This is the first of the final three instalments of this story! I was commissioned a piece around 3000 words, but that's too much to read in one go so I'm uploading it in chapters instead.

Morris

The noise had come from the beach they had just left, and as Nico and Morris sprinted down the hill they could hear screams from mortals.

Morris looked toward Nico and saw he had his teeth gritted with concentration. Sweat stood out on his skin, glinting underneath messy blue-black hair. He looked good, and Morris wasn't totally sure how she felt about that. He was cute, sure, but despite her initial bravado, she was nervous. They had only just met and Morris got the feeling that Nico was just as bad at relationship stuff as she was. Thankfully he hadn't freaked out too much about the gender transformation thing… Morris was glad, because she didn't often meet other demigods, but she knew that even amongst half-bloods her ability was weird.

Still, she had more important things to worry about for the moment. Now they were at the beach, Morris could see a crowd gathered at the end of a jetty. Normally mortals fled from monsters – maybe these ones were particularly clueless. The demigods pushed through the crowd, relying on the Mist to disguise their weapons as fishing nets or tourist paraphernalia.

Where was the monster? Morris hated searching them out. She preferred a straight up fight, with the outcome decided as soon as possible so she could get back to her business. She and Nico wriggled through to the front line of people, brandishing their armaments, to see-

-a child caught under a fallen piece of a jetty.

The crash they had heard from inland must have been the jetty's infrastructure cracking under the weight of so many tourists using it as a platform for crabbing and jumping into the waves. Morris, who was around six feet tall, was waist-deep in the waves – but despite the relative shallowness of the bay, several planks had broken away to form a mound of wreckage, pinning a toddler underneath. He was completely submerged, gulping in water as he struggled to move himself from the debris. He couldn't have been more than three, and Morris could sense the water claiming him. Oceanus was such a primordial god that Morris didn't enjoy the ability to commune with sea life as easily as a child of Poseidon might; she was better at controlling the waves, sensing their mood and fighting with sea monsters.

Controlling the waves.

"Nico, keep the crowd back," she ordered, an idea flashing through her head like lightning. "I'm going to pull the water off him."

Nico nodded once like he understood. "I'll remove the planks." Morris didn't see how such a skinny teenager could have the strength to pull heavy timber from the sand but as she began to focus on the waves, willing them back out to sea, she gasped and almost lost concentration. A skeletal hand had emerged from the ground, followed by an entire skeleton. Perhaps the sand had preserved the corpse, because it still wore scraps of clothing – and judging by the smell, some flesh remained on its bones. All around the fallen jetty, a crowd of zombies pulled themselves from the ground. Some formed a barricade between the watching crowd and the demigods; others pulled the jetty away from the child, who had stopped moving.

So Nico wasn't joking about controlling the dead.

Gradually, with Morris keeping the water at bay – literally – and Nico using skeletons to manoeuvre the child free, the crowd quietened.

After what seemed an age but in reality must only have been a couple of minutes, a skeleton grasped the child under its armpits and hauled it from the water. Morris focussed again and manoeuvred the water from the child's lungs. Nico took him from the skeleton, muttered what sounded like a prayer to Hades and handed him into the outstretched arms of his hysterical mother. As the adrenaline wore off Morris could hear the wail of sirens – a mortal had called the emergency services, which meant that demigod services were no longer required. Before Morris could suggest they vacate the premises lest a bystander notice them, Nico had taken hold of her arm and pulled her into a pitch black vortex – the last thing she saw of the b each was the skeletons sinking back into the mud.