CHAPTER ONE

My name is Tamara Hope, and I have an unusual life. I have no clue who my parents are; my father didn't stick around long enough to learn of my existence, and my mother dumped me in an orphanage when I was around one year old. My entire life has consisted of being bounced around from one foster home to the next. I've never had a real family, nor any real friends. It seems like every single kid at every single school I've attended believes that I'm a freak that needs to be avoided. That is except for Tina Gonzalez. I was taken into a new foster home in New York about a month ago, along with Tina. When I had first heard I was going to a home with another foster kid, I had been so nervous. Some of the kids in the foster care programs can be ugly and make life miserable. Not Tina though. She was nice to me and we had become friends almost overnight.

I was finally happy at this foster home. The couple who had taken us in were around their forties and had never had kids. They were nice and really cared for us. I had Tina who, within the last month, had become my best friend, and I was finally putting in an effort at school. I was happy with my life, but little did I know that it was about to be flipped upside down.

"Tamara, hurry or we'll be late for school!" I heard Tina yell through the bathroom door.

"I'm coming, just hold on!" I put my long red hair up in a pony-tail and quickly brushed my teeth. When I came out of the bathroom, Tina was waiting for me at the front door with my backpack in hand.

"The last day of school and you're going to make us late," she teased as we rushed out the door.

We made it to the sidewalk just as our bus was about to leave.

"You girls are really pushing it," our driver, a mid-aged woman with crooked yellow teeth and greasy gray hair said to us.

I didn't bother giving an excuse. Nobody really cared anyway. Tina and I quickly sat down in our usual seats in the back of the bus. We talked quietly, trying not to get noticed. Like every other school I had been to, the kids at this one thought that Tina and I were both freaks.

When we got to the school, we waited until all of the kids were off the bus. Then we quickly jumped out before our driver could take off again. As Tina and I were walking into the building, I noticed that someone was watching us from a distance. It was a woman wearing dark clothing, despite the heat, with sleek black hair pulled into a pony-tail and yellow-green eyes. She stood underneath an oak tree and watched our every move. I nudged Tina and jerked my head in the direction of the woman.

"Is she watching us?" Tina whispered to me. "Why would she be watching us?"

"I don't know, and I don't want to find out. She doesn't look very friendly."

I stared at the woman, trying to figure out why she found us interesting, before looking away and putting her out of my head. She was just watching us. No harm in there, right? It wasn't the weirdest thing I had seen in my time spent in New York.

When we stepped through the doors of the school, kids glared at us and started murmuring as they always did when we walked in the hallways.I kept my head down, trying to ignore the heat rising to my cheeks. It was stupid that I felt embarrassed everyday at school for doing absolutely nothing except pretending to be invisible, but I was always humiliated anyway.

As I walked past him, the quarterback and captain of the football team stuck his foot out, causing me to trip. I was about to land on my face, and make a fool out of myself in the process, when I felt some sort of force underneath me, holding me up. It was only a few inches off the ground so no one would notice, but I was definitely not on the floor. I quickly pushed myself up and rubbed my temple. There was no possible way that I alone had been defying the laws of gravity and floated in mid-air, so I told myself I had been hallucinating and followed Tina to our first class of the day, trying to block out the mocking laughs that followed us.

By lunch, I was tired and grumpy. The teachers in my classes were convinced that summer meant more time to do homework, so they had loaded me down with reading assignments. In history, while I was taking my final of everything from World War II to the present day, some girl had stuck pink bubble gum in my hair, which had resulted in me pulling quite a lot of hair out of my head as I tried to get it out. And then in P.E., the class had decided to play dodge ball, except everyone, including my own teammates, had only seemed interested in hitting me.

As Tina and I walked over to our usual table in the very back of the cafeteria, I noticed that the creepy woman we had seen earlier this morning was watching us again. She stood at the entrance of the cafeteria, her eyes trained us. I got a nervous feeling in my stomach. Tina and I sat down and I whispered to her, "We're being watched again."

"By the same woman?" Tina said back.

"Yeah. She's over by the entrance."

Tina glanced back at the door and, when she saw the woman, tensed up. She looked back at me, her amber-brown eyes full of worry. "What should we do?" she asked.

I wasn't really sure. I didn't like the idea of talking to the woman, but then again, I was also curious as to why she was so interested in us. "We should probably ignore her. She looks like she wants to kill us or something," I decided. "And besides, what can she do to us? We're in a public place surrounded my a lot of witnesses."

Tina nodded and tried to focus on her lunch, but both of us were too tense to eat. I glanced back at the entrance and saw that the woman was walking towards us.

