An Undertow of Sand (Percy Jackson and the Cthulhu Mythos)

[Shujin]

Author's note: So, this was really hard to write and should have been out over a week ago. But it's longer than normal so please don't lynch me?

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction
​

Oh hey.

Welcome back. Everything okay?

Alright.

So where was I?

---

Humans still had a lot of survival instincts leftover rattling around in our skulls somewhere.

If you fall down while sleeping, you wake up. The dark is scary. The instinctive repulsion from a person that doesn't look like they should, wrong proportions, too pale, moving too stiffly or too gracefully. A sudden change in temperature gives you goosebumps. The chill down your spine when you hear noises from something you can't see, from something that shouldn't be there or the way that you notice when all the ambient sound disappears.

Hypnos wasn't here.

My body was in the back of a Jeep, probably leaning on Luke's shoulder, trying to catch some Zs. I was tired. I've been up at least twelve hours and all of that was bad news. Realizing what it meant to have to Quest during the Night. Luke's fate. Mine. Being harassed for four hours into Texas, almost being killed twice, Artemis'...everything. I deserved a few winks. We were finally leaving Houston and under the harsh, watchful gaze of the Night Winds, that frying pan wasn't yet hot enough to sizzle.

My sleep felt empty. Restless. I was already regretting trying to nap, because not having my friend here felt wrong. It felt like being back in the deep, dark ocean of the Dreamlands, hoping nothing noticed me.

'Yow! Percy, it's me!'

Clovis?

So I was totally going to blame that paranoia for why I almost cut Clovis' head off.

Or I guess, why I almost cut one of Clovis' heads off.

Uh, I said dumbly, staring. You look…like your dad, I finished lamely.

'Mhm,' the eight eyed shadow with three bull-like heads and a mess of a lower body reminding me of five octopus squished together hummed. 'I noticed.'

New thing?

'Very,' he said gravely and that jump started my brain. My logical mind was asleep, but that didn't mean alarm bells hadn't started ringing really loudly. Along with red flags, the mining canary started choking, the whole nine yards.

Wait, how the fuck are you here - didn't they ward Camp?

They better have, because if they couldn't be bothered to even do that much….

I was burning the whole thing down.

'They did.' The bull heads grinned and those teeth were definitely not for chewing cud. 'But I'm a demigod of Sleep. You can't chain me,' he almost snarled and I backed up. He sounded like Ethan. 'Not like that anyway.'

Clovis was a chill dude. He's been that way since the day I met him, half-asleep and everything. Now he seemed too intense. I didn't want to put Damocles away when he was acting so weird. Back at Camp, Clovis' Sleeping soul still looked like his mortal body. Kind of. He could change shape, just like a Dream spirit, but he's never looked like this.

Ethan was more sensitive about it, but Clovis still cared that he wasn't human standard. He looked like his dad. That was the only thing that kept me from thinking this wasn't Clovis at all.

Little cousin, I tried. I made myself look smaller. I had the feeling spooking him would be a bad idea. What happened?

'We went looking,' he admitted and I felt my stomach swoop back in my body.

You…went looking? In the Night? I took even more steps back so that I didn't lunge forward to shake him. He might eat me. Argh, I told you - I ran a hand through my hair several times, frustrated. It wasn't like I saw the Night coming. I didn't tell them all the ways it could go wrong because that would take years. I thought they would be safe as long as they took it slowly. You can't take this stuff for granted -

'My father, Percy!' Clovis snapped at me and he sounded like Ethan. It was his actual voice. 'No one told us anything - ' Annabeth. 'We needed answers - you don't know what it's like to find out you've been left in the dark your whole life.'

Castor and Pollux.

Clovis, I whispered, horrified.

He pulled himself back. His three heads swung around the same way a horse's or cow's would when they were strutting across a field.

'Sorry,' he whispered.

I almost didn't want to know, but this was my fault. Maybe without me, Clovis alone would go looking because his dad was already teaching him. But without me, no one else would have been at risk.

What happened?

'We went looking,' he repeated slowly. 'Grandmother was there instead.'

At this rate, my heart was going to be permanently lodged in my ass.

'She recognized us, Ethan and I.'

Her grandkids.

'We tried to tell Her what we were,' he said too calmly. 'That we couldn't go "home," but She didn't understand.'

Home, I said numbly. She grounded her children and their children. That was why not even the Dream spirits remained behind. She didn't even need to mistake them for rogue Oneiroi. Not really. Erebus thought I would take him up on his offer to bunk over at The House of Night, but I was mortal.

The House of Night drives mortals insane.

He didn't understand.

Are the others still there? I asked him quickly.

I didn't know what I was going to do if the answer was yes. My first idea of telling Mom I threw out just as quickly. I didn't need to cause more problems. Maybe Mr. D could fix them after? I don't know if asking Erebus would work. I spent two days sick as a dog from burnt mortality when he could have just given me a lift. None of Nyx's kids would go against their mother.

'We never made it.'

What?

'Percy, we're in the Dreamlands.'

I gaped at him.

That might actually be worse.

'Grandfather stepped in.' Clovis' form trembled. 'I don't know what happened. He said something. I could only understand a little and it hurt. I think we were sent 'back' but I think - I think Annabeth confused Her.'

Wait, I said sharply. What about Annabeth?

Clovis' baby blue eyes, all eight of them, blinked innocently at me. 'She doesn't - the Sleeping soul, she doesn't have one. Her soul doesn't split like ours, it's one piece.'

I'm sure that meant something, but I couldn't really think about it right now. My thoughts were a jumble of fragmented panic.

Are you telling me Annabeth's body is empty right now? She's trapped there?

'She's not doing well,' Clovis whispered. 'We were too close, everyone's changed.'

Because that's what exposure to gods like the Night and my brother does to you.

Fuck!

'I tried to protect them.' Clovis shrunk back away from me. I forced myself to calm down and dimly noticed burning green eyes closing up on my form. 'Took them inside a bit. Castor is doing better than Pollux, but Ethan made me let him go and I've been trying to find help…'

Okay, okay. I tried to breathe before remembering that I was a Sleeping soul.

Think!

Should I wake up, think it through and then go back to sleep? Was that a bad idea? It felt like a bad idea. Should I get Luke? Clovis could probably find me again, but what if something happened? Erebus intervened (favorite sibling, hands down) and Nyx tossed my friends into the deep end. How long have they been there?

Days?

…I was in the Dreamlands. Erebus came to find me. My brother came to the Dreamlands.

My brain felt like it was made of mush, but I was on to something.

Was it because of me?

Because I was there too?

Where are you?

'Some kind of safari,' Clovis offered. 'Mountains nearby.'

Can you see black towers or pyramids?

Don't say pyramids.

'The towers,' he said warily.

Oh, thank God.

Head right for them and then keep going past it, I said quickly. Run away from everything until you see a village. It's the right one if there's a bunch of cats. They'll help.

Clovis side-eyed me with four eyes.

'When you said a week ago about getting me a cat…' he drawled, sounding more like himself and less like everyone he 'took inside.' I don't know what he meant by that, but I wasn't going to ask. He did what he had to. Have to respect that.

You thought I was kidding? I tried to make my smile not look as sick as I felt. Just stay in Ulthar, and when Night's over, your dad will come get you guys.

This could be fixed. It had to be.

I wracked my brain for anything else that could help. If you ask around about the Dreamer, Willie. He'll help too. He was mortal once.

Clovis' heads bobbed thoughtfully. 'Okay. Ulthar. Cats. Willie. Got it.'

I swallowed thickly. I'm sorry.

'Not your fault,' my cousin said immediately. 'You couldn't have known. It was just…bad luck.'

I wanted to believe him. I couldn't. All of the sudden, Cliff's joking accusation that this wouldn't be happening if I hadn't been born wasn't funny.

Still sorry, I said. Be careful!

'I will. We'll be different,' Clovis said as his body flickered like a bad channel on the TV. 'But maybe we'll be okay?'

Then I was alone again in the dark.

Almost.

I whirled around, Damocles already drawn -

And stopped.

"It is just me," the small, auburn rabbit whispered as she limped into view. "Just…me."

How long were you there?

"I heard very little," she assured me. "I…did not want to intrude."

The creature behind her dwarfed the both of us. It was smaller than Hypnos, but not by much. It was hunched over, curling over the rabbit like it was bracing its back for a blow. I couldn't see how tall it was without craning my neck. The right half looked like a person. A black haired girl with golden hued skin and wearing a drifting pale shroud. And it was a girl, she didn't look any older than maybe fifteen, with a small nose, mouth and an iris of molten silver with a black pupil. She had a despondent, thousand yard stare.

The left half looked like a nightmare.

This is your inheritance, isn't it? Mom didn't take it away, I asked. I lowered my sword slowly. These jump scares couldn't be good for my blood pressure. Maybe it said something about my life (or my brain) that this all made perfect sense and clearly checked out.

"Why am I still surprised that you already know?" The rabbit honked softly. "What is left of my inheritance, yes." It looked up at the hulking form above her and introduced it like we were kindergarteners on a playground, "Perseus, this - this is Diana?"

The bunny blinked up at me. The creature seemed to breathe. The left side had her chest cavity flayed open. Hundreds of shattered ribs, bloodstained at the site of the breaks like they weren't ribs, but teeth fluttered open and then closed again. Half of the spine was fully exposed in a bloody column of warped and pitted vertebrae. It looked like someone went through the trouble of field dressing a human, cutting away all the fat and meat and organs but were stopped halfway through. Most of its weight was on the right leg, the left was gnarled and lame, ending in a club foot with black talons.

The left side didn't have a face. It looked more like a mask. Its eye was the hungry void I recognized like an inverse of the right eye, a dot of silver light in the center like a pupil.

Hi, Diana, I said. That answered one question. When Artemis changed her eyes, she was shoving this Name further away. Further separate. So this is where you keep her? In Sleep?

"Yes," the rabbit said eventually. "Manifesting her is not - it is better for her here. Selene has always had a way with Dreams…"

I got my hopes up.

Campers, I said abruptly. Some Campers fell into the Dreamlands and one of them managed to find me for help.

The rabbit reared back, eyes wide. "Oh…"

Can - can you do anything?

"I - as I am?" She sounded incredulous. "Perseus, I know of the Dream, we all do, but I have never been foolish enough to go there." I don't know what expression I made, but she shrunk into a ball. Her voice became very small. "Selene brought it to me. What little time I spent there was hunting and being hunted. I know nothing."

I should have known better. It wasn't really her fault this time, but I was getting a little used to feeling disappointed in her.

It's okay. I understand.

"We can still help, Perseus," she murmured as she turned away. "We are not Hypnos, but we can watch over you here. And anyone that needs it." Her voice went quiet as Diana slowly hunched even further forward, towering over us.

I felt lost. There was nothing else I could do. Everyone else was busy with the Night and I didn't put good odds on Olympus dropping everything for some demigods either.

Get Luke in here, I muttered as I stomped away until just the flowing tendrils coming off Diana was above me. I was trying not to run away like an upset child, but my stomach boiled with helplessness. He needs to sleep too.

Maybe this wasn't completely my fault, but I wasn't blameless either. Knowledge is dangerous. I knew that. I know that. I was too busy running my mouth on a righteous crusade to think about the consequences if anyone actually used what I told them at the wrong time, or to the wrong god.

The truth made the stakes so much higher.

So of course, like an idiot, I continued to shove Luke off a pier into the deep ocean and hoped he swam.

It began the way it usually did: my dumb ass just not thinking anything through until the problem was staring me right in the face, shakily whispering,

'Perce…what is that?'

Because duh.

Everything wrong with this situation was obvious as hell.

Luke's Sleeping soul was a shadow, an impression of a person and more movement than substance. The dim light of his mortality glowed brightly in the dark in between our souls wander into.

Uh, I said stupidly as I turned back around. That's…can't you tell? I tried to avoid saying it outright. I considered lying, but I wasn't going to do that to him. It's…well, it's -

'Artemis?' Luke sounded horrified.

Kinda sorta. I pointed towards the rabbit. That's Artemis. And that. I moved the pointing finger up. That's Diana.

'Diana's Roman - ' Luke went rigid.

Then his form nearly exploded, all spines and mouths with long tongues.

'You're the same?'

Remember when I said that conversation about the Romans was going to suck?

Yeah.

My bad.

Long story short, Romans tried to conquer them and almost did. If you can't beat 'em, join em, I said quickly. They aren't all the same, because how would that even work? Kronos was in the Pit and Rhea would be Ops and Cybele at the same time which is kind of weird -

'Percy.' Luke said.

I shut up.

His form trembled once, then twice.

'There are Roman demigods,' he stated flatly. We were riding in a Jeep with one. Him and his dumbass hellhound puppy. 'Do they have a Camp?'

Artemis' gaze drifted over to me. I don't know why. Maybe she was realizing that if she didn't answer him, I would. She looked down and away.

"Yes," Artemis said softly. "Camp Jupiter."

For a long moment, he didn't say anything, and I knew he was thinking about Quintus. An Olympic demigod old enough to start going gray.

He finally, painfully, muttered, 'Is it better?'

The bunny's ears drooped. "No."

I almost contradicted her. New Rome had the minor god of Borders, Terminus playing security guard since it was built. Lupa and her pack of wolves were around. The Little Tiber river was kind of useless as a boundary but at least it did something and they didn't need to sacrifice a demigod of Zeus to get it. The 'camp' was an actual city, meant to be lived in.

The impulse to blab passed, and I remembered that all my modern Roman knowledge was from whatever Apollo let slip. The downsides I didn't know about must be fucking terrible.

Why is it bad? I asked.

"...many reasons," Artemis admitted. "But the first and foremost reason is…it is not a good idea to rear children to believe in the Roman ideals of justice, responsibility, truthfulness and piety…"

Acta, non verba, Diana rasped.

Holy shit, it talks.

Luke's form rocked backwards and I knew he understood what it said.

"...if you do not intend to uphold your end of the bargain. Deeds, not words," Artemis said quietly.

Luke's shadow strobed quietly, mimicking someone taking deep breaths to calm down. 'I'm…relieved,' he croaked. 'How - how messed up is that?' He laughed and it sounded broken. 'I'm relieved Olympus is equally unworthy for two separate pantheons.'

Artemis flinched.

'Where is this other Camp?'

"Near San Francisco."

'San Fran - ' Luke strobed again. 'We were told to avoid the city. That it was dangerous,' he said and I remembered that he was just there two years ago, on a Quest for a Golden Apple. 'Chiron knows.'

The bunny rabbit looked at us with sad, silver eyes.

'I could have gotten Brandon help - ' Luke hissed.

No more secrets, I said. Not anymore. Not between us three.

Artemis lowered her head. Luke didn't say anything. He fluttered away. He looked almost like a dark, shifting bird as he paced back and forth. He came back spiny, like a pufferfish.

'How'd Olympus almost lose so bad?'

I blinked at the subject change, but Artemis seemed almost happy for the pivot, "We have physical forms," she said. "Give us a target to break and it will break. That has limitations. The Romans were incorporeal. Pure divine energy."

So basically a pantheon of poltergeists with the powers of a god. Yikes. I can see why that'd be tough.

It made me feel a little better about not feeling any kind of way about how the Greeks won. Desperate times call for desperate measures. It was just like that one dude Mom convinced to commit suicide by cannibal. If I had a problem with it, I'd be a hypocrite.

'Can't beat them, join them?' Luke echoed.

"How did we win…" Artemis whispered softly, almost as if she was talking to herself. "Perseus taught you, did he not? Of what Divine Names are?"

Luke's form shimmered, shivering. 'They're…aspects,' he said warily. 'They can be Given through worship and Taken away?' Artemis nodded, so he kept going. 'They can be made into avatars, a focus for a god's divine nature, having more makes you stronger because they are a source of power - '

"Power, yes," she interrupted. I felt like she had been waiting for that particular word to come out. "Power that is used and replenished, much like energy."

Luke recoiled as he figured it out.

"And our enemies were nothing but," Artemis finished.

'You grafted the Romans onto yourselves?'

"We had no choice!" The rabbit spit, but the anger faded just as quickly. "Nothing remained of Venus. We don't know what Aphrodite did," Artemis continued, speaking faster. "She wouldn't say, so we had to use other methods and Athena's was incomplete. Minerva almost took over and I - Selene, I - " she sputtered and stuttered to a stop.

Diana curled in, looming closer.

That's when you got adopted, I spoke up. You went to her for protection and let her change you. You gave in.

"It was…not that simple," Artemis said in a small voice. She shuddered, curling into herself as Diana's massive hand came down to gently cup around her small body. "But I was safe," Artemis said miserably. "Trivia, Luna, Egeria, Virbius - between her and the Three-Formed, there was nothing left. I was allowed to take the Name Diana for myself and - and the rest is history."

You turned on your adoptive parents then too, I pointed out. Endymion and Selene.

"It was not that simple," Artemis repeated stubbornly.

My gut had been right.

Rhea did have a sore spot about Selene's death and for good reason.

Luke sputtered, trying to say something before he gave up and just blew a loud, obnoxious raspberry.

'By the Styx, is there anyone you haven't screwed over?' He asked.

That's what I said!

We spent the rest of our nap ribbing Artemis over and over for everything under the sun (she left Apollo holding the bag of cat shit more than once. Never forget). I don't know if it was just my subconscious mind spitting out a crazy idea, but by the time I woke up, I was sure of two things.

One. Elder Gods like Selene can't really use Names. Which means Hecate, the Queen of those Below and the Three Formed gave up a Name for Artemis before and that bunny ain't dumb enough to burn down all those bridges.

And Two.

There was something I could still do for my friends.

I could end the Night.

---

"Uno," Artemis said quietly.

Quintus and I looked at her from over our cards. I grimaced as I leaned back against my backpack. Quintus smirked. The bunny's ears flattened as she narrowed her eyes at the Roman demigod sitting across from her. He mockingly narrowed his right back, grinning wider and Artemis began to look cornered. Her ears went straight up again in alarm as she shuffled protectively over her last card.

"Just one?" Artemis pleaded. "Can I win once?"

"No," all three of us said and she immediately turned on Luke next to her, betrayed.

"You were supposed to be on my side!" She protested. "I trusted your advice! Were you trying to make me lose?"

Luke grinned sunnily back at her.

Quintus slapped a +4 card in her face. She gnashed her teeth as Luke snorted, leaning forward to draw the cards for her. The rabbit thumped her seat as she turned away from him, huddled into her annoyed loaf.

I reached over to play a card. The sarcophagus, weighed down by steel padlocks and chains, rattled menacingly at me.

Too bad, it's not like we have a card table in here.

Our truck roared over the highway towards San Antonio. It was black with dark red flame decals on the hood. We had to switch over from the Jeep due to some blown out tires. Running over monsters tends to void the warranty on those. A Nightspawn was driving us. The Ghost Rider voluntold him, all golden eyed glaring from the helmet when he tried to protest. From what little I could make of his whistling, I creeped him out.

Which means I have a new hypothesis! Very scientific like. That maybe - just maybe - Nemesis didn't lie to me. Wait, wait. Just… hear me out, okay?

It wasn't Night when she said it.

Maybe I would be drowning in monsters right now, but I wasn't because Nyx's touch canceled it back down to normal.

Don't ask me why Night's monster kids hate me so much.

It's probably Mom's fault. Rhea said Fate and Night weren't feuding, but for all I know she's using Olympus-logic. According to Olympus, sure, Poseidon will drown demigods of Zeus caught in the sea without an excuse and Zeus will blast demigods of Poseidon out of the sky if he could get away with it, but they're not really feuding.

Inheriting bad blood was a thing, right? Just ask any spider about Athena.

…I can't explain the hellhound puppy.

Clovis' uncle looked like the same kind of vaguely goat-like, six limbed twisted creature with eyes all over that I saw birthed from Night when she came to visit Hypnos. He just looked more stable. Not tearing himself apart, not eating his own face or anything like that. Instead, he was stuffed into a poorly fitting leather jacket and might need an inhaler. He was sucking at the air like he couldn't get enough through the slimy tubes he had for mouths.

Our 'escort' to California was a large group of motorcycles, trucks, Jeeps and monsters. There were humans too, but I wasn't confident if they were actually human or if they just looked like it. The inhuman, the old and powerful prowled the outskirts of the parade of vehicles. You could hear them jeering, whooping and hollering in the distance, praising the Night. Every so often, there were gleams of eyes, flashes of teeth, eerie calls from the darkness around us echoed back.

If it looked like an outlaw biker gang of monsters making a run, it was because it was an outlaw biker gang of monsters making a run. That's how we were being escorted through the desert.

By being disguised as just another group of horrors. There were mortals on the road. I don't know where they were going or why they were leaving Houston behind.

Were mortals on the road.

Quintus blocked my line of sight every time, a look of resigned apology on his face. A screech of burning rubber, breaking windshields, doors torn off. Short, sudden screams. Then nothing.

We were the cargo. They weren't.

The back of my neck constantly hummed with a vague warning. I don't know if it was the ominous box we were playing cards on or just all of the barely restrained violence of the monsters around us.

Quintus' dog Mrs. O'Leary ran with them, coming back to the open door of our truck every so often to make sure her favorite human (that's still weird. His dog's broken) was still okay. She showed off her trophy of my chewed off backpack strap still in her mouth every time.

Sam was right.

Dogs were jerks.

Quintus slapped me with a +2 card.

This dog owner was a jerk too.

"I was doing you a favor!" Reverse cards suck. "You're going to pay for that, old man," I threatened as I drew my cards.

"You'll try," he said smugly, which was uncalled for, by the way. Out of seven games, I won two and he won five. I still won a few though. He then did a double take as we all took our turns. "Wait, old man?"

Luke snorted again. "He's twelve. What are you, forty five, fifty?"

"Forty eight," Quintus muttered.

"Practically geriatric then," Luke said indulgently as he settled back in his seat. It was the same tone of voice Mom had when she was trying to convince me that maybe your father isn't being an idiot right now, humor him please.

Real 'the child is being adorable, play along' energy.

I could work with that if it kept the panic from Luke's eyes. If I acted like nothing was wrong, maybe I could convince my group nothing was wrong a little.

"Objectively true," I nodded sagely. "Four times my age? Nutty. How are you not dead yet?"

"By being clever." A quicksilver smile I could have sworn I've seen on someone else flashed over Quintus' face.

"Clever doesn't stop your hair from turning gray," I countered. "Or like, arthritis."

"Can't argue with that," he said with a huffed laugh. "But if I am geriatric, what does that make of your divine parents then?"

"Ancient," Luke said.

"Paleolithic," I said. "Actually older than dirt."

"Old enough to know better," Artemis mumbled and Quintus laughed at her.

"I'm afraid age does not automatically confer wisdom. If it did, we would not need a word for wisdom's lesser cousin, experience."

Huh.

Never heard it put like that before.

We played a few more rounds before Quintus said, "Uno."

Artemis' wide silver eyes swung over pleadingly at Luke. He grimaced at her cards, shaking his head.

"Enough!" She groaned out loud. "I surrender!"

"What?" I gasped. "You can't just give up." My cards were garbage. The best I could do was stall until something happened, but it was the principle of the thing! "Don't be a quitter."

The bunny glared at me.

"It is called 'cutting your losses,'" she said snootily.

"Just for that, we will play until you win," I sentenced her and the rabbit belly flopped onto her seat.

"I hate card games."

"You hate losing," Luke corrected her with a small cuff to the side of the head. "You'd love Uno otherwise, don't try to deny it."

Quintus watched us with a fond smile.

Turned out, Artemis was equally bad at Rummy, Oh Hell and Pinochle.

"Are you cursed?" I asked as I gathered up the cards for another round. We were stopped, because those giant jellyfish weren't the only worrying creatures roaming the countryside at Night.

"No!" She gasped.

"Are…you sure?" I couldn't figure out what cursing Artemis' cards was going to do to her exactly, but I will never put any level of pettiness beyond a Greek. "Because Tyche cursed Apollo's dice and he didn't figure it out for like, a year, so maybe…"

"I am simply unused to it!"

"Card games have been around forever?"

"Exactly!" She hissed under her breath. "I grew up knowing them only as something men do for betting and gambling."

Oh.

"Okay, first, if anyone's gambling money with Uno, they're dumb and second - "

The van door slid open.

"- be almost a day, so you are better off trying before we reach San Antonio," Quintus was saying. He glanced over us. "We'll get moving again soon. Road's almost clear - argh!" A happily woofing hellhound jumped on his back. "Mrs. O'Leary! Down!"

The dog chased him away from the van and Luke stepped up. He was wheeling a really gnarly looking motorcycle with him, painted blood red and gold with eerie blue lightning along the machinery.

"What's with the Iron Man Mobile?"

Luke shrugged. "Its owner is a pile of ash back in Houston, sooo mine now."

I didn't know what to say.

"I'll be riding, so you're gonna have to lose for her," he said and the bunny hissed at him. Luke smirked back at her as he swung himself into the seat.

"When'd you learn to ride?" I asked.

"The second I got on," he answered easily, fiddling with the dashboard. "Like the bulldozer," he clarified. "I'll give it back to Annabeth once the Quest is over."

Annabeth.

My stomach scrunched.

"You are using someone else's divine gift?" Artemis hissed then, pointedly looking over with her ears to where Quintus was talking with the Dullahan. He had a hand in Mrs. O'Leary's eye-scorchingly pink collar as she play-wrestled with a painfully skinny white dog with red ears almost as big as she was.

Luke stiffened, glancing around before relaxing. Khione had hushed him about the fact that he could do that. Looking back, I guess Luke being able to use Athena's trademark instant skill mastery like he was one of her own demigods was a big deal?

"I'll give it back," he said quietly.

"I believe you," Artemis said just as quietly. "But…careful."

Quintus came back to Luke giving me a heart attack popping wheelies. I know he's a demigod. Hermes Enagonios, of Athletes, was a Name I knew he inherited. I know he was using Annabeth's skill. He hasn't killed himself yet, but I was still a little concerned.

"I see why you wanted the bike," Quintus said.

"I prefer 'em. They're easier to hotwire than a car and you don't need driving lessons," Luke said with a sly smile. "It's just like being on a very fast bike and you never forget how to ride those."

I have no idea if he's telling the truth or not.

Once we got on the way again, Luke drove next to us. The highway was big enough for him to shout through one open door of the van while Mrs. O'Leary harassed her human from the other door whenever she came back from playing around.

Artemis suddenly had a whole seat to herself and she shuffled back and forth anxiously. "How long until we reach the Roman border?"

"Hours," Quintus admitted with a shrug as his smile faded. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably. "Almost a day. We will be heading straight past San Antonio and across the US border into the desert - "

"What?" Artemis snapped.

"Into the desert," Quintus said calmly. "We have little choice. None here would risk a wendigo sighting."

The rabbit cringed back.

…what's in the desert?

"That's the second time I've heard that," Luke observed loudly. "What's up with wendigos?"

I remembered that Khione said we didn't want to meet a wendigo.

That she didn't want to meet one.

And this was a goddess that offered blood and snow to an old soul stealing tentacle murder dog like it was just a rowdy puppy that got out of its playpen.

Um.

…Okay, so - Olympus was shit to her, alright. She's still my second favorite goddess, but now that I've actually put into words her whole deal with the Amarok, I could be convinced that Khione might actually be a little crazy.

"To lay eyes on What Walks on the Wind…" Quintus trailed off. As if summoned by his words, the Night Winds blew harshly, resting a whistling noise as we drove further and further away from the Houston metropolis. We would be running parallel to the sea for a while yet, but the lights of the city were long, long gone.

"...is a bad idea," Quintus finished.

"Thanks," Luke sighed, exasperated as he maneuvered around a pothole. A bit of his rough accent was back, making him sound just like any other annoyed teenager. "That explains everythin' and totally isn't just as helpful as what I'd get from the gods."

Quintus' lips twisted unhappily at the comparison. "I apologize. You don't live as long as I have without being overly familiar with the bitter taste of secrets."

"No need for that," I said. "Whatever you were told, doesn't apply to me. I was personally trained by Apollo at the order of my mother." Quintus shot me a sharp look. "I'm teaching Luke too."

The Roman demigod looked over at Luke curiously, only to get a short nod back.

"It's been…enlightening," Luke said.

"Painful too, I bet," Quintus replied evenly.

Yeah, no kidding.

The Roman sucked in a harsh breath. "The wendigo is legion, yet singular. A hive mind. An eater and wearer of flesh. A being and an idea in one. Knowledge of that idea is restricted, because knowing increases the risk of exposure."

"Oh, one of those," I said. "Memetic hazard."

Like that book I told Athena Cabin about with all the Names of gods like the Night and Fate in it. I only knew two of my mother's Names, because some of them were too dangerous for me to even know.

"Yes," Quintus said with a wry smile. "One of those." He crossed and uncrossed his arms. Then he was playing piano on his knees. "We'll be stopping again. I do have to pull my weight." Quintus was still shifting in his seat, uncomfortable. "It was part of the deal. I know how to navigate - we have to pass through an Indus worm nest."

I blinked.

Shit.

"Those are nasty," my mouth said.

Think carnivorous pale worms big enough to swallow a car whole with giant naked mole rat teeth and venomous spit. Hard to kill, like miniature hydras. Just cutting one in half meant now you had two worms.

They also had a bad habit of hollowing out the planets they infested.

"Indus worms," Luke said blankly as Quintus raised disbelieving eyebrows at me. "Don't those live in the Indus river? In India?" He glared at me, for some reason. There was no universe where Indus worms existing was my fault. "And are extinct?"

"Weelll," Quintus started to say.

"There are two of you!" The roar of the motorcycle engine was almost loud enough to drown out Luke's cursing as he drove off.

Rude.

Artemis stared after him. Quintus' lips frowned, before he pursed his lips and let out a god awful high pitched whistle that assaulted my ear drums. Artemis winced bodily as Mrs. O'Leary happily ran over.

"Hey, girl," her master murmured as he reached out to rub at her ears. "You see that boy?" He pointed in the general direction after Luke. "The blond. Can you keep an eye on him for me? Can you do that?"

When she went to bark, Quintus snatched the backpack strap out of her mouth. He tossed it onto the floor of the van next to me as if I actually wanted it back.

"That's a good girl." He distracted her from her stolen trophy with a slap on her broad back and a tossed dog treat. "Off you go."

She booked it, barking.

"So he can handle Filipino vampires, Russian werewolves and the headless Celt, but Greco-Indo worms are what gets him?" I asked no one. I faintly heard Luke's muffled screech as a hellhound puppy ran him down.

"Hmm. If I had to make a guess…" Quintus leaned back in his seat, hand on his bearded chin. "It's because other pantheons and their horrors are much easier to accept than yet another lie from your own."

I heard the bitterness in his voice. 'Yet another.' I wondered what happened that taught him the truth. Did anyone tell him or did he have to wait until he grew up and realized the world outside didn't like staying in its little Roman box?

Or maybe the Roman box wasn't all that little.

Half of the Roman pantheon came from somewhere else. It was like some kind of weird daisy chain. The monsters followed their original pantheon that were conquered by the Romans that were underneath the Greek.

I asked Apollo how they kept the secret once.

His guilty face said it all.

"It was not a lie," Artemis said quietly. "The native tribe was extinct."

"They come from elsewhere," Quintus scoffed. "There is no such thing as a native tribe of Indus worms. The invasion simply started becoming manageable after the Hindus personally intervened." Artemis' ears flicked back and forth, but she didn't say anything. He looked at me next. "Only gods would call a selective culling of their transient parasites to be extinction."

"Only some gods," I said. When my mother says something is extinct, she means it.

Quintus conceded that, nodding. "That's right, you said you were trained by the god of Truth and the restrictions didn't matter." He scratched at his beard. "How long was your apprenticeship?"

"Uh, seven years?"

I redid the math as Quintus' eyes grew huge. Left unsaid was that most of the 'training' was Apollo's desperate flailing trying to figure out what kind of demigod I was, tiptoeing around the Celtic Name and then shitting his pants when he figured the Mórrígan out, realizing he didn't know half as much as he should and wondering what Ananke wanted from him. He tried his best, but I'm not sure he ever figured that last one out.

I haven't either, but I wasn't about to complain about it. I couldn't blame Mom's scheming for just the bad things in my life. I got a big brother out of it.

"Almost eight, why?"

"What'd you mean, why?" He gasped. "I was expecting a year at most - eight years? That's unheard of - the god practically raised you?"

My mother raised me.

I…wasn't going to say that though. It was bad enough with Luke. I didn't need to brag to someone else, who already grew up and had been on his own for decades, how much of an outlier I was in my own pantheon.

"Mom wanted him to? He's the god of Prophecy. Sometimes gods raise kids." I said eventually. I tried not to sound defensive. I don't know if I managed it. "And they choose champions and stuff. It happens."

"From the primogenitors?" Quintus was incredulous. "The gods that never even acknowledge the mortal realm?"

"They have!" I protested. I knew that Latin word. You didn't think I made up the term 'Elder God' did you? That's the English translation. Primogenitor had the same meaning as protogenoi did in Greek:

The Original Ancestors. The Firstborn. The Eldest.

Yeah, I know.

'A half-blood child of the eldest gods.'

And Olympus thought it meant the youngest children of Kronos and Rhea for …reasons? Even Athena put her money on Demeter being the one. Maybe because she was the only one of the Elder Olympians connected to an Elder God?

I was hoping the goddess of Wisdom was just praying the protogenoi were never going to get involved in anything ever, because I'm not gonna lie.

She done goofed.

"The Night and the Pit each had a demigod once," I continued.

Quintus blinked, taken aback. Some expression flashed over his face before he frowned. "I see."

Telling him that was thousands of years ago would defeat the point. I also didn't volunteer that the demigods of the Night and Pit were monsters. I knew the gods of Olympus put down the daughter of the Pit, but I didn't know what happened to the Night's son. I am not sure I wanted to know.

"Mom's never been good at doing what you expect her to," I said instead.

Quintus snorted softly. "I suppose that is one way of looking at Fate."

"Yeah," I said weakly. I just realized that quirk of hers might be Mom going out of her way to test the limits of her chains, desperate for any kind of freedom. It was why she had me in the first place. "One way of looking at it."

I felt sick.

"Let's play something else."

Artemis moaned, burrowing her face underneath her paws.

"Don't be like that." I nudged her. "Mythomagic?"

Quintus perked up. "I have not heard of that one. Is it new?"

"Ever heard of Magic: The Gathering?" I asked as I dug my card tin out from my still damp, slobbered on canvas backpack with a missing strap. I could only hope Mom would fix it once this was over. My bag and my shirt.

"Vaguely."

"It's the same kind of game, came out about six years ago. It's based on our pantheon."

Quintus curiously drew a card from the deck I held out towards him.

I saw the blood drain from his face. Then he turned away from us to try to hide it, coughing. "Based on our pantheon, right."

I took the card from him.

"Not this one," I said, holding the card up before I put it to the side. You could tell by the gold band along the edges and the shiny, holographic background that this was a mythic card. The rarest of the rare. Reflecting light that didn't exist back at us from the seat of the van was the hybrid trap and spell card:

The Labyrinth.

"It was banned in tournaments five minutes after it came out," I offered as Artemis looked the card over, her little nose wiggling furiously. "And for good reason."

A defense or offense card that allowed you to draw 2 extra cards and 'lost' the opponent's highest attack card in a maze for three turns?

Busted.

The only way to counter it was with the rare String of Ariadne card so you only lost 1 turn and could draw a card too. I've been trying to get my hands on this card for my collection for two years.

It was just like the Oracle of Trophonius rare card. The one I knew I didn't have in my deck before I drew it for our Quest Prophecy. And afterwards? I couldn't find it again, no matter how many times I checked. I put it out of my mind, forgetting about it, until three weeks later when I woke up to the crack of angry thunder with that Prophecy tugging at my mind. The weird thing is, I've been badgering my parents to take me to the store to buy booster packs just to make my readings easier. They only used the cards I actually had before.

I don't feel possessed by an Oracle spirit? Apollo said I wasn't.

I shuffled the deck again. Artemis cast suspicious looks between the two of us. Out of the corner of my eye, Quintus' ghost ground down to a halt, the gears seizing with a relieved smile and crumbled to ash.

"You're not going to ask?" Quintus said quietly.

"Ask what?" I shrugged. "I don't care."

"But - " Artemis started.

"He's doing us a big favor," I pointed out. "He can keep a few secrets, right?"

And I would be a hypocrite if I wanted to know his life story, while not telling him we were being hunted because of our rabbit's life story.

Maybe I should tell him. Do you think he deserved to know? It's not like Aura is breathing down our necks right this minute or anything. We still have to get to California. What if he changed his mind about helping us because of Artemis?

I should probably tell him.

Just…not right now. Maybe we can hoof it once we get to Arizona or something. I was fine being the flashy, distracting puzzle for a son of Intellect for a bit.

"There's no way he could turn out to be any worse than the vampire," I reasoned out loud. "Because that one might really bite us in the ass eventually."

"And whose fault is that?" Artemis said.

"Uh, excuse you." I scowled at her.

She was stealing phrases from Luke to use on me and I did not appreciate it.

Storm gray eyes searched my face. I don't know what he was looking for. His shoulders slumped and for a moment he looked like he was far away, but then he looked down as I split the cards into seven groups and then gathered them up again. I split the deck in half. It wasn't going to be perfect, but Quintus seemed like the type of guy that would enjoy a challenge.

"So the rules. We both start with five cards - Arty, you're with me…"

We were halfway through the new game when Luke came back. "New game?"

"Yeah," I said as I placed down The Cydonian Cincture as a face down trap card on the coffin. The sarcophagus rattled its chains, protesting, but nobody cared. Artemis inspected the remaining cards in my hand from my lap. "Mythomagic."

"Huh." Luke glanced over the cards, lingering on Tisiphone, the Punishment and The Minotaur cards facing off against each other on the field. He looked fine. He leaned into his motorcycle's handlebar. "How's she doing?"

"Arty's been cursed to be bad at card games," I admitted. "All of them."

The rabbit squeaked in protest. "You cannot tell me my boar would ever lose to - "

"What about 'card game based on our pantheon' do you not understand?" I asked her. "Honest question."

Artemis tried to blame me for it (my instructions were fine!) and Luke smiled.

I think we're okay.

In about another fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, the convoy of monster bikers went off road away from the city of San Antonio. Quintus was all business, staring out into the darkness with pupils that were shaped like squares, gray eyes gleaming like they were lit from within. Artemis huddled on my lap as I shuffled my Mythomagic deck over and over again.

I breathed out. Then I let my mind drift a little. I didn't try to focus or force anything. I watched Mrs. O'Leary bound up happily for an ear rub from a resigned Luke before she took off again. I flipped a card. I was hoping for a sign. An Indus worm nest was one hell of a rough patch on a road trip.

Chiron, the Trainer of Heroes.

Again.

Mom? I prayed. What are you trying to tell me?

Instead of a clue, or a nugget of wisdom or some help, there was a strange electronic beeping sound ringing out in my head.

What the -

Is that -

Is that a fucking busy signal?

Mom? What is this? What's happening? I have never felt her respond like this before. I then had a sudden realization. Are you still mad?

The beeping continued.

Mom - Mom, you know this one is on you, right?

The beeping got louder.

Literally an Elder God - have you tried not having shit powers?

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

I take back every good thing I've said about my mother.

She's the worst.

Our van rumbled to a stop. Quintus was out of his seat immediately. I watched his hand drift to his dagger, but he didn't draw it. His expression was tight.

"Take a bit of a walk," he told me, making the effort to relax his face. "Stretch your legs. Gotta protect those young knees of yours."

I snorted, but got out with our rabbit clutched to my chest. "Whatever, old man."

That earned me a light cuff on the head.

"Brat." The Roman smiled.

I turned to Luke. "Coming with?"

He hesitated. I saw his cloudy blue eyes dart around.

The monster bikers were setting up some kind of perimeter, all their wheels in a circle, facing outwards. One of the tall, hulking 'distractions' had started prowling around like it was hunting everyone in the center, restless.

It was dressed like it was from the Middle Ages in a rusted plate of armor. It still had spear handles, arrow shafts and a few broken swords sticking out of it as it dragged something behind it in a massive claw. I couldn't see what it was clearly through the brush grass, but it was either a mannequin or a corpse. It was a vrykolakas, a kind of revenant. It was just enough ghost to make its form indistinct, and just enough beast to hunt the living.

Never heard of them?

I guess they were originally Slavic monsters, but Macedonia shared a border. They're Greek too now. You could tell. It was staring at Luke and I, thin nostrils flaring.

Luke smiled weakly at me as he sank into the open seat in the van as Quintus vanished into the darkness with Mrs. O'Leary at his heels. "I'll…stay here. You can go on, if you want."

I swallowed the flash of unease I felt. Were we okay? "Alright."

I ended up standing guard for Artemis as she went to the bathroom behind a tree. This part of Texas was really forestry with short, tough grass and gravelly soil. The rabbit was embarrassed, but at least it wasn't the utter disaster of last time.

"I do not trust Quintus," Artemis said quietly. She was cradled in my arms, ears alert. "He smells like machine oil and sulfur."

"Is smelling like a mechanic a crime now?" I asked, shrugging. I didn't make a habit of telling other people how someone died. That seemed personal. "He seems nice."

"Your judgment is the very definition of suspect," she said bluntly.

"...that's…fair," I said thickly, stung.

I wanted to snap back that she was right, because I thought she was great once, but I couldn't. She was hardly the only person I've misjudged. She wasn't even the latest. My mother had that spot.

I wanted to blame the ADHD, but maybe I was just stupid.

Artemis wriggled in my grip.

"I…am sorry," she said softly. "I did not mean it that way - "

"I get it," I said tightly. "You don't have to explain. He's playing nice with the son of Fate, like everyone else."

The rabbit stiffened in my arms. For a second, I thought (I hoped) she was going to explain anyway. To tell me what was wrong with Quintus or tell me I was wrong, but she didn't. (She won't, just like with Khione) My heartbeat pulsed in my ears.

Take away her power, her privilege and what was even left?

Right now, it was looking like the only parent she hasn't backstabbed was Leto, and that's because the woman was three-quarters dead. Rhea called her out as a problem child. Artemis wasn't a wolf, she was a rabid dog.

Or maybe a vulture.

For the first time since Rhea told me what it meant, I truly saw what Mom's punishment was. Like Narcissus as a flower staring into its own watery reflection, or the wind nymph Echo forced to repeat the words of everyone she heard as an eternal gossip.

A cruel echo of the victim's true nature.

Ananke cursed Artemis and it was so very classically Greek.

I started walking. Just so that I was moving, just so that I was going somewhere and not waiting around. I was trying to keep the black feeling in my stomach (my friends are trapped in the Dreamlands. The Night. Luke doesn't know anything. Have to get the Bolt, if it's not in California, what do I do?) from eating me alive.

The rabbit was silent.

I walked in a circle, making my way back to the Jeep where I dumped the rabbit back on Luke. He said he'd handle her, so let him. I had to keep walking, because then I started to wonder why we were all staying here if Quintus was supposed to navigate us through an Indus worm nest and then I was thinking that maybe it was less like having a map and more like being the first soldier through a field of landmines.

That didn't give me good feelings about all this.

It was in the middle of my second rotation when one of the monsters called out to me. My head jerked in their direction automatically, my ears ringing with I understood that and I shouldn't understand that. It wasn't in Greek and it wasn't English either.

The back of my neck prickled with warning as I realized that I had wandered way too close to Ghost Rider and the group of monsters that surrounded him.

Thin, hungry faces eyed me.

"I…understood those words separately," I admitted. I shifted from one foot to the other, resisting the urge to draw my sword or run.

Ghost Rider's head was perched on top of his bike as his body turned towards me. His motorcycle was all black with a grinning skull decorating the front suspension. It was big enough, cracked and stained enough to be real. The handlebars were long and curved, looking just like what you would expect out of a classic motorcycle club or something you'd see from the Grease movie, just built for a giant.

The one who called out to me had an outfit that looked like it was made out of belts with silver buckles, a featureless helmet on her head. Her bike looked like she fused a three headed deer with sapphire eyes to an engine and two white tires and the animal was still alive.

"But you did understand," the woman said. She was tall, but not as tall as Ghost Rider.

"Mac Morrigu," the Ghost Rider rumbled in his deep, dark voice. "Tuigeann sé ar ndóigh."

Son of the Morrigan, I heard. Of course he understands.

Yeah, right.

Obviously.

Like any of Mom's kids wouldn't understand Gaelic - who do you think you are? Get the fuck out.

I tried not to stare at the lady monster's ghost. Under her helmet, she was pretty the same way Hiraya was. Recognizably something like a human, but clearly not. When she took off the helmet, it was even worse. I looked at her and sometimes I saw a woman that could be related to Luke with her sharp features and pale hair. Then I blinked and I saw greedy shadows and smoke and fire licking at her skin from the inside. Her eyes burned like stars and she flashed me a grin with sharp translucent teeth like icicles in the sun.

So, that's an elf, my brain went stupid at her pointed ears.

Fuck.

"Um, hi," I said, like a dumbass.

"Your need must be great, to risk the Romans," she said in a dialect that didn't sound like modern Irish at all. I had to focus on it to be sure of what she was even saying.

"Like, are they just really grumpy right now, or…"

That got me a bright flash of her star-like eyes and I had the feeling that the shadow and smoke lurking in her skin was amused. I bit down on my lip. Don't expect straight answers from elves, right.

She wouldn't say anything if it was just the normal risk of coming across a Roman right now. So that must mean it was the fuck you in particular risk. Which was.

Not great.

We were planning to break into Ares' temple while in their territory and hopefully get away with our lives. That would be hard enough without anyone having it out for me.

I didn't even do anything!

For fuck's sake, Mom!

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.

I wanted to scream, but that wouldn't help anything.

The monsters around drifted closer only to scatter when Ghost Rider's golden eyed gaze opened.

"Be sure to defend your mother's honor, Kieran," the elf told me.

"An mhi-onόir?" I blurted out. I ignored the name (but real talk, what is it with old monsters calling me some variation of 'dark boy?').

The elf (what is she, Norse ljósálfar? Welsh Tylwyth Teg?) had a sharp, eagerly malicious grin. "Do not die too quickly. It would be disappointing."

"Disappointing, right," I said. "Sure you don't mean embarrassing? For her, not me. Because I'll be dead." What was I doing? Shut up! "But thanks, anyway. For the vote of confidence."

I beat a hasty tactical retreat.

I was too busy wondering who Mom pissed off (and who was going to be pissed at me in response) to realize I hadn't taught myself how to ask about 'dishonor' yet.

I hadn't learned…

I stopped dead in the middle of the clearing. The circle of monsters were penning me under the empty sky. I felt trapped suddenly, almost claustrophobic. Did you think it was weird that Mom raised me, but I didn't know if she had blessed me with Greek fluency when Castor and Pollux asked? It's okay if you don't remember that. It was a while ago.

Apollo was the one who figured out I could understand the Greek dialect he had been born knowing.

I could understand Coptic Egyptian, you know.

Cliff figured that one out. We both thought it was because Coptic Egyptian was written with mostly Greek letters. Ptolemy, you know? The Greeks, Romans and Egyptians had all been one backstabby family ruled by Serapis back then.

Cliff called it a 'pantheon bleed through.' When the pantheon that laid claim wasn't the only claim. It was a monster thing. The elves could be both Old Germanic or Gaelic. The vrykolakas could be both Slavic and Greek. Cliff's Cynocephali Mom was all Egyptian, but my best friend was Greek and Roman too. I'm not a monster, but we thought that maybe it happened to demigods as well.

I highly doubted my pants shitting Prophecy scare would have been in Egyptian, but I didn't rule it out then either. Not likely doesn't mean impossible.

Mom has an Egyptian Name, you know.

The Black Pharaoh.

Mom said she let me inherit from all of her Names because she wanted me. Because she chose me.

But Mom can't lie, not won't. My whole life up to this point was shaped by everything she let me assume was the truth. By everything she didn't say.

The god within Fate was there when I was born to Ananke. She's an Elder God. They are always there.

I don't like thinking about this.

I took one shuddering breath and then another before I almost ran back to the van.

"You alright?" Luke gave me a look. He was brushing Artemis again, but this time she seemed 100% with the program, huddled on the seat as if she was trying to disappear.

"We might want to avoid running into any Roman gods," I muttered.

Luke snorted. "Yeah?"

"I mean, we really might want to avoid any Romans." I chewed on my bottom lip. "Or I really want to avoid - look, if you have any ideas for how we're going to handle after we break into that temple - "

A loud 'bwaooooh' howl of a big dog shattered the quiet.

We all sat, tense as everyone around us sprung into movement. The 'distractions' vanishing from sight into the darkness and engines starting with throaty grumbles. There was talking, but the only one I could make out was Ghost Rider's deep voice.

Mrs. O'Leary was still barking her head off somewhere along with her friend.

Something in the dark screamed. It almost sounded like a person being tortured to death, but it was too guttural and hoarse for the sound to have come from a human throat. I wish I didn't know enough to say that.

Artemis went still.

"Oh, no," she moaned as she pressed herself back into her seat. "No no no no no."

"Arty?" I asked as Luke hauled his motorcycle into the back of the van, like it didn't weigh over 300 pounds. "You know what that is - what's coming after us now?"

"An béar! An béar! An béar!" went up as a cry of warning.

The bear.

The rabbit was shaking violently, in tears. "Please, no, Nemesis please - "

"Arty!"

Quintus swept by us. "Keep all hands and feet inside the vehicle," he said quickly. "We're heading into the mountains. Things might get a little strange outside, that's normal, don't stare too long."

"Wait - "

He was gone. Our van started up.

I stuck my head outside anyway, looking back as our tires literally burnt rubber. Luke hauled me back inside as the desert mountains rose up on either side of us, but not before I got a glimpse of the problem.

A flash of teeth and the gleam of silver cloth.

Another one of Artemis' former Hunters. The ones she transformed into monsters.

The bear.

Kallisto.

 

[Shujin]

AN: Sorry for the delay. Motivation during a cancer scare is hard to find.​

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction​

The sudden silence was loud.

"Did we lose her?" Luke asked, twisting around in his seat to look out the back windows of the van through the handlebars of his bike.

"No," Artemis and I said at the same time.

I could almost hear the hairs on the back of my neck vibrating in warning. Instead of a low hum of danger, I felt like even as I sat in the backseat of a battered soccer mom van that was probably stolen from a soccer mom, I was being stalked through a dark forest by something very, very hungry. It reminded me of a dark ocean in the Dreamlands. That sensation of encroaching doom deep underwater was not going to leave me any time soon.

"My spidey sense is still going wild."

"Spidey what?" Luke asked.

I was getting a little numb to being in danger. It was still there on the back of my neck and has been for a while. The tiny prickle of warning around Hiraya never actually went away after we made our deal and it's just been downhill from there. This entire situation with the Ursa Major after a rabbit's ass with us in the way was terrible and I could feel how terrible it was in my gut, but I'm going to blame my ADHD here:

"...seriously?"

I got sidetracked. In my defense, he doesn't know Spider Man?

Luke made a face. "No money, no time, can't leave Camp if I don't want to get attacked." Luke waved his hands, frustrated. "And if it's from a comic book - is it?" I nodded. "There are a ton of those, they make no sense out of order with a lot of characters and reading."

All good points.

I mean, they were terrible points (because yikes, reading comics out of order?) but they were legit, is what I meant. "...okay, Camp Half-Blood needs an American Culture Class." Like, yesterday. "After we're done here, remind me."

Luke gave me a look of long-suffering. "Find room in the schedule between javelin training and the Greek culture class."

"That doesn't teach anyone about xenia," I pointed out. "That makes it a shit class by default. We can toss it."

He looked like he was going to argue for a second, then he glanced down at his hand where Khione's ring sat. He spun it about his index finger with his thumb.

"Or about reconciliation gifts," he mused. "Or I guess, it does, but I feel like 'refusing a god's gifts is unwise' isn't even half of it."

Holy shit, I had been kidding. Cabin 12 didn't need Greek culture class, because Dionysus taught his fucking kids. I don't know what expression my face made, but it hurt and Luke just sighed.

"Yeeaaaap," he drawled.

I'm going to strangle that centaur.

The exchange of gifts and what they were for was pretty much the basics of the basics. That meant no one in Camp Half-Blood ever expected anyone on Olympus to actually pay for a favor or to properly apologize. They didn't know what a proper apology even looked like.

Jesus H. Christ.

"Remind me to do something about that class too."

"Believe me," Luke said dryly. "I have a list."

"Can we focus?" Artemis pleaded, dragging us both back to the present. "We did not lose her."

"Sorry," I mumbled.

The bunny was a small, sad ball on her seat as our van rumbled through the desert out of Texas into Mexico. The mountain range wasn't very tall. It looked more like a dry, blocky version of the Rockies than anything, but there were flashes of moving patterns in the cliff faces that I didn't stare at. I don't know if it was just me, but it looked like it was getting even darker outside.

"It is - Kali was not impatient," Artemis said suddenly. "But she could not stand sitting still or moving slowly, driving me mad because she always made it worse for me to control my fidgeting…"

The rabbit trailed off.

"Are you trying to say she's still in there?" I asked, trying to make sense of her rambling. "Still intelligent?" Thinking back, I shouldn't be surprised. Aura spoke. I should always be expecting the worst case scenario, because Mom set up nothing but for me.

I don't know if you remember the story. Kallisto was a Hunter of Artemis, the nymph daughter of Lycaon. You might know him as the first Greek werewolf, punished by Zeus for the crime of being a complete asshole and a worse dad (like Zeus had any room to talk. He doesn't). Anyway, Zeus was the one who decided to rape Kallisto while wearing Artemis' face. It was fucked up. She didn't tell Artemis. I don't know why, but I bet trauma was part of it. And when Artemis eventually found out, she didn't react well.

The rest was history.

"She would startle prey on purpose," Artemis said quietly. "Pulling back from us now is just like her. She would let prey know she was hunting them by mimicking the calls of known predators, or loudly trampling through the brush. Make them run or fight. A self-imposed challenge she never lost."

You could tell by the almost tangible atmosphere of despair she had that Artemis didn't think Kallisto was going to lose now.

