This chapter contains spoilers for Night Broken, the 8th book in the Mercy Thompson series. If you like the series, but haven't read it yet, don't read this story, go buy the book. My writing can't compare to Patricia Briggs or Rick Riordan's.

Note, I'm skipping a lot of flavor text and background info, I figure if you're reading a fan fiction about a book, then chances are you've read the book and know, at least in part, that information.

I own none of the characters, not even the OC I made as she is part of the PJaO books and anyone is free to duplicate her for their own stories. Writing a story using characters from published books, I certainly can't complain if someone likes my idea enough to run it in a different direction, but please, no slash.

Rick Riordan and Patricia Briggs own all characters.

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I also found the story I got the idea for the Shadow Travel mistake from;

s/9380435/1/Shadow-Worlds by Musafreen.

A really good story, to bad he's pretty much dropped it. I figure since we're all playing around with other people's ideas anyway, as long as I didn't copy exactly, it wouldn't be a big deal. But still, check his story out; it's well worth the read. Maybe we can convince him to restart it?

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The gun on the cover image is what I based Terry's on. It's a real weapon that fires real shells, shotgun in the case of the gun in the picture. Terry's has more decoration, including an engraving of the Drakkon she killed on the handle (made of Drakkon Ivory) and Greek lettering spelling out "End of Infinity" along the barrel. It's also a lot more powerful, but then, most of the weapons used by demi-gods are.

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The Ronald McDonald House Foundation is a real thing. They establish places for the families of children in long term care facilities to stay so they can be near their children, and the children can have someone from their family nearby. For instance; if a young child has leukemia, and the family lives a hundred miles from the nearest treatment center, The Ronald McDonald House would allow for some of her family to stay at low, or no charge, rather than forcing the parents to pay for a hotel room in addition to the hospital bills, or stay home and only visit once per week.

I strongly encourage everyone to give to this organization whenever you have some extra cash. Donation is easy, every McDonalds has a donation box near one of their registers. Please give generously; being alone while in the hospital sucks for an adult, for children, it's much worse.

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If anyone would like to do the story of Terry's first quest, or her parents, give it a whirl. Her father was a Miwok Indian, son of Hephaestus, his last name, Yutu, means 'Coyote out Hunting.' Her mother was the daughter of two different half-bloods, one the son of Aphrodite, the other the daughter of Hecate. Let me know if you're going to try, but bear in mind, the story I established for Terry pushes on some subjects that can easily offend, please tread carefully, and tactfully. Also, in both cases it'd be strictly PJaO, no crossovers.

I'm also still working out how I'm going to work children of two half-bloods. They'd still be half-bloods, but it'd be half-human, quarter one god and quarter another god. I've got a basic idea, but it hasn't played out completely in my mind yet.

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The Coming Circus

Mercy

CRAP, CRAP, CRAP, CRAP! "Oh my God, I'm sorry Tad. It's been such a screwed up morning I completely spaced what day it was. Crap, I missed church as well." I'm thinking that this next coming week is going to require more than a little help from on high to get through it as well.

"Oh, that's ok," Tad says, "I figured out you were having an interesting day when I saw the video on the internet of you with the baby pegasus. Did you know that your house is on a tour bus route?" WHAT?!

"The famous, or infamous depending on who you ask, Adam Hauptman's house is something of a local landmark." Tad adds, "but I must say, I'm not sure I'd pay money to drive by it slow enough to take videos. I'm sending you the link to the one I'm watching. It went up fifteen minutes ago, and already has over two thousand hits."

Dead silence reigns after that. No one here, or at Bran's, is making a sound. I get the link and download the video. Sure enough, it's taken from the back of a bus with a tour guide giving a spiel about Adam, and some of the things the public knows about him. When suddenly a child shouts out and starts pointing to the field next to the house, and sure enough, there's Riverwind, dancing away. The bus slows some more, and several people call for it to stop, but the guide states its company policy not to stop at the homes on the tour, and adds that it's generally a bad idea to invade a werewolf's property.

I'm utterly and completely flabbergasted. How did we miss this? Who and the hell gave them permission to run tour buses to our home? Do they follow us now as well? Are we going to get fanboy stalkers as well? WHAT THE HELL?

OMG! Are they doing tours past my Garage? What kind of person would take a tour like that. I'm starting to have a panic attack when Adam puts his hand on me to calm me. We'll deal with this.

Now everyone is talking and offering suggestions when Tad tells us to be prepared, several news agencies have been pegged watching the video, so we can expect news vans to arrive soon as well. Warren goes off to call Kyle, the video shows him and his client and her children, so it might come up in court. Tony gets a call from his superior, and generally things turn chaotic pretty quick.

