Chapter sixteen: In Loving Memory
I could feel Ryan standing close behind me. There was an awkward moment when I turned around and actually had to look up to see his face.
He was so near that I noticed tiny little brown streaks in his dark green eyes, almost indistinguishable in anything but the bright sunlight that was filtering onto his face through the trees. Why did that shade of brown seem so familiar?
I mentally shook myself. Concentrate.
We didn't really have to argue about what to do next. It was obvious.
"Ready?" I asked Ryan, who nodded grimly.
I offered him my hand, and tried to ignore the fact that my palm must feel sweaty and yucky.
"Okay." I breathed in deeply, failing to calm down my insides, which were fluttering with nervous anxiety. Was this really the right thing to do? I sure hoped so.
Timidly, I stretched out my other hand, while holding on tightly to Ryan with the other.
Although most of the time he was an annoying prat, I was glad he was with me now. This wasn't something I wanted to do on my own.
With one last breath, I closed my eyes and thrust my hand forward.
The effect was imminent.
The air closed in around us, twisting and turning, as if it couldn't decide whether to suffocate us or not. My whole body felt like it was doused in ice, then fire, then ice again.
I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think. I could only hope we wouldn't die.
And then, it was over.
When the world stopped spinning around me, I could see that we had landed on the outskirts of a little town, maybe somewhere in the South, judging by the dry ground and oppressing heat.
A cough came from beside me, and I looked to my right to see Ryan, looking as if he was going to be sick, but at least not quite as deathly pale as the last time we'd...whatever it was we'd just done.
"You okay?" I asked, and he nodded, probably not trusting himself to talk without puking yet, which was fine with me.
Then I noticed I was still gripping Ryan's hand, and immediately let go. Of course, my cheeks had to burn red. Why did my body always work against me? What's your problem, bod?
Gingerly, I got to my feet and started walking around, leaving my companion to recover for a few minutes.
As I'd previously seen, we were just outside of a small, American town, the kind you came across every few miles along a highway.
We had landed just next to a two lane road, which I guessed transformed into the high street a little further on.
There was nothing else around. What are we doing here?
"Erin." Ryan said, his voice a little shaky. I walked back over to him, and offered him my hand.
He shook his head, and got up by himself.
Fine, I thought, annoyed. Be like that. See if I care.
But Ryan's face didn't look particularly hostile, so I decided not to mention his rudeness.
"Where are we?" I asked instead, hoping for answers I couldn't find myself.
Yet it seemed Mr Independent was just as clueless as I was, for he shook his head after having a brief look around.
Frustrated, I flung myself back onto the ground. I was already getting tired of this quest. How could we succeed if we didn't even know what we were looking for?!
We guessed it was the Spirit of the Oracle, but we knew nothing for certain.
And anyway, it wasn't as if we'd find the Spirit in this puny town, lounging on a seat at the bar around the corner, having a pint with Billy-Joe and the rest of them.
So what was the point of this trail, or whatever it was we were following?
Were our destinations random, or did they have some deeper meaning? I suspected the latter, but if so, why couldn't we make any sense out of them? Why couldn't the trail lead us directly to the Spirit?
"Hey, stop pouting down there." Ryan kicked my shin with his foot. "Get up and we can have a look around."
"Yeah?" I replied, not at all in a good mood. I was hungry, hot and tired, and the people who knew me well knew this was not a desirable state for me to be in.
"What's up?" Ryan asked, sounding a little exasperated.
And to add to it all, I thought viciously, I have the most self-righteous, insensitive quest partner in the whole world. Great. Just great.
"This whole thing doesn't make any sense." I snapped. "We haven't found out anything, except that I can touch shimmering air and transport us to random, probably dangerous places. Almost getting us suffocated in the process, mind you."
To my utter annoyance, Ryan actually laughed. The cheek of him!
"Quests hardly ever make sense, especially this early on. And to be honest, we're doing quite well. We've found out a way to travel, albeit a very uncomfortable one, and we think we know where this trail is leading us. So if we keep following it, we should eventually find out where the Spirit's hiding. And, we've even managed not to get kill-"
"Don't!" I interrupted him, slapping his leg for good measure. "Don't say that. You'll jinx it."
Ryan smirked down at me, but didn't continue.
Still a little grumpy, I got to my feet.
"Fine, let's have a look around town then." I said, trying to ignore my rumbling stomach.
We started walking toward the gathering of buildings, careful not to step on any snakes bathing in the summery heat. To be fair, we only saw one.
