Changing Fate (Book 1: The God and The Titan)

3

As we trudged up Madison Avenue, my mind swirled with questions: Why hadn't Zeus given me a winter coat? Why did Percy Jackson and Naomi Riverstone live so far uptown? Why did pedestrians keep staring at Emma and I?

I wondered if my divine radiance was starting to return. Perhaps the New Yorkers were awed by my obvious power and unearthly good looks.

Meg McCaffrey set me straight.

"You smell," she said.

"Yeah, You look like you've just been mugged." Emma said.

"I have just been mugged. Also enslaved by a small child and her personal huntress."

"It's not slavery." She chewed off a piece of her thumb cuticle and spit it out. "It's more like mutual cooperation."

"And I'm not Meg's personal huntress or sidekick!" Emma yelled in anger for the third time.

"Mutual in the sense that you give orders and I am forced to cooperate well Emma watches?"

"Yep." She stopped in front of a storefront window. "See? You look gross."

My reflection stared back at me, except it was not my reflection. It couldn't be. The face was the same as on Lester Papafopulos's ID.

I looked about sixteen. My medium-length hair was dark and curly—a style I had rocked in Athenian times, and again in the 1970s. My eyes were blue. My face was pleasing enough in a dorkish way, but it was marred by a swollen eggplant-colored nose, which had caused a gruesome mustache of blood down my upper lip. Even worse, my cheeks were covered with some sort of rash that looked suspiciously like...My heart climbed into my throat.

"Horrors!" I cried. "Is that—Is that acne?"

"Hey Apollo, I've seen people uglier than you, trust me," Emma stated but I didn't listen because Immortal gods do not get acne. It is one of our inalienable rights. Yet I leaned closer to the glass and saw that my skin was indeed a scarred landscape of whiteheads and pustules.

I balled my fists and wailed to the cruel sky, "Zeus, what have I done to deserve this?"

Meg tugged at my sleeve. "You're going to get yourself arrested." "Yeah," Emma said.

"What does it matter? I have been made a teenager, and not even one with perfect skin! I bet I don't even have..." With a cold sense of dread, I lifted my shirt. My midriff was covered with a floral pattern of bruises from my fall into the Dumpster and my subsequent kicking. But even worse, I had a flab.

"Oh, no, no, no." I staggered around the sidewalk, hoping the flab would not follow me. "Where are my eight-pack abs? I always have eight-pack abs. I never have love handles. Never in four thousand years!"

Meg made another snorting laugh. "Sheesh, crybaby, you're fine."

"I'm fat!"

"You're average. Average people don't have eight-pack abs. C'mon."

"Yeah, and eight-packs are not a thing Apollo" Emma snapped at me.

"Emma you're really rude and I'm a god. So have some respect," I told her.

"I could kill you, you right here and now." Emma said. I rolled my eyes at her.

I wanted to protest that I was not average nor a person, but with growing despair, I realized the term now fit me perfectly.

On the other side of the storefront window, a security guard's face loomed, scowling at me. I allowed Meg and Emma to pull me farther down the street.