VALERIE CAN'T SLEEP. The mid-afternoon sun beats hotly against the curtains lining the windows of Cabin 21, warming up the small space, and despite the fact that Valerie is cozy in her bed, with music playing softly from the corner of the cabin, she can't seem to find sleep.

    She knows her mother would laugh at the irony of it all, and Chiron wouldn't believe her, but a child forged by and built out of dreams being unable to sleep is nearly unheard of.

    A few years ago, she would have prayed to her father. Even after the branding, as painful as it was, she would have prayed to him, sought him out for a few hours of peaceful sleep.

    She doesn't pray anymore. Not to him, at least. Not after the dreams in the weeks leading up to that day in Manhattan, and that day itself.

    As a substitute, she prays to her grandfather.

    And it almost works. Her eyes begin to grow heavy, her breaths evening out, and she can smell the sweet, tangy scent of the dreams of those who, like her, are sleeping in the middle of the afternoon.

    But there's a knock on her door, and instead of Hypnos dragging her gently into the realm of sleep, someone is standing outside of Cabin 21, asking to be let in.

    There are exactly two people who would have the audacity and the courage to bother Valerie Greenwood—Alyssa, who wouldn't have knocked, and Travis, who should know better.

    Lo and behold, when Valerie throws the door open, it's not Alyssa. It's not Chiron, or anyone else worth talking to.

    It's Travis Stoll, still in his clothes and armor from training. He looks surprised to see her, and his eyes drift down to her bare shoulder and the brand gracing the skin there.

    "I didn't think you'd answer." He says after meeting her eyes again. "Can I come in?"

    She barks out a mirthless laugh. "No. What do you want?"

    She wishes it had been Alyssa. Alyssa, who can be in the room with her and sit in a comfortable silence, who can finish her sentence before she'd even begun to speak, who knows not to show up when she's not wanted.

    Travis doesn't let her tone get to him. "A bunch of the senior counselors are meeting up after curfew in the arena to play baseball. Chiron already signed off on it. And since you're a senior counselor..." He trails off, picking at the stitching of the straps of his armor.

    "I'm not a senior counselor." That's a lie. The minute she got her own cabin—the minute she was declared, formally and publicly, as the only known, living demigod child of Morpheus—she was made a senior counselor, invited formally to every war meeting, supposed to be in the room when important conversations were had.

    She's gone to one single counselor meeting in the year and a half since she'd been appointed to the position, and it was a war counsel, where they decided how to defend the camp against the Roman invaders.

    The looks she got when she walked into that room made it very clear that she was not welcome among them. So she hasn't gone since.

    Travis's eyebrows pull together. "Listen, the teams are uneven. I know you don't want to go, but there's eight of us and six for the minor gods' cabins." He pauses. "You could play for a couple innings, then leave. No one would mind."

    Valerie knows he doesn't mean it in a derogatory way, but the way he says us makes anger prickle at her spine. Us, like there is a definitive line between him and his friends, and her and the other children of minor gods. She knows he doesn't mean it like that, not one bit. But it stings.

    "No. I don't want to play baseball with your friends that hate me. Thanks for the offer, though."

    She slams the door in his face and turns away from it, resting her back against the black-painted wood. She slides down the door until she's sitting on the floor, arms wrapping around her shins. The position makes her feel small, but her heart beating against her knees feels reassuring, somehow.

    Valerie isn't sure when she started looking at him differently, in a way that makes her stomach flutter and chest hurt. She can't be sure, not really. Somewhere between the ages of four and twenty, something changed.

    All she knows is that the change has been painful in all of the worst ways imaginable, that it has started to hurt to look at him, and that he's noticed. In some imperceptible way, it has started to show on her face, and he'd known her when she was nonverbal, so he noticed.

    She just prays that he has enough common sense to not bring it up. The last time someone—Alyssa, her only friend and safe person—had mentioned the way she looks at him, Valerie had fled to Manhattan just weeks ahead of the war, and had only come back when Alyssa had dragged her by the scruff of her neck.

    Those had been the worst weeks of her entire life, with and without the confusion. And when she'd come back to camp after, everyone had noticed that something was missing from her, the part that made her feel human.

    Travis had been the only one to recognize the small, sister-sized piece that was not where it had once been.

    And she hated him—hates him—for it.

    For Valerie, hatred has always been the easiest emotion to feel.

|

    Katie Gardner is sitting with her back against Thalia's tree just after sunset, her blonde hair glowing gold in the fading light. She watches the road below the hill, watches the empty pavement with bored eyes. She wills the sun to rise again, to peek over the horizon once more so she can go back to bed.

    At least, that's what the daydreams bouncing around in her skull are saying when Valerie walks up, sword strapped to her hip.

    "Gardner."

