The Winged Warrior

Chapter 8

I hugged him back.

Once we had finished our moment of emotional forgiveness and that, I turned to the others with a question that had just formed on my lips.

"Why are so many of you immortal?"

Butch answered. "All the counselors from the cabins were made immortal, to become sort of staff for the camp. After the war and everything, there was a massive upswing in godly children. The rules are more relaxed so the gods were like 'hey, let's go crazy' and now there's hundreds more kids in camp. The big three still hold back a little, but now there's three children of the big three in every cabin.

Plus sometimes we go on quests for the usual stuff, and sometimes to look for Percy Jackson and Nico di Angelo. Their souls aren't in the underworld. We're also a bit curious about Luke Castellan, he went to Elysium of course and one day his soul just... vanished. So we go to look for them a lot."

I glanced at Nico and Luke next to me. The fact that after five hundred years the campers were still looking for us was quite extraordinary.

"Well... the other reason we called this meeting was because we need lookouts 24/7 around the camp to give warning of further attacks. Clarisse can organise that and gather a team. If more come, we need to call more meetings to find links, but currently I think there isn't really much to go on. Also, I want the Apollo cabin working hard to find a cause of Katie's death. Once we've found it, I would like the Athena cabin to make her a shroud, is that ok?"

I looked at Annabeth and Will, and they nodded. Murmurs of consent echoed around the table, and Clarisse gave me a rare approving look before stomping off to organise.

The crowd dispersed and vanished out the door. I was just heading out when I was pulled out to the side by Annabeth.

"Look." She said, "I know you're still really mad at me, but I just wanted to say thank you for giving Nicolas another chance. You know, his family in England were terrible. His dad was a drunk, his mum was abusive, and he had an older brother who hated him. He had a terrible childhood. The reason he was in the sea was because when he was on holiday with his family here in America he tried to drown himself."

I looked at her in utter shock. I had no idea at all that his life had been so miserable, much worse than mine.

"No problem." I replied. "I had no idea. And I'm not mad at you, I'm sorry for yelling at you, but I just had to vent my spleen, I had a lot of pent-up anger on that day. I'm really sorry."

"So, we're cool?" Annabeth asked me, her blonde eyebrows arching questioningly.

"Friends. But no dating or anything." I replied, smiling.

We shook hands.

***

Lexi's POV

I was strolling out of the infirmary when I saw Annabeth and Percy talking quietly on the porch of the big house. Percy smiled, and they shook hands.

I didn't know how to feel about it. I didn't know whether Percy still had feelings for Annabeth, but I had promised myself I would make friends with her.

After all, it wasn't her fault. Percy had been very forgiving.

Will had told me before he let me out that 'Aeschyus' had just forgiven Nicolas of his crimes and given him the opportunity to start over. If Percy could do that with the person who stole his girlfriend, all his friends and his parent's lives, surely I could do that with the girl he used to date.

Percy had walked away, heading towards the chaos cabin. I walked up to Annabeth.

"Hi." she said. "Lexi, right?"