Anti-Hero || Leo Valdez

22 - Much Scary Snek

Via tried not to watch Leo sleep.

She knew it was a creepy thing to do, and she knew that she wouldn't want anyone to watch her while she slept. Who watched people sleep? Perverts and weird, creepy people, that's who. And probably animals, too, but they got an excuse because they didn't know any better and some of them were cute. Via probably wasn't cute enough to be cut any slack.

Especially not as a ghost.

Still, Via couldn't help glancing over at him as he lay curled up with his back against Festus, which must've felt like being spooned by a heat lamp. A tendril of curly black hair had fallen into his face and whenever he exhaled, it rose slightly and fell when he inhaled. The movement was almost hypnotizing, and Via had to look away and try to focus on something else.

She decided to think about Pat. By now, he was almost, if not already, a third of the way there. Hopefully he'd be able to warn the Romans, maybe help them survive if needed, and head back to the Waystation. He'd mentioned stopping in Texas to visit their mom since he'd miss out on seeing her in D.C. with Via and Leo, but even then it shouldn't be too much of a detour.

Unless he got mauled by a monster or something. He was kind of an idiot, after all. Well, that was unfair. She'd been an idiot plenty of times, too. Like last year.

Almost a year ago in May, they'd decided (or rather, Via decided) that the incoming war with the giants and Gaea was looking more and more grim, and on June first, they'd left Camp Half-Blood to return home to see their family. It had only taken a few weeks to realize that they were only putting their family in more danger than they were in already.

At first they thought the woman who'd moved in across the street from them had just been another friendly lady. To Via, she was a good substitute for her Tia Catalina, her second-favorite person in the world (her mother was obviously number one) who unfortunately lived halfway across the country in Washington, D.C. She offered the twins rides to school (which they usually declined politely since they always rode their bikes), gave Via advice for her boy problems (she'd been going through a rough breakup with her best friend, Cecil, who was a son of Hermes), and joked around with Pat. They never learned her name — they simply called her Tia or Auntie — but the twins hadn't thought it was strange until it was almost too late.

What had started out wholesome soon corrupted into something evil. Via noticed that her relationship with her mother had been going south for a while, but she never realized it was because of Tia. She began to see toxic behavior where it didn't exist and hear harsh words where they'd never been spoken. Somehow, Tia had managed to turn Via against her mother, her favorite person in the world.

Pat hadn't been so far gone, probably because he hadn't missed Catalina as much as Via had (he was closer to their uncle David, the man who'd given him his truck), but it had been him who'd realized that Tia had warped Via's perception of their mother. It was Pat who'd discovered that Tia was really Lamia, a queen from Ancient Greece. She'd been one of Zeus' countless lovers who'd been fucked up by a jealous Hera. The queen of the gods had killed Lamia's children and left her with a gaping void that Lamia filled by kidnapping and eating children.

Unfortunately for the twins, they'd been her next targets.

Lamia had convinced Via to join her on a trip to a farm in Forney, Texas, and had been planning to kill and eat her there when Pat had shown up like a knight in shining flannel and converse. Exposed, Lamia shapeshifted back into her true form, a terrible half-woman, half-snake. Via helped Pat kick the Greek lady's ass back to the Underworld, but if it hadn't been for him, Via's story would probably have been in one of Bailey Sarian's "Murder Mystery and Makeup Monday" episodes, or maybe even on Buzzfeed: Unsolved.