Advisor's Son

Chapter 5 I Didn't Mean For it to Happen!

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It was Annabeth’s idea.

She loaded us into the back of a Vegas taxi as if we actually had money, and told the driver, “Los Angeles, please.”

The cabbie chewed his cigar and sized us up. “That’s three hundred miles. For that, you gotta pay up front.”

“Do you accept casino debit cards?” Annabeth asked.

He shrugged. “Some of’ em. Same as credit cards. I gotta swipe ’em through, first.”

Annabeth handed him her green LotusCash card.

He looked at it skeptically.

“Swipe it,” Annabeth invited.

He did.

His meter machine started rattling. The lights flashed. Finally an infinity symbol came up next to the dollar sign.

The cigar fell out of the driver’s mouth. He looked back at us, his eyes wide. “Where in Los Angeles… uh, Your Highness?”

“The Santa Monica pier.” Annabeth sat up a little straighter. I could tell she liked the “Your Highness’ thing. “Get us there fast, and you can keep the change.”

Maybe she shouldn’t have told him that, but to be fair we were in a hurry since apparently we lost five days inside the Lotus Hotel Casino. Which I found hard to believe, no way I slept five days, but the newspaper clearly said June twentieth.

The cab’s speedometer never dipped below ninety-five the whole way through the Mojave Desert.

On the road, we had plenty of time to talk. Perse told Annabeth, Grover and myself about her latest dream, but the details got sketchier the more she tried to remember them. The Lotus Casino seemed to have short-circuited her memory. She couldn’t seem to recall what the invisible servant’s voice had sounded like, though she was sure it was somebody she knew. The servant had called the monster in the pit something other than “my queen” some special name or title. Which given everything seems to have one of those doesn't narrow things down.

“The Silent One?” Annabeth suggested. “The Rich One? Both of those are nicknames for Hades.”

“Maybe…” Perse said, not looking all too convinced, but I couldn’t really see her face since Annabeth was sitting on my lap.

“That throne room sounds like Hades,” Grover said. “That’s the way it’s usually described.”

Perse shook her head. “Something’s wrong. The throne room wasn’t the main part of the dream. And that voice from the pit… I don’t know. It just didn’t feel like a goddess's voice.”

“What?” Perse asked, staring over to Annabeth.

“Oh… nothing. I was just – No, it has to be Hades. Maybe she sent this thief, this invisible person, to get the master bolt, and something went wrong –”

“Like what?”

“I – I don’t know,” she said. “But if she stole Zeus’s symbol of power from Olympus, and the gods were hunting her, I mean, a lot of things could go wrong. So this thief had to hide the bolt, or she lost it somehow. Anyway, she failed to bring it to Hades. That’s what the voice said in your dream, right? The woman failed. That would explain what the Furies were searching for when they came after us on the bus. Maybe they thought we had retrieved the bolt.”

I wasn’t sure what was wrong with her. She seemed to start fidgeting more, which made me nervous for two reason. Was she trying to get a reaction? And she didn't seem the type to get nervous about stuff easily.