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Copyright © 2011 by Rick Riordan
All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion
Books, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part
of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without
written permission from the publisher. For information
address Disney • Hyperion Books, 114 Fifth
Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690. First
Edition
ISBN 978-1-4231-4059-7
Map illustration on pp. viii–ix by Kayley LeFaiver
Visit www.disneyhyperionbooks.com
Table of
Contents
Also By Rick Riordan
I Percy
II Percy
III Percy
IV Percy
V Hazel
VI Hazel
VII Hazel
VIII Hazel
IX Frank
X Frank
XI Frank
XII Frank
XIII Percy
XIV Percy
XV Percy
XVI Percy
XVII Hazel
XVIII Hazel
XIX Hazel
XX Hazel
XXI Frank
XXII Frank
XXIII Frank
XXIV Frank
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XXV
XXVI Percy
XXVII Percy
XXVIII Percy
XXIX Hazel
XXX Hazel
XXXI Hazel
XXXII Hazel
XXXIII Frank
XXXIV Frank
XXXV Frank
XXXVI Frank
XXXVII Percy
XXXVIII Percy
XXXIX Percy
XL Percy
XLI Hazel
XLII Hazel
XLIII Hazel
XLIV Hazel
XLV Frank
XLVI Frank
XLVII Frank
XLVIII Frank
XLIX Percy
L Percy
LI Percy
LII Percy
Glossary
Coming Fall 2012
The Percy Jackson Series
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The Kane Chronicles
The Throne of Fire
The Heroes of Olympus
About the Author
Also by Rick Riordan
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book One:
The Lightning Thief
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book Two:
The Sea of Monsters
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book Three:
The Titan’s Curse
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book Four:
The Battle of the Labyrinth
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book Five:
The Last Olympian
The Kane Chronicles, Book One:
The Red Pyramid
The Kane Chronicles, Book Two:
The Throne of Fire
The Heroes of Olympus, Book One:
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The Lost Hero
To Becky, who shares my sanctuary in New Rome. Even
Hera could never make me forget you.
THE SNAKE-HAIRED LADIES WERE starting to annoy
Percy.
They should have died three days ago when he
dropped a crate of bowling balls on them at the Napa Bargain
Mart. They should have died two days ago when he
ran over them with a police car in Martinez. They definitely
should have died this morning when he cut off their
heads in Tilden Park.
No matter how many times Percy killed them and
watched them crumble to powder, they just kept re-forming
like large evil dust bunnies. He couldn’t even seem to
outrun them.
He reached the top of the hill and caught his
breath. How long since he’d last killed them? Maybe two
hours. They never seemed to stay dead longer than that.
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The past few days, he’d hardly slept. He’d eaten
whatever he could scrounge—vending machine gummi
bears, stale bagels, even a Jack in the Crack burrito,
which was a new personal low. His clothes were torn,
burned, and splattered with monster slime.
He’d only survived this long because the two snakehaired-
ladies—gorgons, they called themselves—couldn’t
seem to kill him either. Their claws didn’t cut his skin.
Their teeth broke whenever they tried to bite him. But
Percy couldn’t keep going much longer. Soon he’d collapse
from exhaustion, and then—as hard as he was to
kill, he was pretty sure the gorgons would find a way.
Where to run?
He scanned his surroundings. Under different circumstances,
he might’ve enjoyed the view. To his left,
golden hills rolled inland, dotted with lakes, woods, and a
few herds of cows. To his right, the flatlands of Berkeley
and Oakland marched west—a vast checkerboard of
neighborhoods, with several million people who probably
did not want their morning interrupted by two monsters
and a filthy demigod.
Farther west, San Francisco Bay glittered under a
silvery haze. Past that, a wall of fog had swallowed most
of San Francisco, leaving just the tops of skyscrapers and
the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.
A vague sadness weighed on Percy’s chest. Something
told him he’d been to San Francisco before. The
city had some connection to Annabeth—the only person
he could remember from his past. His memory of her was
frustratingly dim. The wolf had promised he would see
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her again and regain his memory—if he succeeded in his
journey.
Should he try to cross the bay?
It was tempting. He could feel the power of the
ocean just over the horizon. Water always revived him.
Salt water was the best. He’d discovered that two days ago
when he had strangled a sea monster in the Carquinez
Strait. If he could reach the bay, he might be able to make
a last stand. Maybe he could even drown the gorgons. But
the shore was at least two miles away. He’d have to cross
an entire city.
He hesitated for another reason. The she-wolf Lupa
had taught him to sharpen his senses—to trust the instincts
that had been guiding him south. His homing
radar was tingling like crazy now. The end of his journey
was close—almost right under his feet. But how could that
be? There was nothing on the hilltop.
The wind changed. Percy caught the sour scent of
reptile. A hundred yards down the slope, something
rustled through the woods—snapping branches, crunching
leaves, hissing.
Gorgons.
For the millionth time, Percy wished their noses
weren’t so good. They had always said they could smell
him because he was a demigod—the half-blood son of
some old Roman god. Percy had tried rolling in mud,
splashing through creeks, even keeping air-freshener
sticks in his pockets so he’d have that new car smell; but
apparently demigod stink was hard to mask.
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He scrambled to the west side of the summit. It was
too steep to descend. The slope plummeted eighty feet,
straight to the roof of an apartment complex built into the
hillside. Fifty feet below that, a highway emerged from
the hill’s base and wound its way toward Berkeley.
Great. No other way off the hill. He’d managed to
get himself cornered.
He stared at the stream of cars flowing west toward
San Francisco and wished he were in one of them. Then
he realized the highway must cut through the hill. There
must be a tunnel…right under his feet.
His internal radar went nuts. He was in the right
place, just too high up. He had to check out that tunnel.
He needed a way down to the highway—fast.
He slung off his backpack. He’d managed to grab a
lot of supplies at the Napa Bargain Mart: a portable GPS,
duct tape, lighter, superglue, water bottle, camping roll, a
Comfy Panda Pillow Pet (as seen on TV), and a Swiss
army knife—pretty much every tool a modern demigod
could want. But he had nothing that would serve as a
parachute or a sled.
That left him two options: jump eighty feet to his
death, or stand and fight. Both options sounded pretty
bad.
He cursed and pulled his pen from his pocket.
The pen didn’t look like much, just a regular cheap
ballpoint, but when Percy uncapped it, it grew into a
glowing bronze sword. The blade balanced perfectly. The
leather grip fit his hand like it had been custom designed
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for him. Etched along the guard was an Ancient Greek
word Percy somehow understood: Anaklusmos—Riptide.
He’d woken up with this sword his first night at the
Wolf House—two months ago? More? He’d lost track.
He’d found himself in the courtyard of a burned-out mansion
in the middle of the woods, wearing shorts, an
orange T-shirt, and a leather necklace with a bunch of
strange clay beads. Riptide had been in his hand, but
Percy had had no idea how he’d gotten there, and only the
vaguest idea who he was. He’d been barefoot, freezing,
and confused. And then the wolves came....
Right next to him, a familiar voice jolted him back
to the present: “There you are!”
Percy stumbled away from the gorgon, almost falling
off the edge of the hill.
It was the smiley one—Beano.
Okay, her name wasn’t really Beano. As near as
Percy could figure, he was dyslexic, because words got
twisted around when he tried to read. The first time he’d
seen the gorgon, posing as a Bargain Mart greeter with a
big green button that read: Welcome! My name is
STHENO, he’d thought it said BEANO.
She was still wearing her green Bargain Mart employee
vest over a flower-print dress. If you looked just at
her body, you might think she was somebody’s dumpy old
grandmother—until you looked down and realized she
had rooster feet. Or you looked up and saw bronze boar
tusks sticking out of the corners of her mouth. Her eyes
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glowed red, and her hair was a writhing nest of bright
green snakes.
The most horrible thing about her? She was still
holding her big silver platter of free samples: Crispy
Cheese ’n’ Wieners. Her platter was dented from all the
times Percyhad killed her, but those little samples looked
perfectly fine. Stheno just kept toting them across California
so she could offer Percy a snack before she killed him.
Percy didn’t know why she kept doing that, but if he ever
needed a suit of armor, he was going to make it out of
Crispy Cheese ’n’ Wieners. They were indestructible.
“Try one?” Stheno offered.
Percy fended her off with his sword. “Where’s your
sister?”
“Oh, put the sword away,” Stheno chided. “You
know by now that even Celestial bronze can’t kill us for
long. Have a Cheese ’n’ Wiener! They’re on sale this week,
and I’d hate to kill you on an empty stomach.”
“Stheno!” The second gorgon appeared on Percy’s
right so fast, he didn’t have time to react. Fortunately she
was too busy glaring at her sister to pay him much attention.
“I told you to sneak up on him and kill him!”
Stheno’s smile wavered. “But, Euryale…” She said
the nameso it rhymed with Muriel. “Can’t I give him a
sample first?”
“No, you imbecile!” Euryale turned toward Percy
and bared her fangs.
Except for her hair, which was a nest of coral
snakes instead of green vipers, she looked exactly like her
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sister. Her Bargain Mart vest, her flowery dress, even her
tusks were decorated with 50% off stickers. Her name
badge read: Hello! My name is DIE, DEMIGOD SCUM!
“You’ve led us on quite a chase, Percy Jackson,”
Euryale said. “But now you’re trapped, and we’ll have our
revenge!”
“The Cheese ’n’ Wieners are only $2.99,” Stheno
added helpfully. “Grocery department, aisle three.”
Euryale snarled. “Stheno, the Bargain Mart was a front!
You’re going native! Now, put down that ridiculous
tray and help me kill this demigod. Or have you forgotten
that he’s the one who vaporized Medusa?”
Percy stepped back. Six more inches, and he’d be
tumbling through thin air. “Look, ladies, we’ve been over
this. I don’t even remember killing Medusa. I don’t remember
anything! Can’t we just call a truce and talk
about your weekly specials?”
Stheno gave her sister a pouty look, which was hard
to do with giant bronze tusks. “Can we?”
“No!” Euryale’s red eyes bored into Percy. “I don’t
care what you remember, son of the sea god. I can smell
Medusa’s blood on you. It’s faint, yes, several years old,
but you were the last one to defeat her. She still has not
returned from Tartarus. It’s your fault!”
Percy didn’t really get that. The whole “dying then
returning from Tartarus” concept gave him a headache.
Of course, so did the idea that a ballpoint pen could turn
into a sword, or that monsters could disguise themselves
with something called the Mist, or that Percy was the son
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of a barnacle-encrusted god from five thousand years ago.
But he did believe it. Even though his memory was
erased, he knew he was a demigod the same way he knew
his name was Percy Jackson. From his very first conversation
with Lupa the wolf, he’d accepted that this crazy
messed-up world of gods and monsters was his reality.
Which pretty much sucked.
“How about we call it a draw?” he said. “I can’t kill
you. You can’t kill me. If you’re Medusa’s sisters—like the
Medusa who turned people to stone—shouldn’t I be petrified
by now?”
“Heroes!” Euryale said with disgust. “They always
bring that up, just like our mother! ‘Why can’t you turn
people to stone? Your sister can turn people to stone.’
Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, boy! That was Medusa’s
curse alone. She was the most hideous one in the family.
She got all the luck!”
Stheno looked hurt. “Mother said I was the most
hideous.”
“Quiet!” Euryale snapped. “As for you, Percy Jackson,
it’s true you bear the mark of Achilles. That makes
you a little tougher to kill. But don’t worry. We’ll find a
way.”
“The mark of what?”
“Achilles,” Stheno said cheerfully. “Oh, he was gorgeous!
Dipped in the River Styx as a child, you know, so
he was invulnerable except for a tiny spot on his ankle.
That’s what happened to you, dear. Someone must’ve
dumped you in the Styx and made your skin like iron. But
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not to worry. Heroes like you always have a weak spot.
We just have to find it, and then we can kill you. Won’t
that be lovely? Have a Cheese ’n’ Wiener!”
Percy tried to think. He didn’t remember any dip in
the Styx. Then again, he didn’t remember much of anything.
His skin didn’t feel like iron, but it would explain
how he’d held out so long against the gorgons.
Maybe if he just fell down the mountain…would he
survive? He didn’t want to risk it—not without something
to slow the fall, or a sled, or…
He looked at Stheno’s large silver platter of free
samples.
Hmm...
“Reconsidering?” Stheno asked. “Very wise, dear. I
added some gorgon’s blood to these, so your death will be
quick and painless.”
Percy’s throat constricted. “You added your blood
to the Cheese ’n’ Wieners?”
“Just a little.” Stheno smiled. “A tiny nick on my
arm, but you’re sweet to be concerned. Blood from our
right side can cure anything, you know, but blood from
our left side is deadly—”
“You dimwit!” Euryale screeched. “You’re not supposed
to tell him that! He won’t eat the wieners if you tell
him they’re poisoned!”
Stheno looked stunned. “He won’t? But I said it
would be quick and painless.”
20/589
“Never mind!” Euryale’s fingernails grew into
claws. “We’ll kill him the hard way—just keep slashing
until we find the weak spot. Once we defeat Percy Jackson,
we’ll be more famous than Medusa! Our patron will
reward us greatly!”
Percy gripped his sword. He’d have to time his
move perfectly—a few seconds of confusion, grab the platter
with his left hand...
Keep them talking, he thought.
“Before you slash me to bits,” he said, “who’s this
patron you mentioned?”
Euryale sneered. “The goddess Gaea, of course! The
one who brought us back from oblivion! You won’t live
long enough to meet her, but your friends below will soon
face her wrath. Even now, her armies are marching south.
