Death's Daughter (fem oc x annabeth chase)

A Strange Request

"Found you a sleeping bag," Luke said to Percy, holding up Mara's old sleeping bag. "She doesn't sleep here anymore so it's yours. And here, I stole you some toiletries from the camp store."

"Thanks," Percy awkwardly said as he grabbed all the stuff.

"No prob." Luke sat next to him, pushing his back against the wall. "Tough first day?"

"I don't belong here," Percy insisted. "I don't even believe in gods."

"Yeah," he said. "That's how we all started. Once you start believing in them? It doesn't get any easier."

The bitterness in his voice surprised Percy, because Luke seemed like a pretty easygoing guy. He looked like he could handle just about anything.

"So your dad is Hermes?" Percy asked.

He pulled a switchblade out of his back pocket and scraped the mud off the sole of his sandal.

"Yeah. Hermes."

"The wing-footed messenger guy."

"That's him. Messengers. Medicine. Travelers, merchants, thieves. Anybody who uses the roads. That's why you're here, enjoying cabin eleven's hospitality. Hermes isn't picky about who he sponsors."

Did Luke just call him a nobody?

"You ever meet your dad?" Percy asked.

"Once."

And that was his only response.

Luke looked up and managed a smile. "Don't worry about it, Percy. The campers here, they're mostly good people. After all, we're extended family, right? We take care of each other."

He seemed to understand how lost Percy felt and he felt grateful for that. Luke was welcoming and probably his first friend here, if Percy could even call him that.

He'd even stolen Percy some toiletries, which was the nicest thing anybody had done for him all day.

Percy decided to ask him his last big question, the one that had been bothering him all afternoon.

"Clarisse, from Ares, was joking about me being 'Big Three' material. Then Annabeth...twice, she said I might be 'the one.' She said I should talk to the Oracle. What was that all about?"

Luke folded his knife. "I hate prophecies."

"What do you mean?"

His face twitched around the scar. "Let's just say I messed things up for everybody else. The last two years, ever since my trip to the Garden of the Hesperides went sour, Chiron hasn't allowed any more quests. Annabeth's been dying to get out into the world. She pestered Chiron so much he finally told her he already knew her fate. He'd had a prophecy from the Oracle. He wouldn't tell her the whole thing, but he said Annabeth wasn't destined to go on a quest yet. She had to wait until...somebody special came to the camp."

"Somebody special?"

"Don't worry about it, kid," Luke said. "Annabeth wants to think every new camper who comes through here is the omen she's been waiting for. Now, come on, it's dinnertime."

The moment he said it, a horn blew in the distance. Somehow, Percy knew it was a conch shell, even though he'd never heard one before.

Luke yelled, "Eleven, fall in!"

The whole cabin, about twenty of them, filed into the commons yard. Campers came from the other cabins, too, except for the three empty cabins at the end, and cabin eight, which had looked normal in the daytime, but was now starting to glow silver as the sun went down.