GREEK TRAGEDY [PERCY JACKSON A.U] ✓

FOUR: THE THIRD CLUE

Althea, Percy, and Lizzie arrived at a run-down motel in South Carolina just before eleven that night. Lizzie had fallen asleep four hours into the trip, leaving the elder demigods in the front seat with an uncomfortable silence between them.

    After paying for a room and parking as close to it as possible, Althea gently shook Lizzie awake, cooing softly that they'd arrived and it was time to get out. The younger girl and Percy went in first while Althea grabbed her bags from the van and locked it.

    The blonde entered the small, shabby room, seeing a double bed on the nearest wall and a twin on the one opposite, the latter bed already laden with Lizzie's bag and weapons.

    If Lizzie had claimed the twin bed... that left Percy and Althea to share the other one.

    His eyes met Althea's for a brief moment before she averted her gaze, announcing to the group that she was going to take a shower.

    The daughter of Dionysus locked the bathroom door behind her, leaning her forehead against the cool wood. She sighed, stepped away from the door, and stripped out of her blood-soaked clothes, eager to wash the day's filth off of her body.

    The water that came out of the faucet was freezing, and probably not very safe, but Althea let it pour down on her, using the cheap motel soap to scrub off the dried blood and wash her hair.

    She thought deeply about the prophecy given for the quest, and even more deeply about the prophecy the old Oracle had given her and her alone when she was thirteen:

Daughter of wine, thy journey be long,

You shalt listen closely to the siren's song.

Lose thy brethren in the battle of the maze,

Take down the Titans, you shall raze.

You shalt become landlocked, truly stuck,

Losing the sea and losing thy luck.

Death will fall upon the bereft,

Signifying the end of a promise unkept.

Thine own grief shall drown out thy mind,

To keep thy love or thy new life, your choice shall bind.

    Althea remembered the way the voice had exploded from the body of the mummified woman, and the fear she had felt had paralyzed her. She hadn't told a soul what the Oracle had predicted, no matter how hard her friends and Chiron begged and demanded.

    The first six lines of the prophecy had already come to pass: she had heard the sirens sing about her fatal flaws—the things that nearly got her killed on a daily basis—on the quest to find Grover in the Sea of Monsters, watched Castor die at the hands of an enemy demigod during the Battle of the Labyrinth, and killed the titan Epimetheus when Kronos's army attacked Manhattan. As for the fifth and sixth lines, she had lost Percy, and it had almost broken her.

    The last four lines of the prophecy were what scared her most. But she promised herself the day she received the prophecy that she wouldn't dwell on it.

    Althea shook her head, forcing herself to break out of her thoughts. She shut the water off, grabbed a ratty towel from the counter, and dried off her dripping body before throwing on the spare clothes she'd brought.

    When she walked out into the main room, Lizzie was out cold on the twin bed, and Percy was nowhere to be found. Upon further inspection, however, she found a note on the bedside table that read went down to pool to clear my head, written in his messy scrawl.