Greeking Out and more

Crazy Feelings

Nico wasn't sure how he'd gotten sent grocery shopping alone with Zia. Carter and Sadie were usually very careful to make sure things like that didn't happen.

Not that Nico disliked Zia or anything. They'd been getting along better lately. It was just that . . . well . . . there really wasn't a way to make things normal between the two of them. Not when Zia had inherited Nephthys' motherly instincts for Anubis and superimposed them onto Anubis' host. Or when Nico couldn't decide whether he wanted to get Zia a Mother's Day Card or stay as far away from her as possible.

She is not my mom, he told himself as he followed her through the produce department of the food-mart, pushing the cart while she burdened it down with vegetables and fruit. Why is it so hard to convince myself that when I know it's true?

He felt Anubis stir inside his skull, the god's attention caught by Nico's deep concentration. Usually the god kept the majority of his consciousness elsewhere, doing death godly things that involved feathers, scales, human hearts, and hippo-doodles that didn't Nico neither wanted nor needed to know about in detail. Anubis would have vacated Nico's skull altogether if he could have, but since their souls had somehow been fused together, that wasn't possible. He made up for it by trying to intrude in Nico's day-to-day life as little as possible, and by showing up with Mythomagic booster packs as soon as possible every time a new series was released. That went a long ways toward helping Nico forgive the god's unintentional intrusions.

Nothing's wrong, Nico told Anubis. Just shopping for food. Health food. He shuddered.

Keep your guard up, Nico, said Anubis.

You don't have to tell me, I already know. And Nico really did know. They were in San Fran-freaking-sisco. Home of Ghiradeli's chocolate, the Golden Gate Bridge, and hordes and hordes of evil monsters that were all out for Nico's blood. They had been in the city for just three days and Nico had already had to kill a sphinx, two cyclopses, and an automaton on the fritz. No demigod in their right mind hung out in the Bay Area if they didn't have to.

It was still up in the air whether or not Nico was in his right mind, but unfortunately, he really did have to hang out in San Francisco.

One of the local museums had recently cleaned out their storage and found a huge collection of Greek and Egyptian artifacts in their horde that they hadn't even been aware they'd owned. They were all old things that had been packed away since the 1920s, a time long before most people had respect for concepts like national treasures or customs arrangements, or even productive things like cataloguing the crap you bought that you intended to use to draw crowds and make money.

It was an old museum, but not very well known, so it hadn't yet drawn the crowds that Nico, Zia, and the Kanes knew that it would once word spread about what the museum actually had. As far as they knew, the exhibit had only been publicized through a few newspapers put out by local colleges. The Kanes and company had only learned about it because one of Anubis' idols turned out to be a part of the collection, and after it had been moved into the light after so long in darkness, Anubis had gone to check out what was going on and one of the other artifacts had caught his eye: a jeweled collar with the crest of the Mad Oracle on it, the woman who'd given the doomsday prophecy that Nico and Anubis were a part of. If there was one thing that she had owned in the exhibit, there might be more, which was why the Kanes, Zia, and Nico had come. As soon as word about the various treasures in the exhibit spread, House of Life magicians would begin swarming the site, no doubt, along with scholars, school groups, and new age hippies. Then everything would probably be packed up and sent on tour across the country when requests and donation money began pouring in to the little nothing, low security museum that owned the artifacts, and getting access to them would be much more difficult.