DISCLAIMER: Guess who said no when we asked for the PJatO series?

Rick Riordan.

Jk. We didn't ask him anything.

oOo

Thankfully, I didn't dream of falling again.

I hardly dreamed of anything. The fact should have worried me; yet, somehow, it didn't.

There was grey. Grey mist. Sometimes it morphed into a plain of bones, and that's how I knew that our connection wasn't that great. Wasn't as solid as it'd been the night before. From somewhere far off, I could hear Nico calling.

And then I woke.

I pondered for a moment what it might've meant, and what he could've possibly found on Mount Othrys. Disappointment burned heavily in my chest as I realized that he'd probably have left it by the time I slept again and that I'd missed the last possible sights of my old home. That I still didn't know how it faired. If… if something was feeding off of it, like Nico suspected. If it was alright. If it needed to be saved.

That palace had reeked of Kronos with its every inch. Stood cold and proud and maliciously almighty. Crisp and presentable save the places it didn't care nor could ever fix, those rooms where blood had been spilled and countless killed. In ways, it had been cold and cruel to me.

But it was still familiar. Still the first place that'd held any meaning to me. The first roof to witness the meaning I'd suddenly found in myself.

An odd thought struck me then. No, of course Mount Othrys was fine. How couldn't it be?

I knew very well that it was false hope. I shrugged the thought aside and got dressed, heading downstairs quickly and raiding the cabinet for those cheap little donut sticks that come individually-wrapped in boxes. Food of the gods, those were…

Granny, Hunter, Brook, and Grandpa had seated themselves before the television. The news was on.

"Snowstorm last night?" I guessed.

"Yep," Hunter said, popping her lips. "We've got a total of eleven feet out there again, and we've still only got a two-hour delay."

"By the gods! It's only a half-day! Why not just close it?"

She threw her hands in the air. "That's what I'm saying!"

I took my less-than-healthy breakfast to the corner of the kitchen where I could see the television yet still remain clear of the living room's vulnerable carpet. Beneath the flustered weathergirl buried just about six feet in her panicked winter getup – apparently, the ancient traditions and winter mentality of Oswego hadn't blessed her like it did the plowmen – was a white bar. On it, blue letters scrolled by lazily.

"We're in the A's again," Brook said, squinting at the screen. "…B's… C's…"

The historic countdown was picked up by Moon. Over the racket, Hunter raised a sly eyebrow at me and said, "We should do the sacred snow-day rites."

"Superstition," Granny scoffed, a mocking smile on her face.

Hunter shrugged. "Hey, I don't know who the snow god is, but there's a shot…"

"I'm sure the whole flush-ice-cubes-down-the-toilet thing worked in Ancient Greece," Grandpa put in. "The Minoan society was where the first toilet and indoor plumbing was invented."

"Thank you, Daedalus!" Hunter crowed.

"M's!" Brook yelped excitedly. Moon reared and howled.

Behind me, footsteps sounded. Shay had decided to stay a second night in our guest room. By the sound of it, she'd slept well, or at least had until this started. Each dragging step from her was like a ringing curse. "Whass goin on?" she slurred.

"CLOSED!" Brook bellowed, and began the traditional marathon through the house with her wolves on her heels.

Shay jolted awake. "Closed?"

"Yep. Christmas break starts early this year!" I declared.

She sighed heavily and plopped down on a stool next to me. "Ugh. So that means we're on our own clock with the twins."

The matter suddenly gained about five hundred pounds. I took the second stool. "We'd get out around noon or so…"

"Not just that, but they live between two hills. There's no way they're getting their door open. I'd have to confront them in front of their step-parents if I were to say anything at all."

Well. There's no faster way to sink a ship. Too heavy, the subject sank beneath waves and sent nothing but a few lonely bubbles back up to pop on the surface amid the awkward silence.

"Their parents have a right to know, anyway," Granny said, glancing at us. "Just because they'll be there doesn't mean you can't go."

Shay shuffled nervously. "That might be true…"

The reluctance in her voice rang louder than a tornado siren. Shay hadn't grown up with her mortal mother; all she'd known was her father, who'd left her in favor of serving Kronos as soon as he'd gotten the chance. And she'd been utterly alone since. Not exactly Nico's story, but strong nonetheless. The adults just simply weren't to be trusted.

Besides. It was just two more people to crush.

Two more humans.

Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Smith! Sorry, but the orphanage got your adoption papers wrong. These two aren't human. They have to march off into war now. We'll send you a postcard from wherever the demons drag us off to!

