Chapter 22: Boosting cars

I waited on the station alone, the same way I had earlier that day. But much had changed since then. I had a father now, or I had met him. So much had been explained now. Why I was always a person that was more active at night, the shadows were my territory, so the night was my time to be alive. I knew why I could see in the dark and why I felt better hiding in the shadows than laying in the sun. I understood things about myself now that I had no clue of. Being the son of Erebus made sense. But that it made sense, didn't mean that I liked it. For one the guy was a bastard, and being the son of the god of darkness didn't really seem like I had much choice but to be evil. All those things didn't bother me as much as another though...why didn't he help me before? I knew that very few demigods got help from their parents but I had been through so much shit. When I lived on the streets he didn't bother helping me, when I went down the path of a murderer he didn't show me the right path. The first time I met him he decided to test me, how could he do that? He wasn't much of a father. None of the gods seemed like role model parents but after Phthonos, Erebus must have been the worst. As I sat on the bench silently hating my father I dozed off. It was one of those naps when it seems like nothing but a blink. I closed my eyes and what seemed like barely a second I opened them an hour later. Luke just came walking on the platform with Max. Max didn't look too well. I got up and got to them as fast as possible.
"What happened?" We sat Max down on a bench, he wasn't bleeding or anything but he seemed very out of it. His look was dazed and he didn't seem to be able to keep himself standing.
"We ran into a Cyclops, tough buggers to kill." Luke said. "Max got hit pretty hard. He should be fine though, he had some ambrosia." Max had an empty stare in his eyes. I wondered if he could have some kind of brain damage. I hoped not. It would explain that the ambrosia didn't work though. Once the brain got messed up there was little ambrosia could do. "Come on, we'll get him on the train." Max barely stood on his feet without help. In front of the doors of the train stood a man in a blue uniform. The uniform alone made me promise myself that I would never work at a train station.
"Sorry kids, you can't board." He said.
"Wait what? Look man we have our tickets and everything." I said. This train was vital to our planning. If we couldn't get to Chicago we were screwed
"The train isn't leaving today. We have some technical issues. If you talk to someone at the desk they'll show you some hotels. The next train leaves in two days."
"Two days! We need to get to Chicago tomorrow." Our plane to Los Angeles left in the late afternoon, this train needed to ride!
"Then I suggest you hitch-hike or rent a car. The train isn't leaving." This guy got on my nerves. Not long ago I would have hit him right there and then but that wasn't me any more. I controlled my self now. We got Max back to the bench and sat down ourselves.
"Now what?" I asked. With Maximus like this we could hardly travel on foot and hitch-hiking didn't seem like a good idea to me. There were some bad people out there, that or I had seen too many movies.
"We have to get out of here and try to get to Chicago as fast as possible." Luke said.
"On foot it would take at least a week to get to Chicago. How much money do we have left?" I asked. Maybe we could rent a car but it wasn't in our plan so probably not in our budget either.
"About 150" That wasn't enough.
"Is that enough to rent us a car?" But I had to ask.
"Not even close." I knew we were screwed. We had one plan, and it failed. It would take us ages to get to Chicago and from there we wouldn't even be half way. There was no way we were going to get to Los Angeles like this.
"Give me a minute, I'll be back in a second." Luke got up and walked off. I sat there for about ten minutes before he came back. He came back with a silver Toyota Celica. Not very cheap car, and not one Luke could have just gotten out of no where.
"Where did you get the car?" When a friend of yours pulls up in a silver Celica which looks pretty much perfect you start to think: is this entirely legal?
"Doesn't matter, just put Max in the back and leave." Luke seemed anxious. I knew how he got the car. I didn't know he knew how to boost a car but apparently he did. I shouldn't have been surprised. He was the son of Hephaestus and as far as I knew he was the guy that invented the first auto mobile. We put Max in the back seat and drove off. Some people turned their heads but in the end we got out of there without trouble.

Luke and I didn't speak a word for an hour or so. Luke was a pretty good driver. No one would notice that he was an unlicensed driver. I figured it was all part of being a son of Hephaestus.
"So how did you learn how to boost a car?" I asked after a while. We were on the highway, at this time of night it was pretty dead. Max was still on the back seat, he had fallen asleep not long after we left Pittsburgh.
