not just your regular gourd

It's the smile that stops Nico mid-step in the middle of a Manhattan sidewalk. He catches a half-second glimpse of it, but that's enough for him to approach the chainlink fence for a closer look.

Beyond the metal lattice, a crowd of bodies run around each other on a half-court, a darting blur of competition and teenaged male ego. With quicksilver footwork, Percy Jackson dribbles around his opponents, outfitted in a low-slung tank top, baggy shorts, and his familiar crooked grin. He lines up a shot, jumps, and throws. The tank top floats up his stomach and Nico's eyes magnetically lock in on the strip of Percy's underwear peeking above his shorts.

The ball bounces off the rim. A player from the other team wins the scuffle for it and dashes for Percy's side. Percy lunges for the ball, misses, and groans as one with his team when it springs off the backboard and right through their net. They file off the court and another team steps in.

Nico lets go of the fence. He's about to continue on his way when he hears Percy say, "Nico? Is that you?"

It only takes a couple of seconds for Percy to jog up to him, glowing with exertion, lit up from within. He stops in front of Nico and says, "What are you doing here? Not here to see me, are you?"

"I do have a life outside of you," Nico says. He has another retort loaded up and ready to fire, which is the precise moment when Percy grabs the hem of his tank to wipe at the sweat on his face. His exposed chest and stomach gleam bright as polish from his exertions on the court and, with each swell of his breath, the sunlight's covetous rays trace over his every curve. Below his navel, Nico's eyes catch a trail of dark hair leading below the band of Percy's shorts and underwear. The shirt comes back down. Nico's mouth is dry.

"Wait," says Percy, his expression falling with his shirt. "Don't tell me that this is demigod stuff."

It's not, actually. Nico didn't even mean to walk by Percy's neighborhood, it was just on the way. "Okay, I won't tell you that."

Percy groans. His head collides with the fence in a rattle. "All right," he says, resigned. "What's the sitch this time? Hydra in Central Park? Sea monster in the Hudson? Or do I have to go across the country again? Because I have a math test tomorrow and I was hoping to cram for it today."

Nico's laugh is a sudden bark leaping from his chest. "I mean it. I don't need you for this one. Nice to know you'll go the distance for me, though."

"Woah," says Percy, "I didn't know you knew that movie."

"What movie?"

"Hercules? You've never seen it? Okay, forget whatever you were doing, you have to come over today."

One of Percy's teammates whistles at him. "You ditching us for your date, man?"

Percy hollers back, "Maybe I'd stick around if you passed to me more!"

"No fucking way, you can't land a shot to save your life!"

"Says you!" Percy snatches a backpack from the ground and circles the fence. "All right, I'm outta here. You coming?"

"What happened to studying?"

Percy shrugs and grins. "Are you saying you'd rather be out fighting monsters than having dinner and a movie? I thought you were more romantic than that."

Nico's chest throbs. He can picture it — joining the Jackson household for their family cooking. Watching some movie or TV show in the living room with Percy's arm over his shoulder and Percy's study notes forgotten on the coffee table. Maybe even staying the night. Percy stripping off his tank so that Nico can take in the uninterrupted whole of him in the warm-yellow light of his room. The two of them sharing a bed in peace and listening to the sounds of the city out of Percy's window.

"I — I can't." Nico stumbles back. "Sorry. Maybe next time. Thanks. Sorry."

"Oh. Yeah. Okay, see you around then?"

As Nico wraps the shadows of the fading day around himself, he chances one more look at Percy and the disappointment pulling at the shape of his mouth, at the corners of his lovely green eyes. It must be pure insanity that has Nico blurting, "Tomorrow. I'll come over and watch Hercules. At your place."

---

So, just a quick heads-up: When the news hits the stands tomorrow morning with my face plastered all over their fronts (déjà vu, anyone?), let me put it on the record that whatever they're saying I did, it was not my fault, okay? Okay.

To nobody's surprise, the reason why I'm on the run again is monsters. It's always monsters! The thing that's different about this time is that the monsters have finally caught up to the twenty-first century. They've figured out how to kill me with technology.

The tech in question? A boxy plastic thing that I found buzzing in my backpack, down in that pocket meant for water bottles. It was a grey-black pager with two little nodes for red and green lights and a metal clip on the back. There was even a digital display on the front for a message or the time or whatever. Real cutting-edge stuff. Before it was planted on me, it must've come from someone's real job because even with my dyslexia, the text on the screen was just a string of numbers and there was a little sticker centered unevenly under the display with someone's name on it. Not that I'd had any time to look, really — almost as soon as I'd found it and fished it out, a flaming dodgeball shattered the nearest window and narrowly missed turning me into a Percy-shaped burn mark on the wall. I may have screamed a little.

Rachel, who'd shoved me away a split-second before my imminent death — wow, having someone around who can sense the future sure comes in handy — did not scream. She ran through the pottery studio where we'd been about to start the class and yanked on the fire alarm.

