Hey guys, I'm back with a new chapter. Let's get into it:
Being a male in the camp of the Hunters of Artemis was probably one of the more uncomfortable things I've ever had to do in my life. Artemis' distain for men is almost as well known as her hunting prowess. That distain trickled down to her Hunters. The Hunt usually disposed of males in some way, usually by turning them into animals or girls. So for us to sit around the campfire, completely untouched, it was a testament to the oddity of the situation.
Thalia was applying some salve to the gash on my head when Grover and Nico came back. Percy sat across the fire from us looking miserable. He'd been treated first, as his wound was more severe. But the entire time it had been tense between him and Thalia. Now, he just looked like he wanted to melt into the snow with guilt.
"Hopefully you won't get a scar out of this," Thalia said as she finished applying the medicine.
"And if I do?" I asked, cocking my other eyebrow.
"Then that's one more scar for you to scare off the Aphrodite Cabin with. Now don't touch that for ten minutes," she ordered.
"It's green!" Nico exclaimed with delight as he came right up to us. Grover came over and studied Thalia's handiwork, turning my head back and forth while checking for a concussion.
"It's not nearly as fun as it looks," I cautioned as Grover released my head and gave Thalia a nod.
"Here, eat this, you big baby," Thalia said as she passed me a chunk of ambrosia. I took it and ate it, savoring the flavor. The food and drink of the gods always tastes like the one thing you love most food and drink wise, which made it tempting to just pig out on the stuff. Problem is, eat or drink too much, and you'll turn to ash.
"Are you really the Son of Poseidon?" Nico asked me. I cocked my eyebrow at Grover, who along with Thalia were struggling to hold in laughter. Percy looked up from his funk, annoyed.
"I'm Jack, not Percy," I corrected.
"Ooohh! That makes more sense cause Dr. Thorn called him the Son of Poseidon," he said. I fought the urge to face palm and give myself a headache. Thankfully, the correction sent him over to Percy, and he was just full of questions. To my utter amusement, Nico proceeded to ask every question that came to mind without so much as a thought given to context of the current situation. At one point, a Hunter came by and dropped off our bags that had been recovered from the school, but that didn't faze the kid one bit.
He asked them all. How did Percy's sword work? Did it ever run out of ink in pen form? Being a Son of Poseidon, was he a good surfer? Was Annabeth his girlfriend? I laughed at that one. Did Thalia and him fight a lot because of their dads? If Annabeth's mom was the goddess of wisdom, why wasn't she smart enough not to fall of the cliff?
Based on the look on Percy's face, I figured he was getting really close to draping sausage links around Nico's neck and throwing him to the wolves. Nico was about to ask another question, when Zoe came up to us. She tossed a cold glare in Thalia's direction before turning her attention to Percy.
"Percy Jackson. Come with me, Lady Artemis wishes to speak with thee," she said. Percy cast an uneasy glace toward us before he stood and followed the Lieutenant. He was gone for maybe thirty seconds before Nico started up again.
"So, are you really the Son of Hephaestus?" he asked. I closed my eyes and held back a groan. Gods save me, this was going to be a long night.
Dawn was approaching as the Hunters quickly packed up their camp. Artemis herself stood out on the cliff, looking east toward the glow of the approaching sunrise. Grover was swooning over her, while Thalia silently fumed. Apparently Bianca had gone and joined the Hunters during her and Percy's conversation with the goddess.
According to Percy, the Hunters were also going to Camp, which caused an uneasy look to pass between Grover and I. This, for once, didn't go over Percy's head.
"What?" he asked.
"The last time the Hunters visited Camp, it didn't go well," Grover said, looking quite pale.
"Not good as in…what, exactly?" Percy pressed.
"What started as a Capture the Flag game devolved into a Hunter raid which set half the cabins on fire," I said, frowning at the memory. Hephaestus' Cabin was more or less fireproof thanks to the materials it was built out of, but being the main craftsman in Camp, we got pulled into doing most of the repairs.
"Fun times," Percy said, making a face of his own.
"And Bianca joined them," Thalia added with disgust, "That stuck up, no good…"
"Who could blame her? An eternity with Artemis?" Grover asked, letting out a love-struck sigh.
"You stayers, you're all in love with her. Don't you know she'll never love you back?" Thalia asked with a roll of her eyes.
"But she's so…into nature," Grover said, his voice sounding like he was about to float away on cloud nine.
"You know she's probably got the hide of one of your cousins pinned to a wall as a trophy somewhere, right?" I asked. The stayer in question actually sighed and fanned himself like he was some Aphrodite spawn. I just threw my hands in the air and crunched away from him. If the hopeless idiot wanted to become a pin cushion, I was not going to be involved.