"Son of Hephaestus, I know a lot of handy tricks." Luke said as he shifted gears. The car was manual shifting, Luke didn't seem to be very used to that but he was driver like pro.
"Who's Mack?" I asked. I knew I shouldn't pry but I heard him scream that he was going to kill the guy so I was curious. If Luke hated a person enough to want to kill him it had to be a pretty bad guy. I couldn't imagine Luke hating someone that bad. Of course I didn't know Luke as well as I thought I did.
"Never heard of someone named Mack." Luke wasn't a very good liar.
"Bullshit. Back when we met Erebus, you said you were going to kill him." Luke doubted for a second. Eventually he started talking.
"Back in England, I met this guy with a broken car. I was quite handy with the technical stuff you know. I fixed his car within seconds. I asked him for a ride and the guy told me he robbed a bank and that I had just fixed his get away car. His name was Mack, and he was part of a gang." Luke's story was more interesting than I thought, and it didn't seem at all like the Luke I knew. "Not long after I joined the gang. Burned down abandoned buildings as a distraction. It was easy, fun and no one got hurt."
"I didn't figure you for a pyromaniac Luke." I said.
"I used to be. I burned down quite a few schools and can still make some half decent explosives. That's actually what got me in to the gang. Anyway I digress. One time they asked me to burn down a suburban house, it didn't feel right but the people were supposed to be on vacation so what the hell.. When I set it on fire, I saw someone there. A young girl, barely old enough to go to school. I saw her in the house I had just set a blaze." I could see that Luke beat himself up about it. I guess he should, what he had done was pretty bad. Then again, I had done much worse. I wasn't one to talk. "I went inside, pulled her out. The firemen called me a hero and everything. Sadly the girl wasn't the only on in the house. Her parents they were dead. I believe she's in an orphanage near Liverpool now. Not really sure. Anyway after that with a little persuasion from a friend I left the gang." Luke said. "Over the time I was with them I also learned how to boost cars, there's your story." Luke didn't want to tell the rest. But it wasn't over. The way he told the story made it seem as if he left the gang on good terms. And I highly doubted that he meant that he watched the girl die earlier that evening.
"I'd like the whole story Luke." He looked at me with intense rage. He didn't like to be pushed into telling this. My guess was not many people knew this story. But he told me this much, I had to know it all.
"Fine, you know you pry too much." I shrugged. I had to know what happened. "The gang didn't really let me leave so easily. They sent Mack after me not long after I walked out on them. He came up to me as a friend and shot me right in the chest. After I recovered I went back to school with a girl name Rose. The same girl who persuaded me to leave the gang. She turned out to be a satyr and told me the same old bogus story you were probably told."
"What the good old: you know the Greek gods?" I asked.
"It's such a cliché, if I ever tell anyone about who they are I'm going to think of something original." He never actually did think of something else to say. Maybe he forgot about it, maybe he couldn't think of something original, I never really asked. "Anyway after we faked my own death."
"Wait you faked your own death?" This seemed to be the most amazing part of the story yet.
"Will you let me talk?" He said slightly annoyed. "Anyway we got to New York and went to camp. Well I did, she never made it."
"Sorry to hear that." I said. I knew what it was like to lose a friend, it was tough even after years. Luke didn't say anything about that though. He just continued his story.
"About a year ago, Mack came looking for me. He abducted Maria and got me to come after him. He's also the one that gave me this." Luke raised his bronze hand. "You want to hear a funny thing about me screaming that I would kill him? I already did." That was a shock. I didn't think Luke was capable of that, even if Maria's life was in danger. I just didn't think he could. "I stabbed him, at least five times. I was so angry. We were friends and he stabbed me in the back, and on top of that he tried to kill Maria. I couldn't control myself." Even though I hadn't dreamed that he could do something like that I felt like that Mack deserved what he got. He was obviously one lousy human being.
"Revenge is ugly mate. I know what it's like. It eats you up inside doesn't it? Even after all he did, you can't let it go." It was a subject I knew all too much about.
