A/N: I wrote this chapter, but most of the characters are music5692's- I only own some of Joshua... too bad I can't keep him, since he belongs to Zoë, and Zoë mostly belongs to my lovely, talented co-writer. The basis belongs to Rick Riordan, we're only playing with his characters and adding some of hers and mine in. No copyright infringement is intended. If I can write that, you can review! Feel free to PM if you need background about Zoë's parents but it's better to read the prequels to this, which are located on music5692's account, just read them but hopefully Unchained Melody stands alone...

Chapter One of Unchained Melody by Sister Grimm and music5692
Di Mortales!

"Di immortales!" The girl shouted, brushing back gold-brown curls over blue eyes that now flashed green-gold like a cat's in anger. "Why do these things always happen to me?"

"Because," hissed Echidna, consort of Typhon, "you are a child of one daughter of Hades and Hestia, called 'Titan-Slayer', now immortal herself, and her lover, a son of Apollo, the only one to ever escape death. Why their children are mortal is completely beyond me. I protect my young."

Zoë Phaedra Eliot was normally pretty easygoing, even self-effacing, but this morning had been rushed enough, what with her brothers Azrael and Leon blowing up the yard experimenting with Greek fire (you'd think their ability to control and enlarge fire would have tipped them off that it wasn't a good idea). Hearing about her overbearing, legendary, all-powerful parents from an evil lady whose name had been used on an anteater was not helping her mood.

"I happen to know that," hissed Zoë, daughter of Sholeh Promethus and Leo Eliot. "And I wouldn't call sending out your Chimera to be destroyed by random half-bloods protection, lady. Not that you're here to chat." Zoë quirked an eyebrow and drew her bow. Before Echdina could do more than put down her son, Stygian iron-edged arrows pierced the Chimera's hide. Thanks for those archery lessons, Dad. But it merely growled and sprung up on its hind legs, snapping for the girl's neck.

Zoë felt fast and strong, and the sun was high in the sky on this summer solstice. She drew her bow again, and called upon the flame that burned within the descendants of Hestia. The stygian iron burst into flames, and pierced the Chimera's heart.

It howled its death-throes, and Echidna howled in anger. Zoë drew her bow again, preparing the fire.

Just as the serpent nymph charged, Echidna was pushed over by another, far more easily dealt with monster. A hellhound growled.

"Oh, come freaking on," muttered Zoë. "Hellhounds should know better than to attack a granddaughter of Hades… Exerchomai, kuon!" The hellhound whimpered. Zoë kicked at it a little. "Therion!" It tried to lick at her hands. Zoë sighed. "Look, you really don't want to go home with me. I mean, my dad hates anything from the Underworld-," The girl made a frantic shooing motion with her hands. Mom had been clear on no pets.

A couple minutes earlier, Joshua had been just minding his own business, trying to get to school on the last day of the year, that is June 21st. But his dad hadn't been able to drive him again. Then he'd missed the bus. His mom had been taking care of his baby sister. And now, his watch read eight-oh-five. Great. Pre-calc had started five minutes ago.

So he'd been forced to walk through Brooklyn, because he was the only person in New York City left alive without a Metro Card, and he was tired.

Then Joshua came upon a sight that he couldn't ignore.

The first thing he noticed was the girl. She had shining golden hair tugged back in a ponytail, tanned, athletic limbs, and intense blue eyes with hints of green and gold. But she was definitely not the kind of girl who would be content to hang on her date's arm.

Why, Joshua couldn't quite explain.

Maybe it was the lines of her face, the determined way she held her chin, the faint, haunting shadows that imperceptibly drew towards her. The flash and fire and glow of her body, a tigress in her prime.

Or maybe the way she was shooting flaming arrows at a lion-goat-dragon creature with wings, the elegance and practiced grace that would have put his old archery instructor to shame-

Wait a minute, Joshua's common sense said, snapping him out of his trance. What was that about the winged lion-goat-dragon? Joshua closed his eyes, assuring himself that the chimera was going to be gone in a minute. When he opened them, he saw it explode in a shower of golden dust.

That was when he noticed the nymph-snake lady. She snarled. That was when Joshua started looking for a way to help the poor girl who was being attacked by creatures right out of his drawings- Aw, c'mon Joshua, his common sense said, you can't even beat your dad in basketball. How do you expect to help this girl? I have to try, his never-look-before-you-leap side told him.

He looked around on the street, searching for some sort of cool weapon like in a book. Starbucks. Man passing by without seeing anything. Starbucks. Comic book shop-

Man passing by without seeing anything?