Yeah. That'd go over great. If they didn't reject the twins entirely. Or, you know, throw us into an insane asylum.

I tried to imagine my own induction to this giant, lovely, magical, tragedy of a world. It was not hard. Mount Othrys had been proud and tall and powerful in the most unforgettable of ways back then; the marble columns stood with righteous authority and loftiness, the fires flickered with a grim sense of duty, the shadows crept along in their timely fashions and oversaw every little piece. That palace…

Kronos. Golden eyes. Straight from the start, demigods were the outcasts of whom? The rejects of what? The discarded side-effects of what favorite pastime? Always against the Olympians, even from then.

There had been Ethan. What was he'd said that day… It struck me hard, right then.

He'd said that we fight just to find another fight. Fight to fight. Not to live, but to experience the next battle, because even a victor might not live longer than a moment. We just go on and on and on in this short circle that was more like a dot until one day our luck ran out and we were to hope the judges were in a good mood.

Just fight to fight. Fight to fight.

I swallowed thickly and stared at the floor. Ethan had not housed hope, nor much life himself. He was not Shay. But I could tell now that they had the same thing in mind in a moment like that.

But Shay was Shay. Shay was hope. I waited for her to say something sarcastically optimistic, but not a word was uttered. The ship hit the sandy bottom of the ocean and stayed there under the heavy, sluggish, dark waters.

"Something has to be done," Hunter said loudly. "I'd recommend talking to all four of them. Though it might be hard to convince anyone of anything without evidence."

"Mist," I reminded her.

"Yeah, well. Work around it. Luna and Haley think they're human, and they're what – thirteen? Which means they're still kids. They're not like Bree or Brook or me. You can't just talk to them and leave that decision, whether or not to spill, entirely on their minds. They aren't demigods yet."

The ship was crumpling under the sea's pressure now. Great gods of Olympus, no, they weren't demigods, and we couldn't break this to them…

I grit my teeth and shook my head. No. Shay had been stuck at that block for a week; none of us could afford a moment more stalling in its shadow. "You're right. We've got to try something. Someone… Someone's going to get killed if we don't."

Shay sighed and nodded. "…Alright. Alright. Give me an hour or two to get ready."

"Cool," Hunter said, getting off the couch. "You want us to come?"

"No. I can manage alone; the snow's nothing but water. And it might be less overwhelming if only one inhuman thing showed up at their door."

Hunter chuckled darkly. "Damn straight. So we'll stay."

"Nobody thinks of you as inhuman," Granny argued.

"Granny, most people don't even see us as demigods. There's Nico, Shay, and… Oh, no, that sums it up."

"I can concur with that," I offered, raising my donut stick. "Besides, these guys don't even know demons exist. They're just as likely to see us as Kindly Ones as they are to see us as insane."

Granny sighed heavily. There was something in her eyes, hard as stone and bright as the sun, but she held her lips shut and didn't reveal it.

Shay groaned and let her face crack into the smallest smile. "So. What's Nico's latest news?"

"Nothing," I muttered. "Couldn't make out what he was saying, or even see the ruins."

"That might be for the best, sweetie," Granny soothed with her eyes still locked on the news. "Some things…"

I sighed and hung my head. "Anyway. So I don't know anything."

"We should Iris-Message him," Shay murmured. "Do you think-"

"No."

We turned. Brook had finished her victory laps and was standing in the kitchen, Moon and Night at her feet. Her silver eyes had turned the bleak and forbidding grey of storm clouds ready to pour all the pressure crushing that boat down onto the land but managed to hold back just long enough to see what they'd destroy. "You can't," she said, "contact him. He's in stealth mode. Wait until he calls one of us – that way, we won't blow his cover or anything. We'd get him killed if we tried."

The thought set my heart beating. Not even just that Nico might die – though that fact caused me guilt – but that Mount Othrys really could be haunted by something. By someone. Feeding off it in some sort of sick, magic-style necrophilia.

Though if that were the case, you'd bet your life that Nico would take payment for such a crime. Ruins or person or even ideas. I hoped he still had the energy to get mad at whatever he found up there.

I hoped, prayed, begged.

"On the matter of dreams," Hunter said, "Brook?"

She smiled and shook her head. "No. It's gone."

Gone. Just like my own nightmare of falling. Just like my contact with Nico.

If anyone saw the look on my face, they didn't point it out.

oOo

There is a saying. Don't know who said it. I should, I really should – stupid, stupid! – but I don't. It goes something like, "We are all products of our childhood."

Well. How much will and force the soul holds against an upbringing is not something I'll discuss openly. Plead the fifth, whatever. Have that debate on your own time. But I will say this; I believe that statement to be true, at least to a degree.

