prologue! ——camp half-blood
❝ aren't you just a ray of sunshine? „
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ALASKA ALWAYS HAD AN INNATE TALENT FOR READING ROOMS. She could sense how others were feeling in her senses, such as smells, tastes, and colors seeming to radiate off of others.
It had surprised her a little when it first happened, but she assumed it was because of her recent exploration of witchcraft.
When she told her dad about the new vivid colors swirling throughout the air and the smell of freshly baked brownies all around the house—even though there was nothing baking—his usual warmth seemed to dim a little.
He seemed to become more distant and worried and even if she couldn't see what he felt, she would still be able to feel the sense of a storm coming.
It was the nervous feeling before going out to sea, sensing a shipwreck would be coming, although what would be coming would be much worse than a shipwreck.
𐐪𐑂
"SO WE'RE NOT GOING ON OUR CAMPING TRIP?" Alaska asked, a small pout forming in her lips.
Her dad was driving and tapping his hand along the wheel in tune with Queen's Don't Stop Me Now but Alaska could still tell he was worried, the deep crinkles residing in between his brows and decorating his forehead giving him away.
"No, this is the summer camp I was telling you about," he said. "You'll learn a lot of things there and meet a bunch of new friends."
"Like summer school?" she asked with a tinge of disappointment.
She was great at the electives part of school, especially in the art department, but when it came to the general education subjects, she struggled quite a lot.
"Not exactly. You'll be learning more hands-on activities; they have a lake for canoeing, strawberry fields, horse stables, archery, and a lot more. You'll have fun, I promise."
"You promise?"
He nodded and smiled at his daughter, causing her to smile in reciprocation.
"And what if I don't?"
"Well you definitely won't with that attitude," he said with a chuckle.
Alaska scoffed playfully and was about to retort when her dad turned the music up and tapped harder on the wheel.
"Don't stop me, don't stop me," he sang along. She giggled before joining in. "Don't stop me. Hey, hey, hey."
𐐪𐑂
"HERE WE ARE," HER DAD ANNOUNCED, pulling over and stopping the car on the top of the hill.
Alaska grabbed her duffel bag from the backseat and got out of the car, filled with curiosity. She let the bag swing and hit her side as she stared up at the big flat arch made of white stone and green vines snaked around the columns. The slab atop the columns had engravings in another language that she recognized as Greek. Her dad had taught her Greek so she was able to make out the words.
"Camp Half-Blood?" she asked confusedly. What kind of camp name was that?
Her dad nodded and locked the car doors before walking up next to her. The two walked over to camp when Alaska noticed her dad had suddenly stopped. He tried to walk more, but he couldn't.
Alaska turned and frowned at the sight of her dad still a few feet behind her. "Are you not coming?"
"I can't," he said, a little confused. "I think something's happened and I'm not allowed inside."
"Why not?"
He shrugged. "I guess people like me just aren't allowed."
"People like you?" she asked. "Like . . . adults?"
"More like mortals," he said, a little hesitantly.
"What? But I'm mortal too," she said, clearly confused. "Who isn't?"
He sighed and hesitated, wondering if he should explain what was happening to her or if he should just let her go and have everything explained to her. He opened his mouth, before closing it and running a hand through his hair.
"Just go inside without me, okay? Find Chiron and tell him who you are and what you can do. I'll be here at the end of the summer to pick you up and you can tell me about all the fun you had at camp."
"Tell him about what I can do?"
"Yeah, like all the colors and feelings you can see," her dad said, glad she was understanding.
She furrowed her eyebrows and tilted her head in confusion. "Is this some sort of science place where they're going to experiment on me? Why'd we come all the way to New York?"
"No! No, no, no," he said and sighed hesitantly again. "Listen, I'm probably not the best person to explain it to you, but just talk to some of the other kids here. If you don't like it, you can come right home."
She nodded slowly before dropping her bag and going back to hug her dad. He wrapped his arms around her and she was engulfed in a cloud that smelled of brownies. When they pulled away, the thin burnt sienna fog around him seemed to dim and spread a little—sadness, Alaska recognized.
