Woohoo! Character deaths! I hated killing Charlie; his accent was so much fun to write : .( Ah well! So here would be chapter 16, in all it's glory. We're starting to near the end of this story (OK, so we're not that close, but you get what I'm trying to say) so I kinda have to start setting up for the final battle/finalie/going-out-with-a-bang thing. Anyway, please review if you like!

Oh, I haven't had a disclaimer in, like, ever have I? Huh. Well then, here we go:

Disclaimer: Do not own PJO, or the expression "Holy Hera's Cow," which originally belongs to Mr. Rick Riordan. I got it off his blog :)

Ch. 16

"Okay, so let me get this straight. You want to begin picking off the demigods, right?"

"Yes."

"And you want to do that by organizing a guerrilla-style combat. . . whatever-it's-called—force to do so, made up of the best hit-and-run soldiers you can get your hands on. Right?"

"That's right."

"And we're completely ignoring the fact that those frigging demigods have a goddess on their side, and Jackson is out to get me. And they have the Hunters, who are almost as good of a shot as Damian. And a cyclops."

"We have giants, and dracaenae."

"Giants and dracaenae suck at stealth, and couldn't run to save their lives."

"Whatever. Keep going."

"So, after we have magically avoided Artemis and her Hunters, and Jackson, and the cyclops, and the son of Hades who could detonate us all with a blink of his eye, and Clarisse the Drakon Mauler, and their pet dragon at the pine tree, and—shut up, Hawkeye—so after we have gotten around their defenses, and cut down some of their campers, we somehow get ourselves back out of the camp again without getting killed or captured. Considering the demigods don't attack us before we're organized enough to do this. That's the brilliant master plan?"

Zane frowns at me. "Do you have a problem with the brilliant master plan?"

I snort. "Hell no! I'm just, you know, wondering how you figure this is going to work. The only thing this plan has going for it at the moment is that the demigods have no border. Speaking of that, why can't we just go in and overrun them? Force them out?"

Hawkeye sighs, giving me his you-are-so-stupid look. "Christine, we can't do that because if we all-out attacked them right now, chances are they'd win. We have the numbers, but they have a whole lot more power than we do, with Artemis and the children of the Big Three. All it would take is one good temper, and they'd wipe half of us out. If we'd attacked them earlier, we probably could have run them out, yes, but they had a border then so we couldn't get in."

I hold up my hands in resignation, blowing hair out of my eyes. "Fine! So, when do you plan on executing this no-fail scheme of yours?"

"Tomorrow night, probably," Zane says. "I say it's been long enough since the battle—four days already."

"We'll announce who'll be going later today," Hawkeye tells me. "Probably just mutants and some of our demigods."

"Suit yourself," I say, turning to stalk out of Zane's tent. "But tell me when you two come up with a plan that doesn't involve an insane amount of sheer luck and some crazy, suicidal break-in mission. There comes a point where even I get sick of almost killing myself."

Hawkeye mutters something under his breath that I decide to ignore, stomping out of the tent and out into the morning sunlight. Predak waddles around the corner of the tent with a huge nasty grin on his face, and I know he's been eavesdropping again.

"Well, what do you think of that plan?" I ask him as we walk through camp.

The telekhine shrugs. "Doesn't sound any wilder than anything else we've tried lately. Besides, the master plan has a tendency to change every other day, so I'm not worried. It'll work out."

"Yeah well, you tell me that when you're dead," I retort.

Predak gives me an odd look. "Still thinking about Charlie, are we?" he asks.

"No," I say. Total lie. "I just think that we could have planned this out better. And Artemis is openly fighting us now. You know how tight-strung I get when she's around."

The telekhine has nothing to say to that. No god has ever done him any personal wrong like Artemis did when she cursed me, so he isn't really entitled to an opinion. So he just nods, and we walk along in silence.

This is the fourth day after the battle at Camp Half-Blood, where I had been rescued from my basement. We've been spotting demigods crawling all over the place for the past day or two, so just about everyone is under major amounts of stress. This results in lots of fights among our own soldiers, which only mounts the tension even more. I know that Zane and Hawkeye are anticipating some sort of attack from the godlings sometime soon, but they can't do much about it because nobody knows what they have planned. We've been sending runners out almost every day to haunt Camp Half-Blood in search of information, but a lot of them don't come back, and the ones that do have nothing good to report. So we have no choice but to go about planning attacks as if nothing was hanging over our heads, unable to do anything other than tell each other to keep our eyes open for any sign of attack and not to sleep too soundly.

