Chapter Text
It actually was a new place, she hadn’t been lying about that, but of course it wasn’t the casual lunch between friends she had made it out to be. Karen ordered for herself (omelette with hash browns), Matt (bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich) and Foggy (tuna melt on rye). Annabeth just asked the waitress for a cup of coffee.
“You sure you don’t want anything to eat?”
Annabeth shrugged. “Nah, I was just going to get three Red Bulls from the vending machine for lunch anyway. I think coffee is marginally healthier.”
Karen really wished Matt was here so he could tell if she was being serious or not.
The busboy brought them their complementary waters, and the waitress followed quickly with Annabeth’s coffee. She offered cream and sugar, but Annabeth turned both down in favor of taking a long sip of the pure black brew. It must have been piping hot, but she didn’t react to the temperature in the slightest. She just drank it, smiled, and set the cup back down on her paper placemat. “Gods, I needed that. I love caffeine.”
Karen had planned it so she and Annabeth would get there before Matt and Foggy, but now she regretted it slightly. Anything she wanted to say to her had to wait until they were all together, so now they just had to make small talk until her friends showed up.
Annabeth took another sip of coffee, and Karen mirrored her with her water just for something to do. They put down their cups at the same moment, and Annabeth gave her a dry smile. “So how did you find me?”
Karen blanched. It was one thing to dig around the records for details about someone, but it was quite another to admit it right to their face. “I, uh, got a copy of the incident report, and I looked you up online. Found some fluff piece on your school’s website, and there was a little picture of you in it.”
“Is that the only article you found?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, never mind.” She was fidgeting with her necklace, pulling the beads up the string and letting them knock back into each other, twisting a jet-black one with a blue symbol that Karen couldn’t quite make out round and round between her fingers. “What’s your name, since you know mine?”
“Karen, Karen Page,” Karen said quickly, hoping the prompt response would be enough to make up for her internet-stalking confession. “And my friends Matt and Foggy will be here soon. Matt’s the one you met before.”
“Yeah, I know. How’s he doing?”
“He’s okay, as well as he can be under the circumstances,” Karen said, picturing the ugly yellow bruises on his neck and the dozens of stitches she was pretty sure he had popped during his nighttime activities. Looking at Annabeth’s neck for the matching set of bruises she had seen swelling up at the hospital, she realized for the first time that they had faded completely, and her arm was free of the bandages and the sling Karen had last seen her in. “What about you?”
Annabeth shrugged. “I heal fast.”
Karen felt like that was a lie too, but she wasn’t sure what to say in response. They fell back into a silence that was only broken by the bell ringing as someone opened the diner door. Karen looked behind her, and sure enough, her friends had finally arrived.
Foggy’s face dropped when he saw them, but Matt was already frowning. He must have smelled them from five blocks away. Karen excused herself and hurried over to them, meeting them halfway and throwing up a pacifying hand as Foggy gave her an exasperated look.
“Seriously, Karen? I thought we agreed to leave it alone.”
“You said you wanted to leave it alone,” she pointed out. “I was the one who said we shouldn’t. We never agreed on anything.”
“Karen,” Matt said.
“I found her,” Karen said before he could finish that thought. “You said you wanted answers. I found them for you.”
“That’s not,” Matt took a deep breath, “that’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“Come on, what were you going to do, break in through her window? I’m sure that would have gone over great. At least I found her in broad daylight.” She had him there, but he was not happy about it. Swiftly changing tactics, she adopted a pleading tone and repeated what she had said during their last conversation. “She needs help, Matt, legal help. You saw it yourself; she’s mixed up with the wrong kind of people, and they’re trying to kill her.”
Foggy raked a hand through his hair in exasperation. “I would say I’m surprised, but I really, really can’t. How did you even do this?”
“I read her name on the incident report, Annabeth Chase,” Karen said, ignoring his subsequent question of how she got her hands on the incident report. “I just looked her up online, and I got a bunch of results. I found her, went to see her, and brought her here. To talk to you. Both of you, please.”
Matt’s hands had been tightening around his cane as she spoke. His jaw worked, and she could tell he was fighting between firing off a scathingly hypocritcal critique of her methods and admitting that he really wanted this conversation to happen regardless of how it did. Finally, he seemed to come to a conclusion and tilted his head towards his partner. “Foggy, what do you say?”
