k, i know i skipped updating last week... this excuse is gonna sound really lame, but my teachers are merciless... scheduling tests and quizzes once we got back from winter break... haha, right now i'm supposed to be doing science, but i'm a procrastinator.

i think there's no point in posting that i'm not RR

Sibling Quarrels

When there was no answer, I tried the doorbell, but it must've been broken or something because there was no chime. I resorted back to knocking on the door again.

The door swung open – barely. A girl poked her head out. She scowled at me. "I don't want your damn girl scout cookies. Wait, you're a girl right?"

Being insulted by a girl shorter with me sort of pissed me off. I forced myself to remain calm. "Yeah… Um…s you know Jake?"

The door closed a bit. "Why?"

I was beginning to lose my patience. And, I apparently wasn't the only one. "Hey, you better tell us or we'll knock this door down," Nico threatened.

"Can you?" she sneered.

"Okay, then we'll shoot our way through."

"You don't have –"

Nico held his blade up. The girl opened the door wide at the sight of it. I don't know what she was seeing but usually I'd close my door and then lock and chain bolt it at the sight of a weapon, not open it up.

"I love that trick," he laughed as he stepped in.

"Is everything okay?" Cailey called up.

"Perfectly fine," I answered cheerfully. "Come on up."

"He's upstairs, down the hallway, second room to the left." She watched us go up the stairs with wary eyes and edged to a table shoved against the wall. I could make out a notepad, a pen, and a phone sitting on the surface.

Nico shook his head, and I suddenly wondered why Nico had to scare the girl. "I'm sorry for scaring you but really, we're not going to cause any trouble, I swear. So don't call the police, okay?"

She went for the phone anyway.

Jess tackled her and knocked the phone out of her hand. "What did you even say to her?"

"I just threatened her?"

"Just go, will you? I'll watch her."

Unfortunately, she began screaming his head off. "Help! Help!" she kept shrieking. "Robbers! Drug addicts! The mafia!"

I looked uneasily to the door, relieved that it was shut so no one on the outside would be able to hear. Wasting no more time, I turned around and ran up the stairs. And got knocked down three steps from the top by a guy wielding a baseball bat.

Thank gods I was holding onto the railing otherwise I would've tumbled down the steps. I held my head with my hands, waiting for the guy to start swinging.

"What the hell is it now?" the guy asked the girl who currently had Jess's hat stuffed in his mouth.

She spit it out. "Isn't it obvious? I'm being mauled. They were asking for you, by the way, but I have no idea who they are."

"They don't look like drug addicts or the mafia."

"I needed your attention. You know what I mean."

"You're Jake?" I asked him.

"Yeah. Care to explain how you know my name?"

"Diana told me," I said, but he was already rushing down the stairs. I turned my head – painfully – and watched him envelop her in a hug. She hugged him back. The girl stopped struggling for a second. "You have a girlfriend?" she gaped.

"No, she's my –"

Then the doorbell rang. Cailey peeked into the peephole and then opened the door. I started to ask her what she was doing.

"What are you doing here?" Alec asked. Alec. Of all people. This was where he came after West Point.

"What are you doing here?" she responded angrily. This was the maddest I'd ever seen her. She looked ready to bang him over the head with the bow any minute. "Do you know how worried I was when I went back to West Point only to find that you left Jess by herself while you left to go gods know where?"

"Um… no?" He dropped his backpack on the ground. "Jake, are you okay? I've never seen you express any kind of positive emotion before."

Cailey wasn't done. "Shut up, Alec, I thought you'd died or something. You could've left like an address or something with Jess."

"In my defence, I didn't know you'd come back on your knees searching for me."

"Cocky and arrogant as always," she retorted and retreated to a corner of the hallway.

Alec pulled off his mittens. He reached into the bag and pulled out a loaf of bread, throwing it at Jake. "I got fresh bread. Enjoy it before it gets cold."

"But if we eat all of at once, we'll be starving for another few days," Jake mused. "I'll put this in the fridge." He started to move to the other room but Alec shook his head.

"Power was cut off a few days ago, remember?"

Jake sighed and kept the bread in his hands. "Right. Maybe if you didn't get fired from your job –" he let it drop.

