New chapter for the new year. Gained some inspiration from another literary work, so if you spot it kudos to you. Have a wonderful new year!

I do not own Percy Jackson or any of the characters.

Fire in the deep

I sat next to the mystery boy in the back of the bus. We had retrieved him last night after the hound creature attacked him. Already its aura was affecting some of us. Nico had mucus building up in his nose that made him snore all night long. Max had a slight fever as well as ackyness. Mari had chills and her sinuses were worked up. Lucas had weird red dots sprouting over his arms, but he said it was because of dry skin. Both Thalia and I were fine so far. Thalia had the blessing of Artemis and my curse of Achilles prevented infection. But it was evident that we needed to speed up our progress of finding our siblings, or else we were in big trouble.

I took a good look at the boy known as Mel lying in the bed in front of me. He was like a miniature me. He was a head shorter, tall for his age, but thin as a twig. He had short cut black hair, and when his eyes had been open they were a dark green, like Max's when we first found him. As far as I could tell, his most probable parent was my father, Poseidon. Looks like I have another sibling.

Max quietly sat down next to me. We sat in silence for a few minutes, but it felt like forever because of our ADHD. His brow was furrowed, a look of pain and confusion on his face. His skin was red from a sudden fever from our friend the hound. Suddenly he sat straight up, his eyes flying open and a gasp escaping his lips.

He looked around, frowning. He grabbed his pad of paper and scribbled something on it. I took it from him and read 'where is Mari?' "She is resting now. Your Max, right?" He nodded. "That's good. My name is Percy, and this is my half-brother Max." After I had established that, I asked a question that would almost confirm if he was a demi-god. "Did you only have one parent?" Immediately his expression hardened and became more guarded. He nodded slowly, writing 'mother' on his note pad.

"Do you know about the Greek gods?" I asked again. He nodded. It was always a stupid thing that we had to ask every camper this question. Really, what idiot wouldn't know about the Greek gods? Mel must not be an idiot, because he nodded again. I continued. "Well, they are real." His eyes widened in disbelief. Typical. "And sometimes the gods come down to earth and have mortal children. All of us on this bus, including you, are the children of gods."

Mel turned his head to the side to ponder this fact. I remembered the first time I had heard this, one of my most fuzzy demi-god memories to be sure. Sitting there on the porch of the big house dumbstruck while a calm game of cards went on around me.

Mel grabbed the paper and wrote out 'who is my father then?' I leaned back in my chair. "I think, stressing the think part, that you may be the son of Poseidon, lord of the ocean. If that was the case, then you would be me and Max's brother." I motioned to Max and I respectively. Mel's eyes widened in disbelief. He wrote down 'My father may be POSEIDON?' then as an after thought he wrote 'If my father is the all powerful sea god, why has he not helped me?'

This was always hard to explain to new demigods. I sighed and rubbed my temples in exasperation. "The gods are bound to a set of ancient rules that prevents them from interfering directly. But they can send help. Our father sent me to find both you and Max, so there is one way he has helped you."

Mel lay back on the bed and closed his eyes and started to contemplate. Shortly thereafter he was asleep. Looks like he shared that gift with Tyson. "Come on" I said to Max, "Lets let his sleep."

We walked to the front of the bus and joined Nico and Lucas in a game of Super Mario Bros. Lucas kept on loosing his focus because he kept on glancing at Mari, who was talking to Rose. Gabe was sitting in the back, looking out the window while listening to his iPod.

All was well.

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I sat in the back of the bus next to the sleeping form of my brother Mel. I had been reading the Aeneid by Virgil for a while, and all the epic poetry was making me weary. I put the book down and my thoughts drifted to Annabeth.

I must have tuned out for a while, because a voice said to me "Well look whose living up to the name seaweed brain." I jerked out of my chair so fast that I fell on the floor. Blearily I looked up to see a hazy circle of mist hovering over Mel's bed with a girl laughing openly at me within.

