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

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction
​

It felt like standing in the eye of a hurricane.

Grandpa described it to me once. I think I was five or six years old. He said it was the calmest, most peaceful weather he had ever witnessed. It had been a warm day with a slight breeze. The sky had been as blue as a robin’s egg with the sun shining brightly. A picture perfect summer day.

But everything felt wrong, like being at the top of a roller coaster just before the drop. Except you knew there was no track at the bottom, just a dark pit. Just ten minutes earlier, the howling of a Category 5 hurricane had been ripping up telephone poles and trees, but now the air was dead. The streets were still flooded. Every animal was silent like they knew the storm wasn’t really over, it was just Mother Nature taking a breath.

Safe, for now.

Trapped.

Grandpa said he looked out at the horizon and saw a solid wall of grey closing in with a distant noise like an oncoming train.

My grandmother called him an idiot during the story. He never denied it. It had been shortly before I was born and Mom didn’t tell them until I was six or seven months old anyway. They were still living in Florida when Hurricane Andrew rolled in to ruin everyone’s day. Grandma had been out of state visiting Dad in the psychiatric hospital. Grandpa had been caught with his pants down. He hadn’t thought it would make landfall and he said it was because every yokel on the news stations make noise about storms out in the ocean hitting the coastline all the time and they rarely made it that far. He said he stayed to make sure the house was going to be okay. Grandma called him a liar and said he stayed to try to save his boat.

And I remember wondering, whether it was the house or the boat, did it really matter if he was there or not? Why didn’t he just leave as soon as he could? Just in case? What did he think he was going to do against a hurricane?

The house ended up with too much water damage to salvage with a collapsed roof on one side and the boat had gotten unmoored somehow. Grandpa never saw it again.

I told Mom the story later when she came to pick me up, asking her the same question. What was he going to do against a hurricane? I remember the way Mom smiled then. It had been small and nostalgic instead of the usual amused quirk of her lips before she said ‘nothing at all.’

I told her Grandma thought he was just dumb. She ruffled my hair in response.

‘Do not judge him too harshly. That is the one kind of idiocy I adore.’ I hadn’t understood. ‘There is nothing he could have done. He meant nothing to the storm. He was nothing, but you will always find a human willing to give it their best shot anyway. Who knows?’ She had said with a small laugh as she buckled my seat belt for me. ‘Perhaps he could have delayed the inevitable.’

‘You know,’ I had said then. Before my seventh birthday, I thought Mom was perfect in every way and knew everything about everything ever. Dad was the screw up who was lucky to have her and I was Mommy's perfect little boy that had to be convinced to play with mortal kids.

Man.

Looking back, Apollo was right.

I had been a small little shit and not in a good way.

Mom had made an amused sound in her throat. She didn’t actually answer me until she had gotten in her side of the car and was already pulling out of my grandparents’ driveway.

‘Everything comes to an end, eventually.’

It felt like standing in the eye of a hurricane.

Maybe I could talk to Mom, I offered Hypnos weakly.

The Elder God pulled me even closer to him and shook back and forth in a clear ‘no.’

I could, I insisted, even though the thought of calling her attention back to me right now didn’t fill me with great feelings. She’ll listen to me.

I have never seen Mom mad before.

I’m her son, I whispered. She has to listen to me.

I didn’t know how to handle this. I don’t know what to think about it. I didn’t even know how to feel about it any other way than…

Terrified.

Hypnos hugged me. I could feel something like acceptance, or maybe it was understanding coming from him.

Whatever your mother did to me, it wasn’t bad, right? I asked Hypnos. I had to make sure.

The personification of Sleep was still holding on to me tightly. To the point that I could really feel it. Usually, his grip was feather light, barely there, like a reflection on glass. Now, I could feel a hundred of his fingers clutching my Sleeping soul like a safety blanket. His presence was curled around me. I imagined he looked a bit like a giant hedgehog.

Kind of?

Just replace the quills with his fingers and stick a six eyed cow head in there.

I felt Hypnos nod. He gave me that moving picture again of the grub eating its way free of its egg sac along with a feeling of reassurance. The vision was longer this time, showing me the grub encasing itself into a cocoon and what broke out of it this time had six skeletal black wings.

It didn’t look like any kind of bug I’ve ever seen before. My first instinct was to say it was still fucking ugly, but - I don’t know. There was something charming about it.

She was helping, I translated and he nodded again, but he sent me a pulse of uncertainty. You think she was helping? Dude.

He felt a bit indignant.

She didn’t think it was bad?

He agreed with that.

So if we could just talk to them -

Hypnos shuddered and seemed to shrink into himself.

Mom’s a bit upset, but not at you, I tried to reassure him. You didn’t do anything wrong.

I got a half-hearted response.

Erebus is your step-dad, so you’re basically her grandson, I reasoned out loud. I didn’t want to believe Mom would punish someone for something their parents did. That was for weak losers that couldn’t or wouldn’t get back at the one truly at fault. It’ll be fine.

Hypnos gently, hesitantly showed me an image of a set of perfectly balanced scales.

It wasn’t just about my Mom.

There were two sides to the equation.

I swallowed thickly.

I assumed Hypnos was scared because two primordials having, uh, words wasn’t something that happened all the time. It was pretty rare. And by pretty rare, I mean I don’t think it has happened since the Earth Mother rebelled which was a long time ago.

A long time even for immortal gods.

I thought he had a fear of the unknown, or of an unexpected negative change.

Some of my own fear was that.

I have never seen Mom mad before. Dad was the one who got angry, but it was because he was worried. When Mom left, he had been angry all the time and the alcohol didn’t help. He scared me once, but he scared himself more. He cut back on the drinking and Apollo basically moved in with us for that year. Artemis had -

Never mind.

I was just about to go stupid about her again.

I know better now.

Anyway, I got my temper from Dad and I knew he was never going to be at his worst ever again.

Mom’s not like Dad at all.

I get it, I said quietly. You’re worried about your mom too.

His grip on me tightened as he gently questioned me.

‘Too?’ I could almost hear him say.

Mom’s the best. I love her and I know she loves me. I tried to smile, but I don’t think it looked all that great. I probably looked sick. But it’s not Mom that’s mad, is it?

It was Ananke.

I’ve told you this story, haven’t I? When I was younger, Mom still had trouble being human all the time. The Elder God bled through. She didn’t mean to break me as a kid, like I’m sure she didn’t mean to almost throw me into the Beyond, but that doesn’t change the fact that she did. Being a demigod, I was sturdier than most, so I bounced back.

My sunglasses should tell you that I didn’t come back the same. At five years old, I was missing bits and pieces, adding up to months of lost memories because my head was just so full it felt like my brain was leaking out of my ears. Dad took me in for the MRI because my visions were relapses. For weeks after, I was obsessed with this little panpipe Mom got me, trying to recreate this strange flute sound I could barely remember.

And Apollo’s ghost was the first one I saw.

I know my mother loves me, I told Hypnos. But she’s not safe.

Hypnos pulsed with a sad agreement.

The picture he sent me was of himself gently nudging a piece of glass, but it shattered into a million pieces.

Fragile, my ass. I snorted. I saw your mom a bit and that was okay, right?

He paused, and I could tell when he remembered because he congratulated me.

Yeah, I’m stronger now than I was when we first met. I’m not a baby anymore.

Uncertainty.

Oh fuck right outta here.

He laughed at me.

It’s not as if I don’t know my birth mother at all. My education started at birth, maybe even earlier than that. My lessons were all in Dreams, to make sure that I would remember what she wanted to show me.

And she wanted to show me places far beyond this little blue ball, worlds under foreign stars at the ends of Yggdrasil’s branches and oceans between the edges of reality. My favorite memory is of a star studded expanse, watching a cold, dark planet hurtle through space and my mother showed me how it felt to reach out, pluck it from its lonely journey and gently place it in the orbit of a binary star like I was decorating a Christmas tree with a star ornament on top.

She showed me the birth of the Young Gods. I remember what Kronos didn’t anymore. Ananke taught me how to control my Dreams and at two years old, I fell into the Dreamlands and met a foul mouthed orange tabby cat with a very pullable tail named Sam.

She never spoke, because we never needed words. I never saw her, but it never mattered. She never touched me, but I could feel her wonder when I reached out for her.

She was my mother.

Then I got older and the Morrigan was there to catch me when I fell from the stars.

I’ve always known Ananke wasn’t safe for mortals to witness. Dad was right there to remind me with his screaming nightmares for most of my early childhood.

But I had been a stupid little kid who thought he was so fucking special.

With only vague recollections from the Dreams I shared with her when I was little, I decided I was going to find the woman who had my eyes. I was going to find Ananke, my very own Dream-Quest. I even convinced some friends to help me, good people who didn’t like the idea of a small child making the trip on his own, but knew they couldn’t stop me.

Like Sam.

My Quest led me to the Dreamlands' very own golden moon.

It didn’t end well.

Maybe I’ll tell you about it, someday.

Do you think my brother - your dad can do something? I asked.

Hypnos cringed.

I guess between his consort and his mother would be a little awkward.

Hypnos felt incredulous.

Okay, a lot awkward.

The way he nodded, you’d think the personification of Sleep had never heard a truer statement in his entire life.

Maybe we can both try together?

He wasn’t a fan of that idea, and to be honest, I wasn’t either.

We have to do something, I said and forced my lips into a small smirk. Before your mom gets hurt.

Hypnos immediately hit me with his annoyance and I felt my spirits lift a little. If he was annoyed, he wasn’t terrified. If I was annoying him, I wasn’t drowning in my own fear.

Win win.

Uh huh, I said with a bigger smile. We both know my mom can beat up your mom - woah!

Hypnos turned me upside down.

I crossed my arms, dangling in front of him by a leg. Fate is way cooler than the Night anyway, I said in my most obnoxious voice. I borrowed it from Apollo. Nobody messes with Fate, but the Night?

Hypnos swung me back and forth like he was trying to shake me down for my lunch money, even more annoyed.

What a Momma’s boy.

Not that I had any room to talk.

Admit it, your mom got shafted in the primordial department. The Pit, Time, Fate - come on, even the oceans are scarier. I grinned at the spike of his anger. What’s she gonna do, make me go to bed early?

“Oh yes - “ a deep, masculine voice echoed from behind me. “ - and you will simply die in your sleep. Only the truly fortunate will stay dead.”

I twisted my head around to look at the newly arrived melodramatic motherfucker.

It was a winged god, like the Boreads Zetes and Calais but instead of golden scales, his wings were shimmering with dark blues and purple feathers. He had skin the color of dark wood with pitch black long hair and was the kind of buff you only see in try-hard martial gods like Thor. The classic robes he was wearing were just a blank dark grey without any identifying features. He didn’t carry any Symbols either. He could have been anyone, but his eyes gave him away.

Step-nephew! I said with as much cheer as I could fake. I’m not sure how it was possible, because I was just a fraction of my soul right now, but I’m pretty sure I just felt my heart drop out of my ass.

The corners of the mass of grinning skulls the god had for eyes crinkled in amusement.

“Little uncle,” Thanatos, the God of Death replied. “So you are the reason for his tardiness.”

He’s late? I asked in surprise.

I...didn’t know Hypnos had somewhere to be? This was kind of - I thought we were in his realm.

“Very,” the death god said with his eyes fixed on his brother. “It is time to come home, brother.”

Hypnos slumped like his Playstation was being taken away and it was my stomach’s turn to drop out from between my butt cheeks.

Home? I asked quietly. The House of Night?

Nyx was ordering her children to come home?

Was it too much to hope this was a normal thing where play time was over and everyone was gathering for family dinner and Hypnos just wanted to throw a few more hoops before coming inside or something?

Thanatos inclined his head.

“You are welcome to visit, little uncle,” he said, sounding amused. “Many of us know of you through our brother, Sleep and father shares your postcards.”

Well didn’t that just give me the warm and fuzzies.

Erebus really did care.

Uh, thanks for the invite - but there were two problems with that named fucking Alecto and Nemesis. I do not want to see them right now and the feeling was probably mutual. Not to mention, the House of Night had a nasty habit of driving mortals mad. But I’m gonna have to - wait.

Hold the fucking phone.

If Hypnos is leaving, what’s going to happen to everyone who’s asleep?

Wasn’t it kind of important that Sleep itself was on this side of the Pit? The House of Night was in Tartarus. Much like how the River Styx was the border between the land of the living and the dead, the Pit was a border too.

Between us and Chaos.

It was the kind of place you throw things into when you really don’t want them coming back out. Like the pieces of a certain Titan Lord.

I fucked that up, but you know what I mean.

Thanatos quirked an eyebrow. “The Crossroads will call to whomever it will, but the Oneroi and Somnia have been called home.”

The Oneroi and Somnia were the spirits and gods of Dreams. That meant Morpheus wasn’t guarding the entrance to the Dreamlands either.

But people still have to sleep. They can still sleep, right?

Hypnos sent me an affirmative, but it was edged with worry.

“Mother does not make idle commands, so no, you cannot stay.” Thanatos gently chided his twin. “They will sleep as they did in the times of antiquity,” he clarified.

You mean getting lost in the Night, I said bluntly.

“It will not be the first time,” Thanatos said. “Nor will it be the last.”

But that’s -

“ - of no consequence.” The God of Death said just as I remembered who I was talking to. Yeah, I guess he wouldn’t think a few cases of sudden death because people wandered too far and got their Sleeping soul fucking eaten wasn’t that big of a deal.

Thanatos gestured and Hypnos reluctantly put me down.

I could immediately feel the difference as my soul drifted, like a planet slowly rotating around a gravity well that had just disappeared.

I bit my lip.

Thanatos didn’t offer to help me, but then, I didn’t ask either. For the first time in my life, Hypnos was the one telling me goodbye. I waved after them, until I couldn’t see them anymore.

Then I was alone among millions and millions of the faint lights of sleeping mortal souls, slowly drifting away. I hoped they had a head start in staying put, but there was nothing I could do for them. I felt so very small again. Insignificant.

Mortal.

It felt like standing in the eye of a hurricane.

I shivered.

I thought of my apartment in the Dreamlands and willed myself there.

I, look, it’s been a while since I haven’t had Morpheus correct my trajectory, so I was a little off.

And, uh, I didn’t exactly stick the landing.

I’ll be honest.

I fucked everything up.

When I say something like ‘I fell into the Dreamlands,’ I don’t mean ‘I fell from the sky of the Dreamlands.’

That would be super counterproductive.

There was something about the sensation of falling that really didn’t play nice with Dreaming. Some half-forgotten survival instinct left over from the days when sleeping meant wandering the Night. Back then, if you ever felt yourself falling down while sleeping, you better wake the fuck up.

There really wasn’t anything you could do about wandering too far, but at least that was usually painless.

Falling into the Pit wasn’t.

Evolution was funny like that, right? It was crude, but effective as far as failsafes go. Hypnos was awesome and tried his best to keep everyone safe, but I know not even gods are perfect.

When I say ‘I fell into the Dreamlands,’ I mean I fell from the outside in. And in the Dreamlands, shit only makes logical sense when it feels like it. You can ‘fall’ in sideways, diagonally, backwards and Sam told me about this one time he fell in five minutes ago. Time isn’t constant in the Dreamlands either. He met himself five minutes later and things got weird.

If you are like me who remembered half-way through that I had no idea where my apartment actually was, Morpheus wasn’t there to be my GPS and promptly panicked like a blockhead, then you can fall in from the bottom up.

Of the ocean.

For the second time today, I found myself drowning.

My first reaction was to panic harder.

Don’t do that.

If you do that, you’re a moron.

The Dreamlands is the last place in the universe where you want to be feeling really strong, negative emotions like hatred or fear.

It starts messing with you. Getting into your head.

For that one second, I was back off shore of that cold beach right after Rhea intervened again. I could feel Artemis’ broken bones grind under her fur as she was shocked awake. I could feel Luke’s weight pulling me down into the dark depths. The cold saltwater burned as it invaded my nose and my lungs. And somehow, through it all, I could still feel Luke’s blood on my face.

A Dream doesn’t have to make logical sense.

Dreamlands, remember? I reminded myself. It was still hard, even when I knew. We made it. We’re safe.

I was a sleeping mortal soul in the Dreamlands.

I don’t need to breathe.

The burn in my chest faded away as I gulped down saltwater, trying to ignore the iron tinge.

I thought of Artemis, how the little auburn furball slept on her back with her paws in the air and mouth open in her wicker basket.

Not here.

The thrashing form in my hands vanished.

I thought of Luke, unconscious on the back of a lion as it padded past me, but breathing. He was just sleeping in his own guest room and Apollo had snuck him a bit of help. He was fine.

Not here.

I stopped sinking. The weight of his arms slipped off my shoulders and I still reflexively turned towards it, reaching out (no, no, no Luke!) to stop him from falling away.

There was nothing there.

I was alone, floating in the midst of pitch black waters. The water itself felt ridiculously heavy, like it was fighting every move I made and I was wearing weights. Good thing I was a soul. If my body was here, it would be crushed to a pulp.

I had no way of knowing how to get to the surface or even which direction was up. I wish it was as simple as just willing myself out of here, somehow, but it didn’t work like that. Not from inside the Dreamlands.

Sam would tell you that it wouldn’t work, because it wouldn’t work. He’s not dumb, but he’s a cat. He likes to keep things simple. One of Sam’s friends, Wilhelm, would say the Dreamlands was a reality that operated on its own set of rules and physics, like bizarro gravity. You could try something clever, like make a teleporter, but logic had mixed results here because the rules weren’t the same as reality.

They just pretended to be.

Your teleporter might not work. You might blow up. It might work, but what comes out the other side isn’t you. It will look like you for a few minutes and it would sound like you, but everyone could tell something was wrong. It was just some squiggly thing that had hollowed him out in transit and was wearing him like a meatsuit, trying to convince us it was safe to try out too -

Anyway.

Potato - remember him? Dog that used to be in charge of a mining town in the valley of the mountain range down south until everything went wrong.

Potato told me the Dreamlands were alive.

I believe him. I didn’t want to think about what was lurking in its oceans.

I should think about it.

Not thinking about it was a good way to get eaten by whatever was lurking in this ocean.

Getting my sword back was probably a good idea.

I thought of Damocles.

Damocles was a beautiful bone sword. I thought of the way light reflected off the leaf shaped blade polished to an ivory shine. I thought of the silver-gold rippled edge of exposed marrow, the curved bronze cross guard and pommel with the horse hair dangling from the end of the long leather grip.

A twelve year old with a sword, you might be thinking. Against a sea monster while in the sea.

Sounds legit.

Don’t count me out just yet. Damocles has a few tricks up its scabbard. It’s the rule of ‘like to like.’ If you want to kill or destroy something, use something just like it.

My sword was made from bone.

Mom made it from the rib of an ancient sea monster, the Coinchenn. The same one that had killed the sea monster Cu Chulainn’s dad, Lugh made his spear from. She didn’t name it. I did. I don’t think she liked my choice, but it was mine to make. Everyone remembers the sword. I named it after the man.

Damocles was my reminder not to want what I didn’t have.

I had to be okay with being mortal.

With being just a demigod.

My sword settled in my hand.

