Annabeth P.O.V
I knew I wasn't supposed to leave Montauk but I didn't think going into New York for the night would do any harm.
Luke called me and told me that he had tickets for the opening night of Salomé at the Palace Theater and I agreed to go with him.
"Wow, look at you," Luke said when he picked me up, "You look like a Princess."
I was wearing a pink beaded evening frock and a crown of wax flowers.
"Thanks," I replied, blushing.
The curtain rose and we were transported back in time to Judaea around the time of Christ. Aphrodite Love played the role of Salomé, the bored, beautiful Judaean Princess who experiments with the cruelty her beauty and sexual allure can inflict. Her co-star was Tristan McLean as John the Baptist, the fiery but doomed Christian martyr.
McLean, an exceptionally handsome man despite the pale, wild, bedraggled appearance the costume and makeup people had given him, was dragged on stage by two guards. He denounced the sinful queen Herodias, Salomé's mother, for marrying her dead husband's brother, the Tetrarch Herod. Love, who was lounging on a chaise on the palace's terrace, hears his words and is overcome with lust. She wore a white evening dress with a silver pattern that reminded me of butterfly wings and a crown of red roses in her hair.
Like a predator stalking its prey, she circled around John the Baptist, swinging her hips suggestively.
"Who is this woman who is looking at me?" shouts John the Baptist, "I will not have her look at me. Wherefore doth she look at me with her golden eyes, under her gilded eyelids? I know not who she is. I do not wish to know who she is. Bid her begone. It is not to her that I would speak."
"I am Salomé," Salomé replies, "Daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea."
"Back! daughter of Babylon! Come not near the chosen of the Lord. Thy mother hath filled the earth with the wine of her iniquities, and the cry of her sins hath come up to the ears of God."
"Speak again, John the Baptist. Thy voice is wine to me."
The more John the Baptist insults Salomé, calling her a wicked daughter of Babylon or of Sodom and telling her to repent of her sins, the more aroused she becomes. She waxed poetical about her desire to touch his white body, black hair, and to kiss his red lips. When John the Baptist is repulsed by her advances, Salomé stomps her feet petulantly and her guards whip him.
"Never! Daughter of Babylon! Daughter of Sodom! Never!"
"I will kiss your mouth, John the Baptist."
The tension between them was so electric that it seemed indecent for us to be watching. My body shivered with illicit pleasure.
Salomé demands that John the Baptist let her kiss his mouth. He is disgusted by her and calls her accursed. The guards drag him off while she vows that he will give in to her and calls
"I will kiss your mouth, John the Baptist, I will kiss your mouth."
A/N here's a full video of a production of Salomé.
I recalled that Aphrodite Love and Tristan McLean were Piper's parents. They had an affair during an earlier production of Salomé which resulted in Piper's conception. With all the passion between them that I saw on stage, this was not a surprise to me.
During the intermission, Luke and I went to get some refreshments. Because the theater could not legally sell alcohol, we could only drink coffee, tea, lemonade, or soda water.
I had never seen Luke look so pale; he looked like a wan, cold shadow of himself. Thalia had told me he was ill but she had not gone into more detail. His eyes shifted like that of a madman and sometimes, he would let out a sigh, as if something was troubling him.
I noticed Rachel standing by the bar. She wore a light blue gown which suited her red hair and rosy complexion and a rather theatrical tiara which looked like a halo of shooting stars made from silver foil and rhinestones.
Standing next to her was a handsome blonde man who I recognized as Apollo Phoebus. Rachel lit a cigarette, took a dag and then handed it to him. I couldn't hear what they were talking about, but from the way he was twirling one of her springy curls around his finger and the way she blushed, they seemed like an item.
Rachel Dare, you sly thing, I thought, You said you weren't trying to catch him.
"So how is Percy Jackson?" Luke asked me, "Thalia told you have been seeing him."
"We had a wonderful time in Quebec," I told him, "He spent most of the trip in the hotel pool."
"The boy always did swim like a dolphin."
Across the room stood a tall, powerfully built man with close cropped salt and pepper hair. His cold grey eyes were fixed on Rachel and gave her a predatory smile.