I was wondering where we would look, once inside the city's borders. The church? The post office? Maybe the Spirit had left us a helpful little aerogramm, stating it's current hiding place and asking us to answer, ASAP.
"Stop!" Ryan suddenly hissed, thrusting his arm out, catching me round the middle.
I rubbed my gut, murmuring that a simple please stop walking would have sufficed.
Looking around at what Ryan was squinting at, I suddenly noticed ruins across the other side of the road, that definitely hadn't been there before.
"Check it out?" I whispered, and Ryan nodded. "Definitely."
He crossed the road, then looked back in confusion to see where I was.
I took my time turning my head first left, then right, and only then walking across to the other side.
Ryan raised an eyebrow at me. I shrugged.
"Never underestimate traffic."
He rolled his eyes and we carefully crept closer to the ruins.
They seemed to be smoking, was my first thought. But it was odd smoke, white and thick, curling around the brick strewn ground like something...alive.
"Mist." whispered Ryan into my ear. "It hides things from our world from mortal eyes."
I made a mental note never to touch this Mist schist. It looked like aerosol poison.
"Should we go in?" I asked Ryan, who had drawn his sword.
Silently, I damned myself for leaving my backpack behind at Rachel's cave. It had contained my knife, without which I felt strangely helpless.
Ryan seemed unsure. His eyebrows had drawn together and he bit his upper lip in concentration.
From where we were standing I couldn't see anything inside the crumbling remnants of what might once have been a big house, but of course that didn't mean a lot.
After waiting for several long minutes for something to appear, which it didn't, we made an unspoken agreement to go inside and check things out.
But before we'd even walked two metres, I yelped and pointed.
There, just in front of what might have been the entrance to the house, stood a small, black, wooden sign, shining in the sunlight.
We approached it carefully, and read the neat, white lettering:
In loving memory of Maria di Angelo, a mortal woman whose life was taken on this site, long ago. May her spirit reach the blessed shores of Elysium, and rest there for all eternity.
I stared at the words. The sign wasn't from the human world, that much was for sure. But why would anybody on the mythological side write something in memory of a mortal? In loving memory, even.
Ryan reached out and ran his fingers over the name. Maria di Angelo.
His brow was furrowed, as if he was trying to remember something.
"What is it?" I asked, using hushed tones. Anything else seemed out of place.
"I'm not sure.." Ryan mumbled. "That name...I know it."
"How?" I asked, astonished. It seemed absurd that Ryan would know the name of some random mortal woman.
"The surname, it's the same as one of the most famous demigod's in, like, ever. Nico di Angelo."
I looked at him blankly. The name didn't sound at all familiar to me.
Ryan raised his eyebrows.
"Seriously? You haven't heard of Nico di Angelo? The Ghost King? Son of Hades?" He seemed genuinely surprised.
I shook my head. "I haven't learnt all of my Mythology one-oh-one."
Ryan looked at me, and at first I thought he was going to make another joke about my ignorance of the mythological world, but instead he just shook his head, even smiling a little.
I had the strong suspicion he was laughing at me, but for the sake of the quest I decided to let it pass for the time being. When we got back though, then he could prepare himself for something! If we got back that was...
"So can you ask this Nico guy about the sign? It might be a clue." I wanted to know.
"I'm not exactly on first name terms with him." Ryan said, avoiding my eyes. "He doesn't hang around Camp Half-Blood a lot. I'm not sure he'd appreciate two random demigods calling him-"
"One random demigod." I corrected, with an attempt at a smile. Somehow it didn't come so easily. "I'm not a hero, remember?"
Ryan nodded, tight-lipped. "Fine, one demigod then. Anyway, I don't think it's a good idea, calling on him."
"Let's try Percy then, or Annabeth. They've been around so long, they must know something." I suggested.
"Come to think of it, they're actually Nico's friends, I think. At least they've had dealings in the past, he had a major role in the outcome of the Second Great Prophecy..."
I interrupted Ryan before he could start another speech on 'Famous Demigods and What they did'.
"Let's go into town and find somewhere to make a rainbow then."
***
"This should do" Ryan said, as we arrived at a do-it-yourself car wash. We sneaked to the nuzzle furthest away from the little office and tried to position ourselves so that the owner, a fat, middle aged lady, couldn't see us.
Then Ryan got out a shiny golden drachma and, after I had made a rainbow with the water and the sunlight, tossed it into the spray, asking Iris to accept our offering and show us Percy Jackson.
The IM took a moment, as if it was dialling and then we suddenly saw the arena at camp, where maybe two or three pairs of demigods were practising sword fighting.
"Percy?" Ryan asked.
