The Dark Side of the Moon Series: Taken (Book 1)

Part 1: Lieutenant of the Shattered

Chapter 12: Party Poison


Long Island, Camp Half-Blood

October 8th, 1:46 p.m.

Thalia Grace, Daughter of Zeus, Lieutenant of Artemis


So, some more information on my supposed best friend that I didn't know. Of course, I realize that she only has problems talking about her past because it's probably nothing short of hell, the low point of her life that she doesn't want to be reminded of, but still. It had been only yesterday she told me she had been in foster care, ran away, and lived on the streets with some son of Hephaestus; I just didn't realize that she was talking about Leo of all people. Leo Valdez. I'd met him once, a few weeks back when I went to visit Percy and Annabeth, he and the Piper chick had been there. The first words he'd said to me, were him asking me out. That kid was annoying. Hello, this is the lieutenant of the maiden goddess speaking, may I help you? Uh, no.

But then again, when I thought about it, I shouldn't be surprised at all. I mean, Leo had run from foster care and lived on the streets fighting monsters quite a while. He couldn't have made it on his own for as long as he did, even with his freaky fire powers. He fit the description. And really, I could see them being friends. They'd get along just swimmingly. Him with his inappropriate jokes and easy nature and her with her sarcasm and wit, not to mention their mutual love of pranks.

Enough of that. I was still mad at her for not saying anything, though I suppose she really had no way of knowing that I knew him. And she had a right to her privacy; I certainly didn't like sharing much with others. Actually, several of my old teachers had remarked that about me: doesn't play nice with others. But, I'm the daughter of the king of the gods. Can you blame me for finding mortals annoying? Well, I find a lot of people annoying, mortal or not so...

Okay, so anyway, after all the happy reunions crap and all the necessary introductions and exchanges of information were over, I went in pursuit of the one and only red-headed Oracle of Delphi. I'd trekked through these woods several times before, but finding the cave of Rachel Elizabeth Dare was extremely difficult. Even Percy and Annabeth, who were walking Skylar, Riley (she was very reluctant to leave Leo, I might add), and I, got confused as to which way her dwelling was. The trees moved. That or maybe Dare just liked to be left alone and out of reach. I could respect that.

Percy pushed aside the purple curtain which concealed the mouth of the cave, carefully walking directly in between the torches, with Annabeth following after him. I gestured for Riley and Skylar to head in as well. I went last.

I'd been to her little condo a few times before, and I noted that it looked much the same as it had last time. However some of the artwork adorning the walls had been swapped for a newer painting or sketch or something. But it was still just as clean and fancy yet plain as all the other years she'd lived here. As for the Oracle herself, she was sitting calmly on the leather sofa, her legs crossed and an art magazine in her hands.

She didn't look up from her reading when she spoke to me. "I knew you'd come to see me."

"Of course you did."

I noticed Percy nodding his head at me wearily, clearly agreeing. Percy gets freaked out a lot, just in case you didn't notice (because in all honesty, he does hide and get over whatever it is fairly quickly), and though it had been years since she became the Oracle, the whole "seeing the future" thing that Rachel did still kind of weirded him out.

She laughed easily, gesturing for the five of us to sit down. It was a very spacious living area, so we could all have a seat at once. Rachel leaned back into the plush white of the sectional, crossed her legs, and clasped her hands in her lap, keeping her unnerving green eyes trained on me.

When nobody said anything for a few uncomfortable moments, she spoke again, still directing her words at me. "You know, I can't just spout prophecies on command."

"I didn't come for a prophecy."

Her carefully controlled expression showed no hint of surprise at all. "No, you did not." She nodded to herself. "Let me take a not so humble guess, you want to know if Apollo has told me anything about the Order."

Annabeth leaned forward in her seat. "The Order?" She frowned to herself, her eyes getting that faraway look they always get when she was in her "intellectual zone" as I like to call it.

I nodded. "Yeah. As far as we know they're just a bunch of raving lunatics who want to control the moon and sun and shit. Now, they also might be going after the wind gods and other gods and goddesses whose domains and powers are involved with the sky. Or maybe they're planning a full out attack on Olympus." I shrugged, sharing a glance with Rachel. "But I don't think it'd do us well to underestimate them if they can take the goddess of the moon, an Olympian, like it's no big deal."

