A Touch of Destiny

by Lady Dawson

Chapter Five: Sisterly Talk

When I woke, I wasn't exactly sure where I was, because the ceiling above me was a frilly pink, not at all like my bunk at the Hermes cabin and it certainly wasn't my bed back home, because I've got some of my artwork pinned above my bed, so it took me a few minutes to remember where I was and it wasn't until I was sitting up in bed, looking around at the cabin that I was sleeping in that it finally hit me.

My mother had claimed me. I was a daughter of Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love.

Slowly, I slid out of the pink, frilly bed, taking a look around at all of my brothers and sisters that were already up and preparing themselves for another day at the camp.

"Morning, Lily," Valentine said with a smile at me as I made my way into the showers, carrying a few of my belongings.

"Good morning," I said nervously back. A few of my sisters hadn't exactly given me warm welcomes and more than a few of them had been . . . oh, how shall I put this and remain a lady? They had been hostile towards me when they realised how unusual of an Aphrodite girl I was.

Valentine grinned at me as she saw my nervousness. "Natives giving you trouble?" she asked.

I looked down. "Well . . . a little bit."

She shook her head. "Don't worry about it, I'll talk to them. It's just because you're new. Once they get to know you, they'll back off a little bit. But you're the first daughter of Aphrodite that we've ever had whose actually been a pretty good fighter. I mean, nobody in our cabin has ever actually managed to fight off a daughter of Ares."

"But wasn't that the whole point of the game yesterday?" I asked, a bit confused. "Wasn't that what I was supposed to be doing?"

"Yeah, but our mother isn't exactly a warrior goddess," Valentine explained to me as I stepped into the shower, weaving my hands through my hair as I shampooed it. "That's reserved for Athena and Artemis or . . . well, most of them besides Mother. She's the goddess of love, not battle. So it kind of makes sense that a lot of us aren't good fighters."

I nodded as I mulled through this. "Yeah, I guess that makes sense," I admitted as I washed. "Nichole is gonna be getting a lot of grief over my whipping her butt, isn't she?"

"Yep. Don't worry, though, it's about time that somebody whipped that girl into shape. She's got an attitude problem and it's about time that somebody curved that behaviour. Better keep an eye out for her, though," she warned me, "you never know if she might try and stick a knife in it."

"Is that literally or figuratively?" I asked, only half-joking considering that this was a camp for warrior training and we actually did carry around lethal weapons that could kill and wound people.

Valentine only sighed. "We'll just have to wait and see. But like I said, don't worry about our cabin, I'll give them a few words of warning. They'll back off in a couple weeks. Hang in there."

"Yeah, I'm trying," I admitted. While I was glad to know who my mother was—and now that I knew the truth, all that talk from my dad at how beautiful my mother was actually made some sense, considering she was the goddess of beauty—I was actually kind of nervous at how different from my siblings I was. Even though Valentine was nice to me and a few of the others were at least pleasant and cordial, a lot of them didn't like how different I was. All they seemed to care about was magazines and shopping and worrying endlessly about their appearances.

Me? I was fine with the way that I looked and at twelve, I wasn't about to start putting on make-up just yet. That was reserved for when I was actually a young woman instead of just a girl and while I was starting on the bridge to womanhood, I was only just beginning to cross it. I wasn't there yet.

And like I said, while I didn't mind going shopping, I didn't spend endless amounts of time at the mall, worrying about finding the "perfect" top to wear to school on Monday. Not to mention, Dad—while being a really good artist and owned his own gallery—had a limited income and we didn't really have the money to spend endless amounts of cash at the mall every day. Not that I really minded; as long as I had plenty of paper and pencils to draw with, I was more than happy.

"Did you ever meet our mother?" I asked my sister, who chuckled as I stepped out of the shower, fully dressed and proceeded over to the mirrors to brush out my tangled hair.