Luke frowned. "Is she like the other one?"

The rabbit looked up, startled. "I - I do not know?"

"You don't know?" He ground his teeth. "Isn't this your fault - you did this. How can you not know? Can she die?"

"I never tried!" Artemis wailed and there was a loud bang sound as the van bumped over something large enough for all of us to feel the vehicle tilt and then fall back onto all four wheels. My heart was in my throat as I gripped onto Damocles silver pendant, waiting for a bear claw to tear through the doors.

But nothing happened.

The tension broke in my sixth sense, snapping like a taut wire. It was still there, but different. I didn't know what it meant.

"Must have been a rock," Luke muttered as he turned to look out the back window again, but there was nothing but the dark of Night showing.

Nothing but…

"Where's the rest of the convoy?" I asked, searching for the other headlights. There were a few jeeps and bikes in front of us, visible only by the dim red glow of their backlights but we were supposed to be in the middle of the pack.

Luke blinked and then frowned, gripping his dad's lighter in his hand. He squinted out the back, then frowned harder before closing his eyes. He breathed out slowly and his eyes moved underneath his eyelids like he was Dreaming, "Nothing on the wind. They're gone."

"Maybe they're just running interference?" I offered and Luke shrugged, unconcerned.

"Better them than us."

I bit my lip.

That's right. Because they were all monsters. It wasn't like I forgot about the murdered mortals on the road or anything. That kind of stuff is important. I just have to catch myself looking in from the wrong side of the fence sometimes.

I don't know why I do it. I'm mortal. I know that.

"Assume she can't die," I moved on. "What can we do?"

"Maybe she can though," Luke said with the 'click clack' of his lighter cap being flicked on and off, the bright flame appearing for a second. "If I remember my myths right, there was something about a son hunting her down? Arkas?"

Artemis flinched back. I had a really bad feeling about whatever she was going to say next.

"There was a son," she said quietly. "He had not been born yet when…"

"Ah," Luke said blankly.

Oof.

"Kali was - was a terrible, horrible mistake. One I could not undo, no matter how much I tried." Artemis sounded more than guilty. She sounded shattered. "Zoё searched for her because I lied - and she knew I lied, I do not think she knows how to give up…" The rabbit lifted her head weakly. "You asked why my lieutenant would try to end my life," she told Luke. "She wasn't lieutenant then, but…" She shrugged her small shoulders. "...this was it."

Luke blew out a breath. "...you don't want to kill her."

"No!" Artemis blurted out. "No - I - it is - she does not deserve this! She was in agony and I doubt that has changed! Constellations feel no pain or distress, why was she removed? She was safe - "

"Nemesis doesn't care about that," I said, feeling cold at the near panic in Artemis' voice. My niece, the daughter of Nyx and my brother Erebus. Clovis tried to tell the Night that they couldn't go to the House of Night. Erebus could pretend, but he didn't really understand. Nemesis took on a human shape, but maybe expecting the grinding mass of teeth in her eyes to care about her son, Ethan the way I wanted her to was naïve. I thought about my mother, the sentient black hole mimicking right from wrong. Why should she care about dust? The cycle of life is one she's seen millions and billions of times over, not one more special than the last. Even if Luke had the perfect childhood with parents who loved him, if Hermes' plan with the golden apple worked, that still didn't guarantee anything. It didn't mean anything. One little godling on a single planet in a single solar system among billions of stars.

Everything ends.

"It's not about what's best for anyone, not really," I realized. Nemesis might not be capable of thinking about things in those terms. "It's about addressing the Balance."

Artemis sniffled. "...I know."

"You know we might not have a choice?" Luke asked her softly and the bunny nodded miserably.

"She has suffered enough, but…" The bunny uncurled from her little ball. "When she was first captured, Zoё was still near godhood, supported by other senior Hunters." 'Near godhood.' So the fractured nebula I saw in Nightshade's eyes had been broken. "Her death might be possible, but still out of our reach."

"Can we lose her then?" Luke asked after a moment of thought. "In the desert?"

I looked at Artemis, who shrunk back into her seat. "Any ideas?"

The bunny shuffled. "I - if we go much further south, we risk trespassing."

"She doesn't mean territory," I said when Luke opened his mouth to ask. "She means mythologically. Origins. The Mesoamerican pantheons like the Mayans or the Aztecs are all down in South America. We won't fit and whatever doesn't fit, gets attention."

I wondered how Hiraya did it. Then I thought that maybe Olympus was just that dysfunctional and she slipped through the cracks. Wouldn't surprise me at all. It wasn't like anyone would be picking up Olympus' slack. Nyx getting involved in this reality was a bad idea (current disaster said it all), no idea what Erebus does for a living, Chronos getting involved in this reality might be a really bad idea, Tartarus was literally asleep at the wheel and Mom was still getting the rust off on Giving a Shit.

"We'll have a lot less of our monsters and a lot more of theirs," I finished.

Luke's face pinched. "And we might run into wendigos if we go north…"

"Can we make it to the Roman border?" I thought out loud. "They'd have to respond to a monster like - shit."

I almost forgot about what the elf said.

Luke raised his eyebrows. "You just said you don't want to meet a Roman - "

"I know what I said!"

Quintus also told us in that diner that he paid for smuggling because the border was closed down by the order of Mars. That was the Roman Name of Ares. How much you wanna bet that he told border patrol no one was to be allowed through, with extreme prejudice?

Luke held up his hands in surrender. "We might have to risk it anyway. This is the second one, I thought Nemesis only sent one but if there are multiple super monsters out for our hides - "

"Apollo said you only made monsters of two of your Hunters," I turned on Artemis. "That true?"

"Yes," the rabbit said, resigned. "...of my Hunters."

"You - " Suddenly the little tidbit that sometimes she turns boys into jackalopes stopped being trivia and started being a giant red flag of how utterly stupid I was. "Y̸o̴u̶ ̷d̴a̶u̵g̶h̴t̶e̶r̶ ̵o̶f̸ ̴a̵ ̵b̸a̴s̵t̸a̷r̷d̶ " I don't know what language that came out in, but I knew what I meant to say. "How many?"

"I - I do not - "

"How many?"

"One thing at a time!" Luke cut in sharply. I was a little thrown by how angry I was and he was the one being reasonable about the rabbit. When did that happen? "Percy, worry about that later, worry about the bear now."

I breathed in harshly through my nose. My gut churned, but I blew it out. Luke was right. Now was not the time for this.

"How is she here, now?" I asked instead. "Once Nemesis interferes with a Quest, then she can't - "

Out of the corner of my eye, something peered into our windows from the darkness and then turned away. I swallowed hard. Our van bumped and rumbled as it rode on, not daring to slow down, not even for a second.

"She cannot meddle further," Artemis said quietly. "However, Khione could," she said and my stomach dropped a little.

"You mean - "

"Are you really surprised?" She asked slowly and my stomach dropped further. "The withholding of hospitality was hardly an accident."

"Guess not," I mumbled as I realized that I couldn't say that Khione didn't help Aura find us in Quebec City. Now that I was thinking about it, we went all over the city, across the river and to the waterfall and everything. I assumed the pulse of cold energy was a ward of some kind, but then again, she wanted Artemis dead.

She still does, I reminded myself. Really badly. I couldn't take her help for granted. She wanted Olympus to change, but Khione was still Greek. I won't know which side of her won out until after it already blew up in my face.

"Every instance of interference," Artemis continued, "Is counted separately."

Any god with a grudge could piggyback onto Nemesis' revenge. My sisters wouldn't say a word against it.

Luke and I didn't say 'And there isn't anyone you haven't screwed over' but we were definitely thinking it. Bunny faces were hard to read, but by the way her ears dropped, I think she was thinking it too.

"What's around here?" I asked instead. "New Mexico is next to Texas, right?" I wracked my brain for whatever sunk in through my skull during geography class. "And then…Nevada?"

"Arizona," Luke corrected me.

"Right."

Luke didn't even go to school. I was choosing to believe that he knew because he inherited something from his dad. American education couldn't possibly lose out to being chased cross country by monsters.

"...I'm drawing a blank on anything not Native American or, like, terrible," I was forced to admit. That was a bad sign I should have expected. Sure, I knew that one of my cousins tended to wander around the West Coast area, but I've never met them before and Mom kept me from most of my cousins for a reason.

The further from Mt. Olympus, the closer to the Door to the Underworld and the Mountain of Despair. The original Mt. Othrys was still in Greece, just like Olympus, but it wouldn't surprise me if the aftershocks of the Gate opening leaked into its mythological counterpart.
I know Ouranos' prison moved.

Did the Romans close the border to keep people out or to keep things in?

"Are we just going to have to fight her and hope for the best?" I asked, feeling my stomach sink to the floor.

Artemis' ears buoyed.

"Arizona…" She mused. "Something is…yes, one of Hephaestus' junkyards is there, I believe?" She thought it over, her little nose wiggling furiously. "My father dislikes involving himself, but Eagle Point at the Grand Canyon, if we make a petition there or at the Hoover Dam in Nevada then -" Her voice cracked painfully. "Maybe?"

Maybe Zeus would help her, but his so-called favorite daughter didn't sound so sure of that.

Luke opened his mouth.

"Forget I said anything," she said quickly then. "Attempting to circumvent Fate, even indirectly, is not something I see Father doing lightly." My anger abandoned me so fast, I felt dizzy. It was in the way she just collapsed in on herself. "Or at all."

He shut his mouth with a click.

Her brother couldn't help her. Her father wouldn't. That was true for everyone else. She was completely and utterly alone. Except for me and Luke. Most of it was her own fault, but you can still feel bad about it, can't you? Or pity or something?

Maybe it was because I was feeling like a hypocrite.

Kallisto was hunting us down and she was concerned about how much it was costing the bear, not herself. I was struggling to remember if Artemis ever actually defended her actions at all. Was Selene the only time?

Maybe…

Maybe Apollo had been right to say she changed. Mom's punishment was earned, but…

I don't know.

"That's still several states away," I said eventually.

"She might wait that long," Artemis offered, but I doubt she believed it. "If you must, leave me. I will try to buy time."

"No," Luke said immediately. He looked alarmed. "We're not doing that."

"What he said," I put in.

"Then…" She thought for a bit. "You - you mentioned something about Egyptians the - " Artemis shuffled self-consciously. "The first time…"

I blinked in surprise. She remembered? "My phone. We can probably hijack an obelisk for their teleportation magics, so if we need to get away, we got a freebie."

"But?" Luke asked knowingly.

"But where we end up is random," I admitted. "There are a lot of obelisks around and I'm not a Magician."

…

Or am I!?

Mom has an Egyptian Name. Houy of the Flooded Toilets had the Pharaoh Djer as his ancestor, one of the incarnations of the god Horus. A lot of the elite Magicians had similar lineages. Did I count? What did it mean for me if I was? I don't know the first thing about Egyptian magic. What if I tried and messed it up even more? Crap. I should have asked Cliff if he at least region locked my reception or if I could risk ending up in Cairo.

I hated this. All of it. No one told me Quests were supposed to involve an identity crisis.

"So not useful right now," Luke concluded. "That's why you were pointing those out. But." He looked sly. "If we have to grab the Bolt and run, or confront the god of War then run, we have a get out of jail card."

My mouth opened. "Oh, so you don't know Spider Man but you know Monopoly?"

Luke choked. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"You are actually a Greek barbarian."

"I am not!"

"Have you ever even seen Star Wars?"

"I snuck Annabeth into a showing of The Phantom Menace?"

"...You're irredeemable."

Artemis sighed and stared at the floor of the van as we rode on.

I'm not stupid all of the time. I knew that Artemis' offer to buy us time was her volunteering to go off and die for us. And maybe, in the middle of a fight if we were completely out of options I could see it, but not like this, planned and premeditated. That didn't feel right at all. It bothered me that she offered. I don't think Artemis really came to terms with the idea of dying. I think she came to terms with the idea that she didn't deserve to be saved.

That wasn't the same thing.

I caught Luke's eye and jerked my head towards the bunny. He crossed his arms and looked over the rabbit critically. Then he sighed, nodding to me. He saw it too. He saw it ages ago. He turned to look out the back windows of the van again. "What is it with you daughters of Zeus…"

Riding in a van through the desert expecting a giant monster bear to tear the vehicle apart at any moment did not do great things for our blood pressure. We couldn't exactly ask for the ride to let us off, because the windows had turned pitch black like we were riding through a tunnel. The occasional flashes of light, sound and sometimes feeling vibrating through the doors of the vehicle weren't reassuring. During a bright blue flash, like a bolt of lightning, I thought I saw a derelict city around a giant inverted ziggurat surrounded by a lush forest in the distance, but when the light went, my sight went with it.

I haven't heard of any kind of ancient Mesoamerican city this close to the border?

"So…" Luke puzzled as he clumsily navigated his Isaac through the Golden Sun tutorial dungeon on my Gameboy. "Why doesn't anyone just kill the Joker?"

"Because," I said, shrugging.

He looked up with raised eyebrows. "Because?"

"Look, comics are like modern day mythology. If people weren't stupid there wouldn't even be a story half the time. It's just how it is."

Luke nodded slowly, absorbing this. "...The Punisher is cooler than Batman."

"Fight me."

We were trying to pass the time on the car ride across the desert the best way we could. We were still on guard, but the longer we went without Kallisto ruining our day, the more we unwound. Kallisto was still on our tail. I could feel it. But there was nothing I could do about it until it happened.

"What's the story behind the first monster?" Luke asked eventually as we munched on the snacks he had stolen from that rest stop with Hiraya. "The one that tagged me?"

Artemis looked up at him from her small pile of hay, and then away. "...she's my first cousin, the daughter of my uncle Lelantos."

Lelantos was the uncle she could have bummed a Name of Hunting off of, if she wasn't herself.

Figures.

"One of my oldest companions. We were like sisters, but we brought out the absolute worst in each other," she continued softly, bitterly. "I do not remember who started the stupid game, but it was - it was nothing but poison to both of us."

"Game?" I asked.

"We kept score," she murmured. "We did our best to find petty, mean ways to hurt each other, but if you let on how much blood that needle drew, you lose the round. We were both very good at it. It went on for years, getting more and more thoughtful. Practiced. Cruel."

That sounded like either something I'd hear from a documentary of a school shooting or it was the plot of that new movie Mean Girls.

"And you couldn't stand losing," Luke sighed.

"I had just lost," Artemis admitted. "She just - I was livid, but I could get over - I can defend myself - there were some close calls but I - " Artemis almost couldn't speak. "My mother is off limits." The bunny breathed harshly, stomping around on her seat. Whatever Aura did, just thinking about it still made her blood boil thousands of years later. "Neither of us were ever gracious in victory, mocking each other, but she would not stop!"

On an impulse, I picked the rabbit up. I got where she was coming from. That didn't make it right, but I understood. Hell, I tried to kill one of my schoolmates -

Okay.

So.

I didn't actually mean to tell you that, but guess we're doing this live!

I was.

Not great as a kid. I know that now. Apollo was right. It was a rare occurrence, but not unheard of. Being confidently wrong was just one of his talents. I didn't have a high opinion of mortals back then. Like my big brother, Apollo the Locust, when I lost my temper, I got mean and I used to have a bad one. If there was one thing that stayed the same about me from then to now? It was that no one insults my mother to my face.

Some dumb third or fourth grader with a stupid take on Irish accents and paddywagons. They couldn't prove it wasn't an accident (technically…never mind), but she was paralyzed from the belly button down (consolation prize) so I got expelled.

(Mom smiled)

That didn't help my case with the whole cannon incident at the next school.

Shut up.

The 'disturbed child' thing was still bullshit. I was innocent that time!

"What set it off was not even that bad." Artemis shuddered in my hands. Her nose was cold as it pressed into the palm of my hand and her voice was muffled. "It should not have cut as deep as it did. It was an absurd joke. All of my friends made fun of my base form back then, because I hated it. Her way of apologizing. She expected me to laugh, but not this time." The bunny nearly whispered as she repeated, "Not this time."

I ruffled her semi-floppy ears. She looked up at me, but then her eyes dropped, ashamed.

"I was just so angry. The years and years of insults and slights and assaults from our 'game' was the only thing I could think about. I went to Nemesis, but the Rhamnousia only offered Balance. I agreed to the rules of our game, after all. I gave as good as I got. But mother was a bystander. Aura overstepped, so I was given a token from Retribution. I took it - " Artemis shuddered and wheezed. I was afraid she was having a panic attack as she shook her head almost violently. "I took it," she whispered. "And used it to call upon her mother instead. The Night answered."

Oh, I thought.

That explains why Aura looked a bit cousiny. Artemis was responsible, but it was Nyx who turned her into a monster.

"...what happened to Kali then?"

The ball of fur that was Artemis inflated and then deflated with a wheezing sigh. "Later, please?" she begged quietly.

"Yeah, okay," I murmured. "Later."

She said it was a mistake.

"Thank you," she sighed. "If we have to fight her, do not imbibe her blood." Luke opened his mouth to say something smart, but the bunny pinned him to the seat with her solemn, silver eyes. "No matter what it takes."

"Right," Luke said quickly, spooked. "Message received."

Silence is terrible. Silence because no one knows what to say anymore is the worst. I opened my big mouth.

"How long did it take you to kill the accent?" I asked Luke. And he stiffened (because what the hell Percy? Where'd that come from?) and then deliberately relaxed, looking at me out of the corner of his cloudy blue eye. "Sorry," I apologized, feeling like I wasn't supposed to notice.

"Why do you think it's something I had to lose?" He asked back.

"You've been slipping a bit," I replied and Luke's lips tightened into white lines. He might have been annoyed, but the way his eyes widened made him look almost frightened. "It's not bad, dude."

"Yeah?" Luke said tightly. "You've never had a time in your life that you'd give anything to never be reminded of, ever again?"

I had several.

"I see that you do," he nodded. He turned back to the window. I thought that was going to be the end of it, but then he muttered, "...I didn't want to introduce myself to Thalia sounding like a thug." He glanced back at me, like he was testing my reaction. I tried to look as non-judgy as possible. It must have paid off, because he relaxed further and shrugged one shoulder. "Annabeth made it easier to watch my mouth and I just…kept at it? Besides, I got to Camp and was the oldest one in Hermes Cabin. You know what that means."

Luke's been in charge of raising kids since he was fourteen and his best friend had just died on him.

"You shouldn't have to hide who you are," I said because my brain was stalling on coming up with anything better to say. Story of my life. "You sound like a proper law-abiding citizen."

To my relief, he cracked a smile. "Yeah, not what you expect when you hear 'son of Hermes,' right? The exact opposite of my father. That was the point." Artemis huddled into herself. His face twisted up then. That complicated expression made his scar pop out. "He had to go and copy me. Just - " He deflated.

"He wasn't mocking you," I said quickly. "He just - " My tongue felt thick in my mouth. "Maybe he was trying to relate to you."

"Maybe," Luke agreed thoughtfully, before he rolled his eyes. "And he's a god so of course he thinks I would just get that him copying me is a good thing. He can't explain for crap either." This ugly expression flashed over his face. "Can't explain for...no offense," he muttered, shaking himself out of the sudden melancholy. "But I despise your sisters."

"None taken," I said. "They tried to kill me with a Pit Scorpion."

Artemis started in surprise. Luke's eyebrows nearly flew off his face. "No shit?" He caught himself a second later, grimacing. "I am slipping. Crud." He glared at me. "You are a bad influence."

"The absolute fucking worst," I agreed with a grin.

He huffed. "...a Pit Scorpion, huh? Nasty."

"I was three!"

"Now I know you're messing with me."

I don't know what event or last straw made Luke run away from home and his mom.

Apollo had his mom's blonde hair, Zeus had black hair like his brothers and father. Artemis walked around with auburn hair, but, Diana, the human half was a black haired silver eyed girl. Both of my party members didn't want to be defined by their dads. I tried not to feel like the odd one out. The third wheel, in a sense. I sat there, feeling vaguely heartbroken as I joked around, because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't really imagine cutting Mom out like that at all. I rebuilt myself because she left. Even after everything I've learned on this Quest, the thought was like trying to pick up streams of water with chopsticks. I'd have the shape of what it would look like to be free of Fate. The concept. The idea.

Then it would just slip right through and fade away, because it didn't feel like freedom at all.

My chest hurt.

We rode on.

I don't know how long it took, but my ass was completely numb by the time the van started to slow down. You couldn't hear the crunch of the tires gripping onto the gravel, but you could feel it. Luke hissed, fingering his lighter as he placed a wary hand on the door handle.

"Time to face the music," he muttered.

He was right on the money. We were deep in the desert, surrounded by the short, tough grass with a lot of sandy gravel, peyote plants and rocks. Quintus abruptly stopped arguing with Ghost Rider as soon as he saw us. He straightened, a hand falling to Mrs. O'Leary's eye-blisteringly pink collar and the expression on his face turned to stone. I risked a glance behind us. The mountain range loomed on the dark horizon, but strangely, it didn't look that large. Maybe the Night was messing with my depth perception again, but I could swear the short limestone mountains could be crossed in a day of hiking, but we drove for hours.

Ghost Rider rumbled warningly. Quintus glanced back at him.

"You left a few things out, graceus," he said coldly, holding Mrs. O'Leary back when she tried to shuffle over to me. There was a livid fresh red wound scoring across her side. The dog was weird, but that didn't mean I didn't feel bad about getting her hurt. She was a puppy that didn't hurt me when she could have.

Fuck.

That dog is literally my cousin.

Why did I have to remember that right now?

"Didn't they?" Quintus sneered. "Artemis."

Luke sighed. "I tried."

Artemis hopped forward boldly, ears straight up, lion charm collar on and little jacket tidy. "A few things," she agreed. "Daedalus of the Labyrinth."

I saw Luke shift his weight from one foot to the other, narrowing his eyes.

That name…

…meant absolutely nothing to me.

"Ah, yes, the card rather gave it away, didn't it?" A crooked smile crossed Quintus' face. "Ironic. The Calydonian Boar. Title, sacred animal of the Hunt. Quotation: 'It is customary to offer sacrifices for the Harvest offerings to the goddess of the Hunt. Since you have neglected to remember, I shall provide my own.' Fifteen hundred attack power, four thousand defense, Charge ability."

"What?" Artemis recoiled.

"The Calydonian Boar," Quintus repeated impatiently. "Fifteen hundred attack power, four thousand defense, charge. I defeated it with a mere harpy card because you didn't put it into a defensive position."

He's talking about Mythomagic.

Quintus pitched his voice to sound almost exactly like the rabbit's. "You cannot tell me my boar would ever lose."

I palmed my face. Hard.

I cannot believe this. Artemis is so bad at cards, she loses outside the game too. In hindsight, the Mythomagic was a bad idea.

"Okay, wait, stop." I held my free hand up as I turned to my party members, dragging my other hand down across my nose. "Who is this smug bastard again?"

"Wha - " In an instant, the angry whoever was once again the nerdy Roman with a puppy as he gaped at me. "You don't know who I am?" He said incredulously. "I invented carpentry!"

"Debatable," Luke coughed.

"Oh, like you have done any better, demigod!" Daedalus (?) glared at him. Luke glared right back, crossing his arms. Carpentry, huh? And Luke did not like this guy. Guess we were dealing with some kind of historic…demigod?

(?)

Great.

Mom's education was once again worthless.

"My statues, the daedala? Known for their uncanny likeness?"

"...is that what they're called?" I wondered.

"He was named after them," Luke explained. I could almost hear Daedalus' teeth grind together.

"That's not true. First man to fly."

"His son Icarus was the first plane crash."

"Invented the mast and sail design!"

"Stole it from your sister. Hermes remembers."

"I did not - "

"Yeah, yeah," Luke waved off. "Women couldn't take credit for anything back then."

"Are you going to contradict everything I say!?" He snapped finally. Mrs. O'Leary woofed in concern, pressing against him and almost toppling him over with all 300 of her pounds. Quintus took a deep, calming breath. Then he stood proudly with an equally superior smile,

"I mapped the Labyrinth!"

"He killed his nephew," Artemis said.

His smile disappeared.

"Oh don't you even start with me, hypocrite - "

"Mapped the Labyrinth?" Luke muttered. "You didn't even create it, you absolute - "

"You can't map the Labyrinth," I interrupted everyone and Quintus snapped back to me, scoffing.

"I thought you said you were educated by Apollo, but then knowing that god - "

"Not Apollo. My mother told me you cannot map the Labyrinth." I took off my sunglasses and stared right into his storm gray eyes and watched the color drain from his face. "But if it 'likes' you, it will pretend you can. But you can't. Ever."

Now I could place this guy. The nameless mortal who told the rest of the Greek world about the existence of the eternal maze running in a phased space through the Earth's crust, like blood vessels under the skin. You could walk into an opening you thought was a normal cave with only one exit and get lost forever. You could cross the planet in five minutes or cross the street in fifty years. It was choked with the Mist, messing with all six of your senses. It was vast, it was dangerous, it was malevolent because it was alive.

"That's why you took an escort across the desert, isn't it, Daedalus?" I prodded. "What did he call his usual methods back at the diner?"

Luke had a mean smile as he remembered. "Unreliable?"

Quintus scowled. "An escort I invited you on, out of the goodness of my - "

"Celestial bronze heart?" I asked and he paled again. "Sorry." Not sorry. I grinned my toothy smile and tilted my head at just the angle that creeped Cliff out. My spine clicked. "Forgot to mention." I tapped my left temple. "This son of Fate can see how you die."

The silence was thick and heavy. Mrs. O'Leary's head swung back and forth between us like she was following an invisible tennis ball bouncing back and forth. It was a mirror of the way Daedalus' eyes traveled all three of us like he was trying to see into our bones.

"Why are you defending her?" Quintus finally asked quietly. "Don't you know what the gods - she has done?"

"Yup." I popped the P, then I gestured down at the bunny with two hands. "But just wook at dat wittle face! How can you be mad at her? She's adorable."

Luke snorted and then pinched the bridge of his nose. "Percy."

"No one else gives that rabbit shit for being shit but us."

My Camp Counselor sighed. "Mascot?"

I nodded. "Exactly!"

Artemis stared up at us, speechless.

I made up my mind.

Mom's punishment was earned. 100%.

But Artemis swore on the Styx.

To help.

We were now parole officers.

Daedalus stared at us blankly. Then he closed his eyes and sighed, resigned. He half-turned away. He exchanged looks with some of the monsters milling around their vehicles and there was a prickling along my forearms. Kallisto was still breathing down my neck.

Awesome.

I was in so much mortal danger, my Spidey Sense was in overflow.

Quintus raised a hand like he was saying goodbye. "Camp Half-Blood remains blindly loyal to the last, I suppose."

This time, it was my turn to snort. I almost choked even as the thin hungry faces of Ghost Rider's crew crept in. I couldn't help it. "Pretty sure that changed once they all learned Athena used to be King of the Gods."

Daedalus just about gave himself whiplash turning back around.

"What did you say?"

Huh, that's funny.

That was literally the same thing Annabeth said when she heard that.

 

[Shujin]

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction​

"Again!" Daedalus demanded.

"Athena ruled Olympus for at least two millennia," I droned for the fifth time. "She founded Mycenaean Greece."

Basically.

Malcolm taught me that Theseus, the demigod she helped, went on to found Athens. How many times did that story repeat? Didn't Annabeth tell me something about how Poseidon tried to take Troezen from her too? And Athens itself by contest or something? I'll be honest. I wasn't really paying attention, because Greeks are jerks.

News at 11.

The ancient half-blood leaned back from his seat on the gravelly ground. His head tilted up as his face scrunched into this confused, upset but awed expression. We went from facing off on the edge of a fight to sitting in a circle on the ground Kumbaya style. I wasn't going to complain about it. It meant we weren't dying just this second.

Instead I asked, "Is it sinking in yet?"

"Not really," Quintus admitted. "One more time!"

I sighed. The smart thing would have been to humor him, but I was tired of repeating myself. Luke was a model student compared to this guy.

"No, you're supposed to be smart, or something." I was guessing based on his boasting from earlier. It doesn't take a lot of brain cells to stumble into the Labyrinth when it wants to be found. "We've got places to be. Figure it out on your own time."

"I'm trying!" He protested. "You don't understand how much this recontextualizes - what it means - how? When exactly?"

"You want me to tell you now?" I said incredulously. Kallisto is shivering down my spine. I was not going to get into that whole thing here in the middle of the desert. Quintus may not care if a giant murder bear came out of nowhere and murdered us, but I sure did. "It was ages ago. Why do you even care so much?"

"Why do I - "

"He has no idea who you are," Luke pointed out from next to me. He still had his dad's lighter gripped tightly in his hand. Quintus fumed, fists in his lap. Mrs. O'Leary sniffed around his neck and then laid a big, fat slobbering kiss on his head, giving him a blond cowlick. He calmed down enough to spit out,

"Son of Intellect, remember?"

Uh.

"If it makes you feel better, pretty sure your dad and her are still engaged," I offered. It was like Alabaster and Hecate all over again. Of course the Titanborn would only know the 'safe' uncommon knowledge and nothing else.

"...what?" Quintus croaked and Luke snorted. The look on Daedalus' face was somewhere between horrified and resigned. Poor guy just had absolutely no clue. "I - what?"

"He has no idea," Luke repeated.

"I know about Icarus!" I defended my honor. "He's the guy that crashed the sun chariot, right?" I could feel the stares from both my party members and the Roman go straight through me, which meant I should not have said anything. Luke's mouth opened, then he closed it. He held up a finger.

"One, that's Phaethon. Icarus had the wax wings. Two, I am putting you right back into Greek Mythology for Beginners when we get home."

…um.

Yeah, no, Phaethon (?) never came up.

"Okay, in my defense, Apollo told me that." Artemis grumbled some very uncomplimentary things in Ancient Greek about her brother's intelligence. "And in his defense, Helios was the sun god at the time, not him and he has a hard time remembering Herodotus died two thousand years ago."

"Two thousand four hundred and twenty years ago," Daedalus muttered petulantly. "And seven months."

"Sure, that, okay." I waved. "Whatever."

"The nereid you punched at Camp," Luke said suddenly, realizing something profound.

"The one with the suicidal dumbass boyfriend?" I said, confused. "And she was blaming Mom for some reason?"

Why was he bringing that up?

"You were actually serious. You thought he was her boyfriend." Luke's smile was twisted up. "He was her nephew. You don't know who Achilles is, do you?"

Artemis made a sound.

"...I now feel like I should." Now that I thought about it, didn't Chiron mention him getting training or something before we left Camp?

"By the Styx, Percy."

"I told you I learned about the god stuff."

"I didn't think that meant you don't know about the mortal stuff!"

Quintus (I am going to have to decide what I'm calling this guy eventually) was mumbling to himself. "Intellect - separate deity, he can't mean - Prometheus?" Daedalus said very quietly, like he was scared saying it too loudly would get him smited. "She's betrothed to Prometheus?"

Luke grinned.

"Yeah?" I said. "Has been for a while?"

Daedalus let out a strangled scream, throwing his hands up in the air.

"This is unbelievable!"

Luke leaned towards an exasperated auburn bunny. "This. Is. Amazing."

"From this end, you mean," she replied dryly.

"No more comments from the peanut gallery!" Quintus (fuck it, his identity crisis is his problem) snapped at them, hands on his knobby old man knees in his sweatpants. "Is there anything else I should know?"

"I still don't know why you care," I reminded him.

He ground a palm into his face. "She's my mother."

Oh.

"Huh, so you are a demigod," I said. "Then what's with the…" I made a vague gesture at his everything. "Terminator get up?"

"So I wouldn't die," Quintus said flatly. Cool, he knows the Terminator. "I transferred my soul into a crafted homunculus of Celestial Bronze and - "

"It is unnatural," Artemis muttered.

He scowled at her. "If I had a dinar for every time I heard that - "

"It's perfectly natural?" I spoke up and the old demigod and rabbit froze in place.

"...it is?" The former goddess of the Hunt asked with hesitant ears. "Truly?"

("I love this," Luke muttered.)

"Yeah? Mom is big on everything being permitted." I would know. She never punished me, for anything. "But Step-dad drew some lines. If it wasn't allowed," I pointed at Quintus. "He would have been erased."

Quintus knew what I meant by that. The blood drained from the older man's face.

"Don't time travel, especially not backwards," I told Quintus. "Time really doesn't like that."

("I am learning things," Luke said.")

"I understand," Quintus said weakly.

Maybe the Hounds weren't great fairy tales for a five year old, but that doesn't matter. I preferred Mom's bedtime stories over the nightmares the Dreamlands gave me about Dad's abominations like the Tooth Fairy.

"I am a little confused how you didn't just die as soon as you tried to transfer though…?" I admitted.

I rubbed my chin, thinking it over. The body was important, even after you died. The undead and revenants were trapped in it. You could do nasty things to ghosts if you had their corpse on hand. Quintus wasn't undead though, because I could see him die. The Roman Ancient Greek just got paler and paler waiting for me to say something until he looked like death warmed over.

"I mean, congratulations on defying death?" I tried to make him feel better. I was a little worried he was about to pass out and then all hell would break loose. He was the only thing holding back the monster bikers. They were still waiting at the edges, watching us closely with too bright eyes.

"Becoming a lich is a great goal to have, I approve - but like, phylacteries are always about anchoring parts of the soul. The natural splits - "

Suddenly, I knew how he pulled it off.

"Oh right," I said, remembering Annabeth. Who was stuck in the Dreamlands, unable to return because her soul had completely left her body. Clovis and the others were staying to protect her because she couldn't find her way back through the Night. No anchor back to her mortal coil remained.

If it ever existed in the first place.

"...Percy?" I turned to Luke. He looked concerned. "Are you okay?"

"I…" I wasn't okay. "I am having a second hand existential crisis on the behalf of a mutual friend."

Luke had cracked a smile at first, but when I finished his face was full of dread. "Annabeth?"

"Athena fucked her kids up."

Artemis choked.

Holy crap.

Athena fucked her kids up.

It didn't hit me while I was Dreaming because my logical mind was asleep. Now, I was very awake and the stark reality was slapping me in the face. Human souls shouldn't work like that. They don't work like that. They can't work like that. Mortality means you were tethered to a body that can die. I was reminded of Artemis' account of the Roman gods. Formless, but independent beings. But those were Young gods. A Domain could substitute. Spirits were always tied down. To a tree, a concept, a duty. Elder Gods can't be separated from their physical being either. It's just that what counts as 'physical being' could be a bit weird.

But even my mother could be chained.

If Annabeth and Quintus could just abandon their body entirely without dying, did that make them somewhat immortal? Were they tethered to someone, not something? Was that why Athena didn't treat them as children?

Was Cabin Six full of half-bloods or was it full of semi-divine golems?

Monsters.

"Athena fucked her kids up," I said again, faintly.

Quintus blinked owlishly at me. His face then fell. "No."

"Yes." I insisted. "One of your siblings, she's stuck in the Dreamlands right now because her soul doesn't split. She's not tethered to her body." Quintus' ghost shifted. It changed right before my eyes. Its smile was not relieved. It was sad, but peaceful. Then an explosion from within turned everything white.

For a long moment, the ancient demigod said nothing. He just studied me for a long moment. Then he raised a hand and rubbed at the back of his neck.

"A brand that follows me no matter what body I take," he murmured. "Because my body didn't matter. It was always about my…" His head bobbed thoughtfully. "Excuse me."

He stood up and walked a few paces away, his hellhound puppy at his heels whimpering in concern. Then he stubbed his toe on a rock or something because out of nowhere he started yelling at the sky, cursing up a blue streak in at least five different ancient Greek dialects and a few others. I recognized Egyptian and what might have been Phoenician, but I don't want to know what it means that I knew it.

" - I have fucking accomplishments!" He screamed at the void above us. "Stop fucking taking them away from me, gods fucking damn it Athena!"

One of the monsters watching him, turned to Ghost Rider to complain with a cockney accent,

"I don't get it - are we eating the fecking blighters or not?"

"You're not," I said. Quintus whirled on me. His gray eyes were wide and panicked. His neck was flushing red with rage. I wasn't worried though. Now that I knew this guy was a child of Athena, I knew exactly how to handle him. "Think of all the lore I can't tell you when I'm dead."

"You - " Quintus froze, finger pointing at me.

Got'im.

I stood up slowly. "Finish your business, then I'll see you back at Camp Half-Blood to pay you back."

"Please," he sneered. "Do you think I've been living in the Labyrinth all this time for my own health?" He paused. "Well, I have been, but only so I wouldn't be found - " He sighed. "You know what I mean."

"Hiding from the consequences," Luke said blandly. Artemis looked like she was going to say something, then she glanced at the both of us and drooped. Luke noticed and an absent hand gently cuffed her upside the head. "But your mother branded you for murder."

Quintus froze again. The realization dawned on his face.

"Yeah," I said with a shrug. "Athena knew where you were the entire time." If her kids were tethered to her, it was a few steps away from them being her spawns. She knows. Not wanting to fight the Labyrinth for him wasn't wisdom. It's called being sane. "She knows where you are now."

"She is simply too busy," Artemis spoke up, sounding very pleased with herself for the dig.

"Yes," Quintus hissed, not nearly as pleased. "You gods are good at being too busy, aren't they?"

Luke frowned as the rabbit reeled back..

"Don't worry," I cut in. Let's not go down that road again. "I'll be changing that."

Quintus raised an eyebrow. He looked me up and down. I felt vaguely insulted. "Sure you will."

"My mother's not too busy and I can prove it." I gave him a big grin and mentally crossed my fingers hoping that Mom would back me up here. I took a few extra steps away from my party members. Then a few more steps. Just -

Just in case.

"Hermes has no idea he wrote up for a cross pantheon violation Ananke herself."

Mom was there.

And she was still pissed.

I could tell because I fell about six feet and rolled my ankle when the ground underneath me just evaporated. My tattered tunic fell apart. Time seemed to slow down as I watched it crumble into the same bone white dust as the ground, falling off me in streams of dust that blew away on the Night Winds. I saw my skin ripple and spasm. My stomach scrunched and I thought my belly button looked back -

Then the moment was gone and I was left in a big hole with glass smooth sides and no shirt.

"Thanks, Mom," I muttered. I was stuck. "Sorry, love you too."

There was no response.

I tested my ankle and approached the wall of the hole. My sneaker slid right off the smooth side with a screech of rubber sole. Dust fell in a stream and I looked up to see a gloved hand reaching down to help. There was fire and smoke and shadow grinning underneath. I followed the hand up further and saw the elf look back.

"Thanks," I said. I didn't move. I knew better. "Can I repay you with a joke?"

"A good one," she warned me.

"Cool." I grabbed her hand and she hauled me up easily. Around the hole I saw various monsters of the convoy had either backed off or thrown themselves onto the ground, stretching out all manner of limbs just like Rhea did. Luke was pale and sweaty, unsteady on his feet but making an effort to hold Artemis up. The small rabbit clinging to his vest looked like she just had a decade scared off her life.

"Urk!"

Quintus bent over and threw up.

"Yeah, sorry," I said. "She does that." As he wiped his mouth, I turned back to the elf. "So how many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman?" She blinked her star-like eyes slowly at me. "None."

The Ghost Rider grumbled from somewhere behind Quintus (I must have hit a nerve) but the elf's laugh was like the short ringing of a chime.

"What's wrong with you!" Quintus barked at me.

"Uh nothing?" I said as I reached down and picked up my backpack. Capable of traversing space from the van to my hand, cursing thieves and defying physics, still missing a strap because of a fucking dog. "Also, rude."

"Very rude," Luke said unsteadily, but he strengthened. "You won't kill us."

"I don't have to take you with me either," he snapped back, but he glanced at the hole in the ground. It was the same radius as a trampoline and perfectly spherical. "I can leave you here. I -"

"I can't tell you shit if I'm dead," I sing songed.

Quintus rubbed at his temples, torn. "You don't understand…"

"Just tell your mom I said to let you bunk at Camp," I said reasonably as I dug around in my bag for another shirt. Apparently, I packed all my tunics. Another blue one. Blue is good. "Say I'm returning the favor. Feel free to rub it in. She wants to be on my good side. She'll do it."

Quintus wavered.

"He's been teaching us," Luke joined in. His voice was that smooth, calm tone again. "Your siblings have been getting themselves locked in their Cabin at least three times a week since they learned about Athena."

"...rioting?" Quintus asked quietly.

"Researching," Luke deadpanned and Quintus snorted.

"Yes, yes, that sounds like…" His voice got quieter. "Something I would do." The world hung on a breath as he thought about it. "You are being chased. I can't in good conscience put the convoy at further risk." My heart sank. "But," he continued. He glanced over my shoulder and I realized he was looking at the elf. "I won't say no to volunteers. The second route, further north. It's risky."

My heart sank further.

I didn't look back at the elf.

Debts were bad.

"No debt," the elf said, like she read my mind. "The favor has already been paid in entertainment." She smiled, but it wasn't a nice one. "I swear this thrice, on the Name of Nodens."

A chill ran down my spine, the sensation of a mountain that reached the stars shifting ever so slightly with glacial movement in our direction. A howl rang out in my mind of some unnamed predator, blood was in my mouth, a faint unpleasant pressure like being squeezed through a tube lined with the glass shards of its attention and then it, too, was gone.

I breathed out, shaken. Now I know how everyone else feels when Mom answers.

I knew that Name. Nodens. He was Celtic. That probably means she was not a Light Elf of the Norse, she was one of ours. No wonder she laughed at my joke. Dark and gallows humor, we love that shit.

I wish she was Norse.

"Okay then," I murmured. I glanced at Luke and Artemis.

"We need to go," Artemis said quietly. "I feel…"

I felt it too.

We were boring Kallisto.

"Get your bike," the elf told Luke. "Kieran, with me."

Joy.

Quintus watched us scramble around. Mrs. O'Leary first followed Luke around as he hauled his red and gold hot rod motorcycle out of the van and then she ran back to follow me. She was sniffing me frantically, like she was trying to commit to memory what we smelled like. Like she knew her new friends were leaving.

"It's okay girl." I rubbed her ears as her brimstone eyes stared pitifully back at me. I give up. This hellhound was alright. Her siblings were all jerks though. "We'll see you soon."

Up close, I realized that the elf's bike didn't just look like she fused a deer to an engine. The fur was real and warm and I could feel a pulse under my hand when I touched it and it whined. It was a whistling agonized sound as the three heads of the deer twitched.

…please… Destroyer…

Was he talking to me?

"Don't mind him," the elf said lightly as she put on her helmet. "I won a bet and he's a sore loser, aren't you, old friend?"

"So…" I started. "How long ago was that?"

The shadow and smoke chuckled as dark blood from the deer trickled onto the ground. "Does it matter?"

She's definitely a Celt.

"Good to see you still have some spirit!" She said gleefully in Gaelic. The deer moaned and then went silent. I swallowed as she held up a hand and with a twinkle of fae lights and embers, a smaller motorcycle helmet was tossed my way. Right. So I just…keep my hands in very safe locations.

Quintus wandered over as the convoy split into two groups. The more varied monsters, the big ones stayed with Ghost Rider as the thin, hungry human-like waifs drove in circles around us, a low chant starting up that thrummed in my blood.

He sidled up, looking hesitant.

"I'm sorry," he said miserably. "But Artemis…I can't."

"I get it," I said as I put on my helmet. Khione said the same thing and I couldn't blame her either. This guy had thousands of years of history as a branded demigod alone in the Greek world. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Quintus nodded and turned to leave. He took two steps and then turned back around. "Is there anything else you can tell me?"

"Sure, every human who has ever breathed oxygen?" I paused for dramatic effect. His eyes widened as he leaned in, desperate as the elf's engine roared alive. "Dies!"

I don't have it in me to regret that one, because you could almost see Quintus' soul just leave his body.

"Athena's always been a bad mom. Your brother Ericthonius still lives in Atlantis."

The elf whistled. Her engine roared again, sounding like a dragon and the last I saw of Quintus was his shocked face.

Then it was just the desert.

It was wrong.

The rumble of the engine, the wind whipping past, the crunch of the gravelly, sandy ground and even the look of the Night sky. Everything seemed almost too real. Too bright, too loud, too close. Vibrations were rattling my skeleton as the scenery blurred. We didn't even seem to be going that fast, like our speed was completely independent of how fast we were going.

"Is this a Hunt?" I asked. The noise stole my words away, but the elf heard them. Must have been the long ears.

"Aye, but not yet!" She sounded excited. "We're the prey!"

Glad one of us was having fun.

My neck was still screaming. A looming sense of dread was creeping closer but no matter how much I swiveled my head around, searching, there was nothing around. On a normal day with the sun out, I bet you could stand on one of the nearby plateaus and see for miles. I was back in the dark ocean, feeling the doom creep in. An hour passed like this, waiting.

The attack, when it came, was sudden.

The van. The one we had been riding in until we moved to the bikes drove up next to us. I saw the elf's head turn, "Fiamh, what are you doing - "

It exploded in a burst of rotting flesh and foul blood like it wasn't a van at all, but a giant diseased tick. The shockwave crashed into me, drops of blood burned on my tongue. For the third time in this Quest, I was airborne.

I don't remember hitting the ground.

I remember flashes. Pain. The moment that really sticks out was watching a rabbit look at me and just -

give up

A massive silhouette reached for her, she wasn't going to move in time and the absolute feeling of certainty that Artemis was going to let herself die here. I remember feeling my jaw dislocate itself and distend. There was a different kind of roar. And then -

"Don't you fucking dare!" A voice yelled. "Die on your own time! You swore, Thal - "

Then I must have blacked out again because the next thing I knew,

"- hold on!" I felt myself being picked up as sound came back in bursts along with the pain.
"My legs," I rasped, tasting blood in my mouth. I think I lost a few teeth and I couldn't feel anything under my waist. "I think - "

"I got you - " The sound died. Then it came rushing back as I was placed on a motorcycle. I got the vague impression of red and gold in front of my face. Luke. " - Arizona?"

"I don't know!" Artemis' voice wailed. Someone was screaming in distance, a tortured howl and I recognized it.

"I know where - " The third voice cut off.

I felt like I was underwater, trying to breathe through crushed lungs as the waves washed over me as a rush in my ears. My head pounded.

" - hurt bad, he can't do that again - "

"Strap him in, quickly!"

"Luke?" I slurred. I felt like I didn't have lips. What happened to my face?

"Hey, bud," he said softly with the same tone I've heard him use on the younger Campers. "You're going to be okay, alright?" There was that slight warble that said he was trying to be strong because they were hurting. I couldn't see him clearly. That worried me. "Just need you to do one thing for me. Open wide."

He shoved two cubes of Ambrosia into my mouth immediately, the normal limit for most demigods before they burst into flame.

"Can you - " He turned from me. I could see the silhouette of him moving as my blood rushed in my head again.

"Did he swallow any?" Someone asked. The voice was familiar. I felt an impression of heat against my side as a cool hand brushed my forehead. "Don't die now, Kieran."

I won't.

"I don't know," Luke responded shakily. "Did that cause - he can handle it - " he pivoted. "Son of Fate, right?"

No one answered him.

"Okay," he murmured. "Okay."

"Go," the elf said. "We'll distract it."

"It will not work for long - " Artemis started.

"It does not need to," the elf laughed. "We just want to have some fun!"

Luke started his bike. I felt it rumble against my stomach and I realized I was laying on the seat in front of him. My sense of up and down was all messed up or it was like I was (kind of) seeing through eyes that weren't above my nose.

"Where are we - " I tried to speak but Luke shushed me.

"Just, rest, okay? We've got a little ways and then I'll…" He trailed off. "Figure something out."

"Luke," Artemis' voice said worriedly.

"Who do you trust more?" He asked. "Your father or your step-brother?"

"Hephaestus," Artemis said immediately.

Ouch.

Luke let out a dark sounding chuckle. "Yeah, you and your sister both…"

I think I fell asleep, because the next time I was aware again, no one was saying anything. The screaming was gone and I could hear what sounded like pavement under the tires, instead of desert ground. I felt better, a sharp tingling like pin needles ran up and down my legs and back. I was able to blink again. We were in some kind of town with small squat looking houses with empty streets.

"I'm good," I croaked.

I felt Luke jump. "Styx! Perce - you shouldn't be - " He made a hard turn at the next road sign. "Okay, don't need the hospital - where are we going?"

"I - " I saw Artemis' head poking out of Luke's vest beside me, looking around desperately. "I do not recognize anything - he might not be paying attention - "

"You're a mortal now!" Luke almost yelled at her. "Fucking pray!"

The rabbit startled and then shut her eyes, mumbling.

A store sign on an abandoned corner store flicked on. Some of the lights had burned out but some were left flickering. Before I could even try to read the broken up word it made, Artemis' ears shot straight up.

"Left!"

Luke burned rubber, leaning hard into the turn. I couldn't tell if the back of my neck was screaming or if everything was screaming.

Another store sign flickered on in the distance.

"Left again!"

We followed the trail of store signs off the main road and deep into the middle of nowhere where a ghost town with old school mining equipment rusted and broken silently littered the gravely road. A final 1950s looking diner flipped its sign on, WE'RE OPEN.

Beyond it was a junkyard.

Mountains of trash, old refrigerators, cars, TVs, toys, bicycles in various states of brokenness were piled high on top of each other along with the smashed chariots, crumbled statues, a few dozen crowns decorated with pearls, rubies and sapphires, and a washing machine squatting like it owned the place.

There was another side to the place. Laying on top of an old couch was a gleaming Celestial Bronze bow that reeked of an enchantment. In the driver's seat of a broken down tractor was a shining lorica chest armor, decorated with silver and gold along with an electric guitar shaped like Apollo's lyre. It even felt like him, but there was something wrong with it. Like the time he tried to fix the coffee machine. The broken off heads of bronze horses were scattered around as in the back a giant trash compactor loomed over it all.

And of course, the gate was locked.

Luke flung out a hand, face screwed up in concentration and with a loud click the giant padlock fell to the ground. He spun the bike into a skid, slowing down just enough to let him kick the gate open.

We were through.

Now what?

Luke drove right through, maneuvering around what he could avoid and driving over what he couldn't. Behind a big pile of stuff, he stopped.

"Okay," he breathed. "Perce, how are you feeling?"

I felt like newly ground beef, but I wasn't going to say that. "A bit sore, but I'm fine."

To prove it, I got off the bike. I nearly threw up. My stomach was a miasma of ick and I felt hot. I worried that I was developing a fever again, like at Rhea's on top of the pain. My back was hovering at a level of Fuck/10 and my legs weren't any better. I was really feeling a broken right big toe right now and my face felt raw.

My eyes hurt.

Luke eyed me suspiciously, but he didn't call me out. Instead he turned to look around the junkyard.

"There," he pointed. I looked and saw telephone poles strung up with wires. "Was she tall enough to get caught in those?"

They saw her?

Artemis squinted. "Almost."

"How sturdy are these piles?" I spoke up. Luke knew what I was getting at, looking around again with fresh eyes.

"We need to involve Hep - " She stopped herself. "The forge god. I think he is just - just waiting for an excuse. He has power here."

"What are the defenses like here?" Luke asked. "The only traps I can sense are on some items."

"This is the junkyard of the gods," Artemis said and there was a bitter undertone to her voice. "A simple padlock to keep people out, no warnings and nothing to keep anyone safe. What else could we possibly care about other than thieves?"

The wind shifted.

"She's here," Artemis said, hushed.

She was.

As the lumbering form slowly slunk through the open gate of the junkyard, I could see why Kallisto went down in history as a bear. Just as I could see how Apollo could say her true nature was hidden by the Mist and that she wasn't a bear at all.

There was a vaguely canine short muzzle lined with fangs. It was hunched over, like Artemis' Roman half Diana with a too long neck and torso. The silver chiton like uniform was almost completely intact, billowing about her, giving Kallisto the appearance of a burly, heavyset form, but underneath she was an emaciated skeleton. Large dark claws curled off the tips of hairy paws. She walked on three of her limbs, the fourth clutching desperately the broken remains of a silver bow to her thin chest.

She had no eyes. Gouged out pits partially hidden with bandages stained a rust red with old blood. It looked like worms were writing under her skin and the silver fabric over her chest moved independently.

"Arty…" I sighed.

The rabbit looked down at the ground.

"That pile," Luke whispered, pointing. It was actually three piles close together, but I could see that one had a beaten up Chevy Impala sticking precariously out of it. "Can you play bait? Artemis."

Her head whipped around. "I - yes."

"Bait," Luke warned her. "You don't have my permission to die."

Artemis didn't reply, just darted out into the open and jumped on top of a broken TV that looked like something out of an old sitcom. Just as Kallisto's head peered around a corner, she did something I thought only happened in that one old Disney movie, with the deer. She started thumping her foot against the TV like it was a drum.

"She didn't - " Whatever Luke was going to say was immediately silenced by the tortured scream that shook the yard. Kallisto took one lumbering step, and then it was like she swung her body like it was a bat. One second Kallisto went from standing there, and in the next Artemis was already running as the Hunter was way too close, slamming everything around her into a scattered pile of trash.

You don't understand. Imagine a trash pile of junk with TV screens, old dishwashers and chairs and desks, the works.

And it just scatters like you swung a hand through a Jenga tower.

Luke yanked my arm, ducking under debris, "Come on! This way!"

I think I got it. Lure the former Hunter to where the car was perched, drop said car on her, then keep running. Simple, direct, this was a good plan, right? We couldn't possibly screw this one up.

Right?

As Kallisto smashed through another pile trying to grab Artemis, Luke glanced back at me, "Gonna need your help with this."

"Drop the car on her?" I asked, hoping I was on the same page as him, and blinked when Luke shook his head quickly.

"Not yet, need to slow her down, trip her up, something to keep her still long enough to do the trick." Luke explained, eyes searching the scattered junk before he paused, "Huh, that could be useful."

I followed his stare and saw what look liked the freakish love-child between a roll of barbed wire and a bomb. Luke dove for it, sweeping it up into his hands.

"What do you need me to do?" I blurted out, as another loud crash sounded. Artemis couldn't run forever. In response, he shoved the bomb looking thing into my hands. "Use this."

"But - "

"Yeah, let's hope it works." Luke spun on his heel, grabbing a discarded spear. He completed the spin smoothly, launching it into the air where it cut through one of the wires running from the telephone pole. There was a loud snap! Sparks flew as the wire fell.

