"No," I said, slamming my laptop shut as the bell rang, no longer looking forward to my weekend. "I will not put you guys in any danger, not if I can help it."

"Oh, come on!" Pete whined, pouting and pulling his puppy dog eyes, as if that would make me change my mind. Please, if I could withstand Will, Percy, and Nico's puppy eyes, I could withstand anything. "Don't you think we should learn to protect ourselves from," he lowered his voice, "you know, the monsters?"

I rolled my eyes as I joined the stream of students rushing out of the classroom, our brains completely fried from the nightmare of a biology test we'd just had. But of course, Pete wouldn't let me live down the fact that I had powers, preferring to study me like I was a specimen under a microscope instead of looking at the actual specimen we were supposed to be analyzing.

"You're a mortal," I reminded him, waving back to Leah, who was waiting with Andy while standing on the stairs leading up to the school's library. As for Patrick and Joe, I think they were making up a lab with the new chemistry teacher, but I wasn't really sure. "Monsters won't bother you. Plus, it's not like you can see them anyways."

"I did that one time you did that voodoo magic on me." Pete then proceeded to make the motion of dragging three fingers across his heart and then pushing outwards.

I slapped his hand down, whisper yelling, "Don't do that! Do you want to get yourself killed?"

"So I can see the monsters if I do that!" Pete exclaimed, his eyes alight with a deranged sense of joy, almost as if someone told him he won the lottery knowing that he was going to die the next day.

I groaned and shook my head, causing for Leah and Andy to stare at the two of us curiously. "Why do I even try with you?" I asked Pete, beginning the familiar climb up the stairs to the library.

"Everything alright?" Leah asked, her fingers twitching around a ball of rubber bands that she had made last night, clearly debating about whether to throw it at Pete or not.

"It would be if Andy trained us," Pete said, taking the stairs two at a time.

"Trained, as in combat training?" she asked. "Like, punching people?"

"I prefer monster killing, actually."

I rolled my eyes again.

"You're crazy," Andy declared before shoving his earbuds back in, completely tuning the rest of us out.

"Thank you," I said with a sigh of relief. "Someone who has some common sense."

"No, no, I think Pete has a valid point," Leah said, holding the door open to the library. "I mean, now that we know what kind of things coexist alongside us, shouldn't we learn how to defend ourselves?"

"You're mortals," I reminded them again. "Monsters don't bother you guys if you stay out of their way."

"Then why do they come after you?"

"Because I smell."

Pete actually leaned over the table so that his face was right next to my neck before taking in a huge whiff. I squirmed in my seat, uncomfortable with his close proximity to my neck.

"Yeah, you do smell," Pete said. "You smell like coconuts and honey. What's your hair care routine?"

"Back off," Leah said, finally throwing her rubber band ball at Pete. But he caught it and stuck his tongue out, causing for Leah to huff and settle with kicking his shin.

"Hey, I was just investigating!"

As I was about to retort, I felt my charms start to burn my flesh, as if I'd dropped the metal into molten lava and then put the bracelet back on. Swearing as I squeezed the cloud charm between my fingers, I felt myself slump forward, Percy's voice echoing around my head like a broken record hooked up the world's largest speakers.

"Percy?" I mentally asked, closing my eyes in an attempt to stave off a forming headache. "What's wrong?"

"Something happened at school," he said in one breath, panic evident in his voice. "I can't stop this by myself, and I tried to call Annabeth, but it went straight to voicemail, and I don't know where Rachel is, and Chiron won't…"

"I'm coming, Percy. Just hang on."

"Please hurry. Something's seriously wrong with Paul."

"On my way."

I sat up with a groan, rubbing my aching temples, ignoring the looks of concern on my friends' faces as I hastily shoved everything into my bag and fled towards the math section of the library. Unsurprisingly, the math section was completely devoid of any people, giving me the chance to turn my bag back into its charm.

"Andy, where are you going?" Leah asked, her face flushed with worry.

"S.O.S. call," I said, summoning a dagger to my hand before shoving it into the waistband of my shorts. "I'll be back when I can."

"Stay safe."

I shot her a crooked smile. "I'll do my best."

