Child of lightning-Percy Jackson x reader-Book one

I meet my father

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their own strange 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, Percy and two other adolescents in New York and brought us across country on a ten-day odyssey of terror.

Poor little Joey Grace and Percy Jackson weren't international criminals after all. They'd caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from their 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 and Joey Grace had stolen two guns from their captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotguns-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, Joey Grace and their two friends were safely in police custody.

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

"All I want," Percy said, choking back his fake tears, "is to see my loving stepfather again. Every time I saw him on TV, calling me and Joey delinquent punks, 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."

I had to fight back laughter. The police and reporters were so moved by our story that they passed around the hat and raised money for four tickets on the next plane to New York.

I knew there was no choice but to fly. I hoped Zeus would cut Percy some slack, considering the circumstances. But it was still hard to watch Percy force himself on board the flight.

Takeoff was a nightmare. I wasn't necessarily scared at first, But sitting next to Percy definitely changed that. Every spot of turbulence seemed to scare him more than any Greek monster we'd faced. I made a backup plan in my head that if the plane started to go down I would somehow use my powers to keep it up, though I doubt I could have done anything like that. Percy didn't unclench his hands from his armrests until we touched down safely at LaGuardia. The local press was waiting for us outside security, but we managed to evade them thanks to Annabeth, who lured them away in her invisible Yankees cap, shouting, "They're over by the frozen yogurt! Come on!" then rejoined us at baggage claim.

We split up at the taxi stand. Percy told Annabeth and Grover to get back to Half-Blood Hill and let Chiron know what had happened. They protested, and it was hard to let them go after all we'd been through, but I knew me and Percy had to do this last part of the quest by ourselves. If things went wrong, if the gods didn't believe us... I wanted Annabeth and Grover to survive to tell Chiron the truth.

So me and Percy hopped in a taxi and headed into Manhattan. It reminded me of our taxi ride home from Yancy Academy. Only this time we were not heading to our apartment. We were heading to what could be our doom.

Thirty minutes later, the two of us walked into the lobby of the Empire State Building.

We must have looked like a pair of homeless kids, with our tattered clothes and scraped-up faces. On top of that I hadn't slept in at least twenty-four hours, so that definitely didn't help.