When Two Worlds Collide | pjo & fhdw ✔︎

Chapter 22

chapter twenty two - k e n d r a

We were seated in a hole-in-the-wall B-B-Q, decorated with rustic maps of Georgia and American flags. Seth, Sehvi, Warren, and I were all seated at a booth. Sehvi had turned into a middle-aged woman without her signature blush pink skin to better match her surroundings. Percy and Annabeth couldn't leave because of the barrier and Grandma and Grandpa had decided to stay at the house.

Sehvi told us she had a contact who might help. Unfortunately, it had been a long ride as this "contact" happened to live in Georgia.

A server walked over to our table. "Good morning. Welcome to Bourdan's BBQ, I'm going to start y'all off with some drinks. We have water, lemonade, or soda. For you, ma'am?"

"Sorry, sir," Sehvi replied. "We were actually here for a Miss Li?"

His expression turned a little sour as he tried to keep up his smile. "I'll go get her. She's on break."

We waited until a woman with Chinese features approached in a server's uniform. She narrowed her eyes and the widened in recognition. "Scarlet?"

"How'd you guess?" Sehvi grinned as she fingered her silver teardrop earrings.

"You still kept them? After all these years?"

I felt like I was in a high school reunion that wasn't mine.

"I thought they were flattering," Sehvi confessed, "plus they let me signal you in my different forms."

"Great, you use my gifts as homing beacons, " the lady dry panned. "Now, I expect you have company?"

"This table."

"I've never seen you make a friend ever. Let alone three. What's going on?"

Sehvi shrugged. "It's what happens when worlds collide."

----

"So it's Chrysie causing problems this time, huh?"

"Yeah, she wants to cause a war, between demigods and the preserves," Seth responded to the lady who we know knew went by Bai Li.

"Why do you reckon she wants to do that?" she asked, reclining on a chair as the rest of us sat on her couch in her apartment. It made me feel like a talk show guest.

"To quit her job, I think she said. She doesn't want to continue being a warden," I interjected.

"Now, why do you think that is?" Bai asked.

"Are we here to have some epiphany? I just want to know how to beat her," Warren stated.

Sehvi shushed him. "Listen to her. I brought her to you because she is very intelligent. It'd be wise to go along and stop complaining like a little boy with no patience."

"Continuing, why do you think she doesn't want to remain a Warden?"

"She probably got tired of being an immortal glorified guard," I said drawing from my experience with the Eternals.

"The problem is that she is only released of her service by death or the destruction of the barriers she is supposed to protect," Bai said.

"She doesn't want to die," Seth guessed. "So, she wants to destroy the barriers."

"But she can't," Bai said. "It took dark magic to open a temporary anomaly to let your group in and
took a tremendous effort from the boy who originally came with you to shadow-travel out." I almost asked how she knew about Nico, until I realized her whole job was to monitor the barriers. "I can't imagine how she hopes to break the barriers without doing it the proper way with all five gems, but whichever alternative she chooses it is bound to be disastrous."

"So, what's our goal here?" Warren asked Bai.

"We need to prevent her doing the alternative, but the only way to do that is to do it the safe, proper way before she does an alternative."

Kendra spoke up. "What's the catch?"

"We need all five gems...and Chrysie has two."

━━━━━━★━━━━━━

don't forget to vote <33