Then I leapt into the shadows, feeling as the world dissolved around me.

If I thought college life was chaotic, I clearly forgot what it was like to be a high schooler, especially in a high school in a place as crowded as Manhattan.

Seeing that it was only around one, classes were still going on, and if Goode was anything like my high school, then some kids were currently eating lunch right now. But something had happened that made it so that kids weren't in class or in the cafeteria, instead shoving past each other in the hallways like they'd just been volunteered into the running of the bulls.

And the fact that everyone was screaming didn't do much to calm my nerves either.

"Exit the building in a calm and orderly manner!" a teacher was announcing through the P.A. system, but a few moments later, the voice cut off and was replaced with the ominous sound of static.

As for me, who had just landed in the middle of the chaos, I was quickly shoved to the side, learning what lockers tasted like for the umpteenth time in my life. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I knew what it was like to be shoved around this violently thanks to Holly and Carol from my Earth, so other than accepting the fact that I'd have a couple of bruises, I pushed against the crowd until I stumbled into an alcove where the water fountain and bathrooms were.

While the thousands of high schoolers rushed by, screaming their heads off, I used my time in the alcove trying to orient myself. Apparently my mind remembered the layout of Goode, because I remembered this hallway as a part of the tour Paul had given me last year, and if I was right, then his classroom was just a little way down the hallway from here.

"What's going on?" I asked, pulling a random high schooler into the alcove with me for a few seconds.

"He has a gun!" the boy gasped, his blue eyes wide, full of fear. "He's going to kill us all!"

"Who has a gun?"

"I don't know! Some man has a gun!"

In my daze, the boy wrenched his hand from my grasp and took off running, screaming what sounded like a prayer as he faded in the crowd.

"Alright," I said to myself, rubbing my hand, which had just gotten slammed into the wall courtesy of a terrified teenager. "Enough."

I waved my hand over the crowd, allowing for time to slow around me. I then quickly jostled my way through the crowd, only dropping the spell once I was standing right outside of Paul's door, which had been completely ripped off its hinges.

I was instantly on guard, my hand tightly gripping the hilt of my not-so-concealed dagger as I entered the room, scanning for any signs of danger.

Paul's room, which had been so nicely decorated with actually interesting literary posters and pictures of all the places he's visited that played a significant role in the novels he assigned, appeared as if a hurricane had just blown through. Desks were overturned, papers were covering everything, the lights had stopped working, including the emergency lights, and a dark pool of some liquid was coming from Paul's desk, which was now turned on its side, the computer precariously hanging by its wires.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when the light emitting from my dagger revealed the puddle as nothing more than spilled coffee. At least Paul hadn't been pinned under the desk, I thought to myself, searching for the missing English teacher and the friend who'd called me here in the first place.

"Percy?" I asked, turning slowly, getting a 3600 picture of the room. "Where are you?"

"In here," I heard him hiss. "Next to the white board."

There was so much carnage that I'd completely missed the storage closet by the front of the room. Even with the light from my dagger, it was hard to find the definitive edges of the doorway because of the amount of desks stacked on top of each other.

I pulled the desks aside, not flinching as they clattered loudly to the floor, determined on figuring out what the hell had just happened here.

"Paul's over here," Percy said, Riptide's glow illuminating the darkness better than my dagger could. He shouldered past some fallen shelves, pushing books aside as we reached the back of the closet, where Paul was lying prone on the floor, his face buried deep into the debris.

"Help me get this bookshelf off of him," I told Percy once I noticed that his legs were pinned beneath the wood. Between the two of us, we were able to push the bookshelf aside, ignoring the fact that we'd just caused a domino effect, knocking over the remaining bookshelves.

"He won't respond," Percy told me as we log rolled Paul so that he was on his back. "I checked his pulse and breathing, so I know he's not in cardiac arrest, but I didn't see anything indicative of a concussion or seizure."

I inhaled deeply as I held my dagger over Paul's face, seeing the dark rings around his eyes. "Percy," I said, my hands fumbling to summon my bag to get to my first aid kit. "I need you to hold your sword above Paul's head, close enough so I can use the light to see."

Percy did as I asked.