I studied the three of them. They did look pretty thin. And fatigued too. The girl looked ready to fall asleep. "Someone want to explain what's going on? How did my ex break into our home? If she can do it, what about the next time the monsters attack?" Alec rubbed his eyes. "Good thing this time it wasn't the monsters."

I waited for the girl to look blankly at him, but she merely scowled. "They're just demigods… Don't know why they want to talk to us."

"Are you a demititan too?" I asked.

"We all are," Jake said. "Charlotte's my sister."

"You have a sister?" Diana asked. She looked slightly jealous. Probably because Jake felt like a brother to her.

"We got separated during the Great War. She wanted to join the army… I didn't." He nodded to Jess. "I'd appreciate it if you stop choking my sister."

Jess scowled. "Fine."

"So why are you guys here?" Alec looked towards Cailey but she was still stubbornly studying the peeling rose wallpaper.

"Hey, remember me?" I spoke up. "I was at West Point last summer…"

"Yeah, I remember you," he answered. "That day was probably the most interesting day of summer. Plus you kind of stole Atalanta from us."

"So when we got back… I sort of had this idea of a demititan camp. You know, it isn't fair that us demigods get a safe place and you guys don't. The gods asked me to find a couple of demititans to bring them back to camp and see how they do… And if they adjust well then they'll consider giving you a separate permanent cabin." I tried to make my tone cheery and sure but it just came out as exhausted. So we were finally here, at this point that would decide if our efforts would pay off, and I couldn't even sound sure of myself.

"So you want us to be guinea pigs," Jake finally said. "Experimental guinea pigs."

"Well –"

"No way," Charlotte said. "We're doing fine. We don't need gods babysitting us."

"You're doing fine?" Nico retorted. "When was the last time you took a shower?"

"Hey, try taking a shower with no running water," Charlotte yelled back.

Nico turned to me. "She reminds me of you."

I glared at him.

"You could really see the resemblance," Jake commented, which wasn't helping.

"Okay, what were we talking about again?" Nico paused for a moment. "Oh yeah, at Camp Half-Blood, you're safe from any monsters, you get trained, and most importantly of all, the food is great –"

Cailey and I groaned. Trust Nico to come up with that.

" – I bet you're getting tired of stealing bread," he finished.

"What's the catch?" Jake asked.

"Only catch I can think of is that we'll get booted out or killed if the results don't please the gods. Or that we'll be considered as freaks at Camp Half-Blood therefore making it impossible to please the gods while hurting our feelings at the same time," Alec said. "If that's the case…"

"I'm in," Jake announced, unsmiling. "I mean, Diana, it isn't so bad there, is it?"

She just grinned like Jake accepting was the best thing in the world to happen to her, though if I remembered correctly, she'd tried to kill herself during her stay.

Alec and Charlotte stared at him like he was absolutely crazy. "No way," Charlotte said. "What if this is a trap? Just a ploy to get us killed? Since when were the gods welcoming of demititans?"

"They said they won't kill you at the winter solstice," I said.

"They said. Is there any oath binding them?"

"Well uh –" My mind went blank.

"Exactly," Charlotte said. "Who knows, maybe they're plotting to kill us right now."

"It's a chance I'm willing to take," Jake argued. "They're right. Our condition's really bad. If we stay here, we'll starve unless we pull off some grand supermarket robbery."

"Who says we can't?"

Cailey shrugged. "Do you guys really want to continue robbing stores until you're old enough to get a job?"

Alec still hadn't moved since he'd tossed the bread to Jake. Melted snow – water – slowly dripped from his wet hair. It was still blue since last summer, leading me to guess that was his natural hair colour. "So it's a few months, right? Before we get the thumbs up or thumbs down. And we're allowed to leave if it doesn't work out for us?"

"You guys are the only demtitans we've found," I said. "It'll suck for me and the gods will probably give up on other demititans, but yeah. If Dionysus doesn't blast you into pieces first."

Charlotte flicked her eyes back and forth from Alec and me nervously. "Well, I'm not going. I'm hungry. Mind if I take the bread?" She grabbed the loaf from her brother and disappeared deeper into the house.

"Charlotte," Jake called, following after her. "Are you sure?" His voice dropped as he closed the door and I could hear them arguing.