“You guys really want to do this, huh?” Foggy looked between the two of them like he was trying to gauge their sincerity, and Karen stared pleadingly at him, trying to appear as earnest as possible. Matt gave him a single, short nod. He sighed. “Fine. I’m all ears,” he said, clapping Matt on the back. “Let's go get ourselves another dangerous client.”
When they turned back to the table, Annabeth was swinging her legs and drinking her coffee, but her casual posture was belied by the sharp eyes that glinted over the edge of her mug. She tracked their every movement as they came towards her, and her eyes settled on Matt as he folded up his cane and sat down next to Karen.
“Thanks for the save,” she said.
“Don’t mention it.” Matt smiled, all easy charm and affability, but his eyebrow twitched and Karen knew he was thinking that Foggy might have had a point about the whole finding-her-again thing after all.
“So what’s up?” Annabeth asked, drumming her fingers on her mug. “Have the cops been asking too many questions?”
“We’re more concerned about the questions we’d like to ask you,” he said. “We believe you’re in grave danger, and we would like to make our firm available to you for any assistance you might require. I trust my associate has already explained some of the legal options available to you at this time.”
Annabeth blinked and put down her coffee. Ever since Karen had found her—granted, that was only half an hour ago—she had gotten the impression that she wasn’t easily surprised, or at least didn’t like to show it. She hadn’t reacted with shock to Karen’s own arrival, even though there was no way she had known it was coming. Yes, Karen had clocked her as scared back at the hospital, but that was more due to the situation and her own understanding of what it felt like to be powerless than any clear expression. Now, she was visibly caught off guard, an undefinable emotion on her face as she looked at them, and Matt in particular.
“I thought you might have questions, or you wanted me to keep lying to the cops, but you want to help me? Again? And you’re actually lawyers? I thought that was just something you said to get me out of class.”
She said it incredulously, but somehow, Karen didn’t think she was concerned about the fact that she had repeatedly asked them to make false statements to the police and admitted to making them herself. Looking at her, hands wrapped around the coffee mug, eyes full of surprise, Karen felt like she was looking in a mirror. Like she was back in the precinct, cuffed to the table and just waiting to be locked up for a crime she knew she didn't commit. She had been scared and alone, terrified that whoever killed Daniel would be coming after her next, and then Matt and Foggy had showed up and saved her. Now the three of them had to do the same thing for Annabeth.
“Class?” Foggy echoed. Karen glanced at him, wondering why that was his main takeaway from what she had just said, but Annabeth didn’t seem to mind. She had recovered from her moment of shock, and her face slid back into its carefully neutral expression.
“Yeah, I’m supposed to be in calculus right now.”
Foggy looked like he wanted to keep examining that particular witness, but Matt couldn’t see it, and he pulled on the thread that interested him the most. “If you thought she was lying, why did you come here?”
“‘Cause I’m supposed to be in calculus right now. Mr Donahue is the worst teacher I’ve ever had; he does example problems in class and half of his answers are wrong. The average on the last test was a fifty-five and he wouldn’t even curve it.” Annabeth was back to fidgeting with her necklace, and Karen got the sense that she was being deliberately blithe, even if she said that last part with a scandalized undertone and spat out the Fs in “fifty-five” like they had personally offended her. “And besides,” she continued, still in that same lighthearted tone, “if someone shows up and says they want to go outside and talk, the smartest thing to do is go outside and talk.”
Her priorities and her judgment in general seemed somewhat skewed, Karen reflected, but she was used to that from Matt. But then again, Matt would say the same of her, and Foggy would say the same of both of them.
“Wait, wait, wait. Everybody hold on a second.” All heads turned towards Foggy, who was holding up his hands to call for silence. When he was sure he had everybody’s attention, they turned into double pointing fingers, directed straight at Annabeth. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Jesus, Karen,” he said, like he was going through all five stages of grief in a single second, and Karen felt that was a little unfair.
“What? It’s not like I kidnapped her or anything! She’s basically an adult, she can make her own decisions.”
“You entered her school building, claimed to be her lawyer, and brought her to a secondary location under those false pretenses. We can argue over the specifics of the changes, but that is definitely a crime.”
