Chapter 1: The Runaways

The wheels on the bus go round and round, and any moment they might just stop. Thalia wished they would. Soon.

There were too many people on the bus. Grover and Luke pressed against her on each side, while Annabeth squirmed on her lap, alternatively leaning over Luke to spy out his window, or over her shoulder at the window at the back. They were on open road. Nothing to see but grass and trees and the storm cloud covered sky. Thalia wrapped her arms around the tiny blonde daughter of the wisdom goddess and tried to settle her without voicing her irritation. However cunning her parentage made her, and no matter how well she handled a celestial bronze knife, Annabeth was only eight years old, and eight year olds tended to cry when snapped at by their 13 teen year old best friends.

Grover was antsy, too. The back of the bus was full up, so they were forced to stuff themselves in a row beside the middle folding doors. His head swivled up and down the aisle, checking and double checking and triple checking every other passenger for scales, tails, and unibrows. From the way he chewed on his backpack, she knew he smelt something. A satyr's nose was always good for sniffing out monsters. But he didn't say anything, and he wouldn't. Because as far as satyrs went, Grover wasn't exactly the top of his class, and his paranoia had delayed them far too much already.

Thalia didn't mind that he kept his mouth shut. It was enough that she knew he could smell something.

Luke's arm wrapped around her shoulder, casually, like they were boyfriend girlfriend and did this all the time. Thalia smiled and leaned into him, like they were normal. That was always the play when they were being watched, and Luke had a sixth sense for unwanted attention. Those shoplifting genes of his acted like a passive form of the ADHD that wired most half-bloods for combat and made them unsuitable for non-life-threatening activities like taking notes in class. There was never a time when Luke wasn't aware who was around him, and where they were looking.

Four unsupervised minors taking a bus into Gotham City attracted less interest then a person would think, if they weren't a runaway. But as every half-blood knows, mortals will always pass the buck. They do not want you to be their problem. The smart half-blood realizes quickly that that means, do not be their problem. The angry, hurt, incredibly stupid half blood, that all of them are at some point, will take intentional obliviousness as a challenge. You don't want to deal with me? Fine. But what if I want to deal with you?

Thalia pressed her mouth against Luke's neck, so he could better whisper in her ear. His pulse beat faintly against her lips. Steady, but now fluttering, and with a deep breath back to steady. It pleased her, almost as much as it scared her.

"Old lady two rows back, on the left. Knitting furiously."

Thalia frowned and shook her head softly. It was impossible. The Kindly Ones were close, but not that close. Certainly they hadn't been able to catch the bus before the half-bloods used it to escape Allentown and the hounds of hell.

Annabeth pushed her face into their conversation. Her expression said yes, I know exactly what you are whispering about and you should have just asked me in the first place. "It can't be her," said Annabeth. "I tried to prick her with my knife when we got on and I ran to the back to check for seats. It went right through her arm, and she didn't notice a thing. Completely mortal."

"You what!" Thalia hissed.

Annabeth shrugged, and pushed her hair back behind her ear. "I don't trust old people anymore."

Luke laughed and Annabeth blushed and Thalia hid her smile behind her sleeves.

Then Grover screamed, and something big hit the other side of the bus. The bus rolled and bounced and screamed as it left the road. Glass, metal, bodies, luggage; all beat against each other; noise and pain; a hurricane in a broken bottle. What was left of the bus landed upside down. And then they were kicked like a soccer ball, and thrown further into the grassy plain.

The bus went round and round, and then it hit the trees. And there it stopped.

The giant had red hair. That was the only special thing about him. He had two eyes, ten teeth, each the size of stereo, a nose bigger than his mouth, and he was 17 feet tall. He had a club, and then broke it against the bus, denting the crumpled shell even further, and causing him to angrily stomp his feet and throw the enormous splinter away. His name was probably Burt, Thalia thought, because it rhymed with Hurt, or something stupid like that. Giants were always stupid.

In fact, Thalia hated giants. They were just worse cyclopses. Not more evil, just more boring. Bigger, but dumber. She couldn't even brag when she killed one, she was always so embarrassed. The lamest of the lame. Not even scary.

Though now that she thought of it, Burt looked kind of scary, staring down at her, smiling his big empty smile. Her arm was pinned down under something she couldn't see. Her leg was definitely broken. Oh, she could feel that. Blood pooled around her, and some of it was hers. She didn't know how much.

The rain started to come down heavy as he tore open the shell of the bus. Thunder roared. Lightning flashed. Thalia wanted to scream. Zeus really thought that was helping.

The giant screamed back at the sky, a shrill, brutish cry. He laughed when the Lord of the Sky did not answer him.

His gaze fell back on Thalia. He had blue eyes, almost like hers. But his were dark, hers were electric.

Her left arm was free. She aimed a finger gun right at his forehead. She might have been delirious, or she might have been praying. She hated praying. She would never tell Luke she had prayed. But the thing about life is, you often don't have any other choice. You have to ask for help.

"Dad, please," she said, and each word tasted like copper.

The giant reached down. Thalia closed her eyes and said her final prayer.

"Bang."

Power.

Heaven opened and the elemental fury of the Sky God reached down and embraced his last living daughter. For an instant, connected to Olympus by the lightning that tickled her outstretched finger and stopped her beating heart, Thalia for the first time felt the loving hand of her father.

