🌷 "We're Greek, Percy. We're all born with tragedy in our blood."
The only thing Daphne could ever be sure of was that she was not meant to be alive. Whatever you wanted to call it - a gut feeling or just some serious anxiety, she couldn't shake th...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
chapter XIII
🌷 According to the L.A. news, the explosion at the Santa Monica beach had been caused when a crazy kidnapper fired a shotgun at a police car. He had accidentally hit a gas main that had ruptured during the earthquake.
"This crazy kidnapper (a.k.a. Ares) was the same man who had abducted Percy Jackson and three other adolescents in New York and brought them across country on a ten-day odyssey of terror!"
Poor little Percy Jackson wasn't an international criminal after all. He'd caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterward, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus - "Why didn't I remember him before?"
The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St. Louis Arch. After all, no kid could've done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo, and notified the police.
Finally, brave Percy Jackson had stolen a gun from his captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach. Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson and his three friends were safely in police custody.
The reporters fed them the whole story. They just nodded and acted tearful and exhausted (which wasn't hard), and played victimized kids for the cameras.
"All I want," Percy said, choking back tears, "is to see my loving stepfather again. Every time I saw him on TV, calling me a delinquent punk, I knew... somehow... we would be okay. And I know he'll want to reward each and every person in this beautiful city of Los Angeles with a free major appliance from his store. Here's the phone number."
The police and reporters were so moved that they passed around the hat and raised money for four tickets on the next plane to New York.
Daphne was too tired to laugh, but imagined the face of his stepfather after receiving all sorts of calls about appliances and felt her lips twitching. Only Percy Jackson would do that.
