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FIC: The Necklace of Harmonia, chpt 10
Title: The Necklace of Harmonia (Daughter of Wisdom 3)
Author: shiiki
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Annabeth Chase, Thalia Grace, Percy Jackson, Luke Castellan, Chiron, Clarisse La Rue, Chase family, OCs, various others, Gen with slight Percy/Annabeth
Fandom: Percy Jackson
Summary: After an eventful summer, Annabeth Chase is on her way to boarding school for the first time. With her friends Thalia and Percy close by, she's looking forward to spending the year in New York. But soon, she finds herself dealing with unfathomable dreams, tangled plots, and a mysterious necklace that keeps finding its way back to her. Worse still, her father wants her to move to the most dangerous city in the country. The choices Annabeth faces this year will have her questioning the meaning of friendship, loyalty, and family. And most of all, just what it means to keep a promise. An alternate PoV retelling of Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse. Part 3 of the Daughter of Wisdom series.
In this chapter
Chapter Title: We Go Dancing With Nets And Arrows
Rating: PG
Characters: Annabeth Chase, Thalia Grace, OCs
Word Count: 2,493
Chapter Summary: Annabeth's first school dance doesn't turn out quite as planned.
Back to fic content page
Dance day arrived. The organising committee had gone all out with the decorations-the school gym was practically unrecognisable under the streaming banners that festooned the bleachers. The usual ceiling lights had been dimmed so that the fairy lights that had been strung overhead looked like stars winking down at us.
Nearly every eighth-grader was here, relishing the opportunity to turn out in heels and miniskirts and not get yelled at by the teachers. Pop tracks blasted from the speakers while the enthusiastic DJ-one of the senior classwomen-encouraged us to hit the dance floor.
Only a few girls had actually done so; most of us were gathered in tight huddles along the walls and bleachers. Tables had been set up there, heavily laden with bowls of punch, trays of finger food, and cornucopia-style centrepieces.
'I don't see what the hype was about,' Thalia remarked, snagging her tenth hot dog roll from the large platter next to us. She'd let Izzy talk her into swapping her favourite jacket and jeans for a pair of black leggings and a baggy shirt that hung off one shoulder. It was artfully distressed, and had an explosive pattern of luminescent dots that resembled a supernova. With the new silver loops in her ears and the striking black eyeshadow she'd applied, she actually looked quite pretty.
I smoothed the skirt of Patricia's green dress and turned to look at the crowds of students roaming around arm in arm. The dangling hoops in my ears swayed back and forth when I moved my head. It was a funny sensation, but not altogether unpleasant. This earring business was growing on me.
'I guess it's something different. Plus, we get to skip Computer Science.'
'No escaping Seunis, though.' Thalia jerked her head towards our fiery-haired teacher, who was one of the three chaperones (along with Mrs Stimpson and the long-suffering Mr Colbert). Ms Seunis had actually let her hair down for the occasion (literally-it fell in waves around her shoulders) but she was still dressed in her usual smart blouse and pencil skirt. She wove among the knots of giggling girls, trying to break up the cliques and encourage us to mingle.
'Crap, she's coming this way,' I said.
'Let's go dance, then,' Thalia suggested. Izzy and some of the archery team were already on the dance floor. Thalia dragged me over to them. An upbeat song was playing as we joined their hip-shaking, arm-waving group and tried to copy their actions.
The rhythm of the song accelerated at the end. Someone cried, 'Twirl time!' Everyone grabbed their nearest friend. Laughing, Thalia grabbed both my hands and swung me around in an exuberant, if clumsy, circle.
I had a brief moment of panic as I remembered the terrifying spinning from my dream, but it passed. The track ended. Everyone was still laughing. Breathless and dizzy, we made our way over to the punch table. A group of Richards girls (at least, I thought they were Richards girls; it was hard to tell when no one was in house colours) were monopolising the punch. Ms Seunis shooed them away when she saw us approaching.
'Enjoying yourselves, girls?' she said, ladling out punch into little paper cups for us.
'Uh huh.'