So how was I, then?

Well, it had started and ended with-

No. No, no, no. Don't go down that road, Nico. You'll wind up wearing a necklace of rope and dangling like a little dog from a leash on one of these old poles. A little dog lifted off the ground and strangled, dragged, scraped and torn because the other end of the leash just picked up and ran faster than he could follow.

That'd be an interesting obit, actually…

I sighed and lifted my head to the breeze, letting the cold air wash over me and bite through my jacket and raise goose bumps from their resting places. The splash of coolness was welcome. It was warmer than what I felt inside.

My over-active senses (as they tend to get this time of year) buzzed angrily at me, though, millions of little alarms begging for my attention every moment. I shoved them aside and peeled myself off the column I'd been leaning on.

And on I walked, broken marble crunching beneath my feet.

Mount Tam was cold. Very cold. The Mountain of Despair, it'd been called. And Despair favors no one, the white or the black or the grey. Not even when Othrys was concerned. The palace was nothing but a carpet of veined black stones and snuffed torches. Now and then, a few things appeared in the rubble. Things so mundane it made me laugh. A squished pillow. Perhaps a blanket. A shattered mirror. A can of squirt cheese.

Strewn around like bodies amid the chaos of a battle, they peeked at me from the ruins, shy and timid. Animals scared into burrows.

This place had been broken. Despair had torn it apart. The air hung heavy and grey and freezing and snow had begun to fall again since Kronos wasn't here to stop it and snow it did, heavily, coating the graveyard in a thick white blanket.

The magic here was gone.

There was no questioning it. Kronos had been obliterated, his consciousness scattered through Tartarus and spread so thin it'd be several thousand years before he could even form a single thought. And yes, while other Titans might be alive (like Hecate or Prometheus or even Iapetus), his palace could not survive without him. The Titans were finished.

Any heat that was left came from Atlas's head. And the amount of warm breath that he spilled into the air. Little white puffs came from his lips along with his spouts of curse words. I ignored him and kept searching.

My mind moved on. Wandered. I kept it carefully locked, away from my senses, away from the few memories I could sense here – nothing like the one on what I'd found in New York – that were dull, and away from the nightmares. I constantly bit my tongue or pinched my arm to stay awake. I had pushed my luck, with so little sleep; yet I'd had to. Had to. No option.

It was so damn cowardly, but I ran from the nightmares.

Horrible guilt and loathing shot through me at that. Coward. Incapable. Little.

But that was part of the road I couldn't go down. Not now. Not this time of year. I shoved it aside and decided it was best to settle down for breakfast.

…Breakfast?!

I whirled to the east. There, a perfectly round disk had been extricated completely from the horizon. Cold light was filtering through the smoky clouds.

My stomach clenched. What was it by now? Nine? Ten? Which meant… One or two in Oswego.

And I still hadn't heard anything from Bree.

Now, this, I was entitled to worry about. Even if the connections had been unstable and there was a chance she hadn't heard me. I was alone, and while it was nice to finally have peace, it meant I wasn't with them. And anything could happen during that time. It shouldn't have bothered me quite so much, but it did. Perhaps I still saw Bree a little too much as…

No. Not that name. Not now.

Oh, what I'd give to have Phil screaming at me right then. Screw the logic. I'd embrace madness happily so long he kept me in line.

I swallowed thickly and shook my head. No. Bree and Hunter were on home turf. And they would both die before so much as a scratch touched Brook's skin. So they had to be alright. I'd sense it if they were dead, anyway.

Or if they'd been captured…

Maybe that's why. I'd begged her just hours ago to send a message to me. An update. Hermes Express was still down, but Iris had resumed delivering communication. Perhaps she really hadn't heard, or she misunderstood, or was captured, or was wounded and bleeding to death in a ditch somewhere. I had no way of knowing.

Worrying was painful, but it was a good distraction from my Dead End street. And Dead End street was a bigger problem at the moment.

So I worried.

Yet I couldn't get off this mountain to check on them. I decided that I'd do that when I got down past that garden come sunrise – until then, I'd investigate these ruins, and again, and again, finding nothing each time. To stay awake. To distract. To worry. I'd stop in New York to tell Annabeth that I'd found nothing. Perhaps a party of several (she had told me I'd come alone because I could sense memories, but we both knew it was because I was fast) would do better. Then I'd make sure Bree and her sisters were alright. Then I'd be on my own again.

Dead End street would be closing soon, anyway. I could fight through the rest of it.

