Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson. All my fanfic writings are non-profit. 'Tis all for fun.


Piece of Darkness IV - Initiative


Chapter Nine


"Harry," Thomas said. "Remind me why we keep hurling ourselves into this kind of insanity."

Jim Butcher, 'Proven Guilty'


"So I looked at her and I said, 'You're crazy, right? Those magic spells finally cooked your brain, didn't they?'"

"To which she replied…?"

"'I knew you'd say that,'" Kevin shrugged. "Then she explained why she wants me to come with you and her, and I guess it makes sense. Though I still think there's gotta be better candidates."

Kevin and I were sitting by the lake, watching two canoe teams race one another so intensely that one might have thought the secret to eternal life was waiting for them on the opposite bank. It was mid-morning. I'd gone straight to bed after the council meeting, and at breakfast, Kevin, Olivia and I had been released from our schedules to prepare for our trip to Florida.

Ostensibly, then, Kevin and I were practicing sword-fighting, but we were having a self-inflicted break instead. Olivia was in her cabin, preparing her runestones for the quanta transmission trip to Nyx's home. We were leaving at three in the afternoon. As major missions go, this one was pretty leisurely so far.

"Apparently, there isn't," I said, watching the Demeter kids thrash their paddles furiously. "But that's not really important. I'm just wondering what the hell we're going to find in Florida."

"What do you mean?" Kevin asked me. He was polishing his bronze breastplate, his movements full of nervous tension.

"Is Nyx really going to just hand us the information we need?" I said, shifting around on the grass. "Hell, is she going to be there? Demigod life is never simple, and things haven't exactly been flowing smoothly for the last couple days."

"She'll be there. I really don't think the goddess of the night is much of a globetrotter. But you're right about the other part. Nyx is going to test us. If she's the guardian of Tartarus's legacy, she'll want to make sure we're not double agents who'll hand over the piece of darkness to Tartarus or something."

"Oh, no, you've foiled my secret plan. Damn you."

We fell silent, me watching the canoeing half-bloods, Kevin still cleaning his armour. This was the first real conversation we'd had since my return, and neither of us was really sure what to say to the other. My usual sense that I'd abandoned the half-bloods was even stronger when it came to Kevin, and that feeling wasn't lessening. The more I understood how much of an advantage Tartarus had over us, the worse I felt.

It wasn't that I owed Kevin anything, but friends deserve more than total disappearance and utter lack of communication. While I'd been on, to use a charitable term, my hiatus, I'd lumped him in with all the other half-bloods, and that wasn't right.

Kevin wasn't comfortable with things, either. I could sense it in his tone, like I was someone he'd known a long time ago, someone only partly remembered. Our friendship was still there, but it was obscured by the mist of uncertainty that I'd created by running over the hills like a scared rabbit.

So I was just sitting there, trying to think of the best way to clear all this up and not having much luck, when Kevin went ahead and made things easy for us. "So why did you come back?"

I glanced at him. As ever when the son of Ares asked an important question, he wasn't looking at me directly, but glancing at me out of the corner of his eye, as he examined the inner lining of the breastplate.

"Because I had to," I answered, after a pause. "I couldn't stay away. I knew I wouldn't be able to live with myself if it turned out I could have made a real difference."

"To be honest, if you make as much of a difference as that prophecy says, none of us will be doing much living if you don't play your part," Kevin replied flatly. I glanced at him sidelong, and managed to catch his eye as he looked up.

"I'm not angry with you, Cyrus," he said, looking away. Sunlight flicked across his glasses."I know what it's like to want to get away from a set of demands which just don't stop. I would have left this place the day after I came here if it had been a reasonable option. Camp isn't easy for the people who don't fit its rhythm."

"That's exactly right," I nodded, feeling relieved.

Kevin finally put down his breastplate, and folded his arms. "Yeah. But I have a problem. It's not that you left. It's that you just did it. You didn't even think about it much, right? Just made your decision and left?"

I shook my head, embarrassed by my lack of rationality. Even before Hestia had come to me, I'd begun to feel bad about how rushed my decision had been. Still, my supremely strategic friend had a way of making me feel really insecure about my impulsive choices.

"Yeah," he nodded back. "That's what I figured. So what I'm saying is, I respect your choices, but you should have talked to me."

I eyed him.

"You're an introspective guy, Cyrus, I get that," Kevin said, meeting my gaze. His eyes were partially hidden by the sun's reflection on the glasses, and that made him seem a lot sterner. "But life is too complicated to understand it on your own. When you're as smart as you, it's easy to think you can figure it all out inside your own head, but no-one has a head big enough for that."

