Disclaimer: I am not Rick Riordan. I do not own the Percy Jackson characters.

Chapter Three: Skeletons

Ferin tried to pull Charlotte and Jen down the street without anything more of an explanation, but the girls glanced at each other and instantly knew what the other was thinking. With a jerk, Charlotte stopped in her place, grinding her trainers into the concrete while Jen snatched her arm from a bewildered Ferin's loosened grasp. "No." Jen said, smacking Ferin's arm lightly until he let go of Charlotte's sleeve. "We aren't going anywhere until you tell us what's going on. Why are you freaking out Ferin? What happened back there?"

Ferin sighed and started pacing. "I can't tell you much. It's too dangerous to be talking about this out in the open. We need to move now. Before they find us." He looked up from Charlotte to Jen.

"What sort of rubbish is this? You sound like you're talking about spies. 007, and all of that." Charlotte crossed her arms. At first she thought this was a joke. Some elaborate game Jen had created for her amusement on her first day back in the states. Rush about a bit. Have a laugh. Not care about what anyone who happened to be watching them was thinking. That sounded like a normal Jen way to spend a day. Now Charlotte wasn't so sure.

It was clear by this point that this wasn't in fact how Ferin acted in a normal day, if it was she doubted Jen would have been able to stand him. And it was clear that Jen wasn't involved in whatever he was playing at because of the thoroughly bewildered look in her eyes and the way she kept glancing at Charlotte as if expecting her to have all the answers. Then Ferin broke Charlotte out of her thoughts with a single sentence that sent chills down her spine.

"I wish it was that simple." He looked at them both now, sadly. Charlotte saw a flash of real regret in his eyes before he turned around and started rushing down the street again. "I'll explain what I can as we walk, just keep moving."

"Shouldn't we catch a cab?" Jen asked, keeping in step with Ferin. Charlotte was only a few paces behind.

"Too dangerous. I'm so stupid. I shouldn't have thought I could wait the summer. Although it would have been worse if we left before…" He trailed off as he turned the corner and crossed the street without a glance. Charlotte and Jen were struggling to keep up now. "You two are in serious danger. I need to get you a safe place and fast." They turned onto another street, smaller this time, with less of the blazing lights of central Manhattan. The buildings were starting to look like quaint little houses, but Ferin didn't stop walking as his explanation continued.

"All I can tell you now is that the world isn't all that it seems to be. What you can't see is all the more terrifying than any kind of monster you can imagine."

I doubt that, Charlotte thought as she imagined a ghostly creature in a dark black cloak gliding across a frozen lake, all life wilting in its path, a coldness that crept into your veins dragging all the happiness out of you in slow painful surges until there was nothing left but the darkness and the things better left hidden in the shadows.

Charlotte shook herself and tuned back into the conversation, forcing herself to focus on the fact that Ferin was getting awfully close to a very touchy topic. "Names have power you see, otherwise I could explain everything to you right now and-"

"Excuse me, miss?" A low gravelly voice sounded from behind her and Charlotte was stopped in her tracks by a hand gently grabbing her shoulder. "Can I offer you a cab?"

"Thank you, sir, but we-" Charlotte stopped mid turn as she caught a glimpse of the man behind her. "Ferin." She said quickly. "FERIN!"

"We've got to move, Charlo- " His words were drowned out by Jen high pitched scream. Resting on Charlotte's shoulder, the grip growing tighter by the second was a gnarly old hand. Muscles and sinew hung off the bones in rivets like streamers. White and browning bone was visible where patches of skin were missing completely and Charlotte was overwhelmed with the smell of decayed and rotting flesh. A wave of nausea crashed into her, but she swallowed it down as her eyes roamed up the arm, across the collar bone, and into the monsters face, her level of horror increasing with every inch as the amount of decomposition grew. No skin covered the gaping jaw at all and there were gaps where teeth were missing or falling out and hair hung in think oily clumps from the only patch of skin left on its skull. Worst of all were they eyes, gaping blank holes, unseeing, filled with an ice blue glow that shone across her face in the shadows of the building around them.

For a single moment they stood like that, Ferin and Jen watching opened mouthed at the monster that had Charlotte in its clutches. Charlotte herself was frozen in disbelief at the creature. Then all at once it was like a key had been turned inside her head, a rush of inspiration and adrenaline pushed her in action. She grabbed the hand that was holding her, grimacing at the way the way the flesh slid across her palm leaving a slimy trail, and twisted the bone around until her heard a definite crack. In the time it took for the skeleton thing to rotate the bone back into place, Charlotte had her bag over her shoulder and it connected with a thudding BAM. Bone dust and brain matter littered the concrete sidewalk around her. This time she couldn't hold back the revulsion she felt and threw up across the already soiled street.

She glanced back at Jen, whose mouth was covered by her hands, and Ferin who stood visibly shaking. "Oh gods." He muttered, looking pale. "I thought we could at least get to the highway before this."

