I don't know if this showed up last chapter yet, but this is the updated ending that I added after posting:
—-
We reached Washington, D.C. by boat, and apparently Poseidon was so preoccupied with the world war that he forgot to sink us.
I mean, I definitely wasn't complaining.
The half-year that we spent there was just a flurry of getting used to America.
Compared to Italy, this place was practically an alien world.
We lived in a posh hotel that was only minutes away from the school Bianca, Nico and I had been enrolled in, and slowly, we began to get used to our new lives.
Of course, I should've known it couldn't last.
Hades had left us alone after the whole moving event, but just as we got settled, he showed up again, looking rather harried.
We kids had been playing a few feet away from Ma, but when he'd entered, I'd looked up to see what was going on — and I would've realized, if not for Bianca, who shook her head in warning.
"Don't, Callie," she muttered. "It could be about," she lowered her voice, "you know, the war."
We both cast looks at Nico as she said it. He didn't seem to notice, still chatting to himself as he laid out the Mythomagic cards. I let out a breath, tearing my gaze away. "Very well."
I dutifully tuned them out, but couldn't help but freeze when I heard the words, "Certamente. We will stay together. Zeus is un imbecile."
I shot to my feet, looking like I'd just been tasered. "Callie!" Bianca jerked her head up, surprised, but I was hyperventilating.
Memories from my past life ripped through my head, and I remembered.
A conversation. The lightning bolt. A wall of impenetrable darkness. The charred remains of the hotel.
And my mother, reduced to a blackened spot on the ground.
I managed to tune myself back into reality just in time to hear Ma say, "You will not lose me. Wait for me while I get my purse. Watch the children."
She began to walk away, and I rushed to her, screaming, "Ma, NO!"
She half-turned, confused, before my tiny body slammed into her. Not a second too late, the hotel exploded, a streak of white-hot pain suddenly flaring in my shoulder. My head banged hard against a solid surface, and my vision went black, agony coursing through my veins.
But there was only one thing that I thought of as I sank into unconsciousness, bleak and distraught. I hadn't been able to do it. I couldn't save her.
Ma…
Ma was dead.
Alright, and here's the next chapter:
I was floating in the darkness.
I frowned, and even that took tremendous energy on my part. My entire body felt like lead, dragging me down, down, down into the void.
Where was I?
Or, more importantly, I thought with a slight sense of panic, who am I?
My body began plummeting through the darkness, and I heard a woman laughing softly, derisively, at my confusion before I woke up with a start, eyes flying wide open.
A girl of about eleven years stared at me, shocked, before that expression unfurled into one of relief. "Oh, Callie!" She cried, running to me and cupping my face in her hands as if she couldn't quite believe I was there.
A heavy feeling came over me, like something — or someone — was pulling a curtain over my eyes.
Callie, I thought, dizzy. Callie was my name. Callie di Angelo.
Which meant that this girl was, in fact, my twin sister: B…Bianca, right?
"What…What happened?" I asked hoarsely. "Where…Where are we?" Bianca sighed. "I don't know what happened, Callie, but we are in Washington, D.C — America, remember? Pa brought us here to study."
The word Pa seemed to strike a chord in my mind, and I suddenly winced as my head panged with pain, as if something inside was desperate for my attention.
I reached up a hand to massage my forehead, wondering what on earth it could be, when suddenly that strange heavy feeling came over me, and I let the matter go, sleepiness overcoming my eyelids for a few seconds.
It wasn't important. Pa was my father. I did not need to know anything else about him.
I shifted and tried to sit up, making my shoulder suddenly flare in pain. I yelped.
"Callie?" Bianca asked worriedly. "Are you alright?"
I barely managed to lift my other arm to point at my shoulder.
"Hurts!" I managed.
She frowned and peeled back my shirt, which I noticed for the first time, was charred and tattered. I hissed as the fabric prodded at my sensitive skin and let out a shaky breath once it was off.
"Oh," Bianca breathed, her voice trembling. "Uh, do me a favour and don't look here, will you?"
Which meant that whatever injury I had, it was probably really, really bad.
Wasn't that just great?
Not wanting to throw up, I turned my head away, and she rummaged through her backpack for something. "Pa said this would help you," she muttered fervently. "Oh, Callie…"
There was a rustle of fabric.
Suddenly, a cloth coated in some sort of liquid was pressed hard against my shoulder.
I only registered agony for a split second, my vision going white.
"OW!" I screamed, jerking away.
Bianca winced. "Sorry. It'll feel better soon, OK? Just — just hang on a little longer."
I nodded miserably as she wrapped the cloth around my injury again. I bit down on my cheek hard so that I didn't scream, breaths wavering, and a few moments later, Bianca handed me a square of some sort of cake thing.
"Eat it. Pa said it would help."