"Damn, it still has power. Plan C."

"What even was plan B!" I yelled.

"That that thing works!" He yelled back. My Spidey Sense screeched as he yelled, "Scatter!"

I dove to the side immediately.

Kallisto screamed.

Tendrils burst from her like a mutated hedgehog, slicing through the air in all directions. If I hadn't dropped, I would have been speared like a bug on a pin. As soon as they pulled back, I got up and just ran, clutching the strange device in my hand.

It felt cruel and bloodthirsty. The barbed wire really gave it a Try Hard look.

Junkyard of the gods.

I bet I know whose art class project this was.

I risked stopping. Just enough to crank the obvious handle on the thing. It jammed and seized with rust. "Come on," I whispered. "Come on!"

The handle slammed home with a clunking sound.

Then it started to tick.

Uh oh.

I ran back where I just came from. "ARTEMIS!"

A small auburn light bolt ran towards me, darting over the piles of trash. Kallisto followed her far more sedately, almost deceptively slow. She'd wind up and hold and then blur into motion. I was hoping that was just how she was and it wouldn't change.

I was counting on it.

I hefted the ticking barbed wire bomb and threw it as hard as I could. It sailed over Artemis' head. Kallisto was blind and thousands of years old. The ticking meant nothing to her. She suspected something as she wound up her arm. The ticking stopped as it fell with a clunking sound at her gnarled feet.

Oh, okay.

Fuck me, I guess.

The bomb exploded. Reams of barbed wire snaked out of the bomb, wrapping around the Bear as she screamed.

"How do you like that!?" I yelled, whooping.

The Bear reached up, and ripped the barbed wire spike from her chest and tossed it aside. My cheer died as the wriggling under her skin got worse. Her dress started to rip as streams of repulsive, clotted blood began to stream out from her wounds. This thing with two mouths burst from her chest as her scream took on multi tones.

So I was right earlier.

Fuck me.

A roar punched through the Night air as I watched a fucking RPG missile slam into the Bear, knocking her back into a large pile of trash. It didn't all fall over. Underneath was a shining Celestial Bronze construct of some kind. The gears and frame of what was clearly a giant robot arm. Someone's been watching Star Wars movies over and over because there was a suspicious resemblance to C3PO.

There was no way someone would throw an entire giant robot away, right?

I remembered what Artemis said.

What else would gods care about, than thieves?

I ran.

"Artemis!" I called out. "The pillars!"

She split off from me, dashing through a broken down car with missing doors.

I had an idea. It was a stupid idea, but I knew that we were on a deadline. Kallisto was only going to get stronger.

Artemis had an idea too. It was the same as my first one. She made a beeline for the tallest pile, the one with the Chevy Impala defying gravity.

Trash gave way under my feet, causing me to trip. I reached out to steady myself and my world tilted. There was a brief glimpse of Nightshade, tiara and all. The girl and boy from before, on the mountain. Black hair punk with brilliant blue eyes and someone who could have been my twin brother who's sea green eyes looked away from the scene to -

To see me.

"It…it was for Nico," a girl's voice said. "It was the only statue he didn't have."

'Not now!'

The vision broke. I could feel blood gush out of my nose, my head pounding as I finished picking up the small figurine. It was a Mythomagic statuette, from back when they launched their failed answer to Warhammer 40k figurines to go along with their card game. Now, they were just collectors items, discontinued after only 2 years of production.

The figure was of Hades.

Artemis made death defying jumps, hopping from perch to perch as she wound her way up the trash pile. Ominous creaking noises rang out as Kallisto lurched after her, blind. My heart was in my throat. If Artemis brought it down, it would hit Kallisto, but Artemis would still be on top of it.

She hopped onto a part of the pile where the car was sitting. The car creaked menacingly, and just like a Saturday cartoon, I watched the bunny rabbit slam her whole weight into an Olympus Air refrigerator. It fell onto the car, finally losing its war with gravity and the whole thing tilted.

"Artemis!" Luke yelled. "Jump!"

Kallisto just had enough time to scream as the car came down right on top of her head moments before the rest of the pile buried her under metal and other garbage.

I spun on my heel, breathing out just like Apollo taught me, and tossed the toy right into Kallisto's open mouth as she thrashed underneath the trash. She choked but couldn't spit it out. It had been a perfect throw.

"Oh no!" I cried out as loud as I could, clapping my hands to my cheeks. "Goodness me! Look at that! A thief!"

Artemis was right. Hephaestus just needed an excuse.

The Talos moved.

"Run!" Luke yelled as he caught the flying bunny he yanked towards him with his power.

We ran straight for the half buried trailer by the fence. I stumbled. "Wait," I called. "Luke, your bike!"

"Leave it!" he snarled as he jumped onto the roof with a single jump and turned around to haul me up and then tossed me over the barbed wire. I hit the ground hard enough to rattle my knees, but I kept running. I heard Luke land just as hard right behind me, Artemis in hand. I risked a glance backwards.

All I saw was the giant bronze frame of the Talos. Kallisto nowhere in sight.

This wasn't the end, but we bought ourselves time.

Not a lot.

---

I want to say our escape was a thrilling adventure, but the reality was we just ran blindly in a vaguely westward direction until we felt like our hearts would give out. Luke had to pick up Artemis when she ran out of stamina. I felt sick. My head was pounding and my blood felt like it was shifting underneath my skin. It was like I had a really bad vision, but that didn't happen. We found the Roman border by running right into it. I felt like I was six years old again, running face first into the sliding glass door I thought was open. Something shattered and then I fell through, stumbling up the hill.

"What the…hell…" I stopped at the top of the hill.

"By the gods…" Luke breathed.

"Oh," Artemis murmured.

All three of us stared down the hill at the land beyond the Roman border. The sky was no longer just the Night. Above us, dark storm clouds boiled beneath the black Night sky, rolling in and out like billowing smoke. Lightning flashed in the cloud, illuminating the massive silhouette of a creature in the sky.

Who was the sky.

I lifted a finger.

"The prison of the Sky Father," I whispered. I shifted my finger to point far behind us towards the East Coast, shining brightly against the darkness. An unbelievably large trunk, a pale white ash tree disappeared into the darkness above.

"Yggdrasil."

I traced the farthest branches to where they intertwined with the fiery branches of another massive hardwood growing far in the West, glowing gold. "The god that Burns."

Vesta.

The mountain of Despair, Mt. Othrys was far larger than it had any right to be, visible from an entire state away. A giddy feeling rose up in me. They were here. Not phased, or removed from reality, but here. It was like the world was glitching, merging the Was and Could Be and Not together into one plane.

"This is amazing!" I shouted.

"This is terrible!" Artemis shouted back. Luke said nothing, staring at the red harvest moon looming large in the sky. "We can't let it fall! We need the Mist! Even the gods!"

Wait.

"Wait, what?"

The moment was interrupted by the thundering of horses. The sound got louder and louder until they stampeded into sight. The horses were just what you expect. The riders weren't.

Hideous, twisted figures like humans turned inside out but still living with their arms or heads split open with teeth lining the wounds, joints twisted backwards. Some of them had eyeballs hanging out of the socket by the optical nerve with their internal organs showing through their mouths or chests. Their hair, if it could be called hair, were spikes sticking out in all directions like thorns. They were flayed, spurting blood, staining their leather armor.

I knew this. The riastrad, the same affliction that the Celtic demigod, the Hound of Ulster Cu Chulainn suffered from.

'Warp-spasms,' Mom called it.

"The Reserve," Artemis sighed sadly.

The Reserve?

At the head of the column rode two people. The first was a goddess, the rolling thundering of her presence was easy to sense. Strawberry blonde hair pulled back into a severe bun. She was definitely Roman if the armor meant anything, a long spear in her hand. Her right eye glared at us, an endless plain with no horizon. You could see and see and it kept going forever.

Her left eye was just blue. A faint scar crossed the socket. A replacement eye.

The second was a boy about three years younger than I was, the same age as Weird Girl. He was a light blond with electric blue eyes and a scar on the corner of his lip wearing armor that looked too big on him.

Luke made a wounded sound, staring at the kid like he'd seen a ghost.

"What's this?" The Roman said. "A graecus and…" She paused and I had a bad feeling about what she was going to say next. "...A celtae." She stared at me. Artemis wiggled free of Luke's hands, making him set her down.

"Epona," she called out and the goddess' attention shifted down to the small animal standing in front of us.

Oh good, Artemis knows her. We can get through this.

It wasn't like we could outrun horses on foot.

"Ah," the Roman said slowly. "I was mistaken. There are two graecus."

Artemis thumped. "You know who I am! Let us through."

Epona smiled at her. "I know who you are," she confirmed. "I also know what you are now and no mortal may command me."

Well, shit.

There went that faint hope.

"Fine," Artemis said eventually, but she sounded shaken. "If you cannot be commanded, then can you be reasoned with?"

The goddess' horse took a few steps forward and then back, dancing around. "What is there to reason?" She asked carelessly. "My lord has bid this border closed and closed it shall remain. You should be glad I am sending you away intact."

"Well," she said suddenly. "Most of you."

There was no warning.

The nearest Warped just extended in my direction like a human rubber band. It caught me around the neck. I had just enough time to realize how utterly reliant I've become on my Spidey Sense before I was slammed into the ground. I heard Luke let out a wordless yell. The ring of swords clashing, then a wet 'schlick' sound, a high pitched wail and I saw a twisted arm fall to the ground. Red blood spurted from the amputation and I could see that it was tattooed with 9 bars and a spear on the inside of the wrist.

Luke froze. Horror bloomed over his face as he stared at the blood. He didn't move, even when he was tackled to the ground next to me.

"Stop! Stop!" Artemis was yelling and so was the blond boy.

"Boy!" Epona barked, ignoring the rabbit. "Be silent. Soldiers of the Legion do not question their superiors. They obey."

I couldn't see much pinned to the ground, but I could hear the small pony skitter backwards. "I will obey," a childish, thin voice spoke from somewhere above me. Grass tickled my nose. Don't sneeze. "I just…wished to know which section of the legal coda holds the law we are judging them by."

So that heap of bullshit wasn't going to fly, but I loved Mystery Kid for trying.

Epona barked a harsh sounding laugh. She rattled off some numbers interspersed with Latin that had my head spinning, but Mystery Kid seemed to understand. He didn't like whatever it was he understood.

"That's for wartime," Luke whispered. He was slurred from his face being pressed into the road. "He's saying the code she's using is for prisoners of great enemies."

"And she is reminding him that Rome is at war," Artemis said despondently, head hanging. "The war with the Greeks has paused, not ended."

"War with the Greeks?" Luke was bewildered.

"And him?" Mystery Kid said in English again. "We are not at war with the Gallia - "

"He's not of Gaul," Epona snarled. He snarled back, a rough almost barking sound. "And you are not an animal! Bite your tongue."

Yeah, I knew who she was. She was Roman now, but once upon a time, she used to be Rhiannon's foster sister. Epona, the Gallic goddess of the Calvary and Equines, the Fertility of Spring and the Great Mare of the Dead. The Romans conquered Gaul. Absorbed what was left, and the rest was history. I knew now why the elf told me to avoid the Romans.

Mom was the Tuatha de of Future Victory in Death and Battle. The Harbinger of Fate. Just her omens alone could turn the tide of any battle.

The Gauls lost.

"Did you think I could not smell the stench of the Betrayer on you, celtae?" She sneered at me. "Did you think I wouldn't recognize the magic of the Dagda's black whore anywhere?"

Fire roared in my stomach.

"What did you just call hrmghl." My head was ground into the grass and dirt. I bucked, nearly throwing whoever was on me off, but that just invited their friend to dive onto me too.

"I won't kill you," Epona said graciously as I wriggled. Two, three, four Warped sitting on me. "I will just send you back to your mother in pieces, boy. Take his arm!"

How about not?

I struggled harder, digging as deep as I could past the pain until it took five of them just to stretch out my left arm.

Mom!

Nothing.

"Please!" Mystery Kid was begging. "You don't have to do this! At least give him a chance!"

A chance.

My brain started firing on all cylinders. Epona thought I was just a Celtic demigod. An Irish one.

There were rules.

"A duel!" I cried out as my left arm was finally straightened flat onto the cold ground. "I have the right to fight for it!"

I instinctively yanked, expecting the sword to come down on my arm at any moment, but there was nothing. It took me a moment to register that nothing was happening at all. I was abruptly released.

The goddess' mismatched eyes bore into me. "I am Roman, boy," she said severely. "I need not heed your request."

"I can tell you're Roman," I said. I brushed myself off, trying to hide how my hands were shaking.

I just challenged a god to a fight.

"Otherwise you'd treat your foster better."

Mystery Boy stiffened, sneaking a glance at Epona who scowled. "He's not mine."

Yeah, right.

And I'm just Greek.

"My existence doesn't offend Epona of Rome," I continued. "I offend Epona of Gaul. Fight me."

She tilted her head, eyeing me.

Then she smiled. "Very well." She swung off her large black horse smoothly, rolling her spear with her wrist. "My handicap?"

"The fight is to first blood," I said quickly. There was no way I was going to actually beat a god in a fair fight. Being able to land a hit first was my only hope. The way that got a bark of laughter from her didn't make me feel good though.

"You will ask three for advice in my hearing."

Okay. That was a traditional handicap. I didn't know how to feel about it. Glad she didn't ask for worse, like for me to fight one handed? Or worried that she was just that confident?

Why wouldn't she be?

She's a god.

They let Luke sit up, but twisted limbs still held him in place. His face was pale as he gazed around the crowd of Warped. His eyes met mine and they gleamed in the dark.

"They're children," he hissed and I thought back to the cry I heard when he cut one's arm off.

Artemis said Camp Jupiter wasn't better.

"I - okay," I dragged a hand down my face. I was tired. "I have to fight her and you have to give me a tip." I tried to motion with my eyes and face the rest of the sentence, 'that doesn't give itself away.'

Luke looked at me for a long moment. Then he watched Epona pace for a few moments. A small, superior smirk formed on his face. "Spear user, huh? She's worse than Silena."

I breathed out a sigh of relief. I knew what he meant. Luke has bitched often enough about her footwork, and just learned that it's because she was born of Astarte, Lion goddess of Chariots and Horses.

Epona was goddess of the Calvary. She's not used to fighting on foot.

"Thanks."

Luke's head bobbed. The Warped holding him down shifted and he glanced at them. "That kid," he said softly. "I know him."

"You do?" I asked, confused. Luke didn't know the Romans existed, had been at Camp for four years and you could clearly see the six bars for years of service on Mystery Kid's inner wrist. He must have been thrown into the Legion as a toddler.

"Well," Luke continued quietly, painfully. "Know of him."

I approached Artemis next.

The rabbit blinked up at me.

"You know the drill?"

She nodded slowly. "I do. I am…sorry, it has come to this."

"Hey, none of that," I said. "This time it wasn't your fault."

"If I was not a rabbit - "

"Stop beating yourself up. You've got plenty of others willing to do that for you."

She snorted.

"She doesn't know," I said quietly, jerking my head back to where Epona was still pacing impatiently. I pointedly raised a hand to my sunglasses. "If I were to tell her - "

"There must be a reason," Artemis told me, head dropping. "Fate always has one." I remembered that Rhea said the Hunter was in the Celtic pantheon. Someone who really didn't like my mother and was strong enough to do something about it. If I outed myself to the angry Gaul, I might be dropping a steaming pile of shit on Mom's head. I might be dropping that shit on my head.

"Plan B then," I said softly. "If this goes…poorly."

"Yes." Artemis then looked up at me again. "I am assuming you know far more than you should, so I will tell you a riddle. The death of Nuada Silverhand."

I waited. She didn't say anything else. "Wait, that's it?"

"Here." Artemis shuffled off her protective jacket, nudging it over to me with her nose. She did it so easily. I felt warm. Her silver eyes gazed at me solemnly. "And think about it."

I tried, but the second I started I then realized that Epona told me that my handicap was to ask three for advice. That was only two.

Fine.

Electric blue eyes widened as I stomped up to Mystery Kid's pony. "Hi, sorry your mom's a jerk. Got any tips?"

Those eyes widened further, then they narrowed. He slid off his horse and I noticed that he was younger than I was, but nearly just as tall. That was very unfair. He glanced at Epona before stalking around me. He had a strange, loping walk. He was leaned forward, a little hunched over and walking on the balls of his feet. He circled me like a wolf eyeing prey.

Then he stopped.

"You won't win," he said, just a little louder than necessary.

"Is that the advice?" I said dryly.

Mystery Kid smiled gently for a second. That's when I noticed he didn't make a full circle. He stopped just where my slightly taller frame hid him completely from his mother.

"Your mouth will get you in real trouble, better watch that."

"Gee, tha - " His mother has a temper, I realized. One that I could exploit. I gave the kid a considering look. "-nks."

"Don't thank me, graecus," he sneered as he stalked back to his pony.

I was going to have to do something real nice for that kid.

I dragged my feet a little going back, thinking furiously over Artemis' riddle. Nuada Silverhand. He got voted out from being King for a while because he lost his hand and the Celts at the time were vain perfectionist jackasses. You got maimed?

Sucks to be you!

You didn't know that your years of good kingship was worth jack shit compared to being ugly?

Should have thought of that before you got your hand cut off.

Surprisingly, after the jackasses voted the stupid tyrant Bres in his place, seven years was long enough for them to accept his new silver hand replacement as 'good enough' to make him king again. Balor killed him in battle though, because his silver hand wasn't…

Wasn't good enough.

I called my backpack to me. I dug into it desperately. It probably wasn't in here, I took it out, I know I took it out because why would I use it on a Quest?

It had to be in here.

It was.

I grabbed the object I was looking for, slipping it into the pocket of my jacket. As I took up my position and watched Epona show off with a few twirls of her spear, something occurred to me. Epona was goddess of the Calvary.

A Celtic war goddess with a spear. Stronger with longer reach than me.

Like I've been training against for years.

"Even if you win," Epona taunted. "It will be short lived, demigod."

Mom.

I love you.

My mother plans ahead. My Spidey Sense only triggered against shit that will kill me.

Time to make a god mad.

"My victory will be short lived," I agreed as I unsheathed Damocles from my necklace. The bone sword with its silver gold rippled edges was a comforting weight in the palm of my hand. I could do this.

I grinned cheekily. "Your defeat won't be."

 

[Shujin]

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction
​

When Mom said the whole Roman situation made things awkward for her, I think she was understating it.

Because over two thousand years later, it was the reason I was standing across from a Celtic war goddess of the cavalry in a dueling circle on top of a random hill in Arizona feeling sick to my stomach. I would be fighting for the right to keep my arms because of Mom's awkward fuck up. I was standing beneath a pitch black Night sky with the thunderclouds of Ouranos the Sky Father's' prison because Mom fucked that one up too and now I had to deal with her problems. While already dealing with Artemis' problems.

So, yeah.

Shoutout to all the twelve year olds whose lives aren't a complete mess right now.

I should stop believing in coincidences, but I didn't want to think about my mother training me for this fight. She expected me to rely on my Hunger anyway.

That said nothing good about my chances.

Spears are long.

I know you just thought something along the lines of 'no shit' but hear me out.

I trained with a sword.

My Armor Class (D&D thing, don't think about it too hard) was in the dumpster. Epona towered over me by over a foot at nearly six feet tall. The reach advantage was real on top of the speed advantage, because god. And the strength advantage because god. And the endurance advantage because god and she's lived a long ass time with that spear.

Because god.

However this went, it was going to go fast. I had to end it quickly. It didn't help that my stomach was starting to cramp up and I was sweating bullets like I had the god flu again. My best bet would be if Epona underestimated me just long enough for me to figure something out. Asking Mom for a little help got me cautious confidence, encouragement and giddy excitement all wrapped up in the feeling of someone waving a pom pom around in my head.

Fate was cheerleading.

I love my mother to pieces, but Jesus Christ of Nazareth and all his tiny baby hands and feet!

This was not the time!

"You're brave, boy," Epona said, some grudging note in her voice as she took a stance. "Foolish, but brave."

Ain't that the truth.

You know what deja vu feels like, right?

Now, I knew what it looked like as Epona lunged. My memory layered an image of my mother starting our training spars the same way she always did. The same forward foot placement. The same turn of the torso before everything just blurred. I've seen it hundreds of times. My chest burned the phantom sting of the slice scoring my ribcage.

But Mom hasn't gotten me with that one in a while.

I stepped into it with Damocles leading the way. The strike deflected off the bone blade as I slid it down the shaft. Epona whipped the spear away to save her fingers, stepping back and I followed. The spear has reach and wasn't good at slashing. The only way to fight was to stay close.

That had its risks too.

I leaned my head back as she reversed her strike, lashing out with the end. A god's strength behind a blunt weapon was just as dangerous as a bladed one. I could feel the air split as the dark wood passed my nose and then it was my turn.

Clang!

Damocles bounced off Epona's silver arm guard as she spun away. A frown was on her lips. "So you do have some skill."

"I'm not all talk," I protested. I swallowed the excess saliva in my mouth. I hoped I didn't throw up. My head was pounding. "Just eighty percent."

Epona wasn't trying to kill me.

That had to change.

"You know, this really isn't necessary," I began, circling Epona at the same speed she was circling me.

There was an art to making people mad. You can't be too obvious about it, because then they'd know you were trolling them. The last thing I wanted was for Epona to wonder why I was trying to make this harder on myself.

"You know you could have just let us go."

"No," Epona said grimly. Her eyebrows were sharply drawn together. "I can't."

"Because you don't like my mother," I said as casually as I could manage.

"Because I despise your mother," she hissed at me, grip on her spear tightening for a split second before she relaxed again.

Couldn't have that.

"I always wondered what had happened there," I said, shifting my stance in the tiniest, smallest way. "I mean, I knew the Celts fought, but then where'd everybody go?" The goddess' lips thinned. "They can't all be Roman, right? What'd you do, surrender or maybe defect - "

The goddess' eyes flashed as she hissed, "Mind your tongue, mortal."

That hit a nerve.

Dad always told me that if I find out what hurts someone, I wasn't supposed to dig into it. To make the scar bleed. It wasn't a nice thing to do. Just like he told me not to make decisions while angry.

(I think he knows I got mean when I'm angry)

(Maybe he knows how mean)

I didn't listen to him until Mom left.

"Mom always said it was awkward."

"Awkward," Epona repeated in a dull tone of voice, coming to a stop. Her mismatched eyes held a barely restrained fury. Just a little more… "Our destruction was awkward?"

"Awkward," I confirmed. "And annoying, but I'm not sure if she meant the aftermath or you - "

My neck screamed.

My bone blade came up and the impact made it ring, nearly tearing the hilt right out of my hands.

Fuck.

Epona was a blur of motion. It was like trying to respond to a threat in the dark, when you couldn't rely on your eyes and just had to go by sound and movement and the alarms blaring in your gut telling you that if you didn't move, you'd die. Every hit I blocked was painful, but I didn't have the time to prepare for deflections.

My neck suddenly went ominously quiet and I faltered. A hit glanced across my stomach and I leapt back as far as I could. Epona's two colored eyes were calculating. I glanced down. My jacket was unscathed.

Whew.

"Ah," she said. "I was not imagining it. The amulet. The coat. The bag. The sword. The glasses." Her lips curled up into a sneer as her eyes glinted maliciously. Epona did have a temper. The problem was, it looked like her anger burned really, really cold, not hot. "What do those let you see?"

"How things, people, gods die," I threatened.

Epona blinked slowly.

"You see the omens?" she muttered and maybe it was in Gaulish or maybe it was some other proto-Celtic language, but it came through clearly. "Omens," she repeated angrily. A prickle shot across my neck as she examined me. I was starting to think saying anything had been a mistake. "I see. You are not a foster," she marveled. "You are favored, because you are hers."

She disappeared.

Damocles chimed, pulling at my arm and the sudden certainty that I was going to die right the fuck now made me put everything I had into it. People say that sometimes you see your life flash before your eyes and I never understood what that meant until I saw the tip of the goddess' spear scream by my temple, just barely knocked off course by my blade. Damocles was enchanted to watch my blindspots. If I hadn't turned, it would have caught me right in the back of my head.

Spears are poking weapons, not slashing. She had to pull back from the miss to strike again, but she was fast. The time that bought me was in fractions of seconds. The air whistled over my head as I ducked the second thrust. Damocles pulled me into blocking a strike from the shaft from above as I twisted away. I was a lot shorter than her. I fell right into that size where she had to compensate to actually aim for me a little.

Normally, that would mean nothing. Because war goddess.

But Luke had been right.

Epona was used to fighting on a horse. The important part when riding was your torso movements, your shoulders, your waist, your head.

She was outside of her Domain.

She had no idea how much the shifting of her feet and legs gave away.

There was a ringing silence from my power, but it didn't matter. I knew what was coming before her knee even came up. Her sheer speed meant I was almost slammed in the chin anyway. I stepped into the next attack again. I felt the air move as I laid a hand on the flat of Damocles' blade to help control the angle, slicing out at the exposed leg.

My vision exploded in white stars and I felt myself get launched into the air.

I hit the ground hard.

I'm not bleeding, I'm not bleeding, I'm not bleeding, I chanted in my mind. I swallowed back bile as I kept my face turned from everyone as long as I could. I heal fast. I'm not bleeding.

I met Luke's eyes. He looked pale, straining against the twisted limbs of the Warped holding him back. He searched my face, worried. Then he nodded with a small smile. I turned to look at Epona and watched the smug triumph melt off her face as her eyes searched me.

"What - how hard is your head?" She asked incredulously. Luke huffed.

("Hard," he muttered.)

I reached up to feel it.

A bump was rapidly forming on my forehead, but the skin was unbroken.

"I hit you," I protested, feeling my stomach lurch. Was I going to make it? I felt hot and cold at the same time and my blood felt like it was congealing in my veins. "I know I did."

Epona laughed, harsh and cold.

"You did!" She said brightly and then all color, all vibrancy, all life leeched from her like water running down a smooth surface.

She was a god. What we see is always a mask. I watched Mystery Kid duck his head as the Warped around us bowed in their saddles. I realized why Epona's handicap had been so generous, more of a challenge of wit than a true drawback. I thought it was just because she was that confident. I wasn't wrong. I had just forgotten exactly who and what she was. Epona was the Gallic goddess of the Cavalry and Equines, the Fertility of Spring and the Great Mare of…

"But the dead," the goddess rasped. "Don't bleed."

Chalky pale skin crawling with black veins, sunken cheeks, brittle pale hair and decay. Her nose and ears were a sharp contrast of blackened flesh like her face was a patchwork quilt. Her lips shriveled to look like worms. Her teeth shone through the hole rotted away in her left cheek as she smiled. Her natural eye was now a shining topaz gemstone, like Mom's black diamond, with the rolling fields and endless plains reflecting infinitely within.

She'd been playing with me this entire time. The duel had been rigged from the start.

"Be still," she said, pointing her spear at me. "And you will only lose an arm. Stand to fight and you will lose much more."

How could I refuse an invitation like that?

I stood up.

"It was to first blood," I reminded her.

Epona's rictus grin and my neck screeching was the only warning I had.

Blocking the first strike broke both of my arms. I felt them give almost in unison from the force of stopping the spear from burying right through the bridge of my nose. The felt, more than heard, the shockwave. Left arm complete break, I thought deliriously. That was going to be annoying. The second attack tore Damocles right out of my hands.

I threw myself into a corkscrew spin at her, dodging the third by the skin of my teeth. Literally. The spear whistled past my mouth as my head turned. I had to get close. She even smelled like death.That dry, earthy, somber smell you can find around a freshly buried corpse. I dug into my jacket with my right hand. Ignoring the grinding pain of that arm was easier than ignoring the blinding pain of my left as I deflected her swipe with my already broken left arm.

I could feel the bone completely shatter.

She shouldn't have stopped, but her dual toned eyes burned as she hissed into my face, "Any last words?"

"Yeah," I croaked as I brought out of my pocket…

My disposable camera.

"Say cheese!"

Knife, I thought as I pressed the button to take a picture and the familiar cold weight fell into my left hand. My grip was weak, but I held on. Godly eyes like mine couldn't be blinded.

But Epona only had one of those.

Her natural eye changed with her form, but the blue one didn't. The dead don't bleed, but Epona's blue eye was a replacement. Just like Nuada's silver hand, those were never as good as the original.

In the overwhelming darkness of the Night, the camera flash shone like a star had descended. The goddess recoiled. I saw the blue eye's pupil spasm, shrinking and I lashed out with my broken left arm right into her newly blind spot. And maybe she could have stopped me anyway, or reacted in time, but she was turned slightly away, off balance. She hadn't reset her stance from the last strike properly, used to having to direct her horse to prepare for the next.

As Luke would say, 'Footwork, gods damn it!'

Don't trust the friendly face he puts on so he doesn't scare little kids during baby's first sword fight. The advanced battle class was hell on earth.

The pitch black blade of my brother's dagger raked right across Epona's blue eye.

A dark thrill welled up in my chest as I watched the flesh of the eye part in slow motion, weeping silver.

First Blood.

I win.

Epona underestimated me, but maybe I could have killed her.

The explosion caught everyone completely off guard. We all went flying back, horses crying out in fear as this eerie howling rose up as everything drowned in a ghastly green light, like a geyser had just erupted from the ground but instead of water, it was spewing tormented souls.

"Look away!" Mystery Boy shouted. "Don't look!"

My eye! Epona screamed and it sounded like a stampede of horses with steel on their breath and blood on their hooves. The spectral light reared up. I could see what looked like the flashing of a skeletal horse's hooves. I will make you pay for it with your own!

I saw the blur of auburn leap in front of me.

"You will do no such thing!" Artemis thundered as loud as her little body would let her. "He won the duel!"

I wanted to admire the rabbit's suicidal dumb ass bravery, but I suddenly felt like I was about to die.

At first I thought it was something Epona was doing to me as punishment for winning, but it felt like all of the god flu symptoms I was already suffering had just turned up to eleven. Something was happening. The cramp in my stomach suddenly turned agonizing. The saliva pooling endlessly in my mouth was now overflowing as my entire body shivered. I was going to throw up now and there was nothing I could do about it. I could feel Epona's presence thundering through every cell in my body. I felt sick from head to toe. I almost didn't notice my broken arms because it felt like something inside my stomach was trying to break out. When I finally threw up, instead of the potato chips and Kit Kat bars, what came out was a lot like the suspicious week old chunky salsa at Taco Bell.

It tasted like blood.

I kept retching, pieces falling out of my mouth like I downed a whole barrel of the stuff and even worse, the steaming pile on the ground seemed to be moving and growing bigger independently.

That just made me throw up more.

"What - " I heard Artemis start. "Luke, get away from him! She's coming!"

There was a lot of shouting and movement, but I couldn't concentrate on any of it. My stomach burned, twisting in on itself. I was vaguely aware the vomit pile was taller than I was and getting bigger, but I was just too focused on getting

all of it

Ò̴̡̮̩̿U̷̖̐͘Ţ̸̣̄

With one last heave, I spat out a wriggling piece of something and then fell over onto my side. The rest was a blur of me feeling too icky and in pain to move, Luke hauling me over his back, Reclaim flashing as horses screamed, or maybe something or someone else was screaming.

There was a loud crackthoom!

Everything lit up like I took another picture and the stink of ozone tickled my nostrils. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mystery Boy jump off his pony, flipping a shimmering magical gold coin into the air just like I saw Epona turn away from us, distracted.

Jason, back! The Great Mare neighed at him.

He's not her foster, my ass, was my last coherent thought for a while. I felt like I was floating. My limbs detaching, my ears turned inside out and my stomach was empty. Reality faded away. There was just the pounding of hooves, Luke's constant stream of soft noise like he was talking me down from something, Artemis' warm little body tucking herself against my side.

Mom's vicious approval sinking deep into my bones.

When I woke up, I was on the bed in a dingy motel room and nowhere near that hill.

I still felt like I had been run over.

Repeatedly.

I tried to sit up, but forgot both my arms were broken.

"Argh!" I collapsed back, feeling the grinding pain shoot straight from my forearms to my spine. I lay there, panting for a bit before I registered that on the ratty chair near the bed, Artemis was sleeping on her back, paws in the air, mouth open snoring.

I want my camera back.

The door opened and Luke walked in with a paper bag of what smelled like fast food. He closed the door, put the bag on the tiny desk and then saw me looking at him.

"Styx!" He jumped, then clutched at his chest. His right arm was wrapped in gauze. "I'm going to have a heart attack before I'm twenty."

"Let's not," I rasped. My throat was sore from all the vomiting.

Luke sighed. "How are you feeling? The truth - " he said quickly when I opened my mouth. "Be honest this time."

"Awful," I said quietly. "Both arms are broken, left arm was shattered, right arm partial. I can use my right - "

"Don't."

"I feel like I have a fever - "

"You do," Luke confirmed.

"Nauseous, ankle sprained - "

"Broken," Luke said. "I took off your shoes," he said pointing. I looked and my right foot and lower shin in my black sock was almost twice the size of my other one.

"Oh," I said. I thought it was just my big toe. "Um, headache, stomach hurts a lot, back hurts a lot, left leg is a little numb still?"

Luke stared at me silently. I couldn't tell what he was thinking.

"I won't lie to you," Luke began solemnly. "Right now? I hate your mother."

"What - "

He held up a hand and started ticking off his fingers. "I asked you how you felt and you gave me a damage report."

…what was I supposed to say?

"Your pain tolerance is unreal and you told me she hurt you as training. She left when you weren't good enough, she makes you do dangerous things for no reason - "

"She has - "

"You are twelve!" Luke raised his voice. "You think I haven't put it together what it means that all this shit exists in the world, but I lived on the street as a petty pickpocket? And hadn't seen much of it?"

I no longer knew where he was going with this. Where was this even coming from?

"There are a few times when I thought I saw something that didn't belong, but every time something happened to steer me away from it and my father is the god of Travelers and Thieves. Do you get it?"

I didn't.

"He wasn't allowed to, but he still tried to protect me, because that's what parents are supposed to do! You know everything you do, you're on this Quest because your mother doesn't."

"That's not true!" I tried to yell, but something was in my throat, making me cough it out instead.

"Celtic raised?" Luke said mockingly. "You do what you have to? When your mother is actually raising you?"

"You don't understand," I coughed. I didn't want to tell him about her chains. I know I said I wasn't interested in hiding things from Luke anymore, but that had nothing to do with him. Just me. "I can give up on this Quest if I wanted to. She told me I can just go home."

Luke's face could have been carved from stone. "And the Bolt? The war?"

I winced.

"Everyone dies eventually," I murmured, but my heart wasn't in it. Mom didn't care about dust. It was just something that was occasionally swept away. "I chose to stay," I insisted. "I know the risks and what's at stake. I want to help Camp too."

"You're a good person, Percy. And an idiot." Luke sighed and said quietly, "That makes this all worse."

Was he still talking about my mother?

Luke sighed again. "Do you want the good news or the bad news first?"

"Good news," I said. I was glad to be done with that conversation.

"Good news, when we left, the Reserve was occupied with the Bear," Luke said grimly. "The blood you threw up…"

Oh.

Artemis said not to swallow any of it. I dimly remembered blood burning on my tongue, but not much else. I thought I spat it out.

Luke glanced at the sleeping rabbit. "You shouldn't have been able to do that, but you did, so you didn't get…"

Artemis said it was just like her, to warn her prey that she was coming, knowing there was nothing they could do about it. Rhea had said as desecrated as they were, the Hunters still remembered how to hunt.

Our van from the convoy that escaped Kallisto exploded into blood.

"She body hops," I said. "I thought you said that was good news?"

"I stole a horse so we're just past the border to California," Luke replied. "We're safe for now, but that's the end of the good news."

Great.

"And the bad news?"

"I'm down to one cube of ambrosia," Luke said. "I got a map and Compton is right by Los Angeles." Right by the Door to the Underworld. "It's our only lead, we've got seven days left, so we better come up with a plan for what happens if it's not there."

I don't have one.

"Okay," I said quietly.

I looked around the room as I thought. The dingy motel room was just as bad as I thought it was. The carpet was an ugly puke yellow color with threadbare curtains and old furniture. The entire place smelled like cigarette smoke and looked like it too with the stains on the wall and ceiling where a tiny fan stubbornly spun away. The bathroom looked tiny. It really looked like a place you were meant to stay in for a few hours napping and a shower, tops. The mattress was lumpy, but at least the sheets seemed clean.

Artemis snorted in her sleep, waking up as Luke pulled out the chicken sandwiches. She yawned and then shrunk into herself, embarrassed as a small paper plate of hay was placed on the desk for her. As he unwrapped the sandwich for me I asked,

"What happened to your arm?"

Luke grimaced. "You bit me."

I did?

"Sorry," I apologized automatically. It was wrapped from wrist to just above his elbow like he got burned by hot water. "I didn't mean to."

He nodded. "I know. And your bag is booby trapped."

"Um."

"I borrowed your debit card," Luke clarified. "There's no one around to pickpocket from. And stealing from ATMs is annoying. It tried to bite me too until I explained what I needed it for. "

"Yeah, it's…special." Now that I thought about it, I probably should have warned him about the defenses my backpack had against thieves.

"And one last thing," Luke pointed at me with a potato wedge.

I expected him to congratulate me. Now that we were out of danger (finally), he could shower all the praise he wanted on me for that fucking awesome duel I just won. After all the bitching I had to sit through from him about my defensiveness, there was nothing else he could say but 'you're pretty awesome, Percy.' Or maybe 'that was some fancy swording you did there.' Ooh, or maybe 'I was wrong about your defense, Percy.'

"You have eyes on your bones," Luke said.

I stared at him.

"You have eyes on your bones," he repeated, as if I hadn't heard him the first time. "Your left forearm had broken through the skin by the time we got here and there were eyes."

"Uh," I said intelligently. "They're small?"

"On your bones."

"I don't see out of them, if that's what you're getting at," I said, but then I remembered that time on Luke's bike running from Kallisto. Where I couldn't blink or move, but could somehow still see in the direction I wasn't facing. "They're out of the way and not, like, on my face? That'd be weird."

"Ye-es," Luke said slowly. "That - that's what would be the weird part."

I knew he would get it.

Luke turned to Artemis.

"I understand now," he said too calmly. "There is nothing wrong with him or any of this. You just have to uninstall logic and your understanding of reality."

Artemis flicked her ears. "I have a feeling I will be reminding you that you said that."

Now it was her turn to get a food item jabbed in her direction, a sandwich.

"Don't," Luke said.

I wasn't sure what his problem was, but the sandwich smelled delicious. I wasn't too sure about eating it at first. I still felt pretty sick to my stomach. Luke pulled up a chair and dangled the sandwich in front of my face, refusing to let me feed myself. He was completely immune to my glare. The indignity was real, but after the first bite I just scarfed it down. Anticipating it, Luke gave me a second sandwich and then cautiously propped me up against the shot headboard of the bed by the nightstand so I could sip at the soda.

"I'm not an invalid," I pouted.

"Yes, you are," Luke said sternly. "So, ideas," he continued as he ate his potato wedges.

"...maybe we can get other gods involved?" I volunteered after a long moment. "We know who has the Bolt, so if we get help to maybe ambush him - "

"The Night," Artemis said simply.

"Right," I said thickly, shrinking back. I was mad at myself for forgetting. Not only was everyone really busy, but my friends needed help too.

"And I do not think it would be a good idea," Artemis continued quietly. "Everyone I can think of falls into three categories. They would refuse to help because of my father. Refuse because of me or cannot be spared."

Luke whistled. "You never ran out of arrows to shoot into your foot, did you?"

The rabbit's ears flattened in a bunny frown. "I have also been thinking. There are elements of Khione's information that do not align."

I felt my stomach sink. "You think she lied?"

"No," Artemis shook her head. The rush of relief I felt made me feel breathless. "Her support of you seems genuine. It is simply that…" The rabbit paused to think over what she wanted to say. "My father's son is short-sighted, arrogant, cruel and impatient." Artemis didn't want to or honestly didn't think of Ares as her brother. "But he is not suicidal."

Luke blinked. "What do you mean?"

"A war on Olympus between the Sky and Sea - maybe a few thousand years ago I could see him do this, but now we are stagnant." Artemis said. "We are tied to Western Civilization, for better or worse. Losses cannot be easily regained now, how much worse would it be if we crippled it with a silly war?"

I didn't think about it, but she was right. The whole reason Artemis voted to torture Hades was because dead people might be still giving him Names while the rest of them had to let mortals believe they didn't exist. I bet Ares voted the same way for the same reason. So knowing that, why would he do this?

"But he did do it," Luke said.

"And the winds only heard of him hiding the weapon," Artemis pointed out. "The god of War does not make a habit of talking to himself."

Maybe the god of War lost his marbles.

Luke's eyebrows flew up. "...and he wouldn't tell his minions his plans either, right? Someone else is in on it."

"Do you think maybe Kronos?" I asked. I wouldn't put it past a guy who ate his kids, but that conversation was going to be awkward. Mostly because shouting into your freezer, regardless of the subject, was going to be awkward. "Our Prophecy has his card. You think he recruited some gods?"

Luke was tense. "Maybe? But he's in the Pit - no wait."

"My freezer now," I said.

Luke palmed his face.

"I think it was someone the winds could not overhear because they control the winds," Artemis said. "I think it was someone who could use the Master Bolt just as well, if not better than Father could. Someone the god of War has always taken marching orders from. This is only my suspicion but…"

Artemis' voice was soft.

"...I do not think we should be using the goddess of Love's Name anymore."

Well, shit.

I don't know how much of it was Artemis' bias from Aphrodite being on the winning side of history while Artemis lost her mother, got hit with lightning and her brother was booted down to mortal. Aphrodite fought to keep Zeus on the throne then. Would she really try to take over now?

I wanted to tell Artemis that she was being just like Chiron when he accused Hades of wanting the Bolt for no real reason, but this did make a lot of sense. A lot can change in a few thousand years.

"We probably can keep using it," I said. "If I suddenly stop saying Names, wouldn't that just be more suspicious?"

Artemis paced a little. "I…suppose?"

"Really?" Luke asked, skeptical. Annabeth was that way too. What was with these demigods dissing on Aphrodite? "You think Love wants the war?"

Artemis turned to him.

"The Sky Father is still alive," she said.

"Uh huh." Luke pointed upwards. "I can see him."

"He also suffered a somatic death because she nearly subsumed him."

I think 'somatic' means he's brain dead now.

It was close, but no cigar.

Aphrodite Shattered.

The Voice of Heaven used to be a big deal in the Greek world with his False Prophecy thing. You asked him a question about how something would go down and if you acted on his advice, it would come true. Real prophecies always come true. No matter what.

That was my problem.

You could almost call False Prophecies self-fulfilling in a way. Zeus asked how to keep his throne and then turned around and ate his wife. Mom told me Kronos asked the big guy a question about his people's future and then he went and ate his children.

Apparently, The Voice of Heaven, Ouranos, was the god of Terrible Dietary Advice.

I'm glad Aphrodite tried to eat him.

Karma.

Luke's mouth fell open.

'She's from another pantheon, remember?" I said. "Silena inherited from a war Name and she's got lots of them."

"Had," Artemis murmured, then she sighed. "Then again, Athena successfully hid the possession of her Kingly Name, so I can no longer be sure of that, can I? The Roman Name stood for Victory too."

She means Venus.

"The Roman Name lost," I said. I think Aphrodite was already Broken by that point too.

"Exactly," Artemis replied.

"So then we do need help," I said. "But we should end the Night first to get it."

"...how?" Luke asked.

"I can ask?"

Artemis' ears went straight up in alarm. "You can ask?"

"The Night is my great-aunt, aunt, first cousin, sister and sister-in-law. Depending on what myth you read, but related. Closely." I told her the same thing I told Quintus. "I'm friends with her son Hypnos and I have met her before, it'll be fine."

"Fine?" Artemis' voice rose into almost a screech. "You cannot just call her Name down - "

"I'm not going to do that," I interrupted her. "Do you think I'm a moron?"

"What are we talking about?" Luke cut in.

"Artemis thinks I'm going to run around California calling on the Night's Names," I explained. There are so many ways that could go bad, especially near the Door to the Underworld, it wasn't even funny. "While I was actually taught by my mother the right way to get someone's attention."

Artemis went still. "...you were taught."

"Why is that still a surprise?" I asked, exasperated.

The rabbit sighed. "I really do not know."

"Look, the entire reason this happened is that my mom and her pissed each other off, but Mom told me she apologized - " And that had better meant now rather than whenever she got around to it - "so there might be appeasement involved."

Artemis cringed.

"It will be fine," I said. "The Night isn't trying to screw us all over, she's probably not even aware of it. I can talk to her."

Luke looked between us both with his God, Why expression. He then clapped his hands to his cheeks and dragged them down. "...we're actually going to petition a protogenoi." He squashed a cookie into his mouth. "Any minute now this is going to wrap back around to sanity."

"You said - " Artemis started.

"I said don't remind me what I said!"

The rabbit honked softly at him.

"It will be fine," I repeated. I was trying to will them into believing it, because then maybe I would believe it myself. The Night was just like my mother. Just because she didn't want to hurt anyone, didn't mean that was the way things turned out. All she wanted was her children and descendants safe back home and it would have broken Ethan and Clovis' minds.

"Will it?" Artemis said. "The Mist was the last time we made such a petition."

"You said the gods needed the Mist," I pointed out.

"Because it protects us as much as it protects mortals." Artemis explained. "Attention was easy to get before. Too easy. With attention came activity and with activity came the others."

"The others?" Luke looked like he really didn't want to be the one asking.

The rabbit let out a humorless laugh. "I believe Perseus called them aliens. Like Selene. Who might not be dead," she finished quietly.

There was a huge pale bloody moon in the sky outside the motel window.

The aliens. The ones that came after the Earth was won after the Star-spawn rebellion. Pontus. Selene. Apophis. Nidhogg and others. I remembered Kronos' question about what was so important about this little planet out of the entire cosmos. Didn't that apply to the aliens too? Why did Pontus or Selene know to come here?

"The last time someone interfered, it was the Hindus and it nearly broke our reality," Artemis said. "There are still cracks. We had to petition someone."

"My step-dad." Uncle? Cousin?? Mom's Baby Daddy???

Whatever.

"And in Time's usual fashion," the rabbit said, sounding tired. "We got exactly what we asked for and nothing that we wanted."

That sounds about right.

Because the same thing happened to my fucking mother. Really, if the Young Gods could figure that out about Chronos, Mom had no excuse whatsoever. Erebus and Aether were just what she asked for and neither had what she needed. Darkness too little, Aether too much.

My birth was some kind of fucked up Goldilocks scheme.

"It has grown too deeply into our reality by now," Artemis said with a small shrug. "But we would not get rid of it, even though we want to."

And then they dug a deep hole and threw all their knowledge of the Elder Gods into it, hoping beyond hope that if they forgot about it, that It would then forget them.

It wouldn't.

Because They were still here.

"Well, it's not going to be like that," I said. "It won't. We don't want her to do anything, we want her to stop."

Artemis looked at me with solemn silver eyes.

"I hope you are right."

"And if he is, we then - what?" Luke asked. "Wrangle up a few gods and storm his temple to put him on trial based on our word alone?"

Well, when he put it that way…

…

I got nothing.

Luke looked up at the ceiling, sighing. "...there's nothing I can remember from the Prophecy that is a clue either, is there?"

The Proph -

All the air in my lungs left me in a wheeze as I just remembered something. I flung my hand out for my backpack and tore through it, ignoring the pain from my broken arms as I searched for that aluminum tin of Mythomagic cards.

"Percy?"

"Hold on," I said as I brought it out. I opened up the tin and saw the black and silver decorated card backs of my deck. I reached out to flip the first card, knowing exactly what I wanted to see.I laid the card on the bed beside me face up.

Chiron, the Trainer of Heroes.

I stared at the card. Luke dumped the bunny on the bed before looking too.

"I kept pulling his card when we were with the monsters. The Roman," I said, hushed. Epona, the Gallic goddess of the Cavalry and Equines, the Fertility of Spring and the Great Mare of the Dead. "And the Reserve were kids."

"Not all of them," Artemis said softly. "But yes. Trainer of Heroes."

"What is - why is that a thing?" Luke asked as he watched me lay out the thirteen cards of our Quest Prophecy. The one I gave as the Oracle of Chthon. "Why do that to anyone?"

"I did not - " The rabbit pulled back. "We did not do it to them. We have been trying to break it. It is a violent, painful, but temporary transformation and it is a generational curse."

"Blood curse?" I asked. Those were Mom's specialty. "So descendants of descendants also get cursed and so on?"

Artemis nodded, "A great deal of Camp Jupiter are legacies because of - "

Luke held up a hand. "Wait, wait, wait, of Camp Jupiter? You mean you can be a child of a demigod and still have powers!?"

Artemis and I both stared at him.

Then we glanced at each other.

"Yes?" I tried.

That wasn't obvious?

Luke palmed his face for the second time. " - gods fucking have genes," he muttered.

Huh. Guess that's solved!

Luke waved her on. "How'd you get cursed?"

"The Gauls," Artemis said simply.

"Oh yeah," I said. "Your fuck up ruins your kid's life forever? Celts love that."

"We are now aware," Artemis said in a voice as dry as the Sahara. "There is no true distinction between godly children and not. The more divinity a child has, the greater the risk. Demigods get stronger with age. The best we have been able to do is give some of them the chance to escape it as they get older.."

"I'm guessing they're being monitored," I said.

"Closely," the rabbit nodded. "Demigods reaching the Camp are inspected for tainted blood by the Wolf Goddess. If she thinks they can retain their minds upon transformation, they are directed to the Horse Goddess. If she suspects they cannot…"

The rabbit cringed, not wanting to say it out loud.

I didn't want her to say it either.

I felt like that would make it more real.

Luke grimaced. "Is it going to - to take that blond kid?" He sounded pained. "Is that why he was with the Reserve too?"

"That blond boy," Artemis growled. "Appears to be a son of my father." The rabbit puttered around the bed, running in a small circle like she was trying to pace and work off angry energy at the same time. "I - " she panted. "I would know that lightning anywhere."

Luke closed his eyes.

"His name's Jason," he said softly. "Jason Grace."

Grace?

As in Thalia Grace?

The rabbit recoiled.

Luke's lips curled up into a bitter smile. "Now you know."

"I don't think he's tainted," I volunteered. "Ep - " Crap. I think this is the first time in my life I've actually stopped myself from saying a Young God Name. And I won the duel. "The Horse Goddess is raising him and everything. He had a divine gift from her. That coin."

I didn't see what it did, but I'm guessing the coin was a weapon of some kind. Considering who she is, it's a spear. Or a javelin.

"Favoritism," Luke sneered.

Is it?" Artemis scoffed. "If he's with the Reserve, then he is safely out of sight."

I was starting to feel really bad for Myster - Jason. His sister was a tree, his foster mom was a jerk, his birth mother was MIA and his dad was an asshole.

"It's still more than most of us get," Luke said quietly and Artemis deflated.

"That is true."

There was an awkward silence.

Luke shuffled in place. "Well, we're not going anywhere for a while. Percy needs to heal - "

"I have ambrosia - "

"You need to heal," Luke commanded. "For gods' sake, your left leg is numb because you broke your back today. You could have been paralyzed for life."

"Heal fast," I muttered.

"Shut up," Luke snarled.

I shut up and stuffed one of his cold potato wedges into my mouth.

My Camp Counselor sighed as he leaned forward in his seat. He pointed at the cards I had laid out. "I think we can safely assume this one - " He tugged Boreas, God of the North Wind out of its place. "Was for Khione."

I moved to sit up closer, but the look he shot me thoroughly convinced me otherwise.

"The Master Bolt," Artemis murmured and gently tugged Zeus' Lightning Bolt out of place too with her teeth.

"The three of us." Hermes, God of Thieves. The Oracle of Trophonius. Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt. Luke then frowned. "Reclaim is a harpe sword," he said slowly, hovering over that item card. A Harpe Sword. It added a raw 500 attack power to a unit. "You think I'll have to fight for the Bolt?"

"God of War," Artemis reminded him.

"I could take him," Luke muttered, but he put the card back.

"This one…" Artemis gently picked up the card in her teeth and moved it. "Might be for me as well…"

Moros, God of Doom.

"What'd I tell you about being a quitter?" I asked.

She sighed.

Luke looked over the cards critically. "You know…" he began slowly. "There aren't a lot of cards left and they are all too vague."

"I know," I said miserably.

"Unless…" Luke swallowed thickly as he reached out and slid three cards back into place. "Unless these don't really mean us, but are part of the Prophecy."

I stared at the line up, feeling sick.

I knew then, as I looked at the circle of the thirteen Mythomagic cards of my Prophecy, that Luke was right. All Mom had to say about Luke's role in the Quest was 'you needed a thief.' She didn't care who.

"There's going to be something else, or maybe multiple things we're going to have to steal first," I said.

Hermes, God of Thieves.

"Your cards," Luke said. "You were getting warnings about the god at Sea. It told you about the Horse Goddess. Oracles don't go on Quests." Luke shook his head, overwhelmed. "Maybe you need to lead us to our destination? Is our Prophecy even done?"

I don't know.

The Oracle of Trophonius.

"Centaur blood," Luke murmured. He tugged the item card Vial of Centaur Blood out of place. It was part of the item set used to counter control decks, poisoning enemy units if your unit was captured.

"I think it's a reference to both Chiron and Heracles," he said. "Heracles killed the centaur Nessus with arrows tipped with hydra blood and that's the same way Chiron died the first time. He had to give up his mortality because hydra venom hurt too much."

"From goddess to mortal rabbit," I said.

"Right," Luke nodded. "And Nessus tricked Heracles wife, so poisoned centaur blood killed Heracles too, but he ascended instead."

"...is it both then?" I ventured. "Or is it either or?"

"We're trying to get her a Name," Luke said. "I think this is saying it will work."

Artemis stared down at her own card.

Goddess of the Hunt.

"Thank you," she whispered.

I cornered Luke in the bathroom later.

