Chapter One
Old Moon
--
Oh, shit.
"Pease! Reese! Bindy! Sierra! Satsuki!" I barked, springing to my feet. Stupid, stupid, stupid! How could I have let my guard down after last December? "Get your siblings together and hold the things off!"
Reese and Satsuki were on their feet in an instant. "On it!"
"Odd! Get Anthony and Scorpius, round up the rest of the settlements! Find Monica—get them all to the bus! Now!"
Now I could hear the distant thunder of footsteps, and massive splashes—and by the sound of it, the kids noticed it too.
Shit—!
Without another word, I threw the door open and tore out into the sunshine.
Njord—the Njord kids were closest to the house. I swiveled in a tight circle, getting my bearings, and then sprinted off towards the east.
The pounding of giant footsteps was getting louder from the north. It sounded as if they were almost there—and as I ran along the beach towards the territory of Hope and Jax, something blocked out the sun.
I stumbled and almost fell on my sword, which I'd apparently ripped from its sheath without noticing. A quick glance towards what had once been the sun confirmed my horrible suspicions.
They were here.
One of the biggest giants, still several hundred miles out in the water, loomed over me, grinning with crooked teeth. His head blocked out the sunlight; a virtual eclipse engulfed Gamle-Sti.
I ran faster.
I slid to a stop next to the hand-woven tent that belonged to Hope Bannerman, and without any grace, kicked it down. It was no big loss.
A small girl sat, slightly stunned, where her tent had just been, and then directed a crabby blue-eyed stare at me. Hope was a tiny thing, with thick wavy black hair, yellowy skin, and ice-blue eyes, and most of the time she wasn't scary at all.
Except for right now.
"What are you doing, Warren?" she shrieked, waving her arms in my direction. "I just got it set up after it fell down last ti—"
Then she looked up and saw the giants.
"… Oh."
"Yeah, oh," I said furiously.
In Gamle-Sti, a siren suddenly began shrieking, starting up a chain reaction of screaming and the council members pressing their own air horns. Some enterprising soul had apparently pushed the big red button that started the Klaxon, and now all Hel truly broke loose.
The rest of Hope's siblings poured from their tents, scrabbling for a hold to clamber up the beach to safety. Nimbly, Hope herself sprang to her feet and grabbed for her council air horn.
"Alrighty, guys!" she screeched piercingly, effectively halting the flood of rabid demigods fleeing for their lives. All of them looked back at her with terrified blue-green eyes. "So as you may have noticed, we're being attacked by giants! DO NOT PANIC! Run for the bus and STAY CALM!"
Easy for her to say.
I took off, heading for the Idun and Bragi settlement. The two were one settlement, seeing as Idun and Bragi were married (and their children, more often than not, ended up tying the knot as well).
The giants were moving faster now, but not much. To them we probably appeared like madly scurrying ants, while to us they were so very slow.
I could only hope they were slow enough.
I had to shove my way through panicking demigods, all streaming towards the huge purple bus at the entrance of Gamle-Sti. I almost tripped on a kid barely larger than toddler age whose curly blonde locks marked him instantly as a child of Frey.
"Hey, you!" I shouted at random, and when a preteen son of Idun turned to me, wide-eyed, I thrust the child into his arms. "Get him back to his siblings," I said harshly, and tore on.
In the Idun settlement, there was a young girl in a white dress, sitting calmly in the center picking grass. Around her, her sisters and brothers streamed steadily out of their group of tents. Sigurd May—dark of skin and slight of face—kneeled beside her, shaking her shoulder gently.
He was in the process of explaining to her why it would be a very bad idea to stay here with the big men coming, but I snatched her up before he could finish. She let out an anguished cry as the blades of grass dropped from her hands, but Sigurd tucked a cloth doll into her arms as we ran.
"Glad—to see—you here—Warren," he panted. "Tara—didn't want—to leave—"
"Take her," I barked, pausing to ferry the toddler to him. "Is everyone out of your group?"
"Yes—"
"Good!"
Summoning an energy I didn't think I'd known I had, I flew for the bus, looking for Sierra.
The telltale mane of frizzy orange hair—there! I practically fell on my face speeding up to tag her on the shoulder. She turned—
It wasn't Sierra. Just one of her siblings, too inexperienced to defend the frontier.
"Where's Sierra?" I hissed. "She—"
"I'm right here, Tyrsson!" a voice snapped behind me, and I whirled. Sierra brandished Rat, eyes alight with jade war-fire.
"Go," I said harshly. "You're our fastest runner—go around the perimeter making sure everyone's on the bus. Go! Move!"
She moved. In a seamless move she was in motion, Rat sheathed, and fairly blurring away from us.
The giants were almost close enough to step on us now, and I was almost panicking. All the settlements were on the bus—
—except the ones I'd sent out to fend them off!
"Warren!"
"Oy!" I roared, for a moment loud enough to be heard across the entire campus of Gamle-Sti. "Everyone who values their lives, get to the fucking bus or die!"
Oh, yeah. That brought 'em in all right.
