章 910: 18
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Manhattan traffic irritated me. Manhattan traffic during the middle of winter, however, was absolutely infuriating.
"How do people survive around here," I muttered as another jaywalker brazenly strutted in front of the car without regard for the stop lights flashing yellow. White snow fluttered everywhere, but it didn't stop the dozens of people crossing streets in front of and behind the cars.
"What, you got a demigod-magic-power to get rid of traffic?" Justin asked sarcastically in the driver's seat. I knew that Justin was a decent driver, however the car was a rental so he wasn't completely used to the steering wheel. I bet the traffic was bringing down his mood too.
"You know, you wouldn't have to deal with this if you'd just stay back home," I pointed out.
Paige snorted in front of me. "There's no way we're letting you out of our sight after you told us your plan."
I yawned in the backseat. "One of my biggest regrets," I admitted sourly and glared at the car next to us. I had a feeling it wanted to change lanes, but the driver wasn't even putting on his blinkers.
Just like I predicted, the car next us suddenly turned into our lane and I raised my voice, "Watch out-"
"I see it," Justin responded with irritation and lightly honked at the offending driver, the driver honked back.
"We're gonna die," I muttered. "After fighting monsters of legends, arguing with gods, and witnessing prophecies, I'm going to die in a car accident."
"You're not going to die, so relax," Paige sniped. "If anything, you're going to die when we get back home and explain to Yuri about what you've been up to for the past two weeks after you're done with whatever business you have in Central Park."
I rubbed my chin and looked away when she said that.
Sorry, Paige, Justin. I won't be going back home with you two after Central Park.
Several days ago, when my step-siblings cornered me and forced me to spill what I was planning to do, they understandably freaked out. Unfortunately, that meant I was on constant supervision by both of them, which was why they followed me all the way here to New York City. Nothing I said would dissuade them and my attempts to hypnotize them failed, which earned me an earful of lecturing.
"We're less than five minutes away," Justin said while checking the GPS. "By the way, you still haven't told us why you're going to Central Park."
"It's because of nunya."
"Nunya what?"
"Nunya business."
In response, Justin slammed the breaks. Everyone in the car grunted at the sudden impact.
"Seat belt check," he said to my disgruntled face in the rear view mirror.
In response to his stunt, I dragged my thumb across my throat and pointed at him threateningly. Having enough of our squabbles, Paige turned around and showed me her phone screen, her finger hovering over a speed dial. It was Yuri's phone number. I internally swore.
"So why did you have to fly back to Manhattan and go to Central Park?" she asked sweetly while wagging the nuclear button in my face.
Since when was Paige so good at blackmail and threats?
"I'm meeting someone there," I answered reluctantly. "I need their help."
"Who is it?"
"My half-brother, his name is Clovis."
Paige and Justin exchanged curious glances at that.
"Jade, are you not worried at all? About what you're trying to do?"
Sliding down in the backseat, I crossed my legs and closed my eyes. All this traffic was starting to give me a major headache.
"Oh, plenty worried," I said easily.
Justin huffed. "You sure don't sound like it."
Paige studied me seriously. "I'd be surprised if Jade actually had some normal worries."
I opened an eye. "Hey, I worry about some normal things, too."
"Like what?"
"Well, I've been worried about the gentrification of South Los Angeles and if I'll ever get a pension in this lifetime."
Justin sighed. "I was actually hoping for something normal, but I shouldn't have let my hopes up."
"What were you expecting?" I said sarcastically, "Oh! I'm worried about the state of the world right now, a lot of people are going to die in the future, deities are messing up left and right, I'm about to enter the Underworld, a very dangerous place full of monsters and who-else-knows-what-"
"We're here."
Justin parked in the street one block away from the park. We stepped out of the car, the howling cold air hitting our faces like an ice block. I shivered in my winter jacket and stretched my arms and legs from having to sit in traffic for an hour. Justin pulled out his wallet to slot some coins in the parking meter, paying for two hour's worth of parking.
"Well that's officially one sign of bad luck," I commented as I pulled on my beanie and winter gloves.
"What is?"
I gestured to the parked car. "You found street parking in New York City near Central Park. That's bad luck."
Paige laughed in amusement. "Isn't this good luck instead?"
"Nope," I said with false cheer. "Let's go."
Central Park was huge. I had only been here a few times before and I wasn't familiar with the park enough to know the entire layout because that's how big it was. Even though it snowed and the icy air swirled every five minutes, there were still a whole bunch of people strolling down the pathways which were now covered in several inches of snow. Most of the trees had lost their foliage and instead had either snow or some icicles hanging off their branches. Even though there wasn't a single color other than white, grey, or black, Central Park was still pretty in the winter. Instead of a green forest, the park was an ice palace.
