Moon girl (percy jackson x oc)

Part 26

Percy's POV:

The other skeletons opened fire. I raised my lion coat for protection, but I didn't need it. The bronze angels stepped in front of us and folded their wings like shields. Bullets pinged off of them like rain off a corrugated roof. Both angels slashed outward, and the skeletons went flying across the road.

"Man, it feels good to stand up!" the first angel said. His voice sounded tinny and rusty, like he hadn't had a drink since he'd been built.

"Will ya look at my toes?" the other said. "Holy Zeus, what were those tourists thinking?"

As stunned as I was by the angels, I was more concerned with the skeletons. A few of them were getting up again, reassembling, bony hands groping for their weapons.

"Trouble!" I said.

"Get us out of here!" Thalia yelled.

Both angels looked down at her. "Zeus's kid?" Yes!

"Could I get a please, Miss Zeus's Kid?" an angel asked.

"Please!"

The angels looked at each other and shrugged.

"Could use a stretch," one decided.

And the next thing I knew, one of them grabbed Thalia and me - I had to grab Adelia bridal style, the other grabbed Zoe and Grover, and we flew straight up, over the dam and the river, the skeleton warriors shrinking to tiny specks below us and the sound of gunfire echoing off the sides of the mountains.


"Tell me when it's over," Thalia said. Her eyes were shut tight. The statue was holding on to us so we couldn't fall, but still Thalia clutched his arm like it was the most important thing in the world.

"Everything's fine," I promised.

"Are... are we very high?"

I looked down. Below us, a range of snowy mountains zipped by. I stretched out my foot and kicked snow off one of the peaks. Adelia gripped her hands tighter around my neck and i blushed redder than the Camps tomatoes.

"Nah," Adelia said. "Not that high." Even though her eyes were squeezed shut. Cute.

"We are in the Sierras.'" Zoe yelled. She and Grover were hanging from the arms of the other statue. "I have hunted here before. At this speed, we should be in San Francisco in a few hours."

"Hey, hey, Frisco!" our angel said. "Yo, Chuck! We could visit those guys at the Mechanics Monument again! They know how to party!"

"Oh, man," the other angel said. "I am so there!"

"You guys have visited San Francisco?" I asked.

"We automatons gotta have some fun once in a while, right?" our statue said. "Those mechanics took us over to the de Young Museum and introduced us to these marble lady statues, see. And—"

"Hank!" the other statue Chuck cut in. "They're kids, man."

"Oh, right." If bronze statues could blush, I swear Hank did. "Back to flying."

We sped up, so I could tell the angels were excited. The mountains fell away into hills, and then we were zipping along over farmland and towns and highways.

Grover played his pipes to pass the time. Zoe got bored and started shooting arrows at random billboards as we flew by. Every time she saw a Target department store—and we passed dozens of them—she would peg the store's sign with a few bulls-eyes at a hundred miles an hour.

Thalia kept her eyes closed the whole way. She muttered to herself a lot, like she was praying.

Adelia grabbed a pen from her backpack - which i didn't know she had - and started doodling on her arms, when she ran out of space she started on mine.

"You did good back there," I told Thalia. "Zeus listened."

It was hard to tell what she was thinking with her eyes closed.

"Maybe," she said. "How did you get away from the skeletons in the generator room, anyway? You said they cornered you."

I told her about the weird mortal girl, Rachel Elizabeth Dare, who seemed to be able to see right through the Mist. Adelia snorted at the thought of Rachel and then swore. She messed up a line on my arm. 

I thought Thalia was going to call me crazy, but she just nodded.

"Some mortals are like that," she said. "Nobody knows why."

Suddenly I flashed on something I'd never considered.

My mom was like that. She had seen the Minotaur on Half-Blood Hill and known exactly what it was. She hadn't been surprised at all last year when I'd told her my friend Tyson was really a Cyclops. Maybe she'd known all along. No wonder she'd been so scared for me as I was growing up. She saw through the Mist even better than I did.

"Well, the girl was annoying," Adelia said. "But I'm glad I didn't vaporize her. That would've been bad."

Thalia nodded. "Must be nice to be a regular mortal." She said that as if she'd given it a lot of thought.

"Where you guys want to land?" Hank asked, waking me up from a nap.

I looked down and said, "Whoa."

I'd seen San Francisco in pictures before, but never in real life. It was probably the most beautiful city I'd ever seen: kind of like a smaller, cleaner Manhattan, if Manhattan had been surrounded by green hills and fog. There was a huge bay and ships, islands and sailboats, and the Golden Gate Bridge sticking up out of the fog. I felt like I should take a picture or something.