We had to avoid looking directly at the sun chariot as is landed. The heat was enough that it melted the snow all around us. What was left along the cliff side was a red convertible Maserati Spyder. It was the kind of car that just screamed 'beach douche', and unfortunately, that's what Apollo resembled as well.
The sun god resembled a seventeen or eighteen year old with sandy hair, outdoorsy good looks, with a sleeveless t shirt, jeans, and loafers. I'd never had the pleasure of meeting Apollo before, but I was somehow both impressed and annoyed that he had turned out to be pretty much everything I'd envisioned.
"Wow, Apollo is hot," Thalia muttered, causing me to frown.
"He's the sun god," Percy said, thick as a brick wall as usual.
"That's not what she meant," I grumbled. Thalia gave me a look, probably noticing the slight shift in my tone of voice. Whatever she was thinking, she didn't press the matter. Unsurprisingly, I found Apollo to be about as annoying in personality as he looked. He was boastful, carefree, and he loved to speak in Haikus. It was a given, considering that he was the god of poetry, but that didn't make it any less like nails on a chalkboard.
The thing is, while he and Artemis talked, I got the feeling that this was all an act that he put on in order to get a rise out of his sister. Being a Son of Hephaestus, the odds were already stacked against me when it came to various social situations. But on the times when I could pick up on someone being disingenuous, it usually angered me. Given that Apollo was a god, there wasn't much I could do about it.
Apollo wound up morphing the convertible into a bus so that we could all be transported to Camp. I found this to be a handy and agreeable idea. With the speed of the sun chariot, the ride back to Camp would be cut down from five hours to ten minutes. A warm ride, with ample space and a warm cozy bunk waiting at the other end? Yes, please, sign me up!
At least, that's how I felt, until Apollo chose Thalia to drive the sun chariot, and I saw all the color drain out of the Daughter of Zeus' face.
You see, during our little field trip to California at the end of the summer, Thalia had only one stipulation about travel: absolutely no flying. Originally I'd found this to be a little odd. With Zeus being lord of the sky, it stood to reason that the safest place Thalia could be was on an airplane. But never once had she sought to use that to her advantage. At first, I thought it was because she held a grudge against her father, but seeing her reaction to Apollo's offer gave me a different theory.
Perhaps in an ironic twist, the daughter of the sky was afraid of heights. I'd have found it hilarious if I wasn't about to probably die screaming. Thalia tried to decline the sun god's offer, saying that she wasn't even old enough to drive. But like most gods, Apollo wouldn't take no for an answer.
"Your fifteen, almost sixteen," he said. Given that he was also the god of prophecy, it really didn't surprise me that he would know that. But, that put a new damper on my mood. The prophecy that everyone was so freaked out about surrounded the next child of Zeus, Poseidon, or Hades reaching the age of sixteen.
Percy was fourteen, which meant that Thalia was now the one in running for being the subject of the prophecy. Her birthday was December 22nd, which meant we now had one week before all hell broke loose.
I was sitting on the sun bus, trying to process this new information when Thalia floored it, sending us hurtling toward space and probably roasting the military school in our wake. What came next was probably the closest I've ever come to getting motion sick in my entire life. Thalia was all over the place, climbing and then diving again. At one point she almost set some pour New England town on fire and according to Apollo, made Cape Cod freeze over. It was a white knuckle ride all the way up until the bus crash landed in the Camp's canoe lake.
I stopped just long enough to make sure Thalia was alright before I headed to my cabin. Cabin 9 was a brick building with a smoke stack and a large vault door. Stepping inside, I looked the place over and let out a content sigh. There were five of us in this cabin, counting me. We all had our own bunk, each one personalized to each occupant's needs.
"The prodigal son returns," my brother, Charles Beckendof joked as I passed on my way to my bunk.
"So glad to be back, Charles," I said in a posh accent. Charles was about as big as I was, wearing overalls and having a very dark complexion.
"Ares Cabin has some shields they want smoothed out," he said, slipping into serious mode. I waved my hand over my shoulder.
"I'll be down to help with that when I get settled in," I said, dropping the fake accent. My bunk didn't contain much. It was a steel framed thing that looked like it had been aboard a ship at one point. A couple of blankets, a feather stuffed pillow with stains on it, an overhead light for reading, and a couple of lone pictures. One depicted my mother, the other showed myself, Thalia, Annabeth, and Percy at the end of the summer last year.
Casting a long look at the pictures, I tossed down my rucksack along with my jacket before heading to the basement of the cabin in order to help Charles out. With the Hunters in Camp, the Ares Cabin was going to need every shield they could get their hands on.
