Jace, Clary, and Alec decided to lead Percy, Annabeth, Leo, and Piper to the Institute's fountain for their Iris message, leaving Hazel, Frank, Nico, and Jason in the library with Isabelle and Maryse. (Brother Zechariah left.)
The walk down the hallway was tense.
"So, you can catch fire?" Jace said to Leo, who was twitchily looking at everything they passed as though he wanted to disassemmble it and rebuild it. "So can I." He raised a hand, and it began to glow slightly orange.
"Yeah?" Leo replied. "Show me."
"No!" Clary protested. "That could kill him! It's heavenly fire!"
"It's not a superpower if you can't use it, dude."
"Okay, so I have fire that I can't control, and I look like this; you have fire that you can control, and you look like that. Who won here?" Jace raised a cocky eyebrow.
"I'm dating a goddess and you're dating Carrot top. You tell me." Leo flashed his grin and made a finger gun at Jace, who glowered at him.
Annabeth managed to change the subject: "Look at that ceiling. How long do you think that took?"
"We're Shadowhunters," Alec said. "We get work done fast."
"We're demigods. We rebuilt Olympus," Annabeth replied without looking away from the ceiling art.
"This isn't a competition," Piper protested.
"You've got that right," Jace murmured with a scornful side-glance at the demigods.
...
Despite Nico's obviously introverted "don't-mess-with-me" disposition, Isabelle chose to approach him.
He looked up at her with dark blue eyes. "Can I help you?"
"Yes. I just want to know if that surfer dude with the pretty green eyes knows you have the hots for him."
Hazel turned away from Frank with widened eyes. "What?!"
Isabelle examined Nico's pinkening visage and said, "I'll take that as a general 'nope'."
"I don't talk about it," Nico said firmly, then added hastily, "And I don't have the hots for him, either! I had a crush, but it's over now. I don't talk about this."
"You should," Isabelle urged. "At the least, I'm bored enough now to talk about anything."
"I'm not."
"Fine. Sit over here making shadow puppets or whatever you do. I'll just talk to Skull of Steel over there."
Jason made a face as though he was not looking forward to the conversation.
...
"This is how it works," Annabeth said, tossing a golden drachma into the rainbow made by the fountain mist and murmuring the words to Iris. Slowly but surely, an image flared to life: an image of the inside of Athena's Cabin in Camp Half Blood.
But something was wrong.
The Cabin was completely empty, despite the time of day, but for one lone stranger with light blond hair, who was reading from a paper that some Child of Athena discarded.
"Sebastian!" the Shadowhunters cried.
The boy in the rainbow looked up and saw the mirage before him and all of the stunned faces and grinned. "Well, this is embarassing."