It was glowing softly, lighting up the darkness around me. It did that sometimes and I could hear it sing, distorted as it was in the water which was, uh, new.

No, wait.

It sung when we met Aura, didn’t it?

“Yeah,” I burbled at it. I picked a piece of plastic off of its crossguard and brushed a bit of gravel and dead grass from the leather braids of its hilt. A congealed drop of luminescent gold blood, Aura’s blood, peeled off the edge of the blade and floated away. “Missed you too?”

Damocles chimed.

I...you know what? I’m just going to roll with this.

This was probably Mom’s fault.

“You wouldn’t happen to know which way to the surface would you?”

It pulled at my arm.

“Gotcha.”

I started swimming in that direction.

It took a bit to really get going, but only because I realized I was a moron after a minute, and made a little motorized scooter like you use for scuba diving to help me out.

It blew up, because I forgot about the water pressure.

You ever do something and it doesn't work and you just automatically try it again like this time it will work even if nothing changes, but you don’t actually think that it will work. You just do it again because you’re braindead. And it doesn’t really register that it didn’t work until it fails a second time?

It’s not just me that does that. I refuse to believe that.

My second scooter blew up too.

My third scooter was a thick, bulky boy with armor and was more like an underwater jetski. I hooked Damocles on its side and got on my way.

It felt weird for a bit. This wasn’t fun and games in the sun off the coast, but deep in a watery abyss. I could only see by the glo-stick impression my sword was doing and a small red LED on my scooter so I could locate it. It was cold down here.

It was actually kind of nice. It shouldn’t be, but it was. I can’t explain it.

I loved being in the water. Always have.

I started being able to see fish, mostly from the small glints of light from Damocles flashing off red skin and glowing bioluminescence. I got a little curious friend. He was long and thin, but almost completely see through with glowing blue spots along his spine and a face that looked like it’d been smashed into a door a few times. He had one bulbous eye that looked like it was covered in cataracts.

I think he was wondering about Damocles.

“Hey buddy.”

He darted away and I felt a bit bad for scaring him off.

“Wait a second, don’t go, it’s okay.” He hovered just out of reach. “I won’t eat you.”

He darted right back. This time, he was inspecting the red LED light in front of me by bumping into it. He must have liked what he saw, because his face split open vertically, spilling dozens of thin probling tendrils. Maybe he was trying to eat it.

“Trust me, you are way too ugly for sushi.”

He was unable to eat my light and the tendrils retracted. He bobbed along, investigating my sword again.

My new friend is now named Swimothy.

“Race ya!”

I imagined my scooter going faster, but it was really hard seeing how fast I was going in the first place when everything was just water and darkness. So I just ended up using the fish as a benchmark and soon pulled ahead of him.

I like to think he was a bit surprised by the way he bobbed a bit, before he caught up.

“That’s more like it.” I smiled. I cautiously held out a hand, feeling it stream through the water.

He just as tentatively bumped it. “See? I’m not scary.”

Swimothy the Fish abruptly turned tail and dimmed his lights, vanishing into the darkness.

“Good talk.”

Guess he didn’t agree with me.

It only took me a few seconds to notice that I wasn’t seeing any other fish around any more.

Fuck.

Damocles immediately stopped its glo-stick impression which was probably a good idea that I didn’t like at all, because the waters were still pitch black. I smothered the red LED with my hand.

I couldn’t see anything.

The small bubbles and tiny murmur coming from my scooter suddenly felt dangerous. I could almost feel the hairs on the back of my body’s neck stand up, like I was giving myself away to something searching these waters for prey. I swallowed down the bubble of fear and panic threatening to well up in my chest.

I was still a demigod of Fate and divinity was soul-deep.

Even here, I could feel doom approaching.

By the light of my scooter’s LED, I picked up my sword. I briefly thought about making a lot of lights, so that I could at least see what was coming, but I...kind of really didn’t want to see what was coming. I had Damocles, but only an idiot or the kid of a sea god would look forward to fighting underwater.

My sword was a last resort.

I was Dreaming, after all.

I willed a brand new Dream construct into existence around me.

I forgot about the water pressure.

My everything exploded into pain as I fell, like I was an expanding balloon trapped in a tightening vice. My joints felt like they were separating as my ears rang and just to add insult to injury, I slammed into a railing stomach first. I almost threw up as I slipped off down to a cold, hard metal floor. Screaming alarms and the screech of bending metal assaulted my eardrums along with what sounded a lot like high pressure streams of water forcing rivets out of place. I painfully coughed up saltwater.

“Ah, fuck,” I coughed. I shook the water off and willed my soul dry.

Good thing Damocles had twisted in my hand just enough so I didn’t cut myself on it or else that would have been embarrassing.

I stood up and had to cling to the railing that sucker punched me through a dizzy spell.

“I’m okay,” I muttered. I hooked the sword back on the necklace I just expected to be on my neck, and it shrunk down to the little silver sword pendant.

“It’s fine!” I yelled. I hiked up the metal stairs, hand on the railing my stomach had just gotten acquainted with. Don’t implode, don’t implode, water pressure is fine, I made a highly advanced technological achievement that can brave the ocean depths and it’s not going to implode.

I froze when I hit the top of the steps, because, uh, I had the vague thought of making a submarine? My subconscious was weird, apparently. Maybe it was reacting to my fear? I trailed a cautious hand across the large copper colored cylinders of what I knew to be missile tubes. Everywhere I looked, there were heavy duty lights stolen from a Cold War bunker and signs written in Cyrillic giving me a headache and levers and ladders and hatches leading off into other areas of the submarine.

I expected a deep sea exploration module instead of the Red October. I saw one of those in the Smithsonian in Florida with my grandparents - the exploration vehicle, not Tom Clancy’s Russian military submarine from Dad’s favorite movie.

Sure, sea monster bad, but come on, brain.

I don’t need a nuke.

I hope.

Who knows what a nuclear detonation would do in the Dreamlands?

I backed away from the missile tubes.

Alright.

So...

The Red October.

I can work with this.

Rise? I thought.

Go up.

Fast.

Please?

Nothing happened.

I’ve told you before, logic doesn’t really work the way you think it does in the Dreamlands. Turns out ‘I made the thing, so I control the thing’ is too much logic sometimes, because your subconscious has more of a say than it should. Like when I tried to get rid of those baby pictures on the wall of my apartment so fucking Kronos wasn’t going to get an eyeful of baby me wearing pants on my head, and I couldn’t because my brain said no.

If I made the Red October...well, it was from a movie and movies...have actors maybe?

On cue, one of the closed hatches banged open behind me, making me jump as a dark haired man in uniform stepped in. As soon as he saw me, he jumped too, hand flying to his hip and I threw my hands up before I got shot.

“I didn’t touch anything!”

He huffed, relaxing. “There you are, boy.”

I heard English with a heavy Russian accent, but his mouth didn’t fit the words like an obvious dub.

“Uh, yeah. Here I am.” I checked myself over.

Human looking, just a bit hazy like my clothes were steaming hot.

Normal enough.

He strode past me to a lever on the wall that he pulled, and the hissing of gas and water faded. I tried to search for the leaks I could have sworn were just here a second ago…?

The crewman snatched a wired radio off the wall. “Missile chamber, contained. Found the VIP.”

The intercom crackled. “Understood, report to command.”

I cautiously lowered my hands. “Sorry.”

I don’t know what I was apologizing for.

“Come then,” he said as he looked around like he was making sure I didn’t actually touch anything. I didn’t speak Russian, but there was this auto-translation thing the Dreamlands does. Sometimes. “The captain wants you in the control room.”

“Sure, okay.”

We trekked through narrow passages filled with pipes and lockboxes with bright red letters. He opened the hatches for me and the further we got, the more people I saw in dark uniforms, going about their business. I stumbled around a ladder into what looked like the control room, because it was a big space with people sitting in chairs in front of computer screens with headphones on, or looking at clipboards or thick manuals looking a lot like the bridge of a spaceship made in the 80s. There were a few pillars with peppermint colored bars to hold on to here for the standing plebs and there was even a partially enclosed compartment with command chairs within in the center. My mouth was hanging open when Sean Connery turned around with his golden bands glinting in the harsh white light.

“He didn’t get very far, did he?” The actor said with his iconic drawl somehow sounding the same in Russian.

“No, sir,” my guide said curtly, saluting.

“Hm.”

This was fucking Sean Connery.

I shut my mouth, knowing I looked like an idiot. I bit my lip.

I had no idea what to say.

Did my subconscious make me a prisoner? Someone’s bratty nephew they took on deployment for some reason?

Asking would be a little awkward.

“Sorry, sir.” When in doubt, don’t piss anyone off. I don’t always follow my own advice, but that’s just because I’m stupid.

Connery smirked. “We will see how long that apology is good for. Keep an eye on him.”

“Yes, sir.”

I was shuffled into a seat in the corner of the control room. My minder leaned against one of the rails nailed to the floor, pinning me with a gimlet stare. I smiled at him weakly.

“I won’t go anywhere.”

“You won’t,” he agreed.

Okay then.

I kicked my feet back and forth. There were a few low murmurs of conversation between crew members and a familiar face - I had no idea what his name was, but he was in Jurassic Park - who was probably the second in command as Captain Connery observed. There were enough flashing lights and moving green lines on enough screens to keep my attention occupied for a bit, but, uh…

I think my Dream was literally holding me hostage at the bottom of the ocean.

Which was...not great.

It’s not like you can’t wake up from the Dreamlands, you just have to be careful about it. Because ‘you wake up from a Dream when you die’ is a decree the Dream spirits follow because Hypnos likes mortals. If you want to play with the mortals in his realm, you follow the rules of the game.

Hypnos doesn’t rule here.

If I did something dumb and someone pulled a gun on me, I was not going to have a good time. And even if I did wake up, Hypnos was gone.

I would be alone in the Night.

I opened my mouth just to say something when there was a shout.

“Captain, picking up something on the hydrophone - “ a loud rumble reverberated through the hull of my Dream submarine, rattling the teeth in my mouth.

“Drive status,” Connery barked as he crossed the room and the crew men sprung into action. “What are we hearing and where is it?”

So something was out there.

“We’ve had movement on the passive sonar, but it’s not another ship - “

“It doesn’t match any known signatures, sir.”

“Caterpillar drive status is green, all functions normal.”

“Replay that recording,” Captain Connery pointed at a section of the computer screen from over the man’s shoulder. I don’t even know what the screens were showing, they were full of bending green lines, updating from the top down like a slow, pixelated waterfall. “Put it on the speakers.”

The crewman nodded, pushing some papers away from his keyboard. There was a crackle as the speakers turned on.

Then there were some loud whooshing sounds of something swimming through water, but weird. Chaotic, almost. Like we were hearing a lot of things moving in different directions, but still somehow close together?

...tentacles?

The whooshing turned and then we heard what that vibration sounded like through the hydrophones.

It sounded like a whale call, if the whale came from this little suburb a bit north of the absolute bottom of Tartarus.

It was this tortured, screeching moan that sounded like something was dying, but it was the underlying clicking vibration that made my skin crawl as the sound got louder before dying off.

“That is not a whale, is it?” Sean Connery deadpanned.

“It’s big,” the crewman said quietly.

I didn’t like the sound of that.

We were in a submarine.

The Captain stroked his beard thoughtfully. “But not a vessel. Perhaps we are in its territory and our stealth capabilities spooked it.” He thought for a few moments longer. “Stay our course, rise to twelve hundred.”

“Staying course,” the - was it helmsman or pilot? - repeated as he pulled on the small black steering wheel. “Rising to twelve hundred.”

I watched the guy listening to the hydrophones frown, leaning forward as he raised a hand to his headphones. A tension crept up my spine to the back of my neck.

Fuck.

I jumped up from my seat and shrugged off the heavy hand that came down on my shoulder, “It’s hostile!”

Heads snapped towards me.

Sean Connery held up a hand warningly. “Sit down - “

“Captain - !“

It felt like a Boeing 747 crashed into us.

I grunted as I was slammed off my feet into the console next to me and my right arm screamed as it bent around the folded metal edge. The alarms were blaring again and everyone was shouting as the submarine itself felt like it was rolling onto its right side.

“Right full rudder, reverse starboard engine!” The Captain snapped out. His XO repeated the command as the submarine screamed, vents hissing vapour above our heads as red lights lit up on consoles and my arm throbbed unhappily.

“Are you injured?” My minder said under his breath as he clung to the rail bolted to the ground.

I gritted my teeth. “Not really.”

“Where is it?” Connery barked when the rumbling stopped.

One of the crewmembers snapped his head up. “It’s fast, sir, we have sustained damage to the arrays portside - “

“Find it!”

Under my feet, a high pitched ping rang out and then there was a cheep! A quieter, more consistent trilling continued long after the ping before finally tapering off.

The control room went quiet. Everyone had their ears peeled.

Piiiiiing….cheep!

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a change on one of the screens. It was a classic sonar panel, like it was right out of a game of Battleship.

There was a very large dot right at the edge of its range.

Piiiing...cheep!

“Captain!”

“I see it,” Sean Connery said with a calm I didn’t feel. “Speed?”

Someone swore.

“Twenty knots, accelerating.”

“Starboard the helm, ready torpedoes.” The Captain leaned forward, brows furrowed as he stared like he could see through the hull of the submarine. “Prepare for evasive maneuvers.”

Don’t be afraid, I told myself. I ground my fingers into my hurt arm, just to chase away the numbness in my toes. Deep breaths. Calm. It was far too easy to fall into an emotional feedback loop here. The Dreamlands was the last place I wanted to lose my mind in. It will start messing with me. Getting into my head. Don’t freeze. Don’t panic. Don’t be afraid.

Piiiiing….cheep!

Don’t be afraid.

Or I’ll end up creating my own nightmares.

Piiiing...cheep!

….

....

Like my mother.

 

Hello everyone, you might want to reread to catch back up to the story.

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction
​

I know what you’re thinking.

He has nightmares of his mother?

Sometimes.

And maybe that sounds bad. Morpheus’ brother Phobetor, the Frightener, wouldn’t have anything to work with if you weren’t scared of anything. Or anyone. And he taught his sprogs all of his tricks.

I get where you’re coming from.

Kids aren’t supposed to be scared of their parents.

But you gotta remember, I’m only half-human. The rules are different. We aren’t the same.

I don’t really Dream like most people. The minor dream spirits don’t really…Hypnos, their boss (father - grandfather - great aunt’s first cousin, whatever) was probably my next best friend right after Cliff and Sam. If you were a dream spirit, ensnaring me was kind of like playing a prank on the President’s nephew while in the White House.

Awkward.

And don’t quote me on this, but I think my familiarity with the Dreamlands was also a bit intimidating? There was nothing they could do that wasn’t a pale reflection.

And I could tell.

I would take those pale reflections over the Dreamlands when it got its hooks in, though.

A dream is still a dream, no matter the power behind it.

Nightmares all work the same way.

It starts with being afraid.

Mom doesn’t want to hurt me. I know it, Dad knows it, anyone who’s interacted with her for a minute probably knows. Sam will admit it if you dangle tuna under his nose long enough.

What she wants doesn’t mean much when she can’t help it.

And nobody’s perfect.

My mother is Fate. It takes a bit to sink in what that means and it kind of still gets me. I thought I had a handle on it and then I’m blindsided with the fact that Chaos is my grandfather. It’s an open question how much that dude contributed to the making of the entire universe.

He’s my grandpappy.

Think about that for a minute.

Mom is so far above me and my Dad that if she didn’t ground herself by clinging to us with everything she had, her sense of Time meant she’d blink and hopefully we’d only been dead for a few centuries.

To put it another way, the Fates tried to get Mom to abort me once. And by that, I mean they tried to get Mom - to get Ananke, the personification of Fate to reconsider her demigod child. To have a moment of doubt. They just needed her to entertain the thought for a fraction of a second.

I’m mortal.

All it would have taken was a thought.

Really puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?

It still overwhelms Apollo sometimes that Dad went the extra mile and actually asked her to marry him (he gets super smug about it every time Apollo brings it up too).

Mom never has to say she loves us, because we know.

Mom doesn’t want to hurt me.

But I know the difference between ‘want to’ and ‘could’ from ‘would.’

She wasn’t as careful with me as she should have been earlier. It’s okay. It’s only her third, maybe fourth, slip in twelve years. That’s a pretty good track record if you ask me, but it also means I can’t lie to myself and say it won’t happen again.

It was easy to remember when I was awake, when my logical mind was in control with everything I knew to be true, that we were a family. We all fucked up at one time or another and we would fuck up again, but the important part was that we forgive each other and never stop doing our best. My mother loved me.

In my nightmares, she doesn't.

I don’t have the power to summon my mother. The best I could get would be whatever my subconscious fears brought to life and it wouldn’t be worth it. Not if I wanted to live through this. Logically speaking, I should have nothing to worry about but she’s angry

Dreams don’t have to make logical sense.

And dreams are what have the power here.

Piiing….cheep!

You could cut the tension with a sword as the pings of the sonar got closer and closer together. All of the servicemen were still and silent, eyes glued to their screens and dashboards covered in knobs, levers and dials with LED lights. Some seemed to look through their stations with a gaze that was a little off to the side as they waited, tensing and relaxing to the rhythm of their own breathing with their hands at ready.

I just tried to keep my inner four-year-old screaming for his mother quiet.

The First Mate was eyeing the Captain out of the corner of his eye. Connery was hunched over in his chair, murmuring under his breath.

Piing -

“FIRE!” The Captain snapped out.

-cheep!

I expected to hear or feel something that would tell me the torpedo was away, but there was just a beat of silence and then an almost bored sounding report from one of the men.

“Torpedo away.”

Another checked his computer. “Target lock established. Three hundred meters.”

My Russian babysitter hissed under his breath. “Will one be enough?”

Yeah…

Probably not.

The submarine pinged in agreement.

“If we were to - hypothetically - if we wanted to nuke it, how hard - ” The officer gave me this look and the rest of the question died on my tongue.

It wasn’t a dumb question, was it?

I thought it through.

Nuclear ballistic missiles - okay, so maybe they weren’t known for precision exactly and trying to tag a sea monster with one while playing keep away sounded…

Yeah, okay.

A hypothetically bad idea.

So.

“Fingers crossed?” I offered weakly.

Piing…cheep!

Push comes to shove, just fire all the torpedoes. Every single one. Which was another way of saying fire an infinite number of torpedoes because I sure as hell didn’t know how many missiles a tub like this usually carried. As long as submarines fire torpedoes held strong in my subconscious, nothing else mattered.

You know what?

Fuck it.

I elbowed my minder with my good arm. “Tell the Captain to fire all the torpedoes.”

My babysitter opened his mouth just in time for Captain Sean Connery to jump to his feet, hand flying to the peppermint railing above his head.

“Caterpillar drive full reverse, up bubble sixty degrees!”

His First Mate repeated the command as the room spun into action, different voices calling out broken fragments of the captain’s command and the deck under my feet had just begun to feel like it was tipping back when the shockwave hit.

I was thrown clear off my feet, right into my USSR chaperone who ‘oofed’ as I collided with his ribcage, nearly tumbling both of us right over the railing behind him. My arm screamed - definitely fractured - and I braced my spine and threw back my shoulders so that I didn’t curl into myself in pain.

