Return of the Disgraced Archangel

Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge

     The sun began to set. The sky turned to a mix of purple and yellow. In another universe, Leo would've liked a walk on a beach with a pretty girl. But the further they walked, the more paranoid he became. Finally Hazel turned inland.

     "You sure this is a good idea?" He asked.

     "We're close." She said. "Come on."

     Just over the dunes, they saw the woman. She sat on a boulder in the middle of the grassy field. A black-and-chrome motorcycle was parked next to the boulder, but each wheel had a big pie slice missing, like it was Pac-Man. No way was the bike rideable, or at the very least, a very uncomfortable ride.

     The woman had curly black hair and a bony frame. She wore black leather biker's pants, tall leather boots, and a blood red leather jacket. She kind of looked like what Michael Jackson would wear if he joined Hell's Angels. Around her feet, the ground was littered with what looked like shells. She was hunched over, pulling new ones out of a sack and cracking them open. Shucking oysters? Leo wasn't sure if there were oysters in the Great Salt Lake. He didn't think so.

     He wasn't exactly jumping at the chance to approach the lady. He'd had some bad experiences with strange ladies. His old babysitter, Tia Callida, had turned out to be Hera and had a nasty habit of putting him down for naps in a fireplace. Gaia had killed his mom in a workshop fire when he was eight. Khione had tried to turn him into a frozen Leosicle in Sonoma.

     But Hazel forged ahead, so he didn't have much of a choice but to follow.

     As they got close, Leo noticed disturbing details. A curled whip was attached to her belt. Her leather jacket had an image of a twisted branch with skeletal birds perched on it. The oysters she was shucking were actually fortune cookies.

     A pile of broken cookies lay ankle-deep all around her. She kept pulling new ones from her sack, cracking them open, and reading the fortunes. Most she tossed aside. A few made her mutter unhappily. She would swipe over the paper with her finger, like she was smudging the words, then put it back in the cookie and reseal it, before tossing it into a nearby basket.

     "What are you doing?" Leo asked before he could stop himself.

     The woman looked up. Leo's lungs filled so fast, he thought they might burst.

     "Aunt Rosa?" He asked.

     It didn't make sense, but this woman looked exactly like his aunt. She had the same broad nose with a mole on one side, the same sour mouth and hard eyes. But it couldn't be Rosa. She would never wear clothes like that, and she was still in Houston, at least, as far as Leo knew. She wouldn't be cracking open fortune cookies in the middle of the Great Salt lake.

     "Is that what you see?" The woman asked. "Interesting. And you, Hazel, dear?"

     "How did you–" Hazel took a step back. "You look like Mrs. Leer. My third grade teacher. I hated you."

     The woman cackled. "Excellent, you resented her, eh? She judged you unfairly?"

     "You— she taped my hands to the desk for misbehaving." Hazel said. "She called my mother a witch. She blamed me for everything I didn't do and... No, you have to be dead."

     "Oh, Leo knows." The woman said. "How do you feel about Aunt Rosa, mijo?"

     Mijo. That's what Leo's mom had always called him. After she died, Aunt Rosa had rejected him. She called him a devil child. She blamed him for the workshop fire that killed her sister. Rosa turned his whole family against him, and kicked him out. He was a scrawny orphaned eight year old at the mercy of social services. And we all know how those are. Leo had bounced from orphanage to orphanage before he ended up at Camp Half-Blood and found a home there. Leo didn't hate a lot of people, but Aunt Rosa took spot number 1 on his shit list.