Nico di Angelo, Flowers of Death

Chapter 39

Nico's P.O.V

When I regained consciousness, it was light out. My body was sore, and the fact that my clothes were damp did not help. I sat up, finding myself surrounded by trees and lying in the grass, wet from the morning dew. There was something slimy sticking to my face, I reached up to peel it off. It was a green leaf with a yellow paste. I began to peel an abundance of these weird leaf stickers off of my body; there was a lot. They reminded me of coach Hedges sports magic.

I saw Amber, leaning against a tree, staring off into the distance, a look of immense concentration on her face. Her hair was matted, her clothes looked as wet as mine, but her eyes glimmered in the early morning light. We were in a dirt alcove, surrounded by thick trees. Off to my left was a small stream of water.

"Where are we?" I ask. Startling Amber for a moment, since she had not realized, I was awake. She turns to me as if seeing me for the first time; she studied my face, but it did not appear that Amber found what she was looking for.

"Yellowwood State Forest," I give her a confused look. "It's in Indiana, I think. Not very good with American geography. But-" She holds up a slip of paper, and it takes me a moment to realize it's a brochure for the park.

"Did you know," She continues, "that this forest is named after the yellowwood tree, a species that rarely ever grow so far north. Yellowwood trees only flower every three to five years. "

"And you know that because," I ask. Amber flaps the brochure in her hand.

"I read a little while you were getting your beauty rest," She replies.

"How long was I out."

"All yesterday, and all night. It's around 6:30am." She pauses and looks off into the distance again. "I thought you died, you were just laying there, and you wouldn't wake up. I gave you ginseng, that sticky stuff, to combat against your fatigue, but even then." She trails off.

I tried to remember how we got here, at first, it was a little blurry. The car flipped, there was a girl. Right.

"You fought an empousa," I say.

"No. You fought the Empousa. I just stood there and insulted it like an idiot." She replies.

"How did you know that was going to work."

"I didn't. I mean not really, I vaguely remembered this story about some philosopher, travelling home on the road. His friends were attacked by an Empousa, but he convinced them to insult her, so she ran away screaming."

"That was Apollonius," I supply.

"Yeah. I defeat my very first monster by insulting it. Leo would be so proud." Chuckles Amber. My stomach turns at the mention of Leo's name.

"Daisy is not dead, she just ran away." I remind her a little too harshly. However, I can sense that we are hanging onto a touchy topic, so I attempt to change it. "I remember the police and trying to shadow travel away, but not being able to focus on where I wanted to go. It took too much of my energy."

"I guess that's why we didn't just shadow travel to Chicago."

"Yeah. That would have been too much for me, I'd be a dead weight for the rest of the trip."

"Speaking of which, we better get going."

Thankfully, we were close to the edge of the woods. We ended up finding a park ranger who was kind enough to give us a ride to the nearby bus stop, where we bought two tickets to Chicago. As we were waiting at the bus station, I glanced up at the television hanging on the wall.