"After all those years on the streets, I finally feel like I'm home"
"You're lying" Leo didn't even have to look up, he knew her better than anyone.
"You're right, I was always at home with you"
In which there's an unlikely friendship (... and ma...
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On the way, Alex and Jason took turns telling Leo what had happened. They had a sort of picnic in the air when Leo gave them all sandwiches. Alex felt her adrenaline fading, she acknowledged the fear she had been feeling since the Grand Canyon.
She tried too mask it with a smile and some jokes but it wasn't going to work if Leo talked with her. So she let herself think about the past two days.
Suck it up, cupcake! Coach Hedge would've yelled at her. Don't be a wimp!
Alex had been thinking about the coach ever since Boreas mentioned he was still alive. She'd never liked Hedge, but he'd leaped off a cliff to save Leo, and he'd sacrificed himself to protect them on the skywalk. She now realised that all the times at school the coach had pushed her, yelled at her to run faster or do more push-ups, the old goat man had been trying to help her in his own irritating way-trying to prepare her for life as a demigod.
Slowly she slipped into sleep, resting her head on Leo's back who smiled to himself.
Alex had a weird dream, at first she was at Camp Half Blood, she recognised the big house, the cabins and the lake far away. But there was no one and even under the sun, she started shivering uncontrollably.
"Pathetic" A disembodied voice spoke, Alex tried to determine where it came from but it was no use.
"Daughter of Poseidon... your brother's much better" The voice spoke again, Alex realised it was a woman's.
Alex opened her mouth but no words came out.
"Have you been useful so far? You are flying to your death and you trust your so called friends?"
A woman materialised in front of Alex. With a chill, Alex realised the woman was, in fact, asleep. Behind the veil, her eyes were closed. But even stranger: her clothes were not made of cloth. They were made of earth-dry black dirt, churning and shifting around her. Her pale, sleeping face was barely visible behind a curtain of dust, and he had the horrible sense that she'd had just risen from the grave. If the woman was asleep, Alex wanted her to stay that way. She knew that fully awake, she would be even more terrible.
"Who are you" Alex managed.
"Wrong question, then again children of Poseidon never were smart" Her mouth didn't move but the words echoed through Alex's head.
"Do not trust your friends, the daughter of Aphrodite will betray you, the son of Hephaestus will leave you to die and the son of Jupiter is not who you think he is"
Alex noticed she said Jupiter- the roman form of Zeus.
"Gee, I thought we were important. The least you can do is learn our names" Alex said sarcastically.
"You dare speak to me that way?" The woman asked angrily. "No wonder your mother and brother never bothered to search for you"
Alex felt her heart getting crushed, "What?"
"You didn't hide very well young one, why do you think you weren't found? They never searched"
Alex knew she shouldn't pay attention to the woman, but her words made sense.
"You're lying"
"See for yourself what life your brother led with you gone" The woman floated toward Alex and before the girl could protest, the woman placed her fingers on her temples and the dream dissolved.
Alex saw a twelve year old boy who looked scarily like her. They had the same green eyes and black hair. Even their face shape was almost the same, except Alex's was a bit more feminine.
"Percy?" Alex asked unsure. The boy however seemed to not hear her and walked with a young Annabeth, both laughing at something.
The dream changed, Alex found herself at a school dance where a thirteen year old Percy danced with Annabeth while their companions- a girl with spiky black hair and a young satyr watched from across the dance floor.
Alex realised the girl with black hair looked familiar, as soon she thought that- the dream changed again.
She watched from the shore as Percy and his friends floated in a small boat, headed toward the hoover dam. They were all laughing while one of them looked around confused. Alex swallowed, she told herself that everyone had good moments.
The scene shifted and Alex was on Cam Half Blood's hill where Percy and Annabeth raced each other. She realised her brother was closer to Annabeth than her, but then again she was closer to Leo than Percy.
"No one needs you Alexandra" The voice echoed, everything went dark. And Alex woke up screaming, free-falling through the air.
Alex tumbled through the sky. Far below she saw city lights glimmering in the early dawn, and several hundred yards away the body of the bronze dragon spinning out of control, its wings limp, fire flickering in its mouth like a badly wired light bulb.
"FESTUS" Alex yelled, but there was nothing she could do.
A body shot past her-Leo, screaming and frantically grabbing at the clouds. "Not coooooool!" She tried to call to him, but he was already too far below.
Somewhere above her, Jason yelled, "Piper, Alex, level out! Extend your arms and legs!"
It was hard to control her fear, but she did what he said and regained some balance. She fell spread-eagle like a skydiver, the wind underneath her like a solid block of ice. Then Jason was there, holding onto her by her ankle.
"We have to get Leo!" Alex shouted as panic filled her.
Their fall slowed as Jason controlled the winds, but they still lurched up and down like the winds didn't want to cooperate.
"Gonna get rough," Jason warned. "Hold on!"
Alex held onto Jason's neck while Piper held his torso. All of them probably screamed, but the sound was ripped from their mouths. Alex's vision blurred.
And then, thump! They slammed into another warm body-Leo, still wriggling and cursing.
"Stop fighting!" Jason said. "It's me!"
"My dragon!" Leo yelled.
"You gotta save Festus!" Alex yelled too.
Jason was already struggling to keep the four of them aloft, and Alex knew there was no way he could help a fifty-ton metal dragon. But before she could talk with Leo, she heard an explosion below them. A fireball rolled into the sky from behind a warehouse complex, and Leo sobbed, "Festus!"
Jason's face reddened with strain as he tried to maintain an air cushion beneath them, but intermittent slow-downs were the best he could manage. Rather than free-falling, it felt like they were bouncing down a giant staircase, a hundred feet at a time, which wasn't doing Alex's stomach any favours, not that she was focused on flying anymore. Her heart sunk when she heard the crash and wished that Festus wasn't destroyed.
As they wobbled and zigzagged, Alex could make out details of the factory complex below-warehouses, smokestacks, barbed-wire fences, and parking lots lined with snow-covered vehicles. They were still high enough so that hitting the ground would flatten them into roadkill-or skykill-when Jason groaned, "I can't-"
And they dropped like stones.
'Sup you guys... Gotta say, I love my readers. Seriously though, you're all amazing. Anyways, kind of a self promo... but check out my other book. It's called Death and Madness and it's a Nico x oc which exists in the same universe. So Violet- the oc and Alex will meet, not now but later.