He started calling her "red" and mocking the tiara she was wearing. Apollo stepped in and try to get him to leave her alone but Rachel handled the situation by taking a blue hairbrush out of her handbag and saying "Sir, if you don't back off, I won't hesitate to use this," and that got the creep off of their backs.
I knew there was a reason why I liked that girl.
The second act contained the famous dance of the seven veils.
"Dance, Salomé, dance for me," the drunken, insane, and lust filled Herod, Salomé's uncle and stepfather, cried out, wanting to satiate his desire for debauchery by making his nubile stepdaughter dance for him.
"Do not dance, my daughter," exclaimed Herodias, Salomé's mother, noting wanting her daughter paraded about like a burlesque dancer.
"I am ready, Tetrarch," purred Salomé, who is more than willing manipulate her stepfather's perverted longing for her.
Salomé reappeared, tantalizingly shrouded in seven colorful gossamer veils. She slowly dances to Strauss's The Dance of the Seven Veils, removing each layer of gossamer with a coquettish smirk and flick of the wrist.
Her movements gradually increased in intensity as the music reached its crescendo until she was spinning around in a frenzy with a mad expression on her face.
"Ah! wonderful! wonderful," panted Herod, out of his mind with lust, "You see that she has danced for me, your daughter. Come near, Salomé, come near, that I may give you your reward. Ah! I pay the dancers well. I will pay thee royally. I will give thee whatsoever thy soul desireth. What wouldst thou have? Speak."
"I would that they presently bring me in a silver charger....," Salomé replied, "The head of John the Baptist."
Herod is horrified and tries to get Salomé to chose something else, offering anything among the riches he possesses, up to half of his kingdom. But she petulantly insists that she have the head of John the Baptist, like a spoiled child would insist that he have a puppy or a pampered mistress would insist on having a diamond necklace. Like an overindulgent parent or love struck suitor, Herod gives in and the head of John the Baptist is brought to Salomé on a silver platter. She picks up the head by its hair and blood drenches her white dress.
"Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, John the Baptist. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss thy mouth, John the Baptist . I said it; did I not say it? I said it. Ah! I will kiss it now....," she kisses the dead man's mouth and the Judaean court gasps in shock, "Oh, how I loved thee! I love thee yet, John the Baptist, I love thee only.... I am athirst for thy beauty; I am hungry for thy body; and neither wine nor fruits can appease my desire. What shall I do now, John the Baptist ? Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my passion. I was a princess, and thou didst scorn me. I was a virgin, and thou didst take my virginity from me. I was chaste, and thou didst fill my veins with fire.... Ah! ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me, John the Baptist ? If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. Love only should one consider."
Aphrodite Love's performance was mesmerizing. She was both a dream and a nightmare of a mad, petulant, over-sexed but stunningly beautiful and completely irresistible woman. The type of woman who can't help but bring disaster on all those around her. If the gossip columns were true, then Aphrodite was a temptress and man-eater who had broken a long list of hearts, including that of her John the Baptist, Tristan McLean.
After the curtain fell, Luke called a taxi for me. I had the key to my parents' townhouse on Park Avenue and had planned to stay the night there. Luke asked me to call him to say that I'd made it there safely.
It was getting late and I began to nod off in the taxi.
"Wake up, Miss," boomed the driver, "We're here."
My eyelids flickered open and I saw that we were in a part of Manhattan that did not look like Park Avenue, with its elegant skyscrapers and tree lined boulevards.
"Where are we?" I asked the driver.
He answered my question with a good punch to the face. Before I knew what had hit me, a handkerchief was held to my nose and I breathed in the smell of chloroform.
When I regained consciousness, I found myself in a bedroom, laying on a tea green velvet chaise at the foot of the bed. My head rested on a round, coral red cushion.
"Annabeth, is that you?" Someone asked me.
I opened my eyes to see Piper standing over me. She looked pale and anxious like she hadn't left this room in a few days.
"Piper," I mumbled, "What are you doing here?"
"I imagine the same reason you are."
"Why am I here then?"
Piper looked down at the floor and shuffled her feet.
"They're probably trying to smoke out Jason and Percy, I imagine."
"How did you end up here?"
"I was in Plymouth Massachusetts with Jason's sister and his friend, Reyna. We were visiting this cemetery and this strange man approached me. He grabbed me and I tried to fight back but he held a handkerchief soaked in chloroform to my face. Next thing I knew, I was in a car heading back to New York."
