Bad Moon Rising {J. Black}

* weird small town strangers *

Readers,

Thank you for the kind words for the story! I really appreciate it. Here is the first meeting with the crossover worlds! I hope you like it!

XOXO Ally Layne.

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The horn from the first minotaur he ever killed was still perched above his bunk.

There were a few different post-it notes pasted along the wall with reminders written in his chicken-scratch to "remember to take Mrs. O'Leary for a walk" and to "visit Juniper" or to "go check-in with the Hefestus cabin for Annabeth."

Of course, the Seaweed Brain spelled Hephaestus wrong, but there weren't many campers who knew how to spell the god's name right, anyway.

An old picture of him, Grover, Annabeth, and I after our first quest was taped to the wall next to his bedside table. The tape was peeling upward at the ends, mostly from time and age.

"Percy?"

He wasn't with Annabeth at the lake. He wasn't with Chiron going over different plans for extending different cabins, and he most definitely wasn't at the practice yard beating someone up.

I quickly checked over our cabin again and felt my heart pounding heavily in my chest. He was probably just being stupid like normal and was hiding from us to make us worry and then he would jump out at one of us and everything would be okay-

"Is he here?"

I whirled around to see Annabeth standing in the doorway, her chest heaving with every breath. She had come running. She must not have found him where she thought he was going to be.

They had a date.

He never showed.

Percy might have been a Seaweed Brain, but if there was something he was never late to, it was the dates he had with Annabeth. There was something really, really wrong with this picture.

"He's not here, either," I told her, wincing at the silver that started lining her grey eyes. "I'm sure he's just in the lake or something and fell asleep. I can go check again."

Her tanned hands massaged her temples. "He's not there, Andie. You already checked three times. I know you, and you have better attention for detail than some of my siblings- you would not have missed him the first time."

I gulped. "What do we do?"

A tear fell down her cheek, and she hastily wiped it away. This was going to be their break- they were going to be a normal couple, and Percy was so excited that he could hardly wait the entire semester-

"We need to go to Chiron. If Percy's missing, something bad must've happened. He's gone without a trace, and you didn't even hear anything happen-"

"But I-"

Her sharp eyes cut me off. "Andie, you haven't slept well since the Labyrinth. You're not a hard sleeper, and Percy tells me that you wake up if he shifts in bed, let alone snores too loud or is abducted in the middle of the night."

I sat down on his bunk, placing my head in my hands. "I know," I said, my voice muffled. "I should've noticed, I could have helped him-"

Annabeth held up a hand. "If you didn't wake up, there was a reason you didn't wake. Something powerful must have taken him, you know that."