The Path Of Glory (Annabeth Chase x Male Reader)

79. Driving A Dog Into A Tree

He glanced at the Ares cabin. "I'm not so sure. Doesn't sound like the Clarisse I know."

They scanned more reports and they inspected a few more cabins. Demeter got a four. Hephaestus got a three and probably should've gotten lower, but with Beckendorf being gone and all, they cut them some slack. Hermes got a two, which was no surprise. All campers who didn't know their godly parentage were shoved into the Hermes cabin, and since the gods were kind of forgetful, that cabin was always overcrowded.

Y/N tried to see if Nico di Angelo was there. Nico was only a twelve-year-old boy, but he looked much older. He was pretty easy to spot at camp since everyone wore the classic orange Camp Half-Blood T-shirt but he wore black from head to toe—black hair, a black aviator's jacket, black jeans, black shoes, and black T-shirts (usually with dancing skeletons on them, like one of those Day of the Dead pictures).

But Nico wasn't there. He'd been at camp for two years, but he always stayed away from the others. He was the son of Hades, the god of the Underworld. And in his book, children of Hades couldn't get along with other demigods, the same way that Hades couldn't get along with the other gods.

Seeing Y/N looking for something inside the Hermes cabin, Annabeth must've read his mind. "He's probably somewhere else. By the lake, perhaps, or in the woods."

"That's what worries me. What if he tried to run away?"

"Don't say that. He's not a prisoner."

He sighed. "I know. But what if he decided he doesn't want to stay at camp for good?"

Finally they got to Athena's cabin, which was orderly and clean as usual. Books were straightened on the shelves. The armor was polished. Battle maps and blueprints decorated the walls. Only Annabeth's bunk was messy. It was covered in papers, and her silver laptop was still running.

"Vlacas," Annabeth muttered, which was basically calling herself an idiot in Greek.

Her second-in-command, Malcolm, suppressed a smile. "Yeah, um . . . we cleaned everything else. Didn't know if it was safe to move your notes."

That was probably smart. Annabeth had a bronze knife that she reserved just for monsters and people who messed with her stuff.

Malcolm grinned at Y/N. "We'll wait outside while you finish the inspection." The Athena campers filled out the door while Annabeth cleaned up her bunk.

Y/N pretended to go through some more reports. Technically, even on inspection, it was against camp rules for two campers to be . . . let's say, alone in a cabin.

That rule had come up a lot when Silena and Beckendorf started dating. You would've thought, all demigods being related on the godly side, that would be what made things gross. But the thing is, the godly side of their family doesn't count, genetically speaking, since gods don't have DNA. A demigod would never think about dating someone who had the same godly parent. Two kids from Athena cabin? No way. But a daughter of Aphrodite and a son of Hephaestus? They're not related. So it's no problem.

Anyway, for some strange reason Y/N was thinking about this as he watched Annabeth straighten up. She closed her laptop, which had been given to her as a gift from the inventor Daedalus last summer.

"Get any good info from that thing?" he asked.

"Too much," she said. "Daedalus had so many ideas, I could spend fifty years just trying to figure them all out."

She shuffled her paper—mostly drawings of buildings and a bunch of handwritten notes. She wanted to be an architect someday, but better not to ask what she was working on. She would start talking about angles and load-bearing joints until your eyes glazed over.