"Annabeth!" I sighed. Realizing that I still look like a kelp head, I got up and settled back into my chair. I was overjoyed at the sight of my girlfriend. Being cooped up with your cousins for even a small amount of time was frustrating. Four to five days was just to much to bear without a friendly face every once in a while.

"So what is the quest you are on now?" she asked in an inquisitive tone.

"Oh Anna, you know, trekking across the country with my two favorite cousins to find our long lost siblings." I replied nonchalant.

A look of surprise appeared on her face. "You have siblings?"

I shrugged. "All the gods have multiple children. My father wasn't the exception like we thought." At that moment Max conveniently sauntered back to where we were to investigate the noise I had made earlier.

"Percy? Are you O.K?" He asked.

"I'm fine little buddy. Come over here and meet my girlfriend."

He obliged and sat next to me, staring wide-eyed at the image in front of him. He waved sheepishly and mumbled something that sounded like 'hello'. Annabeth waved back and smiled. "And what might be you're name?" she asked.

"Max" he mumbled, eyes downcast. I noticed that Max was very shy around older people.

"Well Max" Annabeth said gently, "My name is Annabeth. I am a good friend of Percy. Can you tell me who your godly parent is?"

"Same as Percy." His reply was so quiet that I had to lean nearer to him in order to hear his reply.

Annabeth had also leaned closer to hear him also. After I had him repeat himself louder (four times), her expression changed into one of surprise then acceptance. "I suppose I should have expected you to have half-siblings, considering your dad. The fact that you have had no idea about them is more surprising."

I feigned hurt. "Are you saying that I am thick headed?"

"That is precisely what I am saying Perseus." She replied with a wave of her hand. She acted like it was nothing, but I could see a smile playing on her lips.

"So where are you now?" She asked.

I looked outside at the rolling planes of dust and cattle. Defiantly not my kind of place. No water as far as the eye could see. It was slowly draining Max's and my life-force. It defiantly was not helping Mel's recovery. "Somewhere in the middle of Texas. Our next stop is a small place near water, thank the gods, a town named Fitch or something."

"What kind of demigod would want to live in Texas of all places?" She said.

"I know! That's what I said when I saw that we were coming here." I said, throwing my hands up in exasperation. Annabeth giggled, which was very un-Annabeth like, and Max also laughed. They looked like they were warming up to each other, which was good to know.

"Well, I was just checking up on my favorite boyfriend, making sure that he was still alive."

I snorted. "You think that after all I have been through I, the great Percy Jackson, would be in danger?"

This time it was Annabeth's turn to snort. "He might have died from an over inflated ego."

"What's an ego Annabeth?" Max piped up.

"Well, its like what a person thinks of them self. If they think highly of them self, like you're brother here, we say they have a big ego." Answered Annabeth. I am so glad I have a smart girlfriend.

The bus stared to slow down, and Thalia shouted from the front that we were at our destination. "Looks like we have to go." I said to Annabeth.

She blew me a kiss, said goodbye to Max and I, and waved a hand through the mist.

I turned to Max. "Lets find another relative, shall we?"

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The town we had stopped in was small. Tumble weeds blew down the street at regular intervals. Thalia and her siblings decided to stay on the bus to watch over Mel and to get to know each other better. That left Nico, Mari, Max, Lucifer and myself to find our newest camper.

We calmly walked down the streets as the sun slowly sank down below the horizon. The town was almost deserted. We saw only a handful of people living here.

"I am getting bad vibes from this place, like the feeling Minos use to give me when I was near him." Nico said with a shiver.

I laughed. "Did you hang out with to many people from the 80's when you were in the Lotus Casino?"

He scowled. "Hey! I am being serious here."

I continued to laugh, but I had the same feeling in the pit of my belly. Something sinister lurked here, something evil. And it was getting worse the farther into town we went.

The stars were glinting in the sky when we saw what could account for the feeling of dread blanketing the town. The streets were dark, but I saw the flicker of fire spreading across the corner in front of us. Quickly I pulled Max into an adjacent ally, Nico and the others following close behind. I put a finger over my mouth to signal them to be quiet.