"Go!" She yelled, and the other students rushed for the exit. I knew that she really meant it for me, so I dumped my bag and the pager, grabbed for Riptide, and made my own escape. If that escape was leaping out the other window, well, that's between me, the glass in my clothes, and the CCTV footage that caught me.

Okay, and also the crowd of laestrygonian giants who greeted me with a new volley of flaming sports equipment and cries of "Meat! Meat! Demigod meat!" Boy, did they sure have a way of making a guy feel special.

Shaking those guys off wasn't easy, because why would the gods let anything be easy? I guess that turning and fighting would've been a great look for me, real heroic, except that the laestrygonians outnumbered me twenty-to-one and the sidewalk was spilling with confused mortals responding to the fire alarm. I didn't want crispy pedestrian to be the new hit craze for the giants, so I did the natural thing which was to yell, "Over here you stupid cannibals!" and leg it.

---

As my staunch ally in my self-imposed quest to not think about camp this summer, Rachel had booked us in for a mid-morning pottery session. For totally normal reasons that make sense. It was going to be the start of my Road to Post-Breakup Recovery. My Journey of Self-Discovery. My Mission to Get a Fucking Hobby Already That Isn't Demigod Shit (Rachel's words).

That'd been the plan. Now I was slouched over a railing, catching my breath and not really paying attention to the Queensboro Bridge cutting through the night sky overhead with its suspension cables lit up like gigantic Christmas lights. The streetlights all along its surface blazed orange-warm, reflecting merrily off the rippling surface of the East River. Despite it being past midnight by now, there was enough illumination off both the bridge and the streetlights on ground level that I could still see the path and the river's surface clearly. My hair and pants were crunchy at the ends and my shirt was missing a sleeve but the late-night citygoers who crossed me passed right by without a second glance. Nothing to see here, folks.

My feet kicked against the metal. I couldn't go home, not with monsters chomping at my heels all day. Maybe I could trek it to camp on foot. If I jumped the railing, I could swim to the other side without worrying about an attack on the bridge. Easy. The real sticking point was the overland walk all the way across Long Island. If I could call a pegasus, I wouldn't need to walk almost two days to camp, but they were all on loan at Camp Jupiter this month for some sort of exchange thingamabob. To improve camp relations or something. What we had instead were Camp Jupiter's unicorns. Which was cool, except that a unicorn couldn't exactly cross Long Island without being spotted. It'd probably be breaking like, fifty different traffic laws just to put one on the road.

I was still deep in thought about unicorns on I-495 when someone came up to the railing beside me and asked, "So what's the world-ending catastrophe this time?"

I turned my head. With his hand as pale as ever where it rested on the railing and his dark hair blowing in long, ink-black trails over his face, Nico stared straight ahead at the other shore. He must have been sixteen by now. Every time I saw him, I realized all over again how much older he'd gotten. With his piercing dark eyes, his straight nose, and serene expression, he looked perfectly statuesque. If he hadn't spoken to me, I'd have thought that he hadn't even noticed me.

"Search me. All I've done today is run from monsters. Besides, shouldn't I be asking you that? You don't usually pop up with happy tidings, if y'know what I mean."

Nico did look at me sidelong then. "Sometimes I do."

"Not with me. Is there some super-exclusive Nico news club where you only appear when there's good news? Where can I sign up? Do you take payment in sand dollars? Because I'm fresh out."

"Well, first of all, wanted criminals are barred from entry," Nico said. "Your face was up on the breaking news segment today. There's a manhunt out for you right now. You do know that, right?" He tilted his head towards the smattering of people on the path who still weren't paying us any attention. The big city, everyone. Gotta love it.

"Wait, wait, you watch TV? Since when? Also, you're not really proving me wrong about being the bearer of bad news, dude."

"I was out shopping. They show the news channel in the electronics department."

"Oh, yeah. Right." I turned back to the water. Not the first time that the feds've been out to get me. At least this time, I hadn't caused a major landmark to be flamethrowered. So, win. "Speaking of electronics, you'll probably want to get away from me."

"Uh," Nico wrinkled his nose. His eyes darted to my pockets. "What, do you have a cell phone on you or something?"

"Worse," I said and, like the lamest magic trick in the world, I pulled out the pager. The exact same one as the one that I thought I'd ditched this morning.

Nico looked at it blankly. Hold up. No way, was this one of those times when he was too young to know what a pager was, or was he too old to know? "It's a pager," I blurted out. Because that explained everything to an emo teenager who'd been born even before TVs hit the shelves, let alone cordless phones.

"Okay," said Nico. "So?"

"It's like - it's like a cell phone," I floundered. "Or, uh, a telegram? It doesn't do calls but you can get messages on it. Short messages. This one can send messages, too. I think it has to be sending messages and giving my location away to monsters, I just don't know how to turn this thing off!"

"Then throw it away?" He asked, like I was stupid. It sure didn't help that the longer I stammered about pagers, the more stupid I felt.