At this point, I hear the stomachs on the kids start to growl, and I realize it's been several hours since breakfast, and the kids hadn't eaten before their ordeal to begin with. I ask Tad to swing by the pizza place and pick up the order I'm about to place, along with an attempt to make a coded request for him to come and check out the kids and see if they're fae or something as obviously, Ariana is out for that duty.

Adam notices what I'm doing, and orders Paul, Mary Jo, Daryl and Auriele to leave, as they aren't actually publicly outed as werewolves. Sam, as the official, on record doctor for the pack can stay without anyone getting suspicious, so that leaves four healthy, and one healing (Eric) werewolves, two normal humans, me, and the five kids, four of whom have ADHD and clearly very active life styles, and in any case are all either teens or one preteen. Let's see, twenty five large meat lovers' pizzas should do it. Oh, and swing by the store and pick up several LARGE bags of dog food.

At some point, Sam lends Adam his phone to call his man Jim Gutstein. He has him call all the news organizations and arrange a deal. One camera crew and a single reporter will be allowed into his home the next day for an interview. The crew must share it with every single news agency that DOESN'T show up at his property. They may not allow any footage taken to get into the hands of any agency that does show up, or any agency that regularly deals with independents that do, neatly cutting off the worst of the coming circus. Paparazzi are really not that much of a problem. The aura of really dominant werewolves like Adam will, in general, cause normal people to obey them, or at the very least, scare them away. That and most reporters and photographers have got the standard safety briefing on dealing with a werewolf.

Meanwhile, Tony explains what he can to his boss, and makes arrangements for State Patrol, County Sheriff and local Cops to heavily patrol the roads around the house and arrest trespassers. Luckily, the main road out front has only a small shoulder, and is a POSTED emergency stopping only area, with the penalties for stopping helpfully posted on said signs. Something tells me, there were a few donations to local politicians that went into those signs. None of our neighbors would allow people to loiter about, and the biggest adjoining property was my own old trailer and yard. Since Gabe was away at collage, I gave the Sheriff permission to park there, as long as he kept us informed of which agencies were there, and in the case of federal agencies, the names of the agents and to not allow sound enhancing equipment to be set up. He got a strange tone to his voice when Adam said that, but he's a smart man, he understands that not everyone in the government wants to allow werewolves their freedom. And he's one of those cops who is all about doing what's Right, not really what's legal. Him and Tony get along fine when they talk.

The chaos continues for the next hour. From out of her purse, Annabeth has pulled normal clothes for the kids and they go change. How did she fit that much clothes in her purse, the damn thing looks barely big enough for a tampon, much less five full sets of clothes. Sam is amused by that, and tells me that a long time ago, some REALLY powerful witches could make devises like that, and there are several prominent stories of the fae that have similar things. Even Adam mentions the trailer he borrowed from Uncle Mike for our honeymoon, and how much bigger on the inside it seemed. Maybe it wasn't just the ILLUSION of good engineering. Besides, Terry's gun shows that the kids have the ability to alter spatial dimensions.

The kids come back out, all of them except Nico are wearing jeans and orange t-shirts that say 'Camp Half-Blood' on them, but some of the jewelry is still being worn. In the case of Percy and Terry, the jewelry is magical, so I'm guessing the same could be said for the other kids as well. Nico is dressed all in black, his top hat has become a black baseball cap and his shirt has a quip about getting a sword and killing people with kindness. It'd actually be funny on anyone else, but on him, I wonder if he really did name his sword kindness. I think he senses the gist of what I'm thinking, and he smirks. The kids start to help clean up the kitchen, and Warren notices something we forgot, and quickly moves to keep Tony and Molly out.

Oh yeh, the human bones littering the kitchen. You see, that's how bad this day has been, we're unable to remember something as major as human bones littering our kitchen before we invite cops over.

When Tad shows up with the pizzas, we all start to dig in, and Sam brings several downstairs to Eric. The kids eat with the typical abandon shown by most teenagers, or more like the gusto shown by teenagers who are Olympic level athletes (except Rachel, she's much more sedate).

When Molly and Tony start to wave off the food, Annabeth makes the comment that they might as well eat for free, after all, if we cost her her job, she might not have enough money for food later. Not sure if she meant that to be funny or not, but Tony is clearly taking a dislike to the kids. Whatever the case, they decide to eat. Maybe Molly thought it was actually good advice?

At some point, Terry goes in and comes back out with a sword. I look at her funny until remember the sword that buried itself into our wall earlier.