My fingers finally closed around my small flashlight, and after quickly pulling on some gloves, I shined the light in Paul's eyes, biting back a wince when I saw that both his pupils were blown grossly out of proportion. Just to check, I shut his eyelids and did the test again, struggling to keep a straight face once I was positive that his pupils were no longer reacting to light stimuli like they should have.

My suspicions were only confirmed when I saw how large the dark rings were, except in the medical field, this is known as raccoon eyes, and that usually only occurs as a result of a traumatic brain injury.

Gently, after telling Percy to stabilize C-spine, I examined Paul's head, finding an extremely deep gash that ran the length from the nape of his neck to the tip of his left ear. In addition to blood staining my gloves, I was greeted with the sight of a clear fluid that appeared like mucus, but seeing that it was coming from his head injury, I was positive I was looking at cerebral spinal fluid.

"Is he going to be okay?" Percy asked, looking up at me, his eyes shining with concern. But from the way he set his jaw, I could tell he was choosing not to cry, knowing that Paul was relying on him.

"I don't know," I told him helplessly, having been completely in the dark about this event happening in the books. As far as I knew, this didn't happen in the books and was a completely unscripted event. "But Paul has a really bad head trauma injury, and if we don't get him to a hospital soon, it's not going to end well for him." I stood up and broke off a piece of a bookshelf to use as a spine board. "On my count, we move him. One, two, three."

We grunted as we quickly, but carefully, moved Paul onto the makeshift spine board, praying to God that we hadn't severed his spinal cord from all the sudden movements.

"He needs to get to an operating room, now," I said, finally finding the C-collar in my bag and easing Paul's neck into it. Yes, ever since my training with Apollo, I carried around things like C-collars with me at all times.

"But he's too unstable to move, and the cops are on their way," Percy said. "Not to mention that something's out there. Can't you operate on him?"

"I'm not a neurosurgeon, unfortunately, but…" I fumbled around my bag yet again, my fingers closing around the piece of technology I swore I'd never reveal to anyone else other than Luke and Will.

"What are you doing with that phone?" Percy glared at the technology like he was debating slicing it in half with Riptide. "We don't need any more monsters at the moment."

"It's monster-proof," I told him, quickly finding the contact I was looking for and dialing her. God, I hoped she picked up.

"Hello?" she asked, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

"Hey, Raina, it's Andy."

"Oh, hi, Andy! What's up? When are you going to drop by? It's been at least a year since your last visit, I think."

"Raina, while I'd love to catch up with you, I'm kinda in a major situation right now?"

I could hear her frown. "What do you need?"

"I need an OR immediately. Get a neurosurgeon and trauma surgeon."

"You're so lucky I'm at work right now. We'll be ready in two minutes. Meet me in OR five."

I sighed again. "You're the best."

"I know. See you soon."

"Who was that?" Percy asked, cringing as we heard heavy footsteps coming our way.

"No time to explain, but you'll meet her soon." I bent down, hefting one end of our spine board while Percy lifted the other end. "Whatever you do, don't let go," I warned before slipping into the darkness.

One thing I really hate about hospitals is their smell. I know that sanitation and sterility is crucial in a hospital, but really, was so much bleach really necessary? That and the fact that this hospital, St. Joseph's, had really sketchy lighting, well, let's just say I was praying that the doctors here were better than the infrastructure.

Another thing, while I respect and appreciate young nurses, they can turn in to a worried mess when they see someone with something as trivial as a scrape. By that I mean, the two nurses who'd seen us when Percy and I ran into the ER nearly had a cow when they saw the amount of debris and dust coating out clothing, asking us if we'd been in a fire. These must've been newbies, fresh out of nursing school, because I knew nurses who'd been on the job for over forty years and no longer batted an eye at something like a gunshot to the head.

After some Mist manipulating and persuasion, I managed to get the nurses off our cases, leaving the two of us to wait in the family room as Paul was whisked in for emergency brain surgery.

Percy was, understandably, a complete mess, pacing back and forth so much that I thought he was going to wear a trench into the multi-stained carpet. Of course, this agitated some of the other people in the waiting room, but one look from Percy quickly shut them up, clearly not wanting to incur his anger on themselves.