Another thing that has been bothering me is Charlie's death. I don't know why it affected me so much, but the runner's sacrifice for me had really hit home. Maybe it was because I had never known anyone who would do that for me. I had lived almost my entire life on the gritty New York City streets, fighting for no one but myself, unable to make a friend without expecting them to double-cross me or stabbing them in the back myself. There was certainly nobody that I would die for. Hawkeye could go fall off a cliff for all I cared, Zane too, and Predak, Mokkan, and Katrina weren't worth dying for either. I hadn't personally known Kodiak long enough to decide what I thought of him yet. Damian? Maybe if he hadn't ticked me off lately, and depending on my mood at the time. But probably not. Nobody else even came close.

"Looks like my crew busted into the mall again," Predak says proudly as we approach the community bonfire at the center of camp. "They're getting good at that. I'm going to take Ziral with me on a raid one of these days; he's one clever kid, you know."

The fire has attracted quite a crowd, and the fact that Predak's telekhine gang had broken into the mall and stolen all kinds of highly edible things certainly helped. From what I knew, the telekhines were a huge hit among the ranks, always supplying the soldiers with something to pass the time. Usually it was just food, but they would also steal just about anything else for you if you paid them enough. For example, Zane kept up constant trade with them, exchanging credit card numbers and stuff for ammunition for the night guard, so the telekhines could hack into the bank accounts of unsuspecting mortals and the Rebel camp stayed well-armed.

Predak gets a round of applause and rowdy hoots as he takes his place at the fire between Damian and his right-hand telekhine, a female named Silvamord. As leader of the telekhine criminals, Predak got most of the credit for the loot, and was therefore a respected figure among the common soldiers who had nothing better to do than get drunk and eat his food. Silvamord got a lot of respect too, but she was not quite as well liked as Predak and his Hades-may-care attitude for some reason.

"Hello, Christine," Kodiak greets me as I sit down between him and Fiona, the cannibalistic little girl.

"Hey Kodiak," I sigh.

"So what did Hawkeye and Zane want?" the mutant asks me, ruffling his big black bat wings.

I roll my eyes. "They're just outlining their latest suicide mission to me," I say exasperatedly. "Some junk about hit-and-run operations that require you to be either incredibly lucky, or incredibly stupid."

"You should be good at that," he comments thoughtfully, and I whack him.

Fiona has gotten herself a raw steak, which she chews on contentedly as she listens to Kodiak and me talk. Blood drips off her chin as she gnaws off a strip of the meat with a horrific ripping sound, her filed teeth stained a grotesque maroon color and flickering in the faint firelight.

"And what about you Fiona?" I ask her after a few s'mores. "What have you been eating lately?"

She leaves off mangling her steak long enough to make a high-pitched, squeaking laugh that would totally creep out anyone in their right mind, and her classic Cheshire cat smirk.

Kodiak gives her a distasteful look over my shoulder. "Whatever you do," he tells me, "don't ask her where that missing empousa went. She won't give you a straight answer."

I wrinkle my nose at the girl. "You ate one of our empousa?"

Fiona just shrugs and licks blood off her fingers. Not that I really need her to answer. I can totally justify her for eating an empousa; she-demons are annoying. "Good for you," I tell her.

Kodiak shakes his head. "You two are gross."

I stare at him. "What, you mean you hadn't noticed?"

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

It was only after several hours of sitting around the campfire with the others, passing the time by roasting food and playfully insulting each other, that I began to suspect trouble. At first I figured that I was just being paranoid—well, more paranoid than usual—but the third time that my skin prickled, the way it always did when I was being watched, I began to get suspicious.

Whirling around, I turned to see nothing behind me but a dracaenae and several hellhounds fighting to the death over a package of Doritos, and a young demigod that Zane had picked up a few weeks ago sitting at the entrance to a tent, sharpening his sword, just like the first two times. So far I had seen nothing that would suggest danger, I just felt like I was being spied on.

"What?" Kodiak asks me, turning to follow my gaze.

I shake my head. "Nothing," I mutter. "Maybe. . . Never mind. It's nothing."

But when I notice Hawkeye striding through camp, sword drawn, on the guard for a fight, I knew it was a whole lot more than nothing. I elbow Kodiak in the ribs. "There," I say. "Hawkeye felt it too."

We watch him as he disappears around the corner of a tent and out of sight, heading for the edge of camp. "What is your problem?" Kodiak asks again, and this time Fiona leans in to hear me talk.

"I don't know what it is," I whisper, glancing nervously around. "I just feel like there's someone watching me. Something. . . I don't know. Something made it's way into the camp I bet."

