• Prolog

    Persephone and Hades were deep in conversation.
    “No, we can’t tell Zeus about Lea, he’ll only get angry and what good would that do?” Persephone said firmly to her husband.
    “But I’m worried,” Hades replied as he paced, “her powers are getting stronger by the day and she’s apparently already turned half of the student body into cats, some of them even by accident. She has to be removed from the mortal world before her and that bloody friend of hers, what’s his name, Jake, son of Apollo, destroy the middle school and then New Jersey! The nymphs that are there repairing the damage that those two cause are SWAMPED! ”
    “Very well, but what will we do with her? Kill her? I won’t have it no matter what you or your stupid brothers say. All right, maybe not stupid, but all the same, what are we to do?” Persephone asked.
    “Artemis owes me a favor; she trains nearly all young daughters of the gods. I’m sure my niece will train our daughter. Or perhaps Athena, she could train Lea and that Jake boy. Apparently they’re inseparable and she’d hate me if I tore them apart,” Hades told his lovely wife.
    “All right you relentless man. We’ll tell Zeus, but he won’t be pleased that we hid this from him,” Persephone relented.












    Chapter one Cats and Flames

    Lea was a tall, young, vicious eighth grader at a boarding school for orphan kids. The reason that I will only describe a few of the “incidents” that she was responsible for is that I would rather not get angry phone calls about the nightmares that my story has caused young children and that Lea was actually a very good person at heart, she just didn’t like it when people annoyed her. She and her best friend Jake were good students in class and always did their homework, but the kindness stopped there.
    Students who annoyed Lea or Jake tended to either spontaneously have their pants light on fire or they mysteriously disappeared and then cats were often seen near their classrooms or dorms. You see, although they didn’t know it, the two of them were the children of the Greek gods. Lea was a daughter of Hades so she had power over cats because they are dark and mysterious creatures, she was also the daughter of Persephone so she liked the wild and birds seemed to flock to her. Jake was the son of Apollo and a minor goddess of no real importance so he had control over fire (here I use the word control in the loosest form because he had very little over his power).
    Lea was a teenager who really couldn’t care less… about anything. She always looked like she couldn’t really be bothered to even look in the mirror to see what a mess she looked. Every day Lea wore jeans with holes in them and a ratty, old, black sweat shirt that was three sizes too big. Most of the other kids sniggered about her appearance until she looked at them, then they just cowered in fear. Lea had straight, coppery brown hair that reached to her waist and hazel, piercing eyes that seemed to see right to your heart and then scorn what they saw. She was just as tall as Jake, maybe an inch taller. She had no roommate unlike most girls, and her room was a pig sty. She had the temper of a dragon with a tooth ache and the record to prove it. Her fighting was school legend and would be told of for years to come.
    Jake on the other hand was a neat freak. He kept his room so neat that it looked spit shined and he always looked pretty good. There was always one clump of hair that stuck out though and that frustrated him eternally. He was about average height with dark brown hair and soft brow eyes that seemed to laugh and cry at the same time. He had a gentle nature but he was always up for a good prank. He had a temper but not nearly so much of one as Lea. Even though he was a gentle kid, Jake was extremely adept at giving the “evil eye”, so most people stayed away from him even when Lea wasn’t around.
    One day Lea was up to another prank, though a friendly one. She was at Jake’s door because he was her victim. She unlocked the door and as soon as she saw him coming down the hall she squeezed some super glue onto his doorknob. She had some of the stuff you use to unstick the glue in her back pocket so she could unstick him after she’d had her laugh. He approached with his stack of math books and waved to Lea over Algebra for the Inept, Trigonometry for the Totally Incompetent and Calculus for the Completely Hopeless. Jake walked over and opened the door but when he tried to pull his hand away, it stuck. The face that he made would have made even the hardiest of men run away screaming and crying, but Lea simply fell over laughing hopelessly.
    “Would you stop it with the pranks, all this superglue that you’ve been sticking to me is giving me a rash,” Jake growled.
    “Dude, I can’t help it, you’re just such an easy target,” Lea laughed as she wiped her streaming eyes.
    “How’d you get my door open? I never gave you the key,” Jake asked.
    “Hairpins. They are the one advantage to having long hair, no lock can withstand them. I even bent one into the shape of your dorm key,” Lea replied.
    Lea opened the tube of solvent and applied it to Jake’s hand. He rubbed it and then opened the door gingerly. After setting down his books on the desk in the corner, Jake turned to Lea, who was walking about and scuffing her sneaker on the floor uneasily.
    “What’s bothering you?” He asked Lea, “You only ever pull out the super glue gag when you really need a stress reliever.”
    “It’s that new girl, Athy. She isn’t normal. It’s like she has magical powers or something. That really bothers me,” Lea confided.
    “We, of all people, shouldn’t be calling kids abnormal. When people bug us, they tend to have weird stuff happen to them,” Jake replied.
    “Yeah, remember when the football team was messing with you, and the next day, the entire team showed up in the hospital with third degree burns and some crazy story about their pants lighting on fire?” Lea said wistfully.
    “Yup, and when Isabella bugged you in math about your hair and she vanished for a couple of days before she was found in a corner of the courtyard licking her arm like a cat and hissing at anybody who passed her,” Jake laughed.
    “Uh hu, she still meows on occasion,” Lea smirked.
    The two friends sat down and began laughing about the crazy things that had happened to people that they didn’t like. Athy was forgotten. For the time.