“Are you sure?” Annabeth asked. “I’ve actually been captured before, and believe me, you’re fine in my book.”
“You’ve been kidnapped before?”
“Well, yeah,” she said, in a tone that implied this was an experience everyone should have gone through at least once in their lives. Karen couldn’t fault her there. “But you guys are cool. I don’t care.”
“See?” It was oddly vindicating to hear a teenager call her “cool.” When she was her age, Karen had mostly thought of adults as a bunch of lame, uptight assholes that she had to pretend to like to get through a million mind-numbing interactions with every day. Or maybe that was just customer service.
Foggy spread his hands out in front of him. “I’m just making sure we all know what’s at risk here. When minors are involved, all bets are off, and it doesn’t always matter what they think about the situation. If her school, oh, I don’t know, contacts her guardians to make sure one of their students is supposed to leave school grounds in the middle of the day, and they say they don’t know what they’re talking about, you’re screwed.”
“Are you serious? She’s seventeen, not seven; she knows enough to make her own decisions.”
“Foggy’s right. The district would have a case, if only to try to save themselves from charges of negligence for allowing her to leave in the first place. What’s so funny?”
That last question wasn’t directed at them; Matt tilted his head towards Annabeth, and Karen glanced at the girl. She really was fighting a smile, biting her lip and pressing a hand to her mouth like Foggy had told the world’s cleverest joke instead of expressing the apparently real concern that one of his best friends might get arrested.
When she saw them looking at her incredulously, she lowered her hand and tried to arrange her face into a more normal expression, but the edges of her lips still twitched as she spoke. “Sorry, it’s just the thought of somebody getting arrested for doing something to me. It doesn't work like that. It’s funny.”
The implication of that statement was the most fucking depressing thing that Karen had ever heard, but if anything it proved her point. Somehow this girl had slipped through the cracks of the legal system, abandoned by anyone who might’ve had the ability to help her, and now she was alone at the tender mercies of that woman and whoever it was she worked for, a whole criminal organization gunning for her head with nowhere to run.
Hit by a wave of empathy, Karen reached over the table and placed her hand on Annabeth’s. “It’s never too late for justice to be served to the people who deserve it. Whoever hurt you, whoever’s hurting you now, we can help you get away from them.”
As soon as she said it, Karen realized she was coming on a little strong. Her passion for the subject bled out through her voice, and just as she feared, Annabeth shrunk away from her. Not in any physical sense, but her eyes darkened and her voice was clipped when she spoke. “Sorry, I’m not going to do that. Kelli and I have history together, so when she saw me, she attacked. But it’s not your circus, not your monkeys. Trust me, you don’t want to get involved with her kind.”
“But we do,” Matt said calmly. “Like I said, we know you’re in danger, and we want to help. All you have to do is tell us who that woman was and why she wanted to hurt you, and we can stop her from ever doing it again.”
It was the voice that had made Karen feel safe in his apartment, the voice she had trusted when he said everything was going to be fine, and she could tell it was working on Annabeth too. But then she rallied against it for some inexplicable reason and doubled down on her position. “No, you don’t understand. I’m not being dramatic or exaggerating for exaggeration’s sake; it’s just the plain facts. You can’t arrest someone who operates outside the confines of the law.”
“You just have to bring them into the light,” Matt said, and Karen could tell he was even more invested now. He tilted his head at Foggy. “The system works. We took down Wilson Fisk together, and he was the worst of the worst. Gang members, cops, FBI; he had them all, and now he’s behind bars. After him, anything is possible.”
Annabeth blinked. “Who?”
“What?” Foggy blinked back. “It was all over the news for months, how could you miss it?”
She grimaced. “I’ve been kind of busy for the past—” she quickly counted on her fingers “—five years? Especially these last two. Trust me, watching the news has been the least of my priorities.”
Five years? If she was seventeen now, she would have been “busy” since she was twelve, a word that Karen could only assume was code for whatever nefarious scheme she was entangled in.
Things were starting to add up in a horrifying way. The reasons that a little girl would be kidnapped at such a young age, kept alive by her captors for five years but so cut off from the outside world that she was unable to watch the news, seemingly free now but still pursued to this day, utterly convinced her attackers were untouchable by the law, afraid to bring more attention to herself by attempting to take them down… Karen didn’t even want to think about it.
