Hey! I'm back, and this time, I bring you plot! Sorry for the delay; finals and AP tests just about killed me. I don't know when the next update will be, but I'll keep you guys posted on my Death's Apprentice Tumblr account at sockmonkey406writing, where I tell you where I'm at in the story, character information that isn't necessary for the plot, and upload any art that people create for my story. If you've got time, check it out! We've already got awesome art of Pepsi the skunk and of course, Uncle Death.

Note: This will be the first chapter where we switch up POVs.

ADDISON

The first thing you need to know about my best friend is—

Addie, what are you doing in here? I'm trying to tell a story!

I'm telling it better, that's what I'm doing, Uncle. And if you didn't want me adding onto it, you wouldn't have used a Quick Quotes Quill so that I could jump in. Dictating a story concerning your apprentice in a public room is just asking for trouble.

I started telling it and I have to finish it. For, um, consistency's sake.

Eh. I don't really care. Anyway, as I was saying—

Addison Aster Evans, you listen to me—

Is my name legally Addison Evans? I mean, James Potter adopted me, so would that make it Addison Potter? Or Addison Evans-Potter?

I…don't actually know. I think it's just Evans?

Well, I'll just stick with Addie, Supreme Overlord of the Universe. It's shorter. Now can I get back to the story?

I want to tell it!

Okay, how about we take turns? I tell what happens to me, and you say what happens to you.

Hmph. Fine.

Good. Good. Okay. Where was I? Oh, yes, Darcy. Ahem. So in order to understand the next few parts of the story, there's a few crucial things about Darcy that you need to know. Firstly, she was deaf, but still went to the same public school as me, which meant that she either had to rely on me to let her know what was going on in sign language or she had to write whatever she needed to say down. The former option was problematic because I'm a chronic liar, and the latter was an issue because Darcy's handwriting resembled that of a drunken rhinoceros, so that not even the most veteran of teachers were consistently able to decipher it. The second thing about Darcy was that she had an uncontrollable Disney obsession, and flat-out refused to wear anything but variants of Disney princess dresses. On occasion, she could be persuaded into a Minnie Mouse outfit, but those instances were rare.

Now, the school we went to when we were eight was a fairly stifling sort of institution (most schools are, in my opinion, but this one was more than usual). You see, Hollow Primary had a set uniform, and a strictly enforced one at that. The fifty-page student handbook—which, by the way, was about forty-nine pages past the point of most students' reading levels—demanded that all female students wear a school button-up shirt and a khaki skirt. For me, this wasn't much of an issue, since I always liked dressing neatly, but for Darcy, the uniform just wasn't going to fly. To our teacher's continued horror, Darcy would come to school each and every day in a slightly different princess dress and a matching tiara.

"Miss Evans, why is your friend once again out of the school uniform?" Mrs. Milligan demanded, her hair pulled up in a bun so tight that it was stretching the sagging skin on her face. She was a witch, I remember, and I don't mean the Hogwarts kind. "This is the second time this week."

She and I both knew that this was actually the thirty-third time Darcy was out of dress code in that school year alone, and there'd only been thirty-three days of school. "What do you mean, Mrs. Milligan?" I asked innocently.

"Clearly, you know what our uniform is, Miss Evans, seeing as you've been in it every day this year so far," sniffed the foul woman. "Why, pray tell, have you not enlightened your friend?"

I widened my eyes. "There's a school uniform?"

You could almost see the steam pouring from Mrs. Milligan's ears. "What exactly do you think you're wearing, you foolish child?"

"I dunno," I said, scratching my head. "My uncle always lays out my clothes for me the night before. I just put 'em on."

Mrs. Milligan sighed deeply. "Then why doesn't he pick out Miss O'Sullivan's clothes as well?"

"Oh, my Aunt Brigid drops her off in the morning already dressed," I said promptly, enjoying my teacher's growing irritation. "We just take her to school."

"Fine," Mrs. Milligan snarled, audibly grinding her teeth. "Then can you please tell Miss O'Sullivan to tell her mother that she must be in uniform in the future?"