At the Feast of Fortune, she’ll awaken, and the demigods
will be cut down like—like—”
“Like our low prices at Bargain Mart!” Stheno
suggested.
“Gah!” Euryale stormed toward her sister. Percy
took the opening. He grabbed Stheno’s platter, scattering
poisoned Cheese ’n’ Wieners, and slashed Riptide across
Euryale’s waist, cutting her in half.
He raised the platter, and Stheno found herself fa
cing her own greasy reflection.
“Medusa!” she screamed.
Her sister Euryale had crumbled to dust, but she
was already starting to re-form, like a snowman un
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melting. “Stheno, you fool!” she gurgled as her half-made
face rose from the mound of dust. “That’s just your own
reflection! Get him!”
Percy slammed the metal tray on top of Stheno’s
head, and she passed out cold.
He put the platter behind his butt, said a silent
prayer to whatever Roman god oversaw stupid sledding
tricks, and jumped off the side of the hill.
THE THING ABOUT PLUMMETING DOWNHILL at fifty
miles an hour on a snack platter—if you realize it’s a bad
idea when you’re halfway down, it’s too late.
Percy narrowly missed a tree, glanced off a boulder,
and spun a three-sixty as he shot toward the highway.
The stupid snack tray did not have power steering. He
heard the gorgon sisters screaming and caught a glimpse
of Euryale’s coral-snake hair at the top of the hill, but he
didn’t have time to worry about it. The roof of the apartment
building loomed below him like the prow of a
battleship. Head-on collision in ten, nine, eight…
He managed to swivel sideways to avoid breaking
his legs on impact. The snack platter skittered across the
roof and sailed through the air. The platter went one way.
Percy went the other.
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As he fell toward the highway, a horrible scenario
flashed through his mind: his body smashing against an
SUV’s windshield, some annoyed commuter trying to
push him off with the wipers. Stupid sixteen-year-old kid
falling from the sky! I’m late!
Miraculously, a gust of wind blew him to one
side—just enough to miss the highway and crash into a
clump of bushes. It wasn’t a soft landing, but it was better
than asphalt.
Percy groaned. He wanted to lie there and pass out,
but he had to keep moving.
He struggled to his feet. His hands were scratched
up, but no bones seemed to be broken. He still had his
backpack. Somewhere on the sled ride he’d lost his sword,
but Percy knew it would eventually reappear in his pocket
in pen form. That was part of its magic.
He glanced up the hill. The gorgons were hard to
miss, with their colorful snake hair and their bright green
Bargain Mart vests. They were picking their way down the
slope, going slower than Percy but with a lot more control.
Those chicken feet must’ve been good for climbing.
Percy figured he had maybe five minutes before they
reached him.
Next to him, a tall chain-link fence separated the
highway from a neighborhood of winding streets, cozy
houses, and talleucalyptus trees. The fence was probably
there to keep people from getting onto the highway and
doing stupid things—like sledding into the fast lane on
snack trays—but the chain-link was full of big holes. Percy
could easily slip through into the neighborhood. Maybe
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he could find a car and drive west to the ocean. He didn’t
like stealing cars, but over the past few weeks, in life-anddeath
situations, he’d “borrowed” several, including a police
cruiser. He’d meant to return them, but they never
seemed to last very long.
He glanced east. Just as he’d figured, a hundred
yardsuphill the highway cut through the base of the cliff.
Two tunnel entrances, one for each direction of traffic,
stared down at him like eye sockets of a giant skull. In the
middle, where the nose would have been, a cement wall
jutted from the hillside, with a metal door like the entrance
to a bunker.
It might have been a maintenance tunnel. That’s
probably what mortals thought, if they noticed the door at
all. But they couldn’t see through the Mist. Percy knew
the door was more than that.
Two kids in armor flanked the entrance. They wore
a bizarre mix of plumed Roman helmets, breastplates,
scabbards, blue jeans, purple T-shirts, and white athletic
shoes. The guard on the right looked like a girl, though it
was hard to tell for sure with all the armor. The one on
the left was a stocky guy with a bow and quiver on his
back. Both kids held long wooden staffs with iron spear
tips, like old-fashioned harpoons.
Percy’s internal radar was pinging like crazy. After
so many horrible days, he’d finally reached his goal. His
instincts told him that if he could make it inside that
door, he might find safety for the first time since the
wolves had sent him south.
So why did he feel such dread?
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Farther up the hill, the gorgons were scrambling
over the roof of the apartment complex. Three minutes
away—maybe less.
Part of him wanted to run to the door in the hill.
He’d have to cross to the median of the highway, but then
it would be a short sprint. He could make it before the
gorgons reached him.
Part of him wanted to head west to the ocean.
That’s where he’d be safest. That’s where his power would
be greatest. Those Roman guards at the door made him
uneasy. Something inside him said: This isn’t my territory.
This is dangerous.
“You’re right, of course,” said a voice next to him.
Percy jumped. At first he thought Beano had managed
to sneak up on him again, but the old lady sitting in
the bushes was even more repulsive than a gorgon. She
looked like a hippie who’d been kicked to the side of the
road maybe forty years ago, where she’d been collecting
trash and rags ever since. She wore a dress made of tie-
dyed cloth, ripped-up quilts, and plastic grocery bags. Her
frizzy mop of hair was gray-brown, like root-beer foam,
tied back with a peace-sign headband. Warts and moles
covered her face. When she smiled, she showed exactly
three teeth.
“It isn’t a maintenance tunnel,” she confided. “It’s
the entrance to camp.”
A jolt went up Percy’s spine. Camp. Yes, that’s
where he was from. A camp. Maybe this was his home.
Maybe Annabeth was close by.
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But something felt wrong.
The gorgons were still on the roof of the apartment
building. Then Stheno shrieked in delight and pointed in
Percy’s direction.
The old hippie lady raised her eyebrows. “Not
much time, child. You need to make your choice.”
“Who are you?” Percy asked, though he wasn’t sure
he wanted to know. The last thing he needed was another
harmless mortal who turned out to be a monster.
“Oh, you can call me June.” The old lady’s eyes
sparkled as if she’d made an excellent joke. “It is June,
isn’t it? They named the month after me!”
“Okay…Look, I should go. Two gorgons are coming.
I don’t want them to hurt you.”
June clasped her hands over her heart. “How
sweet! But that’s part of your choice!”
“My choice…” Percy glanced nervously toward the
hill. The gorgons had taken off their green vests. Wings
sprouted from their backs—small bat wings, which glinted
like brass.
Since when did they have wings? Maybe they were
ornamental. Maybe they were too small to get a gorgon
into the air. Then the two sisters leaped off the apartment
building and soared toward him.
Great. Just great.
“Yes, a choice,” June said, as if she were in no
hurry. “You could leave me here at the mercy of the gorgons
and go to the ocean. You’d make it there safely, I
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guarantee. The gorgons will be quite happy to attack me
and let you go. In the sea, no monster would bother you.
You could begin a new life, live to a ripe old age, and escape
a great deal of pain and misery that is in your
future.”
Percy was pretty sure he wasn’t going to like the
second option. “Or?”
“Or you could do a good deed for an old lady,” she
said. “Carry me to the camp with you.”
“Carry you?” Percy hoped she was kidding. Then
June hiked up her skirts and showed him her swollen
purple feet.
“I can’t get there by myself,” she said. “Carry me to
camp—across the highway, through the tunnel, across the
river.”
Percy didn’t know what river she meant, but it
didn’t sound easy. June looked pretty heavy.
The gorgons were only fifty yards away now—leisurely
gliding toward him as if they knew the hunt was almost
over.
Percy looked at the old lady. “And I’d carry you to
this camp because—?”
“Because it’s a kindness!” she said. “And if you
don’t, the gods will die, the world we know will perish,
and everyone from your old life will be destroyed. Of
course, you wouldn’t remember them, so I suppose it
won’t matter. You’d be safe at the bottom of the sea.…”
28/589
Percy swallowed. The gorgons shrieked with
laughter as they soared in for the kill.
“If I go to the camp,” he said, “will I get my
memory back?”
“Eventually,” June said. “But be warned, you will
sacrifice much! You’ll lose the mark of Achilles. You’ll feel
pain, misery, and loss beyond anything you’ve ever
known. But you might have a chance to save your old
friends and family, to reclaim your old life.”
The gorgons were circling right overhead. They
were probably studying the old woman, trying to figure
out who the new player was before they struck.
“What about those guards at the door?” Percy
asked.
June smiled. “Oh, they’ll let you in, dear. You can
trust those two. So, what do you say? Will you help a defenseless
old woman?”
Percy doubted June was defenseless. At worst, this
was a trap. At best, it was some kind of test.
Percy hated tests. Since he’d lost his memory, his
whole life was one big fill-in-the-blank. He was
____________________, from
____________________. He felt like
____________________, and if the monsters caught
him, he’d be ____________________.
Then he thought about Annabeth, the only part of
his old life he was sure about. He had to find her.
“I’ll carry you.” He scooped up the old woman.
29/589
She was lighter than he expected. Percy tried to ignore
her sour breath and her calloused hands clinging to
his neck. He made it across the first lane of traffic. A
driver honked. Another yelled something that was lost in
the wind. Most just swerved and looked irritated, as if
they had to deal with a lot of ratty teenagers carrying old
hippie women across the freeway here in Berkeley.
A shadow fell over him. Stheno called down gleefully,
“Clever boy! Found a goddess to carry, did you?”
A goddess?
June cackled with delight, muttering, “Whoops!” as
a car almost killed them.
Somewhere off to his left, Euryale screamed, “Get
them! Two prizes are better than one!”
Percy bolted across the remaining lanes. Somehow
he made it to the median alive. He saw the gorgons
swooping down, cars swerving as the monsters passed
overhead. He wondered what the mortals saw through
the Mist—giant pelicans? Off-course hang gliders? The
wolf Lupa had told him that mortal minds could believe
just about anything—except the truth.
Percy ran for the door in the hillside. June got
heavier with every step. Percy’s heart pounded. His ribs
ached.
One of the guards yelled. The guy with the bow
nocked an arrow. Percy shouted, “Wait!”
But the boy wasn’t aiming at him. The arrow flew
over Percy’s head. A gorgon wailed in pain. The second
30/589
guard readied her spear, gesturing frantically at Percy to
hurry.
Fifty feet from the door. Thirty feet.
“Gotcha!” shrieked Euryale. Percy turned as an arrow
thudded into her forehead. Euryale tumbled into the
fast lane. A truck slammed into her and carried her backward
a hundred yards, but she just climbed over the cab,
pulled the arrow out of her head, and launched back into
the air.
Percy reached the door. “Thanks,” he told the
guards. “Good shot.”
“That should’ve killed her!” the archer protested.
“Welcome to my world,” Percy muttered.
“Frank,” the girl said. “Get them inside, quick!
Those are gorgons.”
“Gorgons?” The archer’s voice squeaked. It was
hard to tell much about him under the helmet, but he
looked stout like a wrestler, maybe fourteen or fifteen.
“Will the door hold them?”
In Percy’s arms, June cackled. “No, no it won’t. Onward,
Percy Jackson! Through the tunnel, over the river!”
“Percy Jackson?” The female guard was darker-
skinned, with curly hair sticking out the sides of her helmet.
She looked younger than Frank—maybe thirteen.
Her sword scabbard came down almost to her ankle. Still,
she sounded like she was the one in charge. “Okay, you’re
obviously a demigod. But who’s the—?” She glanced at
June. “Never mind. Just get inside. I’ll hold them off.”
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“Hazel,” the boy said. “Don’t be crazy.”
“Go!” she demanded.
Frank cursed in another language—was that Lat
in?—and opened the door. “Come on!”
Percy followed, staggering under the weight of the
old lady, who was definitely getting heavier. He didn’t
know how that girl Hazel would hold off the gorgons by
herself, but he was too tired to argue.
The tunnel cut through solid rock, about the width
and height of a school hallway. At first, it looked like a
typical maintenance tunnel, with electric cables, warning
signs, and fuse boxes on the walls, lightbulbs in wire
cages along the ceiling. As they ran deeper into the hillside,
the cement floor changed to tiled mosaic. The lights
changed to reed torches, which burned but didn’t smoke.
A few hundred yards ahead, Percy saw a square of
daylight.
The old lady was heavier now than a pile of sandbags.
Percy’s arms shook from the strain. June mumbled
a song in Latin, like a lullaby, which didn’t help Percy
concentrate.
Behind them, the gorgons’ voices echoed in the
tunnel. Hazel shouted. Percy was tempted to dump June
and runback to help, but then the entire tunnel shook
with the rumble of falling stone. There was a squawking
sound, just like the gorgons had made when Percy had
dropped a crate of bowling balls on them in Napa. He
glanced back. The west end of the tunnel was now filled
with dust.
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“Shouldn’t we check on Hazel?” he asked.
“She’ll be okay—I hope,” Frank said. “She’s good
underground. Just keep moving! We’re almost there.”
“Almost where?”
June chuckled. “All roads lead there, child. You
should know that.”
“Detention?” Percy asked.
“Rome, child,” the old woman said. “Rome.”
Percy wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. True, his
memory was gone. His brain hadn’t felt right since he had
woken up at the Wolf House. But he was pretty sure
Rome wasn’t in California.
They kept running. The glow at the end of the tunnel
grew brighter, and finally they burst into sunlight.
Percy froze. Spread out at his feet was a bowl-
shaped valley several miles wide. The basin floor was
rumpled with smaller hills, golden plains, and stretches of
forest. A small clear rivercut a winding course from a lake
in the center and around the perimeter, like a capital G.