I was Dreaming. If I ignored it for long enough, I would forget I was injured and then I wouldn’t be injured anymore.

“Tell me that was a hit!” Connery growled as he straightened, sounding like he was garbling small marbles.

“It was a hit,” someone said immediately, eyes glued to their computer screen. “But we just barely avoided being rammed - “

“It’s still moving!” His neighbor barked. “It’s coming around for another pass.”

Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.

Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.

D̴͕̚o̴̝͎̒́n̷̢̾'̴̢̜̃͋ť̸̪̬ ̷̳̫͐b̵̨́̕e̸̼̓ ̵̺̃ȁ̴̩̍f̶̠̉ŕ̵͇a̵̬̖͠ï̸̚ͅd̷͙͋̈

I was …starting to regret not springing for that sleepover with my cousins at the House of Night.

Which was really saying something, because that meant surviving a walk through Tartarus, not letting Nyx’s domain drive me mad and worst of all, hanging out with Ethan’s bitch of a mother.

Russian orders were flying over my head as I tried to think of something else, anything else, than how I felt like a sardine in a floating tin can.

With a hungry shark prowling outside.

“Can’t we just leave?” I asked. It came out weak amidst all the shouting, but my babysitter heard me.

He steadied himself, gripping the rail with white knuckles. He gestured with his head, towards where one of the crew poured over large white sheets of paper decorated with waving, curling lines of different colors.

“We’re trying.”

“Just head for the surface - can’t we just go up?” I was trying really hard not to sound like a whiny, terrified kid but…

I was a whiny, terrified kid.

I can admit that.

A muscle in my minder’s jaw jumped. “We would die.”

“What?”

His lips thinned. “We took refuge in a submarine volcanic chamber - “

We’re in a cave.

My mind went blank for a second.

Then I thought of what would have happened if I had control over the Red October from the beginning and ignorantly made it rocket up as fast as it could go until it crunched against the cave ceiling -

The submarine shuddered, high pitched metal squealing burst from the walls as steam hissed from valves and the men started shouting louder.

I need to -

I’m going to die here.

I lurched forward, ducking under the babysitter’s grab and bolted for the hatch out of the control room. I heard several people cry out behind me

“Boy!”

Metal walls, pipes and ladders passed by as I scrambled for - I don’t know. I needed to think and come up with some kind of plan. Trying to make my way through underwater caverns in pitch darkness was a non-starter. Lights might as well be a sign that says ‘Good with ketchup’ and it would be stupid to think my current problem was the only monster in these waters.

But…if I could get into a narrow enough area it wouldn’t be able to follow me…and if my next problem was smaller I could probably try to fight it with Damocles. Or maybe, I don’t want to tag the sea monster with a missile, I want to get as close to the seafloor as I can fire and fire a nuke up to the cave ceiling and hope it breaks through -

The hatch behind me banged open.

I glanced over my shoulder and rolled my eyes when I saw that my babysitter had followed me into the guts of the submarine. Orange Cold War bunker lights were flashing off and on and I was pretty sure the sub was taking on water somewhere if the alarms meant anything.

I could fix it. I will fix it.

But fixing it won’t solve everything.

“Do you mind?” I said waspishly. “It’s not like I can leave.”

“Have you considered punching it,” the Russian said from behind me.

“Have you considered - “ I started, turning back to him and he was looking at me when something took him over and I couldn’t breathe. “ - fucking…off.”

There were shimmering hues backlit by stars in his eyes.

I couldn’t say anything for a good fifteen seconds as I just stared at whatever was wearing my Russian babysitter’s skin. I think I even swayed in place, suddenly dizzy.

His eyes looked like mine.

Like Mom’s.

“...who?”

That’s what I intended to say. I don’t know if it even came out of my mouth.

“Guess,” the god said as he ran his hand through dark hair that looked less like hair now and more like liquid shadows. He raised an eyebrow at me with the same crooked, trouble-maker smile I’ve seen on a goddess with grinding teeth for eyes before. “I’ve been told you’re good at that.”

“Erebus?” I whispered.

Piiing…cheep!

His head spun a full 360 degrees on his shoulders like some kind of spastic owl before his human guise fell apart.

Or maybe it would be more accurate to say it imploded.

His arms and legs were sucked into his crumpling torso as the navy blues of his uniform darkened until it looked like it was eating light, making my eyes drift as it became impossible to focus on the black hole that was my brother. He was - I thought he was a perfect sphere, but then my gaze wandered just a bit further and I saw there were reaching tendrils spotted with blue eyes burning like neutron stars radiating from his dizzying center. His limbs didn’t look like they were in one piece, but were interrupted by empty space in between like they were stitches in reality and I could only see the parts that were on my side of the divide.

I could feel those parts though. He wasn’t all here. The rest of him was…

Big.

“Woah,” I said, awed. Sure, Mom made sure I looked like Dad and she always said he was handsome, but honestly?

“I want to look like you when I grow up.”

I’m pretty sure my god brother laughed, even if the sound hit my ears backwards and dripped down the inside of my skull like oil.

If I didn’t already know I was Dreaming, I would have pinched myself.

My brother!

My brother was here!

One of my immortal siblings was here!

HeLlo, Erebus said and his staticky voice pooled behind my eyes. Lii-ii-ii-tle BroTHER!

“Hey, man.” I said with just the biggest grin ever, almost splitting my face in two. I checked my face to make sure it wasn’t actually splitting in two. You never know. “What are you doing here? “ I forced myself to take a breath before I ended up babbling or giggling. “Did you just want to check up on me?”

The Red October’s active sonar ping rang out and then echoed back a few seconds later.

Erebus hummed and it ended in a screeching note of electronic sounding feedback.

It’s time to come in, you guys, he said with the voice of a tired young woman. It’s getting dark out - the voice hitched and changed to an old man with a Texan twang - out here in the countryside, away from the city lights, you can really see the stars, just small - a crackle and his voice changed again to something muffled over a bad quality radio signal. Small step for man, one…giant leap for mankind.

It took me a few seconds to puzzle that one out.

“Oh,” I said. My smile shrunk. He’s not like Mom. “Uh, in my defense, I thought it was an open door policy kind of thing - “

The slick in my skull sprouted teeth.

I flinched (he’s not grading me, he’s not Mom, it’s okay) and reflexively threw the memory of Thanatos’ casual invitation to the House of Night forward and out.

The teeth chewed on the memory.

Then Erebus sighed, sounding like a frumpy old woman. Oh, that boy!

He buzzed, undulating in space like bubbles of ink on water sinking beneath out of sight and then resurfacing, before he hit me with an incomprehensible feeling that felt tight and cold and grated and was maybe something like ‘annoyed,’ but I wasn’t really sure?

I think I understand what’s going on. Erebus wanted me to come to the House of Night. He either forgot to tell Thanatos that or the god of death didn’t believe him, so I got the lame ‘come if you feel like it or don’t’ instead of the offer of protection it was supposed to be.

My brother thought I was shitting all over the rules of hospitality and came to find out what the fuck, I know Mom taught you better than that.

Sheesh.

Good thing we’re bros or this might have been a little awkward for me.

Or a lot awkward.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said with a weak smile. ‘I didn’t know.”

He’s not like Mom.

He can pretend for a while and communicate, but I don’t think he really understands.

Mom had always been pretty strict about introducing me to any of my ‘cousins.’ No matter how much I complained about humans, the answer was usually no. I thought they’d be just like Hypnos.

‘When you are older,’ she’d say. ‘And less fragile.’

I didn’t learn what demigod really meant until she left us on my seventh birthday. It’s a bit like being the one finally realizing what the word ‘bastard’ meant and why you kept hearing people say it around you. Except worse.

I’m half-human. Erebus is my half-brother. I can die.

He probably doesn’t know what that means.

I don’t know if he’s even capable of learning what that means.

“I didn’t - “ The submarine’s sonar pinged, reminding me I was somewhere I’d really rather not be. “You know, actually - “

It only took a second to echo back and that was all the warning I got.

I was thrown off my feet for the second time tonight as the submarine lurched. I twisted just enough to bring up my arm to save my head and couldn’t help the pained gasp as my arm snapped completely on the valve.

Ow.

Better my arm than my head.

The alarms were ripping through my eyes, lights flickering on and off as water poured in. I watched the walls of the Red October buckle inwards like it had been caught in a vice that was slowly squeezing.

iT HunGErs, my brother mused, idly spinning as his own gravity well as the cold, salt water sloshed around my ankles. The Cold War lights flashed brilliant and orange one last time before they all winked out in a hiss of smoke and white sparks that red shifted as they streamed towards him. IT SlePT, it WOke aNd sTIll DReaMS. thrEAt. WhERe iS it? WHERE IS IT?

“Erebus,” I wheezed, squinting into the dark. “Help me?”

Growing boys need their nutrition, he said in a patronizing, thin and reedy voice. If they want to grow big and strong.

“Uh, that’s nice, but I’m the one on the menu!” The steel of the submarine was groaning, creaking and squealing with the staccato pops of breaking rivets. The hallway was becoming uncomfortably narrow. “Look, get me out of this and I - I’ll owe you one and - “

Erebus shushed me with a slimy feeling that burned my lips and tongue.

Mother gave you too much and too little, he whispered as a small child with an echoing dark undertone lagging just a second behind that slithered into my left ear. (Too much, too little)

Beginning and end.

(Begin, end)

Success and failure both.

(Succeed. Fail)

Do not be afraid.

(Be very afraid.)

He was big.

In the crushed hallway of a Typhoon class Russian submarine with maybe half a foot of room to spare, I stood underneath the stare of a burning gas giant. I could feel him thinking. The weight of his concentration made bubbles in the Dreamlands, feeling a lot like pebbles and grit blown by a strong wind against my skin.

You are a slow learner, little brother, Erebus said, sounding just like he had at the start when he was teasing me with a crooked smile and human face. But THEY are not watching. I will loosen your shackles this time.

I had a flash of memory of my first night at Camp and the Oracle of Delphi screaming into my face.

Hear me, son of the Ruiner! Loosen the shackles and relinquish control!

“Erebus?” I asked, trying to keep myself from trembling as the giant burned.

I’ve got no strings to hold me down, he sang, warbling. To make me fret, to make me frown.

Something touched my forehead.

It felt like my brain flipped upside down and then scattered, leaving a mote of consciousness dangling in an infinite expanse studded with wailing stars.

Next time, my brother hummed. Remember you hold the key.

I felt my Dream construct break apart like an older sibling casually smashing their younger brother’s sand castle and the dark, cold waters rushed in. I choked - trying to remember - I am a soul in the Dreamlands, I don’t need to breathe - but it was cold or was I on fire? It was hard to think, as if my neurons were stretched between those screaming stars in my head, flickers of light traveling back and forth as I opened hundreds of my burning green eyes and my back shivered as it struggled to open against the surge of water pressing in -

Going, Erebus said softly as I opened my mouth - but I don’t have a mouth - and (divinity is soul deep). Going, he repeated, quieter. Going, going, going…

Gone, I thought in a burst of light.

 

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction
​

Everything in the Dreamlands makes sense. Even the things that don’t make sense.

Especially the things that don’t make sense.

An old Prussian king lived in a quaint cottage on the top of a hill, surrounded by a jungle village where a tribe of short, dark people prospered in the shadow of four-eyed sentinel birds. Most of the time, it resembled a log cabin, but sometimes bits of an old palace design snuck in.

The orange tabby cat with a crook in his tail slammed the front door open and watched the home he was invading warp and twist at its presence until finally spitting out the old man coming down from a violent start.

Quite literally.

The Dreamlands were true to their name. A land of Dreams. And nightmares were Dreams too. Guard your fears jealously here, for they are not safe.

This nightmare was a shadowy humanoid figure with a revolver, smoking from the shot. The cat banished it with a flick of its tail, ears pressed forward in alarm when the old man fell against the wall, clutching at his bleeding chest with his good arm.

“Ah shit!” The cat yelped as it darted into the house. “I forgot! I forgot, I forgot, I forgot - “ the cat chanted, half an apology. The house was already beginning to break down, swapping out a domestic reality for a crowded cobbled stone street in an old city where the old man feebly applied pressure on the gushing wound, staring up at his assassin.

“Willie.” The animal snapped. “You are a mortal soul in the Dreamlands!”

The nightmare wavered and the man blinked.

“Come on,” the cat needled, batting at the man with a paw. “You’re not seriously going to die to your own fucking nightmare like a little bitch are - “

A trembling hand reached out and batted at the feline’s ears.

“Thought not.”

“Sam! You - “ ‘Willie’ coughed. At first it was wet and hacking, but he deliberately coughed again, brow furrowed in concentration and this time it was dry. The nightmare with the gun disappeared like a popped soap bubble. The street took longer to disappear. Cobbled stone slowly became a shifting floor that couldn’t decide what it was made out of, stone, wood or tile, but was absolutely certain that it was made out of floor. A tell tale sign of memories blurring together. The shadows of the faceless gawkers melted back into the walls. The flat surfaces gained and lost details, changing from wood to brick to plaster and back with various designs and patterns arriving and leaving, but at least they stayed in one place.

The austere house at the top of the hill was back in roughly the same size and shape as before. It even had the chimney and the appropriate number of windows. For a Dream construct, the home practically broadcasted the owner’s dedication and focus.

The subconscious ruled in the Dreamlands. Every memory was given life here, everything you have experienced, everything you have learned, everything you thought you forgot. From past trauma to something as simple as word association. Keeping your reality focused. Keeping it still took decades of study for Dreamers.

Not that it meant much, to a cat.

Willie was still shite at poker.

Not his fault.

It hadn’t even been invented until he was thirty two and a whole continent away.

“You damn little - “

“Sorry Willie, but help.” The cat demanded.

“Wilhelm,” the man corrected automatically, brushing rust red flakes off his shirt before pausing. “I - help? You came barging into my home - ” He stared from underneath heavy brows snowy with age. “Help with what?”

“Finding Percy real quick.”

“Finding…” The old man trailed off. “What?”

“You know him, black hair, sparkly eyes.” The cat held out a front paw an impressive four inches above the man’s shifting floor. “My midget human, ‘bout this tall?”

“He’s grown since I saw him last, surely. It’s been - “ He began, still a bit slow on the uptake. “Wait - what happened?” He asked, suddenly alarmed. “Is he hurt?”

“Worse,” the cat said gravely and Wilhelm tensed, prepared. “He’s fucking lost.”

The old man stared, before rolling his eyes upwards before closing them. “Of course he is,” he muttered. With a soft grunt, he pushed off his wall, good arm still wrapped protectively about his chest. “Of course he is.”

They didn’t talk about his bad arm.

It had been a divine gift.

No one worshiped the gods in the Dreamlands. Sometimes Dreamers didn’t always understand why not. The shrines had power. The temples were all occupied. At times, you could see the massive forms lumbering across the horizon or crossing the sky. Compared to the Waking world, the gods were obvious and omnipresent. Worship was a natural conclusion.

However, worship here meant getting attention and getting attention was…

Complicated.

They didn’t talk about his bad arm.

Wilhelm wanted to forget it and Sam wanted to let him.

“Where did you last see him?” Wilhelm said, all business.

Sam gave a cat shrug. “I don’t have a clue where to begin, mate.”

“But then - “

“I’m a cat,” Sam stressed. “I have ears. And a nose. And fucking eyes. If I knew, I’d just go get his ass.”

The man sighed. “Then how do you know he’s lost?”

“His apartment wiggled,” Sam replied as if that answered everything.

It didn’t.

Wilhelm pinched the bridge of his nose. “Elaborate.”

“It wiggles, or shivers or whatever when he gets Here,” Sam said tightly, compulsively licking his right paw. “Gets more solid. And it did, but he didn’t show up.” There was a very real, trembling note of concern in its voice. “He wouldn’t leave me behind to go explore someplace. He - he fucking knows better. He wouldn’t.”

“Very well,” Wilhelm said softly and the cat ducked his head, turning away grumpily. “We will find him.”

“We better,” Sam huffed as it brushed past the old man deeper into the house. “So I can kill him for being fucking stupid.”

Wilhelm made a sound, little more than a harsh exhale, but the cat still turned back to look at him, eyeing his twitching beard suspiciously.

“By all means, after you,” Wilhelm said, eyes creased with amusement as he scratched his chin. “I will need my salts from the study and then -”

He was cut off by Sam’s groan.

“Why can’t you just chew on a bit of nip or hop on one foot for your magic like normal people?”

The irony was almost painful.

“Take it or leave it,” he told the animal and it just grumbled.

Gathering the necessary ingredients was the work of a minute or two of collecting vials and carved wooden bowls holding crushed mineral rich sand or spices.

“This works better,” Wilhelm was saying as he set his workbench. The cat perched on top of the stool right beside him, watching attentively. “Because it serves to narrow the focus and allows one to truly hold the spell. Wanting something to happen is not actually enough, this place needs to understand what you are trying to accomplish.”

“That’s…” The cat gave him a sideways look as the last of the saltpeter was poured into the copper cauldron filled with darkened water. “Sounds fucking risky.”

“It is not asking for attention,” Wilhelm rushed to reassure it as he picked up his ladle and made a slow clockwise stir. “The Dreamlands already responds to our very existence, what more can we demand of it? This is simply…focusing on its natural inclinations.”

They both held their breath as an image appeared within the water, shimmering like a silver reflection. As swift as a bird in flight, the reflection in the water blurred over the forest to the pits of black and bubbling and crawling before it hit the wide, blue ocean.

“The fuck?” Sam leaned in until it was nearly dipping its nose into the picture.

“Perhaps he just went for a swim. He always did love the water…” Wilhelm trailed off when the reflection dove into the sea. Down past the dizzying colors and twisted creatures of the shallow waters.

Down into deeper, darker waters with three headed sharks and a sliding ocean shelf made of ash gray sand and small, gasping mouths exhaling yellow bubbles of poison.

Down until the last shreds of light have disappeared. When the window stopped, it did so with such abruptness that at first they couldn't tell it had stopped in a blur of movement and churning water. The window shook, spreading jagged, sharp ripples through the water of his cauldron before they saw them.

“Fuck!” He vaguely heard the cat exclaim. “Turn it off! Turn it off!”

He was staring, frozen until a sharp pain stabbing his wrong hand brought him back to himself. “I - what - “

“Turn it off!”

He upended the table.

The cat leapt away, yowling as dark water black as pitch splashed onto the ground. The liquid hissed, eating through the floor like acid until Wilhelm wrung it out of his Dream.

For a long moment afterwards, neither said a word.

Sam’s right eye burned a brilliant bloody orange as the animal batted at its own face as if to pry the eyeball out of its skull.

It, too, had been a gift.

“Fucking…hate that.” It rolled his neck like a pro-wrestler about to step into the ring and coughed. “‘Kay, I’m getting him.”

“Him?” Wilhelm repeated incredulously. “There was no him.”

He could still see the fighting behemoths in his mind’s eye, tearing into each other like wild beasts over food or territory. One a roiling, seething mass as big as a building; a undulating tail like flowing fabric ending in a needle sharp barb did nothing to soften the antediluvian horror of flailing, coiling tentacles of a sickly shade squirming and shifting in seemingly every direction even as it collapsed into itself like some gelatinous, fleshy slurry rolling down a hill.

