My definition of fun wasn't meeting maniacs who used wooden sticks as weapons. But naturally, it had to happen.
I was sitting on the same old wooden bench I had sat for years whenever I came to Central Park. Annabeth laid her head on my shoulder while she slept. While Annabeth was out, hopefully sleeping peacefully and not dreaming about the-end-of-the-world sort of dreams that never seemed to make sense: We weren't even seventeen yet. Couldn't the Fates give us a chance to live a life that made sense?
I felt Annabeth wake up. She said, "What's going on?"
I was confused. "What," I said, "do you mean?"
She screwed up her face. "I don't know. I've had a vision telling me to prepare for something. The woman in the vision told me to wake up because something important was going to happen soon."
Her answer, which I hoped would clear things, just made me more confused than ever. "Say it again, Wise Girl. I don't have your intelligence."
Annabeth laughed, and I pretended to scowl. Poor brain of mine!
Suddenly, a change came to Central Park. The birds stopped chirping, the leaves on the trees stopped swaying lazily in the cool, gentle breeze. I wasn't disturbed about this. Plenty of crazy stuff like this had happened to me already. In the sixteen short years of my life, I had faced down snake women, dogs that looked murderous enough to kill me and my friends, bull-men, lions with spiked tails that hurt a lot when it touched your skin, (which, by the way, is not something I'd recommend to you to try) demon birds, crazy flying pigs, (which really made me want to eat roasted pig so much so as to have my revenge against them: eating their relative) and one-eyed giants who are so not like my brother Tyson. I merely thought this was Nico di Angelo, our friend who sometimes visited us to give us the latest news, like souls escaping, (whee!) monsters of old being reborn, (oh, shoot!) and gods getting weak.
But Nico's lanky figure didn't appear. I even looked around twice. No twelve year old kid waiting for me to notice him. No sign that something bad had happened.
Annabeth punched me in the shoulder to get my attention. "What are you looking for? A new girlfriend?" She scowled at me.
The truth was, I wasn't looking for a new girlfriend. Boys, if you're reading this, well, let me just tell you that Annabeth is the best girlfriend ever, and even if she wasn't, she'd still let you pay for it if you did so much as glance at a pretty (or hot!) girl.
The sky turned stormy, as if to say, Hey, kid, watch out for something that's gonna happen.
A boy, a girl, and another boy appeared near us. They would have looked comical if they hadn't had something suspiciously like sticks pointed at our faces. Those sticks looked sharp enough to dislodge an eyeball, and were not something I normally wanted my eyeballs get too friendly with.
One of the boys, who had red hair, yelled something like "Stupe-die!" still pointing his stick at Annabeth. Then, I looked at him strangely as his stick made Annabeth gasp, then pass out.
I stood up, my hands outstretched, and walked towards them. I noticed that the red-haired guy was taller than me by about three inches, which seriously disturbed me. I doubted I could knock him out in a fight.
He spoke menacingly to the others. "Let's take this git out and leave."
The black-haired one, the one with the rather thin face and green eyes like mine, though his were slightly darker, spoke up. "Shut up, Ron. Now who are you?" he demanded, looking straight at me. We were of the same height, though, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to put up much of a fight if I attacked him. I thought he was crazy for asking me who I was.
"None of your business. Now explain to me why my girlfriend is unconscious, and why you made her so. Or I'll stick this pen through you, I don't really care where, and I promise you won't remember it like you remember your birthdays."
The girl spoke up. "Are you a wizard?"
I laughed harshly. "That's a stupid question. Is your mother a goddess? Hecate?"
"Who's Hecate?" The two boys asked in unison.
Surprising me, the girl answered. "Oh, Harry, Ron, honestly, don't you two read? Hecate is the legendary Greek goddess of magic, but she isn't real!"
"Neither are you," I said, seriously offended. Hey, if they said Hecate wasn't real, then what was I? A human being gifted by someone-whom-I-don't-know?