The geography could’ve been anywhere in northern
California—live oaks and eucalyptus trees, gold hills and
blue skies. That big inland mountain—what was it called,
Mount Diablo?—rose in the distance, right where it
should be.
But Percy felt like he’d stepped into a secret world.
In the center of the valley, nestled by the lake, was a small
city of white marble buildings with red-tiled roofs. Some
had domes and columned porticoes, like national
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monuments. Others looked like palaces, with golden
doors and large gardens. He could see an open plaza with
freestanding columns, fountains, and statues. A fivestory-
tall Roman coliseum gleamed in the sun, next to a
long oval arena like a racetrack.
Across the lake to the south, another hill was dotted
with even more impressive buildings—temples, Percy
guessed. Several stone bridges crossed the river as it
wound through the valley, and in the north, a long line of
brickwork arches stretched from the hills into the town.
Percy thought it looked like an elevated train track. Then
he realized it must be an aqueduct.
The strangest part of the valley was right below
him. About two hundred yards away, just across the river,
was some sort of military encampment. It was about a
quarter mile square, with earthen ramparts on all four
sides, the tops lined with sharpened spikes. Outside the
walls ran a dry moat, also studded with spikes. Wooden
watchtowers rose at each corner, manned by sentries with
oversized, mounted crossbows. Purple banners hung
from the towers. A wide gateway opened on the far side of
camp, leading toward the city. A narrower gate stood
closed on the riverbank side. Inside, the fortress bustled
with activity: dozens of kids going to and from barracks,
carrying weapons, polishing armor. Percy heard the clank
of hammers at a forge and smelled meat cooking over a
fire.
Something about this place felt very familiar, yet
not quite right.
“Camp Jupiter,” Frank said. “We’ll be safe once—”
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Footsteps echoed in the tunnel behind them. Hazel
burst into the light. She was covered with stone dust and
breathing hard. She’d lost her helmet, so her curly brown
hair fell around her shoulders. Her armor had long slash
marks in front from the claws of a gorgon. One of the
monsters had tagged her with a 50% off sticker.
“I slowed them down,” she said. “But they’ll be here
any second.”
Frank cursed. “We have to get across the river.”
June squeezed Percy’s neck tighter. “Oh, yes,
please. I can’t get my dress wet.”
Percy bit his tongue. If this lady was a goddess, she
must’ve been the goddess of smelly, heavy, useless hippies.
But he’d come this far. He’d better keep lugging her
along.
It’s a kindness, she’d said. And if you don’t, the
gods will die, the world we know will perish, and everyone
from your old life will be destroyed.
If this was a test, he couldn’t afford to get an F.
He stumbled a few times as they ran for the river.
Frank and Hazel kept him on his feet.
They reached the riverbank, and Percy stopped to
catch his breath. The current was fast, but the river didn’t
look deep. Only a stone’s throw across stood the gates of
the fort.
“Go, Hazel.” Frank nocked two arrows at once. “Escort
Percy so the sentries don’t shoot him. It’s my turn to
hold off the baddies.”
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Hazel nodded and waded into the stream.
Percy started to follow, but something made him
hesitate. Usually he loved the water, but this river
seemed…powerful, and not necessarily friendly.
“The Little Tiber,” said June sympathetically. “It
flows with the power of the original Tiber, river of the empire.
This is your last chance to back out, child. The mark
of Achilles is a Greek blessing. You can’t retain it if you
cross into Roman territory. The Tiber will wash it away.”
Percy was too exhausted to understand all that, but
he got the main point. “If I cross, I won’t have iron skin
anymore?”
June smiled. “So what will it be? Safety, or a future
of pain and possibility?”
Behind him, the gorgons screeched as they flew
from the tunnel. Frank let his arrows fly.
From the middle of the river, Hazel yelled, “Percy,
come on!”
Up on the watchtowers, horns blew. The sentries
shouted and swiveled their crossbows toward the
gorgons.
Annabeth, Percy thought. He forged into the river.
It was icy cold, much swifter than he’d imagined, but that
didn’t bother him. New strength surged through his
limbs. His senses tingled like he’d been injected with caffeine.
He reached the other side and put the old woman
down as the camp’s gates opened. Dozens of kids in armor
poured out.
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Hazel turned with a relieved smile. Then she
looked over Percy’s shoulder, and her expression changed
to horror. “Frank!”
Frank was halfway across the river when the gorgons
caught him. They swooped out of the sky and
grabbed him by either arm. He screamed in pain as their
claws dug into his skin.
The sentries yelled, but Percy knew they couldn’t
get a clear shot. They’d end up killing Frank. The other
kids drew swords and got ready to charge into the water,
but they’d be too late.
There was only one way.
Percy thrust out his hands. An intense tugging sensation
filled his gut, and the Tiber obeyed his will. The
river surged. Whirlpools formed on either side of Frank.
Giant watery hands erupted from the stream, copying
Percy’s movements. The giant hands grabbed the gorgons,
who dropped Frank in surprise. Then the hands lifted
the squawking monsters in a liquid vise grip.
Percy heard the other kids yelping and backing
away, but he stayed focused on his task. He made a
smashing gesture with his fists, and the giant hands
plunged the gorgons into the Tiber. The monsters hit bottom
and broke into dust. Glittering clouds of gorgon essence
struggled to re-form, but the river pulled them
apart like a blender. Soon every trace of the gorgons was
swept downstream. The whirlpools vanished, and the current
returned to normal.
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Percy stood on the riverbank. His clothes and his
skin steamed as if the Tiber’s waters had given him an
acid bath. He felt exposed, raw…vulnerable.
In the middle of the Tiber, Frank stumbled around,
looking stunned but perfectly fine. Hazel waded out and
helped him ashore. Only then did Percy realize how quiet
the other kids had become.
Everyone was staring at him. Only the old lady
June looked unfazed.
“Well, that was a lovely trip,” she said. “Thank you,
Percy Jackson, for bringing me to Camp Jupiter.”
One of the girls made a choking sound.
“Percy…Jackson?”
She sounded as if she recognized his name. Percy
focused on her, hoping to see a familiar face.
She was obviously a leader. She wore a regal purple
cloak over her armor. Her chest was decorated with
medals. She must have been about Percy’s age, with dark,
piercing eyes and long black hair. Percy didn’t recognize
her, but the girl stared at him as if she’d seen him in her
nightmares.
June laughed with delight. “Oh, yes. You’ll have
such fun together!”
Then, just because the day hadn’t been weird
enough already, the old lady began to glow and change
form. She grew until she was a shining, seven-foot-tall
goddess in a blue dress, with a cloak that looked like
goat’s skin over her shoulders. Her face was stern and
stately. In her hand was a staff topped with a lotus flower.
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If it was possible for the campers to look more
stunned, they did. The girl with the purple cloak knelt.
The others followed her lead. One kid got down so hastily
he almost impaled himself on his sword.
Hazel was the first to speak. “Juno.”
She and Frank also fell to their knees, leaving Percy
the only one standing. He knew he should probably kneel
too, but after carrying the old lady so far, he didn’t feel
like showing her that much respect.
“Juno, huh?” he said. “If I passed your test, can I
have my memory and my life back?”
The goddess smiled. “In time, Percy Jackson, if you
succeed here at camp. You’ve done well today, which is a
good start. Perhaps there’s hope for you yet.”
She turned to the other kids. “Romans, I present to
you the son of Neptune. For months he has been slumbering,
but now he is awake. His fate is in your hands.
The Feast of Fortune comes quickly, and Death must be
unleashed if you are to stand any hope in the battle. Do
not fail me!”
Juno shimmered and disappeared. Percy looked at
Hazel and Frank for some kind of explanation, but they
seemed just as confused as he was. Frank was holding
something Percy hadn’t noticed before—two small clay
flasks with cork stoppers, like potions, one in each hand.
Percy had no idea where they’d come from, but he saw
Frank slip them into his pockets. Frank gave him a look
like: We’ll talk about it later.
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The girl in the purple cloak stepped forward. She
examined Percy warily, and Percy couldn’t shake the feeling
that she wanted to run him through with her dagger.
“So,” she said coldly, “a son of Neptune, who comes
to us with the blessing of Juno.”
“Look,” he said, “my memory’s a little fuzzy. Um,
it’s gone, actually. Do I know you?”
The girl hesitated. “I am Reyna, praetor of the
Twelfth Legion. And…no, I don’t know you.”
That last part was a lie. Percy could tell from her
eyes. But he also understood that if he argued with her
about it here, in front of her soldiers, she wouldn’t appreciate
it.
“Hazel,” said Reyna, “bring him inside. I want to
question him at the principia. Then we’ll send him to
Octavian. We must consult the auguries before we decide
what to do with him.”
“What do you mean,” Percy asked, “‘decide what to
do with’ me?”
Reyna’s hand tightened on her dagger. Obviously
she was not used to having her orders questioned. “Before
we accept anyone into camp, we must interrogate them
and read the auguries. Juno said your fate is in our hands.
We have to know whether the goddess has brought us as a
new recruit.…”
Reyna studied Percy as if she found that doubtful.
“Or,” she said more hopefully, “if she’s brought us
an enemy to kill.”
PERCY WASN’T SCARED OF GHOSTS, which was lucky.
Half the people in camp were dead.
Shimmering purple warriors stood outside the armory,
polishing ethereal swords. Others hung out in front
of the barracks. A ghostly boy chased a ghostly dog down
the street. And at the stables, a big glowing red dude with
the head of a wolf guarded a herd of…Were those
unicorns?
None of the campers paid the ghosts much attention,
but as Percy’s entourage walked by, with Reyna in
the lead and Frank and Hazel on either side, all the spirits
stopped what they were doing and stared at Percy. A few
looked angry. The little boy ghost shrieked something like
“Greggus!” and turned invisible.
Percy wished he could turn invisible too. After
weeks on his own, all this attention made him uneasy. He
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stayed between Hazel and Frank and tried to look
inconspicuous.
“Am I seeing things?” he asked. “Or are those—”
“Ghosts?” Hazel turned. She had startling eyes, like
fourteen-karat gold. “They’re Lares. House gods.”
“House gods,” Percy said. “Like…smaller than real
gods, but larger than apartment gods?”
“They’re ancestral spirits,” Frank explained. He’d
removed his helmet, revealing a babyish face that didn’t
go with his military haircut or his big burly frame. He
looked like a toddler who’d taken steroids and joined the
Marines.
“The Lares are kind of like mascots,” he continued.
“Mostlythey’re harmless, but I’ve never seen them so
agitated.”
“They’re staring at me,” Percy said. “That ghost kid
called me Greggus. My name isn’t Greg.”
“Graecus,” Hazel said. “Once you’ve been here
awhile, you’ll start understanding Latin. Demigods have a
natural sense for it. Graecus means Greek.”
“Is that bad?” Percy asked.
Frank cleared his throat. “Maybe not. You’ve got
that type of complexion, the dark hair and all. Maybe they
think you’re actually Greek. Is your family from there?”
“Don’t know. Like I said, my memory is gone.”
“Or maybe…” Frank hesitated.
“What?” Percy asked.
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“Probably nothing,” Frank said. “Romans and
Greeks have an old rivalry. Sometimes Romans use graecus
as an insult for someone who’s an outsider—an enemy.
I wouldn’t worry about it.”
He sounded pretty worried.
They stopped at the center of camp, where two
wide stone-paved roads met at a T.
A street sign labeled the road to the main gates as
via praetoria. The other road, cutting across the middle of
camp, was labeled via principalis. Under those markers
were hand-painted signs like berkeley 5 miles; NEW ROME
1 MILE; OLD ROME 7280 MILES; HADES 2310 MILES (pointing
straight down); RENO 208 MILES, AND CERTAIN DEATH: YOU
ARE HERE!
For certain death, the place looked pretty clean and
orderly. The buildings were freshly whitewashed, laid out
in neat grids like the camp had been designed by a fussy
math teacher. The barracks had shady porches, where
campers lounged in hammocks or played cards and drank
sodas. Each dorm had a different collection of banners
out front displaying Roman numerals and various animals—
eagle, bear, wolf, horse, and something that looked
like a hamster.
Along the Via Praetoria, rows of shops advertised
food, armor, weapons, coffee, gladiator equipment, and
toga rentals. A chariot dealership had a big advertisement
out front: CAESAR XLS W/ANTILOCK BRAKES, NO DENARII
DOWN!
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At one corner of the crossroads stood the most impressive
building—a two-story wedge of white marble
with a columned portico like an old-fashioned bank. Roman
guards stood out front. Over the doorway hung a big
purple banner with the gold letters SPQR embroidered inside
a laurel wreath.
“Your headquarters?” Percy asked.
Reyna faced him, her eyes still cold and hostile.
“It’s called the principia.”
She scanned the mob of curious campers who had
followed them from the river. “Everyone back to your duties.
I’ll give you an update at evening muster. Remember,
we have war games after dinner.”
The thought of dinner made Percy’s stomach
rumble. The scent of barbecue from the dining hall made
his mouth water. The bakery down the street smelled
pretty wonderful too, but he doubted Reyna would let
him get an order to go.
The crowd dispersed reluctantly. Some muttered
comments about Percy’s chances.
“He’s dead,” said one.
“Would be those two who found him,” said another.
“Yeah,” muttered another. “Let him join the Fifth
Cohort. Greeks and geeks.”
Several kids laughed at that, but Reyna scowled at
them, and they cleared off.
“Hazel,” Reyna said. “Come with us. I want your report
on what happened at the gates.”
