Camp Half-Blood

I Nearly Get Killed For My Birthday: Rex's POV

Okay, so I nearly got myself killed.  Then again that happens every day.   My name's Rex.  Rex Blaze.  I'm what is known as a Half-Blood.  Whether it's a gift or a curse I'm not sure, but I seem to be a danger magnet.  All Half-Bloods are.  Sorry, let me start at the beginning.  It was on my seventeenth birthday party.

The chorus of 'Happy Birthday' echoed off the walls.  All my friends and I sat around the card table in the small apartment my mom, Linda Blaze, owns in South Carolina.  We were about to have cake and I was all excited because my dad, Harry blaze, was actually home.  He only ever visited me once, maybe twice, a year. You see, he was always telling me that he was an an engineer and that he always had buisness in New York.  He had married my mother because she had once been an engineer also.  My dad was a big, strong African American man with a thick dark brown beard, which was wierd since I had my mother's caucasian skin tone.  He had a bad limp and wore a leg brace.  He also had a strange scar running down the left side of his face, from his forehead, across his eye, all the way to his jaw.  'An engineering accident,' he always told me when I asked about it. 

Anyway,  he was about to light the candle on me cake.  "Happy Birthday, Son!"  he told me. 

Suddenly Their was a low rumble from outside.  The match in Dad's hand seemed to explode into a fireball the size of a dodgeball and the noise sounded up again, this time a lot closer.  It sounded like a deep throaty bark.  Dad told everyone to get out of the house and go home.  They all looked  around confused, but when the noise sounded again this time close enough to shake the walls and shatter the windows,  they ran for the door as fast as they could, although a few of them grabbed sodas from the cooler on the floor first.  Then I felt my head hit the floor and my chest felt as if a hundred pound fur coat covered in barbed wire had fallen on it, which honestly would be an improvement to what really happened.  I looked up and saw the largest dog ever.  It was pure black with red glowing eyes, which I knew couldn't be good, and was as big as a small whale.  Its razor sharp claws dug into my stomach.  My dad threw the fireball and caught the monster between its shoulderblades.  The monster looked surprised, loosened its grip, and exploded into a cloud of gold, sparkly, dust, which covered the apartment.  

"Death Hound," Dad said darkly,  "Get in the car.  Hurry!"

I looked at him blankly and then responded.  Fifteen minutes later we were on our way to the airport. I asked Dad how he had done the fireball trick but he just said, "It will make sense later.  This is very serious.  I should have explained this earlier." 

  When we finally got there dad hugged me, told me I'd understand later, and pulled out a ticket from who knows where.  I looked at it.   'Mannhattan, New York  4:30' It read.  I looked up at him, fingered his weird scar and said goodbye.   Yeah, some birthday surprise this was, I thought.

"Good bye, Son!  Just trust me, this is for the better." He replied solemnly with a hint of sadness in his voice, and then he handed me a backpack.  Probably clothes, I figured.  Then, just like that he was gone.  I stared at the ticket, then at the clock on the wall.  It was 4:15, so I headed toward the boarding gate.