Still humming from battle, her sword was back in her hand and swinging before she even registered activating her sword.

She spun, slashing in a maneuver meant to cut any monster in half. A half-second later, her sword clattered to the ground as she realized it wasn't a monster behind her.

Jeff stared at her, stunned, looking between her, himself, and the sword laying on the ground. He only stayed that way a moment, though. True to his motto of "go with the flow," he cracked a grin.

"I guess that'll teach me not to sneak up on you, won't it?"

She let out a half laugh, half sob and wrapped him in a hug, partly as a hello, partly to reassure herself that he was uninjured.

Only when she finally released him did he say, "What just happened?"

"What just happened," she answered, "made me extremely grateful you are fully human."

"So those things harassing me…?"

She huffed a laugh. "Of course, that was you. Figures. What could you see?" He raised an eyebrow at her, and she knew he was thinking, the same thing that you saw. "Just answer the question," she told him.

"Demons," he answered as her eyes widened. "Some o' them had tools for heads. The others looked like evil dwarves."

She just stared a moment, surprised. "You can actually see through the Mist."

"Missed what?" he asked.

She spelled it for him. "It's what hides the mythological from the mortal." She looked around. "Come on. We need to get a few blocks away from here before others catch the scent of battle." He opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off, "I'll answer your questions, but I'm not putting you in battle to do it. I told you run away from the battle, remember?"

He pulled a face at her. "There's a Chick-fil-a three blocks north of here. That far enough?"

She nodded. "Three blocks should be okay. Plus, you know I can never say no to Chick-fil-a."

He smirked. "Why do ya think I suggested it?"

She huffed a laugh at him, and they set off walking, Machaela still on the lookout for more monsters. Finally, nearly two blocks from the battle, the normal crowds reappeared, and she started to relax. Deserted streets in Brooklyn spelled battle for any demigod or magician.

Jeff eyed the ebb and flow of people as the duo dove further into the crowd. "Where'd they go?"

"Mortal minds are easy to manipulate," Machaela answered quietly, still watching the crowds around them. "Most Egyptian demons convince everyone nearby they have somewhere better to be. Some Greek ones can do it too, though not many. The Greek ones usually like the crowd—makes it harder for the demigod to fight back if all the mortals are screaming about the teenager beating up an old lady." She glanced at Jeff, amused at the perplexed look on his face. "The Mist makes the mythological look mortal. A demigod fighting a hellhound with a sword might appear as a teenager beating a puppy with a stick. Gets really annoying when we're the ones painted as bad, because then the police get called."

They walked up the doors of the restaurant as she finished, and Machaela snickered at the look on his face. She agreed with her sister: if you're going to explain the gods to someone, confuse the heck out of them first. Not only is it fun for her, but it makes the explanation go easier.

After getting their food (and Jeff insisting on paying for hers, she would conjure up some money and slip it to him later), Machaela sat at a back table with her back to the wall, and Jeff repeated his question.

"So what were those things?"

Around bites of chicken, Machaela answered, "Demons. Six were Egyptian. Three were Greek. Normally, they wouldn't even consider working together, the two pantheons, I mean, but I combine too many bloodlines. Since I was the one trying to hunt down the Egyptians monsters after a spell backfired, they, of course, teamed up with some Greek monsters."

"Greek? Egyptian?" He gave her a calculating look, probably wondering if she needed a doctor.

"Have you studied any mythologies?" she asked, and he nodded. "Which ones?"

"Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Norse."

She smirked in amusement. "Great. You've studied the four we know are real." The look he gave her clearly conveyed worry that she had finally lost it, and she told him, "Careful. If you call the loony bin on me, you'll need to admit yourself too. You saw all nine of them before I ever appeared on scene." He pulled another face at her, conceding the point, and she continued. "The various gods were all created during Creation week, made and meant to serve the Lord through stewardship over different parts of the Earth's operations." Jeff pastored a small church nearby. She'd lose his attention in a hurry if she didn't start with their real place in the universe. "As far as we can tell, the pantheons came about based mostly on geography and which cultures met which gods at some point. Over the course of time, the different stewards stopped rejecting and redirecting the worship meant for God away from themselves, and they went rogue.

"The Egyptian gods need a human host to leave the Duat, and after several gods killed many humans, the Egyptians spent two millennia hunting and locking away the gods they knew of. The Greeks and Romans, however—well, Olympus moves with the heart of the west, and those pantheons actually have independent physical forms. Considering the Greek and Roman gods have demigods, it became more a matter of trying not to be a pawn than trying to lock them up, with a few exceptions." Thunder rumbled outside, and Machaela rolled her eyes. "You know I'm right, Zeus."

"Don't worry about it," she answered Jeff's look. "Anyway, when I was separated from the rest of my family by that car crash, Egyptian magicians are the ones who took Jesse and me in. We came to New York after realizing our Blood of the Pharaohs heritage would help the war effort here, and the summer after I graduated, when I finally found the rest of my family, I found out my biological dad is Hephaestus and I'm a legacy of Mercury."

He took a moment to digest that. "So the group of kids you always arrived with…?"

"Every student at BAG that names their guardian as Sofia, Amos, or Aunt Kitty is a magician," she told him. "There are about twenty-five in Brooklyn House right now."

"How many are also demigods?"

"None. My siblings and I are the only ones that combine three worlds. We do a rotation in the summer among the groups, but that's after school's already out. Olympus is in Manhattan, so the Greek demigods train at a camp on the north end of Long Island, while Roman demigods go to a camp near San Francisco. The Egyptians divided the world into Nomes, and Brooklyn is number twenty-one. Our headquarters is a few miles from here."