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“Me too?” Frank said. “Percy saved my life. We’ve
got to let him—”
Reyna gave Frank such a harsh look, he stepped
back.
“I’d remind you, Frank Zhang,” she said, “you are
on probatio yourself. You’ve caused enough trouble this
week.”
Frank’s ears turned red. He fiddled with a little tablet
on a cord around his neck. Percy hadn’t paid much attention
to it, but it looked like a name tag made out of
lead.
“Go to the armory,” Reyna told him. “Check our inventory.
I’ll call you if I need you.”
“But—” Frank caught himself. “Yes, Reyna.”
He hurried off.
Reyna waved Hazel and Percy toward the
headquarters. “Now, Percy Jackson, let’s see if we can improve
your memory.”
The principia was even more impressive inside. On the
ceiling glittered a mosaic of Romulus and Remus under
their adopted mama she-wolf (Lupa had told Percy that
story a million times). The floor was polished marble. The
walls were draped in velvet, so Percy felt like he was inside
the world’s most expensive camping tent. Along the
back wall stood a display of banners and wooden poles
studded with bronze medals—military symbols, Percy
guessed. In the center was one empty display stand, as if
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the main banner had been taken down for cleaning or
something.
In the back corner, a stairwell led down. It was
blocked by a row of iron bars like a prison door. Percy
wondered what was down there—monsters? Treasure?
Amnesiac demigods who had gotten on Reyna’s bad side?
In the center of the room, a long wooden table was
cluttered with scrolls, notebooks, tablet computers, daggers,
and a large bowl filled with jelly beans, which
seemed kind of out of place. Two life-sized statues of
greyhounds—one silver, one gold—flanked the table.
Reyna walked behind the table and sat in one of two high-
backed chairs. Percy wished he could sit in the other, but
Hazel remained standing. Percy got the feeling he was
supposed to also.
“So…” he started to say.
The dog statues bared their teeth and growled.
Percy froze. Normally he liked dogs, but these
glared at him with ruby eyes. Their fangs looked sharp as
razors.
“Easy, guys,” Reyna told the greyhounds.
They stopped growling, but kept eyeing Percy as
though they were imagining him in a doggie bag.
“They won’t attack,” Reyna said, “unless you try to
steal something, or unless I tell them to. That’s Argentum
and Aurum.”
“Silver and Gold,” Percy said. The Latin meanings
popped into his head like Hazel had said they would. He
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almost asked which dog was which. Then he realized that
that was a stupid question.
Reyna set her dagger on the table. Percy had the
vague feeling he’d seen her before. Her hair was black and
glossy as volcanic rock, woven in a single braid down her
back. She had the poise of a sword fighter—relaxed yet vigilant,
as if ready to spring into action at any moment.
The worry lines around her eyes made her look older than
she probably was.
“We have met,” he decided. “I don’t remember
when. Please, if you can tell me anything—”
“First things first,” Reyna said. “I want to hear your
story. What do you remember? How did you get here?
And don’t lie. My dogs don’t like liars.”
Argentum and Aurum snarled to emphasize the
point.
Percy told his story—how he’d woken up at the
ruined mansion in the woods of Sonoma. He described
his time with Lupa and her pack, learning their language
of gestures and expressions, learning to survive and fight.
Lupa had taught him about demigods, monsters,
and gods. She’d explained that she was one of the guardian
spirits of Ancient Rome. Demigods like Percy were still
responsible for carrying on Roman traditions in modern
times—fighting monsters, serving the gods, protecting
mortals, and upholding the memory of the empire. She’d
spent weeks training him, until he was as strong and
tough and vicious as a wolf. When she was satisfied with
his skills, she’d sent him south, telling him that if he
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survived the journey, he might find a new home and regain
his memory.
None of it seemed to surprise Reyna. In fact, she
seemed to find it pretty ordinary—except for one thing.
“No memory at all?” she asked. “You still remember
nothing?”
“Fuzzy bits and pieces.” Percy glanced at the greyhounds.
He didn’t want to mention Annabeth. It seemed
too private, and he was still confused about where to find
her. He was sure they’d met at a camp—but this one
didn’t feel like the right place.
Also, he was reluctant to share his one clear
memory: Annabeth’s face, her blond hair and gray eyes,
the way she laughed, threw her arms around him, and
gave him a kiss whenever he did something stupid.
She must have kissed me a lot, Percy thought.
He feared that if he spoke about that memory to
anyone, it would evaporate like a dream. He couldn’t risk
that.
Reyna spun her dagger. “Most of what you’re describing
is normal for demigods. At a certain age, one way
or another, we find our way to the Wolf House. We’re
tested and trained.
If Lupa thinks we’re worthy, she sends us south to
join the legion. But I’ve never heard of someone losing his
memory. How did you find Camp Jupiter?”
Percy told her about the last three days—the gorgons
who wouldn’t die, the old lady who turned out to be
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a goddess, and finally meeting Hazel and Frank at the
tunnel in the hill.
Hazel took the story from there. She described
Percy as brave and heroic, which made him uncomfortable.
All he’d done was carry a hippie bag lady.
Reyna studied him. “You’re old for a recruit. You’re
what, sixteen?”
“I think so,” Percy said.
“If you spent that many years on your own, without
training or help, you should be dead. A son of Neptune?
You’d have a powerful aura that would attract all kinds of
monsters.”
“Yeah,” Percy said. “I’ve been told that I smell.”
Reyna almost cracked a smile, which gave Percy
hope. Maybe she was human after all.
“You must’ve been somewhere before the Wolf
House,” she said.
Percy shrugged. Juno had said something about
him slumbering, and he did have a vague feeling that he’d
been asleep—maybe for a long time. But that didn’t make
sense.
Reyna sighed. “Well, the dogs haven’t eaten you, so
I suppose you’re telling the truth.”
“Great,” Percy said. “Next time, can I take a
polygraph?”
Reyna stood. She paced in front of the banners.
Her metal dogs watched her go back and forth.
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“Even if I accept that you’re not an enemy,” she
said, “you’re not a typical recruit. The Queen of Olympus
simply doesn’t appear at camp, announcing a new demigod.
The last time a major god visited us in person like
that…” She shook her head. “I’ve only heard legends
about such things. And a son of Neptune…that’s not a
good omen. Especially now.”
“What’s wrong with Neptune?” Percy asked. “And
what do you mean, ‘especially now’?”
Hazel shot him a warning look.
Reyna kept pacing. “You’ve fought Medusa’s sisters,
who haven’t been seen in thousands of years. You’ve
agitated our Lares, who are calling you a graecus. And
you wear strange symbols—that shirt, the beads on your
necklace. What do they mean?”
Percy looked down at his tattered orange T-shirt. It
might have had words on it at one point, but they were
too faded to read. He should have thrown the shirt away
weeks ago. It was worn to shreds, but he couldn’t bear to
get rid of it. He just kept washing it in streams and water
fountains as best he could and putting it back on.
As for the necklace, the four clay beads were each
decorated with a different symbol. One showed a trident.
Another displayed a miniature Golden Fleece. The third
was etched with the design of a maze, and the last had an
image of a building—maybe the Empire State Building?—
with names Percy didn’t recognize engraved around
it. The beads felt important, like pictures from a family album,
but he couldn’t remember what they meant.
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“I don’t know,” he said.
“And your sword?” Reyna asked.
Percy checked his pocket. The pen had reappeared
as it always did. He pulled it out, but then realized he’d
never shown Reyna the sword. Hazel and Frank hadn’t
seen it either. How had Reyna known about it?
Too late to pretend it didn’t exist.…He uncapped
the pen. Riptide sprang to full form. Hazel gasped. The
greyhounds barked apprehensively.
“What is that?” Hazel asked. “I’ve never seen a
sword like that.”
“I have,” Reyna said darkly. “It’s very old—a Greek
design. We used to have a few in the armory before…” She
stopped herself. “The metal is called Celestial bronze. It’s
deadly to monsters, like Imperial gold, but even rarer.”
“Imperial gold?” Percy asked.
Reyna unsheathed her dagger. Sure enough, the
blade was gold. “The metal was consecrated in ancient
times, at the Pantheon in Rome. Its existence was a
closely guarded secret of the emperors—a way for their
champions to slay monsters that threatened the empire.
We used to have more weapons like this, but now…well,
we scrape by. I use this dagger. Hazel has a spatha, a cavalry
sword. Most legionnaires use a shorter sword called a
gladius. But that weapon of yours is not Roman at all. It’s
another sign you’re not a typical demigod. And your
arm...”
“What about it?” Percy asked.
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Reyna held up her own forearm. Percy hadn’t noticed
before, but she had a tattoo on the inside: the letters
SPQR, a crossed sword and torch, and under that, four
parallel lines like score marks.
Percy glanced at Hazel.
“We all have them,” she confirmed, holding up her
arm. “All full members of the legion do.”
Hazel’s tattoo also had the letters SPQR, but she
only had one score mark, and her emblem was different: a
black glyph like a cross with curved arms and a head:
Percy looked at his own arms. A few scrapes, some mud,
and a fleck of Crispy Cheese ’n’ Wiener, but no tattoos.
“So you’ve never been a member of the legion,”
Reyna said. “These marks can’t be removed. I thought
perhaps…” She shook her head, as if dismissing an idea.
Hazel leaned forward. “If he’s survived as a loner
all this time, maybe he’s seen Jason.” She turned to Percy.
“Have you ever met a demigod like us before? A guy in a
purple shirt, with marks on his arm—”
“Hazel.” Reyna’s voice tightened. “Percy’s got
enough to worry about.”
Percy touched the point of his sword, and Riptide
shrank back into a pen. “I haven’t seen anyone like you
guys before. Who’s Jason?”
52/589
Reyna gave Hazel an irritated look. “He is…he was
my colleague.” She waved her hand at the second empty
chair. “The legion normally has two elected praetors.
Jason Grace, son of Jupiter, was our other praetor until
he disappeared last October.”
Percy tried to calculate. He hadn’t paid much attention
to the calendar out in the wilderness, but Juno had
mentioned that it was now June. “You mean he’s been
gone eight months, and you haven’t replaced him?”
“He might not be dead,” Hazel said. “We haven’t
given up.”
Reyna grimaced. Percy got the feeling this guy
Jason might’ve been more to her than just a colleague.
“Elections only happen in two ways,” Reyna said.
“Either the legion raises someone on a shield after a major
success on the battlefield—and we haven’t had any
major battles—or we hold a ballot on the evening of June
24, at the Feast of Fortuna. That’s in five days.”
Percy frowned. “You have a feast for tuna?”
“Fortuna,” Hazel corrected. “She’s the goddess of
luck. Whatever happens on her feast day can affect the
entire rest of the year. She can grant the camp good
luck…or really bad luck.”
Reyna and Hazel both glanced at the empty display
stand, as if thinking about what was missing.
A chill went down Percy’s back. “The Feast of Fortune…
The gorgons mentioned that. So did Juno. They
said the camp was going to be attacked on that day,
something about a big bad goddess named Gaea, and an
53/589
army, and Death being unleashed. You’re telling me that
day is this week?”
Reyna’s fingers tightened around the hilt of her
dagger.
“You will say nothing about that outside this
room,” she ordered. “I will not have you spreading more
panic in the camp.”
“So it’s true,” Percy said. “Do you know what’s going
to happen? Can we stop it?”
Percy had just met these people. He wasn’t sure he
even liked Reyna. But he wanted to help. They were demigods,
the same as him. They had the same enemies.
Besides, Percy remembered what Juno had told him: it
wasn’t just this camp at risk. His old life, the gods, and
the entire world might be destroyed. Whatever was coming
down, it was huge.
“We’ve talked enough for now,” Reyna said. “Hazel,
take him to Temple Hill. Find Octavian. On the way you
can answer Percy’s questions. Tell him about the legion.”
“Yes, Reyna.”
Percy still had so many questions, his brain felt like
it would melt. But Reyna made it clear the audience was
over. She sheathed her dagger. The metal dogs stood and
growled, inching toward Percy.
“Good luck with the augury, Percy Jackson,” she
said. “If Octavian lets you live, perhaps we can compare
notes…about your past.”
ON THE WAY OUT OF CAMP, Hazel bought him an espresso
drink and a cherry muffin from Bombilo the two-
headed coffee merchant.
Percy inhaled the muffin. The coffee was great.
Now, Percy thought, if he could just get a shower, a
change of clothes, and some sleep, he’d be golden. Maybe
even Imperial golden.
He watched a bunch of kids in swimsuits and towels
head into a building that had steam coming out of a
row of chimneys. Laughter and watery sounds echoed
from inside, like it was an indoor pool—Percy’s kind of
place.
“Bath house,” Hazel said. “We’ll get you in there
before dinner, hopefully. You haven’t lived until you’ve
had a Roman bath.” Percy sighed with anticipation.
55/589
As they approached the front gate, the barracks got
bigger and nicer. Even the ghosts looked better—with fancier
armor and shinier auras. Percy tried to decipher the
banners and symbols hanging in front of the buildings.
“You guys are divided into different cabins?” he
asked.
“Sort of.” Hazel ducked as a kid riding a giant eagle
swooped overhead. “We have five cohorts of about forty
kids each. Each cohort is divided into barracks of
ten—like roommates, kind of.”
Percy had never been great at math, but he tried to
multiply. “You’re telling me there’s two hundred kids at
camp?”
“Roughly.”
“And all of them are children of the gods? The gods
have been busy.”
Hazel laughed. “Not all of them are children of majorgods.
There are hundreds of minor Roman gods. Plus,
a lot of the campers are legacies—second or third generation.
Maybe their parents were demigods. Or their
grandparents.”