Its opponent had the upper body vaguely resembling a dark winged hydra, proudly crested serpentine heads of gnashing teeth beneath the spines and grasping tendrils spilling from its back; it’s lower body spilled from the lower jaw of one of the heads into a great open maw lined by vicious fangs of teeth, inky shadows leaking between them like saliva and where the throat would be, where the tongue should be, where a mouth wasn't was the abyss of space, populated only by a thousand burning green eyes as distant stars.

He hoped their spying hadn’t been detected.

That would be…

Bad.

“Something must have gone wrong with the magic,” he murmured. “They were - they were too close, a kind of gravitational pull on the search…” Wilhelm glanced up, just realizing he had been staring at the floor as he registered that Sam wasn’t saying anything. “There was no him,” he repeated optimistically. “Why would he be fighting a sea monster? And how would he have gotten to the bottom of the ocean anyway?”

The cat blinked slowly. “I think one of them…” It got quiet. “One of them was him.”

Wilhelm stared and his stomach churned. “O - oh?”

“The eyebally one,” the cat said with forced nonchalance. “He had eyes like that before.”

He was not going to think about that.

Scheiße.

He was already thinking about it.

He’d known that boy since he had been too young for any sense of propriety, running around buck naked with his nappies on his head just because he could. His favorite word had been ‘yeah’ as an answer to everything, even when he meant no, and was always putting something in his mouth.

He didn’t want to think about it.

“Are you…sure it’s not some…distant relative of his through his mother or member of her court…” He stubbornly balled his right hand into a fist to stop himself from reflexively reaching for the dead (it’s not dead) flesh of his left. The Dreamlands tried to latch onto that memory with its relentless greed, but oh, he’s far too familiar with that nightmare to afford it even an ounce of power.

They don’t talk about his bad arm.

Sam closed his eyes. After a long moment, it sighed. “Maybe.”

“I will need something more personal, a connection to follow so we can be absolutely sure…”

He didn’t know what they would do if a second attempt led them right back to the horrors beneath the ocean.

Try to keep the cat from getting itself killed, he supposed.

“Yeah,” the cat said, subdued. “Okay. His place is not far, can grab something.”

“Not far?” The old man paused in the act of shuffling on his overcoat, hat in hand. “So the reason you broke down my door as if you ran, half-mad across the entire continent was because…?”

“I fucking swear on me mum…” Sam groaned again. “I forgot you’re a bitch about loud noises, alright?”

“I was shot!” Willie sputtered. “Nearly assassinated! Three times!”

“You got over it!”

“I most certainly did not - “

“And a fucking cold got you in the end!” The cat jeered as it bounded out the door, crooked tail standing proud.

Indeed, the boy’s home wasn’t far at all.

“I did not realize he was so close.” Wilhelm said with an unasked question. The cat had led him, huffing and annoyed, right to the small valley on the edges of the jungle village he himself lived in. It was little more than a pure white box with a red door, its pristine colors surreal against the dirt ground and dry grass that surrounded it.

It was…surprisingly solid for a Dream construct.

“It moves,” Sam said.

“It - “ Wilhelm began and then stopped.

The cat marched right up to the red door and opened it with a flick of its tail. “Mind the gap,” it called back from over its shoulder. “First step can be a doozy.”

“But there aren’t any stairs…?”

Reality blurred with a step.

“Wha - “ The old man gasped as he found himself in a sterile white hallway lined with windows showing a view ten, maybe twenty stories up as if he hadn’t just walked in from the ground. He turned around to see that the wooden red door had disappeared, replaced by a gunmetal gray gate with buttons on one side. There was no way this space would have fit inside the small hut he had stepped into. “How?”

“No idea.” Sam huffed. “Lil fucker’s bullshit.”

A polished wood door led to an expensive looking living space with white leather couches, dark wood and glass furniture and white carpet. There was a fireplace and exotic looking flowering plants in every corner. A wall full of baby pictures was right by the entrance to what looked like the kitchen and behind a glass wall was a balcony with a pool, complete with a yellow rubber duck bobbing up and down in the water. Just like in the hallway, they were inexplicably high up off the ground as if on the top of a very tall building.

“It is so…” Wilhelm gently removed one of the pictures from the wall. It was a memory. A picnic scene with an exhausted, but happy handsome swarthy father beaming at the photographer like his every wish had come true. He had a proud hand on both of his boys, the older one blond and blue eyed with the father’s curls and darker skin flashing a thumbs up and winking and the younger…He was a little younger than when Wilhelm saw him last. Five or six, black hair and shimmering eyes. He wasn’t smiling at the camera, but up at his mother.

The woman was beautiful, pale and dark haired with a gently amused curl to her lips. Most of her was facing her husband and sons, but it was as if she had turned her head at the last second. Her black eyes stared unerringly into his own.

Everything was crisp.

Solid.

“This is impossible,” Wilhelm whispered.

As if spurned by his disbelief, the picture frame faded from his hands only to reappear in its place on the wall.

“Bull. Shit,” Sam repeated. “Don’t think about it. Just find something.”

There was a window that was not like the rest. It did not show the forest canopy with colorful four eyed birds flitting among the leaves. It was a black beach with sand of razor sharp obsidian shards and in the distance a tall black spire rose amid a starry sky that abruptly became dark and empty in the center. The shadow of some winged creature flew in circles around the tower.

He tore his eyes away.

“This…this is not the home of a Dreamer, is it?” Wilhelm said thickly. It was nearly indistinguishable from the Dreamlands itself.

Real.

“I said don’t fucking think about it.”

The old man ran a weary hand down his face.

“Too late,” he said miserably.

“If it helps,” Sam began in a reasonable kind of tone as it laid down in that indolent way of felines. “He’s still a dumbass.”

“That’s not the point, you little - “

The door to the apartment clicked open and they both went still and silent as they watched Percy walk into his home.

The boy was filthy. Covered in streaks of an oily, gray substance, a bird’s nest of black hair on top of his head, a dozen bleeding scratches underneath tears in his clothing and an impressive shiner on his left eye, swollen shut and leaking a molten silver. He was missing a pant leg and both shoes, trekking barefoot onto the wooden floor and leaking saltwater. An almost hysterical bubble of laughter welled up in Wilhelm’s throat at the thought that he looked just like any other ten or eleven year old boy coming back from a scrap in the streets.

So it had been at least five years.

There was relief, that he was still the contrary little shit who had stared up at him in awe, his mouth in a small ‘o’ of surprise before blurting out, ‘You’re old!’

Then there was the shame that he had spent half a decade avoiding a child.

When they had first met, he had been horrified by the thought that children, barely more than infants, could find their way into the Dreamlands by accident. He feared he had found the answer to the inexplicable sudden death of sleeping young children. In his mind, the boy was basically an orphan, fending for himself in a strange, savage land.

But he had a mother.

Wilhelm cleared his throat. “Perseus.”

The boy startled and Wilhelm held his breath as a hundred burning green eyes blinked open on the boy’s form for a moment.

‘He had eyes like that before,’ Sam had said.

Mein Gott.

“Percy,” was the muttered complaint. He blinked his good eye and the dark pupil was blown wide. “Heeeyy, Will! I haven’t seen you in a while, man.”

The prickling running up and down his bad arm (Percy had a mother) tightened the old man’s smile. “Are you well?”

“You got fucked up,” the cat translated.

“Uh, no. I mean, yeah?” Percy stared at them blankly, a small wrinkle of confusion forming on his brow as if he heard what they said, but didn’t understand. “Maybe.”

A shiver went down Wilhelm’s spine and he could see it run down the cat’s back as well. Something was wrong with him. His stomach sank and he fought not to take a few steps back.

“Like Carl?” He murmured deep in his throat, barely more than a breath of shaped air, trusting the sensitive ears of the cat to hear him.

(Carl was dead.

He had to be dead, because the thought that he was still in there - that he came out of the other end of the teleporter not completely hollowed out by what got him - was a terrible one. He didn’t want to go through that again, but Dreams were not wishes. No matter how hard you tried.)

Sam did not reply, but instead rose to his feet, stretching out as cats do. First the front paws, claws out and wickedly gleaming and then the back legs. Perfectly nonchalant, but the fur along the back remained ruffled and slightly raised.

Sam was a blunt creature.

If he didn’t attack now, that meant he didn’t know who, or what, was in Percy’s skin.

The boy was oblivious to the tension, an utterly punch-drunk smile spreading across his face. He’d always had an awkward, but endearing smile, but now the sight of the crowded mouth - more teeth than the human jaw could ever accommodate - curdled milk in Wilhelm’s stomach.

“You should see the other guy.” Percy declared.

They did.

“We did,” Sam said, deliberately casual. Only the line of raised fur along his back gave it away as not being as relaxed as it seemed. “Fucking ugly bloke, what?”

“Noooo,” Percy trailed off. He looked down at his hands and actually wiggled his toes as if he was counting them, like he needed to remind himself how many appendages the human body normally came with. Then he nodded to himself, coming to a decision. “Maybe a little.”

Sam snorted.

Another too-wide smile. “Delicious too.”

The cat’s tail lashed back and forth as Wilhelm stood there like a stump, uncertain what he just heard.

“Why.” The cat asked flatly. “Are you always putting shit in your fucking mouth.”

The boy had the audacity to look smug.

“‘I’m not a baby anymore, Sam’,” the cat mocked in a high pitched voice. “‘I don’t bite anymore, Sam. I’m not teething anymore, Sam.’ Fucking liar.”

“Oh, come on, Sam, it was - just - I mean basically calamari…” He tried to explain -

But the animal wasn’t having it. “Didn’t you eat a fucking zombie a week or something ago.”

What?

Percy sputtered.

Can they talk about the zombie thing?

“You - “ One could see the boy blindly cast about for an argument and it was clear having to think was paining him. “You - uh, you can’t tell me what to do!”

“The fuck I can’t!” Sam hissed. “Fuck you - who was it that told me not to bite -“

The boy’s head reared back in mock outrage, glee shining in his one good eye. “Because you never know where they’ve been!”

Wilhelm palmed his face.

That had to be Percy.

The cat went blank and still as a statue for a moment. “Did he just - ?” Not even waiting for Wilhelm to respond, it turned back on the boy, spitting. “You fucking hypocrite - “

“Sam, Sam it’s okay,” Percy attempted to sooth his cat with an odd, lopsided grin. Just an amused curl of one side of his mouth. “It’s okay - you cat,” he pointed with a trembling finger. “Me half-god.” He blinked slowly. “Half. Haaaalf. Not one-eighth. Not demi but…”

His nose wrinkled as he swayed in place. His bad eye opened a sliver and whatever rested within that socket whispered.

…Maybe it wasn’t Percy.

“Maybe demi but different demi.” The boy looked at them expectantly. “You know?”

“Uh.” Sam leaned away from him, wary again as a drop of blood from a star dripped down the boy’s face. “I don’t - I have no idea what the fuck -”

“My mom. Mom is -” Percy mimed his head exploding, complete with a bassy, reverberating whoosh and expanding smoke effects from his hands. Then he flapped his arms, desperate to explain whatever scattered thoughts were flitting back and forth in his head. “I can’t - I won’t die until I do!”

The cat stared, speechless.

“That…is rather how it works for most of us,” Wilhelm pointed out gently, for lack of anything better to say.

Sam only tilted its head in Wilhelm’s direction, unwilling to take its eyes off whatever was masquerading as the boy they knew. The casual gesture was punctuated by the agitated lashing of the cat’s tail back and forth.

“Death is a process. It has to happen, mortality itself is a collection of factors that -”

“People die when killed,” Sam cut in.

Wilhelm sighed. “Yes. Fine.”

Now it was Percy’s turn to stare at them, completely and utterly stumped. His mouth flapped open and closed, searching for the words, but Wilhelm could almost see the thoughts dribbling out of his ears until the boy gave up with a whiny,

“Oh.”

Sam made a soft yowling sound. “Hoooow’s about we have ourselves a bit of a lay down, hmm? Just a small kip.”

Percy frowned. “I’m already sleeping.”

“You’re shaking,” the cat replied flatly.

The boy blinked and looked down at himself again.

He was. Tremors were running up and down his slim frame like beetles burrowing into a carcass.

“I can just - “

“Sit. The Fuck. Down.”

For a moment, Percy was about to argue. Wilhelm could see it in the stubborn jut of his chin, but then he twitched like a puppet jerked on its string, swayed again, then plopped down where he stood with a loud put upon sigh.

“Happy?” He grumbled as he sprawled across the wooden floor.

“Ecstatic.” Wilhelm drawled in response before the cat bit the boy’s nose off. He yelped when the apartment shifted around them, the foyer stretching to place the front door far away from them until they were deposited in the middle of the living room. There were no distortions or hints of instability.

The sheer ease of it all!

He snuck a glance at the boy stretching out on the floor, leaving smudges of red blood too bright and shining to be real on white carpet.

“My brain is floating out of my skull,” Percy said suddenly, very seriously, staring up at the ceiling. “Are my ears still backwards? I think Erebus turned them backwards. And my asshole ran away.”

“Fucking tragic, that is,” Sam replied, also very serious.

They were not actually talking about his literal…?

“Does that make me constipated?”

They were.

“Only if you need to shit.”

“No. But I can’t poop without one, so I better not.” The boy’s brows furrowed. “I was hungry, but I lost - I’m losing my stomach, Sam.”

“Better hold on to your hat then.”

“Okay,” Percy said, as if that made any sense at all. He wasn’t even wearing - a black bowler hat appeared on the boy’s head and Wilhelm about swallowed his tongue. “My brother said I need to eat.”

The cat blinked. “Aren’t your siblings jackasses?”

‘Siblings?’ Wilhelm mouthed, horrified.

He thought of the smiling blond boy from the photo-memory. There were more like him?

Percy huffed. “Only - only the triplets. Darkness is cool. He helped and then - and then there were some looking,” he said, skipping train tracks. “Other gods. From - around here, I think? And they thought I was cool. And I was. Cool. I won. I cheated, with a volcano,” He whispered loudly, as if imparting a great secret. “It woke up,” and in the Dreamlands, that could very well be completely literal, “but I didn’t die, so it was fine. Not dying was important. And I think I got asked out on a date.”

By what?

Percy gingerly rolled onto his side, giving them a heavy, one eyed look as if to ask them something very important. “It’s not my fault mom’s kids are good looking, right?”

“No,” the old man said, completely bewildered.

“Right. Okay.” He rolled onto his stomach and began to trace the swirling pale patterns in the rug. His hat was tipped rakishly, complete with a blood red feather sticking out of it. “I knew that. I’m too young for a girlfriend anyway.”

He was …not going to touch that with a ten foot pole.

“We will get you a snack,” Wilhelm offered, trying to escape.

“I could eat,” Percy admitted. “Yeah, thanks.” He lifted his head, throwing them a bright, hopeful smile. “Mom didn’t really mean it, you know? She can’t help it sometimes, but she was sorry!”

Wilhelm allowed himself to reach across to touch his bad arm. “I know.”

“‘Kay.” He laid his head down again and his hat slid off. “We can be friends again, right?”

Wilhelm smiled weakly and shuffled the cat back into the next room when Percy’s attention shifted to his hand as if it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. And perhaps it was. It was shifting under the attention, fingers merging together, twisting, becoming spindly, becoming smoke before hardening into a dark spine before relaxing back into a human boy’s hand.

The heavy wooden door closed behind them with a satisfying click and he let out a sigh. “Verdict?”

“The stupid burns.”

“Sam,” Wilhelm scolded. “You know what I mean. Is he…” He shrugged his good shoulder in Percy’s general direction and whispered out the corner of his mouth, trusting those cat ears to pick it up. “Well?”

“Tripping premium top fucking balls,” the cat said. “But yeah, it’s him.”

He was assuming by the context that ‘tripping balls’ was another way of saying ‘acting drugged.’ He wasn’t going to ask if he was correct. He’s always been a little afraid of asking the cat what it was even saying since he learned that ‘clap’ was no longer just a word for smacking your hands together in appreciation.

If it was Percy, and he was under the effect of some kind of hallucinogenic then…

Then…

He was dismayed by how little that actually solved.

Sam tilted its head, wiggling its right ear. “Not convinced he’s alone in there. He’s too fucking…”

It trailed off, searching for the words.

“Demigod,” the old man ventured. “What do we do then?”

“Dunno,” Sam said unhelpfully. Its tail lashed back and forth quickly. “If it were anyone else, I’d tell them to never put a fucking mushroom in their mouth ever again, but he’s always mouthing shit and nothing ever fucking happens sooooo…” Sam glanced back at the door thoughtfully. And then shrugged. “Dunno.”

“And when he wakes up from this Dream…?”

“He’s a mortal soul in the Dreamlands, like you.” Sam muttered. “You never wake up, you just leave for a bit.”

“I see,” Wilhelm hummed.

It was true. You never do wake from the Dreamlands.

He sighed as he had no ideas making themselves known either. “Well, I did say I would get him something to eat…”

The cat grumbled, turning towards the open doorway leading to what looked like the kitchen. “Right. Do something about the munchies…brat going to eat me out of house and home.”

“Is this not his house and home?” Wilhelm asked mildly.

Sam shot him a dirty look.

And then it froze right outside the kitchen, its tail shot straight up, crook and all. “Fuck.”

“Now what?” Wilhelm grumbled as he stepped past the animal…and stopped dead right at the door. “...what?”

The kitchen was a disaster.

There were cartoons and plastic bags holding previously frozen food that had been allowed to drip all over the counter top for hours, if not days. Streaks of multicolored brown goop had congealed on the white cupboard doors, right next to nauseatingly sweet, artificially fruity smelling puddles and bloody water from thawed meat pooled on the tiled floor.

The old man moved automatically. Most of it was driven by reflexive disgust at the mess, but he would be lying if he denied a sliver of concern over a black haired boy with a thousand eyes seeing all his spoiled ice cream.

“What even were you doing?” Wilhelm hissed, picking up the most intact packages - brightly colored plastic tubes with pictures of fruit on them - and rushed to the ice box.

“Shit, I had to do something with him - “

Him?

He opened the ice box.

He closed the ice box.

Wilhelm fell against the wall beside it and slowly slid down it, blueberry, raspberry and watermelon Pops!cle bags falling to the floor alongside him.

“There are body parts in the freezer,” he said dully.

“Not my fault!” Sam protested immediately and for a moment, he foolishly dared to hope the cat had a reasonable explanation. “He fucking came like that!”

“Explain,” he demanded.

The whole story didn’t make any more sense.

“...he’s got power, sure, but pop him in the noggin and his head fucking flies off. Ain’t nothing fucking happening cut up like he is.”

“Kronos,” Wilhelm repeated in a dead voice. He was no academic in life, but he had been born into the last days of the Holy Roman Empire. There was no escaping that history. “Percy rescued the Titan Lord from the Pit and now he’s on ice. Here!”

The cat blinked. “I just said that - ”

Wilhelm reached out and swiped at the cat’s ears, shutting it up. His head was beginning to spin unpleasantly (the pagan gods of the Waking world were real). “Is he conscious?”

