So I realized that last week was the one-year anniversary of this series! Kind of awesome, haha. And we ain't done yet :D

Short chapter this week. Thanks to those of you who reviewed the last one, as always! Enjoy!

We can live forever / If you've got the time

The silence was suffocating.

It was like Percy could still feel his uncle's hands around his throat, squeezing the air from his lungs. He didn't know why he felt that way—they'd done exactly what they'd set out to do. Zeke was dead. For all intents and purposes, they'd won.

But somehow it just didn't feel like a victory. In leaving the organization a year and a half ago, Percy had hoped to show his uncle that he had no intentions of going against him, plotting his downfall. And yet here he was, having ended up doing exactly that. It was as though, intentions aside, Zeke had been right all along.

It was frustratingly maddening. Even in death, Ezekiel Grace still won.

Percy thought he'd feel better when this whole thing was over and done with, but as they drove out of Chicago that morning, having narrowly avoided the police cars that had begun to gather at the base of the Willis Tower, he only felt worse. Their ragtag assassination team—or, what was left of it—sat in silence, no one seeming keen to strike up a conversation. From the middle of the backseat, Percy kept his gaze downward. Every time he glanced up, he saw Piper's eyes in the rearview mirror, their normally-bright colors dimmed with melancholy as tears dropped quietly from their corners. Her hands were stiff on the steering wheel and her mouth tightly closed. Percy knew she blamed no one but Zeke for her sister's murder, but that didn't keep him from feeling guilty. And looking at Piper only made that feeling stronger.

Not that avoiding her eyes helped completely. It didn't matter where he looked—there was guilt all around him, considering the fact that the owner of the car they were driving in was also absent. Percy didn't know if Leo was alive or dead. All he knew was that he'd left him in Atlas's hands. He told himself he hadn't had a choice—if he and Annabeth had stayed, weakened and outnumbered as they'd been, there was a high chance they'd have been captured or killed as well. Not only would that not have helped anyone, but selfish as it was he didn't want to see anything happen to his fiancée, not after he'd just gotten her back. Even if that meant sacrificing someone else. It had been a no-win situation, and Percy had done the only thing he could think of to keep her safe. But in no way did that mean he was proud of it.

Beside him, Annabeth gently squeezed his hand as though she'd been reading his mind. He looked at her to see a sad, brittle smile on her face. Her eyes were dark and stormy with weariness, her stature drooped as though something heavy pressed down on her shoulders. Her injured arm had stopped bleeding and was resting on her lap, and her skin looked pale from a mixture of weakness and exhaustion both mental and physical. Percy tried to return her smile, but he didn't think he managed it completely.

She turned to glance out her window. "Take that exit," she told Piper, who complied without a word.

"You got an idea where we can go?" Percy asked. His voice sounded surprisingly leaden and heavy.

Annabeth nodded. "Reyna's sister, the one who gave Leo and me a place to stay last night. She's about half an hour from here."

Another thick silence fell over the five of them, until Frank shifted on Percy's other side and asked the question they'd all been unconsciously avoiding: "So what do we do now?"

Percy really wished he'd thought about it beforehand. It was like part of him had been so convinced all along that they would fail—he hadn't fully entertained the possibility of success, and what would happen if they accomplished their goal. But now the time had come to realize the truth—the leader of Olympus was dead, and they'd made it happen. The time for denial and hesitation was over.

Letting that sink in, Percy took a slow, steady breath in an effort to steel his voice and expression. "This is big," he said. "When the organization gets word—which they will, and soon—it's gonna be messy. I'm sure there's surveillance on United's floors of the Tower. There's a good chance they're gonna know exactly what happened tonight."

Clarisse turned in the passenger seat to shoot them all a grim scowl. "Which means we've got a choice to make. We either stay and explain, maybe try to help fix stuff, or we leave the country and make sure we're not followed."

Percy shook his head immediately. "I'm done running," he said in a low voice and strong as iron. "I already abandoned the family once, and nothing good came out of it. I'm not doing it again. No way. If that means I've got to answer for everything I've done, then so be it."

"I agree," Annabeth said, her voice just as grave and solid. "I didn't come here to destroy Olympus—not this time. If there's anything I can do to help, I want to do it. I'm the one who pulled the trigger, after all. I'm more than ready to face the consequences."