One look at her friends told her that they were doing the same mental math as her. Matt was angrier than she had ever seen him, and then Foggy said what they were all thinking: “Let’s get these assholes.”
Annabeth smiled again, and this time Karen detected a hint of sadness on the edge of her lips. She felt incredibly guilty. They should have tried harder to keep her at the hospital and ask her more questions, despite and indeed because of her strange, off-putting behavior, but they had been too concerned with themselves to realize it then. Maybe their only chance to help her had slipped as soon as she ran out that door, because now the moment had passed and she was starting to believe her situation was hopeless again.
“I appreciate the enthusiasm,” she said. “Really, you have no idea. But you can’t do anything to help, and you really shouldn’t try.”
“We can get you police protection today,” Foggy promised. “We already have proof of violent and threatening physical action against you. If you can just give us something, anything else, we can go right to the DA and take them down.”
Incredibly, she let out a noise that was pure bratty teenage energy, somewhere between a sigh and a groan. That Karen could relate to, even if she was momentarily surprised at the flippancy on Annabeth’s part. But then she reconsidered; everyone had their coping mechanisms, who was she to judge? “No, it doesn’t work like that. Not for them. I can’t explain it in more detail, ‘cause you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“We’ve seen a lot in our time,” Matt said quietly. “And I’m very good at telling whether or not people are lying to me. If you tell me the truth, I’ll believe you.”
Annabeth stared at him for the longest minute of Karen’s life. That expression from before, the one she had noticed when Matt and Foggy joined them at the table, was flickering across her face as she rolled her necklace beads between her fingers. Finally, incredibly, something in her seemed to give way, and she said softly, “Okay, if you’re sure.”
Karen braced herself to hear the most depraved tale of human misery, already fighting to keep her face in a calm, normal expression instead letting it slip into one of disgust and fear.
“Greek mythology is real. The gods are real, the monsters are real, the magic is real, and my mom is the goddess of wisdom.” Annabeth sat back in her chair, crossing her arms and raising her eyebrows as if daring them to object.
Karen wanted to object. She and Foggy looked at Matt. He made a weird little gesture that was somewhere between a nod and shrug. Truth.
She was right; Karen would never have believed her if Matt wasn’t a human lie detector. On one hand, it was one of the most insane things Karen had ever heard in her life, but on the other hand it was miles better than what she had been imagining, and if Matt said it was true, she was more than willing to accept it.
Foggy seemed to be going through the same thought process across the table, and compensated by taking an extremely long sip of his water. They made eye contact, and his eyebrows were clearly panicking as he worked through the five stages of grief for the second time that lunch.
Yes, her brain was breaking a little bit (Was this girl seriously confirming the existence of a higher power over lunch? Should she stop calling herself an atheist? Should she start going to church again? Would that make them mad? Hello?), but at the same time, it was easier to just shove the panicking part of brain into a little box and lock it away so the remaining five percent of her brain could actually absorb all the information coming at them right now. She had wanted this, after all, hadn’t she brought Annabeth here to get an explanation? Surely she had to accept one when it was offered to her.
Matt, on the other hand, seemed to be more annoyed than freaked out by her incredible confession. After a moment of visible relaxation, he heaved a deep sigh that seemed to come from his very bones. He scrubbed a hand across his face, folded his hands on the table, and asked wearily, “Did you punch a dragon in the heart too?”
“No, but I have a sword that’s made of drakon bone. A similar species.” Annabeth looked like she wanted to say more, but then she paused. She narrowed her eyes, like she couldn’t believe her luck, and said, “You actually believe me? You’re not joking around or making fun of me?”
“Like I said, we’ve seen a lot. I’ve—we’ve done a lot. Yes, we believe you.”
For the first time since they had sat down, Annabeth relaxed completely. Her arms uncrossed, and she gave them another one of those rare genuine smiles. Karen wondered what Matt was sensing right now, but he clearly picked up on the change in her attitude too. He gave her a weak smile, one that was immediately squashed when she rested her elbows on the table and said, “I guess that makes sense, especially considering your whole thing.”
“Who says I have a thing?” he said quickly, employing the knee-jerk response of anyone who totally had a thing but didn’t want others to know about it.