The cat hesitated. “...no?”

He leaned away from the unassuming humming appliance. “You do not know!?”

“He can’t do anything!”

“Anything can happen in a Dream!”

They glared at each other.

Sam was the first to look away. “I could take him. If he fucked around.”

He could take - ignoring the sheer arrogance of that statement, because Kronos was an immortal god and Sam was an orange tom cat: “This is Percy’s home.”

Sam spit at him, chops curled back into a savage snarl. “You don’t get to bitch about his safety anymore. You fucking left, remember?”

His bad arm prickled uncomfortably as the shame came flooding back.

“You are right, of course,” Wilhelm mumbled contritely.

“Damn straight.” Sam sat proudly, ears bent back against his head. “Which is why he’ll be staying with you.”

“What!” The old man sputtered. “Absolutely not!”

“He’ll be away from Percy.”

“He’s a pagan god.”

“...Okay,” Sam said slowly, clearly not understanding the problem. “But, in pieces. He can’t do anything you can’t handle, seriously.”

“You don’t know that!” Wilhelm snapped. “He’s a god!” His breath was coming fast, too fast. He could feel the weight, foreign and cold, hanging off him as a gangrenous limb fit only to be amputated. He didn’t look at his bad arm, he never looked at it if he could help it, because it would look back.

His bad arm was a divine gift.

As much as a replacement for what you took could be a gift.

No one worshiped the gods in the Dreamlands.

Percy, painfully young and absolutely horrified, hadn’t realized that insisting - ‘it was an accident! She didn’t mean it! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’

(People died.

He almost died and he did not know what would come after, this time)

-only made it worse.

“You don’t know that,” he repeated, softer.

“He was human once,” Sam nearly whispered.

His breath caught.

His curiosity burned. Humans could ascend?

Truly?

There was a long moment of silence.

“I will consider it,” Wilhelm said stiffly as he gathered up the popsicles back onto the counter and then he rooted around in the refrigerating unit. “Clean up your mess,” he ordered. “I can handle a few sandwiches.”

He almost couldn’t handle a few sandwiches.

Nothing looked the way it should have. The bread was already sliced right out of the clear, crinkly package. As was the bacon, looking almost like a different cut of meat entirely, and he had to be walked through using the ‘microwave’ by the cat, because the stove had a lot more knobs than he was comfortable with.

The future was not convenient. It was confusing.

At least the lettuce head was familiar, as was the tomato, albeit far larger than he was used to.

The knives were tucked away. The wood block almost shoved into the corner on the far end of the counter, as if they were trying to hide away. He reached for the closest handle.

Something took hold of him.

‘Is that what you think?’ A man hissed into his ear. ‘Is that what you fucking think!? Come ‘ere!’

Blood splashed onto the counter as the back of his hand opened.

‘Look! Look at it! It’s not silver! It’s not fucking gold! It’s red! Like MINE!’ The man was yelling through tears. The stink of alcohol was almost a physical slap to the face. ‘Tell me again what Apollo said, you little shit. You bleed red! She left BOTH of us!’

He felt so very, very small.

A grain of sand on an infinite beach, battered by the waves. Lost and drowning.

‘We’re. Mortal!’

Then it was gone and the kitchen knives, quietly tucked away in the corner, were silent.

“Willie?”

The old Prussian king grabbed one of the ‘paper towels’ from the counter and cleaned up the red blood staining the white surface.

“I am well,” he answered quietly.

The cat eyed him dubiously. “What the fuck was that?”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I do not know.”

Another memory, like the picture? A nightmare? Both or something in between?

He wanted to ask, but whatever it was, it felt like an old, private shame.

He was familiar enough with those.

They finished making the sandwiches.

Percy was waiting, more or less patiently, in the living room. A small, spinning galaxy was dancing between his fingers as he slouched on the white leather couch before a long glass table. No shoes. A dirty white button up shirt rolled up at the sleeves. A streak of molten tears was still leaking from his swollen eye.

Every inch a bored, young godling resting after a fight.

“BLTs?” Percy asked. “Nice.”

“There’s a Titan Lord in your ice box.” Wilhelm tattled.

Sam glared at him.

“Uh.” The boy blinked slowly, hand hovering over a sandwich as his good eye traveled over to the cat. “Zagreus? You didn’t throw him back - “ He paused. His face scrunched up. “Throwing someone into the Pit sounds like a war crime, Geneva cares about that. So we shouldn’t, because it's the 21st century, baby.”

…What?

“High as fuck,” Sam reminded him as a low hiss.

“Do you care about him being in your ice box?” Wilhelm stubbornly pushed on.

“My ice cream is in there,” Percy responded and out of the corner of his eye, Wilhelm saw Sam flinch in the middle of stealing a piece of bacon. “But not really? He’s not my problem and he doesn’t want to be.” Percy smiled guilelessly. “He’s smart like that.”

Wilhelm had absolutely no idea what to say.

He was saved from having to say anything by a loud, lingering honk. Percy’s head whipped around.

“What was that?”

“The signal horn,” Wilhelm supplied. “There is something of a market festival in the village today.”

“We’re near people?” The boy said abruptly. He stuffed the remainder of his sandwich into his mouth and stood up. “I wanna see, let’s go!”

Sam bounded right at his heels.

If it pressed a little too long against his shins, a little too eager to keep its friend within its sights, no one said a word.

Wilhelm watched as Sam dug this cute little woven vest from the bottom shelf of the closet by the front door, shimmying into it. It had hooks on the side where Percy painstakingly perched leather pockets. Whoever made it for the animal had a sense of humor. It was decorated with a small orange cat chasing a red bird.

“ - I ain’t buying you shit,” the cat was complaining as Percy tried and failed to make himself presentable. The most he could do was get some shoes on. “Get your own fucking money.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“Do you remember N’ath?”

“Um.”

“Because I remember fucking N’ath, you cheap bastard.”

“Oy, my parents are married!” Percy barked a laugh. “Luke called me a koala once.”

“Yes,” it said immediately. “What the fuck’s a koala?”

“Sam. Sam! Sam,” Percy said. “I love you.”

The cat recoiled. “You really are fucking flying, mate.”

Eventually, they remembered him and both turned to regard the old man still sitting, nonplused on the sofa.

“Willie. Coming?”

“I have seen more than my fair share of market days,” he declined, patting his knee. “Let me rest my legs a little longer.”

Percy’s smile softened. “Sure. Stay as long as you like.”

And he did.

He went out on the balcony to smoke a bit of his favorite pipe, the earthy, bitter taste calming as he contemplated. The yellow duck floating in the pool was free of judgment and he watched it make laps in still water.

He went back inside and glanced over the wall of pictures.

They were all of a very young Percy, from a chubby cheeked baby to a six year birthday party. The blond boy was present only in the last few rows of memories. Sometimes he looked as young as ten, perhaps twelve years old and in others an older teenager or young man with the same features appeared.

Not mortal, then.

Could this be Apollo?

His eyes searched for the picnic photo-memory and it took him longer than it should have to find it.

Because it had changed.

The mother was now returning Percy’s smile, a possessive, gentle hand trailing through his black hair, ignoring the photographer entirely.

It had changed.

Goosebumps broke out all over his skin and he hurried away.

The kitchen was just as he left it. After a moment of thought, he retrieved the plate of crumbs and put it in the sink. He busied himself cleaning up the remains of the mess, little stains left behind by the cat’s half-assed effort. The knives were still in their dark corner. An echo of their cry (we’re mortal!) wailed in his ears. But eventually…

Eventually.

He opened the ice box.

“Lord - “ What had Percy called him? He was unfamiliar with it, but he knew the power Names held. “Zagreus.”

Something shifted.

He could feel it as the temperature dropped and the shadows lengthened.

The Titan of eld stirred.

“I have questions,” he continued.

The deep voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once.

“Speak.”

 

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction
​

I laughed at Cliff for his ‘superhero’ Dreams.

We’re besties, that means we’re allowed to be assholes to each other sometimes.

Anyway, some random Dream spirit would manage to squirm through his wards and give him the most obvious, ridiculous Dreams. Ones where he was on top of the world, being awesome and rich and famous and all that jazz. I’ve heard everything from the Mist being gone and he was an actual dog-headed superhero to him being voted to Chief Lector of the House of Life, the head honcho of all the Egyptian magicians.

Yeah, right.

Then his alarm would go off and he’d remember that, actually, everything sucks! He had chores to rush, his half-finished homework to bullshit and if he didn’t get up right now, he was going to be late for the school bus.

I didn’t understand how he could let himself get suckered that badly. His disappointed grumbling was hilarious. Dreams were Dreams for a reason. What was the point of wishing they were real?

So.

I’m an idiot.

And a hypocrite!

I was the one who asked Morpheus to let me see my parents in a Dream when the Quest got to me. I hadn’t known Mom’d actually be there when I asked. I was prepared to settle for a shade.

And I would have given anything for last night’s Dream to be real.

I felt like I could take on the entire world, and every god on it at the same time. I had my cat buddy ready to kick ass with me, reconnected with an old friend and was allowed to forget about my Quest. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t afraid, because there was nothing to be afraid of. My big brother Darkness was there! I could feel his awareness of me the entire time, like I was worth something! I wasn’t small and weak anymore! Mom had nothing to be ashamed of, because I was like him! Like all of them! I was -

I

I was

And then I woke up feeling like absolute, utter dogshit.

That had been tap danced on by someone in razor sharp stiletto heels.

Before they wiped me off on a wet curbside and threw me into a burning dumpster.

“Blarghable!”

It was worse than just waking up and remembering that Luke nearly died yesterday, my asshole rabbit party member was at fault for being her asshole self and that we had ten days to find where Ares’ stashed the Master Bolt.

Way worse.

Because it was all that and I was fucking sick!

Every inch of me hurt with this tight, dry pain making me feel strangely bloated, like if I moved too much, I would tear out of my paper thin skin. I had a stuffy nose and a killer headache. I felt like I had a concussion. The world was tilting back and forth like I had water in my ears, my clothes were sticking to me with sweat because I needed out of this sauna that was my immune system and my stomach…

“Urghhuah!”

My stomach hated the ever living shit out of me.

I was hanging halfway off the bed, trying not to vomit all over my sheets and getting most of it on the hardwood floor and the yoga mat. And let me tell you, Rhea’s lasagna and her chocolate chip cookies did not taste the same coming back up.

It also squirmed in my mouth.

I was blaming the lasagna.

“Guurgghah!”

Or maybe the cookies.

I also wouldn’t put this past Alecto’s cooking skills.

Mom’s given me some questionable shit to eat before, sure. And maybe I had a habit of trying out stuff like those honey ants and fried greasy three-headed snake sticks I got Sam to buy for me, but nothing I ate in the Dreamlands counted!

None of it could move after being swallowed!

I want a refund!

I threw up again.

I don’t know how long I spent upchucking, but the tank ran on empty pretty quick. Nothing but scorching bile and wriggling chunks I was starting to think were pieces of my intestines. I would not be surprised if I was actually spitting up my entire digestive system. The way my stomach ached and burned, twisting itself even tighter into knots, sending a sick flush right through my skull was not filling me with confidence.

I laid there, half off the bed, head hanging down hearing blood rush in my ears as I panted, coughing. The yoga mat was covered in what Sam would call a dog’s breakfast. A thick slurry the color of kibble filled with mushy chunks and writhing bits of a gelatinous, sickly pale meat that I vaguely remembered eating.

At the bottom of an ocean.

I don’t -

I don’t know how that’s a thing.

Damocles was the only thing capable of following me out of the Dreamlands. Because Mom made sure it could. Even now, it hung from my neck back in its place of honor as a silver pendant.

Nothing I eat in the Dreamlands counts.

This can’t -

It’s got to be Rhea’s chocolate chip cookies. They were too good.

That’s how you know they’re evil.

The guest room door opened soundlessly as the star-spawn baker from hell poked her head in.

“Are you - “ she started. I tilted my head just enough to see her out of the corner of my eye as I stared at the steaming pile of vomit. Or maybe it was smoking? I think the yoga mat was melting. We both watched as one of the flailing pieces, like a demented severed limb flopped its way under the bed.

I blinked slowly.

Um.

Okay.

Rhea pinched the bridge of her nose for a second.

“Why?” She asked me.

I wanted to answer that.

But I -

I got nothing.

I can’t think straight and I have no clue.

“Right. I’ll just - “ Zeus’ mom was honestly in a tie dyed belly shirt and blue sweatpants as she waved a hand in my general direction. I felt something in the world change as the smell of bile disappeared.

I could do that, I thought fuzzily.

I had done it.

“You’re - I heard that? I think your brain is leaking,” Rhea said.

It was just like when I fixed the tears in my couch because Sam hated scratching posts and authority. A simple exertion of will. I painfully flopped back onto my bed and feebly tried to kick my sheets off. My legs were noodles, so I didn’t get very far. Everything I was wearing was sticking to me.

I had the thought.

Why don’t I just do it right now?

Rhea barked. “Don’t - !”

My stomach tore.

It felt like Zeus tagged me with a lightning bolt to the belly button. Pain seared right through the center of my navel to my spine, then crawled up it. Everything locked up. My limbs. My thoughts. My blood.

I couldn’t even scream.

Rhea caught me as I fell off the bed.

The jolt of halted movement was all it took.

I threw up all over Apollo’s grandmother.

Not my best moment.

Not gonna lie.

She stiffened and blew a harsh breath out her nose.

“...yup. Just like your sister,” she said blandly before willing the mess off us.

I didn’t even have the energy to cringe.

On a scale of one to ten, with one being ‘miserable’ and ten being ‘doing great’ I was at ‘demigod shaped turd bucket.’ So maybe a negative five. Aftershocks were making my fingers curl into twitching claws. I hurt all over. My fever was a billion degrees. I doubted I would be able to keep down water right now.

Am I dying? I thought slowly, draped all over Rhea.

Maybe?

Was my very first illness actually going to take me out?

Lame.

I tried to straighten, but from the way her hands hovered, purposeless around my shoulders, I wasn’t doing a good job. I knew I was swaying in place, taking deep breaths to try to scrounge up some strength.

I opened my mouth to apologize for throwing up on her -

And then pressed my lips together when my stomach launched a surprise attack, sending a rush of burning bile to the back of my throat. Rhea’s expression scrunched up in sympathy as she pressed a cool hand against my burning forehead. It took the edge off of the nausea, letting me swallow it back down.

“Easy, now,” Rhea said softly as that smokeless fire swirled around the hand on my head. “Don’t push yourself.”

I leaned into that hand.

I knew she was trying to help me.

I knew that.

I still felt the heady rush of a greedy, molten tug in my gut as my stomach painfully snapped at her, like a starving dog offered a treat going for the whole bag instead.

She gently clapped back.

I say gently (and it had to be real gentle) because if the Matriarch of Swarms actually decided to metaphysically haul off and punch me in the gut? I’m not sure there would be enough of my soul left to complain to Mom about it.

Even if it definitely felt like she just hauled off and punched me in the gut.

My stomach cratered.

I bowled over as air rushed out of me in a harsh cough that was followed by a torrent of searing hot liquid iron. My hand flew to my mouth, because I didn’t want to throw up on her again, but I couldn’t hold it back.

I coughed again. Bright red blood dribbled through my fingers.

Oh.

Fuck.

I really am dying.

“Ah,” Rhea said after a moment.

Then she picked me up.

Pain suddenly lanced down my back over my shoulder blades. My stomach was stitched shut into a cold ball of ice. My head felt like it had just spun right off my neck and some part of me, hurt and scared, lashed out like a dumbass.

I felt like I had just snapped a tripwire holding a ton of concrete blocks over my head.

The hairs on the back of my neck quivered as Rhea slowly raised an eyebrow at me. The hum of a thousand gossamer wings buzzed in the back of my head as I felt a rumble travel my bones, like something massive had just shifted right underneath my feet. The floors and walls of the unassuming light blue bungalow home actually buckled with just the threat of Rhea paying attention to me.

Attention I did not want!

At all.

I went limp like a puppy held up by the scruff.

“That’s what I thought,” the former Queen of the Gods snorted. “You’re adorable.”

I was never going to get any respect on this Quest.

Her home shifted around us as she took a step, transporting us from the guest room to the living room. The living room looked a bit better from earlier with my and Apollo’s help. It was more blank, with the piles of newspapers and photo albums and collections of fine china mostly packed away into their cardboard boxes. The sewing table with the ruler attached to it and folded bolts of cloth and sewing machine was still there and so was the randomly placed ratty sofa, looking as if someone had just dropped a piece of doll house furniture into the room. Like every room in her house, there were lions. A pair was lounging on some flat boxes before a recliner chair.

Rhea slammed the door shut behind her with her foot.

Someone squawked in surprise.

“Wha - oh.” That someone sounded a lot like Artemis. But, uh, she’s currently a rabbit so it can’t be her. I inclined my head, trying to take a look. “Is - what happened to him?”

“Domain sick,” Rhea answered absently as she bumped one of her curious lions away with her hip. “Probably.”

What?

Was that bad or do I just have a god cold?

I was set down into the blissfully cool reclining chair. Was this real leather? I burrowed into it as much as I could. Rhea tossed a feather-light sky blue duvet decorated with rainbows over me. My arm was immediately nudged by an ice-cold cat nose. Just flopping my hand on top of the fluff so I could pet the lion laying his head on my armrest was exhausting.

‘Who’s a good boy?’ I mouthed at the lion, because my stomach was threatening to rebel if I put any more effort into it. He gave me that deadpan look cats do so well, but clearly the scritches were worth more than his pride.

Rhea flapped her hands in my direction, sending the bangles around her wrists clicking. “A real downer, but he can tough it out, I think.”

“What?” The Artemis-sound-alike said blankly.

I felt like asking that too.

But I was just too strung out.

Miserable.

Thinking was hard.

The second lion shuffled a bit closer. A female, since she didn’t have a mane, and there was a small auburn rabbit perched on her head as both of them stared at me.

I blinked, hard.

Nope.

Rabbit is still there.

Wow.

My fever must be bad.

The lioness huffed and actually rolled its eyes at me.

Rhea was already turning away, folding my Celtic shirt into a neat square with my jeans slung over her shoulder. I looked down at myself and weakly picked at the black silk chiton she replaced my clothes with. The blood on my hands was gone too.

I hadn’t even felt her do it.

Come to think of it, I hadn’t felt Nemesis swipe our train tickets either.

Mom graduated me from my Sensitivity lessons with a D- and just didn’t want to tell me I sucked, apparently.

“What?” the rabbit said again and I could feel my eyes try to pop out of my head. The rabbit’s nose was twitching, and it’s mouth was moving a little, but it was more like the voice was being thrown into my ears rather than actually coming from it.

“Domain sickness,” Rhea repeated, turning to the animals with raised eyebrows. She tossed my clothes into the air where they vanished. “You…do know what that is - “

“I know what it is!” The bunny snapped. “Why - he is mortal. That is not possible - “

“Ha!” It was Rhea’s turn to cut the bunny off with a harsh bark of laughter. Her compound eyes shimmered blood red for a second, before settling back into emerald green. “And who are you,” the Matriarch of Swarms asked slowly. There was ice in her voice and something more than a little cruel. “Has Selene’s chariot gone to your head, that you would tell me what is and is not possible, child?”

