VII HAZEL
HAZEL HATED BEING KILLED. It was exhausting.
Like that hour they decided to stop at Ithaca. Leo, Jason and Piper headed off, leaving the other four demigods alone on the ship. After a while, Percy and Annabeth decided to go for a walk. Hazel didn't argue. They needed some alone time after… their fall.
She wondered how calm Percy and Annabeth could be about falling into Tartarus. They acted as if it were no big deal. But it was a big deal. Physically they were the same, but Hazel wondered about mentally…
She walked down into the mess hall/lounge, where Frank was curled up on a recliner as a boar. Hazel grinned, sitting down in a chair beside him.
"Hello," she said when he woke. Frank turned back into a human, yawning and stretching.
"Good morning," he replied, even though it was something past noon. "Are the others still gone?"
"Yeah."
"Long enough for us to start worrying?"
"Not yet. Soon, though."
Frank nodded. "How you feeling?" he asked.
Hazel shrugged. She looked down at her hands, which were streaked with old battle scars and bore grimy fingernails. "About as fine a demigod on her way to prevent the rise of mother earth can ever be."
Frank smiled a little. "Are you okay?" Hazel asked him.
He took a deep breath before replying. "I'm fine," he lied.
Hazel cocked her head to a side. "I know that's not true," she said.
Frank threw an arm up in the air sarcastically. "Well, we are a group of demigods on their way to prevent the rise of mother earth. Some of us aren't as calm about it as you are."
Hazel must have looked hurt, because he began apologizing right away. "Oh, gods, Hazel, I'm so sorry. It's just… I'm not so cool about this whole quest thing at the moment. It's changing us. I mean, three of our friends just fell into Tartarus, which is bound to leave some psychological scars. You can now control the Mist, I'm…" It took a moment to find the correct terms. "…Taller, and the two camps are about to go into war against each other. Camps of teenagers, Hazel. Even some little kids of six or seven. I've had to fight so many monsters these past few weeks that if I don't I feel weird. And my father—" He stopped.
"What about Mars?" Hazel asked.
Frank shook his head. "Nothing. I was just—" He winced for no reason.
Hazel had no idea what was up, but it he didn't want to talk about it she wasn't going to press matters. "Yeah, but look at all the good things," she said instead. "The Athena what's-its-name is on its way to Camp Half-Blood to stop that fight. A lot of us are a lot more confident than we were before. And you being taller is a good thing!"
"Sure," he said, but it didn't sound like he believed it.
Hazel stood up and sat down in his chair. "And you have an amazing group of friends to help you," she told him. "Just think, a little less than two more weeks and this'll be over."
"For good or for bad," Frank finished.
"Yeah," she said, and they went quiet.
Hazel was worried about Frank. What was he about to say about his father? Was something wrong? Maybe he had a dream, or Mars had appeared to him in his cabin one day. Whatever it was, it wasn't fun, she could tell.
But all she had to do was believe her own words—in less than two weeks this would be over. For good or for bad. Hopefully for good, because if for bad then they were all dead.
The two of them eventually droned off to sleep, enjoying the other's company. The lazy waves rocked the ship from side to side.
They woke up to the sound of something shattering loudly.
Both demigods were up on their feet in an instant. Hazel looked around the mess hall. Seven lime-coloured snakes with spiky white fins and uncanny yellow eyes slithered around the room as if they owned the place. Two wrestled each other on the coffee table. Two others lay sleeping, while their neighbour watched a muted game of hockey from Canada. Another had just knocked a lamp off a table and sent it shattering to the floor, which was what had woken up Hazel and Frank. And the last one somehow found its way into Piper's cornucopia, and it was munching on purple jellybeans contentedly.
Hazel remembered these things from ROFL. One of them had disintegrated Frank's bow when he smacked it down a hill. To get rid of them he had used a spear his father had given him, which basically set an undead zombie warrior to deal with them. Unfortunately, Gray was long gone.
(Later Leo told her that in the texting world ROFL stood for 'rolling on the floor laughing', which was exactly what Hazel had wanted to do when she learned of Iris's gluten-free, no-sugar-added, vitamin-enriched, soy-free and goat-milk-and-seaweed-based natural Ding Dongs before she realized the goddess was being serious.)
"How did they get on the ship?" Hazel demanded, turning around slowly so that she was back-to-back with Frank.