Annabeth was clearly not impressed, and even Karen had to admit it wasn’t his finest moment. How had he kept his double life a secret from them for so long if one question from a teenager sent him scrambling for a good lie?
“One, that question was way too specific to not be about something; two, you heard Blackjack on the roof before; and three, the faces that you all just made when I asked that mean that there’s definitely something going on with you.”
Once again, Karen cursed herself for her overly expressive facial expressions. Back at the hospital, she hadn’t been able to stop herself from reacting when Annabeth had implied she saw Matt fight like Daredevil, and now she knew she had shown his hand for a second time. It was little comfort that Annabeth was only some kid and not a well-nigh unstoppable crime boss and that she didn’t watch the news and seemingly didn’t actually know who Daredevil was in the first place. It was still too close for comfort. Just like Foggy had said, she could put the rest of the pieces together at any time.
Matt’s jaw clenched. He sat there, apparently chewing over every possible word he could say in response while the rest of them stared at him. Karen knew that she and Foggy would back up whatever he told her, but she hoped it would at least be something easy to riff on.
When he finally spoke, he spoke slowly, as though he couldn’t believe he was telling her this much. Maybe he felt like he owed her something for confessing her own secret weirdness, or maybe he had just come to the conclusion that she had already guessed his abilities and he wouldn’t be giving her any new information, just confirming her suspicions. “I can do a lot of things. Law school isn’t the only place where I got an education.”
Even knowing all that she knew, the explanation was confusing to Karen—how did any of that equate with physically fighting criminals in the subway?—but Annabeth seemed to accept that was all she was going to get from him. She looked incredibly pleased with herself, actually, and now Karen was sure she had already figured it out and just wanted him to tell her she was right. She had no idea how Annabeth had clocked him so quickly, but it probably had to do with her own background. When you lived with gods and magic, maybe you were always on the lookout for anything that was even slightly out of the ordinary.
There was a brief and uncomfortable silence that followed his words. Karen looked at Foggy, who had been taking one long drink of water this entire time. She wasn’t sure if he was actually swallowing or just holding the glass in front of his mouth to keep his thoughts inside.
She was trying to think of something to say that would support Matt’s vague truth at worst and steer them to a safer subject at best, but he beat her to it.
“So, goddess of wisdom. That’s Athena, right?”
Annabeth beamed. “Exactly! Do you know the ancient stories? Who’s your poet of choice? Hesiod? Homer?”
“That would be D'Aulaires.”
Annabeth couldn’t stop herself from narrowing her eyes a little bit, even as she nodded and made a noise of agreement. None of that made much sense to Karen, who had never been into myths. That sounded insane given what she had just learned, but as a prospective English major, she had never focused on the classics, preferring more modern authors instead. Well, subjectively modern; the Brontës and Hawthorne were still a couple centuries past their expiration dates.
Evidently she was making a face too, because Foggy took one look at her and started explaining himself. “Oh, come on! It was fifth grade, our teacher took us to the library, I was bored, and the book looked cool. It’s not that weird. We all had a mythology phase, didn’t we?”
“No.”
“I had a book of saints’ names that I tried to memorize, but I only got to St. Sebastian before I gave up.”
“I’m still in my mythology phase.”
Incredibly, Karen found she could laugh at that, and so could her friends. Now that she had taken a second to process everything, it didn’t seem that crazy after all. If she could fight a crime lord, meet five vigilantes and fall in love with two of them, and hide from evil ninjas in a police precinct, maybe she could believe that all of this was real too.
It was just another, bigger, weirder leap into the unknown, and the only thing she had to do was accept things that would have made her think she had sold someone a little too much coke if they had told her about them in Fagan’s Corner all those years ago. But she had done it before, and she could do it again.
She reached into her mind and unlocked that tiny box. The panicking part of her brain came out, a little shaken but otherwise normal again, and she took a deep breath. Matt put his hand on her arm as she breathed out, and Karen suddenly realized that the conversation had been moving forward without her. She appreciated the reminder to rejoin the group, even though it was a little disconcerting that he could tell she had zoned out by the sound of her breath alone.
“—think I need to go back to the library,” Foggy was saying, with Annabeth nodding seriously beside him.