Ms Seunis looked between Thalia and me. 'Try to mingle more,' she admonished. She gave me a little push in the direction of a bunch of girls trading cards near the food table. Thalia, she herded towards a pack in the bleachers who looked like they'd managed to find something stronger than punch. She was about to redirect Izzy, who was right behind us in the punch queue, to a different group as well, when Izzy tripped. In the most precise display of clumsiness ever, Izzy caught the edge of the punch ladle as she flung out her arms to catch herself. The ladle flipped out of the bowl, flinging punch all over Izzy … and Ms Seunis's clean, white blouse.
'Oh, sorry!' I thought I heard a hard edge to Izzy's voice, but another loud song had just started up, so I couldn't be sure.
Ms Seunis looked like she was exercising immense restraint to keep from lighting into Izzy on the spot. 'It's all right,' she said stiffly. 'Let us go clean up.'
She placed a hand on Izzy's shoulder and marched her towards the exit. I caught Izzy's eye as they passed, meaning to give her a sympathetic look. But the expression on Izzy's face froze my own. She didn't seem at all troubled; rather, she was nearly triumphant, like she'd solved a particularly thorny puzzle.
They were gone so quickly that I couldn't verify what I'd seen, but the back of my neck tingled in warning.
Thalia re-joined me and we took our punch to the benches by the side of the gym, near the doors to the equipment storeroom.
'Score one for Izzy,' Thalia said, grinning over her punch. She drained the cup. 'You know, I actually went to a dance once.'
'Really?'
'Yeah, Luke and I ended up crashing one in-oh, I think it was in Charlotte? I don't remember. But we snuck in to hide from this crazy warthog and we just had to blend in. Of course, that was a mixed dance, not like this, or Luke would've been in real trouble.' Thalia got a faraway look in her eyes, a bit wistful, but also a bit hard.
'We had a dance at camp once,' I said. It had been the summer after Luke's quest, when Chiron's Party Pony relatives had come to visit and organised a prom, to the delight of the Aphrodite cabin. I'd still been the youngest kid at camp, then. I remembered wandering aimlessly around the amphitheatre and chugged endless goblets of punch because nobody bothered to ask the nine-year-old dance. Until Luke found me and pulled me into a dance not unlike the spinning Thalia and I had just done.
Thinking about Luke made goosebumps stand out on my bare arms. Or maybe the temperature in the gym had actually dropped a few degrees. The atmosphere was different, somehow.
A commotion had broken out at the punch table, where Izzy's spill hadn't yet been cleaned up. A couple of girls were arguing in increasingly loud voices. Melanie Richards was one of them. She shoved one of her friends' shoulders. The girl shoved her back.
That was strange. Melanie was always surrounded by a pack of sycophants. I'd never seen a single one of them stand up to her.
I looked around. Ms Seunis hadn't returned, and both Mrs Stimpson and Mr Colbert had vanished, too. The DJ stopped the music to go break things up, but to my surprise, once she got there, she simply joined in the fight. In fact, all the girls were now moving towards the punch table, squabbling at the top of their voices.
'Something's wrong,' Thalia whispered. 'Do you feel that?'
'Monsters?' It was hard to tell in the gym. Even the dance organisers hadn't been able to eliminate its perpetual dirty-socks smell.
'I'm not sure.' Thalia got up, placing one hand on her bracelet.
Melanie's voice rose above the din: 'It's mine! I saw it first!' She broke away from the angry crowd, moving towards the dance floor.
Esther McGuire tackled her and snatched something out of her hands. 'Over my dead body!'
Someone else yanked on Esther's hair and pulled her back into the melée. The entire eighth-grade population of St Catherine's seemed to be transformed into howling maenads, intent on tearing each other to pieces in their scrabble for the coveted golden object.
I climbed onto the bench to get a better look. The object of contention was tossed briefly into the air between grappling hands. It was a circle about the size of a dinner plate, glittering with gold and jewels. An ornate necklace with an eagle-shaped clasp that ended in a pair of snakes' heads.
I knew that necklace.
But what was it doing here, in the midst of a bunch of mortals?
However it had appeared, it was now instigating a full-out brawl among our mortal classmates.
'We gotta get it away from them,' I said.
'No kidding.' Thalia ran forward into the screaming, shoving fray and elbowed her way to the centre, where Melanie and four other girls were engaged in a five-way tug-of-war for the necklace. It was a miracle that it hadn't been ripped apart by now. Thalia got her hands on it and yanked it out of everyone's grip.
