Discovery (PJO/HoO ff)

Too Close For Comfort

Reyna

Percy had heard the crying. I bet that there was nothing in the woods that couldn't hear Marina crying; I mean you'd have to have been seriously deaf not to have heard a baby's cry in the middle of a forest in the middle of the night. Percy looked to me as if to ask 'Where the Hades did that come from?!' so there was really nothing I could have said to convince him that he was hearing things, my reaction was to just stand there, with my mouth wide open and nothing to say.

I stared in the direction of the crying; it was coming from about 10 metres away. Percy then started to walk towards the sounds, which was literally the worst thing he could have done. He looked back at me as he edged towards the source of the crying; the look on his face was almost unreadable. Almost. There was a vague sense of suspicion on his face mixed with a strange look, like he was drawn to the crying. That was all I could decipher from his face though.

As he looked at me I dared to move my gaze towards where Marina's cries had come from; my eyes widened as Annie's image flickered like candle light, disappearing again as soon as it had come. He didn't see her but he knew I'd seen something from the way my eyes grew wide; even in the millisecond that I saw her I caught the sense of desperation on Annabeth's face. I saw Marina squirming in her arms reaching out towards Percy, too, tears running down her podgy little face.

"What is it?" Percy demanded, turning away from me to looked where my eyes had just left: the spot where Annie was.

"Uh..." I stuttered I reply, both lost for words and tongue tied at the same time. There was nothing useful I could say to Percy: he'd have to find out when Annie was prepared to tell him.

"That was useful. Thanks" he said with vague sarcasm but he really wasn't putting much effort into it. He was still drawn to Marina's cries. He walked a few more metres before stopping again.

He had, unbeknownst to him, (and which I only later found out) walked to within a metre of Annabeth and the baby when the crying stopped abruptly so that the forest became eerily silent. This seemed to confuse Percy but it didn't stop him from being curious. He just stood there with his back to me; I held my breath, praying to as many different gods as I could think of; Fortuna, for luck, mostly. I prayed to the gods for Percy not to step any closer or for a distraction to arise or basically anything that would stop the situation from getting any worse. I should have known that I couldn't have had it both ways; I'd given the Fates options in my prayer and that almost always ended badly.

My prayers were answered. The Fates definitely had more to do with the answer than Fortuna.

The Cyclops groaned; I knew that that meant it would only be seconds, maybe a minute at the most before it was up and trying to kill us again, but Percy hadn't noticed, he was still severely distracted by trying to figure out where the crying had come from. He was frozen; the problem was that the Cyclops wasn't anymore. I knew, (and hoped) that when the time came he would snap out of it and run straight into the action because he was trained to react that way, like we all were, but, at that moment, he was cutting it a little too close for comfort.