The Shadow Summoner | Book Three - PJO Universe

one

A SILENT TRAIN

When travelling through Washington, DC, one expects to see a few snakes in human clothing. Still, Ariana was concerned when a two-headed boa constrictor boarded their train at Union Station.

The creature had threaded himself through a blue silk business suit, looping his body into the sleeves and trouser legs to approximate human limbs.

Two heads protruded from the collar of his shirt like twin periscopes. He moved with remarkable grace for what was basically an oversize balloon animal, taking a seat at the opposite end of the coach, facing our direction.

The other passengers ignored him. No doubt the Mist warped their perceptions, making them see just another commuter.

The snake made no threatening moves. He didn't even glance at them. For all Ariana knew, he was simply a working-stiff monster on his way home.

And yet she could not assume ...

Apollo whispered to Meg. "I don't want to alarm you -"

"Shh." she said.

Meg took the quiet-car rules seriously. Since they'd boarded, most of the noise in the coach had consisted of Meg shushing them every time they spoke, sneezed or cleared their throat.

"But there's a monster." Ariana persisted.

She looked up from her complimentary Amtrak magazine, raising an eyebrow above her rhinestone-studded cat-eye glasses. Where?

Apollo chin-pointed towards the creature. As their train pulled away from the station, his left head stared absently out of the window.

His right head flicked its forked tongue into a bottle of water held in the loop that passed for his hand.

"It's an amphisbaena," Apollo whispered, then added helpfully, "a snake with a head at each end."

Meg frowned, then shrugged, which Ariana took to mean Looks peaceful enough. Then she went back to reading.

Ariana suppressed the urge to argue. Mostly because she didn't want to be shushed again.

Ariana couldn't blame Meg for wanting a quiet ride. In the past week, they had battled their way through a pack of wild centaurs in Kansas, faced an angry famine spirit at the World's Largest Fork in Springfield, Missouri (they did not get a selfie), and outrun a pair of blue Kentucky drakons that had chased them several times around Churchill Downs.

After all that, a two-headed snake in a suit was perhaps not cause for alarm. Certainly, he wasn't bothering them at the moment.

Ariana tried to relax next to Apollo, in his arms.
Meg buried her face in her magazine, enraptured by an article on urban gardening.

Their young companion had grown taller in the months that Ariana had known her, but she was still compact enough to prop her red high-tops comfortably on the seatback in front of her.

Comfortable for her, not for Apollo or the other passengers. Meg hadn't changed her shoes since their run around the racetrack, and they looked and smelled like the back end of a horse.

At least she had traded her tattered green dress for Dollar General jeans and a green VNICORNES IMPERANT! T-shirt she'd bought at the Camp Jupiter gift shop.

With her pageboy haircut beginning to grow out and an angry red zit erupting on her chin, she no longer looked like a kindergartener. She looked almost her age: a sixth-grader entering the circle of hell known as puberty.

Ariana had not shared this observation with Meg.

The train rolled through the suburbs of Washington. The late-afternoon sun flickered between the buildings like the lamp of an old movie projector.