(Wyatt)
It was during second period math class when the world as I knew it ended.
No, seriously. Nothing ends the world as you know it quite like a couple of emaciated humanoid corpses with oversized canines busting through your classroom window. (Others will tell you moments involving furies, cyclopes, evil pigeons, ect. are equally effective for turning your life up-side-down, but I still don't think anything can compare to the horror of the creatures that ruined our review of the quadratic formula.)
Anyways. Second period. The Friday before the last week of school. Right.
I'm Wyatt, by the way. Wyatt Atkin. Medium height, blue eyes, short brown hair, light skin, fourteen years old, nerd, try-hard. I'm that boy at school who gets perfect grades but is kinda quiet and doesn't have a lot of friends. I like to think I have a personality once you get to know me, besides being socially awkward and a bit of a know-it-all.
Oh, and apparently I'm a demigod. Long story. The demigod part explains my severe ADHD, which means I'm wired for battle instead of studying. My GPA tells a different story about the studying part, but that's because of my academic stubbornness and inexplicable lack of dyslexia. Being a demigod does not explain that other thing that I am definitely not thinking or talking about right now.
With that mess out of the way, let's get to the actual story.
It was second period math class, as I've already mentioned. It was a Friday, and next week was the end of the school year, when we would be taking our final exams for every class, which was a huge deal. My school is special like that.
I was sitting at my usual desk near the back by the windows, alternating between doodling on my review sheet and raising my hand to answer questions. Ms. Thompson was reviewing our geometry unit with very little enthusiasm, looking even more bored than her students. My best friend, Daniel Burr, had fallen asleep, his mass of curly black hair covering his dark eyes while he muttered indistinguishable words in Spanish. Daniel has many strengths. It just happens that school really isn't one of them. The rest of my classmates were either zoned out or on their phones.
Suddenly, Daniel sat bolt upright, his nose twitching. He yelled a string of curse words in Spanish that I refuse to translate, jumped out of his chair, grabbed my arm, and started pulling. Everyone stared. I could clearly see the animal-like panic in his eyes, but I had no idea what was wrong.
That's when the window exploded. Shards of glass flew into the room, followed by three large creatures unlike anything I'd ever seen or heard of. They were clearly undead, their bodies swollen and contorted, though not decayed. The creatures were hunched over, with inhuman proportions, glowing eyes, and protruding jaws with enormous canines. Also, they smelled incredibly bad, like compost and poo had been put in a blender with a dead vulture and then left out to rot.
After a moment of initial shock, our classmates screamed in unison and ran towards the door. I let Daniel pull me after him, too busy staring at the creatures to think clearly.
For some reason, the three beasties immediately turned towards me and Daniel, backing us toward the broken window. We were on the third story, so I wasn't sure how the corpse things had gotten up here. I was sure Daniel and I wouldn't survive the fall.
"What are those things?" I managed to ask.
"Bears!" one girl shrieked.
"Vrykolakas," Daniel muttered to me.
"Vryko-whats?"
"Greek version of vampires, except they eat flesh instead of drinking blood. Also, these ones were werewolves before they became undead."
"How do you even know that?"
"I've taught the Mythical Monsters class at camp for four years."
He said this like it would explain everything. Things that it did not explain included what "camp" was, why there were Greek zombie werewolf vampires in my math class, why our classmates thought the aforementioned Greek zombie werewolf vampires were escaped zoo animals, and everything else about our situation.
By now all of our classmates had made it out the door, and Daniel and I had nowhere left to go, except out the window.
One of the vrykolakas lunged for me, jaw unhinged and claws outstretched. I grabbed the first thing I could - someone's geometry textbook - and smashed him on the head. He stumbled back, but the blow had only enraged him. I stared at the book in my hands, which was now covered in thick black blood and matted coarse fur. Before the vrykolakas could regroup and attack again, Daniel tackled me, throwing us both out the window.
I screamed (a very high pitched sound similar to a dying cat) and squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for impact.
By some miracle, we landed on something soft. I opened my eyes to our fall had been broken by a humongous dandelion plant.
That's right. Daniel and I were sitting on a giant yellow weed blossom, about ten feet across, held above the ground by a stem as thick as a tree trunk.
Daniel and I looked at each other with wide eyes, then at the giant plant, then back up at the window, where the vrykolakas looked temporarily stunned.
