Chapter 9: We Ruin a Train

Chapter 8

Julie

It took an hour, but Duke and Max finally got ready. To be fair, Max was ready first...and Duke was ready pretty quickly too, but that's not the point. The point is that it took us an hour to finally meet Argus at the car.

Argus is a big fellow that doesn’t talk much, but sees pretty much everything. Might have something to do with the fact that his body is covered in eyes. Literally. There are rumors that he even has eyes on his tongue, but if anyone has seen them they aren't telling. Anyways, once we were all at the cars, we piled in to the “Delphi Strawberry Service” van and drove to New York. I didn’t pay much attention to the sights, and the rest of the car was silent too as we went to the station. Once there we piled out of the car, Argus gave us our tickets, and then he left.

We got onto the train without incident, but Max was looking around like a bloody tourist. Honestly, this train station looked like every other New York train station, but I suppose your first time might be a bit shocking. Once we got into our private compartment, Max got talking.

“Why is it whenever we get on train, we always have the private compartments?”

“Probably because our parents are Gods and dole out the cash for it,” I responded.

“Also, because most of the time we are away from camp its because of a quest it gives us a chance to talk without freaking mortals out,” Duke finished.

“I don’t think we were properly introduced, I’m Max.”  He held out his hand, Duke sighed and shook it.

“Duke Danford. Just to let you know, I am only here because my life would have been hell, literally, if I had stayed at camp.”

“Why?”

“To put it simply, I am not like my siblings...most of them.”

“How did that work out?”

“I talked about it with some of the Athena kids and we started bouncing around a theory,” Duke started. This is the most I have ever heard him talk, so I sat down and listened. He pulled a pen out of his bag and a piece of paper out of the compartment stock pile.

“You got one of those too, eh?” Max said.

“Hmm, oh, yeah, Alex gave me a stack. Anyways,” he drew two circles, with the interior overlapping. “The Venn Diagram is the simplest way to explain it. My dad is the God of War,” he labeled the left circle Ares,” but Athena is also a Goddess of War,” he labeled the other circle Athena. “The difference between the two gods is their focus. My dad focuses on the weapons, the manpower, and victory. The blood and guts and glory of it all. He only cares for winning,and the loosers are indentured to him for a period of time. Athena is more focused on the strategy, the thinking process of it. She doesn’t care too much about winning, but she cares about how you win, or how you lost.

“What I mean by that is as long as you came up with a brilliant plan for the battle, the fact that you lost because the other side had far more troops, or better weapons, doesn’t matter to her. She focuses on the wisdom of what you did. Now, how that trickles down is that these two Gods have an area of overlap. Both have a focus on the fight and weapons. A child of Ares can easily learn how to use any weapon, just give us a few minutes. We don’t care what weapon we use, most of my siblings care about the fight and victory. Conversely, Athena’s children care about learning how to use a weapon, they master it. They focus more on how to fight, how to win. Not the fight itself. So far only two Ares children fall into that iffy category in the middle,” he tapped the overlapping circles.

“Myself and Alex. We focus on one type of weapon, her two-handed swords, me on Axes. We have sought to master the weapon, learn its secrets. Our siblings can pick up anything and they are good, any Athena kid picks up a weapon and can master it, but they don’t go about learning others after they favor one kind. We have learned all kinds, but master a few of them to improve our skills. We care more about the strategy of winning than our breatheren, not as much as the Athena kids though. What we think is that it gods pass on one kind of gene like a normal human would to their children. For lack of a better term, the Athena kids call it the God gene. It has a dominant form and the recessive form. Most Demigods have at least one dominant gene, thereby getting the common set of abilities to their kids. The recessive one is the superior abilities, and we have those for Ares.” Then he shut up, and looked out the window.

Max spent the next few minutes asking questions, but Duke didn’t say anything. He then turned towards me, but didn’t say anything. I looked at him, but he was actually staring past me, out the window. I followed his gaze and saw a herd of centaur running alongside the train before pulling off. He looked at his glove and frowned.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Thunder is acting up,” he said. Thunder?

“The glove?” I asked.

“Hmm? oh no, the wind horse thing I captured back home. I think Mark called it a Venti.”

“You captured a Venti?” I asked slack jawed.

“Yeah, but I mean he doesn’t have a problem being in the glove normally, but he is acting up right now for some reason.”

“Maybe its because of who we are sharing this train with,” Duke interrupted. I looked out the door, but didn’t see anyone.

“What do you mean?” Max asked him.

“The hall. Beautiful woman keep on passing our door. A different one every time.”

“So? It is not against the laws of nature for attractive woman to gather in one place,” I said. Men.

“True, but for every woman on this train to be beautiful? I saw them when they were getting on, it didn’t register then.”

“Every woman?” Max asked.