"Why don't you tell her, Mrs. Milligan, ma'am?"

"Because she's deaf, that's why," she snapped.

I pretended to look shocked. "Mrs. Milligan, that's an awfully rude thing to say about somebody."

By that point, I'm pretty sure that Mrs. Milligan was having to restrain herself from strangling me, which I was pretty proud of. "Just tell her to stop wearing Disney princess costumes to school, then," she said, rubbing the bridge of her nose.

"I don't know how to say that in sign language," I told her. "I've only been learning it for a few years."

In this case, a few years meant four years, which also meant half of my lifetime that was spent in almost constant communication with my deaf best friend, meaning that I was nearly as fluent as Darcy.

"Just go outside!" Mrs. Milligan half-screeched, shoving me out of the door to the playground, where my fellow students—and more importantly, Darcy—were already playing.

I jogged over to where Darcy was doodling on the sidewalk with the colorful sidewalk chalk I'd given to her for her last birthday. She was oddly a much better artist that she was a writer, and sometimes, even at only eight years and two months (one month younger than me, which I never let her forget), her pictures looked like they were about to spring up from the surface on which she drew them. Today's picture was of Piglet from Winnie the Pooh, which was one of her favorite characters from the more recent Disney movies (it was only 1986, after all).

I tapped Darcy's shoulder and grinned as I sat down in front of her, careful not to smudge any of her drawing. "Looks good," I told her. "Hand me a piece of chalk?"

Darcy obliged, giving me a blue piece. "What'd Milligan have to say to you?"

I shrugged. "She wanted me to get you to stop wearing princess dresses to school."

"I'd kill you first," signed Darcy, utterly straight-faced in her pink Aurora dress and slightly lopsided tiara.

"I told her that I didn't know how to sign Disney to you to explain, and that I had no idea that there was a uniform at all."

"Nice," Darcy told me appreciatively. "Did she believe you?"

"You know, I think she did."

I looked down at the sidewalk and started a shaky outline of Eeyore. Sadly, I didn't have a fourth of the skill that Darcy had in her pinky finger, so I ended up with a blue stick drawing of a mutated bear instead of a depressed donkey.

"No, no, no," sighed Darcy. "Why am I friends with someone so awful at art?"

I snorted. "Because I'm the only one who speaks sign language at this school."

"Can you even 'speak' sign language?" she mused. "Shouldn't it be that you 'sign' sign language?"

"Picky, aren't you," I said (metaphorically). "Kids these days—"

A piercing scream echoed through the chilly fall air. I couldn't tell where it came from, but it sounded much closer that I wanted it to be. "Did you hear that?" I asked Darcy, looking around for the source of the sound.

"You cannot seriously have just asked me that," Darcy signed, lifting one of her eyebrows.

I ignored her and continued searching for the sound. It wasn't that I wanted to be all heroic and help whoever had landed themselves in trouble; I just didn't want to be some monster's afternoon snack. After a few minutes with no sign of any further disturbance, I let myself relax a little and tentatively picked the chalk up again, still keeping a wary eye on my surroundings, which was why I noticed when the giant potatoes attacked the schoolyard.

Yes, you heard me right. A small army of potato creatures that were approximately the size that I was—which admittedly wasn't saying much, since I was a particularly tiny eight-year-old, but still—were bombarding the lot of Hollow Primary and the children occupying it with shovels, pitchforks, and strangely enough, potato guns, sending the students running and the teachers running even faster. I would've run, too, except that the potatoes had cornered Darcy and me against the school, despite having appeared almost instantaneously. I'd have to fight my way out if I wanted to make it out.

Well, fine, then, I remember saying to myself. Every man for himself. I can deal with that. Then I felt a small hand on my elbow and looked into the grey-green eyes of my one and only friend and realized that, while it may have been every man for himself, we were girls, and that meant we were never, ever alone, even when we went to the restroom.

"Wish I had a fork and some butter," Darcy told me, picking up a heavy rock and tossing it in her hand to measure its weight. "I could make a solid dinner out of those potatoes."