"A similar thing happened to me."
"You're starting to get a black eye. They must have roughed you up a bit, the bastards."
"I was knocked out by a right hook as well as chloroform. Dammit, where the hell am I. Luke's probably out of his mind with worry because I didn't call him."
The door opened and a man stepped in. I recognized him as the man who had been teasing Rachel at the theater: the tall, powerful build, closely cut salt and pepper hair, cold grey eyes, and predatory smile.
"You have Castellan to thank for being with us this evening," he said.
"No," I insisted, "Luke would never do anything to hurt me."
"He lured you here tonight. We've got Castellan and his family by the balls and he'd do anything we tell him to. We told him to ask you out tonight and he handed you over to Orion, the "taxi driver" who brought you here."
"Orion is the guy who brought me here too," Piper cut in.
"Anyway ladies, good evening."
He closed the door and locked it behind him.
I didn't want to believe that Luke could have done this to me. He was one of my oldest friends and then he goes and sets me up to be kidnapped.
"Who the hell was that?" I asked Piper, referring to our host.
"Kronos Titan, himself," she answered.
"Has he hurt you?"
"No, we're not who he's after. He's using us to get at Percy and Jason."
"Are we trapped in this room?"
"There's an en-suite bathroom we can use and we're allowed to leave the room to make ourselves something to eat in the kitchen three times a day. Let's be thankful for small favors. I've been getting sick every morning and I'm eating for two."
"Piper, are you going to have a baby?"
"Yes, I realized it while I was in Plymouth."
She began to cry and murmur "I'm so scared." I put her head on my shoulder. Normally, I would have told her that everything would be okay but I knew that this would ring false. So instead, I said "Let's get some sleep, we'll need our rest."
Jason P.O.V
The Titans had my wife and I wanted her back. I enlisted Nico Di Angelo to help me find her since he might be able to help me more than the police could.
The days following Piper's disappearance were spent at home, waiting by the telephone in case Nico or the police called. I had fallen asleep on the sofa in the living room when I heard a knock at the front door. Rubbing my eyes, I turned on the lamp on the end table and looked at the clock. It was three in the morning, who the hell could be visiting at this hour?
Percy stood in the doorway, looking like a wreck.
"They took her," he said, "Annabeth went to the theater tonight and was planning on sleeping at her parents' townhouse. She promised to call her parents when she was in for the night but she never did. They called me to ask if she was with me and I told them that I didn't even know she was in town. As you can imagine, I started to worry, especially since Piper disappeared. Then I found this note under my door," He pulled a piece of paper of out his pants pocket which read: the princess is in the tower, "If those sons-of-bitches hurt her..."
"Come in, I'll make us some coffee," I replied.
When we sat down at the kitchen table with our cups of coffee, I showed Percy the note I'd found on the day when Piper went missing. When I held it up next to Percy's note, I noticed that they had both been written on the same type of paper and in the same handwriting.
"See, I got one just like it."
"You'd think they'd be smart enough to make these look different."
The coffee had begun to kick in when I got my long awaited phone call.
"Hello," I yawned into the telephone receiver.
"I'm calling from a pay phone," Nico said, "I'm on my way because I have a lead on where Piper might be."
"Alright, see you soon."
Nico showed up at our door a few minutes later. He looked paler than usual with more pronounced dark circles under her eyes, as if he hadn't slept in days, which knowing him, was probably true. His shaggy black hair was disheveled like he'd been too distracted to comb it back.
A/N a popular way that guys wore their hair in the 1920-30s was with an undercut and long and full on the top, which was usually slicked back.
Worn loose, not slicked back, it would look like this, which screams Nico Di Angelo.
"Would you like some coffee, Di Angelo?" Percy asked him, "I can make another pot."
"Yes please," Nico replied.
"So what did you learn?" I cut in.
"Some of our guys tracked a group of Titans to a building a few blocks over."
"Right under our fucking noses," Percy grumbled, "Who'd-a thought it."
"Well boys, we've got a castle to siege, monsters to slay, and damsels to rescue."
A/N I imagine this song playing while Jason, Percy, and Nico are suiting up to be all badass and rescue their ladies.
This song from the musical Hadestown also reminds me of this situation.
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