Note: The songs mentioned in this chapter are "Stay Awake" by 100 Monkeys and "Burning" by Phantom.
The sour smell of oil, sweat, and metal permeated Hephaestus Auto Repair, much as Reyna could have predicted. She sat stiff and cross-legged in the chair closest to the open window in the waiting room, breathing through her mouth and eyeing the ceiling as she, Jason, and Piper waited for Leo to let himself in from the back room. The stale, humid air probably made the smell feel worse than it was, but she wasn't exactly in the greatest mood to start with. Her clothes remained soaked and stuck to her skin, and the base of her skull still pounded with headache.
When the other two began playing footsie under the coffee table, she pulled out her World Myth textbook.
She was reviewing the Roman pantheon, looking for anything she could use in her research paper, when the door behind the front desk flung open and Leo trotted out wearing a faded golden tool belt and twirling a key ring around his left index finger. "It's a go," he said brightly. "And there's no one here, so you guys can totally come hang out with me in back if you want."
Under any other circumstances, Reyna would not want, but it was her 'Stang back there and she would be damned if she let the consistently hyperactive Valdez so much as think about it without her supervision. As much as she trusted Jason, who had advocated the mechanic, she distrusted said mechanic more. So all three of the waiting-room guests rose from their seats and followed Leo through the door to the work garage, where, thank the Lord, both garage doors were up and letting a good breeze circulate.
"So this is where you work," Jason said. "Nice." He appeared unaffected by the stench of man and machine, or maybe he was just being polite. Reyna didn't think she was making it up.
"Where are the others?" Piper asked as she wandered to the CD player and plugged in her iPhone. "Are you guys not open Saturdays?"
Leo shrugged. "Nah, we usually are. Today Beckendorf had a funeral to go to and Nyssa had, I dunno, something, and I had you guys this morning, so we decided to take the day off."
Are we here to discuss weekend plans or fix my car? Reyna thought, and though she didn't say it out loud, she pursed her lips and crossed her arms and glanced pointedly at the black machine of perfection sitting a few yards away. And shouldn't their boss, whoever it was, have taken issue with their self-scheduling? Not that she cared, of course. But still.
Jason picked up on her nonverbals first, probably because he had years more experience with her Are We Doing This Or What tics than the troublesome two did. "Hey, guys, so… the car?"
"Oh, yeah," Leo mumbled. He glanced Reyna's way, got wind of her hard stare, turned a curious shade of red, and wheeled himself around. He hand went to his lighter, and Reyna snapped.
"Don't take that anywhere near my car," she ordered, stepping forward and blocking his path. "The lighter stays five feet away at all times."
"I'm not gonna—"
"Five feet."
"Jo—sheesh." He caught himself and screwed his mouth up, something between a grimace and a pout. "Fine. Here." Reyna breathed in sharply when he tossed the lighter to Piper, but the barista caught it cleanly. "Happy?"
"Relatively speaking," Reyna said, her icy gaze drilling into him. Happy was never her descriptor of choice around him; she fluctuated on a spectrum between not yet irritated and homicidal. "I'll be closer to it if you can fix my car without repeating the microwave incident."
"That was one time!" Leo protested, his voice cracking with indignation.
"Reyna," Jason cautioned her. She glanced his way and he nudged her forearm with the ridge of his knuckles. The message was clear: Play nice.
"Oh, here it is," Piper said to herself, still over by the CD player functioning as an iPod speaker, and then music began to play. A happy tenor sang, I will kill you in your sleep, so you better try, try and keep awake. Reyna saw Piper grin to herself, and an appreciative smirk quirked her own lips. Leo, who picked up on the musical warning as well, backed toward the Mustang, and Reyna pointed two fingers at Jason.
"It's lunchtime," she told him, as if he and his loudly grumbling stomach hadn't already noticed as much. "Go pick something up and bring it back. You can take my card; I'll stay here and… supervise." Pulling her wallet out of her bag, she tugged out her debit card and held it out.
He nodded once and took it. "Will do. You have any preferences?"
"Not that Chinese place we tried last week—it only offers lies and deceit. Anywhere else."
"Pizza?"
She gave a wave of assent, and he headed for the door. "Use it as credit!" she called before he disappeared, and his loose salute was the only sign he'd heard. But he knew her and her intense dislike of being charged needlessly, so she sat down beside Piper, who was flicking through her music selection, playing songs for a verse and a chorus before finding something else.
