A Part of The Family (Nico Di Angelo meets the batfam)

2

I was planning on writing the second chapter after publishing the first chapter, but I restarted my laptop while it was doing updates and broke it. I had to completely reset it, but it still took a couple of days for me to fix it. I don't like leaving my books with only one published chapter for very long, so I apologize. Also, this is somehow ranked #3 in c-ptsd. I don't know how tho. I find it funny because #1 is also about Nico Di Angelo. That being said, thank you to anyone who read my book even though there was only one chapter! I was not expecting anyone to read it for at least a couple of weeks or months! I would like to thank emax0425 especially for commenting. It gave me the extra encouragement I needed to start writing this chapter! I won't bore you with anymore. ONTO THE CHAPTER! 😁

Nico was wrong. He did not get enough energy to shadow travel to camp and in fact seemed to be losing energy. Oh, he had enough energy where he could be a normal productive human, but he seemed to be slowly losing energy that was required to use his powers.

It was strange it was almost as if he had two types of energy reserves, one for normal everyday things and the other for using his demigod powers. Nico hadn't even known he had two types of energy reserves until one of them was slowly being drained. With each passing moment he could feel energy from the second slowly drain. It was barely noticeable, and it shouldn't have tired him out to the point he was unable to shadow travel but because he shadow traveled to get here in the first place it had a sort of head start.

Nico frowned as another thought occurred to him. If he had shadow traveled to Gotham, then he should've had been able to at least shadow travel out of the city. He had assumed at first that his lack of energy was due to the fact that his powers had weakened since he shadow traveled a big ass statue to camp, but he had been slowly recovering and Gotham wasn't far enough to weaken him so severely.

There must be something about Gotham that weakened his powers, Nico thought. This didn't exactly make sense. Gotham was a city full of death. It would make more sense if he somehow got stronger than weaker. It was then that Nico realized another thing, he hadn't seen or felt the presence of any ghosts in Gotham. With as much death and violence as there was in Gotham there should be ghosts everywhere and yet he hadn't seen a single one. It was as if something had decided that anything to do with his world just wasn't allowed in Gotham. Nico mentally filed this newfound information away to think about later.

Nico heard someone coming and pretended to be asleep. He did not feel like dealing with other humans right now.

Not only did he not have enough energy to shadow travel, but he had severely underestimated how tired he was and so ended up sleeping the normal amount a human of his age was supposed to sleep instead of waking up before everyone else and leaving like the sleep deprived demigod he actually was.

"Nico, it's time to wake up. Someone is here to foster you," a woman's voice said gently. Nico turned around in surprise. Foster him!? He didn't need to be fostered! This was bad. How was he supposed to sneak away if he was going to be fostered?

The woman who had spoken was middle aged and had salt and pepper brown hair. She had kind eyes and a gentle aura. She kept her distance from him, making sure to move slowly and keep her hands somewhere he could see them.

She didn't know what he had been through and didn't want to alarm him on accident. A lot of kids here had been abused, neglected, or something else equally as bad. She had learned that sometimes kids felt safer when she moved slowly or kept her hands in their line of sight. She guessed this made them more relaxed because if she had any intent to hurt them then they would see her coming.

Nico didn't let his guard down however and continued to watch her warily through narrowed eyes. Just because she seemed nice didn't mean she was nice. There was always the chance that she was a monster in disguise and with his powers weakened he needed to be extra careful.