"Amen to that," I signed fervently, grabbing the cricket bat that was lying abandoned on the grass nearby. "On three?"

Darcy considered that for a moment, then shook her head, instead shooting me a grin as she launched the rock in her hand at the nearest potato to us. "You get in close, and I'll cover."

I rolled my eyes and charged at the potato, which had angrily begun to stomp its way towards us. At least, I think it was angry; it was difficult to read expressions on a faceless vegetable. All the potato had was a half-dozen eyes or so, and that wasn't any different than your average potato.

Smashing potatoes is oddly cathartic, as I quickly found out. Generally, I'd recommend that you do it on potatoes that you plan to eat, not giant demonic potatoes who are trying to kill you by slamming their bodies repeatedly against your skull in an effort to cave it in, but the basic principle remains the same. It's even better if you sing a war song to yourself while you're at it.

"Hot potato, hot potato, hot potato, hot potato, potato, potato, potato potato," I sang out, slamming my bat into another potato monster and crushing part of its face (?). "Cold spaghetti, cold spaghetti, cold spaghetti—"

Rocks and pebbles zoomed over my head, stunning some of the potatoes that were trying to approach me while I was engaged with one of their cohorts and knocking over some of the others. Darcy's doing, of course; we'd learned a long time ago that she was much better at providing cover than she was in a direct fight. Being deaf didn't bode well in a melee, where someone could attack her from behind, where she wouldn't be able to see them, so she usually tried to stick to distracting and attacking the enemy from afar, like she was doing then.

Abruptly, I thought of what would happen if I broke my leg in the fight. It would severely cripple my ability to fight, that much was certain, and it would probably tip the fight in the favor of the giant potatoes. I could feel how much it would hurt already; I'd had a similar experience with a broken finger back when I was six and got into it with the family television, and I vividly remembered the excruciating pain associated with broken bones—

Cursing, I tried to drag my attention back to the fight. My OCD tended to crop up in extremely inconvenient times, like in the middle of an all-out brawl with a potato army that could have fed the entirety of Ireland for a solid month during the potato famine. Unfortunately, before I can get an intrusive thought out of my head and focus on what's in front of me, I have to repeat the intrusive thought exactly three more times in order to get four, which has a perfect square root and is therefore the closest number I can get to perfect—another quirk of my OCD. Luckily, my ADHD is enough to keep my body on autopilot and continue the fight while I'm mentally breaking the leg in question once more and the other one two times for good measure.

By the time I had finished with my little ritual, nearly all of the potatoes had been eradicated, save for the one Darcy took out from behind with a rock before it could reach me while I was distracted.

"Thanks," I signed, wiping sweat from my forehead and reflexively straightening my shirt.

"No problem," Darcy returned, poking the potato she had taken down with her foot and wrinkling her nose. "It's too bad we had to turn these into mashed potatoes and mix them all with the dirt. We could have eaten them for dinner."

I glanced around at the carnage. It really did look a giant blender had gone on a rampage and flung the innards of enormous potatoes all over the schoolyard. "I don't think I'm gonna want potatoes for the next few months, anyway."

"Sacrilege," Darcy informed me, plopping back down on her spot on the sidewalk and reaching for her chalk. "So do we just wait here for the teachers to come back, or should we just assume school's out for the day?"

"Let's wait for Uncle Death to show up," I said. "Knowing him, he'll want pictures. He's weird like that."

Without warning, the air in front of us flashed blindingly with light, heralding what I knew was the arrival of the true form of a god. Immediately, I slammed my eyes shut, praying that Darcy had done the same. After the light had faded and my eyes stopped feeling like they were going to bleed if I opened them, I cracked my eyelids and squinted at the latest person to join the party, expecting to see Uncle Death or maybe Nana. Instead, I saw what looked like an angel of the Lord in a loincloth.

"I'm going to hell," I said quietly. When Darcy didn't answer, I at first thought that she too was overwhelmed with the sight of the extremely handsome, golden-haired angel/god in front of us, but then I realized that she was looking at me with irritation and suddenly remembered that she was deaf.

