Wild ― Piper McLean

―xxix. snitches get stitches, jackson

VERONA WOULD BE FINE NEVER DREAMING AGAIN if it meant the nightmares would end. It seemed like every night she closed her eyes since her memories returned in April, some distorted memory would play behind her eyelids. Sometimes, they were almost pleasant—memories of her time in the legion, before Michael became praetor and led them on their damned quest. She would dream of racing Mercury kids through the forest, of war games with Jordan and Lawrence, of coaxing the unicorns into taking her for a ride when they tried to spear anyone else who tried. Some dreams were even of her childhood—of her father's voice singing in Italian, of the smell of paint and charcoal, or her little hands smearing pinks and blues across a canvas that would later be hung high and proud somewhere in her father's studio. 

They were nice, but they were nightmares all the same for the simple fact that they were reminders of everything she'd lost in Alaska. 

Part of her—a small part that would never see the light of day if she could help it—wondered if she would have been better off truly dying in that snowy battle. Anyone else would consider her fate a blessing; none of her friends got the same second chance she had. 

But she wondered if maybe they would've been better suited for it. 

She didn't know why she'd been the one chosen, why she—with her meager combat skills, her powers of simply talking to wild animals and not being able to do much else—was the one who got to come back, the one of the False Eight who'd actually been chosen by the prophecy. She wasn't sure she'd ever know why, and that haunted her just as much as her fallen cohort. 

Because what had she done with her new life but mourn her old one? 

Verona kicked her blankets away, sitting up in mild despair. In the pitch black room, with the fate of the world pressing in, reeling from a bad dream that was already slipping away from her memory, all she wanted was one thing. 

She wanted her dad. 

She wanted to be able to burst out of this room and run down the hall to his. She wanted to be small enough to whimper in his doorway and be held in his arms, words of comfort wrapping around her hurt and squeezing the life out of it until she was okay again. She wanted to smell the scent of paint that clung to her father's skin no matter how many times he washed it off, to eat his famous-to-her sporcamuss and get powdered sugar all over her clothes. 

She wanted to go home. And she was—across the Mare Nostrum, to Italy. But Rome was far from Venice, a foreign city in her home country. And if they failed, it would be gone in six—five, now—days. Who knew if Venice would follow? If the world would follow?

There was every chance she'd never see her father again. And even if she did—how could she ever explain how she'd come back to him thirty years later still looking sixteen? How could she ever face him when her friends' mortal parents would never get the chance to see their children again?

Verona squeezed her eyes shut. She wasn't sure she'd ever let go of that—of the wrongness of surviving, the guilt that dogged endlessly at her heels. No matter what explanation the gods could offer, no matter how much her friends tried to convince her she deserved this, she would never fully understand why her. Why it hadn't been fearless Jordan or genius Lawrence or sweet Stacy or strong Logan or brave Isaiah who was given this second chance. 

On the verge of suffocating, she slipped out of her bed. She pulled on a thick pair of socks before making her way out of her cabin, padding quietly into the hall. 

The muffle of her footsteps meant nothing, of course, when she nearly ran directly into Percy and Annabeth. 

Annabeth, with a look not unlike a deer caught in headlights, immediately hissed, "What are you doing out here?"