Meanwhile, I was reading Catching Fire, patiently waiting for someone to come and give us an update.

Instead of an update, however, someone came in and handed me a clipboard with a stack of papers, telling me to fill out all of Paul's information for billing purposes. Thank God for insurance.

"Do you know this stuff?" I asked Percy when I got to the sections about previous illness and/or surgeries. Plus, it's not like I could fill out his phone number, email, or social security, because he had never given it out to me, and I seriously doubted he was going to any time soon.

"Nope," Percy answered, popping the 'p'. "Mom and Paul tell me I don't need to worry about this kind of stuff."

"They're right," I said, pinching the bridge of my nose in exasperation. "You're a kid. You don't need to worry about insurance."

Percy rolled his eyes. "You're not that much older than me."

"Seven years older, to be exact."

"That doesn't mean anything."

Now it was my turn to roll my eyes. "To put that into perspective, I'm entering my junior year of college while you're just now starting the tenth grade."

"Never mind, you are that much older than me."

"Sorry, am I interrupting something?" I heard Raina say, a knowing smirk resting on her face as she tapped her pen against her thigh.

"It's great to see you again," I said, giving the younger girl a hug.

Even though she was a daughter of Hecate, Raina had told me that she always wanted to become a trauma surgeon after having her dad die because a hospital didn't have a trauma surgeon. And seeing that she started doing her own studying at a young age, at the age of twenty, she was already a surgical resident, having passed all her exams when she was nineteen.

"Ditto that. Now, would you like to know how Paul's doing?"

"Yes, please," Percy replied, violently nodding his head.

"Well, that was a pretty massive brain bleed that he had, and the neurosurgeon said that the dura had been cut as well." I winced. "But, after evacuating the bleed, he was able to sew the dura back together and is going to add a steel plate over the skull fracture since there isn't enough original bone to work with."

"What about his legs?" I asked. "When I got to the scene, it appeared like he'd been pinned under a bookshelf for some time."

Raina pulled out a little notebook from the pocket of her coat and flipped to the right page. "We were initially concerned about blood flow to the extremities, but after some blood transfusions, we knew that everything else was fine. He might have some bruises, though. And as for every other thing, he's perfectly fine."

"Thank the gods," Percy sighed, stumbling into an empty chair and slumping in it, full of relief. "How long do you think it'll take him to recover?"

"Typically the recovery time is anywhere between six to twelve weeks. But everyone's different, so I can't give you a set date."

"Thanks again for doing this, Raina. I can't thank you enough."

"Well, you could always thank me by dropping by for a drink and telling Jonathan to stop complaining about living in a house with only girls. He's old enough to get his own apartment if he wants to, for gods' sakes."

"Wait, what happened to Leo?"

Raina winced. "He ran away last month. One night I was helping him with his history homework, and the next morning, he'd taken everything of his. None of us know where he is, and believe me, I've tried tracking him down. I was hoping you'd heard something from him?"

I glanced down at my bracelets, glaring at the cloud charm, remembering how the Cyclops that had attacked me in Times Square might've had Leo's necklace. "No, he hasn't spoken to me as of late." I shook my head. "Go back to the OR, Raina. I'll find Leo soon."

"Good, because I want him to know that he'll always have a home with us." She pocketed her little notebook. "I'll be back in a few hours with another update."

True to her word, Raina came back four hours later, letting us know that Paul's surgery had been a success and that he was taken up to the ICU for recovery. Afterwards, Percy asked that Raina lead us directly to Paul's room, where we were met by the unconscious English teacher with a thick layer of bandages wrapping around his head.

"What could have caused this much damage?" Raina asked, moving around the room with perfect ease, jotting down notes on Paul's chart as she checked his vitals and medications.

I turned to Percy, waiting for an explanation. He'd been there when the attack happened, so maybe he saw something that could make sense of the disaster scene I witnessed at Goode High.

"I don't know, to be honest," Percy said, sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck. "There was this one guy who seemed to be made of pure fire, but he didn't find me, instead destroying all the other classrooms. I found Paul after he'd managed to set off all the fire alarms, which helped contribute to the panic. I guess kids saw his sword as a gun."