"What? Who's there?" Percy had come into view, turning this way and that to locate the source of the voice.
"We're here" both of us said, and finally Percy saw us. He looked stunned.
"Erin, Ryan! What are you two doing? What's happened?"
As quickly as we could, we explained what had happened so far. Percy looked perplexed when we told him about my ability to teleport us from one place to another, but he didn't interrupt, which was good as we were running out of dollars to keep the water running.
"And now we've arrived at some old ruins, and we saw a sign which was put there in memory of Maria di Angelo, a mortal who died at the site. Do you know anything about her? Has she got some connection with Nico di Angelo?" Ryan asked urgently.
It hadn't escaped me how, at the mention of Maria's name, Percy had drawn in a sharp breath.
"What is it?" I asked, my voice unusually low. "You know something about this, don't you?"
Percy glanced around, as if he didn't want anybody to hear him. His face was full of concern and, was it fear? No, that wasn't possible, nothing could scare a hero like him.
"Listen." he whispered. "Those ruins, they used to be a hotel. Back in the 1930s, Hades and his mortal love, Maria di Angelo, went there with their kids, Bianca and Nico. Hades was trying to hide them from Zeus, who was pretty pissed off at his brother back then.
He struck the hotel with lightning, killing Maria, as Hades only had time to save the kids."
My insides felt like lead. What a sad, sad way to die. The gods really weren't very kind, I realised.
Ryan looked just as horrified as I felt.
"So Nico, he was born 1930 something? But he's only your age!"
Percy nodded. "His ageing was...stopped for a while I guess. There's no time to explain it all now."
"But, what's all of this got to do with our search for the Spirit of Delphi?" I muttered, the confusion in my voice obvious.
The son of Poseidon bit his lip, looked around again, and then lent closer to the Iris Message. For one moment I was afraid he'd break the connection, but it held up, even though we were on our last minute.
"After Maria died, the oracle, the ex-oracle that is, not Rachel, came to see Hades, to repeat her warning to him. Of course" Percy sounded bitter "the gods don't like being told that what they've done is wrong. So, unable to curse the Spirit itself, Hades cursed its host, a mortal girl. For decades, no other person was able to accept the Spirit, and the girl never came to rest. Of course, that changed after the Titan War, but still..."
Anger was etched on Percy's face, and I could understand him, feeling rage bubble inside me as well.
How could Hades be so cruel, so unforgiving to that poor girl? It wasn't her fault he'd messed up. But maybe that was the nature of the gods, taking out their emotions on defenceless mortals and demigods.
I looked up as Percy was just about to say something, but the nuzzle clicked and stopped spraying water. Instantly, the IM disappeared, leaving us standing there, a little dumbfounded.
Ryan has just opened his mouth, probably to suggest we get moving, when we suddenly heard footsteps behind us.
We both whirled around, Ryan with his sword, me with my lethal fists. Or not.
Standing there was the owner, her face pudgy and smeared with make up that was way too dark. She didn't look particularly threatening, but I had learned from the others tales that looks could be deceiving, especially with monsters.
Yet, somehow, I didn't think she was a monster. As Piper had explained back at camp, I was one of those mortals who could see "through the mist", which meant I should recognize a monster if I
saw one. But this lady didn't look like one to me.
Instead, there was a certain aura around her, as if she was from a whole other world.
The longer I looked at her, the worse I felt. I remembered all those times I failed to achieve something, be it remembering a poem in school, or forgetting my mother's birthday.
Sadness and guilt filled me as I thought of all those missed opportunities, of how I didn't really fit in at camp, and hadn't succeeded in any challenge a demigod faced so far.
But there was something that went even deeper, something which burnt like smouldering coals in the pit of my stomach. An old ache, one I couldn't understand.
Yet I knew the feeling this lady was giving me. It was one everybody had to deal with, some more than other maybe. But it was always there.
"You're a goddess." Ryan whispered. His own face was contorted in pain, and I felt a sudden rush of protectiveness. I didn't want him to hurt.
The lady bowed her head, a mysterious, sad little smile playing around her mouth.
"I am indeed, young hero. And think your friend here has recognized me, haven't you?" She turned to me, but all I could do was nod. My voice had left me.
The goddess smiled again, and the ache inside me grew stronger.
"I am Metanoia, the goddess of regret. And I have come to talk to you, Erin Carraway, and to give you a warning."
Soorryy for the wait, lovelies, I was simply too afraid of reading a spoiler for BoO! Who of you has read it?
Anyway, thanks for reading and reviews are very much appreciated.
I'm not Rick Riordan.
xxxx