Speaking of less traumatizing things related to Apollo: he hadn’t shown up since appearing when Seth and I had . . . I cut the thought. There was no news. So no demigod bloodhound, but oddly, I was beginning to be able to sense the difference between pures and halfs. It was something that had started off as a barely noticeable ripple of energy, like a warmth I felt whenever I was around a pure-blood. I didn’t feel it around Luke or Colin or Solos. I’d mentioned it to Laadan and she felt that it was some of my demigod powers starting to kick in, slowly but surely, and she’d said there’d probably be more. Since I was sensing the aether in the pures, I wondered if eventually I would be able to find the other demigods. At this rate, I might have to, since Daddy Dearest was MIA.

The aether-sniffing thing was pretty cool.

But weird, really weird.

Things were rather calm, though. Actually, that wasn’t necessarily true. Things were calm for me. Everyone pretty much gave me a wide berth. Only a few brave souls came around when Colin was hanging out with us. They’d chat with him while trying to inconspicuously stare at me. Other than that, no one really seemed to be all that interested in having a demigod on campus.

What was going down between the halfs and pures, on the other hand, was not calm. From what I gathered there had been no leads on who had killed the half-blood or who had been responsible for the horrific things done to that girl, Felicia. Colin believed that the powers that were—the campus council—hadn’t tried hard even though half of the Council was made up of halfs. It was one of those things you didn’t want to believe, but had to accept as being true, because it was.

There had been two more rallies in the last week, with halfs calling for serious investigations into what was happening at the campus and in other communities. Deacon and I had joined Colin at the last one, and so far everything had remained peaceful. Probably had to do with Marcus and a crap-ton of Guards having been present.

Staring out over the quad, the division between the two sides was painfully obvious.

Since it was actually warm outside—not hot, just warm—a good portion of the school was hanging on the main quad, stretched out under the afternoon sun or playing a really weird version of Frisbee where they weren’t actually touching what looked like a much heavier and dangerous disc.

Halfs were grouped together on the other side of where we sat, closest to the dorms. It was a Saturday, and only a few were in their black training attire.