𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐬'𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 • 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘺 𝘫𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘴𝘰𝘯

Luke... Or Is It Kronos?

A/n: THE TEASER TRAILER FOR THE PJO SERIES CAME OUT AAAAAA

Y/n's Pov:

Jumping out a window five hundred feet aboveground is not usually my idea of fun. Especially when I'm wearing bronze wings and flapping my arms like a duck.

I plummeted toward the valley and the red rocks below. I was pretty sure I was going to become a grease spot in the Garden of the Gods, as Annabeth yelled from somewhere above me, "Spread your arms! Keep them extended."

The small part of my brain that wasn't engulfed in panic heard her, and my arms responded. As soon as I spread them out, the wings stiffened caught the wind, and my descent slowed. I soared downward, but at a controlled angle, like a kite in a dive.

Experimentally, I flapped my arms once. I arced into the sky, the wind whistling in my ears.

"Yeah!" I yelled. The feeling was unbelievable. After getting the hang of it, I felt like the wings were part of my body. I could soar and swoop and dive anywhere I wanted to. I turned and saw my friends—Rachel, Grayson, Percy, Annabeth, and Nico—spiralling above me, glinting in the sunlight. Behind them, smoke billowed from the windows of Daedalus's workshop.

"Land!" Annabeth yelled. "These wings won't last forever."

"How long?" Rachel asked.

"I don't want to find out!" Annabeth said.

We swooped down toward the Garden of the Gods. I did a complete circle around one of the rock spires and freaked out a couple of climbers. Then the four of us soared across the valley, over a road, and landed on the terrace of the visitor centre. It was late afternoon and the place looked pretty empty, but we ripped off our wings as quickly as we could. Looking at them, I could see Annabeth was right. The self-adhesive seals that bound the wings to our backs were already melting, and we were shedding bronze feathers. It seemed a shame, but we couldn't fix them, and couldn't leave them around for the mortals, so we stuffed the wings in rubbish bins outside the cafeteria.

I used the tourist binocular camera to look up at the hill where Daedalus's workshop had been, but it had vanished. No more smoke. No broken windows. Just the side of a hill.

"The workshop moved," Annabeth guessed. "There's no telling where."

"So what do we do now?" Grayson asked. "How do we get back in the maze?"

Annabeth gazed at the summit of Pikes Peak in the distance. "Maybe we can't. If Daedalus died...he said his life force was tied into the Labyrinth. The whole thing might've been destroyed. Maybe that will stop Luke's invasion."

I thought about Grover and Tyson, still down there somewhere. And Daedalus...even though he'd done some terrible things and put everybody I cared about at risk, it seemed like a pretty horrible way to die.

"No," Nico said. "He isn't dead."

"How can you be sure?" I asked.

"I know when people die. It's this feeling I get, like a buzzing in my ears."

"Same!" Grayson exclaimed excitedly. "I thought it was an ear problem or something, but it wasn't!"

"You can feel the dead too?" Nico questioned.

"Yeah. My mom's Persephone."

"Oh!" Nico muttered. "Father will not be so happy about that."

Grayson ignored Nico's last statement. "I can only do it in winter, though. I know because I felt it last winter when Zoe - " He paused, looking at me. "Sorry."

I fiddled with my ring, a habit I had started to do much more since last winter. "Don't worry."

"What about Tyson and Grover, then?" Percy intervened.