drunk on your madness

part 2 titans curse

The hunters piled into the van. They all crammed into the back so they'd be as far away as possible from Apollo and the rest of us highly infectious males. Bianca sat with them, leaving her little brother to hang in the front with us, which seemed cold to me but Nico didn't seem to mind.
"This is so cool!" Nico said, jumping up and down in the driver's seat. "Is this really the sun? I thought Helios and Selene were the sun and moon gods. How come sometimes it's them and sometimes it's you and Artemis?"
I zone out half way through their conversation and focus on the red head who is sitting a few rows behind us, with her cat on her lap.
I go approach and sit in the seat across from her and she looks up and nervously looks around but then looks back at me
"H-hi (she says quietly but then realisation comes across her eyes, for something I'm not aware of, and she brightly smiles) oh hi! I'm Alyssum, it's nice to meet you"
"Hi I'm Percy, it's nice to meet you too" she seems happy that I said that, judging by her growing smile and I continue "are you a camper? I haven't seen you before"
"Oh yea! I'm a camper but I usually don't join in on a lot of stuff sadly, and my cabin is away from the others"
I look at her confused but decide not to question it because of her sad look and instead say referring to the cat "and whose this little guy?"
"Oh! This is clover, she's my familiar"
"Familiar? So your a child of hecate?"
"Oh no I'm not but I do worship her and practise witch craft in her name"
"So who is your godly parent then?"
Just as she goes to answer, I hear a annabeths voice.
"PERCY!" I look at her and she gestures for me to walk over and so I look back at alyssum and say "sorry, I've got go talk to annabeth but I'll talk to you later, yeah?"
"Yeah! Ok, thank you for the chat"
I smile and get up to join annabeth and say
"What's up?"
"What's up!? Why where you talking to asylum alyssum? I mean gods percy do you even know who she is!?" She harshly whispers
"Um no, and that's why I went and introduced myself, why is that a problem?"
"You really don't know? Do you?"
"No and what's the problem really, she's a camper just like us?"
"She's nothing like us Percy, she isn't even a half blood"
But before I could ask her what she meant, she turned and looked to Thalia, who was at the driver's seat, tightly holding her driver's wheel
"What's wrong?" I ask her
"Nothing-nothings wrong" she replied shakily.
She pulled back on the wheel. It tilted and the bus lurched upwards so fast I fell back but I never met the ground, and neither did the other passengers, it all happened so fast that no one but me noticed.
I turned my head seeing that I am still floating and look at the purple whisps that are surrounding us. I look up and see alyssum, still sitting in her chair, with her legs crossed, without a care in the world, humming a small tune, lookin at and petting her cat, but what caught my eye is that one of her hands is slightly raised and the same purple flame like thing that is covering us, is also covering her hand. I realise that she was the one who stopped us from getting hurt but before I can even do anything, we are all lowered to the ground and Apollo screeches
"slower!"
"Sorry! I've got it under control!" Thalia replies
I managed to get to my feet. Looking out the window, I saw a smoking ring of trees from the clearing we had taken off from.
With a lot of screaming from all of us, and slight crash, we made it and all I can hear is the slight giggles coming from alyssum
"Well" said Apollo with a brave smile. "You were right, my dear. You had everything under control! Let's go see if we boiled anyone important shall we?".