I looked around the corner to see over a dozen people in long black robes with cowls walking down the street. Half of them carried blazing torches. A low rumble emanated from beneath the hoods, the product of the joining of twelve voices in perfect harmony. And in the center of the group was a boy, lashed onto a large wooden board. He was being carried aloft by four of the creepy druids and was struggling against his bonds.

Nico poked his head out as well, his eyes narrowing as he watched. "What do you think?" I asked him.

"It looks like some kind of extreme pagan ritual. I've seen a few in books and in my travels in Europe." He said

"Wait, you have been to Europe?" I said. "Without me?"

Nico rolled his eyes and replied, "Yea, when I was searching for clues about my mother."

I backed of on the subject, knowing that he was still sensitive to it. "Lets follow and see what's shaking with the pagans."

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We followed the murmuring hooded figures to an old playground, which looked about as old as my father. In the center was a rusted merry-go-round, which is where they placed the writhing boy. Then they spread out in a circle, encompassing the boy at the twelve points of a clock face. The chanting changed from something Germanic to a language that I had heard once before, at the mouth of a pit in the underworld. The language of magic.

Glancing over at Nico, I saw that he was hearing the same thing. "We need to save that boy." He hissed. "I have heard this once before, in a brutal exorcism that I witnessed in Germany. His life is in danger."

I looked back at the ritual and my blood ran cold. Two of the people stood over the boy, one of them holding a knife. As I watched, the hooded person carved what looked like runes in the boys bare skin, a sick hissing sound accompanying each scratch. The boy screamed against a gag in his mouth and strained against his bonds.

The chanting was reaching its apex when all hell broke lose.

As the hooded people raised their hands, an ear-shattering crack could be heard. A sight I had only seen once before unfolded before me. The ground opened beneath the ground of the circle like a misshapen maw of some great beast, spiting fire and swallowing ten of the people in an earth-shattering roar. The other two, standing on an island in the center if the circle, were spared for a short time. Then the boy burst from his bonds in a ferocity roar, ropes flying from where they once bound him. He proceeded to grab the arm of the person with the knife and tore it from his shoulder. He swung the arm and hit the other person in the head. A sickening crack resounded through out the grounds, and the person fell like a marionette with its cords cut. The boy turned on the other person and brained them in turn.

In less than forty seconds, the procession that was exorcising the boy had been killed in a truly violent act. We were all stunned at this display at the boy's primal ferocity. We sat and stared as the boy slid his legs over the side of the merry-go-round and licked the grey matter that had splattered on his lips off. Then he got up and spoke in a new language, one I had also heard once before, only in an abandoned prison. The language of the earth this time.

The earth cracked at a fissure that appeared before the boy. The cracks widened, and a strange red glow started to emanate from between the cracks. But the glow looked like the reflections off of water on a wall, except the glow was red, not blue. Pieces of the earth fell, leaving a space that looked as if it was the mouth of a volcano, lava far at the bottom reflecting on the mouth far above. After a sizable hole had formed, a shadowy hand as large as my forearm reached from the depths and grasped the edge. A second hand followed, and a figure hauled itself up from the ravine.

It was twice as tall as a man and was wreathed in shadows like fog. It had no definite form, but looked somewhat human. Fire danced along the things body, illuminating the surroundings in an eerie light. The thing rumbled in the language of the primordial, and the boy responded in the same tongue. He motioned to the town, and the thing almost looked like it nodded. Giant wings that did not exist before spread out behind the thing, and it lifted itself into the air and flew into the town.

"What just happened?"

The question came from Mari, who was shaking to the roots of her long black hair. I was to stunned to answer. But Nico was less affected by the spectacle than the rest of us, because he could answer without his voice shaking. "What happened was a boy murdered twelve people and summoned a nearly forgotten creature from the depths of Tartarus. That means we have to stop him. Now, before he hurts any more people."

Lucas visibly gulped. "You mean, possibly die first?"

Nico nodded. "Its part of being divine. We need to accept it and hope we can obtain our goal. Now, who is ready for almost certain doom?"