“That's good for a history lesson,” she said, “but keep in mind that all of those stories happened a long time ago. There’s been a few changes over the years. Now Olympus is at the top of the Empire State Building, and instead of a cave in Mount Pelion, we have a summer camp in Long Island. Chiron still teaches us, though.”
“Are you sure you should be telling us all this?” Matt asked. “The location of your bases, the name of your mentor; this all sounds like privileged information.”
“You seem like you’re good at keeping secrets,” she said, and it took everything in Karen not to burst out laughing again. Foggy choked on his water. Obviously Matt knew they were fighting the urge, because he turned his head and raised his eyebrows at them as Annabeth continued. “But it’s not like the gods will smite me for telling. It’s not really a secret, per se, it’s just something we don’t like to advertise. Some mortals can get so weird about it, and I’d rather not be called delusional before I have my fifth cup of coffee.
“Honestly, you’ve probably crossed paths with one of us before, you just didn’t know it. During the school year there’s a good hundred of us running around, trying to live our lives as normally as possible without attracting any attention from monsters or mortals. Key word being trying.” She waved her hand at him, summing up their entire first interaction with a rueful smile. Then she addressed the table more generally. “Like, do you remember two summers ago, when there was that massive power outage that lasted a couple days?”
Matt shook his head, but Foggy and Karen nodded. A couple of days after the earthquake and the power outage and the explosion at Midland Circle, Manhattan had experienced a second, days-long blackout due to residual instabilities. Already-damaged buildings had crumbled to the ground, and part of the Williamsburg Bridge had finally given out from the stress of the quake.
Looking back on it now, Karen couldn’t quite remember what she had been doing all that time, but then again, she didn’t remember a lot from that first week anyway. Mostly just sleeping and crying and hoping for that one phone call that never came.
“Just after Midland Circle,” Foggy said in an undertone, giving Matt a significant look. He couldn’t see it, but he got the message. Matt didn’t react in any way that Annabeth could see, all the way across the table like that, but Karen was sitting next to him and she could see his hands flexing underneath the table.
“You remember it as a blackout,” Annabeth said matter-of-factly, like she was a professor giving a lesson to her class instead of a teenager explaining modern Greek mythology to a vigilante lawyer and his friends, “and that’s what they said on the news, but it was actually the mortal explanation for a battle we were fighting. A whole army of monsters was invading the city, and they used a lot of magic to make sure that you mortals wouldn’t notice what was going on.” She paused, took a sip of coffee, and continued. “Chiron said the earthquake was Typhon's doing, that he was sending a shockwave ahead of the advancing army to shake us up.”
“Oh, really?” Matt looked like he was torn between laughing and screaming, which was par for the course and also how Karen felt at the moment. This was the first thing Annabeth had been wrong about since she got here, but obviously they weren’t going to tell her that. Karen wasn’t sure why, but that kind of made her feel better about arranging this whole thing when her reasoning for it had turned out to be so completely wrong.
“Yeah, and at first we thought they had reached our shores ahead of schedule,” Annabeth said, “but our scouts told us they were still in New Jersey. Which was honestly terrible for them, ‘cause I’ve spent enough time in Jersey to know that it sucks in a major way. Their Greyhound bus service is abysmal.”
She was making it into a joke–-talk about coping mechanisms—but Karen couldn’t laugh this time. This was starting to uncomfortably familiar, and one look at Foggy told her he was thinking the same thing. They knew enough about what Matt had been fighting at Midland Circle to draw some uncomfortably close parallels, and the fact that their secret wars had overlapped like that was even more of a cause for concern.
“Is this a recurring problem?” she asked, glancing nervously between the two of them. Annabeth couldn’t get the significance of her question, but that was okay. Even if it sounded that way on the surface, it wasn’t intended for her.
“It sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime event with incredibly extenuating circumstances,” Matt said, his voice slightly too hard to be described as calm. He folded his hands on the table and leaned forward, like he could reassure them by being as close to them as possible. “It won’t happen again.”
“Yeah, you don’t need to worry about it. The war’s over now, and it really was a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Annabeth agreed. “Most monsters won’t bother you unless you bother them first. They’d much rather kill demigods. The rivalry between gods and monsters is centuries old, and they hate us just as much as they hate our parents.”