    Katie looks up like she's been electrocuted, shock plain on her face. "Oh." She starts, scrambling to stand up even though she's eight inches shorter than Valerie. "Hi. Didn't think you'd show."

    Valerie swallows something snarky. "We don't have to talk," is what she says instead, far kinder than whatever would have come out of her mouth if she hadn't stopped it.

    "I know." Katie replies, and her hand goes to the sword at her side.

    Valerie has known Katie long enough to know her tells—she grabs for her sword the second she feels uncomfortable or unsafe. During the one counselor meeting Valerie attended, Katie's hand was on her weapon the entire time.

    Val should feel guilty. She totally, one hundred percent should. It had been her dream demon that got her into this mess, that apparently caused Katie to wake up half the camp with her screaming.

    But she doesn't feel guilty. Guilt is not in her emotional repertoire. If anything, she feels a small bit of pride in her chest.

    Because she did this. She inspired this fear. The morbid, evil part of her that relishes on the terror she inflicts and the repurcussions of that, light up with glee. It's something her childhood therapist had called 'destructive tendencies,' something that had gotten her in trouble more times than she could count.

    "I'll take everything left of the tree. You take everything to the right." Valerie says, eyes on the horizon. She hides her smirk by facing away from Katie. "If you see anything concerning, scream."

    Gods, Chiron might actually kick her out for good this time, if he ever finds out what sick and evil thing she has planned. That's the worst case scenario; the best case scenario is that she never gets scheduled a guard shift with Katie ever again.

    Time passes slowly on the hill.

    The only entertainment comes from watching the horizon and the stars slowly making their way across the sky, although Alyssa comes up around midnight with food. She brings leftovers from dinner, and she stays for half an hour, ranting about the baseball game with the senior counselors while Valerie eats.

    When she's gone, and it's just Katie and Valerie on the mile-long stretch of land, the night is quiet apart from crickets and the waves crashing against the distant shore of the Long Island Sound. The sky over camp is cloudless and clear, an inky indigo-black dotted with stars, but beyond the border, storm clouds are rolling in, and they are dark and heavy and mean-looking.

    It's not unusual for this time of year—spring storms often rage along the coast, although Camp Half Blood itself never sees an inch of rain.

    The air smells like lightning as Valerie prepares herself.

    She knows Katie's nightmares, inside and out. She's been inside of them—been the cause of them—for so many years that she can recite Katie's worst fears from memory.

    Katie is terrified of zombies, and has been since she was a little girl. One bad horror movie has stuck with her for most of her life, and it's so, so easy to conjure something so simple. Valerie did worse to her sisters in her childhood, with far greater consequences.

    "Valerie!"

    Katie's shriek is loud and piercing, cutting through the otherwise quiet night like a knife.

    Valerie's eyebrows pull together in confusion—she hasn't done anything yet, hasn't conjured a wicked vision to get herself kicked out of camp for good.

    Another screech comes a second later: "Greenwood! There's something coming up the hill!"

    Valerie's sword is out before Katie can scream again, and she's sprinting to Katie's side with her eyes on the shadowy figure moving slowly just outside the camp's border.

    Breathing slowly and shallowly, Katie whispers, "What is that?"

    "You should be asking how we kill it." Valerie says in response.

    Katie is shaking. "If this is some kind of joke, if you're trying to scare me again, Greenwood, I'll kill you." Her voice is as unsteady as her hands, and despite the fact that she's gripping her sword tightly, there's a tremor.

    It takes every bit of restraint to stop Valerie's scoff as she says, "Shut up, Gardner."

    She steps out from the safety blanket of Camp Half Blood's borders, inching towards the creature to get a clearer look at it.

    The next words out of her mouth are a breathy oh, shit as she recognizes the thing prowling below her. It's a cynocephalus, a monster with the head of a dog and the body of a man. It walks on all-fours, and its eyes are beady but alert when it focuses on Valerie.

    "Katie," Valerie whispers, not daring to take her eyes off of the monster. "Katie, go wake up Alyssa Winslow. Tell her to come here, and then go wake Chiron." She pauses and feels her instincts sliding into place over whatever fear she might be feeling. "But get Alyssa first. No matter what."

    The cynocephalus is one of those monsters that is so incredibly hard to kill. In all her years, she's never seen one outside of books—books that she's never read. She's never had to read them. Alyssa does the reading, does the research. She simply tells Valerie how to kill the things that nightmares are made of.

    Valerie needs Alyssa right now. "Gardner, go!"

    Valerie's brain only starts to kick into gear when she hears Katie's footsteps retreating into the distance. And when her attention is solely focused on the dog-headed beast before her, the final piece of her mental armor clicks into position, and the hair that had been standing up on the back of her neck settles.