"She's coming our way," I whispered to Tina.

"What do we do?" she whispered back.

I weighed our options. We could sit here and wait for her, we could confront her, or we could run. Judging by the death stare she was giving us, I was going with the latter idea.

Tina and I grabbed our bags and, as quickly as we could without raising too much attention, we tried to walk along the wall of the cafeteria, hoping the woman wouldn't notice us. It didn't work. Tina and I were almost to the door when it slammed shut on its own. I tried to pull it open, but it was locked.

"Thought you could get away from me?" someone said loudly in a way that reminded me of a cat's purr.

I turned and saw the woman standing about twenty-feet away, a malicious grin on her face. Her teeth didn't look normal though. They were long and pointed, like a cat's.

"I've been watching you both for a while now," she said in that voice again, slowly walking towards us.

"Who are you, and what do you want?" Tina asked.

"I'm an agent for my Lord. Don't worry, you'll meet him soon enough, if you come quietly."

By now, the whole cafeteria was watching us, their eyes moving back and forth between me, Tina, and the woman.

"We don't have any intentions of going anywhere with you," I said back at her.

She grinned, like that was exactly what she wanted to hear. "Alright, if you insist." She took off the black trench coat she had been wearing and let it fall to the floor. Her body changed. Her legs shortened until she was standing on all fours. Her hands and feet started morphing into huge paws the size of my face, with long black claws. Golden fur was rapidly covering her entire body. Through all of this, her face stayed the same. As she was morphing, the kids in the cafeteria screamed and started running to the door and I pulled Tina out of the way so we wouldn't get run over. The panicked kids tugged, kicked, ran into, and punched the door, but it wouldn't budge.

I wasn't quite sure who the woman really was or why she wanted us, but I understood enough to know that she was a sphinx, a mythological monster, and she probably intended to kill us all. I didn't really have time dwell on the fact that sphinxes were supposed to be myths, and I shouldn't have even been in the situation to begin with.

The sphinx slowly made her way towards us, knowing that she had all the time in the world; we couldn't going anywhere. She crawled up to us until she was about five feet away. She shifted her weight to her back legs and said, "Are you sure you don't want to come with me quietly? I'll even leave at least two kids alive!" She said it like it was a great offer.

I looked around and grabbed a lunch tray off a table and held it in front of me as a pathetic shield. Tina ran behind the lunch-line counter and grabbed a long metal spoon. The sphinx sighed like our attempts at protection were tiresome before she launched herself at me. Her claws looked like knives, and her teeth pointed to tear me apart. I stood rooted in my spot, too afraid to move. Then I realized that if I didn't do something quickly, she was going to kill me. I slammed my tray into her face and sent her flying into a table. There was a sound of metal sliding along the ground as the tables screeched across the floor. The sphinx picked herself up, ketchup and mustard in her fur and a milkshake oozing all over her hair. She roared at me angrily. I stood my ground, gripping my tray. The sphinx was about to launch herself at me again when metal utensils came flying from behind the counter. Tina threw spoons, forks, and knives, all of which pelted the sphinx. The spoons and forks looked like they hurt, but the knives did some real damage. They cut into her fur, sending glowing golden liquid out of the monster. She turned and roared at Tina, who responded by sending a butcher knife into the sphinx's face. It cut her cheek and the sphinx yowled with pain.

As all of this was happening, the kids behind me kept pounding on the door, even more frantic then before. The boys were trying to ram their way through the door. Most of the girls were screaming and crying. A few sensible kids were on their phones, trying to get help.

Watching the other kids was a mistake. While I wasn't looking, the sphinx had pulled herself together and was crawling towards me.

"Tamara, look out!" Tina cried.

I looked too late, and the heavy monster jumped on me, pushing me to the f1oor. She stood over me, grinning.

"You will make a wonderful prize for my master," she said, purring with happiness.

Tina was throwing more utensils, along with plates and bowls, but the sphinx ignored them, focused on me. She growled and opened her jaws, and I got a good look at all of her very sharp teeth. I was pretty sure I was whimpering as the monster's mouth came closer to my face, ready to tear me apart. Suddenly, the sphinx yelped. Her eyes went wide with surprise and she crumpled to golden dust. I sat there, covered in her remnants and breathing heavily. Standing next to the back door of the cafeteria was Archer Mason, a tall boy with plain-brown hair and light-green eyes. He held a bow in his hands and had a quiver of arrows was strapped to his back. Next to me was a long wooden arrow with a very sharp point at the end.

