Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first year Will Solace had to stand at the top of Half-Blood Hill and wave goodbye to his siblings instead of running down into his own mom’s arms and getting in her car too, he managed to hold back the tears until everyone else’s mortal parents’ tail lights had disappeared down the road. Once he was pretty certain no one else was around, he turned and ran back past the pine tree, newly de-Thalia-fied (as his brother Michael had put it), the Golden Fleece from Clarisse La Rue’s quest gleaming in its branches, guarded by a baby dragon. He ran past the strawberry fields, the Big House, the amphitheater, and straight into his cabin, where he flung himself into his bunk and hid his face in his pillow to cry. He couldn’t have cried where there was any chance the Stolls could see him, or Sherman Yang and Mark Dillard from the Ares cabin, but alone—it was okay.

That he was alone was part of why he was crying. It was bad enough he had to become a school-year camper, instead of getting to start middle school with his best friends back home like a normal kid. His siblings Silas and Sophie, twins just six months older than Will, thought year-rounders were the biggest weirdos at camp. They’d said so when he told them he was going to be one. Then they had shut up about it when Michael dared them to say that to Clarisse’s face, but it still stung.

Worse, Will wasn’t just stuck here—he was the only one of his siblings who was. He’d be all alone in his cabin, usually full of laughter and music, dead silent now except for the sound of his own sniffling. He hated it.

But his mom was going on tour this winter, since she was about to release an album for the first time in a few years, and he would be safer here than at home with his grandparents, since they didn’t know he was a demigod and wouldn’t be able to deal with monsters if they showed up. So instead he was, quote unquote, “going to stay with his dad.” Will would have given a lot to go stay with his dad—to have a dad he could really “go stay with” at all—so the worst part was how that wasn’t even true.

“Will?” a small voice said from the front of the cabin. Will looked up, hurriedly wiping at his eyes, to see the small figure of Olivia Locke standing in the doorway.

Olivia was new this summer, and she and Will had become friends during a particularly harrowing canoe race. She was eleven, like him (though he would be twelve very soon, in September), and like Will she had been claimed her very first summer for no apparent reason. In her case, by Hermes, which never really felt like as big a deal as it was for everyone else, since it wasn’t like Hermes campers had to move into a new cabin with a bunch of new people.

He was glad, if he had to be at camp for school, at least she would be too. She had found out the very last week of summer, when her mom had called Chiron to ask if Olivia could try out his educational system, to see if maybe she would find less ways to get into trouble there than she had in her school district up in New Hampshire. Apparently she’d already been through all six elementary schools in her hometown—one for each year from kindergarten to fifth grade.

Will didn’t understand it. Olivia was great. Way nicer than most of her siblings, who were mostly either jerks who liked playing pranks on people, or worse jerks who had betrayed the other campers to go help Luke Castellan and Kronos. He couldn’t see why any school—or, for that matter, Olivia’s mom—wouldn’t want her around.

“Are you okay?” she asked now. “Were you crying?”

“I’m fine,” Will said. “Is it time for dinner?”

“Yeah, are you coming?”

“Yeah.” Will fumbled for a tissue to blow his nose, then joined her. Olivia offered him her hand as they walked out toward the dining pavilion. Will took it, grateful for the kind gesture. His big sisters liked to hold the younger kids’ hands for security, to make sure they didn’t wander off and get into trouble, and now that Will wasn't one of the cabin babies anymore he actually kind of missed it. It was comforting.

“Julia and I were thinking of asking Chiron if you can sit with us for meals, since none of your siblings are here,” Olivia told him. “And maybe you could even come stay in our cabin, if you want, so you don't have to be alone in yours.”

“That would be nice, I guess,” Will said, maybe not as enthusiastically as he should have—Olivia’s sister Julia was nice (not as nice as Olivia, but nice enough) but he wasn’t sure he wanted to put himself in Travis and Connor’s sights like that. They’d been at camp since they were really little, well before Will got here, and they were well-established by now as kind of the bane of everyone else’s existence. In his three summers here so far Will had learned it was best to fly under their prank radar as much as possible.

Rather than reject Olivia’s offer outright, though, he just said, “thanks, Olivia. That’s really nice of you guys.” He figured Chiron would never go for it, rules being rules and gods being touchy, so he wasn’t too worried about actually having to move to the Hermes cabin.

As it turned out, Will was exactly right—Chiron shot down the cabin-sharing suggestion right away, and the table idea too, though that part he seemed sorrier about. Meanwhile, Connor saw him holding Olivia’s hand and immediately started pointing and laughing about “Livvy has a boyfriend!”

Will dropped Olivia’s hand like it had scalded him. She looked sad about it for about half a second before she squared her shoulders and started talking back to her big brothers. Will left the bickering children of Hermes to their table, the fullest left with six of them set to stay year-round, and went to sit at his table alone.

He looked around at the other tables, most of them empty, and found himself catching—or caught by?—Thalia Grace’s eye. The daughter of Zeus sat alone at her own table. Will hadn’t seen her smile at anyone but Annabeth Chase since she… reemerged, but now she offered him a small, sad smile of lonely solidarity.

It helped a little. At least he wasn’t the only one stuck at a table alone, and at least it wasn’t summer anymore—Will could only imagine what it was like for Percy Jackson, and now Thalia too, he guessed, being completely alone while every single other table was full of laughing siblings. This sucked, but that would suck even more.