Kodiak nods, my anxiety rubbing off on him. Fiona goes back to shredding up her fifth steak in the last hour, but I can see that she's a bit more tense than she was before. Several minutes later, Zane appears behind us, wearing that same distracted look that Hawkeye had. I meet his eyes, and he blinks meaningfully at me before stalking off in the direction Hawkeye had gone.

"C'mon," I mutter to Kodiak, getting up from my spot by the fire as casually as possible. "There's someone here."

I feel Damian watching me and give him a pointed look as I dust myself off, stalling for time. He and Predak know me well enough to figure out that I'm trying to tell them something. Predak nudges Silvamord, alerting her to a disturbance, and Damian whispers something to Mokkan, who is laying beside him.

Kodiak stands up beside me, stretching his wings powerfully and sending the young demigod that had been sharpening his sword scuttling fearfully away. We start off after Zane and Hawkeye, but before we have even left the clearing, something reaches my ears. I put a hand on Kodiak's shoulder, making him pause.

For a moment I don't hear anything, and I begin to wonder if I had imagined it. But then: beep. . . beep. . . beep. . .

Kodiak hears it now too. "No way," he whispers, swiveling his head from side to side as he tried to pinpoint the telltale beeping of a Greek fire bomb.

Now, traditional Greek fire bombs don't beep, but some of those Hephaestus godlings had been experimenting with the demolitions supplies in the last couple of months after the war ended, and had majorly updated them. Now the modernized bombs had over twice the force and fire packed into a simple shell, usually disguised as a common household object. The only side-effect was that they beeped upon activation, which, let me tell you, I am incredibly thankful for.

Out of the corner of my eye I notice the demigod that had sat at the entrance to the tent for so long, sharpening his sword. He's walking away from us, but even from behind I can see how tense he is. "It's in the tent," I hiss at Kodiak, just as the beeping speeds up to double time, beep, beep, beep, beep—

"EVERYBODY DOWN!" I howl for all I'm worth, throwing myself onto the concrete and rolling away from the tent, morphing into wolf form. I squeeze my eyes shut as an electrical crackle sounds through the air, followed by an eruption of bright green light. The sound of the explosion travels several seconds slower than the light and the debris, so by the time the supersonic-worthy crash blows out my eardrums, I've already been propelled fifty feet across the camp and had all the fur fried off my left flank and my tail set on fire as loose, smoking slabs of pavement skip across the ground like small self-commanded missiles.

For several seconds, all I can do is lay there on the concrete, trying to get my bearings as the echoes of the explosion die away. My burnt flank doesn't hurt yet, but I know it will soon, as will my tail, which is still smoldering. I can't hear anything other than an odd, distant buzzing in my ears, and my own heartbeat hammering in my chest.

I haul myself into an awkward sitting position. "Holy Hera's Cow," I croak as I catch sight of the destruction that the bomb had wreaked. There's a considerable sized crater in the ground where it had gone off, and the pavement around it is stained black. Pebbles of destroyed concrete are scattered a hundred feet in every direction, and shreds of charred and burning tent material swirl through the air like a rainstorm from Hades. A sizable mushroom cloud of black smoke hovers above the crater.

Not too far to my left, Damian is flicking bits of concrete off himself and coughing up a storm, and Predak and Silvamord are extracting themselves from the smoking wreckage of a tent. Mokkan, who had managed to outrun the explosion, is shaking flakes of dust from his black fur. Nearer to the crater lies the charred carcass of another hellhound, burnt down to little more than a skeleton. Several telekhines can be found in a similar state, along with what might have been an empousa. Kodiak and Fiona are nowhere to be seen.

That's when I notice the white timber wolf. Very much like the ones the Hunters of Artemis keep as pets. It bounds across the clearing, gracefully leaping the smoking crater and running for the edge of the Rebel camp. Mokkan spots it too, and I watch as he leaps over my head and takes off in pursuit of the sparkly little bugger.

Dragging myself painfully to my paws, I am wracked by a fit of coughing. Every noise I hear is muffled, like I'm listening from the bottom of a fish tank, and echoes sightly in my ears. My head spins rapidly, but I force myself to my feet. Something was happening here. I wasn't sure quite what it was yet, but I knew that we had been caught off guard.

That bomb. . . what if it had only been a distraction? Or a signal, maybe.

A signal.

I'm up on my paws and staggering off in the direction Mokkan and the white timber wolf had taken, the same direction Hawkeye and Zane had been going only minutes before. They had been waiting for the godlings to make a move, hadn't they? I was willing to bet this was it.

