They had been searching for hours.

Where in Hades was she?

You shouldn't have let her take first watch, Nico kept scolding himself in his mind. If you hadn't, this wouldn't have happened. Serena would still be here.

Nico picked up a sea green bag that had been set on the ground––Serena's bag. They had been carrying it with them, since Serena wasn't there to carry it herself.

As he picked it up, a notebook fell out of the top. Probably the same notebook Serena had been drawing in when they first met, Nico guessed. Curiosity got the better of him and he opened the notebook to a marked page, and he nearly dropped it again. It was the drawing Serena had been working on at her school's dance, but it was what it was a drawing of that caught Nico off-guard.

It was a drawing of Bianca.

Nico looked more closely at the drawing, trying to make himself believe that it wasn't his sister on the page, but he couldn't. It was definitely Bianca, and she looked like she did after joining the Hunters; hair braided, bangs pulled out of her face, a bow slung over her shoulder. She seemed calm and confident.

But how did Serena know what Bianca looked like?

"Guys, over here!"

Closing the notebook, Nico ran over to where Eclipse's shout had come from. The daughter of Apollo was kneeling down next to what looked like vines, and she was holding something in her hand. "What is it, Eclipse? Anything on where she might be?"

"Maybe," Eclipse held up the object in her hand for Nico to see. "If this has anything to say about it. She was definitely here."

Nico stared at the metallic hair clip Eclipse was holding. Three silver leaves held together with a gemstone. "If this is here, then she doesn't have her trident."

"That's what I'm worried about."

Nico turned his attention to the vines. "These don't look natural. Vines don't grow in this kind of forest."

"I know," Eclipse muttered. "It's strange."

Nico then spotted something under the vines, and he moved to push away the plants with a stick. He didn't trust those vines enough to touch them with his bare hands, and sure enough, the stick was smoking when he pulled it away. Once the vines were cleared, the son of Hades picked up two cracked circlets: one silver, one pearl. Serena's anklet-daggers. "Serena was definitely here. These are her anklets, but if they're here, along with her hair clip, then she doesn't have a weapon."

Eclipse's eyes darkened. "Then we'd better keep searching. She can defend herself without a weapon, but not for long."

"Nico, Eclipse, come check this out!"

"Coming, Will!" Eclipse shouted back. She quickly started walking to where Will's voice had come from, and Nico followed suit. When they found him, Will was standing in the clearing we had set up camp, but there was something in the center that Nico was sure hadn't been there the night before.

"What's that?" Nico asked. As he came closer, he saw that the thing in the clearing looked like a scroll, and an old one at that. It seemed absolutely ancient.

"No idea. It just showed up out of nowhere." Will replied, sounding curious.

Eclipse took a step toward the scroll. "Well, I wouldn't touch it. It looks like . . ." She trailed off for a moment, then shook her head. "No, that's impossible."

"I find that impossible things tend to be quite possible in our lives," Nico told Eclipse, raising an eyebrow.

The maple-haired girl sighed. "It's just that I feel like I've seen this thing before. It looks a lot like a scroll I once saw in a museum, but that's impossible."

Nico shrugged. "Like I said, impossible things can be very much possible in our lives. What can you tell us about the scroll you saw in the museum?"

"Hm," Eclipse thought for a moment. "They called it the Book of Thoth––wait, it was part of the Book of Thoth. I know that Thoth was the Egyptian god of knowledge, if that clears anything up?"

Nico and Will looked at each other for a moment, each thinking the same thing: Egyptian. That word seemed to follow them throughout their whole quest.

"I think we should take it with us," Nico finally said. "I don't think we should just leave an ancient scroll in the middle of the woods, right?"

Will and Eclipse both nodded, and Nico carefully picked up the scroll and set it in Serena's bag, which he then moved to carry over his shoulder. "We'd better keep searching. She could be anywhere by now."

A few minutes later, Eclipse had moved back to the strange vines when she shouted for Will and Nico to come over. When they got there, Nico noticed something that he hadn't paid much attention to earlier: marks on the ground, like something had been dragged.