“So the woman who attacked us was one of these monsters?” he asked, clearly keen to move the conversation away from more personally uncomfortable subjects. Karen and Foggy allowed it; it wasn’t like they could keep talking about Midland Circle in front of her, and Karen wasn’t sure she wanted to rehash all of that even once they got back to the office.
Annabeth had raised her coffee to drink, and she nodded over the edge of the mug. “Kelli’s an empousa, a monster made of dark magic, bronze, and donkeys. They like to drink the blood of men and the teenage girls who defeat them in battle. I’m not sure if they ever went over those in the kids’ mythology books.” She sent Foggy a questioning glance with that last sentence, but he shook his head. She shrugged and set her mug down, looking to Matt for support instead. “You were there, you experienced her charmspeak—her magic—first-hand. She seduced you into a trance so she could drink your blood without resistance. It’s her signature move. You were this close to being drained like a juice box, you know.”
“What?” Foggy yelped. Karen leveled an accusing glare at Matt. He hadn’t told them that; he had only said she cut him with a knife. She knew he was trying to keep them in the loop with the big stuff, which was why he had told them what was apparently a vague version of the truth, but almost getting your blood sucked out by a vampire sounded like a pretty big deal.
The waitress chose that moment to bring them their food. Behind his glasses, she could tell that Matt closed his eyes briefly, probably offering up a silent prayer of thanks that the Lord in His infinite wisdom had stopped his friends from freaking the fuck out on him for lying by omission.
Karen knew it was only temporary, though. So much for not rehashing anything. Foggy was going to lay into him when they got back to the office, and she was certainly going to make sure he could tell she was upset with every single one of his super-powered senses.
As soon as his angel of mercy walked away, he changed the topic again before anyone could get a word in edgewise. Foggy scowled down at his plate, but once again he stopped himself from commenting by taking a drink of water.
“What happened to her? I didn’t hear her leave, she was just gone.”
“Oh,” Annabeth said, taking a sip of coffee. “That’s because I killed her.”
“What?” Karen realized that all three of them had spoken at once, saying the same word in three different voices, but Annabeth didn’t even break a sweat. She just drank her coffee, put the mug down, and shrugged.
“She was drinking your blood.”
“So you beat her to death,” Matt said, his jaw clenching, “with a brick?” He actually seemed more worked up about this than he had been about learning Greek mythology was real and the girl sitting in front of them had fought yet another secret war.
“What? No, I stabbed her.” Annabeth’s eyebrows furrowed, and she looked at him with genuine confusion. Karen could practically see the gears turning in her head before her eyes lit up. “You know, that’s really interesting. They always said that the Mist distorts the sight of mortals, but they never mentioned the other senses. I guess I assumed you would be immune, especially with your whole thing, but maybe that’s what makes you more susceptible. It knows there’s something different about you, so it’s overcompensating to do its job.”
“Susceptible?” Matt looked like the mere suggestion that he had some kind of weakness in his powers was akin to stabbing him.
“I actually had a knife,” Annabeth explained, and that had to be one of the top ten sentences that sounded like it was supposed to be reassuring but was actually more concerning when you thought about it for a second. “It was just magic messing with you again. The Mist makes everything in my world appear normal in yours, basically filling in the gaps of your mind with whatever reality you expect to experience. Mortals would totally freak out if they saw a lady with horns walking her hellhound in Central Park, so the Mist makes them see a normal woman with a fancy hat walking a Great Dane or something. Percy’s sword usually turns into a baseball bat or a lacrosse stick.” She paused, and that gear-turning look came back into her eyes again. “You run into people swinging bricks around a lot?”
Matt was silent.
Annabeth waved a hand through the air, like the suggestion that she stabbed a woman to death in the subway was a mildly annoying fly she was swatting away. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. They don’t have human souls. You can kill a monster in the moment and win the battle, but you can never truly defeat them.”
“If you killed her,” Karen asked, “why wasn’t there a body?”
“They explode into golden dust.” She made a quiet exploding sound, blowing out her cheeks and popping her lips. It was accompanied by a hand gesture that Karen had to believe was accurate based on the highly specific motion. “You got covered in it, actually, you were very sparkly. It can be a little messy sometimes, but it usually makes cleanup a breeze.”
