Hi, gang! Tuesday again :) Thanks as always to everybody who reviewed last chapter (I know you guys love my cliffhangers, don't even try to deny it). So let's all give a warm welcome to my fourth and final (and a bit unorthodox) POV narrator, and on we go! Enjoy!

X
NICO

The good news: When the world is completely covered in darkness, you can use shadow-travel pretty much anywhere. The bad news: Shadow-traveling while falling through the air at terminal velocity is freaking hard.

No sooner had the words 'going down' left Leo's mouth than Nico had twisted in his seat and made a grab for each of the people on either side of him with only one goal in mind: get out of that dive. 'Hang on'? Yeah, right. No way was he sticking around to see if the dragon decided to abandon its apparent suicide mission. There were plenty of ways to die that were higher on his list than a fatal nosedive strapped to the back of a sixty-foot kamikaze metal reptile.

The instant Nico was sure his grip on Leo and Reyna was strong enough, he squeezed his eyes shut and jerked his body backward, trying to mentally gauge the distance between them and the ground below (which was extremely difficult considering their speeding velocity). He visualized a shadowy rope tying him to where he wanted to be as the darkness closed in around them and he felt the pressure of the harness belting him to the falling mechanical dragon vanish. The whipping shadows tried to wrench Leo and Reyna from Nico's grasp, but he held on, and a second later the darkness thinned and they fell the remaining four or five feet to a hard, uneven ground.

Nico pushed himself up on his hands and spat out a mouthful of dirt, wincing at the new bruise on his side where the hilt of his sword had poked him hard during the short fall. The low buzzing in the back of his head had intensified a bit, but he ignored it. Ever since Erebos had risen and the war had begun, it had been there—a dull, whispering ache between his ears that just wouldn't go away. The buzzing was his death sense, which seemed to be locked in the ON position with so much madness running wild all over the world. The headache, he knew, was more complicated. The balance between life and death was off-kilter, the border between the human world and the Underworld skewed almost beyond recognition. Now, Nico had a feeling that was because the gods—including Thanatos, the god of death—were held prisoner and locked in slumber. Souls both human and monster alike were swerving back and forth across the border, which was never meant to happen. So naturally, he was the one suffering for it.

"What the—what just happened? Where's Festus?"

Looking up, Nico saw that Leo was running back and forth frantically, his neck craned farther back than should have been humanly possible. "What the heck just—?"

"Would you chill out?" Nico interrupted sharply. Panicking wasn't going to get them anywhere. He glanced around briefly and realized they were in a hilly forest, surrounded by trees. "We're on the ground, should be just below where we were. Sorry I didn't give you a warning, but you said it yourself—we were going down. Somebody had to get us out of there."

Leo turned and fixed wide, anxious eyes on Nico. "What about Festus?" Nico had barely gotten to his feet before Leo charged in and grabbed the front of his shirt, demanding, "You didn't leave him, did you?"

"Have you ever tried shadow-traveling mid-freefall?" Nico shot back, irritated. "It was hard enough just grabbing you two! How the heck was I supposed to drag along a ten-ton hunk of metal? I'm not friggin' Superman!"

"Calm down, both of you," Reyna cut in, climbing to her feet and brushing dirt from her clothes. "Nico acted quickly and very well might have saved our lives, but this isn't the time for arguing about it. Leo, what happened up there?"

"I don't know," Leo said, letting go of Nico and sounding a bit dumbfounded. "He was working fine. Really, I swear. It was like—" He broke off suddenly as a deafening sound of splintering wood rose from somewhere nearby, followed by the creak of metal and a dull boom that shook the ground and made them all stumble. Leo's eyes widened like he'd been stabbed in the stomach. "Aw, no, no, no, no, no," he muttered quickly before turning on his heel and dashing off toward the sounds.

"Wait!" Reyna called after him, and she and Nico exchanged stricken glances before following. They didn't have to go far before they found what they were looking for.

The dragon must have decided to pull out of its dive at the last minute—or, at the very least, slow it down—because the damage wasn't quite as bad as expected. It was still in one piece, albeit one piece that was heavily dented and completely caked with dirt and leaves. Its neck was bent at an odd angle and its wings were crinkled like paper. Oil was streaming from a tear in its hide and another across its snout. One eye was dull and colorless, while the red light in the other was dim and flickering.

The automaton may have survived the crash, but that was more than anyone could say for the surrounding bit of forest. At least a score of trees had been knocked down or broken in half. Huge splinters stuck up in all directions. A deep, mucky trench stretched out behind the dragon's flank where it had dragged across the ground, a few oversized branches flattened in the dirt at the bottom of it. Nico sincerely hoped there was no one around, because the chances of all this going unnoticed weren't exactly favorable.

By the time Nico and Reyna pushed through the wreckage, Leo had already circled the dragon a few times, assessing the damage with a frantic expression and mumbling, "Okay, that's salvageable. This could have been worse. At least that's still in-tact. Where am I gonna find another one of those?"