Light.

There was pain. So much pain. But also bliss. Thalia saw her body from outside, and she was smiling.

Noise.

For the giant there was nothing but pain. Thunder and Death. Every cell of his supernatural body burst. Even the memory of the giant disappeared inside the obliterating noise of Zeus's wrath, and his name entered into the never ending noise of desolation.

With a touch Zeus cast the mangled soul of Burt into the pit deeper than Tartarus, from which nothing is born and no one returns.

A stranger's blood dripped down Thalia's cheek.

Beside her Luke shook and groaned, senseless, pale as bone, and the only other living person in sight.

And then Grover stumbled through the emergency exit, dazed and bruised, but otherwise uninjured, and looked as horrified at seeing Thalia alive as she imagined he would to find her dead.

Grover spooned the ambrosia into Luke's mouth as he murmured blessings over him, supposedly to help his recovery.

"I think I should stop," said Grover, still looking intently at Luke. He hadn't looked at anything else since he saw Thalia standing unharmed and glowing in the middle of a dark and bloody hell – a hell they were still trapped in until Luke was strong enough to move. "I told you, too much and he'll burn up. This stuff is dangerous for mortals."

"Give him all of it," Thalia insisted. "There's not much left, anyway. You're sure Annabeth doesn't need any?"

Grover shook his head. "No, she's fine. Better than me, actually. I don't know how it happened. We were rolling, and I grabbed onto Annabeth and then we were outside the bus, laying on the grass, like we fell through a window at just the right moment. It's unbelievable. It had to be a blessing. Annabeth's mom. It had to have been her, saving her daughter. I was just along for the ride, thank the gods."

"You're probably right." Suddenly, Thalia grabbed Grover's shoulder, and said firmly, "Never mention blessings again. Not around Luke. You were lucky. That's all, okay?"

Grover looked at her like a goat stuck in traffic. "R-right. I understand. Lucky." He jumped when Luke suddenly groaned and rolled onto his back.

"Thank the gods," Luke groaned, indistinct, but still somehow sarcastic.

Thalia sighed. "He's ready to move."

She expected to find Annabeth hiding from the storm beneath a tree, crying and scared and hurt. Grover hadn't let her look inside the wreck, and as far as Thalia was concerned, that was the wisest idea Grover ever had.

But she should have known better. She and Grover had just put Luke down fifteen feet from the wreck when Annabeth appeared, pointing and crying, leading a strange man their way. He was tall, large, and shielding himself from the rain with an oversized red umbrella. He also wore glasses, was balding, and moved with a mixture of panic and concern, his head swivelling repeatedly between the battered children and the crumbled metal. The shock had taken his voice, and Thalia was grateful for that.

"Oh my gods you're okay!" Annabeth cried. She ran up to Thalia and threw her arms around her. And then she whispered in her ear, "Zap him. Quickly."

"What!" Thalia hissed.

"Trust me." Annabeth looked at her intently, and even the dark of the storm, Thalia could see the calculating spark in her grey eyes.

It never failed to amaze Thalia that, no matter how absurd or horrific the situation, her little pal, the eight year old, kept the coolest head. Honestly, Annabeth sometimes scared her. (She and Luke watched far too many late night tv documentaries on killer kids, camped out in motel rooms they didn't belong in.) And other times she wondered when this brilliant little thinking machine was going to have a really dumb idea, like kids do, and Thalia was going to be too confident in Annabeth to question it.

But for all that, Thalia reasoned, now really wasn't the time to lose faith.

She she went over to the man, who looked like a nice man, and who was starting to freak out about how exactly he should handle the situation, and seemed to be trying to back up and return to his car, and she touched him on the arm.

With the amount of power flowing through her, Thalia tried to keep the shock as low as she could.

He flew about a yard. But he was breathing. Which is something.

"Come on, he has a car!" Annabeth shouted, urgency making her bounce on her feet. "The key is in the ignition. We have to go before firetrucks and ambulances show up."

The man lay unconscious, shivering in the rain. Thalia couldn't bear to look at him, but wouldn't let herself look away.

"Grover, go get the car," she ordered suddenly. "Bring it over her, and we'll get Luke and this guy inside."

"We're taking him?" Annabeth asked, as Grover quickly went to work. "Why? The ambulance will be here soon. He'll only cause problems."

"You don't know that, Annabeth. It could be hours before someone notices the crash and reports it. We can't let someone die just because they were unlucky enough to cross our path. We're not monsters, Annabeth. It can't be our fault."

"Of course it's not our fault, Thalia," said Luke, coughing, and with a grim look as he climbed onto his unsteady feet. "You know who to blame."

Thalia clenched her jaw. "Well, we're taking him."

Luke smirked. "You're the boss."

The grey Ford Taurus struggled across the bumpy terrain, but Grover soon pulled up alongside them. Together, Thalia, Grover and Annabeth lifted the man into the backseat. They had to move an expensive looking wooden doll that was buckled into the seat behind the driver, as if he were a VIP being chauffeured by the unconscious man. Thalia was tempted to throw the creepy looking doll away (too many late night horror movie marathons involving murderous dolls), but decided the least she could do was not destroy the man's property after knocking him out and abducting him.

After another few minutes struggling to get the car back onto the road, they were finally back on their way to Gotham City.

The storm raged on for several more hours. And then without sign or warning, it stopped.