"We already knew she was here. Maybe something took her, if all of her weapons were just left here on the dirt ground," Eclipse thought out loud, explaining to Will and Nico.

"Do you know where the tracks lead?" Nico asked urgently. Eclipse shook her head.

"I was waiting for you guys to get here to search, just in case."

Nico nodded appreciatively; he understood her reasoning just fine. The son of Hades started walking along the tracks, the two children of Apollo following suit.

They were gonna find her. Nico was going to make sure of it.

"What. . .what happened?"

Her voice sounded hoarse, but she didn't know why. As the daughter of Poseidon woke up, her first instinct was to reach a hand up to her cheek. Sure enough, she found cut under her fingers that burned like acid. Serena's eyelids snapped open, realizing that the voices hadn't been a crazy demigod dream. Her eyes darted around, trying to figure out where she was, only to be met by stone walls. When she tried to get to her feet, her ankles seared in pain, sending the girl falling back down to where she had come from. Strangely, that wasn't the only thing that pulled Serena down; she felt felt something metallic wrapped around one of her ankles.

A chain.

She was trapped.

"Don't you escape on my watch, songbird."

Her eyes darted around the room again, this time seeing a slightly transparent figure standing––no, floating––not too far away. The ghost. "What do you want?"

A chuckle reverberated around the room. "You should know very well what I want."

"I actually don't." Serena said, raising an eyebrow. She lifted her hand up to activate her trident, but her fingers only grazed her hair. "Where––?!"

"You're looking for a weapon? Ha. Good luck with that. Your 'magic hair clip' is sitting in the dirt back in the middle of that forest." The figure said coldly. "And don't even think about reaching for your daggers. They're right next to your trident."

Serena glared as best she could with the pain in her face. "I don't need a metal weapon to attack. Don't you know who I'm descended from?"

If anything, that seemed to make the sneer on the ghost's face grow even more mischievous. "Believe me, I know very well who you're descended from. Even more than you do. Have you looked down recently?"

The daughter of Poseidon narrowed her eyes and reluctantly looked down at the ground below her, but was surprised to see not stone, but water. How had she not felt that before?

"What's that supposed to mean? If anything, this helps me." Serena growled, trying to make the water help her.

But nothing happened. She didn't even feel the surge of strength she normally felt in water.

The ghost's sneer suddenly seemed much more evil. "That's darkwater. Meant to drain your strength and render your powers useless."

By now, Serena was panicking inside, but she sure as Hades wasn't going to let it show. She had no trident. She had no daggers. She had no powers. She had nothing to use. Nothing to escape with.

There was no way she'd make it out of here this time. Not without Nico and Will to help her.

"That's right. You're got getting away from me this time. I will have your power, even if you don't know it yourself."

Power? Serena thought to herself, confused. All the power she had was the powers from her father, and those didn't seem like they'd be much help to a ghost. "You want my control over rocks and water?"

The ghost rolled his transparent eyes. "No, of course not! I can do that myself without so much as lifting a finger. I want a power that I can't get by myself, my little songbird."

The demigod's eyes narrowed, and a frown formed on her pain-filled face. "You keep calling me songbird. I'm no singer, so why?"

His response was a chuckle. "Like I said, I want your power, one that you don't even know yourself. Your friends bringing me that scroll is just a bonus."

"Scroll? What scroll?" Serena was already getting really confused, and that only seemed to be growing the longer the conversation lasted.

"I will not answer that. I've said too much already; you really have a way of convincing people to talk, don't you." The ghost said with an evil look in his eyes before Serena heard something outside the stone walls. "Ah, that'll be my scroll. Well, I have no need to worry about leaving you alone; you couldn't escape even if you weren't locked up."

With that, the ghost disappeared, leaving Serena to her own thoughts. The girl was worrying about her friends' safety; she knew they'd be stubborn enough to try and find her, and they wouldn't be afraid to attack anything that stood in their way.

The young demigod wasn't worried about herself. She already understood that there was a good chance she'd die on her quest.

If the Angel won't help, the Mermaid will drown. Serena had always known what her name meant.

Her fears didn't feel so irrelevant anymore.