Reyna was only half-listening when one song began with a soulful I'm burning down tonight. Piper sucked in her breath and hastily pressed next. Reyna assumed she was worried about reminding her about the microwave incident, but when Piper glanced up to make sure all was well, she looked not to Reyna but to Leo. Strange.
After that curiosity, though, Piper seemed content to sit without talking, and that suited Reyna perfectly well. More time to work. Probably should try to draft part of the World Myth report, she decided, since the headache-inducing morning work session had put that project on her mind already. As she rooted through her bag for a pen, her fingers closed around a creased, stiff envelope. What she pulled out was the letter with no return address, the one Annabeth had hypothesized was spam. Reyna had almost forgotten she had it… almost. The handwriting felt as heavy as a sword, and the unopened envelope weighed down her bag.
Should I open it? she mused, worrying the top right corner between her fingers. If it's from her… Surely there were other people with similar handwriting. It could be spam, like Annabeth had suggested. It could. It could.
Repeating this mantra to herself, she slid her thumb under the flap and slowly, carefully, dreadfully, listened to the paper crackle as it separated, as her thumb slid from the left corner to the right. Once the flap fell backward, she reached inside the envelope and pulled out the letter—cold white, folded into martial thirds, almost as stiff as its matching envelope.
Please be selling something, she prayed as she unfolded it and looked down to the header greeting written in that handwriting so regimented it could have been typed:
Reyna.
Her stomach dropped.
"Ow! Joder!" Leo yelped, and something clanked loudly in the Mustang's engine. Desperate for anything else to think about, Reyna shoved the letter into her Mythology textbook and pushed herself to her feet.
"What did you do?" she demanded.
"Nothing!" he insisted, but she was already on her way over, her arms crossed tightly over her chest.
"Something just went ka-clank in my engine," she gritted out, stopping at her front right headlight and peering into the machinery for the source of the noise. "It wasn't a ghost. Now what did you do?"
He made a face at her. Very mature, she thought. "I told you, it's nothing. I pinched myself opening the engine oil filter and dropped my pinhead screwdriver. Thanks for worrying, though," he added, a bit more brightly, as he reached into the engine and fished out the fallen tool.
I wasn't worrying about you, she thought, her grip on her crossed arms tightening, but she shifted her weight, planted her feet, and leaned in to keep an eye on whatever he was doing (or trying to do). As he placed his knee on the bumper and finished opening one of the filters, she asked, "Why are you doing that?"
He wiped some dirt from his cheek, but there had been grease on his hand, so he only replaced the fleck of brown with a streak of black. "Just basic checkup," he explained. "Gotta make sure the computer's on before you try to fix a bug, don't you?"
Ugh. He probably thought she was stupid. "I deduced as much. Why are you doing that?"
He reddened again. "Oh. Sorry." He sped up when he blurted his explanation, and she only made out "checking" and "just in case," which gave her zero new information. But she took pity on him.
"I see."
"Your car is in really good condition, though," he continued with a jump of his eyebrows. His awe slowed him down enough to be comprehensible. "Like, Transformer-level good. How've you managed it? Who's your mechanic?"
Reyna smoothed her braid, tilting her chin up just a bit. She took pride in her answer: "I do the basic maintenance. For the big fixes, I call up some personal friends who do this for a living."
"I do this for a living!" Leo pointed out. "Look, do they charge you for it?"
"Yes," she said, confused as to why that was a question. "I pay the standard fee. I don't ask for special treatment; I just happen to know them personally."
"Okay, here's what I propose." He glanced her way before he recapped the filter. "You come to me, I'll give you a discount. Piper, you like your discount, right?"
"Right!" she called faithfully from her seat by the CD player.
"See? Customer satisfaction," he insisted.
"I really don't—" Reyna started.
"Pleeeease." Leo actually looked away from the engine and clasped his hands together, a desperate, pitiful plea. "Come on. Let me work on your car. Pretty please."
Reyna held her ground, but she was tempted to take a step backward. She got that he was a car guy—he had to be, to work as a mechanic—but he seemed to love her Mustang even more than she did. Hmm. Well, he couldn't be all bad, then.
"We'll see how well you fix it this time," she said neutrally.
"Yes!" Leo pumped his fist and grinned, elfin dimples appearing on either side of his face, and he threw himself back into his work with renewed vigor.