“Every single one I saw. They also all looked around the same age too. No kids, no older adults, all around our age.” This was getting me worried. I opened the door and looked outside, I saw a bunch of girls gathered on either side of our compartment. I moved to close the door, but Max stopped it.

“Max?” I asked. His eyes were slack, just staring into the hallway. Then I noticed the humming. The walls were humming, not with the movement of the train, but with something else. I looked at the girls again, and noticed they were all humming. Duke was covering his ears.

“Cover Max’s ears!” he said. I did and Max blinked.

“What?” He asked.

“They have to be Empusai! This is your fight Julie, we would be useless against them till they show their true form.” Duke yelled. My mind raced, empusai. I have no idea what they are.

“Close the door!” I yelled at Max, and he did, his eyes starting to glaze over again. I heard a shriek of rage from outside. I slapped Max, and he turned angrily towards me as I flipped out my daggers.

“What was that for?” He asked.

“No time now, danger approaching.” I responded, then turned. What I saw freaked me out.

In the doorway was a creature with one donkey leg, one metal leg, and her hair on fire. Yes, I could tell it was a she. The teeth were as sharp as my daggers.

“Oh my God.” Max said when he saw it.

“Empusai are children of Hecate, monsters who prey on men. The legend of vampires come from them. We’re cornered.” Duke said as he drew axes from his bag.

“C’mon boys, were ready,” said an Empusa from beyond the door in a sing-song voice. My mind raced, monsters, boys useless, metal legs, donkey legs...metal....

An idea formed. One I knew Max was probably going to hate. I reached out with my senses and found the water store’s on our caboose. I focused, it was located across the the bottom, reaching into the bathrooms on either end of the caboose. I reached out to it, commanding it to flow out of the faucet and toilet in the loo and across the floors. It soaked across the floors, but too slowly. I pushed at it, and could see the water flowing across the bottom of the hallway, a full inch deep. The Empusa laughed.

“Foolish child of Poseidon. You cannot stop us with simple water. We will eat you and those delicious looking boys.” I ignored her and focused, making the water leak under the door. I moved onto couch.

“Duke couch, now.” His eyes were glazed but he did what I told him too. Max reached to open the door, and stepped into the water. Nothing happened. I growled, then focused on the water again. This time I made it reach up and touch his leg, just above the boot. Nothing happened still. I did the only thing I could. I slapped him again.

His eyes widened and he turned towards me,but his concentration must have been broken. The wall he built to hold back his electrical charge went down and lightning shot into the water. I felt it flow into me as well, and then the Empusai, Max, and Myself were crying out in pain as the electricity flowed into our bodies. Max and I fell to the floor, writhing in pain. I opened my eyes and saw the Empusai bursting into golden dust. Duke pulled a rope out of his bag and, timing it just right, looped it around Max’s torso, then dragged him up onto the couch. The electricity stopped shocking me. Unfortunately, it was too soon, and there were some Emusai left, screaming in residual pain.

My body didn’t want to, but I forced it to move. I made the water get off of Max to help him recover. Then I focused on the water in the hallway. I could tell where the monsters were because of how they displaced the water. I decided to try the freezing trick I did earlier at camp. I made it form into a spike growing out of the water, freezing as it grew outwards. The Empusai screams changed frequencies as the ice pierced them, but they didn’t die. They started to fight back.

Fire slammed into our door, making it buckle.

“Any other bright ideas?” Duke asked in a tone I didn’t quite like.

“There were at least thirty of them out there before I did what I did. Now there are three.” I responded testily.

“I don’t argue against the results of what you did. However, they are still out there, we are still in here, the train is still moving, and now Max is not in the best condition to fight.” He said. that was a good point. We were still in trouble.

“Julie,” Max grunted. “If you ever do that again, I will strike you with real lightning, not the stuff I can throw around.” He sat up.

“Now that there are less, and they are doing more screaming versus whatever it was that blanked my mind out, I think I can deal with these three.” He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the blue glowed. I am not joking. The already sharp electric blue became even more noticeable, more striking. He reached out his right hand and twisted it to the left. After a few seconds of this, he turned it to the right. He then lifted his left hand and held them apart, like he was describing the length of something. Then, with what looked like great effort, he started bringing them together.

Sweat was beading on his forehead, his breathing became shallow. His hands moved maybe a couple of inches in the five minutes he was doing this. Then I heard foot steps, his hands started to move a little easier, but his eyes widened and he started to put more effort into connecting his hands. They were only a few millimeters apart now, but his face was turning red. The steps stopped, and then started to move backwards, but it was too late. He slammed his hands together violently. The hallway glowed brightly and the entire train caboose shook with thunder. Duke and I fell into the little walkway between the couches, I knocked my head against something and the world started spinning.

Then I blacked out.

Chapter 10