Delays on the Journey

The first two connections went the way Matt liked travel to go. Nobody talked to him, the bus did not break down, and the station where he changed was loud enough that one more teenager with a duffel disappeared into it without attracting attention. Lunch was eaten standing up near a timetable board, the next departure checked once rather than five times, and by early afternoon he was somehow ahead of the route he had written down. Matt distrusted that immediately. Getting lucky with travel usually meant the day was saving the inconvenience for later.

The weather provided it somewhere over New Jersey. Ordinary storms at least had the decency to build toward something, while this one seemed to arrive halfway through the process. One minute the clouds were the usual dirty grey hanging over a long bus corridor; the next they had stacked themselves into something too dark and too sudden, with the first crack of thunder arriving before the rain appeared to have decided where it was falling. People on the platform crowded beneath the overhang while water hammered the concrete beyond them, leaving Matt to watch the timetable lose its usefulness one connection at a time.

Waiting would cost him the next two buses, and losing those meant reaching the camp road after dark. Travelling alone with celestial bronze was already stupid enough without adding a nighttime walk through the woods for variety. The duffel went higher on his shoulder before he took the back exit from the station and started covering the next stretch on foot.

Two blocks later, something about the rain began bothering him. His sleeves should have been plastered to his arms by then, yet they still moved dry against his skin. Water streamed along the pavement, gutters overflowed onto the road, and a delivery driver was swearing at a flooded crossing while Matt stood in the middle of all of it with dry hair. Even the straps of the duffel had escaped the downpour. The cheap paperback near the top of the bag should have been halfway to becoming pulp and, judging by the corner he checked beneath the flap, remained irritatingly intact.

A tree farther along offered almost no shelter to anyone else, but Matt stopped beneath it anyway and turned one hand over beneath the dripping branches. Nothing touched his palm. “Great,” he muttered while watching rain strike the ground around his shoes. “That’s not unsettling at all.” Standing there trying to turn the problem into a mystery would not make Long Island any closer, though, and dry remained preferable to soaked even when the reason for it was questionable.

The town had more or less surrendered to the weather by then. Shopfronts were dark, cars sat hunched along the curb beneath sheets of water, and thunder kept moving somewhere overhead as though it had taken a wrong turn and was too annoyed to admit it. Matt kept walking while the rest of the route deteriorated around him. Buses were delayed, one line stopped running entirely, and the footpath held in reserve turned into a wet verge followed by a wooded stretch the map optimistically described as a shortcut. It probably qualified if the objective was to be farther from other people when daylight disappeared.

By the time the rain weakened into a steady drip from the trees, reaching the Hill before dark had stopped being realistic. Camping off the road had never been part of the preferred route, but most of the preferred route had been washed out, cancelled or otherwise rendered useless, which made preference increasingly academic.

A stand of trees well back from the path offered the least bad option. The ground sat high enough that runoff had not collected beneath it, while a thinner section of undergrowth on one side gave him enough visibility to notice anything large before it reached the campsite. Between two trunks that looked unlikely to collapse during the night, the hammock went up quickly. The duffel remained strapped close enough that a hand could reach it without sitting upright, with the sword positioned where drawing it would not require fighting through half his clothes first.

The hammock dealt with sleeping. Everything beyond it required admitting that the night might become more complicated than he wanted.

Trip lines went across the narrower approaches at about knee height, followed by a scatter of dry branches placed where anything trying the obvious route would make enough noise to wake him. Farther out, a snare learned at camp went into a gap between the brush where an animal might plausibly wander through. Matt disliked that one most because pretending it was intended for wildlife required ignoring the reason he had bothered setting it.

Once the preparations were finished, the woods seemed quieter for having been measured into approaches, blind spots and places something could hide. The storm had left behind the heavy, rinsed smell of wet bark and soil, while water continued ticking from the canopy in no particular rhythm. Matt climbed into the hammock with clothes still dry enough to be suspicious, shifted until the dagger rested comfortably against his ribs, and listened.

The traps would help against anything careless. Something using the obvious approach might catch a line, step through the branches or blunder into the snare before getting close enough to become his immediate problem. None of that offered much comfort against the sort of thing capable of tracking a demigod through several towns and a storm, but there was little point improving the perimeter until exhaustion made him too slow to use it.

“That should catch anything that comes through here,” he murmured, settling deeper into the hammock. “Anything and everything stupid enough to try.”

A branch somewhere off to the left released the last of the rain caught in its leaves, followed by the soft creak of rope as his weight shifted. Checking the traps again would accomplish little beyond proving they were still where he had put them. Anything careless enough to walk straight through the perimeter would announce itself soon enough, and anything more deliberate would make the distinction between a good trap and a bad one considerably less important.

Sleep came easier than Matt expected. The hammock was not particularly comfortable, the dagger pressed against his ribs whenever he shifted too far onto one side, and water continued dripping from the canopy long after the storm had moved on, but exhaustion eventually flattened those irritations into background noise.

What woke him could have been several hours later. For a few seconds the dark above the hammock meant nothing beyond branches and clouded sky, until a sharp snap carried through the trees from somewhere beyond the campsite. Another sound followed before he had fully placed the first, dry branches scattering across the ground and then the taut twang of one of the trip lines farther to the right.

One hand had already closed around the dagger by the time the pattern settled into place. Something had crossed the outer approach, pushed through the noisy scatter and kept moving far enough to catch a second line instead of retreating. The direction put it on the side facing the road, close to where the undergrowth narrowed around the snare he had set farthest out.

A foot slipped quietly from the hammock and found the ground while the rest of his weight remained supported by the rope. The duffel was still within reach, sword buried where he could get to it quickly if the dagger proved insufficient, though for the moment the sounds beyond the trees mattered more. Brush shifted again, followed by a dragging scrape from the snare and enough movement through the wet leaves to rule out most of the small animals that might have wandered through by accident.

The corner of Matt’s mouth pulled upward despite himself. He had told himself the traps were enough to catch anything and everything that came looking, and something out there had obligingly started proving the point. Another pull tightened the snare somewhere in the darkness, heavier this time, while the surrounding brush shook hard enough to send trapped rain pattering onto the ground.

“Anything and everything,” he murmured, more satisfied than surprised as he eased upright.

Keeping low, he shifted clear of the hammock and turned toward the section of woods where the trap had been triggered, letting his eyes adjust around the overlapping trunks and wet undergrowth before looking properly at whatever he had caught.

As he spied what was in his traps Matt's eyes widened....