So I shut Atlas out of my mind and searched the empty remains again and again, watching the sun pass by above. Avoiding sleep and the nightmares it'd only laugh at. The things that'd please Atlas.

Coward. Incapable. Little.

Once upon a time.

For a moment, I took a forbidden peak down Dead End street, and I saw. So many times, I swear, I had felt Bianca's footsteps beside mine. Even when I'd run from Laelaps, a part of her had thrived. She lived on inside like she promised she would.

But she was dead. No changing that. And her footsteps were not there now.

Coward. Incapable. Little.

Alone.

oOo

I don't think we were surprised when it happened.

The ship just sank fully into the sand, nothing but flattened steal. Some of it had even dissolved into a soupy paste and risen among our minds, clouding our thoughts, numbing us to the cold and horrible freeze of the water.

My sisters and I – plus Moon – had been sitting on our roof, playing Scenario. The storm clouds had gathered from above the lake around two in the afternoon. Classic Oswego snow, of course. We had stayed out as long as we could, even when the white flurries began to fall down over the East Side and a pasty blanket covered the buildings like the blessing of gentle fingers. Then the wind had picked up. The snow fell harder. Irate swirls of it came raining down above the river.

"We should head inside," Hunter muttered. "Who wants hot chocolate?"

All in all, even as hard as it was, I was so glad she hadn't spoken sooner. If she did, we'd have been inside, and missed it.

Lightning.

It struck up from the ground and rocketed into the clouds. Two more followed in what appeared to be the same place. Around that spot, the clouds had gone from grey to black.

Silence fell over us. That was when the ship was crushed into the sand.

Then I grabbed their hands and ran.

Anonymous and the bow were drawn as soon as we dropped out of the shadows on the edge of the yard, and Întuneric had been wielded on the run. No more lightning streaks came up or down. Above us, the black clouds swirled.

Our weapons dropped when we saw the house.

It stood like a skeleton. Blackened and weak, leaning to one side, walls stripped away. Charcoaled wood in a hollow frame. Some charred remains of furniture were left on the ground floor. Ash had fallen atop it and coated the once-decorative carpet. Shards of shattered glass, bits of it even melted and bubbling, lay on the snow in a gleaming shell. In the yard lay a torn and deflated soccer ball with burn marks on the edges.

That was all.

No Shay. No set of twins. No step-parents. Not even a picture to remember them by.

Just the ball and shell and skeleton amid ash. Its own guts turned to powder. Like one of those crabs Hunter and I would find in Seattle – the seagulls hunted them relentlessly and would make a mess similar to this.

That was when the soup rose. When mist clouded our eyes and our noses so that we couldn't cry and couldn't smell the ozone or frost. When it numbed our skin so we couldn't touch the remains even if we'd tried. The only thing I was aware of was the lightening sky as the blackness faded.

"It was Venti," Hunter said flatly, staring at the carnage.

I recalled the lightning, saw the cauterized house. Up in one far corner of that midnight frame, I saw wires sparking with electricity, a shower of little white streaks.

"It was Venti," she repeated coldly.

We were too numb to ask if we should've been there. Too numb to care. Somewhere, though, we heard a police siren and knew it was time to bail.

It was a short good-bye, but it was something.

The whole way home, that soup did not lift. It stayed as a heavy murk, lingering over us, pressing down. Making us numb. Forcing us to fight for each and every breath.

Hunter managed to fume, but that was about it. Furrowed eyebrows and a scowl. The only words she could scrape from her mind, though, were the familiar three. She chanted it with religious hate all the way home.

"It was Venti. It was Venti. It was Venti."

oOo

Nyx: Eh? Thoughts?

Nic: O.O …

Nyx: I remembered what I needed to say. One, I was lazy this morning and got a shower before deciding it was time to update. I apologize for the wait. Two, as you may have noticed, Nico wasn't too well-written in Rejects. He'll be much better in this one. As you can probably see. I don't know what it was – he was fine in my rough drafts, has always been the easiest to write – but nevertheless he's recovering from Rejects now. It'll be alright.

Nic: I'm not talking to you, Nyx.

Nyx: Please review, guys! Three chapters will next go up Saturday morn, as promised. Thanks to all our readers, infinitely!

Oh. And I just read Misery by Stephen King. READ IT, GUYS! Even if you hate horror and hate Stephen King, read it for Paul. He's the protagonist and he's a writer and there's no faster way to get inspired or excited or so pumped up with epicness. Kolkolkol…

Nic: Still not talking.

Nyx: Happy weekend, guys!

Nic: *stony silence*

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