After dinner, Will walked back to his cabin by himself. Inside he pulled on pajamas and turned on the sun-shaped light attached to the underside of the bunk atop his. Apollo’s kids weren’t generally afraid of heights—some of them might love them a little too much, in fact, or at least that was what Lee had said to Michael when he almost got stuck in a tree this summer—so the top bunks were a lot higher up than most, leaving ample space for kids on the lower levels to sit up in bed. A smaller kid than Will probably could have stood upright on the mattress without hitting their head.

Maybe it wasn’t so bad, actually, Will thought as he sat up reading by the artificial sunlight much later than Lee would have let him. There were some benefits to being the sole enforcer of his own lights-out. But—still, he thought, he didn’t like being all alone.

Will had grown up in Texas learning about one-room schoolhouses. Now he got to be in one, more or less. Chiron held many of their academic lessons—math and reading and stuff—in the Big House’s massive… parlor? Dining room? Will wasn’t sure what it had been in the olden days, if it had ever been anything but the schoolroom. All the kids learned there, arranged at square tables that reminded Will of how his elementary school teachers in Austin would put four desks together in blocks.

On one side of the room were the older kids’ tables, for the high schoolers, and one table just for the eighth graders—there were more of them than any other grade. With two years and the high school divide between them, the Stolls were seated at different tables, so they spent a lot of time turning their otherwise-untouched math worksheets into paper airplanes that could do elaborate tricks as they flew them across the room to each other. At the table she and Travis shared with Charlie Beckendorf and Silena Beauregard, Clarisse would snap at them for distracting her—she was actually a good student, Will realized, and really was trying to do her work and stay focused, as well as any of them could. It didn’t actually make her any less scary, but it made him like her a little better. Contrary to all logic, the older kids’ tables actually got louder after she left on her secret mission in October.

The elementary school kids had their own table, since there were just three of them. Will and Olivia were the only sixth-graders, so they sat at the fourth table with Sherman and Mark, who were seventh-graders, and did their math and reading assignments together.

Reading was the best part of learning from Chiron instead of in regular school. Will wasn’t sure where the old centaur had gotten an Ancient Greek translation of The Giver, but with the barrier of dyslexia removed it was the first time in his life he had actually enjoyed reading a book for school.

Mark and Sherman thought the book was “ugh, super gay,” though—there were a lot of things Mark and Sherman thought were “so gay”, like Hey There Delilah, and that Connor always threw M&Ms in the sacrificial fire for Hermes at dinner instead of getting rid of his vegetables that way like a lot of the other kids did, and history lessons that were about anything other than war—so mostly Will kept quiet about it. It put a bad feeling in his stomach when they started calling stuff gay, maybe for the same reason he’d been so desperate to avoid crying where anyone else could see. Cause gods forbid they think he was, for actually liking the book and the history lessons (he was ambivalent on Hey There Delilah), or for anything else. Not that there was anything wrong with it. He just didn’t want Mark and Sherman turning against him. They already called him a nerd all the time for being pretty good at math.

One day, though, they made the mistake of complaining about The Giver within earshot of Chiron. No sooner had the word “gay” left Mark’s mouth as a rude epithet than Chiron was looming over the middle schoolers’ table in full centaur form, his expression almost as thunderous as Thalia on a bad day. Will looked around, feeling like he too must have done something wrong.

“Evidently we are in need of a history lesson,” Chiron boomed. “Everyone, gather your things and follow me to the amphitheater.”

“Right now?” Mark complained, because apparently his guts were lined with pure celestial bronze.

“Right now,” Chiron said with terrifying finality, and trotted out of the room. Everyone stumbled after him, mostly looking confused, though Silena and a few of the other older students had sly looks on their faces, like they knew exactly what Chiron was going to teach them. Will wondered if maybe this had happened before.

History lessons at Camp Half-Blood were usually held outside, along with science and art classes. It was hard for a bunch of adolescent demigods to sit still indoors for very long, so Chiron didn’t try to make them. For science and art their projects might involve running around collecting stuff from camp and the woods, or going from place to place learning from their peers and the nymphs and satyrs, but history meant hanging out in the amphitheater under the always-blue sky while Chiron told them stories from his many centuries of life.

Sometimes those stories had to do with the kinds of things Will had grown up learning in public school in Austin, American history, wars and stuff (those were the lessons the Ares boys liked), but just as often they were about things that had happened far, far beyond living memory. Well—mortal memory. In those cases there was usually some kind of a lesson to the story, a moral for young demigods who might grow up to be the same kinds of heroes as the ones in Chiron’s stories. Never challenge a god unless you’re ready to put your money where your mouth is (and even if you win you’ll probably still die). Don’t get on Hera’s bad side. (Seriously.) Be careful what you wish for. Don’t look back.

That day, Will learned for the first time about another golden-haired boy Chiron had taught once, millennia ago, and the man he had grown up to love so much he would have died for him if his beloved hadn’t gone and done it first. As Chiron told them about Achilles and Patroclus, the anger in the old centaur’s voice turned into the wistful sorrow that was more usual when he told stories about heroes long dead, but the fire still simmered in the pointed way he looked at Mark and Sherman.

“Great heroes of history should not have the truth of their lives reduced to a means to slander what you do not like,” he said. “And nor should anyone else—any stranger on the street, maybe even some of your friends—great heroes or no.” He held their gazes until they both looked away, shamefaced, at their feet. Then, for an instant, his eyes flickered up to Will, who shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

Sometimes Chiron looked at people like he knew things about them they didn’t even know about themselves.

