Bronze Gold Shadow (Percy Jackson/Teen Wolf Crossover)

Carl And Bartholomew's Competition

The nightmare that followed my unconsciousness was entwined with reality. 

I was on Ninth Avenue, I was pinned below Alyssa. She had the knife in my shoulder. 

I panicked and bit her. 

She didn't scream. She was supposed to scream, that's how it happened. 

Instead she just glared at me as the taste of metal filled my mouth. 

"You have no idea what I'm gonna do to you," she said. 

The liquid became too much and I released my jaw from her arm. I was choking on the blood in my mouth. On her blood. 

"Just wait," she told me. "You'll get what's coming to you." 

I was still choking and coughing when I woke up. 

This was different though. The taste was like acid. It filled up my lungs quickly and brought tears to my eyes from the gas. It was so rancid and thick I couldn't breathe. I coughed and in the process I think I agravated the wound on my neck. I rolled over to my side and found I was in the boat, my backpack a headrest. It didn't matter how I positioned myself. I couldn't get my lungs clear. 

"Nico," Will coughed. "Where are we?" 

"Inside," Nico answered. "We're inside." 

I couldn't see over the side of the boat, just kept coughing. Something was stuck in my throat and I coughed it up. It was a bit of phlegm with red around the outside. 

"Inside what?" Will asked. "What's inside, Nico?" 

"You know," Nico breathed out. "The mist." 

At first, I wasn't sure if he meant the magical Mist the obscures mortals' vision. I pushed myself into a sitting position and looked around. Green and yellow mist was the only thing I could see with the tears in my eyes, the ground all around the river was slick stone but not much else beyond that. The fog was crowding it. It was everywhere, thick and acidic and hard to breathe around. 

I gasped which sent out another coughing fit. 

I had barely gotten through ninth grade science but I remembered something about the stomach acid, how it managed to dissolve proteins and different monosacchrides. 

We were in Tartarus's digestive system. 

It made me a little nervous to see what the rectum looked like. 

I looked over at Will to see he had come to the same conclusion. 

If the earth was Gaea's body, then the Pit must've been Tartarus's body. We were in the old god's body. The Pit was alive. 

The thought of it made my hands shake and made me dizzy. I felt something in my head hurt, like my mind trying to make sense of something that it didn't understand. It made me think that I just needed to take another nap. 

It was Will that broke me from my funk. 

"Nico!" he cried. "Nico, Liz! I think we're here!" 

"What?" Nico asked. "What is it?" 

I released the gunwale and looked over at Will. He was pointing at something in the distance as he stood at the bow of the boat. There was a cat next to him. 

Why was there a cat?

"I know those trees!" Will cried. He hesitated for a moment then continued, "Mangroves!" 

I pushed myself to join the boys at the bow of the ship. "Which means..." Nico trailed off. 

"It's a swamp," Will stated.