Disclaimer: I do not own anything in this story except for Nikki Wolfe and her items, except for the Lightning Thief book. Everything else is Rick Riordan's.

Chapter 2: I Bite A Dog From Hell

As soon as we got out of my neighborhood, I almost exploded. There were a lot of emotions and thoughts running through my head: angry that he'd woken me up (a girl needs her beauty sleep), puzzlement at why he was here, and fear about being in a van with a kid that I only knew from a book and a man that had, like, a thousand eyes. For all I knew, he could be some crazed lunatic that dressed in a fake Camp Half-Blood tee shirt that pretended to be Percy Jackson, luring kids to their doom. Yes, I'm obsessed with that stuff. The first few miles, I grilled this Mr. Jackson.

"Okay, first question. Why the—"

"Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa!" Percy managed stopped me from babbling on. "First, what's your name?"

"Nikki. Nikki Wolfe. I—"

"Tell me a bit about yourself."

I huffed. Fine. I'd do it this jerk's way. "All right. I'm fifteen and in ninth grade. I live in Seattle, Washington with my mom and dad and a silly Golden named Riley. I play the guitar, I love to read," I held up one of my books, "and I'm an honors student. Anything else?"

"Yeah, I kinda got the impression that you weren't dyslexic, like most of us."

"No, duh. I—" Hold on. Did he just say like the rest of us? "There's more of you?"

He gave me a puzzled expression. "You're reading The Lightning Thief. I'm in it. There's a bunch of other kids in there, too. Therefore, there has to be others like me. Now, go ahead with your question."

"Okay. Where the heck are you taking me, who are both of you, and what's going on?"

"I would think that you'd figure it out already," Percy replied. He ticked off reasons on his fingers. "One, I'm wearing a Camp Half-Blood shirt. Two, who else has eyes all over him?" He pointed and I finally recognized Argus from the book's descriptions.

"Three, what other kid has this?" He took out a pen; just your regular everyday ballpoint pen that you'd use for cursive handwriting practice, or important documents, or whatever. I remembered it from the book (finally, something I remembered) and leaned back as he uncapped it, and it grew into a long shimmering bronze sword.

"Riptide," I said. Percy smirked, amused that that was the first thing I'd remembered and that he was the wiser of the situation, while I was older. "Okay, fine, I believe you. But why are we taking a van to New York? Couldn't we, like, take a plane or something to get there faster? It's gonna take forever."

"Duh, no. I'm Poseidon's son. Zeus would blast me out of the air if I entered his domain. Plus, don't you remember how me, Annabeth and Grover made it from New York to Los Angeles and back in ten days?" What he said reminded me of that movie, Around The World In 80 Days, but I kept my mouth shut. "That time, we were walking. We're in a van. How long could it take?"

As I was about to find out, a bit longer than expected.

As soon as we could see each other clearly without flashlights, we stopped at the nearest fast-food joint, and got food to go. The van was just going through the sweeping hills of Eastern Washington, rocking along to some country singer on the radio, when I looked out the window and saw something black. Something black, dark, and very scary.

"Percy?"

"Yeah?"

"I think I just saw a hellhound."

"WHAT??"

I had been a bit reluctant to say hellhound, seeing as it had the word hell in it, but since it was a name I still said it.

"I'm serious. It was this big black dog, and I know that there's no sheep or sheepdogs up here. And this thing was drooling and staring at us." Percy looked at me with a you're-sure look. "I really saw it!"

He uncapped Riptide. "Can it get us from in here?" I asked.

"I don't think so."

Boom!

We screamed as a big black shape hit the side of the van. It leaped on top of it, its weight making the roof sag.

"Don't get out!" Percy yelled. "If you do, it'll get you!"

I thought differently, though. As I did so, the roof sagged a bit more. The hellhound was trying to crush us. I had to act fast.

In the book, the hellhound that attacked Percy was the size of a rhino, but this was more Great Dane in size. I'd learned in physics that the bigger the object (this was a creature, but whatever), the more inertia. If I ran, and when it was about to hit me, I turned, it would go right past me. And unlike the Minotaur Percy'd also fought, the hellhound had no hands to grab me. Perfect. I swung the door open, lunged out, and took off running. "Close the door!" I yelled to Percy, then to the hellhound, "Hey! Dog breath! Over here!"

Just as I'd hoped, the hellhound leaped from the van, landed with a heavy thump, and took off after me. I listened behind me, glad that we were running on grass (I could hear the hound better). I shortened my stride, taking shorter, quicker steps to go faster, running on my toes like I do when I go fast. I could hear the hound getting closer and closer behind me. It lunged.

I sidestepped and made a ninety-degree turn to the left. Sure enough, instead of tackling me to the ground and ripping my guts out, the devil dog tumbled to the ground in a heap of blue-black fur. Then, on a whim, I did something that no one has ever done before, and no sane person should ever do again.

I bit the hellhound's ear.

At first, it yelped, a loud high-pitched yelp of pain and lay still. Then it slowly sat up, and after a few heartbeats, its face broke into a big stupid smile, like it was drunk or something. I backed up and turned to run back to the van.

A bit of advice to other people: don't run full tilt until you just touch any kind of vehicle. I would have made a human-sized dent in the side of it if Percy hadn't been outside to grab me. He called me nine kinds of fool and ten kinds of idiot, then ordered me to get inside. Then he started laughing and congratulating me for getting rid of the hellhound. He told Argus to step on it, and we continued rolling along, on our way to New York. But before we started, he looked at me and said, "There's no way you could have fought that hellhound, much less seen it, if you had been mortal. Now we know: you're a half-blood."

Oh, joy.

A/N: Yay, second chapter. Please excuse the longness, but we finally got a bit fo action! I'm trying to write a chapter a day, so wish me luck. Read and review, please!