"Look out!" Charlotte cried as more of the creatures lumbered slowly into the low light. Charlotte looked around madly, desperately trying to find anything, anyone that could explain what was going on. The street was empty. They were on their own. Ferin shoved at a creature reaching towards him. A third creature had its hands wrapped tightly around Jen's throat. They struggled for a moment, Jen gasping as the pressure and need to breathe increased.

"Jen!" Charlotte screamed. "Don't just stand there! Do something!" Jen was frozen in place, staring up at the monster that had her doing nothing to get away or weaken its hold on her. Charlotte struggled to reach her, fight the creature off of Jen herself, but another monster had caught the back of her jacket and was dragging her close to it, farther away from Jen as Ferin fought against his own skeleton. More of them were coming now, out of the shadows , the alley ways. What had once been an empty street was now full of dead creatures whose only purpose, it seemed, was to kill them all. Everywhere Charlotte turned there were more of them. Where had they come from? Why hadn't they noticed them before?

"JEN! FIGHT!" Charlotte screamed as a creature jerked her head back by her hair and bringing a long, sharp finger nail towards her throat. She slammed her head into its own and stomped it into the ground, whirling around to see Jen suddenly spring into action at the sound of Charlotte's voice. She kicked out, her foot connecting with its knee and Charlotte watched as the knee cap twisted around backwards. The creature held on as Jen started swinging at anything within her reached. Her fist collided with the monster's head . It crashed to the ground with a thud and Jen was free.

The cab the first skeleton had gotten out of still sat beside them, door open, keys in the ignition. "Quick!" Charlotte yelled. "In here!" She swung her bag in a wide arc, making contact with at least two more creatures as Ferin and Jen scurried into the passenger side. Charlotte jumped into the driver's seat and slammed the door shut behind her. The monsters beat heavily on the glass, covering the driver's side completely. Thin webbings of cracks had just started spreading across the window beside her as the car roared to life. Jen let out another scream and Charlotte's foot rammed down on the accelerator with as much force as she could muster and the car jerked forward, taking them quickly away from the still stumbling skeletons who were reaching out their grimy fingers towards their lost prey.

Charlotte let out a breathe of oxygen she hadn't been aware she was holding as Jen and Ferin stared over at her. "Now where the bloody hell are those strawberry patches?"

"Turn left up there," Ferin said, pointing in a direction that would lead the trio out of town. Charlotte made the turn without slowing down and Jen would have been thrown into Charlotte's lap if Ferin hadn't had a firm grip on her bag's strap.

"I want answers, Ferin. What is going on?" Charlotte demanded keeping her eyes on the road, but the force in her voice was clear.

"We followed because you had us worried," Jen added, turning as much in the awkward angle she was sitting in as she could to look at him. "I think we deserve to know what's going on."

Ferin banged his head against the window but didn't answer. He didn't speak for a long time except to give directions. The sun had already started to slip behind the tree lines when he finally spoke. They had been driving for at least an hour and a half and both Jen and Charlotte had stopped pestering him with questions that would go unanswered. Finally, as if making some great decision, he turned to them and asked. "What would you say if I told you that there was more to the world than what you actually knew?"

The girls were quiet. Charlotte's hands tightened around the steering wheel. Once again the subject was being addressed by Ferin. Not just tiptoed around or hinted at like all the times she had tried to get Jen curious. There was a cold gripping her chest as she continued to drive down the long narrow street they had been on for quite some time now. A part of her, one little spark of hope, prayed that she already knew the subject of this discussion. Magic. It was real. It was out there, hidden in a world only visible to the fair lucky few who had been born into it. That was unreal enough on its own. But a larger part, the part that sent a shiver down her spine, the feeling of ice slipping slowly through her, knew that that was not the case. There was something more to this than anything she had ever understood before. She knew instinctly that whatever Ferin was about to reveal was going to completely shake the foundations of everything her knowledge of the world was based on.

"What are you talking about?" Jen asked, thoroughly confused now. Whatever strange explanation she had been expecting after everything that had just happened, his question wasn't it.

"Like magic." Charlotte interrupted before Ferin could even open his mouth. "Myths. Lengends. How else are we going to explain what just happened. We just attacked by walking skeletons."

"But…But magic and all that.." Jen stammered. "It's not real. It's just pretend. Stories to tell little children at bedtime and all that."She looked from me to Ferin as if asking us to agree or to laugh and say that all of this had been a clever little ruse to get her even for all the tricks she had played on us.

"Charlotte, Jen," Ferin said looking at each of us as he said our names. "What do you know about the Greek gods?"

"Not too much," Charlotte answered. And while it wasn't exactly a lie, it wasn't completely the truth either. She had read a book once as a first year about the Greek myths and she still remembered a good bit of the stories although she was kind of blurred on some of the finer details.

