Page 27 of The Court of the Dead (The Nico di Angelo Adventures #2)
Nico leaned against the parapet. “We don’t exactly know. But we’ll find out.”
Savannah still looked troubled. The cacodemon Guilt skittered toward her, its long legs making it look like a tarantula wreathed in inky black vapor. It stared up at Savannah as if it recognized a fellow sufferer.
“This isn’t your fault,” Nico told her.
“It kinda feels like it is,” she murmured.
“Come on,” said Deion. “Don’t say that.”
Savannah faced him. “Easy for you to say. You make friends with everybody, even a farting griffin. Me? I had a meltdown. I blamed Arielle for something she didn’t do! I hurt her. I wished she would go away. I wanted them all to go away, and now…”
Deion didn’t reply. He just stood beside her, scanning the hillside. Guilt rolled around at her feet, showing off his smoky belly.
“Sorry,” Savannah said softly. “I didn’t mean to take out my problems on you. I seem to be doing that a lot.”
“It’s cool.” Deion gave her a smile. “ ’Least you don’t fart when you’re nervous. As far as I can tell.”
Savannah punched him playfully. Will refilled everybody’s cups, because there was no problem hot chocolate couldn’t make better.
“We all do it,” Will said. “I mean, lash out sometimes. Not fart. Although I guess we all do that, too.”
Nico cleared his throat. “I think what my boyfriend is trying to say, in his fumbling but adorable way, is that we all make mistakes. Will can attest to how many times I’ve said something completely out of line when I’ve been upset.”
“But not like this,” said Savannah. “If something has happened to Arielle…”
Sadness washed over Nico. “You know, I once blamed a really good friend because my sister died. Blamed him for a long time, too.”
He could sense both Deion and Savannah staring at him, but he pushed past his discomfort. He knew he needed to talk about this.
“She died so far away from me. There was nothing I could do about it, but I thought that my friend…I thought he could have done something and simply didn’t try hard enough. And I hated him for it.”
Despite the fact that it had been years since Bianca’s death—and only months since the last time he’d spoken with her in the Underworld—Nico’s eyes blurred. He swayed a little.
He turned to the campers with a sorrowful smile. “I’m still grieving. But I realize that I was so angry and afraid, I found the easiest person to blame. I gave him every ounce of my rage and my sadness.”
“And now?” Savannah asked.
Nico shrugged. “It was a process, but we’re friends again. The hardest part was learning to live with that little guy.” He pointed to Guilt, which was rolling on its back, legs flailing, just begging for Savannah to scratch its shadowy tummy.
Will gazed at the city below them. “I’ve learned that grief is…
weird. I lost a lot of friends in the Battle of Manhattan.
One was a sibling—an older brother from the Apollo cabin.
I was so furious that he was gone. Then, right after he died, I got the chance to save someone else.
Inexplicably, that healed a part of me .
I think I would have been so much worse off if that hadn’t happened. ”
Savannah wiped away a tear. “I guess I haven’t even really had a chance to be sad about my parents. I was with Lupa so soon after they died. Then I came here.”
“And then you saw Arielle.” Deion patted her shoulder. “After what happened to your folks, that would mess up anybody. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. When we find Arielle, you two can talk. I’m sure that will make you both feel better.”
He winked at Nico and Will. “And we will find her, right? You two survived Tartarus. You can do anything.”
“Oh, gods, that’s right.” Savannah sniffled. “Here I am talking about my own problems, and you guys have been through so much worse.”
“Hey,” Nico said, “everyone’s pain is valid. Dionysus told me that, and he should know. He is a pain.”
Savannah laughed for the first time Nico had heard. “Still,” she said, “you’re both kind of celebrities.”
Deion nodded. “For real. Everyone is talking about you all time. You must have noticed?”
Nico and Will exchanged a look.
“Is that what the legionnaires have been whispering about?” asked Will. “I kind of assumed they were complaining about Asterion and his friends.”
“I mean…okay, that’s most of it,” Deion admitted. “But you two are a big deal!”
