AN: I just want to thank all of you for your support and hype for my new story! Seriously. You guys are the best.
To PixelArtyGirl1: Thank you! I always try to go for the unexpected… ;)
To ShadowsOfATridentTattoo: I know, right? That song is amazing. And, thank you so much for your review!
To EvenTheSunsetsInParadise: What'sup, first reviewer? Sorry I made you cry. (But not really. BWA HA HA HA HA HA!) Though it really wasn't my intention. Honestly.
2015
Annabeth stays in an abandoned apartment.
The other apartments in the complex are fine, but this one is cut off from the electricity and pluming. But Annabeth knows that the landlord won't tell the other residents this, and she's fine with it.
It's not like she needs water, anyway. She just needs a place where she can be away from all the noise.
But today she gets dressed bright and early (even though she's a ghost, her clothes still get dirty) because the new neighbors are making quite the racket as they unpack.
She tugs on her last shoe and heads over to the window. Placing her hands on the glass, she phases through and ends up on the fire escape. She hops onto the railing and lets herself fall, if only for a moment, because then she's floating.
Gliding lazily along, she wonders what she's going to do today. Then, she spots thousands of people in line for a ticket booth. There's a concert going on in the amphitheater.
That could be fun. She hasn't been to a concert in about ten years. Wait, no, twenty years. She only saw that Green Day one on TV.
She touches down on the street beside the sidewalk where hordes of people are gathered. A car barrels straight into her, and she phases through it.
"Ugh!" groans a girl with curly red hair. "We've been in this line for centuries!"
The Native-American girl next to her chuckles. "It's not that bad, Rach."
"It is!" Rach drawls, sounding five levels past bored. "I swear, this is taking so long, we're going to die here, and then our souls will wait in line forever!"
Annabeth rolls her eyes and walks straight into Rach. She passes through her and her friend, strolling casually down the sidewalk. The line causes no challenge for her, as she just walks straight through everyone.
The concert is already happening when she makes it to the main crowd. The music that the band is playing is catchy, but not the best she's ever heard. (She has seen The Beetles and Elvis live before, after all.)
Even though Annabeth is 5' 9" and can see over the masses' shoulders, the best kind of seat is to float in a sitting position right above everyone's heads. It's even better to float at the absolute front of the crowd, right next to the amplifier. She can't destroy her eardrums, anyway, so might as well get the best quality sound.
She nods along with the music, chuckling with herself. People shout and scream below her, jumping up and down excitedly. Annabeth finds it quite amusing.
Though, she guesses, she would probably scream and shout too if she had someone to share in her mirth. She used to.
Well, not as loud. Teenagers seem much louder in 2015 than they were in 1891.
Shaking her head, she focuses on getting back in grove with the music. She closes her eyes, mumbling along to the chorus.
She gets bored with it quickly. Not that the band isn't good; it's just that, if you've had over a hundred years to go and see concerts, you've pretty much seem them all.
She glides out of the amphitheater area, spotting 'Rach' and her friend on her way out. Rach is still complaining out the line, she can tell by the look on her face.
Deciding a walk wouldn't hurt–since she can't get tired, after all–Annabeth touches down a block away from the concert. She strolls down the sidewalk, just watching the living go by.
A college-age couple snuggles on a bench. A business man holds his phone out to his ear, walking straight through Annabeth as he yells at the person on the other side. Three people–brothers, or at least best friends, she assumes–chat eagerly with cups of coffee in their hands.
None of these people interest her. She's done nothing but watched people for a long time now. But then–something catches her eye.
An elderly couple, sitting at a table at a cafe, their wedding rings glinting in the sun. Annabeth freezes, craning her neck to stare at the couple. People pass through her. The couple looks thoroughly pissed at each other, neither of them sparing one glance at their significant other.
The sight claws at Annabeth's heart. She turns away briskly, kneeling in front of the first flower bush she sees. She picks them carefully, making sure they're all the same length. Once she gets enough of them, she tugs the loose string on her shirt she's been meaning to pull out for years, and wraps it around the stems, delicately, yet tightly, tying it into a bow.
She walks over to the elderly couple, bouquet in hand, and slips through the fence that surrounds the cafe.
The elderly man gives no indication that he feels anything when she presses the flowers into his palm. When she pulls her hand away, though, he jumps in surprise, startling his wife, and brings what seemingly fell out of the sky and into his hand to his face for inspection.