"How do you know they're going after Apollo too? Or everyone else for that matter? How did you even find this out?" Annabeth looked suspicious, but there was that desperate look in her eyes that was dying to grasp onto anything that provided an explanation or logical reason for what had happened, what was happening, and what was going to happen.

"I overheard a conversation between Apollo and Artemis just before she was kidnapped. He was on an I.M. and they were fighting. Apparently, Apollo was worried about his dearest little sister but she warned him neither of them could do anything to stop it and that they were after him to. I figured out that it was the Order who did this when I was reading some of Artemis's notes. As for what their true goal is, we don't know yet. That's why I came to Ms. Divination here; so she could tell me what information she's hoarding."

"I'm not hoarding anything," Rachel snapped, so unlike her usual carefree tone that it startled me. "I know about as much as you do on this, Thalia Grace."

I felt my eye twitch. "Don't use that damn name."

Her jaw tightened. "Running from your past, Thalia Grace? And what good will that do you in the future, I wonder?"

Riley's eyes drilled into the side of my head. Annabeth; lost in her thoughts. Skylar hadn't spoken a word since we arrived at Camp Half-Blood, and she didn't break that streak now.

"Woah, woah, woah. Calm down, guys." Percy held his hands up, palms open, in an "everybody chill, put down the weapons" kind of gesture.

I didn't pay any of them attention, and neither did Rachel. Our eyes remained locked in a stare we both refused to back out of. But suddenly, green eyes started to turn into red flames filled with power. A string of words that seemed spoken oh-so-long ago and yet only recently drifted through my head: 'I am well, thank you. Though I'm not sure the future will be... However, I'd be better if you trusted me. I'm here to talk.'

"Trust you? Fat chance. I don't want to fucking talk. Don't you people get that?"

I was vaguely aware of everyone staring at me, of Riley shaking my arm and asking if I was okay. Green eyes were green eyes again. Just my damn imagination...

"Fine," I mumbled. "I'm fine."

Rachel studied me carefully, when quite abruptly, her gaze glued itself to the back of my hand. I looked at my hand as well. "Avenge" was still carved there from this morning in silvery lettering. I noticed her roll her wrist around as if experimenting to make sure the muscles still worked. That's when I noticed she had the exact same marking on her own hand, except her's was in a burning orange-yellow. The color strongly resembled the shade of the sun. Her eyes shifted again, looking at one of the high corners of the room where a spider web was hanging.

The Oracle of Delphi quickly stood and dashed across the room towards a desk which displayed a bunch of dark drawings. The rest of us got up and went to either stand close by or look over her shoulders. She was muttering to herself. "Of course. The sketches. How didn't I notice? Darkness. The dream and that feeling. Of course." She suddenly spun around, making us all jump back, but she walked right passed the five of us and went to begin to lay all the papers out on the coffee table in the middle of the living room. "Of course. Connected like threads. Threads in a freaking spiderweb. Of course..."

Just as we were all about to follow her again, Rachel Dare dropped to her knees, the air leaving her body in a whoosh, like someone had punched her in the stomach. The rest of the papers dropped from her grasp. Her eyes glowed with an inhuman green light. Her mouth stretched wide open, the green Mist pouring from her it, coiling around her like a snake waiting in the long grass, poised to strike.

But it wasn't just the Mist that passed her lips. No.

My prophecy.

I don't know what I was expecting. I'd never gotten a prophecy before, so I'm sure my subconscious must have been pinning for something. But whatever that was, I didn't know. All I knew is that that voice that used Rachel's mouth to speak, it wasn't her's. It sounded ancient and powerful and ominous and plain out fucking creepy, like a gypsy or something.

Glowing green eyes and glowing green Mist and that old, rasping, disturbing voice that delivered my apparent fate.

"Painted realms stand on the brink

While the free chase by the goddess's ink

Clashing powers in the sky

Fall may he who breathes to die

Crashed are the gates of the blackest world

Trapped by the unknown to choose or face peril

A veil stolen by means of a ram's skin

And one to prevail but none to win"

Oh, well now, that's just perfect.

