YOU ARE IN LOVE ↬ leo valdez x reader, book 2

9. but you saw enough

"Hey!" he yelled. "Hey! Let me go!"
Piper ran toward us, but a voice in the storm said, "Oh, yes, Leo Valdez. I will let you go permanently." Leo shot skyward, like he'd been launched from a catapult. He disappeared into the clouds.
"No!" Piper raised her knife, but there was nothing to attack.
"Piper?" I shouted from the funnel of cloud as it began to raise me higher. Then it blasted me through the storm and into the sky, where I could faintly hear Leo's girly screams from down below me.

The clouds parted around me. I saw the glittering sea far, far below. No sign of the Argo II. No sign of any coastline, familiar or otherwise, except for one tiny island at the horizon. Leo was below me, still clutching the Archimedes sphere, which didn't surprise me. Unconscious or not, he would never let go of that stupid thing.

"YES!" he yelled.
"Leo?" I screamed from above him. He looked up at me. Clearly the rush of wind roaring in our ears made him completely unaware of my presence, but he had just created the world's most dangerous personal helicopter.
"Y/N?" he shouted. I was, for some unknown reason, falling faster than he was. I caught up with him very quickly. "Khione threw you overboard too?" He grinned, his hair going haywire flying around.
"I've got no idea who that is." I yelled back.

We shot toward the island in the distance, but we were falling much too fast. The blades on his sphere shuddered. He had made some kind of helicopter on his chest. The beach was only a few hundred yards away when the sphere turned lava-hot and the helicopter exploded, shooting flames in every direction. One of them singed my arm, sending me into a fit of wails as I continued to fall. I felt like that one small portion where the fire had hit was melting.

The blast flung Leo sideways into me and I pressed my eyes shut, afraid of what my fate was going to be. I was ticklish all over, which made sense because when I opened my eyes, I was in Leo's lap in a bathtub-sized crater in the sand.
A few yards away, a column of thick black smoke roiled into the sky from a much larger crater. The surrounding beach was peppered with smaller pieces of burning wreckage. smaller pieces of burning wreckage.
"My sphere." Leo patted his chest.
"My arm." I groaned tearfully, scrambling up. I shook as I tried to pull my sleeve away from where the burn was.
He struggled to his feet. He staggered across the beach and I followed in pursuit, biting my tongue to try and not cry out.

The island seemed perfect for a resort, with blue water and soft white sand. Maybe it was uncharted. Did they still have uncharted islands in the world? Maybe Khione had blasted us out of the Mediterranean altogether. The larger crater was about eight feet deep. The crater was littered with broken wooden furniture, shattered china plates, some half-melted pewter goblets, and burning linen napkins.

"Sphere!" he yelled. "Come to Papa!" He skidded to the bottom of the crater and snatched up the sphere. He collapsed, sat cross-legged, and cradled the device in his hands.
A girl approached, giving the crater a disgusted look. She was definitely pissed at us, though her glare faltered at the sight of my puffy eyes. She wore a sleeveless white Greek-style dress with a gold braided belt. Her hair was long, straight, and golden brown—almost the same cinnamon-toast color as Hazel's, but the similarity to Hazel ended there. The girl's face was milky pale, with dark, almond-shaped eyes and pouty lips.
"What are you doing? You blew up my dining table!" She looked maybe fifteen, about our age, and, sure, she was pretty; but with that angry expression on her face she reminded me of every popular girl in every school ever

"Oh, I'm sorry!" he said. "We just fell out of the sky. I constructed a helicopter in midair, burst into flames halfway down, crash-landed, and barely survived. But by all means—let's talk about your dining table!" He snatched up a half-melted goblet. "Who puts a dining table on the beach where innocent demigods can crash into it? Who does that?"
The girl clenched her fists. Instead she looked up at the sky. "REALLY?" she screamed at the empty blue. "You want to make my curse even worse? Zeus! Hephaestus! Hermes! Have you no shame?"
"Uh...I doubt they're listening. You know, the whole split personality thing—"