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chapter eighteen. ☄︎. *. ⋆
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I'VE ALWAYS BEEN a fan of the way the Mist works. I mean, mortals could literally watch the rebirth of a Titan king, and they would pass it off as just another Saturday. Honestly, I'd say mortal minds can be even more powerful than the gods sometimes.
Still, I was baffled at how quickly the general public wrote off Percy and I's battle with Ares. They blamed the explosion (you know, me) that happened at the Santa Monica beach on a kidnapper firing a shotgun at a police car, accidentally hitting a gas main that ruptured during the earthquake.
This crazy kidnapper (a.k.a. the god of war, Ares) was the same man who had abducted me and three other teenagers in New York and brought us cross-country on a ten-day odyssey of terror.
Percy Jackson wasn't an international criminal after all. He'd caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterward, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus—"Why didn't I remember him before?") The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St. Louis Arch. After all, no kid could've done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo, and notified the police. Finally, brave Percy Jackson (I was beginning to hate this kid) had stolen a gun from his captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach. Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson and his three friends were safely in police custody.
See? Complex. I would've just tried to convince the entire country that none of that had happened.
The reporters fed us this whole story. We just nodded and acted tearful and exhausted (which wasn't hard), and played victimized kids for the cameras.
Percy fed the cameras some sob story about how his gross stepfather was probably so grateful that his stepson was back that he was going to give away free appliances from his home goods store. The police and reporters were so moved by his fake tears that they passed around a hat and raised money for four tickets on the next plane to New York. It wasn't our favorite idea to take to the skies, seeing as how Percy was literally Zeus's least favorite hero and he would probably like to blast us out of the sky before we could even buckle our seatbelts, but we had no other choice. We needed to get the bolt back to Olympus before the summer solstice, and the clock was ticking.
At first, Annabeth tried to sit next to me on the plane, and, already assuming she was going to try to coax some explanation for what had happened on the beach out of me for the entire flight, I quickly threw my little butt into a seat next to Grover, who slept the entire time. The worst I got from him were a few snores.