Paige and Justin followed me into the park, but at a slower pace since Paige took multiple pictures the entire time and even staged a mini photoshoot of herself at one point. She forced Justin to pose for a few shots before insisting that we take a photo of all three together. Justin and I didn't fight her because we could never really win against Paige, so we obediently waited for her to grab a passing stranger to take our photo.
"We're so cute," she squealed when she checked the picture on her phone. "I'll send it to Yuri and dad later."
I glanced at the photo and couldn't help but crack a small smile. My dark hair was a stark contrast to their dirty blonde hair and it was funny how none of our expressions matched each other. Paige was positively beaming at the camera, her arms grabbing hold of me and Justin at either sides, and had a nice smile showing a row of perfectly even teeth. In contrast, my smile looked lazy. Justin had a tight smile.
"Justin, you look constipated," I observed. "Do we need to stop by a bathroom?"
"Shut it. Just keep walking," he shoved me ahead.
Clovis and I had agreed to meet each other at a specific part of Central Park, somewhere towards the middle of the area where there would be less spectators. It took about thirty minutes of walking .
I felt him buzzing in my mind before I saw him.
"He's around here," I said, looking around, and then did a double take.
There was someone sleeping on the bench and covered with a considerable amount of snow. Walking over, I leaned over the person and tilted my head.
"Clovis?" I asked cautiously.
The person stirred, sitting up and ignoring the snow that fell away. Large, soft brown eyes opened up and looked at me.
"Jade?" Clovis' voice still contained traces of sleep.
Seeing my half-brother in person was strange since I was used to seeing him in my dreams, but he looked exactly the same. Clovis had a round face with round eyes with fluffy brown hair sticking out of his hood. Bundled up in multiple layers and a thick winter coat, he looked like a swaddled baby.
Justin and Paige came up behind me.
"This is him?" Justin asked doubtfully.
"He was sleeping? Outside in this weather?" Paige sounded so concerned. "That's so unsafe."
"Mm, I wasn't cold," Clovis shrugged. "Are you guys Jade's step-brother and sister?"
I introduced them to each other. "Right, Justin, Paige, this is Clovis. Clovis, these are my step-siblings."
I took a breath. Justin and Paige are going to kill me for this.
"Okay, Clovis, you can start now."
Clovis looked at me with some reluctance. "If you're so sure..."
"What are you guys talking about?" Paige asked confused.
Clovis turned to my step-siblings, snapping his fingers to catch their attention. The sharp sound was loud and echoed, I felt the Mist at work immediately, but it was dense and heavily coated with hypnotism. Justin and Paige were clear-sighted mortals, so the normal Mist wouldn't work on them and something stronger had to be used to hypnotize the two of them. While I didn't doubt my own godly abilities, I didn't have the confidence to hypnotize Justin and Paige because they'd throw off whatever magic I threw at them. Clovis was just as good, maybe better than me, when it came to our godly abilities.
I shivered, not because of the cold weather but because I felt the Mist settle around us. Justin and Paige's guards were already lowering as the Mist churned at their feet, swirling up their bodies. I suspected that they were beginning to feel drowsy and light-headed.
"Hello." Clovis' relaxed voice sounded almost melodic when he spoke.
"Hi," Justin and Paige murmured, their eyes fluttered shut and their breathing slowed down to shallow breaths.
"You both must be tired looking after Jade," Clovis said sympathetically. "You must be so tired."
"So tired," Justin and Paige repeated. I fought the urge to back away from the creepiness. I wondered if it looked just as creepy when I was the one hypnotizing other people.
"Well, you don't have to look after Jade anymore. We finished our business here in Central Park and then you guys dropped Jade off Camp Half-Blood, okay? The camp will take care of her now, and you can go home and tell your mom that Jade is safe. Does that sound alright to you both?"
"We dropped off Jade at camp," Justin said in a low voice.
"We can go home," Paige said after him. "We can tell Yuri."
Clovis nodded. "That's very good, thank you. You guys should walk around the park for a little bit more, maybe for an hour? And then you can head back home. Jade is back in camp now."
"Okay, we will walk," Justin and Paige chorused. They opened their eyes and I flinched at the Mist fogging up their eyes, as if they were possessed. Moving like puppets in syc, the two of them turned to the side and slowly walked away keeping pace with each other. Snow trailed behind them and covered their tracks. I sent a silent apology their way.
I let out the breath I hadn't known I was holding until it was all over.
"Wow," I whistled. "You're good."
"They weren't expecting it," Clovis said as he stood up, shaking off snow. "It would've been harder if they knew it was coming."
"Yeah, thanks for doing it," I said. "Are they going to realize what happened when they get back home?"
"Hm, the hypnotism might break after they tell your mom since that was the last condition I made before breaking it off," Clovis guessed. "Did you tell camp that you used it as a cover?"
