crow's calling - Percy Jackson (2)

chapter one

     Parker Kelley was a good man, an even better father. While he had been unprepared and admittedly terrified, his daughter was convinced that had the gods been real, he was the best of them.

He never hid from a dirty diaper, and he kissed all of the cuts and bruises that would blemish her arms and knees. He dressed his daughter in polka dot overalls, learned how to do her hair in little clips and bows, and he always pretended not to be looking when she licked the brownie batter off the spatula.

Wren Kelley was a wild child. She liked to chase after the chickens in the barn, launch herself from the low hayloft onto the piles of soft hay below, and pick ladybugs off the windowsill to hold in her hand. She wore her baseball caps backwards to match her dad's, and she liked to slide down the stair bannister as best she could before he would grab her and dangle her upside down by her legs.

They were a happy duo, with fruit stained smiles and strikingly similar laughs. To think that Parker had been so terrified at the sight of the little baby, so scared that he would royally screw up and ruin her life.

He was only thirty years old and without the slightest of clues of what to do when he spotted his girlfriend, who'd vanished into thin air about seven months prior, walking up the driveway to his farm with a newborn child in her arms- a baby girl swaddled in a blanket that was decorated with blue cosmos.

"I can be quite irritable when I'm pregnant. It's bad for the agriculture around me." Demeter had smiled at the farmer in front of her as if that statement alone validated her long absence and provided grand reasoning for her abrupt reappearance. Parker had a begged for her return, and there she stood... with a baby. The woman pulled down the blanket that kept the baby swaddled, revealing her peacefully sleeping face, "Meet your daughter."

The baby was asleep, eyes closed with her mouth drawn into the smallest of pouts, and her round cheeks just the slightest bit pink. She was so small, looking almost like a toy doll that young children carried around. He supposed, now, that his daughter would carry a baby doll around herself one day.

Daughter.

Parker Kelley had never imagined himself a father, much less the father of a little girl. He grew up well, a happy mother and father, he graduated with a degree from college, and he ran a farm on his own and made business with the town. A family had never crossed his mind until he met Demeter, but when she revealed herself a real goddess the idea flew out the window - in what world would this goddess want to create a baby with him, a farmer?

He dispelled the idea so far from his mind that it sounded almost like a cosmic joke.

Plants, animals - that he could do. But a baby? A living human being that would depend on him in order to live?

The gods had to be playing a trick on him, and he could very well think that because the woman standing in front of him with a goddess herself.

Demeter took note of his hesitation, a light laugh brushing past her lips as she gently began to pass the baby over to the his hood. Her heart swelled at the sight, Perker Kelley holding the little girl in his arms, almost going pale as he held her as though she was a delicate glass figurine.

"I haven't named her - I wanted you to have the chance."

"Me?" Parker Kelley nearly guffawed as he looked down at the baby in his arms. She was stirring awake now, the movement from one parent to the other having awoken her. Her eyes were blinking in the sunlight and her free hand had latched onto the pointer finger he poked at her with.

He was expecting for the baby to cry in his hold - all of his friends kids did - but much to his surprise the tears never came. She smiled up at him with the smallest of coo's and in that very instant Parker Kelley knew that he was a goner. His throat had gone tight, his eyes felt like they were burning, and he held his own baby in his arms.