Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson. All my fanfic writings are non-profit. 'Tis all for fun.

Piece of Darkness I - A Knight or a Pawn

Chapter Two

"You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner. You're in one."

–Hector Barbossa, 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl'

First, there's something you should know about me.

All my life, I've been able to see strange things - and when I say that, I don't mean that I hallucinate, or that I have strange visions. I literally see bizarre things in front of me almost every day.

It's not just me - my mother has it too, though to a lesser degree. I liken it to wearing an extra pair of glasses that enable me to see deeper into everything. There's the normal surface level, the stuff everyone sees, and then there's the level where the monsters lie. There, the creatures from stories and legends walk among the normal people.

Not everything I see is a monster, though. I have seen a few amazing things, but not many. Unfortunately, the dark and ominous side of this hidden reality is far larger and more noticeable than the bright and cheery side.

Of course, seeing such things every day all your life will have the obvious and understandable effect of leaving you pretty desensitised. Imagine that every time you look out your bedroom window, you see a Thing with snakes for legs, or an Abomination with wings and claws and scales. Sooner or later, you're going to stop staring in disbelief and start shrugging your shoulders in resignation.

However, what I saw when I walked into my dad's shop was drastically different to anything I'd ever seen before.

Standing at the counter, waiting for my father to serve him, was a dark-haired guy wearing a leather jacket. He looked about sixteen, but his almost-black eyes were a window into a mind that was far too old and far too angry.

That wasn't the scary part, though.

Surrounding the guy, wrapped around him from head to toe, was a strange coat of shadows. It was mostly pure black, but here and there a flash of blue or a spark of purple could be seen rippling through it. It writhed and churned a little, and tapered out behind him, leaving a trail several feet long.

The teenager himself seemed completely unaware of it.

When I'd taken a few steps into the shop, he heard me, and glanced around hurriedly. I was surprised to see a look of alarm in his eyes, as though he were expecting someone to be coming after him, as though he ought not to be there.

I frowned slightly. Why would someone buying - I glanced at what he held in his hands - bread and water be so tense?

I looked again at his coat of shadows. It seemed to have been shaken up, and it was rolling around on his shoulders more vociferously than before. As I stared at it, I felt a deep sense of heaviness grasp around my head like an iron fist around a peanut. My mood started to turn sour again as the dark thoughts that my parents had carefully banished began to creep back. All I could think about was how dark everything was, and how little everything mattered.

I shook my head, and quickened my pace. I had to get out of there as quickly as I could.

The Dark One (I'd given him a name in the absence of any other way to refer to him - I have a liking for dramatic nicknames) was still glaring at me. I was nearly at the door onto the street when I heard him move. His footstep made an emphatic thud on the wooden floor.

"Can I help you?" my father's clear voice said suddenly.

I exhaled deeply as I got out the door. My dad had an amazing talent for interrupting at the most effective of times, and just then, I was never more glad of it.

I shuddered deeply as I walked down the street. I'd seen odd, aura-like things around a few people before, but never anything like that. It had looked almost primal, as if a basic force of nature had wrapped itself around some teenager who thought he was a cool dude with his leather jacket and unruly dark hair.

I took a few deep breaths, clearing the image of the coat of darkness from my mind, as I approached my school.

Boone High School wasn't especially wonderful in any way, but nor was it particularly unpleasant. It was the kind of place that you certainly didn't love but definitely didn't hate. It was just there.

My one good friend met me at the gate. Bob Greenwood was far more socially awkward that I had ever been, and for some reason he'd taken a liking to me. I found him a tiny bit annoying, but I wasn't exactly surrounded by a giggling entourage of adoring fans and companions, so I took what came my way.

Every day for the last three months, he'd met me at the gate and stayed at my side for more or less the entire school day. I couldn't help but think that it was a little strange how he started doing this less than a week after one of my teachers was replaced by a monster.

No, I'm not being metaphorical, or even insulting. I'm being literal. Mrs Celato looked like an unfortunate genetic experiment which had involved a flock of ravens, a scrawny but extremely angry vulture, an arthritic snake, and some other strange creature that was itself the by-product of a disastrous genetic experiment.

