The Second Jackson- Piper McLean book 1

Well, We Found Him

Lani

Riding Arion, I felt at peace. Sure it was entirely possible that I could fall off at any second, my teeth were clenched, and my eyeballs were bouncing around in my head, but I could think without thinking. That didn't make any sense, but no way I describe it would. The best analogy I can come up with is that the wind blowing through my hair and past my face were like my thoughts, memories that were coming back. They flashed in my mind at a speed that should have been alarming, but it was calming. The bad memories were outnumbered by good memories a hundred to one.

One that hung around a bit longer than the others was the first time I discovered I had inherited a power called siren song. Basically charmspeak like Selina Beauregard could do but only when I sang. Then there was the memory of Selina and Charles Beckendorf celebrating my birthday with me at camp. Percy was with Annabeth and Grover with the entire camp wishing him happy birthday. Charlie had made me a little wind up version of the bronze dragon his cabin was working on. Selina had snagged me a slice of cake. Even though they were only a few years older than me they treated me like their daughter. Once they actually grounded me for pranking the Ares cabin.

Now that I think about it, the masthead of the warship in my dream looked a lot like the dragon I never got to name. Charlie let Selina and I decide on a name, but we couldn't pick one. Selina wanted to name the dragon Blaze while I wanted to name him Inferno. In the end the dragon never got a name. Selina and Charles were the first people I came out to as well. It seems cruel that they're dead too. Either the Fates hate me or I'm a curse to anyone close to me except my brother. Maybe even him.

Clarisse put up with me thanks to Selina, she and I got along pretty well considering how often I insulted Ares. Thalia and I got along rather well because I insulted her father a lot, so I suppose there is a wide variety in how I got people to not hate me or to prevent them from liking me.

None the less, all of these thoughts came and went without giving me time to fully process them. It kept all the bad emotions out of the good memories and the bad memories were gone so fast, they couldn't ruin my mood.

We raced through icy straits, past blue fjords and cliffs with waterfalls spilling into the sea. Arion jumped over a breaching humpback whale and kept galloping, startling a pack of seals off an iceberg.

It seemed like only minutes before we zipped into a narrow bay. The water turned the consistency of shaved ice in blue sticky syrup. Arion came to a halt on a frozen turquoise slab.

A half a mile away stood Hubbard Glacier. Purple snowcapped mountains marched off in either direction, with clouds floating around their middles like fluffy belts. In a massive valley rose two of the largest peaks, a ragged wall of ice rose out of the sea, filling the entire gorge. The glacier was blue and white with streaks of black, so that it looked like a hedge of dirty snow left behind on a sidewalk after a snowplow had gone by, only four million times as large.

As soon as Arion stopped, I felt the temperature drop. The tice was sending off waves of cold, turning the bay into the world's largest refrigerator. The eeriest thing was a sound like thunder that rolled across the water.

"What is that?" Frank gazed at the clouds above the glacier. "A storm?"

"No" Hazel said. "Ice cracking and shifting. Millions of tons of ice"

"You mean that thing is breaking up?" I asked.

As if on que, a sheet of ice silently calved off the side of the glacier and crashed into the sea, spraying water and frozen shrapnel several stories high. A millisecond later the sound hit us- a BOOM almost as jarring as Arion hitting the sound barrier.