DAYLIGHT ↬ leo valdez x reader

10. now i'm wide awake

"We could use some good luck." I admitted. That doesn't mean we'll get it. I just crossed my fingers and prayed that this trip with Leo and Hazel wasn't going to be as unpleasant as I believed it would be.

Riding Arion was amazing.
The horse's hooves turned the surface of the lake to salty mist. Hazel sat on the front, with me squished between her and Leo had one arm around my waist stiffly to avoid falling off. Ahead of us lay an island—a line of sand so white, it might have been pure table salt. Behind that rose an expanse of grassy dunes and weathered boulders. Leo was oddly quiet, but I didn't question anything. Arion thundered onto the beach. He stomped his hooves and whinnied triumphantly, like Coach Hedge yelling a battle cry. We dismounted. Arion pawed the sand.
"He needs to eat," Hazel explained. "He likes gold, but—"
"Gold?" I asked. 

"He'll settle for grass. Go on, Arion. Thanks for the ride. I'll call you." Just like that, the horse was gone—nothing left but a steaming trail across the lake.
"Fast horse," Leo said, "and expensive to feed."
"Not really," Hazel said. "Gold is easy for me." Leo raised his eyebrows.
"How is gold easy? Please tell me you're not related to King Midas. I don't like that guy." Hazel pursed her lips, as if she regretted raising the subject.
"Never mind."

Leo knelt and cupped a handful of white sand. "Well...one problem solved, anyway. This is lime."
"The whole beach?" I exhaled, looking around at the ground.
"Yeah. See? The granules are perfectly round. It's not really sand. It's calcium carbonate." Leo pulled a Ziploc bag from his tool belt and dug his hand into the lime. Suddenly he froze.
Leo?" I questioned. "You okay?"
He took a shaky breath. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, fine." He started to fill the bag. I knelt next to him and helped, alongside Hazel.
"We should've brought a pail and shovels."
Leo smiled. "We could've made a sandcastle."
"A lime castle." Our eyes locked for a second too long.

"You are so much like—" Hazel started.
"Sammy?" Leo guessed. She fell backward.
"You know?"
"I have no idea who Sammy is. But Frank asked me if I was sure that wasn't my name."
"And...it isn't?"
"No! Jeez."
"You don't have a twin brother or..." Hazel stopped. "Is your family from New Orleans?"
"Nah. Houston. Why? Is Sammy a guy you used to know?"

"I...It's nothing. You just look like him."
We finished filling the bag in silence. It seems we must've hit a nerve because Leo doesn't make stupid jokes and Hazel isn't even nervously peeking up at us. Leo stuffed it all in his tool belt and the bag vanished—no weight, no mass, no volume. He stood and scanned the island—bleach-white dunes, blankets of grass, and boulders encrusted with salt like frosting.
"Festus said there was Celestial bronze close by, but I'm not sure where—" "That way." Hazel pointed up the beach. "About five hundred yards."
"How do you—?"
"Precious metals," Hazel said. "It's a Pluto thing."
"You're cool." I grinned, heading where Hazel's finger directed.

"Handy talent. Lead the way, Miss Metal Detector." I shove him and he groans. Hazel just rolls her eyes at me. Boys. She mouths.

The sun began to set. The sky turned a bizarre mix of purple and yellow.
"You sure this is a good idea?" Leo asked.
"We're close," she promised. "Come on." Just over the dunes, we saw the woman. She sat on a boulder in the middle of a grassy field. A black-and-chrome motorcycle was parked nearby, but each of the wheels had a big pie slice removed from the spokes and rim, so that they resembled Pac-Men. No way was the bike drivable in that condition. 

The woman had curly black hair and a bony frame. She wore black leather biker's pants, tall leather boots, and a bloodred leather jacket—sort of a Michael Jackson joins the Hell's Angels look. Around her feet, the ground was littered with what looked like broken shells. She was hunched over, pulling new ones out of a sack and cracking them open. Shucking oysters? Attached to the woman's belt was a curled whip. Her red-leather jacket had a subtle design to it—twisted branches of an apple tree populated with skeletal birds. The oysters she was shucking were actually fortune cookies.