An unclaimed Demigod

Matthew Davies had spent most of the morning pretending he was not packing for Camp Half-Blood.

Technically, he was packing for summer camp. That was the version written on the forms, the version his foster parents had been given, and the version Matt intended to keep using because explaining the truth tended to create more problems than it solved. Long Island, outdoor activities, supervised accommodation, several weeks away from the city. All perfectly ordinary provided nobody asked what sort of activities required a bronze sword wrapped in two shirts at the bottom of a duffel bag.

The foster placement had turned out better than most. Nobody shouted unless there was an actual reason, nobody searched his room, and his foster mother had stopped asking why he kept checking the locks after the second week. More importantly, neither of them had tried to convince him that dyslexia could be cured through greater enthusiasm for reading aloud in class. Matt considered that enough to qualify them for sainthood.

Leaving for the summer still meant getting to camp, which was where the irritating part began. Monsters had an unpleasant habit of finding demigods eventually. Older campers sometimes made it sound mysterious, as though monsters possessed some supernatural instinct for dramatic timing. Matt's experience suggested they mostly relied on persistence and the fact that demigods eventually did something stupid. Travelling alone, carrying celestial bronze and following the most obvious route toward Long Island qualified as several varieties of stupid at once.

So the direct route was out, instead, the morning had been spent checking bus schedules, working out where he could change lines without sitting around too long, and deciding which parts of the trip were worth doing on foot. Nothing especially clever. Clever plans usually depended on everything going correctly, which meant they stopped being clever the moment something went wrong. Matt preferred having several ordinary options and enough money left over to abandon all of them.

His duffel reflected the same philosophy. Clothes occupied most of the visible space. Toiletries sat near the top. A paperback he would probably spend half an hour fighting through had been added because normal teenagers apparently travelled with something to read, and appearing normal still had its uses. Beneath everything else rested the sword, a few squares of ambrosia wrapped carefully enough that nobody would mistake them for food, and the battered camp necklace he generally kept out of sight until he reached the boundary.

Years of doing this had removed most of the excitement. Campers arriving for the first time worried about monsters behind every tree and expected every stranger on a bus to sprout claws. Eventually you learned that constant paranoia was exhausting and, worse, made you obvious. Better to watch reflections in windows, pay attention when a crowd started behaving strangely, and know where the exits were without staring at them every ten seconds.

Being unclaimed helped, or at least that was the theory. Whatever divine parent had contributed to his existence had never bothered announcing themselves, leaving him in Hermes cabin with everyone else whose family tree contained an inconvenient blank space. Perhaps the lack of divine attention made him harder for monsters to notice. Perhaps he had simply been lucky. Camp Half-Blood contained enough conflicting theories on the subject that Matt had stopped caring which one was correct.

By early afternoon the duffel was packed, the route had been changed twice, and enough cash had been divided between his wallet, shoe and jacket that losing one would not strand him somewhere unpleasant. His foster father had offered to drive him directly to Long Island, which Matt had declined on the grounds that traffic would be terrible.

That part, at least, was completely true. A ride would have been easier. It would also have meant keeping two mortals beside him for several hours while travelling in the general direction of the safest concentration of demigods on the East Coast. Monsters generally preferred the demigod, but Matt had never noticed much concern for whoever happened to be standing nearby when they found one.

The decision had therefore been fairly simple. The explanation had been less so.

A knock against the half-open door interrupted another check of the route. His foster mother had stopped in the hallway with a laundry basket tucked against one hip, though her attention went straight to the duffel and the shirt still lying beside it. “You’re still packing?” Matt told her he was finished, glanced at the shirt, then corrected himself with a reluctant, “Mostly.” The look she gave him said she remembered hearing exactly the same thing an hour earlier. Unfortunately, so did he.

The shirt went through another unnecessary fold before being forced into the remaining space along the side of the bag. When she pointed out that nothing had actually changed since the last time he packed it, Matt informed her that circumstances had changed.

Her eyes moved from him to the shirt. “It moved six inches.”

That was technically a change, which earned her a flat “Exactly” and him the familiar expression she had developed over the last few months whenever she suspected arguing would only encourage him.

Most foster homes eventually acquired some version of that look. This one carried considerably less irritation with it, which Matt still had not entirely decided what to do with.

The laundry basket came down on the chair, whatever had originally brought her upstairs apparently forgotten. His foster father, she informed him, still thought driving him out to Long Island made more sense than letting him spend half the day changing buses and trains. Of course he did.

Breakfast had already included a lengthy explanation of why an eighteen-year-old navigating New York public transport somehow constituted an unreasonable risk, followed by Matt pointing out that he had been doing exactly that for years. Under normal circumstances, a ride probably would have been easier. Normal circumstances rarely included monsters capable of smelling demigods.

“I’ll be fine,” Matt said, adjusting the zipper rather than looking up.

“Matthew," she began earnestly, "I didn’t ask whether you could manage it. I asked whether you’d let us drive you.”

“No, but it’s still the answer.” He gave the zipper one last tug and left it alone before checking it became another excuse to reopen the bag. Keeping the answer casual was easy enough. Explaining why he would rather spend half the day changing buses than sit safely in a car with his foster parents was considerably harder.

Travelling alone meant one person had to notice when something started following them, one person had to change direction when a station felt wrong, and one person had to get clear if the Mist stopped hiding whatever had taken an interest. Adding two mortals made every part of that harder.

They could not see half the warning signs until a situation had already gone bad, and even then there was no guarantee they would understand what they were looking at. Matt had survived enough trips to camp to know that the safest way to protect people who could not see the danger was usually to keep them away from it.

Telling his foster parents any of that would only replace one argument with several worse ones. Monsters led to Camp Half-Blood, Camp Half-Blood led to celestial bronze and Greek gods, and Greek gods led inevitably to explaining why Matt himself could not name whichever immortal had contributed half his blood and then declined to identify themselves. By the time that conversation finished, whether he took a bus or accepted a lift would probably rank somewhere near the bottom of everyone's concerns.

Letting them think he was being stubborn required considerably less explanation, and after living with him for several months, neither foster parent was likely to find that difficult to believe.