The Dark Side of Beauty

Chapter 7//Child of who?

{{Annabeth POV}}

I watch Vespera on the other side of the bonfire, all happy smiles and laughs, but when I look at her eyes, I see grief, sorrow, guilt. It scares me how well she hides her emotions, and the only way anybody can see them is if they actually pay attention to her, how she skirts around certain subjects, and never talks about her or her family. If they look at her eyes when she thinks nobody is looking.

I see Vespera shiver, and then turn around, looking right at me. I smile and wave, and Vespera smiles back.

After the bonfire, I walked with Malcom back to our cabin, talking about various things, but mainly architecture.

I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking over what I saw about Vespera today. She ran out of the dining pavilion at breakfast, and then hours later I saw her walking towards the training grounds, a book in her hands.

About thirty minutes after that, I saw her and Luke, covered in sweat, walking to the Hermes cabin. Even sweating and covered with sand, Vespera didn't look too shabby.

I try to look at it from multiple angles, trying to think of who her godly parent would be if she had one. She never lost her sense of glow that was around her, no matter how she looked, and that could mean she was a child of Aphrodite.

But, Luke had told me that she fought with a dagger, as many children of Athena do, including myself. That could just mean she liked daggers, or something else, like maybe she was a child of Athena. That would make her my half sister.

That'd be cool, having Vespera as a sister, I think.

I also think about how Vespera had traveled across multiple different universes, and maybe that meant she was going to be a child of Hermes?

But one other thing that Luke had told me today was how Vespera had fought, analyzing and striking weak spots. Maybe she was a child of Ares? I shudder at that thought. If she was a child of Ares, I didn't want to get on her bad side.