"The thingamajig that alerted monster attacks and the smokescreen," Frank reminded her. "Broken. Leo said he was going to fix it today."
He didn't have his bow and arrows, Hazel realized. Neither did she have her spatha. And why should they have their weapons? The ship was supposedly safe. So she improvised and grabbed a rolling pin from the coffee table. Not exactly a dangerous weapon (okay, not a dangerous weapon at all), but Annabeth told Piper who in turn told Hazel of a story of some mortal girl who hit Kronos in the face with a blue plastic hairbrush. Ordinary household items could become deadly weapons in the hands of a master. Hazel hoped she could be considered one.
The basilisks had left them alone until then because they had obviously blended in with their surroundings, being asleep. But now that they were awake, seven pairs of glowing yellow eyes fixed on them hungrily (except for the one that was already eating whose gaze was more threatening, like it was trying to say, Don't even think about stealing my jellybeans).
"We'll never make it out alive if we stay here." Frank spoke in a low voice as to not startle any of the monsters into spontaneous fits of violence (which Hazel guessed was possible). "It's too confined. We need to get to the upper deck."
Hazel wondered how he knew that, then decided it was a kid-of-Mars thing. "You're right," she said. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the air around them. There was Mist everywhere, she discovered, but most of the time it was too diluted to actually do anything. She imagined all the magic in that room rolling together into one to form a cover for her and Frank.
Too late, she realized.
The basilisks attacked. One of them sprung and latched onto Frank's knee, sinking in its fangs. He yelled and kicked it off, but two more shot poison at his face, blinding him. Hazel screamed, and the basilisk that had been lounging in the cornucopia hissed and sprang forward, fire curling from its mouth. Her rolling pin slipped from her grip as she fell forward, dead. Frank collapsed beside her. The demigods were taken down in less than half a minute.
"That's disturbing," Frank commented as they watched the basilisks viciously pulverize their dead Mist corpses.
Hazel grabbed his hand and they ran up to the upper deck. The others still hadn't arrived.
"What do we do?" Frank asked. His bow and arrows were slung over a shoulder in backpack-mode, paint green. Hazel noticed the backpack was never the same colour twice. Most of the time it was blue. Sometimes it was orange. Once it had turned hot pink with purple dancing llamas.
"Duck!" Hazel shouted, and she swung her rolling pin over Frank's head. She hit the leaping basilisk right in the face, and it sailed over the side of the ship in some demented demigod version of baseball.
She dropped her disintegrating rolling pin. Three more basilisks (not including the one Hazel neatly home-ran) waited for them on the top deck, the other seven arriving from below, surprised but mostly extremely annoyed to find Hazel and Frank were still alive.
"Eleven," Frank noticed. "Wow. Gaea isn't underestimating us, is she?"
"We need to get out of here," Hazel decided.
"Well, there's only one thing to do in a fight like this," Frank said, sounding as if he were prepping himself for something he was seriously not looking forward to.
"Flee?" Hazel asked hopefully.
Frank turned into a weasel.
Hazel thought they were done for. But actually, the basilisks went berserk. They shrieked in terror, trying to turn t run away. Seeing Frank as an ordinary household pet instantly reminded Hazel of Gale the polecat, and she would have laughed out loud if the sight of a screeching mad weasel chasing away ten terrified monstrous mythological creatures wasn't already making her crack up uncontrollably. The basilisks took a suicidal leap of faith over the Argo II, and ten tiny splashes were audible.
"Wow," coughed Hazel between her laughs, impressed. "Ten monsters beaten by a weasel. Maybe Gaea did underestimate us." She turned to Frank as he turned back into a human. "Where did you learn that trick?"
He shrugged. "Iris," he replied simply.
"But did she mention why they're so afraid of weasels?"
Frank hesitated, then leaned close to her ear and whispered it to her. She made a disgusted face.
"Seriously?" she asked. "That's messed up."
"I had the same reaction," he replied, then gazed back to the streets of Ithaca. "We should think about finding the others."
Hazel nodded. "Gaea would have sent more monsters out for us. I know it." Her shoulders slumped and she sighed. "I hate Mondays."
Together they leaped over the railing of the ship and raced to the streets.
And, no, I did not make up the weasel thing. In the Son of Neptune, Iris legitimately told Frank basilisks were terrified of weasels, although in the book it was never said why.
Pleassse review! Reviews make me happy.
PS: Did you see that new thing on Rick's website about the Argo II? I died laughing.
