Annabeth Chase and the Last Olympian

Chapter 7 - Chores make me angry

Percy and I teamed up to do inspections the next morning. Technically it was my turn to do them, but Percy's chore was to sort through reports for Chiron, which he hated nearly as much as I hated mine. We thought that doing them together would be better than alone, if we didn't strangle each other first, of course.

We started with Poseidon's cabin, aka Percy's mancave. He looked pretty proud with himself for making his bed, if you could call it that, and tried to convince me to give him a four out of five. 

I raised my eyebrow and used the end of the pencil to pick up a pair of running shorts from the ground. "You're being generous."

He snatched them from me and shoved them under the pillow, as if that was an improvement. "Hey, give me a break. I don't have Tyson cleaning up after me this summer." He smiled at me, like that made it better.

"Three out of five," I said and gave him a stare until he closed his mouth and nodded meekly. 

We stepped out of the Poseidon cabin and headed to the next, Percy struggling with the reports. Most of them were depressing, all the satyrs, nature spirits and demigods we had scattered across the country reporting on the high monster activity that was making life miserable for all of us. It didn't seem like there was any good news at all. 

I gave the Aphrodite cabin a five out of five, which was it's usual score. There was not a thing wrong with the place, with the colour coordinated shirts in the cupboards and the flowers growing in the window sills. Percy wanted to give them four out of five because of the strong designer perfume smell but I ignored him. 

"Great job as usual, Silena," I said. 

The daughter of Aphrodite nodded listlessly. She'd made an effort to look nice today, with slight touches of makeup on her face and her hair combed back, but it was a far cry from the glamorous Silena that I was used to. It didn't help that she was sitting on her bunk with photos of Beckendorf and her all over the wall. She had a box of chocolates on her lap that looked untouched. 

"You want a bonbon?" she asked quietly. "My dad sent them. He thought - he thought they might cheer me up."

"Are they any good?" Percy asked. 

She shook her head. "They taste like cardboard."

I passed, but Percy, the human trash disposer, took a few. After promising to check in on her soon, we immediately nearly got hit by a flying chariot as we stepped out of the cabin. Apollo campers armed with fire bombs were soaring over the heads of some very angry Ares kids, laughing as they dropped the bombs on the roof of the Ares cabin. Naiads from the canoe lake had to be called in as the emergency fire brigade to blow water on it. 

The Ares kids retaliated by calling down a curse that turned all the Apollo kids' arrows into rubber, so that they bounced harmlessly off anything they were meant to hit. I sighed at the immaturity on display, especially when an Ares kid chased two Apollo archers.

"Curse me, eh?" he yelled. "I'll make you pay!/ I don't want to rhyme all day!"

"Not that again," I said. "Last time Apollo cursed a cabin, it took a week for the rhyming couplets to wear off."

Percy shuddered. He knew first hand how bad Apollo was at poetry, despite being the god of it. 

"What are they fighting about anyway?" he asked. 

The question just served to remind me of how much he'd missed when he was away and I busied myself by giving both Apollo and Ares a one out of five while I calmed myself so I wouldn't yell at him. But every time I thought of him being away, I couldn't help but think that he was spending time with her, and what that could mean for him and I. And that made me both irrationally angry and jealous and I hated myself for thinking that way, but damn it, I couldn't help it!