The rabbit shrunk back.

Selene’s chariot?

“Artemis?” I rasped in disbelief.

I saw that same disbelief mirrored in the rabbit’s eyes as her head snapped towards me.

She was missing my jacket.

Maybe it was in the laundry. Blood and seawater are hell on fabrics.

“How - ?” She swung back to Rhea. “Are you - ?”

“No,” Rhea hummed as she paced along the walls of the room, trailing symbols glowing with her smokeless fire along the paisley wallpaper. I could almost read them, like I had learned the language a long time ago and if I just thought about it for a few more minutes, it would all come rushing back. It’s got to be some form of Greek, right?

“It seems he doesn’t need help to speak, unlike you,” she said, stepping over some of the boxes and around the easel in the corner. “Either he received leave or he is strong enough to resist.”

What?

I searched the room with aching eyes until I found the window. My breath caught as my stomach twisted uncomfortably. Underneath the bamboo blinds and behind the glass was an abyss. I couldn’t see even an inch beyond the walls of the house.

It was still Night.

I wanted to believe I’d only been Dreaming for an hour. Time is weird in the Dreamlands, right? A thousand years could pass in five minutes if you were unlucky. Wilhelm loses track all the time.

But I knew better.

“Strong enough - of course,” the rabbit spat, her disbelief turned to anger. “Even now Fate mocks me. A boy I refused and her own personal perversion of divinity, her spawn.”

My head pounded. “I’m not - “

“Save your lies for someone who would believe it!” Artemis snarled. Her ears were pinned back against her head, auburn fur bristling. “You think I did not notice how easily you shed your humanity when in danger?” But I - “Stop pretending! I do not require your pity!” The bunny was nearly hyperventilating. “What did you want from - “

The lioness tossed the rabbit off her head.

I bit my tongue as Artemis hit the beige carpet hard, rolling once before her former perch placed a heavy paw on her back.

I don’t understand.

Was this about - about what I said on the beach?

“Ata…“ the bunny squeaked, betrayed.

“Atalanta,” Rhea said softly as she traced the windowsill with a burning finger. “Take her back to her room, if you would. And keep her there, until she decides to behave.” The lioness obediently dropped its head, picking up the small woodland creature up within its massive jaws.

Artemis went very, very still between those teeth.

I don’t blame her.

I turned to my lion buddy. If that was Atalanta, then was this one her dumbass boyfriend? Apollo said there was an IQ threshold and anyone that went out of their way to piss off a god just to get their rocks off fell far below it.

Can’t argue with that.

I tilted my head questioningly.

He chuffed under my hand and then licked the leather arm rest. I gave him a narrow eyed look back.

Maybe not.

“But - “ Artemis protested weakly.

Rhea turned away from her designs to regard the room with a cool look. She retraced her steps back around the room as the lioness padded to the door, rabbit in mouth.

“I - Grandmother, why - “ The rabbit wiggled a little, prompting the lioness to pause.

“You disappoint me,” was the simple reply. Rhea checked her work, completely dismissive. This wasn’t Apollo’s groovy grandmother speaking. This was the Queen. “I will not tell you how to treat your nephew, the son of Hermes,” the boy Artemis said she refused. Luke. What did that mean? When did that even happen? “But this one is my cousin. You forget yourself.”

That sparked a warm, fuzzy feeling in my chest that had nothing to do with my fever.

My cousins were awesome.

“It’s okay,” I croaked at Rhea. “I’m not offended.”

In return, she tilted her head in my direction, but didn’t spare Artemis a look. “But I am.”

Ouch.

The rabbit blanched as the lioness trotted out of the room and the silence was allowed to hang for a moment.

I shifted in my recliner.

That had -

That had probably been about what I said on the beach.

‘If he dies, you die.’

Now that I didn’t have Luke’s blood on me, I felt a little ashamed about threatening Artemis like that.

Because I knew Dad would be.

I guess I’m more like my mother than I thought.

“I had - “ I began, trying to explain what the problem was. More for Rhea’s sake than Artemis’. “On the beach, I - “

“I heard,” Zeus’ mother murmured. “As was your right.”

“What?” I blurted out and regretted it as my head spiked with pain. My stomach roiled. This was her granddaughter we were talking about, an Olympian. “But I’m just - “ The Queen of the Titans looked at me. The words ‘a demigod’ died in my mouth. I looked down at my hands again, half-expecting them to be painted red with my blood. “It was too far.”

“Was it?” Rhea gently shooed my lion buddy away as she took a seat on the couch beside me. She reached for the table that hadn’t been there a second ago to pick up a glass of water that also hadn’t been there earlier. She passed it to me with a quiet, “Slowly.”

I took a cold sip. It hurt going down.

“You have no idea what her punishment means, do you?” She asked.

“She’s mortal,” I said.

And a rabbit.

Maybe there was something more to it than Mom’s terrible sense of humor?

Rhea blew out a breath like she was banishing the Titan Queen from the room. “Rabbits.” She paused. My heart sank. “Rabbits are a species that do not need disease or starvation to turn to cannibalism.”

She said it so easily.

Like it was an interesting factoid she read about in a magazine one day and not something she had personal history with.

My stomach twisted. I put the cup down.

Rhea studied me for a moment. “A mother rabbit when frightened, overwhelmed and… sometimes for no reason at all, will kill and eat her newly born young.”

Artemis was the goddess of Childbirth.

All of her Names regarding children…

I felt like someone had just jabbed me in the throat. I could almost see Luke’s wry grin and equally wry, ‘What symbolism! Apropos, isn’t it?’

If anyone could pass judgment on a god for - for dereliction of duty…

It would be Fate.

“Her transformation is an open invitation,” Rhea continued, running a hand through her dark hair. “Fate’s a bit unglued, this is the culprit, real ‘will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest’ energy, except they might actually be rewarded for it.”

Like a pirate’s black spot complete with a bounty.

A mark for death.

I wasn’t stupid all the time.

My sisters, the Fates, gave Artemis that Domain just like they gave Apollo his Prophecy. They should have stepped in sooner. The Domains they grant are their responsibility. And if they slack off, our mother was the Supreme Court.

Which usually meant they could do whatever they wanted.

This was thousands of years in the making, and would have continued for thousands more because Mom didn’t really care. I knew she would have continued not giving a shit until I was involved. The Quest could have chosen any god. Athena would have worked, she had a War Domain. Apollo’s Archery might be able to swing something. Going on a Quest with Heracles or Nike would have been awesome.

Hindsight let me see the trap. I was twelve. Mom gave Artemis just enough rope to hang herself.

But Artemis didn’t know that.

It was her final offense.

And Mom was not a forgive and forget kind of person.

This is why Nemesis and Khione did what they did. The Quest doesn’t matter. Even if we succeeded, Mom had no intention of letting Artemis make it out alive. Ever. The only thing I could use to buy her life was my boon.

And I gave that to Luke so he could help me help her survive.

No wonder she didn’t answer any of my pleas.

This is what fighting Fate feels like.

Like shit.

“Does she know?” I whispered.

“The former goddess of the Forest and all the wildlife within it, rabbits included,” Rhea reminded me gently. There was that soft, pitying look again. “Fate was not subtle, not this time.”

Yeah.

She knows.

I was going to ask if Zeus knew, but honestly, who cares if he knew the difference between ‘probably will die’ and ‘definitely will die’ when he made her go anyway.

Fuck him.

“But you - ” I started, before I realized I was dumb. There were rules. If Erebus got in serious trouble, I couldn’t do anything either. It’d have to be Mom. Real old school hierarchy setup, but. Gods. “You can’t do anything.”

Fuck.

I didn’t let myself think about abandoning Artemis for too long, because I swore to give Luke my boon for helping me protect her. As long as Luke was onboard, I couldn’t be seen trying to renege on it by sabotaging his efforts, because I swore I would.

Luke almost died.

Asking him to give up now?

The Styx was always watching.

I -

I think I fucked myself over.

The star-spawn paused and pinned me with a hard look that made my spine tingle.

“Can’t?” She questioned me, deliberately light as she leaned her chin on a hand, propped up on the couch arm rest. “Not won’t?”

“Uh,” I said, taken aback. “Isn’t the Pit - “

“Father still sleeps, yes,” Rhea nodded.

Oh phew, I was worried for a second there.

“And you wouldn’t ask your mom to petition my mom,” I reasoned out loud. “Because…a lot of reasons?”

“Plenty,” she drawled, amused.

Like I said, Rhea was loyal.

The Earth Mother hadn’t been.

And also holds one hell of a grudge.

“So…”

“I do wonder what your mother has in mind for you,” she said instead with iridescent compound eyes as she leaned in and flicked my nose with a finger. “You are just as right as you are wrong.”

Um.

“I am not able to intercede on my granddaughter’s behalf before the god within Fate, because that would never be an option.” Huh? “I could only do that if Artemis was not Young.” Her lips tugged into that almost smile she had when she heard my Prophecies. “And if I was not using the Name Rhea.”

Oh.

God within Fate.

She means Mom’s original Name. The First Name.

The Names of an Elder God were more like avatars. Sock puppets. Mom calls them Masks, you get the idea. They are always there, but drawing attention to that is stupid and probably wouldn’t end well. You gotta know what you’re doing. They are probably using that Name for a reason, like not wanting to kill you by proximity damage and, if they’re anything like Mom, also wouldn’t appreciate the game being ruined.

So be polite and call them by their preferred nouns.

And pronouns.

Mom is…

Yeah.

There you go. Elder God Etiquette 101.

Elderquette.

“Qetesh can, perhaps, on the behalf of Selene’s successor,” Rhea said thoughtfully and the buzzing, humming undertone in her voice slid through my bones with hollow knives. You couldn’t see the difference in her eyes, but you could feel it. Elder Gods were always there.

Even when asleep and Dreaming.

Especially when Dreaming.

“Athirat, maybe,” she mused. “Or - ah, Cybele.”

And I -

I was going to throw up again.

Rhea breathed in a sharp breath and the pressure disappeared. “Man. You are…hella sensitive, aren’t you?”

“I - “ I swallowed hard and nearly regretted those sips of water. “I don’t think so?”

“More sensitive than Dionysus was, for sure,” she said. Sections of the fiery writing on the walls of the room lit up and changed around, casting an eerie light on the cardboard boxes and the vine pattern in the beige carpet. “I’ll keep that in mind. Don’t worry, I’ll have you back right cherry in a bit.”

My head was spinning.

Was she just talking about demigod Dionysus in general or was he sick too when she met him?

“If I’m sick, then maybe Apollo - “ I tried.

She shook her head. “The absolute last thing you need is more divine energy anywhere near your soul, hun.”

That didn’t sound great.

“Besides, he is of the sun.” Her lips ticked up in a mirthless smile as she glanced at the dark window pointedly. “He is likely occupied.”

I nodded weakly.

“Domain sick?”

“A failed apotheosis,” she explained in words that made no sense, because she was talking about me. “Overextended divinity, so much so that it starts changing things.” She crossed her arms and legs, absently. “And burning other things for fuel.” Like mortality. “But you didn’t have enough to keep it up.”

“Oh,” I whispered.

“Yeah, ‘oh.’” She clucked her tongue. “If that’s not what happened, whatever you did is close enough. Don’t do it again. You might shatter.”

Like Aphrodite did.

Rhea waved it off as she stood up, almost springing from the couch. “You can recover, one hundred percent. It’s a drag, but burn out is temporary.”

Breaking, not so much.

If it was, Aphrodite would be whole.

I guess that made more sense. I was mortal, and Artemis was surprised because she didn’t know my brother gave me a boost. She thought Rhea was saying I did this to myself. I didn’t. I guess Erebus did me a favor and it gave me a sugar high. This was the fallout.

The crash.

…

I probably shouldn’t have eaten the sea monster.

“- this’ll be your pad while you’re here,” Rhea was saying as I regretted every decision I made last night. “Bathroom is that door, kitchen is this door, boob tube - “ a large flat screen TV appeared on the wall opposite me, complete with a flare of the writing on the wallpaper and a remote on the couch arm rest by me. I don’t want to know why the television has a name like ‘boob tube.’ The 60s were weird.

“Sleep in the chair.”

“And the…” I waved a weak arm at the walls.

“Suppressors,” Rhea said bluntly. Like my room at Camp Half-Blood. “Keeps the ambience in check so I don’t off you by accident. The excess has to go somewhere because I don’t want you poppin’ off, freaking out and blowing yourself up, you dig?”

That’s fair.

“Gimme some skin if you understand, lil’ cuz,” she held out a hand. I grinned as I gave the Titan Queen a high five. The warm and fuzzies were back. Lil cuz. I could get addicted to meeting relatives that wanted me in their family tree. And weren’t jerks. “Far out,” she grinned back, all teeth. She ruffled my hair. “I wish your mother told me about you,” she said wistfully. “I missed babysitting sprogs.”

“I threw up on you,” I quipped faintly.

“‘Teia and Aether did the same. Weak stomachs,” she quipped back with a sage nod. “Plagues all your mom’s kids.”

…the last time the Stele household heard from Aether, he was sleeping off the indigestion that came from eating a cold gas giant in the Boomerang Nebula.

Weak stomachs?

“Oy,” I grunted.

She made a raspberry sound. “Just shout if you need anything. You’re family, I’ll hear you.”

That fired a few of my neurons.

“That’s why you heard Luke?” I asked quietly.

“That dropout?” Rhea blinked. “Nah, he - “ She tilted her head, pausing. “He caught my attention.”

A small lion cub darted into the room, looked around with big, blue eyes and then ran out again. His sibling tumbled in after him and decided to stay, trotting over to Rhea who picked her up and tucked her underneath her arm.

“Your voice might go away in an hour or two,” she tossed out as she made her way to the door that led to the kitchen, tickling the cub underneath the chin. “But don’t be surprised if it doesn’t - “ Rhea hesitated. This strange expression I couldn’t read scrunching up her nose and brow. “Demigod.”

The door shut behind her.

“‘Kay,” I whispered.

I lasted maybe three minutes sipping water before I figured out that I had no idea what you’re supposed to do when sick. I don’t think taking care of Dad when he had a bit too -

Oh shit, Dad!

I flung my hand out for my backpack. Hauling it up onto my lap left me feeling like I’d run a marathon, but I found my phone and money purse.

“Oh Iris, goddess of the Rainbow, please accept my offering.” I fished out a gold drachma and tossed it into the enchanted rainbow.

The coin bounced on Rhea’s beige carpet.

A lump lodged itself in my throat as the small rainbow silently hung in the air in front of me.

Right.

It’s still Night.

She’s…probably busy.

I swiped my thumb across the hieroglyph and the rainbow faded. I bit my lip and tried not to think about how Mom was too angry to think about me.

There was a chime, like someone just rang Rhea’s doorbell.

A rainbow flickered in front of my face.

My heart leapt as an image appeared in it and then I regretted it when said image nearly burned out my eyeballs.

There was a giant coruscating flashing neon lights thing made of spinning discs, like someone had taken the idea of an astrolabe and a rave party and not only built a ten sided starfish out of it, but decided to glue golden butterfly wings to its back for good measure. It was bright, spitting sparks of blue lightning and looking at it did not do my head any favors.

“Oh crap!” The starfish said and then it was a person.

A gold butterfly winged…gorgon…mermaid…person standing before absolutely massive ebony wood and silver doors etched with art-deco, framed in a pitch black metal that matched my Stygian Iron dagger.

She had thin sea-green tentacles for hair lashing about a sharp featured emotionless face that looked more like a shark than a human, with sharp scales, fluttering gills and dappled patterns that slithered across her form. She glowed like a humanoid firefly and her three eyes were those spinning rings of neon colors.

“You - are fine.” For a moment, her look changed again to a dark haired human woman with the gold butterfly wings and a shimmering tie dye toga with a silver shawl, but then she seemed to change her mind and just stayed fishy. Her hair-tentacles pointed at me. “You’re Hypnos’ little buddy, aren’t cha?” she asked in a burbling, watery voice. “My bad, I assumed only gods would be able to call me right now.”

She said it matter-of-factly, but I still felt like there was a question.

“Sorry,” I said quickly. “I know you’re busy. I just wanted to check up on my father.”

She glanced back at the closed doors. “Yeah, I got a moment. Remind me who he is?”

“Dorian Stele, Manhattan.”

There was a beat of silence and then she shook her head. “I’m sorry, those are some nasty wards around him and at least half of them are Mr. Apollo’s. I probably could punch through them - “

“That’s okay,” I breathed, feeling like a weight had been lifted off my chest. Dad’s fine. “I can talk to him later, just wanted to know he’s okay.”

Amphitrite’s first cousin inclined her head. “Anyone else?”

I thought about it. I could call Camp Half-Blood? I don’t know what to say though, besides ‘not dead yet, but not for lack of trying.’ I sure as hell wasn’t going to spill the beans on Ares having the Master Bolt. Clarisse and Mark and Ryan of Ares Cabin were kind of friends. It would make them pariahs overnight.

Telling the Hunters about Artemis would just be cruel.

Hypnos was at his Mom’s house, Sam had been sick and tired of my shit when I left and I doubt Iris could reach the Dreamlands anyway, I can just pray to Apollo and everybody else…

Wasn’t Greek.

“Not unless you’re doing cross-pantheon again.”

She made a bubbling sound. “Not for another seven years, unfortunately.”

I did the math.

It physically hurt.

“What happens in 2012?” I asked slowly.

That got me a wide shark toothed grin.

“Nothing!” Iris chirped.

Should I be worried?

I feel like I should be at least a little concerned.

…I’ll worry about it after my Prophecy is up.

“Now, you really need to detox,” the Messenger Goddess of the Rainbow lectured. “Water’s nice,” she pointed at my glass. “But green tea. Or lemon water. Eat lots of fruit, brown rice and some asparagus and kale, oh! Greek yogurt really helps cut down on the repeats and honestly? Go Vegan. I swear by it.”

The rainbow blinked out.

Butch’s mom…

…is odd.

I dialed Cliff next.

The high pitched squealing only sounded for a second before he picked up.

“You’re fucking alive!” Was the first thing he said. “Now is this crap your fault or no? I have a bet riding on this.”

That was the second thing my best friend said.

“Seriously?” I deadpanned.

“Absolutely.”

“Cliff.”

“Hey man, last thing I heard, you were asking about an experimental prototype teleport function because of the Rhamnousia and who’s her mom again?”

The Night.

Even the Egyptians knew that messing with her kids was a game of Russian Roulette.

“This isn’t my fault,” I protested.

“Damn.”

Just feel the love.

“How are you talking, by the way? We’ve got the Nome warded up the ass - “

“I’m…” I looked around my new ‘pad’ in Rhea’s house. The lettering on the walls shimmered. “Someplace that’s warded too.”

“Cool. Stay there.”

I rolled my eyes, even though he couldn’t see it. “Duh.”

“Just saying.”

“This has nothing to do with Nemesis.” I dragged us back on topic. “Her mom just…thought I was interesting a while back?” I didn’t know how else to explain it. “And my mom…just found out and didn’t like it?”

“So it is your fault!” Cliff said triumphantly.