Percy exchanged a genuine smile of gratitude with his fiancée, glad that she felt the same way he did. Turning to the others, he went on, "If you guys want to run, I won't stop you. We started this crusade. We'll tell the others we forced you to go along with it."

"Not a chance," Piper spoke up without hesitation. She glanced up at the rearview mirror and met Percy's reflected gaze. He noticed that some of the color was starting to return to her irises. "I'm not gonna insult my sister by backing out. She gave her life to stop Zeke's war—to save the family. I have to see this through for her, no matter how it ends."

"Same here," Frank agreed with a brisk nod. "When Zeke threatened you, he threatened family. He wasn't Olympus anymore, not the Olympus I joined, anyway. As far as I'm concerned, we did the right thing." Clarisse grunted her assent with her half-brother's opinion.

Glad to hear them all say such things, Percy leaned back in his seat and grinned. "Thanks, guys. Guess I owe you."

Piper managed a smile, Frank nodded again, and Clarisse grumbled, "We're not doing it for you."

"So what's our next step?" Annabeth asked, glancing out the window and crossing her legs at the knee. "Wait for Olympus's big shots to find out what happened and track us down?"

"No." Percy knew exactly what he had to do next—he wasn't putting this off any longer. "Soon as we get to Reyna's sister's place, I'm gonna call my dad and explain everything. It'll be better if he hears it from me. It's bad enough I didn't let him know I'm alive and back in the States—if I let him figure this out on his own, he's a lot less likely to see things our way."

Annabeth frowned in slight worry. "You think he will?"

After a brief moment's consideration, Percy answered, "Yeah, I do. He's not like Zeke. Neither's Harley. They'll listen to us. They'll understand. They have to."

Slowly everyone exchanged looks of grim conviction, content that the conversation was over. As they all returned to staring silently in different directions, Annabeth slid closer to Percy on the backseat and linked her right arm with his left, shifting her legs so that her thigh touched his. "Are you sure about this?" she asked quietly, her eyes searching his expression and seeking confirmation.

Percy looked past her through the glass of the car window. It was still very early, the sky above as dark as tar. But in the light of the highway street lamps far above them, he could see that a white flurry of snow was falling, drifting through the winter air in such a normal, habitual way. It was somehow strange—for the past few days he'd felt oddly removed from the rest of the world, like in his plot against Zeke he'd been sneaking through some parallel dimension that consisted only of himself, his uncle, and the people who'd promised to help him. And when Zeke had fallen through that window, for a moment it had felt as though that entire dimension had collapsed in a suffocating pile of rubble, shattered like that glass, like everything he'd worked for had finished and disappeared.

But watching that snowfall reminded him that outside his narrow-sighted goal, the rest of the world was still turning. Time was still moving forward. What remained of his family was still out there, unaware that their leader had just been ventilated with six bullet holes and taken a seventy-nine-story high-dive. Olympus would be in chaos by morning. And Percy knew that no matter what he'd done and no matter what would happen in the future, every part of him wanted to help them. He wasn't going to run from them again.

"I'm sure," he finally answered Annabeth, giving her a small smile. He noticed the pained guilt behind her eyes that he was sure mirrored his own, but he couldn't fault her for feeling that way. Instead he did what he could do—he reached his free hand over and pushed a lock of her hair behind her ear, trailing his fingers on her skin and rubbing a spot of dried blood from her cheekbone in what he hoped was a reassuring gesture. "I'm never leaving my family again—you included."

A return smile tugged at her lips. "Good," she replied. She tilted her head toward him and he met her halfway, pressing his mouth gently against hers for a brief few seconds.

It wasn't as though he was looking forward to the talk he was about to have with his father, but he was ready for it. He'd made a promise years ago to protect his family. Running without thinking things through was only causing that family to dwindle more and more. And he was done letting that happen.

Even if it meant answering to his father and remaining uncle, paying the price for what he'd done, family was more than worth it.

Only two chapters to go! Well, one more really, because the epilogue is a bit more removed in this book than the epilogue of the last one was. Important all the same, though.

The next chapter's a bit longer and was surprisingly fun for me to write, despite the lack of action in it. You'll see when we get there ;)

How 'bout a review? Ready for the end of this story? Haha. See you all again next week! Later days!

-oMM