Savannah sipped her hot chocolate. “To be fair, we’ll gossip about anything. Don’t you guys do that over in the Greek camp? The boys are especially bad.”
“We are not!” said Deion. Then he glanced at Nico and mouthed We are.
Nico smiled. It made him feel better to know that not all the whispering and gossiping he’d noticed in the mess hall was about the mythics.
He knew Asterion’s group meant no harm. The bigger problem was getting the legionnaires to believe that. If Deion and even Savannah could learn to be more open-minded, maybe there was a chance, and that could change everything .
Bob had done that for Nico. The Titan had chosen to be something different than what he had been destined for at birth. And wasn’t that exactly what Nico had done himself over the past six months?
He’d been known as many things over the years: Death Boy, the Ghost King, Grumpy Little Ball of Darkness.
Inherent in all of them: He was different.
He was not like anyone else. He certainly had no aversion to being associated with darkness.
He loved that part of himself. But sometimes being on the outside was hard.
It made it easy for him to empathize with Asterion and his friends, who’d been rejected by their own kind and were now struggling in a world that couldn’t see them as anything but monsters.
Nico wanted to bridge that gap. He wanted to show the Romans and mythics that it was possible to choose something better than fear and mistrust. If Bob could do it, maybe there was hope for the rest of them.
He watched the younger demigods chat while their eyes kept scanning the horizon for any threats, but there was nothing out of the ordinary within sight.
And at that moment, for no reason Nico could see, the Cocoa Puffs went into a frenzy.
They raced around him, crashing into one another.
Fear and Guilt grabbed on to Nico’s bootlaces.
Jealousy prodded his ankle with its pointy tusks, flooding his mind with bitter images: Annabeth reaching for Percy’s hand.
Sally Jackson speaking fondly about her son while handing out homemade blue cookies .
The hairs rose on the back of Nico’s neck. Jealousy’s touch seemed to sharpen his senses. He felt something moving toward them from the west, like a low-pressure zone before a storm.
“Nico?” asked Will. “Why are the Puffs so upset?”
“I sense something,” he said. “We’re being watched.”
Deion frowned. “Are you sure?”
Nico glanced down at the freeway. He didn’t see anything, but dread was building in his stomach.
“Hold on,” Savannah said, setting down her cup. “Frank’s calling.”
She raised her bracelet and listened.
The temperature dropped as if Nico had stepped into a freezer. His breath steamed. The Puffs mewled and howled.
Will shivered. “I think you’re right. I can feel it now too.”
Savannah spoke urgently into her tessera. “Hold on. What? Wait, someone else is calling.”
Nico raised his own tessera. “Terminus! We need you here now .”
CRASH! The sound came from Nico’s tessera. A split second later, another one echoed from Savannah’s pendant. A cacophony of voices shattered the night air. “Something’s here!” “Terminus!” “Hazel!” “Where is it?” “Frank!” “Terminus!”
Deion gripped his spear, looking around wildly for some invisible foe to fight.
Light exploded from their tesserae. Every Iris-message from every pendant blazed overhead at full brightness, blinding Nico and burning the afterimage of a hundred rainbow spheres onto his eyes.
Just as suddenly, the lights flickered out. From Nico’s tessera came a noise like wet breathing into a microphone, followed by a distorted voice.
“What is this shiny toy?” The speaker sounded like an old woman…like La Befana, the Christmas witch from the fables Nico had grown up with. “Oh, how clever! I think I’ll keep it. And Hazel Levesque…interfering with a duly appointed officer of the court? Tsk, tsk. You shall be next!”
The voice went silent. The tesserae grew so hot that the demigods had to pull them off and throw them to the ground, where they lay smoking like blown fuses.
“What just happened?” Savannah asked.
Panic constricted Nico’s throat. “Hazel. Hazel’s in trouble!” He grabbed Will’s hand, summoned a hasty mental image of the mythics’ quarters, and pulled his boyfriend into the shadow world.