The girls fell on her instead, pulling at her hair and tearing at her clothes. Thalia activated Aegis, but the image of Medusa did nothing to deter our classmates. Aside from the fact that they probably didn't even know who Medusa was, they were scarily focused on the necklace and only the necklace. The shield blocked Melanie and four other girls; everyone else crowded Thalia from behind.
Although she could probably have taken them all easily, she'd hurt a lot of our classmates in the process. And she'd have to drop the necklace to fight them off.
'Thalia, stop!' I reached among the bickering girls and grabbed her arm. 'Leave it-we need a better plan!'
The moment the necklace left Thalia's hands, the girls lost interest in her. I pulled her out of the frenzy.
'Holy Zeus, it's like they've turned into harpies!' She rubbed her scratched, bruised arms. 'Where in Hades have Seunis and the teachers got to?'
'They won't be any use, not if that thing's magical,' I said. 'Someone planned this.' It was too coincidental that Ms Seunis had been lured out of the gym just before the craziness had started.
Too coincidental that Izzy had gotten her out of the way.
I shook my head. We didn't have time to worry about who had set this up and why just yet. 'We need to separate them first, then get the necklace away.'
'What's the plan, then?'
My eyes travelled across the gym, searching for anything that might help us. They landed on the storeroom door. The storeroom where all the sports equipment was kept-game balls, archery bows, volleyball nets …
'That's it!' I ran for the door and flung it open. The sports equipment lay in neat piles inside the storeroom. I went straight for the volleyball section, where the nets were folded up on a shelf. 'Get something heavy to weigh them down,' I told Thalia.
She caught on right away. While Thalia gathered up a small collection of baseballs and softballs, I dragged out the nets and began to weave them together. I made little loops at their ends and we wrapped in the balls so that we ended up with a few large throw nets.
'We need a way to fling it over them,' I said.
'I have an idea.' Thalia went to the shelf of archery equipment. She handed me a sheath of arrows. 'Tie these to the top of the nets.'
We emerged from the equipment room armed with bows and our unorthodox trapping device. I shot my arrows first, sending the nets into the air. Thalia had the tougher job-she aimed her arrows at mine, so that as the nets arched over the fighting crowd, she pierced the shafts, detaching the net from the arrows.
The nets fell over our fighting classmates, splitting them into smaller, trapped groups. They shrieked and tugged at the netting confining them, but slowly, the spell broke. The fighting began to subside. The girls who were separated from the necklace stopped clawing at each other and stared blankly around them. Finally, only the group who still had the necklace inside their net remained fighting. Thalia reached between the netting and plucked it out of their hands. At first, they yelled at her to give it back, but then their expressions turned dazed and unfocused.
Thalia held the necklace at arm's length to examine it. The light it gave off was almost holographic, like the surface of an Iris-message. I glimpsed my own reflection in its ethereal sheen-not sweaty and dishevelled as I undoubtedly was, but a vision of beauty equal to Helen of Troy, or even Aphrodite herself.
I had a sudden, powerful urge to snatch the necklace away from Thalia and fix it around my own neck.
Thalia dropped the necklace. The spell broke as it clattered to the floor. I blinked and shook the vision of my prettified self out of my head. (The complement to that image-Percy staring at me with unhidden admiration and awe-was harder to dispel.)
'What in Zeus's name …' Thalia's voice was shaky. I wondered what she'd seen in the necklace.
'We can't leave it lying around,' I said. 'Let's take it to camp. Chiron might know what to do with it.'
The harsh glare of electric ceiling lights filled the gym. I scooped up the necklace and stuffed it quickly into the pocket of my dress.
'What is going on in here?' Ms Seunis had returned, clean and punch-free. She stood in the open door next to the light switch, her hands on her hips. Her mouth fell open as she took in the students trapped under the volleyball nets and Thalia and me standing in the middle of the dance floor with the revolving disco lights centred on us like guilty spotlights.
Mrs Stimpson and Mr Colbert appeared in the doorway behind her, gaping at the scene. I had no idea why they'd left, but guessed that it had been Mist-induced. This whole situation reeked of magical intervention.
Ms Seunis strode up to us. 'You have some explaining to do, girls.'
'We-'
Ms Seunis put her hands on our shoulders. 'To Principal Kellis,' she said curtly. Her long nails dug into my skin. 'Come.'
