little bird - Percy Jackson

chapter sixteen

      When the girls dispersed the Argo II in Charleston, Wren was in a visibly bad mood. She put up a good fight to try and stay on board, but Jason, Frank, and Leo were heading off to explore the museum, Percy was exploring the water harbor to try and talk to the Nereids, and no one was sure how good of an idea it was to leave Wren and Coach Hedge alone. Leaving the satyr by himself aboard the ship was already questionable - him and Wren together would most likely result in Charleston erupting in flames.

Hazel, Piper, and Annabeth seemed to be having a decent time walking along the Battery. They wandered through the seaside park that was named White Point Gardens, and the breeze from the ocean swept away the muggy summer heat and left a pleasant chill beneath the shade of the palmetto trees.

The roads were lined with old Civil War cannons and historical bronze statues, all of which made Wren uneasy. She couldn't help but think back to the statues in New York that had come alive thanks to Daedalus's command, and even the ice statues that Boreas housed in his faux-hotel. If these war statues and their cannons were just waiting for someone's word to jump to life and launch back into battle, Wren was sure that the queue would come while they were there.

The inland side of the park was a bit more pleasant. It wasn't crowded, and it was likely that most of the locals had fled for their summer vacation before the tourist spots got heavy. Wren wandered a little behind the group as they strolled along the Colonial mansion lined South Battery Street, each mansion with Roman-esque white columns in front of their brick walls. Ivy coated the brick, and the front gardens were bustling with rosebushes, honeysuckles, and flowering bougainvillea.

Looks like my mom threw up here, Wren mused.

"Kind of reminds me of New Rome." Hazel said, "All the big mansions and gardens. The columns and arches."

Annabeth nodded, spouting something about how the pre-Civil War South had often compared itself to Rome.

No one said much after that, but they were all less than enthused in the first place. Piper had mentioned seeing the park in her knife, but after Percy and Jason tried to kill each other in Kansas, she refrained from elaborating any further. Hazel had a far off look in her eye, like she was trying to admire their surroundings but was too focused on worrying about Nico. They had four days to find and free him, otherwise...

The deadline was weighing on Wren. Four days. They had four days to save Nico or he would die, and that blood would be on their hands.

Nico hadn't exactly been easy to be friends with - he was too young but too old all at once, like he'd missed the best years of his life stuck in that stupid Lotus Hotel and was freed just in time to be smacked with worldly devastation. It was far more that understandable, he was thrown into a new life and immediately his older sister died. Still, there was an unfathomable darkness to him, some that grew from his birthright as the son of Hades, but there had always been something deeper.

But Wren always took a liking to him, she knew what it was like to navigate a world alone. And she Pringle to the others. Nico didn't seem to mind Wren as much as he did anyone else, almost as if he held a soft spot for the Kelley girl who never gave up on him.

She didn't plan on giving up now - they would find Nico before the deadline in four days. She wouldn't lose anyone else, not on her birthday.

Her birthday - sixteen. Why did turning sixteen in movies and books have such large implications? What was so special about it? For all Wren cared, it should just be another simple day. But Wren didn't live a simple life.

Parker Kelley died on her sixth birthday - birthdays were bad omens. Turning sixteen in the middle of this quest didn't exactly provide any warm reassurance.