The red-haired one looked at me like he wanted to knock me out like he did with Annabeth. "Excuse me?"
"You're half-bloods, you three," I blurted out. They looked at me, stunned.
"Actually, Hermione here," the black-haired one indicated the girl, "is a Muggle-born. Ron's a pure-blood. But I'm a half-blood. Is that what you mean?"
"No, no, you're a half-blood," I tried to insist. I was getting annoyed at the black-haired guy, who didn't even yell nor do something I would normally have done when I was confronted with that situation. "Son of Hecate, are you?"
The boy sighed. Clearly, he was frustrated with me. I was afraid, for a moment, that he might do to me what his friend had done to Annabeth. Then he spoke, again.
"No, I am not. I'm a wizard."
"I'm a son of a Greek god and a mortal woman."
At the sound of my voice the girl raised an eyebrow. "Is that so? But aren't Greek gods supposed to be legendary?"
"You're a legend," I pointed out to her. "Witches and wizards don't exist."
"Oh yes, they do. We're here, are we?" The freckled one, the one with the red hair, said, clearly in a barely suppressed rage.
"Great. You're a half-blood, I'm sure of it. Now come with me to camp. Wait, how did you guys end up here, and where do you come from?"
The guy with the dark hair laughed. "We come from a war, half-blood, as you call yourself. A war where Greek gods don't exist, where they can't hope to win. Come on, Ron, Hermione, we're leaving. I don't see why we Apparated here. Have you been here, Hermione?"
The girl named Hermione said yes in a very small voice. The guy with that flaming hair rolled his eyes at me and said, "Let's Apparate back there" in a very low voice, not wanting me to hear. Of course, I heard it, though I pretended like I hadn't.
Suddenly, they looked like they were travelling through air. Their images blurred, and for a second I thought I was crazy, but then my impulse was, of course, grab the nearest one, which turned out to be the girl-Hermione. Just my luck. Then we vanished into nothingness.
I landed hard on my feet, in an unfamiliar place. My best guess was that I was thousands of miles away from New York, which was bad. So was the fact that my girlfriend did not know where I was. In fact, nobody except the trio I just met seemed to know where I was.
When I landed, I fell right on top of the bushy-haired, brown-haired girl whom the guys referred to as "Hermione." Immediately, as if it was a reflex action, or if "Hermione" was the red-haired guy's Annabeth, the guy pulled me off and threatened me with his stick that I now thought of as a dangerous weapon.
"What are you thinking?" he snarled to my face. Suddenly, I was hit by an invisible force, which hit me so hard I felt like a Teflon pan had hit me on the head five consecutive times.
I yelled, "What did you think of me, jerk?" I didn't mean to add the word jerk, but my ADHD got in the way. The words had their immediate effect on the freckled guy. He looked like an angry bull that had been given a lot of blush-on, and it didn't suit him. He put his hands on my shoulder and squeezed it, making me yell in pain. The dark-haired guy who looked a little like me held him back.
"Ron!" He sounded tired, like he'd spent the most of his life holding his friends back or fighting when he knew that he might not win, and immediately the red-haired boy released his grip on me. I rubbed my shoulders, thinking about how lucky I was not to have the blood in there totally stop from being circulated around there. Yeah, since Annabeth's my girlfriend, some of the things she actually tries to teach me about gets stuck in my head. And I don't think it's going to go away 'til college, which is a long time for a demigod, to get killed, to get into trouble, it only depended on the Fates.
Okay, I admit I felt pity for the guy. His eyes told me nearly everything that wasn't immediately obvious: he had suffered and lost people he loved. It was quite clear from the way his shoulders drooped whenever he said a person's name. It was as if he couldn't stand them being hurt or taken away from him. I knew that if this guy was a demigod, his fatal flaw would be like mine.
The silence between us was getting longer and longer. I finally broke it by asking, "Where are we?"
The red-haired guy glared at me with open hostility. "The Burrow."