Naomi played back-to-back shows in New York City on December 14th and 15th, so she let Will come and stay with her in the hotel those two nights. On the 14th he went to the concert and watched from backstage with his mom’s manager’s PA, a young woman named Leanna who handed him a multi-pack of fruit snacks by way of childcare—he wasn’t five, he wanted to protest. Then she spent the whole concert texting when she wasn’t running around doing stuff for Wade, Naomi’s manager.

Will just sat on the black floor, earplugs in since he was so close to the sound system, and watched a country-rock star who never felt anything like his mom perform, and ate maybe five fruit snacks total, and felt more than ever like he didn’t belong anywhere at all.

Then Naomi Solace finally came offstage after the encore and transformed back into Will’s mom. After a tense-looking discussion with Wade and Leanna, they went to the hotel and she let him order room service spaghetti and meatballs and stay up late watching Star Wars on pay-per-view—the TV only had the prequels, but it was better than watching weird old guys interview celebrities he knew nothing about. He didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep midway through Attack of the Clones until suddenly it was morning.

That was the best day Will had had all year. After fancy breakfast in the fancy hotel, they spent the rest of it out in the city—pizza, riding the subway, Times Square, ice-skating. Will had thought it would be easy, cause he was a good runner and had those demigod reflexes and stuff, but he fell down three times before he figured out how to balance. Naomi cheered him on. The second concert was no different from the first, but it felt a lot better after actually getting to spend the day with his mom, not Naomi Solace, and this time Leanna had actually ordered more pizza for him instead of just fruit snacks.

It was wonderful. Will didn’t even see a single monster at all. But there was never a good thing without a bad thing to balance it out, especially for demigods, so if he’d been on his guard it shouldn’t have been half as much of a gut punch as it was to get back to camp the next day, hug his mom goodbye, and find—

“Will! WILL!” He reached the top of Half-Blood Hill to see Olivia tearing across the grass toward him, trailed by a dark-haired boy who must have been new. There were about 15 year-rounders total right now, and after three months stuck with them Will obviously knew them all, and this kid was not one.

“Olivia! Olivia!” he yelled back jokingly, mimicking her. “What’s up?”

“Will!” She tackled him, almost knocking him over. “You won’t believe what happened!”

“What?” Will squirmed out of her hold. Before Olivia could elaborate,

“Is your dad really Apollo?” the new kid asked him without the slightest preamble, brown eyes wide. He was maybe five feet tall, and wearing an orange Camp Half-Blood t-shirt that looked like it was fresh off the camp store rack. “He’s awesome! He has plus thirty health and two thousand defense and his car is really cool even though he wouldn’t let me drive it—”

“Um,” said Will. “Who are you?”

“This is Nico di Angelo,” said Olivia, who looked like she was trying very hard not to laugh. “He’s new.”

“O—okay,” said Will. In the distance, his eye was caught by what looked like a group of people in silver uniforms walking out of the cabin area. They definitely hadn’t been here when he left. “What did I miss?”

“Well,” Olivia started to say, but Nico got there first.

“My sister and I were at school, and then our teacher turned into a monster, but Percy saved us, and Thalia almost killed the monster, but this girl named Annabeth fell off a cliff, then Artemis came—” his mouth turned down for an instant, but he didn’t stop talking—“and then she called Apollo and he drove us here in the sun! Cause the sun is a car! But I guess you probably knew that,” he trailed off, finally seeming to actually think about the words coming out of his mouth, “because…he’s your dad.” Will swallowed hard around a growing lump in his throat.

“My dad was here?” he said to Olivia.

“Yeah,” said Olivia. “He was here yesterday. Not for very long—” she seemed to realize he wasn’t as excited about this news as she was, and definitely not as much as Nico (though it seemed like it was hard for any human to be as excited about anything as Nico was), and backtracked. “It was just—really cool,” she said. “But it’s okay! Did you have fun with your mom?”

“Yeah,” Will said, though it felt like all the joy of the past two days had vanished into a gnawing pit in his stomach. “I did. We had a lot of fun.” He looked at the ground for a moment. “I should go put my stuff away.”

“Okay,” Olivia said weakly as he brushed past her to trudge down towards the cabins. “I’ll see you at dinner?”

“Yeah.” Will sighed. “Right.”

“It’s nice to meet you!” Nico yelled after him.

“You too,” Will called back grudgingly.

His dad had been here, but hadn’t bothered to stick around long enough to see him. He hadn’t even left a note—there was no sign of him in the cabin. To add insult to injury, it turned out that not only had Artemis gotten his dad to bring Percy and Thalia and Nico to camp, Will’s aunt had also sent her Hunters with them. Now there was a “friendly” Capture the Flag game scheduled for tonight—and since Will hadn’t been here when that was decided on, they hadn’t saved him a spot on the Camp Half-Blood team.

Even the new kid got to be on the team, but not Will. Of course not.

“That’s all right,” Chiron said kindly. “We’ll keep you on the sidelines in case of any serious injuries. Your healing skill could save lives tonight.” It was nice of him to try and be reassuring, Will thought glumly.

But as it turned out, every single Ares camper managed to break at least one limb in the carnage that ensued, plus the Stoll brothers both had concussions. “I hate those Hunter girls,” Mark grumbled, while Sherman kept muttering “break my leg” mutinously. Since they had saddled Will with half the camp as patients when he was the only Apollo kid around, while none of the Hunters seemed to need medical attention themselves, he didn’t entirely disagree. He told the Ares boys to stop complaining anyway.

