*tiptoes in cautiously* Hi guys...um, please don't kill me for being a few days late with my update. *gets a tomato in the face* Ok, I guess I deserved that. But thank you for being patient with me in my laziness. I was just so busy this past week, with school, family, and friends, but mainly because this past Thursday was Thanksgiving for those of us in America, and today and yesterday I'm decorating my house for Christmas (YAY!) That's my excuse. I hope it's sufficient enough! Now, please enjoy Chapter 10, and don't kill me!

Sally Jackson.

Yeah, Sally Jackson, the only one I know by that name. As in my mother Sally Jackson.

I was surprised, to say the least.

"Don't move!" she said, emphasizing her point (which, by the way, had already been made very clear) by roughly jamming the dangerous end of the gun into my back and making a low growl originate in her throat.

I flinched. I knew that growl. That growl was a Mama Bear growl: the kind that only came from my mom when she was protecting me from something. Or someone.

But that didn't make any sense: how could she protect me if she the one she had a gun pointed at was me? And why would she be protecting me in the first place? According to her and the rest of the world, I was dead. In fact, I still didn't really know what I was.

But I had been thinking about it quite a bit over the past few hours. The nearest I could figure was that I had definitely died when that hellhound bit my head off. After all, it's pretty hard to recover from an injury like that. At the same time though, I don't think I'm completely dead either. I mean, if I'm actually dead, then shouldn't I be down in the Underworld by now? At first I kind of figured that maybe the whole death process was lagging a little bit, maybe because my death was such a big deal (not to toot my own horn, but I was somewhat of a...celebrity, I guess you could say, in the demigod world). But at least 24 hours have gone by at this point, and I'm pretty convinced by now that it's not the system's fault that I'm dodging bullets and crazy burglars up here on Earth instead of lounging around in the Underworld with a cool drink and an umbrella straw. Nope, no bitterness here, whatsoever.

"Wait a second...who are you?" Retlaw stepped from the kitchen into the den, and I heard my mom let out a slight gasp as the others joined him. It was pretty creepy actually, the way that they all emerged from the shadows and lined up in a well thought-out sequence so that my mom could clearly see each of their faces. They were either really good at organizing themselves on the spot, or they were all in one of those boy bands from the '90s like the Backstreet Boys or 'N Sync (or *NSYNC or Nsync or however the Hades you spell it!). I expected any second for Retlaw's face to morph into that of Justin Timberlake's as he stepped forward and busted some "hip" dance moves.

"Who are you?" She sounded confident in her accusation, but for someone who had known her for so long and had been with her for practically every hardship, only I heard the stun in my mom's voice, the slight tremor. But her false confidence was enough to make Retlaw take a tiny step backward.

I smirked internally, satisfied with his reaction.

"Um...We're the...cable guys."

I rolled my eyes, and I could picture my mom wearing a similar expression, even though I couldn't see her.

"Right," she said sarcastically. "And I'm Oprah Winfrey. Since apparently I'm a talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist with a net worth of over 3 billion dollars and you're just a couple of 'cable guys', I recommend that you get out of my house before I set my security team on you." I got the sense that when she said "security team", that translated more closely to "police department".

At that thought, a realization suddenly shook me. Speaking of the police, where were they? My mom had called them a few hours ago, and they still weren't here. But it wasn't like we lived on the outskirts of the state or anything. And the New York Police Department are worth more than they're given credit for, so I didn't think it was an error on their part in the system/communication.

Something was definitely wrong here.

"Look, lady," said one of the other guys behind Retlaw, a guy with a big spider tattoo over his face, as he stepped forward and pushed past his comrades. "We can do this the hard way or the easy way. You put down the gun, go back into your bedroom, and come back out in 15 minutes. Anything you see, anything that's missing, you don't call the cops on us, no matter what, you hear? No matter what. That's the easy way. The hard way is if you decide not to put down that gun, and me and my friends kill you. So it's your choice: you can either walk away from this situation with your life intact and some of your stuff stolen, or you can not walk away at all, and still get robbed. So what's it gonna be, lady?"

My mom opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it. Then closed it again.

"I...I don't understand," she said, and the tremor in her voice was much more evident this time. I wondered just how broken she must feel right now, to let herself seem this vulnerable. She must still be lost in that depressing state of mind where you just feel weak and lethargic all the time. My heart- whatever was left of it- physically ached for my mom, and I instantly hated these people.

Who did they think they were? Marching in here like they owned the place, demanding things of my mom. I wouldn't allow it. I knew my mom was tough, and that she could usually take care of herself. But even now, when armed with a gun (when and where did she get a gun anyway?), she was drastically outnumbered by these bozos.

