In which, Adira Lancaster falls in love with her rival, Percy Jackson
OR
he falls in love with her first, unknowingly.
She only seemed to think about a rivalry. Nothing else. Zilch. Nada. Zip.
-disclaimer- I do not own the Percy Jackson Books, or an...
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Ever come home and find your room messed up? Like some helpful person (hi, Cassie) has tried to "clean" it, and suddenly you can't find anything? And even if nothing is missing, you get that creepy feeling like somebody's been looking through your private stuff and dusting everything with lemon furniture polish? That's what Percy told me it felt like being back at camp.
That's kind of the way I felt seeing Camp Half-Blood again.
On the surface, things didn't look all that different.
The Big House was still there with its blue gabled roof and its wraparound porch. The strawberry fields still baked in the sun. The same white-columned Greek buildings were scattered around the valley—the amphitheater, the combat arena, the dining pavilion overlooking Long Island Sound. And nestled between the woods and the creek were the same cabins—a crazy assortment of twelve buildings, each representing a different Olympian god.
But there was an air of danger now. You could tell something was wrong. Instead of playing volleyball in the sandpit, counselors and satyrs were stockpiling weapons in the tool shed. Dryads armed with bows and arrows talked nervously at the edge of the woods. The forest looked sickly, the grass in the meadow was pale yellow, and the fire marks on Half-Blood Hill stood out like ugly scars. It pained me knowing my secondary safe place, the woods, was in fact, dying.
Somebody had messed with my favorite place in the world, and I was not...well, a "happy" camper. My hand was balled up into a fist, making it sweaty. My tongue pushed up on my canine tooth on the top. My eyebrows scrunched up and my nose nostrils flared.
A lot of kids didn't say anything. The only new half-blood I saw was a scrawny 12 year old. I wanted to say Welcome to Camp! But, with what was going on, I couldn't. My goal was to talk to Chiron.
Nobody said, "Welcome back."
Some did double takes when they saw Tyson, but most just walked grimly past and carried on with their duties—running messages, toting swords to sharpen on the grinding wheels. The camp felt like a military school.
None of that mattered to Tyson. He was absolutely fascinated by everything he saw.
"Whasthat!" he gasped.
"The stables for pegasi," Percy said. "The winged horses."
"Whasthat!"
"Um...those are the toilets."
"Whasthat!"
"The cabins for the campers. If they don't know who your Olympian parent is, they put you in the Hermes cabin—that brown one over there—until you're determined. Then, once they know, they put you in your dad or mom's group."
He looked at Percy in awe. "You... have a cabin?"
"Number three."
I pointed for Percy to a low gray building made of sea stone.