He had to admit—grudgingly—Chiron had had an actual point. His healing wasn’t all that powerful yet, not compared to Lee or his big sisters Izzy and Renee, but it was the only talent he seemed to have gotten from his dad, so all of them and Chiron were encouraging him to lean into it.

That was fine. It was easy enough—that was the main way it had manifested so far, actually, was how intuitive medicine felt to Will. While Chiron and the counselors met in the rec room (concussions and all), Will worked in the infirmary under Argus’ ever-watchful eye (well, eyes), setting bones, wrapping bandages, and administering nectar and ambrosia to speed the healing processes for the other campers. Gods, he wished Izzy was here to do more of the prayer-magic healing stuff she was so good at, or that Renee was here to make sure he was doing things right, but… at least, doing it on his own from memory, he was starting to feel more and more like he knew what he was doing.

It took a lot out of him, though. Especially the magic healing. It was like helping other people get some strength back totally sapped his. When he finally got to go back to his cabin, accompanied by Argus so the curfew harpies wouldn’t freak out, Will was so tired he was just glad he managed to make it to his bed before he collapsed.

In the morning Will went to breakfast to find that Thalia, two Hunters, and Grover Underwood had left on their quest. The third Hunter who had been supposed to go along was out of commission thanks to Olivia’s brothers, she told him—apparently the Stolls had given her a t-shirt sprayed with centaur blood. That was an even more vicious prank than Will usually would have expected from them. They must have been really mad about capture the flag.

When he offered to help, though, the Hunters turned him away.

“This cabin is holy ground, sacred to the Lady Artemis,” said the girl at the door, who looked no older than Will but sounded like she was from Shakespeare’s time or something. (His father’s forever-favorite son named Will, twenty-first-century Will thought sourly.) “No man may enter.”

“I’m not a man, I’m a boy,” Will pointed out. “I’m twelve. And Lady Artemis is my aunt! My dad’s the god of healing. I can help.”

“That you are a son of Apollo does not lend you as much credit as you seem to think,” the girl said imperiously. “We have had recent dealings with your father. We are well aware of what he is like.” She said it like seeing his father was a bad thing, not something Will would've given anything for. “As if we would allow any man access to our sister when she is in a vulnerable state, let alone one of his spawn.”

“But I’m not—” Will realized he didn’t know what he was trying to say—something he couldn’t quite articulate. “It wouldn’t be like that.”

“Whether or not that is so, we have our rules,” the girl informed him. “And we are perfectly capable of taking care of our own. Good day.” And she shut the door in his face.

As Will trudged down the steps, scowling at the ground, he almost crashed into what looked, in his peripheral vision, like a small shadow. Stumbling aside to avoid a collision, he realized it was Nico. The younger kid wasn’t looking where he was going either—his eyebrows were furrowed together in worry, his focus on a little metal figurine he was turning over in his hands. He looked up when Will moved, startled, and glanced between him and the Artemis cabin.

“Why were you trying to get in?” he asked.

“I heard someone got injured,” Will explained. “I’m a healer, so I thought maybe I could help, but apparently they’re ‘perfectly capable of taking care of their own,” he said, mocking the old-fashioned girl’s accent. The corners of Nico’s mouth curved up in a smile for a moment before it faded again. It was weird—he was so much more subdued today than he had been when Will had briefly met him yesterday, it was like he was a different person.

“Yeah, they wouldn’t let me in to see Bianca before she left either,” said Nico, “even though she’s my sister.” His expression darkened—upset, his eyes were surprisingly scary.

“Oh, is she one of the ones on the quest?” Nico nodded, eyes back on the little figurine. Ah. That would be where all the enthusiasm went, Will thought. “I’m sure she’ll be okay,” he told Nico, trying to make it sound encouraging. When he looked closer at the figurine Nico was focusing on, he realized it was a tiny silver model of Poseidon, trident in hand.

“She will,” Nico said, looking up again, darkness fading. He sounded a lot more sure than Will had. “Percy promised.” Will blinked.

“I thought Percy wasn’t going.” Based on the snippets he’d caught of the meeting in the rec room last night while he was tending to the Ares campers, it sounded like that was a whole thing.

“Like they could stop him.” Nico smiled a weirdly secret little smile.

“So, what’s up with the little Poseidon?” Will asked, figuring what rules Percy Jackson did or did not break wasn’t really his problem. “Is that from a game or something?” It looked like the little miniatures his big brothers and Beckendorf used to play Dungeons & Dragons, except made of real metal.

“Yeah, Mythomagic!” said Nico, finally perking up. “I have almost the whole original set.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of that game!” said Will. That thing Nico had said yesterday about his dad having +30 health and 2000 defense finally made sense. “It’s like Yu-Gi-Oh, right? But with the real gods and monsters and stuff?”

“Maybe?” said Nico, eyebrows furrowing again. “What’s Yu-Gi-Oh?”

“What do you mean, what’s Yu-Gi-Oh?” Will exclaimed, scandalized, at the same moment Olivia emerged from the Hermes cabin and ran up to them.

“Nico, there you are—where’d you go?”

“He’s never heard of Yu-Gi-Oh!” Will told her indignantly.

“Maybe he’s just cooler than you,” said Olivia. “Nerd.”

“He has the whole Mythomagic set! How much cooler can he be?” Will shot back. Nico was giggling now, which was good to hear.

“I’ll teach you to play Mythomagic if you guys teach me about whatever Yu-Gi-Oh is,” he told them. Olivia put her hands up.

“I don’t know anything about Yu-Gi-Oh except that Will likes it, but I’ll still play with you,” she added when Nico’s face fell a little.