"Now that," Daniel panted, "is flower power."
"Time to run?"
The vrykolakas began jumping down from the window ledge, apparently unfazed by the drop or the dandelion.
"Time to run."
We jumped down from the flower. The drop was pretty far, but I managed to roll on impact and get back to my feet. Daniel seemed completely unfazed. He kicked off his shoes, revealing hooves. I would have normally found this weird, but instead I weirdly found it normal.
We ran. I had expected the muscular, wolf-like creatures to be much faster than a pair of unathletic teens. And lucky us. They were.
We made it to the school parking lot, where Daniel fished his keys out of his pocket and unlocked the door of his beat-up black Mazda. He shoved me inside before slamming the door in the face of our pursuers. How he even had a license, I had never been sure, considering he looked several years younger than me and was a terrible driver.
Daniel punched the gas and we shot out of the school parking lot, driving right into the first vrykolaka. The car hit him with such force that he was thrown over the roof and landed behind us with an audible thud. The other two continued to come after us, even as I watched the speedometer climb to eighty miles per hour. Needless to say, Phoenix saw a lot of extra car crashes that day.
"We have a problem," Daniel said.
"Yeah. Vrykolaka is impossible to pronounce. Can we call them koalas instead?"
"Koalas? Seriously, dude?"
"You seriously have hooves."
"The problem I meant was the three koalas chasing us."
"Three?" I glanced back to see that the koala Daniel had hit with his car was back up and quickly catching up with the others. "How do you kill these things?"
"They can be set on fire or decapitated with Celestial Bronze. And I sort of left my bronze dagger at home today…"
"Why would you bring a dagger to school?"
"For fighting monsters. But this year was going so well. You're not a very powerful demigod, so you haven't attracted very many monsters. I don't know how those three even found us, your scent is so weak."
"I'm a demigod?! Like a Greek myth demigod?!"
"And I'm a Greek myth satyr, and those are Greek myth monsters. Don't worry, you'll get used to it."
Before I could even open my mouth to state the obvious truth that I had now gone completely insane, the koalas caught up to us. Two of them grabbed onto the rear end of the car, ripping it clean off. The front part half spun several times, sending up sparks from the concrete and causing my shoe to catch on fire.
I instinctively ripped the flaming shoe off my foot and threw as far away as I could, which wasn't very far. The flaming hunk of melted rubber and canvas landed in the puddle of gasoline next to the wrecked engine, creating an inferno that incinerated one of the koalas.
Daniel gaped at me. "You were actually listening when I said they could be destroyed by fire!"
I grimaced. "Yeah, I, uh, totally meant to do that."
The inferno quickly died out, still leaving us with two very angry koalas. For the first time, I looked around at the part of town we were in. I'd never been to this area before, it was the sort of place my father would denounce as shady. And he wouldn't have been wrong. The houses were crammed and falling apart, held together by tarps and rusted metal. The sort of place where all of society's unwanteds ended up, left to suffer as outcasts.
Daniel and I were running again, so I wasn't paying a ton of attention to the houses. The koalas seemed worn out from the long chase after the car, and couldn't quite catch us. We ducked through an alley into a backyard strewn with broken glass. The koalas charged after us. One of them rammed into a rotten tool shed, smashing it and knocking it to the ground.
There was a feral cry from the roof of the house, and we all looked up in surprise as a girl wielding a long stick jumped down. She landed on top of the koala that had knocked down the shed and struck him between the eyes with her stick. He crumpled into dust. She turned to the other one, who barely had time to think "Uh oh! Scary girl!" before he too was vaporized.
The girl turned to glare at Daniel and I. She had medium brown skin, unevenly cut black hair, and the darkest eyes I had ever seen. She was tall, dressed in ragged brown clothes that failed to disguise how painfully thin she was. Her face was empty and haunted, and it was easy to tell that this girl had seen the worst the world had to offer. I could now see that the end of the stick she had vaporized the koala with was wrapped in bronze barbed wire. Even stranger, there was a laurel wreath on her head that had definitely not been there a moment ago.
"This is not good," Daniel whispered to me.
This girl slowly advanced towards us, looking even more threatening than the koalas.
"You," she said, "destroyed my shed."
"Your shed?" I replied stupidly.