"Well…" I said, raising my eyebrows.

"No, not even Zack," he said, preempting my obvious joke. "You don't have to tell me everything, but you should have talked about things, at least a little, before you left. Do you think Jane would have made the same choice if she'd really talked first?"

My stomach lurched. It was the first time Kevin had mentioned Jane to me. I looked away from him, feeling both ashamed and angry. Ashamed because he was right about me, but angry because he was wrong about Jane. I'd spoken to her before she left, and no words would have helped her.

"Problems are always going to be happening," Kevin went on. "So the next time you feel like you're on your own, I want you to remember that I'm here. Okay?"

I swallowed. He'd hit a chord. There was something about my pure sight that always made me feel alone. It had lessened since I'd joined camp, and sure, I knew I had friends, but sometimes it didn't feel like it. Particularly when I stood alone, as I had back at the winter solstice. When you see things differently to everyone else, it's hard to feel anything but isolated. In some ways, it would have been easier if I was just nuts. At least then I wouldn't have any awareness of how I was cutting against the tide.

There was always the feeling, too, that I needed to keep some things to myself, because no-one would ever understand. Those habits had started when I was very young, and they were ingrained in my behaviour to the point that it was hard even to catch myself in the act.

But even if no-one could understand, it didn't mean no-one would listen.

Kevin punched me lightly on the shoulder. "Hey. Don't clam up on me now. I'm here. You got it?"

I looked up at him, my moment of melancholy washed away by gratefulness. "I get it, man."

"Good," he nodded, tilting his head back and eyeing me. His glasses caught the sunlight fully now, and shone for a moment, making him look like a deranged scientist. "Now talk. What happened? Why did you leave, and why did you come back?"


"Hestia," Kevin repeated, for the twentieth time.

I'd talked for a solid hour, explaining everything, from my last encounter with Jake Wilson right up to the events of the last day. I even included the whole piece of darkness story. Kevin deserved to know the full truth.

I'd told parts and pieces to Chiron and other people, but it felt good to lay it out in a cohesive narrative. It gave me perspective on what had happened, and on why things had unfolded in this way. For once, I understood that phrase, "the talking cure". Sometimes there's nothing like telling your story, even if there's just one guy listening.

That one guy, meanwhile, was having a real hard time grasping the part where I'd been blessed by an ancient goddess who'd had a time-transcending apocalyptic vision and then made a trip back in time to effectively set the events of that apocalypse in motion.

"So let me get this straight," he said, raising both his hands. The breastplate lay on the grass next to him, long forgotten. "Not only are you the first mortal in centuries to have pure sight, and not only are you the chosen one named in the be-all and end-all of prophecies, but your big destiny was also foreseen by one of the senior Olympians in the time-warping aftermath of the most important mythological battle ever?"

I nodded. "Yeah. You've just about got it now."

We sat in silence for a long moment, me twiddling my thumbs, Kevin staring out across the lake.

He blew out a long sigh, and shook his head.

"Man," he said. "I've heard of predestination, but that is really ridiculous. Wouldn't it have been easier for the Fates to hang a sign around your neck that says, I dunno, 'world-saving sucker'?"

"Thank you for your support, Kevin, I'm glad you appreciate the gravity of my position," I said drily, giving him a disappointed glare.

My friend went quiet, and his aura sparked into activity around him, flickering like an ethereal brain monitor as his mighty strategist's mind began to churn through the data. I just sat, watched a few nereids squabble under the water close to us, and waited for him to output the dramatic insights I'd missed.

I checked my watch. It was nearly noon. Not long until lunch, and not long until we had to leave on the mission. Perhaps I should have been working harder to be combat-ready, but I knew it wouldn't make any difference. I couldn't see Nyx being so pedestrian as to test us by making us fight. The best way for Kevin and me to be ready was if we were clear on what the hell was going on.

As if on cue, Kevin looked up from the grass at which he'd been staring intently, and said, "You know what this means, right?"

"Oh, sure I do," I said cheerily, watching at one nereid hit the other over the head with a half-finished basket. The basket broke in two, which seemed kind of counter-productive to me. "But I'd be even more sure if you told me."

The son of Ares missed the sarcasm. He sat up straighter, looking at me intently. "Something big is coming. Something game-changing that will alter the course of this war, maybe even decide it completely. So far, we've had a lot of important events, but none of them have made any real impact on people, apart from the gods and spirits. Now, though, we're on the edge of the denouement."

"Big word. How do you figure that one?"

