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When they find him, Will still can’t breathe. His arms ache with the weight of his brother. He won’t notice the blood on his hands for hours still.
—
Will Solace is eleven. He has been at Camp Half-Blood for four weeks, and a boy has just come back from the dead. Lee Fletcher sits him down on the bed and says he’s going to tell him something very important.
“You’re the newest, but I know I can trust you with this,” he tells Will. “It’s really bad right now. You know that, right?”
Will can only nod. He’s still figuring out how to talk to his new siblings.
“If the monsters make it to Camp, they’ll have people with them. Demigods, like us. Some of them were our friends.”
Will nods again. He knows this. No one really explained it, but he’s heard enough whispers around the cabins to get the idea.
“One of our sisters is one of them. I’m scared to fight her, Will. We all are.” There are tears in Lee’s eyes. He runs his fingers through Will’s hair.
“If we see her out there, Will, you have to do it. You have to lead us, I think. I don’t know if anyone else could manage it. I don’t think I can.”
Will stays silent. He knows how this works. In the morning, Lee won’t remember this conversation anymore. He’ll put on his sunglasses, even though he always says Apollo kids need the most sun, and he’ll hog the cabin bathroom brushing his teeth over and over, and no one will say anything. It’s a lot like being back home, when his mom’s seen one too many reminders of a past she’s tried to forget. It’s familiar. He nods and tries his best to smile at his oldest brother.
—
The Apollo cabin is the second line of defense, Lee explains. They have ranged weapons, so when the monsters start to get past the traps and barricades, they’re going to pick them off from a distance. Will, who has only been shooting for a month and has already proven to be the cabin’s worst fighter, is supposed to stay the farthest back.
It’s easy to get separated in the forest, though, and as his siblings split off and head for the loudest parts of the woods, Will gets left behind with Lee. He doesn’t think they do it on purpose, but he heard Michael tell one of their sisters that he would be worried if Will was left with one of the younger campers. Will is the weakest of them all, but Lee is the strongest. He’ll be safe with him, or safe enough, at least.
The first to get through, in their part of the forest, are harpies. Their wings are a disadvantage in the densest parts of the forest, but these few have found enough space to fly out of the way of traps and monster corpses. Will doesn’t manage to hit any of them. After the first few shots miss, he gives up. It isn’t worth the waste, and there will be bigger, slower targets. Lee kills them all easily, with a smile on his face.
Michael’s shouts echo in the distance as the monsters smash through the trees. Those are his happy shouts, Will has learned. He hopes that means they’re winning. A horn sounds and is echoed by other campers behind them.
Lee slings his bow on his shoulder and draws his sword. He tells Will to do the same.
“The fight is coming to us,” Lee says. “Traps could only hold them for so long. And the demigods—most of them know our strategies. We haven’t changed enough, yet. The smarter campers are working on that.” He winks.
Will is supposed to stop here. He draws the line in his mind, the boundary that his siblings had pointed out—a tree bent here, a frog-shaped rock there—and tries to think with his brain. Reinforcements are coming. Someone will fill in the space behind Lee, soon, and they’ll protect Will again.
He can hear them coming, but he can also see what’s ahead. Lee has started down the hill on his own, his spine straight and his sword at the ready. There are so many monsters, most of them ones whose names he still hasn’t learned. Lee is good, but Will worries that he isn’t that good, and there’s only so much time.
As his brother charges down the hill, Will draws his bow once more and seeks out a target. Not the closest, because he can’t risk hurting Lee, but something close enough to reach. As the monsters get close and their shapes grow more distinct, he can see them now: the demigods. They’re older than him; older than most of Camp, he thinks. Michael had said that when demigods got old, they tried to get out. Will was pretty confident that this wasn’t what he meant.
The demigods are smaller targets, but these few are close, and they’re slow, slower than the monsters, at least. They’re laughing as they run, like they’re excited to kill the people they used to know. He doesn’t know any of them, Will reminds himself. They aren’t his friends or his family. But Lee—
Lee stops dead when he sees the first girl. He almost drops his sword, he trips over his feet, he stumbles—
Will is done arguing with himself. He isn’t the best shot, but he can do something when it matters. He mutters a prayer to his father, the first one he’s really meant, he thinks, and he fires.
The girl goes down as Lee gets back to his feet. He watches her instead of his brother. There’s something about her freckles, and he realizes at that moment that she was carrying a bow.
“Alison,” Will whispers, and he’s running down the hill before his thoughts can catch up. Lee stares at her like he’s hypnotized, like people do in movies when they’re not sure if they’re alive or dead. Lee is a good swordsman, but he can’t fight without looking. The giant—because that’s what it has to be, as tall as it is—moves at the same time as Lee.
Will reaches the bottom of the hill just in time to watch it happen. The giant’s club swings down in the space between Lee and Alison, between his brother and his sister, and Lee—Lee moves too fast. In his hurry to reach his sister, he loses his one chance at getting away.
Will Solace, eleven years old, watches in horror as a club strikes his brother in the head and keeps going down. It doesn’t just knock him a bit, the way he would have imagined. The giant had put its whole body into that swing, and its body comes down with it. Lee’s eyes bulge for just a moment before the club smashes through his skull, bits of brain flying out and his eyes—gods, his eyes—
Will wants to cover his eyes, but something inside him knows that he has to watch this. As Lee’s body collapses, Alison drags herself to her feet. She looks at the body of her brother, who loved her so much that he stopped fighting to check on her, and she laughs. She laughs, and she chokes, and she runs the other way. If Will strains his ears, he thinks he can hear her puking.
The giant uses Lee’s chest as an anchor to push itself to its feet. The battlefield is quiet, just for a moment. No one from Camp has reached them, yet. The other demigods have followed Alison. It’s just Will, the giant, and Lee’s mangled body, as the horde of monsters around them thins. They’ve followed their noses and gone searching for other prey.
Will has only been using a sword for four weeks, but he’s got a decent handle on it now, he thinks. He understands it enough that as he reaches the giant’s feet, he swings his sword up and aims straight for its groin. For a moment, he’s so caught up in his humanity that he expects blood to come out. There’s no blood, but there isn’t any dust either, not right away. There’s just a giant body and a boy and more than enough space to crush another child of Apollo on its way down.
The giant explodes at the last moment. Golden dust gets in his eyes as he falls to his knees beside his oldest brother. The first brother he ever had, and the first one he ever lost.
He’s never carried a body before, but Will tries his best. He’s supposed to be strong, after all, strong enough to carry Lee. He has to settle on dragging him. He chooses to do it by the legs, to stay farther from the—his head, and he clenches his teeth and resists the urge to cover his ears. The squelching sounds his brother’s head makes on the grass will never leave his thoughts.