How could people not notice this? A girl was fighting for her life right there, and no one even stopped to look! Joshua could no more explain the anger churning in his gut than he could the girl or the dog the size of a tank she was kicking-

Wait a minute, someone was kicking a dog? A dog?

Joshua's brain immediately zeroed in on this. It didn't matter that this girl was the most beautiful person he'd ever seen. It only mattered that she was kicking a dog that had done nothing to her. Animal abuse was one thing Joshua couldn't stand.

"Wait a minute!" he shouted, sprinting towards her.

The girl turned around, an expression of shock on her face that soon melted to irritation. "Look, I really can't talk right now, demigod."

"Demi-what?" he sputtered.

Zoë sighed. Not another undiscovered half-blood (or in her case, 3⁄4 blood...)

"Son of one of the Twelve Olympians, or another god?"

"The who? My parents are completely normal."

"They live together?"

He nodded.

"How long have they been married?"

"Twenty years!"

The girl frowned. "How old are you?"

"Sixteen," Joshua was confused.

"Have you ever been attacked?"

"Only by my three-year-old sister."

"Are you sure your parents are really your biological parents?"

"Yes!" he shouted. "Not that that's nice to ask!"

"All right. What does this mean?" And Zoë spouted off words in Ancient Greek, slowly and delicately, as if she were trying to calm herself down. In Joshua's opinion, though, it wasn't working, because she still seemed fit to be tied.

"Was that Chinese?"

Zoë sighed. "Do you trust me..."

"Joshua Sterling Dare."

The name tugged vaguely at Zoë's memory, but why she couldn't discern.

"Then give me your hand."

Mesmerized by her eyes, Joshua could only nod and hold out his hand.

Zoë took out her celestial bronze dagger and before Joshua could blink, she nicked his finger, no more painfully than you would do for a blood test.

Except nothing happened.

The knife went right through his finger. Zoë blinked, amazed. She did it again, a little harder, with the same result.

Celestial bronze cannot hurt mortals, Zoë dimly recalled, the thoughts reaching her brain very slowly. Stygian iron refused to bypass them, it just stopped halfway in-between. Weapons of the half-blood world wouldn't even hurt their skin...

Finally, Joshua recovered enough sense to gape. "What are you doing?"

"You're a mortal!" Zoë sputtered, having processed the information at last.

"What are you?" Joshua replied, indignant.

"No one. Nothing. You never saw me." Zoë snapped her fingers in his face, trying to manipulate the Mist like her adopted aunt Annabeth Jackson did, despite the fact that she'd never really been good at it...

"Yeah, I did!" He tugged on her arm. "What's going on?"

Zoë sighed. "I can't tell you, … what's your name again?"

"Joshua Sterling Dare," he replied automatically.

"If you want to do yourself a favor, you'll forget me. The Chimera. Go back to being a regular teenager. You have no place in this world you have just glimpsed the surface of."

Her eyes, blue and intense, bored into him. Joshua's instincts said she was telling the truth. Joshua's common sense said to obey her. Joshua's curiosity said he had to follow her. He looked up to glare at her defiantly, and Zoë held up a hand, a wall of fire coming between them. She ran and ran. The wall gave way quickly, but by then she was gone.

Okay, Joshua thought. Let's take time to process this. He sat down on the bench. Beautiful girl shows up fighting three different monsters. She stabs you and nothing happens. She immediately acts like you have the plague and makes huge flames appear between you. Was she in a cult? (The weird weapons did make a case for that.) Evil? Had the universe suddenly fallen apart? Or- even more disturbing- had the universe he'd been living in for the past sixteen years been a complete lie?

Well, Joshua figured, if he was going to trust that this all wasn't a crazy dream, the world he'd been living in had definitely been hiding something.

And he had a feeling that girl had a key to what that was.

Time to play stalker.

Zoë was panicking as she ran away from that mortal whose eyesight was way too good. Demigods had to remain secret. If they tried to explain themselves to a regular mortal, the government would have to open a new insane asylum. Of course, Joshua Sterling Dare was hardly regular.

She didn't know why, but he had something about him that made him seem out of the ordinary. It was probably just his Mist-sight, but it could be something else. A strange, rosy glow. Like he was god-marked. It clicked in Zoë's brain. That was why she'd been so sure she was a half-blood... most demigods tended to look a little special, a little too bright to careful vision, a little bit too out of the ordinary. Not always in a flattering way, it could be like her mother's ability to attract shadows- it depended on the parent. But since he wasn't a demigod, was he god-marked?

