To Find A Place
By: Moonlightbear
Summary: It's the place where love takes over hate, where confusion becomes clear vision, where once you were lost, now you are found. This is the story of Lilias Connor, a girl who seen too much, but knows so little. Formally, It's a Hard Demigod Life…
Disclaimer: these books are so good I wish I could say I wrote them, but I didn't… please give it up for the brilliant Rick Rioridan! Although all characters you know are his, but the ones who are new are mine and I'm proud of it!
Chapter Five: The Journey Begins
Mom couldn't get us into another co-ed school, like the two previous years, so she sent us to a brother/ sister school in Wyoming. They were two separate schools about 100 miles a part, but anytime there was a dance or sporting practices the schools got together. One was for boys, the other for girls. I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I missed having Eli with me at school. It just wasn't the same.
This was an O.K. school, nothing wonderful about it. No horses, I was so bored in my free time. There were no interesting people to make friends with. The only person I talked to on a regular base was my room mate, Helen McKinnins. I could talk with her until she started to preach. She is the president of the bible youth group in school and the biggest bible thumper I've met. When she preached, I disappeared, it drove me nuts.
I really missed Eli, and I know he did too. He'd text me constantly, and I did the same. I can't tell you how many times I got my phone taken away in the middle of class. When we went home for break, mom told us off; she was notified every time they confiscated our phones.
For the winter term mom called the school and had a long talk with mine and my brother's building moderators. On Monday mornings the moderators took our phones and returned them on Friday night. Funny enough I made a friends this way. Another girl had the same problem, she used her phone so much to talk to her friends back home, and her dad found out. Every Monday morning we had to turn the phones in and all through breakfast we just complained and ranted to each other. It was great fun.
It was the first week in May, less than a month before we get to go home. I was packing my math book into my bag for my last class of the week. I opened the door to leave when the phone in my dorm room rang. I picked it up; it was usually my mom, Helen's parents, or the moderator. "Hello?"
"Oh, thank the gods, Lily! Are you ok?"
"Yeah, mom… What's going on?"
"Ok, I need you to listen to me closely, and do exactly what I say!"
Twenty minutes later I was in the front office, signing myself out. The headmistress was on the phone with my mom as I filled out the papers. I was nervous; my mom didn't tell me what exactly happened to Eli, but I knew it was bad if he was in a taxi cab. I was waiting for him now and then we we're to head to Salt Lake City, UT. It was the closest place that had a train station and mom told me to go there and open a locker. Supposedly, after that, everything would be explained, but I had to get there! I really hope Eli is okay; I wouldn't forgive myself if something bad happened to him.
The taxicab came squealing into the front parking lot and I saw Eli huddling inside. I threw opened the door and jumped in. "Eli!"
"Lily!" He cried and hugged me for dear life.
"Oh my god, are you ok? What happened? Mom wouldn't tell me what happened!"
"The lion! A big elephant lion chased me!" He mumbled in to my chest.
"Excuse, please close the door and where are we heading ma'am?"
"What?" I forgot there was a dude driving. I grabbed my backpack, that I dropped outside when I saw how distress my brother was, and put it between my legs and shut the door.
"It's coming back!" My brother whimpered.
"Train station, Salt Lake City and step on it!" I told the cab driver. "It's ok," I whispered to my brother to calm him down. The cab wasn't moving yet. "What's wrong? Why are we moving?"
"Money, you have some child?"
"My mom told me it's paid for. Didn't my brother give you something?"
"I gave him a big gold coin mommy hid in my backpack." Eli said taking his head away from my chest to speak clearly. "It gives us a trip to anywhere we wanna go."
"Exactly, so take us where we want to go, NOW!" The man gave us a dirty look, but did as I said. He started speeding through deserted roads. There was no one around for miles. "Should you be going this fast?" I asked. He was going at least 30 over the speed limit.
"Do you or do you not want me to step on it and get you to where you want to go fast?"
"Well, yeah, but if the police pull us—"
He cut me off. "Police won't stop us, not with your payment."
"Really."
"That's what I was told… Pretty much all we were told during orientation 10yrs ago." The man said in a foul mood. He had to listen to these kids and not get paid; he hated this!
"Have you taken others with coins? Who were they? Where did you take them?" I asked. Mom was really cryptic and I wanted to know more about what was going on; if this guy had the answers, I wanted them!
"No, you're the first, kid. A reminder came out, where the receipts come out. Now if you don't mind, I'd like to keep my eyes on the road, concentrate, and not talk to little children crying in the back. We're stuck together for another two and a half hours, and I don't want any trouble!"
And with that he began to ignore us. He was so rude! Anyway, he told me we'd be getting to our destination an hour ahead of schedule, which was good. I turned to my brother, pulled him away and looked him in the eye. "Now, tell me everything… What happened?"