She marched us out of the gym and down the halls of the sports C, leaving Mrs Stimpson and Mr Colbert to sort out the trapped students. Some of them had started to cry.
We ran into Izzy as we left the building. She was racing across the field that separated the sports C from the main building. This was even more suspicious. When and why had she left the sports complex?
'What happened?' she gasped.
'Miss Chase and Miss Brunner played a distasteful prank,' Ms Seunis said icily. 'I am taking them to the principal's office. You should return to the gym, unless you were involved in their mischief as well.'
Izzy shook her head quickly. She looked stricken, like she'd failed a pop quiz. I could feel her eyes following us all the way to the main building.
There was no way to explain our true involvement in the dance fiasco without sounding like we were insane. No one would believe that the entire eighth grade had just started fighting out of the blue-especially without producing the necklace that had instigated it, and I wasn't about to do that. Aside from not wanting it to be confiscated, I didn't know if it would have the same effect on Ms Seunis and Principal Kellis. The last thing we needed was to break up a fight between them. That would probably end in our suspension, at the very least.
We listened in helpless silence as Ms Seunis described the scene she'd walked in on and accused us of disrupting the dance with an elaborate prank. With no real defence, we could only hang our heads and accept our punishment: rescinded home privileges, and detention all weekend.
'Chiron is going to kill us,' I groaned when we finally got out of the office. 'And how are we going to take the necklace to him if we can't go to camp?'
'We've got worse problems,' Thalia said darkly. 'Someone planted that.' She gestured to my bulging pocket. 'And that means someone knows we're here.'
I tugged fretfully at my camp necklace. 'It doesn't make sense. If it's a monster, why didn't they just attack us?'
'Maybe they needed a distraction.'
The back of my neck prickled again as I replayed the events of the afternoon-and in particular, Izzy's actions. She'd never struck me as the clumsy type, yet she'd managed to trip herself up at the punch table.
Thalia looked trouble when I mentioned this. I could tell she didn't want Izzy to be an enemy.
'If it's her,' she said uncertainly, 'why now? We've been hanging out with her all term. If she's really a monster, wouldn't it be easier to just attack us during sports practice or something?'
'I don't know,' I said. 'But I think we'd better be on our guard.'
Author: shiiki
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Annabeth Chase, Thalia Grace, Percy Jackson, Luke Castellan, Chiron, Clarisse La Rue, Chase family, OCs, various others, Gen with slight Percy/Annabeth
Fandom: Percy Jackson
Summary: After an eventful summer, Annabeth Chase is on her way to boarding school for the first time. With her friends Thalia and Percy close by, she's looking forward to spending the year in New York. But soon, she finds herself dealing with unfathomable dreams, tangled plots, and a mysterious necklace that keeps finding its way back to her. Worse still, her father wants her to move to the most dangerous city in the country. The choices Annabeth faces this year will have her questioning the meaning of friendship, loyalty, and family. And most of all, just what it means to keep a promise. An alternate PoV retelling of Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse. Part 3 of the Daughter of Wisdom series.
In this chapter
Chapter Title: We Go Dancing With Nets And Arrows
Rating: PG
Characters: Annabeth Chase, Thalia Grace, OCs
Word Count: 2,493
Chapter Summary: Annabeth's first school dance doesn't turn out quite as planned.
Back to fic content page
Dance day arrived. The organising committee had gone all out with the decorations-the school gym was practically unrecognisable under the streaming banners that festooned the bleachers. The usual ceiling lights had been dimmed so that the fairy lights that had been strung overhead looked like stars winking down at us.
Nearly every eighth-grader was here, relishing the opportunity to turn out in heels and miniskirts and not get yelled at by the teachers. Pop tracks blasted from the speakers while the enthusiastic DJ-one of the senior classwomen-encouraged us to hit the dance floor.
Only a few girls had actually done so; most of us were gathered in tight huddles along the walls and bleachers. Tables had been set up there, heavily laden with bowls of punch, trays of finger food, and cornucopia-style centrepieces.
'I don't see what the hype was about,' Thalia remarked, snagging her tenth hot dog roll from the large platter next to us. She'd let Izzy talk her into swapping her favourite jacket and jeans for a pair of black leggings and a baggy shirt that hung off one shoulder. It was artfully distressed, and had an explosive pattern of luminescent dots that resembled a supernova. With the new silver loops in her ears and the striking black eyeshadow she'd applied, she actually looked quite pretty.