"Cheery, isn't it?" Percy was the first to speak after Rachel's tea party with her little fortune cookie friends on the other side. Oh-so-predictable, Jackson. But I swear sometimes we were in the exact same mind set and it kind of freaked me out how similarly we thought. Rachel, by the way, was passed out on her ass, laying on her floor, totally drained.

"Lovely," Riley echoed our sentiments.

There was an uncomfortable silence as we all stood around Rachel, watching her passed out form as if she would suddenly wake up and explain what the hell the spirit of Delphi was drinking last night. Nope. No such luck. Well, it's not like she remembered the prophecies after she spouted them, so she was basically useless as she seemed dead set on keeping any information she knew from me. Besides, she was already pissing me off, so maybe it was in everybody's best interest if she was unconscious and therefore not continuing to tap dance on my temper.

Slowly, one by one, they took up their new positions, Riley on a bar stool next to the island that divided this room from the kitchen, Percy leaning against the wall, and Skylar back on the couch with her legs crossed. Annabeth paced the length of the room and I remained standing where I was.

Annabeth shattered the thick, heavy silence that loomed over us. "So. A quest. Thalia's quest." She shot a glance at me for a split second, but her cloudy gray eyes quickly flashed back down to her feet as she twiddled her thumbs. "I don't like that prophecy."

Percy and Riley snorted simultaneously, which she ignored.

"I've heard and read about a lot of different prophecies, but this one is really odd. I don't like that. Typically, they are six or four lines and are arranged in couplets, meaning the two lines that rhyme with each other will go hand in hand. But that's not the case here. This one doesn't even have an introductory first line or give any hints where to start. The lines are also longer than usual. And some of the word choice is throwing me off. "Painted" realms? Fall "may" he? Stolen "by means of?" And the whole second line is phrased weird. This is one of the most cryptic things I've ever heard in my life," she ranted, but her voice remained quiet.

"Instead of dissecting why the prophecy is the way it is and why it's so different, maybe we should just skip ahead to the part where we try and fail to interpret it's meaning?" Riley sounded bored with the whole thing, but I knew her better than that. She'd start rambling if someone gave her the opportunity; she was nervous, fearful, on edge, tense, and a whole bunch of other things that would lead to the eventual explosion.

As for myself? Did I even want a fucking prophecy? No, not really. I wanted answers, and these things just confused me more. But I guess I was taking this whole thing rather well, I suppose. After everything that had already went down, I think I was too far gone to be shocked or any more worried about the future than I already was.

"Fall may he who breathes to die," Annabeth stated the fourth line. "It seems odd that it would be phrased that way when, technically, we all breathe and we'll all die; we all breathe to die. Why state the obvious? It's not like a prophecy to do something like that."

"And trapped by the unknown to choose or face peril. Let's see. Trapped. I don't like being confined. At all. Unknown? No, not a fan. Choose or taste peril. Hmm. Don't like peril and I haven't had much good experiences with choosing either," Percy mused.

"How about the easier lines first, huh?" Riley locked eyes with me. "The goddess's ink. It did give us a place to start. The notes. We are the free, the only ones who can still do anything about this."

Rachel chose that moment to sit up, rubbing her head with that hand that didn't have the almost same marking on it as mine did. "What...?" Recognition dawned in her normal green eyes. "Ugh. Prophecy, wasn't it? Damn; hate when that happens."

Percy laughed shortly. "Yeah, care to tell us what the Hades it means?"

The Oracle rolled her eyes. "I don't remember anything from the passed, like, ten minutes."

As they had their little exchange, I was busy thinking about Riley's conclusion. "The 27th," I remembered the message Skylar had delivered from Artemis to me. I glanced back at the girl who had still yet to say anything and, after a moment of her seeming to decide something, she nodded at me.

"What are you talking about? What did the note she write on the 27th say?" Annabeth asked.

I frowned. "I don't remember what it was exactly. I read so many of them..." I trailed off, looking back to Riley, silently asking about The History of the Moon by Zoe Nightshade. She seemed to understand, as she gave me a conspiratorial wink. We'd discuss it later then.

