This chapter contains spoilers for Night Broken, the 8th book in the Mercy Thompson series. If you like the series, but haven't read it yet, don't read this story, go by the book. My writing can't compare to Patricia Briggs or Rick Riordan's.
Note, I'm skipping a lot of flavor text and background info, I figure if you're reading a fan fiction about a book, then chances are you've read the book and know, at least in part, that information.
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Also, I own none of the characters, not even the OC I made as she is part of the PJaO books and anyone is free to duplicate her for their own stories. Writing a story using characters from published books, I certainly can't complain if someone likes my idea enough to run it in a different direction, but please, no slash.
As a side note, I hope everyone was able to figure out that Terry is an OC. I was going to use a minor character from the books, but I couldn't find one that really fit.
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Also note, For Percy and crew, this story takes place after the battle for New York, and before Percy disappears, obviously. I haven't decided yet if the Son of Sobek has taken place yet.
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Before anyone asks, yes there is a reason I have Rachel speak the prophesy in Greek while in Mercy's point of view, I suck at rhymes. Also, I figure quite a bit of the demi-gods talking would be in Greek, and almost definitely the Oracle's.
Things get Ugly
Mercy
When the girl, Rachel goes into super freaky undead mode, several things happen at once. One, Adam takes a step back. That's something of a big deal as he's the Alpha; he can never admit fear without getting challenges. Still, he only took a partial step back, more like he was bracing for an explosion. The rest of the pack all jumped back, with the clatter of pots and pans falling and broken dishes to go along with that.
The other thing that happened is that the older kids grabbed Rachel and pulled her back. Each of the boys was holding an arm, and the girl was holding her legs and yelling at the younger girl to get a pen and paper. All this while Rachel his hissing out some sort of lyrical rhyme in a different language. A glance around at the pack, several people are mumbling, and much to my surprise, Ben holds up his finger and calls for quite. Ben is at the bottom of the pack, but lately, he hasn't been acting that way. The events of the past few years have changed him, generally for the better. Several of the middle rank wolves start to snarl at him when Adam calls for quit, he's noticed that Ben seems to be following what Rachel is saying, at least in part.
"It sounds like Greek, but it's a weird variant, like it's evolved in some isolation from the rest of Greek speakers." Ben says, "I'm having some trouble understanding it."
Bran speaks up over the phone Jesse is still holding, "That's because it's ancient Greek. It's been a long time since it was spoken like that, longer then I've been alive."
Normally I would have been intrigued by this little tidbit of info on our most fearless of leaders, but for now I wanted to know what was going on in my kitchen so I'm paying more attention to what Ben's saying. "Something about a volcano coming to collect his runaway bride and destroys the dogs who protect her, I'm not real clear on all the words, but I think she's talking about Christy." Christy's stalker is a volcano? WTF?
"Then she says something about dogs driving around, and, oh you're going to love this, a Lord of Greyness who shall lay waste to all if he isn't stopped or gets something." Oh shit, wonder what that's about? Tad, Ariana, the Silver Bourne (I thought that the Grey Lords didn't want that back), the Walking stick, crap, too little information.
"Now she's going on something about divergent worlds and how they don't exist here, blah, blah, undecipherable words, and now she's talking about them now. Something about 'The child of the sea, and bearer of the curse, shall rise and claim the throne of water, war and the world', something else I can't make out, 'and the daughter of wisdom and child of a man, born of no women shall inherit her grandfather's kingdom.' Well isn't that nice, I hope I'm getting that right. Let's see, 'Son of death and bringer of life, born from bones, wealth and soil, the Ghost King shall be the friend to farmers and his stepmother's heir.' And more incomprehensible gobbledy gook, 'Lastly the descendant of 3, but child of none, born of beauty, passion and grace, magic and mechanical. The builder, the destroyer, master of technology, and the master of all things made must chose her path wisely and risk leveling the world.' Ummm, not really sure what's going on here, but now she's saying something about a power increase and some more stuff that just doesn't sound like real Greek."
Suddenly, she just stopped talking and all the green mist got sucked back into her mouth and the skull and claws disappeared leaving the kitchen in absolute silence.
Before anyone could say anything, there was a tearing sound, and I noticed that the kids and their dog where hanging from the fabric of infinity again while still standing right in front of us. They looked at the outline in space (I realized they couldn't tell what it was), and the youngest one reached up and touched it.