I thought he was joking. The burrow? The first thing that popped in my mind was a prairie dog burrowing itself in the ground. Hey, don't get too impressed. Annabeth drilled it into my mind after she found out that I didn't even know basic facts about prairie dogs. I only agreed to have it stuck in mind because I didn't want to make her angry by arguing with her and yeah, an angry girlfriend is not something you would want to have, especially when she has a bronze dagger strapped on her belt, reserved for enemies and people who annoyed her, including me.
"What is that, a sort of hideout place for animals?" I regretted saying the words as soon as they came out of my mouth. Now the guy looked like he could have killed me and walked off without any trace of guilt.
The girl looked positively appalled. "No, silly. This is Ron's house."
Now I understood why the guy was angry. It was like calling his mother dumpy or something. I guess he was the good-son type, the son who always seemed to be better than most sons, and that his mom was the great-mom type, and the mom who fit the exact stereotype of a mom: baking cookies and making sandwiches for her children.
"Would you mind telling me why you tagged along with us?" It was the dark-haired guy, speaking to me. I suddenly had the strangest feeling that I was looking into my twin, though with deliberate mistakes. He was skinnier than me, paler, more matured-like than me, and yeah, he looked like he was always in danger, a vulnerable prey.
"I don't know."
"Well, you just grabbed at Hermione and you Apparated with us! A Muggle, Apparating!"
"Hey," I said, incensed, "who you calling a what-did-you-call-me-again?"
"Never you mind. Let's go," the boy said, grabbing the girl's hand and beckoning for the other guy to follow him to the house in the distance.
"WAIT!" I shouted to them, and they froze. "How about me? What will I do? How can I go back?"
The girl, who looked a little like a classmate I once had, said calmly, "I don't think you can go back."
"What do you mean?" My voice sounded hollow and distant.
"I mean you have to stay with us. I'm sorry, but the U.S. is not a safe place for you anymore."
"Why?"
"Because Voldemort- Oh come on now, Ron, get used to it!" she told the bright-haired boy, who had jumped. "Honestly, it's just a name." ("Names have powers," muttered the boy) "Okay, so this is it: Not only does he want to conquer Britain; he wants America too. So you can't go back."
"Who's Voldemort? Why is he so feared?"
"He killed many, that's why! Did you honestly think that he was feared for no reason at all? So, really, you can't go back. You would only endanger yourself."
"But my friends! Camp! My mom! My girlfriend!"
I saw the girl look at her dark-haired companion for a while, and then turn back to me. "Harry here hasn't seen his girlfriend for nearly a year."
"Why?" I interrupted.
"The thing is, we're sort of on the run," clarified the girl whom I had now come to call Hermione. "Voldemort's looking for Harry, because of a prophecy that was made-"
I barely listened to her, because now I knew why the guy looked so sad-looking. A known murderer was looking for him. He was either gonna die, or spend his whole life running away from people who wanted to kill him. Compared to his life, mine seemed pretty normal and stress-free.
I sort of listened to her when she explained everything about their world, but I couldn't understand how they could disappear and then appear from one place to another. I voiced my question out.
"So, how do you Apparate?"
"You aren't a wizard; you wouldn't be able to."
"Then take me back to where I belong."
The guy named Ron, who had so far remained silent, butted in. "You know what? You're a prat. A git. A buffoon. Son of the Sea god eh? Let's see about that." (I had told them of my secret identity) I looked at him. Then I yelled things that were mostly insults and jeers of Coward!
"Let's duel, then."
I got my pen out. The guy laughed at me, but his laughter abated when I uncapped it and Riptide materialized. I wanted to say look who's laughing now, but thought better of it. Since I now knew that they were wizards, (I still had a really hard time not thinking of them as children of Hecate) I wondered if my blade could deflect one of their spells. The girl took one look at the sword in my hand and seemed to be intimidated by it.
The girl objected. "Ron, he hasn't got a wand. Besides, under the International Magical Law, wizards are not allowed to brandish their wands against innocent Muggles who haven't hurt them or done anything. I think what he's saying-the Olympian gods-are true."
