Chapter 15 15
Annabeth's POV:
I got down from the attic with the diary pressed against my stomach under my shirt, and I swear my heart was beating so loud that Aunt Sarah would hear it from work, wherever she was right then.
The leather was warm against my skin, almost hot, which made no sense because the attic had been freezing. My hands shook as I closed my bedroom door and locked it, something I never did during the day, and I stood there for a minute just breathing and trying to process what I'd just read.
"Your father wasn't human."
The words kept repeating in my head, over and over, in my mother's handwriting that I recognized from birthday cards I'd memorized years ago.
I pulled the diary out and set it on my desk, opened to that first page in English. The rest was all those weird symbols, pages and pages of them, and I had no idea where to even start.
Okay. Think, Annabeth. Think like a scientist. This was a puzzle, just a really complicated one. Languages followed patterns, rules, structures. If I could identify the patterns, maybe I could start to decode it.
I grabbed my laptop and opened about fifteen tabs at once. Ancient languages, dead languages, constructed languages, cipher systems. I pulled up images of Sanskrit, of hieroglyphics, of runic alphabets, of cuneiform. Nothing matched. The symbols in the diary were completely unique, or at least nothing I could find in two hours of increasingly frantic searching.
Some of them looked almost familiar, kind of angular and flowing at the same time, but every time I thought I was onto something, the connection dissolved. It was like my brain couldn't quite hold onto the shapes, couldn't process them the way it processed normal writing.
I tried sketching some of the symbols on notebook paper, thinking maybe if I drew them I'd understand their structure better. My hand cramped after the fifth one and I gave up, staring at the meaningless marks I'd copied.
"Fuck," I said to my empty room.
My phone buzzed. A text from my aunt: "Home in 20. Want me to pick up dinner?"
Shit. I shoved the diary under my mattress, cleared my browser history because I didn't even know why, just paranoia maybe, and tried to make myself look like I hadn't spent the afternoon discovering that my entire understanding of reality was wrong.
Twenty minutes later I heard her car in the driveway.
Dinner was Thai takeout, pad thai that tasted like nothing in my mouth even though I usually loved it. Aunt Sarah kept looking at me with this expression I couldn't read, concern and fear mixed with only God knows what else.
"You feeling better?" she asked. "Your fever go down?"
I'd completely forgotten about the fever. I touched my forehead and yeah, still burning up, but I felt fine. Better than fine.
"It's the same," I said. "But I don't feel sick."
"Annabeth—"
"I know, I know. I'll go to the doctor if it gets worse."
She didn't look satisfied but she dropped it, focusing on her own food. We ate in silence for a few minutes and I kept thinking about the diary upstairs, about my mother's words, about everything I wanted to ask but couldn't because I wasn't supposed to know any of it.
"Did my mother ever..." I started, then stopped.
Aunt Sarah's fork froze halfway to her mouth. "Ever what?"
"Did she ever say anything about my father? Like, anything at all?"
The pause was too long. "No. She never told me who he was. I asked, but she said it was complicated."
"Complicated how?"
"Annabeth, why are you asking this now?"
"I just... I don't know. I've been thinking about them lately. About where I come from."
Her face did something strange, this micro-expression of pain that she covered up fast. "You come from your mother, and she loved you more than anything. That's what matters."
But it wasn't what mattered, not anymore. I needed to know what I was, what this fever meant, why my eyes did that thing, why I felt like I was changing into something I didn't understand.
I finished dinner and escaped back to my room as soon as I could.
The diary came out from under the mattress and I stared at it for another hour, trying different approaches. Maybe it was a substitution cipher? Maybe each symbol represented a letter? I tried mapping them to English, to Spanish since my mother had been fluent. Nothing worked. The patterns didn't match any known linguistic structure I could find.
I needed help. Someone who knew about ancient languages, obscure texts, weird historical stuff.
I needed Kaelen.
The thought came with a rush of heat that had nothing to do with my fever. This was a stupid reason to text him. I barely knew him. I'd helped him once and now I was gonna show up with a mysterious diary written in a language that might not even exist? He'd think I was crazy.
But I pulled up his number anyway.
My thumb hovered over the keyboard for a full minute before I typed: "Do you know anything about dead languages? I found something and can't translate it."
The three dots appeared immediately. My heart did that stupid jumping thing.
"Depends on the language. Can I see it?"
I stared at his response. Could he see it? That meant meeting up, showing him the diary, explaining where I got it and why I was so desperate to read it. That meant involving him in whatever this was, whatever I was becoming.
"Is Monday okay?" I typed. "I can bring it to you."
"My place? My siblings will be at school. We can have privacy."
His place. Alone. To look at my dead mother's diary about my not-human father. This was either the worst idea I'd ever had or... I didn't know what.
"What time?"
"2pm?"
"Okay."
I saved his address when he sent it and then sat there holding my phone, rereading the conversation, trying to figure out if this was just about the diary or if part of me just wanted an excuse to see him again.
Both. It was definitely both.
I got ready for bed but I couldn't leave the diary anywhere obvious. Under the mattress felt too exposed, like my aunt might find it if she came in to wake me up. So I did something that would've seemed ridiculous a week ago: I put it under my pillow and climbed into bed with it there, this hard uncomfortable lump that pressed against the back of my head.
Sleep came slower than I expected, my brain still trying to decode symbols, still repeating "your father wasn't human" in different tones like that would somehow make it make sense.
When I finally drifted off, the dream started immediately.
I was back in my room but younger, maybe five or six, and my mother was sitting on the edge of my bed. She looked exactly like she did in photos, dark hair and kind eyes, but when she turned to look at me her eyes weren't brown anymore.
They were red. Bright red, glowing like embers in a fire.
"My love," she said, and her voice sounded normal, warm and familiar even though I didn't actually know what she'd sounded like. "It’s almost time."
"I don't understand," I said in the dream, my child-voice high and scared.
She smiled and touched my cheek, her hand warm. "It’s almost time, my love. Almost."
Almost time for what? But I couldn't ask because the dream was shifting, my room dissolving into darkness, and my mother's red eyes were the only thing I could still see, burning in the black like warning lights.
"Almost time," she whispered again, and then she was gone.
I woke up gasping, my sheets soaked through with sweat again, my heart pounding. The clock said 3:17 AM. The diary was still under my pillow, warm against my hand when I reached for it.
Almost time.
Almost time for what?
I didn't sleep again that night. Just lay there in the dark, my mother's red eyes burned into my brain, and waited for Monday to come so I could go see Kaelen and maybe, finally, get some answers.