a story as endless as the ocean . pjo / allie jackson

1.6 my unpaid acting job

1.6 If I Had a Nickel for Everytime I Had to Pretend to Agree With a Greek Myth on this Quest so I Don't Get Killed, I'd Have Two Nickels, Which Isn't a Lot, But It's Weird that It's Happened Twice

It was Luke's idea.

He loaded us into the back of a Vegas taxi, and told the driver, "Los Angeles, please."

The cabbie chewed his cigar and sized us up. "That's three hundred miles. For that, you gotta pay upfront."

I was going to give him my credit card, but then thought of a better idea. "You accept casino debit cards?" I asked as I rubbed my jeans anxiously and tried not to have a complete breakdown at the sudden reduction of time for our deadline. One day to get to LA, find the Bolt and get it back to New York to give to Zeus. This was a disaster. The world was going to end because of a goddamn casino and my lack of self-control.

The cabbie shrugged. "Some of 'em. Same as credit cards. I gotta swipe 'em through first."

I handed him my green LotusCash card.

He looked at it skeptically.

"Swipe it," I urged him.

He did. His meter machine started rattling. The lights flashed. Finally, an infinity symbol came up next to the dollar sign.

The cigar fell out of the driver's mouth. He looked back at us, his eyes wide. "Where to in Los Angeles... uh, Your Highness?"

"The Santa Monica Pier." I sat up straighter, smirking at the title. Luke snapped out of his despair long enough to roll his eyes at me. "Get us there fast, and you can keep the change."

A few minutes later Grover was cursing my name for saying that. The cab's speedometer never dipped below ninety-five the whole way through the Mojave Desert.

The good thing is that on the road, we had plenty of time to talk. I told Luke and Grover about my latest dream, but the details got sketchier the more I tried to remember them. The Lotus Casino seemed to have short-circuited my memory. I couldn't recall what the invisible servant's voice had sounded like, though I was sure it was somebody I knew. The servant had called the monster in the pit something other than "my lord"... some special name or title...

"The Silent One?" Luke suggested. "The Rich One? Both of those are nicknames for Hades."

"Maybe..." I said, though neither sounded quite right.

"That throne room sounds like Hades'," Grover said. "That's the way it's usually described."

I shook my head. "Something's wrong. The throne room wasn't the main part of the dream. And that voice from the pit... I don't know. It just didn't feel like a god's voice."

Luke's eyes widened. A look of disturbed realization crossed his face and he sucked in a sharp breath.

"What?" I asked immediately.

"Oh... nothing. I was just— No, it has to be Hades. Maybe he sent this thief, this invisible person, to get the master bolt, and something went wrong—"

"Like what?"

"I don't know," he said. "But if he stole Zeus's symbol of power from Olympus, and the gods were hunting him, I mean, a lot of things could go wrong. So this thief had to hide the bolt, or he lost it somehow. Anyway, he failed to bring it to Hades. That's what the voice said in your dream, right? The guy failed. That would explain what the Furies were searching for when they came after us on the bus. Maybe they thought we had retrieved the bolt."

"I think it was a girl, and the thing in the pit was male," I muttered absently, frowning at my knees and hoping the driver was too focused on driving without crashing to listen to us.