He scowled. "Oh yeah? Well, I have my own set of rules that I follow. And he isn't an innocent Muggle, thank you very much Hermione."
"Ron, there's a war out here, and we're just standing here, defenseless! Drop the weapons, I say!" The guy named Harry shouted.
"Okay!" He glared at me, but I did my best to ignore him, which wasn't that hard, to be honest.
"Where is this place? South America or somewhere?" I asked them a little too loudly and impatiently. No one answered except the dark-haired guy.
"England."
Now I was confused. I knew England was part of a country, all right, or was it a country? I couldn't tell. Maybe I hadn't been listening when Annabeth told me about it, or maybe my memory's getting worse, probably due to the number of knocks I have received in the head during the past month. I'm going to have to have a doctor check me, though. It's not something you want in your life, especially when you're a half-blood like me.
England did not look as I had previously pictured it. For one, there were no buildings and the clock tower and the place where there were stone what's-its-name-again?
So I walked and talked with them some more. Then I realized we weren't heading towards the shabby little house identified as the Burrow.
"Where are we going?" I asked them. No one spoke, except for the irritable one named Ron, or was he Rod? I'm not sure, though.
"We can't go to my place because they've probably got Death Eaters stationed there or something; it's a risky place to be, especially for us, with Harry and you know, fame and glory and whatever. We're probably the most wanted persons in England."
He wasn't hostile anymore. On the other hand, his news made me feel alarmed. So I was hanging out with a bunch of wanted criminals or whatever they were? Hardened hooligans? Juvenile delinquents? High school dropouts?
I didn't know what the guy meant by Death Eater, but I decided not to ask.
"Okay, guys, where are we going?"
"The Forest of Dean. Our new campsite."
"Why are you taking me there? I mean, you're not gonna hold me as hostage, are you? Hey, I didn't do anything wrong!" I shot at the red-haired guy, who had rolled his eyes at me.
"I didn't say anything," was his shifty reply.
Suddenly I thought of something. "How old are you guys?"
The guy named Harry blinked. "Seventeen."
"Exactly how long have you been seventeen?"
"Since we turned seventeen on our birthdays, which was incidentally last March, the September before last, and last July. Why?" asked the girl.
"Well, I was wondering –you guys don't look like you're from the present, if you ask me. No offense, but what you're wearing 's somewhat –old-fashioned and unacceptable in the society today." Nobody answered me. I talked again.
"Hey, if I'm going camping with you guys, can I like, go to my mom's place first? Because I didn't exactly pack ahead."
"Oh, you're all right with traveling with us? No worries? All right, then, I thought we should make ourselves clear. We traveled her because we were hoping to hunt for Lord Voldemort's Horcruxes. Now these Horcruxes are objects that contain a fragment of a person's soul. We need to destroy them to destroy Voldemort," the girl told me hurriedly.
"Fine, if not my place, then Annabeth's. She's my girlfriend," I looked at Ron while saying the last sentence out loud. For some reason, he was staring at me with a look of total incredulity, as if he couldn't believe that I'd gotten a girlfriend.
"Well, since we don't have food and other supplies, I suppose we could try to go there."
"Excellent!" Harry and Ron hit each other's backs, which must have hurt, but I decided not to comment about it. It proved to be a good decision, because nobody objected when I raised my opinions about the subject again.
"Okay, so let's go, doing whatever-you-were-doing-that-brought-us-here!"
The girl suddenly held hands with me, which made me steal a glance at Ron hurriedly, but his face was impassive, which was a huge relief.
Then we turned into nothing again and, for the second time that day, felt the choking sensation and feeling of oxygen deprivation intensifying every second.
Then my feet hit solid ground. We were standing outside the house of Annabeth Chase, my girlfriend.
"What do you reckon we should do?" Ron asked Harry and Hermione.