The outcome looked plenty dark, that's for sure.

"Lady," Spider-man said, clenching his teeth, and I hated him even more for calling her 'lady', in a derogatory, disrespectful way. "How many times do I have to go over this? Put. Down. The. Gun. I get it, you wanna shoot me. But if you're gonna shoot me, then 8 other people are gonna be standing over your dead body in less than five seconds. Capeesh?"

The deafening silence that ensued was stale enough that I could practically sense the confusion in the air. My mom, who presumably still didn't recognize me from the back of my head, slowly lowered the gun from the back of my head. Then I felt her icy cold hand, shaky and frail, reach out and tentatively touch my hair in a single stroke. She gasped, and placed her hand on the top of my head, leaving it there in disbelief.

In that instant, she knew. I don't know how she figured it out, but the touch of my head under her hand must have been familiar enough that it brought her back to my level. She recognized me.

I didn't know whether to celebrate by jumping up in the air and clicking my heels together, or to fall in the ground and grieve for my mother, who would no doubt be haunted by the fact that her son had either come back from the dead, had a clone, or was some sort of ghost.

So, me being the genius that I am (which I'm sure we've established by now), I did nothing. And neither did my mom (genius genes must run in the family). She just stood there, her gun lowered and her hand on my head.

It got awkward fast.

Don't worry, you're not the only one who felt the tension. It was pretty obvious. So I was actually kinda thankful when the Spider Man broke the silence with a menacing voice.

"You got a question or somethin', lady?"

Now it was my turn to be confused. Clearly my mom was placing her hand on my head. I thought that was pretty obvious. I mean, it's kind of hard to miss that.

And it wasn't like I had turned on my invisibility powers or anything. At this point, I figured I'd pretty much mastered that skill, although I still didn't exactly understand it. But still, I'd managed to somehow turn it on when the burglars were all together in the foyer downstairs, when the Cat, Alicia, and Forrest were conferring on their raid in the hallway outside; and when my mom was being threatened by Cat in the den.

Suddenly, a realization dawned on me. All of the pieces of the puzzle came together in my mind, and I was able to see the entire picture.

And it all clicked.

I wasn't able to control my invisibility powers. I'd never been able to, and I wasn't able to now. It was never up to me, only this weird force that had kept me half-dead, half-alive. As far as humans were concerned, I was completely invisible.

But I thought of how Cat had easily been able to see me when we fought in the kitchen, and how she had had no trouble in wrestling with me. Neither had Alicia- the Bianca lookalike who had exploded into gold dust when I stabbed her with Riptide. Clearly she had been a monster of some sort. But what about my mom?

I peered at her over my shoulder now, and how she was the only one in the room who was able to see me now (Cat was still presumably crouching somewhere in my bedroom). I thought about how she had always been the only human when I was growing up to be able to see the weird stuff associated with the world of the Greek gods. But that was because she had the Sight, and could see through the Mist. And the nearest I could figure was that during the fight between me and Cat, when my mom had stood there in shock when I sntached the bullet out of the air, was that she had been so out of it from my death that she had thought she was going crazy and seeing things, and the familiar touch of my head under her head had brought her back to normal.

So...I supposed that meant that whatever was keeping me invisible now was the Mist. Although, the Mist was meant to shield weird things in the Olympian world from the eyes of mortals, so that definitely confirmed that I was some type of ghost-thing now. Now to narrow down who the other people were. People that could see me as a ghost via the Mist: Alicia- a monster. Check. Sally- a person who had always had the Sight. Cat- a crazy nut job. Not check.

I figured that whoever- or whatever- Cat was, she was either a mortal with the Sight (not unlikely: I knew a few, like my mom and Rachel Elizabeth Dare), or a monster (also not unlikely, considering her fiery temper and her skills to use a pair of boots as a weapon).

Still, neither of those categories seemed to fit quite right. There was something else about her. Something familiar, something relatable. And as I watched her peek from around the corner in the hallway, her icy blue orbs wide and curious, the wave of realization hit me like a tsunami. The truth was more startling than my previous thoughts. This changed everything.

Cat was a demigod.

*falls over dead in shock* Whaaaat?! Cat's a demigod? What does this mean for her? For Percy? For the future of mankind? Anyone else hungry for pizza? I am, so I'm gonna go eat now. I sincerely hope you enjoyed this chapter, and thank you for being patient with me and reading it even after I was a few days late. Please review, favorite, follow, and vote! Thank you!

Have a wonderful week!

Love,

~Princess Andromeda II