"I'll see you at the end of summer," he said, kissing her forehead.
Alaska gave him a small wave which he returned before picking up her bag and walking through the two columns. She saw other kids scattered throughout the fields and she could see colors swirling around them from a distance.
Their auras—she called them, for lack of better wording—all seemed to swirl creating a beautiful light rainbow blend in the air above them. The smell of strawberries also hit harder from inside.
She almost didn't notice when two people walked over to her, and she probably wouldn't have if one of those two people hadn't had half of a horse's body. Alaska looked down at his horse legs before her eyes shot back up to his human face and she tried not to show any reaction.
Was the blond boy seeing this too?
"Uh, hi," Alaska said enthusiastically, a smile lighting up her face. Don't look at the legs, don't look at the legs. "I'm Alaska; I came here from Baltimore."
She dropped her duffel bag and stuck out her hand confidently. The horse-man seemed a little surprised but amused, and he shook her hand in response.
"Aren't you just a ray of sunshine?" the blond boy grumbled, rolling his eyes a little.
The horse-man gave him a quick side-eye before turning back to face Alaska. "Don't listen to him. He's just a little upset right now."
He nudged the blonde boy who unfolded his crossed arms and shifted his weight awkwardly. "Sorry," he mumbled.
"How old are you?" the horse-man asked.
"Thirteen and three quarters, sir," Alaska answered proudly.
The horse-man nodded and seemed to think to himself, looking back over the camp. "Mr. D is napping right now, but he should be waking up soon and we'll get everything sorted out.
"This is Luke," he said, gesturing to the blond boy. "He's a year-round camper. He can show you around—maybe that'll distract him for a little."
"Okay," she said with a nod. "My dad said I should talk to someone named Chiron though."
"That's me. Take a tour first and I'll explain everything with Mr. D," he said.
Chiron gave her a small nod before trotting off, a thin cloud of forest green following after him like a shadow. That only left her and Luke.
She tilted her head and furrowed her brows in curiosity at him. Opposed to Chiron's aura, which seemed like a solid cloud, Luke's cloud of purple seemed to wisp near the outside and dissipate into the surrounding air.
When Chiron was still near them, she couldn't smell as well since often when multiple people are near it was like an onslaught of smells and colors that gave her a headache if she was around too long, but now that it was just her and Luke, she smelled some kind of fruit juice. Capri Sun, maybe?
She couldn't just tell him he smelled like fruit juice; that was not the first impression she wanted to make.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" he asked, tilting his head to match her eyes.
"Uh, nothing!" she said, blinking rapidly a few times. "Tour of the camp, right? Let's go do that."
He laughed a little at her, causing her to smile awkwardly. "Yup, come on, Sunshine."
She quickly picked up her duffel bag and walked to keep up with him. They walked through the camp as he pointed out the important areas before they made it to the cabins and he took her inside the Hermes cabin where they sat on his bunk together.
"How come you're a year-round camper? I thought this was a summer camp?" she asked.
He hesitated, his smile dissipating a little. "I'm gonna be staying here year-round since I ... ran away from home. Chiron says a lot more people will come in a week for summer and this cabin will be filled with a lot of people."
"Why this cabin?"
"All the unclaimed kids stay here," he said. "And children of minor gods."
"Unclaimed? Gods?"
Luke nodded and ran a hand through his hair. "Chiron probably wants to be the one who explains this to you, but this is a camp for demigods. Half-bloods."
"Those aren't real though," she said. "That's only in Greek mythology."
"Did you see Chiron?"
She opened her mouth to speak before closing it again and laughing a little. "I thought that was some sort of blow-up costume or something. But how is that even possible? Aren't the gods—"
"They're alive," he said, quickly interrupting her as if they could hear the two, which they could. "They're alive and they're very real and sometimes they have children with a mortal and here we are. I'm a child of Hermes, hence the cabin."