Percy blinked. “Children of demigods?”
“Why? Does that surprise you?”
Percy wasn’t sure. The last few weeks he’d been so
worried about surviving day to day. The idea of living
long enough to be an adult and have kids of his own—that
seemed like an impossible dream.
“These Legos—”
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“Legacies,” Hazel corrected.
“They have powers like a demigod?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes not. But they can be
trained. All the best Roman generals and emperors—you
know, they all claimed to be descended from gods. Most
of the time, they were telling the truth. The camp augur
we’re going to meet, Octavian, he’s a legacy, descendant
of Apollo. He’s got the gift of prophecy, supposedly.”
“Supposedly?”
Hazel made a sour face. “You’ll see.”
That didn’t make Percy feel so great, if this dude
Octavian had Percy’s fate in his hands.
“So the divisions,” he asked, “the cohorts,
whatever—you’re divided according to who your godly
parent is?”
Hazel stared at him. “What a horrible idea! No, the
officers decide where to assign recruits. If we were divided
according to god, the cohorts would be all uneven.
I’d be alone.”
Percy felt a twinge of sadness, like he’d been in that
situation. “Why? What’s your ancestry?”
Before she could answer, someone behind them
yelled, “Wait!”
A ghost ran toward them—an old man with a
medicine-ball belly and toga so long he kept tripping on
it. He caught up to them and gasped for air, his purple
aura flickering around him.
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“This is him?” the ghost panted. “A new recruit for
the Fifth, perhaps?”
“Vitellius,” Hazel said, “we’re sort of in a hurry.”
The ghost scowled at Percy and walked around
him, inspecting him like a used car. “I don’t know,” he
grumbled. “We need only the best for the cohort. Does he
have all his teeth? Can he fight? Does he clean stables?”
“Yes, yes, and no,” Percy said. “Who are you?”
“Percy, this is Vitellius.” Hazel’s expression said:
Just humor him. “He’s one of our Lares; takes an interest
in new recruits.”
On a nearby porch, other ghosts snickered as Vitellius
paced back and forth, tripping over his toga and hiking
up his sword belt.
“Yes,” Vitellius said, “back in Caesar’s day—that’s
Julius Caesar, mind you—the Fifth Cohort was
something! Twelfth Legion Fulminata, pride of Rome!
But these days? Disgraceful what we’ve come to. Look at
Hazel here, using a spatha. Ridiculous weapon for a Roman
legionnaire—that’s for cavalry! And you, boy—you
smell like a Greek sewer. Haven’t you had a bath?”
“I’ve been a little busy fighting gorgons,” Percy
said.
“Vitellius,” Hazel interrupted, “we’ve got to get
Percy’s augury before he can join. Why don’t you check on
Frank? He’s in the armory doing inventory. You know
how much he values your help.”
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The ghost’s furry purple eyebrows shot up. “Mars
Almighty! They let the probatio check the armor? We’ll
be ruined!”
He stumbled off down the street, stopping every
few feet to pick up his sword or rearrange his toga.
“O-h-h-kay,” Percy said.
“Sorry,” Hazel said. “He’s eccentric, but he’s one of
the oldest Lares. Been around since the legion was
founded.”
“He called the legion…Fulminata?” Percy said.
“‘Armed with Lightning,’” Hazel translated. “That’s
our motto. The Twelfth Legion was around for the entire
Roman Empire. When Rome fell, a lot of legions just disappeared.
We went underground, acting on secret orders
from Jupiter himself: stay alive, recruit demigods and
their children, keep Rome going. We’ve been doing that
ever since, moving around to wherever Roman influence
was strongest. The last few centuries, we’ve been in
America.”
As bizarre as that sounded, Percy had no trouble
believing it. In fact, it sounded familiar, like something
he’d always known.
“And you’re in the Fifth Cohort,” he guessed,
“which maybe isn’t the most popular?”
Hazel scowled. “Yeah. I joined up last September.”
“So…just a few weeks before that guy Jason
disappeared.”
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Percy knew he’d hit a sore spot. Hazel looked
down. She was silent long enough to count every paving
stone.
“Come on,” she said at last. “I’ll show you my favorite
view.”
They stopped outside the main gates. The fort was situated
on the highest point in the valley, so they could see
pretty much everything.
The road led down to the river and divided. One
path led south across a bridge, up to the hill with all the
temples. The other road led north into the city, a miniature
version of Ancient Rome. Unlike the military camp,
the city looked chaotic and colorful, with buildings
crowded together at haphazard angles. Even from this far
away, Percy could see people gathered in the plaza, shoppers
milling around an open-air market, parents with
kids playing in the parks.
“You’ve got families here?” he asked.
“In the city, absolutely,” Hazel said. “When you’re
accepted into the legion, you do ten years of service. After
that, you can muster out whenever you want. Most demigods
go into the mortal world. But for some—well, it’s
pretty dangerous out there. This valley is a sanctuary. You
can go to college in the city, get married, have kids, retire
when you get old. It’s the only safe place on earth for
people like us. So yeah, a lot of veterans make their
homes there, under the protection of the legion.”
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Adult demigods. Demigods who could live without
fear, get married, raise a family. Percy couldn’t quite wrap
his mind around that. It seemed too good to be true. “But
if this valley is attacked?”
Hazel pursed her lips. “We have defenses. The borders
are magical. But our strength isn’t what it used to be.
Lately, the monster attacks have been increasing. What
you said about the gorgons not dying…we’ve noticed that
too, with other monsters.”
“Do you know what’s causing it?”
Hazel looked away. Percy could tell that she was
holding something back—something she wasn’t supposed
to say.
“It’s—it’s complicated,” she said. “My brother says
Death isn’t—”
She was interrupted by an elephant.
Someone behind them shouted, “Make way!”
Hazel dragged Percy out of the road as a demigod
rode past on a full-grown pachyderm covered in black
Kevlar armor. The word elephant was printed on the side
of his armor, which seemed a little obvious to Percy.
The elephant thundered down the road and turned
north, heading toward a big open field where some fortifications
were under construction.
Percy spit dust out of his mouth. “What the—?”
“Elephant,” Hazel explained.
“Yeah, I read the sign. Why do you have an ele
phant in a bulletproof vest?”
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“War games tonight,” Hazel said. “That’s Hannibal.
If we didn’t include him, he’d get upset.”
“We can’t have that.”
Hazel laughed. It was hard to believe she’d looked
so moody a moment ago. Percy wondered what she’d
been about to say. She had a brother. Yet she had claimed
she’d be alone if the camp sorted her by her godly parent.
Percy couldn’t figure her out. She seemed nice and
easy going, mature for somebody who couldn’t have been
more than thirteen. But she also seemed to be hiding a
deep sadness, like she felt guilty about something.
Hazel pointed south across the river. Dark clouds
were gathering over Temple Hill. Red flashes of lightning
washed the monuments in blood-colored light.
“Octavian is busy,” Hazel said. “We’d better get
over there.”
On the way, they passed some goat-legged guys hanging
out on the side of the road.
“Hazel!” one of them cried.
He trotted over with a big grin on his face. He wore
a faded Hawaiian shirt and nothing for pants except thick
brown goat fur. His massive Afro jiggled. His eyes were
hidden behind little round rainbow-tinted glasses. He
held a cardboard sign that read: WILL WORK SING TALK go
away for denarii.
“Hi, Don,” Hazel said. “Sorry, we don’t have
time—”
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“Oh, that’s cool! That’s cool!” Don trotted along
with them. “Hey, this guy’s new!” He grinned at Percy.
“Do you have three denarii for the bus? Because I left my
wallet at home, and I’ve got to get to work, and—”
“Don,” Hazel chided. “Fauns don’t have wallets. Or
jobs. Or homes. And we don’t have buses.”
“Right,” he said cheerfully, “but do you have
denarii?”
“Your name is Don the Faun?” Percy asked.
“Yeah. So?”
“Nothing.” Percy tried to keep a straight face. “Why
don’t fauns have jobs? Shouldn’t they work for the
camp?”
Don bleated. “Fauns! Work for the camp!
Hilarious!”
“Fauns are, um, free spirits,” Hazel explained.
“They hang out here because, well, it’s a safe place to
hang out and beg. We tolerate them, but—”
“Oh, Hazel is awesome,” Don said. “She’s so nice!
All the other campers are like, ‘Go away, Don.’ But she’s
like, ‘Please go away, Don.’ I love her!”
The faun seemed harmless, but Percy still found
him unsettling. He couldn’t shake the feeling that fauns
should be more than just homeless guys begging for
denarii.
Don looked at the ground in front of them and
gasped. “Score!”
63/589
He reached for something, but Hazel screamed,
“Don, no!”
She pushed him out of the way and snatched up a
small shiny object. Percy caught a glimpse of it before
Hazel slipped it into her pocket. He could have sworn it
was a diamond.
“Come on, Hazel,” Don complained. “I could’ve
bought a year’s worth of doughnuts with that!”
“Don, please,” Hazel said. “Go away.”
She sounded shaken, like she’d just saved Don
from a charging bulletproof elephant.
The faun sighed. “Aw, I can’t stay mad at you. But I
swear, it’s like you’re good luck. Every time you walk
by—”
“Good-bye, Don,” Hazel said quickly. “Let’s go,
Percy.”
She started jogging. Percy had to sprint to catch up.
“What was that about?” Percy asked. “That diamond
in the road—”
“Please,” she said. “Don’t ask.”
They walked in uneasy silence the rest of the way to
TempleHill. A crooked stone path led past a crazy assortment
of tiny altars and massive domed vaults. Statues of
gods seemed to follow Percy with their eyes.
Hazel pointed out the Temple of Bellona. “Goddess
of war,” she said. “That’s Reyna’s mom.” Then they
passed a massive red crypt decorated with human skulls
on iron spikes.
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“Please tell me we’re not going in there,” Percy
said.
Hazel shook her head. “That’s the Temple of Mars
Ultor.”
“Mars ... Ares, the war god?”
“That’s his Greek name,” Hazel said. “But, yeah,
same guy. Ultor means ‘the Avenger.’ He’s the second-
most important god of Rome.”
Percy wasn’t thrilled to hear that. For some reason,
just looking at the ugly red building made him feel angry.
He pointed toward the summit. Clouds swirled
over the largest temple, a round pavilion with a ring of
white columns supporting a domed roof. “I’m guessing
that’s Zeus—uh, I mean, Jupiter’s? That’s where we’re
heading?”
“Yeah.” Hazel sounded edgy. “Octavian reads auguries
there—the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.”
Percy had to think about it, but the Latin words
clicked into English. “Jupiter…the best and the greatest?”
“Right.”
“What’s Neptune’s title?” Percy asked. “The coolest
and most awesome?”
“Um, not quite.” Hazel gestured to a small blue
building the size of a toolshed. A cobweb-covered trident
was nailed above the door.
Percy peeked inside. On a small altar sat a bowl
with three dried-up, moldy apples.
His heart sank. “Popular place.”
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“I’m sorry, Percy,” Hazel said. “It’s just…Romans
were always scared of the sea. They only used ships if they
had to. Even in modern times, having a child of Neptune
around has always been a bad omen. The last time one
joined the legion
…well, it was 1906, when Camp Jupiter was located
across the bay in San Francisco. There was this huge
earthquake—”
“You’re telling me a child of Neptune caused that?”
“So they say.” Hazel looked apologetic. “Anyway…
Romans fear Neptune, but they don’t love him
much.” Percy stared at the cobwebs on the trident. Great,
he thought. Even if he joined the camp, he would never be
loved. His best hope was to be scary to his new camp-
mates. Maybe if he did really well, they’d give him some
moldy apples.
Still…standing at Neptune’s altar, he felt something
stirring inside him, like waves rippling through his veins.
He reached in his backpack and dug out the last bit
of food from his trip—a stale bagel. It wasn’t much, but he
set it on the altar.
“Hey…uh, Dad.” He felt pretty stupid talking to a
bowl of fruit. “If you can hear me, help me out, okay? Give
me my memory back. Tell me—tell me what to do.”
His voice cracked. He hadn’t meant to get emotional,
but he was exhausted and scared, and he’d been lost
for so long, he would’ve given anything for some guidance.
He wanted to know something about his life for
sure, without grabbing for missing memories.
66/589
Hazel put her hand on his shoulder. “It’ll be okay.
You’re here now. You’re one of us.”
He felt awkward, depending on an eighth-grade girl
he barely knew for comfort, but he was glad she was
there.
Above them, thunder rumbled. Red lightning lit up
the hill.
“Octavian’s almost done,” Hazel said. “Let’s go.”
Compared to Neptune’s tool shed, Jupiter’s temple was
definitely optimus and maximus.
The marble floor was etched with fancy mosaics
and Latin inscriptions. Sixty feet above, the domed ceiling
sparkled gold. The whole temple was open to the wind.
In the center stood a marble altar, where a kid in a
toga was doing some sort of ritual in front of a massive
golden statue of the big dude himself: Jupiter the sky god,
dressed in a silk XXXL purple toga, holding a lightning
bolt.
“It doesn’t look like that,” Percy muttered.
“What?” Hazel asked.
“The master bolt,” Percy said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I—” Percy frowned. For a second, he’d thought he
remembered something. Now it was gone. “Nothing, I
guess.”
67/589
The kid at the altar raised his hands. More red
lightning flashed in the sky, shaking the temple. Then he
put his hands down, and the rumbling stopped. The
clouds turned from gray to white and broke apart.
A pretty impressive trick, considering the kid didn’t
look like much. He was tall and skinny, with straw-
colored hair, oversized jeans, a baggy T-shirt, and a
drooping toga. He looked like a scarecrow wearing a bed
sheet.
