𝑨𝑺𝑯𝑬𝑺 • 𝑃𝐸𝑅𝐶𝑌 𝐽𝐴𝐶𝐾𝑆𝑂𝑁 ²

FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
—dumb boys

🗡🗡🗡

  —JUDITH had come to the jolting realization that you could hate someone with a fiery passion and still miss them. It was not really advertised, the average lifespan of a demigod. But it wasn't hard to figure out that a midlife crisis occurred in their teens.

  They say the star that burns twice as bright, burns half as fast.

  And the son of Poseidon — well, Percy Jackson was the brightest star Judith ever had the misfortune to meet. The constellations above paled in comparison to his vibrant heroics on earth. He was the sun next to their twinkling specks, and he burned accordingly. He left everyone in the ashes, wondering where it all went wrong and where they were to go from there. Correction: he left Judith in the ashes, and she was wondering how to go on.

  The future suddenly felt hazy and impossible to navigate, hidden beneath the embers of a lost legend.

  The daughter of Ares, specifically, couldn't see a damned thing through the reddened smoke of her fumes. The flares in her chest had long since spread to the rest of her body, begging to be unleashed upon the world. Her hands yearned to break something indestructible, to show the fates just what they'd done. They'd killed something that should have been unkillable.

  The crimson shade over her eyes made the blue-green shroud look burnt. She could hardly recognize the trident insignia stitched onto its center, glaring at her in mockery.

  The sea beyond the coast was tranquil and Judith wanted to scream at it, at the god who ruled it. Demand recompense for bringing a stupid hero into this world only to have him be swept away the next second. She wanted storms, hurricanes, typhoons, anything to make it seem like there was someone out there who cared as much as her. She wanted a storm to match her rage.

  It had been two weeks, and still, she wanted violence and frenzy. She'd waited and waited, just as everyone else had, for something to happen. For a miraculous revival or a storm to shake the earth and tear everything apart.

  And neither had happened.

  It was like the world had gone forever still in Percy's absence. The earth waited on baited breath to see who would strike first — the tides or the moon.

  Judith couldn't stop the whirlwind of memories from flooding into her mind of that day. She'd hacked away at the metal door, sparks flying as celestial bronze hit iron and gold panels. She'd only made one single dent before Annabeth found her, screaming curses at any deity who dared to listen. The daughter of Athena had never seen the girl so worked up, so completely distraught and furious. The anguish on her face burned itself into her subconscious.

  Annabeth had managed to drag her along to follow the spider back to Hephaestus's current forge where they'd wait for him to finish. Judith had been silent the whole time, so mad at what the boy had done to her that when the television where they'd seen Mount St. Helens on the first time switched on, she had paid it no mind. That was, until a news broadcaster quickly ran on in a breaking news sequence.

  "Still uncertain about further eruptions," the newscaster was saying. "Authorities have ordered the evacuation of almost half a million people as a precaution. Meanwhile, ash has fallen as far away as Lake Tahoe and Vancouver, and the entire Mount St. Helens area is closed to traffic within a hundred-mile radius. While no deaths have been reported, minor injuries and illnesses include — "