Just as she was starting to touch it, the view of the kids holding on to space shifted, so she would be touching herself. I felt the immediate gathering of power, and the second group of kids where just standing there, for all of half a second. The 2 copies of the youngest girl were standing there touching their index fingers to each other when the magic took an audible to everyone else hum to it, and all the kids merged with their duplicates in an explosion of magic.
None of the wolves, or even Jesse were directly affected by the explosion, I'm more sensitive to magic then werewolves are. Sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad. Like now, the explosion knocked me on my butt and caused a fit of sneezing. The young girl was blown across the room and slammed her back into our restaurant sized solid steel refrigerator hard enough that the hinges on the door snapped and it cracked the wall behind it. As she was flying across the room, she was accompanied by a plethora of nuts, bolts, little mechanical do-dads, a couple of knives, screwdrivers and a sword as large as she was. The sword buried itself into the wall, thru what was left of our cabinets, all the way to the hilt, something that the laws of physics say can't actually happen. One of the pack who was standing next to the fridge was hit by some random piece of shrapnel that penetrated over an inch deep into the muscle of a werewolf, that's like half a foot on a normal person. She was hit by quite a bit of her debris field, it followed her direct path, yet she seemed unhurt by either the shrapnel or her impact with the fridge, though she was dazed by whatever caused the magic surge.
At the same time that was happening, the other kids were merging with their own copies with similar, though less violent results. From the group a wave of debris flew out, thankfully, with less force, which included salt water, fish, horse hair, owl feathers, blueprints for buildings, various woven cloth doohickeys, soil, bones (including some human), at least one 8 once trade bar of gold that hit Adam (if anyone else got hit with one, they pocketed it and didn't tell anyone), rocks that looked like broken stalactites and we where to find out later, when cleaning up, several gems.
Our kitchen was totaled.
The young girl staggered back to her friends while everyone but Rachel stood back up (she was lying on the broken table top moaning). I could hear Bran on the phone asking for an explanation, even Jesse couldn't think of anything to say, when one of the pack, a werewolf named Eric Myers who was sitting a little less than half way up the hierarchy snapped. He started to shout and demand answers when Ben made a sarcastic comment, he rounded on Ben and yelled, but held back from attacking by custom of no dominance fights in front of potential enemies.
Whatever he was thinking, he did realize he needed to assert some authority or risk losing his place, so naturally, he turned on our visitors and attacked. Before Adam could shout out an order to stop, he punched their leader in the face as hard has he could. To the surprise of everyone, Eric howled out in pain gripping his fingers and the boy was unharmed, didn't even force his head to the side.
Realizing how bad he screwed up, Eric proceeded to make it worse by grabbing a chair to use as a weapon (seriously, werewolf fist doesn't work, so you use a CHAIR!?). As soon as he brandished it, the boy backhands Eric in the chest, throwing him back several feet into the door frame with much crunching of wood and some snapping of bone.
Now mind you, Eric isn't one of the major players amongst werewolves, but he's still pretty stout at about 350 to 400 pounds, solid muscle (and muscle that is pound for pound stronger than human muscle), he should not have been an easy defeat.
The kid just looked at Eric, sighed and turned to face Adam again, but several pack members were now snarling and starting to advance, so what does the kid do?
He pulls out a fricking pen and pocket watch.
Seriously, a pen, a moment later, the pen changes into a sword, the pocket watch becomes a shield, and that tacky bit of jewelry on his lapel starts shooting out salt water that surrounds him and flows over him in a spiraling double helix.
I glance at the other kids just in time to see the one girl put her cap on and disappear (no idea what she pulled from her purse), the young girl is now holding a sword and a revolver that is WAY larger than any pistol I've ever seen, and several bits of her jewelry are now moving across her combining and enlarging into a suit of armor. The undertaker wannabe is also holding a sword that is every bit as chilling in appearance has he is, plus his cane is now glowing in a vomit green colored flame and his hat is now openly revealed itself as magic by opening its mouth and showing off its fangs. Rachel was still on the ground.
Whatever else it did, everyone stopped and looked. I mean really looked at the kids. There was no denying they weren't supernatural somehow, no way anyone could believe that they were a group of helpless kids caught up in something larger than themselves, and we clearly knew nothing about them or what they were capable of.
Once again, we were at an impasse when the kid in charge stepped up, "Look, my name is Percy, I'm sorry about your friend, but I'm not going to allow any of us to be attacked, I'm just not. Can we talk about this?"
