Wild Heart ⋆ Riordanverse¹

xxiv. winners

xxiv. winners

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THEY ARRIVE IN CAMP HALF-BLOOD THAT NIGHT. The Hephestaus cabin practically suffocates Charlie and Thea in a group-hug, the Hermes cabin coming next with half-hearted "congrats on not dying" and an attempted pick-pocket on Connor's part. Reggie has been glued to her ever since after being plagued by nightmares nearly every night that Thea died.

After two weeks, they have finally made it home. At least home for Thea, the others can leave and go home to their other parent, but not her. She's preparing herself for the heartache that is Charlie going back to his home in Chicago. He offers for her to come, but she isn't ready for that. She can't face his younger siblings or his mother.

She takes every shift with the guard she can, practically daring anything to come and try to take the Fleece. She's spent two weeks in the hell that was the Sea of Monsters, she'll be damned if she went through all of that just for the Fleece to be snatched out right from under them.

Tommy stays, too. He wants to experience Camp Half-Blood—or rather spend time around people his own age, but both work too. It turns out that he's good with tools and knows his way around chariots, which comes in handy. He knows to the exact degree to engineer the rigs for the horses—automatons or not—which he says is yet another one of the perks of being a centaur.

Thea is as shocked as everyone else when Chiron announces that the chariot races are back on. Again, Thea's helping with Hephestaus Cabin's chariot, and Tommy is, too. She even pitches in with the Hermes cabin, mostly because Reggie pesters her into it with the claim "Travis and Connor have no idea what they're doing, they got glue in Maily's hair!" which is true, she has to comb the glue out of poor nine-year-old Maily's hair.

The Hermes Cabin isn't hers, not by Claim at least, but it goes unsaid that she has a place there just as much as the kids Claimed by Hermes. After all, if you aren't Claimed, or aren't one of the Olympians', the Hermes Cabin is yours to stay in.

"Your cabin mates are . . . delightful?" Tommy tries, wincing at how it sounds, even to himself.

"They grow on you," she says, glancing over at where Travis is trying to charm Katie Gardner into giving him three drachmas. "Very, very slowly. Like molasses eating you alive."

"Oh. Wonderful image." He tightens a bolt on the wheel. "Are you going with Annabeth and Percy, or Hermes?"

"And Tyson," she adds. "He's their pit crew. And I'm not on either, I just like to help build. Plus, this is more of a them thing, y'know?"

"Hermes' kids?"

"No, Princess and King of Atlantis," she huffs. "Them and their stupid niceness. They offered, but it wouldn't have worked."

"And why not? You three seem close."

"I mean, we are," she says, angrily beating a piece of metal into place with Charlie's hammer. "But we're also not, y'know? They both can go home to their cushy little lives. Well, Annabeth's is cushy, her dad makes, like, over a 100k a year. But she has a step-mom and even more half-siblings, and her dad, and Percy has his mom. Almost everyone in camp gets to go home but me, and I have to just wait here until everyone else comes back—"

Tommy softly grabs her arm and moves it to lower the hammer to the ground. "It is good to get that out, but please not with a hammer. You'll lose a finger." He pauses. "Or more of your fingers."

Thea sputters out a laugh and hits him across the chest. "Like you're one to talk! You're missing, like, two fuckin' fingers."

"In my defense, I am not quite as strong as my centaur brothers. They didn't know a firework would blow off those two."