(A/N, Crappy chapter sorry. Thanks for reading.)

Annabeth's POV

168 hours of horse riding.

168 hours of listening to Percy sing every country song he could possibly think of.

168 hours of the worst torture known to man. I would honestly rather get thrown into Tarturus.

Do you know how long it takes to get to Arizona from Manhattan on horse?

Longer than I can possibly take.

The horses only encourage Percy. The louder he sings the faster we go.

It wouldn't be a problem if Spirit didn't try to dance while he sang. Trust me you don't want to ride a dancing horse.

I'm so glad we're almost there.

Since we're on houses we had to go around all major cities. Add that with the fact that every living thing around me, both demi-god and horse has the attention span of a fly and you get a really long trip.

At least Percy talked them into going as fast as possible.

We reached Arizona today, but now we're walking around looking for a desert hidden by the mist.

We'd been looking around when we decided to take a break and get something to eat.

We were in a small town.

If you ever watched a western that's pretty much what it looked like. Tumble weeds and everything.

We rode the horses up to a small breakfast diner called, The Ancient Pancake. Seemed pretty dumb to me.

It wasn't until after we walked through the door we noticed our mistake. We should have seen it coming really hieroglyphs and ancient pancakes, duh. But instead we walked through the door without our bags right into a desert, which if I had to guess I would say it was names Yivi.

Percy noticing our mistake said, "Well carp."

I gave him a weird look.

Who says carp? Leave it to him to find the cheesiest… I was cut off mid thought when Percy said, "Look."

Sure enough he was pointing a little ways over to where a golden path made out of weird shaped stones glowed.

We walked about a mile to reach it. It was solid gold and when you stepped on it it made a click noise that worried me.

We walked and walked without talking. Percy was humming, but he looked like he was about to pass out. I'm sure I looked equally as bad but it seems the sun would never set.

It was probably over 100 degrees, we had no water, and we had been walking for about 4 hours.

I looked to my right and saw a huge pond. It was surrounded by palms and ferns and I wanted to dive in. I almost stepped off the path when the image flickered and disappeared.

I shook my head and turned to see my family and Luke standing there waving at me. I squeezed my eyes shut.

This happened over and over again.

Percy seemed fine though.

I kept glancing at him and he had this unreadable expression. I wondered what he must be seeing and why he wasn't reacting like I was.

Just as that thought went through my head he came to an abrupt stop, spun, and took off running.

Over to our left was a stream.

Since Percy was running that way either it was real or we were sharing a hallucination.

I took off after him and only caught up when he jumped into the small stream. Looking exhausted he said, "I'm staying here tonight."

I started to argue that we shouldn't leave the trail but he went underwater.

Defeated I sighed and sat down. Percy came out of the water to sit next to me, "I'll take first watch you can sleep."

It was only when he said that when I noticed it had gotten dark. I laid down and instantly fell asleep.

For one happy moment I was fine, then the nightmares started.