God-marked, Zoë remembered from her lessons, was when a specific deity or even demigod, on rare occasions, singled out a mortal for protection and guidance, or spent a lot of time around them. Her grandmother Michelle Eliot was god-marked from her time with Apollo and giving birth to a demigod. So was her Uncle Percy's mother from a whole summer with the sea god. The mortal Huntresses were god-marked so completely they glowed an obvious silver. Most of the time, with the exception of the Huntresses, it was so imperceptible to normal half-bloods and mortals that both only saw someone a little larger than life, a little too special. But Zoë technically wasn't a half-blood- she was a three-quarter blood and her parents were minor deities, the only ones to remain faithful to each other. She was mortal, but she, like her mother, could look at a god in his true form and not evaporate. The extra bit of god blood gave her clearer vision than say Uncle Percy, who had gone eight months without realizing his childhood friend Tyson was a Cyclops. (He'd never lived that one down.)

So how had Joshua Sterling Dare, a mortal who had no idea what demigods even were and had thought the giant hellhound was merely a giant Rottweiler, gotten himself so god-marked he had a shadow of rose around him? No one she'd met except Artemis' Huntresses had ever had anything more obvious than that. And usually the god-mark was a warning to other gods not to harm the mortal (not that that always worked). In male gods, it was often a way of marking their territory, like her cousin and best friend Phoebe had always put it.

But he seemed a little young to be dating any of the Olympians (unless her grandfather Apollo was hiding something important), particularly when he didn't even know who they were. The shock in his eyes had been sincere.

It was a question that deserved investigating. But probably by someone else, like her Aunt Kallisti, daughter of Eris. It wasn't as though she had much else to do, besides sell Play-Doh sculptures for millions of dollars on eBay. That had put her husband, Dr. di Angelo (AKA Uncle Nico), through medical school.

At the same time, she wanted to be the one to investigate this mortal. She wanted to keep his memory to herself. And Aunt Kallisti was hardly subtle.

Yes, stabbing someone with sacred weapons is so subtle, she told herself.

But the feeling remained, even as she raced up the steps to her school and begged a pass from the nice secretary.

Normal mortals were so lucky.

And Zoë Phaedra Eliot, daughter of Leo, the immortal consort of Sholeh Promethus, goddess of wildfire and civilization, had a sinking feeling on this fateful June 21st that Joshua Sterling Dare was neither normal nor lucky.

And that, along with the fear that she'd never escape being "daughter of", rather than her own person, made her actually terrified, even though no hellhound or Chimera had ever beaten her. It was never, ever going to be enough for her parents, she would never be good enough—

Just as she was thinking this, a boy ran straight into her. Her books scattered as her classmate numbly apologized.

"Here, let me get that for you- holy shit!" The boy realized, eyes traveling up those same tanned limbs, from the white Keds to the jean shorts and red tube top. Her bow was sticking out of her pack from its scattering. The books lay forgotten on the floor.

The two very different eyes met again, the same shock echoed in both irises.

It was Zoë who finally said it.

"Holy shit," she agreed, the faintest ironic smile twisting her Cupid's-bow lips.

A/N: Cookies to anyone who gets Joshua's mom, and those who have read Living From Dream to Dream might get why Joshua is god-marked, though that won't be revealed for quite a few chapters. "God-marked" is one of the very few things I own, and has next to no mythological basis, though it is based in Rick Riordan's Huntress glow. Soundtrack to the next chapter is "Walk This World" by Heather Nova, which I also don't own, this chapter doesn't really have a song on my playlist other than perhaps "Eyes on Fire" from the Twilight soundtrack (which, as you may know, I don't own), suggestions welcome. Zoë is seventeen and Joshua is sixteen, and do not call him Josh under any circumstances. Zoë's brothers and cousins, adoptive and biological, will be met soon. I promise Nico's kids with Kallisti are just as hot as he is in current canon. Peace and love, I know this author's note was long.

Must I say it? Review or I'll sic Zoë's brothers on you with their Greek fire!

BUT if you review and want a hug from them, or maybe a kiss, that can be arranged. Apollo, Chase Dylan Jackson, Astor Maguire (long story) are available as well, and so are Minerva Eliza Jackson and Calypso for the guys! Phoebe (full name Phoebe Bianca di Angelo) and Zoë are never going to hug you, my apologies. I've tried. Please specify because there are so many choices or just say "I can't choose" and we'll give you them all depending on gender or preference.