Chapter 14
Shelton
This time the dead girl was in front of the gates at LIRI. She didn't look dead. Her chest hadn't been torn open and there weren't organs scattered on the dirt road. I wouldn't have known she was dead if we hadn't confirmed the lack of heartbeat through pack channels.
"Emma," Sapphire said.
The sun disappeared behind a cloud. I could still see the dead girl.
"You know her?" Ben asked.
"Not her," Leo said, gesturing towards the dead girl. "But she looks like the second girl Jeremy Asher got killed."
Amber had a pained look on her face. "That's what I was afraid of. Blonde...Daughter of Apollo, right?"
Leo and Sapphire nodded.
"Second girl?" Ben asked. "Who's Jeremy Asher? Do you know what's going on?"
While Leo and Amber filled Ben, Hi, and Tory in on the previous murders that Sapphire had told Jordan about, I stepped a few feet away to where I could get cell reception and called Jordan. When I told him there was another dead girl, he was totally silent for a second before he started what I assume was swearing in Latin.
"Don't touch anything," Jordan said. "Don't go anywhere. We're on our way."
"...want us to leave," Leo was saying when I rejoined the group.
Sapphire crossed her arms. "I'm beginning to see why that might be a good idea. How the hell did he get out here? Isn't there only one boat?" She looked at me, Hi, Tory and Ben.
"Stealing a boat wouldn't be that hard," Tory pointed out. "But someone would have heard it." She didn't mention that our pack would definitely have heard a boat coming towards Loggerhead. We hadn't heard anything.
"Your sister could have helped him," Amber said. "She helped him raise a ghost."
Ben held up his hands. "Hold up. Her sister?"
"The goddess of ghosts," Amber said. "Don't say her name, we don't want to attract her attention."
Hi frowned. "You mean Mel—"
"Don't!" Amber, Leo, and Sapphire said. Ben hit the back of Hi's head again.
"The police are on the way," I said when the glaring died down. "Jordan said to just sit tight."
Tory looked towards the body. "I could just—"
"No," I said. "Bad idea. We barely survived the last time you examined a dead body, we have no chance against a murder ghost whisperer son of a god."
Leo whistled in a way that I was pretty sure meant that he was impressed. "Assuming we're all alive and not in jail when this is all over, I want to hear some of your stories. I'm guessing you guys don't have a handy book masquerading as kids' fiction?"
Tory smiled. "Fresh out, I'm afraid."
Leo chuckled. How they managed to smile while standing less than fifty feet from a dead girl I didn't know. Maybe it was a coping mechanism.
While Tory and Leo were having their weird deadly adventures heart-to-heart, Sapphire was squinting up at the sky. "Does the sun look dim to anyone else?" she asked.
All of us looked up. I didn't look directly at the sun because I like my eyes to not be charcoal, but what I could see at the edge of my vision did look dim, almost grey.
"Uh, little bit, yeah," Hi said.
Sapphire looked towards the body. After a long moment, her eyes widened. "Oh no."
"Oh no," Leo said. "Why 'oh no'?"
"She wasn't a mortal," Sapphire breathed. "She's a demigod."
A demigod war meeting is something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Hi, Tory, Ben, Coop and I were in the corner of the third floor of my house trying to stay out of the way of the shouting match going on through something called an Iris Message, which is basically a video call via magic rainbow. Actually, Hi, Ben and I were seeing it as a video call, because magic.
Yeah, magic. I'm not going to get used to it any time soon.
The group of demigods on the other side of the IM were sitting around what looked like a ping-pong table. All of them (except for one kid who was sleeping with his head on the table) were watching while a pale, dark-haired boy shouted back and forth with Sapphire. I thought that he was Nico, but the introductions had happened very quickly and included a lot of names. He and Sapphire had started talking in English, switched to Ancient Greek, and were now speaking in a sort of dry hissing that sent shivers down my spine.
"Enough!" a blonde woman who I was pretty sure was named Annabeth yelled over Sapphire and Nico. They immediately went silent. "Put a pin in whatever issues you two are having and rejoin the group. We have an actual problem to solve," the woman said.
Sapphire blushed and looked down at her feet. "Sorry. What were you saying, Mark?"
Mark tossed a gold coin to the girl sitting across the table from him before turning back to the IM. "I said we should just track him. Let's use magic or something, track him down, and end this."
The pronoun game was referring to Jeremy Asher, by the way.
"Lou Ellen? Amber?" Annabeth asked.
The girl who'd caught the coin looked thoughtful. "I'd need his hair or blood, but I could jury-rig something using family connections. His mom is alive, right? Because godly blood will light up half the country."
"His mom was alive," the black-haired man sitting next to Annabeth said. "Chris tracked her down after we got the news that he'd escaped. She's been dead almost a week."
All of us were silent.
"Well, that doesn't look good," one of the pair of identical men at the end of the ping-pong table said.
"Where?" Tory asked. All eyes turned towards her. "Where did his mom live?" she clarified.
"Nebraska," Annabeth said.
"So he escaped from L.A., probably went to Nebraska, and then ended up here in less than two weeks," Tory said. "How?"
Annabeth frowned. "The Grey Sisters extended their service to California. They could have taken him that far in a day or two, and that's assuming the door he used to leave the Underworld opened in California. For a place that's meant to keep people in, the Underworld has a lot of ways out. No offence."
"None taken," Nico said. "Sapphire and I are pretty sure our sister, not Hazel, the ghost goddess, we're pretty sure he's working with her."
"Graphic dreams, zero out of ten, would not recommend," Sapphire added.
Lou Ellen sighed. "She moves her door. If he's using it to get around he could literally be anywhere, and tracking spells aren't going to help."
Amber shook her head. "Yeah, I've got nothing. I'll ask around, but I think tracking would need some sort of sympathetic magic. I'm not great at that. We could send a pillar of fire after him."
"But I'm not powerful enough for that," Sapphire said.
Oh, yeah. Sapphire had fire magic, apparently, which had nothing to do with Hades being her dad. I was still trying to wrap my head around the whole only-one-twin-is-half-god thing.
"Any other ideas?" Annabeth asked.
"Curse him," a blond boy said grimly. Nearly all of the demigods looked at him with wide eyes. Only Nico, Sapphire, and a brown-haired woman seemed unsurprised.
"I'm with Will," the brown-haired woman said. "Aren't there some long-distance curses you could put on him, Lou Ellen?"
"Uh, probably," Lou Ellen said. "I'd have to check Mom's grimoire. I haven't done much cursing lately."
"Do it," Nico said.
Annabeth looked around the table and through the IM at us. "Any less drastic ideas?"
"Why does it matter?" Leo asked. "We're going to kill him anyway."