"It all comes down to the positioning," he explained, making wide gestures as though moving pieces on a board. "You, for instance."

"Are you saying I've been positioned?" I said irritably, my outrage half-genuine.

"I'm afraid so," he said. "At least, you're in a position. You're ready to take up your role, and you're prepared to face what's coming. As for the gods, it sounds like they're more afraid than ever, even more than during the Titan War. All these impromptu councils? Even when Kronos was banging the door down they refused to meet, except at the solstices. And now, suddenly, Tartarus is powerful enough to threaten Olympus and demand one of his old artefacts."

"So you're saying…"

"I'm saying that things are happening. Events and strategies are converging. It's a convergence." Kevin rubbed his brow. "We've been waiting for Tartarus to make his push for dominance. Well, it's happening now. This piece of darkness thing isn't another one of his tentative steps towards his plan for world domination. This is the plan."

I gulped. I didn't understand how the pieces fitted together as well as Kevin seemed to, but I trusted his insight. He didn't just have a strategist's mind, he had a survivor's instinct. "So what do you think he's going to do?" I said, speaking carefully, as though just asking the question would summon Tartarus up from his prison.

Kevin sighed, and folded his arms again. The sun passed behind a cloud, and his glasses stopped reflecting blinding light into my eyes. He stopped looking like a mad genius, and now was just another guy struggling to pick all the jigsaw pieces out of the river.

"I think he'll make a grab for the piece of darkness as soon as he can," he said finally. "From what you've told me, that's all he needs to overpower the gods. He's hoping that they'll - we'll make a mistake, and then he'll probably use Jake Wilson to take his power back."

"So what do we do? There must be a way out. We're not powerless and doomed." I paused "Are we?"

Kevin took a worryingly long time to answer that question.

"We can protect the piece of darkness," he said, looking across the lake with an unreadable gaze. "We find out where it is and get it here as fast as we can. We don't fall for any of Tartarus's tricks, and we get ready for the surprise, because I guarantee it, the son of Chaos will have something in store that none of us will ever see coming."


Unlike other, similarly important missions I'd been on, this quest was dispatched as quietly as possible. At two o'clock, Kevin, Olivia and I assembled in Chiron's office, all of us tight with nerves and uncertainty. The daughter of Hecate carried a backpack that carried so many enchanted stones, it gave off a faint aura.

"We've been gathering these in my cabin for months now," Olivia explained, in response to my puzzled glance. Chiron came into the office and shut the door as she spoke. "I took as much as I could carry, in case we need to go straight from Nyx to the piece of darkness's location."

"Nyx is aware of your imminent arrival," Chiron said, sitting down in his magical wheelchair. It always amused me how the centaur folded himself in and out of that contraption while none of us ever paid any attention. I had long ago mentally replaced "Chiron got into his wheelchair" with "Chiron sat down". I wondered if that was a normal seating arrangement for a centaur, or if he got a special deal since he was the famous trainer of heroes.

I shook myself. My thoughts were wandering like a hyperactive demigod's conversation. I was way more nervous about this mission than was logical. It was just an information-gathering task, like visiting the library. Yet my stomach was tight almost to the point of nausea, and I kept clenching and unclenching my fists like a malfunctioning human machine.

I knew why. This was the first mission I'd faced since I'd seen those half-bloods die, and since I'd watched Tartarus threaten the heart of Olympian power. I was more aware than ever of the dangers that lay beyond camp borders, and I felt less equipped than ever to face those challenges.

No. That wasn't it.

I felt more mortal than ever.

The only thing that kept me going was the thought that maybe, just maybe, my heightened awareness of what I faced would keep me sharp, and keep me and my friends alive.

Of course, also helpful to staying alive would be listening to Chiron. I beat my rambling thoughts into silence, and focussed on him.

"Nyx has indicated to Hermes that she will greet you cordially, which is more than she's done for some demigods. However, she gave absolutely no indication of whether or not she'll reveal the location of the piece of darkness. Your job is to convince her that it's in her best interests to tell you where it is."

"How exactly are we planning on doing that?" Olivia asked, shifting from foot to foot. Her aura was crackling like a thundercloud, but her expression was admirably composed. "Do you think we'll have a nice little chat and she'll agree with us, send us on our way with a nice little map and a hug and a kiss?"

Kevin and I exchanged amused glances. Chiron's expression barely flickered.

"Ideally, yes," he said flatly. "Failing that, Nyx will pose you a task, in which you will earn the information."

"What sort of task?" I asked, checking my dagger for the twentieth time.