"Once," she answered with a nod. "It was a few years ago, before I even knew about this place. All I really knew back then was that I was different and that my dad was a jerk." She shook her head, anger making its way across her pretty features. "Ever since I can remember, my dad's ignored me, acting like I was in the way instead of actually being there for me and being my dad. He cared more about parties and drinking and having fun than he did about me. Mother . . . well, he's a musician and most of his songs are love songs, which is how she fell for him in the first place, I think. He wrote her a beautiful song and she fell for him. But he and his band members were always on the road and he wasn't interested in having a kid to drag him down, so he left me in the care of my aunt, his sister. But she didn't really care about me either, more interested in her work than caring for her irresponsible brother's kid." Valentine was bitter as she said that. "So she made sure that I paid my dues, helped out around the house, making sure that everything was spick and span by the time that she got home and if it wasn't, then she was very cranky. I was twelve when the monsters started coming and she blamed me for it. So I left, packed up my stuff in the middle of the night and took off. I didn't even know where I was going or what I was going to do. I think I was somewhere in Ohio when she showed up. I thought that she was an actress or something, from the looks of her, but she just smiled at me and told me that she was my mother. I couldn't even believe it, but I knew it was true. She took me to a bus and told me that there would be someone waiting for me when I got off. And sure enough, Chiron was there, waiting for me and I've been here ever since." She shook her head. "Don't hold your hopes on meeting Mother, Lily. She might help us out on occasion, but the gods are too busy with their duties to spend more than a few brief moments on occasion with their kids."

"I'm sorry about your dad," I said quietly, truly meaning it. It had never occurred to me just how lucky I was to have had my dad. I mean, he actually gave up everything for me, gave up everything that he had ever loved to open up an art galley so he could pay the bills and did everything in his power to keep me safe from harm. The idea that he could have just abandoned me and went on his own way had never once occurred to me.

"Yeah, I'm sorry about yours," Valentine said with a smile at me as I tried to brush out my hair. "Here, let me give you a hand."

She walked over to me, abandoning applying her lip liner to take my brush from me and gently began to brush out the knots in my hair, sweeping them out of the way rhythmically.

"You have very fickle hair," she commented with a laugh. "Pretty, but very temperamental. But there we go," she said as she brushed it all out and pulled it back into a ponytail to keep it out of the way. "So, we've got archery this morning, so try not to make all of us look bad, okay?"

"That might be a problem, archery's the thing that I'm really good at around here," I admitted.

"I know," Valentine said with a twinkle in her eye. "Get out of here, kid. I'll see you in the mess hall."

With a smile, I obeyed, heading out of the showers, back to the cabin and replacing my stuff before I followed the now familiar path towards the mess hall, almost joining the Hermes table by accident before I remembered that I was supposed to sit at the Aphrodite table now.

Stefan, who was chatting with one of his sisters, waved to me as I passed him and I smiled at him, grinning wildly as he got to his feet and headed over to me.

"Daughter of Aphrodite, huh?" he asked with a grin.

"Yeah," I agreed with a laugh, shaking my head as I looked up at his grey eyes. "Who would have ever guessed that one?"

"Not many," he answered, shaking his head. "But it's cool. I was kind of betting that you'd be one of us Athena kids, but I'm kind of glad that you're not." He said this with such finality and appreciation that I wondered what he really meant by that. "Anyway, I'll see you later at the arena for sword fighting. By the way," he added, "nice job with Nichole yesterday. I think she's still sore from the thrashing that you gave her."

I rolled my eyes. "Jeez, I wasn't trying to hurt her. Well," I admitted, "not really, anyway. I was just—"

"Training," Stefan finished up for me. "Yeah, I know. Don't worry, she'll get over it. Eventually. But we'll work on your sword fighting, okay? I think that you've got the archery part covered. Even Brandon said that he was thinking about moving you up to the advanced classes or at least letting you help him out as an assistant," he said with a grin at me. I shoved him playfully as he headed back over to his table and I moved towards my own, where my brothers and sisters had already shown up. A few of them gave me sullen looks as I joined them while a few gave me warm, friendly smiles, but Valentine was really the only one to really talk to me, so the conversation was pretty much nonexistent all the way through breakfast.

Whatever. I wasn't so used to being included that I expected to be welcomed by everybody. I rarely had anybody to talk to during school, so the fact that I did have a few people that I talked to on friendly terms—Valentine, Eli, Brandon—and one person that I actually considered a friend—Stefan—was a plus in my book.