I smoothed the skirt of Patricia's green dress and turned to look at the crowds of students roaming around arm in arm. The dangling hoops in my ears swayed back and forth when I moved my head. It was a funny sensation, but not altogether unpleasant. This earring business was growing on me.
'I guess it's something different. Plus, we get to skip Computer Science.'
'No escaping Seunis, though.' Thalia jerked her head towards our fiery-haired teacher, who was one of the three chaperones (along with Mrs Stimpson and the long-suffering Mr Colbert). Ms Seunis had actually let her hair down for the occasion (literally-it fell in waves around her shoulders) but she was still dressed in her usual smart blouse and pencil skirt. She wove among the knots of giggling girls, trying to break up the cliques and encourage us to mingle.
'Crap, she's coming this way,' I said.
'Let's go dance, then,' Thalia suggested. Izzy and some of the archery team were already on the dance floor. Thalia dragged me over to them. An upbeat song was playing as we joined their hip-shaking, arm-waving group and tried to copy their actions.
The rhythm of the song accelerated at the end. Someone cried, 'Twirl time!' Everyone grabbed their nearest friend. Laughing, Thalia grabbed both my hands and swung me around in an exuberant, if clumsy, circle.
I had a brief moment of panic as I remembered the terrifying spinning from my dream, but it passed. The track ended. Everyone was still laughing. Breathless and dizzy, we made our way over to the punch table. A group of Richards girls (at least, I thought they were Richards girls; it was hard to tell when no one was in house colours) were monopolising the punch. Ms Seunis shooed them away when she saw us approaching.
'Enjoying yourselves, girls?' she said, ladling out punch into little paper cups for us.
'Uh huh.'
Ms Seunis looked between Thalia and me. 'Try to mingle more,' she admonished. She gave me a little push in the direction of a bunch of girls trading cards near the food table. Thalia, she herded towards a pack in the bleachers who looked like they'd managed to find something stronger than punch. She was about to redirect Izzy, who was right behind us in the punch queue, to a different group as well, when Izzy tripped. In the most precise display of clumsiness ever, Izzy caught the edge of the punch ladle as she flung out her arms to catch herself. The ladle flipped out of the bowl, flinging punch all over Izzy … and Ms Seunis's clean, white blouse.
'Oh, sorry!' I thought I heard a hard edge to Izzy's voice, but another loud song had just started up, so I couldn't be sure.
Ms Seunis looked like she was exercising immense restraint to keep from lighting into Izzy on the spot. 'It's all right,' she said stiffly. 'Let us go clean up.'
She placed a hand on Izzy's shoulder and marched her towards the exit. I caught Izzy's eye as they passed, meaning to give her a sympathetic look. But the expression on Izzy's face froze my own. She didn't seem at all troubled; rather, she was nearly triumphant, like she'd solved a particularly thorny puzzle.
They were gone so quickly that I couldn't verify what I'd seen, but the back of my neck tingled in warning.
Thalia re-joined me and we took our punch to the benches by the side of the gym, near the doors to the equipment storeroom.
'Score one for Izzy,' Thalia said, grinning over her punch. She drained the cup. 'You know, I actually went to a dance once.'
'Really?'
'Yeah, Luke and I ended up crashing one in-oh, I think it was in Charlotte? I don't remember. But we snuck in to hide from this crazy warthog and we just had to blend in. Of course, that was a mixed dance, not like this, or Luke would've been in real trouble.' Thalia got a faraway look in her eyes, a bit wistful, but also a bit hard.
'We had a dance at camp once,' I said. It had been the summer after Luke's quest, when Chiron's Party Pony relatives had come to visit and organised a prom, to the delight of the Aphrodite cabin. I'd still been the youngest kid at camp, then. I remembered wandering aimlessly around the amphitheatre and chugged endless goblets of punch because nobody bothered to ask the nine-year-old dance. Until Luke found me and pulled me into a dance not unlike the spinning Thalia and I had just done.
Thinking about Luke made goosebumps stand out on my bare arms. Or maybe the temperature in the gym had actually dropped a few degrees. The atmosphere was different, somehow.