Well, I say cornered, but in all honesty we were there treating our wounds. Luke cleaned and re-wrapped his arm. It looked like he had stuck it up to the elbow in a giant lamprey's mouth and then pulled it out. He washed the blood off in the sink. We checked on my left arm to make sure it was healing okay. Healing fast doesn't mean shit if you heal wrong.

Luke glanced up as the bone moved under his fingers. Then he shook his head, "Hate your pain tolerance," he muttered as he kept nudging all the slivers he felt back into place. "I really want to take you to a hospital, but that x-ray is going to be crazy."

"Yeah," I said. "Mist doesn't hide it well."

Dad found that out from experience.

"Did you really think it was both?" I said very quietly as he checked my sprained wrist and then motioned for me to give him my broken foot. "The centaur blood. Or were you just saying that to make her feel better?"

Luke glanced at me. He looked troubled, like I asked him something he'd been asking himself.

"...I don't know."

I put one of my plans in motion when we went to bed.

Well, my only plan.

I had other plans, but they were more like half plans.

Quarter plans.

First, I hung around while Luke peppered Artemis with questions under the hulking form of Diana. I wasn't going to tell them I was about to do something very stupid, because then they might stop me from doing the stupid thing.

'The Reserve is what makes Camp Jupiter no better, isn't it?' Luke asked.

Artemis was sitting in a small rabbit loaf by his shadowy Dream form. "They do not know it can happen to them," she said quietly. "It was a guarded secret by the Pontifex Maximus, but there has not been one for over a century."

'You kept the fact they were cursed a secret?'

"Because of what happened when they did know," she replied. "I told you, it is not a good idea to rear children to believe in the Roman ideals you yourself do not hold. They assumed - no, they expected the sacrifice they made for Rome to be honored."

Luke flitted around her as a dark spiny hummingbird. 'They rebelled.'

"Yes," Artemis said softly. "They did and who do you think fought them on our behalf?"

Luke was quiet for a long time.

'Camp Half-Blood.'

She curled up into a little ball.

"History could not be changed, but it could be rewritten. We were no longer the enemy. Well," the bunny huffed. "Not all of us. Athena was the architect of the deception and she volunteered to be the one at fault. The Romans blame her for fighting the Greeks of Camp Half-Blood, the curse is a state secret and we train them not to ask questions. Never question the gods. No answers, only commands."

I asked Apollo once how they kept the secret of the pantheons.

His guilty face had said it all.

"We took away their culture. We took away their history. We took away their freedom. Would you call that better?" The rabbit asked.

'Ktêma empsuchon.' Luke said.

It was the same phrase he used when Khione told him demigods didn't qualify for hospitality laws.

It meant slave.

"Some of us tried to change things for the better," Artemis said. "It was not enough. Athena was one of them."

'She volunteered to be the scapegoat, tried to help Camp Jupiter, but doesn't give a damn about her own children.' Luke raised a blob that was his hand. Then he raised the other one and juggled them in the air like he was weighing scales. 'I don't get her at all.'

"There is a trick to it," Artemis huffed. "What is wiser? To win the fight or to avoid it altogether?"

'Avoid,' Luke said.

"Athena is a war goddess," Artemis replied. "And in war, wisdom is how best to spend the lives you have as currency."

Alright.

I'm never telling Annabeth that.

Luke rocked back.

'Damn.'

"Wisdom for its own sake was her mother," Artemis murmured. "Would that she were still alive…"

I checked to make sure Diana wasn't watching me and sought out the Crossroads.

I regretted it immediately.

You may not know this, but being force fed someone else's vision felt like going on the worst acid trip in anyone's life.

I felt like I had been sliced into pieces thin enough to see through. I was simultaneously strewn haphazardly among the stars and stuffed into each and every molecule of oxygen on Earth. My vision broke into fourteen sections as I watched what looked a lot like an adult Artemis with short red hair wearing an actual suit with a long military looking coat and cravat catch up to the taller Athena in a really old style dress with a poofy skirt.

When was this, the American Revolution?

'What are you thinking?" Artemis (?) hissed at her older half-sister as she pulled her along with her through golden hallways decorated with Greek mosaics. "You cannot do this."

"I can," Athena (?) said evenly. "And I will. The Doors of Death as a battleground between the Camps, is the start of a race to the bottom. If I am the only one who sees that demigods scrambling for a means to not die so they can fight us -"

"You're not the only one!" Artemis hissed. "I know. I know, but the vote -

"Is the most hare-brained, short-sighted waste of time of the past decade," Athena snarled. "That won't end the war, it will start one on Olympus."

Artemis recoiled.

"Why should the demigods trust we will keep our word when we haven't?" Athena said coldly. "Why should the minor gods? That is what started this mess, if you recall."

"We should be able to end it!" Artemis' frustrated shout echoed.

Athena looked at her pityingly. "The time for overtures is long gone. We will simply have to do better the second time."

Artemis dropped Athena's arm like it had burned her.

"The second time?"

"I am aware of what our father is like," Athena waved the question off. "Have you never wondered exactly how many times we could use Camp Half-Blood as an attack dog before the mutt breaks?" she asked idly.

Artemis looked incredulous. "I think you are the only one that thinks like that."

"Hmm," Athena said primly, didn't explain anything, just started walking again. Artemis hesitated, but then caught up again,

"They aren't mutts."

"As you say."

"If you do this, Father still won't let that statue - "

Athena turned her head. The expression on her face was blank, but I saw Artemis bite her lip and look down at the ground.

"Do your duty," Athena said coldly. "And I will do mine. Alone."

Artemis straighted. "And what is my duty?"

They walked in silence for at least five minutes as I watched, passing other eternally youthful beings in everything from Greek chitons, Roman togas to Victorian reenactments with powdered wigs, a few walked around looking like they were in Imperial Russia, but most were in the same style of clothing Artemis and Athena were wearing. When the crowd in Olympus' grand halls thinned, Athena murmured,

"The Etruscan Messenger has outstayed his welcome, if you would Diana?"

Artemis tilted her head curiously and the silver of her eyes vanished into that hungry void without a hint of resistance. A satisfied little smile was on her face.

"Finally."

A jumbled mess of images pulled me away. I saw that vision from the time when the Oracle of Delphi attacked me again, but it had changed. The warring animals were still there, the three eyed goat and the monstrous bat. The world was waking up with every clash, bursting open with screaming vents of steam as the sea formed a massive whirlpool leading down into the depths where I saw ancient ruins start to rise. I looked to my left and saw the boy with the sea green eyes there. He was older than before, fifteen or sixteen, looking on in horror.

'There is safety in repetition' my mother's voice said as the stars in the sky danced in patterns as skyscrapers fell to the deafening cheer of delirious crowds murdering each other with a smile -

I pulled back with a gasp.

The dainty yellow flowers of Delos bloomed around me.

"And so you return," Hecate said and she was standing beside me, looking out over the pale Crossroads just like I was. It looked like a branching river, just replace the water with stardust. It kind of hurt my head a little to think that every glowing mote in the Crossroads was a choice.

The goddess of the Dark Moon looked just like she did last time with twisting silver designs on her dress and a black dog at her feet. Her pole cat was taking a nap around her neck and her twin torches were held up high.

"I - yeah," I said, curling into myself. "I'm sorry, your grace."

"Are you really?" She asked calmly and I cringed.

I was now.

"I, uh - I just wanted to ask you something?"

"I know." She inclined her head towards me and then turned to walk away. "I am afraid I must decline."

"Do you need anything stolen?" I blurted out to her back.

Hecate stopped.

"Do I need…" She said, but this time there was this whisper underneath her voice, repeating her words in a language I couldn't make out, but the sound of it felt like ice water was being poured into my bones. My lizard hindbrain started wailing like air raid sirens. "...something stolen."

"We've got a thief," I whispered. Quests were when mortals were allowed to break the rules. The Ancient Laws didn't apply to us. "We can pay for it. Please."

Hecate turned back around. Her free hand came up to pull down her hood. I vaguely noticed some of her black hair was pulled up.

Looking her in the eyes stung.

Thankfully, she didn't look at me for long.

"...I will meet you in the meadows, in the sunlight of new construction," she said as she turned away again. "You will not be late."

What?

"Uh, wait- "

I woke up.

The motel fan creaked almost soundlessly above me. There were words in my head that weren't mine. They were staticky, cutting in and out like I wasn't supposed to hear it.

Wisdom's daug - - lks alone,
-Mark of - - rns thro - - Rome
Twins - - - angel –
— – —- -key —

Then it was silent.

I didn't know whether or not to feel worried or triumphant as I laid there. Hecate hadn't said no. I smiled to myself as I realized something else.

I really was an Oracle.

I didn't win much of anything in that duel.

But.

Epona was going to spend the rest of her long life knowing she lost an eye to a demigod of The Morrigan.

---

AN: IVLIVS is the gold coin that belonged to Jason Grace and it is never said who gave it to him. When flipped, if it was heads, then it became an Imperial Gold gladius. If tails, it was a seven foot long javelin. Jason was well trained in the use of both, but seemed to favor the spear. The name IVLIVS is Latin for Yulius. The sword side had the image of Julius Caesar as a reference to the minted aureus coin. The spear side was an ax, the symbol of Caesar's victory over Gaul. It was destroyed in canon in battle against the giant Enkelados on Mount Diablo, exploding with enough force to melt sand into glass, but Jason was mostly unharmed.

 

[Shujin]

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction
​

"She what?" Artemis croaked as she huddled by the headboard of the cheap motel bed. The crumbs of her breakfast were still on her whiskers. We must have gotten five or so hours of rest. It wasn't enough to get rid of the bags under Luke's eyes, but at least I no longer felt like every bone in my body was made of splinters.

Progress!

One of these days, I'll remember to thank my mother for my healing factor (and maybe Apollo). It probably wasn't something she consciously thought of when I was conceived, but it was wild to think that a few hours ago my spine had been broken.

That's awesome!

"She what?" The rabbit looked like a toy stuffed in between the lumpy pillow and my one strap backpack.

I will be asking my father to send Quintus an invoice for a replacement.

"Agreed," I said again before I stuffed the blueberry Eggo waffle into my mouth. My left arm was still really sore. The plastic bag of cold water Luke got me helped, but I was really wishing for the cast of ice Khione had made when I broke my leg. The place where my bone had pushed through the skin was still a dark blackish purplish scar line.

I wondered if I could actually see through my bones if I ever tried to.

That would kind of be gross, wouldn't it? I'd just see my tissues and stuff. "I toldsh you I was gonna ashk someone."

"You personally went to the Crossroads - " The bunny took a big, deep breath. "Consider me now forewarned," she said quietly. "You are always serious about the nonsense that comes out of your mouth."

Luke threw up his hands from where he sat cross legged by the door, nearly throwing his hash brown. "That took long enough."

Have I mentioned yet that my party members were both jerks?

"You should try it sometime," I said acidly. "It's amazing what actually following through can get you when you don't make a habit of not meaning what you say."

"Even when it is insane," Artemis sighed.

"Especially if it's insane," Luke said.

"Okay," I said, offended. "What is this, did I miss the memo for 'pick on Percy day?'"

"I," Luke said very deliberately. "Am trying not to freak out about you just invading a god's territory uninvited alone."

Oh right.

That was a thing.

"So you," he continued. "Are going to sit there and take it."

I knew it was stupid.

I still tried to defend myself.

"...she could have blasted me earlier when Mom accidentally threw me over there, so I figured she was cool - "

"Percy," Luke gritted out through clenched teeth.

I shut up.

"What did she say, exactly?" Artemis asked, sounding impatient. "She'll meet us in the meadows…?"

"She will meet us in the meadows," I recited. "In the sunlight of new construction. You will not be late."

"Sunlight?" Luke said, glancing towards the small motel window partially covered by the too small faded curtain. The Night still reigned.

"It's a riddle, duh," I said. "Problem is, I have no idea what she means. Maybe 'sunlight' is referring to an obelisk? Those represent sunlight to the Egyptians. Maybe there is one by a construction site somewhere?"

"How would we even find it?" Luke asked. "There are a ton of those things around."

"Look for a meadow? We are near the Great Plains area?"

"Wendigos," Luke said.

Fuck.

"You will not be late," Artemis murmured. "You will not be late. You will not be late?"

Luke pointed at the rabbit. "And that. She didn't give a deadline? We have less than seven days."

"You will not be late…" Artemis said again, with a different emphasis. "Perhaps we cannot be late?"

Luke glanced at her. "How much you want to bet on that?"

"I do not want to bet anything," she insisted. "Much less a potential Name, but…" Artemis sat on the pillow in a thoughtful silence. "Hecate often has an uncommon foresight. She has always been…odd," Artemis said slowly. "Different."

I was starting to get the sinking feeling that Artemis didn't know how different.

Hecate was Old.

In between the Young gods and the Elder gods, there was a third category. I must have mentioned it before, right? The Dreamlands usually knew of them too.

Oh, so I just kind of left it hanging?

Sorry.

Old was a category reserved for the ones who used to be Young, but somewhere along the way something happened. Or maybe someone interfered or maybe they did something, but you couldn't really call them Young gods anymore. They weren't Elder gods, though. Mom was clear on that.

They were just different.

Young god Names could be Taken, but why bother peeling off the layers one at a time when you could just swallow them whole? That was what Old gods were.

Young god predators.

Mom gave me a few Names to watch out for. Aphrodite and Hecate from my own pantheon, Ra was another one and maybe meeting Bast would have been a bad idea. The twins of Zurvan were around somewhere and someone in the Shinto ate a bunch of buddhas, but it was anyone's guess who.

Mom didn't have many rules, but she did tell me to be polite if I ever met an Old god.

They earned it.

You bet your ass I listened.

So there you have it. Young, Old and Elder. Don't worry, those are the only labels that matter. Everything else you can ignore. I was planning to. I had first hand experience now how useless some labels were. Khione spent who knows how long as a nymph, because it was just as Mom said. The word 'god' didn't mean much.

Mom also told me my first cousin Rhea, the one who had to build suppressors into her house so her presence wouldn't accidentally kill me, was a star-spawn.

Beneath me.

Mom told me a lot of things.

"Percy?" Luke called out. "You still with us?"

"Yeah," I muttered, shaking my head. "I zone out sometimes, you know that."

"I also know you had a concussion a few hours ago," Luke countered.

"I did?"

"Mhm."

"Oh." It must have happened when Epona hit me on the forehead, but I didn't bleed. "Well I'm fine - "

Luke gave me a look.

" - better," I corrected myself. "Let's put Hecate's riddle aside for now. If she didn't give us a deadline, then maybe we will just be where she needs us to be eventually. We just have to keep an eye out."

Luke grimaced, but he didn't say anything.

"That leaves the Night," Artemis sighed. "You were serious about that too."

"Uh, yeah?" I said. "Waiting it out is clearly not working fast enough."

"What do we need to do?" Luke asked. He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. "Are we going to the Underworld after all?"

"We need an appropriate sacrifice," I explained and then I held up my arms. "Which means you need to take me to the hospital!"

Luke stared at me.

I waggled my broken arms at him.

He blinked and looked around the room like he was searching for cameras.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"The hospital," I repeated and then I took pity on him. "We're going monster hunting. We'll stop by the hardware store for some supplies and then once we get into the emergency room, you can do your Mist thing - "

"The hospital?"

Now it was my turn to blink. "Yeah? The only other nexuses of suffering I can think of are call centers and Walmart during Black Friday - "

"You are going to need to start from the beginning with this one," Artemis interrupted me.

Luke buried his face in his hands. "Please."

The beginning.

That was also a big problem with ADHD. Sometimes I was able to come through like a champ, but other times telling me to start at the beginning meant my mind flew off in fifty different directions of different ways to begin.

I floundered.

"Um, okay," I said. What was even the start? The monster I wanted to sacrifice and why did it like suffering? Maybe why I needed to sacrifice it? Let's go with that. "Burning food like we do at Camp, doesn't work."

"It doesn't work," Luke repeated dully.

Crap.

I didn't mean it like that.

"I mean, it works for the Olympic gods, but for the gods like the Night? You need more." I licked my dry lips, trying to piece the words together. "Something with life, preferably with power, that we can use to bridge the gap between us and Her."

"Not an altar?" Artemis asked curiously.

I felt cold.

"The only one I'm worshiping is my mother," I said flatly. "If She wants one, She'll just have to get over it."

Luke whimpered.

"Do not worry," the bunny crooned at him. "You just need to uninstall your logic - "

"I said don't remind me!" Luke snarled and lunged for the rabbit who bolted from the bed. She forgot Luke had telekinesis. "Come here, you little shit!"

---

"You pushed the bone back in," the triage nurse said incredulously.

The Palo Verde Hospital was right by the border between Arizona and California in a place called Blythe right off of Interstate 10. It looked nothing like the glass and white concrete and chrome buildings I was used to in Manhattan. It was a small local place that had a squat adobe look to it, blending right in with the desert plateau and plains around. You could really see why this place had a state prison just down the street. If anyone ever got out, there was nowhere to go.

Everyone here looked busy.

The triage nurse had a weak grip on my left arm. I had both my sleeves rolled up. My right arm was just swollen, but my left was looking pretty lumpy along the forearm. Luke tried, but there was only so much you could do without an x-ray.

"How long ago was this?"

"A couple of days?" I guessed. I have no idea how long it takes normal people to scab over. "I wasn't really keeping track, but the pain wasn't going away as fast as it usually does."

The nice lady continued to stare at me, dressed to the nines in hospital scrubs with comfortable looking shoes, bags under her eyes and a flashing pager. Her name tag said 'Rica' and she looked like she regretted asking.

"I heal fast," I told her.

Luke snorted.

Her eyes slid over to him. "And you?"

He held up his right hand with a crooked smile where a bunch of bloody napkins were strapped to his wrist.

"His rabbit bit me."

Artemis remained huddled in her annoyed rabbit loaf on the seat next to us, staring stubbornly at the back of the chair with her butt out to the world.

Rica nodded slowly. "May I?"

Her face pinched a little when she finished unwrapping the napkins. Artemis really got him good this time.

"That might need a stitch or two," she sighed. She bundled up the napkins and fished a packet of gauze from one of her deep pockets. "Keep pressure on it. And this?"

Luke shrugged. "Got caught in some poison ivy," he lied as he shifted his bandaged arm away from her. "Don't worry about it."

Rica turned back to the front desk where a heavyset man in business casual was typing away at the computer. "Are they checked in?"

Luke subtly waved his left hand. "I'm responsible for him. Our father called ahead."

The receptionist (is that what they are called?) blinked rapidly. His fingers flew over the keyboard. "I'm just making edits to their file, we were missing some information is all."

"Alright," the nurse turned back to us. "I'm making the call to take Perseus here back to an exam room straight away. I don't like his fever, so we're going to take a hard look at those arms."

I did not realize I still had a fever.

"And his foot," Luke spoke up.

The nurse looked horrified. "I'll get a wheelchair."

As she hurried off, I muttered under my breath, "You remember why we're here, right?"

Luke gave me a nasty smile. "Yup."

Get a load of this guy.

I graciously allowed the ER staff to bundle me into one of those ugly looking blocky hospital wheelchairs after they took my sneakers. They handed them to Luke in a plastic bag as I was handed my official 'emotional support animal'.

Who then proceeded to kick me in the gut because I ruffled her ears.

Artemis is lucky she's so cute.

The hallways of the hospital were filled with people. Most of them were nurses or doctors hurrying one way or another, but there were quite a few people with backpacks, water bottles and coats in the exam rooms or resting outside of them. It was a mirror image of the waiting room. All the people looked like they stumbled in from a cross country road trip or hike, carrying supplies with them like it was the end of the world. All of them looked haunted and everyone looked tired. There were a lot of thousand yard stares, people just lost in their heads, staring at the walls.

The triage nurse stepped between me and a young woman being led back to her room. The patient was talking. She looked like she knew what she was saying, but it was just a stream of sounds that didn't make any sense.

"We're a bit overworked," the nurse offered weakly. "There was a movie set in the area. The sky is…"

She didn't complete the sentence.

I don't think she knew how to complete the sentence.

"We know," Luke said.

We were led to an exam room at the very end of the hall. It was just what you'd expect, with a bed and a lot of equipment around including breathing masks and oxygen tanks, shelves and bandages. There was that thing for taking your blood pressure and small hammers to knock your knees with.

Take it from me, it is actually possible to fail a reflex test.

"Here we are." Rica the nurse flipped a tag on the wall by the door. She bustled around in the room in a circle, adjusting chairs and equipment with practiced movements and then came back out. She waved at the room. "Another nurse will come in to get more information, what exactly happened, your medical history, if you have any allergies, that sort of thing. Then the doctor will come in to see you."

I glanced at Luke.

He hesitated.

I glared at him.

Luke grudgingly lifted a hand. "We're in no hurry," he said smoothly. "You can take your time. Feel free to forget about us."

The nurse's face went blank. She looked around the hall with her eyes passing right over us. She checked her pager and with a muttered curse left us right there out in the open. Luke deftly flipped the tag by the door from red back to green as he pushed me into the room.

"Okay," I said. I put Artemis on the gurney. "Give me my shoes."

"No," Luke said. He raised the plastic bag with my sneakers up over his head when I made a grab for it.

"Oh my god, give me my shoes! I'm not staying here - "

"How'd you do that?" Someone asked and we all froze in place.

"How'd I do what?" Luke's hand dove for the pocket with his dad's lighter as he turned back to the door. He froze again.

I twisted in my wheelchair so that I could see who the problem was too.

The problem looked a lot like a ten year old girl in a baggy pastel green shirt, faded purple jeans, mismatched socks and a baseball cap worn backwards with shoulder length chocolate brown wavy hair. She was cautiously peering into our room from the side, like she was ready to make a run for it at the slightest sign of trouble. The first thought I had was that she was actually pretty cute.

The second thought I had was 'what the fuck?'

Human girls don't look cute, they just look human. I don't think Epona broke my arms and knocked me right into sudden puberty, so that meant something was up.

That 'something' was probably the fact that one of her eyes was brown, but the other one was constantly shattering into a kaleidoscope of color. There was some kind of weird pull, but I was able to snap my head back, shoving the sensation away.

"Cut that shit out," I barked at her.

Both of her eyes went wide. "What?"

Luke stepped forward, frowning, but I caught on to his sleeve. "You've got some kind of aura going." I said. "Stop it."

She inched further away behind the door frame. "I - I don't know what you're talking about and I don't know how."

I felt Luke rock back on his heels.

"Demigod?" He asked.

"Demigod," Artemis confirmed and the girl gaped at the talking rabbit on the gurney. She looked around like she was hoping to wake up from some kind of dream.

"Yeah, she talks and you're part god." I gave her the jazz hands. "Surprise!"

The mission took a backseat. Maybe it was the distraction from ADHD, but I'd like to think that maybe I was trying to pay a debt or at least make up for another girl in baggy clothes that I left at a train station in New York City almost five years ago. The one I changed my mind and went back for way too fucking late. The one Mom left us over.

The Night had lasted this long. It could wait a little while longer.

So ten minutes of a rushed explanation later about the whole god business (Yes, they are real. I'm of Fate, he's of Thieves. Your parent was one. No idea who it is or what pantheons they are from. Yes, pantheons, plural. The rabbit is a rabbit because she was an idiot). There we were, Luke and I, a bunny and Problem Child -

"Piper," she said, annoyed.

"Um," I began. "I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking it," she insisted in the mysterious all-knowing annoying way of preteen girls. "It was all over your face."

"No, it wasn't."

"Yes, it was."

"You just admitted to using your powers to steal stuff five minutes ago," I pointed out. "Why are you complaining?"

"I didn't know what I was doing!"

"You still did it," Luke pointed out mildly with a slight grin, because he would approve of petty thievery to get back at an absentee parent. "Repeatedly."

Piper crossed her arms, a mulish set to her chin. "You know you sound crazy right?"

"Says the girl who's been talking people into giving her shit for the past year?" I said sarcastically.

"Look, I didn't - " Her face twisted up. "I didn't really think about it. I just thought they were creeps."

…aaannnnd she's got a 'look at me, I'm pretty' energy field she didn't know existed.

That sucks.

"So that's why you look like you got dressed in the dark," I said. Piper's face twisted up further into something pinched and pale.

Luke cuffed me over the head.

"So why are you here?" I changed the subject only for Luke to hit me again. "What?"

"This…is a hospital," he hissed.

Piper looked away. She was practically swimming in her clothes, looking more like a drowned kitten than anything else. "None of your business."

I have discovered that I don't like the taste of my own feet.

"Sorry," I said awkwardly. I searched for a way out of this. "Want to hunt a monster?" That got her to turn her head back a little with raised eyebrows. Luke palmed his face.

"We just met her."

"Yeah, and she's got voice powers," I said. "That'll make everything so much easier. So how about it? Do I hear a yes?"

Piper bit her lip. "It's a maybe."

I knew it.

"You're totally a demigod," I told her. "We live for danger."

I reached for my bag. Piper seemed to wince a little when she saw it, but that was probably because it still looked like the victim of a dog attack. "We just grabbed some stuff at a hardware store, so it's not traditional but I still think it will work - "

"A dream catcher?" Piper blurted out. She snatched the hoop of tied together sticks with the rope webbing in the middle right out of my hand.

"Cool, you know what it is."

Problem Child gave me a very cool look.

What'd I say?

"Ye-es," she said slowly. "I know what it is. Do you know what it is?"

"Asabikeshiinh," I said and watched her eyebrows fly up. "From the Anishinaabe. It's supposed to hang between the dreamer and the Moon to protect them from dark influences - " Artemis cringed on the gurney. " - but uh, we're kind of just going to whack a dark spirit that eats suffering over the head with it."

Piper stared at me, then her neck almost creaked as she looked over my head at Luke.

"Yes," he said, slowly closing his eyes. "He's serious."

"Unfortunately," Artemis chimed in.

"It'll work," I insisted.

Piper's cheeks puffed, before she let it out in one breath.

"Anishinaabe?" she asked. She was studying me with some kind of look that I couldn't understand.

"Ojibwe."

"Aren't they called Chippewa in the US?"

"So?" I shrugged as I muttered, "Names are important."

The Originals always had the most power.

The girl smiled at me. I felt my face heat up without my permission, which was annoying. Piper's smile dropped immediately.

"I'm sorry," she murmured.

"You didn't mean it," I shrugged. "I get it."

She glanced down at her hands. She turned the dreamcatcher over and over in her slim fingers to avoid looking at me. "Well, first - " she started to untie the rope and undo all of my five minutes of hard work. "Let's fix this up. Do you have any beads or feathers?"

"I do," Luke the Packrat volunteered as he unslung his own purple and black backpack from his shoulders. He had plain wooden ones. Three of them were etched with little designs made with a sharp pencil. "Ideas," he said as he reached for his own Camp Half-Blood necklace where four painted beads were strung. At the end of every summer, there was a camp tradition. All the Counselors got together and voted on behalf of their Cabin what the most important event of the summer was. Two of the beads on his neck were pretty unremarkable, but one had a winged sandal and the other a lightning bolt. I picked up one of the wooden beads. The clear graphite picture of a spindle was on it.

That was Mom's symbol.

"Aww," I said.

Luke snatched it from me. "Don't push it."

In the end, it was really all very anticlimactic. Piper made us a bona fide Cherokee style dream catcher.

("It's about intent," she said. The colors in her right eye were spinning slowly as she worked. "It's for protection and love and care. You can't mass produce that."

"And you'll do that for us?" I asked.

"I don't want you to die," she said primly. "So yes, I will.")

We snuck up to the hospital roof under the cloak of Luke's sneaking ability thing where he unlocked the door.

("We still have to be careful," Luke insisted. "We can still be seen, we're just…in the background. It gets rid of noise, but not smell or touch, okay?")

And then Luke put the rabbit down and just fucking jumped off the roof, tackling the dark shadow that was phased half in and half out of the side of the building with Reclaim in one hand and wooden hoop of rope and beads in the other. Artemis immediately bounded to the side of the roof after him, looking like she was about to jump off too.

Why am I surrounded by suicidal morons?

I could have screamed.

Piper did scream.

"STOP!"

It didn't come out sounding like English. It came out sounding a lot like what I imagine an octopus underwater trying to speak English might have sounded like. A watery burbling of chiming notes.

She sounded like Weird Girl, Drew Tanaka.

The dark shadow froze and Luke did too, caught in the blast radius of her voice.

"G- get down - " she wheezed.

"Easy," I murmured.

Piper gave me a wild look, like she had just reached into a bonfire and finally realized that nothing had been a coincidence. She didn't burn. But now she had a fistful of embers that she couldn't put back and couldn't put down.

"It is not foreign," Artemis said shakily. She was still looking over the side, not even moving. "It is part of you. It was always a part of you. Think about how it feels," she said. I tried to swallow my own panic and fear down. "Reach for it and then try again."

Piper inhaled deeply.

Climb down, she said and we all watched the shadow move to obey. Luke clung to what could pass for a back.

Wait there, she commanded next. Luckily for us, the hospital was only three stories, so the rush back down wasn't long. I tried not to think about how I attempted to follow along with Artemis' advice.

And got nothing.

Just a yawning empty feeling.

The dark spirit, when we got to it, was a horrendous shape. It was tall, easily topping ten feet and barely humanoid. It looked like the idea of a human being but it was tattered and ruined, wisps drifted off the creature like dead leaves in the wind. You know those Halloween costumes where you put on black cloth overlaid with the picture of your skeleton? Well, invert that. Instead it's a skeleton around an overlay of emptiness. The 'face' was a skeletal shadow with deep pits for eyes and nose. A gaping mouth was jagged with phantom teeth.

These things were parasites. Attracted to suffering and desolation and they only exist to make it worse. Side effects include: unease, insomnia, nightmares and then waking hallucinations where the victims completely lose their grip on reality.

They weren't common, exactly, but they weren't rare either. Everything was going wrong, which meant they would be there.

"Behold," I said, waving a hand at it. "A n'athm."

Luke gingerly climbed off it, a white knuckled grip on his sword.

Stay still, Piper commanded.

"I'm not going to ask what you were thinking," I said as Luke sidled around it. He had his blade pointed at it like he was just waiting for an excuse.

"I was thinking I don't want to see what you'd come up with," he snarked unsteadily.

I was thinking we could find who it was haunting and confront it in the room where we could set a trap. Who does he think I am? Rambo?

"My plans are fine."

"Your plans are shit."

Like he was one to talk. "You jumped off a perfectly good building - "

"Boys!" Artemis snapped.

Piper looked like she was about to pass out as she stared up at the n'athm. I saw her pinch herself a few times. Now that I think about it, this was a rough introduction to the mythological world.

My bad.

"Give me the dream catcher," I prodded Luke.

"Just tell me what to do."

"I'm not an invalid."

"Tell. Me."

I sighed. I lifted a hand in demonstration and brought it down. "Bonk."

That got me an incredulous look.

"That's it," I said and then because I couldn't help myself, added, "You had to go and make it difficult."

Three pairs of eyes turned and glared at me.

I was feeling very underappreciated.

Luke stepped closer to the n'athm. It exhaled noisily. Its breath smelled like rotten meat and old gym socks. The pits it had for eyes shrunk into little pin pricks of darkness when it saw the hoop in Luke's hand and it started screeching. You know, the way all monsters do when they realize their time is up.

Why was it always some version of 'my god's going to kick your ass for this!'

"Sure, buddy," I said back. "Whatever you say."

It kept spitting and snarling until Piper shut it up with a simple,

Silence!

Luke bopped it with the dream catcher and it got sucked into the protective web of the talisman. One minute big scary, the next it was trapped in our pokeball.

Luke dropped it like it burned him.

"Cold," he hissed.

"It would be," Artemis murmured. "That is usually one of the signs of something that does not belong…"

I picked it up from the ground. Piper's creation was smaller than the one I made. A tighter hoop with a more intricate web with five wooden beads woven into it and one of her shoelaces around the edge.

It felt warm.

"Thanks for this," I turned to Piper.

"I…" Piper's lips pursed as she stared at the empty space where the n'athm used to be. "...am going to make a lot more dream catchers."

"Good idea," I told her.

She nodded slowly. "Don't take this the wrong way, but I never want to see you again."

"Smart," Luke said.

"Oof." I mimed being hit in the chest. "I thought we really connected on, like, a fundamental level."

"You're both crazy."

"No, I'm not," I said.

"It's his fault," Luke said.

Artemis sighed.

"Do I want to know…why you wanted that, that thing?" she asked, looking up at the dark sky. The boiling clouds of Ouranos' prison were right above us, lightning flashing along the steel gray bellies with no thunder. I wondered if she could see it. If she could see all of it or if the Mist was barely clinging on or if she could see through it anyway with that right eye of hers. It looked like mine, kinda. She still had the whites of the eye like it was almost a physical structure, but right where the iris would have been just dissolved inwards into that dizzying pattern of colors.

Piper hadn't known she was a demigod. Did the Mist hide it from herself or did someone else step in?

"We're trying to stop the Night," I offered. "This whole no sunlight thing."

Piper dropped her gaze. Her face had fallen, something achingly vulnerable in her expression as she looked at us. "The whole 'people go to sleep and they don't wake up' thing?" she asked in a small voice. "That?"

We were at a hospital.

"Yeah," I said, feeling like I'd been kicked in the stomach. "That."

"Good luck," she said simply and then she turned away.

I didn't much feel like the conquering hero after that.

That was okay.

I was going to fix everything.

Yeah, I know.

I jinxed it.

We went out into the desert. I wasn't nearly stupid enough to make a sacrifice like this right next to a bunch of unsuspecting people. If anything went wrong, either I took enough precautions or it didn't matter what precautions I took.

"This is far enough," I said. I looked behind us from the back of the horse Luke had stolen from the Romans. The beast was so well trained, it didn't seem to even register that anything had changed. Behind us was just the horizon of the desert plains of this part of California. The interstate and the town of Blythe was left far behind.

Luke blew out a harsh breath as he searched the shrubs with the light of Rhea's electronic torch. "You sure about this?"

Not really.

"Don't really have a choice," I muttered as I slid off the saddle. My previously broken foot twinged painfully when I hit the ground. "This would be safer than going into the Underworld, at least."

It should be.

I walked in a circle, feeling the crunch of the gravelly ground and tough grass against the bottom of my shoes. I unsheathed Damocles and it flashed silver, reflecting the lightning raging overhead. Artemis' silver eyes watched as I drew in the sand with the silver-gold rippled edges. The Night Winds didn't blow out here. It was completely silent as I scratched out the circle and then the ten sided star design in the center.

Something settled in my chest. This was familiar territory.

I set my sword aside and bent down.

"Open the way," I whispered as I drew the symbolic eyes at the points with a finger. "Grant us clarity, grant us vision…"

Knife, I thought. Erebus' dagger fell into my open hand. I cut my palm and let the blood trickle down to my index finger. I kept drawing. I needed this symbol here for the Greek aspect. Don't forget the praise words and then the bridge. We just needed a sliver of the Night's attention. I wasn't asking for much.

Luke was almost milk white. "That's hurting my eyes."

I glanced over it.

Huh, really?

"Hey, Artemis, wanna proofread?"

The bunny sucked in a breath and then hopped over. She inspected it, walking around the circle to take it in. "It looks…fine," she said a bit helplessly. "But…the offering language is…?"

"Killing it in the circle works," I admitted as I took out the occupied dream catcher. "But if She's anything like Mom, it's so much better keeping them alive."

I tossed the dream catcher into the center.

The world inverted.

Pure darkness fell upon us like we had actually been standing in the noon day sun this entire time. Now, I could see nothing. The beams of Rhea's flashlights sputtered out, the sky vanished and the void closed in until there was nothing but the ground under our feet like we had been scooped up from the face of the earth and brought into the depths of a black hole. My ritual circle glowed with a soft unlight, the dream catcher smoked as the n'athm within screamed.

'Hush,' a feminine voice called out from the darkness. It was as soft as the velvet of a coffin lining. A shadow picked up the dream catcher, easily bypassing the circle. 'Hush,' it crooned as it brought it closer.

There was a crunch.

Artemis pressed her face into the ground as a figure coalesced from the darkness, drawing the smoke into itself as a giant of smoke and ash. It was vaguely shaped like a woman with no face, but stars for eyes with large black wings and a dress splattered with the colors of a red nebula, spotted with stars. With every heavy beat of the wings, a pressure battered us with waves of billowing shadow and an odd sleepiness.

Luke choked, falling to his knees.

I sighed.

"Oh, it's you."

Great.

At least she didn't bring her dumbass horses.

"Perseus!" Artemis snapped, panicked. "Show respect!"

'Perseus?' The figure asked suddenly. The stars it had for eyes flattened as if she was squinting. 'You!'

I waved. "Hiya, cuz. How's it hanging?"

'How is it hanging?' It repeated.

"You know," I said. "How's it going? What have you been up to? The stuff you usually say when meeting family members."

'Are you making fun of me again?' The figure demanded.

I winced.

Boys and girls, meet the personification of Deception, Apate. One of my cousins.

Kind of.

If you're wondering why a ritual to call upon the Night turned up this?

No, I didn't screw up.

This was the Night. Apate was just like my eldest sister.

A spawn.

"I'm really not this time," I promised, wishing I could go back in time to strangle the arrogant little toe rag that had been toddler me. Remember when I said I had to be convinced to play with mortal kids when I was younger? It didn't stop there. When Mom set up some playdates for me. Hypnos was fine, but god forbid a dirty spawn gets to touch my toys.

I know exactly how Artemis and Zeus got into the messes they made for themselves thousands of years down the line.

It starts with being an asshole.

I made an x across my chest. "I'm not teasing you. Cross my heart."

The star-eyes narrowed even further.

"Look, let me start over." I cleared my throat. "Hello, Mighty One. What Name are we using this decade?"

The figure crossed her arms petulantly. 'Night.'

I boggled. "And everyone's just letting you get away with that?"

'Of course they are! I'm her favorite!' was the indignant answer. 'And you just ruined it!'

That means, no one knows if the actual Night was ever going to take over her spawn, or if she was aware of everything said spawn did.

So they spoiled Apate rotten.

'You're supposed to be trembling in fear before me!'

"Why would I do that?" I asked. Luke was jerking his head so hard I was afraid he'd snap his own neck. I don't know if he was trying to tell me to run or trying to get me to shut up. "I literally called you here?"

'I am the Night!'

"I wouldn't be cowering before your mother either."

She blinked. 'You wouldn't?'

"God, no," I said. So maybe it was an itty bitty white lie. I just wasn't planning on it, but if the actual Night showed up pissed, I was going to do whatever kept me alive. "Last time I saw her, I got permission to call her Aunty."

I think that sound I just heard was Artemis, but I wasn't sure.

Apate hemmed and hawed for a bit as she slowly processed the Night not scaring the bejesus out of someone. She was shifting around as a formless shape. The only constant was her star-eyes.

"It's okay," I said. "You are very scary."

'I am!'

"Yup, look at my party members." I pointed at Luke, who was frozen like a deer in headlights and Artemis who had gotten as far away from me as she could without being noticed. "They're terrified."

Apate's giant form loomed closer. 'They do look appropriately awed.'

"Exactly. You can hang this over Hemera's head next time you see her."

'She's my daughter!' Apate crowed.

"Right," I said, playing along. I'd almost forgotten Elderquette 101. They are who they say they are. Always. Apate was easily distracted, easily confused, easily angered and easily appeased. The simple explanation was that she was still a toddler. I grew up. I don't know if she even can.

"Day came to my birthday and I gotta tell you, that girl doesn't know how to pull off a good spook. Not like you do."

Satisfied, she leaned back into the void. 'What did you want then?'

"The Night," I said. "It needs to stop. Any way you can make that happen?"

The star-eyes narrowed again. 'Maybe. What do I get for it?'

"What do you want?" I had an idea. "I could make Hypnos tell everyone at the House that Apate is your favorite child? Or maybe I could talk to my mother about doing you a favor?"

'Hmmm,' Apate hummed long and loud, thinking it over. Then she brightened, the stars for her eyes lighting up like quasars. 'Nope!'

The ground opened up beneath us.

We fell.

'Have fun in the Pit, cousin!' Deception cackled from far above, her voice echoing.

"Wait!" I screamed. The wind whistling past as we fell down and down and down stole my words. "Wait! Please! I can do something else for you! Anything! Can't we come to some kind of deal - !"

Something shot out of the walls, grabbing on to us. I heard Luke's scream cut off as we were slammed back into the side of the hole. Artemis cried out. I choked as the air was crushed out of my lungs as my momentum came to a sudden stop. Now my Spidey Senses started to fucking shriek. I looked down and wished I didn't.

I was being held against the wall of the hole by dozens of rotting hands.

The entire wall around us was made out of dead limbs. Most had only a few strips of rotting flesh still attached with papery tendons keeping the joints together. Maggots and beetles crawled all over them as they jutted out of the wall like we had fallen into the world's largest mass grave and no one here wanted to remain dead.

A long moment passed as I tried to catch my breath.

My head was ringing.

"Perce," was Luke's ragged cry.

"I'm here," I rasped back. The back of my throat was tickling like I inhaled a spider. The air was tinged with the molten taste of the Underworld. "Artemis?"

"Yes," the rabbit said from somewhere. I couldn't see her.

There was movement in the wall of hands. Like a snake moving underneath a pile of fallen leaves, there was a bulge in the wall slowly spiraling down towards us. I held my breath when it finally reached our level. It paused to my right. The hands fluttered apart like an opening eyelid and all I could register was

Rot

Decay

Wither

Spoil

Decompose

Putrefy

Corrode

die

D e a l



?​

Something asked.

"Yes," I said. I had no choice. The red glow of the Underworld river, Phleglethon, burned beneath us. We'd fallen far enough beneath the earth that we could see it. "An exchange or a bargain between parties. I'm willing to make one."

Silence answered me. The eye closed. The thing beneath the wall of hands kept moving, like a shark underneath the surface of the ocean. I felt my stomach cramp up in fear the closer it got to me. I felt it pass under me feeling like my spine had just been brushed by a thousand tiny fingers of lightning and then it was on the other side directly across from us.

It stopped and then the wall opened. Artemis let out a cry as a large gnarled hand blackened with rot and decay reached out. The hand was all wrong. There were seven fingers and four joints on each one, swollen and twisted. I caught a glimpse of the owner, but I can't tell you what it was because my brain just recoiled backwards. That lizard hindbrain was wailing hysterically as I forced my eyes onto the woman that stood on the palm of that hand. She was a pale skinned brunette with long black hair. She had an old 1940s looking dress with colorful flower patterns all over it in soft reds and yellows. A simple headband held back her hair and tucked into it was a single, blooming pomegranate flower.

She didn't have eyes. Smooth flaps of skin covered where the eye sockets should have been. Instead, there were eyes strung throughout her long hair like rhinestone decorations, each one trapped in a small glass ball allowing them to endlessly spin around, focusing in all directions at once.

"Deals are nice. Everyone is always so eager to make one with me."

The Dread Persephone had a voice like bone dust and honey. Her presence was almost crushing.

"Aren't they?"

"How could they not?" I croaked. "You have an excellent sense of timing."

She laughed.

"Oh, I like you, boy."

"I aim to please."

"Then you'd better get on with it," she said with an amused tilt of her lips as all the eyes in her hair focused on me. "You have my attention."

Yeah.

I did.

 

[Shujin]

AN: Holy shit, nearly forgot about this site somehow! Sorry about the late post!​

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction​

So, uh.

This…

This wasn't even remotely part of the plan.

Shocker.

Apate showing up wasn't in the plan either.

Look, I'm going to level with you. In hindsight, I really should have expected her to still be holding a grudge. Maybe an asshole toddler needling you over not really being 'alive' so who'd care if you 'died' was a bit memorable, you know?

And Apate's Greek.

I should have known from the start that it was going to come back to bite me.

Apate was smart enough not to just smite me, but that meant I was dumb enough to believe that changed anything. I knew better than to try to ask Mom for help here. If there was anything I could do to disappoint my mother, it would be asking to be saved from my own stupidity.

I was on my own here.

If you're just like 'isn't Persephone that one chick that got kidnapped and forced to marry Hades with that fruit thing? What's the problem?'

Debts are not toys.

You can't just put them down and stop playing with them whenever you feel like it. And you better know what the other party is getting out of it, or you'll end up paying interest you can't afford.

Two, she had no fucking eyes.

Persephone was standing on a giant decayed mutant hand belonging to something in the walls beneath the earth, literally hanging us by rotting threads above the Greek Super Hell, Tartarus like we just stopped by for cookies and hot chocolate.

Hello?

If you haven't figured out that there is an awful lot missing from that version of the myth we both heard, I don't know what to tell you.

I didn't know what to tell Persephone either.

This was the worst time in the history of ever for my mind to just go blank.

You know that thing that happens when you open your mouth to say something, anything, and fucking nothing comes out?

I was completely at the Dread Persephone's mercy with my mouth open and I couldn't think of a single word to say. My brain just checked out. I tried to bank on my ADHD to pick up the slack, but it didn't know what to do either.

The silence dragged on long enough to get awkward. My blood turned cold when Persephone's slight smile started to falter.

You might be wondering how I was going to smooth talk my way out of this one.

There was no way.

Luckily for me, I was traveling with the absolute dumbest fucking rodent known to mankind.

"You - Persephone?" Arty the Wonder Rabbit, She-Who-Voted-To-Torture-This-Woman's-Husband-Because-She's-a-Petty-Baby gasped.

I gasped in a greedy breath of air as the dangling eyes of the dark goddess shifted off me. I watched the corner of her red lips curl in a familiar way as she slightly inclined her head, like she was acknowledging the existence of a dog.

Or a rabbit.

"...in the flesh," she said softly.

"But it's summer!" Artemis cried out.

"Really?" Persephone's slim dark eyebrow raised over blank skin instead of a right eye.

She absently shook out a wrinkle in her skirt, lifting it up over her bare feet as she stepped towards us. She would have fallen right off the hand, if one of the fingers hadn't moved on its own to catch her. The loud 'crack' of the swollen, rotting joint made my stomach lurch.

"I hadn't noticed," she said with a lazy wave of her hand. "You know, with all the utter dark darkness going on."

Shit.

She's likable.

"You can't - " Artemis wheezed, having just as much trouble breathing as I did. "But you can't - "

"Be free?" Persephone finished the sentence still with her soft, mild tone. She turned her head back towards the hole in the wall where the putrid arm came from, a hand to her mouth as she stage whispered, "I do believe our mother has been keeping secrets. And we love her for it, don't we?"

Something spoke.

I felt like a bubble in my head just popped, a warm feeling of water trickling down the inside of my skull as I blinked. I looked around and everything felt off. I felt confused. There was blood in my mouth and I realized that I had slipped further down the wall somehow. Had I just -

Had I just blacked out?

"Well, now." Persephone was suddenly there right in front of me. The rusted nails and pressure was back. I felt her gently grasp my chin between her fingers. Her touch was so cold, it burned.

Staring her in the face was hard.

It wasn't because she didn't have eyes. She almost looked like one of those old school actresses from the 30s, a real classical long dark haired look. It wasn't the ADHD making me notice the small mole on her right cheekbone or the diamond studs in her ears or even the odd scar that made a divot in her bottom lip. I had to settle for focusing on the tip of her button nose.

It was because she didn't have eyes, but I could feel her gaze cut right through me. I felt like she was looking at me with two ice cold needles of vision, gently drawing blood. Everytime I tried to raise my eyes, something about the blank where her eyes should have been was…

Wrong.

I had the sudden thought that maybe she did have eyes and maybe I really didn't want to look at her without my sunglasses.

"You heard my brother, didn't you?" Persephone mused as she slowly turned my face this way and that. I felt like I was a horse being inspected for bad teeth. "What a pleasant surprise. You just keep getting more interesting."

Great.

Just what I wanted to hear.

"But where are my manners?" she asked herself as the hand platform she was standing on smoothly drew away.

Her face turned, as if she was glancing to the side and the hands holding me to the wall moved, clamping onto my wrists and shins. My stomach swooped as I was peeled away from the wall. For one terrifying moment, I was suspended in mid air with just creaking bones as support and then I was deposited onto the rotting hand.

Which was so much worse.

The flesh under my sneakers was putrefying. Almost goopy in some areas and hard as a rock in others. She didn't seem to care about the slurry squishing between her toes. I almost gagged at the smell.

"There we are." Persephone affectionately ruffled my hair and it felt like getting a brain freeze after eating too much ice cream. I wouldn't have been surprised to find icicles in my hair. "We were about to make a deal, weren't we?"

"...any chance we could relocate to someplace nicer?" I risked asking.

She raised a dark eyebrow again as the eyes decorating her hair pointedly looked around.

She said nothing.

"Fair," I said weakly, curling into myself.

"P-perseus," Artemis coughed out. I looked over and saw the rabbit trapped in a cage of bones. Two large skeletal hands were clasped together like a clam shell of interlocking finger bones around her, holding her above the abyss.

Luke was held to the wall like I was, with a large rotten limb bent across his chest and hands held his head still, but one of his legs had disappeared into the grave. At first, I thought he was unconscious, but then I realized he had his eyes screwed shut. Every inch of him was tense, the muscle in his jaw straining like he was furiously pretending he was somewhere else.

Anywhere else.

"Perseus," Artemis said again. "Don't."

Persephone frowned.

Awesome.

We weren't going to the Pit or getting into debt, because this rabbit was going to get us killed in horrible ways.

"Arty," I said, feeling tired. "Please shut up."

The Dreaded let out an amused huff of air.

"You heard him, 'temis," she said with an odd smile as she watched me curiously. The pomegranate flower in her hair wilted and withered away to dust. A single, crinkled gray petal landed on my sneaker.

"Shush."

Artemis obeyed.

"Perseus, is it? Like my title, Persephone?" She asked idly. "I prefer to think it means 'Murderer.'"

Take it from me, pick a nickname.

Live it, breathe it until it's just as real to you as the name you were born with. I told you before, didn't I? Names are important. Some beings out there can really make you regret giving yours away.

"Ravager, or perhaps 'one who destroys.' Good name."

I swallowed thickly.

"So, uh," I began.

My brain felt like it was made of mush. I felt like I was stuck in a trap room with the walls closing in. My fingers were numb and I was trying really hard to not think about the last time I took on a debt even as the back of my neck kept screaming like an air raid siren. My forearms were prickling in warning too. I felt like that moment back at Rhea's where reality itself seemed to buckle under the threat of the Matriarch of Swarms paying attention to me. My Spidey Sense let me react to mortal danger I couldn't even see, but right now it didn't need to warn me. I already had Persephone's attention.

I knew I was looking Death in the face.

"What are - " I stopped myself. I didn't like people asking me that question, why would I go and do it to someone else? "Sorry."

Persephone shrugged a careless shoulder. "What have you heard about me?"

I shuffled, and then stopped when my shoes squelched. "What…everyone does, I guess?" When she waved me on, I kept going. "So, Hades was a huge dork - "

"The biggest," she agreed.

"And for some reason thought asking Zeus for help with you was a good idea - "

"It wasn't."

"And then your mom did the…" I waved a hand vaguely. "The whole thing with trying to kill everyone and Olympus was panicking because it was all going to shit until you made…"

My brain finally caught up to the words coming out of my mouth.

A slow smile was spreading across Persephone's face. "The deal?"

The pomegranate flower in her headband bloomed as the endless hands stretched out towards us, their skeletal remains mimicking the opening of the flower petals as they grasped at thin air, begging.

The cavern around us shuddered, pelting me with dust and rocks.

The version of the story I heard was that she was forced to stay in the Underworld for six months of the year, one month for each pomegranate seed she ate.

But the pomegranate flower was Persephone's symbol, like the spindle was for Mom. It made me wonder how many times gods were represented by their chains. But Persephone was in the Underworld now, in the middle of June and Artemis didn't seem happy about that at all.

Maybe it was the other way around. It wasn't that Persephone was forced to stay in the Underworld, it was that for six months of the year, she was supposed to be locked out of it.

She called it 'being free.'

"I thought Demeter was your mom," I whispered.

"She is," Persephone said simply. She smiled a bit sadly. "Her…occupation has its risks when it comes to getting attention." As the Earth Mother's Warden. "She was not given a choice, I'm afraid."

"You have a brother?"

Another hole in the wall opened and I didn't look into it as a ragged, slimy looking tendril snaked past me and seemed to almost questioningly poke the goddess' cheek. Her hand came up absently, petting it. "What'd you think?"

She turned away from me towards the holes in the wall. I barely had the time to brace myself before the world pulsed, like I'd been caught in the shockwave of an airplane breaking the sound barrier. The only reason I didn't fall right into the Pit was Persephone's steady, burning hand around my upper arm.

"Easy," she said and then with a twist of her fingers, she was gently dabbing at my face with a cloth. "Literally. It will be simpler if you just open your mind to him. Blow your nose."

I did. The cloth was stained with my blood.

"Can I - " Persephone didn't stop me from making a grab for the napkin. If Hiraya had taught me anything, it was that there was nothing I could take for granted. I pinched my bloody nose shut. "Thanksh you."

She was still looking at me. "...you're not one of Poseidon's, are you?"

"Uh," I said dumbly. "No."

At this rate, I was going to have to ask my father to turn in a paternity test.

"And you're not of Demeter, Dionysus or Hephaestus," she mused as the hands in the wall fluttered, like long blades of grass bending before an unfelt breeze. "No, don't tell me, let me guess." I felt like there was some kind of pattern or logic in who she was Naming. If she had eyes, I was sure I would have seen them looking me over from head to toe. "You're pretty enough to be Aphrodite's."

"Uh."

Call me old-fashioned, but that did not feel like a compliment.

"If only I was younger," she said wistfully.

"...and less married?"

Persephone burst out laughing.

She had one of those movie star laughs, the kind that was all charm, perfect white teeth and the partly raised hand, like she thought about covering her mouth to be polite but couldn't quite bring herself to care.

I forced a laugh. "Right, haha. I - I was kidding. Greek, right?"

"Oh, you're adorable," she chuckled, wiping a non-existent tear from the corner of a non-existent eye. "Tell me you're Rhea's."

"...does she actually have demigods?" I had to ask.

"Of course." Persephone's lips curled again. "Technically speaking."