In the background, someone swore colorfully. I could hear the thuds of frantic footfalls leave the room.

Guess I was on speakerphone.

“I didn’t do anything!”

“If you didn’t exist, would this be happening right now.” He said it like he already knew the answer.

Because he did.

“That’s not fair!”

“Yeah, so, two of them. At the same time. Just - “

“Blame my mother?” I offered.

“Oh, I will.” Cliff made a whining noise. “I’ve been up for over twenty four hours thanks to someone calling me at unholy hours for random bullshit and then that same someone - “

“Oh my god, I get it! I’m sorry!”

“Yeah, yeah.” I heard the rustling of paper. “But…look, I know you’re on an errand for the Greeks, but if you get the chance - maaayyybeeee stop by? It’s your birth mother. And Houy will vouch for you.”

“Really?” I felt my stomach sink. “I’m Greek. In an Egyptian Nome.”

That hasn’t happened for…

A long time.

Cliff sighed. “Yeah.”

“How bad is it?”

“Not as bad as it could be!”

That…really wasn’t saying much.

“I mean, we’re still panicking,” he continued. “Have you seen the news?” He asked, like I wasn’t on a cross country road trip for Olympus. With a time limit. “There’s a bunch of people dying in their sleep and the White House press conference was held on a fucking whiteboard and passed notecards because people can’t make noise. No one really knows what to do. The last time was before the House stuffed the gods into a fridge.”

“That was kind of a shit decision.” I sniffled as my stuffy nose got a little unstuffed by starting to run and dug a packet of Kleenex out of my backpack.

Something about said shit decision was also giving me a fucking wild sense of deja vu.

Something about gods in a fridge.

‘Don’t.” Cliff sighed again. “I’ve been hearing that from a dozen different people using different words and three different Egyptian dialects - “ his voice picked up. “For the past twenty four hours! That I’ve been up - “

“Bye, Cliff,” I said.

“Because someone - “

He was laughing when I hung up.

My friends.

Are just the worst kind of people.

I spent a little bit playing Golden Sun on my Gameboy and nibbling on a plate of flat bread and feta cheese that came out of nowhere. I did watch the news for a bit. He was right. It was all writing.

And I’m dyslexic.

I can just barely tolerate English’s bullshit enough to play videogames, so that was a wash. A few lions wandered in and out of my room, like they were just checking to see if I was still miserable.

I was.

Just to make it clear how much this god flu was fucking me up, it took me another fifteen minutes before I realized: Rhea could not petition the god within Fate. But she never actually said she can’t do anything for Artemis.

Or if she even wanted to.

I fell asleep at one point.

I think Rhea enchanted my chair without telling me, because the Dreaming part of my soul, what Cliff would call the ba, stayed put. Snugly tucked away in my mortal coil.

That was okay.

I understood.

Dreams aren’t real, anyway. Not mortal ones. Not where it counts.

That’s why they’re called Dreams.

 

An Undertow of Sand
A PJO Fanfiction​

I woke up like I was drowning.

Gasping for breath, flailing around, the whole nine yards. I felt trapped. I was suffocating. It lasted forever. It was over in a moment. Then I opened my eyes to Rhea’s living room. There was a half-grown lion cub sitting on the couch next to me. He had a TV remote between his front paws, a plate of potato chips on the cushion next to him and an unimpressed look on his face. He was just starting to look fluffy around the neck, so I was confident it was a boy.

“Look.” I told him. “It’s been a rough couple of days.”

The feline couch potato snorted as I scrubbed my face with a hand. I think I drooled in my sleep again. Yuck.

I still felt like a polished turd.

My skull was a throbbing radiator of heat, but at least it felt like it was firmly attached to my neck this time. Thinking was easier. My nose was still stuffy and my face still hurt. Everything hurt, like there was ice water in my bones. I was shivering. This spasm was pulling at the back of my right arm nonstop, making me feel like something was hitting my funny bone over and over. My stomach was quiet though. I wasn’t going to call it a win. It felt hollow.

Empty.

The lion crunched on a few potato chips. Disney was on the TV, playing one of the new cartoons, American Dragon: Jake Long. There wasn’t any sound coming from the speakers, but there were subtitles. I gave up trying to read fast enough for the scrolling after a couple of seconds.

If I wanted to torture myself, punching myself in the balls would be simpler.

“Danny Phantom is better.” I adjusted my glasses.

The lion gave me the side eye as he shuffled his remote closer to his chest, like he was protecting it.

I held up my hands in surrender.

“Can I have a chip?” That got me another suspicious look, but eventually, he nosed the plate over. “Thanks.”

He meowed back.

It was clearly a cat’s meow, just with a decade of chain smoking at least four packs a day thrown on top.

There was a new glass of water with a lemon slice waiting for me on the small table by my reclining chair. My hands trembled as I picked it up so I moved slowly. My muscles still pulled and burned. I took a few sips and settled in to watch the inferior cartoon with the small-big cat anyway, because I’m a sucker for kids balancing supernatural forces and homework.

Relatable.

I couldn’t hear a single thing any of the characters were saying, but it wasn’t a bad watch. Middle school half dragon with a normal dad and dragon mom beating up bad guys and pulling tricks on a skateboard. I could see why my lion buddy was a fan of the new show. I had a lot of fun bitching about everything I didn’t understand over his offended yowling. He was either trying to explain what was going on or he was telling me to fuck off, but I was sick and Rhea said this was my room, so there.

The commercial break revealed the TV had this fancy time table program showing what was next up on what channel. Teen Titans on Cartoon Network. We should watch that. I was just starting to get into explaining how it tied into DC’s Justice League with my fellow junk food eater and cartoon watcher when Rhea busted into the room.

“Think fast!”

I didn’t.

The thrown twinkie hit me right in the nose, then fell into my lap with a miserable sounding splat.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked.

Rhea blurted out, “What the fuck was that?”

I raised my eyebrows. Then I raised my hands out from under my blanket. They were still trembling. The overall awful had gone down, but now it was like I wasn’t in complete control of my body with muscle spasms and twitches going every which way. Which meant the infamous demigod reflexes of mine?

They went fishing.

Check back later.

The Titan Queen’s expression went blank for a moment. Then she sighed. Her head made a dull thunking sound as she slumped against the door frame.

“Domain sick, right,” she remembered. “This is today, not…yesterday?” She didn’t sound too sure. I’m not sure it was even her Trees of Random Foresight this time. The sun was still a no show.

I wasn’t too worried about Apollo, but her orphanage and her duty was all Saulė, the Young goddess of the Baltic sun had.

“Yesterday,” I confirmed.

“Or two days from now!” she said brightly (so maybe it was the trees). “I got it, I’m here, I saved you, the boy annnnnd…” Her eyes found the window and the darkness outside. I could see her good mood evaporate. “That. Yes.”

I didn’t feel like reminding her about Artemis.

“Who is…” Her brow furrowed. “Night and…?”

“Fate,” we both said at the same time.

Rhea made a buzzing sound in her throat. “Should have known.”

A second twinkie bounced off my cheek.

The lion barked.

“Laugh it up, buddy,” I said.

I picked up my second twinkie as Rhea pulled a finger food platter out of thin air with olives, cheese, crackers, vegetables with some dip and cold meat cuts.

“Should have known?” I asked as she widened my small table, and I caught the flickering of the suppressors on the walls. “Are they feuding, or something?”

“Feuding?” Rhea asked. She looked amused at first, but then her face changed. “Not how mortals would understand,” she allowed as she set the plate down and refilled our potato chips. She brushed the curious cub’s nose away from my lunch and he lost interest when the commercial break ended. Back to the adventures of the American Dragon.

I felt pulled in three directions. The TV, Rhea and the plate with a rose vine pattern around the edges with bees. I couldn’t help noticing, so at least my ADHD was still working.

Yay.

“But no, your mother’s just a little shit.”

I choked on my potato chip.

Rhea burst out laughing. A full on witch’s cackle as I tried not to die. She threw herself onto the couch beside me and hugged the grumbling lion cub to her side. “Oh, she’s got you fooled! I told you she deserved shits for kids!”

“Because she has a terrible sense of humor!” I came to my mother’s defense. “Not for picking fights!”

“Amazing!” Rhea sounded thrilled. “How’d she manage to keep in the groove for so long?”

My mouth worked.

“In the groove?”

“You know, keep her cool.” She gave the lion cub a noogie. “Stay calm?”

“Mom doesn’t get angry?” I said, then reconsidered. “It takes a lot?”

“A lot,” Rhea repeated incredulously. To add insult to injury, the cub was giving me a bewildered look too. “When things don’t go as expected, your mother has the emotional maturity of a larva.”

I had a hard time wrapping my head around that. Maybe I was just too mortal to understand. What was the definition of ‘uncommon’ to someone who had a lifespan in the millions of years?

Mom was Fate, right? Things being unexpected meant something was wrong.

Didn’t it?

I knew Mom wasn’t perfect, but I spent most of my life thinking she was. “But - “

“Literal baby,” Rhea continued mercilessly. “For better or worse.” She waved a hand as she leaned back against the couch and took the lion with her. He adjusted, laying half on her lap with his eyes still glued to the screen. “I will forever be grateful, her patronage is an honor, yadda yadda, but you should have seen her when Night decided she wanted your brother!” Rhea gossiped. “Flipped her fucking wig - sure, Night’s a slut even by our standards - “

“That’s my sister-in-law you’re talking about,” I said.

“She’s my sister too,” she countered dryly.

My brain tilted on an axis.

We haven’t been talking about our mythological family trees.

I was, but I don’t think Rhea is.

I have a lot of cousins and making the distinction between who is a cousin because they’re the kid of someone who is actually related to me and who’s a descendant of a Name everyone thinks is related to me is messy, because they are usually still related somehow. Some are human shaped and some aren’t, doesn’t matter.

The Greek pantheon isn’t a family tree, it's a Celtic knot. I don’t have a spreadsheet about who is my great nephew twice removed (thanks Annabeth) in my head like some people.

(Annabeth)

The Pit isn’t Rhea’s father, the god beneath it is her father. And he’s the father of the god behind Night.

Rhea probably doesn’t think of herself as Rhea, Greek Titaness of Legacy, Comfort and Motherhood. Goddess of the Mountain, the Great Mother, the Queen of the Gods.

It’s just a Name, one of many.

Rhea wasn’t calling me cousin how I used the word. She meant blood relation, at the highest level. When she said ‘your mother,’ she didn’t mean The Morrigan. She didn’t mean Ananke. The god beneath the Pit and the god within Fate were real siblings.

We’re first cousins.

For real.

…why did Mom tell me she was a star-spawn?

“Night’s calmed down some since your brother,” Rhea admitted grudgingly.

My brain snapped back into place.

Holy shit, over two hundred kids with him, hundreds of hellhounds, another forty seven immortal spirits and a demigod is ‘calmed down?’

“The way your mother reacted, you’d think she’d insulted grandfather.”

“She’s just protective.” To be completely honest, Dad would probably react the same way. “And picky. High standards.”

“Petty,” Rhea corrected me. “Control freak.”

“No,” My mouth said automatically. Then I thought about it.

Describe the concept of Fate in two words.

“Well, yeah, okay.”

Rhea sighed as she figured it out. “What’d you do?”

Why was everyone always assuming it was my fault?

“Nothing,” I bit out. “Night thought I was interesting and she helped and Mom flipped out.”

“Night thought you were…” Rhea trailed off and threw herself back, clapping a hand over her face. “No. No. I’m not doing this again, I am staying asleep, I don’t care!”

Again?

“You care a little,” I needled her.

“I don’t care.” She glared at me through her fingers. “Eat.” She ordered. “That first,” She pointed at my twinkies. “If you don’t throw it up, you should be good.”

I wanted to ask about what she meant by ‘again,’ but I knew a subject change when I heard one.

Most of the time.

I tore into the plastic. “Aren’t you supposed to tell me I’ll spoil my appetite?”

“Do I look like your mother?” Apollo’s grandmother scoffed. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

I was really starting to wish Mom had let Rhea be my babysitter. My parents never understood the nutritional value of junk food. High fructose corn syrup, chemicals with long names and pure sugar, what’s not to love?

Rhea bounced up and the leftover pieces of her furniture slid around the room, shoving everything against the wall beneath the TV and freeing up more space around the couch. She leaned over to check on my fever with the back of her hand and my new friend made a grumpy sound.

“Sorry,” Rhea said automatically, moving out of his line of sight to the TV. Then she paused and gave the cub a wry look as a red teenage dragon with a green mohawk karate chopped the air triumphantly on the screen.

The lion’s shoulders stiffened under her eyes.

She clucked her tongue. “Aren’t you grounded?”

He mewed, but it definitely sounded like a whine.

I laughed at him.

I think he was hiding in here.

Rhea sighed.

“I’m not your mother either,” she told the lion. “Keep the boys company and I won’t say a word.”

I swallowed my bite of twinkie. “Boys?”

My cousin did something to the main door into the room, making the writing on the walls light up with blood red light. There was a small twinge in my stomach as the door frame warped and expanded sideways like it was opening up for a sandwich. And then a bed scuttled through into the room on beetle legs with the bulbous eyes of a spider sticking out like tumors from the bottom with antennae waving from the posts. The small clicks of carapaced joints bending almost distracted me from Luke’s still form under the white sheets. It made him look washed out.

Half ghost.

I sat up straight in my chair. “Is he - “

“He survived the night,” Rhea shrugged and my chest tightened as I considered that maybe she meant the capital N Night instead. Luke had no way of knowing what was going on. Hypnos gave Hermes a part time job at one point. If Luke was used to Dreaming, I was hoping he inherited that Name too.

Maybe it helped.

“That’s good.” I breathed. “That’s he’s okay. Please tell me your furniture isn’t bugs.”

My cousin blinked.

“...no.”

She had to think about it!

Suddenly, I was not okay with my recliner.

I slept in this thing!

“Panty waist.” If she had pupils, I’m sure I would have seen her eyes roll. “That one I got in a garage sale. You’re safe.”

Thank God.

I relaxed back into the chair.

I eyed the couch.

The bed clicked its way to the other side of it, positioning itself to mirror my recliner as the eyes on the bottom jiggled, searching the floor. I counted twelve bug legs and eight bug eyes, five antennae and hundreds of these tendril things hanging off the side where the mattress should have been. They were tasting the air, curling in whenever they caught some dust.

“But why is it a bug?”

Rhea looked offended. “It’s cute!”

“It’s gross!”

Rhea jerked a thumb at herself with wide, innocent eyes and opened her mouth.

“No,” I said. “Don’t even.” I pointed. “That still looks like half a normal bed. No.”

Look.

I’m not shallow.

But I gotta draw the line somewhere.

With a title like Matriarch of Swarms, it should surprise no one that Rhea’s base form was a giant bug. She was a pretty bug, don’t get me wrong. Gem-like eyes, a shining bronze carapace and very nice wings. Everything was perfectly symmetrical. Looking at her felt like that first time you saw a butterfly land on a blooming flower.

At the time, none of the Elder Gods had human avatars. Rhea was the first. She didn’t have to, she chose to.

I said Kronos was a dumb motherfucker and I meant it.

Dad would agree with me.

Aether’s girlfriend Hemera crashed my birthday picnic last year. Mom gave her directions. And made sure Hemera didn’t accidentally vaporize us. Pulsars, you know how it is. Anyway, Dad had some very nice compliments for her. Very smooth. I thought her eyes were great too. She had Erebus’ dagger for me and Aether’s stardust ball for Dad to try.

Actual stardust.

They found a tasty nebula with an aborted star and decided to share the treat with the mortal step-father. Because that’s what happens when your frame of reference for modern day mortals is Dragon Ball Z.

Explaining would take too long.

Let’s just say Aether’s a bit confused, but he’s trying.

When we got back to the car, he begged me to give him a year’s warning if I ever wanted to date anyone with more than three eyes or non-human appendages. He was joking.

Mom said he wasn’t.

But he was joking.

Rhea turned to the lion cub. “He’s ridiculous.”

The cub huffed at her.

“Don’t you start.”

Luke’s bed settled. The insectoid features sunk back into wood grain, complete with a bed spring that was only a little rusted and a faded blue mattress.

“Happy?” Rhea said dryly.

“Not really.”

Not being able to see what I knew was there actually made it worse.

“City boy,” Rhea huffed, a little exasperated. She turned her head towards the TV and quiet, but understandable sounds began to drift out of the speakers. The cub purred, leaning in. “Try not to wake him, but if he does, make sure he stays put. He needs to get that excess divine energy out of his system.”

I frowned and speared a piece of cheese and lamb on a toothpick. “Apollo’s?”

“Mine.”

“What’s wrong with yours?” I winced as soon as I finished asking. Asking people ‘what’s wrong with you.’ Even I knew that wasn’t a good idea.

“Nothing.” She raised an eyebrow at me and I winced again. This time what hit me in the face hard enough to sting was a Hostess chocolate cake. She cheated, but I deserved it.

I picked up the sugary snack. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

Rhea waved it off.

“Nothing,” she repeated. She tilted her head slightly. “Our power, our being can overwhelm, even when we’re trying to help. And he’s only human.” Her voice took on a classic Greek lilt as her eyes shined orange. “Exposure tends to change the exposed.”

“So he’s okay, you’re just being careful?”

“Can’t hurt,” she shrugged. “He’s healing well, though. You’ll be back to it in a few days, trust me.”

That’s another thing about ADHD. Deadlines just aren’t real until I’m staring one in the face. It made it easy to forget the clock was still ticking while I was watching TV and having fun. Khione used it to her advantage and that weakness was never going to go away.

Even if we were ready to tackle the Quest tomorrow, that left a little over nine days to track down where Ares’ stashed the Master Bolt. While Night was still leaking into our reality. Hellhounds were bad enough. I don’t want to know what else found its way through.

I fiddled with my lunch plate. “Just to…make sure.” I swallowed. “You can’t help our Quest, right?”

Her eyes were back to the sea green gem like shade as her lips twitched. “I’m not helping already?”

That’s fair.

I’m an ungrateful fuck.

I raised my hands.

A wrapped donut beaned me in the forehead anyway.

“It’s best if I don’t,” Rhea clicked her tongue. “It’s been a while…” Apollo’s reaction told me it had been a long while. “And just swooping in to help Poseidon of all people.” She tilted her head back. “Even indirectly.”

“Is that bad?” I asked slowly.

Rhea blinked slowly.

“He inherited my eyes,” she said softly.

I didn’t understand.

That mattered?

“It shouldn’t.” She read the question on my face. She tried to smile, but her lips turned down as she looked away. “It still fucking does. I made…mistakes with my youngest children. Out of ignorance. I fucked up a lot, if I’m going to be honest. Not all of them have been forgiven.” Her nose wrinkled. “In hindsight, giving Zeus to your mother through Adrasteia to raise was also a bad idea.”

I was going to protest.

But, honestly?

‘Pull Out Your Soul If You Get Too Close’ Adrasteia, the Inescapable was Zeus’ babysitter?

Yikes.

She done goofed.

“No,” Rhea concluded firmly. “Afterwards, though? I’ll consider doing - “ She blew out a harsh breath and ran her hands through her long, dark hair, turning it wheat blonde. “Something. I’ll think about it.”