Throwing myself into my work helped me take my mind off of the issues we currently faced. All signs pointed to trouble on the horizon, yet the gods seemed content to stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing was wrong. Well I can do that too, although in my case I retreated to the workshop that was kept in the basement of Cabin 9.
Between Beckendorf and myself, we were able to get the shields done relatively quickly before we turned our attention to our main pet project: the Bunker System.
The Bunker System was a series of reinforced tunnels designed to connect all the cabins together and be a safe place for half bloods to go to should the Camp's borders ever be breached. Currently the tunnels only connected the Dionysus, Hermes, and Hephaestus cabins, which meant that the Stoll Brothers and a Son of Dionysus named John Henry Thompson liked to use them as smuggling tunnels.
The Stoll Brothers had a reputation of being the Camp pranksters, as well as the ones who could smuggle in pretty much anything you could ever want. They'd been making great use of the tunnels as a storage space and means of moving around the various bits of contraband they had gathered. The Son of Dionysus was another story.
John Henry was someone I found to be both an annoyance and a valued asset. He was a displaced soldier from World War One who had somehow wound up at Camp almost a full hundred years later. How he had gotten here, I'm not entirely sure even he knew. But he was here, and he was here to stay.
Unfortunately, being the Son of the Wine God meant that he had inherited his father's passion for winemaking, something which was not allowed in Camp. Part of it was because pretty much everyone involved was under the legal drinking age, and I suspect the other half was to prevent Mr. D from going off the rails because he wasn't allowed anywhere near the stuff while he was on probation. Still, that didn't stop John Henry, who used the tunnels to both ferment and hide his brews.
This was where we found him when Charles and I entered the tunnels. The tunnels themselves resembled a mineshaft, with wooden supports and large lamps hanging down from the ceiling. Concrete and other reinforcements would come later, once more of the tunnels were complete and some more building material could be whipped up.
John Henry was in the section of tunnel near the Dionysus end, overlooking massive glass jugs containing a red liquid. He wore combat boots, olive drab trousers, and had on a gray shirt with black suspenders.
"Could you not do that down here? We don't even know how stable the tunnel is yet," Charles said.
"This place is the perfect temperature and amount of light for fermentation. Besides, neither the cleaning harpies or the Aphrodite Cabin would ever think to check down here during inspection," John Henry replied.
"What are you making, anyway?" I asked, bending down to look at the liquid in question.
"Strawberry Wine. I'm hopping to take it into town and sell it," John Henry said with a hint of pride, tapping his knuckle on the glass.
"You know prohibition is over, right?" I asked as I stood up straight.
"What's prohibition?" he asked with a genuinely confused look on his face. I considered answering, but hesitated. I didn't have time to explain over a decade worth of history to him.
"Never mind that. Look, your dad is probably gonna blow a gasket when he finds out you've been making wine under the cabin," I said. John Henry simply shrugged and went back to looking over his jars.
"Chiron might, but I doubt Dad will care. His probation doesn't extend to his kids," he replied. One thing I had learned about John Henry in the three or four months since he had popped up was that he generally had a disinterest in the things going on around him, whether it was the rules or events that shaped the world. If he wanted to do something, he'd disregard everything else and do it. Right now, he wanted to make wine, so that's exactly what he was doing.
"I can give you guys a bottle as payment for letting me stay down here," he offered.
"I'm trying to give the stuff up. Look, we're extending the tunnel toward the Aphrodite Cabin after New Years, can you find a new place for your stuff by then so you're not in the way?" I asked. John Henry brought his hand to his chin in thought and stood quietly for a moment.
"I suppose I can relocate them into Cabin 12's basement until you get the extension completed. Just don't let Selina or any of the others know you're there, they'll get this little project of yours shut down in no time flat," he finally said. At that moment, a deep bellowing steam whistle, like that off of a steam boat came from the direction of Cabin 9. Both Charles and I looked back in that direction before I checked my watch.
"Chow time," I said.
Meal times at Camp are always…interesting. They have goblets which can fill with almost any drink you can think of, and yet are limited when it comes to food such as hamburgers. But I will concede that nine times out of ten it's usually BBQ or something along those lines, and it's always healthy. I sat at the Hephaestus table with my siblings, silently poking a hunk of brisket with a fork.
Chiron had taken the time to introduce Nico to the Camp, as well as announce the traditional Capture the Flag game against the Hunters. The group in question were all seated at Artemis' table, doing their best to keep to themselves. From what I had heard, they hadn't even been in Camp for twelve hours and already problems were starting to spring up.
"We'll need to have repair duties at the ready," I muttered out of the corner of my mouth to Charles. While he was technically the Counselor for Cabin 9, Charles liked to share command with the rest of us, particularly if we were old enough and had been in Camp awhile. As a result, while he was the representative at Camp meetings, the title of Foreman usually rotated between people from week to week. One week it would be Charles, the next it would be me, the week after that it would be Jake Mason, and so on.
