Cam Valdez and the Lost Origins: The Unkown Twin

A Weirdo in the Woods Steals My Rootbeer

    Demigod or not, I was never a normal kid, even though I tried to fit in the best an orphaned weirdo can. 

     I never knew my family or anything about them. All they did was give me a name and some dumb, broken medallion, and then send me off to foster care. 

     They named me Camileo Valdez, but everyone in our section of town knows to never, ever call me that unless they wanted a broken nose. They just called me Cam or ‘the freak girl around the corner.’

     I have lived with the Joneses for the last seven years, ever since I was nine. I was a “good”, sarcastic kid that stayed out of the way most of the time. Most people said that I looked like an elf. I was a short, skinny kid, with dark curly hair. I was Latino and my hair was shoulder length if you could ever catch me with it down. 

      The day Greek myths walked into my life, I was running full speed into the forest about a mile or so away from the Jones' home on the edge of Perico, Texas. School had ended yesterday and now it was summer. Yay.   

     That may sound a bit bitter coming from someone who almost always fails their classes. The only subject I get good grades is in math. I guess it had something to do with how quickly and accurately I can do almost all of the equations. But let me explain why summer was always dreadful for me and how I almost wished I was back in school. 
    
     Summer was like being let out of torture (school) and put into prison (the Jones' house). Mary and Jonathan Jones always make me watch all six of their kids while they go out to parties and on huge trips. I mean, if you were never able to get away from six kids you'd probably glorify school as your safe haven.
 
     Now back to the reason that I was running. I had put about a hundred fake spiders in Lilea Jones', the eldest non-adopted (and two months older than me), makeup bag. She was mortally afraid of spiders. And she was also the only one I could prank without getting in too much trouble. 
      
     I shoved a branch out my way and emerged into a clearing. About a hundred feet away stood a large tree with a hut below it. Well, it wasn't even a hut. It was more like a couple of wooden, graffitied boards placed between low hanging branches. I walked up to the hut, a feeling of security passing over me.

     Reaching on tiptoes above the roof, I pulled a concealed string. A blanket dropped from the ceiling, I pulled another string and a camouflaged section of ground was ripped away to reveal an ice chest. These were some of my safety precautions to ensure my privacy.     

     I sat down on the blanket and opened the ice chest. In it were things I had collected in the forest, like random pieces of wood, flowers, and some berries. Those were just the things I usually find in my secret grove, things that you normally find in forests. But on those random days that always seem to be pretty bad days for me, I collected many odd pieces of silver metal. It may not sound that bizarre but the thing is, the pieces were glowing. 

     Some looked like half-formed weapons, like a shield, or a sword. A few looked like toy horses. Others were just portions of glowing metal. I knew how to bend them to my will though. No, I mean literally bend them to my power. All I had to do was hold a piece of metal, close my eyes and concentrate on what I need, and an odd tingling sensation would spread through me. When I opened my eyes, the exact piece I was thinking of would appear in my hands. (Saves a lot of time from trips to Home Depot.)

     I pulled a small scrap of glowing metal out and examined it. I had been trying to figure out what the metal was. At first, I had thought it to be a special type of steel, but I tried to bend the shape like I can do with the strange metal by using regular steel and nothing happened. After I studied the piece of metal, I decided to have some soda. I pulled out a box of root beer, my favorite soda. I always kept a pack in the icebox. It was what I spent the money on that I salvaged from the couch cushions on. 
 
    I set the package down on my blanket and reached back into the ice chest. I pulled out the one thing my parents had left me. It was a rusted half-circle medallion on a leather string that was engraved with what looked like a hammer hitting an anvil, though it was hard to make out because it was broken in half. I could somehow sense that it held a lot of power. Again, I don't know how.