Before the Barrier

Part Five

            Annabeth slept for a few hours, and I kept lookout, though I doubted that anything else lived in this mansion that we wouldn’t be able to take.  I set Annabeth beside Luke gently, and I smiled when she instinctively curled up with him as she slept. She was crazy about him.

            I pulled the ropes off of him and tried to heal his head wound to the best of my abilities. Playing doctor wasn’t usually my thing, but if I was needed to help someone, I could usually make the situation somewhat better.

            I cleaned off the blood from his face and tore off a bit of cloth from my undershirt. I soaked it in a puddle of water that spilled from the cauldron the cyclopes had knocked over earlier. I pressed the cool cloth to his head, right on the impact spot. He winced slightly. That was good. That meant he was coming to.

            “Luke?” I whispered, soaking the blood from his hair with the cloth.

            He groaned and stirred. Gradually, his eyes drifted open. “Wha . . . ?”

            “Shhh, you’re safe. The cyclopes hit you and knocked you out. You should be fine though. You’re tough, right?” I assured him.

            He grinned his crooked grin, and, despite the pain he was in, he still managed to reassure me. “What happened after that?” He groaned slightly and struggled to sit up. I helped him.

            Annabeth stirred when he sat up and opened her eyes. She looked around and yawned again. Resting her head in my lap, she went back to sleep. I smiled. “Annabeth saved us.”

            Luke’s eyes shone with pride. “Really?”

            “Oh, yeah. You and I were both tied up to the spit thingy and the cyclopes was getting ready to eat us when, all of the sudden, it started shouting. I looked over and saw Annabeth attacking it with a hammer. She had managed to sneak up on it without it or myself noticing.”

            Luke positively beamed. “She’s a smart one. Good fighter, too. One of the best. She’s only seven, and yet she’s one of the bravest people I know.”

            “She has to be, if she wants to survive. The life of a half-blood isn’t one for the weak.” I added. He sighed.

            “Yeah. Sometimes, I like to think that if . . . if we were like normal kids, with normal parents, normal families, normal lives, I wonder if we’d be friends.” He muttered.

            “I wonder.” I decided to humor him, even though I knew it was impossible. If the life I led was a normal one, I’d still be living with Mom, and . . . and . . .

            Jason.

            No. I couldn’t. Even thinking of him caused too much pain.

            “If we had normal lives, we wouldn’t have met each other. So maybe things did turn out for the better.” I replied, not letting on to what I had just been thinking.

            “Yeah. Maybe.”

            I looked down at Annabeth, who was still sound asleep with her head in my lap. After a long silence, I wondered aloud, “Do you think we’ll be friends even after we get to camp?”

            Luke looked at me. “Of course. Why wouldn’t we be? We’re loyal to each other. Nothing could hurt this friendship.”

            “Yeah . . . I guess I’m just getting nervous about meeting so many new people. What do you think it’ll be like there?”

            “Grover said there’s a lake with beautiful girls who live in it called naiads.”

            “Okay, something aside from beautiful girls.”

            “He said there’s an arena where you can train as much as you want, and there’s a weapons shop, and a forge, and—”

            I laughed. “Luke, we’ve been on the run for almost a year. Once we get to a place where we can actually relax and not have to worry about monsters or starving, and all you want to do there is train? Haven’t you gotten enough of fighting?”

            “Nah. You really think that once we get to this camp, that life will just be perfect from now on?”

            “The way Grover explained it, he made it sound pretty good.”

            “Well, yeah, because he wants us to come. If he said the downsides of it, who knows if we would have gone or not?” He reasoned.

            “Hey, as long as it has food, a place to sleep, and safety from monsters, I don’t care if it has any downsides whatsoever.”

            “Thalia, you’re too optimistic. You’ve got to be cautious. This place sounds like heaven. The better it sounds, the more suspicious I get. They’ve got to be hiding something. Like, what if you can’t ever leave?”

            “Why would you want to leave when the real world is nothing but fighting and danger and starving?”

            He sighed. “Alright, so maybe I wouldn’t want to leave. But wouldn’t you at least want the option to?”

            “Well, yeah, I guess. But who says if that’s even an issue? We’re just making up reasons to be suspicious. What if this place really is what Grover says it is? A sanctuary for people like us. Where we don’t have to hide the truth, or run from monsters, or steal food and clothes. What if this place is where we belong?”

            Luke nodded, but I could tell he still wasn’t willing to just accept that. He was still cautious, and that was good. It was the reason he was still alive. The reason we all were still alive. Luke had saved us on countless occasions, and both Annabeth and I owed him out lives. But it was like that with all three of us. We had each saved each other so much, we lost track. It’s just that Luke tends to do most of the saving.

            After a while of silence, Luke stood. “Come on. We need to get going. The hydra at the front gate is probably long gone by now. Let’s see if our satyr friend ever showed up.”

            I nodded and picked up Annabeth.

            We left the chamber with a new respect for the little seven year old girl I carried.