"If we keep them in the woods we shouldn't have to worry about repairs at all," Jake said.
"Since when has keeping the Hunters confined to the woods ever been an easy task?" Charles asked.
"We could probably talk to Chiron and get incendiaries banned. Someone's cabin gets hit with a fart arrow, that's hardly our problem," Nyssa Barrera said.
"As long as we remember to keep the Cabin on lock down, Nyssa is right. Fart arrows aren't really our concern," I added before trailing off again. My eyes drifted toward Thalia, who was eating by herself at the Zeus table. It looked lonely, and part of me wanted to go over to her. Camp tradition strictly forbid that, although I have no idea why.
"You're fifteen, almost sixteen"
Apollo's words echoed in my head like they had been spoken down an empty corridor. The idea that the world could come crashing down within the week was enough to chase away my appetite. It really showed that the gods almost seemed to be burying their heads in the sand and pretending that nothing was wrong, despite the fact that all signs indicated that something was about to happen.
That past summer, Thalia's tree had been poisoned in an effort to bring down the barrier that protected Camp. If the Camp had fallen, half bloods as a force for the gods would have been scattered to the four winds and likely wiped out. The summer before that nearly had Olympus plunged into civil war because someone had snatched up Zeus' master bolt. Such a conflict would have likely caused World War Three in the mortal world and left Western Civilization in flames.
Thankfully, both of these disasters were averted. But I didn't need Apollo's foresight or Athena's wisdom to know that something much bigger was at play here. Camp needed to be on high alert, not preparing for a useless Capture the Flag game that was so one sided I don't think even Chiron remembered the last time we'd won against the Hunters.
Normally I would have jumped at the chance to play Capture the Flag. It was arguably my favorite activity at Camp. But the revelation of Thalia's age and the fact that it was against the Hunters put a damper on my mood. Silently, I made the decision to sit this one out. Some extra swords or pieces of armor wouldn't hurt the Camp armory any. Setting my plate to the side, I silently stood and slipped away from the pavilion, heading back toward Cabin 9.
"Hey, blacksmith!" The voice caused my heart to skip a beat before I had even turned to face her. Taking a breath, I slowly turned and found Thalia trotting toward me. The way that she moved indicated that she had battle training, making her look like a warrior princess with an affection for dark colors. To me, it just made her look more beautiful than she already did.
"Can we count on you for Capture the Flag tomorrow night?" she asked when she had finally caught up with me.
"Charles is the Counselor, Thals, you should ask him," I said, nodding my head back in the direction of the pavilion.
"I wasn't asking about Cabin 9, I was asking about YOU. You, specifically," she said. I cocked my eyebrow at her.
"Why me? I'm just a blacksmith, you said so yourself on the way down here," I pointed out.
"Because I've seen you fight, both in California and at Westover. You're a powerhouse, and we're gonna need that against the Hunters," she replied. I let out a sigh, glancing back toward Cabin 9 in the process.
"I don't know, Thalia. I got a lot of work to do, and I've seen this song and dance with the Hunters before. They're in their element in the woods, and calling it short staffed on our end would be doing us a favor," I said.
"Which is exactly why we need every recruit we can get. Percy is a good fighter, but we're going to need someone who's been up against the Hunters before and knows what to do against them," she said.
"If you're wanting battle experience and strategy, I'd recommend you try the Athena Cabin, it's that way," I replied, pointing back in the direction of Cabin 6. I honestly didn't know what Thalia's game was. Sure I could swing a hammer, but that was a skill better invested in forging something new, rather than bonking someone on the head.
"Please, Jack. For me?" she asked. Thalia stuck her bottom lip out in this cute little pout. My knees suddenly felt like they were made of jelly. I silently cursed. She had found out about this little weakness of mine during our trip to California, and although she didn't make use of it that often, it was still frequent enough to be annoying.
"Fine," I found myself saying before I realized what was going on. Instantly Thalia's face brightened into a wide smile and she planted a kiss on my cheek. I felt my cheeks flush and my jaw fell open, but Thalia didn't seem to notice at all.
"Thanks. We're gonna knock that stuck up Shakespeare wannabe back a century or two!" she said before hurrying off, I guess to go and give the good news. I stood there in a stupor, watching her go. Slowly my fingertips reached up and brushed the spot where her lips had just been.
"What just happened?" I asked to the snow around me. Unsurprisingly, there wasn't an answer.
And cut. That's all for now. Please feel free to leave a review, a PM or some other means of communication to let me know what you liked or didn't like, and I'll see you all in the next one.