Pease arrived first, at the head of a column of my brothers and sisters. They loaded into the bus—I counted quickly, and everyone was there, thank gods—closely followed by Bindy and Anthony of the Thor cabin.
Anthony snapped me a salute as they arrived, the pounding of the footsteps a constant reminder of danger in the background. "Everyone present and accounted for, trust us!"
"Move it, thunderheads," I shouted, and they hauled ass into that bus before you could say "I forgot my toothbrush".
Scorpius was next, leading a line of orange-haired, green-eyed monsters with battle-lust in their eyes. He nodded curtly to me, but I had no time to deal with him.
Satsuki, for once solemn and focused, arrived with Odd at her side and a mass of her siblings behind. Odd had time to grin good-naturedly and shoot me a thumbs-up before Reese showed up, shoving the Heimdall kids into the bus with his Frey siblings.
"Nice to see you're attentive," he said sardonically, before vaulting up onto the steps.
I stood outside the doors, anxiously awaiting the return of Sierra. From the driver seat, Monica shouted, "Are you getting on or being suicidal?!"
There was a loud, electric noise as the first settlement—Njord, as close as you could get to the water without being in it—was crushed underneath the first boot. The runes—placed by the Aesir to protect us—were destroyed. I almost yelled. Sierra couldn't be there!
She couldn't be—
Not again…
But—
There was a blur approaching. One with suspiciously orange hair.
"One kid," Sierra sputtered, skidding to a swift stop beside me. "Sitting pleased as punch in the Freyja settlement with a mirror. I got her, 's all good."
Sure enough, she was dragging a tiny kid with red-peach curls, who was complaining loudly; both were signs of Freyja parentage. I nodded sharply, then pushed both of them promptly into the bus.
The giants were still moving slowly; I barreled into the bus, really panicking now. The bus was dead silent, all breath held in terror. I heard the whimpering of a terrified teenage girl.
"Is everyone present?" I said calmly.
In quick succession, the council members shouted out their parentages to confirm. There was a tense moment when Hope and Jax conferred before shouting "Njord!"
"Then what are we waiting for?! Monica, get us out of this place!" I bellowed, and as a giant foot slammed down besides the bus, we were out of there.
x-x
One of the great things about Gamle-Sti was the bus.
Not even those prissy Greeks had a bus like ours. Frey had had it made for us, blessed by Idun and Bragi. It seemed about the size of a normal school bus, though the inside was big enough for the population of Gamle-Sti and half of the Sanctuary of the Nile - the Egyptian's "camp" - to boot, and was fast enough to get us the Hel away from giants without any trouble.
Of course, it was also bulky, difficult to maneuver, rusty with the concept of braking, and extremely purple, but we made amends. At least it kept us alive.
Monica Turner, female council representative on the Gamle-Sti council, kept a death grip on the wheel as she darted through traffic. (Another fortunate thing the gods had blessed us with - the magical ability to not smash into other cars when we were fleeing for our lives at 100-something miles an hour.) My knuckles were equally white as I held onto the stair rail, staring back behind us.
When the giants were out of sight, I waited for another good five minutes until I finally said, "We've lost 'em, Monica. Give us an empty lot and let's confer."
With an earsplitting screech, Monica wrenched the wheel to the left and sent us skidding into a Sam's parking lot. She slowed down and pulled behind the building, then shuddered to a stop. I was thankful she'd had the sense to do so; a large purple bus with the words "GAMLE-STI INSTITUTE" painted on the side suddenly appearing in a parking lot would have raised a lot of questions that no one really wanted to answer.
Panicked chatter broke out on the bus. I began to feel a little light-headed and sat down on the stairs of the bus.
We'd never been directly invaded before.
Oh, there was the occasional uprising of the Brood in northern Wisconsin, but we'd never had something on this scale. Never had our attackers shattered the rune barrier; they'd burnt themselves to bits on it or sensed it and run away. There was a moment when we found a couple Loki kids working from the inside to weaken the runes, but we'd exiled them.
But this was something completely different. This was power like nothing we'd seen, or ever been prepared to defend ourselves from.
Now our home was gone, destroyed. What would we do? I didn't know.
But I had a small, horrible idea that ate away at me even as I stood and turned to face the rest of Gamle-Sti.
"This is it, guys," I said seriously. "I don't think we'll ever be able to go back there. The giants have found it, and if we go back..." I paused, deliberated. I didn't want to seem too melodramatic, but...
"We're dead if we go back there."
One of the saner-looking Freyja daughters raised a slender, manicured hand. "Warren?" she called, blinking at me with pale violet-red eyes.
"Yes?"
"Where are we going?"
I paused. The horrible idea seemed horrible - but it's not like we had anywhere else to go. The Egyptians would never let us in their camp, and the Celts... I didn't even want to think about them.
"I don't know," I finally said, truthfully. "But, guys - I don't want to freak you out, but-"
I took a deep breath, and with a sinking feeling, I finished, "We might be going to Camp Half-Blood."
And then the bus exploded.
