Falling for You

Jason: IV

Jason: IV

Jason grabbed the nearest kid by the scruff of his neck, and shoved him into the crowd rushing to get back to the dining pavilion, where kids of Hecate were putting up shiny blue barriers with intense looks of concentration on their faces.

He stepped up on a rock nearby, peering through the trees and around the cabins to see if anyone was being left behind. The only other person he could see was Percy. He was facing away from him, and slowly walking towards the field. Jason could see his hands shaking. He frowned sympathetically- Percy hadn't been doing so good since he came back, and Jason guessed he was scared. He hopped down and rushed over to him.

"Percy, bro, we gotta go!" he urged, "It's not safe here."

Percy just stared at something across the field. Jason turned his head. Oh wow. There were a lot of monsters poking their heads out of smoke-filled forest. The army hissed and bayed from the trees; they weren't attacking just yet, and Jason wasn't going to stick around to find out why. He flung an arm around Percy's shoulders, and half dragged him away. Percy shook him off with a scowl, but seemed to very unwillingly relent. He followed Jason through the barrier, though Jason could see him turning back to look with every other step.

In the pavilion, everyone was shouting and panicking. It took both Reyna and Annabeth bellowing at the top of their lungs to get quiet: "Shut up!" they shouted.

A tense silence fell, but soon questions were being fired at them. Some kids still had wet blood dripping from their hands. Annabeth and Reyna stood on the same table, Chiron stood right next to them, and they both looked irritably overwhelmed.

"Why are they dead?"

"What's going on?"

"You've brought them right to our doorstep!" That one got another wave of angry mutters.

"What exactly is going on?"

"Look, we know just as much as you do!" Annabeth wasn't having any of it. "Did anyone see anything at all?"

Jason looked around. Everyone was mumbling; no one had any ideas. The Hecate kids were straining to maintain a barrier, but it held nevertheless. That made him think for a second.

"What if they're shooting arrows at us?" he shouted, hoping that the contribution of an actual theory would shut people up.

It did, and soon people were raising their shields up defensively.

"I didn't see any arrows!" Clarisse shouted.

"Me neither!" said a freckly boy in confident confirmation, Jason thought his name was Will?

"They could be invisible?" Hazel offered. "Arrows can be enchanted to be unseen, can't they?"

But Chiron was shaking his head in a way that made Jason's heart sink. He breathed in and out to calm his racing heart, looking around for Piper in the crowd, nearly knocking over the kid next to him, a son of Mercury Jason knew from New Rome, Tyler. A heavy pendant hung around his neck. Jason spotted Piper stood by a column; she looked worried, and Jason wanted nothing more than to go over to her and hold her.

"Those weren't arrow wounds, my dear." Chiron said, the rare grey hairs on his head looking more prominent than ever.

"Those were knives." Reyna said definitively.