It takes one long, tense hour for her to return, bleeding and limping slightly, but in one piece. The tips of her hair are singed a tiny bit, and she has her Yankees cap dangling from one hand had a celestial bronze dagger clenched in the other.
"So," she says, quite nonchalant, stopping in front of where the two boys are parked on the curb. "Ninetieth Street, then?"
Percy's eyes are glued to her leg, where a three inch long gash lays behind torn jeans and is slowly oozing blood. "Your –"
Grover cuts in. "Bleeding. Get used to it. She's got a crazy tolerance for pain. Wait, is your hair smoking?"
Annabeth grins, lines around her eyes crinkling and dimples pressing into her cheeks. "Probably. Hellhounds don't seem to like me a lot, but I'll live. We should go, preferably fast and soon." She twirls the knife around her thumb, and then runs her thumb and forefinger down the blade, wiping off the blackish-red blood and smearing it across her dirty, ruined jeans. Somehow she's acquired a bow, which is slung across her back with a quiver of arrows resting on her hip. "Come on, get up. I don't feel like arguing about this!"
Grover chuckles. "Since when do you turn down a fight?"
She laughs, and turns from snapping her quiver closed to look at them over her shoulder. "When I've got two dozen dracaena tailing me and a very tight time limit to get where I'm going."
