Anti-Hero || Leo Valdez

17 - My Dad Flashes the Emperor

All Via and Leo had to do was cross through the kitchen and the dining room, and they'd be home free. But why would something go their way after the shitshow that had just happened?

They found Thalia, Pat, Lityerses, and Calypso in the kitchen, looking extremely grim, like someone had died. Via felt a pang of dread go through her. She wondered who it was. It couldn't be Emmie. Or Jo. Or, gods forbid, Georgie. Via couldn't have gone through all that shit on her own for nothing.

All eyes snapped over to her, and everyone looked like they'd seen a ghost — which technically they were looking at a ghost, so Via had to admit that their reactions weren't that surprising.

"Via?" Pat said, his voice shaking with disbelief. Via's nonexistent heart nearly broke at his voice. He'd only sounded like that after she'd come back from her first near-death experience during the Battle of Manhattan, and —

Oh, no.

Now Via understood: They thought she was dead. Which, technically, she was, but she wasn't gone.

"You saw my body, didn't you?" She said quietly.

Pat shook his head disbelievingly, "I — yeah, you — you were — there was blood everywhere — what's going on?"

"Valdez!" Lit stormed over and grabbed Leo, slamming him against the wall in a chokehold. "You were supposed to protect her! What happened?"

"Lit!" Thalia, Via and Calypso rushed to pull back the Reaper of Men. Via, of course, was noncorporeal, so she was able to do nothing, but Thalia and Calypso managed to get him off Leo, who nearly collapsed and gagged.

"Thanks for helping, Pat," Via said sarcastically to her brother, who'd merely glowered at the son of Hephaestus.

"He got you killed, Via!" Pat retorted.

"No, he didn't!" Via insisted. "It wasn't his fault, okay? None of this was his fault. It was the emperor!"

"What happened, Via?" Thalia asked.

Via sighed and explained the whole situation: how her Glow-Hulk thing was actually a blessing from Helios called Sun Wrath, how Commodus had wanted it and chased Via down to get it, how Via had killed herself to stop him from getting it, and how he'd stabbed her with the Stygian Iron knife last second, trapping her soul here.

"So we came to look for you guys to figure out what to do," Via finished. "Guys, it's not Leo's fault, so please don't blame him for it. He's done nothing but help me."

"So you're dead, and your soul is trapped here?" Thalia asked. "Well, the only one who could really help us right now is —"

"Nico di Angelo, I know," Via said. "But he's not here, so we need someone else's help. Calypso, Leo said you had some experience with wind spirits. Is there anything...?" She trailed off as she saw Calypso's doubtful expression.

"Wind spirits aren't dead," she said. "So I don't think I'd be any help. Lityerses, out of all of us, you've actually been dead and lived in the Underworld — for longer than five seconds," she added with a roll of her eyes to Leo as he opened his mouth to say that he'd died, too. "Can you help?"

"I've only seen spirits who are dead and anchored to the Underworld," Lit said. "You're definitely not anchored to the Underworld, or you'd be there already."

"So what am I anchored to?" Via asked.

Lit shrugged. "It could be anything. The Waystation, your body, Commodus' blade —"

"Well, this gets better by the second," Via grumbled. "This is it, then? I'm just going to be stuck as a fucking ghost forever?"

"Unfortunately, most likely," Lit said apologetically.