𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧

chapter fourteen. ☄︎. *. ⋆

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

ANNABETH IS THE SMARTEST demigod I've ever met. By far. It was all her idea.

     We piled into the back of a taxi. (There was only three seats, so Grover squished onto Percy's lap.) I still had a little bit of cab driver anxiety from Dave, the cabbie that had turned into a flock of Stymphilian Birds, so Annabeth did all the talking; she told the driver "Los Angeles, please," all official-like, as if we had any money at all.

     "That's three hundred miles." The driver chewed his cigar, sizing us up. "For that, you gotta pay up front."

     "You accept casino debit?" Annabeth asked.

     He shrugged. "Some of 'em. Same as credit cards. I gotta swipe 'em through first."

     She handed him her green LotusCash card. This is the part of the plan I didn't expect to work, but when the cabbie swiped the card through the reader, the machine started rattling and flashing. An infinity symbol came up next to the dollar sign.

     The cigar fell out of his mouth. I figured that wasn't very good for his car, but he didn't seem to care. He looked back at us with wide eyes and said, "Where to in Los Angeles.. uh, Your Highness?"

     "Santa Monica Pier," I said, because Annabeth looked to be a little too smug with the title "Your Highness." I checked the time on the dashboard. "Get us there fast, and you can keep the change."

     In hindsight, I shouldn't have said that. The speedometer never dipped below ninety the whole way through the Mojave Desert. We raced down the interstate, our surroundings an orange blur.

     On the road, I shared my dream with Annabeth, Grover, and Percy, then listened as Percy explained a nightmare of his own that he had had the same night as me. It was odd, though; neither of us could describe what happened in our dreams very well. The Lotus Casino seemed to have messed with our memories. I filled them in as best as I could, but when I tried to describe the voice to them—the one I had recognized—I couldn't even begin to recount it.

     After Percy finished telling us what happened in his nightmare, Annabeth looked pale, like she'd seen a spider or something. (Annabeth's almost as scared of spiders as I am of snakes.) I was afraid she might pass out, but then she said, "I guess.. I guess that explains what the Furies were looking for, back on the bus. They kept asking us where 'it' is, remember? Maybe they thought we had the bolt."

     "But if I'd already gotten the bolt," Percy said, "why would I be travelling to the Underworld?"

     "To threaten Hades," Grover suggested. "To bribe or blackmail him into getting your mom back."

      "You've got a dark little goat mind," I noted. Grover smiled.

     "But the thing in the pit was waiting for two items," Percy said, recalling his dream. "If the master bolt is one, what's the other?"

     Nobody replied. I got the feeling Annabeth knew what the missing puzzle piece was, but didn't feel it safe enough to divulge us yet. We met eyes; her gaze was hard-set, like she knew something I didn't. I thought about Percy's and my dreams for a moment. The voices we had heard had to have been the same ones; that, we could agree on. Percy said his had been coming from a pit, like its body was buried beneath surface level.

     "You have an idea of what it is," Percy said to Annabeth. "In the pit. If it isn't Hades—"

    I shook my head. "No way it's Hades. If it was, he would be showing himself to us."

     Annabeth shot me a look, like I'd just blown her cover, or something. "It's got to be Hades," she said. "If it isn't... No, it has to be him."
𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧

"I AM NEVER GOING back to that place," groaned Grover, rolling his neck out. "Horrible customer service—I'd give it, like, a two out of ten on Yelp."

     "Agreed," I said, wincing. We stood in front of Crusty's Water Bed Palace; Annabeth, Grover and I all groaning and readjusting ourselves. Crusty, the owner of said water bed company, had—surprise, surprise—actually been a monster. I'd never heard of him, so when he introduced himself as Procrustes, I told him we had no idea who that was, and that wounded his ego enough to crank the adjustments of my water bed to quick-speed. See, Crusty had this weird quirk where, if somebody didn't fit onto his bed, he had to 'fix' them, which included either cutting off any extra bits or stretching the person out so they would fit perfectly. I would've been stretched to death if Percy hadn't tricked Crusty into laying onto one of his own beds and cutting off the monster's head.

     So, once again, I owed my life to Percy Jackson. You'd think he would just let me die one of these days.

     "You look taller," Percy had told me when he cut the ropes off my bed.

     I scowled, massaging my neck. "Be faster next time."

     Percy laughed, recapping Riptide and putting the pen back into his pocket. I held my bow at my side, itching for a chance to use it, but also not wanting to deal with another monster. The deadline was, if you'll excuse my pun, deadly close. We didn't have time to fight anything else. We'd already raced across the country at ninety-five miles an hour, betting that the bolt was in the Underworld. If we were wrong, there was no time for us to fix our mistakes.

     Annabeth, rolling her neck and grimacing, pointed to a bulletin board behind the late Crusty's desk. There was a flier for Hermes Delivery Service, another one for All-New Compendium of L.A. Area Monsters, and a small pink advertisement for a nail salon down the street. At the bottom of the board, printed on neon-orange paper, was the location and phone number for DOA Recording Studios, offering commissions for heroes' souls.

     "Dead on arrival," I translated, my lips sinking into an impressed frown. "DOA stands for dead on arrival. It's smart. Tacky, but smart."

     "That's our stop," Grover said, then let out a frightened bleat. "Can we wait a minute? We were almost stretched to death."

     "Then you're ready for the Underworld," Percy said. "It's only a block from here."