Apollo looked young. He looked like every young man who’d died messy and in pain that Much had ever seen. It was hard not to see the echoes of young lives lost pointlessly at war, hard not to feel a sickening mix of sympathy and grim horror. Morbid curiosity made him look at Apollo’s stomach and some kind of grief made him close his eyes.
“Shit, you really did a number on him,” he said, as there was quite clearly more than one stab wound. From where he crouched at the edge of the pool of blood, he cast a quick look up at Marcie, surprised and horrified by her, and still relieved. Still relieved it wasn’t her bleeding out on the carpet.
He had to remember he was an Olympian. One who’d threatened Marcie more than once. There was no innocence here, no matter how young Apollo looked. Do your job Much told himself, and carefully started to search Apollo’s body till he found his phone. He pressed Apollo’s dead finger to the screen to unlock it, standing and moving out of the bedroom (out of the air that tasted like blood) as he looked through it.
He wished Marian were here. He could hear her voice in his head as he looked through the phone - Apollo’s location was already switched off, that was good for them, right? - but he couldn’t summon any of her words of technological wisdom. He put the phone on flight mode before he looked through his messages. That would have to do for now.
Apollo had a lot of messages on his phone, most of them to people called Caitlynne and Tara and Rebekah and Quinn. But the last message to someone Much recognised was Clio.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
“I can’t see anything in his messages about him planning this,” Much said to Marcie, trying not to think about Clio. “So if he told anyone else he was coming here... it’s not in his phone. That’s good. A good thing.” He was scrabbling for good things, desperate to find something to offer her that wasn’t horrific.