The kid’s enthusiasm returned as quickly as it had faded. It was really something to behold.

In all his months at camp without his siblings, Will hadn’t gotten to hang out with Olivia in his cabin because of the rule against two campers of different genders and godly parents being alone together, but now Nico was here, so it was fine. That was how Will, Olivia, and Nico wound up spending their afternoon sitting on the floor of the Apollo cabin with Will’s entire collection of Yu-Gi-Oh packs spread out around them.

To Will’s delight, both of them picked it up pretty easily. Olivia quickly developed the kind of casually chaotic tactics he would have expected from a Hermes kid, while Nico’s small face was deadly serious as he considered his cards and his opponent’s.

“You’re letting me win,” he accused Will halfway through their game.

“What? No I’m not!” said Will, who had absolutely been letting Nico win. Nico’s eyes narrowed.

“You’re letting me win and you’re a bad liar,” he said.

“Would you rather I kicked your butt?” Will asked. “Cause I could do that instead.” Nico blinked like he hadn’t been expecting that.

“Yeah,” he said, surprisingly. “Sure. If you can, I mean.”

“I definitely can,” said Will. “You’re doing okay, but you’re not that good yet.” Nico shrugged.

“Whatever. Bring it on. I’ll get you back when we play Mythomagic.”

“Okay, fine,” said Will, and spent the next fifteen minutes roundly trouncing Nico at Yu-Gi-Oh. He had been holding back because he figured the kid was already in a not-so-great mood with his sister gone on a dangerous quest, and he didn’t want to make it worse—his own younger siblings and mortal cousins were prone to tantrums if they lost at the best of times.

He supposed Nico wasn’t that much younger, though, and as it turned out he was completely serious about being willing to lose. By the end of the game Nico had lost by almost 5000 points and was laughing about it.

“Wow, you weren’t lying,” he said, looking at Will with shining eyes. “You are good.”

“Of course I wasn’t lying. You’d have known. Like you said, I’m a pretty bad liar,” Will pointed out. “I am pretty good at this, though. My one skill,” he added, mostly joking. He felt very self-conscious suddenly. Will was a relatively untalented younger child of a medium-important god—people didn’t usually look at him like Nico was right now, like he was cool.

“That’s not true,” Olivia said, shoving gently at his arm. “You’re a great healer and archer.”

“I am not a great archer. I’m, like, an okay archer on a good day.”

“You’re better than me!”

“Yeah, but your dad isn’t the god of it!”

“You’re talented and special, Will Solace!” Olivia insisted. “Get over it!” Unfolding her legs, she stood up. “Are non-Apollo campers allowed to use the Apollo bathroom?”

“Sure.” Will shrugged. “I mean, I don’t know what Lee would say, but Lee’s not here and I don’t mind.” Probably Lee wouldn’t mind either—Lee was like the nicest person in the world. Now, Michael...

“Who’s Lee?” Nico asked as Olivia excused herself, leaving him and Will alone.

“My half-brother,” Will replied. “He’s one of the oldest and he’s been here the longest, so he’s our head counselor.”

“Why isn’t he here?”

“Cause he just comes to camp in the summer. Most people do.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“Cause my mom is a musician and she’s on tour.”

“That’s so cool!”

“Yeah,” said Will, “I guess.”

“How many kids are there usually?”

“You mean during the summer?”

“Yeah.”

“About a hundred,” said Will. Nico’s eyes widened.

“Oh, wow! The gods have a lot of kids.”

“Yeah,” said Will, then amended, “some more than others. Like, Artemis is an eternal maiden, so she doesn’t have kids, just her Hunters. And obviously Zeus and Poseidon just have one each, Thalia and Percy, and they’re not really supposed to have any—Hades doesn’t—but my dad and Olivia’s dad probably have the most.”

“Why aren’t Zeus and Poseidon supposed to have kids?” Nico asked, frowning. “Percy and Thalia are really cool.”

“The Big Three—Zeus, Poseidon, Hades—they made a vow not to,” said Will. “Their kids are too powerful. They almost destroyed the world.” Nico nodded, still frowning thoughtfully.

“Percy’s really powerful,” he agreed. “So is Thalia. She got mad after capture the flag and shot lightning at him, then he almost dumped the whole river on her. It was awesome.” His eyes widened. “Are they going to destroy the world?” Will wanted to say no, because Percy and Thalia both seemed pretty nice (ish—Thalia was a little scary, and not just because of her being, as Sherman kept saying, “kind of a zombie”), but on the other hand he knew there was a prophecy that, from the rumors he’d heard in his years here, made it sound like at least one of them might, so,

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we’ll see.” They sat in silence for a moment. Seemingly unperturbed by the non-zero chance of Thalia and/or Percy causing the apocalypse, Nico looked around at the cabin.

“How many siblings do you have?”

“Fifteen,” said Will. He pointed out their beds, at least the beds that would be theirs when they got back next summer—the bunk beds Lee shared with their sister Claire; the set Michael shared with their brother Jasper; Renee and Izzy's beds; the twins'; the new kids from this summer, Xavier and Leah’s; and the two youngest, the cabin babies, Hannah and Teresa’s. “And some other kids have gone to college now. So, fifteen. That we know of.” That was the joke Lee and Renee liked to make, a little bit at their dad’s expense—even in a pantheon of gods who (mostly) had affairs with mortals all the time, Apollo wasn’t exactly known for chastity, or for keeping very good track of his kids.