Alaska didn't know how to process this information. Had she not seen Chiron, she would probably think this was some sort of psych ward that her dad had placed her in, but some of the things seemed like they could actually make sense.
"How do I know who my godly parent is?"
"Hopefully you'll get claimed during campfire," he said.
"What if I'm unclaimed?"
He shrugged. "You'll stay here and you'll still continue to train since you're still a meal to monsters."
"Monsters?" she asked, her eyes widening.
"I should probably let Chiron explain this all to you," he said and she nodded in agreement. "So how'd you know to come here?"
"My dad just brought me here and said I would learn stuff or something like that. How come he wasn't able to get into camp?"
Luke hesitated and his aura seemed to flicker like a broken lightbulb. "There's a barrier around the camp to protect the campers from monsters and it blocks mortals from getting in. The Mist keeps them from seeing a lot of things, but it's still best if they don't see anything."
"The Mist?"
"Another thing for Chiron to explain, I guess."
She nodded and changed the subject, trying to get more information that Luke could tell her. "So if my dad is a mortal, that makes my mom a god?"
He nodded in confirmation and she furrowed her eyebrows.
"My mom's dead though."
"That's what a lot of parents say," he said. "She had to go since she couldn't stay and take care of you."
"Why not? I'm still her child."
He hesitated. "It just doesn't work like that."
A silence fell between the two of them before Alaska spoke up again. "I saw her in a dream a few months ago. I was standing in a field of flowers and there were a bunch of butterflies and there she was—flying. She had wings and everything."
"How'd you know it was her?"
"I don't know," Alaska said; she was still a little confused by that as well. "Somehow I just knew. She didn't even look familiar or anything, though the first thing I thought was Mom. And then after that, I started seeing colors and stuff."
"You were colorblind before?"
She laughed a little and shook her head. "No, I can like—" she sighed in exasperation. "I'm gonna sound crazy."
"Again, did you see Chiron?"
"Fine," she said and chuckled a little. "I can see clouds of color around people—auras, I think they're called. Sometimes I can even smell and taste the air around someone even if nothing actually smells like that."
"That's so cool!" he said.
She smiled shyly and shrugged a little.
"What do I smell like? What color is my aura?"
"Uh," she already knew both of those answers, but she didn't want it to seem like she was just waiting for him to ask her. "You smell like fruit juice. I think Capri Sun? Or maybe Hawaiian Punch."
"Kool-Aid," he mumbled.
"What?"
"It's Kool-Aid, not Capri Sun," he corrected.
Sensing his discomfort, she decided not to ask how exactly he knew.
"And your color is like a ... purplish color."
"Purple?"
She nodded quickly and pulled out her Pantone color swatch book from her deep overall pocket. Her dad had bought it for her when she first started seeing auras so she could use actual swatches instead of Crayola crayons to match the colors of her friends and family.
Flipping to a line of purples, she held them up next to him to try to match before deciding on one. It seemed the most accurate since the auras themselves weren't solid nor did they adhere to the Pantone color spectrum.
Luke watched curiously as she pulled a sharpie out of her pocket, uncapped it with her mouth, and bit the cap as she wrote his name in small letters on the top left corner of the color swatch.
"There," she said, putting the cap back on and wiping it on the denim. "You are 5125 C."
"Why is your handwriting so small?"
"In case I need to write other people's names in there."
"Have you ever met two people with the exact same color auras?"
"Well, no, not yet. But I could!" she said defensively.
He raised his eyebrow skeptically before taking the book of swatches with minimal protest. "Can I?" he asked, gesturing to the pen she was clutching in her hand.
She pretended to sigh dramatically and dropped the sharpie in his hand. He mouthed "Thank you" and she giggled and watched as he wrote "Luke Castellan" in all caps across the colored rectangle.
"There, now you can actually make out what it says, even with dyslexia and stuff," he said and she frowned in confusion at the fact that he knew she had dyslexia. "Come on, we need to finish the rest of the tour."