"The Greek who?" Jen asked.

"Ah," Ferin mumbled. "I shouldn't be doing this now. Chiron is so much better at explaining all of this in the beginning."

"Chiron?" Charlotte questioned as the name set off little bells in her head. "Wasn't he the one who trained the heroes for their quests?"

"That's right!" Ferin perked up, looking excited that she at least understood a little of what he was talking about.

"Wait." Jen said holding out her hands at us in a stop signal. "Heroes like Hercules? Those Greek gods? And the singing muses and all that?"

Ferin face palmed while Charlotte busted out laughing. "Right people, completely wrong details."

"But you're on the right track."Ferin amended. "Do you know what the gods were most famous for in all of the myths? The reoccurring factor?"

"Singing?" Jen tried to joke, but nobody laughed. "Ah, come on, Ferin. You can't be serious. You aren't actually trying to say that the Greek gods were real. Right?"

Ferin didn't even crack a smile. "I think that is exactly what he is trying to say, Jen. And what the gods were most famous for was…" Charlotte's eyes widen as realization struck her. "No way," she mumbled in complete awe. "No way. No way. Oh my gods."

"What?" Jen asked. "What is going on? I don't know enough to get what you're going on about."

"Jen, the thing that the gods were most famous for was having children with mortals. With humans. Children who grew up to be the heroes of all the legends we've heard of. Heroes who fight monsters."

"You can't actually believe all of that? Charlotte? It's impossible. Stuff like that isn't real! We would know!"

"Did you ever think," Charlotte asked, turning her eyes from the road and glanced at her best friend, "that the world we know is just the world as we see it, not the world as it actually is. We can't presume we know everything that is out there. That is what is really impossible."

"Well said, Charlotte, and-"

"LOOK OUT!" Jen screamed. Charlotte jerked her attention back onto the road in time to see a set of headlight blazing in from of her, coming straight towards them.

"Get on your side!" Charlotte yelled.

"WE AREN'T IN ENGLAND, LOTTIE! NOW MOVE!" and with that Jen grabbed the wheel jerking it to the right hard. The headlights zoomed by in the sound of a honking horn as the cab flew off the road and hit a small hill, flipping it over and sending it tumbling across the open field they had been following for almost the entire drive. Grass and dirt flew in all different directions as the car rolled across it's hood, spinning as it when. The trio were thrown into their seat belts with enough force to knock the wind out of them. Charlotte's head cracked against the door as they slowed to a stop.

"And that my friends," Jen said woozily, struggling to get her seat belt undone, is why we always drive on the RIGHT side of the road. Right is right!" She giggled.

"Oh, gods." Charlotte said wriggling out of her own seat belt and pushing herself forwards towards them. "Is she concussed? I think she's concussed. What do we do? Ferin? Are you okay?"

Ferin's head popped up from beside Jen where he was just undoing her seat belt for her. She collapsed into his arms and he looked up at Charlotte. A thin line of blood ran from his hair to his cheek leaving a zigzagging trail of red, but other than that he seemed fine. "Charlotte? Are you okay?"

Charlotte reached up to touch her forehead where it collided with the glass. Her hand came away wet and sticky and raw. Flipping it over, she found shards of glass sticking out of her hand at odd angles. Thinking it better to leave them in since she didn't know how deep they went, she shrugged. Even that small action sent spots dancing across her vision. But she pushed them away. Jen 's head was lolled across Ferin's shoulder and they were still trapped in the upside down car.

The window beside her was covered in thin spider web cracks running from end to end. Charlotte braced herself for the pain and shoved her hand against it with as much force as she could must. The window shatter and fire raced up her arm as more glass dug in and caught hold. "Come on, she said, climbing out and reaching for Jen. Ferin passed her through.

"Pretty goat," Jen muttered, "Pretty goat."

"Be quiet, Jen. Ferin, are you coming?" Charlotte asked, trying to stand with the dead weight that an incoherent Jen had become.

"My pants are caught on something!" He called. "Hold on!" Then a curly head appeared in the window and Ferin crawled out. Minus his pants.

"Pretty goat," Jen cooed from her place on the ground. "Pretty goat." At first Charlotte didn't know what Jen was muttering about and then she saw it. From the waist down their friend was in fact a goat.

"So you're a satyr."

"You're a witch."

"We learn something new every day don't we?" Charlotte asked, grinning at the absurdity of the situation.

"That we do. But right now, we need to get up that hill," he said pointing in the direction of a large tree sitting at the crest of the hill. Lightning flashed across the sky and thundered crashed around them. A roar sounded in the distance. "The sooner, the better actually."

"I'm Jen!" Jen sang.

"Sure you are, sweetie." Charlotte said, grabbing her under her arms as Ferin grabbed her feet and together they started up the hill, rain falling in sheets onto of them.