    She's faced down worse than this—monsters with venomous bites and poisonous claws, beasts straight from Tartarus that can warp your sense of reality, creatures that can kill with a single look—and she's done it alone every time. She just needs a way to make sure this thing will die and die quick.

    Her mind is racing, thinking back to every battle she's ever fought, trying to remember how to kill beasts like it. She's killed lycanthropes, drakons, and giants, but nothing that has an animal head and a human body.

    "Hey, puppy," she calls, watching intently as the cynocephalus turns its entire body to face her. There are raised, angry scars all over the human parts of its body, like someone had tried their hardest to take it down in the past. "Sit and stay while I figure out how to kill you."

    Minutes tick by as Valerie and the cynocephalus observe each other with malevolent curiosity, thirty feet and a razor-sharp celestial bronze blade between them.

    Finally, when the creature's curiosity is starting to wane and a sort of bloodlust is starting to set in, twigs are snapping behind her, and Alyssa is slamming into Valerie's back. The dagger in her hand barely avoids skewering Valerie, and something hard and solid lodges itself against Valerie's ribcage.

    "Holy shit." Alyssa hisses. "Cynocephalus."

    She forces the dagger into Valerie's free hand as she tears open the book that she had been carrying. Val can hear the pages flipping even as she stares down the beast, as it starts salivating.

    Valerie frowns. "Any day now, Alyssa. I think this thing wants to eat me."

    Alyssa flips through the book with more haste, muttering to herself as she searches for something.

    "Okay! Okay. I got it." Alyssa says. "'The cynocephalus can be killed by decapitation combined with cutting off its limbs. The creature's nails grow into claws when threatened, and its bite causes infection, rigor mortis, and cognitive defecits.'"

    A sword has never felt lighter in Valerie's grasp. This isn't an easy kill, but it is far easier than most.

    Valerie spins the sword before resting the flat of the blade against her shoulder, eyes narrowing as she asseses the cynocephalus. The hardest part about killing it will be narrowly avoiding its claws and jaws.

    She sheaths the sword and wraps her fingers more tightly around the dagger's hilt.

    And then she's moving, fast as lightning, carving through the dark night like a knife through flesh. She takes the cynocephalus by surprise and is able to slice off its right arm before it even realizes that she's moved.

    Despite the fact that the dagger is Alyssa's and not her own, Valerie uses it with precice, deadly force. She has the other arm off within a singular beat of her heart, and even when she feels teeth sink into her hip, she continues to stab and slash with the dagger.

    By the time she's barely starting to breathe heavily, all four limbs have been chopped off, and the cynocephalus is laying flat on its back, its head raised with its beady eyes trained on Valerie.

    When the head is severed from the body, Valerie looks back at Alyssa and grins in a way that shows all of her teeth.

    "Alyssa," she says, still beaming, scarcely moving her mouth. "I can't move my face or my arms. Catch me before I fall."

    Alyssa moves quickly, but Valerie still hits the ground hard.

|

    "How much ambrosia did you give her? She's burning up."

    "It was either that, or she dies from a blood infection. What would you prefer?"

    A feminine voice, followed by a masculine voice. Alyssa's voice. There's a hand on Valerie's forehead, fingers brushing her hair away from her temples, and it reminds her so much of her older sister that her chest hurts and her nose scrunches.

    "Val, it's me." Alyssa murmurs, and the fingers on Valerie's forehead pause in their movements. "I know you're awake, V. Open your eyes and yell at me for touching you and bothering you."

    Valerie wants to keep pretending to be asleep, wants to pretend that she's in her bedroom in Manhattan with Josslyn playing with her hair, wants to pretend that the entire left side of her body isn't on fire with pain.

    Instead, she can't help but snort, one eye opening to find Alyssa hovering over her and Maxwell Altman, son of Apollo and a world-class healer, standing behind her.

    "I wasn't dreaming." Valerie whispers, face hot and feverish. She's teetering on the edge of consciousness, one foot in the land of Hypnos and one in the real world. "Alyssa, I was asleep and I didn't dream."

    Alyssa's eyebrows scrunch together. "Okay. That's okay. I'm just glad you're alright." Her face is concerned but her voice is absent of emotion, and even in her half-awake state, Valerie can tell that Alyssa thinks that something is very wrong.

    Maxwell's sigh is loud. "Greenwood, you have a fever. I gave you ambrosia, and your body is trying to burn out the cynocephalus venom. You'll be fine, but you're going to be loopy for the next couple of hours, at least until your fever breaks."

    Valerie nods, nose crinkling again. She looks at Alyssa. "I want my sister," she says, and her lower lip wobbles.

    "I know." Alyssa brushes Valerie's hair back again. "Just go back to sleep. I'll call Joss when you wake up, okay?"

    Valerie shakes her head, forehead bumping against Alyssa's fingers. "Not Josslyn. I want Noelle."