"I have no idea," Chiron shrugged. "There are few records of Nyx's dealings with mortals. We are in uncharted territory. Nevertheless, I'm confident that you will overcome whatever obstacles she puts in your way."

He really sounded like he believed what he was saying. Absent-mindedly, I wondered if skills in self-delusion were a prerequisite for the role of mission planner in a demigod camp.

"How are we getting there? I'm guessing we're not just taking the bus?" Kevin asked. He didn't look nervous at all. His arms were folded and his feet were planted firmly. Even his aura was calm.

(Goddamn him.)

"We got lucky," Olivia said, her tone grim, as though to say we shouldn't get used to this strange phenomenon. She pointed at a map, the only thing on Chiron's desk. "This morning I found an old ley line chart. Children of Hecate can use the planet's natural ley line network for quanta transmission."

'Huh?" I said wisely. Kevin gave her an even wiser blank stare.

"Just imagine it's a massive subway system," she said, with an impatient jerk of her head. "The ley lines work like that. Once we get on them we can travel to any location on the planet that's on a line. Obviously a lot of places aren't on the lines, like the Underworld—"

"Hades cut the Land of the Dead off from the planet's energy system," Chiron supplied. "He was afraid that someone in the Underworld might try to use the ley lines for their own nefarious ends."

(But dead people are always so peaceful! I thought but did not dare say.)

"Okay," Olivia nodded. "But this is where we're lucky. Hecate's residence is at Daytona Beach, which is conveniently located at the end of a major line. I can have us there in two minutes."

"That's great," Kevin said, raising his eyebrows. "Maybe we'll be really lucky and the piece of darkness will be on a ley line, too."

"Reality is never that helpful," the daughter of Hecate said darkly, withdrawing a small stone from her jeans pocket. "Are we all ready?"

Kevin nodded. I jerked my head in what was meant to be a nod, but with my ever-tightening muscles, it ended up being more like a spasm. Olivia glanced at Chiron, as she placed the stone in the palm of her upheld right hand.

The centaur inclined his head. "Good luck."

She gestured for us to join hands. We did so, Kevin and I both putting our hands on top of the stone. Olivia breathed in slowly, placed her free hand on top of ours, and exhaled sharply.

Once more, we plunged back into nothing.


Streaks of light sparked by us, like we were travelling along a train track lit by streetlights. Utter silence was around us, and I couldn't see my friends, or even my own body, nothing but the flickers of light. Everything was still. Time had no meaning. There was nothing but the dark, and the light that made it bearable.

And then, the green light grew brighter, clearer, sharper, until it filled everything, until I wanted to look away even though there was nowhere else to look, so I shut my eyes—

And a humid breeze hit my face, as solid ground appeared under my feet.

I staggered, nearly falling to my knees. We were standing… on a beach. On Daytona Beach. The sun blazed high in the sky above us, and an aggressively blue sea was lapping on our right. The sand was hard and compacted underfoot. People were hurrying to and fro around us, apparently uninterested by our magical appearance out of thin air.

"Ugh," I heard Kevin choke out. I glanced around. He was just behind me, kneeling on the ground with his head in his hands. Olivia stood over him, one hand resting on his shoulder, soft pulses of energy rippling from her aura into his.

"Sorry," he said, looking up at me. "I can't really take that kind of shi— shift. It's too much of an assault. Ugh."

I began to feel the heat of the sun, as my disorientation faded. We were close to the sea, just a few feet of sand between us and the water. Mortals were busy all along the beach, doing nice, non-monster related things. No-one paid us any notice. It was pleasant. Calm. I could have fun here, if I didn't have to worry about little things like apocalypses.

Olivia helped Kevin to his feet, and he shook his head briskly.

"Okay," he said, heaving a sigh. "I'm fine. What next?"

"Next," a soft voice said next to us, "would be saying hello, I imagine."

None of us even bothered to jump. We were so used to weirdo gods and spirits that this kind of thing didn't really surprise us any more.

But I did jump when I looked over my shoulder and thought Jane was standing there. It was a long, heart-stopping second before I saw the woman was too tall, too old.

I'd expected the goddess to be intimidating, but she looked more like a wistful Southern soul singer than anything else. Her skin was pale, and her long dark fell loosely down to her waist. Her clothes were ordinary, and her eyes a deep, attractive black. Her aura had the same colours and patterns as Jane's, but it was the nuclear-powered version. It burned around her, a singularity of shadow power, drawing my gaze like a visual black hole.

She turned her gaze from the sea, onto us, and raised one thin, dark eyebrow.

"Hello," said Nyx. "I believe you're here to kick the sleeping dog."