I winced. "Not exactly, but I am going back to camp after all this, so technically..."
I let Clovis follow that trail of logic.
Clovis slowly blinked. "That's potential for a mess."
I sighed. "It'll be a problem for the future me. What about you? Did you have trouble getting here?"
I knew that Clovis had a fairly stable homelife and came from a small town in Iowa. His mom was remarried to a carpenter who already had three kids, so Clovis was the oldest child in his family. Although I was the one who sent him money for his plane ticket and taxi fare, I didn't think it'd be so easy for him to leave his home and come all the way here without suspicion.
"I told them I was visiting a friend," he said easily.
"And they just bought it?" I asked in disbelief. "They just let their thirteen year old son fly off to New York state by himself?"
"Mm, I might've hypnotized my uncle to come with so that he could 'chaperone' me," Clovis added and he didn't sound the least bit remorseful.
I narrowed my eyes at him. "Okay, I'm not going to hassle you right now because I owe you a lot already, but that's so wrong. How much did your uncle pay? I'll cover for his flight, too."
Clovis shook his head. "No need, flights in and out of Iowa are really cheap, so you sent us enough money for the two of us. Also, you just had me hypnotize your step-siblings. I don't think you're in a position to talk to me about hypnotizing my uncle."
I checked my watch and sighed, "Point taken, we're tight on schedule so I won't push the issue. We'll finish our business downstairs first before continuing this conversation. Come on, let's go to the entrance, we're meeting Nico there."
He brightened up at that. "Cool. I've been wanting to meet him."
Nico and Clovis got along like a flame to a candle; Clovis was the candle and Nico was the flame.
It wasn't that they had great chemistry and could banter for hours on end, but if you put them together and they just… worked. They were fine in each other's presence, they didn't clash, they were respectful of each other's boundaries, and they worked well together.
"Jade, are you listening?"
My inner thoughts whirred to a stop and I looked up. Nico looked faintly annoyed and Clovis seemed unimpressed.
Clovis turned to Nico. "She's the one with the crazy plan, but we're the ones doing the actual work."
Nico sighed. "We're the ones who'll probably have to deal with mess afterwards, too."
"Hey now, I'm appreciative," I defended myself. "Besides, I'm not forcing you two into this."
Clovis checked our surroundings. "It's not like we exactly have a choice at this point."
It was sort of true, we were in the Underworld now so it wasn't like Clovis could wander off on his own without getting mauled by a monster or hassled by ghosts. The only thing keeping us safe was Nico's authority in this territory. However, if we were to go beyond the scope of Hades' reign, then we'd be in huge trouble. It was a good thing that the River Styx and Lethe were within the domain of the King of the Underworld.
We stood on a strip of barren wasted land that separated the two deadly rivers. The rivers ran almost parallel across the Underworld and separated when it got close to Hades' kingdom. Nico was the one who navigated us to this spot as per my request to find a location that was close to both rivers and far away from where Charon ferried the dead to the Underworld. We could see the other three rivers of the Underworld, Phlegethon, Acheron, and Cocytus, at a far distance away; the three of us had already come to mutual agreement to not go near there no matter how curious we get.
On our right, the Styx was murky and translucent, almost grey, and polluted with so many objects that had come from the world of the living. Nico had told us that the dead would often try to bring things with them into the Underworld, like money, trophies, jewels, or trinkets, but none would be allowed to take it with them past the Styx which was where all those items would be dumped. The River Lethe, on the other hand, was a complete contrast in that it was clean, free of trash, and milky white like heavy cream.
"Nico, did you bring everything from camp?"
Nico nodded and shrugged off the backpack he had been carrying off his back. Setting the items on the floor carefully, he took out a box of plastic gloves, three sets of metalwork facemasks, a couple vials with airtight lids, several pipettes, a towel, and three pairs of dishwashing gloves. It looked like he had raided a high school chemistry lab. The dishwashing gloves weren't any normal kinds, they were the ones that the Harpies used to clean the camp's dishware with lava, so they had to be extra resistant to the river waters.
I picked up one of the facemasks. "Did you take these from the Hephaestus Cabin's forge?"
"Yeah. It was a pain to swipe that and the dishwashing gloves. The harpies went bat crazy when they realized some were missing," Nico said.
The three of us strapped multiple layers of plastic gloves on our hands, put on the facemasks, and then pulled on the dishwashing gloves last. The gloves were made of stiff rubber that were still flexible near the fingers and they extended up past their elbows, giving enough coverage of their arms. The facemasks would protect our faces in case any liquids splashed.
Nico held one open vial while Clovis held the other. I grabbed the pipettes and faced them.