“What’s he doing?” Percy murmured.
The guy in the toga turned. He had a crooked smile
and a slightly crazy look in his eyes, like he’d just been
playing an intense video game. In one hand he held a
knife. In the other hand was something like a dead anim
al. That didn’t make him look any less crazy.
“Percy,” Hazel said, “this is Octavian.”
“The graecus!” Octavian announced. “How
interesting.”
“Uh, hi,” Percy said. “Are you killing small
animals?”
Octavian looked at the fuzzy thing in his hand and
laughed. “No, no. Once upon a time, yes. We used to read
the will of the gods by examining animal guts—chickens,
goats, that sort of thing. Nowadays, we use these.”
He tossed the fuzzy thing to Percy. It was a disemboweled
teddy bear. Then Percy noticed that there was a
whole pile of mutilated stuffed animals at the foot of
Jupiter’s statue.
68/589
“Seriously?” Percy asked.
Octavian stepped off the dais. He was probably
about eighteen, but so skinny and sickly pale, he could’ve
passed for younger. At first he looked harmless, but as he
got closer, Percy wasn’t so sure. Octavian’s eyes glittered
with harsh curiosity, like he might gut Percy just as easily
as a teddy bear if he thought he could learn something
from it.
Octavian narrowed his eyes. “You seem nervous.”
“You remind me of someone,” Percy said. “I can’t
remember who.”
“Possibly my namesake, Octavian—Augustus
Caesar. Everyone says I bear a remarkable resemblance.”
Percy didn’t think that was it, but he couldn’t pin
down the memory. “Why did you call me ‘the Greek’?”
“I saw it in the auguries.” Octavian waved his knife
at the pile of stuffing on the altar. “The message said: The
Greek has arrived. Or possibly: The goose has cried. I’m
thinking the first interpretation is correct. You seek to
join the legion?”
Hazel spoke for him. She told Octavian everything
that had happened since they met at the tunnel—the gorgons,
the fight at the river, the appearance of Juno, their
conversation with Reyna.
When she mentioned Juno, Octavian looked
surprised.
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“Juno,” he mused. “We call her Juno Moneta. Juno
the Warner. She appears in times of crisis, to counsel
Rome about great threats.”
He glanced at Percy, as if to say: like mysterious
Greeks, for instance.
“I hear the Feast of Fortuna is this week,” Percy
said. “The gorgons warned there’d be an invasion on that
day. Did you see that in your stuffing?”
“Sadly, no.” Octavian sighed. “The will of the gods
is hard to discern. And these days, my vision is even
darker.”
“Don’t you have…I don’t know,” Percy said, “an oracle
or something?”
“An oracle!” Octavian smiled. “What a cute idea.
No, I’m afraid we’re fresh out of oracles. Now, if we’d
gone questing for the Sibylline books, like I
recommended—”
“The Siba-what?” Percy asked.
“Books of prophecy,” Hazel said, “which Octavian
is obsessed with. Romans used to consult them when disasters
happened. Most people believe they burned up
when Rome fell.”
“Some people believe that,” Octavian corrected.
“Unfortunately our present leadership won’t authorize a
quest to look for them—”
“Because Reyna isn’t stupid,” Hazel said.
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“—so we have only a few remaining scraps from the
books,” Octavian continued. “A few mysterious predictions,
like these.”
He nodded to the inscriptions on the marble floor.
Percy stared at the lines of words, not really expecting to
understand them. He almost choked.
“That one.” He pointed, translating as he read
aloud:“Seven half-bloods shall answer the call. To storm
or fire the world must fall—”
“Yes, yes.” Octavian finished it without looking:
“An oath to keep with a final breath, and foes bear arms
to the Doors of Death.”
“I—I know that one.” Percy thought thunder was
shaking the temple again. Then he realized his whole
body was trembling. “That’s important.”
Octavian arched an eyebrow. “Of course it’s important.
We call it the Prophecy of Seven, but it’s several
thousand years old. We don’t know what it means. Every
time someone tries to interpret it…Well, Hazel can tell
you. Bad things happen.”
Hazel glared at him. “Just read the augury for
Percy. Can he join the legion or not?”
Percy could almost see Octavian’s mind working,
calculating whether or not Percy would be useful. He held
out his hand for Percy’s backpack. “That’s a beautiful specimen.
May I?”
Percy didn’t understand what he meant, but
Octavian snatched the Bargain Mart panda pillow that
was sticking out of the top of his pack. It was just a silly
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stuffed toy, but Percy had carried it a long way. He was
kind of fond of it. Octavian turned toward the altar and
raised his knife.
“Hey!” Percy protested.
Octavian slashed open the panda’s belly and
poured its stuffing over the altar. He tossed the panda
carcass aside, muttered a few words over the fluff, and
turned with a big smile on his face.
“Good news!” he said. “Percy may join the legion.
We’ll assign him a cohort at evening muster. Tell Reyna
that I approve.”
Hazel’s shoulders relaxed. “Uh…great. Come on,
Percy.”
“Oh, and Hazel,” Octavian said. “I’m happy to welcome
Percy into the legion. But when the election for
praetor comes up, I hope you’ll remember—”
“Jason isn’t dead,” Hazel snapped. “You’re the augur.
You’re supposed to be looking for him!”
“Oh, I am!” Octavian pointed at the pile of gutted
stuffed animals. “I consult the gods every day! Alas, after
eight months, I’ve found nothing. Of course, I’m still
looking. But if Jason doesn’t return by the Feast of For-
tuna, we must act. We can’t have a power vacuum any
longer. I hope you’ll support me for praetor. It would
mean so much to me.”
Hazel clenched her fists. “Me. Support. You?”
Octavian took off his toga, setting it and his knife
on the altar. Percy noticed seven lines on Octavian’s
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arm—seven years of camp, Percy guessed. Octavian’s
mark was a harp, the symbol of Apollo.
“After all,” Octavian told Hazel, “I might be able to
help you. It would be a shame if those awful rumors about
you kept circulating…or, gods forbid, if they turned out to
be true.”
Percy slipped his hand into his pocket and grabbed
his pen. This guy was blackmailing Hazel. That was obvious.
One sign from Hazel, and Percy was ready to bust
out Riptide and see how Octavian liked being at the other
end of a blade.
Hazel took a deep breath. Her knuckles were white.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Excellent,” Octavian said. “By the way, your brother
is here.”
Hazel stiffened. “My brother? Why?”
Octavian shrugged. “Why does your brother do
anything? He’s waiting for you at your father’s shrine.
Just…ah, don’t invite him to stay too long. He has a disturbing
effect on the others. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I
have to keep searching for our poor lost friend, Jason.
Nice to meet you, Percy.”
Hazel stormed out of the pavilion, and Percy followed.
He was sure he’d never been so glad to leave a
temple in his life.
As Hazel marched down the hill, she cursed in Latin.
Percy didn’t understand all of it, but he got son of a
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gorgon, power-hungry snake, and a few choice suggestions
about where Octavian could stick his knife.
“I hate that guy,” she muttered in English. “If I had
my way—”
“He won’t really get elected praetor, will he?” Percy
asked.
“I wish I could be certain. Octavian has a lot of
friends, most of them bought. The rest of the campers are
afraid of him.”
“Afraid of that skinny little guy?”
“Don’t underestimate him. Reyna’s not so bad by
herself, but if Octavian shares her power…” Hazel
shuddered. “Let’s go see my brother. He’ll want to meet
you.”
Percy didn’t argue. He wanted to meet this mysterious
brother, maybe learn something about Hazel’s background—
who her dad was, what secret she was hiding.
Percy couldn’t believe she’d done anything to be guilty
about. She seemed too nice. But Octavian had acted like
he had some first-class dirt on her.
Hazel led Percy to a black crypt built into the side
of the hill. Standing in front was a teenage boy in black
jeans and an aviator jacket.
“Hey,” Hazel called. “I’ve brought a friend.”
The boy turned. Percy had another one of those
weird flashes: like this was somebody he should know.
The kid was almost as pale as Octavian, but with dark
eyes and messy black hair. He didn’t look anything like
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Hazel. He wore a silver skull ring, a chain for a belt, and a
black T-shirt with skull designs. At his side hung a pure-
black sword.
For a microsecond when he saw Percy, the boy
seemed shocked—panicked even, like he’d been caught in
a searchlight.
“This is Percy Jackson,” Hazel said. “He’s a good
guy. Percy, this is my brother, the son of Pluto.”
The boy regained his composure and held out his
hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’m Nico di
Angelo.”
HAZEL FELT LIKE SHE’D JUST INTRODUCED two nuclear
bombs. Now she was waiting to see which one exploded
first.
Until that morning, her brother Nico had been the
most powerful demigod she knew. The others at Camp
Jupiter saw him as a traveling oddball, about as harmless
as the fauns. Hazel knew better. She hadn’t grown up
with Nico, hadn’t even known him very long. But she
knew Nico was more dangerous than Reyna, or Octavian,
or maybe even Jason.
Then she’d met Percy.
At first, when she saw him stumbling up the highway
with the old lady in his arms, Hazel had thought he
might be a god in disguise. Even though he was beat up,
dirty, and stooped with exhaustion, he’d had an aura of
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power. He had the good looks of a Roman god, with sea-
green eyes and wind blown black hair.
She’d ordered Frank not to fire on him. She
thought the gods might be testing them. She’d heard
myths like that: a kid with an old lady begs for shelter,
and when the rude mortals refuse—boom, they get turned
into banana slugs.
Then Percy had controlled the river and destroyed
the gorgons. He’d turned a pen into a bronze sword. He’d
stirred up the whole camp with talk about the graecus.
A son of the sea god...
Long ago, Hazel had been told that a descendant of
Neptune would save her. But could Percy really take away
her curse? It seemed too much to hope for.
Percy and Nico shook hands. They studied each
other warily, and Hazel fought the urge to run. If these
two busted out the magic swords, things could get ugly.
Nico didn’t appear scary. He was skinny and sloppy
in his rumpled black clothes. His hair, as always, looked
like he’d just rolled out of bed.
Hazel remembered when she’d met him. The first
time she’d seen him draw that black sword of his, she’d
almost laughed. The way he called it “Stygian iron,” all
serious-like—he’d looked ridiculous. This scrawny white
boy was no fighter. She certainly hadn’t believed they
were related.
She had changed her mind about that quick
enough.
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Percy scowled. “I—I know you.”
Nico raised his eyebrows. “Do you?” He looked at
Hazel for explanation.
Hazel hesitated. Something about her brother’s reaction
wasn’t right. He was trying hard to act casual, but
when he had first seen Percy, Hazel had noticed his momentary
look of panic. Nico already knew Percy. She was
sure of it. Why was he pretending otherwise?
Hazel forced herself to speak. “Um…Percy’s lost his
memory.” She told her brother what had happened since
Percy had arrived at the gates.
“So, Nico…” she continued carefully, “I
thought…you know, you travel all over. Maybe you’ve met
demigods like Percy before, or...”
Nico’s expression turned as dark as Tartarus. Hazel
didn’t understand why, but she got the message: Drop it.
“This story about Gaea’s army,” Nico said. “You
warned Reyna?”
Percy nodded. “Who is Gaea, anyway?”
Hazel’s mouth went dry. Just hearing that name…It
was all she could do to keep her knees from buckling. She
remembered a woman’s soft sleepy voice, a glowing cave,
and feeling her lungs fill with black oil.
“She’s the earth goddess.” Nico glanced at the
ground as if it might be listening. “The oldest goddess of
all. She’s in a deep sleep most of the time, but she hates
the gods and their children.”
“Mother Earth…is evil?” Percy asked.
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“Very,” Nico said gravely. “She convinced her son,
the Titan Kronos—um, I mean, Saturn—to kill his dad,
Uranus, and take over the world. The Titans ruled for a
long time. Then the Titans’ children, the Olympian gods,
overthrew them.”
“That story seems familiar,” Percy sounded surprised,
like an old memory had partially surfaced. “But I
don’t think I ever heard the part about Gaea.”
Nico shrugged. “She got mad when the gods took
over. She took a new husband—Tartarus, the spirit of the
abyss—and gave birth to a race of giants. They tried to
destroy Mount Olympus, but the gods finally beat them.
At least…the first time.”
“The first time?” Percy repeated.
Nico glanced at Hazel. He probably wasn’t meaning
to make her feel guilty, but she couldn’t help it. If Percy
knew the truth about her, and the horrible things she’d
done…
“Last summer,” Nico continued, “Saturn tried to
make a comeback. There was a second Titan war. The Romans
at Camp Jupiter stormed his headquarters on
Mount Othrys, across the bay, and destroyed his throne.
Saturn disappeared—” He hesitated, watching Percy’s
face. Hazel got the feeling her brother was nervous that
more of Percy’s memory might come back.
“Um, anyway,” Nico continued, “Saturn probably
faded back to the abyss. We all thought the war was over.
Now it looks like the Titans’ defeat stirred up Gaea. She’s
starting to wake. I’ve heard reports of giants being
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reborn. If they mean to challenge the gods again, they’ll
probably start by destroying the demigods.…”
“You’ve told Reyna this?” Percy asked.
“Of course.” Nico’s jaw tensed. “The Romans don’t
trust me. That’s why I was hoping she’d listen to you.
Children of Pluto…well, no offense, but they think we’re
even worse than children of Neptune. We’re bad luck.”
“They let Hazel stay here,” Percy noted.
“That’s different,” Nico said.
“Why?”