How do you technically have a demigod?

"And you are certainly not mine. I would remember that," she continued matter of factly. She made a frustrated sound. "I give up. Who do you remind us of?"

"Um." I licked my lips. My jaw was still throbbing. "Are you going to drop me if I give the wrong answer?"

Her lips pursed. "Hmm, I think not. You still interest me." She turned her head towards my party members and I felt my heart stop. I could swear Luke started praying. "But if you don't answer, I will just drop them."

Alright.

That's fair, I guess.

"Fate," I said quietly. "My mother is Fate."

My stomach scrunched into a ball when Persephone pulled back, her nose wrinkling. "Those - your mother is a Fate?"

"Not…a Fate."

Persephone's face went blank the same way Rhea's did, the same way Mom's did, in surprise. Like the guiding intelligence had just zoned out and went fishing for a second. The molten red glow of Phlegethon, the river of fire running through the heart of Tartarus burned below as all the eyes strung in her hair focused on me.

Persephone stared.

I felt like an ant looking up into the magnifying glass, seeing the radiant edge of the sun just come into focus.

"...well met, Perseus of the Bloody Tongue, son of Ananke," she said softly.

Nothing happened.

My stomach, lungs and heart dropped out of my ass simultaneously.

Nothing happened.

Mom didn't answer.

She wasn't here.

"I am Persephone of the Endless Abyss, Priestess of my father, Tartarus."

The Name felt like being dropped into a black hole.

My blood turned to fire and steam and evaporating gas. I could feel my body stretch like it was on a torture rack, my spine was popping, my feet being pulled down by an impossible gravity towards the mind of a malevolent galaxy. I felt like screaming. I think I tried. I was coming apart at the seams, separating into strands like spaghetti as the molecules that held me together began to fail -

And then it was over.

"He sleeps still," Persephone said with the air of someone explaining why it was raining outside. "Not forever, but, for now."

I was shaking. I couldn't help it.

Mom kept me from most of my cousins for a reason.

"Hi," I croaked.

If I was a dog, my tail would be tucked so far between my legs, it would have fused with the crack of my ass.

"Hello," Persephone nearly chirped, amused. "Perhaps a change in locale is in order. How are you with curry? I know a nice Indian place."

She was offering to feed me.

Hospitality.

I almost lunged for the promise of safety, but at the last second, I pulled myself back. "My - my friends…"

Her eyebrows rose. "You are…including 'temis in that?"

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

Persephone's eyebrows rose higher. She turned towards the cage of bone holding a still and quiet bunny rabbit. "Oh, very well," she sighed. "It might be for the better, actually. How long has it been since we had a real conversation, sister?" She asked the rabbit. "Like this, I mean. Face to face."

"...Rome," Artemis said very quietly.

"That's right," Persephone said. "That was a bit of a mess, wasn't it?" It must have been a rhetorical question because in the next instant, the dead limbs pulled Artemis and Luke into the wall. I swallowed a yell. There was nothing I could do. "Don't worry," she reassured me. "They're your friends. I am not…" She tilted her head with a thoughtful frown. "Metaphorically heartless. It's always nice meeting family members."

Right.

Nice.

"And you haven't changed your mind, have you?" She asked. "I was rather looking forward to making a new deal with someone."

"I would…really like it if we didn't end up in the Pit."

"Nothing wrong with the classics," Persephone reassured me with a numbing touch to the shoulder.

If you asked me yesterday what I would have done if I got tossed into the Pit, I would have said 'sit down and scream for Erebus.' Now, the very thought made my skin crawl with fear. The Mist wouldn't hide anything from me. I wanted to staple my sunglasses to my head.

I was now probably the last person on earth that wanted to look my uncle in the face.

"And…still alive to tell my grandkids about the close call," I continued hopefully, because not going to Super Hell because she thought killing us solved our problems would be Super Lame.

Gotta cover all my bases.

"All of us intact and unchanged." I hesitated. "Would it be too much to ask to be deposited within a horizontal mile of our previous location on the surface?"

Persephone's eyebrows jumped a little. "Done this before, have you?"

"You could say that," I mumbled.

I've failed at it before. Lost a game I was too stupid and arrogant to realize I was playing in a den full of monsters.

Those pixies were - were never going to leave Eva alone -

Don't think about it.

I felt sick.

"Are you sure that's all you want?" Persephone sounded disappointed.

I panicked.

"We're doing Hades a favor!" I blurted out. "Alekto came to ask if we wouldn't mind looking around for something he lost, so we're doing that but the Night is making it hard - "

"For the love of - " Persephone's hand came up to massage at a temple. "'I've got it under control, Persephone. I can handle my own problems, Persephone. I know what my siblings are like, Persephone' and he just goes asking random people for help?"

"Well, I mean - "

She wasn't listening. She leaned over the edge of the hand and shouted down the hole, "I am right here, you insufferable man!"

Silence answered her.

"We really need the Night to stop," I whispered. "I called, but Apate answered - "

"Of course she would," Persephone said. "Nyx is currently suffering - hmm," she thought over her word choice with furrowed brows and I abruptly remembered that Rhea and Nyx were her sisters. "Let's call it 'a bout of melancholy.' She will only respond to something that interests Her and you are not it."

I felt completely helpless.

So that -

That's it then.

"No need for the long face," Persephone said, bumping my chin up with a cold finger. "We can kill three towns with one plague."

I think that meant the same thing as the saying 'kill two birds with one stone.'

Don't - don't quote me on that.

"Sometime ago, my husband stashed a pair of children away with the Lotus Eater in fear Olympus would continue to be as stupid as we all know it is. A boy and a girl."

A boy and a girl?

What she was saying was tickling something in my memory. Something I heard at Camp, but it took me a bit to place it. Zeus had murdered a pair of children, a boy and a girl, back in the 1940s after WW2, after the oracle of Delphi gave her Great Prophecy. Children of Hades.

"You will retrieve them for me and in return, I will intercede on your behalf with Nyx in my official capacity." Persephone's lips twitched up into a brief smile. "The Night is nice, don't get me wrong, but it is, perhaps, too early."

I wasn't sure what she meant by that.

"You…want your husband's demigods?" I asked, just to be sure I understood what she was saying and what was going on. Maybe those kids didn't die, but were smuggled away.

Except…

That must have been about sixty years ago.

"Why can't you get them?"

"I am not Hera," Persephone said coolly. "And I will not trespass lightly. It would be more trouble than it is worth, but you should be…more or less fine."

"More or less?"

"There's an entry fee to Its abode," Persephone admitted easily. She pinched the air with her index finger and thumb. "Just a small amount of your time, nothing you cannot afford easily. They will be easy enough to spot and they have aged…slowly."

So they were - they were still kids?

After all this time?

"Go in, get them, get out. Simple."

"Simple," I repeated dully.

I didn't miss the Name. The Lotus Eater. We were going to have to walk into another old god's territory to swipe some children of Hades right out from under its nose.

Fuck me.

"Well?" Persephone asked. "Do we have a deal?"

I told you before.

I didn't really have a choice.

"We do."

"Excellent!" Persephone was genuinely pleased, but I felt like I just made a bargain with the devil. "He won't say it, but I know he'll be thrilled to see his daughter again."

…just the daughter?

Right as I thought that, Persephone's face soured. "Almost as thrilled as Nyx would be with her son."

And my world fell out from under my feet as giant putrid fingers closed over us.

I think I dissociated.

Or maybe I had an aneurysm.

It's happened before. Dad took me in to meet with a therapist a few days after Mom left. I wasn't sleeping well. I wasn't eating. That's where I first heard the term to describe this hazy, separated feeling, like everything was just shy of being real. Or maybe I was the one who wasn't quite real, just going through the motions, hoping that any moment now, I would just wake up and everything would be back to normal.

It's really all a blur.

I sort of remember a cozy, but exotic looking restaurant where everyone sat on the floor in front of low tables and Ottoman carpets with cushions. I remember smelling spiced meat, but all I can remember tasting was blood and cinnamon, like I just chewed on my own tongue with every bite. I remember seeing Artemis' auburn fur turn an aged gray underneath Persephone's fingers, before the Priestess of the Endless Abyss changed forms. Pale skin warming to olive. Black hair lightening to the color of that dirt that was sold with grass squares.

I remember Luke breaking three glasses in a row with his white knuckled grip, before the server settled on a plastic cup. For some reason, Persephone offering to let Artemis live out the rest of her punishment as a flower really stuck with me. I don't remember if I said anything. I don't remember if anyone said anything back.

'A half-blood child of the eldest gods, shall reach sixteen against all odds,' was on a never-ending loop in my head.

Nyx has a demigod.

I wasn't the only one.

I've known since Apollo told me when I was nine years old that I was the Prophecy child. I had a destiny. I wasn't like everyone else. I was important.

Mom never said otherwise.

I knew now that she needed me. That she had to have me. All I had to do was figure out how to break my Prophecy.

And it turns out, my Prophecy might not even be mine.

I know my mother is not perfect. She's not all powerful. She's not all-knowing. But there was a difference between not being omnipotent and being helpless. There was a difference between Mom's plan going so wrong, she didn't know what was going to happen anymore and thinking that maybe Mom's plan had always been a desperate shot in the dark.

I felt the same way she must have.

I could see all my plans for fixing Camp, for fixing Olympus fracturing into tiny, little pieces.

Maybe Nyx's son was the wiser choice for Athena. Maybe he wouldn't put his foot in it so much, maybe he would know what to say to Khione or know what to do when there was a problem instead of standing there, running his mouth like an idiot. Maybe he could actually focus and listen and didn't - didn't trust the wrong people or make risky bets and made better decisions that didn't hurt people.

Didn't hurt Clovis or Annabeth or Luke.

Maybe he was more careful or knew more or was just -

Just better.

Maybe the future wasn't up to me at all.

Maybe that was a good thing.

I felt like I was watching myself through a TV screen. I saw a hand that didn't feel like mine pack away leftover schwarma and I saw it reach out and take the bus tickets from Persephone's (or was it Kore, the Maiden now?) warm hand. I know I stared at them. I couldn't read. The letters were just impressions of ink, a blur. It was like I was Dreaming, when I knew I should have been wide awake.

My mouth opened and I didn't know what I was going to say.

"So that could have gone bet - "

Luke punched me.

I snapped back to myself as stars exploded in my eyes and I fell over.

I looked up at him from the pavement of the parking lot somewhere in California. I felt numb as he loomed over me. At six feet tall, both of his hands curled into shaking fists with a street light at his back throwing his scar into sharp relief, Luke looked menacing.

Dangerous.

I didn't realize how lucky I was that he didn't pull Reclaim on me until I saw the tears in his eyes.

"You - " He breathed. "You fucking - "

He didn't finish.

Luke turned and ran away from me.

I sat there like a bump on a log.

I didn't move until a cold, wet rabbit nose nudged my hand. I lifted it automatically and it just hung there in the air. I didn't know what I was going to do with it, so then I put it back down. Instead of rough tar, it fell on fur.

I pet the rabbit.

"...I messed up," I said. I felt like it was killing me to have said it out loud. I couldn't breathe. My chest felt tight and it hurt like I had broken every one of my ribs. A cramp was forming in my side. I felt light headed.

I nearly got us thrown into Tartarus.

Once you're in there, the only way out were the Doors of Death.

And that could only be opened from both ends.

Artemis sighed under my hand. "No, you did not."

I turned disbelieving eyes onto her. "You can't be serious."

"We are alive, intact, unchanged and sane," she said bluntly. "I believe this is what is called a 'win.'"

"What'd I win?" I snapped at her. I waved my hand in the direction Luke ran off in. "What did I fucking win?"

"Luke is not angry with you."

I was barely able to restrain myself to just pushing her away. She still hit the ground hard. "Fuck off."

He's furious.

"He's scared," Artemis said quietly as she got back to her feet.

I stared at her mutely.

"It is…so much easier -" she said in a rush. "When you are scared, or worried, or hurt or sad to just - just get angry instead. It makes you feel powerful. It makes you feel like you can do something about it. And it does not - " her voice hitched. "And it hardly matters anymore if it will even solve the problem. If you are hurting someone else, you cannot be a victim."

"...I don't think that's how it works," I rasped. There was a frog in my throat. My eyes burned.

My father was not like my mother.

Dad got angry, but I always knew it was because he cared.

"It feels like it does," Artemis said. She risked coming closer again. "He's not angry with you. I promise."

"I messed up," I said again. I waved around the bus tickets still in my hand. "You told me - to not make a deal - "

"I was wrong to do so," Artemis cut me off. Her ears drooped. "I have not seen Kore in a very long time," she admitted softly. "We both wanted to be…more than we were. All three of us, actually." Artemis stared off into the distance, seeing nothing. "Athena changed her mind quickly and stopped seeking Time's attention altogether. I…struggled." She laid a paw over her eyes. "To this day, I am amazed Selene did not just kill me."

"She loved you," I said thickly. "She was your mother."

Artemis sighed. "She was incapable of communicating with words. I learned directly from concepts implanted in the mind, so believe me when I say that does not mean what you think it does."

I frowned.

I wasn't sure how to take that.

The rabbit looked away again. "Kore despite all advice, caution, warnings went to her father. And she thrived."

Those words hung in the air.

"Athena saw the abyss for what it was. I was - was stupid and ignorant until I found myself standing at the edge. I do not want to know if Kore just…slipped or if she did not fall so much as just…" Artemis looked up at the dark Night Sky and the boiling thunderclouds of Ouranos' prison. "Our last real conversation was just - " She fought with her words. "I was disappointingly human," Artemis said. "I said things I regret." She huffed. "A lot of things I regret, because I was scared."

"You still are," I said.

"I am terrified," Artemis said. "I gave up on my sister that day and I - I did not see her today either."

"...she offered to turn you into a flower," I said because I'm stupid and don't know where half the shit that comes out of my mouth comes from. "Hijack your punishment from Mom. Doesn't that mean anything?"

"...I do not know." The rabbit looked up at me with solemn, silver eyes. "Demeter blames Hades. She has to. I - I blame myself."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"She seems happy," I said.

"That is what scares me," Artemis replied. "This…feeling you have, that you failed. You did not."

I couldn't say anything.

"We are intact, so that means you won. This is what being a demigod means." She was a six month old bunny rabbit, but I felt like she was ten feet tall. "The odds are always against you. You are one grain of sand before an uncaring ocean. You can sweat and bleed and die and sometimes it will mean nothing beyond what you make of it."

Artemis paused.

"This is what being mortal means," she said quietly, almost like she wasn't talking to me anymore.

Mortal.

When it truly matters, we're dust in the wind.

Sometimes I forget.

Artemis is several thousand years old.

"Kore listened to you," Artemis murmured. "You have a foot in both worlds, but I think….one day, you will have to choose."

Choose.

'A single choice shall end his days, Olympus to preserve or raze.'

Well.

I wasn't so sure about that anymore.

After a bit, Artemis went to find Luke.

I didn't stop her.

I stayed out of it entirely.

I don't know what they said to each other, if they said anything. I wasn't keeping track of time either. I should have been. We had bus tickets. Those had departure times and everything.

My ADHD was all out of fucks to give.

I was getting gravel down my sneakers and I think I had California dirt fused into my jeans by the time I heard heavy footsteps approach. I stood up. Brushing my pants off was automatic, I wasn't even looking. I don't know if I got anything off as I watched Luke stalk across the parking lot.

He stopped a good five or six feet away.

His blond brow furrowed. He was getting stubble on his cheeks now. His face was too angular, like in the week and a half since we left Camp, he had lost weight he didn't have to lose. I swallowed hard, but I didn't say anything.

I felt like trying to apologize would just make things worse.

Luke looked down at the rabbit at his heels, then he looked back up at me. Then he slowly got down on one knee, like I was some kind of wild animal. I didn't know what he was doing until he opened his arms.

I crashed into him.

Luke hugged me, hard. He hugged like my grandfather did, with a hand cupping the back of my head and I'm going to blame that for why I just started bawling into his shoulder. I tried to stop, but my emotions were out of control. The tears wouldn't stop coming.

"You're fucking twelve," Luke almost whined, like this was the first time since he's laid eyes on me that he finally figured it out. "You're twelve."

"A-and a half," I hiccuped.

Luke cursed a blue streak. There were something in there about 'fucking nuclear waste mountain' and 'King Thundercunt,' a bit about this 'piece of shit reality' and a fifteen second piece that was just one cuss word after another before he finally calmed down.

I stared at him, sniffling as Luke put both hands on my shoulders. "Repeat after me."

I nodded.

"I don't want to die."

I stared.

Luke shook me. "Say it."

"I don't want to die."

Luke sagged.

"I don't want to die," I insisted. "I don't."

"No," he agreed sadly. "You were just taught to do whatever will work first and to worry about getting through it alive later."

My throat closed up.

Luke sighed. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have hit you. I was just - "

"Worried," I finished for him.

Luke gave me a weak smile. Then he yelped, and glared down at the rabbit.

Artemis had her ears flat against her head in a bunny glare as she looked back up at him. "Tell him," she hissed.

Luke looked away.

"...I fell into the Pit once," he said roughly. "In my sleep."

Even though we were on solid ground and out of danger, the thought still made my blood run cold.

"Something noticed me before I could get away and I - I had nightmares for weeks when I didn't do what it wanted me to." Luke was still looking away. "It showed me what it was like down there and I - I never - " His voice broke.

I'm sorry," I said thickly.

Luke shook his head. "It - it should never have been up to us to end something like this." He flung a hand out at the sky above us. "That's - that's fucked up."

"If we don't, who will?" I asked.

Luke shook his head again. "You still have…the tickets?"

I dug them out of my pocket and handed them over. Luke took them like they were coated in acid.

He blew out a breath. "Okay. Tell me…what the objective is."

"Rescuing demigods," I said. "A daughter of Hades and a son of Night."

Luke did a double take.

"Of Night?" Artemis squawked.

"Yeah," I said, feeling like I was going to explode.

"Another half-blood of the eldest gods."

---

We found the nearest bus station. Persephone had left us on her doorstep in Los Angeles. Way more than a mile away from Blythe, but then we hadn't settled that deal either. I had gotten distracted, remembering the last deal I made and I had been too scared to think straight and I had panicked, letting Persephone make a counter offer.

This could have turned out so, so badly.

It still might.

Luke found the Greyhound bus after squinting at the tickets. "Go over the border, go back across the border, go over the border…" he griped as he stuffed his backpack underneath his legs. Artemis peeked out from his vest, her little nose twitching furiously as she sniffed around for monsters.

"Where are we going?" I spoke up. My voice sounded small. Young.

"Las Vegas," Luke said. He glanced over at me. "Should be about four hours. Are you going to sleep?"

I shook my head mutely.

"Yeah," Luke sighed. "Me neither."

The other passengers looked as haunted as I felt. Here behind the Roman border things were better. Kind of. People could talk and it wasn't nearly as dark. The pale harvest moon in the sky was almost radiant and Vesta cast a golden glow far and wide. I don't know if the mortals could really see it, but some people were plastered to their windows, staring out with wide eyes.

"It's all over, if you're trying to find someplace sane," an older man turned in his seat to look at us from underneath heavy salt and pepper brows.

"That's fine," Luke said smoothly. "As long as it's away from here."

"Amen to that," the man said, making a sign of the cross. He handed Luke a small pocket Bible, but didn't try to preach, just settling back in his seat. Luke frowned at the book.

I fiddled with Damocles on my necklace.

Luke's told me more about…what hurt than I've told him. I've told you some of it, but it's not the same, is it?

It's not the same.

"Debts are bad," I said.

Luke looked at me and it felt like I had just jabbed a needle right into a pus filled sac in my heart. I watched him wave a hand at the people close by.

"Debts are bad, but I'm a Celt."

I'm Greek. I'm Egyptian.

"Greek demigods have dyslexia pretty bad and Norse are - are stifled in mortal flesh so usually their abilities don't emerge until they die. Shinto demigods are shadowed, like they are more real to the mythological world and that causes all sorts of trouble."

I was rambling. I knew I was, but neither Luke or Artemis stopped me. "Celts are similar, too bright, too noticeable by things that shouldn't notice."

I tried to find the words.

"Going with - with what will work is how Celts do things," I said. "There's no room for half-assing anything. It's like climbing a sheer cliff, but you were always just - just leaping for the next foot or hand hold, no time to plan out your moves because the foundation you were standing on was going to break at any moment."

My eyes burned.

"I don't know how to - "

I didn't know how to say that I wasn't sure any other approach would work at all.

Not with gods like the Night or the Pit or Persephone.

Or Mom.

"This is how we survive, I - "

My voice died.

I was so scared.

Luke swore under his breath and pulled me close to his side.

I hiccuped.

"...how old were you?" Luke asked softly.

"Eight."

"Eight," Luke said tightly.

But I already had training, I didn't say. He was thinking about Annabeth. I knew he was. I was already learning about the mythological world and the pantheons. I had a safe, warm home with nice clothes.

…

I was eight when I taught myself how to clean up an arm amputation. You gotta - arteries feel different from veins. They're thicker and rubbery and there's pressure from the heart so you can't just pinch -

It's better to even the wound out and then -

Burning works.

Not with an open flame. Just heat up some metal and press -

I got three of my friends killed going to the moon of the Dreamlands. Cost Willie his arm. Cost Sam an eye and got him banished from his home.

Carl, he was another Dreamer. I knew - I knew that teleporter was a bad idea because the Dreamlands only pretended to work by logical rules, but I didn't - I didn't say anything because it's not like we were close, he was in that spot in my brain that said 'Willie's friend' and then what came out the other end wasn't him.

Wilhelm killed whatever it was. Sam and I trashed the machine and we threw the pieces into a tar pit and then we burned the house down.

Mom left.

A scared girl in an oversized hoodie in New York died for nothing.

Dad tried so hard - so fucking hard that year, raising me alone. I just made one dumb decision after another, alternating between thinking I was invincible to feeling like I should just keel over and die.

Evangeline gave her right arm to pay a debt for a stupid kid. She could have died right in front of me. She should have died, but she didn't and that was -

That was the straw that broke the camel's back.

She wasn't the same.

And I couldn't be.

Then Apollo kidnapped me.

He drugged me, left a note on the refrigerator door, packed a bag of my stuff, hopped continents and threw me at Saule, the most patient goddess I've ever met.

I won't say I healed.

That implies going back to normal, or close to it. I know Saule didn't mean it how I took it. I think I knew it then too, but I had already made up my mind.

I went into the Dreamlands.

The place where logic didn't matter and the subconscious ruled and ripped it all out.

My home in the Dreamlands used to be a black beach of razor fossils and coarse sand. A tower in the distance, the crashing of waves and deep, dark water. Now I have my apartment. It's mortal and normal and filled with mementos of my family.

It's better.

One of my windows stubbornly won't change from that beach. From the old me, but I try to keep the blinds closed on it as much as I can.

Sometimes I fail.

"Hey," Luke said softly, squeezing my shoulders. I realized I was crying again. "We're going to get through this and then - and then I'll use my boon to punch your mother in the mouth."

I snorted and nearly choked.

Artemis did choke.

"I'll do it too," Luke said with a grin and soft eyes. He ruffled the rabbit's ears and avoided her bite.

I found him. Later. The one who betrayed Eva. The person I trusted. After Mom came back. It was the first step in getting our relationship back to normal. Mom…didn't seem to understand me anymore, but that -

That she knew about.

She helped.

I told you, right? If I flipped my shit over how the Greeks beat the Romans, if I clutched my non-existent pearls at the guy feeding himself to a cannibal getting exactly what he wanted, if I felt bad about the Oracle of Delphi…

I'd be a hypocrite.

I ate him.

I still don't feel like it was wrong.

I'd do it again.

"Do it," I said. "You won't."

"Betcha twenty," Luke said.

"No." Artemis sounded exasperated.

The Greyhound bus rumbled out of the station. I looked out the window and saw my face reflected back. A half-blood child of the eldest gods. A child of Prophecy.

Not 'the.'

Hey, um, thanks.

For listening. For being here.

 

[Shujin]

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction
​

"I see why you like the Christian god," Luke said eventually.

At some point, he must have gotten tired of failing at Harvest Moon on my Gameboy Advance (don't ask) because he had the small Bible propped up on Artemis' back as she snored away on Greyhound's cheap overnight pillow. If you told me two weeks ago that Artemis would take a nap on Luke of her own free will, and that he would let her after grumbling a bit, of his own free will, I would have thought you were either crazy or had my mother's sense of humor.

Or both.

"He actually tells his demigods what to do sometimes," he finished thoughtfully.

"Uh," I said. "Demigods as in plural?" I had to stop myself from looking over at him, because I was trying not to get killed by a zombie in my own game. "I'm pretty sure it's just Jesus?"

"Nah," Luke said easily. I heard him turn the page. "I would bet my sneakers Moses was his too."

"That guy is Cliff's role model," I threw out there.

Not because it was important or anything. My brain tended to take a subject and just run with it through everything remotely related and when I was distracted, all of that came out of my mouth. And I was distracted because this game's whack-a-mole combat was the most cursed version of First Person Shooter I have ever seen. You know that game at carnivals and malls where there's this slider constantly moving back and forth and you have to smack the button to make it stop on the mark?

That's how I'm shooting zombies.

I hope someone was fired.

"Your friend, the monster looks up to a hero?" Luke asked, just to be sure. "..that's still weird, by the way."

I shrugged. "Moses was the greatest Magician on record - " and those records weren't buried because it turns out when you get your pharaoh, your gods and your entire organization humiliated by a former prince of Egypt turned hobo, people notice. "- with the worst fashion sense. Very melodramatic, but good dude."

"I refuse to believe he was a random unrelated schmuck," Luke declared. "There's no way."

"Hey, don't judge every god by Olympic standards," I pointed out. In Greek mythology, everybody was related to somebody. A lot of the time, that somebody was Zeus. Because Zeus, but he definitely wasn't the only one showing up in hero's family trees and Olympus played favorites like whoa. "Just because Moses kicked a lot of ass doesn't mean - "

Hold up.

Doesn't it, though?

Egyptian Magicians had pharaohs, incarnations of a god in their lineage.

It was the reason my Magician status went from You're Kidding, Right? to Oh, Shit.

Because Mom had an Egyptian Name.

As far as I knew, it was Egyptian legacies or bust for their kind of magic. Even Cliff wouldn't get anywhere if it hadn't been for Anubis way back when. Moses was a prince of Egypt and his brother a pharaoh, but he'd been adopted.

And he still tore the entire House of Life a new one.

Shit.

Was it heresy or blasphemy if I said that maybe Luke had a point?

I wasn't what you'd call devout by any stretch of the imagination. I only went to mass when I was visiting my grandparents. The holidays were nice, I never remembered Lent and this one time I prayed to Lucifer for some help. The Roman one. If that helps. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe there's two of them?

I would not recommend it.

The Morningstar is a prick.

Mom came first, but the Big G was always just kind of - okay, so 'backup plan' sounds really bad and I don't mean it the way you're thinking. It should be obvious by now that I'd follow Mom's lead into a lot of shit and it should be really obvious right now that she was perfectly willing to let me do that. Telling me what it was all for and who or what she wanted me to be was clearly not a priority. A kid can get really turned around. You know what a pole star is, right? It always points north, no matter how lost you get.

I like to think that maybe God doesn't mind.

"So I need to introduce you to my grandmother," I said blankly as I looked over, feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Luke glanced at me with a raised eyebrow. "Your grandmother?"

"It'll be great. She knows a lot more than I do and you can, like, bond over wanting to punch Mom in the face," I said with a cheeky grin to make him think I wasn't totally serious.

Except I was totally serious.

"You gotta be quick if you want the first shot though," I continued thoughtfully. "Nana doesn't fuck around."

Luke's eyebrows flew up.

"Broke every bone in her arm punching Mom a few years ago," I confirmed. "She had to have surgery and still needs a wrist brace, but as far as she's concerned, worth it - shit!"

I pouted at the pixelated bloody You Died screen on my Gameboy. Get distracted for a single second, forget everything I had just been doing. Get the main character Leon Kennedy ate by undead.

Yay.

I sighed as I chose to reload from the last save and then I frowned as I moved the character around a bit. What was - I didn't even remember this level - weren't there autosaves? There were no autosaves. Are you telling me that my only saves were the incredibly stingy manual ones?

You know what?

Resident Evil Gaiden is a dumb fucking game.

Who bought me this?

I put my Gameboy Color down. "How are you reading that, by the way?"

Luke shrugged. "Got curious."

"No, I mean, how?" I waved a hand at the tiny book and its infinitely smaller letters that even from just one seat away were giving me a headache with how they seemed to float off the pages. The neon orange book cover wasn't helping either. "Without wanting to murder yourself."

"Oh I - " Luke paused and then he eyed the pocket Bible suspiciously, holding it a bit away from him. "...I have no idea."

"Oh," I said too. "So, it's not one of your random powers?"

"I - what - 'the get rid of my dyslexia' power?" Luke drawled sarcastically as he closed the book. He glanced at the sleeping passenger in front of us like he was debating tossing it back, but then I guess he changed his mind because he hurriedly stuffed it back into one of the pockets on his vest like it might bite him. "And one of my random - "

I could see it coming, I just wasn't expecting it as he flicked my forehead.

"Ow!"

"You have no room to talk."

"Okay, no." I scowled, rubbing my forehead. I don't understand. That hurt more than taking a spear handle to the head from a goddess. "You have, like, three different kinds of super-stealing, super athletics, telekinesis, super swording - "

Luke blinked. "Super swording?"

"Can unlock things from a distance - "

"That's just the tele - "

"No," I said. Throwing things with your mind was not the same thing. "Your stealth thing and do you have super speed? Could your eyes track Epona - " shit.

Hope she wasn't paying attention to me saying her Name, because murder Romans out of nowhere would kind of suck right now. Maybe I should get out of the saying Names habit.

Nah.

"Like, actually see where she was at all times," I explained and then I watched Luke hesitate to answer. "You've got super speed," I said flatly. "So that's bullshit. How many fucking Names did your dad let you inherit from?"

"That's - how many did your mother let you?" Luke hissed and that was a question I didn't even want to know the answer to.

I was kind of curious and kind of not if there was some kind of 'official' word for what kind of demigod I was.

Some kind of gestalt demigod?

A mutt?

Was it an Elder God demigod thing? Was Nyx's demigod half Norse, half Hurrian, half Greek and who knows what else?

"This isn't about me," I said.

"You can teleport," Luke said through clenched teeth.

I blinked.

"Uh, what?" I said, thrown.

"You've gotta be - " Luke aborted throwing up his hands to hurriedly hunch over when he nearly launched Artemis off his lap. "Damn - uh, we're fine," and it was pretty funny watching him wave his hands over the rabbit like he was trying to hypnotize her. "Go back to sleep."

Maybe he was hypnotizing her.

Luke held his breath until the rabbit began to softly snore again.

"This is not what I imagined happening when we left Camp," I pointed out. "You. Artemis. Just saying."

"You're telling me," Luke said. His voice was teasing, but his smile was tight. "We've got an understanding. I tell her when she's being shit - "

"And she tells you when you're being shit?"

I almost winced as soon as I said it. Too soon. It's only been a couple of hours since Luke punched me for being an idiot. The bruise was long gone, but my face was still swollen a bit. I think he cracked my cheekbone.

Luke lifted his nose into the air snootily. "Well, excuse you."

"You both tell me when I'm being a moron again," I said with a weak smile, relieved that my mouth hadn't gotten me into trouble again. "So that's fair."

Luke's smile loosened slowly, until it fell into a small, thoughtful frown. "I blame her brother, really."

"Um." My eyebrows rose. "Blame him for what?"

Don't get me wrong.

I'm sure Apollo is guilty of a lot of things.

"It's - " he blew out a breath and looked away. "I get that you grew up way differently, but Camp…" he trailed off as I frowned, already uncomfortable. I was now very, very aware of how differently I grew up from everyone else. "You get used to the idea that no one cares or not as much as they should and then - then there's Fred." Luke shrugged almost sheepishly. "It actually took me a bit to figure out who that was."

I boggled. "How?"

Blond and blue eyed idiot mystery Camper, who else could that possibly be but Apollo in 'disguise?'

"Hard to believe," Luke said softly.

My chest hurt.

"Apollo's good people," I croaked.

"And I'm…willing to entertain the thought…" Luke started haltingly. His jaw worked and the words just weren't coming out like they went against everything he stood for.

"She swore an oath."

"Yeah," Luke blew out quickly, relieved that I said it for him and then he grimaced. "I want to say it doesn't change anything, but it does."

"That's not a bad thing," I ventured. "Right?"

He tossed his head back against the bus seat hard enough to make our row rock a little, squeaking. "Ask me again after we get through this."

"I will," I assured him.

We fell into a comfortable silence. Luke started up his Harvest Moon save again and I dug around in my backpack for the rest of my Gameboy Color games.

"...did I really teleport?"

"D'you remember back right before we met Corey? Running after Artemis?" Luke asked, distracted. I nodded. "You teleported in front of me. I saw it. That's how you got there in time."

…I did?

I must have said that out loud because Luke nodded at me. "You did. I assumed it was hard to do, like mine."

I looked at him in surprise. "You - ?"

Luke grimaced. "I can…run on the wind. A bit," he said, making a vague swooping motion with his free hand like it was a kite catching a breeze. "It hurts. Chiron warned me off practicing." About fucking time that centaur was good for something. "Said only for emergencies because, get this." Luke turned towards me, sneering. "Apparently sometimes demigods inherit powers that could kill them."

"Ye - up," I drawled. "Lucky us, right?"

Luke snorted.

"Two guesses who also get no warning that's a thing until after they nearly have a heart attack and the first one doesn't count." Ouch. "I was out for days," he whispered harshly. "Throwing up and with a fever and - and I thought now - now surely my father would show up, or send someone else, or give me a message telling me off for being stupid or…"

Something, I heard in the silence.

"That was the last straw," Luke whispered. "I gave him an ultimatum, demanded a Quest and…" Luke's eyes were shadowed. "You know the rest."

I turned back to my Gameboy Color, convinced he was done talking about this pretty depressing topic, but I should have known better.

Luke didn't know how to let anything go.

"Your mom didn't teach you about your powers." He said. It wasn't a question. He just looked at me, expecting me to confirm what he already suspected.

I didn't know I could teleport (and still not sure how. Or why) and I knew either my back or my shadow (or both?) could sprout wings, but no idea how to make that happen without Luke bleeding on me because the last time I tried, I just farted and maybe I could do something with my voice other than sound scary but who knows what -

"No," I mumbled, my Gameboy hanging limply in my hand. "She didn't think I'd need it," I offered in her defense.

At the time, it was a pretty good defense because Mom was that little thing called Fate, so her not seeing something coming was a big deal. But for some strange reason, when I repeated it out loud?

Not gonna lie. It sounded pretty lame.

Luke didn't buy it.

Which was fair.

I wasn't sure I bought it either.

"I - " he breathed. "Am going to punch her so hard."

"It's not that big a deal - " I tried.

"Fate loses out to Hermes in parenting right now," Luke said flatly. "And he's terrible."

I gave up.

"Maybe we should be talking about our demigod heist," I changed the subject. "Since we're, what, an hour away from the city of Lost Wages?"

Luke cracked a smile. "City of Lost - " He stopped, eyes going unfocused.

"Luke?"

He refocused. "Might be nothing." He sighed as our Greyhound bus rolled over a rough pothole or bump and Artemis stretched on her pillow, groggily waking up. "Any details on the op?"

I grimaced and finally put my Gameboy down. I brought it up to get away from Mom's parenting skills, and it still tanked my mood down into the basement. I didn't feel like even trying to play through this conversation.

"The Lotus Eater," I mumbled.

"What?" Artemis stiffened, suddenly wide awake.

"The Lotus Eater," I muttered. "Kore said entering its abode is going to cost me time." I didn't need to see Luke's face to remember that we didn't have a lot of that. "Only what I can afford," I said then too, but I was well aware that I didn't ask if she meant 'afford' as in it won't kill me or 'afford' as in our Quest's deadline, if she was actually aware the Quest was even a thing. "A little bit?"

"Perseus," Artemis said and her voice was thick with either sleep or horror. "Even gods avoid paying the Lotus Eater's toll." Her silver eyes were wide as she sat up. "How are we supposed to escape it? Were you given - " The rabbit read the answer on my face.

Persephone expected us to succeed without her divine help.

I swallowed hard.

I thought…

That was when I realized that maybe I was better off not making any deals with anyone else for the rest of my life.

Luke sucked on his teeth. "There's gotta be a way. Didn't - " I wondered why he stopped when Luke held up a hand with a growing, mean smirk on his face. And then he pointed at me and my stomach sank. "Pop quiz."

Oh no.

"Who escaped the lotus eaters in Greek myth?"

Of all the -

"I don't know?" I said with a shrug and innocent smile.

Luke was unamused. "Guess."

Crap.

"Um." I wracked my brain. It didn't take too long, because there wasn't much in there.

Funny.

I meant about ancient demigods. I only knew a few names and I could count them off on one hand, a thumb and a pinky finger. Two of those were now gods, one was Apollo's dead boyfriend (he has a lot of those), Theseus, my namesake Perseus and Daedalus. I already forgot who the crashed sun chariot dude was and I still don't know who Achilles is or what he did.

Luke never actually said.

"O - " I started and Luke nodded encouragingly. "O…deee…?" He waved his hands in a 'come on' gesture. So I was on the right track! "Oedipus?"

"Wait." Luke dropped his hands and his smile to look at me incredulously as Artemis snorted. "You don't know Odysseus, but you know Oedipus?"

So I wasn't on the right track.

"Okay, look, dyslexic and they start with the same letters," I said in my defense. Or close enough to the same letters. Don't you start - Oedipus has an extra letter, but dyslexic. "It's not my fault."

"Where'd you even hear about Oedipus?"

Uh.

"Good question," I said stiffly. "It's a long story that we really don't have the time for - "

Luke's smile was too wide and plastic looking as he leaned over me, boxing me in against the bus window. "Try me."

"Artemis?" I called for help.

The rabbit sighed as she huddled in her loaf on Luke's lap. "I am afraid Perseus is right."

"Thank you."

Her ears bounced. "Which is why he should say it in as few words as possible."

"I hate you."

"Out with it," Luke demanded. "Was it a Prophecy thing?"

"There was a Proph - " shit. "Uh, sure, yeah, duh, of course. Gotta make sure I know all about those…"

My party members silently stared at me.

I groaned and copied Luke by throwing my head back against the back of my seat. I palmed my face with both hands and felt like sinking right into the floor. Have you ever been put on the spot like this, your friends both looking at you expectantly waiting to hear about that time you escaped the house wearing no underwear and your pants on your head as a kid? And it's all 'haha I was a dumb kid' whenever your grandmother brings it up, but when faced with telling someone else, it suddenly feels like you should be surprised you could even breathe without instructions?

I think this was revenge for the Pit thing.

"Okay, so, you're not telling anyone else, got it?" I ordered.

Luke crossed an x over his heart.

I rolled my eyes. I didn't ask Artemis, because between this Quest and Apollo, I've got mountains of dirt on her. "Okay, so, I must have been five or six - no five." Apollo had just arrived, so it had to be right after I turned five. "And my parents, well Dad, went all out on their engagement party."

"Your parents are married?" Luke cut in.

"Yeah?"

Pure disbelief and what looked uncomfortably like awe was on his face.

I cleared my throat.

"And that's great and all, but I was five and no one told me what was happening."

I don't think it was really anyone's fault there. Dad and I were…not and Mom was literally older than marriage as a concept.

"So I ask and my father explains that he and Mom are getting married and what that means and I was like, but, Mom." I widened my eyes dramatically in an incredulous look. "You could do so much better."

Luke made a strange huffing sound that was probably an aborted laugh.

I waved my hands. "I spent the rest of that fucking dinner trying to change her mind."

I love my father, but I didn't always and he's still kind of a loser. Yeah, sure, corporate lawyer, but also super nerd and if Mom hadn't picked him, I don't know if he would have ever gotten a girlfriend.

"So I'm there tossing out a bunch of Names she could marry instead like 'whatever Time did so that you guys broke up, I'm sure he's sorry' - " and the Shiva suggestion was Dead on Arrival and I was still a little butthurt about it. Who wouldn't want my mother? Assholes, that's who. " - and Dad's super bummed and everybody else is laughing - " And five year old me hated being laughed at. "And I'm like 'Mom, don't do this!'"

I threw up my hands.

"I'll marry you!"

"Phhhhhhhbbbbt!" Luke cracked.

Loud, right from the belly laughs came out of him drowning out Artemis' snickers and making other passengers in the bus turn their heads. The laugh creased up his entire face.

"I was five!" I protested as he dropped his face into his hands, still chuckling.

Mom had been of negative help during all this, by the way. Did you know the Earth Mother had kids with her own kids Ouranos and Phanes?

I wish I didn't.

"It gets worse."

"Nooo," Luke moaned.

"Yup," I popped the 'p'. I pointed at Artemis and the rabbit had the sense to look alarmed. "Your dumbass brother told me to marry one of my sisters instead."

According to Apollo, going after your mom was tasteless, but your aunt is fine.

Do not look at me.

Gods are gonna god.

"And Mom's like 'that is such a bad idea' - "

I'm talking full on Quantum Stupid face and maybe a little PTSD. That's when I learned three of them tried to abort me, tried again with a Pit Scorpion two years ago and the last one would kill me just by proximity.

"So then - heh, then I ask - " I started cracking up too, because Luke's snort giggling was infectious and now that it was out there, it was actually hilarious. "So I ask Apollo if he has any spare sisters - " I flapped my hand obnoxiously and put on an exaggerated Valley Girl accent. "Like, wasn't there, like, this huntress chick?"

That set Luke off again.

Artemis looked like she regretted everything.

Good.

I don't know how much of that stupidity was responsible for the crush later, but you know how that went. Saying it crashed and burned would be an understatement.

"And that's how I learned about Oedipus," I finished. "Any questions? I am here all week."

"How are you still alive?" Artemis asked tiredly.

She was right to ask. Apollo had something of a reputation regarding Artemis' would-be boyfriends. By that I mean he was well known for skipping the shovel talk part and going right to the digging a shallow grave part.

"Mom was right there and I'm adorable." Probably more of one than the other, but who cares?

Not me.

"Eh heh, eh heh heh." Luke was having trouble breathing.

"Lotus eater," I offered.

"Right," he wheezed into his hands. "Lotus eater."

"Odysseus did not escape," Artemis said quickly, clearly eager to move on for reasons that escape all of us, I'm sure. "He was never caught in the first place. It used to rely on lotus fruit to ensnare its victims. People could choose to not partake. They could drag others away."

"And now?" I asked, my good mood draining away.

"It joined the 21st century," she replied dryly. "A place of recreation that exacts the toll the moment you step within. Mortals enter. They do not leave."

I bit my lip.

That was going to be a problem.

"Time…" she murmured. Artemis' ears wiggled thoughtfully then as she tilted her head left, then right as she stared at me. "And Kore listened to you. You had her attention. The deal was with you."

There was a ball of ice in my stomach.

"What?"

I wasn't sure I wanted to understand what she was saying. Whatever it was, Luke had caught on. He finished wiping the tears from his eyes as he asked, "Houston?"

"What?"

"You were aware during a time stop," Artemis said, her voice low and I remembered the possessed body of the mercenary Torus, and the ticking fractal patterns in her eyes before she stole Luke's…steal.

Luke was still mad about that.

"There are minor gods unable to replicate such a feat," Artemis said and that made me blink, because that -

That didn't sound right.

"I couldn't do anything though?" I said thickly.

"And he's not going in alone," Luke nearly snapped at her.

Artemis' ears fell as she curled into herself and I knew that she was right. I offered to make a deal and Persephone answered. Luke and Artemis hadn't even been on her radar. If I hadn't said anything, we might have just fell.

"Actually," I said miserably. "I think I am."

Luke's head snapped towards me. "No - "

"You went into that school alone because you're the thief," I said and watched him grit his teeth.

"That's not the same - "

"Isn't it?"

Isn't it?

"If I don't get out in time, you can just come get me," I said quietly. "Right?"

Luke's face scrunched into an angry neutral, but then it slowly softened out of it into something determined and sad. "I'll come get you."

The rest of the bus ride passed by slowly, like I was the one stretching out time itself to try to make it last.

But I was just a demigod. There was only so much I could do.

Our bus tickets took us to a bus stop right in front of where Persephone wanted us to go. Luke and I shared a despairing look, before we grabbed our bags and got off.

The Lotus Hotel and Casino looked like all the other buildings on the street.

Las Vegas, Nevada had an architectural style that was timeless, remaining just as much of a tacky eyesore now as it had been five decades ago. It was like everyone had just collectively decided that movie theaters, carnivals, tasteless hotels and casinos had this one look and this place took that look and ran it right out of bounds. Purple, yellow and orange were the dominant colors, entire awnings made out of hundreds of brilliant fluorescent bulbs, the blocky fifties lettering lined in white or red light, the constant moving pictures, endless booming music, cars clogging the streets and honking horns, flashing lights everywhere demanding your attention -

It was an ADHD nightmare.

"I am actually getting a headache," Luke marveled. Artemis whimpered, curling down into his vest to try to save her ears.

What no one else could see was the rippling, giant tube sticking out the top of the casino in front of us. It reminded me of an eel, or a lamprey worm or one of those nasty looking lipstick tube worms from the ocean growing out of the neon lit roof. As I stared, a contraction rippled up the tube like it had just swallowed.

I tore my eyes away.

I learned from Artemis that when someone said the Lotus Eater took your time, they didn't mean 'caused you to waste it.' The demigods we were after were still kids because the Lotus Eater took your time. No one could be born and no one died. You didn't age and you didn't change. You wouldn't need to cut your toenails or hair. Your body still worked, but it was like you were living the same day over and over again.

The Lotus Eater was some ancient pre-Greek civilization's ideal of a benevolent god. You were compensated. All the distractions and entertainment you could want. All your needs met. Even if something traumatic happened to you in there, you'd quickly forget it and revert back to how you were when you first entered.

Like blissfully happy fattened cattle.

Two guesses on how likely anyone was going to figure out something was wrong in the first place and the first doesn't count.

"So how long are we talking before you come in?" I asked and then I frowned. "And how bad's the time dilation?"

"I do not know," Artemis mumbled.

"So…six hours?" I guessed. Get in, get them, get out, right? Persephone did say finding them would be obvious…Aannnnd now I'm really hoping she didn't think my godly eyes came with actual god vision installed and could see auras. Demigods would be super obvious if I could, but I can't.

Fuck.

I was half-tempted to ask Mom for a refund. If Quintus was right and you could learn to see through the Mist anyway, what have my eyes really done for me lately?

"Twelve hours?" I tried. "You gotta have some faith in me, right?"

"Two days," Artemis said and Luke grimaced.

Ouch.

"I won't need two days," I said in false confidence. "Watch me."

I marched right up to the giant neon flower entrance. The petals were lighting up in a strobe effect that made my temples pulse and the flowery air-conditioning spilling out of the glittering chrome doors did not help.

Just inside, there was a doorman who had a friendly smile, a professional haircut and closed eyes. "Hey, aren't you going to bring your friends?"

I looked back.

Luke stood on the other side of the street with his purple and black backpack slung over one of his shoulders, his yellow fanny pack on his waist and a rabbit in his red vest. He raised a hand. A black SUV drove by and when it passed, he was gone.

I swallowed. "Later, maybe."

The doorman nodded agreeably. "Alright then, come on in!"

The second I stepped inside, I could feel it. My vision swam and I stumbled forward, but the weird vertigo passed so quickly, I almost thought I imagined it.

"Easy there, son," the doorman said. His smile had shrunk but his eyes were still closed. "You got a reservation?"

"...not exactly," I said warily.

He looked like an ordinary guy, just in a white-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt with lotus flower and watermelon designs on it, jean shorts and pink flip flops. I knew that didn't actually mean anything. Hiraya could look like an ordinary person too and my sensitivity wasn't enough to really be sure who was a monster and who wasn't. Relying on my Spidey Sense to tell me when I was in trouble had its risks.

It only reacted to things that would kill me.

No one could die in the Lotus Casino.

"Well," the doorman said slowly. "If you want to stay, you're going to have to check in at the front desk."

He pointed.

The whole lobby was a giant game room and I'm not talking about cheesy old Pac-Man games or even the expected slot machines. It looked like an entire theme park, a water park, a carnival fair, a video game store and the New York Roosevelt Field's food court were all occupying the same space. There were even tourist attractions like rock climbing here, completely taking up one side of the ground floor and an indoor bungee-jumping bridge. As I looked around at the water slide snaking around the glass elevator, the virtual reality suits with working laser guns, wide screen TVs hooked up to every game console on the market, snack bars with little holographic flags telling you what country the food came from, my mouth hung open.

I suddenly understood why the Lotus Eater was considered a cool dude. No wonder Hades and Night stashed their kids here. My childhood was starting to look like a missed opportunity.

Because this was awesome.

At the far, very far end of the lobby was a lonely looking, shadowed semi-circle desk with a blocky 1990s computer screen on it. There was a banner of a smiling woman eating a lotus fruit hanging off the edge, but there was no receptionist and I could swear the computer was black, but it looked like it was gray from dust.

There was no way I would have even noticed the desk was there without it being pointed out.

I turned back to the doorman. "There's no one there?"

"There will be," he said.

O…kay.

With nothing better to do, I started walking.

It turned out, walking in a straight line from the entrance to the front desk was a lot harder than it looked. The casino didn't pull any spatial shenanigans. It just took a lot of willpower to walk past all the games and fun things on both sides of the lobby. There were even a few kids around, laughing and having a great time.

"You new?"

I turned and saw a small black haired boy a couple years younger than me with that Mediterranean tan I had. He looked like he dressed himself in the dark with a bright pink shirt, khaki shorts and lime green flip flops.

He had godly eyes.

They were pure black. The only hint of white were his pupils, a pearl floating in a moonless, starless night sky. As I watched, he seemed to shift, reminding me strongly of Persephone on how he turned pale and the color of his eyes inverted to pure white like a full moon with black pupils.

"Nico!"

His head whipped around. "Coming, Bianca!" He shouted guiltily. He gave me a hopeful look. "You play any card games? No one else does, it's all about the telly."

"Yeah," I said thickly. "I've got a deck too. Mythomagic, I could show you."

He lit up.

"Finally someone who isn't a drip!" Nico grinned, open and friendly. "I keep telling people that the old stuff is still reet killer diller and a gas to play!"

I think I got all that?

The 1940s was a strange place.

I had absolutely no idea what to feel standing in front of Night's demigod son.

I would say it looked like he was happy, safe and looked after. The kind of kid you could tell was growing up without a care in the world, but that was the problem.

He wasn't growing up.

Can I just…grab him and book it? I looked around. There were bellhops in tropical beachwear all over, waitresses behind the snack bar and the doorman was still by the door. "I - uh, I've been sent to get you, actually," I said quietly so I wouldn't be overheard.

Nico looked at me like I just sprouted a second head. "Get me from where?"

Right.

He's been here for sixty fucking years.

"I - "

I almost jumped out of my skin when a large hand came down on my shoulder.

"You're looking a little lost, buddy!" A bellhop from out of nowhere had a wide grin as he looked down at me and a necklace of flowers around his neck. His eyes were closed. "Loitering isn't allowed."

Of course it isn't.

"This one has got to check in first, prince," the bellhop told Nico with a soft smile. "You two can catch up later."

"Later," Nico told me, just accepting being shooed off.

I started walking again immediately, not wanting to give the bellhop any reason to do something drastic. The hotel was at least forty stories tall, making it much bigger on the inside than it was on the outside with every floor going up and up, lining the insides of the gullet I had seen. I had no idea how I was going to do this.

Best case scenario, this took five minutes and Nico was right where I left him so I could tell him what was up. And then find Hades' daughter, somehow.

I could only hope they kept some kind of guest registry.

Something like Victim #56874, demigod of Hades, room 401, Third Floor. No room service.

It was just like the doorman said. I arrived in front of an empty desk. I blinked and there was a receptionist.

"Checking in?" She said with a bright smile with her eyes closed. Like everyone else, she was in beach clothes, a tie dye cut off shirt and a straw hat with lotus flowers on the rim.

"Sure," I said as casually as I could. "You take Mastercard, right?"

She laughed like that was the funniest joke in the world.

"Good one!" She beamed. "Don't worry, we do take payment up front, but there won't be any extra charges or fees and you don't have to tip!"

I sucked air in through my teeth.

"Okay, so, it's not that I don't want to pay - " I just don't want to pay. "It's that I don't know how to."

The receptionist's smile wilted. "Oh."

There was a really awkward moment where we both just stood there.

"You are locked up pretty tight," she said eventually, with a thoughtful purse to her lips and wrinkle on her forehead. "Can't you just relax?"

I gave her an incredulous stare.

Just relax?

Really?

"Right," she sighed, somehow seeing the look I gave her through closed eyelids. "If it were up to me, I'd give you a freebie, might help loosen those shackles you have, nothing like a little fun to make the time just pass you by!"

I bet.

"But I really don't want to be unmade again," she sighed for a second time.

"Uh, yeah," I said, shifting uncomfortably. The plan I had of talking her into giving me that freebie had just evaporated. "Unmade? That's a little excessive." That doesn't mean killed. "Free samples is just good business sense."

"Exactly!" The receptionist smiled. "You're very sweet, prince, but I shouldn't keep you." She pointed, like the doorman had earlier and there was an elevator door I completely missed somehow right by her in the wall.

"The manager will see you now."

The elevator door slid open smoothly with a soft chime. There was just one button to push.

Down.

…so what are my chances of not ending up in the Pit if I just walked out of here and asked Persephone for a do over?

Yeah.

I pushed the button.

The doors closed, my stomach did that flip from the g-force of the metal carriage lurching into motion and bland elevator music started playing through the speakers. There was no indicator of how far down I was going, but I could almost feel the minutes crawl past. By the time the elevator finally stopped, my stomach felt like it was eating itself with nerves making me feel nauseous.

The door opened and the doorman from the entrance was there.

"Uh…"

He smiled, eyes closed. "Well, come on then. Don't want to be late to your appointment."