“Why wouldn’t you know about the other ones?” Nico asked, looking confused. Will considered whether he wanted to give this hyper-inquisitive ten-year-old (well, basically-eleven-year-old, as Nico kept insisting) the birds and the bees talk right here, right now, and decided he would rather have to deal with the whole Ares cabin getting food poisoning.

“Gods don’t always remember to check on their demigod kids,” he said instead. “I mean, you don’t know who your godly parent is, right?”

“No.” Nico frowned. “I don’t even know if it’s my mother or my father. Bianca and I—we don’t remember our parents.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Will didn’t pry—Nico didn’t look like he wanted to talk about it. Instead, after another moment of awkward silence he perked up again and asked,

“Are you Olivia’s boyfriend?” Will choked.

“No!” he exclaimed. “Gods! Why do people keep saying that?” Nico shrugged, looking taken aback by the strength of Will’s reaction.

“I don’t know. You’re a boy, and she’s a girl, and it seems like you like each other, so.”

“Of course I like her,” said Will, “she’s my friend, but I don’t like-like her. Just because—I don’t have to—boys and girls can just be friends!” He wasn’t sure why his stomach clenched so painfully. He just really didn’t like it that people assumed he was interested in Olivia like that, just because she was a girl, and his friend. He didn’t want a girlfriend. Being girl-crazy was fine for Mark and Sherman, but they were older than Will—for the gods’ sake, he was barely twelve.

“Sure, I guess.” Nico just shrugged, looking pensive. “Is Annabeth Percy’s girlfriend? They were dancing together at the dance before Dr. Thorn turned into a monster, and he seemed really upset that she’s gone.”

“I don’t know,” said Will. “It seems like they do like-like each other, but I don’t actually know them that well, you know. They’re cool older kids who get to be part of prophecies and go on quests. They don’t really hang out with the younger kids who don’t get to do stuff like that.”

“I guess my sister’s one of the cool older kids now,” Nico said grimly, his mood darkening again just in time for Olivia to finally come back from the bathroom.

“What did I miss?” she asked. Will looked at Nico, who shook it off and said,

“Nothing. Do you want to play against me? That way Will can’t beat us.”

“Hey!” said Will as Olivia flopped back onto the floor.

“Sure,” she said. “If I get Will on my team.” She grinned at him, batting her eyelashes overdramatically. Will shoved at her arm.

“That’s not how it works!” he and Nico protested at the same time. Will held out his hand for a high-five, because that was what his siblings always did when they accidentally spoke in unison or finished others’ sentences, which happened fairly often—their dad was the god of prophecy. Nico looked confused for a second, then he reciprocated, yanking his hand away just as fast.

“Okay, fine,” Olivia grumbled good-naturedly, settling into place cross-legged opposite Nico. “Let’s do this.”

The prank war between the Stolls and the Hunters only escalated in the week the Artemis cabin was occupied. First the Hunters retaliated for what the Stolls had done to Phoebe, unfortunately catching everyone else in the cabin in their net too—except Olivia and Nico, who were busy playing Yu-Gi-Oh in the Apollo cabin at the time. Then the Ares kids got in on it, out for revenge for their broken limbs. This time the Hunters’ response resulted in the roofs of both the Hermes and the Ares cabins catching on fire at two in the morning.

“You know, if Percy had been here,” Mark ranted while a bleary-eyed Will applied salve to a burn on his arm where a blazing shingle had fallen on him, “he could’ve just dumped water on the roof, but no, he’s Percy freakin’ Jackson and he just had to go on a quest he wasn’t even invited on, again, cause he thinks he’s so cool—”

“We get it, Mark,” Sherman interrupted, “you have a big gay crush on Percy.” Mark clammed up, looking mutinous. Will just sighed, shook his head, and moved on to setting Sherman’s leg, which was somehow broken again. “Ow!” Sherman yelped as Will pulled maybe a little bit too hard. “Will! Don’t break it more!”

“Don’t be such a baby,” Will snapped, his patience wearing thin. “Gods, you guys are immature, and I’m younger than you. When are you going to think of a better insult than just calling things gay all the time?”

“Hey,” Sherman said, “I call it like I—”

“Will’s right,” Olivia cut him off. “It’s super immature.” She was sitting two cots over, huddled under a blanket with Nico, who looked about as happy to have been woken up in the middle of the night as Will felt—he was scowling as he made his Artemis and Ares figurines fight. “And it’s not fair to gay people. Do you jerks need me to go get Chiron so he can explain about Achilles again?” Now Mark looked abashed again, and Sherman looked mutinous.

“Whatever,” he grumbled.

Things around camp didn’t necessarily get worse from there, but they sure didn’t get better. Unfortunately, the campers were basically on an early winter break while the Hunters were here—it wasn’t that Will liked school enough to miss it (he wasn’t that big a nerd), even if it was better than school at home, but he thought everyone having more time on their hands than usual was just making the pranks more elaborate. And dangerous. Which meant Will wound up spending hours in the infirmary, treating scrapes, bruises, and more burns.

Talk about getting better at healing—without his big sisters around, it was like a solo trial by fire. Sometimes literally. The more time he spent healing his friends and acquaintances and… school tablemates, the more Will could feel his own abilities—his own magic powers, which even after three years of knowing his dad was a god still felt unbelievably awesome to say—getting stronger. Sometimes he could make a scrape stop bleeding and vanish from a kid’s skin just by touching it and thinking about it really hard. It still took something out of him, too, but—it was less and less every time.