“Percy,” Hazel cut in, “look, the giants aren’t the
worst problem. Even ... even Gaea isn’t the worst problem.
The thing you noticed about the gorgons, how they
wouldn’t die, that’s our biggest worry.” She looked at
Nico. She was getting dangerously close to her own secret
now, but for some reason Hazel trusted Percy. Maybe because
he was also an outsider, maybe because he’d saved
Frank at the river. He deserved to know what they were
facing.
“Nico and I,” she said carefully, “we think that
what’s happening is…Death isn’t—”
Before she could finish, a shout came from down
the hill.
Frank jogged toward them, wearing his jeans,
purple camp shirt, and denim jacket. His hands were
covered with grease from cleaning weapons.
As it did every time she saw Frank, Hazel’s heart
performed a little skip-beat tap-dance—which really
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irritated her. Sure, he was a good friend—one of the only
people at camp who didn’t treat her as if she had a contagious
disease. But she didn’t like him in that way.
He was three years older than she was, and he
wasn’t exactly Prince Charming, with that strange combination
of baby face and bulky wrestler’s body. He
looked like a cuddly koala bear with muscles. The fact
that everyone always tried to pair them up—the two
biggest losers at camp! You guys are perfect for each
other—just made Hazel more determined not to like him.
But her heart wasn’t with the program. It went nuts
whenever Frank was around. She hadn’t felt like that
since ... well, since Sammy.
Stop it, she thought. You’re here for one reason—
and it isn’t to get a new boyfriend.
Besides, Frank didn’t know her secret. If he knew,
he wouldn’t be so nice to her.
He reached the shrine. “Hey, Nico…”
“Frank.” Nico smiled. He seemed to find Frank
amusing, maybe because Frank was the only one at camp
who wasn’t uneasy around the children of Pluto.
“Reyna sent me to get Percy,” Frank said. “Did
Octavian accept you?”
“Yeah,” Percy said. “He slaughtered my panda.”
“He…Oh. The augury? Yeah, teddy bears must have
nightmares about that guy. But you’re in! We need to get
you cleaned up before evening muster.”
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Hazel realized the sun was getting low over the
hills. How had the day gone so fast? “You’re right,” she
said. “We’d better—”
“Frank,” Nico interrupted, “why don’t you take
Percy down? Hazel and I will be along soon.”
Uh-oh, Hazel thought. She tried not to look
anxious.
“That’s—that’s a good idea,” she managed. “Go
ahead, guys. We’ll catch up.”
Percy looked at Nico one more time, as though he
was still trying to place a memory. “I’d like to talk with
you some more. I can’t shake the feeling—”
“Sure,” Nico agreed. “Later. I’ll be staying
overnight.”
“You will?” Hazel blurted. The campers were going
to love that—the son of Neptune and the son of Pluto arriving
on the same day. Now all they needed was some
black cats and broken mirrors.
“Go on, Percy,” Nico said. “Settle in.” He turned to
Hazel, and she got the sense that the worst part of her day
was yet to come. “My sister and I need to talk.”
“You know him, don’t you,” Hazel said.
They sat on the roof of Pluto’s shrine, which was
covered with bones and diamonds. As far as Hazel knew,
the bones had always been there. The diamonds were her
fault. If she sat anywhere too long, or just got anxious,
they started popping up all around her like mushrooms
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after a rain. Several million dollars’ worth of stones
glittered on the roof, but fortunately the other campers
wouldn’t touch them. They knew better than to steal from
temples—especially Pluto’s—and the fauns never came up
here.
Hazel shuddered, remembering her close call with
Don that afternoon. If she hadn’t moved quickly and
snatched that diamond off the road…She didn’t want to
think about it. She didn’t need another death on her
conscience.
Nico swung his feet like a little kid. His Stygian iron
sword lay by his side, next to Hazel’s spatha. He gazed
across the valley, where construction crews were working
in the Field of Mars, building fortifications for tonight’s
games.
“Percy Jackson.” He said the name like an incantation.
“Hazel, I have to be careful what I say. Important
things are at work here. Some secrets need to stay secret.
You of all people—you should understand that.”
Hazel’s cheeks felt hot. “But he’s not like…like me?”
“No,” Nico said. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more. I
can’t interfere. Percy has to find his own way at this
camp.”
“Is he dangerous?” she asked.
Nico managed a dry smile. “Very. To his enemies.
But he’s not a threat to Camp Jupiter. You can trust him.”
“Like I trust you,” Hazel said bitterly.
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Nico twisted his skull ring. Around him, bones
began to quiver as if they were trying to form a new skeleton.
Whenever he got moody, Nico had that effect on the
dead, kind of like Hazel’s curse. Between them, they represented
Pluto’s two spheres of control: death and riches.
Sometimes Hazel thought Nico had gotten the better end
of the deal.
“Look, I know this is hard,” Nico said. “But you
have a second chance. You can make things right.”
“Nothing about this is right,” Hazel said. “If they
find out the truth about me—”
“They won’t,” Nico promised. “They’ll call a quest
soon. They have to. You’ll make me proud. Trust me,
Bi—”
He caught himself, but Hazel knew what he’d almost
called her: Bianca. Nico’s real sister—the one he’d
grown up with. Nico might care about Hazel, but she’d
never be Bianca. Hazel was the simply the next best thing
Nico could manage—a consolation prize from the
Underworld.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Hazel’s mouth tasted like metal, as if gold nuggets
were popping up under her tongue. “Then it’s true about
Death? Is Alcyoneus to blame?”
“I think so,” Nico said. “It’s getting bad in the
Underworld. Dad’s going crazy trying to keep things under
control. From what Percy said about the gorgons,
things are getting worse up here, too. But look, that’s why
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you’re here. All that stuff in your past—you can make
something good come out of it.
You belong at Camp Jupiter.”
That sounded so ridiculous, Hazel almost laughed.
She didn’t belong in this place. She didn’t even belong in
this century.
She should have known better than to focus on the
past, but she remembered the day when her old life had
been shattered. The blackout hit her so suddenly, she
didn’t even have time to say, Uh-oh. She shifted back in
time. Not a dream or a vision. The memory washed over
her with such perfect clarity, she felt she was actually
there.
Her most recent birthday. She’d just turned thirteen.
But not last December—December 17, 1941, the last
day she had lived in New Orleans.
HAZEL WAS WALKING HOME ALONE from the riding
stables. Despite the cold evening, she was buzzing with
warmth. Sammy had just kissed her on the cheek.
The day had been full of ups and downs. Kids at
school had teased her about her mother, calling her a
witch and a lot of other names. That had been going on
for a long time, of course, but it was getting worse. Rumors
were spreading about Hazel’s curse. The school was
called St. Agnes Academy for Colored Children and Indians,
a name that hadn’t changed in a hundred years. Just
like its name, the place masked a whole lot of cruelty under
a thin veneer of kindness.
Hazel didn’t understand how other black kids could
be so mean. They should’ve known better, since they
themselves had to put up with name-calling all the time.
But they yelled at her and stole her lunch, always asking
for those famous jewels: “Where’s those cursed
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diamonds, girl? Gimme some or I’ll hurt you!” They
pushed her away at the water fountain, and threw rocks at
her if she tried to approach them on the playground.
Despite how horrible they were, Hazel never gave
them diamonds or gold. She didn’t hate anyone that
much. Besides, she had one friend—Sammy—and that
was enough.
Sammy liked to joke that he was the perfect St.
Agnes student. He was Mexican American, so he considered
himself colored and Indian. “They should give me
a double scholarship,” he said.
He wasn’t big or strong, but he had a crazy smile
and he made Hazel laugh.
That afternoon he’d taken her to the stables where
he worked as a groom. It was a “whites only” riding club,
of course, but it was closed on weekdays, and with the
war on, there was talk that the club might have to shut
down completely until the Japanese were whipped and
the soldiers came back home. Sammy could usually sneak
Hazel in to help take care of the horses. Once in a while
they’d go riding.
Hazel loved horses. They seemed to be the only living
things that weren’t scared of her. People hated her.
Cats hissed. Dogs growled. Even the stupid hamster in
Miss Finley’s classroom squeaked in terror when she gave
it a carrot. But horses didn’t mind. When she was in the
saddle, she could ride so fast that there was no chance of
gemstones cropping up in her wake. She almost felt free
of her curse.
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That afternoon, she’d taken out a tan roan stallion
with a gorgeous black mane. She galloped into the fields
so swiftly, she left Sammy behind. By the time he caught
up, he and his horse were both winded.
“What are you running from?” He laughed. “I’m
not that ugly, am I?”
It was too cold for a picnic, but they had one anyway,
sitting under a magnolia tree with the horses
tethered to a split-rail fence. Sammy had brought her a
cupcake with a birthday candle, which had gotten
smashed on the ride but was still the sweetest thing Hazel
had ever seen. They broke it in half and shared it.
Sammy talked about the war. He wished he were
old enough to go. He asked Hazel if she would write him
letters if he were a soldier going overseas.
“’Course, dummy,” she said.
He grinned. Then, as if moved by a sudden impulse,
he lurched forward and kissed her on the cheek.
“Happy birthday, Hazel.”
It wasn’t much. Just one kiss, and not even on the
lips. But Hazel felt like she was floating. She hardly remembered
the ride back to the stables, or telling Sammy
good-bye. He said, “See you tomorrow,” like he always
did. But she would never see him again.
By the time she got back to the French Quarter, it
was getting dark. As she approached home, her warm
feeling faded, replaced by dread.
Hazel and her mother—Queen Marie, she liked to
be called—lived in an old apartment above a jazz club.
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Despite the beginning of the war, there was a festive
mood in the air. New recruits would roam the streets,
laughing and talking about fighting the Japanese. They’d
get tattoos in the parlors or propose to their sweethearts
right on the sidewalk. Some would go upstairs to Hazel’s
mother to have their fortunes read or to buy charms from
Marie Levesque, the famous grisgris queen.
“Did you hear?” one would say. “Two bits for this
good-luck charm. I took it to a guy I know, and he says it’s
a real silver nugget. Worth twenty dollars! That voodoo
woman is crazy!”
For a while, that kind of talk brought Queen Marie
a lot of business. Hazel’s curse had started out slowly. At
first it seemed like a blessing. The precious stones and
gold only appeared once in a while, never in huge quantities.
QueenMarie paid her bills. They ate steak for dinner
once a week. Hazel even got a new dress. But then stories
started spreading. The locals began to realize how many
horrible things happened to people who bought those
good-luck charms or got paid with Queen Marie’s treasure.
Charlie Gasceaux lost his arm in a harvester while
wearing a gold bracelet. Mr. Henry at the general store
dropped dead from a heart attack after Queen Marie
settled her tab with a ruby.
Folks started whispering about Hazel—how she
could find cursed jewels just by walking down the street.
These days only out-of-towners came to visit her mother,
and not so many of them, either. Hazel’s mom had
become short-tempered. She gave Hazel resentful looks.
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Hazel climbed the stairs as quietly as she could, in
case her mother had a customer. In the club downstairs,
the band was tuning their instruments. The bakery next
door had started making beignets for tomorrow morning,
filling the stairwell with the smell of melting butter.
When she got to the top, Hazel thought she heard
two voices inside the apartment. But when she peeked into
the parlor, her mother was sitting alone at the séance
table, her eyes closed, as if in a trance.
Hazel had seen her that way many times, pretending
to talk to spirits for her clients—but not ever when she
was by herself. Queen Marie had always told Hazel her
gris-gris was “bunk and hokum.” She didn’t really believe
in charms or fortune telling or ghosts. She was just a performer,
like a singer or an actress, doing a show for
money.
But Hazel knew her mother did believe in some
magic. Hazel’s curse wasn’t hokum. Queen Marie just
didn’t want to think it was her fault—that somehow she
had made Hazel the way she was.
“It was your blasted father,” Queen Marie would
grumble in her darker moods. “Coming here in his fancy
silver-and black suit. The one time I actually summon a
spirit, and what do I get? Fulfills my wish and ruins my
life. I should’ve been a real queen. It’s his fault you
turned out this way.”
She would never explain what she meant, and
Hazel had learned not to ask about her father. It just
made her mother angrier.
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As Hazel watched, Queen Marie muttered
something to herself. Her face was calm and relaxed.
Hazel was struck by how beautiful she looked, without
her scowl and the creases in her brow. She had a lush
mane of gold-brown hair like Hazel’s, and the same dark
complexion, brown as a roasted coffee bean. She wasn’t
wearing the fancy saffron robes or gold bangles she wore
to impress clients—just a simple white dress. Still, she
had a regal air, sitting straight and dignified in her gilded
chair as if she really were a queen.
“You’ll be safe there,” she murmured. “Far from the
gods.”
Hazel stifled a scream. The voice coming from her
mother’s mouth wasn’t hers. It sounded like an older woman’s.
The tone was soft and soothing, but also commanding—
like a hypnotist giving orders.
Queen Marie tensed. She grimaced in her trance,
then spoke in her normal voice: “It’s too far. Too cold.
Too dangerous. He told me not to.”
The other voice responded: “What has he ever done
for you? He gave you a poisoned child! But we can use her
gift for good. We can strike back at the gods. You will be
under my protection in the north, far from the gods’ domain.
I’ll make my son your protector. You’ll live like a
queen at last.”
Queen Marie winced. “But what about Hazel…”
Then her face contorted in a sneer. Both voices
spoke in unison, as if they’d found something to agree on:
“A poisoned child.”
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Hazel fled down the stairs, her pulse racing.
At the bottom, she ran into a man in a dark suit. He
gripped her shoulders with strong, cold fingers.
