DON'T BLAME ME! (p. jackson) (#2) (ON HOLD)

- five

PERCY HAD TAKEN ROSE on some romantic walks before. this wasn't one of them.

they followed the phlegethon, stumbling over the glassy black terrain, jumping crevices, and hiding behind rocks whenever the vampire girls slowed in front of them.

it was tricky to stay far enough back to avoid getting spotted but close enough to keep kelli and her comrades in view through the dark hazy air. the heat from the river baked their skin. every breath was like inhaling sulfur-scented fiberglass. when they needed a drink, the best they could do was sip some refreshing liquid fire.

at least rose's knee seemed to have healed. she was hardly limping at all. her various cuts and scrapes had faded. she'd tied her hair back with a strip of denim torn from her pants leg, and in the fiery light of the river, her brown eyes flickered. despite being beat-up, sooty, and dressed like a homeless person, she been told by percy that she looked great.

time was impossible to judge. they trudged along, following the river as it cut through the harsh landscape. fortunately the empousai weren't exactly speed walkers. they shuffled on their mismatched bronze and donkey legs, hissing and fighting with each other, apparently in no hurry to reach the doors.

once, the demons sped up in excitement and swarmed something that looked like a beached carcass on the riverbank. rose couldn't tell what it was—a fallen monster? an animal of some kind?

the empousai attacked it with relish.

when the demons moved on, percy and rose reached the spot and found nothing left except a few splintered bones and glistening stains drying in the heat of the river. rose had no doubt the empousai would devour demigods with the same gusto.

"come on." percy led her gently away from the scene. "we don't want to lose them."

as they walked, rose thought about the first time she'd fought the empousa kelli at goode high school's freshman orientation, when she, percy, and rachel elizabeth dare got trapped in the band hall. at the time, it seemed like a hopeless situation. now, she'd give anything to have a problem that simple. at least she'd been in the mortal world then. here, there was nowhere to run.

wow. when she started looking back on the war with kronos as the good old days—that was sad.

she kept hoping things would get better for her and percy, but their lives just got more and more dangerous, as if the three fates were up there spinning their futures with barbed wire instead of thread just to see how much two demigods could tolerate.

after a few more miles, the empousai disappeared over a ridge. when rose and percy caught up, they found themselves at the edge of another massive cliff. the phlegethon spilled over the side in jagged tiers of fiery waterfalls. the demon ladies were picking their way down the cliff, jumping from ledge to ledge like mountain goats.

rose's heart crept into her throat. even if they reached the bottom of the cliff alive, they didn't have much to look forward to. the landscape below them was a bleak, ash-gray plain bristling with black trees, like insect hair. the ground was pocked with blisters. every once in a while, a bubble would swell and burst, disgorging a monster like a larva from an egg.

suddenly rose wasn't hungry anymore.

all the newly formed monsters were crawling and hobbling in the same direction—toward a bank of black fog that swallowed the horizon like a storm front. the phlegethon flowed in the same direction until about halfway across the plain, where it met another river of black water—maybe the cocytus? the two floods combined in a steaming, boiling cataract and flowed on as one toward the black fog.