She didn’t trust such an easy way in, but Sadie didn’t wait. A single two-by-four was nailed across the doorway in a half-hearted attempt to keep out trespassers, but the door itself was slightly ajar.Īnnabeth was about to suggest scouting the perimeter. That door, you think?’Ī set of steps led to a basement entrance. When necessary, blast enemies into teeny-tiny bits.’ ‘So what’s your standard operating procedure?’ Sadly, when demons attack, they don’t give us any warning, and they rarely bother to identify themselves.’ Carter – he would love to spend hours in the library, reading up on every hostile demon we might face, highlighting the important bits and making flash cards for me to study. Tell me, how often do monsters give you the luxury of Googling them before they attack?’ ‘I like to do research first – arm myself with knowledge.’ ‘Wish I knew what we were dealing with,’ she muttered as they crept towards the building. Unfortunately, Annabeth’s wits weren’t working very well at the moment. A child of Athena should never rely on a blade if she could use her wits instead. But that’s why Annabeth liked daggers: they kept her focused. She gripped her new bronze dagger, realizing it was too small and too short to provide much offensive power. Whatever was inside the building, its power tugged at Annabeth too, the same way Crabby had on the train. Even the graffiti seemed to vibrate on the walls, as if the symbols were trying to come alive. Hieroglyphic birds and stick figures formed in the air and floated inside. Up close, the red glow in the windows was even more radiant. She didn’t need special vision to know the tower was full of bad magic. The world no longer looked so multilayered and kaleidoscopic, but that was fine with her. The enchanted gloop on Annabeth’s eyes seemed to be wearing off. ‘Let’s go find a god.’Ī chain-link fence ringed the building, but they squeezed through a gap and picked their way across a field of spear grass and broken concrete. Yeah, of course.’ She accepted Sadie’s hand. Normally she would’ve been the one giving the pep talk. And now you have a lovely dagger as well.’Īnnabeth felt the blood rise to her face. You’re still the same tough-skinned, rucksack-wielding demigod you’ve always been. ‘Look, I know it’s a lot, but nothing has changed. The number of veils she could see was overwhelming – like a tapestry folded in on itself a hundred times. But she’d never thought of the Mist as an actual curtain.Īnnabeth wondered if the Mist and the Duat were related, or maybe even the same thing. She’d spent her whole life learning about the Mist – the magical boundary that separated the mortal world from the world of Greek monsters and gods. But, looking at the swirling layers of magic, she was afraid to move. ‘To merge with the other piece of the sceptre –’Īnnabeth knew she should get up. ‘So that’s where the dog monster is heading,’ Annabeth guessed. ‘It’s attracting red light from all over the place.’ The scene reminded Annabeth of Charybdis, the whirlpool-inhaling monster she’d once encountered in the Sea of Monsters. Dark clouds swirled overhead, and more tendrils of red energy flowed towards the building from all over the landscape, as if being drawn into the vortex. The tower glowed red from the inside – light seeping through the boarded-up windows, shooting through cracks in the crumbling walls. Crimson tendrils snaked away from the site, following the direction in which the monster had fled.Īnnabeth focused on the derelict apartment building in the distance, and her heartbeat doubled. Where the dog monster once lay, the ground smouldered like live coals.
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