By The Angels (PJOxSH)

2

Another week passed for Nico Di Angelo, and for him, things rapidly improved. He admitted his crush on Will, now they were dating, he quickly learned how to hide his wings, watching as they transitioned into shadows, then decorated his back as if the darkness were ink. The camp was winding down for the summer, and everything was becoming peaceful and melancholic of the recent summer. 

After he'd returned from the Underworld, Will had hunted him down to scold him, even though he had recently been fully healed by the god of healing himself. Nico somehow managed to just talk through a crack in the door, using the natural darkness of his cabin to hide, as well as his lack of a shirt as an excuse for Will not to enter. 

Nico gained a new habit of sneaking off into the woods to train with his new abilities, testing new limitations as well as whatever he gained from Thanatos's blessing. So far, he just had wings that he could make appear and disappear on command, though he had to be careful or his wings would manifest themselves on instinct. He also found out that contacting people though dreams were now much easier than it had been before. Death and Sleep were twins after all. 

Will had once caught Nico angrily ranting to Blackjack about how he could fly, and how hard flying was. Not catching any of the contexts, Will had burst out laughing at Nico's frustration and a seemingly offended pegasus. He continuously brought it up to annoy Nico, causing the small Italian to blush almost violently. 

Turned out, the gift Thanatos had left him was a phone... iPod?... something like that... reminiscent of the god's own Ipad, but smaller. After shouting at the device all night long when he struggled to use the 21st-century technology, he discovered it contained a list of names, all spirits who had escaped from the Fields of Punishment. It could also call and text, but no demigods he knew had a phone so he wrote of that feature as practically useless. Every few days, a notification would pop up, giving Nico a name and location, sometimes even a picture of who he was supposed to find. Sometimes, it was a few names all at once. 

That, actually, was what Nico was currently up to in the middle of the Brooklyn industrial area. He was having a fun, merry time hunting the souls of the damned. Apparently, a group had escaped together and were hiding out in this particular warehouse, and he was supposed to send every one of them back to the Fields of Punishment. Nico fully knew what to expect of a "group", and had packed some medical supplies just in case.   

Nico was careful as he slunk through the shadows around the warehouse, masked in darkness, further hidden by the black in his outfit, near impossible to spot unless he was what someone was looking for. He still made it a point to look as inconspicuous as he could, hiding his sword in the shadows and not dressed in anything too unusual, nothing that would make him stand apart from the crowd in New York without the aid of the Mist. 

Something inside him shifted, a sense of wrongness centered around whoever was inside of the warehouse, a feeling Nico increasingly began to associate with this type of "errand". A wrongness of not belonging among the living, a twisted sense of knowing where someone was meant to be, a stench of undeath, and the flames of the Fields of Punishment. Nico had always been able to tell if someone didn't belong, if they were a ghost, spirit, or escapee of the underworld, or had even been there recently, but since his blessing from Thanatos and Hades, it was magnified tenfold to the point where Nico swore it was almost visible. He could pick out a lost soul in a panicked mob like they were highlighted and trace them through the maze of the Labyrinth itself if he had too. 

Nico looked towards the obvious entrance, the front door, and immediately dismissed it. He felt through the shadows of the building inside and slipped into them, shadow-traveling a short distance to the other side of the wall inside of the warehouse. He gripped his sword and brought it out with him into his hiding spot and the shadows in his particular area grew a bit denser and darker.