His wife spots the bouquet and instantly melts on the spot. "Oh, Tom!" she crows. "You shouldn't've!"
Tom looks at her, startled. "I-I didn–" He stops himself, realizing he could use this. "I did," he says. "Here." He hands the flowers to his wife, who accepts them eagerly with a kiss on the cheek.
Annabeth smiles at them when Tom blushes. His wife busies herself with cooing over the flowers, and he looks up at the sky. "My guardian angel must be looking out for me today," he mutters quietly, and Annabeth's grin only broadens.
Sticking her hands in her pockets, she walks down the sidewalk, feeling like she did some good. Hopefully she helped Tom and his wife on the path to repair their relationship. She hated having to watch the first divorce she ever saw.
The sidewalk becomes dense with people, and Annabeth steps off onto the street. Cars speed through her as she treads along her way.
Then, she hears someone scream, "Ghosts! Ghosts are among us!"
She immediately swerves towards the voice because–c'mon, the guy is pretty much asking for her to go over to him.
The screaming person has an aluminum foil hat on and a sign with the words SUPERNATURAL DOOMSDAY UPON US splayed across the ruined cardboard. People just laugh and shake their heads at him.
She grins wickedly. Time to teach these guys a little respect for ghosts…
Walking through a woman with a hat, she picks up rocks before phasing halfway inside the fence behind the screaming man. She aims, and then she throws.
It hits the woman's hat clean off her head. She jerks, her hand going to her hair, glancing around angrily for the culprit. A few other people do, too, but they do it with more wondering. Annabeth tosses another rock.
This one harmlessly bounces off a man's grocery bag, and he completely flips out. "He's right!" the guy exclaims, pointing at the screaming man. "A ghost threw that rock!"
"Oh, come on," complains another guy, taking a drag from his cigarette. "We all know you're in cahoots with that guy right there."
Annabeth aims another pebble. It flies, and it smacks the cigarette out of his hand with a puff of ash. He shrieks like a little girl, jumping away in surprise and fright when he realizes no one threw the rock.
"I'm outta here!" he announces, turning away on his heel and avoiding defeat. All the people, looking uneasy, mutter and leave too, and their pale faces are so funny that Annabeth can't help but burst out laughing.
She comes out of the fence and leans on it, chuckling, telling herself to do this kind of thing more often and not just on Halloween. (Her favorite day of the year, by the way. She's so glad it was invented.)
The sun is going down, she notices when she stops laughing. Better get back to her apartment.
She flies to the complex, landing on the fire escape and phasing through the window. Her clothes are dirty–whatever is not touching a living human being can cling to her–and she changes out of them.
Even though she knows it's futile, she collapses on the makeshift bed she has set up. She curls up on her side, feeling cold and tired and lonely, but unable to go to sleep.
She always tries, though. It's been over a hundred years since she's been able to sleep.
That's why she hangs out in the apartment; to try to fall into slumber. That's the truth. Not she needs somewhere to put her stuff.
She just wants to go to sleep. She doesn't want any more lonely nights.
;
1891
"What do you mean, I'm dead?!" Annabeth demands. She can hear her brothers talking behind her, but her focus is on the man whom just told her something absurd.
"I mean you're dead," Cupid insists. "It's just as it sounds."
"But-but how–"
"You know how," he interrupts her.
"Fine, then," she spits. "Why?"
"Love can be even worse than death," he states simply. "Your brother is in love, and he was blinded by it. He went to go wash away his troubles with wine, and he ended up spilling blood. Your blood."
"But I-I…" She digs the heel of her palm into her forehead. Then, looks back at Cupid and his glowing red eyes. "But if I'm dead, then where's Heaven? I've never done anything to make God mad, so why am I not in Heaven?"
"That would be your brother's doing, my dear," Cupid tells her, almost a tinge of sympathy to his voice. Almost. He spreads his hands like he's all out of ideas. "He threw your body in a ditch, but didn't bury you. Now, your soul wanders aimlessly, never being able to touch another, searching for something that will make you whole again."
"Wh–"
Frantic knocks sound on the door, and Annabeth glances that way, momentarily distracted. When she looks back at Cupid, he's gone.
"Cupid?" she asks, craning her neck to look for him. "Cupid!" she shouts. "You haven't finished answering my questions, damn it!"
Her mother goes to open the door. "Oh, hello, Luke," Athena says, and Annabeth immediately whips around at the sound of her brother's–her killer's–name.
