After Medea left, the room was filled with a stunned silence. The three of us sat, unable to move, just staring at where Medea had been until Zoey broke the silence with a snore.
"Zoey!" Angie shouted, elbowing Zoey hard in the stomach and wrinkling her nose in distaste. "We need to focus! Didn't you hear Medea? There is a demigod somewhere in the world that probably doesn't know that she's a demigod. We need to figure out how to save her!"
"Gods Angie," Zoey said, sleepily rubbing where Angie had elbowed her. "Didn't you listen to Medea? She said Dana was sleeping. I'm a child off Hypnos, in case you'd forgotten-"
"How could we with the way you snore all the freaking time?" Angie asked sarcastically.
"-And sleep is my domain. While you were panicking, yes, Angie, that was definitely panic, I was reaching out to my siblings and asking if any of them had heard anything from a scared, sleeping child of Demeter." The fact that someone had thought of something smart to do shocked Angie perhaps even more than the realization that Dana was actually a reanimated witch from 300 B.C.E.
"Oh. That was. Actually. Well. That was really quick thinking of you," Angie eventually managed to say.
"Did anyone hear anything from her?" I asked.
"I'm not sure. One of my siblings, Clovis, thought that he might have."
"Then that's great. What did he say? Was it useful?. Does he know where we can find her? How we're supposed to find her? Could he tell if she's injured? I know Medea said she was unharmed. Call me crazy, but I don't trust her."
"Angie woke me up before I could fully get through to him."
"Why don't you just fall asleep again?"
"Dreams don't work like that, Rachel. They're fluid. It's not like a television, I can't just switch back to a channel I accidentally turned off. His dream-self has probably already moved on. We're better of going to camp and asking him."
"Why couldn't we just send him an iris message?"
"You think he'd wake up for that? Please. Butch fit twenty pencils inside of his nose before he woke up. And besides, Iris might not be too happy with my father right now, so I doubt she'd accept my offering or connect anyone to a child of Hypnos."
"How could Hypnos offend anybody?" Angie asked. "I thought he spent too much time sleeping to do any serious damage. He didn't even help fight the titans!" Zoey looked out of the window, as if she expected thunder or lightning to appear. With most gods, if you insult them, even accidentally, it hardly ever went without a reaction, but it appeared that Lord Hypnos was not one of them.
"He's not going to do anything, Zoey," Angie continued. "He's probably sleeping the day away like he does everyday."
"Dreams are more powerful than you give them credit for. You kids of Athena, all you care about is reason. Rationality. What's the best, the smartest thing to at any given moment. There is nothing rational about dreaming. You're completely powerless when you surrender yourself to my father's realm. Dreams are desires, sometimes wishes you didn't know that you had. You're right; he did not fight against the titans last summer. But that does not mean that he didn't help. When Morpheus put the city to sleep, he ensured that the inhabitants slept sweetly. That if they died, their last thoughts would be gentle. Every time any demigod fell asleep in the days leading up to the final battle, their dreams were either rousing calls for their bravery in the upcoming fight, or, if they were among Luke Castellan's traitors, in their dreams he showed them what they always wanted: their parent's respect, something that they would never see if they succeeded in dethroning the gods. You ask how my father could have offended Iris. My father knows everything that has ever been wanted. Lusted after. In a dream, he simply reminded her of that, as I expect him to do to you after the disrespect you've shown him."
"Um, sorry Lord Hypnos?" Angie said meekly, recoiling from the stony look on Zoey's face. Zoey's face softened, and she stood up.
"I just don't like it when people disrespect my dad," she said with a shrug. "So we should probably pack for our trip, yeah? I can't wait to go back to camp!"
"We can't just leave," I reminded Zoey. This is a school. What will our teachers do if we don't show up for class? They'll call my parents, that's what they'll do. And then you two will get in trouble with Chiron and I'll never be able to come back to camp."
"Since when do you care what your parents think, or what they'll threaten to do?"
"Since I swore on the River Styx to Chiron that I wouldn't do anything that would put the oracle's spirit in danger. What use is holding the spirit of the oracle if I'm never allowed back to camp to give a prophecy?"
"Okay, so if we can't go to camp, what do you want us to do?" Zoey asked. "We'll need to leave here anyway if we want to find Dana."
"Let's start by sending an Iris message to Annabeth and Percy or Chiron and asking them to wake Clovis. Let me go grab a drachma out of my wallet." Angie ran back into her room, only to return seconds later.
"They're gone. They're all gone. I don't understand, I always carry emergency drachmas. Somebody must have gotten into my bag and stolen them."
"Stolen them? Who would have even known to look for them?"
"It had to have been Cora."
"Cora? We have the gods' protection. She couldn't have come in unless we invited her."
"Oh gods. You know who we did invite in? Medea. I bet she took them. That doesn't even sound like difficult magic."
"So now what?" I asked Angie. "We can't call camp and we can't just pick up and leave. Do you have a plan?"
"Maybe."
"Okay well part of a plan is better than no plan at all. What have you got?"
"Nice math Zoey. Before we left, Chiron told me that, should we have any trouble, we could always talk to the Greek teacher. Apparently she's a child Aphrodite."