"Knock, I suppose," they said together, causing Ron to scowl at the ground and pretend to be looking at his shoelaces.
"You mean ring the doorbell," I said irritably. Sometimes I really wondered if they were even people of the 21st century.
"Oh, right. Yes. That's what we meant," said the girl.
I rang the doorbell. While waiting, Ron and Hermione went off a bit and started talking among themselves. At first I thought they were discussing tactics or something. But then I realized that they were arguing, which was, apparently, a normal thing for them to do every day, every week, every minute, every second. They stepped back and continued their argument.
The guy named Harry stayed behind. Since we were alone, I struck up a conversation with him.
"Where are your parents?"
"Killed. By Voldemort. You?"
"Nah, father's Poseidon, god of the Sea, and mom's Sally Jackson, whom you just prevented me from meeting."
"Sorry." He winced. I was really feeling sorry for this guy.
"So when were you born, all of you?"
"Hermione's on September–"
"No, I mean the year."
"Oh. Me? I was born on July 31, 1980. You?"
I suddenly felt nauseous. Because I realized one thing, but I wasn't about to spill it out. I didn't know him that well, but I didn't want him to be more panicked and scared than he already was. See, that's my good side. The bad side of me spends a lot of time insulting Clarisse and other people who annoy me.
I told him my birthday, but when he asked, "What year?" I couldn't bring myself to tell him. Maybe he'd say I was crazy if I voiced this out, but it seemed to me as if magic had brought them to the present, if that was even possible. I doubt this guy knew who the current American president was, or, incidentally, since we were in England, who the current Prime Minister of England was now.
I only knew things about time machines, how they could somehow "bend" time or whatever and transport the user back or forward, time. Okay, that was one of the lecture books Annabeth had instructed me to read, and besides, a good boyfriend listens to his girlfriend. But even with the knowledge from the books, I still couldn't figure out how this guy and his friends were transported to the present.
The guy named Harry spoke. "The Burrow didn't look this old before. I don't know why it looks as it is now."
I didn't answer, because answering him would mean that I'd have to tell him the truth, and sometimes the truth did hurt. I didn't want to add another reason for the guy not to smile and laugh and relax like an ordinary guy in their place would do.
I looked at the red-haired guy and the bushy-haired girl. Calling them by their names seemed to be so full of FC weirdness, (feeling close) but I had to try. I'd seen how quickly Ron could Stun people, (they'd told me what they'd done to Annabeth) and I did not want to have that spell placed on me.
What was taking the owners of this house so long to answer the doorbell? Maybe he didn't want to show his furry slippers. Maybe he had something (e.g. chest hair or squashed nose) that he didn't want us to see. Or maybe this was a trap.
Through the clear window, I saw, instead of the kindly mother, father, and brothers I had once met a few years back, a man, with eight companions, holding something in their hand.
I barely had time to yell "DUCK!" before the door burst open. Ron and Hermione stopped arguing at once. Then they yelled, "PROTEGO!" Harry included. But Harry, who probably didn't listen to me and therefore failed to stoop down, because after saying the incantation, he said a variety of spells, and I got the feeling quite a few difficult spells were involved. The men who had burst out of the house were holding those wooden sticks I still had trouble believing that they were wands, yelled "STUPEFY!" and the jets of light that issued out of their wands hit the only person left standing, the person I had been talking to prior to all of this.
He fell to the ground, his wand toppling out of his hand as he hit the hard earth. He lay there, unmoving.
Behind me, I heard Hermione scream, a natural thing for girls under pressure to do, and Ron bellowed another curse which I didn't quite catch, which blasted the attackers apart and made them fall to the ground.
Hermione ran forward and kneeled down beside Harry. I braced myself. Even though I barely knew this kid, I wasn't about to just stand back and have the attackers who'd wanted to kill him succeed. It was part of being a demigod. You had the inborn desire to protect.
Together, as if we had read each other's thoughts, Ron and I charged, me with my sword, him with his trusty weapon-of-choice, his wand.