I don't think I was in Las Vegas anymore.

The hallway past the elevator doors was made out of sunken brick, the kind of damp, moist clay of a recently flooded tunnel covered in algae and lined with the mosaic carvings of primitive people. My footsteps sounded wet, bouncing back through the hallway sounding like splashing puddles. I could see where the murals had been painted once, but the colors had long chipped away and washed out. The etchings were smooth with erosion, but the bowing figures venerating an octopus like creature were clear to see. A blooming lotus flower was carefully etched at the top of each mural, rays coming from it like it was replacing the sun.

You wouldn't think childish cave etchings of stick figure people throwing an unlucky dude into a maze where the vague, tentacled form dwelled would be scary, but uh.

Yeah.

"Nice art," my mouth said.

"Wouldn't do to forget our history," the doorman chuckled.

"And it is history," I said. My stomach was starting to cramp. "Right?"

"These were made thousands of years ago," he said, waving a hand at the walls we walked past.

That wasn't what I was asking.

"Don't you worry, prince," he said reassuringly. "The manager will just clear up this little issue you're having with payment. We have no intention of crossing your father."

Um.

Right.

I kept my mouth shut. I was figuring that being told 'we won't hurt you because your dad is badass' going 'my dad's a mortal lawyer' would be pretty stupid of me.

"Here we are."

We stepped out of the hallway into a section that looked like it came from Waterworld. The stone was replaced with glass revealing dark water all around, a pale, almost translucent jellyfish was lazily floating along with tendrils so long they continued out of sight past the stone floor and on the other side closer to the stone doors at the end was a weird, starfish looking thing hanging on to the glass.

"See you on the other side!"

I looked at the doorman.

He smiled brightly.

I hated every bit of this. My stomach gurgled and not in the hungry kind of way. I was starting to feel like that curry I couldn't remember eating was threatening to make a great escape through my ass. The fact that the back of my neck had been completely silent through everything wasn't comforting. As I approached the doors, I saw that there was a little laminated orange plastic paper attached to the left side with duct tape saying 'Maanegr.'

I know it was my dyslexia, but come on.

Really killing the vibe here.

Beyond the doors wasn't an office. It was a giant basin of dark water in the middle of the stone floor and a giant shockingly ugly statue of something like looked almost like a prehistoric shark if it had been crossed with an octopus, tentacles with detailed toothy suckers curling off the squat main body, almost dripping with disgusting flesh rolls of fat into the air. I was glad it was made out of stone so I didn't have to see it move. There were broad fins and the whole thing looked almost curled around the giant blood red gemstone centerpiece as its long snout grinned, showing off sharp triangular shark teeth.

There was no one here.

Okay.

Vibe is not dead, it is very much alive.

"Hello?" I called out. I took a few more steps inside, trying to see if there was anything I was missing.

Something pushed me into the water basin in the center of the room.

I gasped, choked, tried to swim back out, but it was much deeper than it seemed. My sneakers felt like they had turned to lead, dragging me down as the light circle of the surface got further and further away no matter how hard I flailed my arms.

I remembered the bottom of the ocean in a dream. The prickling feeling of doom approaching.

At ease, a ponderous, deep slow voice burbled. At ease. Our lord takes only what freely flows from the faucet. You need only to turn off the spigot.

I remembered Erebus' burning touch to my head.

I yelled.

The tension in my stomach snapped.

The water exploded.
​

---

"Jeepers!"

Nico leaned over our table and picked up the holographic mythic Hecate, Goddess of Magic card. It was a really pretty card, the silver film flashing all the colors of the rainbow when you tilted it towards the light. Hecate herself was a shrouded female figure on an obsidian throne with a black dog at her feet and a polecat on her shoulder. Twin torches burned at the sides of her chair. She was looking off to the side in the art, dismissive.

She also had a whopping twenty thousand points of defense for no logical reason.

Sure, okay, she had zero offense but that didn't mean anything because her special let you spam spell cards and trigger spell effects like they were going out of style. Every player who focused on spell cards and caster monsters wanted a Hecate in their deck, because putting her on the playing field was shorthand for,

'Get fucked, loser.'

Too bad getting your hands on one was going to cost you a couple grand on eBay or your grandkids are going to be the ones with a completed Spell deck, because you're going to be opening booster packs for the rest of your fucking life.

I'm choosing to believe Mom tossed me a bone so I wouldn't suffer, but I…

Can't remember when.

Christmas, maybe?

"I didn't know cards could be so…"

"Told you," I said smugly.

"Now you're just gammin'." Nico rolled his monochrome eyes.

"He's not bothering you is he?" Nico's sister Bianca swung by our little table with a pina colada looking drink, pink with sliced strawberries and a yellow umbrella sticking out the top. She had black hair like her brother, but it was more like hair, you know? Less shadow. She had black eyes too, but in the normal way. The color was confined to her irises.

"He's fine," I said a bit sharply and Bianca flushed.

"It's not - usually people don't want to hang out here, always have something to do or play so I'm just…" She bit her lip. "I know he talks a lot."

Nico dropped his head.

"But if you don't mind, then I'm glad he's found a friend," she finished with a soft smile.

Nico's head shot up.

"I don't mind," I said. "I'm having a lot of fun."

Nico shifted in his seat. "Do you wanna…try out bungee jumping?"

"You promised to teach me how to play Crazy Eights," I reminded him and I grinned.

Nico's answering smile trembled. "Sure."

"Awesome. Let me just get these…" I started packing away my Mythomagic deck back into their aluminum tin. There was some kind of trick of the light, or maybe a feature in her holographic card, because for a second when I picked it up, I thought Hecate turned her head to look at me.

I put the card away with the others, feeling like I was forgetting something important.

 

[Shujin]

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction​

Have you ever had someone tell you about a game or a movie or something and you're just like 'I have no idea what that is.' Then they tell you the name of it and you still don't know what it is. But as soon as they sit you down in front of it for five seconds, you realize you do know what it is, your brain just farted and refused to put the pieces together for no actual reason?

Yeah?

That was my brain with Crazy Eights.

Pretty sure that's happened to everyone at least once. To be honest, I was slowly becoming convinced that whoever made humans had been drunk off their ass the entire time. That someone was probably my mother.

She was never going to admit it.

Nico squinted at me from over his hand of cards suspiciously. "Are you sure you've never played before?"

"It's like Uno," I admitted.

"What's Uno?"

"Like this," I said dryly. "Just with special cards. Switch is like this too, but with fewer rules and you just play until you run out of cards or get bored." Which means it's another game Artemis will fail at somehow, I thought with a smile. Then I had to blink, hard, through a dizzy spell. I took a sip of my soda to cover up my confused frown.

Where had that come from?

I got the mental image of a small, cute bunny rabbit with reddish fur.

Oh okay, so not Apollo's sister, just named after her. Someone's pet? That sounded right, but also felt really wrong like I really should know whose pet the rabbit was. I went through the pets of everyone I knew. Neighbors had two small dogs, a fucking tarantula, Eva had a snake and Apollo had a cat he swore wasn't his, but no rabbits. It also did nothing to explain why I thought a bunny would be bad at cards.

Besides the obvious.

I put down seven of diamonds and waited for Nico's shadow to take its turn.

I watched as the black tendril put down four of diamonds only for Nico to play a four of spades. Damn. I picked up cards from the deck fully aware of the hole Bianca di Angelo was boring into the side of my head with her eyes. Nico's older sibling was just as olive skinned as he was half the time with longish black hair, brown eyes so dark, they looked black and a button nose.

"Yeah?" I asked, a little annoyed at being stared at. "You said you didn't want to play."

"Not… that," she said slowly.

Her dark eyes darted across the small round table we were sitting at. It was in the middle of the Lotus Hotel and Casino's food court. Walking all around us, hungry hotel residents and eager kids were stopping for a bite to eat or a sugary drink between games. The delicious smells had me constantly a little hungry, so we parked here so Bianca could make snack runs when she finished off her drink. The latest run had been sushi for her and sticky, sugary crispy pastries filled with nuts and a sweet paste for us.

So.

Okay.

I could have sworn a baklava was a ski mask?

I was apparently wrong? I felt a bit betrayed honestly. I had to be at least a little right. Clearly, some wires had been crossed in my brain somewhere and I don't think it's my dyslexia?

It's probably my fucking dyslexia.

"You really don't have a problem with that?" Bianca jerked her chin across the table where Nico's shadow had taken a seat.

You heard me.

It was mostly a blob of darkness just…sitting in a chair like the rest of us. When I say blob, I mean it. A roundish blob of pitch black night. It compacted and gained definition the closer to the floor it was. Or maybe I should say, the closer it was to Nico? Kind of? Nico himself didn't have a shadow of his own, really.

He had Dark Link, from Ocarina of Time.

A perfect silhouette branching off his feet into its own being that just pretended to be Nico's shadow sometimes. It was holding its hand of cards in front of it with dark tendrils. It didn't have a face or eyes, but was still doing a pretty good job of giving off the impression of a blank stare into space with peak 'no thoughts, head empty' energy.

It didn't have a head, but you get what I mean.

"Most people here can't even see it, and when they do…"

"They forget," Nico said.

He and his sister shared a look as his shadow played a card.

"I was…expecting you would forget too," Nico admitted uneasily. "But you didn't even blink."

"You can't even see if I blinked," I said snobbily, pushing my sunglasses up my nose with my pointer finger. Bianca's lips twitched as Nico got his big smile back. "Why would I? It's not dangerous, right?"

"It saved us," Nico said earnestly.

"And only us." There was something hard in Bianca's voice. I caught a flicker of her eyes towards her brother, but then she relaxed so I don't know if that meant anything. "You really are different from most people here."

"In a good way," I said with a cheeky grin and raised eyebrows.

Bianca rolled her eyes and started to get up from her seat. "Yes, in a good way, you - "

An excited kid chose the wrong moment to run past and our table jolted when his foot caught on the chair that had just been pushed into his path.

"Woah!"

We all cried out as Bianca tipped and he fell over, his drink going flying and without thinking, I grabbed for it.

I missed.

There was a tugging sensation in my gut as the glass shattered all over the floor.

"Woah," the kid said, softer as I stared at my hand.

The glass had obeyed gravity, but his lemonade didn't. An arc of spilling pink lemonade hung in the air like it was frozen in time and the only clue was my outstretched hand and the weird feeling in my stomach.

"How - "

"Accidents happen!" We all jumped as one of the waitresses cut Bianca off.

I hadn't seen her arrive, but the loud sound the glass shattering made must have gotten her attention. She was dressed like an airplane attendant in a pale blue uniform, blonde hair pulled back neatly under the blue cap and bland smile. Her eyes were closed.

She had a new empty glass in her hand that she extended towards me. "Good catch, prince."

"Um." I said.

"How?" Bianca demanded again.

Nico raised his hands when I looked at him. "I didn't do it!"

"It was not I!" The new kid said, eyes wide and taking several panicked steps backwards.

Okay.

So I guess everyone just agreed that I was the one doing this.

I raised my hand.

I half-expected nothing to happen. There were literal VR suits and technology with working laser guns just across the lobby. Who knows what is and isn't possible here? Maybe localized time stops were just so no one had to mop up messes and keep the floor from getting sticky. I was also hoping it really wasn't me. I've always loved water, but I never thought about controlling it. Mom never - I had no idea what it meant if I could now.

Or maybe I always could have.

The feeling in my stomach seemed to shift and I…did something? My stomach felt like it was reverse-cramping. Instead of twisting up, it felt like it was a loosening rubber band. That weird ache you get when you hold a stretch that doesn't actually hurt but it's definitely not comfortable either. Whatever it was, the lemonade followed my hand and poured itself into its new cup.

"Well done, prince," the waitress said. For a second, I thought she was going to open her closed eyes (what's with that anyway?), but there was just movement like snakes slithering through sand under her eyelids. "You can let go now."

I dropped my hand, but my stomach was still weird and I knew that I still had a hold on the lemonade.

"Um," I said again.

I didn't even know where to begin. So far my demigod powers have come in two categories: I Have No Idea How It Works or It Didn't Fucking Work. I've never been able to consciously start using one of my powers, so I didn't have even the slightest clue on how to consciously stop.

"I see." The waitress nodded slowly and there was a pinch to her face as she slowly, warily raised her empty hand. "May I?"

I nodded slowly. "Sure?"

The waitress poked my shoulder like she was investigating a bear trap. Then she let out a small sigh, relaxing, like she thought something was going to happen to her before laying her full hand on me.

I could feel the difference immediately as the stretched pull in my gut faded.

"There we are." She removed her hand not quite fast enough to seem rude and handed the glass to the new kid. "Watch your step now."

"Nanty narking!" He breathed and then he trotted off happily like nothing had happened.

"So," I began. "Thanks? What about - " I stopped talking when I turned back to the floor where the glass had broken and saw that the mess was already gone. "Never mind."

"We live to serve!"

It was said cheerfully, but I got the feeling that the waitress with the bright smile actually meant it the one way you don't want to hear anyone mean that phrase.

"Every one of us is at your beck and call, prince."

There was a flicker of something in the back of my mind that echoed 'We have no intention of crossing your father' as she beamed and threw her arms out wide. "Please do not hesitate to let us know if you have any concerns. We give only the best of service at the Lotus Hotel and Casino!"

"I'll keep that in mind," I promised, a little uneasy.

With a final smile, the waitress walked back to her food booth that was decorated with a flag that…might have been Germany? Or Belgium? I don't know. The red, yellow and black flags are a lot of European countries copying each other's homework and I had the honor of being taught by the American education system. The hungry customers loitering around seamlessly shifted into a new line in front of her like they were just waiting for her to get back without actually waiting.

Not gonna lie. It was kind of creepy.

I sat down again and picked up my hand of cards. I also registered the very awkward silence that was going on.

I decided to keep my mouth shut.

There was no good way to say 'I don't know what the hell is going on' so I wasn't even going to try.

"So…" Nico started. His face was scrunched up. I mentally bumped my age estimate down a year or two from ten to more like an eight and a half. Kid was smaller than me, so that was saying something and had lots of baby fat on his cheeks. "You can control lemonade?"

"Water, I think." I tried to smile, but it probably looked more like a grimace of 'please don't ask.'

"You control water," Bianca said flatly because I never get what I want.

I shrugged one shoulder and tried, "Your brother has a sentient shadow?"

Nico glanced at said shadow.

It didn't even twitch. Just sitting there holding its cards mutely as it stared into space.

So maybe 'sentient' was a bit too generous.

"I mean," he said eventually as he played a card. "He's right?"

"We don't even know how you do that," Bianca snapped. Her eyes narrowed at me. "But I have a feeling he knows how he did that."

"I…really don't know," I said, completely honest. "How. I did."

She crossed her arms, unconvinced. "The why then."

"Um." I thought about how I was going to find the words to explain this for a couple of seconds while I picked out a card from my hand. Then I thought: Fuck it. "My mother is a river goddess. Technically."

Bianca's dark eyebrows flew up as Nico's eyes widened.

It was the obvious answer, but it felt like putting on a sock that was a little too small. I knew somewhere in my head that it was perfectly reasonable to suspect that I actually did inherit something from The Morrigan instead of Ananke.

I just couldn't remember why or when I figured that out.

"Technically," Bianca said faintly, arms dropping slightly.

"I'm a demigod." I shrugged. "It's complicated." Boy was it ever. "But there are like, three surviving rivers in Ireland that Mom made way back in the day. I never really tried checking if I had water powers before but I'm - I'm not that surprised, you know?"

Bianca looked like she very much did not know.

"Look, Nico's probably a demi-something too? Some kind of spook gave him that shadow." We all watched said shadow play its turn silently. "He's not adopted, right?"

"No!" Nico's cheeks puffed, offended. "Same mom," he said at the same time Bianca said,

"Same dad."

They looked at each other.

"Same father," Bianca stressed with the same 'don't argue with me' look Apollo got when I was being an annoying little shit on her face. "Different mother." That hard note in her voice was back for a second. "We're half-siblings."

Nico chewed on his lip, but stayed quiet as he drew cards.

"Okay," I said before it got uncomfortable. "Nico's mom is not human, like mine so…"

"I'm half-Martian?" Nico wondered.

"What?" I said intelligently as my brain struggled with the whiplash. Where the fuck did he get half-Martian from? Was there something I missed?

"You said she wasn't human, so she's an alien and aliens are from Mars," he reasoned out loud with the bizarre and slightly concerning little kid logic we all know and love.

Glad I grew out of that!

"Not human doesn't automatically mean alien," I tried to explain. "She could be - uh." My ADHD dove down the rabbit hole of exactly how many gods, Elder, Old and Young were technically 'aliens' from outer space. I mentally flailed around before blurting out, "She could be a spirit!"

Nico gasped. "I'm half-ghost?"

"You - I don't think you're a halfa, but that's not what - "

Bianca stared blankly like she couldn't believe this conversation was happening. "Dead people can't have kids."

The train of my thought patterns blew its fucking whistle as it mutli-track drifted from Danny Phantom to explaining what a spirit was to answering the dead person kid question.

"Well, I mean - "

"Dead people can have kids," she whispered in horror.

"No!" Crap. "Kind of," I corrected myself. "They're only mostly dead or like after they died, but they came back because a god said so so they aren't dead anymore."

"She's an angel!?" Nico yelled.

I hate that I completely understood how he got there from what I said.

"Let's go with aliens."

"So Martian," Nico said, disappointed.

This fucking kid.

"I - look, what do you think this is, Biker Mice from Mars?"

"There are biker mice on Mars!?"

I should not have said anything.

"Wha - no."

"You just said - "

"...not all aliens are from Mars," I said desperately. Nico squinted at me. "Some are from Jupiter," I lied through my teeth and his black eyes got round. "Some just stopped by for a visit from the next star over and some just stayed on Earth because they…got work permits to build the pyramids and stuff."

I can't.

Work permits.

Part of me wanted to ask Mom for her green card just to see the look on her face, but most of me just wanted this stupid to stop.

"My mom made some rivers so I have water powers, your mom worked on something…uh."

"Dark," Nico said helpfully, waving at his shadow.

"Right."

"And scary."

I blew out a breath. "Sure."

"...your mother made rivers in Ireland?" Bianca asked the question like it was a drowning man grabbing onto a brick in verbal form. Or someone digging through mud and shit for the tiniest glimmer of sanity.

I sighed. "Yup."

She pinched the bridge of her nose. "...why?"

"...it's what she does?" I offered tiredly.

Thanks to Mom's complete lack of a mouth filter, I knew the story behind at least one of those rivers was nowhere close to PG-13. Nico and Bianca di Angelo really didn't need to know about The Dagda's love life. I didn't need to know, but for some god forsaken reason, Mom had no issue with telling a nine year old all about it. Don't ask me why I asked. I don't know why I asked.

I immediately regretted asking.

"Irish river goddess makes Irish rivers…"

There was another awkward silence as they stared at me.

I was just on a roll today.

"Are you serious?" Bianca finally broke, incredulous. I gave her an incredulous look right back. What did she think I was trying to say? "A goddess?"

Nico eyed me from behind his cards. "You're Irish?"

"I - what." I say my mother is a goddess and it's the Irish part that gets him? I raised both eyebrows. "Is there a problem with that?"

I could strangle this kid, I swear to God.

I don't care if he's basically six years old.

If there was a problem with me being Irish, then there was a problem with Mom being Irish and if anyone had a problem with Mom then I had a problem with them.

It wasn't rocket science.

Bianca winced. "Nico…we talked about this." She blindly reached out to pat her little brother on the head while keeping her eyes on me. "Forget everything Mrs. Lancashire told you."

"But - "

"No buts. She was English," she said. "And English people don't like anything."

"Well, that's straight up not true," I said. "They like tea and… the Queen. Sometimes."

Bianca conceded the point with a tilt of her head.

"That's it though. They hate everything else," I said, mostly joking.

Mostly.

Maybe it's because I'm American, but to me, it looked like British humor is all about all the things they don't like (which is everything, including themselves) and why they don't like it. You've got a dead end trading company that barely makes rent and based in an old yellow supervan, your brother is an idiot and your best friend is enough of a moron chasing get rich quick schemes that it's honestly surprising he's still alive?

That's not depressing.

That's British comedy gold.

"Like a-the-ists," Nico singsonged and Bianca's face twisted in pain. "And Catholics and loose women and ho-mo-sex - "

His sister covered his mouth with her hand. "Yes. That." She waved her other hand at me. "Besides, does he look drunk to you?"

What.

"Mrs. Lancashire sounds like a fucking asshole," I said bluntly.

Bianca choked as Nico's monochrome eyes lit up white in glee and I rolled my eyes.

Right. Profanity.

Gotta watch out for those young virgin ears. The reminder just increased the respect I had for -

For…?

Weird.

"She was…" If Bianca di Angelo was looking for an excuse, she didn't find it as she slumped a little. "Better than her husband," she said weakly. So that sounds terrible. She let out a shriek. "You're disgusting," she said, wiping her hand on her pants as Nico stuck his tongue out at her. Rolling her eyes, she turned back to me. "You know, because of the mob. And then when the war started and Italy…"

"Oh."

It didn't make it right, but I vaguely remembered that happening a lot on the TV and in my school about people from the Middle East after the Twin Towers -

Hold up.

"What does Italy have to do with the war?"

Nico and Bianca stared at me.

I stared back.

"You don't know about the war?" Nico blurted out.

"Well," Bianca cut in. "It's over now, right? And I don't think Mussolini did a lot?"

Mussolini?

I frowned as a sudden feeling of wrong curled in my chest. "Lancashire is an old bat, right?"

"Ancient," Nico said solemnly.

Bianca swatted at him.

"Oh okay," I said as the feeling faded. "My grandparents have a neighbor like that, super butthurt Germany lost."

I didn't understand why hearing that flooded Bianca's face with alarm. "Tell me they turned him in or at least told someone about a sympathizer?"

A little harsh. I couldn't blame her though.

"They called the police on him once?" I reassured her. "Noise complaint. He's not anyone important, just a really old jerk."

"Oh," she said. "That's good then."

"That he's a jerk?" I asked, bewildered.

"What?" Bianca startled. "No, that your folks called the authorities anyway, even if the war's over, you never know what someone like him could do."

"It was a noise complaint."

"Funny, isn't it?" She cracked a smile. "Sometimes that's how you get them. Like how Al Capone was convicted for tax evasion."

I was so fucking confused.

"Our father's from Greece," Nico said suddenly, filling me with dread. Bianca and I looked at him and his face was scrunched up like he was about to cry. "If my mom's from Jupiter, does that mean I'm not an American?"

His shadow stared.

I put down my cards.

"So who wants to go bungee jumping!?"

---

There was nothing like throwing yourself off a sixty foot drop at the end of a rope for your anxiety. You'd either forget your worries for a while or if you really can't forget, try it without the rope!

Sorry.

Celtic humor.

I must have bungee-jumped the lobby four or five times, dragged Bianca into playing virtual-reality laser tag and FBI sharpshooter with Nico and I, climbed the rock-climbing wall, taught Nico how to snowboard on the artificial ski slope because they already knew how to ski and just generally goofed around. It really reminded me of some of the vacations I went on with Mom and Dad. It was a bit of Six Flags, a bit of Disney World in Florida, a bit of the YMCA, a bit of the Boy Scouts and a little of the vacations abroad for Dad's job or when we went to see my great-grandmother one time in Athens, Greece.

Which meant sooner or later, I was going to gravitate to the pools and the waterslide.

"Let me get changed," I said, tugging on my jacket and looking down at my sneakers. The light beach wear Nico and Bianca wore was fine for taking a swim, but I knew from experience that wet jeans chafed like hell. "I'll be quick, go on without me."

"I'll get towels!" Nico exclaimed before he rushed off, his shadow right beside him.

Bianca lingered. "If there is anything else you want to do instead…"

"I love water," I said honestly. "Really, don't wait up. You might be okay letting a four year old walk around on his own - "

"He's almost ten," Bianca said with a wry smile.

I ignored her. "But I for one am not okay with unsupervised toddlers."

Her smile faded. "Unsupervised." It almost sounded bitter, but it was gone from her voice when she spoke again. "You're right, who knows what trouble he could get into?" She gave me a half-smile and a nod. "See you by the waterslide."

"Yeah," I said, trying not to frown.

I won't claim to be the most observant guy on the planet, but I was starting to get the feeling that Nico's sister really needed a break. The first month of Mom's absence had been rough. Dad didn't want to give up on me, but that didn't keep him from thinking that maybe he should.

That kind of thing comes out sometimes no matter how hard you try.

Maybe at knife point is when I finally started taking him seriously as my father. As someone Mom chose for a reason. Because he was capable of scaring me that badly.

I'm not sure what it said that he scared himself more.

Bianca wasn't anywhere near as bad as Dad was when he was working through therapy and single parenting, but I knew the Hot - Cold dynamic towards her little brother meant there was a problem.

Nico's birth mother was a Ghost-Angel-Kryptonian from Jupiter, so she wasn't around, but it sounded like they were growing up with mortal parents. Maybe it wasn't any of my business, but I liked them and wanted to help. I wasn't going to shake my friends down for where their folks were, but maybe if I stuck around long enough until dinner, I could get some answers. I could figure out where to go from there.

I approached one of the bellhops on the main floor. "Hey, question."

He grinned at me with a smile big enough to turn his eyes into a bunch of wrinkles. He was wearing a bright yellow tank top with a necklace of lotus flowers and fire engine red shorts. "What's up, prince?"

"I checked in, but I completely forgot what my room number is," I told him, a little embarrassed. "Should I go back to ask at the front desk?"

"No need!" He laughed. "There's only a limited number of royal suites at this location and I - " He dug into the pocket of his red shirt and held up a black key card triumphantly. "Have got a master key. Come on, I'll show you up."

I followed him towards a group of elevators. I heard the soft 'ding' as one of them opened and a beach goer wheeled out a cart full of bedsheets and towels. I thought we were going to take the vacant carriage but as we got closer, my stomach made a funny swooping feeling.

"We'll take the stairs," the bellhop said, smoothly changing his stride.

"So, how do you all see with your eyes closed?" I asked as we climbed the empty stairwell.

He almost missed a step. "Huh," he said, tilting his head up. "It's been a while since anyone was aware enough to ask."

"That was rude, sorry," I apologized.

He shook his head. "I was just surprised!" He held the door on the next floor open for me. "The short answer is that you really don't need eyes to see, right?" He said it like that was a reasonable conclusion to make. "And if you don't need them to see, well, no use letting all that space go to waste."

"Makes sense," I said, suddenly no longer curious about their closed eyelids. "Can't say I see the appeal." He chuckled at the pun. "I like my eyes."

"Your eyes are great!" He reassured me, completely genuine even though his were closed and I was still wearing my sunglasses that no one could see through. "It's not a popular school of thought on this side of the cosmos, that's for sure, but that doesn't mean it's not still valid!"

"If it works, then it works." I could understand that.

"Exactly!" He led me to a door and with a swipe of the keycard introduced me to the 'royal' suite. With a name like that I shouldn't have been surprised, but I still was shocked to see that it was a full penthouse suite. "Here we are, prince."

"This is too much," I protested.

"Not at all!" The bellhop grinned at me. "Trust me, we are nothing but honored by your patronage."

"Thanks," I said helplessly.

The bellhop's eyebrows knit together in a puzzled look.

"For what? You deserve this, prince. And it's all paid for." He waved towards the full length coffee table in front of the clustered group of love seats, half-sofas and recliners in front of the big screen television. "There's your keycard." I blinked and he was right. "If you need anything, like extra bubbles for the hot tub, room service or whatever, call the front desk. We'll send it right up."

I took in a big breath and stepped into the room. In my dirty sneakers and worn jeans, I felt like a hobo being mistaken for royalty.

I knew what five star hotel rooms looked like. It wasn't as if my family was hurting for cash. We liked having nice things, but that didn't mean we had to go overboard. I assumed 'royal' were just King or Queen sized rooms with beds, couches and amenities, but instead I was faced with a full three bedroom suite with a balcony view over the Las Vegas Strip. The hot tub on the balcony reminded me a little of the penthouse I called home with our pool, but I definitely wasn't the kind of person who took baths out in the open. I expected the stocked bar, high quality towels and linens, not so much the skeet-shooting machine by the balcony sliding glass doors and shotgun for blasting clay pigeons out of the Nevada sky.

That's a little excessive.

And probably illegal.

I picked out one of the bedrooms and shuffled out of my jacket. After I folded it up, I reached for my backpack. It was the canvas under my fingertips that made the wrong feeling come back. If I was staying at a high class hotel like this, why was all my stuff in the Bag of Holding?

That was for tests.

And how many times did I just want to sleep in a real bed without anything trying to kill me during a test, I thought.

I could easily afford one night, even in a place like this. What was it, three, four thousand dollars? Maybe I was wasting time staying here, but Mom hasn't given me a hard time limit since that time when I was seven.

If one day was going to screw everything up, that was on her, not me.

…what was even the test, though?

I stared at my backpack, feeling unbalanced.

I wanted to say that if I couldn't remember it, then it must not be important. I couldn't say that though, because I was getting the feeling that it was really important. I tried to think back to how I got here.

By bus?

…one of my cousins gave me a ticket, I remembered. I was supposed to be here.

I changed out of my clothes, threw my dirty jeans, socks and tunic into the laundry basket and found some swimming trunks and a plain white T-shirt in the closet that was just my size. There were new sneakers too. I thought about it for a moment, then threw my old ones into the trash and fished out new socks from my bag. I wasn't going to jump into the pool with socks on, but after I dried off, I'd want some footwear.

I hung the key to my room around my neck and left my backpack on my bed. I took the stairs back down, feeling a little claustrophobic at the thought of the elevator. I was hurrying a little, so I ended up bumping into someone headed for the elevators.

"Sorry." I spun around the blond guy to keep my balance. "My bad, wasn't looking."

"It's fine," he said, cradling a small sleepy rabbit against his chest. He looked me over with an eye color I haven't seen on a human before. They were blue, but it was like he had fog or clouds in his irises. He frowned. "Do I know you?"

"Nope," I said. I grinned. "I just have that kind of face."

He huffed, rolling his eyes and turned away. "Whatever, Perce."

I spun back around, but he was already getting into an elevator. Did he just - I shook my head. I wasn't even sure why I turned around. It wasn't even a matter of mishearing, because that wasn't my name.

I always introduce myself as Percy.

I found Bianca and Nico by the biggest pool, the same one that the huge water slide winding around the main elevator emptied into.

"Go, Nico," Bianca pushed him lightly, exasperated. "You don't have to stop because I'm taking a break."

He took a couple steps towards the line in front of the ladder, then looked back. There was no trace of her irritation when she nodded, waved and made a show of collapsing into one of the many pool chairs around.

"So what's that about?" I asked as he dashed off.

"What's what about?" Bianca raised an eyebrow.

"That." I crossed my arms. "I can watch him if he's what you need a break from." She froze in her seat and then her bottom lip started to wobble. I swore under my breath. "Look, I really don't mind helping if you don't want - "

"I do want him around!" She sat up in her pool chair, aghast. "He's my little brother."

"But?" I prompted.

She didn't answer. We both watched Nico reach the front of the line by the water slide ladder and start climbing. I saw him glance over his shoulder. When he saw we were both watching, a megawatt grin lit his face and he climbed faster.

"Where's your parents?"

She shot me a look. "Where's yours?"

"Upper West Side Manhattan," I said easily. "Though I just came from visiting a cousin in - " My brain hiccuped. "Los Angeles," I finished slowly.

Bianca blinked. "Oh. We're…moving from Washington D.C to L.A too. House isn't ready yet, but." Her face darkened. "Soon."

I opened my mouth, then I closed it. I wasn't sure what to say.

She sighed. "I'm not perfect, but I'm keeping it where he won't notice."

"Uh huh."

She slumped in her chair. "Alright, so obviously I'm not doing as great as I thought I was."

"You're, what? Thirteen?"

"Twelve," she said.

"Same." I shrugged. "You're a kid. Even parents need a minute to themselves someti - "

"That's not it," she said quietly. "She said I have to look after him." She? "I'm his older sister and father is busy and that's fine." It didn't sound fine. "Half the time I just want to wrap him up in a blanket and never let him go, but then the other half I just can't help wishing…"

"Take ten," I said gently. "We'll be here for a while."

"His shadow saved us," she said instead. 'And only us,' I remembered her saying earlier and suddenly, I had a really bad feeling about how their dad was the one that was busy. "We were in a hotel and there was an explosion." Her eyes were glued to her brother on the ladder. "It saved us, but only because I was close to him. Me living? That was an accident."

"You can't know - "

"I know that, because he - his shadow didn't save my mother," Bianca cut me off. "She was in the next room. I saw her through the door."

Yikes.

"Then the building collapsed." She dragged her eyes away from Nico and back to me. "I don't know how long we were trapped there in the dark, maybe a minute?" She pursed her lips, like not knowing how long she was under the rubble was her fault.

My stomach sank as I thought of a possible reason why. Her mother had been close enough to see.

Maybe she didn't die right away.

"The whole thing was unstable," Bianca said dully, almost clinically. "Whatever blew up was on our floor, so the top was coming down. If our father hadn't gotten us - me out, if he hadn't come as fast as he did…"

"He can't control it," I pointed out as gently as I could.

"I know." She looked down at her hands where she had them clenched in her lap. "I know," she repeated. "And if he's really like you? I don't want him to be able to control it," Bianca confessed. I could almost see the infection drain from the abscess as her shoulders slumped and she laid back on the chair. "I owe him my life and I don't want him to be able to control what let him save me."

She didn't have to say it, but I knew why she didn't want Nico to learn about his powers. Because if he could control it, then instead of her life being an accident, she'd be wondering about the what ifs. If someone had been around to teach him earlier, like whoever he inherited the ability from. If she had known he could do that from the beginning. If he had just figured it out sooner.

What if her mom didn't have to die?

"I'll get over it," she insisted. "It was…a long time ago, I think. A few years. I'm getting over it, I'm just a little stressed, moving across the country and all."

"I get that," I said. "Still, offer stands. I can watch a two year old, no problem."

"Thanks," she said with a weak smile. "I needed - I needed to get that off my chest."

Nico shrieked happily as he came down the twisting slide.

"I love him. He's my little brother," Bianca said. "But he has a mother."

Basically, emotions suck is what I was getting out of this.

I plastered a big smile on my face as Nico splashed out of the pool. "My turn," I said. "Coming with?"

"Yeah!" Nico beamed.

"So, do you remember anything about your mom?" I tried to ask as casually as I could while we waited in line.

Nico blinked up at me. "No?"

"Nothing?" I felt stupid as soon as I asked. If he did, he wouldn't have been confused on which parent he shared with his sister earlier.

Nico shrugged.

I bit my lip as the line moved forwards. I started to have some loud second guesses when I realized the ladder to the top of the water slide was even taller than the bungee-jumping bridge. Wasn't there safety concerns about slides literally a hundred feet long? "I'm in room 4001," I said. "If I die, you can have my stuff."

"No one's gonna die." I could tell from the tone of his voice that Nico was rolling his eyes at me.

"You can't know that."

"Yes, I can."

"Can not."

"Can too!"

He was giggling by the time we got up to the top and I felt a bit better. I let him go first and heard him whoop with joy all the way down. A hotel lifeguard with a whistle around her neck and dark hair bound up under her baseball cap flashed me a thumbs up. I got in the tube and pushed off.

I laughed all the way down. Spinning and spinning and spinning around the spiral with the water splashing up around and under me in the dark tunnel where every sound echoed.

It was the longest water slide I'd ever gone on, but it still ended too soon. The tunnel abruptly ended in favor of an open slide the last twenty feet and then I was catapulted into the pool.

…!

I launched myself out of the water, feeling like I was about to explode. My heart was beating in my ears and I felt like I was about to throw up all over the pool chairs as my head throbbed. I was vaguely aware that there were people around, but I squeezed my eyes shut. There was a painful lump in my throat as I tried to breathe. I hunched over, clutching at my stomach and it felt like my bellybutton was moving around under my hands. Was I -

I'm having a panic attack, I thought dimly.

"Percy - "

"Don't touch him!"

I didn't look up as someone scrambled away from me and my skin crawled. There was - a monster in the pool? That wasn't right. There had been a monster in the pool. It - I -

'You need only to turn off the spigot,' rang out in the back of my mind.

"What's wrong with him? Is he going to be okay?"

"My prince, you need to calm down. Please breathe."

I was trying.

"What year is it?" I gasped out. I needed to know.

"2005," The voice from earlier said very quietly. "You have not been here long, prince. Please, do not be concerned."

I was supposed to be here, because -

'Go in, get them, get out.' A black haired woman with no eyes said with a quirked smile in my memory. 'Simple.'

I forgot.

Before I could think better of it, I threw myself back into the water and let myself sink even though my heart felt like it was going to beat out of my chest in fear. I could feel it. I remembered the weight pulling me down. I looked up and I remembered the hundreds of thin tendrils covered in toothy suckers creeping over the edge of the pool towards me.

I looked down and remembered the jaws prying my stomach open -

I climbed out of the pool.

Water clung to me like armor. My wet T-shirt made it obvious that my bellybutton was gaping, a sunken hole the size of a watermelon. There was a small crowd nearby. I could see Bianca and Nico staring with wide eyes. The lifeguard from the top of the slide was there too, a hand on her whistle and tense like she wanted to run.

"Hi," I said. "I need to speak to the manager? I've got an overcharge complaint."

"Overcharge?" She asked faintly.

"Overcharge," I confirmed.

The toll was time.

Not my fucking memories.

She flinched when I walked towards her.

"Don't worry, I don't bite."

I smiled my wide, toothy grin.

"Much."

 

[Shujin]

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction​

I don't think I've ever been this angry before.

I have a temper and a lot of things to get mad about, especially this past week, but this? I felt violated, like I could still feel the slimy lingering stench of tendrils rifling through my memories. Suppressing some, pruning others, all to make sure I wouldn't want to leave.

I accepted that I would have to pay the toll. I knew what the Price was and I accepted it.

I felt betrayed. I felt like I had just seen Dylan again.

Right where Mom said he would be.

It wasn't quite the same, because my anger then had been made up of a lot of different pieces. Shame and guilt and a desperate need to do something to make Eva's missing arm right and knowing there was nothing I could do. It had been a done deal. Everyone in the Celtic pantheon of the Tuatha de respected Eva's Price.

Even Mom.

I had been a bit scared too, because Dylan was so much older and better than me with the spear. I had been worried that his dad, Donn of the Dead would intervene even with what his son did to the daughter of his King.I had still been lost, drowning because Mom had just come back after a year of being gone and I didn't know how to feel or what to do about it. All of those feelings mixed into a toxic cocktail of rage so black, I almost couldn't even see. I moved to attack him with my new unnamed sword immediately. He deflected it with the pitch black and silver javelin and maybe he looked sorry.

Maybe he even said he was sorry.

I can't remember. It had been really hard for me to think.

My next attack he had parried, reached for the sword he dual wielded and it was the exact same movement he had made when he parried Evangeline's long dagger when she realized he had given us up -

And I had stopped thinking at all.

I was on the edge of that. I could feel it. I could imagine the fluttering of the blinds in my apartment in the Dreamlands, glimpses of the black beach of razor fossils and the dark tower on the horizon behind the drapes. On the part of me that I locked away.

As I leisurely walked behind the lifeguard (heh, lifeguard, get it?) my back rippled under the coating of pool water on my skin as everyone stared. No one got in my way. I didn't know what I would have done if anyone did. I was still smiling when we came to the front desk and the receptionist was back between one blink and the next.

She looked worried. "So, you wanted to see the manager again, right?"

"Yup."

She fidgeted and shared an unseeing closed eye look with the lifeguard. "...do you mind waiting? He's in a meeting right now."

"I think," I said very slowly as I leaned in. "That he has taken enough of my Time. Don't you agree?"

She obligingly bobbed her head as the lifeguard grimaced and backed away from the desk. "Wholeheartedly," the receptionist said. "Unfortunately, I just don't have the clearance to interrupt him like this."

"Just bring up the elevator," I said. "I can take it from there."

"...is there anything you would take in recompense instead?" She frowned. "I can't call the elevator right now."

"You can't," I repeated blandly.

She shook her head and bit her lip.

I considered this blankly, like I was thinking without really thinking. It felt familiar. A vague sense of

'Going, going, going….'

I looked around the lobby and felt the world tilt.

That kid again. Black hair and sea green eyes dragged what looked a lot like Annabeth and Grover past me towards the hotel exit, sparing me a confused, alarmed glance. He opened his mouth, thought better of it and kept moving. One of the bellhops broke off from the crowd and I couldn't tell if he was here with me or there with him.

Well now, are you ready for your platinum cards? He asked the kid.

We're leaving, was the reply as the Annabeth look-a-like snatched the Grover-look-a-like's hand back from the card. I watched as he vanished out the door, a heavy backpack warping its way onto his back as they spilled out into the Las Vegas street.

He cast one last look back through the Lotus Hotel and Casino doors at me and the vision broke.

I could do that. All of the servants were scared of me. They would let me leave. They probably wanted me too and this wasn't an offense that caught Mom's attention. We would all know if it did.

Luke and Artemis were here too, I remembered distractedly. I should go find them before too much time has passed. Then I should grab Nico and his sister, Bianca and leave.

I should leave.

Run away, like the little mortal I am. My stomach twisted. I was going to have to face my cousin, Persephone again after this. I didn't want to do that, still afraid. Part of me acknowledged that being afraid of the Priestess of the Endless Abyss was the sane response, but most of me didn't care right now. Aren't you supposed to face your fears?

'Fear' didn't feel like it meant the same thing I thought it meant just minutes ago. Like the definition had changed to something just two dimensions to the left. I felt like my thoughts were floating on the surface of a reflective pool, but I didn't know what it would take to drown them.

No time like the present.

I made myself approach the wall behind the front desk. The elevator had been right here. I thought about the doorman when he pointed me towards the front desk.

There's no one there?

There will be.

It was just a wall now. I stared at the smiling poster of the beach goer with a pina colada in their hand taped to the blank white plaster. I couldn't help thinking, I choose my own destiny. To this day, I still don't know why I thought that. It had nothing to do with this. The Lotus Hotel and Casino were just beside reality and I already knew the elevator was there. I paused for a second, thinking again that I should just leave, but it was like my brain was running on a parallel track to my actions. I raised my right hand.

There was nothing there.

There will be.

I reached out and pushed the button.

The elevator made a dinging noise as it opened.

"It's fine," I said as the receptionist choked. I looked back and her eyebrows were so high up her forehead, her eyes were even open a little. Just enough for gossamer thin white legs to fold out and curl up to the top and bottom like eyelashes. "I got it. By the way." I got in the elevator. "Do you want his job?"

"What?" She said faintly.

"His job. Want it?" I waved a hand as the doors started to close. "You have a better business sense."

That freebie would have saved us all so much trouble.

I hummed along with the elevator music as it screeched like cold metal shearing under the twist of the vice. Down and down and down I went. When the doors finally opened again, I felt my smile wilt a little.

Lining the hallway in front of me were faceless men in suits wielding batons, walkie talkies and sunglasses all with identical haircuts. By faceless I meant faceless, like moving mannequins directed to block the corridor.

Hotel security.

"You really don't want to do this," I said slowly. They advanced, all taking the same exact step forward.

Guess we're doing this.

I leapt right into them, pulling Damocles from its necklace while in the air and the first guy went down with the bone blade through his forehead. I was immediately smashed over the head with a baton as all their radios screeched with static. I fell with the blow, letting my weight help me free my sword as I fell right into the middle of them.

"Hi," I said, head pounding, then I lashed out with Damocles aiming for their ankles.

I wasn't interested in killing them. I just had to get through.

The entire slog through the corridor was like that, exchanging blunt hits with more permanent bladed solutions. They were built to deal with the average hotel enjoyer. They were trying to restrain me. My water reflexively surged up when I was caught around the neck and lifted off the ground, churning until it was a pressure hose and then lashing back.

More blood mixed in with the water I was wearing as armor, turning it pink. I was under no obligation to hold back. My Spidey Sense was silent, so I knew I was perfectly safe.

'No one can die in the Lotus Casino.'

I swung my hand and my water extended my reach, crushing a few guys against the walls. I was knocked into the wall myself from a vicious kick to my side from my blind spot and I swung Damocles blindly in the direction it pulled in, water coming off the edge just as sharp, cutting through limbs.

My sword sang.

I pushed off the wall, blinking the eyes that had opened in my shadow. No more blind spots. I launched myself back at them like a human blender. I just swung and swung with absolutely no skill, because everything I touched came apart. My water started gaining shape, lifting off my body as crude battering rams, to sharp tendrils moving like I had a second mind I wasn't consciously aware of.

I took a sharp punch to the face, flooding my mouth with an iron taste that turned to saltwater, washing the pain away as my water took the offending arm off. I turned, seeing another approaching behind me and Damocles hit air as he suddenly backed off when his radio crackled.

They all did, standing still like statues in an art museum.

I blinked and realized I had made it to the other side of them, my back to the rest of the hallway and it was empty.

I let out a long breath. "Are we good?"

They didn't respond.

"O…kay then." I felt like nothing had happened at all. I knew I'd been hit. A lot. Maybe it was the adrenaline, or maybe I just healed a bit faster than I thought I did.

I spared them one last wary look and then turned away to get out of the foyer. Right on the other side of the narrow opening into the mural filled hallway was a familiar face.

Kind of.

"Oof, that's rough, buddy." I had kind of been wondering where he went.

The doorman wheezed through his open chest cavity from where he had been impaled to the wall. His face was shredded to the bone and so was most of his torso. One of his arms was straight up gone, sluggishly bleeding from where it had been bit off above the elbow and the other had a flayed forearm. His uniform was just barely holding together. He looked like he had tried to hug a wood chipper and it hadn't appreciated the violation of personal space.

No wonder the servants all seemed wary of touching me.

I gave awful haircuts.

…the manager… The quivering black barb through his guts was one that I recognized because it was mine. …will see you now.

"I bet," I snorted as I called more of the water to me and it rose from the ground. "I gave you a hard time, huh?"

The man nodded weakly.

"I'd apologize, but you know how it is."

The hallway I was standing in was really different from the room right outside the elevator. They were scoured like a sandstorm had blown through for hours. It had completely wiped the murals clean until all that was left was pitted sandblasted stone and seeping pockets of brackish water. I pulled on the barb. The doorman fell to the floor with a silent groan as the inky viscous material of the spine sunk back under my skin.

An echoing whale song roared up the hallway as I started walking.

It took no effort at all to dig into the well of nothingness in my stomach. "You speak to Perseus of the B̸l̴o̸o̶d̶y̵ ̴T̷o̵n̷g̴u̶e̷."

The walls vibrated loud enough to hum with the second call.

What was up with the misgendering? I did not have the time nor the inclination for a Tolerance and Diversity session.

"You did not cross my parent," I admitted as my voice resonated with a dark whooshing howling. "You should have been more concerned with crossing M̵̨͒E̷̙͑."

The next call was louder. The floor shook.

"Your Price was Time, amadán," I refuted, the Irish just slipping out. "I do not care that you 'only' nibbled on my memories. I did not agree to that."

The manager wailed.

I trailed a hand along the wall and the rock crumbled before the churning water on my fingers. "But do you have the receipt?"

The walls shook and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I came to the glass corridor at the bottom of an alien ocean.

'No one can die at the Lotus Casino.'

My Spidey Sense was for what would kill me.

I stopped politely at the opening and slowly, a giant sickly pale finger emerged from the dark water to gently rest on the glass. It reminded me of the finger of a frog, or maybe a Roswell Gray with an enlarged pad and a bony triple joint before the rest of the finger extended out of sight. Just that single joint dwarfed me by at least fifteen feet. I could feel the water beyond the glass somehow. The impression of vague movement, of hundreds of tentacles waving through the water and a greedy, grinning snout filled with shark teeth.

Then came the silent touch to my mind.

Oh.

The manager, duh.

Middle management was always incompetent. As Mom always said, if you want something done right, sometimes you just gotta do it yourself.

If you really wanted to make yourself heard, take it to the owner.

"Sorry for interrupting your meeting with your employee." I told the Lotus Eater as I opened my mind further and felt the sickly sweet smell of lotus flowers worming their way through my perspective of what happened. "But this really couldn't wait? I am o̶w̷e̷d̵."

The finger dragged on the glass. The impression of the grinning shark-like snout flickered again in the dark water as a far, far off ghostly light drifted into view.

I crossed the corridor of glass, aware of death screaming at the back of my neck. I opened the door on the other side and saw that it looked like the aftermath of Woodstock. Everything was smashed and broken and sandblasted clean. The basin that had been in the center looked like a bomb had gone off in it, scattering pebbles all around the room still etched with the geometric designs.

The statue holding the gem was untouched, but it wasn't smiling anymore.

There was a squeal of fear.

An astonishingly small ugly grub-like creature in fluorescent yellow robes and a flowery straw hat made a break for it out from under the statue's shadow, wriggling for the far corner. I don't remember even taking a step before I was suddenly just there behind it. My own hand was too small to fit around its sunken, misshapen skull, but the water surged up from the pool to ensnare it. It looked like it had gone through a meat grinder, with one side of its body bandaged up in seaweed under the robes.

"I'd ask for a refund, but your boss is actually a pretty cool dude, from one big eater to another," I said. "And really, Time was the actual payment. It's what you skimmed off the top that I have a problem with. You had all the Time in the world to tell me you wanted a tip."

The water dragged the manager backwards as it futilely struggled, scrabbling at the floor with all six of its backwards limbs.

My stomach opened wide.

"So I'll just have to settle for a little charge back."

I left the room, burping.

Why did everything always taste like pork or calamari?

Or both.

"No hard feelings?" I asked the Lotus Eater, just to make sure. I smelled lotus blossoms. "Sweet. If it helps, your receptionist is A tier, just a bit unpolished."

The acknowledgment brushed the inside of my skull and then the pale finger slowly fell out of view.

I backtracked through the halls and to the elevator. I felt a little bad for having ruined most of the murals on the walls. It wasn't really my fault and I didn't have the memories anymore, but it was the principle of the thing. Tens of thousands of years of history, gone just like that.

Everything ends eventually, I thought. A stray half-thought/feeling/impression made me pause before entering the now empty and clean foyer. "Hey, has there ever been another boy that looked like me, staying here?"

The doorman wheezed a dubious negative.

"There could have been?" I clarified and he nodded weakly from the floor.

"Huh," I said. "Thanks."

I got into the elevator. I wondered for a moment at the two buttons, because I clearly remembered there only being one when I first came to the Hotel. I shrugged it off and pressed to go back up. At least this time, there was better music playing.

When the elevator opened again, Luke was there, holding my backpack in one hand and my jacket in the other with Artemis still out of it in his vest.

"I hate…" he began slowly. "...everything about this Quest."

"We didn't know you were a prince," the receptionist insisted with the air of having already said it multiple times and was now wondering if his IQ surpassed the room temperature. Her closed eyelids scrunched further like she was squinting. "Or half of one…? Semi - demi…?"

There was blood leaking down his face from his shattered eye.

The left looked the normal cloudy blue. The right looked broken. It resembled one of those perspective puzzles. Looking at it head on made it similar to the left, but as soon as you paid any actual attention, you could see the half-dozen blearily staring blue irises reflecting off each other making the eye gleam in the bright Hotel lighting.

"Huh," I said again. I turned to the staring Nico and his looking-like-she-was-going-to-pass-out sister. "Hi, I'm Percy and was actually here to rescue you."

Bianca flinched, clinging to her brother tighter like she was seconds from snatching him away and forgetting I ever existed. "Rescue…?"

"Something came up," I said. "Your stepmother sent me on your dad's behalf." Her mouth fell open into a little 'o.' "Yeah, I got turned around."

"Stepmother?" Nico said quietly, eyes black as he mournfully gazed between his sister and me.

"Not yours," I said gently. "Because we're going to see your mom too."

His eyes lit up. Literally.

"Please?" He turned to his sister. "We can always come back."

"We're not supposed to - " Bianca was hyperventilating. "We can't just walk off with anyone that says they know our parents - !"

"He's not a stranger!" Nico protested. "He's nice - '' He winced when Bianca swayed on her feet. I then realized that maybe the dark spines poking out from my shoulder blades, the blood on my T-shirt, my shadow full of burning green eyes and all the tentacles made of water waving around me was not the greatest impression I could have made if I wanted the 'Come with me if you want to live' thing to work.

My bad.

"Change of plans," I said. "Luke - "

He was already gone, appearing behind Bianca in a blur of motion, picking her up and cutting off her scream by turning on his heel and fading away. Nico gaped.

"Trust me?"

He nodded slowly.

"Then let's go." I retraced the steps of the other boy through the Lotus Hotel and Casino lobby, holding Nico's hand. I felt the weirdest sense of deja vu when one of the bellhops plucked up the courage to call out before we hit the door.

"You sure you don't want to say a little longer?" He said plaintively. "We just added a new floor of games for platinum card members and VIPs."

"We're leaving," I echoed. "But I'll probably come back, it was fun without the whole…" I circled my head with my free hand vaguely.

He nodded sadly and then we were out.

I had barely taken two steps into the humid Nevada air when a newspaper was shoved into my face. When I finally managed to pin the floating numbers down, my heart sank.

June 19th.

Forget only being in there for twelve hours or my limit of two days. I was there for four.

"Two days left," Luke snarled.

"So that's bad," I agreed. The water I was holding splashed onto the ground. "But, look, I am about to fucking pass out - "

I woke up mid sentence.

" - so I would appreciate it if you could get us someplace…" I peered around dizzily at the blobs of color, finally recognizing that I was in a completely different location. And laying down on something soft. "Oh, come on!"

I was annoyed at myself for interrupting myself by fainting. I had been in the middle of a fucking conversation -

I blinked as my vision cleared up and I realized the monochrome blob I was staring at was actually a very annoyed looking Bianca di Angelo. I wasn't sure if her irritation was because she had just been kidnapped, because I had keeled over or because she had duct tape over her mouth.

It was probably the kidnapping. What kid would want to be pulled away from all those awesome games and food?

"Luke," I sighed. "You could have just stolen her voice?"