"Hello, Addison Evans," boomed the not-angel, flicking his blond hair over his shoulder. He glanced at Darcy. "And company."

"Hey," I said awkwardly, gripping my cricket bat.

He frowned at Darcy. "Why is your company not returning my greeting?"

"Sorry, my friend Darcy's deaf," I explained.

He looked alarmed. "She's Death?"

"No, that's my uncle," I said. "Darcy's deaf. As in, she can't hear you."

The god nodded, his golden hair bobbing as his head moved. "So she is imperfect, then."

I felt a little offended for my friend's sake. "That's kind of rude, you know."

The god shrugged. "She is unsuitable for the post of High King of Ireland, unlike me. Unfortunately, the Tuatha de Danann stripped me of my throne and instead made me teach them farming, the—"

He then said a word in Irish that my nana had taught me when I was four that any responsible adult would have washed my mouth out for saying, if they actually knew Gaelic.

"Pardon me, I'm afraid I didn't catch that last word," I said politely. Beside me, Darcy twitched in annoyance at not being able to understand what was being said around her.

"You know, it's—" the god explained his previous word with several more unflattering words, still in Irish.

"I don't speak Irish," I said, in perfect Gaelic.

Darcy twitched again. "Who is this guy?"

"Who are you?" I asked aloud, acknowledging Darcy with a slight nod.

"I am Bres," he announced proudly, thrusting out his chest. "Sympathetic to the Fomorian cause and the husband of Brigid."

I swore violently and mostly internally. The Fomorians were bad news for kids of the Tuatha de Danann; they were a race of giants and monsters who had been fighting the Tuatha de for as long as anyone could remember (and that's saying something, considering that both sides were immortal). If Bres supported them, then Darcy and I were in deep, deep trouble, and we were in even worse trouble if Bres was married to Darcy's mom and still supported the Fomorians.

"Well?" Darcy asked impatiently, blowing her own blonde hair out of her face while still clinging onto her chalk. "Who is he?"

Gulping, I shrugged haphazardly. "Your stepfather, apparently. Ever heard of Bres?"

Darcy made a disgusted face. "Mum does go on about him."

"What are you saying?" Bres asked curiously. "Can she only communicate with her hands?"

"Essentially," I said. "We were just discussing…um, how you felt about your wife. Do you two get along? Sometimes relationships stagger after the first ten millennia or so. I know a few good marriage counselors that you could consider—"

"Enough!" Bres bellowed, glaring at me. "You're as annoying as the beetles that destroy my crops."

I blushed. "Oh, stop it, you."

That only seemed to make him angrier. "And for your information, my wife and I have been separated for nearly nine years now, and I'm doing just fine."

"Of course, of course," I said, holding up my hands in surrender. Almost nine years; that would have been about when Brigid came down with the parasite that I lovingly call Darcy. Maybe Brigid cheated on him with a mortal and they split up as a result? "I meant no offense. Clearly you're a strong, independent man who don't need no woman."

"Clearly," Bres said, watching me through eyes narrowed with suspicion. He shook his head suddenly, reminding me of a shaggy dog trying to remove water from its ears. "But I've been distracted from my mission. I am here as a representative of the Fomorians and as the mouthpiece of Morgan, who have decided on your demise."

I sputtered. "Now hold on," I said hurriedly, "I don't think that someone as awesome and independent as you should try to kill a harmless little girl like me on the word of some chick named Morgan."

"Watch your mouth," snapped Bres. "That's Morgan le Fay you're speaking of. And I'd hardly classify you as harmless, Addison Evans, daughter of the Roman god Jupiter, great-granddaughter and apprentice of the Morrigan."

"I'm not the Morrigan's apprentice!" I protested. "I'm the apprentice of Uncle Death—uh, Thanatos."

"That's not what Morgan says," Bres said smugly. "Now, Addison Evans, prepare to die."

He stretched out his right hand and summoned a wicked-looking iron broadsword, spinning it casually in his hand to test it. Yelping, I jumped back, nearly knocking over Darcy in the process.

"Negotiations went a little south," I told her, lifting up my cricket bat.

