THE SANDMAN ☞ TRAVIS STOLL

NINETEEN

ICHOR STAINS.

    While blood washes away, crimson swirling with water and flowing down the drain, the golden blood of the gods stains in a way that feels almost purposeful. You kill a god, you live forever with the stains of their death.

    As Valerie Greenwood stands under the scalding spray of the shower, she scrubs at her skin until it's red and raw, stinging with every faint touch. No matter how hard she drags the rag against her skin, the ichor stays, shining a bright, brilliant gold. It remains under her fingernails, tracing down her cheeks, splattered onto her hands and arms.

    She refuses to look in the mirror as she passes it in the bathroom, not wanting to see the stains of her killing in the reflection.

    It's been twenty four hours since Morpheus was crushed within her palm. Twenty four hours since something inside of her cracked and changed and shifted. There is a sense of power beneath her skin that, despite the fact that she's known an unbelievable amount of power since she was a child, is something she hasn't felt in her entire life.

    She feels like she could bring cities to ruin, end civilizations. The ability for sheer destruction hums within her. It scares her and intrigues her.

    In the safety of her bedroom, she curls up on the massive bed, dragging a blanket over her body.

    It hasn't been easy, getting to know this new body. She'd shattered a glass at dinner last night, just by wrapping her hand around it to take a drink. There's a new strength, a new sense of grace, to her movements that she hasn't yet mastered.

    She's managed to figure out the blinding, charring, incinerating light that radiates from her if she doesn't concentrate, though. Thank gods—thank her?—for that.

    "Valerie?"

    She doesn't lift her head from the pillow when Josslyn calls her name. "Come in."

    The eldest Greenwood is quiet as she enters the room, quiet as she crosses the distance between them and lays parallel to Valerie on the bed. "How are you feeling?"

    A loaded question. Valerie closes her eyes, a muscle in her jaw twitching. "Overstimulated." She answers, her voice little more than a hoarse whisper. "I can feel everything. It's too loud."

    Without being asked, Josslyn's fingertips push back the damp strands of hair at Valerie's temples, and to her credit, she doesn't flinch at the scorching temperature of Valerie's skin. "What can I do?"

    "There's two numbers in my phone. Yours, and Camp Half Blood's. Call camp and ask for Alyssa. Tell her what happened."

|

    The summons from the Underworld arrives at breakfast.

    They all sit around the table in the dining room, Valerie sandwiched between Travis and Clara, who clings to her like a second skin after the altercation in her bedroom the day before. It's silent between the five of them, all four Greenwood girls and Travis. They seem too scared to speak up, to ask about what happened.

    That silence shatters like glass when a bundle of poppies wrapped in twine flash into existance on the table in front of Valerie, a note tied within the twine.

    Her molten gold eyes widen, and her ichor-stained hands reach hesitantly for the note.

    The quiet that overtakes them as she reads it is harsher, heavier. It feels like the air has thickened, and each breath is harder to take.