"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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At first Alex thought rocks were pelting the windshield with how much noise they were making. Then she realized it was sleet. Frost built up around the edges of the glass, and slushy waves of ice blotted out his view.
"An ice storm?" Piper shouted over the engine and the wind. "Is it supposed to be this cold in Sonoma?"
Alex wasn't sure, but something about this storm seemed conscious, malevolent—like it was intentionally slamming them.
Jason woke up too and he grabbed Leo's seat for balance. "We've got to be getting close."
Leo was too busy wrestling with the stick to reply. Suddenly they started to lose altitude.
Below them, the ground was a dark quilt of trees and fog. The ridge of a hill loomed in front of them and Leo yanked the stick, just clearing the treetops.
"There!" Jason shouted.
A small valley opened up before them, with the murky shape of a building in the middle. Leo aimed the helicopter straight for it. All around them were flashes of light that reminded Leo of the tracer fire at Midas's compound. Trees cracked and exploded at the edges of the clearing. Shapes moved through the mist. Combat seemed to be everywhere.
He set down the helicopter in an icy field about fifty yards from the house and killed the engine. Alex was about to relax when she heard a whistling sound and saw a dark shape hurtling toward them out of the mist.
"Out!" Leo screamed.
They leaped from the helicopter and barely cleared the rotors before a massive BOOM shook the ground, knocking Alex off her feet and splattering ice all over her.
She got up shakily and saw that the world's largest snowball-a chunk of snow, ice, and dirt the size of a garage-had completely flattened the Bell 412.
"You all right?" Jason ran up to Alex, Piper and Leo at his side. They looked fine except for being speckled with snow and mud.
"Yeah." Alex shivered.
"Guess we owe that ranger lady a new helicopter." Leo joked.
Piper pointed south. "Fighting's over there." Then she frowned. "No... it's all around us."
She was right. The sounds of combat rang across the valley. The snow and mist made it hard to tell for sure, but there seemed to be a circle of fighting all around the Wolf House.
Behind them loomed Jack London's dream home-a massive ruin of red and gray stones and rough-hewn timber beams. Alex could imagine how it had looked before it burned down-a combination log cabin and castle, like a billionaire lumberjack might build. But in the mist and sleet, the place had a lonely, haunted feel.
"Jason!" a girl's voice called.
Thalia appeared from the fog, her parka caked with snow. Her bow was in her hand, and her quiver was almost empty. She ran toward them, but made it only a few steps before a six-armed ogre-one of the Earthborn-burst out of the storm behind her, a raised club in each hand.
