Two: Kalypso

I Run To the Dumbest Spot Possible

When Kally bolted to the front lines of the battle at the camp's border and told Will that she would cover him, she hoped she sounded like she had a plan.

She didn't.

Kally found herself, without a plan, running between two scary gods, and two equally terrifying half-bloods. The battle escalated so quickly, she couldn't have kept track of who was stabbing whom without the sense of time slowing down—something Axel had explained as a demigod power.

To one side, a boar the size of a minivan charged Alabaster C. Torrington, the child of Hecate and enemy—former enemy?—to Camp Half-Blood. From the few Greek mythological studies she'd attended, she knew other campers might think this was just a standard, terrorizing boar, but the hideous pink and green bowtie gave away his identity: Phobetor, the God of Nightmares—someone she'd rather see as bacon rather than an oncoming attacker.

As Phobetor barreled forward, Kally could feel her legs tremble, unsure how Alabaster took such a solid stance, lowering his forked staff like a lance.

"What, little child of magic? Are you defending this camp, again?" Phobetor huffed.

If Kally was closer to Alabaster, the aura of Alabaster's hatred might roast her: no powers necessary.

At the last second, the child of magic knelt, scrawling something into the dirt while hissing, "Incantara: captarent eum."

As Phobetor bore down on him, Alabaster rolled to the side. [footnote 1] The pouches for his spells rattled and spun around as he dodged. Because he'd shoved his Cloven Terror helm back on—a Stygian iron enlaced ram's skull with smoking green eyeholes—he looked almost as much a monster as Phobetor. Alabaster's eerie eyes blazed in the shadows and his limbs looked elongated and almost tree-like.

One of Phobetor's front feet snagged on that spot of ground, catching on whatever trap Alabaster had set.

Alabaster lunged from his crouch, forked staff aimed at Phobetor's head. "For the last time," he snarled, "I'm not doing it for this camp!"

The god melted into black tar before Alabaster's strike could land.

When the tar reformed, Phobetor stood in a humanoid form, donning a colorful minstrel's costume. He had a bird skull in place of a head and a piccolo-hatchet in hand. The hatchet was mid-swing at the child of magic.

Meanwhile, on Kally's other side, Reyna had led her small unit of legionnaires in a wedge shaped pattern into Melinoe and her amassing army of ghouls.

Before Pax had run off to do whatever with his brother, Axel—she'd been too far away to discern much of Pax's shouts—he'd called the Goddess of Ghosts, "Two-Face." This was an appropriate title. The goddess looked like two desecrated corpses, one mummified in wrappings and one drained of blood, cut down the center and sewn together.

The goddess' form rippled when she rushed forward at Reyna's army. With a swift motion, she knocked Reyna away from her troops, closer to Nico. Reyna barely avoided tumbling to the ground.

Instead of a monster, Melinoe turned into something that Kally found far less ghastly: a middle-aged Hispanic man wearing an American soldier's desert camo uniform. There was a saber hanging out of his bleeding torso and a rifle in his hands. His sharp, stern features almost reminded Kally of the praetor's.

Reyna fully regained her footing when Melinoe reached the praetor again. With Reyna's brave stance, the glare of her imperial gold breastplate in the moonlight, the glow of her tattoo, and the fluttering of her dark braid and billowing of her purple cloak, she looked like a goddess of war. Kally could completely understand why a warrior like Axel had fallen in love with her.

Reyna's seeming invulnerability made it all the more horrifying when Melinoe managed to nail Reyna in the face with the butt of the rifle. Seeing Melinoe in the form of a Hispanic soldier, Reyna looked too shocked to dodge.

Reyna skidded backward. Blood leaked from her lips.

"Ramirez!" a centurion from the Roman unit, Kally thought it was Kahale, cried. Their wedge slammed into the line of ghouls nearby. The clash of celestial metal and the hiss of ghouls thundered around the camp.

"Keep the formation!" Reyna snarled, wiping the blood off her face and straightening to full height. "I'll handle the goddess!"

With that, Reyna charged the Goddess of Ghosts, fighting spear to rifle. The goddess screamed at Reyna in enraged Spanish.

With Reyna and Alabaster taking on two gods without back up and the Roman legionnaires fighting the undead, Kally reminded herself she could only help one person right now, and the person who needed her the most was Nico.

With Phobetor and Alabaster colliding hatchet-to-staff on one side, and Reyna and Melinoe battling on the other, Kally raced forward. [footnote 2] She didn't see Will anywhere and hoped her ghost brother had done whatever he could for his boyfriend.

In front of her, Nico was strung up like a marionette with shadowy threads. They entwined into his skin, appearing to thicken with each second. His mouth contorted in a scream. Despite the roar of brutality from the nearby combat, his desperate shriek pierced her ears. He withered in spasms and Kally was nauseous when she saw why.