He told me he was playing soccer with some of the other kids, when panic spread throughout the campus. A rhino was loose from the local Zoo. When I asked what Zoo, Eli just shrugged. He told me it wasn't a rhino when he saw it. "People were lying, just like when they said it was a dog, at our last school!" I blew up at that. The cab swerved slightly and the driver glared at me. I yelled at Eli, against my better judgment, but he lied too. We argued, but eventually I let it go. He didn't realize those people were wrong until these people were wrong too. "I just believed the teachers and you didn't say I was wrong either." At least I wasn't nuts; well, either that or we're both nuts.
My brother explained that when the rhino turned past the building, he said it was really a lion as big as a pickup truck. It was huge with orange fur. The thing saw him and raced after him. Eli did the same thing I did the year before, he ran into a set of woods. Ever notice that the borders of a boarding school are always a forest of some kind? Anyway, he ran as fast as his feet would carry him. The lion was slowed down by the trees; the trees were huge, some fell under the giant's weight while others blocked its path. Eli climbed the biggest tree in the whole forest; he told me it was called 'The Tree of Three.' It was planted a few hundred years ago when a family with three sons owned the land. One of the sons descendents opened the school in 1894, and opened the sister branch in 1918. The lion wasn't like the horse, that sensed I stopped running, the lion continued to race off into the distance. My brother didn't move for over an hour, just to be sure, but the lion didn't come back. He wondered the woods for a while before finding a small road. Eli followed it, hoping it would take him back to school, but the gas station he found was good enough. "I called mom from there and told her everything I just told you. She called the cab. She told him where to go. She told me about the coin. I was glad I picked my bag up when people started freaked out; I had it with me at the gas station. What… what did mom tell you?"
I told Eli about the locker and the train station; I told him it didn't sound like we'd be going home. The way mom talked to me I felt like it would be a long time before we'd see her again. After a while we settled into our seats and relaxed. I was listening to my MP3 player when Eli squeezed my hand. "I think it's coming back." He whimpered. He was scared.
"Shhh, it's ok." I looked around us as we sped down the roads. There was nothing there. We sped past yet another cop but they didn't bother me anymore. At first they made me nervous, but after the third one I realized they weren't going to come after us. It took me ten or so minutes to calm him down. He was really tired actually and fell asleep. About a half hour after that I heard a siren behind us. A motorcycle cop was pulling us over. "I thought you said they're not supposed to stop us…"
"They're not,"
"Then why are we stopping?"
"Because I'm not going to be chased by the police all the way to the train station!"
"But-"
"No buts kid!" And he slowed to a stop on the side of the road.
The cop stopped six feet behind us and walked up to the driver's side of the cab. He was a young guy, in his twenties. He seemed nice. "Hey you guys," He said. It was weird, like he was doing a social call rather than writing a ticket for excessive speed. "I'm Officer Daley, and well truth be told, curiosity killed the cat. I just have to know; you're going well over the speed limit, but we're not supposed to pull you over. Can you tell me why?"
"So why did you?" I mumbled in the back, before saying. "It's just the way things are."
The cab yelled, "Hey! You don't talk to adults that way!"
Did I mention I hate our cab driver? The cop and him talked for a while and I was getting annoyed. Five minutes past and I couldn't wait any longer maybe it was because of my ADHD, or maybe it was the tension I felt rising in the air. "Excuse me!" I butted in rather rudely. "I know your curios, but we don't have all the answers and my brother and I have to get some place. So if you don't mind, which you shouldn't since you were never supposed to pull us over in the first place, we need to leave."
"Young lady, you do know that talking back to a police officer is not a smart thing to do, right?"
"Yeah, and you not doing your job is just as bad…"
The cab driver turned in his seat to face me and said with a nasty sneer, "Who do you think you are? Royalty?"
I didn't get a chance to reply because the sky lit up like a Christmas tree. Moments before it was a bright sunny day, but now cloud covered the sky and a large flash of lighting flashed across the sky. The cop and cab driver started gabbing about the crazy weather, and how cool it was. I didn't think it was neat, I was stunned silent. To me, it felt like a warning. "We, um, we really need to get going, sir." I said as I finally got my voice back.
"Just wait!" The cab driver snapped at me.
Suddenly my brother, who'd been asleep, practically jumped into my lap. His eyes were wide and fearful. He looked ready to burst into tears. "Eli, what's wrong?" I barely got the words out before I heard: thump, thump… thump, thump… thump, thump… The cop, the cab driver, my brother, and I looked behind us slowly… We saw it galloping down the road, a huge, enormous, -
"Rhino!"
-end chapter—
I really hope those of you who have read my story really like it and if you do then please PLEASE REVIEW! THX