"Well, at least we won't be going into this blind." Percy had Riptide in pen form in his right hand, twirling it around between his fingers, watching it spin.

That startled me. I hadn't thought about who I was taking. I assumed I was supposed to take two, but this wasn't a normal case so maybe I could bend the rules here a bit as I so loved to do. But I did know that I wasn't taking Percy or Annabeth if I could help it. They were two of my best friends, they were great, I loved them like my family, but some things you just know. I just knew I wouldn't be taking them to... wherever the hell was I was going. Hmm. Now I have to think up an excuse so Percy won't whine and bitch about missing out on the quest...

"Actually, Percy, I was going to ask you and Annabeth to stay here. Camp needs it's two leaders. You wouldn't leave them in a state like this, would you? No. I'll take Riley and... eh, I guess I'll take Skylar. We'll go, figure this out from the outside, and hope not to die along the way."

Each of their facial expressions changed at that. Annabeth's went completely blank, but her eyes darted around like she was trying to look at everything at once, trying to come to a conclusion on something. Percy looked ticked off, but resigned, like he already knew this wasn't an argument he'd be winning. Skylar's face showed mute shock, but also her familiar smugness I absolutely hated. Rachel had gotten up and was frowning at her sketches that were strewn across the coffee table; she picked them up, as well as the ones that had fell in the floor in the spirit of Delphi take over, and walked over to her desk to set them back down. Riley was... no... was she... reluctant? Since when the hell did Riley Ruine show reluctance for an adventure of any kind? What? Did she want to stay at Camp? Why would she... My teeth clenched together. Just when I thought Valdez couldn't annoy me any further... No. She was coming with me. I didn't care what she wanted; she was coming.

I tried to stare Riley down, but she didn't cower away from my stare as I'd hoped; I knew she wouldn't, but it was worth the try. She shook her head slightly, but it wasn't in defiance, rather that "we'll talk later" look. Whatever, Riley. Whatever.

Riley then cleared her throat, startling just about everyone. "So. Clashing powers in the sky. That's got to refer to the gods, right? They're all on Olympus right now, up on the 600th floor of the Empire State Building. They're fighting, arguing. Maybe this really is a civil war."

"No," I mumbled, then louder, firmer: "I don't think the threat is coming from the inside of Olympus at the moment. If the Order does have a spy or two up there, they'll be quick to weed them out once Apollo shares the story with the Olympian council."

"Does anyone have any clue where this Order is? Where's their base? They must have one," Annabeth insisted.

It was Rachel who answered, "I don't know what state it's in or anything, but it's basically this big, institution type thing in the middle of a forest. On a mountain, I think. It's protected by a heavy layer of magic which coats it like a veil." Annabeth nodded at her to continue, obviously not about to question Ms. I-Know-Your-Future. "But anyway, the magic is really, really strong. Unbreakable, I'd say. The only magic that could be that powerful is Hecate's own magic, the goddess of the very craft herself." Hmm. Wonder what else Rachel Dare knows. Wonder what she's trying to hide. What she's hoarding. What she doesn't want us to know. Doesn't want me to know.

Riley shot a triumphant look at me. "Who says it's not civil war?" she asked mockingly.

"Who said she's on Olympus?" I shot back.

"Who said she's helping them willingly?"

I shot Skylar a surprised look as that was the first time she'd spoken since we arrived, though she made a valid point. Skylar kept staring at the wall though.

Percy's eyes widened comically. "It talks!"

That earned him a dark look from the daughter of Nyx herself, before she went back to her seemingly mindless staring as she had been before.

Annabeth rolled her eyes at her boyfriend's stupidity, then sighed. "Right. So, the ram's skin is the Golden Fleece. That's actually the one obvious thing."

"Yeah..." Percy tapped his fingers against his knee. "I don't want to have to deal with that thing again. But what about that whole crashing the gates of the blackest world? Is that literally or figuratively?"

The blackest world. Weren't they all black by now? "Both, Percy," I said. The blackest world. "Definitely both."