t die for me. You died because you were an idiot, and you needed to motivate my cabin to join the fight. That wasn’t for me.”
She looked like she wanted to punch her, and the fists balled at her side made it increasingly likely that she might actually do it too. Instead, she tried a different tactic. “You had your whole life ahead of you. Why did you throw it away?”
She eyed her, scathingly, “What life did I even have without you in it?”
Silena stared back at her, completely shell shocked, “I-”
And then, like she hadn’t divulged the biggest secret she’d kept since she’d been twelve years old and scared and confused and stupid, she brushed past Silena Beauregard and into a… hunting lodge. “What is this place?”
“It’s the Hotel Valhalla,” her oldest friend replied robotically. “What did you mean by that?” Her voice cracked a little. Clarisse winced in shame. She’d made her cry. Or almost.
“What do you think I meant?”
Silena didn’t reply. Clarisse didn’t want her too.