Mad Woman - Rewrite

1.11

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TW : mentions of suicidal thoughts. The beginning and end will be marked with •

Part 1. Chapter 11.

Includes :
I Settle My Tab
The Prophecy Comes True

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This was it. The last leg. They could all feel it (and you know, see the number of pages reducing from the book as it kept reading itself). They were about to find out see how it ended.

Rowan had shifted away from Percy and Annabeth and actually gone towards Nico and Hazel. Remus was right behind her. They knew what was coming. Percy and Annabeth had sadly looked at her before also moving, but them towards Thalia. The others were just there together, apprehensively waiting. They had a general idea of what was about to happen but....well, they didn't know how deep it actually ran.

Chapter 21 : I Settle My Tab

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality. Chiron had told me that long ago. As usual, I didn't appreciate his wisdom until much later.

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 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 me and three other adolescents in New York and brought us 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 (I was beginning to like this kid) 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.

"Oh damn," people said, impressed.

Leo nodded with them, "Noice. Ro, did you come up with that ?"

"No," the girl sounded miffed. "Nobody let me lie on this trip," she pouted.

"Then how—"

She pointed to the book with a look that said, wait for it.

The reporters fed us this whole story. We just nodded and acted tearful and exhausted (which wasn't hard), and played victimized kids for the cameras.

"All I want," I said, choking back my 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 three tickets on the next plane to New York.