"My shed, and everything I own because it was all IN THE SHED"
Daniel gulped. "Uh, we're really sorry and all. But can I point out that, ah, it was technically the koala that destroyed your shed?"
The girl blinked, momentarily taken aback. "Koala?"
"The ancient Greek zombie werewolf vampires. Vrykolakas. AKA koalas," I put in helpfully.
The girl looked momentarily confused, then annoyed. (I get that reaction from girls a lot.) She went back to threatening us with her monster-slaying barbed wire stick. "I don't care if the koala did it, it was you guys who led the koala to my home."
"Isn't that your home?" I gestured towards the house, and regretted it immediately.
"That place," the girl replied bitterly, "is no home of mine. That shed has been my home for as long as I can remember. For thirteen years, I kept the monsters from destroying it. Until you two came along."
Daniel cleared his throat. He was eyeing the girl's laurel wreath and barbed-wire stick like they somehow made sense. "I'm assuming you've never been to camp before?"
The girl scowled. "Camp?"
"And you don't know who one of your parents is?"
At this, the girl's scowl deepened. "I have no parents."
She said it calmly, like we were discussing the weather, but I could tell that there was a lot of deeply buried pain underneath those words. I wondered what her backstory was. Anyone living in a place like this certainly had one.
"Okay," Daniel said. "I need to tell you something, and then you need to come with us. It's for your own safety. And, uh, we're going to take you to a much better place."
"If your 'much better place' is foster care, I ain't going."
"You're a demigod. Looks like you just got claimed as a daughter of Nike," Daniel pointed to the laurel wreath.
The girl reached up and seemed startled to find the circle of leaves in her hair. She shrieked and tried to pull it off, but it wouldn't budge. "Daughter of Nike?"
Daniel laughed nervously. "Yeah, I know, that's a common misconception. But I promise, Nike is not the goddess of athletic shoes. She's the goddess of -"
"Victory, I know." She tried to pull the laurel wreath off again. "I'm not stupid, unlike you. What kind of sick joke is this? You can see me, right? What I look like, where I live? How can I be a daughter of victory?"
"The fact that you're still here," Daniel's voice softened, almost reverent. "Through all this time, you never stopped fighting. You survived. What greater victory is there? Oh, and also, that wreath won't come off for twenty-four hours."
She made a sound of irritation and turned to stalk away, but Daniel caught her by the arm. A dangerous move, considering the girl's stick-fighting skills. "It's okay. You're going to come with us to a better place. A safe place for demigods like you and Wyatt. It's called Camp Halfblood."
Camp Halfblood. My breath caught at those words. I'd never heard them before, but they somehow sounded familiar. They felt right.
"Yeah, no thanks. I was perfectly fine here until you two showed up."
"Fine? Nothing about this place seems fine to me." The girl turned her dagger glare on me, and I instantly regretted my words. I would rather have still been facing the koalas than deal with her.
"I'm not coming with you."
Daniel cleared his throat again. "You have to. You aren't safe here, especially now that you've been claimed."
The girl pulled her arm out of Daniel's grip and tried to walk away again.
"Please?" The other two looked at me, just as surprised as I was at the simple word. I temporarily lost my voice, pinned as I was between Daniel's "don't you dare mess this up" look and the girl's death stare. "It-it looks like you haven't got much here. Monsters or not, you need to get out of this place."
The girl walked up to me and slapped me across the face, hard. I was so startled that all I could do was blink and rub my stinging skin. "Don't you dare patronize me, pretty boy." She turned back towards the shed's wreckage, and sighed. "But you're right. I'm coming with you to this camp of yours. If either of you annoy me or ask too many questions, you'll be sorry."
"Okay, cool," Daniel smiled nervously. "I'm Daniel, by the way. Satyr, mythological monsters nerd, and your new protector. That's Wyatt, my best friend. He just found out he's a demigod too, and we don't know who his godly parent is yet."
"Okay, whatever." She turned away again, managing to pull a broken down backpack out of the pile of broken wood and rusted metal, shoving in a few sets of clothes and a filthy blanket full of holes she also uncovered. I noticed the sound of wailing sirens in the distance.
"And your name is?" I ventured.
"Zara."
"Zara? It suits you."
"Zara Lantham. And DON'T compliment me." She slung the backpack over one shoulder. "Now let's get out the heck of here."