Raina and I shared a glance.

"Percy," she spoke softly. "Did this man have a sun anywhere on his armor? Was he about seven feet tall? Did his aura feel more primal when compared to that of a god?"

"Uh, I think there was a sun on his breastplate, but I'm not sure. He was way too bright to stare at for too long without suffering permanent blindness." Percy paused for a moment. "Imagine staring at Apollo except the light hurts your eyes more."

Raina inhaled sharply and turned to face me. "I know you told me things were bad, but I wasn't expecting this."

"None of us were," I said, nervously messing with my bracelet. "But it's clear that this was an attempt on Percy's life. I just can believe my father would send his brother like that in broad daylight with so many potential witnesses."

"Wait, so that was an assassination attempt?" Percy asked, his eyes wide. "And who was that, anyways? Didn't you-know-who have five other brothers? And it can't be the one my dad's fighting, so that only leaves four brothers left."

"It seems like the Titan of the East is out for your blood, Percy," Raina said. "Don't know what you did to piss him off-"

"Exist."

"-but you better do your best to stay safe. I've got to go, but if you need an extra hand in the fight to come, I'm only one call away."

"I'll keep that in mind," I told Raina, giving her one final hug before she left the room, presumably to work on other patients.

In the meantime, I had to keep Sally in the loop of what had happened to her son and husband as she was probably sick with worry. After all, this would definitely be aired on the news, so it was more of a matter of time before Sally found out.

Pulling out a drachma, I threw the gold coin into the rainbow that resulted from light streaming in from the room's window, watching as the image shimmered to life. "Sally Jackson, Manhattan," I requested, Sally's face appearing a few seconds later.

Needless to say, she was relieved when she saw that both Percy and Paul were alive, but still concerned over the fact that Paul was in a medically induced coma and there was no telling of when, or if, he'd wake up.

Maybe if I had better control over my chronokinesis, I could turn back the time on Paul's body to before the accident, but I'd never tried manipulating time on a single person like that before, and I definitely wasn't going to have Paul be my first guinea pig. Maybe I should use Octavian as a guinea pig and have Jason and Reyna give him to a family that will teach him kindness and respect.

Oh, well. A girl can dream.

Eventually we decided that I would bring Percy home ASAP while I watched over Paul until he recovered.

But before I forgot, I said, "Percy, do you still have that star charm I gave you?"

"Yeah," Percy said, beginning to run his finger across the chain that held the charm. "Why?"

"I need it for a second."

"What are you going to do with it?" he asked as he slipped the chain off his neck, gently tugging the star off and placing it in my hand.

"Make its enchantment stronger. Things are worse than I originally thought, and I don't want you getting hurt."

Finding the vial that Salina had used to enchant the stars with, I added five drops directly into the middle of the charm, muttering an incantation in the language of Chaos, just as she had taught me all those years ago. Once I was done, the charm was positively humming with newfound power.

I then threaded it back onto Percy's chain and watched as he slipped the necklace back on, the charms resting comfortably at the base of his throat, hidden behind the clay beads of his camp necklace.

"C'mon," I told him, having to lead him a little ways away from Paul, the guilt tearing him apart from the inside out. I had to remind him three different times that what happened was no one's fault but my father's and that he shouldn't blame himself for the damages done to his school. "We need to get you home before your mom grounds the both of us."

"And Paul? What about him?"

I placed my hands on his shoulders, forcing for him to face me. "You have my word that Raina will keep him safe. Plus, I'll be back here after dropping you off, so I'll keep you updated if anything changes."

I pulled him into a hug, rubbing soothing circles into his back. He sighed and hugged back, his breaths uneven as he suppressed his emotions.

"You'll be okay, squirt. As long as I'm alive, I'll always do my best to keep you safe."

Then I grabbed Percy's hand, and we faded into the shadows, the sound of steady beeping being the last thing we could hear.

Shout out to Horseyiscool for being such an amazing person! (And to answer your question, Chronos and Kronos can refer to the same person depending on which version of the myths you look at; in this case Kronos is a Titan and Chronos is a primordial).

Thanks for reading! I love you all!