“There you are!” Otrera exclaimed, crashing down beside me in a spray of sand.

I jerked back, startled, shutting the journal before she could catch a glimpse of the crazed scrawl.

“How was your run?” I asked, sitting up.

“Great.” Otrera managed around a gasp for breath. “Except I misjudged the distance. Got all excited thinking I was done and—” she drew in another breath. “Ugh.” She dropped backward, hand hitting the beach towel with a thump. “I’m gonna need a minute.”

I reached into my bag and grabbed her metal water bottle. “Here.”

“Lifesaver,” she gasped and took a huge gulp. “Whatcha working on?”

“Just journaling.” I tucked the book into my beach bag. “Jason said a blog was too high risk no matter how private I set it, so I’m going old school.”

Otrera nodded around another sip of water. “Cool. Is Glauce meeting us tonight, or—”

I shook my head, and made a futile attempt to brush the sand off the blanket. “Jason’s testing every inch of the shield. Again.”

“Poor thing,” Otrera clucked, eyes sliding to the volleyball playing demigods down the beach as a particularly large burst of laughter reached our blanket. “He’s working you two to death.”

I shrugged. “He’s starting to ease off now that we’ve got the evacuation drill down to a science. He’s talking about taking a few days then starting random drills.”

“You can’t keep doing that, Medea. We don’t know enough about how this stuff works.”

“I’m fine.” A strand of dark hair worked free from my pony tail, and whipped around in the wind. Irritated, I tucked it behind my ear.

“I’ve seen you afterward. You’re not fine.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Otrera was in her mid-twenties, making her one of the oldest people on the island. And that meant something to her. She flip-flopped between mothering Glauce and I, and just hanging out like a regular person.

The first time she saw Jason kiss me, she’d grabbed my arm so tight I was sure her fingers left bruises, made some excuse to Jason, then marched me off in the opposite direction and told me in no uncertain terms I didn’t have to do anything with him that I wasn’t comfortable with. The age difference between us still made her squeamish. But now that Jason and I were older news, she seemed to be coming to terms with it.

“Well if she’s not meeting us, I guess there’s no reason to wait,” Otrera decided, climbing to her feet and further upsetting the blanket. “I need a shower.” She shoved my shoulder when I nodded. “Want to hang out at my place until the dining hall opens or were you sticking around here?”

~@~

Otrera is a new character who will be introduced in Love and War. Unlike almost every other named character on the Island of the DAMNED, she’s not an Argonaut, so I haven’t talked about her yet on this blog.

Otrera was a Queen of the Amazons and Hippolyta’s (the much more famous Amazon queen) mother. She was either a consort or a daughter of Ares, though many myths place her as the daughter of the Eastern wind. She is credited with the creation of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus and the creation of the Amazon nation.

In short, she was an awesome figure in mythology. Unfortunately, she was later killed by Bellerophon (he’s interesting, I’ll be sure to talk about him in another mythology Monday).

I wrote Otrera into my story because I needed another female demigod, and there aren’t that many to choose from. But I’m glad I chose her, because she’s interesting. There’s not a ton of information out there on her, but what I have been able to dig up from research tells me she’s fierce.