"Let's get this over with," I said firmly and went over near the River Styx. Crouching so that I wouldn't be near the riverbed, I reached over with a pipette and carefully dipped it into the water as if I expected it to burst into flames.
It didn't, to my relief, and I squeezed the pipette head. Murky liquid filled up the plastic tube and I turned around to empty it into the vial that Nico held. The vial was a little bigger than my thumb so it didn't take long to fill it up with water from the River Styx. I discarded the pipette into the River Styx, to which Nico unhappily objected, and repeated the process with the River Lethe. In less than five minutes, one of the most nerve-racking five minutes I had ever experienced, we had two full vials of grey Styx and milky Lethe water.
"It looks like milk," Clovis voiced the obvious observation.
"Don't drink it," I said humorlessly. I was sure Clovis would've made the attempt to taste it if he hadn't seen it come from one of the most deadly rivers in the Underworld.
With gloved hands, Nico used a towel to carefully wipe down the vials before putting them in a snug pocket in his backpack. We all stripped off the protective gear, putting the dishwashing gloves and facemasks in a plastic bag that Nico pulled out of nowhere. Even though nothing got splashed around, we decided it was too risky to let people touch the stuff until they got scrubbed clean with lava back at camp. After cleaning up, Nico led us out of there, dodging some undead beings or two along the way, and after thirty minutes of hiking, we were back in Central Park and crawling out of the Door of Orpheus.
Our breath frosted in the cold air and we scrambled to grab our coats that we had left behind a dead bush.
"Here," Nico passed me the two vials. I stuffed them in the inner pockets of my jacket, Styx on the right and Lethe on the left.
I felt my stomach rumbling. "Anyone hungry?"
"Starving."
"Yeah."
"Let's find a place to eat. It'll be my treat as thanks," I said gratefully. I always had a bit of allowance from mom, and that amount doubled when Fritz married her, but I never used it so I had quite a bit saved up from the past year.
Nico and Clovis looked excited, like puppies. Although they were demigods and they had just come back from the Underworld, they were still adolescent boys who enjoyed eating like any other kid.
Sitting at a cafe, one recommended by a passerby, I took a sip of hot Americano as I watched Clovis and Nico wolf down their food across the table. Lunch hour had just hit and we were lucky enough to walk in right before it got crowded. Regular mortals surrounded us, clinking their silverware, chatting away about mundane topics, and the smell of roasting coffee beans permeated the air.
It was calming. I breathed in the smell of my coffee before sipping it again.
"Clovis, are you going to be able to stay awake after eating?" I asked my half-brother.
"Mm, probably not," the sleepyhead answered. "I get a bad case of food coma after I eat."
I made a sound of understanding since I had the exact same issue, but I think Clovis was the sleepier one between the two of us. It looked like he was about to face plant into his pancakes any minute.
I noticed that Nico was already done with his food and picking at the scraps of his hash browns. "Are you still hungry? Order more if you're hungry."
I shoved the laminated cafe menu into his hands, the little kid tried to protest against my insistence, but he gave up and petulantly agreed to eat a serving of eggs benedict. It was cute how his eyes got wide when the waiter slid the hot plate of food in front of him. Even though Nico had just finished a serving of hash browns and pancakes, he dug into the eggs and bread with the same vigor as before.
Nico's complexion was a little better, not as pale, and there was a hint of color in his skin; I think my help with his sleep has been improving his health. His shaggy black hair covered his forehead and got in his eyes, I was tempted to grab a comb and run it through his hair to tame it. For now, Nico resembled a black Labrador puppy: a clumsy, unkempt, puppy that needed to be trained and groomed. With proper training and lessons, Nico would be on par with Percy in terms of being a very dangerous, capable demigod with ungodly powers. Or, rather, godly powers.
Shifting my eyes to the other kid at the table, I stared casually at Clovis, who was now leaning on his arm, splayed across the table and his finished plate pushed to the side. I recall that the books had described him as a baby calf, and I couldn't think of any other description that fit him more perfectly. For some reason, I implicitly trusted him without any particular reason other than he accepted me and hasn't betrayed me, not that I've noticed at least. I also had a hard time to believe that someone with such open, soft brown eyes could be capable of deceit.
I munched on my food slowly and let my mind crank away, thinking about the next agenda for me and my minions.
"Okay, so here's the breakdown of what's going to happen next," I said with a business tone, wiping my face with a napkin. "Sorry, Clovis, it doesn't involve you much."
"S'okay," he murmured and then started snoozing. Nico looked at him with curiosity.
"He's definitely your half-brother," he commented.
I agreed. "Cute, isn't he?"
Nico swallowed his last bite and then drank his water. "Okay, so what do you need from me?"
I almost wanted to coo at the eager tone in his voice.
"Have you ever summoned the dead?"
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