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chapter forty-four ☄︎. *. ⋆
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WE'D ARRIVED ON THE outskirts of a little ski town hidden in the mountains. The sign said WELCOME TO CLOUDCROFT, NEW MEXICO. The air was cold and thin. The roofs of the cabins were heaped with snow, and dirty mounds of it were piled up on the sides of the streets. Tall pine trees loomed over the valley, casting pitch-black shadows, though the morning was sunny.
Even with my new lion-skin coat, I was freezing by the time we got to Main Street. I wondered how the others could have possibly felt. When I looked at Bianca, her lips were blue, and she was shivering horribly. I nudged her side, then pulled the coat off my shoulders. She took it gratefully.
We stopped in the middle of town. You could pretty much see everything from there: a school, a bunch of tourist stores and cafes, some ski cabins, and a grocery store. But despite its homely nature, we were the only visitors in sight.
"Great," Thalia said, looking around. "No bus station. No taxis. No car rental. No way out."
"There's a coffee shop!" said Grover.
"Yes," Zoë said. "Coffee is good."
"And pastries," Grover said dreamily. "And wax paper."
Thalia sighed. "Fine. How about you two go get us some food. Percy, Bianca, Theo, and I will check in the grocery store. Maybe they can give us directions." She glanced at me, then Percy, and pursed her lips like she was mad. "Scratch that. Grover and Zoë, take Percy. Bianca and I will take Theo."
I noticed the way she talked about us: like we were things rather than people. It made me uneasy. I knew Thalia, of all people, would have no ill intent, but I couldn't shake the underlying feeling that we weren't as safe on this mountain as we thought we were.
We agreed to meet back in front of the store in fifteen minutes. Bianca had looked uncomfortable about coming with us, but since I was coming now instead of Percy, she calmed down a little.
Inside the store, we found out a few valuable things about Cloudcroft: there wasn't enough snow for skiing, the grocery store sold rubber rats for a dollar each, and there was no easy way in or out of town unless you had your own car.
"You could call for a taxi from Alamogordo," the clerk said doubtfully. "That's down at the bottom of the mountains, but it would take at least an hour to get here. Cost several hundred dollars."
The clerk looked so lonely that I bought a keychain, just so she would have something to do. Dangling from it was a white rabbit.
"Wonderful," Thalia grumbled as we left the store. "I'm going to walk down the street, see if anybody has any other suggestions."