"Yeah, the sword kind of proved that," Darcy snarked. Her fingers caught on fire, which I assumed was intentional, since she then chucked a small fireball at her evil or at least extremely violent and annoying stepfather.

The fire didn't really do much to Bres, but it did startle him and singe off his eyebrows, making him look slightly less like an angel and more like a mad scientist who'd had a run in with one of his own experiments. He stopped, confused. "Who is your friend Darcy descended from, to have such control over fire?"

I figured that telling Bres that Darcy was the kid of his estranged wife with another man wouldn't be the best plan, so I thought quickly. "She's a daughter of…uh…Hephaestus," I improvised. "He's Greek."

"You keep strange company," Bres remarked before lunging at me with his sword.

I panicked and dropped to the grass, narrowly avoiding my head being severed from my body. Fighting a god and winning would be pretty much impossible for Darcy and me; we were powerful demigods, but we were also eight, and extremely unprepared for a fight with anything larger than an army of potatoes. Fighting a god and surviving long enough to reach my uncle and nana was only mildly more plausible, but it was the only chance we had.

"Run!" I signed frantically to Darcy, slamming my bat into the back of Bres's calf and rolling forwards into a dead sprint—one of the few things gymnastics classes had taught me. I got maybe twenty yards before a giant root wrapped around my ankle and yanked me down to the ground, shoving my face into the hard dirt.

I spat out dust and rubbed my eyes with the sleeve of my uniform, trying desperately to free myself from the clutches of Bres's nefarious plant minion. My best efforts failed and I had resigned myself to clearing my vision and attempting to summon a bolt of lightning (unlikely, since I had yet to use anything much larger than a static shock) when a hand landed on my shoulder. If I had possessed complete control of my responses, I would have noticed that the hand was considerably smaller than one of Bres's; as it was, though, I failed to realize this and instinctively punched the owner of the hand in the face.

The hand retracted instantly and I swung my head around to see who I'd hit, still blinking dust and dirt out of my eyes. I expected Bres with a sword pointed at my throat, but instead saw Darcy, rubbing her face and wincing.

"Sorry," I told her, rubbing the back of my head. "Thought you were Bres."

"I'm going to try not to take that as an insult," Darcy signed, raising an eyebrow and shooting a small burst of flame at the root around my ankle and disintegrating it. She reached out a hand and helped me up. "Now let's get out here before Bres gets rid of my distraction."

I looked over at where we'd left Bres and glimpsed a small, pink rabbit-pig hybrid viciously attacking him by latching onto his shining blond hair and ripping whole patches of it out, before launching itself at his arm and gnawing.

"Piglet doesn't like Bres," Darcy signed, looked satisfied.

I'm pretty sure my respect for Darcy doubled as we watched her sidewalk chalk drawing of Piglet fight a literal god. "Did you do that?"

"I did." Her face showed nothing but pride. "Mum's got power over inspiration, which includes stories and created characters, so I can make them real."

"So you have power over Disney," I said. "That is so unbelievably unfair."

Bres managed to throw off the frenzied Piglet for a brief moment. "Brigid!" he roared. "I know this is one of your powers!"

I exchanged a glance with Darcy. "I think that means it's time to leave."

"I wouldn't know," complained Darcy as we started to run towards the direction of our house. "I'm deaf."

THANATOS

When Addison and Darcy charged into the kitchen covered in bloody patches and dripping with mud and what seemed to be mashed potatoes, I was not all that alarmed at first; I just assumed that they'd gotten into yet another food fight at school and had been sent home for starting another bloodbath amongst the children. Then, of course, Addison had to proverbially open her mouth and ruin my much more pleasant illusion of trouble.

"So you two are telling me," I signed hesitantly, "that Darcy's father Bres—"

"Stepfather," Darcy corrected, bending down to scratch Briggie's ears, having been separated from her all day (for some reason, the school didn't approve of a yappy dog with violent tendencies).

"—that Darcy's stepfather Bres tried to kill you after sending a small army of potato monsters to your school?"

