I made it four days before I ran out of food.

I also ran out of clothes. I hadn't realized when packing that bringing a warm jacket and extra clothes was slightly more important than Mary Poppins and the Grapes of Wrath.

I was attacked by monsters day and night. All I had to fight with was my hammer, but I did okay.

I walked with no real destination in mind, except to get as far as possible from my house with the mean spiders and the meaner family.

After two weeks I made it to Richmond, New York. There was an abandoned iron mill in the outskirts of the city, so I hid there for a few days to rest. The monsters came, as usual, but I was more worried about starving to death. I had one mouldy orange left that I had found in a Dumpster in the city. I had discovered that mold really wasn't a problem as long as you ate around it.

One night, I was seriously considering eating the orange. I was so hungry I couldn't sleep, and I wasn't even sure I could sit up to get the orange if I decided to eat it. I was trying to ignore the rumbling in my stomach and count sheep when I heard voices outside. I ignored the pain in my gut and ran for my hammer. I was scrambling for it when I accidentally ran into the wall of the vent I was hiding in and the metal quivered. I froze, silently cursing myself, and the tin was ripped away.

Without even having to think about it, I flew at whatever was outside with my hammer. I whipped the hammer around, aiming for anything that moved. I heard a voice shout, "Whoa!" It was a human voice, but I didn't have time to process that. "No more monsters!" I screamed. By this point, my paranoid brain was convinced that whatever had found me was a monster. Something grabbed my wrist and the hammer flew out of my grasp. It skittered across the pavement, and it only took me a moment to recover before I began punching at the monster. It was still holding my wrist, so I screamed and kicked and yelled for the monsters to go away.

"It's okay. We're not going to hurt you." A boy's voice.

"Monsters!" Some monsters could imitate human voices. I had read about it in my mythology books.

"No," the boy said soothingly. "But we know all about monsters. We fight them too."

Wait. What?

I slowly stopped kicking and punching and looked up at the boy who held my wrist.

The first thing I noticed were his eyes. Huge, blue, full of pity and gentleness. He was maybe fourteen, tall with messy blond hair. I immediately knew I could trust what this boy said. Besides, if he wanted to kill me, he would have already.

"You're...Like me?" I asked hesitantly.

"Yeah. I'm Luke. This is Thalia. We're... Well, it's hard to explain, but we're monster fighters, too." For the first time I noticed the girl next to him as he looked over at her. She had spiky black hair and startling blue eyes, and was dressed in all black. Scariest of all, she wielded a shield with a real gorgon's head pressed into the bronze. She had snakes for hair and a horrible, disfigured face. Her eyes bore into me and froze me in place, so it felt like Medusa was slowly turning me to stone. Luke noticed me staring and said, "Thalia, put your shield up. You're scaring her." The girl tapped the shield and it spiraled inwards and transformed into a silver bracelet. She knelt next to me and asked," Where's your family?"

I looked down. "My family doesn't want me. I ran away."

Luke and Thalia looked at each other and seemed to have a silent conversation.

Finally, Luke looked back at me. "What's your name, kiddo?"

"Annabeth," I responded shyly.

He grinned. "Nice name. Tell you what, Annabeth, why don't you take this?" He took a bronze knife from his belt loop and offered it to me. "This is Celestial bronze. Works a lot better than a hammer. Knives are only for the bravest and quickest fighters. They don't have the reach or power of a sword, but they're easy to conceal and they can find weak spots in your enemy's armor. It takes a clever warrior to use a knife. I get the feeling you're pretty clever."

I beamed proudly. "I am!"

Luke smiled. "Why don't you come with us? No monsters are going to hurt you."

I blinked. They wanted me to go with them? I knew I shouldn't be going with these strange people. What if they kidnapped me? Or worse, what if they took me to my stepmother? But Luke would never do that. He said he was a demigod, too. He would understand why I couldn't go back. "You're not going to take me back to my family?"

Luke knelt next to me. "We'll be a new family now, okay? And I'm not going to fail you like our families did us. I promise."

A new family? I weighed the possibilities. I didn't know these people. They could be working for the monsters, or one of the evil gods I had read about in my books. But I looked up at Luke, and I knew he would protect me. I could have a new family, and never have to see my stepmother again. He had promised.

Smiling up at Luke, I took the knife.