Reyna heard Piper laugh, closer than expected, and when she turned, the other girl stood near her left shoulder. "What a dork," Piper said with a screwed-up smile, loudly enough for Leo to hear.
"Aw, quiete, beauty queen," he replied, with his head still under the car's hood.
Piper blew a raspberry at him. "Don't Spanish at me today. I'm out of practice."
"Okay," he said agreeably. "I'll translate into French: shut-tez vous the hell up-eax."
"Flawless," said Piper.
The door to the waiting room jiggled a few times, and then Jason shouldered through, two pizza boxes balanced on his forearms. He called, "I come bearing gifts," just as the pizza-smell hit the three who'd stayed. Reyna and Piper hastened to alleviate his burden (namely, by taking the pizza from him), and Leo scrambled out from under the hood, pausing only to caress the car's bumper and promise his quick return before he threw himself at the nearest table.
"Yaaaassss," he sighed. Reyna and Piper set the boxes of pizza down on the tabletop, and he inhaled deeply. "Almost as perfect as me. Let's eat."
"I thought we could just sit around and admire the cardboard until the pizza gets cold," Piper suggested, and Reyna had to pretend to dust something off herself so she could hide her smile.
"Did you bring any plates?" Reyna asked Jason once she'd pulled her facial muscles into submission.
He smiled ruefully. "Next best thing?" he offered, and he handed each of them a wad of paper towels.
Leo accepted his handful of improvised napkins with one hand and draped half of a pizza slice into his mouth with the other. "Yaaaaas," he moaned. "Dude. Is this extra cheese?"
"With pepperoni, yes. The other is mushroom and green pepper," he added, and Piper pulled the second box towards herself with a terrifying expression on her face.
"Don't you have lunch plans with the scary architecty one?" Leo protested, reaching across the table to bat her hand away from her mouth, but she simply leaned backward out of his reach.
"Yeah," she garbled smugly through her mouthful of pizza, "but that's not til two. This is just a slightly late elevensies, bro."
"I understand that reference," Reyna said casually as she dabbed the grease off her own slice. "I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy every summer. I enjoy the idea of the Hobbit culture, even if their calorie consumption is completely unsustainable in reality." She smiled at her own joke, and the other three laughed, their heads thrown back as though they starred in a 90s sitcom.
Reyna shook her head, and the daydream dissolved. Leo was still swatting at Piper, who now taunted him with her third slice. Jason tried to swallow his bite without laughing. Reyna swallowed hers, but it felt more like a stone than a few ounces of food. She ran student government without a hitch and so far managed a 4.0 GPA; why could she not manage to contribute to normal conversation?
"I love pizza," Leo declared, kicking back on two chair legs. "I love the crust. I love the sauce. I love the cheese. I love the pizza-juice on top of the cheese."
"That's disgusting," Piper informed him.
"Thank you."
After the four of them had demolished the two pizzas (plus a few cookies that Leo had left in a Ziploc bag inside the phone table), Jason walked Piper out front to wait for Annabeth to come pick her up, and Reyna took up her supervisor position by Leo as he went back to trying to dig out the source of her car's problem. Finally the mechanic slammed the hood shut and swiped his hands on his pants.
"I think that did it," he said, in as close to a pensive voice as Leo Valdez ever got. "Let's give it a try."
"I'll do it," she said immediately. Before he could protest, she snatched her keys from the stool and slid into the driver's seat, the paper floor cover crinkling under her feet.
Leo nodded and waved one hand over his head. "Okay," he called, flashing her a thumbs-up.
Replying with a tiny nod, she pressed her key into the ignition… and turned.
The dash trembled momentarily. The engine coughed once… and then turned over into the beautiful purr she knew so well. She didn't realize she'd been holding her breath until it whooshed out between her lips.
"Aaaaaaaayyyy!" Leo cheered in the rumble of Mustang engine. "Yeeeeahhh, whooo! That's what I'm talking about!"
She glanced up at him and found him doing some sort of weird victory dance, more of a full-body flailing than any sort of rhythmic move. He scrunched his eyes up and swung his head back and forth, his curls bouncing like a two-year-old with the movement. He pumped his scrawny arms in circles, kicked his legs out in a backwards cha-cha, twisted his hips as though he thought he was Elvis. And to her surprise, she felt her lips twitch.
"All right," she called from inside the car, and the sound of her voice made him pause. "You did all right."
The flush spreading over his face didn't keep his grin from spreading even faster.