"That sounds like Bres," the Morrigan said, leaning against the fridge and crossing her arms. She'd learned to understand most of what Darcy signed, but still couldn't sign anything more than the alphabet herself. "He always was fond of his potatoes."

Addie nodded, absentmindedly tugging on the end of her plaited orange pigtails. "He said he was acting as a representative for the Fomorians—" she had to spell out the word, since she didn't know the word for it in sign—"and for Morgan le Fay."

The Morrigan blanched stark white. "Hold on," she said. "Addison, did you say Morgan le Fay?"

"That's right," Addison signed, perking up with interest. "Why? Is she strong or something?"

Apparently, Addison had decided that it was time for her to decide on a worthy evil overlord rival.

"You could say that," the Morrigan said, looking dazed. "Morgan is an old friend, I suppose. I taught her everything she knew—that I knew."

Addie quickly translated what the Morrigan had said to Darcy, then turned back to us. "That sounds promising—I mean, unfortunate."

The Morrigan shook her head. "Yes," she said distantly. "I had thought her dead for over a thousand years. The fact that she survived, after all this time—that she survived my curse—and Bres said that Morgan wanted him to kill you?"

"That's right," Addie said, now looking distinctly uncomfortable. "He also said that I was your apprentice, not Uncle's, which I thought was a bit odd."

If the Morrigan had been white before, now she was grey. "Oh, Danu," she whispered, rubbing a shaking hand over her eyes. She stayed like that for a moment, breathing deeply, then dropped her hand and immediately began barking out orders. "Addison, pack as much of your things as you can," she said. "Darcy, collect what you have here at the house. I'll let your mother know where we are."

"But Nana—" Addie said.

"No buts, Addison!" the Morrigan snapped. "Now go!"

I put my hand on the Morrigan's shoulder as the girls scurried from the room. "Morrigan, what's going on?" I asked her quietly. Seeing her scared was an altogether new and entirely unpleasant experience, and I wanted to know what had a normally fearless goddess fleeing in terror. "Why are you so afraid of Morgan le Fay?"

The Morrigan's dark red hair shimmered on her shoulders like blood on white snow. "You're not the first death god to take an apprentice, Thanatos," she said. "Nearly two thousand years ago, I took Morgan on as mine. She was brilliant and powerful and talented, and a minor goddess in her own right. She became like my own daughter over the time I taught her. We were practically inseparable for hundreds of years."

"What happened?" I asked, almost dreading the answer.

Her eyes glazed over with something that looked like grief. "I took another apprentice," she said. "Not quite as brilliant or as talented as she was, but a fantastic magic user in his own right. Morgan hated him, and despised the fact that I focused most of my attention on him. One day, she snapped."

"She couldn't handle it?"

The Morrigan shook her head. "No. She tried to kill him, and when that didn't work, she went after me."

"What did you do?" I pressed.

"I had to destroy her," the Morrigan said sorrowfully. "I thought she was dead these past centuries. I mourned her."

"I'm sorry," I said softly, pulling her in for a hug and resting my chin on her shoulder, even while my head spun. I couldn't imagine having to destroy my own apprentice. I couldn't imagine having to kill Addie.

I prayed I never had to.

"We have to go," the Morrigan said, pulling back and discreetly wiping her eyes. "If Morgan really thinks that Addison is my apprentice, it could have set her off again, even after all this time. She knows where we are, and she will not hesitate in killing Addie."

"Alright," I said, rubbing my hair. "Alright. Where will we go?"

The Morrigan paced for a moment, muttering to herself. "We need to leave Godric's Hollow," she said under her breath. "Somewhere Morgan can't track. Hogwarts would protect us, but Addie's too young. Leaving the country will only delay her. We need a place where the Celts have no power, where other gods have power. Camp Half-Blood? No, they wouldn't accept the daughter of a Roman."

"Then where?"

The Morrigan stopped moving and met my eyes evenly. "Camp Jupiter," she said with finality. "We're going to Camp Jupiter."

So what did you think of my shiny new villains and plot? Let me know in the reviews! Next time, we'll get to meet everyone at Camp Jupiter: almost two decades before the Prophecy of Seven!