From a mesh of blackness around his waist ghoulish arms erupted, clawing into the sides of his torso and ribcage to pull themselves out from within. The ghosts would erupt, howl with glee, then rush to flank the Roman formation. The process took seconds, sometimes with more than one ghost greedily slithering through. With each escapee, part of Nico's arms or legs would dissipate into shadow, like they'd stolen a piece of his life to sustain their own.

A shadow bridge—that's what Melinoe had called Nico.

Despite her terror and confusion, Kally quivered in rage.

Even after everything they'd gone through: all their quests and tribulations, the months of nightmares, what Apollo had done to her mother, how Joey and Will had died, and how she and the other "Traitors of Olympus" had fought Percy and his gang for Eris's amusement, Kally hadn't given much thought to the gods that had been puppeting them.

What Melinoe was doing to her friend was like a billboard of We're Jerks and This is How We Amuse Ourselves.

Kally wasn't sure what to do. She couldn't throw her imperial gold discus at Nico's shadows. It would either go through him or hit him and make things worse. And she doubted her healing would help him here.

Will's shouts echoed in her head, about how to treat Nico's shadow poisoning and how to weaken ghosts.

Last time Pax had driven her to anger, she learned how to harness one of her powers, something she hadn't been able to replicate on a large scale since months ago in Howe Cavern.

But, now, Kally could feel her hands heating up. Her gut twisted the same way it did when she healed someone. As she stumbled to a stop directly in front of the son of Hades, she screamed, "Nico, Will, hold on!"

When she lifted her hands up, light exploded out of them.

The ghosts crawling out were incinerated with little more than a hiss.

The tendrils wrapping Nico exploded off.

He collapsed onto his face.

Nico's arms and legs didn't reappear in the sunrays like she had hoped. What was left of his thighs and upper arms barely remained solid. To her horror, Kally realized Melinoe's tendrils hadn't just been holding him upright. They'd been holding him together.

Nico would probably disappear into the shadows if she stopped her rain of sunshine now.

Worse: he continued to wail.

Last time she'd done this, her solar flare had burned bright enough to knock Python off of her and Will. Could she eviscerate Nico like she'd done the shadows and tendrils? But, if she stopped, he'd dissipate.

On the edge of her peripheral vision, Kally could see something moving towards her—fast.

"Insolent child of Apollo!" Melinoe shrieked nearby.

Her heart seemed to hold its beats. She couldn't turn or do anything to defend herself. If she did, she wouldn't be able to sustain Nico.

Something made a horrifying, chattery hiss right beside her ear.

Then she heard a double thump.

A shade stumbled out from beside her, into her beam of light and obliterated into a puff of smoke. Before it poofed, she could see two distinct arrows sticking out of it: one gold, one silver.

More shades chattered around her.

"We got you covered!"

"Keep that torch on, Kal!"

Although she couldn't turn, something produced a brief flash of light and a pop. Electricity arched nearby. Shades hissed.

Another set of shades jumped, willfully, into her blaze, as though they'd decided the sight was so lovely, they'd die to touch it.

Judging from the shouts and actions, Kally assumed Thalia, the Lieutenant of Artemis, and Calex, the son of Eros, were keeping an eye out for her.

Over the shriek of dying ghosts—did ghosts… die?—she could hear Nico's continued sob. Each heave was so despairing, the area seemed to radiate despondency.

She strained to focus on the intensity of emotion and the tug in her stomach. She could feel her body whine in protest under the stress and heat. As someone trained to repress her emotions and forgive everything, fueling the sunlight with her rage was difficult.

With the way Nico wouldn't raise his head, Kally couldn't shake the feeling that Nico wanted to fade away. That scared her more than any of the ghouls, the Goddess of Ghosts, and the God of Nightmares all together.

Although she didn't know what Will was doing or what she could do, she found herself thinking, Hurry, Will.

Two things gave her hope.

In the distance, she could see the horizon tinting pink. The sun would rise soon, putting this battle to a standstill.

That, and, in the distance behind Nico, she could see a van park along the border of Camp Half-Blood, beside the Paxmobile. Sam Datta's taxi van. A very pissed Percy Jackson had hopped out of the front passenger seat and an infuriated Hazel Levesque jumped out of the back.

Percy cracked his neck and took a step towards the battle.


Author's note:

Thanks for the read! We're jumping hardcore back into our battle. Tune in next week for Chapter Three: Percy—I Become King of the Party.

And make sure to let me know what you think! Thanks for your comments on the first chapter :D


Footnotes:

1: Pax, "Get it? The boar bore down on him—" "Ajax, shut up."

2: I needed to reword this sentence to smooth it out, but Pax wanted me to maintain part of the original sentence and point out that Reyna and Alabaster are taking on two gods, head on, without back up. Percy wants to point out that this is a typical night for him.