"San Francisco? Don't you go to college near there?"

She nodded, surprised he had noticed that. "My college is within the Roman camp's borders. It's the only place my siblings and I can go to school and not have monsters attacking our dorm room. They also have degree programs specific to demigods, like my major combining construction, design, and metalworking, among other things, that's only available to children of Vulcan or Hephaestus. I train with the legion on weekends and go to class during the week."

"And what was that about 'the war effort'?"

Finished with her meal by now, Machaela's grip on her drink became just the slightest bit too tight. "The September I was at BAG, you remember I missed a day without explanation?" He nodded. "That weekend, all of us at Brooklyn House, what we call our local headquarters, travelled to Egypt. A team of rebels had allied with the Chaos snake and was going to siege the First Nome. We prevented the Egyptian apocalypse that weekend, and that upcoming war is why Jesse and I moved to New York to begin with, because the group in New York was doing the most to prevent it, then fight it. About a month before that, on August 1, the Greeks and Romans fought and prevented their own apocalypse when they defeated the Earth Mother. I've fought in one war; my sister has fought two, as she fought for Olympus three years ago when the Titan lord rose. We're hoping to avoid a repeat performance any time soon, like this century, but the Norse might have a battle coming soon, and we don't know if we'll be called in to help. For now, every group is settling back into everyday life. The Egyptians are training their initiates and tracking down demons that escape a backfiring spell. Rumor has it the Greeks have lost a major god in Manhattan," she rolled her eyes at this, "as if that could happen. And the Romans recently sent a team to Alaska to recover some Imperial Gold that was found up there a few years ago."

He leaned back, running his fingers over his goatee in an unconscious motion of thought. She released a small grin—he hadn't changed a bit—but the grin didn't stay long as he kept thinking. Knowing his habit of thinking things completely through before responding, she stayed quiet and let him think, but eventually doubt started crowding in. Was he going to call her crazy and cut off contact? She still hadn't told him that she thought of him as a father, but she also couldn't imagine life without him.

Struggling to keep her face blank as she battled the worry he would reject her, she studied the crowd around her. The restaurant seemed more crowded than it had a few minutes before, which could be tied to the lunch rush or to a monster.

She saw nothing amiss as the crowd eventually received their food and flowed to the tables outside. Jeff stilled hadn't answered, however, and she resumed watching the crowd, though now more for entertainment than necessity.

A large family of kids chased each other around the play set. A group of college kids sat in the corner talking and laughing. Outside, she could hear cars honking on the main road and the drive-through speakers sounding off with each new customer. Through the window, she could see a couple leaving a picnic table, finished with their food, and pointing out the large dog waiting for his owner to return. A mom called the large family of kids together, and they left out the back while…wait. Dog?

Suddenly alert, she looked back out the front window toward the dog awaiting its owner. It was staring straight at her. She blinked, forcing herself to look through the Mist, and her eyes refocused as the truck-sized hellhound slammed into the side of the building. Shrapnel flew through the restaurant, most of it too small to hurt anyone, except for the piece of steel headed straight for her and Jeff.

Adrenaline hummed, and magic flowed. "Kep." Shield.

She placed it around both of them—there was no one in the neighboring tables—but centered it on Jeff. As long as she remained conscious, he and anyone he stood next to would be shielded from the battle. The flying piece of steel deflected off the barrier behind his chair, putting a dent in her magic reserves, before burying itself in the wall. She could feel him watching her, but she didn't glance over, too afraid of the fear and rejection she was sure would be in his eyes. She knew this attack would be the final straw. She would never hear from him again. That hellhound had just cost her her father, and it was going to die.

She stood, keeping her eyes firmly on the monster as she drew her sword. "Stay here," she told Jeff, then she stepped outside the shield she had thrown up.

The hellhound let her come outside, stepping through the gaping hole in the building, before it lunged at her.

She dodged and spun, avoiding the attack while staying between the monster and the building. Before it could attack again, she lunged, slashing deeply into its leg with her sword. Howling in pain, it tried to tackle her while she was turned to the side. She ducked under the attack, raking her sword down the hound's stomach. The wound wasn't fatal, but it did land with a crash and a whimper. One more swipe of her sword and the monster dissolved into dust.

The battle was over in a hurry, but she stayed on alert. Hellhounds usually travelled with a humanoid, like an empousa. She scanned the people in and around the parking lot, looking for the other monster and knowing that it might be trying to escape. If their hellhound was killed quickly, the empousa didn't always attack, especially if the demigod was female.

There. A tall, slim girl was trying to slip away from the area unseen, but Machaela could see the mismatched legs peeking out from under her clothes.

Knowing better than to throw her sword by hand, she judged the distance and used a spell.

"Tao." Throw.

Her sword flew out of her hand, embedding itself in the back of the monster as Machaela took off running to retrieve it, releasing her concentration on the shield when she got too far from the building.

Scooping her sword up out of the pile of monster dust, she hurried back towards the restaurant, hoping to find Jeff waiting for her. She stepped inside the damaged building to find pandemonium. People ran here and there, corralling kids, cataloguing damage, checking for injuries, and trying to find the cause of the explosion. Nobody had any obvious injuries, and she needed to get away from the scene, so she didn't stop. More than slightly worried about what she would find, she shoved her way through the panicking mortals to where she had last seen Jeff.

Beneath a steel beam driven six inches into the wall, all she found was an empty table.

Poor Machaela...

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