Alec sighed and pulled open a door. A closet. He hung up his worn jacket and closed the door again. It fell, landing on the ground and narrowly missing Alec's feet. He sighed again. "We're running out of duct tape," he muttered and pushed the door back into its frame. It just fell down again, refusing to cooperate. So he left it there and stepped over it into another room. I examined the duct tape that had held the door to the wall. "Hope you're not planning to stay the night. We barely have enough space."

"You have upstairs and all this space downstairs," I pointed out.

"Half the house is falling down in case you didn't notice. So you're staying the night?"

"No. Maybe, if Jake and Charlotte keep arguing. We need an answer. What's yours?" I asked.

He shrugged. "West Point wasn't so bad. Maybe I'll go back there. Jess can come with me, right Jess?"

Jess didn't answer. She began opening doors and slamming them randomly. "Where's the bathroom?"

"Don't do that. We're running out of duct tape. It's upstairs."

Jess nodded and kept her eyes on her feet as she proceeded up the stairs.

Cailey slapped Alec. "You're a jerk," she announced.

Ow," he scowled, rubbing his cheek. "What the hell was that for?"

"You left Jess alone!" Cailey started. "You abandoned her and you expect her to just forgive you and come back with you to West Point?"

"You left us alone," he pointed out. "Middle of the night, you just suddenly disappeared."

"That is not the point, she depended on you to be her big brother –"

"Do you think I left without telling her like you did? I offered her to come with me. I knew Charlotte from the Titan war – before you were assigned with me – and thought it would be better with more people than just the two of us. She refused."

"You left her without an address."

"We didn't have one! Charlotte and Jake were wanderers back then."

"You should've dragged her along with you."

"But that would mean knocking her out every few hours or so and hauling a hundred pounds or so around with me everywhere. You know how Jess is."

Cailey smiled, just slightly. Then the angry look returned. She jammed her hat back on her head and muttered that she was going to wait outside.

"Are you sure?" I asked. "I mean, Jake and Charlotte don't sound like they're done arguing." The door closed. Alec put his hand on the knob for a second, and then raised it to lock the door. I went over to Nico who was listening to the conversation on the other side of the door intently.

"Not much difference," he reported. "She wants to stay, he wants to go. Except now they're both really angry. I think Charlotte called Jake a 'piss-face'.

"She has guts."

We stopped talking since they'd suddenly grown a lot quieter. It was harder to hear the words.

I brought my hands to my face, tired. What if they came out saying no? What if they didn't want to come? And then we'd be back at the beginning again. Lena Evans, a complete failure in finding people who are actually willing to go with her idea… And if that happened, then what about Cailey and Nico and Diana? They'd probably hate me for dragging them along.

The door opened. Nico half stumbled inside and then walked backwards a few steps, clearing his throat and brushing out the creases in his clothes like he'd never been listening.

Jake started. "Okay, so we've decided –"

"No," Charlotte finished.

Jake clubbed her with the loaf of bread. "Yes!"

"No," she said adamantly.

He tightened his fists. "Charlotte, I don't know about you, but I am seriously sick of eating stale bread every single day. There's no power or running water in this house, no heating, and I'm tired of freezing my butt off every time the sun sets."

"Then we'll find another house."

Jake sighed and slammed the door in our faces. They started arguing again.

I slumped to the ground and closed my eyes.

Then things started getting seriously wrong.

There was a scream from behind the door, in the kitchen where Jake and Charlotte were. Nico acted faster than I did, turning the knob and accidentally knocking the door down which was held in place by nothing but duct tape. We stared at the two of them, Charlotte holding an old frying pan in one hand, the loaf of bread in the other, Jake with his arm stuck in the monster's mouth – uh, one of his mouths. The lion one.

If this didn't convince them to come to Camp Half-Blood, I didn't know what would.

I took out my sword and ran at the monster, searching for the right term in my mind. It looked vaguely familiar. What do you get when you have a lion's head and body, a goat's head sticking out of its back, and a snake's head waving behind it?

Chimera.

"Hey!" I shouted at it. "I thought we killed you in Central Park."

It roared flames at me. I rolled out of the way and watched the flames melt the kitchen tiles. Not good.

If it continued this way, the house was going to burn down.

so this chapter is... kind of a filler? it's probably really bumpy and unsmooth so i apologize for that.

please review!