A commotion had broken out at the punch table, where Izzy's spill hadn't yet been cleaned up. A couple of girls were arguing in increasingly loud voices. Melanie Richards was one of them. She shoved one of her friends' shoulders. The girl shoved her back.
That was strange. Melanie was always surrounded by a pack of sycophants. I'd never seen a single one of them stand up to her.
I looked around. Ms Seunis hadn't returned, and both Mrs Stimpson and Mr Colbert had vanished, too. The DJ stopped the music to go break things up, but to my surprise, once she got there, she simply joined in the fight. In fact, all the girls were now moving towards the punch table, squabbling at the top of their voices.
'Something's wrong,' Thalia whispered. 'Do you feel that?'
'Monsters?' It was hard to tell in the gym. Even the dance organisers hadn't been able to eliminate its perpetual dirty-socks smell.
'I'm not sure.' Thalia got up, placing one hand on her bracelet.
Melanie's voice rose above the din: 'It's mine! I saw it first!' She broke away from the angry crowd, moving towards the dance floor.
Esther McGuire tackled her and snatched something out of her hands. 'Over my dead body!'
Someone else yanked on Esther's hair and pulled her back into the melée. The entire eighth-grade population of St Catherine's seemed to be transformed into howling maenads, intent on tearing each other to pieces in their scrabble for the coveted golden object.
I climbed onto the bench to get a better look. The object of contention was tossed briefly into the air between grappling hands. It was a circle about the size of a dinner plate, glittering with gold and jewels. An ornate necklace with an eagle-shaped clasp that ended in a pair of snakes' heads.
I knew that necklace.
But what was it doing here, in the midst of a bunch of mortals?
However it had appeared, it was now instigating a full-out brawl among our mortal classmates.
'We gotta get it away from them,' I said.
'No kidding.' Thalia ran forward into the screaming, shoving fray and elbowed her way to the centre, where Melanie and four other girls were engaged in a five-way tug-of-war for the necklace. It was a miracle that it hadn't been ripped apart by now. Thalia got her hands on it and yanked it out of everyone's grip.
The girls fell on her instead, pulling at her hair and tearing at her clothes. Thalia activated Aegis, but the image of Medusa did nothing to deter our classmates. Aside from the fact that they probably didn't even know who Medusa was, they were scarily focused on the necklace and only the necklace. The shield blocked Melanie and four other girls; everyone else crowded Thalia from behind.
Although she could probably have taken them all easily, she'd hurt a lot of our classmates in the process. And she'd have to drop the necklace to fight them off.
'Thalia, stop!' I reached among the bickering girls and grabbed her arm. 'Leave it-we need a better plan!'
The moment the necklace left Thalia's hands, the girls lost interest in her. I pulled her out of the frenzy.
'Holy Zeus, it's like they've turned into harpies!' She rubbed her scratched, bruised arms. 'Where in Hades have Seunis and the teachers got to?'
'They won't be any use, not if that thing's magical,' I said. 'Someone planned this.' It was too coincidental that Ms Seunis had been lured out of the gym just before the craziness had started.
Too coincidental that Izzy had gotten her out of the way.
I shook my head. We didn't have time to worry about who had set this up and why just yet. 'We need to separate them first, then get the necklace away.'
'What's the plan, then?'
My eyes travelled across the gym, searching for anything that might help us. They landed on the storeroom door. The storeroom where all the sports equipment was kept-game balls, archery bows, volleyball nets …
'That's it!' I ran for the door and flung it open. The sports equipment lay in neat piles inside the storeroom. I went straight for the volleyball section, where the nets were folded up on a shelf. 'Get something heavy to weigh them down,' I told Thalia.
She caught on right away. While Thalia gathered up a small collection of baseballs and softballs, I dragged out the nets and began to weave them together. I made little loops at their ends and we wrapped in the balls so that we ended up with a few large throw nets.
'We need a way to fling it over them,' I said.
'I have an idea.' Thalia went to the shelf of archery equipment. She handed me a sheath of arrows. 'Tie these to the top of the nets.'
We emerged from the equipment room armed with bows and our unorthodox trapping device. I shot my arrows first, sending the nets into the air. Thalia had the tougher job-she aimed her arrows at mine, so that as the nets arched over the fighting crowd, she pierced the shafts, detaching the net from the arrows.