Luke looks horrible. Dark bags sag under his bloodshot blue eyes and his hair is thoroughly messed up. A bloody bandage wraps around his hand. He leans on the doorway, gasping and panting like he ran a marathon.
"Annabeth!" he gasps. "She's in–not moving."
His broken English is enough to send Athena into panic mode. "Where? Where is she?" she demands.
Luke points in a vague direction, coughing and bending over more. "Woods," he manages to force out.
"Frederick! Malcolm! Matthew! Bobby!" Athena shouts for the rest of her family. They're all immediately at her side.
"Wha', Ma?" Matthew asks. "Wha's wrong?"
"There's something wrong with Annabeth," she informs them.
The twins' eyes go wide, and Malcolm blurts, "Wha-what do you mean, there's somethin' wrong with Annabeth?"
"Luke," Athena says to him, not answering her second oldest, "lead the way."
He nods. "Right."
Then they leave, all following Luke, and Annabeth chases after them.
Luke leads them deep into the woods, and she recognizes the path as the one she took when she stumbled out of the ditch. The ditch that Luke put her in.
They have to slow down for Athena, whom has trouble maneuvering around gracefully in her hoopskirts, but they finally get to where Annabeth woke up.
"In there," Luke pants, pointing, and Annabeth gasps.
Her body lays in the grass, printer-paper pale and covered in blood. Crows pick at her limbs, and she and her entire family, except Luke, gags.
She looks down at her arms and legs–the ones she's connected to–with horror. She was separated from her body, too? This…this was getting too weird for her.
"Git off o' her!" Bobby yells at the crows. He, Malcolm, and Matthew run forward, chasing all the birds off of her body.
Athena follows closely behind. She reaches out, almost as if to touch the body, but then she retracts her hand to cover her mouth as her being jerks with a gag. Frederick comes down, too, wrapping his arms around his wife and shielding her from the view.
"My baby!" she sobs into his neck. "What did my daughter ever do to deserve something like this?"
"I don't know," Frederick admits, a few tears of his own tracing down his face as he rubs Athena's back. "I don't know."
The only living Chase that doesn't go into the ditch is Luke. He looks on, a conflicted expression on his face that Annabeth feels like smacking clean off.
Why did he do this to her? Why? Whywhywhywhywhywhy?
"We need to take her body back to town," Frederick suggests. "See if the sheriff knows anything about this." Everyone, except Luke, nods in agreement.
The boys take off their over-shirts, and Athena ties them together to make a makeshift tarp. Bobby and Matthew slide it under the body, and Malcolm and Frederick carry it out the ditch. They shift slightly, so that it's easier to carry through the woods, and lead the way.
The twins walk beside Athena, whispering quietly to her and assuring her that they'll find the killer. Luke trails behind, and Annabeth speeds up to join Matthew and Bobby beside their mother.
Even though no one can hear her, (even if they could, she couldn't tell everyone she's alive, because she isn't) it feels good to walk next to her mother. She tries to rub Athena's shoulders in a comforting way, but her hands slip right through her mother's body.
"Matthew, Bobby," Athena says, "run ahead. Fetch the sheriff."
The twins share a look before nodding. "O' course, Ma," says Bobby, and he and Matthew take off.
Luke doesn't move forward to take up comforting their mother. Instead, he stares forward, a passive look on his face.
When he, Frederick, Malcolm, Athena, and (ghost) Annabeth make it through the treeline, the sheriff and the twins are waiting for them.
Mr. Thanatos, the sheriff and Lou Ellen's stepfather, takes a sharp intake of breath when he sees the body. (There's crime in this town, but barely ever a murder mystery.) He takes a step closer, examining it closely. "Bullet wound is the cause of death, I presume," he says. "And whoever killed her must have dragged her a long way." He gestures at the cut feet and the ripped skirt. "Where did you find her?"
Luke clears his throat, shifting on his feet. "We…um…we found her in the woods."
The sheriff peers at him suspiciously. "We are you so nervous, son?"
"Because I just found my sister's dead body in the woods!" he snaps, setting his jaw and squaring his shoulders in order to look more confident. "I don't like the idea of murderin' varmints hangin' about!"
"Well," Mr. Thanatos drawls, "I heard that she was at your place last."
"She left durin' the early night," Luke tells him.
"Then why is your hand covered in bloody cloth?" he drills, leaning closer to Luke.