“It’ll help,” I said quietly.

“Will it?”

I don’t know.

“My youngest children are a bunch of idiots,” Rhea said matter of factly. “But you didn’t hear it from me.”

I cracked a grin. “Got it.”

“Yell if you need anything,” she said, turning to go after one last check of Luke, me and rubbing the lion’s short, stubby ears. “Including Stallone.”

I looked over at my fellow couch potato. His shoulders tensed again. I shrugged. “As in the actor?”

He meowed.

Better name than ‘Widdle.’

“Rocky?”

Another meow. It sounded proud.

He should be.

He had good taste.

“Will Luke be able to talk?” I asked.

Rhea blinked, glancing at Luke.

“Good question. You -” She cut herself off and tossed something at me and this time I caught it. It was a simple necklace. A wooden lion pendant on a leather string. “Give him that.”

I nodded, turning the lifelike small big cat over in my hands.

“This will blow over,” Rhea said. “It has to blow over. It will blow over, Night will forget about this and pop out another sprog and your mother will get over herself.” She shrugged. “Either that, or the world’s ending.”

There was a lot in between those two options that I didn’t want to think about.

“You’re not worried,” I observed. I tossed the necklace onto the far side of the sofa, close enough for Luke to reach out and grab it from his bed. “Aren’t you going to do something about it?”

“Why must I do anything?” Rhea buzzed, an odd little smile on her face. “With eyes like that, I thought you’d be familiar with your mother’s favorite saying. Everything ends.”

Mom did have a favorite saying. Everything comes to an end.

Eventually.

I forgot. Rhea was my cousin, but humans weren’t really people to her.

They were defective.

She can’t be as worried about my father as I was, because a fully realized Matriarch of Swarms in the flesh?

She’d kill him herself.

It was hard to concentrate on the cartoons after that. I ate what I could stomach and sipped my lemon water. Stallone let me scratch his chin during the commercials. Luke slept on. I was able to get out of my chair and stretch my legs a little.

Stallone escorted me to the bathroom because I think he was afraid I was going to fall down and break my neck. I came back and went to the window and opened the curtains up wide, so that I could look out into the void dominating the night sky.

No sun, no moon.

Gods fade, I reminded myself. Things rotted and broke down. People got sick and they got old. They got hurt. Nothing is forever.

I wrapped Rhea’s pendant around Luke’s wrist. As soon as it settled, he hissed and shifted around a little in his bed. I froze and kept my eyes on him, but it was a false alarm. I went back to my chair. Stallone made a deep, growling ‘mmrp’ sound. It sounded like a question.

“We’re good,” I said.

I took off my glasses. Without them, the house was an overgrown pile of rubble. Stallone was a big Lion King with his ribs exposed from the wound that killed him. Luke’s ghost gasped as he stared at me, pleading, mouth moving with words no one could hear as something pulled the dark claw back through his chest.

Even stars die.

It wasn’t comforting.

Mom? I threw out in her general direction. For a moment I thought…

No.

There was nothing.

---

​

Luke woke up like I did.

Gasping, panting like he had run a thousand miles at a sprint with his arms flailing like he was trying to ward something away. It scared me half to death. I actually dropped my Gameboy Advance and it bounced painfully off my knee then hit the floor with a thud.

Luke flinched at the sound. I think he tried to sit up, but pulled on his wound. He flinched again harder, almost convulsing, before he fell back into his bed.

“Luke?” I tried.

For too long, there was just his harsh breathing breaking into the soft murmurs of the television.

“Perce…?” He whispered. I don’t know if he dropped the EE sound on purpose, or if all he could manage was the initial puff of air.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

His lips moved soundlessly and my chest hurt.

“I’m alive,” he gasped. “That’s good.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah,” he breathed.

Then he passed right back out.

The second time Luke woke up didn’t really count. I don’t think he was lucid.

I hoped he wasn’t.

He was sitting up in his bed, one arm crossed over his chest to painfully clutch at the vivid blood red scar on his neck. He was very pale, almost see through and his blond hair was plastered over his scalp with sweat. Rhea had put him in a chiton too, this one a dark green with gold lions prancing on the collar.

“What were you thinking, Thalia?”

He's been calling me that this entire time.

I don’t look like a girl.

I don’t think I do.

Alecto called me pretty but she was being mean.

I think.

Sam was never hearing about this.

“You blew off a god that wanted to help you?”

“Are you blaming me for not leaving you to die?” I threw my second twinkie at his head. He didn’t catch it either. “I would have had to leave Art - " Don't confuse him. More. "Annabeth behind too and you know I couldn’t do that!”

Luke made a frustrated sound, shaking his head back and forth. I don’t know if I was imagining things, but his eyes didn’t seem as blue as before. A paler, cloudy blue instead of sapphire.

“Fine,” he grumbled. He inspected the twinkie. “Are we safe here?”

“This is Rhea’s place,” I told him. “She saved us.”

His face went slack.

“Luke?”

He was silent. He laid back down and let out a shaky, watery sigh.

“She answered?” He said in a very small voice that cracked. The twinkie was crushed to a pulp in his fist. I regretted giving it to him. “She saved us?”

“She did,” I said quietly.

His expression crumpled.

“The Queen of the Titans answers,” Luke said, hiking his bed sheet up over his head as he turned away. “And my father won’t.”

“When did you ask her to help?” I asked. Now that I thought about it, didn’t Rhea say she’d hear me because I was family, but Luke had to get her attention? I could still remember the rattling exhale in my ear before Luke said, ‘Now would be good.’

She must have been prepared to answer him.

“Luke?”

He didn’t answer.

Asleep again.

The third time Luke woke up, Stallone was kind of sitting on Artemis.

“Atalanta, please!” The bunny struggled from under the cub’s front paws. Turns out, Atalanta, the former Arcadian princess, was Stallone’s mom. She wised up to where he was spending his grounding. In hindsight, I should have expected it because the Disney channel wasn’t exactly standard practice in a zoo.

“You cannot still be holding Meleager against me - “ A growl. “Fine! I apologize! Again. Get your son off me!”

In my defense, Sam’s an ordinary tabby cat and he potty trained me.

I was two years old.

Mom had gotten into the habit of just vanishing my diapers when I needed to be changed and back then Dad was nonexistent.

Don’t.

And don’t tell me cats can’t teleport either. I won’t believe you.

I noticed Luke was awake when he made a confused noise. He was blinking owlishly with pale blue eyes as he slowly sat up. He was looking around the room with the flickering orange lettering on the walls, ratty sofa with two small cubs fighting over an equally ratty soccer ball on it and the big screen TV with one of the first episodes of Star Trek: Voyager playing like it was the first time he’d ever been inside of a house.

“Ignore Artemis,” I said and ignored the indignant squawk of a rabbit who didn’t like being groomed with a lion tongue. “She promised to behave.”

Artemis shut up.

Luke looked even more confused. His eyes drifted over the lions and the rabbit before coming back to me. One of his hands drifted over his new scar. His voice was hoarse when he asked, “What happened?”

“You threw us out of a building,” I deadpanned.

Luke blinked and then the corner of his mouth pulled into a self-satisfied smirk. “It worked, didn’t it?”

I ignored that. “Rhea saved our asses.”

He clearly didn’t remember our last conversation. I was prepared for his emotions to take a hit again, but he just looked relieved. Maybe a little vindicated. He was a lot harder to read. I realized it was almost impossible to tell how deeply Luke felt until it all came out at once. He looked down at his chest and traced the ugly scar until it disappeared under his clothes.

“Hey, look, I match,” Luke said darkly, briefly touching the scar on his face running down from his eye. “It’s almost like Ladon didn’t miss.”

Wait.

What?

“Ladon?” I said, horrified. “When did you face that?”

Ladon, more commonly known to the Ancient Greeks as ‘What The Actual Fuck’ was this dragon - snake - lizard thing with literally one hundred heads, fifty tails, six legs tipped with obsidian claws, solid bronze scales, the deadliest venom on the planet, bad breath and the worst taste in goddesses.

Rhea says he got that from his father, Typhon and is convinced her nephew is only guarding that tree because he has a crush on Hera.

God knows why.

“Why’d you fight that?” If you stopped to count how many things would kill you, you’d be pretty much dead.

Luke smiled this razor thin smile that felt like it should cut someone. “I’m not surprised no one told you the details. It’s rather embarrassing.” He glanced at Artemis and the lions. I don’t think he was talking about himself. “It was my Quest from Hermes, to steal a golden apple from the Garden of the Hesperides and return it to Olympus.”

That was his Quest? The one he failed? The one that killed the previous Counselors of Ares and Athena?

Stealing from Hera?

“Weren’t you sixteen?”

“I’ve been at Camp year-round for two years at that point. I had nothing but training and before that, I was surviving with Thalia until…you know,” he reminded me, but that was not the point.

“He thought you could steal an apple at sixteen?” I was vaguely aware I was starting to hyperventilate. Everything was jumbled in my head. My thoughts were firing at a hundred miles per hour. That didn’t make any sense. Everything I have ever learned about Hermes from Apollo, from meeting him when he ticketed my Mom and at Camp and how he left Luke, the strongest demigod at Camp Half-Blood in decades, if not centuries…

None of it made sense!

“Herakles was twenty seven!” I nearly shouted. “He needed help!”

“Exactly!” Luke said viciously. “After all the training I’d done, that was the best he could think up. A repeat. My heart wasn’t in it.” Then his face darkened. “Or maybe he was just trying to kill me.”

I couldn’t take it anymore.

I got up and in quick strides, I was at Luke’s bed side. I reached out and grabbed his face.

“Percy - “

“Luke.” I said, very seriously as he flailed. “Luuuuke.”

“What?” He demanded, muffled as I pulled his cheeks.

“What happens…” I pinched his cheeks harder when he protested. “No. What happens if you eat the fucking golden apple!”

Hera would say her golden apple tree had been a wedding gift.

Technically.

And she would say she got it from Zeus.

Again. Technicalities.

Because Odin knew arguing wouldn’t do anyone any good and Iðunn, the Vanir of Eternity still had the rest of her garden. The apples were capable of giving a regular mortal a lifespan measured in millennia.

It could do more given to someone who already had a trace of divinity in their blood.

Luke froze.

“That’s not - “ He brushed my hands off. “I was supposed to take it back to Olympus,” He snarled. “To come crawling on my knees for recognition and begging Hera not to smite me!”

Artemis made a sound.

I don’t think she meant to, because she flinched as soon as our eyes fell on her.

“Artemis!” I barked. My stomach jumped, like it thought about doing something, but then went back to sleep. Stallone raised a paw and I snatched Artemis out from under him as she yelped. I held her in front of Luke’s face, all four paws dangling with her ears flattened against her head. “Talk.”

Her ears wiggled back and forth as she studied the hard, resentful snarl on Luke’s face. She went limp, inflating like a rabbit balloon before letting it out in a wheezing bunny sigh.

“A successful thief keeps the spoils,” she said softly. It wasn’t official, but that was practically the oldest Law in the book. If you could take it, it’s yours. From the soul of the deceased to the Master Bolt. “Hermes was punished for that Quest.”

Luke froze again. His blue eyes went wide and there was confusion swimming in them.

“What - “ He licked his lips. “What do you mean punished?”

“Do you not understand English?” She snarked and I shook her.

“Luke is your grandmother’s guest, daughter of Zeus,” I growled. I was not in the mood to entertain an asshat. “Behave.”

In the background, Atalanta chuffed in approval as the bunny went limp again.

“The youngest of the Fates exposed him to the Inescapable,” Artemis said dully and I felt my breath leave me in a whoosh. Adrasteia, my eldest sibling. She can pull out your very soul if you get too close, but just being in her presence brought it to the surface. “The Quest could not be rescinded, but it would fail.”

Luke looked up at me.

“What does that mean?”

“My oldest sister,” I began helplessly. Luke had no idea. The youngest of the Fate’s threw Hermes at our elder sister? Atropos, the one who cuts the threads of life, punished Hermes.

For trying to make Luke immortal.

There was sulfur burning in the back of my throat.

The Fates were playing one of their games. They have never cared about anything else.

“She’s…” I trailed off.

I shook the rabbit again.

“It is one of the worst punishments on Olympus,” Artemis said automatically. “It is agony, every inch of you tears. A million knives slicing into you, flaying you and you can feel yourself hollow out.” The monotonous tone of her voice drained my anger. I found myself gently putting her down on Luke’s bed. Her silver eyes were unfocused. “You bleed, but you do not know from where. You scream with no voice. You cannot see it, but you can feel your pieces drift away.”

I had the sinking feeling she was speaking from experience.

“Artemis?” I whispered.

Her eyes focused as she looked up at me.

Then she looked away.

“Athena was forbidden from assisting you,” Artemis continued in a disinterested tone of voice.

Luke let out a strangled whisper. “What?”

Artemis’ silver eyes found his blue. “My sister is not one for compassion, but she despises being in debt.”

“Annabeth,” Luke murmured. “Because I - I helped her daughter to Camp?”

“What else have you done of note?” Artemis sneered, but she dropped her head and ears as she hopped away from us to the end of the bed. And said in a much quieter voice, “I certainly did not.”

Annabeth had been seven going on eight when she had been with Luke and Thalia on the streets, trying to make it to safety. Luke, the boy she refused. He had been fourteen. Thalia was twelve and she died.

Dereliction of duty.

I didn’t like the picture my brain was putting together.

I felt sick.

“And knowing what I do now, I dodged an arrow!” Artemis chirped and Luke’s fists clenched. “The Fates have their eye on you and it has never done anyone any favors getting in their way.”

“You’re lying,” Luke declared.

“Why would I?” Artemis countered. “What reason have I to keep the secret? I can hardly be punished more.”

Mom’s judgment was final.

“Do you expect me to believe the only reason demigods are just abandoned is because the Fates told you to? Do I look that gullible?”

“Not all demigods,” she said lazily. “Just you.”

Luke’s face flushed red, but then he thought of something. Or maybe he remembered something because then his eyes widened as his face went white. He turned to look at me, pleadingly, so much like his ghost it took my breath away.

He looked lost.

And like he was begging me to tell him it wasn’t true.

I couldn’t do that.

Nothing about Hermes’ treatment of Luke made sense, until you considered the possibility that Hermes had no choice. And there was only one reason why Atropos, cutter of lifelines, would have an interest in keeping a random demigod mortal.

“The Fates - “ I forced out of my mouth. “They are playing some kind of cruel game - I’m sorry, I don’t know why they’re like this - “

Artemis laughed at me.

“Have you forgotten who your mother is, boy?”

I turned on her, blood rushing in my ears, but when I went to take a step, Luke grabbed my arm. Rhea’s lion charm dangled from his wrist.

He read it in my face.

There was only one reason Atropos would want to keep him mortal.

“The bathroom!” He gasped. His fingers dug into my arm. “I need - I need to - I’m going to - “

I pointed.

He bolted out of his bed.

As the door slammed behind him, I turned on Artemis.

“What is wrong with you!?” I yelled. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Stallone giving me worried looks.

“I merely did as you asked, my lord,” Artemis spat. “It is hardly my fault you did not like the result.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it,” I hissed back.

“You cannot be so naïve as to not know what your mother did to me.” Her voice hitched. “What this means!”

“So what?” I threw my hands up. “You’re going to die, so you’ve got to be as bitter a cunt as you can imagine on your way out? Is that it?”

“Do not judge me - “

“You’re supposed to be better!” I shouted.

Artemis shut her mouth with a click and her eyes went huge.

“You - you’re supposed - “ My chest hurt. It was hard to breathe. I was angry. At Mom. At myself. At Artemis. At Olympus. I was panicking because I was going to have to keep this rabbit with a death wish alive, but most of all, I was disappointed. “Apollo told me - “

I cut myself off.

Apollo told me a lot of things.

I had been a small little shit when I was younger and not in a good way. I didn’t want mortal friends. I had no one but Apollo and a pet cat until Cliff nearly got me killed. I barely tolerated Dad and he tried. If my grandmother hadn’t split Mom’s lip with her knuckles, I don’t think I would have liked my mortal grandparents either.

For a few years there, I was convinced Nana was an actual goddess and was just keeping it a secret.

I was a dumb kid.

Mom left.

On my seventh birthday, I failed a Test. A simple survival mission. Make it across New York State in time. I would get my birthday present and the whole weekend at the beach. It was supposed to be a graduation to the next stage of my training. The time limit was harsh, but we both knew I could do it.

But I met a street kid.

A demigod.

She didn’t know. Brown haired with a large blue hoodie and tattered jeans and sneakers. A few years older than me and thought she was going crazy, being paranoid about being followed by monsters. She saw me kill the Cyclops and insisted on sticking around for a little bit. Just to the train station. By then, I already knew about Camp Half-Blood.

Would’ve. Could’ve. Should’ve.

I didn’t.

By the time I changed my mind and went back to where I last saw her to see if I could help, she was already gone. The only thing I found was a blood stained large blue hoodie I hoped wasn’t hers.

I still hope it wasn’t.

I was four or five hours late.

Mom looked at me stumbling into the clearing like she didn’t know who I was.

Then she was gone.

Dad got off work and got worried when we didn't come home for dinner and came to find me. I’d been left in the woods and was too devastated to even think about moving. I kept hoping she would come back. I napped in a tree to keep out of reach of Hellhounds when it got too dark to see.

If Mom hadn’t left and if Apollo hadn’t practically moved in, crashing on the couch to help Dad who tried…

If Artemis hadn’t come across a crying eight year old boy and his small shattered galaxy globe while looking for her brother. He hadn’t been there, because he and the boy had an argument just before. That maybe Apollo only stayed because he was scared of punishment, not because he actually cared about anyone.

The boy’s father had bought the globe for him because he knew what his son’s favorite memories of his mother were. After an entire year of single parenting, he was still trying. And in a fit of rage and grief, the boy broke it because it wasn’t like his Dreams. The stars were dull.

‘Boy, why are you crying?’

It was fake.

‘Sounds like your father cares for you very much. Not every child is so fortunate. Here.’

He regretted breaking it, because he knew it wouldn’t bring his mother back.

‘I will admit to being partial to images of the night sky, but there is still something missing…’

And Artemis thought to enchant the globe after she fixed it, to make it sparkle and spin and glow warmly like it was real, like he held actual pulsing stars in the palms of his hands.

‘Ah. There we go.’

Just to make him feel better.

“I want to believe you’re still the person that would fix a child’s broken toy just because they were crying,” I said painfully. “I want to believe that’s the real you and you’re just - “ I waved an arm. “Just playing along with the worst of Olympus because you don’t want to rock the boat or are just scared of the consequences or something and I know I’m being stupid!”

She didn’t remember when I met her again.

“I know I’m being stupid.”

But it meant the universe to me.

“I want to believe you’re just scared,” I whispered.

Artemis said nothing.

Fine.

I’m done.

I went back to my recliner. I picked my Gameboy Advance up off the floor and blew my nose. Very faintly, I could hear Luke in the bathroom. I don’t know if he was crying or throwing up. I had just loaded my save back up when a small auburn furball with a white cotton boll tail and silver eyes whispered,

“Terrified.”