Foggy made a face. “I’m sorry, are you saying that you two were almost killed by sparkly vampires?”
“She’s telling the truth,” Matt said, though he still seemed distracted by the whole murder thing. To be completely honest, Karen had been a little surprised by her casual confession, like taking another life was no big deal, but she couldn’t find fault with her actions. It had been self-defense, and defense of Matt, and she couldn’t blame her for that.
“Don’t start.” Annabeth looked supremely displeased. “First of all, they hate being called vampires, and second of all, we predate those stupid books by two millennia. The point is that they always reform and they always come back. Percy likes to say that they respawn like video game characters. I’ve faced Kelli three times now, and I’ll probably see her three dozen more times before I die.”
“Eternal life,” Matt said. “Regeneration, again and again.”
“Exactly. The monsters that we kill today are the ones you read about in all the ancient myths. Same monsters, new demigods, and it never ends. We’ve always fought each other and we always will.”
Now it was Annabeth’s turn to change the topic completely, going back to a point Karen had forgotten she was making. But of course, this had all started because they had been trying to convince her to take a monster down in court and she had been trying to explain why it was impossible.
“So, yeah. Don’t you see why you can’t use mortal measures to defeat them? Monsters only obey the Ancient Laws; they don’t answer to any mortal ones. Best case scenario, you spend a lot of time and energy to accomplish absolutely nothing. Worst case scenario, they get tired of your mortal meddling and eat you, and I probably won’t be there to stop it.”
There was a pregnant pause after that ominous announcement, which was probably her intention. While she had been making her little speech, Annabeth had not once taken her eyes off Matt, as though she was trying to impress her message on him with the power of her stormy glare alone. After a beat, it flicked to her watch, and she winced. “I actually have to go now. I have a test in history, and Mrs Kinecky always makes sure her tests take the whole period.”
“Of course, yes!” Foggy said, his voice a little too loud as he waved his hands through the air. “Go! The last thing we’d want to do is get in the way of your education.”
Annabeth laughed like he was making a joke, but Karen could tell he was having flashbacks to their whole kidnapping-a-minor discussion.
“If you want to talk again,” she said as she got up, “you know where to find me.”
“Of course,” Karen said, and Foggy gave her a Look. Oh, he was definitely thinking about it.
Annabeth left the diner and they watched as she ran up to the curb, pulled something out of her pocket, and threw it at the empty parking space in front of her. A gray taxi drove up, parking in the spot even though Karen hadn’t noticed it in the oncoming traffic, and Annabeth hopped in the back seat. It drove away, and that was the end of one of the strangest conversations Karen had ever had.
“Why do you always end up right in the middle of the weirdest shit I’ve ever heard of in my life?” Foggy asked. “Blind old men teaching you how to fight, evil ninjas, magic girls in the subway. It almost makes me yearn for the days of Grotto and Castle again.”
“Don’t blame me; nobody could hate this mystical bullshit more than I do. But I can’t deny that everything she said was true. And I did fight a monster.” Matt let out a long, low groan, like a grandfather lifting himself out of his leather recliner. “God, there’s always something, isn’t there? At least her people aren’t tunneling beneath our city.”
Karen had to agree; thank goodness for small mercies indeed. Trying to bring the mood up a little, she forked up a bite of her eggs and said, “I may have lied about some things today, but lunch is still on me.”
“Oh, it better be,” Foggy said, and just like that, it was as though they really were having a normal friendly lunch. Matt started talking about one of their latest cases, and then he and Foggy got into a debate over probable sentencing using legal jargon that Karen had spent the past however-many-years trying to learn.
So Annabeth was fine. Actually, she seemed pretty far away from fine, but like she said, there wasn’t anything the law office of Nelson, Murdock, and Page could do for her. Karen was all for helping those who needed it, no matter their backstory, but even she had to acknowledge when something was out of their pay grade.
Now she was worried about Matt. Well, she was always worried about Matt, but this just added another layer to it. Despite Annabeth’s warning and despite his professed hatred for anything remotely mystical, Karen knew that if a similar situation arose again, he would jump in without hesitation. Even knowing the cost, even knowing he couldn’t win, if it would help one person get to safety, he would do it.
Karen had never been a religious woman, but in that moment she prayed to any and all gods who were listening that he would make it out a second time.