"Did that." Luke came into view then too. I was lying down on…a restaurant booth? There was a table low enough to nearly brush my nose when I turned my head. "Turns out, it makes me sound like a little girl so I gave it back." Bianca's left eyebrow twitched as her dark eyes pinned a glare on him. He ignored her. "How are you feeling?"

I rolled over onto my side and threw up all over his sneakers.

"Oh," Luke said.

I passed out again.

I woke up into the middle of a conversation over my head.

" - can't be, gods aren't real!" That was Bianca.

"You know what, I think I agree with you," my mouth said and she blinked down at me. "What?"

"What?" Artemis said, a fuzzy face peering over the table at me too.

"What?" I said. "Where are we?"

"Still in Las Vegas," Luke's voice said slowly. "Las Vegas is Spanish for 'The Meadows' in case you were curious."

"That's cool," I said, vaguely remembering what he was even talking about. Hecate's riddle. "So we just need to find the sunlight and new construction and shit?"

"...you gonna explain that god thing?" Luke asked as Nico loudly slurped up his soda from a can. "And yes."

"Sure," I said. "So the thing is, gods are like, a political term - "

And I was out like a light.

" - almost eight thousand years ago so Mom doesn't really pay attention to things like that anymore." I woke up to finish my thesis and then noticed that everyone but Nico had left.

Jerks.

"I am sure that was very interesting," the little shit said as he munched on a twinkie in the restaurant booth across the aisle from me. "In your head."

"Shut up," I rasped. I had a fever blazing out of control again making my head feel like it was a radiator on max settings and a bone deep cold pain in my shins. "Gimme a twinkie."

Nico hesitated as he pulled Luke's backpack closer to himself. "Are you going to sick up again?"

"Probably," I admitted, feeling my stomach gurgle unhappily. I waved a hand. "Help me up."

My head swam a little, but all in all, I could tell that I was doing much better than I had been at Rhea's. Like instead of being knocked out with pneumonia, I was getting over a cold or the annual flu and was just tired, achy and a little nauseous.

Progress!

"Where is everybody?"

"Bianca is talking with the…rabbit," Nico said with his face scrunched up. "You didn't tell me there were rabbits on the moon," he accused.

"The hotel manager took my memories." I gave up before I even started. "Couldn't exactly tell you what I couldn't remember."

"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I…wasn't really paying attention earlier, but…" He looked at me with sad black eyes. "We were in that hotel for a very long time, weren't we?"

"I - yeah." There was a lump in my throat as I considered what it would be like going to sleep for a bit and waking up to find out that everyone I knew and loved had died ages ago. Mom solved that problem by rarely loving anyone that wouldn't last.

"World War 2 against Hitler ended about sixty years ago."

He blinked rapidly and then looked away, sniffling. "I'm an old man now," he tried to joke. His eyes shined wetly. "Nonno always used to say I'd know everything about everything when I got to his…age…" He sniffled again and rubbed his nose on the sleeve of his bright yellow shirt. "...we missed Mama's funeral. It was only supposed to be for three weeks…"

"Sorry," I said helplessly.

"...not your fault," Nico said almost thoughtfully with a dark whisper and tears in his voice. "Not your fault." He buried his head in his hands as it had finally all sunk in. His shadow spoke up for him instead.

it is Zeus' fault

---

"Is he lucid?" Was the first thing out of Luke's mouth when he came back inside the restaurant.

"Uh, excuse me?" I'd been lucid this entire time!

"English!" He exclaimed as he shuffled over to my table. The place we were stashed in was a brand new building, so new it wasn't even open yet with appliances in the kitchen still missing and everything but the plumbing turned off. Rhea's torch was providing the light, wedged in the design of the chandelier above us by someone who was too tall for his own good.

"You were talking in your sleep."

I shrugged. Honestly, not the first time someone told me that and it probably wasn't going to be the last. "What'd I say?"

"No idea!" Luke said with mock cheer. His right eye was still shattered and looked almost bloodshot. I opened my mouth to ask about that, because what the fuck but Luke kept going. "I heard Egyptian, some kind of Gaelic, Persian, something my brain only registered as Aboriginal Australian, Sumerian - "

"I understood that one," Nico spoke up from where he fiddled with my Gameboy. Don't judge me. Nico was practically a baby. That was the only thing I knew what to do with miserable little kids: throw some video games at them. His cheeks were still puffy and red from crying. "You still didn't make any sense."

"Greek - "

"And I understood that," Bianca admitted miserably, clutching Artemis to her chest from where she stood behind Luke.

"And fffff - " Luke cast a glance at Nico. "Freaking Chinese."

I really didn't know what to say to that other than, "So… what Name gives Hermes god of Diplomacy again?"

He flicked my forehead. I nearly threw up again. He looked a bit ashamed. "You've been out for about three hours, I just had to kill this…thing sniffing around four demigods and a rabbit in a bar so I am a little on edge," he explained in a Not Apology.

"I get that," I gasped as I tried to make sure whatever was trying to crawl up from my stomach didn't make its way out. Demigod scent. Hera's Curse was stil a thing. "Let me just - " I closed my eyes as I tried to beat the nausea back down. I Called out in Ancient Greek, "Persephoneia?"

I was a bit disappointed that nothing seemed to happen. When I was sure I wasn't going to spew, I opened my eyes to see Luke eyeing me in concern. "Is that…all it takes?"

"Yeah," I said. "But they've got to be - "

"Listening," Persephone finished from beside me and I nearly jumped an entire foot out of my skin when her cold hand rubbed my back. My Spidey Sense screamed. "Oh, you are adorable."

"You couldn't have…given a warning, cuz?" She let out a small, musical laugh as my heart tried to beat out of my chest and Luke did jump nearly a foot in the air with a yell when he registered the goddess sitting next to me.

"You Called me. Why weren't you prepared?" She looked the same as before, with long dark hair strung with rolling eyeballs in glass cages, but with a black and white dress and her pomegranate flower broach on her collar already withered and dry. She turned her face to 'look' across the table when Bianca gasped, taking a short step forward before she faltered and her face fell.

"Let me guess," Persephone said. "I look like your mother?" Bianca nodded hesitantly, like she wasn't sure if the woman would take offense to that. "Honestly, that man," the dark goddess sighed fondly. "And you," she said a lot less fondly as her face turned to Nico. He stiffened in his seat as all of the eyes in her hair focused on him. "You look like your mother," Persephone offered gently, but the skin where her eyes should have been was tight. "Hello, nephew."

Nico slowly relaxed. "Hello," he said shyly. "Aunt Persephone?"

The woman inclined her head.

Luke opened his mouth, blanched and closed it again, backing up a few panicked steps when Persephone stood up, ghosting right through the table like she was just an illusion. I pressed back into my seat.

My stomach hurt.

"Bianca," she said and the girl jumped. "I already prepared your rooms. Don't worry about missing anything, trust me. I missed nothing." She raised her hand, fingers pressed together like she was about to snap them. "Ah, please put down the rabbit," she said dryly.

"Oh!" Bianca rushed to put the shivering Artemis down on the nearest table and then paused. "What about - "

"Your half-brother?" Persephone flashed a charming smile as the siblings stared at each other. "He is no longer your concern."

Bianca bit her lip. "I…I don't understand any of this - "

"Can you not feel it?" The goddess interrupted her. "The comfort in stillness, the ease with the cold, how I feel safe to you?"

Hades' demigod daughter stared with wide eyes. I didn't blame her. My demigod sense was constantly shrieking that I was looking at Death.

Then again, Hades was the God of the Dead.

"It means 'welcome home,' girl. Your father and I will teach you what you need to know, I promise." Everyone ignored Artemis' small gasp of surprise. "Now, are you ready to go?"

Bianca nervously brushed some of her long hair back behind her ear. Nico hugged himself when she nodded, not sparing him a glance. "I am."

She was gone in a snap of the goddess' fingers.

"Well done, Perseus," Persephone mused and a shiver went down my spine hearing my name when she turned back to me. "It will take her, hmm, perhaps a few months to reconstitute from perishing so suddenly - "

What!

"You killed her!?" Nico burst out.

"Technically," the goddess said. Nico jumped to his feet, but he only made it two steps before suddenly falling into a dead faint right into her arms. "You are definitely your mother's child."

I found my voice. "You killed her? You said - "

"Exactly what I meant," Persephone said coolly. "Oh, don't give me that, I adopted her, silly boy."

"You - " My mind went blank. "You adopted her," I said slowly. Persephone's dad was Tartarus, an Elder God. I would bet money that she was like Hypnos, an Elder God as well. They adopt? That happens? "And for that she had to - "

"There is only so much her gifts from my husband will do for her in the Underworld," the Priestess of the Endless Abyss said easily as she cradled Nico on her hip with his head against her shoulder like she was just taking him to bed. "The human condition is a hindrance."

Artemis scoffed tightly. "You would say that."

"Because it is true," Persephone said just as tightly. "The same way Nyx will have to put in a bit more work into this one to make sure he doesn't drive himself mad - well," she corrected herself, looking down at Nico's sleeping face dubiously. "She might not have to, but to be on the safe side - the safe…"

She trailed off with dawning horror on her face.

"The safe - I'm turning into my mother!"

Persephone quickly turned around and headed straight for the back door of the restaurant without another word.

I looked at Artemis. Artemis looked at Luke. Luke looked at me.

We all bolted for the door after her.

Outside in the empty parking lot, the Night sky overhead felt low and oppressive. Like the darkness was just a few feet over our head instead of hundreds of miles away. Even the bright lights of the Las Vegas Strip in the distance seemed muted and hollow. Persephone stood against the darkness with her head tilted up, the white diamond patterns on her long dress glowing like the sun.

"She suspects," Persephone said as we approached, turning her head just enough to show the curve of her cheek. "She will recognize him, but does not truly know who the boy is, so you will let me do the talking, understand?"

"Yeah," I croaked as pitch black shadows started to gather in the center of the lot.

I heard Luke whimper as a figure rose from the black as the void closed in until we were standing in a small patch of tar and pavement, just like when I had Called Apate. At first glance, the feminine figure looked like Deception too with stars in her eyes and a dress splattered with the colors of a cold nebula and developing stars. A pressure was building behind my eyes and pounding in my head as the shadow at her feet got bigger and bigger, at twenty feet tall and then fifty and then a hundred before the mouths sprouted.

Too close, my brain gibbered. Too close.

"Sister," Persephone said. Her voice was very, very even in that way people who are spitting mad and determined not to show it sounded. She stepped forward. "This is the boy you forced my husband to sire. Do you recognize him?"

The star eyes blinked slowly.

Mine​

The darkness whispered with all of her thousand mouths, scraping at my ribs.

"It is within my right as my Father's Priestess to Claim him - '' She broke into an eerie multi-toned gurgling rasp of grinding bones and the Night pulled back from where She had moved. "Do not be rude. Our cousin went through the trouble of retrieving him for you. You owe him."

The weight of Night's attention fell on me.

My knees buckled as I choked. It was nothing like and exactly the same as when I was Dreaming. I didn't know how much of it was Hypnos shielding me or if my Sleeping Soul was just more resilient, but I could swear I heard my entire skeleton creak. The unrelenting pressure was like I was falling into the center of a star, endlessly on the verge of swallowing me whole, but satisfying itself with simply tasting my soul.

After a few deep breaths, I was able to stand through it again.

Nyx projected something like affection and something like pride at me before letting Persephone command her attention again.

Favor​

"Remove yourself from this plane of existence for a Gaian cycle," Persephone said sharply before softening. "You have a demigod to take care of, sister. Just like you wanted."

Joy glittered in the shadows as the pale woman with dark hair finished taking shape.

Nico did look like her.

He and Bianca shared a chin and ears, but it was something about how his features were spaced and the shape of his face that really made me think he was Night's son.

Persephone woke Nico up, setting him on the ground. Before he could yell, she knelt in front of him with her hands on his shoulders.

"Your mother is right there," she said and his mouth snapped shut as he whipped his head around, his monochrome eyes white and surprised. "Go to her."

Nico looked at me with wide black eyes.

I tried to smile confidently. "Auntie's great."

He stared for an uncomfortably long time. His eyes flashed between white and black before he eventually smiled a trembling smile back. "I'll see you again?"

"Definitely," I said. "We're friends and family." Some fucking how? "Count on it."

The other child of Prophecy took in a deep breath, then before his courage broke he ran to his Mom who gathered him up in her arms. The void retreated from around us, sinking back into the sky and the ground and the spaces in between as he babbled to Her, crying.

My​

The entire Night sky sighed.

Baby​

Nyx's toothy shadow collapsed over top of them and then they too were gone.

In the silence that followed, Artemis' whispered from the ground,

"He is Hades' demigod."

"My husband made a deal," Persephone replied. She folded her hands in front of her and they were trembling. "That boy was his payment for this millennia and he is no more capable of resisting than any random human on this planet." She smiled coldly. "Wonder what it is like to have a child you know is yours and at the same time you know they aren't. You can feel it. You can see it!"

The eyeballs spinning in their glass cages swept over me.

"I would have said nothing. I did say nothing when he chose to pass the boy off as his own. He would have made sure the Night in him was buried, even if it meant dipping the boy in the Lethe."

I felt a chill that had nothing to do with Persephone's presence.

The Lethe.

The Lethe was a river in the Underworld, the one where souls that wanted to be reincarnated took a bath in so that they forgot everything about who they used to be. To do that to someone still alive by force was dangerously close to what 'being unmade' meant. To have everything that made you you stripped away, not just exposed.

Scoured clean.

And you remembered it happening. At least the Lethe would make you forget.

"Anger no longer means the same to me," Persephone said almost airily. "But if there is one thing that still infuriates me is someone - "

Her body split apart like a 3D puzzle and there in the center were her eyes.

"F̷u̸c̸k̴i̸n̷g̷ ̷w̶i̸t̴h̴ ̸m̶y̷ ̷h̷u̶s̴b̵a̵n̸d̵!̵"​

There was blood in my mouth and dark spots in my vision as I reeled back from her, unable to recall what exactly I just saw. My head was pounding. I felt like I had just taken a rusty spoon through my ear to scoop out a few tablespoons of my brain. There was a thud as Luke hit the ground with a groan, a hand over his shattered eye as blood streamed from it. Artemis convulsed on the ground, teeth clattering.

"Competent demigods are so rare these days and all so weak. I will remember this. Your mother must be proud." Persephone clicked back together primly.

"She is," I slurred, dead on my feet. "Really proud."

"The Night is retreating, but it will take some time for the natural order to reassert itself." That old Hollywood movie star smile and chuckle from the daughter of my uncle, the Priestess of the Endless Abyss and the Goddess of Murder. "Three villages, one plague! A pleasure doing business with you, cousin."

As I wondered what exactly she got from this, grasping bony fingers erupted from the ground and dragged her under.

I wasn't sure when I passed out again, but when I woke up this time it was to a skinny black dog draped over my legs back in the restaurant we broke into. I was leaning against someone that I assumed was Luke and I grunted as my head throbbed like I'd taken a brick to the face.

Maybe I did take a brick to the face.

Or at least a parking lot.

"And so the prodigal son awakes," Hecate murmured.

"Shit," I said.

I had been sleeping on her.

"Wait - "

"I said that you will not be late," the goddess of the Crossroad said softly. "And what is sunlight, but that which banishes the darkness? You are where you should be."

My mouth hung open.

Really?

That was it?

I looked around the new restaurant to see a Luke curled up in that minimized space kind of way in Hecate's white cloak on the floor and her polecat was cuddling an auburn bunny rabbit on the table.

"What do you want?" I asked warily, feeling exhausted.

It's been a long fucking day.

"A key," she replied. "But not right now. Go back to sleep."

I eyed her.

What I could see of the goddess' chin and mouth under her white cowl looked amused as she pulled me back against her. She started humming and against my will, I felt my eyes droop. Has she ever done this for Alabaster or any of her other kids? I was vaguely aware of her handing me a Mythomagic card.

"She knows where it is."

Artemis, the Goddess of the Moon.

"Now, sleep."

I could have cried in relief.

Hypnos was finally there to carry me away.

 

[Shujin]

AN: Let me know if there are any problems, please.

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction
​

You know, I once spent three days in a coma when I was six.

Mom had been sitting on my bed when I finally woke up, reading a book. She'd been in black, starry night pajamas with only one sock on and her black hair pinned up with a pen. The memory of her painfully fond sigh, like she had caught me with my hand in the cookie jar and was remembering when she had done the same, a long, long (long) time ago, is burned into my mind.

Because the very next second, she showed me the nightmare that had followed me awake.

I don't remember what it looked like.

I think that was for the best.

She allowed it to lunge for me and I know I screamed.

Mom had crushed the parasite with ease. Dark blood and the kind of viscera that stunk to high heaven and still squirmed drenched my bed sheets. The taste of iron in my mouth, a burning in my eyes and swallowing back bitter tasting bile of sheer terror was nothing next to the gentle hand that passed through my hair. My mother had made a soft, huffing sound of amusement as I tried not to cry and tapped me on the nose.

'What did we learn?' Mom had asked me.

A couple hours later, she was walking me through cutting up strawberries without murdering myself to the sound of Robert Jordan's Eye of the World on cassette tape like nothing had happened. Dad had taken off work and was just so relieved I was finally awake. I remember his awkward hovering, trying to talk to me around and through his wife to make sure I was okay. Mom gave me the week off from training even when I insisted I was fine and guided my dreams for another week after that.

Dad didn't suspect a thing.

Not that he could have. Mom never leaves evidence behind. I was still ignoring him, and well.

There was nothing to suspect?

At the time, I was embarrassed, feeling like a baby that couldn't take care of himself.

I understood the lesson, though.

I took Sam with me whenever I felt like exploring from then on and I never overstayed my welcome in the Dreamlands ever again.

'What did we learn?'

It was the only thing Mom ever needed to say.

The Greek Personification of Sleep had stared at me for a second, pulsed in disbelief and then had nearly exploded in rage. His anger was rough. Grating. Like it was actually peeling parts of my Sleeping soul away. The lights of the mortal souls he was holding flickered with terrible nightmares. A lot of them tore right out of their rest, that lizard hindbrain blaring the alarms and waving red flags that staying asleep was death.

It wasn't. Just unpleasant. Hypnos was more careful than that.

I think.

Look, no one's perfect.

I know Luke said it.

Multiple times.

It wasn't until Hypnos flipped his shit when I told him where Clovis was that I started to accept (just a little) that maybe there was something a bit off with how Mom was raising me.

I just couldn't put my finger on what it was.

The part of me that felt guilty for putting my friends in danger understood why he was angry. It was because he was worried, but having a panic attack never helped anyone, right? Having a crisis just because someone you care about was having a crisis meant you were useless.

There was also the fact that he couldn't deck his mom for putting her grandchild in danger.

Ignoring my mother doing just that causing all our problems, him doing the same would be a bad idea on so many levels. It was just like Artemis said, being angry felt better.

Dad got angry too, but I knew it was because he cared. I guess he and an Elder God had something in common.

Mom was not like my father.

Part of me understood why Hypnos was angry. It was the rest of me that fluttered my spines in bewilderment and said, He's not lost.

My buddy paused mid-tirade.

I told him to go to Ulthar, I continued. None of the cats in that village like me, but I knew they would help. He's only staying to help our friends. He's fine.

I fell in at two years old.

I was alive (and sane), so obviously, it was fine? Clovis already knew all the really important stuff. I made sure to tell him when he started so he wouldn't have to learn on the go like I did: If he saw puddles of tar, he was going in the wrong direction. Always. Don't go too deep into the water. Avoid the Pit. The mountain range to the south? Bad news. Keep track of your thoughts. If they go weird, get the hell out of dodge.

Leave the temples alone.

Trust me, getting haunted out of the corner of your eyes by a twisted altar and its bloodstained knife even while awake is not as cool as it sounds. Me, being a dumbass kid, thought it was way cool. Especially when I found out that Apollo couldn't see it, but Evangeline could.

A month later was when Eva and I finally realized it wasn't cool at all.

Oh, and.

You don't want to go to the moon.

An enterprising dream spirit, drunk on their renewed freedom, latched onto the shadow of my fear. They projected an ominous 'ping……cheep!' of a submarine's sonar at me.

Hypnos and I both turned to glare at them.

Their presence blanched a pale yellow under our combined hundreds of eyes before it quietly slunk away.

Jerk.

Hypnos poked me.

He's fine, I repeated at the fragile relief in Hypnos' form. Clovis was fine. I was just a whole lot less sure about everyone else. Just make sure nothing is trying to follow them awake, okay?

Hypnos grabbed me in a massive hug. I felt like my face was being crushed into a pillow made of koosh balls. I grabbed him back with my wings and squeezed until he wiggled in amusement, but there was an undercurrent of concern.

Two words: Red October. I sighed as I let him go. Don't really wanna talk about it.

Uncertainty.

I'm fine now. My brother helped.

Reassured, Hypnos nudged me questioningly. His grasping presence lightly tugged on the spines and barbs curling off my form. I was a lot bigger than I was used to, finally able to look him in the eyes without needing him to lift me. I also felt like someone had turned me into their origami paper folding project when I wasn't looking, layering me into myself with burning green eyes filling in the spaces in between.

Which was, uh, new.

I shrugged.

Fuck if I know, I said honestly. I fell asleep like this.

I had my suspicions, but it wasn't like I knew for sure. The last time I couldn't keep my eyes on the inside was after Apollo's oracle jumped me. Rhea sealed my Sleeping soul somehow, but I guess I was right back at it after making lunch of Lotus Hotel's manager. Was I going to turn into a freakshow every time I ate someone?

Because that would be kinda lame.

Speaking of, You missed an absolute shit ton while grounded, by the way.

Hypnos was unsurprised.

I only had two kinds of days, after all.

Nothing Happens and Fucking Disaster.

It hadn't seemed like all that much while it was happening, but when I thought about exactly what had happened since Mom lost her shit and made the Night lose her shit and everything else went to shit -

It was a bit much, you know?

Also, an unreasonable number of things that might come back to bite me in the ass later.

Being on Persephone's shortlist wasn't even half of it.

I patted my buddy. Right now, we gotta steal some kind of key for the Queen so our rabbit is less useless so we can find the Bolt in two days.

Or maybe it was more like one and a half now.

Hypnos radiated incredulous disbelief.

Then he slumped with a resigned shrug and gave me another hug. I can't tell you how much I appreciated it. Just a good old fashioned 'hang in there, man' from a friend. Especially when I caught the pulse of dread from him. I pulled back a little.

You know what key she wants. It wasn't a question.

Hypnos pursed, collapsing in on himself. His grip on me tightened, like he was going to try to keep me with him. Safe and sound.

We both startled when his multitude of fingers passed right through.

I was waking up.

Shit, I said. I tried to reach back for Sleep, but he slipped through my fingers. Shit! Tell me quick!

Hypnos sent me a wave of reassurance.

You're going to help? I shouted. The dark world around me was breaking apart as I struggled to stay in the oblivion.

Hypnos was determined.

He was a little less determined when he sheepishly replied that he had to rescue his son first, but he was going to make up for lost time.

He had my back.

Say hi to Nico for me!

That was the last thing I got out before I became aware of my bladder threatening to empty itself right the fuck now, if you don't wake up, I swear to God…

I bolted awake.

Only to discover that the restaurant was nowhere to be seen because I had just woken up in a fucking airport.

"I - okay." I dragged a hand down my face. I could feel where I had drooled in my sleep, dead to the world. I scrubbed my mouth on my sleeve and rubbed the crust out of my eyes. The goddess I had been napping on had replaced herself with a giant Charizard body pillow.

Cute.

"Hecate. I know we just met you properly and you are helping and I am really grateful for it. Honest."

I blearily peered around at the dead looking airport who knows where, hollow faced people all around. I knew saying this out loud was probably a bad idea. I was going to say it anyway.

"But I am already sick of your shit."

Luke snort laughed in the seat next to me as he finished waking up too. He stretched and cracked his back like an old man, still laughing under his breath. It wasn't a 'ha ha' funny laugh. It sounded like he was laughing because if he didn't, he'd burst into tears.

"Are you okay?" I asked quietly.

Luke hunched over, head hanging so low it was almost between his knees. "No."

My stomach scrunched uncomfortably.

Right.

That was a stupid question.

"I failed to get you." I opened my mouth to reassure him that it wasn't his fault, but Luke pressed on. "I failed. I walked in, I forgot, I stabbed myself in the eye - "

I completely forgot what I had been about to say. "You did what?"

"You know," he said slowly. "You could still see the moon from those hotel balconies." I stared at him, not sure what question he was answering. If any. "I was staring at it when I realized something was wrong," he mused idly. "I couldn't even remember when or where I'd heard it, but I still remembered what you said. When you made that summoning circle, remember?"

"Yeah," I said quietly. With Piper. I had drawn the ritual circle Mom had taught me on the ground so we could Call on the Night relatively safely. Apate answered instead. You know the rest. Luke had said then that the circle hurt his eyes.

"Grant me clarity," Luke murmured. "Grant me vision."

He looked up. He had one of those rictus grins on. The kind that made you uncomfortable and vaguely sick just looking at it. His shattered eye stared out at the world with a dozen irises and six pupils blown wide open.

I could see myself reflected in each and every one.

"Grant me eyes," he whispered.

"I didn't say that last part," I said a bit sharply. I knew I didn't. "Getting body parts involved never turns out well."

Never ask for what can't be easily given back.

My bladder chose that moment to remind me that it did not give a damn about any of our problems.

"I gotta go to the bathroom!" I blurted out before Luke responded and ran for it.

I have no idea why airports seem to believe that people are ice cubes who will just melt if the air conditioning isn't only a few degrees above freezing.

The airport was one of those chrome and white plastic structures that looked like it had been put together in a body shop for cars by mechanics instead of by an architect that gave a shit. It just felt functional.

And cold.

If you were wondering how airports were faring during the Night?

The answer was no.

It was still pitch black outside. I don't know if that meant we didn't sleep all that long or if it meant the Night was taking her sweet time leaving. The airport we were in was a small two lane regional transportation hub with a single taxi company. The intercom was playing some radio show with commercial breaks for its trapped residents instead of announcing departures.

No one, customer or staff, looked happy.

If there is one thing you should know about my ADHD, it's that I am either the most observant dude on the planet or the most oblivious dude on the planet. And sometimes I am both, which is why I ended up wandering the airport instead of getting back to my adventuring party.

I got distracted.

I noticed the Gello, a Greek daemon of infertility, stalking a couple (and warned it off), gave my last Snickers bar away to a sneaky Kobaloi, a Greek trickster sprite, gave a desperate, stranded college student some tips on how to pronounce the Greek alphabet in his struggle to order a taxi cab, listened to some radio commercials about Athens over the intercom.

And then spent ten minutes in front of the vending machine, wondering why I couldn't recognize half the brands it was offering and why some of it wasn't in English.

Maybe that's not ADHD.

Maybe I'm just stupid.

Artemis was woken from her sleep by the travel brochure Luke dropped on her head.

"We're in Greece," he said flatly.

"What?" The bunny squawked.

"Yup." I tossed him a MASTIQUA lemonade in half an apology for slapping him awake again with the brochure. Luke caught the can out of the air. In my defense, I had panicked a bit at waking up in another country a billion miles and an entire ocean away from where we just were.

So sue me.

"Crete, to be exact." You might have heard of this island off the coast of mainland Greece, but if you haven't, it's an island off the coast of mainland Greece. "Too bad we're not near Delphi. I have a great grandmother over there."

"So do I," Artemis muttered.

That just reminded me.

The Earth Mother is imprisoned in Delphi.

So maybe it was a good thing we weren't near Delphi. Sure, that star-spawn was on ice, but there was no point in tempting Mom.

"Are you okay?" I asked as casually as I could.

Luke's mismatched eyes flickered up at me as he nodded and cracked open his can. I wondered how? Usually, stabbing yourself in the eye was something that had bloody consequences, but instead - then I remembered where he had done it.

No one could die in the Lotus Hotel and Casino.

Everyone reverted back to the way they were when they entered, forgetting the outside world. If you got hurt, you would reset from it, like you were living the same day over and over again.

The time dilation healed his eye.

But it didn't come back the same.

Luke dropped his gaze to his drink. "Why are we here?"

"At a guess?" I sat back in my own chair, nudging the Charizard pillow until it fell onto the floor. "Someone isn't interested in letting us change our minds."

Luke took a miserable sip of lemonade. "Figures," he muttered bitterly. "What did the Lady of the Underworld want now?"

"Uh, what?" I said. Luke stared at me with his mismatched eyes. I stared blankly back until I realized what had happened. In hindsight, Luke would have definitely ridden my ass for sleeping on Hecate's lap if he knew about it.

I was telling no one else about that.

"So we all got knocked out then?"

"I…can barely recall what happened at all," Artemis admitted quietly. "The Night came. And then…it is a bit of a blur." She didn't even remember speaking up. "Or perhaps a dream."

Luke's hand crept up his face to his shattered eye. "I lasted a bit longer. The Lady split apart. It felt like I just had a red hot poker shoved into my eyeball."

Yeah, I could see that. Literally. He had two more eyes opened from when he was in the hotel lobby.

Luke snatched his hand back. His face went pale. "...she said she would remember us."

I'm not sure if it's the Greek way to be a gloryhound. I understood wanting to make your god parent proud and proving yourself. Everyone at Camp Half-Blood hoped for great deeds and important Quests. That kind of thing worked great when all you had to worry about was your god parent and petty Olympic squabbles.

At some point, that stops working.

The Celt way of doing things was a bit different.

Go unnoticed. If you are noticed, be forgettable. If they won't forget, be amusing.

You had a better chance of getting out alive that way.

"If you were thinking of taking Rabbit up on that job offer to be a mercenary," I began, trying to joke about it. "It would be a hell of a thing to put on your resume."

"What happened afterwards?" Artemis wondered out loud.

"Hecate," I said.

Her rabbit ears stood up for a moment. "She made an appearance."

It wasn't a question.

"What is sunlight, but that which banishes the darkness?" I quoted with a grimace.

"Las Vegas. The restaurant. The deal," Luke said, ticking them off his fingers while still holding his drink can. "It wasn't a riddle we were meant to solve."

"Of course not," Artemis muttered bitterly. "That is just like her."

"She wants a key," I dove right in.

"A key?" Luke asked.

I don't think we were talking about the kind of key you hang on a keyring next to your front door and garage keys. It could be anything from a spell to a rock. Whatever it was, the fact that Hecate actually went through the effort of godnapping us told me she wanted it.

Really badly.

Enough to give up a Name for it.

"Yeah." I pointed at the rabbit. "She said you'd know where it was."

"A key?" Artemis parroted, huddled on top of my backpack. "I do not - " Her ears sprung straight up in alarm as her silver eyes got huge. "No," she whispered. "No, she would not dare."

"Uh," I said. "Hate to break it to you, but obviously - "

"And it's not her daring, it's us," Luke said and he was right on the money. It wasn't like Hecate really loses anything if we die trying.

"I cannot." Artemis trembled, curling into herself. "You do not know what you are asking of me. I cannot go back - I - we should abandon this - do not make me - I can't!"

"'Temis!" I used Persephone's nickname for her, hoping to snap her out of it.

"It is folly," the rabbit hissed at me. "It is impossible to succeed - it - " The bunny stared up at me with wide terrified eyes as if just seeing me for the first time. "Oh," she murmured in the flat monotone I heard once before. When she was describing what Adrasteia's soul tearing presence felt like. "That is her game. She thinks it will not destroy you."

That was not what I would call promising.

"Why don't I be the judge of that?" I offered. "I'd really like to know what we're after before we get ourselves killed."

"Artemis?" Luke drawled, looking down at her when she failed to answer me. "Mind educating us poor ignorant souls?"

Her silver eyes shifted in his general direction, but you could tell she wasn't really seeing us anymore. "And we are in Crete," she mused to herself. "A doorway into dreaming. Make me reclaim the fragment I left behind. Send us into the broken nightmare for the ruins of gods - how did I wake up?"

She sounded just as confused as I was.

"She spoke to you wearing white," Artemis said as a fact even though she hadn't seen Hecate at all.

Hecate had been wearing white. Since the first time I met her on the shore of the Crossroads when Mom lost her temper, the goddess had been in white. It was a pretty insignificant thing, until you remembered that Hecate of the Dark Moon was known for the color black. It was why people thought Cerberus was her pet and got her pseudo-adopted by Nyx. It was even on her Mythomagic card.

New Moon. Dark Night. Black Dogs.

…who had I been talking to this entire time?

Artemis looked up at us.

Then she ran.

Luke cursed, almost spilling his drink and falling out of his chair as he tried to catch her. "What the Styx - " He set his can down and got to his feet after the blitzing bunny. "Artemis!"

I sat there like a bump on a log.

A doorway into dreaming. A broken nightmare.

Artemis, goddess of the Moon, knows where the key is.

"Oh, Selene has it," I told no one.

"Now there's a Name I haven't heard in a while," a man's voice said and I turned to look.

A huge Greek basketball player of a dude cleaned his right ear with his pinky finger. He was in a leather jacket over his jersey, rocking the short curly black hair and stubble look as he looked over me with shining blue eyes. The gleam in them reminded me of the Priest of the god at Sea. Like Evangeline. It wasn't like his bright eyes were lit with their own light, but were reflecting themselves, like shining a flashlight into a hall of mirrors or a carnival funhouse.

"You make a habit of calling people out, kid?" he asked, flicking ear wax off his finger.

I stared. "Sorry. Who the hell are you?"

He gave me this look. "I don't know what you did to sneak past me - "

"Uh." I raised my hand like I was in math class. "Fell asleep in Las Vegas?"

"But it wasn't good enough," he said with raised eyebrows.

I raised my eyebrows right back because that was the gospel truth. None of this was my fault! It was not like I asked Hecate to dump us here.

"Great," the unknown god (?) sighed. "Another little shit." I scowled. "Travel to the Old World is forbidden by order of the King of Olympus," he drawled in a bored voice. "Because I am such a nice guy - "

Get a load of this random asshole.

"I'll give you the chance to convince me to not punt you and your out of bounds friends back to America."

I blurted out the first excuse that came to mind. "Not an Olympic demigod."

"Uh huh," Random Ass said skeptically. "You feel like a Greek hero to me."

That was strangely comforting? I had just fully accepted that I wasn't completely Greek, only to be told that whatever else I was, I was still a son of Ananke at the end of the day. It was what gave me the confidence to raise my hand again, but this time when I lowered it, I dragged my sunglasses down with it.

I stared at him with my mother's eyes. His ghost looked bewildered, turning around with a silent 'huh?' before getting obliterated. Around me, the airport fell apart. "Perseus of the Bloody Tongue. You are honored to make my acquaintance."

Don't ask me why I took to using that one of all Mom's titles to introduce myself with.

Just felt right.

"Feel free to tell my mother I'm not allowed to be in Greece." I smiled nastily as my belly button quivered. "I dare you."

Random Ass nodded slowly. "...I'll pass on that, thanks."

I thought so.

"Uh huh," I said as I snapped my sunglasses back up, because I am a huge little shit, thank you very much. "And who the fuck are you, again?"

It turned out the random asshole was Herakles.

Who was surprisingly a lot less of an asshole when off the clock.

"Autograph," I ordered as I slapped one of my notebooks and a pen down in front of Greek Mythology's greatest hero. "Not for me," I clarified when Luke's arguably most famous uncle's eyebrows bounced. "For some friends. You know Camp Half-Blood, right?"

"Chiron still running the place?" Herakles looked bemused as he grabbed my pen from the table.

"You went?"

"For a bit," he shrugged, then he rolled his eyes. "You'd think I was born and then disappeared off the face of the earth for over a decade the way history goes on about it."

There was no good way to tell someone that the stupid way they ascended was the only reason I knew who they were at all.

On a good day, your second wife being dumb enough to accept a gift from a dying enemy you just beat up was terrible. He didn't suspect a thing because the whole 'what kind of dumbass gives me a gift from my dying enemy' bit and then had the worst allergic reaction to hydra venom treated fabric known to man.

Take it from me, burning to death hurts less.

I shrugged. "No drama is boring."

His lips thinned. "Glad I could entertain." I gave him the side eye for that one and the god of Heroes sighed. "I don't mean you or your mother, just - " He waved the pen with a frustrated air.

"I get it," I said. "Olympus wasn't worth it."

He looked down at the notebook and started scribbling. "It was for a time," he said, almost under his breath.

I snapped my fingers.

That's right.

"Speaking of, got any opinion on your dad getting the throne again?" I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do about the Zeus problem, but I was one hundred percent sure that I was kicking him off the throne the first chance I got.

Herakles looked at me like I sprouted another head. "My father is already on the throne."

"Duh," I said. "I mean your other divine dad."

It should surprise no one that Zeus did just short of bupkis for Herakles considering he forced his 'favorite' daughter Artemis on this Quest as a rabbit. Maybe the fact that the Patron of Heroes gave a teeny, tiny molecule of a shit about the greatest hero of Greek history is a surprise considering her everything, but I would take what I could get.

As far as I was concerned, Zeus could go fuck himself six ways to Sunday.

I'm not a big believer in 'you can't choose family.'

That didn't even make sense.

My family was multiple choice depending on the myth. Assuming strong loving bonds of kinship with people would probably just get me killed horribly. Mom kept me from most of my cousins for a reason. Maybe you can't help who you are related to, but blood didn't make anyone family.

The Fates had made it very clear that I was not their brother.

Herakles as a hero inherited from the Names of Zeus, but Herakles as a god had a suspicious number of Names more closely associated with his eldest sister.

"My other - " Herakles stopped himself and then beamed. "Kid." He waved me to lean in closer. "I will give you my shield if you call Athena that to her face."

Score!

"Deal." We shook on it. His hand completely dwarfed mine. I basically shook hands with his thumb and two fingers.

"What'd I miss?" Luke asked from behind me.

"Uh," I said as I turned around.

I knew I was forgetting something.

I wasn't an Olympic demigod, but Luke sure as hell was.

"Not much?" I said, mind racing. He had a very miserable, wet bunny wrapped up in his vest like a rodent burrito. His entire right side was soaked, which was odd because I didn't see a single fountain when I wandered the place. I thought about asking what the hell had happened, and decided against it. "This is Herakles." Luke's eyes went huge. "Um, Herakles, this is Luke. He's not an Olympic demigod either? He's, uh."

My mind went blank on how I was going to stop him getting tossed back to America and leaving me alone in Crete.

"Erm."

"Blood of Selene," Herakles said, looking mildly concerned as he looked Luke over.

I blinked.

"Right. Blood of Selene. Exactly."

Gotta admit. I was definitely expecting him to call my bluff there.

"You, uh, so you weren't born like that, right?" The god asked, tapping his own cheek under his reflective right eye.

Luke flushed red and then paled. He swallowed hard, looking like he wanted to vomit. He smiled weakly. "Would you believe it looks like this because I tried to gouge it out?"

"Yes, actually," the former demigod said with clear sympathy. "I've got crap luck in great grandmothers." Like that made any sense whatsoever. "Who the Styx is sending Blood after the moon's crap?"

You could hear the capital B. Herakles was a bit old fashioned. Nowadays, we just call them clear-sighted.

"Hecate," I said.

"The Mormones," Artemis rasped from her burrito.

Oh…kay.

"The fearful ones?" Luke translated, raising his blond eyebrows. "I am…fairly certain those are - "

"What we call the goddess of the Crossroads," Artemis said quietly. "When we do not know who exactly it is."

It felt like a pothole just formed in my stomach.

Artemis did know what Hecate was. That just reinforced my suspicion that maybe I had never actually met Hecate at all. Like Young Gods, Old Gods still needed to receive or Take Names for themselves.

And like the Elder Gods, the Old God was always there.

"And above my pay grade," Herakles conceded with a nod and a low whistle. "Also, Artemis?"

The rabbit raised a wet paw weakly. "Brother."

The god of Heroes stared for a moment.

Then he threw back his head and laughed.

Luke's most famous uncle had one of those booming guffaws that came right from the gut, so loud I was sure the whole airport could hear him. It was jolly and infectious. I could see Luke starting to grin as Artemis grumbled wordlessly. Her half-brother had a good chuckle at her expense, holding his stomach like it was about to burst and slapping his knee.

"What'd you do?" He wheezed.

Like, it wasn't even a question of if she had screwed over someone recently, just how.

The rabbit stubbornly kept quiet.

"Tried to kill me," I volunteered. "Mom wasn't a big fan of that."

Herakles choked and had to turn away from us, coughing into his leather jacket by the crook of his arm at that.

Artemis muttered something to the effect of 'it was ill advised' in Olympic Greek, prompting her brother to snort back a 'no shit.'

After he collected himself, he looked up over again. His blue eyes lit up with electricity, shining like he had turned the lights on behind the curtain for a second. He shrugged one of his shoulders. "You lot hungry?"

Luke and I shared a look.

"The rabbit too, my lord?" Luke asked cautiously, remembering Khione and Persephone.

"And draw Nemesis' attention?" Herakles shrugged again carelessly. "I have no interest in making things harder for you than it needs to be." He frowned. "And you aren't working for Hera. Any demigod taking marching orders from that bitch deserves everything they get."

That's fair.

She made Herakles' life hell for the crime of being her husband's bastard. I'm talking 'dead family members and friends' being her fault kind of shit. Throw in everything she did to end Athena's reign and while, yeah, a random demigod maybe couldn't tell the Queen of Olympus 'no' to her face, exactly, but, dude has a point?

"I'll even throw in a free ride to your next stop after, how about it?"

Luke looked a bit star struck. "Thank you, lord Herakles."

"I've been there, kid." He finished his signature for Camp Half-Blood with a flourish and handed me back my pen and the notebook. "And don't call me 'lord,' I'll get a rash."

"How's Herc?" I asked. Short for Hercules, the Roman Name.

There was a flicker of Not-Movement that I could and couldn't see at the same time, like the god had moved in my peripheral vision even though he was right in front of me. Outwardly, nothing seemed to change. Maybe his face was a little bit sharper or his curly black hair a bit less shaggy?

He didn't, like, graft anyone. He was just that popular and was Given the Name. Even Christianity liked him and come on, how many gods could say that?

Mom sure as hell couldn't.

"That works - " The god of Bravery abruptly turned back towards me. "Wait just a damn minute. How the hell are you a Celt?"

Oh right.

The Roman Name.

Whoops.

Short answer: It's complicated.

Long answer: It's complicated and please don't tell Epona we're here.

We found our way to the airport's tiny food court. There were only a few people there, all looking exhausted. Herc had dragged some of the tables together, instructing us to take a load off. Luke changed his shirt while I toweled Artemis as best as I could with table napkins. I also deflated the Charizard pillow and stuffed it into my Bag of Holding. Sure, I was still kind of pissed at Not-Hecate for it, but also, waste not, want not!

Hercules came back with bags of food to Luke brushing the rabbit.

Artemis was never going to live it down.

"The Blood still go to Camp, right?" Hercules said tiredly as he sat heavily. He poked Luke's bicep and shoulder skeptically, like his own eight foot whatever brick shithouse build was the norm.

Poke. Poke.

Still? Huh, I guess that made sense. It gathered them all in one place, following Olympus' orders. If you inherited enough from Selene to see the truth of the world and all its monsters, wouldn't you want to learn how to fight back?

Chances are you had enough godly blood to pull some tricks too.

Then Selene died.

I suppose things kind of unraveled after that.

"What has Chiron been feeding you?" Hercules demanded. Poke. Poke. "Grass?"

Luke stared at his uncle, dumbfounded.

The god of Heroes was a mother hen.

The two joined tables in front of us were covered in platters of gyros, cartons of Greek salad of cucumbers, olives, feta cheese, lettuce and flatbread strips and a few plastic bowls of a beef stew from a small mom and pop restaurant the god swore by. I could taste why. It reminded me a lot of Nana's cooking, with just a bit of a vinegary bite to the meat, but savory with smooth creamy sauces and high quality olive oil.

"So you're the poor bastards charged with returning my father's Bolt, you had to take the Mare's eye because you're the Morrigan's foster-son," Hercules summed up at the end of my long and somewhat rambling explanation. He casually tossed an olive on top of the small pile of spiced lamb and onions on Luke's styrofoam platter. "Bad luck that."

"That's why I was even at Camp," I said. "Cross-pantheon upbringing not allowed, apparently?"

It was nothing personal, but I wasn't going to out Mom's aliases if I didn't have to. Until I was sure outing her wasn't going to drop me into a huge pile of shit, I was keeping mum.

"Remind me to tell you the story of the Hindu demigod with fifteen parents sometime." Herc grimaced.

"How'd you even know?" I asked. "You said I felt Greek."

"Experience. And paying attention to the right pantheon." Hercules stabbed a thumb at himself. "You think I can't identify heroes when I'm near one?"

That's fair.

"I would really appreciate it if you didn't let the Mare know about us?" I tried out a winning smile.

"Peace." Herc held up a hand. "She won't hear it from me. I always found that an annoying practice, getting others to do your dirty work."

I sighed in relief. "Thanks."

"She's a bit of a bitch anyway." He waved it off.

That was an understatement.

I turned back to my food, shooting Herc a quick prayer about Jason Grace. The god startled in his seat, reflective eyes swinging over to me, before he rolled them skywards, pinching the bridge of his nose. You could almost hear him cursing Jupiter out inside his head.

I feel that.

"You're not leaving until you finish that," the god ordered Luke. "You too, midget."

"Oy," I grunted as I speared a roasted tomato on my plastic fork. "Literally twelve, give me a break."

The god's eyes lit up again. "So you're actually a demigod."

"Yup," I popped the 'p.' "What'd you think I was?"

"Dunno." Herc passed me a vanilla milkshake. "You register as a mortal hero, but you sting." He tilted his head. "What the hell have they been feeding you?"

"A well rounded diet," I said.

"Of what?"

"Pizza and Dairy Queen."

Artemis was complaining loudly from underneath Herc's baseball cap as he dragged the bunny back and forth across the table, tumbling the rabbit ears over her tail.

"I think I am being quite reasonable," Herc said loudly over her whining. "I remember a completely undeserved arrow to the ass - " He raised his voice over her protests. "When I was trying to apologize to a certain someone and return her sword - "

"She could have still had it, but you threw it away!" The rabbit finally managed to stick her head out from under the fabric and bit out. "Tossed it over the horizon!"

"Lost my temper," Herc admitted when I raised my eyebrows at him. "My sister's usual charming self isn't, she was still shooting at me and being peppered with arrows still pisses me off."

"Understandable," I nodded. Really, you can't blame a guy for that, can you? I'd be pissed too. "Please direct your complaints to Luke Castellan - "

"What!" Artemis cried out before Herc sent her tumbling again.

"Our resident bunny manager."

Luke's lips twitched. "I'll set up a P.O Box," he promised his amused looking uncle. "First come, first serve."

"I wouldn't if I were you," Herc said dryly as he freed the rabbit when she threatened to vomit into his hat. "Do you know just how much mail you'll get?"

I think he has a good idea.

Luke had a mean smirk as he loomed over the disgruntled rabbit. "Job security."

I laughed.

We got through lunch/dinner/whatever pretty quickly. Maybe ten, fifteen minutes tops to down enough food for six people. It was almost like we hadn't eaten for four days or something.

Well, fine, I ate, but come on. I'm a growing boy.

Herc watched Luke mop up the last of his gyros like a hawk while I munched through the remnants of the flatbread soaked in the beef stew broth. "Where are you headed?"

Luke and I looked at the rabbit miserably eating blueberries on the table.

She stopped chewing.

Her eyes closed.

She said nothing.

"Artemis." Luke reached out and gently cuffed her upside the head. It was almost affectionate. "We have to."

She shuddered.

"I have to," she agreed quietly, opening her eyes. If a bunny rabbit could look like they were about to march to gallows, that was her. Ears down, eyes wet and little nose twitching sadly somehow.

I didn't understand what the problem was. "Selene's dead," I said. "So it can't be that bad?"

Hercules' smiled sadly. "So we hope."

Rhea hadn't been too sure if Selene had actually bitten it or not. Luke had been staring at the moon in the Lotus Hotel. Something made him stab himself in the eye.

'What is death?' The Sun Voice had asked me in Houston. 'But the sleep of the gods?'

Artemis bobbed her little head. "It is in her realm," she murmured. "But the key we seek belongs to your step-father."

My brain stalled. My step-father.

Chronos.

Time.

It really wasn't as bad as I thought. It was so much worse. I met Luke's eyes. He looked grim and gave me an equally grim nod.

I held up a finger.

"Son of a bitch."

---

Spinalonga, Greece.

The small island off the northeast coast of Crete looked like a pimple on the water on the Gulf of Elounda. All I could really see of it was a vague rounded silhouette in the distance. Maybe what could have been a wall? A cool breeze was blowing in from the ocean, cooling off the warm humidity of the Grecian summer. All around us was a sandy beach, gentle sloping hills covered in sweet smelling grass and the occasional shrubbery. Our rabbit was trembling, teeth chattering with tears welling up in her eyes as she stared out over the water.

"This is it," Hercules said somberly, also looking out.

Luke's brows were furrowed so hard, creases covered his whole forehead. He had his normal eye closed, peering around with his shattered one as he twisted Khione's ring around his finger.

"Why is - " Luke swallowed thickly. "The wind is weird here."

"I think I know what you're feeling." Herc glanced over. The light of Rhea's torch twisted into Luke's backpack strap glanced off his eyes in all directions. Then he looked down at the rabbit who was still staring over the water, like we weren't here. "But it's not the wind."

I didn't feel anything.

I felt a strange kind of numb, like I was feeling too many feelings and just couldn't sort any of them out to actually tell what was going on. The other shoe had finally dropped. I couldn't help thinking about the what ifs, like if I had just left Artemis to Nemesis right from the beginning instead of trying to go against my mother. I didn't have it in me to feel bad about wondering. I was still going to try. We'd come this far after all and we didn't really have the time to try anything else. Maybe I should have panicked.

Or gone hysterical.

It was like I had just blown past freaking out all the way around to calm. Stealing from Ares was whatever. Stealing from the Lotus Eater was concerning.

I had no words for what stealing from Time was.

Terrifying didn't cut it.

I didn't feel that, though. It was more like a detached: 'Welp.'

In order to get Artemis a Name, we had to steal Chronos' key for Hecate.

This rabbit was going to owe me free lunches for the rest of my life.

"You know," Hercules spoke up. "You can take on more than one Quest at a time. I know that from personal experience." He crossed his arms, scratching at the scar on his chin when we looked at him. "And the interference clauses for a Quest are counted separately."

That was a bit familiar. I know Artemis had said that instances of interference in a Quest were counted for each god separately. I wasn't sure how that was important right now, but by the sudden, sharp look in Luke's eyes, he had some idea.

"An errand for the Mormones is unrelated to our search for the Bolt," he said casually.

And that was…

Technically true?

Our mission was getting Zeus' sparkler back, not undoing Mom's punishment. The latter would (hopefully) help with the former, but the latter was something I…

Something I chose to do.

'You needed a thief,' Mom had said. Hermes, god of Thieves, had been one of the cards of my Prophecy, drawn weeks before Artemis ever came to Camp in the first place.

She always told me that I chose my own destiny.

And instead, I came around in a full circle, doing what I foretold myself doing.

I felt cold.

" - gerous for you especially," Herc was telling Luke with a frown. "Exposing Blood to too much, too fast is never a good idea. I would join you - " His jaw clenched. His neck muscles stood out sharply as a collar of gold light briefly flashed around his throat. "But I'm a bit stuck," he drawled acidly. "Call it house arrest."

Luke looked horrified.

I wasn't much better.

Artemis flinched on the beach. "You do not want to join us."

"Hell, of course I don't want to," her brother spat back. "But I want leaving them to this crap even less." He shook his head and tugged at his basketball jersey. "Look, if you can call in any big favors, any Debts, if you can get anyone who would laugh about following you into Tartarós, now is the time."

A dull pain in my chest broke through the numbness.

A few years ago, that would have been Eva, but now, there was a different Name that I had in mind.

I took a deep breath. The ocean air was salty. The breeze ruffled my hair and tugged at my jeans.

"Thanks, Herc," I said quietly.

The Greco-Roman god had sad eyes. "No problem, kid."

He shoved his hands into his jacket's pockets, turning around like he was just going to walk back up the grassy hill and was gone.

"Artemis?" Luke said softly.

The rabbit hiccuped, but didn't respond.

He looked at me with a grimace. "I don't think it's just the theft that's bothering her," he murmured. I was getting that feeling too. Artemis had kind of accepted dying, but it was like we were back at square one (or maybe square negative two). She was paralyzed with fear. "Are you thinking what I am thinking?"

Luke held up his hand, showcasing the cold silver ring on his finger.

"Yup," I said.

There was a cool breeze blowing in from the water.

"I told Hypnos," I mumbled, shuffling my feet a bit. "He went to get Clovis and Annabeth and the others…"

Luke's face had tensed, then softened. The pupils in his shattered eye narrowed. He let out a long sigh. "Good," he murmured. "That's good."

"Sorry."

Knowledge was dangerous.

Both you and I know that.

Luke shook his head and started walking. I followed Luke further down the beach, trying to think positive. I was reasonably sure Chronos and Mom were still on good terms, so maybe Not-Hecate was right, and I'd be able to get away with it by looking cute. What were the odds he was anything like Tartarus? He was Erebus' dad and my brother cared about me.

And I knew the Dreamlands, right?

Sure, maybe not Selene's corner of it, but it couldn't be that - nope, I am not going to jinx myself here!

With a final glance back towards the rabbit, Luke cleared his throat as he came to a stop. "Khione Thrêikion."

The wind blew hard enough to force me to blink. In that one moment, the rock just to the left of us became occupied with the Greek goddess of Ice and Snow. She looked like how I saw her last with the white cowboy hat and light blue poncho, but with her black hair in a single braid.

There was a long moment of silence where we just stood there as she stared back from her perch.

"You are still alive." Her voice was icy as she looked over us with frozen eyes, snowflakes turning and twisting in entrancing patterns. Her gaze flicked down along the beach. "All of you."

Luke smiled mockingly. "I apologize for the disappointment."