The nets fell over our fighting classmates, splitting them into smaller, trapped groups. They shrieked and tugged at the netting confining them, but slowly, the spell broke. The fighting began to subside. The girls who were separated from the necklace stopped clawing at each other and stared blankly around them. Finally, only the group who still had the necklace inside their net remained fighting. Thalia reached between the netting and plucked it out of their hands. At first, they yelled at her to give it back, but then their expressions turned dazed and unfocused.
Thalia held the necklace at arm's length to examine it. The light it gave off was almost holographic, like the surface of an Iris-message. I glimpsed my own reflection in its ethereal sheen-not sweaty and dishevelled as I undoubtedly was, but a vision of beauty equal to Helen of Troy, or even Aphrodite herself.
I had a sudden, powerful urge to snatch the necklace away from Thalia and fix it around my own neck.
Thalia dropped the necklace. The spell broke as it clattered to the floor. I blinked and shook the vision of my prettified self out of my head. (The complement to that image-Percy staring at me with unhidden admiration and awe-was harder to dispel.)
'What in Zeus's name …' Thalia's voice was shaky. I wondered what she'd seen in the necklace.
'We can't leave it lying around,' I said. 'Let's take it to camp. Chiron might know what to do with it.'
The harsh glare of electric ceiling lights filled the gym. I scooped up the necklace and stuffed it quickly into the pocket of my dress.
'What is going on in here?' Ms Seunis had returned, clean and punch-free. She stood in the open door next to the light switch, her hands on her hips. Her mouth fell open as she took in the students trapped under the volleyball nets and Thalia and me standing in the middle of the dance floor with the revolving disco lights centred on us like guilty spotlights.
Mrs Stimpson and Mr Colbert appeared in the doorway behind her, gaping at the scene. I had no idea why they'd left, but guessed that it had been Mist-induced. This whole situation reeked of magical intervention.
Ms Seunis strode up to us. 'You have some explaining to do, girls.'
'We-'
Ms Seunis put her hands on our shoulders. 'To Principal Kellis,' she said curtly. Her long nails dug into my skin. 'Come.'
She marched us out of the gym and down the halls of the sports C, leaving Mrs Stimpson and Mr Colbert to sort out the trapped students. Some of them had started to cry.
We ran into Izzy as we left the building. She was racing across the field that separated the sports C from the main building. This was even more suspicious. When and why had she left the sports complex?
'What happened?' she gasped.
'Miss Chase and Miss Brunner played a distasteful prank,' Ms Seunis said icily. 'I am taking them to the principal's office. You should return to the gym, unless you were involved in their mischief as well.'
Izzy shook her head quickly. She looked stricken, like she'd failed a pop quiz. I could feel her eyes following us all the way to the main building.
There was no way to explain our true involvement in the dance fiasco without sounding like we were insane. No one would believe that the entire eighth grade had just started fighting out of the blue-especially without producing the necklace that had instigated it, and I wasn't about to do that. Aside from not wanting it to be confiscated, I didn't know if it would have the same effect on Ms Seunis and Principal Kellis. The last thing we needed was to break up a fight between them. That would probably end in our suspension, at the very least.
We listened in helpless silence as Ms Seunis described the scene she'd walked in on and accused us of disrupting the dance with an elaborate prank. With no real defence, we could only hang our heads and accept our punishment: rescinded home privileges, and detention all weekend.
'Chiron is going to kill us,' I groaned when we finally got out of the office. 'And how are we going to take the necklace to him if we can't go to camp?'
'We've got worse problems,' Thalia said darkly. 'Someone planted that.' She gestured to my bulging pocket. 'And that means someone knows we're here.'
I tugged fretfully at my camp necklace. 'It doesn't make sense. If it's a monster, why didn't they just attack us?'
'Maybe they needed a distraction.'
The back of my neck prickled again as I replayed the events of the afternoon-and in particular, Izzy's actions. She'd never struck me as the clumsy type, yet she'd managed to trip herself up at the punch table.
Thalia looked trouble when I mentioned this. I could tell she didn't want Izzy to be an enemy.
'If it's her,' she said uncertainly, 'why now? We've been hanging out with her all term. If she's really a monster, wouldn't it be easier to just attack us during sports practice or something?'
'I don't know,' I said. 'But I think we'd better be on our guard.'