I sniffled, a few tears leaking out of my eyes, and took the cake, popping it in my mouth and chewing slowly. A comforting warmth spread through me, and my pain lessened. My tears dried and I felt slightly more energetic. The cake didn't taste like any cake I'd ever tried before. It tasted almost…savoury, like one of Ma's —
Ma? I thought, frowning. Who was Ma?
But the train of thought had disappeared.
There was a sharp sound, as if someone had just snapped their fingers.
You do not need to know about your mother! Someone seemed to chide, and I blinked, a hazy feeling coming over my eyes.
I do not need to know about my mother, I agreed sleepily.
Good. Now, sleep. The person commanded.
I slept.
—-
?/?/1941?
I met my little brother Nico a few days later, once my shoulder healed enough for me to move my arm and wake without passing out only a few moments later. His name seemed to strike a chord in my mind, and I had that feeling of something trying to draw my attention again.
A curtain fell over my eyes, and I let the matter go.
Nico, Bianca and I had lived in Washington, D.C. for a year now. We all attended the same boarding school, and I soon realized that the reason why we were staying there was because our parents were both dead.
We literally had nowhere else to go.
(Cue another weird sensation in my head as I tried to remember how, exactly, our parents had passed).
(Funnily enough, I couldn't).
So naturally, Bianca and I theorized that they had died in a bombing during the world war that was raging all around us and that the memory had been so traumatic, we'd suppressed it and forgot.
This seemed plausible, as I had a bunch of long, jagged scars on my shoulder that matched those of bombing survivors, so it was this theory that we accepted as our story if anyone asked.
Every now and then, a lawyer would come by to check on us. He claimed he was sent by the bank, and that our parents had left a trust fund for us, but I had an uncomfortable feeling that he was eyeing me in particular during every visit.
I didn't know why, but there had been this one strange incident when some guys tried to attack us in an alley, except for some reason they were like, twenty feet tall and had only one eye in the middle of their forehead.
I didn't remember much about the attack, only that they'd tried to grab me and suddenly they had been doused in burning, violent purple fire, before disintegrating into golden dust.
…But that couldn't be right. It wasn't physically possible.
The whole scene had something in my mind banging around like some stupid ping-pong game, and the feeling that something was trying to wriggle out had become so intense I'd almost passed out.
I'd tried to tell Bianca, but she'd looked so shaken that I kept silent, not wanting to scare her any further.
Anyway, apart from that…incident, we'd actually had a rather normal school year.
Nico had recovered from his pirate obsession and had now dragged me into fanning over this thing called 'Mythomagic', which was this super cool card game with collectible figurines about the Greek gods and monsters.
I mean, yeah, I'll admit that at first, I'd been a little apprehensive of the game — the name Mythomagic had panged so loudly in my head that I'd nearly thrown up: that's bound to give someone the heebie-jeebies about something.
But Nico had been so desperate for me to play with him that I finally cracked, and the game actually turned out to be pretty interesting.
So naturally we played at our every waking moment.
It drove Bianca absolutely nuts.
I chuckled.
During the summer holidays, the lawyer had returned, saying that we needed to be moved.
I'd protested, of course, because the school we were going to was perfectly fine — I didn't want to abandon the tentative friendships I'd made there — but the lawyer had been adamant.
Bianca pulled me aside and we had a little whisper-argument, with Nico watching us cautiously, before I finally conceded to my twin's pleading puppy eyes.
She didn't want to go against the one person who had access to our inheritance, and I supposed I could understand why.
And so the lawyer made us pack up and took us to Las Vegas, of all places. He took us inside this place called the Lotus Hotel and Casino, which did not sound like a place for little kids like us to be staying in, and then turned on his heel and just left without any further explanation.
I'd have really liked to know what that man had been thinking at the time.
Probably something along the lines of, Oh, let's leave a nine-year-old hyperactive boy in the care of two equally hyperactive eleven-year-old girls in the middle of a casino right in the middle of a world war!
Nothing could go wrong there, right?
In the end, Bianca had to call the manager over and have him give her the keys to our room.
'Room' being an overstatement. The place was practically an apartment. It had three spacious bedrooms that each had their own bathrooms, wardrobes and kitchens, along with a freaking slide in the middle that shot down to the casino level, where there were games and all sorts of cool stuff.
Well, at least now I knew with absolute certainty that Nico was not going to be leaving this place any time soon.
All our rooms connected in a small passageway that led to an absolutely massive trampoline park, complete with foam pits and everything. It was so large, I couldn't even see where it ended.
I kept expecting others to come and join us while we jumped around in there, but the park was apparently part of our 'room'.
Honestly, it made me wonder just how rich our late parents were.
And why didn't I remember them?
Actually, why couldn't I remember anything before Bianca patched my shoulder up last year?
All my childhood memories were just gone. It was almost like I'd taken a dip in the River L —
I stopped abruptly.