"That's the first thing I did! But it popped back into my pocket like Riptide, so I smashed it, I launched it into a pond, I threw it into a drakon's mouth, I dropped it down a grate, I took out the batteries, I pressed all the buttons - nothing! It keeps ending up in my pocket and it keeps telling monsters where I am!"

Nico backed up a bit as I spoke and looked at the thing warily. His long fingers hovered near his sword. "So why aren't monsters swooping down on you now?"

I sighed and flung the thing over the river. It went ker-plunk! and a couple of passersby gave me the stink-eye for littering. "I think that it only activates when it gets a message. Whenever it buzzes, I end up mobbed in five seconds flat. I gotta get back to camp and find someone who can figure this out."

"I can take you now," Nico said, which was what I'd hoped and dreaded he'd say. He frowned at my expression. "Unless there's a reason you don't want to go to camp? You know Mrs. O'Leary would've come anytime you called, right?"

I couldn't blame him for being weirded out by my hesitation. With its magical borders and genius tinkerers in the form of the Hephaestus cabin, it was maybe the best place for me to be right now. Only someone with a death wish wouldn't jump at the chance to teleport there in my circumstances.

I was definitely not jumping for joy in front of Nico, so obviously there was something deeply wrong with me. I looked down at my shoes and scuffed the paving stones. In between the waves of monsters, I'd Iris-Messaged, in order:

1) Rachel, who deserved an explanation after she'd planned this whole day out in advance;

2) My mom;

3) Paul, who'd come in while I was in the middle of explaining this whole shitty day to mom and had to start over; and

4) Grover, who'd sensed my near-brushes with death through our empathy link and wanted to know if he had to get his own affairs in order.

Now, there was 5) Nico, who'd courteously shown up so that I could explain my latest crisis to him in person (and therefore for free), and was only getting the essentials and not the part where I really, really needed a girls day out to process my break-up with Annabeth, who was — oh, right — currently at camp. Where I still wasn't. I was steadily running out of drachmas and excuses, and I sort just wanted to be at home with my parents and Estelle now.

"I'm just kind of tired," I said lamely. "I don't really want to deal with, uh, Mr. D right now. Or the cleaning harpies. You know."

Nico squinted at me because clearly he did not know and I was definitely coming off like maybe I wanted to get dismembered and eaten by nasties. Surprisingly, what he said next wasn't, "Are you an idiot?" (which was probably what he was thinking) but, "I was planning to stay at a place in Newark if you want somewhere to sleep. It's partly underground and mostly concrete so maybe the signal won't get out for the monsters to find you."

"Yeah," I said, so relieved that my knees shook a little and I had to lean against the railing. "What were you doing in Jersey, though? And who'd rent to a kid? No offence."

"The landlady's house was haunted by a restless shade," Nico said as he offered me his palm. "It terrorized her and her husband for years. I was in the neighbourhood when I sensed it, so I sent the unwanted visitor back to the Underworld and the owners let me stay free of charge for a year. They think that I'm a runaway."

I obediently held his hand. It was cold and ridged with callouses, like mine was, from years of handling his sword. His grip was loose around me.

"Sounds like a sweet deal," I said. "Lead the way, Ghostbuster."

---

Nico dropped us off into a basement unit that looked like the bastard lovechild between a church and a studio apartment. A tiny window high up on the wall was a rectangle of blue-black framed with dried-up grass and leaves. There was a tiny kitchen facing a bare brick wall decorated with shelves upon shelves of religious statuettes, books, candles, dried flowers, and framed photographs of saints. Crosses hung from dollar-store Command hooks at seemingly random intervals on all the walls. A bible sat heavy and untouched on the table in the centre. At least the bed was nice and normal, even if all-white-with-silver-threads wasn't really my style.

Nico caught my expression and his lip quirked. "I told you. The house was haunted. The owners went with what they knew for a while, which was mostly from Sunday mass and horror movies."

"Y'know what, I dunno that I could've done much better if it turned out my sword didn't work on it."

Nico settled his bag and gestured to a door next to the kitchen. "Bathroom's in there. Sorry, no food in the fridge. I don't really come by often enough to keep stuff here. I have a couple apples in my bag, though."

"Nah, I'm good." I would've cracked a comment about the garden of Eden and the apple or something, but the siren call of the bed was getting stronger the longer I was here. I sat down on the duvet and yawned.

Nico was putting his apples away in the fridge. "Go to sleep. I'll keep watch."

I shook my head. "I can stay up. You probably need sleep too."

"You take second watch. I'll wake you later."

"Yeah? Promise?"

He flapped a hand at me. "The longer we discuss this, the less time you'll get to rest. Go on."

"Yeah, yeah grampa," I muttered and crawled into his bed. Nico pulled up a chair and sat by my head, where he had a line of sight to both the mini window and the staircase leading up to the ground floor.

I'd just settled in when I felt something brush over my head.

"You had something," Nico whispered. His hand continued to stroke through my hair. It reminded me of when I got too scared of the monsters at night and my mom would stay up to watch over me. When I was still a kid, obviously.