My head clears as I run, and my hearing slowly begins to return. Weaving through the maze of tents as I bolt for the edge of camp, I keep an eye out for the enemy. There's a fight going on up ahead; I can hear it, and the smell of blood hits my nose.

I burst from the final row of tents—and am immediately sent rolling by an attack from a huge white wolf, almost as big as me. He pounces on my side and body-slams me into the ground, scratching at my burnt flank with his back claws. For a moment I can't fight back, taken off guard by the suddenness of the attack and still not recovered from the bomb, but then pain from my flank cuts through the last of the fogginess and I strike a hit. I swing a paw around and nail the timber wolf on the side of the neck, snapping it sideways and knocking the beast off my side. Rolling to my paws, I jump on his back and hang on for dear life as he spirals around, searching for a way to dislodge me. See, the thing about these wolves is that they may look like me, but they're highly lacking in my human intelligence.

Finally, in a fit of frustration, the timber wolf slams himself up against a brick wall. I allow myself to slide off his back, landing on my paws. I easily pin the wolf up against the wall and rip out his throat.

Free of my distraction, I try to figure out what the demigods are up to. Not far from me, another Greek fire bomb has taken out a giant, blowing a hole in his chest the size of a small truck and sending him toppling over. Hawkeye is engaged in furious battle with Thalia, the lieutenant Hunter herself. He seems to be winning until the girl suddenly lowers her knife and delivers him a karate kick in the chest, sending him reeling backward into a tent. Jackson and Zane are a lot further away, squaring off against each other with their swords. I can hear Zane cursing like a sailor as Jackson lands a blow, even from here.

Way off on the other side of camp, a warning signal goes up from the guard over there too, and I realize that we are surrounded.

Io finds me. She's lost her sword sometime during the battle, but is good enough of a fist fighter to hold her own. "Christine!" she yells, punching a satyr in the nose. "What are they up to?"

I catch the satyr as he falls, sinking my teeth into his neck. "I have no idea. We're totally surrounded, but they don't seem to want to enter the camp," I say, spitting out a fang.

"Did they set off the bomb in the camp too?" Io pants.

I stick out a paw to trip a Hunter as she staggers by, and pounce on her. "Yeah," I say, "they planted a spy. One of those puny little demigods, I think."

"Did he—"

She's interrupted when Tyson the cyclops throws himself between us, shoving me backward off the Hunter and sending Io rolling.

The cyclops grabs my neck in his huge hands before I can twist out of his reach, and wrenches my head to an excruciating angle. I yelp and struggle wildly, flailing violently about in vain attempt to extract myself from his grasp. Just as I begin to black out, my claws find one of his wrists, and in a final attempt to free myself, I rip into his skin as hard as I can. Blood from the cyclops's wrist gushes out, soaking both me and him. He roars in pain and flings me for all he's worth, throwing me an insane distance.

I hit the ground with a thump, my neck aching, my burnt skin searing, a horrific headache crashing into my skull. For a moment it's all I can do not to pass out, but then the sensation passes and I once more drag myself to my paws.

I find that I am quite a ways away from the battle. Looking at it from this angle, I can see that the Rebels are being pushed back into the camp, instead of outward. From what I can see, we are definitely losing the battle; the carcasses of our own Rebels laying on the sidewalks far outnumber those of the godlings.

Shaking myself off, I begin to slink back towards the fray when a soft hiss whistles through the air. Acting on instinct, I throw myself backwards again as one of the Hunter's silver arrows lodges itself into the concrete right where I had been standing. Looking up, I see that Hunters and godling archers have dominated the rooftops of nearby buildings, keeping whatever strays out of the battle and into the streets at bay. Growling to myself, I once again try to regain entrance to the battle, and am once again am nearly skewered on a long silver arrow.

Instead I bound several blocks to the left, hoping that I can get out of range of the archers, but it's useless. No matter where I try to get in, it's covered by people I can't fight. I could, of course, try charging in regardless of the arrows and hope to Hades that they miss, but even I'm not that stupid. Hunters never miss.

Blocked from the fight, I have no choice but to watch as the Rebels are pushed further and further back into the camp, away from the edges. And it's then, as I watch Katrina the hellhound turn tail and flee from Travis and Connor Stoll, that I realize what they're doing.

They're both splitting up the ranks, and holing most of the Rebels up. Every entrance to the camp is guarded and unable to be breached unless you felt like turning yourself into a pincushion. Many of the Rebels are now trapped inside their own camp, and others—because I'm sure there are more Rebels than just me who fell out of the border—are stuck outside, on the streets.