The Chains That Bind Ch 17

Chapter 17: The Angle Oak

We were woken up by the sound of an alarm going off at the fort. I guess someone had discovered out intrusion somehow and sounded the alarm, either way it was time to go. Erika rushed to pull the covering off the car and tossed her bags into the trunk while Kat was just starting to squirm in her sleeping bag. I had managed to toss my bags in the trunk as well when I heard the two links in my bag hit each other and it reminded me that we had three more to go and not a lot of time. It was this thought that got me to simply pick up Kat who was still inside of her sleeping bag and tossed her into the back seat. Erika got into the driver’s seat while I pulled out the map to see if our next stop was at least close by.

As the map started to glow, a trail began to go southeast and stopped in a town called Charleston, South Carolina.

“Hey Erika, can you think of anything important in Charleston?” I asked her. I really didn’t expect her to think of anything as I had never even heard of the town before; I just knew how to get there. Being a child of Hermes, when we were on the road it was like we had a GPS in our heads. When I looked over her eyes lit up like a child’s.

“I know exactly what is there!” she yelled, shocking me a bit and causing Kat to shoot up in her sleeping bag in the back seat.

“I’m up,” Kat called from the back before taking a look around. “When did we get in the car?”

“The alarms at the fort went off so we decided it was time to leave,” I told her as I looked back to Erika. “Now calmly, what is there?”

Erika took a deep breath before talking, most likely trying to calm herself so the rest of us would be able to understand her.

“The Angle Oak,” she said. “It is the oldest living tree in America, or at least I think it is. I have always wanted to go see it as I’ve heard some of my siblings talk about the amazing life energy it gives off. That has to be where Demeter’s link is hidden. Maybe because she is my mother it will be easy.”

Somehow I doubted that as these challenges didn’t seem to get easier at all, and may be getting harder. Erika continued to talk about it as if it was Disney World. She even started to hit the gas a bit more as the speedometer went up another 15 MPH and I wondered if maybe I should take the wheel.

“Is there anything else about this place we should know about,” Kat asked as if she knew there was more to it but left it out. She had finally managed to free herself of her sleeping bad and fastened her seatbelt.

“Well, the park itself is said to be haunted and there are a lot of ghost stories about it,” Erika answered but then went right on talking about how old the tree was. I kind of tuned her out after awhile as my thoughts turned to her comment about ghosts. Melinoe was still out there planning her next move and she still wanted me for something but I still had no idea what it could be. There was also the line of the prophecy saying that our enemies would try to deceive us. There were so many enemies out there is was hard to figure out who I was. My biggest concern was that Prometheus would turn on us like he had turned on the gods and that him helping us was just some way to use us. However, right now we needed to get the next link and we needed to do it soon. I checked the time on the clock and it was still pretty early in the morning, and with any luck we could be at the tree by sunset. The only times we stopped was for food or a bathroom break as we didn’t have time to fight monsters. We arrived just as the sun was setting and the area did look creepy with the moonlight shining through the cracks of the trees.

“This way,” Erika told us with a shaky voice as she pointed toward a large. “That is it right there.”

Darkcloud1111 ~Fastest Hero Alive  21:22, June 24, 2011 (UTC)