Favorite : Change for the both of us

Chapter 10

Again, a few rounds into our game we had another interruption. A girl around my age with curly blonde hair and weird grey eyes comes out of the marquee, looking around nervously until her eyes land on Thalia (who has me pinned to the floor). The girl smiles, "Thalia!"

Thalia releases me and a second later she's hugging the girl. I sat up, looking at her in confusion. Okay, I swear to god I've seen this girl before, but where? Nico grins – he clearly recognises her.

"I've not seen you in ages, Annie!" Thalia exclaims once she and the blonde-haired girl had stopped hugging. What is it with girls and hugging?

"Only a week," the girl giggles. "My mom's been busy with work,"

Thalia just beams. She grab's the girl's hand and drags her over to me and Nico. "C'mon, you can play with us," she says.

"Hi, Annie!" Nico says brightly, waving to the girl.

"Hello, Nico," the girl smiles, ruffling my little cousin's hair. She looks up at me, confused.

"Oh, right, I should introduce you – Annabeth, this is my cousin Percy Jackson. Percy, this is my best friend, Annabeth Chase," Thalia says.

Hold on. Annabeth Chase. I've heard that name before. She goes my school! She's in my class, in fact, but we've never spoke – not even made eye-contact. Annabeth's the quietest kid there is, at least in school. Here, out of school, she seems quite chatty.

"You go my school," Annabeth states, staring at me. Her eyes are unnerving – more so than Zeus and Hades's, in fact. But strangely I don't get the urge to hide from them.

"I know," I say slowly, nodding.

"I didn't know you knew Thalia,"

"Neither did I. We only met today,"

Annabeth glances at Thalia who waves her hand dismissively. "I'll explain later, promise," she says. "C'mon, we're playing our favourite game,"

"Heroes vs monsters?" Annabeth asks excitedly.

Thalia nods. "Yup! Me and you can be the monsters first, 'coz Nico doesn't like being the monster, and we'll play boys versus girls. Then we'll swap,"

Nodding, we split off. Nico and I run away whilst the girls start counting. I'll admit – I'm confident that we'll win. Nico and I are the best at hiding and sometimes Thalia isn't very observant and she'll just walk past us. I assume that Annabeth will be the same.

I'm wrong. Very wrong.

Two minutes into the round, I'm racing away from Annabeth. She's hurling playful insults at me and I was hurling them back.

"LEAVE ME ALONE BEAST!" I scream, sprinting through the garden; leaping over hedges and rolling under statues.

"NEVER PETTY HUMAN!" she retorts. I've never really spoken to Annabeth in school but she seems pretty cool here. She's not like other girls, like Thalia. They're both tough and independent and don't care about getting their clothes and hair dirty. In fact, it's Annabeth who tries to tackle me into the fountain. Thankfully Thalia steps in before she can and that round ends pretty fast.

The sky soon starts getting dark. Being September, days are getting shorter. The adults keep poking their heads out of the marquee to check on us (one time it was Hades, another time it was Apollo, etc). By 6pm, Nico is exhausted and we've played nearly a hundred rounds of kill-the-monster, so we decide to take a break. We sit on a table cloth from inside the marquee, given to us by Aphrodite when she saw us sat on the damp grass. Thalia and Annabeth are telling me about how they met.