Percy Jackson Series. Annabeth Chase X Male Reader Story

I am Entrusted With Sharp Objects

Percy's POV

Four flights up, the stairs ended under a green trapdoor. I pulled the cord. The door swung down, and a wooden ladder clattered into place. The warm air from above smelled like mildew and rotten wood and something else... a smell I remembered from biology class.

Reptiles. The smell of snakes. I held my breath and climbed. The attic was filled with Greek hero junk: armour stands covered in cobwebs; once-bright shields pitted with rust; old leather steamer trunks plastered with stickers saying ITHAKA, CIRCE'S ISLE and LAND OF THE AMAZONS.

One long table was stacked with glass jars filled with pickled things– severed hairy claws, huge yellow eyes, various other parts of monsters. A dusty mounted trophy on the wall looked like a giant snake's head, but with horns and a full set of shark's teeth.

The plaque read: HYDRA HEAD NO. I, WOODSTOCK, NY, 1969. By the window, sitting on a wooden tripod stool, was the most gruesome memento of all: a mummy. Not the wrapped-in-cloth kind, but a human female body shrivelled to a husk.

She wore a tie-dyed sundress, lots of beaded necklaces, and a headband over long black hair. The skin of her face was thin and leathery over her skull, and her eyes were glassy white slits, as if the real eyes had been replaced by marbles; she'd been dead a long, long time.

Looking at her sent chills up my back. And that was before she sat up on her stool and opened her mouth. A green mist poured from the mummy's mouth, coiling over the floor in thick tendrils, hissing like twenty-thousand snakes.

I stumbled over myself trying to get to the trapdoor, but it slammed shut. Inside my head, I heard a voice, slithering into one ear and coiling around my brain: "I am the spirit of Delphi, speaker of the prophecies of Phoebus Apollo, slayer of the mighty Python. Approach, seeker, and ask."

I wanted to say, "No thanks, wrong door, just looking for the bathroom." But I forced myself to take a deep breath. The mummy wasn't alive. She was some kind of gruesome receptacle for something else, the power that was now swirling around me in the green mist.

But its presence didn't feel evil, like my demonic maths teacher Mrs Dodds or the Minotaur. It felt more like the Three Fates I'd seen knitting the yarn outside the highway fruit stand: ancient, powerful, and definitely not human. But not particularly interested in killing me, either.

I got up the courage to ask, "What is my destiny?" The mist swirled more thickly, collecting right in front of me and around the table with the pickled monster-part jars. Suddenly there were four men sitting around the table, playing cards.

Their faces became clearer. It was Smelly Gabe and his buddies. My fists clenched, though I knew this poker party couldn't be real. It was an illusion, made out of mist. Gabe turned towards me and spoke in the rasping voice of the Oracle:

"You shall go west, and face the god who has turned." His buddy on the right looked up and said in the same voice: "You shall find what was stolen, and see it safely returned." The guy on the left threw in two poker chips, then said: "You shall be betrayed by one who calls you a friend." Finally, Eddie, our building super, delivered the worst line of all: "And you shall fail to save what matters most, in the end."

The figures began to dissolve. At first, I was too stunned to say anything, but as the mist retreated, coiling into a huge green serpent and slithering back into the mouth of the mummy, I cried, "Wait! What do you mean? What friend? What will I fail to save?"

The tail of the mist snake disappeared into the mummy's mouth. She reclined back against the wall. Her mouth closed tight, as if it hadn't been open in a hundred years. The attic was silent again, abandoned, nothing but a room full of mementos. I got the feeling that I could stand here until I had cobwebs, too, and I wouldn't learn anything else. My audience with the Oracle was over.