The River what?
I strained my mind for more information, but there was nothing. The thought, brief as it had been, was disappeared.
Go figure.
I huffed and folded my arms, scowling at the mirror in front of me, which reflected my visage back.
I was taken aback at how much I resembled Bianca, what with my long, wavy ebony locks and obsidian eyes. My skin was olive-toned just like my other siblings, but the one thing that set me aside from them was the streak of red that shot through the left side of my hair.
I reached up a hand and combed my fingers through it thoughtfully.
Bianca had told me the strange colour was apparently some sort of genetic thing, passed on from our grandmother, but she didn't seem to quite believe it. Nico had thought it was cool, like always, and had tried to test it for 'magic powers' more than once.
I snorted at the memory, already beginning to forget why I'd gotten so fixated on my hair, of all things.
Bianca came in.
"Hey, Callie, we're leaving."
My head snapped up at the words as if she'd just said, hey Callie, wanna cannonball off a tower?
"What? No!" I shot to my feet, strangely panicked. "It — it's so nice here!" I grabbed a lotus flower off a nearby waiter and showed it to her, pleading. "Look!"
But Bianca shook her head. "The lawyer's back, Callie. Summer vacation's…" Her brow furrowed and her eyes glazed over, trying to remember. "Summer's over?" She sounded uncertain.
I felt that something was amiss, but her story made sense.
We'd been in here for about a month — which was pretty much how long the summer holidays lasted.
I let out a groan, getting up from the ground. I cast a longing look back at the lotus flowers, but for some reason they didn't seem as enticing as before. It was almost as if there had been a curtain over my eyes, willing me to eat the sweets, but had now disappeared.
Bianca pulled me along, and we met Nico in the hallway. I was slightly mollified to see that he was just as miffed as I was.
"Why do we keep moving around?" He complained as I took his hand. "I just wanna stay in one place for once!"
"Don't I know it, little brother," I muttered to him.
We exited the Lotus Hotel and Casino.
It had only been a month since we'd entered, but I could already see that a lot of things had changed.
The lawyer who had come to pick us up was different, too. For one, he was wearing a crisp shirt and tie, while the other lawyer had been wearing a suit and had a pocket watch hanging down from his pants.
He didn't say much, just gave us a cursory glance over the top of his dark sunglasses and beckoned us to follow him. I hugged my black coat closer to me as we huddled together in the back of the car taking us to our new school — 'Westover Hall', apparently.
Something in my head ached at the name, and I just sighed in irritation. I'd been getting a lot of those lately, and the random pains didn't seem to serve any kind of purpose, which is why I'd begun to ignore them.
Or had been trying to, anyway.
Sensing my deteriorating mood, Nico leaned over and whispered, "do Zeus's lightning bolts have six hundred attack power or seven?"
I huffed. "Everyone knows it's six hundred, Nico," I said grumpily, folding my arms. "He gets extra movement points for throwing them with his air powers."
Nico grinned. "Wanna play?"
He showed me the card deck, and I stared at it for a few seconds before relenting. "Alright."
Someone had to keep him entertained, otherwise he'd do something stupid, like try to climb into the driver's seat.
Which wouldn't be good, since the car was moving.
Bianca dutifully scooched over a little, giving us room to set the cards up. She watched with a small smile as we began to argue the minute we started playing, and shook her head.
Siblings will be siblings.
"It's seven hundred attack power!"
" —Hey, you're supposed to move those, you got damage!"
"Dionysus is kind of useless, isn't he?"
"No, he's not! His powers are totally sweet!"
A pause.
"...Actually, you're right, never mind! Never underestimate the powers of insanity!"
And so on and so forth it continued.
I didn't know how long we'd been playing, but by the time we reached Westover Hall, the sun had already set.
Nico and I sighed as the car finally rolled to a stop, and packed our cards up reluctantly.
I handed my deck to Nico, who pocketed them with the care of a historian being handed a priceless artefact, making me snort at his overly-cautious behaviour.
I looked up at the dark, ominously spiked gate of Westover Hall, and sighed again — this time in resignation.
This was going to be a long, long year.
Uh oh, the main plot point's startedddd!
To all the pissed off people out there, there IS actually a reason why Callie has forgotten everything!
I repeat, there is a reason for this!
Please read this before you get mad: In the books, Nico and Bianca forget nearly everything about their lives after their mother dies. If Callie remembers, that would create a whole bunch of problems, especially as no one is able to combat the powers of the River Lethe (unless you're Percy Jackson, which she is not).
A reminder that Callie, despite being a daughter of Hades, has not tapped into the full potential of her powers and therefore cannot control the Mist just yet. She is a NORMAL demigod, at least physically.
Don't worry, she WILL remember eventually (~character development~~~~) but for now, yes: she's forgotten, and it's going to come bite her back in the ass later ;)