"I wish I could back time. I wish I had been able to just get him to leave me alone." I had never seen Luke like this. He seemed so sad. Usually he was the one guy you could expect to keep on smiling. But not now. "Mind taking the wheel for a bit? I'm quite tired." I didn't know how to drive, but how hard could it be? I knew most things. I knew what every pedal was, how to switch lights, when to switch gears. I was very good at the theoretical part of driving but I had never actually driven. Back when I was growing up in the orphanage every male orphan dreamed about driving a car later. The ultimate freedom to get away from that hellish place. So we all knew everything there was to know about cars ever since we were ten. It took me a while to actually get the hang of it but after a while I was fine. I wasn't tired unlike Luke. I'd sleep on the plane. We had more than enough time to get to Chicago. In a stolen car perhaps but when trying to save the world you had to make some sacrifices. After about four more hours of driving Maximus woke up. He seemed a lot better after some sleep. Luke was still miles away. Probably dreaming about being back at camp half-blood. That was my guess anyway. After having a drink and something to munch on Maximus started to talk.
"So why are we in a car?" He asked.
"Luke got it. The train wasn't going anywhere."
"Luke can boost cars?" Sometimes it was weird how much Max and I were alike. I asked the exact same question, and that seemed to happen more often.
"Son of Hephaestus, he knows some handy tricks." I wasn't going to tell Maximus the story Luke told me. It wasn't my place to tell Maximus something like that. Maximus unlike me just shrugged. Of course he hadn't heard Luke scream out: 'I'll kill you' to some hallucination.
"I guess." He said as he dropped himself back into the seat. "Yo want me to take over for a while?" Maximus asked.
"Do you know how to drive?"
"Did you think I walked all over the country running errands for Phthonos?" So we switched places. Maximus took the wheel and I went to crash on the back seat. Now that I could lay my head down I noticed how tired I really was. I hadn't slept in two days now. I could still function even with so little sleep but these too days had really taken it out of me. I was happy that I could catch some shut eye.

My dream was even worse than the usual one. What I saw was Samael walking around in a hotel hallway. I figured it was a hotel anyway. There were doors with numbers, room numbers in my opinion. Samael stopped in front of door 316. He stood there for a second, I wondered if he was doubting about something. Eventually he kicked in the door and walked inside the hotel room. There was a girl there, only about 9 years old. She was wearing a white dress and had a pendant in the shape of an owl. The exact same pendant that Jake had, the pendant that turned into Messor.
"You're here for the pendant aren't you?" The girl said.
"Just give it to me and I won't have to hurt you."
"You know I'm not going to give it away. So are you going to hurt me?" The girl sat there looking at Samael without a single sign of fear. She just sat there without moving. I wondered if the girl was even human.
"I think I'll have to. It's not really my decision." Samael seemed so different than I remembered him. He seemed to hate what he was doing while when I knew him he seemed so sadistic and evil.
"You always have a choice. You just turned your back on who you are to get your revenge. And now you've become a thing that you hate." The girl seemed to know everything about Samael. I didn't understand what she meant though. Only now I realized how little I knew about Samael. I hated him so much but I had no idea who he was. All I knew was a face and an obvious alias.
"They abandoned me! They were my friends and they left me for dead. I deserve my revenge." Samael seemed so human like this. I always thought of him as a monster more than a man, but now I was proven wrong.
"Then do what you have to." Samael doubted for a second, and then he pulled his sword and struck the girl down. His face went black, no emotion any more. He bowed down, pulled the pendant of the girl and opened it. The pendant turned into a dagger, was this Messor? Samael inspected the blade and then cut his own hand with it. Blood dripped from his palm, the cut was deep. Samael looked at the blade again, and then threw it away. That's when he started with another thing. He collected everything that was flammable and put them on one heap. He got a small canteen of lighter fluid out of his pocket and sprayed it on the heap and around the room. Out of his pocket he got a match box, he got a match, lit it and threw it on the heap. It burned so quickly. Samael walked out of the room like nothing happened. Leaving behind what he had just killed for. And that's when I realized. Samael was looking for Messor. But why? Phthonos already had it. Unless Jake had a fake, and now Samael was tracking the real one. Phthonos didn't have the real Messor. The real one was still out there...