All in all, she was a terribly distracting sort of teacher to have when you were trying to learn freaking Pythagoras.

Her class was the first one of the day, and as I sat there, watching her drone on about Cartesian coordinates, I considered the one truly unusual thing about Mrs Celato The Monster.

Invariably when I met a creature of any kind, they didn't pay me any attention at all. If I spoke to them, they interacted with me as though I was some kind of insect that had crawled out from the depths of the sewers. To these creatures, I was an irrelevancy, a zero in the equation.

Mrs Celato The Monster took a different tack, however. Ever since she'd taken over the math class (in obviously suspicious circumstances - how can an almost-penniless twenty-three-year-old male maths teacher have a crippling skiing accident in the Swiss Alps?), she'd been fixating on me. Whenever I glanced up from my struggles with theorems, there she was, staring at me as though I were a particularly fascinating spherical surface area problem.

I hadn't bothered mentioning Mrs Celato's monsteriness to anyone. I'd given up doing that when I was eight. All I'd get was a you're-a-freaking-nutcase-someone-get-the-straitjacket stare, followed swiftly by a high-pitched, slightly panicked, "I gotta go, Cyrus!"

However, a few weeks ago I'd gotten so weirded out by Mrs Celato The Monster's behaviour, I'd decided to mention something about it to Bob. It had been an even stranger conversation than I'd expected.

"Hey, Bob," I'd said, as I sat down for lunch. "Do you ever think there's something kinda weird about Mrs Celato The– Mrs Celato?"

Bob had gotten a wild rabbit-in-the-headlights look in his eyes, as though I'd threatened to kill his family if he didn't immediately recite 'Les Misérables' in its original French form.

"Er," he'd said slowly. "What kind of weird?"

"Oh, you know," I'd replied airily. "Maybe she's a tiny bit fixated on me?"

"Maybe she likes you?" Bob had volunteered lamely, still seeming inexplicably panicked.

I'd stared at him.

"Well, I don't know, Cyrus," he'd said. "Teachers are weird. It's a law of the universe."

I'd laughed, and changed the subject. You didn't need to be a genius detective to see that Bob knew something which he wanted to keep quiet. Hell, maybe he could see that Mrs Celato The Monster was a monster, and he was simply trying to avoid sounding like a lunatic. I could relate to that.

I glanced up from my work to see Mrs Celato staring at me once more. I fought back the temptation to roll my eyes. The world was so screwed-up. Even the monsters didn't act normal anymore.

There was an ominous scraping noise as Mrs Celato pushed her chair back. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as she rose slowly and solemnly, like a mutant bird rising from the grave. With methodical steps, she walked around to the front of her desk. I risked the tiniest of glances up into her face, and was perturbed to see that she was staring down at me with more intensity than ever.

Celato took another step forwards. I got the feeling she was coming in my direction. Was this the point where she put those talons to their natural purpose and ripped me to shreds?

Luckily for the continued existence of my insides, it seemed not. The lunch bell rang, and the creature was driven back to the stronghold of her desk by the unstoppable army of hungry teenagers rushing for food. As I hurried by the teacher for what was hopefully the last time until September, I noticed her eyes boring into me once more. I could almost see her thinking: Sorry. Wrong day to die.

I carefully avoided the rush to the canteen, as I always did. Every evening before I went to school I arranged my lunch pack for the next day, so I would waste as little time as possible at lunch hour.

You may have noticed that I have a thing about order. Most people call me neurotic, but it's not that. It's not even that I particularly like order itself - it's more that chaos really annoys me. I'm pretty sure it's a side-effect of that little thing where I can see beasts and fiends walking among oblivious men and women.

I sat down at the end of a table which was surrounded by a bunch of people who I knew as "acquaintances".

I have a lot of acquaintances.

They were all busy discussing their myriad plans for the summer. Where they were going, who they were seeing, what they'd be doing, blah, blah, blah. I kept quiet, not wanting to be asked the dreaded question of, "Hey Cyrus, what are you doing for the summer?"

Bob flopped down on the seat across from me. He was an awkward, gangly sort of guy. No matter how sunny the weather was, his skin seemed to stay the same almost-chalky colour. His brown eyes usually had a vaguely manic expression, but he was actually a good deal calmer than he made out.