Reyna huffed, crossing her arms as she took in the scene. "So can you fix it?" she called.

Leo leaned up from behind the dragon's neck, his hands already grimy with oil. "I think so," he replied, serious eyes studying the automaton. "But it'll take some time. Might set us back a few hours."

"Great," Nico grumbled, leaning his back against a nearby unbroken tree. "Wonder where we are, anyway…"

"Indiana," Reyna said at once, and both Nico and Leo shot her incredulous looks.

"How do you know that?" Leo asked.

She rolled her eyes and nodded toward a nearby pile of broken wood. Nico saw a hint of color and stepped forward to see that half-buried in a mess of splinters was some kind of cracked, wooden sign. Beneath the dirt, he could barely make out the words 'Welcome to the Hoosier National Forest' and below that 'Charles C. Deam Wilderness Area. 12,935 Acres. Lawrence County, Indiana.'

"Oh," Leo said lamely.

With a groan, Nico added, "We're still a long way from Death Valley. We'd better get moving again as soon as possible."

"Assuming it's safe to take the dragon," Reyna pointed out.

Leo seemed to tense, but he didn't turn on Reyna. Instead, he climbed onto the automaton's neck and lifted some sort of panel on its back, eyes studying whatever lay beneath it. "I can't figure out what went wrong," he said, sounding frustrated. "Everything was working fine—it still is, aside from the collision damage. He didn't malfunction, I'm sure of it." He sat back, scratching his head at the puzzle he couldn't solve. "It was like… like someone was controlling him from the outside. But that's not possible, so I don't know what—"

"How 'bout a look-back on your definition of 'possible'?"

Nico jumped and blinked at the voice that had come from nowhere before suddenly the darkness over Festus seemed to shimmer. The next thing he knew, standing on the dragon's back was a person—a tall, skinny young man, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four years old. He had short, midnight-blue hair styled into deadly-looking spikes and was dressed like some sort of punk rocker—tight jeans, studded boots, faded leather jacket with sleeves cut off at the shoulders. At least half a dozen belts were wrapped around his hips—some made of chain, some of leather. His arms were covered in tattoos Nico couldn't make out at a distance and were folded across his chest, rows of rope bands tied around his wrists. He was eyeing them all with a smirk that pulled at the twin piercings on his bottom lip, his chin raised in an air of smug amusement.

"Who are you?" Nico asked in a less-than-friendly voice, narrowing his eyes at their visitor. This was not what they needed right now.

The man's smirk widened almost to a sneer. "I know you," he said lightly, pointing a finger at Nico and ignoring the question. "You're Hades' kid. Big fan. That whole 'death-sense' thing? Pretty rad, man, I'm sayin'. The doom around you is way whacked-out."

"What…?" Nico stammered, taken aback. He had no idea how to respond to that.

"Wait-wait-wait," Leo cut in. He'd spun around so fast when the guy had appeared that he'd slid off the dragon's neck and onto the ground, and now that he was back on his feet he was staring at the new arrival with wide, accusing eyes. "What did you say before? About 'possible'…" He shook his head, seeming to come to some sort of conclusion. "You can't have… Were you the one that did this?"

"Whooooa," the man said, his dark eyes seeming to light up as he looked over at Leo. "You got a wicked doom-aura, bro. It's all around you, like… like smoke. Or black fire."

A flash of panic crossed Leo's face and he suddenly scrambled backward, almost falling over again. Nico felt a spark of curiosity at his reaction to the seemingly meaningless jibe, but a second later Leo's expression had hardened and he glared at the guy. "D… Don't change the subject. It was you, wasn't it? You crashed my dragon!"

The man chuckled and shifted his weight, and as he did so Nico realized that he wasn't actually standing on Festus's back at all. His feet were floating just a few inches above the metal surface, like he was standing in midair. And not only that, but he didn't seem entirely there. His whole body was almost ethereal, just a tiny bit transparent like an almost-developed photograph.

"Who are you?" Nico asked again, though this time his voice was edged with apprehension.

"Been waitin' for some of you to try headin' west from that camp of yours." The guy unfolded his arms and placed both hands on his hips, a dark sort of grin appearing on his face. "Name's Moros. Good to meet ya, demigods."

A chill of dread crept down Nico's spine at the name, stories tickling in his memory. Some sort of recognition must have registered on his face, because Reyna leaned over and asked him, "Who?"

Nico swallowed hard, his throat dry. "Moros," he repeated. "The spirit of doom. If he's here to stop us from going west, then we're… Well…"

"Doomed?" Reyna guessed dryly.

Nico lifted a shoulder, eyes trained on the spirit still smirking evilly at him. "Pretty much."

Short, I know. But the next chapter is almost 6,000 words, so there's that to look forward to (to gauge, this one was just under 2,000. Next one's about 3 times as long). Nice and exciting one next time, so just hand tight 'til Friday, okay?

How 'bout a review? Love you guys! Later days!

-oMM