"Because when she left, she was pissed–"
"Luke!" Athena chides him for his language, especially when referring to his dead sister.
"–and she slammed the door, and my beer bottle shattered on the floor, and I had ta pick up the pieces," he says. He leans forward, too, challenging the sheriff. "I. Didn't. Kill. My. Sister."
He says it with so much conviction that Annabeth believes him.
At least, she wants desperately to believe him. It'd be much easier to accept her death if she knew it was some random guy off the street who shot her, and not her own brother.
"I'll have to take her body for a bit," Mr. Thanatos sighs, accepting defeat. "Hopefully I can get the bullet out of her. See what kind of gun it belongs to."
Frederick nods. "Of course."
He and Malcolm carry the makeshift stretcher onto the road. People gasp and gape and whisper, wondering why the Chase's only daughter is dead.
Thalia and her fiancé Kronos are some of these people. When she sees the family and the sheriff, she rushes forward, Kronos following closely behind. She lets out something that's halfway between a sob and a gasp, and she cries, "Why? What kind of monster would do this?"
Luke immediately looks pained, like he's the one who died, not Annabeth.
Kronos stares in shock at the body. "I don't know."
She turns to Mr. Thanatos, and, in a breathy, horrified whisper, asks, "Do you know who did this?"
He shakes his head. "I'm sorry, not yet, but we're workin' on it."
"Kronos." Thalia turns to her fiancé, clutching at the labels of his tailored jacket. "You must help with the search."
His eyes widen for the split second, then they return to normal, obviously realizing that the body is Annabeth Chase; his fiancé's best friend and their would-have-been maid of honor.
"Yes, of course," he says. He looks at Mr. Thanatos. "Any money you need to help with the investigation…just come to me."
"That is very generous, Mr. King," he says, nodding. "Thank you."
After that, they all part ways; Thalia and Kronos, the former sobbing uncontrollably, head back to his house, Frederick, Malcolm, and Mr. Thanatos take Annabeth's body around the corner, Bobby and Matthew escort Athena home, and Annabeth follows Luke back to his store.
Maybe Luke didn't murder her. Maybe she had left and she just didn't remember, and some other man killed her.
But then why had Luke been in the woods? There was no reason…Annabeth shakes her head.
You can poke holes in everything, her mother had told her when she began to doubt the existence of God. That's why they call it faith.
And she had faith in Luke. Luke, the guy whom beat some of the school boys up when they picked on Annabeth. Luke, who shared his desserts with her because he knew she had a sweet-tooth. Luke, who let her hang around in the store and taught her Morse code when the teachers wouldn't. Luke, the best big brother ever.
She follows him into the store. He kicks off his shoes and rubs his hand over his face after he shuts and locks the door behind him.
Then, he unwraps the bloody bandage from his hand, placing it next to the not-shattered bottle bourbon. He washes the dried blood off his hand in his water basin, revealing the fact that he doesn't have a cut.
You can poke holes in everything, Annabeth repeats to herself. You can poke holes in everything.
But then, he reaches behind his counter, pulling out his gun and her shoes, laying them down on the flat wood surface. He picks up his gun again, examining it.
"No one can know," he mutters to himself, and Annabeth's un-beating heart drops to her stomach. "No one can ever know."
;
2015
Sunlight streams through the window, and Annabeth groans, sitting up straight.
Another night gone by.
Another lonely twelve hours without a wink of sleep.
She pulls herself up, tugging on her favorite pair of jeans and green hoodie. She phases through the window, stepping onto the fire escape and then standing on the railing.
Right when she's about to let herself fall, something…something warm wraps around her waist, preventing her from falling forwards, and she ends up toppling backwards. She lands on top of something soft, yet hard. She flips herself over, finding herself staring at lively sea-green eyes, and having her hand covering warm skin pulled over a beating heart.
She sputters and gasps, wondering if she finally fell asleep, or if this is one of Cupid's tricks, before the guy says, "Whoa! Watch it there!"
AN: So, I gotta know something; do you want me to continue with the flashbacks, or just have Luke get arrested? Frankly, I'm leaning for more flashbacks, but if it really bugs you guys too much, I'll just wrap up that subplot.
Anyway, thanks for reading! Hope you guys liked this chapter. Any grammatical or spelling errors are on me, since this was not beta'd.
Disclaimer: I do not own Percy Jackson or any other kind of product I might have mentioned.
Constructive criticism welcome, and reviews really do mean a lot to me!