I elbowed him in the gut.

What was his problem?

"Have you ever been in the Dreamlands?" I laid it out there. I wasn't aiming to trick her into anything.

"No, I have not," she said slowly as the discordant symphony in her eyes began to play. "I know of no one on Olympus that would dare." She looked past us out at the water and towards the silent shadow of the island, then back down the beach where a rabbit sat. "...this is not about the Bolt."

"Not directly," I admitted. 'It's a personal favor."

"A personal favor," she repeated neutrally. Her gaze darted around again, putting the pieces together. She had who knows how many college degrees. She was smart enough to figure it out without us saying anything. Khione went as still as a statue. I was afraid she was going to just disappear, not even bothering to tell me to fuck off, when her lips curled into a bitterly cold smile,

"For Artemis?"

I sighed. "Yes."

"I told you I would help you in her place," Khione cajoled. "You still have over a day left. I am…" She raised an eyebrow for a second. "Unsure how you ended up in Crete, but I can - "

"Khione." I stepped forward and beat down my pride.

Then I bowed to her.

I bent right at the waist, all the way until I was staring at the ground. I gritted my teeth as the memory of the last and only time I ever bowed to a god like this tried to surge to the front. I heard Khione's breath hitch.

She offered to help us get to Houston, but Artemis' everything had burnt that down to the ground. This was a second chance.

If she wanted it.

"I would owe you," I choked out. "Help me. Please."

I was putting a lot of faith in the Boreide. Debts were dangerous and this was going to be a huge one. I felt sick to my stomach. I didn't even know how to calculate just how much this was going to cost me.

It was weird.

We were going to steal from Mom's baby daddy and I didn't feel much of anything. The thought that Khione was going to prove herself to be so very Greek in the end made the tips of fingers go numb.

At first I thought it was just the breeze pulling at my hair, but then the tug on my scalp sharpened to something almost painful that caused me to look up. Khione was kneeling in front of me, a lock of my hair around her finger as she searched my face. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood to pull my attention away from her eyes.

"I will hold you to this," she said quietly, warning me. I didn't see malice or greed in her gaze, just the discordant, haunting melody.

I risked a smile as a hopeful warmth welled up in my chest. "Of course you will."

Her expression didn't warm so much as it got less cold. She scoffed as she let my hair go. "Heroes."

"That isn't an insult," Luke said dryly.

"Oh, yes it is."

"No, it isn't."

"You will also owe me for this, Luke."

"What?" He yelped under her sharp look, daring him to disagree with her. He dared. "I don't remember agreeing to that."

I knew I was grinning stupidly. I couldn't help it.

I…think I really like Khione.

She patted me on the shoulder as she stood up, absently sweeping sand off her pants. "I have been told the Dreamlands are filled with horrors that could kill gods, similar to what lies beyond the Edge in the lands beyond us. Is that true?"

"Nope," I said, straightening, still smiling. "It's worse."

She rolled her pretty eyes. "Lovely." She looked between me and Luke's judgy frown, his arms crossed. "How is this done then?"

The answer to that was by taking a nap.

There was a ferry that was used to take tourists to the island of Spinalonga, but our way in was a long collapsed tunnel called 'Dante's Gate.' It had been built out of the same pale crumbling beige brick common to old Greek architecture, a flat top triangle tunnel leading from a small hill on the beach down into darkness. The island itself was some kind of fortress city or town. It had been occupied by a bunch of people throughout history, but now it was a ghost town, completely abandoned and empty.

"It used to be a leper colony," Artemis said absently as we hunkered down just inside the tunnel entrance. Rhea's torch was put in the middle as we circled around it. "The sick would walk beneath the stone and the waves in darkness, unaware of what lay on the other side, but still hoping."

"Naturally," Khione said neutrally. "Anything would be better than squatting in caves at the edges of civilization."

"...some cures are worse than the disease," the rabbit whispered.

The ice goddess frowned, but didn't reply to that.

"Last chance," Artemis said. Her silver eyes shone in the dark.

No one backed out.

We had all just slept. Normally that would be a problem, but Khione had waved it off as an easily inflicted symptom of hypothermia. True enough, I had just barely set my head down on a patch of grass before suddenly feeling exhausted, like my muscles should be burning from running a hundred miles.

I closed my eyes.

I opened them in a field of pale flowers, a sky dotted with strange stars and dominated by a massive, full moon. Diana looked down at us as her giant form loomed, the bloody teeth of her flayed chest cavity fluttering open and then closed. Her exposed spine of pitted and warped vertebrae bent as she leaned closer. The mask of her left side turned towards the moon. There was another creature far down the beach. Long spindly gnarled legs planted in the ground like stilts, but it was holding a bulbous, sickly gray body with long mandibles and gossamer thin feelers drifting beneath it. The twisting eyestalks swiveled in my direction. Its presence washed over me.

Familiar.

Corey had gotten its attention once.

I inclined my head. "Tsukuyomi."

The attention slipped away.

Khione was luminescent, as if she was lit from within. Physically flawless save for a bored hole that went straight through the middle of her sternum, exposing a gnarled, wooden knot that thumped like a heart and creeping vines burrowing under her skin. Luke stared up at the moon, eyes shining.

The human half of Diana silently raised her arm, pointing out over the water.

A hazy city of tall gothic spires and steeples shone on the lone island both too close and infinitely far away.

The statuesque figures of more warped creatures, moon deities, rose up from the waters and disappeared into the hazy clouds, surrounding the island like guards watching a prison. The tunnel of Dante's Gate was pristine and smoothly carved as if it had been built just yesterday, leading into darkness towards the city. And waiting beside it, curled up on a patch of grass was an orange tabby cat with a crook in his tail. I couldn't breathe. I felt like if I did, I would break into a million pieces. That couldn't be my pet cat. He couldn't be here.

"Sam?" I whispered.

The cat's ears twitched.

Hypnos said he would help me. He knew about the key we were looking for.

Sam would laugh at following me into Tartarós.

He followed me to the moon.

The small auburn bunny rabbit hopped forward, out from under Diana's shadow. Her sigh then sounded like terror, it sounded like despair and it sounded, bizarrely, like relief. Like coming back home after a storm and finding everything just like you left it.

"Some nightmares never end," Artemis murmured.

Distant bells rang.

 

[Shujin]

AN: Um. Hi. Hope this is good. Tell me if it isn't. Recommend re-reading the story.

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction​

Sam is a perfectly ordinary orange tabby cat of Here.

A proud tail. Four paws with pink moisturized toe beans. Well maintained claws and whiskers. Sleek white and striped orange fur, alert ears and a healthy five kilograms in weight. Lady cats loved him! Adventurous, curious with a taste for whiskey and salmon. He preferred his litter clean, mice and birds absent, toilet paper shredded and only knocked things off the counter when there was literally nothing else to do.

A good sort of bloke. A truly upstanding citizen of Here.

Here where, you ask?

Well, sometimes it's There, other times it's Nowhere and rarely it's When but every cat who does cat things and follows the cat ways knows that 'falling asleep' is a misnomer. Your world can be likened to an onion, with just as many layers to existence. Close your eyes.

Wake in another reality.

The transition most humans aren't aware of. Blessed ignorance. A vested interest in keeping it that way. Do not panic. Hypnos means well.

Most of the time.

For cats, it was a fact of life.

You may have heard the Here, There, Nowhere and When called the 'Dreamlands.' A paradise of imagination that fulfills your every whim. A place of surreal wonders. A land of dreams.

Another affectation.

Everything in it is as real as you are. It knows of you too.

It just doesn't play by the same rules.

Remember that.

Play along if you want to survive.

One day, some time ago somewhen (and that's as detailed as it's going to get)

(cat)

Sam dodged a falling toddler.

No shame.

There he had been. Minding his own fucking business snooping around one of the visiting ziggurat temples before every strand of fur stood on end. It wasn't like he knew the shrieking bundle was a kid before he jumped out of the way - you know what kind of things fall from the sky Here?

Imagine his surprise when instead of some twisted abomination taking an ill advised all expenses paid flight, a human baby hit the crumbling rock where he had been standing diaper first, bounced, and then flailing short arms, wide sea-green eyes and all, tumbled over the edge down the stone staircase.

Sam blinked.

Sat down.

Slowly blinked again. His tail flicked back and forth in agitated swishes.

He peered over the edge of the ziggurat and yup, that certainly looked like a human baby. Which was, uh, very strange. Unusual, even.

He should probably do something about that.

With a put upon sigh, Sam leaned over the edge of the ziggurat again. Kid didn't dash his head open on the rocks, so that was lucky, he supposed. The cat bounded down the crumbling structure as cats do, zigzagging from stair to stone wall and off the hanging tree, stair again, over the gap and -

Came to a yowling halt when a hundred, burning green eyes blinked open in the shadows pooling between the cracks in the stone, seeping from under the brush of the nearby jungle, crawling underneath the roots of trees, leaking from behind its small form to look at him.

Not a baby.

Not a fucking baby!

"Mu - mummy?" The thing sniffled as it raised itself up on scratched chubby palms.

It was barely larger than the cat himself with two arms and two legs, an ocean blue shirt that rode up its plump belly. And a diaper. Windswept downy black hair crowned its head and tears gathered in the corners of its two face-eyes that sparkled with stars amidst a shifting blue-green aurora borealis. The little brow scrunched, closing the eye that had briefly opened on its forehead.

"Mummy!" It cried out. The bottom lip trembled threateningly, but it didn't cry. "Mummy…I won' scare." The little chin jutted out stubbornly. "I won'. I pwomise."

'That's right, you tell 'em,' Sam said because playing along was a survival instinct Here.

Between the folks that didn't know they were Dreaming, the folks that did know they were Dreaming, the natives and the Others…

To put it this way.

You'd think someone would appreciate being told that they clearly weren't listening to anything the rock was saying, they had a shit personality and maybe they should stop humping it before they broke their dick.

But no.

Grew a second head and went apeshit.

The thing sniffled as those burning green eyes looked in every which way from the shadows around it. "Kitty," it mumbled with a lisp and spit bubble. "Sam."

Every strand of fur stood on end. 'How the fook you know that!?'

The thing grinned. The mouth stretched further than it should on a human looking face, filled to the brim with multiple rows of sharp teeth.

Fuck.

One of them cockwombles.

"S'ok if I have you Name," the thing murmured as the air crackled with potential, a heavy weight as the Dreamlands considered the creature and almost gently crushed the darkness trying to escape the seams of its pink flesh back into the shape of a small toddler.

Sam's ears flattened back against his head.

The Dreamlands was rarely gentle. What the fuck was this?

"Ihmm Ṕ̴̡̰̌ę̴̬̌̚ř̶͉̱͊̿ş̷̦͘ê̸̦u̵̯̚͝s̷̥̘̥̃͑̃." The thing blinked sleepily. "I won' betway. E̶͇͔̘͠v̶̨̒ͅę̵́ŕ̸̪̼̺."

'Uh,' the cat muttered. 'I ain't usin' your fookin' Name.'

The thing's head tilted. "Percy 'kay.'

'...what?'

"Percy is me!" The thing cheered.

'Kay?'

The cat did not even think of running. He was no coward.

And it wouldn't help anyway.

Space and distance in the Dreamlands was subjective. He could take five steps and remain where he was.

"I like kitties and you pwetty."

He'll fucking take it.

'Thanks.'

"Wewcome!"

The cat tilted his head a little curiously. 'Awfully polite for a muppet.'

Some people called them 'gods.'

If it made them feel better to put words like that on their fears, to convince themselves that they could appeal to greater beings, clawing for infinitesimal amounts of control over the utterly uncontrollable, deluding themselves into thinking they proudly earned what they begged for at the feet of merciless apathy…

Yeah, well, some people were fucking stupid. What can you do?

The mini-muppet shoved its thumb in its mouth.

It was both fucking pathetic and incredibly unsettling in its mimicry. Playing along was a survival tactic, but it was those that made you forget for a second - edged close to making you wonder that were the truly dangerous ones.

Fuck if he knows why one was pretending to be a baby though.

Guess all that infinite bitchery didn't come with a sense of dignity.

Sam lifted a paw and volunteered, 'You smell like shit.'

"Ew!" 'Perseus' agreed with a nod.

'...you gonna do something about it?'

"Sowwy," It muttered, looking a bit ashamed as it shuffled in its smelly used diaper. "Dunno how."

'Um.'

It shrugged its small shoulders helplessly.

'...think really hard about being clean?'

The thing blinked. It struggled to its feet, scrunched up its face and then its clothes vanished.

Sam sighed as it posed proudly buck naked.

Not like he was one to talk about letting it all hang.

'Close enough.'

It was like a demented, fucked up kitten. As mobile as a drunk coming off a weekend bender with the brain cells to match.

The cat's ear swiveled as it honed in on the sounds of the jungle around. Unlike the humid forests one could find There, this one was dripping with wriggling vines, gasping mushrooms and trees bleeding from their pores as their canopies bent towards them filled with hungry, gaping mouths masquerading as birds.

This was probably stupid.

If the small muppet wandered off and got itself eaten from the inside out by larvae, it would probably be doing everyone a favor.

But it looked pathetic and was polite so fuck it.

Sam's tail flicked.

'You.' Cat green eyes narrowed at one of the trees as he pointed with the tip of his tail.

For a long moment, there was no response.

The cat's tail stiffened, bristling. The tree sagged and then melted into something distinctly less hardwood and more caterpillar, if it had a head made of a dozen chattering skulls, bone spines dripping with paralytic venom and a body more of a suggestion of dark flesh then a reality.

'Fook off mate.'

Caught, the skull caterpillar slunk away through the slimy underbrush.

'Creepy fook,' Sam muttered under his breath.

"Tank 'ou." The thing lisped as it stared up at him with two shimmering eyes as his tail stood straight up in the air.

Since when did muppets thank folks?

Or apologizing for anything?

It stretched a pudgy hand up towards him with a hesitant, wobbling step. "Can I pet?"

'No.'

"Oh."

Thing and cat stared at each other in silence for a long moment. 'Where tha fook did ya come from?'

The thing sucked its thumb for a moment. "I feww."

'You fell,' the cat repeated flatly.

"Yeah!"

'From…the moon?' Both of them glanced up. The sky was a sparkling purple color, a shower of inverted stars trailing across the rippling canvas. A golden moon loomed large and full directly overhead, but it was the thing that flinched away from looking first.

"No," it mumbled. "I go sweep, then I feww."

It went to sleep?

Muppets don't need to sleep. They didn't need to breathe either, fuck, he wasn't sure they even bleed. What does it mean 'I went to sleep!?'

Never mind.

He decided he doesn't want to know. It was too early for this.

It would always be too early for bullshit.

'I give up. What the fook are ya?"

'Perseus' blinked up at the cat. "Demigo'."

Sam nodded agreeably, making the appropriate 'ah ha' noises before saying, 'What's that.'

"Haff go'."

The cat squinted. 'What's the other half?"

"Mortaw."

'Huh,' Sam said as he digested this new information. 'Mortal.' So maybe part human. No real guarantee of that being the other half, but he looked similar enough. Sam could not claim to truly be surprised. Humans got their rocks off on all sorts of weird shit and them muppets weren't any better.

It also explained the lack of cunty behavior.

'How old are you?'

The boy (?) held up two fingers of his free hand.

Fuck.

'If you came from There, you can't just trip and fall to get Here. There's guards, like whatshisface - H something. Hippie, Hypoc, Hip - '

"Hypnos!" The stars in the boy's eyes lit up as he cheered. "He nice! Want as friend."

A muppet was nice.

Positively friend-shaped.

'That.' Sam shrugged and firmly decided to not think too hard about anything the kid told him. 'You tellin' me you tripped past him?'

The boy stared blankly, chewing on his thumb. "Uh?"

Brain cells to match.

Right.

'Never mind.'

Sam hopped down from the pole. His ears were alert, tail hanging low as it circled the small half-muppet once, then twice before he tossed his head and batted at the boy with a paw.

'...tag. You're it.'

'Perseus' blinked wide eyes that lit up in a strange kind of joy.

"Okay!"

Maybe the kid didn't just fall asleep.

Maybe he's dead.

That wouldn't be a surprise either.

---

'Yeoooow!'

"Sowwy!"

'Watch the fooking tail!'

"I sai' sowwy!" The kid looked apologetic for a second before smirking as he leapt off the cliff. "You it!"

The cat rushed to the edge expecting to see nothing.

What he got was Perseus clumsily flipping him a two gun salute at the bottom.

'You lil' fucker!'

---

The Dreamlands had its own convoluted sense of time.

A toddler and a cat roamed.

The cat's tail healed into a visible slight crook. The boy grew a little taller, more steady on his feet. His speech matured as if it wasn't his age that had been the problem, but practice at hearing English.

It could have been months.

It could have been decades.

"Ack! It burns!"

'Why the fook would you put that in your mouth.'

"It look okay!"

'It had tendrils coming out of its fooking arse - no, I am not doing this.'

"Sam! Help! Water!"

'Maybe next time we don't eat the ugly thing.'

---

"...that is a child."

'No shit, Willie.'

"Whoooa." 'Perseus' stared up at the dreamer with wide eyes and his mouth in a little 'o' shape. He managed to conjure back some diapers and scrounged up a pair of short pants from memory. The diaper he had on, but the pants, the pants the kid apparently felt were of more use on his head than his bum.

"Sam." He whispered too loudly. "Sam! He's old!"

'Damn ancient, mate.'

The old man sighed, mutton chops wobbling. "Sam. Must you?"

'Wut?'

---

'I told you to use the litter before we left!' Sam hissed under his breath from underneath the quivering bush.

"I thought I could hold it…" Perseus peeked over the large rock he was hiding behind, knees pressed together as the multi-headed snake slithered closer. "Distract it?"

'So you could take a fooking piss?'

The boy made his eyes huge and sparkling. "You want me to leave a piss trail while running?"

Not particularly.

'Fuck me.'

---

It wasn't all sunshine and roses. The kid was still half-muppet. Among the innocent wonder, infectious joy and curiosity was a certain kind of cruelty that made the cat's ears stand forward, straight and alert. The boy never turned it on him though, only others and, well, Sam was a cat.

He knew enough to know humans weren't supposed to revel in the suffering of others. No pulling the wings off the butterfly.

But sometimes that shit was hilarious.

Being half-muppet also meant the kid was half bullshit that sometimes just made no sense at all.

The cat stared at the dark tower rising on the horizon incredulously. It wasn't just the structure. He'd seen dreamer homes before. It was the amethyst grass of the Dreamlands giving way to a beach of black razor sand, as if it was made out of grains of obsidian. It was the iron clouds gathering around the spire, complete with a skeletal dragon bat thing flying around it.

Like it wasn't a home, stolen and smuggled from the Dreamlands.

'So that's bullshit.'

Perseus' gaze stared off into the distance with the two eyes on his face and it was then, belatedly, that Sam wondered when he had last seen those eyes in his shadow. A while, he supposed and pondered where they had trotted off to.

"He's gone."

'Huh?'

"Someone I know?" The boy shook himself and the stars in his eyes lit back up. "Wanna see inside!?"

---

Sam woke up first from the cat nap.

Percy murmured sleepily as he turned on the rock, curled into himself. The first time the boy jumped off something, Sam expected him to poof like that one fellow who came looking for the muppet city over the mountains a while back.

Human thing.

They were yellow bellied lily livered cowards so scared of a tiny drop, their soul shrivels back into their body.

But that didn't happen. The boy had been Here so long, he could sleep in it without leaving and eventually, Sam stopped expecting him to. Even if he found a way, once the Dreamlands had you, you never really leave.

Not a visitor. A mortal soul in the Dreamlands.

Like the old Prussian Willie. Or Carl and Magdalene and other Dreamers.

Nothing to return to.

The tower on the black beach was as much a home as a ball and chain.

The cat's ears flicked back and forth as he searched the flat plateau they had been sunbathing on for what had woken him up. Their 'bed' was a tall twenty foot structure overlooking the Salt Plains of red stone baking in the blue sun. The glittering salt crystals stretched to the horizon interspersed with small oases of larger cloudy crystals, sparse fauna and clear, deadly water.

There was nothing.

And then there was.

Someone.

Every strand of fur stood up, his hackles rose, back arching and tail puffing under the disinterested black diamond gaze.

The muppet looked like a black haired, pale skinned human with freckles dusting the bridge of its nose and the top of its cheekbones. It could have been a woman off the street back There in black slacks, white blouse with a jean jacket on top of it. Even the microexpressions of momentary amusement, mild exasperation and something almost satisfied were accurate.

That was the scary part.

Remember, the ones that could pretend were dangerous.

Space casually broke.

The cat found himself standing in the same location ten feet away as the muppet scooped the boy up from the ground that was suddenly by its feet, having just rearranged the entire plateau to its whims in the blink of an eye as the Dreamlands quivered.

"Mummy," Perseus whispered sleepily as he flung his small arms around its neck. "I wasn't scared."

"Now, now." The visible softening of its expression was eerie as it pressed a kiss into the kid's hair and murmured, "You know better than to lie to me."

The kid shrunk back, eyes squeezing shut. "I'm sorry! I won't do it again, please don't change me it hurt -"

"I won't," it shushed him, wincing and the cat couldn't figure out if it was supposed to be from the child's sudden fear or something else. "That was - that will not happen again. I will not need to ever again." It frowned. "I will do better with you."

Muppets.

Not even once.

Percy cracked an eye open, pouting piteously. "Promise?"

"I promise."

"...love me?"

"You are perfect just the way you are," it said gently and Sam's fur rippled with unease. It sounded genuine to his sensitive ears. Creepy. "How could I not?"

The boy settled. "Can I have a cat?"

Sam stiffened.

"You already have a cat," it said, voice thick with amusement as those black diamond eyes slowly traveled back to the orange tabby tom. "And it did very well, didn't it?"

"He's the best cat ever!" Percy declared solemnly.

Sam appreciated the sentiment, but kid, bloody not right now!

"That settles it then. For the best cat ever," it said, matching the toddler's seriousness. "He may receive one favor from me."

Like fuck Sam was going to take it up on that.

"Go back to sleep, Perseus," the muppet intoned and the boy's eyelids obligingly began to droop. Percy tensed for a moment, grasping tightly as if remembering some nightmare, before drifting off to sleep. The muppet whispered fondly, "Time to go home."

As it turned away, Sam found the courage to speak.

'He didn't fall.'

He was pushed.

The muppet's face turned to look at the cat from over its shoulder. Holding the dozing boy in one arm, it silently raised its free hand to hold a finger in front of its lips.

It smiled.

Then they were both gone.

The next time Sam saw Perseus, crowing about being allowed back since his 'accident' and promising to figure out how to bring treats next time, the cat got his own tongue. He'd been tempted to say something a few times as the kid grew up a little. The worst one was when his Mum left him There and Percy started hoping, begging that he could find her Here.

On the moon.

Sam knew what - who was up there.

Every cat who does cat things and knows the cat ways of Ulthar was aware of the dreaded master behind the moon beasts, the Stalker in the Dark, their ancient enemy.

But this was Percy.

He was just a kitten. A bit too fucked in the head to not come with a discount, but still good when he wasn't what his mum wanted him to be.

Sam could help him, right? That was what Ulthar cats did. Help. And…he owed him that much. He could make sure the kid came back alive.

Because he couldn't bring himself to say a word.

Percy called in that favor on his behalf, crying over Sam's pulped eye, blood leaking from his ears, the other eye filled with burst blood vessels and even now a little blurry looking through it. A little ringing in one ear still. A little rattle in his chest where the bones didn't quite heal right. A cold ache in his joints and paws he didn't let on he had.

It was the most powerless he'd felt since he was a hungry kitten huddled in a cold, wet alleyway, hiding from older cats and loud cars belching black smoke and sirens sounding overhead. It had been a long, long night.

He had nothing to return to either.

Sam was just a cat.

Playing along was a survival instinct Here.

---

Hey, you came back! I was wondering where you went. You…still don't mind listening to me, right? It's been a long time no see!

That's where we stopped, remember?

With Time…

---

Hey, you remember that story about me falling into the Dreamlands when I was two, right?

It wasn't some kind of weird flex, if you were wondering.

Really more of an accident.

I always knew almost falling on top of an orange tabby cat was a bit of a lucky break. I just don't think I actually knew how much of one it was until I found myself in Selene's little corner of the Dreamlands.

Unwelcome.

The air felt heavy.

It was that thick, choking weight of something like we were being slowly smothered and just didn't realize it yet. The kind of feeling you expected from a dense fog after a bad storm, but the only mist was wafting up in ghostly wisps from the sea. The field of pale flowers we woke up in was a large, perfectly unnatural circle around us before the dismal gray shore that met the black water.

The bells from the far off city rang a final toll. The chime carried on over the dead air for a long time.

Silence fell.

Artemis' auburn and patchy gray fur bristled in the same shiver that ran up my spine.

I forced my words out, "Everyone okay?"

Khione glanced at me, grimacing and my breath caught.

Her eyes were ice flowers instead of snowflakes, crashing, shattering, warping, turning inside out and splitting into eleven dimensions before finally annihilating inside a crystal clear snow globe made out of folded space.

So maybe this was not the best time to get distracted, but God dayum!

"So that's what your eyes really look like!" I burst out in awe. This was what I was catching glimpses of whenever that melody showed up in her eyes!

"Wha - " The snow goddess looked down at herself and then swore in Mycenaean Greek. She turned away from me as her hand came up to the hole in her chest where the wooden heart thumped. "Of course it shows here. Idiot," she spat at herself. "Can't do anything right!"

I don't understand.

Why would anyone try to hide something so beautiful?

"It's fine!" I said quickly, trying to be reassuring. "Your eyes are pretty girl - I mean, pretty great!" Holy shit. "I mean, you don't have to hide them. I mean, you can if you don't like them? But I think they're…" I swallowed hard and tried not to dig myself in deeper. "...okay?"

"Okay?" Khione echoed dully.

Jesus Christ on a bicycle.

Someone kill me.

Put me out of my misery.

Please.

"Can we please forget I said anything?" I pleaded.

"Done," Khione said instantly. "But, thank you." She tried to smile at me, but there was something almost broken about it before she turned away again. "I will need - a few minutes before we set forth. Please."

"Yeah, sure," I said quickly. "Don't worry about it."

That's weird.

I really expected Luke to give me shit there.

When I looked, he was still staring up at the large moon dominating the sky above us like it was made out of solid gold.

"Who is changing you?" Artemis spoke up quietly. "It - it cannot be too late to…" The rabbit lost steam as Khione tilted her head down, shielding her face with her black hair. "To reverse…"

"I am here because Percy offered," the Boreide said softly and bitterly cold. "We are not friends, Artemis Apanchomenê."

The bunny flinched and then nodded miserably.

The Strangled.

That wasn't a Name I knew the history of, but at this point, I don't think I even want to know.

"And I am fine," Khione finished harshly, like a gust of storm winds before turning away from us again.

I bit my lip and decided to leave her be. "Luke?"

He didn't move.

I don't think he heard me?

"Hey," I said as I reached out to shake him a little. "Are you - "

Humans are not owls.

Luke's head wasn't meant to twist a full 180 degrees on his neck!

I stumbled backwards as he snarled at me. His teeth was bared in a bestial grin, his breath frosting in the air with wide, manic bloodshot eyes that shone in the moonlight. "Luke - !?"

Then he convulsed, like he was having a seizure. His head snapped back around with a wet crack as his entire body shook. Diana leaned in closer, blocking out the moon until looking up just got you an eyeful of her flayed chest cavity. Khione's cold hand fell on my shoulder, pulling me back as Artemis cried out,

"Luke! Fight it!"

The shaking got worse as if he was about to vibrate out of his own skin -

Then just like that, he went still.

None of us moved.

"...Luke?" I called out softly.

"I - " He groaned, shuddering. "I'm here." I could have sworn his teeth looked bigger in his mouth and it looked like he gained a dozen wrinkles on his forehead. "I'm here," he muttered. "I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, I - can't you hear that?"

"Not a thing," I said.

He's hearing things. That's always a good sign!

Not.

"It sounds like - "

"Do not listen to her!" Artemis snapped at him as "You cannot listen to her, or you will go rabid, do you understand?"

Luke startled like a surprised deer. He swallowed thickly as he looked at us with tears in his eyes. The broken one was a kaleidoscope of cloudy blue irises. "Selene?"

Artemis hesitated.

"No more secrets," I reminded our rabbit grimly. "We're already here."

And there was no going back.

"Selene died," Khione murmured.

"What happened?" Luke asked shakily as he ran a hand down his face. He looked down at his sneakers. "Did someone forget to tell her that?"

Diana ponderously watched us. The human half of her face was frowning as the rabbit's mouth worked silently.

"'Temis." I growled.

"Not her," the bunny muttered.

Ipse. Diana said. Memet.

"Me," she admitted.

"You?" Luke said what we were all thinking.

"I tried to fix it," Artemis whispered instead. A sinking feeling was pulling at the bottom of my stomach. She said she left 'a fragment' of herself behind back in that airport. If my suspicion was right, it was a fragment that was talking to Luke, a descendant of Selene through the Moon. "I tried to fix everything."

"And failed," Khione said harshly. "Like you always do."

The rabbit didn't respond.

I didn't know what to say or do, standing there like a bump on a log. I don't know if you were also getting the feeling that some of the things Artemis was hiding wasn't because she was being a Greek jerk, but because something had gone so wrong somewhere that she made herself forget she was hiding it. That kind of thing was hard to bring out into the open.

I know that from experience.

Luke blew out an explosive breath. "Okay," he said. "Okay. We need a plan."

"Ice him if he goes weird?" I volunteered.

"With pleasure." Khione inclined her head as Luke winced, squeezing his knees together.

"I don't like this plan!" He squeaked. "I take it back. We don't need a plan! I'll be fine!"

"You looked like you wanted to bite my head off," I pointed out. I raised my eyebrows at him, incredulous. "A little cold is not going to kill you."

Luke winced again.

Jeez.

What a crybaby.

"But before we do anything else," I said with a finger up in the thick air. "I'm going to get what I think is my cat."

In the distance, the bells began to ring again.

Another shiver went up my spine.

I headed down the gray beach towards Dante's Gate and the small patch of grass beside it where an orange and white tabby cat was curled up in a ball.

There was a crook in his tail.

"Sam," I breathed, disbelieving as I bent down by my cat as he sat up. He looked exactly like he should have. Uneven whiskers. White booties. One eye was green while the other one, the replacement, burned orange. Even the dark orange swirls on his side looked right. "Are you really here?"

I reached out and poked my cat friend's cheek.

He bit me.

"Ow!"

'They say there's a blithering fucking idiot born every minute,' Sam said flatly as I cradled my hand against my stomach.

Uh oh.

'When you were born, we must have been good for the next hour.'

His ears went flat against his head, so I knew he was just getting started. "Sam, wait - "

'Your muppet bitch arse friend told everyone about this latest bout of fucking stupidity and I was not surprised your fucking suicidal random-shit-in-your-mouth arse is at it again being a dumbfuck fucking allergic to good ideas!'

I said Sam would laugh at following me into Tartarós.

That's still true.

Just so you know, swearing my ears off for being stupid was always going to come first.

Behind me, I heard Khione choke on a small laugh.

Great.

A small, furry animal whose tail I pulled is ruining my impression on a girl for the second time.

I can't win.

"Hi Sam," I said dully, feeling one inch tall. I turned back to my adventuring party as they warily approached the dark yawning mouth of Dante's Gate. "Everyone, this is my pet cat, Sam." I gave a limp wave. "Sam, everyone."

"You have a supernatural cat," Luke said flatly. Which was sort of fair and sort of…so telling him about cats, all of them, was going to be awkward.

"Master Sam," Khione nodded her head politely. "Khione, of ice and snow."

Sam squinted. 'Oh, another muppet.'

Oh my fuck.

I forgot Sam's an asshole.

Khione stiffened. "I beg your pardon?"

I palmed my face, hissing under my breath, "Sam, don't! She's Greek!"

So maybe that sounded like an insult?

It was the truth. And an insult. Kind of. Greek gods were many things and one of those things was having no chill.

And I swear to God, if you make a dumb joke about Khione being an ice goddess, I will disown you.

My cat sniffed like he'd been waiting to insult somebody new for years. 'A muppet. Fucking dead from the neck up scrubbers with a worship kink.'

Khione gasped, pretty eyes going wide. "Rude!"

Luke just nodded sagely. "I like him!"

"Don't encourage him," I groaned. If you're wondering what exactly Sam said in the strange, unique dialect of far off lands known as British, there were eleven words to say what could be said in four: 'stupid whores demanding worship.'

I was almost impressed.

I don't think salvaging this train wreck was even possible.

Sam lashed his crooked tail back and forth. 'I am not wrong.'

That's fair.

There was a tense silence as the Boreide glared down at my pet asshole. I prepared to jump in between an angry goddess and a cat. This was probably going to hurt. Lots.

"You're not wrong, no," Khione admitted, backing down.

"Still rude," Artemis muttered.

Alright.

Now I really was impressed. And a bit jealous. The last time I insulted a goddess to her face with the truth, she turned into a mountain lion and tried to murder me. How come he gets away with it?

I stole a quick head rub and ear ruffle, snatching my hand back as he swiped at me with a disgruntled meow.

"Sam," I said quietly with a smile. "You're the best cat ever."

His crooked tail lashed back and forth again as he looked away, sniffing contemptuously.

'...don't you forget it.'

 

[Shujin]

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction



​

i see you​

the observer has always been the observed​

warn him if you like​

he won't hear you



"And if we somehow don't all die horribly," Luke said far too pleasantly with a stiff toothy smile. "I will murder you."

I didn't believe him, but I also didn't not believe him, if you know what I mean.

When he felt like it, Luke was a scary guy.

We were kind of way up shit creek without a paddle because I wanted to save a dumbass rabbit and the memory of Luke punching me in the face for being a moron was still fresh. The key for Hecate was somewhere on that island city, because of course the key of an Elder God was hidden in the depths of a gothic city. Fifty - fifty on it being at the bottom of a dungeon or at the top of a tower.

You've read that story or seen that movie before and we were in the Dreamlands.

Dream logic rules all.

Clovis already knew dreams. He just needed me to put the pieces together to fully understand. The Dreamlands was a reality independent of our own. It obeyed its own rules. There were no objective truths. Everyone else was just along for the ride.

How do you tell someone that I was more worried about the nightmares they - I could spawn from my own subconscious than I was about the nightmares already here?

Without making them freak out and have it all go to shit anyway?

I don't think I can.

"Just hear me out!" I protested tiredly. "Look, this time, I'm super sure I'm on good terms with all his kids, okay? Time likes knowledge seekers and I have a ton of questions - "

And since we're in the Dreamlands, I probably won't accidentally the human race if he doesn't feel like answering.

"Percy," Artemis said tiredly. "No."

Khione, Ms. 'Bait a giant tentacle murder dog with her soul' herself, was looking at me like I just confessed to making out with wood chippers in my spare time. She glanced at Artemis and then looked at Luke with pity.

"This is what you had to deal with on your Quest?"

"Oi." I sighed. "Sam, back me up here."

The orange tabby licked at his left paw before stating, 'All of his plans are fooking barmy.'

"I - okay." I glared down at him. "I'ma need you to don't."

'Make me.' My asshole pet quipped with a lazy swipe of his tail. 'It is absolutely the truth.'

"It is not!" I snarled back and out of the corner of my eye, Luke raised his hand. I snapped at him, "Your last plan involved jumping off a three story building onto a N'athm."

"And yours got us into a face to face conversation with the Dread Lady," Luke countered nastily.

He was not wrong and I hated it.

I still tried to defend myself. Call it a bad habit.

call it amusing/intriguing​

"To be fair - " I started.

"No."

Khione's dark eyebrows made a valiant charge towards her hairline. "I'm sorry. You came face to face with who?"

"Stuff," I said stiffly in response. I really didn't want to talk about it right now. "And things."

"When did you - " She pinched the bridge of her nose. "No. Never mind." Thank God. "Anything I should know about the Dreamlands?" Her pretty eyes slid off to the side, towards the too far and too close horizon across the black sea. "I know only vague details about the…inhabitants."

'Capital,' Sam muttered under his breath. 'The muppet is also useless.'

Luke huffed out a soft laugh. Khione's mouth twitched into a small frown, but she was determined to ignore him.

"Yeah. The most important thing -" Guilt churned in my stomach like venomous centipedes. I knew enough by now to know that Olympus and my sisters had given the Boreide more than a few scars. I guess there wasn't a person among our little party that didn't have some hurts to exploit.

Well, maybe not the cat.

There was no good way to ask if they were just badly healed wounds or if they were still bleeding.

So I didn't.

Maybe that makes me a coward. "The Dreamlands wants to hurt you."

Her answering smile was bitterly cold. "I'm used to that."

I swallowed thickly.

Yeah.

Guess she was.

"My hunters will be there," Artemis said in a small voice. "In the city. My monsters." As if summoned by her words, another eerie long tolling of a bell rolled out from across the water and then the too loud silence that squirmed in my ears. Her silver eyes closed. "My regrets."

I looked at Luke only to see him looking back, already grimacing.

Her victims.

"So it's a prison," I said as gently as I could.

Artemis hesitated. "It's a nightmare."

nightmares are dreams/illusions/simulations as well​

"Alright." Luke rubbed at his temples. "Don't listen to the moon voice. Hostile location, everything there is going to be mad at us. What else?"

I bit my tongue. Hard.

Luke thought this was just going to be like sneaking into that secret library in Houston. Figure out the defenses, the available routes, how to get past or through the guards, what doors had locks and where the cameras were and everything would be fine.

Dreams didn't work that way.

Sometimes the door was locked, sometimes the door opened to a wall, sometimes the door tried to eat you and sometimes you shrunk Alice in Wonderland style and walked through the giant keyhole because you had a bag of spicy Cheetos before bed and you regretted it. At the same time, what his subconscious believed would happen had influence on what would actually happen leaving me, the local Dreamlands expert, with no idea on what to actually say that would help.

"If there are pools of tar, we're going the wrong way," I said eventually. "Always."

'Keep track of yer noggin,' Sam chimed in.

I nodded. "Right. If you suddenly can't think straight, we need to back off. There are things in the water, don't go too deep. If there are any temples - "

"There are," Artemis rasped, breath starting to come in fast as she swayed in place.

mine​

'Ah, fook.' Sam sighed.

"We'll avoid them," I said quickly. "Don't look people in the eyes for too long. We can't mark where we've been, like with breadcrumbs or chalk lines or anything because it's all about meaning here and others can pick up on it - "

"And follow us," Luke said grimly.

"Follow us out." Khione figured it out immediately and it made me wish I hadn't been a little idiot when I was younger -

What did we learn?

I breathed out and banished the prickle of fear trying to escape the nape of my neck down my spine.

"If Sam tells you to do something, do it."

My cat's tail stopped swishing incredulously. 'Hold up. Are you serious - '

"You can get on my ass for being a hypocrite later," I shushed him. I tried to smile at the joke but my lips felt like they were made out of cardboard. "Sometimes the Dreamlands likes being what it seems, but most of the time, it doesn't."

"You cannot save anyone here," Artemis whispered. "We should not waste our efforts trying. This nightmare will not end."

I bit my tongue again.

"Alright. On that cheery note!" I clapped my hands. The sound was muted, more like the limp 'plap' of a dead fish hitting something than a clap. "I vote we don't use the creepy tunnel to get to the city."

Come on, a stone tunnel down into blank darkness with the historic name of 'Dante's Gate?' That tends to mean something and you've also seen that movie before.

It was probably Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

But the point is, no.

"You just said there are things in the water," Luke pointed out.

"Just don't fall in?"

"I can freeze a bridge," Khione volunteered, which smacked me right upside the head with my dumbassery.

Knew I was forgetting something.

"Uh, maybe."

Her eyebrows rose. "Maybe?"

"If you're thinking 'it's water, so I can freeze it,' you are using logic." I raised both of my eyebrows in return. "We're in the Dreamlands." And I knew from experience that sometimes 'I made the submarine, so I control the submarine' was too much logic for this place. She was an ice goddess, but, well, there was a reason why Young Gods didn't come here.

slaves. prey. food ​

"It might work, because freezing things is what you do, but it might not."

She clicked her tongue, closed her eyes for a long moment and then said, "Lucid dreaming principles, I presume?"

Luke opened his mouth.

"Psychology degree." She waved a hand in the air, drawing my attention to the large welts of the roots under her skin running down her arms. "Only a Bachelor's, unfortunately."

"Why." He asked flatly.

She cut us a thin smile that looked weak at the same time. Like a knife that had been sharpened so much, it would just snap in half at the slightest bit of pressure.

"I was curious."

Badly healed wounds or still bleeding. She didn't offer anything more than that and none of us felt like asking.

The vote to not walk into the obvious trap named Dante's Gate passed with an overwhelming 'hell no' majority which just left…

The black sea.

Sam's claws caught on my pant leg, holding me back a moment as the others cautiously headed for the gray sand shore just beyond the pale flowers.

'Moon's red.' He hissed softly.

It was.

Since I first fell in when I was two, the moon had always been golden.

Instead, here it was an orangey-reddish color, a paler shade than what everyone uses for Halloween commercials, surrounded by oddly twinkling stars on a bleached canvas. It looked almost like what an elusive Harvest moon would look like Awake, except the pits were darker and of a stranger shape than what was visible on Selene's corpse.

No eye though. Not sure how to feel about that.

'What does that mean?' Sam hissed again, tugging his paw free with some wild flailing.

It was just like with Persephone and the Pit.

I dropped my eyes from it. I shrugged one shoulder and crushed the hysterical bubble of fear welling up in my throat. I can't lose my head. Not now.

Somehow, somewhen, Selene's corner of the Dreamlands had become just that.

Selene's.

It meant there was a reason why she had Time's key.

"Means my mother's not here."

There weren't many things that could keep her away. The Pit could do it. The Night could withstand her anger. The Hunter opposed her.

Time…

yes. ​

If just the presence of his key was enough for Mom to avoid what used to belong to the Moon, then maybe asking him for a favor really hadn't been the best idea in the world.

Who'd a thunk?

Sam examined my face with his eyes narrowed and airplane ears. I smiled weakly, feeling an inch tall under that red moon, and my pet huffed as he started walking towards the water.

'The shit you get into, I swear…'

My throat burned. So did my eyes. I tried to breathe without sniffling and I don't think I quite managed it.

"Thanks," I croaked. "For coming."

He didn't say anything. Instead, he circled back, rubbed against my leg with an arched back and when I picked him up, he didn't scratch me to within an inch of my life, which said it all, really. I breathed into the top of his little head for a couple of seconds, biting back sobs now that no one else was looking.

Mom wasn't here.

But I've been here since I fell in when I was two years old. If it was just me and Sam, I'd be more confident, but it wasn't. It was Luke and Khione and Artemis. I couldn't be the burden or the lucky break. This time I was the one who would have to protect them, even from themselves. I wasn't looking forward to it.

I didn't have a great track record so far.

I bit my lip.

We'd get through this.

We had to.

---

you did pick a good/adequate/amusing one​

of all the variations of failures/successes to observe


of all​

this one is my favorite/mine.

---

Khione's first attempt at an ice bridge was, uh, not a failure, exactly.

"Yeah," Luke drawled as he examined the black ice. It was translucent, cracked and looked like it was made out of frozen oil rather than water. Complete with ominous cracking sounds. "I don't trust that at all."

Khione sucked on her teeth. "It's fighting me."

You know?

"It'll do that," I said lamely, because I didn't know it actually did that? Sure, things didn't work out exactly how I thought sometimes, but I never felt like there was resistance.

'Any reason why we aren't walkin' cross?' Sam had a paw raised. Artemis blinked, her head rearing back and the cat sighed. 'Because you didn't know you could or how. Gotcha.'

"Uh, let me try?" I stepped forward and the same way I made underwater scooters and a submarine and built my apartment, I just…

Made a boat.

A medium sized fishing boat with a propeller engine on the back and a manual rudder bobbed off shore, ropes, red and white safety donuts, plastic oars strapped to the side and all. It was a moss green color with an upturn prow at the front. It looked like it could have sat in the pier off the coast of Florida as I ate ice cream on the boardwalk with my grandparents with dozens of other boats just like it.

"How - " Khione stopped herself.

'Lil' Fucker is bullshit," Sam said, like he always did. 'Don't think about it too hard.'

"I'm awesome. Duh." It was my usual response, but this time…this time the words lodged in my collarbone and throbbed. I cleared my throat. "All aboard?"

Sam hopped in first, completely trusting. And why shouldn't he be? It's not like he wasn't used to my Dream constructs and he's a cat. Keeping it simple. If it works, it works. I pulled the pieces of the Titan Lord out and the Pit and glued them back together with nothing but my Dreaming mind. Kronos had said the same thing Khione did.

How?

I didn't think anything of it at the time.

Fuck if I know, amirite?

Khione was next. There was a moment of awkward balance when the boat bobbed when she expected it to dip before she claimed the middle bench. Luke scooped the rabbit off the ground, who squirmed for a second before giving up.

"Hermes Oneiropompus," he said with one raised eyebrow. Conductor of Dreams. "You?"

I shrugged uncomfortably.

It wasn't a demigod power. I was just…used to the Dreamlands. I had the feeling that saying it was because Mom had little interest in guarding my Dreams beyond the bare minimum to keep me sane and alive wasn't going to do me any favors.

I'm not that stupid.

He sighed. "Your mother didn't teach you about this either, huh?"

I shrugged again. "She didn't have to," I muttered. "I've always been able to do this. That I can remember?"

He hummed, but let me off the hook. Once he was in, I pushed the boat off the silky sand bed into the open water. I shook out my sneakers. Habit mostly. Once I forgot they were wet, they wouldn't be anymore.

Then I walked on the water.

Luke hesitated with the pull string for the engine. I waved him on. "Speed doesn't matter much."

Time and distance didn't matter much either.

"Dream logic," Khione murmured. She lowered a hand to the water. Ice formed under her fingertips, then melted. Then she stopped, her eyes widening as she looked into the water. "Is that you?"

"Huh?" I said intelligently.

Sam leaned over in his seat. 'Oh yeah. That.'

I looked down and stared into a watery reflection that had way too many burning green eyes.

"Whoa."

It was more than the blurry shadow I saw in my Dreams, but defined. It looked a bit like a three headed hydra with crested serpent heads with long, barbed spines coming off its back. Thin tendrils like braids tasted the space around it. Four powerful legs tipped with black claws and armored in tough black scales held its weight underneath dark wings so big, they faded into the rest of the dark water. The lower body spilled from the lower jaw of the middle head into a great, gaping maw framed by vicious looking teeth. The black water was leaking between the rows of pearly whites like saliva, but instead of a throat or tongue, there was just an abyss where my green eyes burned like stars.

Was that me?

…

Holy shit, I'm handsome.

Luke shifted to look over the side too. I watched his brows furrow. "I don't see anything? Wait. No, I do, it's just - " He covered his normal eye with a hand. Then blanched. "What the Hades is that?"

"His divine form!" Khione nearly squealed. "When did you - "

"I'm a demigod," I reminded us both. There was a painful lump in my throat. There was just no way. I bleed red.

"So?" She shrugged. "Dionysus had one while mortal." Artemis' breath hitched but she stayed out of the conversation. "It will not be capable of killing mortals, but - "

"It only shows up here," I cut her off again. "In the Dreamlands. It's just my subconscious."

Wanting to be more than I was again.

So it couldn't be.

"You've had wings before," Luke murmured.

And I couldn't control it and maybe that was all I could ever do. "It's not what you think, okay?"

Khione pursed her lips, hesitating. I don't know what expression I made, but she rolled her gorgeous eyes. "Fine. A pity. I think you would have been rather cute."

I coughed and looked away towards the city.

The moon gods rose up from the water, sickly gray with too many limbs, but each one unique and unsettling in their own way. Which meant making sure that we weren't caught in a never ending loop where the destination could only get farther and farther away would be easier.

"Máni," Artemis said quietly, hushed.

I nodded at the large, cuttlefish looking Norse god of the moon. All five of his mouths gaped at the pale red moon above us. The large eyes on either side of his triangular head rolled a full rotation before he found me.

"Hey, man," I called out, raising my hand. "No sign of Ragnarok yet."

One of his tentacles moved, sending a wave splashing against the boat as a low moan rumbled through the water.

Luke's shattered eye tracked the god as we passed. "Why?"

"Selene was…well liked," Artemis hesitantly offered. "Radiant, when she wished to be. Kind. Patient." Her voice darkened. "And oh so generous."

The boat bobbed in the water, disturbed by a contrary current.

"She was willing to give of the Moon, all it required was that the takers also partook of her flesh. And why not?" The rabbit spat. "Understanding, bright, knowledgeable Selene was no one's enemy. Always willing to share her insight. Brave Helios trusted her like a sister."

"...are you sure it was like a sister?" I quipped. "They had four children together."

Khione raised an incredulous eyebrow at me. Luke looked ill.

I sighed. Goddamn. "Greek, right. Sorry."

'Muppets,' Sam said sagely.

"To feast and gain power was not unprecedented." Artemis' silver eyes were a million miles away, staring blankly at everything and nothing. "And her promises were fulfilled. New moon gods rose to match their counterparts of the sun without the sacrifice."

I grimaced.

Rule numero uno of deal making.

Always know the Price.

Rule two was to never ask for what you can't easily give back.

"Or so everyone thought," I finished the story.

"Yes," the moon rabbit whispered. "When it all went wrong…" The debt was collected, twisting them. It only made me wonder about the gods of the Moon that escaped unscathed. Like Hecate. I wouldn't say Artemis had, because Diana was still watching us from the other shore. Half intact, half-warped. Maybe you don't know this, but Artemis didn't actually become known as a goddess of the Moon until the Romans. Before that, she was just a Huntress. So what happened, exactly? Maybe she did eat some and that was part of the bargain to protect her in that struggle between pantheons? But then...

Maybe I should be wondering if our mascot ate too little to get trapped.

Or maybe too much.

Slightly choked, Artemis moved on. "Bendis."

The Thracian goddess looked more like a crocodile that escaped from an experimental lab. Long, scaled and half submerged in the black water so that only the growths and vestigial limbs on her back showed.

"Kušuḫ."

It took me a second to place the Hurrian god because he looked like he'd been torn in two. Both quivering halves were only held together by slick black tendons draped between like telephone lines. Each side of him was balanced on one thick elephant leg, a tough featureless hide on the outside and teeth like one side of a zipper faced the other half from the bleeding tear.

Our boat passed underneath the tendons, the sound of water and the hushed putter of the engine.

Artemis kept naming the moon gods manning the prison. Egyptian. Sámi. Baltic. Welsh and more. Each name sounded like it drew more and more blood from her heart to find the strength to say.

She was hoarse by the end.

Then it was just water and the other shore.

At first, I thought it was covered in briar bushes, that kind of gnarled dead wood looking bushes that seemed endemic to abandoned buildings and historic sites. It only made sense that you could expect to see them around a gothic city.

Then we got closer.

"Fuck." Luke breathed.

They weren't bushes. They were women.

Naked torsos dissolving into puddles of flesh where the leg should be as the 'trunks' of this grotesque tree, the contorted, tortured branches with reaching limbs silently begged for release. Sometimes separated enough to be almost human, but often melded together into chimera twins of multiple heads, five arms, three breasts or other combinations. Floating in the water by the shore like dead logs were drowned corpses with the pale, bloated looking skin but still floating, gossamer threads of hair spidering out on the surface of the water. It was like visiting a museum of mannequins or clay figures except some idiot with a hot iron ran around, thinking the entire place would look better if it was just one, big, display.

Except the part where they were all still alive.

"We - ell," Khione said slowly. There was this strange kind of resigned-but-amused knowing in the narrowing of her eyes and twist of her lips, like there was a cruel joke she had just thought of, but would rather keep the punch line to herself. "This is…fascinating."

Luke gagged and covered his mouth with a hand.

"I did not - " The rabbit tried. "This is not - I - "

We all looked at her. She went quiet.

I sighed.

"Arty. You had some issues."

Luke cut the engines, looking decidedly too green to be healthy, letting the boat continue to drift closer.

(Dreams have no sense of pacing)

The prow gently knocked against one of the floating corpses.

It wasn't a corpse.

It reared up with a shriek that jabbed my eardrums full of brass needles. Not a woman, the twisted facsimile of one made out of a fleshy humanoid spider.

I moved.

There was a flash of bone white.

The creature screamed as Damocles tore two of its skeletal arms off from my throw. Sam yowled as he leapt into the air - the force twisted the bloated form so instead of capsizing the boat, its side crashed into the front catapulting the back and everyone in it into the air.

"Sam!" I yelled. "Catch!"

I willed my Dream construct to break apart, trusting my cat to get everyone to safety.

Knife.

My fingers closed around the familiar weight of Erebus' dagger. The thing rose from the water, wet limp hair draping it as it lunged at me with a face that was blank. Featureless. Nothing but rotting skin and a bloody mouth.

I didn't even try to dodge.

When you're prepared for it, you can make distance mean anything in a Dream.

Its lunge was a foot short.

Mine wasn't.

The black blade sunk into its skull like a hot knife through butter. I twisted then ripped it out to the music of its pained wail. It clattered against the hard surface of the water.

Of course water could be hard.

I'm standing on it, aren't I?

I brought my foot up and right where the lumpy torso narrowed, bloated skin drawn tight over vertebrae before its wriggling thorax, I brought it down with a satisfying crunch. I did the same to each of its twelve limbs, listening to it scream. I don't even know why. Habit, I suppose. Sam always said it was more satisfying to wait until they deserved it and he was right.

With nothing more to break, I drove my birthday gift into the base of its skull and this time, I heard the death rattle.

Only then did I let it sink.

I sheathed Damocles onto my necklace because why wouldn't I have my sword? Because I threw it? Who has the time to look for details like that in a Dream?

It was only then that my hands started to shake.

No doubt there was going to be worse things waiting for us. We still had to find a way to get out with Time's key, with sanity and limbs intact. If I had been just a bit slower, if I had misjudged the throw…

But I hadn't.

And my hands weren't shaking from fear.

I was smiling.

Just like old times.