"Archer, what—what's going on?" I asked.

He ran over to me and helped me up. "There isn't time to explain. We have to go." He ran out of the cafeteria, and Tina and I followed him.

Now that the monster was dead, the spell she had set on the door had been released, and kids were running out of the cafeteria and into the school hallways, going crazy and telling everyone they met what they had seen. As we ran past them, I heard a girl telling a teacher, "There was this huge dog sir! It was like the size of a horse and it had glowing eyes and huge teeth! It was rabid! And it started attacking these two girls—them, right there! The dog attacked them! And then those girls trashed the cafeteria!" She pointed at me and Tina as we ran past her.

The teacher yelled at us to stop, but Archer ignored him. We ran out of the school and into the parking lot. Archer led us over to an old, beaten down green Jeep and said, "Get in, now!"

Tina launched herself into the front seat and I climbed into the back. In the distance, I could hear the wail of sirens. The police were coming, and I had a feeling that somehow Tina and I would get the blame for what had happened.

Kids and teachers poured out of the school as Archer backed his Jeep up and peeled out of the parking lot. I saw some kids snap pictures of the truck's license plate. Not good.

Archer sped down the street, driving like a maniac as he tried to avoid other cars, pedestrians, and bicyclists.

"Archer, what on earth is going on?" I yelled at him when we got onto the freeway.

He looked back at me and sighed. "It's a really long story."

"I want an explanation," Tina demanded.

Archer sighed, like he was trying to figure out exactly what to say. "That monster that attacked you was a sphinx," he started. "I know you think that sphinxes are just myths, but they aren't. Greek mythology is real, and we're a part of it."

"What do you mean 'we're a part of it.'?" I asked cautiously.

"Okay, you've heard about the Greek gods, correct? The Olympians?" Archer waited for me and Tina to nod before continuing. "Well, it appears that both of you are children of a god in some way, or at least a descendent of one."

I sat there in shock, trying to absorb what he was saying. I was the child of a god? That seemed impossible, unreal, and I wanted to ask if Archer was from Crazyville.

"Where do you come into all of this, and where are you taking us?" I asked him.

"I'm taking you to Camp Half-Blood. It's a camp for demigods, children of gods. Tina, last year you got on our radar, and they sent me to go undercover to protect you from monsters. Now they want you to come to the camp. Tamara, I think you're a demigod. You show some characteristics of being one, but you don't attract nearly as much attention as most demigods do. I don't see any harm in bringing you to safety though. No demigod is truly safe in the world."

I sat there, trying to decide how I felt. This whole time, Archer had been spying on us? Acting as our bodyguard? I didn't know if I was grateful or angry.

"How did I get on your camp's radar?" Tina asked.

"Last summer, when you went surfing in Florida, do you remember that hurricane that hit the beach?"

Tina sucked in a breath. I wasn't sure what this was about. Tina had never told me this story, but it seemed to scare her.

"I was surfing, and these girls kept getting in my way and taking my waves," Tina recalled. "I finally got really mad when one of them knocked me off my board and then tried to run me over."

Archer nodded. "That's right. And then that hurricane came out of nowhere."

"Yeah, and a lot of people got hurt and those girls, it took Search and Rescue a week to find them," Tina said quietly.

"But you didn't get hurt at all," Archer said. "Did you ever wonder how?"

Tina looked at Archer with wide eyes. "Are—are you suggesting that I created that hurricane?"

"Yes," Archer said. "When we saw that story on the news, we immediately sent people out to find you. But when we got to Florida, you had already been moved to New York."

"Whoa, hold on! Time out!" I cried. "How is it possible for Tina to create a hurricane?"

"Demigods inherit powers from their parent. Judging by how big that hurricane was, we figured that Tina was a very important demigod that could hurt a lot of people if she didn't control her powers."

"So you were sent to come get me," Tina said, putting the pieces together.

"That's right," Archer confirmed.

Tina and I traded a look. Did we want to trust Archer? He had seemed like a nice kid in school, but what if that had been an act? And did we really want to believe that Greek gods were real? Then again, we had been attacked by a sphinx, which provided plenty of evidence.

"What about our foster parents?" Tina asked.

"The camp has sent them a letter posing as the school saying that you guys were enrolled to go to a summer camp. You can call them once we get to camp. We'll be there in about an hour if you want to get some sleep."

I told myself that no way was I going to fall asleep, not when a boy who I barely knew was driving us to some strange place. But, try as I might, my body just wasn't in sync with my brain, and slowly I felt my eyelids close as I drifted off into a deep sleep.