It made sense, when he thought about it, that demigods’ divine talents got stronger the more they practiced them, just like any other skill. The same way Clarisse trained constantly with her spear, and a lot of kids spent a lot of time practicing swordfighting, and most of Will’s siblings were always hanging around the archery range. Healing actually kind of sucked in this way, though, Will thought, because for him to be able to practice that much and get better this fast sort of required that everyone else keep getting hurt. Which, what with all their practice being fighting, maybe they would have anyway. But right now the reasons they kept getting injured, and Will got in so much healing practice, were just dumb.

He voiced all that to Chiron after the old centaur spent an afternoon coaching him through healing a stomach wound—poor Jake from the Hephaestus cabin had gotten shot with an arrow, the Hunter who did it swore by accident this time. Chiron just looked sad and said,

“I fear you are entirely correct, Will. And—I fear your opportunities to practice healing may only increase in the coming months. Perhaps even the coming weeks.”

“Because Thalia’s going to turn sixteen?” said Will. He didn’t know what the prophecy was, but he did know it had something to do with a child of the Big Three turning sixteen, and Nico had told him Apollo had said Thalia would do that very soon. And he would know, Will supposed, with the power of prophecy and everything. Chiron sighed.

“Assuming she makes it that far,” he said. “And if not, assuming Percy does.”

Will swallowed hard, startled—he had never heard Chiron sound that bleak. He usually kept a stiff upper lip with campers, at least the younger ones like Will. But now—

“Yes,” he said gravely, “before all is said and done, Will, I fear you may have the chance to become one of the finest healers this camp has seen in decades.” He smiled sadly and set a hand on Will’s shoulder for a moment—“You are certainly making an excellent start.”

Somehow, that didn’t make Will feel any better.

The conflict between campers and Hunters finally, finally flamed out because of two things. First, Clarisse got back from her super secret mission weirdly quiet and twitchy—whatever had happened, she seemed really haunted by it—and in a surprising twist her younger siblings seemed to lose their stomach for the fight, too. And second, as the week went by without any news about the quest, camp as a whole just got too preoccupied with worrying about it.

Will was anxious too, since nobody really knew whether no news actually was good news right now, but he was grateful for the reprieve from the injuries. It gave him more time to play Yu-Gi-Oh with Olivia, Nico, and sometimes Julia, and more time to read his books, curled up in his camp bunk.

Sometimes his friends joined him for that, too. One afternoon Olivia sprawled across most of Will’s bed while he sat cross-legged with his back against the slats at the foot, which probably shouldn’t have been allowed even though they weren’t alone in the cabin, but no one older was around to enforce the rules anyway. Nico, who Will was starting to think of as his friend too, sat on the floor examining some of his Ancient Greek mythology books, tracing the words with his small finger and mouthing them silently. He looked as fascinated by being able to read easily for once as Will still felt sometimes, like about his school assignments for Chiron.

Will was looking forward to having Nico in school with them, he thought. He would probably have to sit with Julia and the other two elementary-school kids, since he was a fifth-grader, but it would be cool just to have another friend around.

“Who do you think his parent is?” Olivia asked Will quietly one morning when it was just the two of them walking to breakfast. “I don’t think it’s my dad. It’s going okay, having him in the cabin, but he doesn’t seem like one of us.”

“I have no idea,” said Will, who honestly hadn’t thought about it much. Going by physical appearance alone, Nico actually looked more like Thalia than anyone else—dark hair, pale skin, piercing eyes, even if hers were very light and his were very dark—but her dad seemed impossible. Or at least, he should have been—obviously Thalia existing proved he wasn’t, exactly. But Will was pretty sure they all would have noticed by now if Nico could summon the power of lightning, and besides, looks weren’t everything when it came to whose parent was who. Will had been told he looked a lot like his dad’s usual human-ish form, and so did Lee and Renee and sort of the twins, but they also had siblings who didn’t look like them at all. Sometimes Will suspected people just said that cause they were blond. Not that he had seen Apollo recently enough to compare.

“I’m guessing either Demeter or Apollo,” Olivia said, tapping her finger against her lower lip speculatively. Will shook his head.

“Not Apollo,” he said immediately. He wasn’t sure why he was so sure, but he was. “I think I’d know,” he added when Olivia looked at him. “Power of prophecy or something. I don’t know.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” she agreed. “I guess it could be Hephaestus. It’s probably not Aphrodite, he’s too nerdy and not cute enough.” Will personally didn’t think the Aphrodite kids were really as pretty as everyone always said, but he supposed that didn’t have anything to do with Nico. “Maybe it’s Ares? But he’s not, like… you know…”

“Enough of a jerk?” Will suggested.

“Yeah, exactly.” Olivia smiled. “Gods, it’s been weird being on the same side with them this week.”

“The Hunters have really brought the camp together,” Will said. “Maybe we should throw them a party or something, you know, to thank them.” At that, they both dissolved into giggles.

The winter solstice passed quietly. On the morning of the 22nd, Will woke in Cabin Seven to find camp weirdly silent. When he looked out, there was no sign of—well, anyone—but across the horseshoe, Cabin Eight looked conspicuously more empty again than it had yesterday.

At breakfast, it turned out he was right. The Hunters of Artemis weren’t at their table. So much for throwing them a party. At the Hermes table, Nico kept glancing at the empty one, looking distraught. Will supposed it must be cause his sister had left.