At the archery range, I managed to get a perfect score on the targets, even managed to split one of the arrows right in the middle, getting me a lot of dirty looks, which Valentine only returned, silently telling them to back off of me. Brandon seemed to enjoy it, though; apparently, it had been awhile since there was a daughter of Aphrodite who was a good fighter and the fact that it was archery that I was good at was bonus points as far as he was concerned.

Since none of my siblings were really talking to me much, I spent as much time as I could away from my cabin. Stefan was always around for a shoulder to lean on, plus extra practice with sword-duelling and Ancient Greek. I still could barely even understand it, but at least the words weren't floating off of the page, which was a vast improvement to English.

Eli had been by a few times since I had gotten here, but he was heading off for a new assignment soon, so there wasn't much chance to talk. Apparently, most half-bloods are put under the protection of a satyr, who protects them until they are discovered by monsters and then they're taken to Camp Half-Blood. I was a rare one, not to be discovered by Chiron or the satyrs, but Chiron explained that children of Demeter and Aphrodite aren't powerful forces, so there are many of us that live peacefully in the world.

There were times that I would have killed to have my dad back, but I had to admit that I actually liked it here. I had never exactly fit in back at my regular school, had never been able to make friends easily. Here, I felt more at home than I had felt in years.

As weeks passed as I grew more and more adapted to life in the Aphrodite cabin—and Valentine was right; they did back off, though were still a bit wary of me—I had the feeling that things were about to change again.

There was a tempest upon the horizon, one that not even the gods themselves had foreseen. An unseen force was heading straight towards us, threatening the very core of the universe and little did I know that I was smack in the middle of it.

Stefan and I were sword-duelling in the arena, with Stefan trying hopelessly to teach me to fight. I'll admit it; while I'm almost an expert at archery, I'm next to hopeless when it comes to swords. I'd gotten lucky in that fight with Nichole—she was still angry about that, by the way—not to mention, I had actually used my bow in order to defeat her rather than a sword, but you'll never convince Stefan of that. He really thinks that swords are the way to go, but I think that's only because he's not as good an archer as he is a swordsman.

"Okay, step back," he instructed me, "and to the left, then forward and parry." I tried to mimic his steps as he showed me what he meant, moving the swords slowly together, gently clashing against mine. "And again. Forward, then back, try and watch my movements before they happen. Try and anticipate what my next move is gonna be."

"I'm never gonna get this," I sighed, but did as he told me, managing just barely to block his next attack.

"Yes, you are. Now block!" I had to dive out of the way and slam my sword up to block his next attack and moved into a defensive position as we battled our way around the arena. A few of the other campers looked around at us as we fought.

Not that it really did much good; Stefan still managed to knock my sword out of my hand half a dozen times and I had to dive out of the way to avoid getting hit by his sword. Thank goodness my reflexes are quicker than an average human's, ensuring that my instincts get me out of the way faster. I was getting annoyed though; I'd been here about a month and my skills as a swordsman were still much to be desired.

And when I get annoyed, I tend to get angry and when I get angry . . . well, you saw what happened with Nichole. Blame Dad; he was the one who had that Irish temper, as he called it, and I got that from him. So getting angry kind of gives me heightened senses in battle and I fought back more fiercely than I'd done all afternoon and just when I thought that maybe, just maybe I might actually beat Stefan just once, a voice called out, "Enough! Halt."

I looked around to see Chiron walking towards us. After my first meeting with him, I had somehow gotten used to the fact that there were centaurs roaming around the world, but what I wasn't used to was the grave look on his face, suggesting that there was something wrong. I exchanged a worried look with Stefan before Chiron headed for us, looking at the two of us.

"Lily, Stefan," he said calmly, "if you two could come with me please. There are some things that we need to discuss."

"Discuss?" I asked anxiously. "Discuss what?"

"This conversation is better left for safer quarters," he replied, gesturing for us to follow him. "Come, let's talk up at the Big House." He trotted out of the arena and I looked at Stefan quickly, but he only shrugged before he headed after our teacher.

After a moment, I followed them, wondering what this could be about.