"What was up with Mrs Celato?" he said suddenly.

I paused before answering. Bob didn't know anything about my "visions", and I preferred to keep it that way. Despite my having numerous psychological assessments, people always defaulted to that friendly mode of "aah crazy person" as soon as I mentioned my "visions".

"How do you mean?" I said carefully.

"You didn't notice her getting out of her chair like a demonic zombie?" Bob asked incredulously.

"Oh, yeah, that," I said airily. "It was a bit weird. Maybe she wanted to stretch her legs?"

Bob shrugged. "Hey, I don't know," he replied. "I'm only asking because she was heading in your direction."

I frowned. Bob seemed to be genuinely puzzled by The Monster's behaviour. Perhaps I should tell him that Mrs Celato was, in fact, a mutant bird monster.

Before I could say anything, however, Bob's phone buzzed. He started, and pulled it out quickly. I watched as he read the text.

"Uh-oh," he muttered absent-mindedly. "I was wondering when this would happen."

"What is it?" I asked curiously.

"Um, uh, nothing," he lied unconvincingly. "I just have to go do… something. I'll be back in time for class."

I nodded. Whatever it was, Bob wasn't going to tell me, and I couldn't have been bothered to prise it out of him. He'd probably trip himself up and let it slip at some point, anyway. He hurried off, looking at his phone again as he sped out of the canteen.

Now that I was alone, I took to one of my favourite activities - people-watching. The great thing about being observant is that it guarantees many hours of amusement.

Most people in the canteen looked cheerful, and the general atmosphere was bright. As a result, the majority of the kids there weren't terribly interesting. Happy people are deeply boring to observe. They spend their time smiling and hopping around like sentient tennis balls. You'll never see anything intellectually intriguing when you're observing a happy person. Miserable people and angry people, now there's something fascinating to watch. You can try to figure out why they're in a bad mood, analyse the way they're acting in that bad mood, and use that to work out what kind of person they are, and generally observe the hell outta them.

So, ignoring the swathes of boring happy people, I looked around to find someone who wasn't trying to win the prize for Cheer of the Year. Unfortunately, everyone seemed to be prime contestants for that prestigious award. I was about to give up completely, when I saw someone who was the polar opposite of cheerful and exuberant.

In a far corner of the canteen, sitting alone, was a very morose-looking girl. She had dark hair and unremarkable features, but she had something that was far more remarkable than any physical feature could be - a faint green aura, trailing around her shoulders and down her back.

The girl herself was munching on a sandwich with a seriousness that suggested it was her last meal. Her aura (I hate to use the word aura, but sometimes it is the only accurate term, and this was one of those times), vibrated softly, making it look like she was shrouded in a sort of odd green electric blanket. As I watched (carefully, of course - the key to people-watching is making sure that the people don't start watching you back), she put the remnants of her sandwich down, and glared at her plate.

My eyes widened in surprise as her aura began to roll and shudder, vibrating far faster than before. In the blink of an eye, a small stream of green energy flowed down her arm and coiled around the plate.

The plate moved a few inches across the tray.

The girl started in surprise, and the aura settled back down into a quieter state, the green energy stealing back up her arm. She eyed the plate with alarm, her expression of misery momentarily gone, before pushing it back to where it had been.

I shook my head slightly. No-one else had noticed what had happened, apart from me. It was one of the weirdest things I'd seen since…

Well. Since that morning.

I frowned, thinking. I hadn't seen any weird auras in several years, and then two came along at once. It seemed merely coincidental that I saw two weird things like that on the same day, but I didn't take it for granted. The study of chess had taught me that there really was no such thing as a true coincidence. Things didn't just randomly happen. Everything was defined by patterns, which meant that everything happened for a reason.

I felt sure that something really screwed-up was about to happen, and boy, was I right.

The bell rang for the end of lunch. Bob still hadn't reappeared. I shrugged to myself. Perhaps he'd rush into class dramatically, just in the nick of time. My day certainly hadn't been short on drama so far.

I made my way out of the canteen, and went out into the corridor.

Then I saw yet another very strange sight.

The day was starting to get a bit predictable.