He didn’t know why the Hunters would have just left—it seemed like either a very good sign, like the quest had succeeded, or a very bad sign, and the world was ending. But the world didn’t seem to be ending, so… Will assumed it meant the quest had succeeded, and Artemis had returned to meet her Hunters with Zoe and Bianca. And then they had left again, which was why Nico was unhappy. It made sense. If it was true, though, where were Thalia, Percy, and Grover? And had they found Annabeth?

He didn’t get his answer until after lunch, when he and Olivia and the Ares boys were having archery practice. Will was suffering. He was doing better than Sherman or Olivia, but he couldn’t seem to match Mark. It was embarrassing; he couldn’t help but feel like a shame to his father’s good name.

“Dude, it’s not your fault your dad has a bunch of different specialties to pass on to different kids,” Mark was trying to reassure him, which was unusually nice of him, though it wasn’t making Will feel any better. “My dad’s only thing is war. I just happen to be better at the archery part of war. Where would we be if the part of your dad’s stuff you’re good at—not that you’re bad at archery, you’re okay—but what would we do if you weren’t extra good at healing? Sherman wouldn’t have a leg left to stand on.” He looked at his brother. “Not that he’d shoot any worse without them.”

“Hey, fuck you,” said Sherman, and flipped him off for good measure.

“Sherman!” Olivia admonished him. “There are children present. Think of their delicate ears!”

“Oh, right. Sorry, Nico!” He sounded like he actually sort of meant it for once.

“I was talking about Will,” Olivia teased, grinning over her shoulder at him, “but sure, Nico too.” Will just shook his head. Reaching back into his quiver, he found it was empty, so he walked off to replenish it.

Will and Mark had offered to show Nico how to shoot a bow, since he said he hadn’t before, but the younger boy had turned them down. Instead he was sitting on the sidelines, half-watching them, shuffling through his Mythomagic deck.

“Hey,” Will said to him as he grabbed a handful of arrows, “you still have to teach me and Olivia how to play that, remember?”

“Yeah!” Nico perked up at the reminder. “Do you wanna do that after this? Unless Bianca gets back today,” he amended, “and then we could tomorrow.”

“Wait,” said Will, “Bianca didn’t leave with the Hunters?” Nico looked up at him like he was confused.

“No,” he said. “I don’t know where the Hunters went, but Bianca wasn’t with them when they left. Neither was that Zoe girl,” he added, frowning, “the leader.”

“Oh, okay,” Will said. “Maybe the quest is over and the Hunters went to meet them somewhere?” Nico shook his head.

“No, that can’t be it,” he said. “Maybe Bianca and Zoe are coming with the other quest people, and they’ll catch up with the Hunters later. But Bianca wouldn’t just… not come back. She wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.”

“No, of course not,” Will agreed, because if there was one thing he understood about Bianca di Angelo from listening to her brother talk about her like she held up the stars, it was that they were very close, and she cared about Nico a lot. He’d been wondering what it would have been like to have a sister like that—all his own siblings were halves, at least to him. Nico and Bianca had gotten to grow up together, like the twins, not just see each other every summer at camp.

Before he could head back out to his shooting mark, Olivia’s sister Julia came running up to the archery range.

“Travis and Connor just got summoned to the Big House,” she said excitedly. “The questers are back!”

Nico was on his feet before she finished the sentence. He looked at the others, then at Will.

“I guess Mythomagic can wait for tomorrow,” Will said. “You go ahead. We’ll see you later.”

“Okay!” Nico shoved his cards into his pockets and was off like a shot. Will hadn’t known anyone could move that fast on such short legs.

As they were putting their bows away a while later Will caught sight of Nico again, at a distance, walking across camp—not with Bianca, but with Percy. That was weird. But Mark was trying to give him a pep talk again, insisting he needed to stop being so hard on himself about archery—apparently Mark could be nice if it was about weapons training—so it was kind of hard to focus on anything else as Will headed back to his cabin. It wasn’t until he got to dinner that he thought about it again, and that was because, well.

Nico wasn’t at dinner. When Will asked Olivia about it, she shrugged helplessly, mouthed like she was going to say something, then just pointed towards Percy. Will looked at the son of Poseidon, who was sitting at his table alone looking as despondent as Will had ever seen him. A low core of worry settled in the bottom of his stomach.

“Oh, are you talking about Nico?” Travis asked around a mouthful of brisket. “Yeah, he disappeared.”

“—He what?” Looking back at Olivia, Will saw tears appearing in her eyes.

“Percy said he told him his sister died on the quest, then the kid got upset and ran off into the woods,” Connor explained. Oh, no. Oh, no, no. “Now nobody can find him. So Chiron figures he’ll have gotten picked up by Luke and—” he looked around his table, the kids who hadn’t left—“his guys—or eaten by monsters.”

“Honestly, better monsters than Luke,” Travis said, scowling. “Fuck Luke.” The other Cabin Eleven campers nodded. That betrayal must have felt personal for each of them, Will thought, in a way it hadn’t to people like him, who weren’t his siblings. And hadn’t had siblings follow him.

“Fuck Luke,” they all agreed now in a rousing chorus, except Olivia, who looked as miserable as Will felt.

“Oh,” was all he managed to say. Then he turned and walked back to sit down alone at his own table. Looking around, he noticed Thalia wasn’t there anymore—the rumor had already reached Will that she had chosen to join the Hunters rather than turn sixteen and trigger whatever the whole Big Three prophecy thing was. Will still wasn’t the only one by himself, though. Now Percy and Annabeth each sat alone at their own tables, neither of them looking happy either.

For the first time, Will felt like he had something in common with the cool older kids who got to be part of prophecies and go on quests. He just really, really wished it hadn’t been this.