“Easy, child,” the man said.
Hazel noticed the silver skull ring on his finger,
then the strange fabric of his suit. In the shadows, the solid
black wool seemed to shift and boil, forming images of
faces in agony, as if lost souls were trying to escape from
the folds of his clothes.
His tie was black with platinum stripes. His shirt
was tombstone gray. His face—Hazel’s heart nearly
leaped out of her throat. His skin was so white it looked
almost blue, like cold milk. He had a flap of greasy black
hair. His smile was kind enough, but his eyes were fiery
and angry, full of mad power. Hazel had seen that look in
the newsreels at the movie theater. This man looked like
that awful Adolf Hitler. He had no mustache, but otherwise
he could’ve been Hitler’s twin—or his father.
Hazel tried to pull away. Even when the man let go,
she couldn’t seem to move. His eyes froze her in place.
“Hazel Levesque,” he said in a melancholy voice.
“You’ve grown.”
Hazel started to tremble. At the base of the stairs,
the cement stoop cracked under the man’s feet. A glittering
stone popped up from the concrete like the earth had
spit out a watermelon seed. The man looked at it, unsurprised.
He bent down.
“Don’t!” Hazel cried. “It’s cursed!”
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He picked up the stone—a perfectly formed emerald.
“Yes, it is. But not to me. So beautiful…worth more
than this building, I imagine.” He slipped the emerald in
his pocket. “I’m sorry for your fate, child. I imagine you
hate me.”
Hazel didn’t understand. The man sounded sad, as
if he were personally responsible for her life. Then the
truth hither: a spirit in silver and black, who’d fulfilled
her mother’s wishes and ruined her life.
Her eyes widened. “You? You’re my…”
He cupped his hand under her chin. “I am Pluto.
Life is never easy for my children, but you have a special
burden. Now that you’re thirteen, we must make
provisions—”
She pushed his hand away.
“You did this to me?” she demanded. “You cursed
me and my mother? You left us alone?”
Her eyes stung with tears. This rich white man in a
fine suit was her father? Now that she was thirteen, he
showed up for the first time and said he was sorry?
“You’re evil!” she shouted. “You ruined our lives!”
Pluto’s eyes narrowed. “What has your mother told
you, Hazel? Has she never explained her wish? Or told
you why you were born under a curse?”
Hazel was too angry to speak, but Pluto seemed to
read the answers in her face.
“No…” He sighed. “I suppose she wouldn’t. Much
easier to blame me.”
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“What do you mean?”
Pluto sighed. “Poor child. You were born too soon.
I cannot see your future clearly, but someday you will find
your place. A descendant of Neptune will wash away your
curse and give you peace. I fear, though, that is not for
many years.…”
Hazel didn’t follow any of that. Before she could respond,
Pluto held out his hand. A sketchpad and a box of
colored pencils appeared in his palm.
“I understand you enjoy art and horseback riding,”
he said. “These are for your art. As for the horse…” His
eyes gleamed. “That, you’ll have to manage yourself. Now
I must speak with your mother. Happy birthday, Hazel.”
He turned and headed up the stairs—just like that,
as if he’d checked Hazel off his “to do” list and had
already forgotten her. Happy birthday. Go draw a picture.
See you in another thirteen years.
She was so stunned, so angry, so upside-down confused
that she just stood paralyzed at the base of the
steps. She wanted to throw down the colored pencils and
stomp on them. She wanted to charge after Pluto and kick
him. She wanted to run away, find Sammy, steal a horse,
leave town and never come back. But she didn’t do any of
those things.
Above her, the apartment door opened, and Pluto
stepped inside.
Hazel was still shivering from his cold touch, but
she crep tup the stairs to see what he would do. What
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would he say to Queen Marie? Who would speak
back—Hazel’s mother, or that awful voice?
When she reached the doorway, Hazel heard arguing.
She peeked in. Her mother seemed back to normal—
screaming and angry, throwing things around the
parlor while Pluto tried to reason with her.
“Marie, it’s insanity,” he said. “You’ll be far beyond
my power to protect you.”
“Protect me?” Queen Marie yelled. “When have you
ever protected me?”
Pluto’s dark suit shimmered, as if the souls trapped
in the fabric were getting agitated.
“You have no idea,” he said. “I’ve kept you alive,
you and the child. My enemies are everywhere among
gods and men. Now with the war on, it will only get
worse. You must stay where I can—”
“The police think I’m a murderer!” Queen Marie
shouted. “My clients want to hang me as a witch! And
Hazel—her curse is getting worse. Your protection is
killing us.”
Pluto spread his hands in a pleading gesture. “Marie,
please—”
“No!” Queen Marie turned to the closet, pulled out
a leather valise, and threw it on the table. “We’re leaving,”
she announced. “You can keep your protection. We’re going
north.”
“Marie, it’s a trap,” Pluto warned. “Whoever’s whispering
in your ear, whoever’s turning you against me—”
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“You turned me against you!” She picked up a porcelain
vase and threw it at him. It shattered on the floor,
and precious stones spilled everywhere—emeralds, rubies,
diamonds. Hazel’s entire collection.
“You won’t survive,” Pluto said. “If you go north,
you’ll both die. I can foresee that clearly.”
“Get out!” she said.
Hazel wished Pluto would stay and argue.
Whatever her mother was talking about, Hazel didn’t like
it. But her father slashed his hand across the air and dissolved
into shadows…like he really was a spirit.
Queen Marie closed her eyes. She took a deep
breath. Hazel was afraid the strange voice might possess
her again. But when she spoke, she was her regular self.
“Hazel,” she snapped, “come out from behind that
door.”
Trembling, Hazel obeyed. She clutched the sketch-
pad and colored pencils to her chest.
Her mother studied her like she was a bitter disappointment.
A poisoned child, the voices had said.
“Pack a bag,” she ordered. “We’re moving.”
“Wh-where?” Hazel asked.
“Alaska,” Queen Marie answered. “You’re going to
make yourself useful. We’re going to start a new life.”
The way her mother said that, it sounded as if they
were going to create a “new life” for someone else—or
something else.
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“What did Pluto mean?” Hazel asked. “Is he really
my father? He said you made a wish—”
“Go to your room!” her mother shouted. “Pack!”
Hazel fled, and suddenly she was ripped out of the
past.
Nico was shaking her shoulders. “You did it again.”
Hazel blinked. They were still sitting on the roof of
Pluto’s shrine. The sun was lower in the sky. More diamonds
had surfaced around her, and her eyes stung from
crying.
“S-sorry,” she murmured.
“Don’t be,” Nico said. “Where were you?”
“My mother’s apartment. The day we moved.”
Nico nodded. He understood her history better
than most people could. He was also a kid from the
1940s. He’d been born only a few years after Hazel, and
had been locked away in a magic hotel for decades. But
Hazel’s past was much worse than Nico’s. She’d caused so
much damage and misery.…
“You have to work on controlling those memories,”
Nico warned. “If a flashback like that happens when
you’re in combat—”
“I know,” she said. “I’m trying.”
Nico squeezed her hand. “It’s okay. I think it’s a
side effect from…you know, your time in the Underworld.
Hopefully it’ll get easier.”
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Hazel wasn’t so sure. After eight months, the blackouts
seemed to be getting worse, as if her soul were attempting
to live in two different time periods at once. No
one had ever come back from the dead before—at least,
not the way she had. Nico was trying to reassure her, but
neither of them knew what would happen.
“I can’t go north again,” Hazel said. “Nico, if I have
to go back to where it happened—”
“You’ll be fine,” he promised. “You’ll have friends
this time. Percy Jackson—he’s got a role to play in this.
You can sense that, can’t you? He’s a good person to have
at your side.”
Hazel remembered what Pluto told her long ago: A
descendant of Neptune will wash away your curse and
give you peace.
Was Percy the one? Maybe, but Hazel sensed it
wouldn’t be so easy. She wasn’t sure even Percy could
survive what was waiting in the north.
“Where did he come from?” she asked. “Why do the
ghosts call him the Greek?”
Before Nico could respond, horns blew across the
river. The legionnaires were gathering for evening
muster.
“We’d better get down there,” Nico said. “I have a
feeling tonight’s war games are going to be interesting.”
ON THE WAY BACK, HAZEL TRIPPED OVER A GOLD BAR.
She should have known not to run so fast, but she
was afraid of being late for muster. The Fifth Cohort had
the nicest centurions in camp. Still, even they would have
to punish her if she was tardy. Roman punishments were
harsh: scrubbing the streets with a toothbrush, cleaning
the bull pens at the coliseum, getting sewn inside a sack
full of angry weasels and dumped into the Little
Tiber—the options were not great.
The gold bar popped out of the ground just in time
for her foot to hit it. Nico tried to catch her, but she took a
spill and scraped her hands.
“You okay?” Nico knelt next to her and reached for
the bar of gold.
“Don’t!” Hazel warned.
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Nico froze. “Right. Sorry. It’s just…jeez. That thing
is huge.” He pulled a flask of nectar from his aviator jacket
and poured a little on Hazel’s hands. Immediately the
cuts started to heal. “Can you stand?”
He helped her up. They both stared at the gold. It
was the size of a bread loaf, stamped with a serial number
and the words u.s. treasury.
Nico shook his head. “How in Tartarus—?”
“I don’t know,” Hazel said miserably. “It could’ve
been buried there by robbers or dropped off a wagon a
hundred years ago. Maybe it migrated from the nearest
bank vault. Whatever’s in the ground, anywhere close to
me—it just pops up. And the more valuable it is—”
“The more dangerous it is.” Nico frowned. “Should
we cover it up? If the fauns find it…”
Hazel imagined a mushroom cloud billowing up
from the road, char-broiled fauns tossed in every direction.
It was too horrible to consider. “It should sink back
underground after I leave, eventually, but just to be
sure…”
She’d been practicing this trick, but never with
something so heavy and dense. She pointed at the gold
bar and tried to concentrate.
The gold levitated. She channeled her anger, which
wasn’t hard—she hated that gold, she hated her curse, she
hated thinking about her past and all the ways she’d
failed. Her fingers tingled. The gold bar glowed with heat.
Nico gulped. “Um, Hazel, are you sure…?”
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She made a fist. The gold bent like putty. Hazel
forced it to twist into a giant, lumpy ring. Then she flicked
her hand toward the ground. Her million-dollar doughnut
slammed into the earth. It sank so deep, nothing was left
but a scar of fresh dirt.
Nico’s eyes widened. “That was…terrifying.”
Hazel didn’t think it was so impressive compared
to the powers of a guy who could reanimate skeletons and
bring people back from the dead, but it felt good to surprise
him for a change.
Inside the camp, horns blew again. The cohorts
would be starting roll call, and Hazel had no desire to be
sewn into a sack of weasels.
“Hurry!” she told Nico, and they ran for the gates.
The first time Hazel had seen the legion assemble, she’d
been so intimidated, she’d almost slunk back to the barracks
to hide. Even after being at camp for nine months,
she still found it an impressive sight.
The first four cohorts, each forty kids strong, stood
in rows in front of their barracks on either side of the Via
Praetoria. The Fifth Cohort assembled at the very end, in
front of the principia, since their barracks were tucked in
the back corner of camp next to the stables and the latrines.
Hazel had to run right down the middle of the legion
to reach her place.
The campers were dressed for war. Their polished
chain mail and greaves gleamed over purple T-shirts and
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jeans. Sword-and-skull designs decorated their helmets.
Even their leather combat boots looked ferocious with
their iron cleats, great for marching through mud or
stomping on faces.
In front of the legionnaires, like a line of giant
dominoes, stood their red and gold shields, each the size
of a refrigerator door. Every legionnaire carried a harpoonlike
spear called a pilum,a gladius, a dagger, and
about a hundred pounds of other equipment. If you were
out of shape when you came to the legion, you didn’t stay
that way for long. Just walking around in your armor was
a full-body workout.
Hazel and Nico jogged down the street as everyone
was coming to attention, so their entrance was really obvious.
Their footsteps echoed on the stones. Hazel tried to
avoid eye contact, but she caught Octavian at the head of
the First Cohort smirking at her, looking smug in his
plumed centurion’s helmet with a dozen medals pinned
on his chest.
Hazel was still seething from his blackmail threats
earlier. Stupid augur and his gift of prophecy—of all the
people at camp to discover her secrets, why did it have to
be him? She was sure he would have told on her weeks
ago, except that he knew her secrets were worth more to
him as leverage. She wished she’d kept that bar of gold so
she could hit him in the face with it.
She ran past Reyna, who was cantering back and
forth on her pegasus Scipio—nicknamed Skippy because
he was the color of peanut butter. The metal dogs Aurum
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and Argentum trotted at her side. Her purple officer’s
cape billowed behind her.
“Hazel Levesque,” she called, “so glad you could
join us.”
Hazel knew better than to respond. She was missing
most of her equipment, but she hurried to her place in
line next to Frank and stood at attention. Their lead centurion,
a big seventeen-year-old guy named Dakota, was
just calling her name—the last one on the roll.
“Present!” she squeaked.
Thank the gods. Technically, she wasn’t late.
Nico joined Percy Jackson, who was standing off to
one side with a couple of guards. Percy’s hair was wet
from the baths. He’d put on fresh clothes, but he still
looked uncomfortable. Hazel couldn’t blame him. He was
about to be introduced to two hundred heavily armed
kids.
The Lares were the last ones to fall in. Their purple
forms flickered as they jockeyed for places. They had an
annoying habit of standing halfway inside living people,
so that the ranks looked like a blurry photograph, but finally
the centurions got them sorted out.
Octavian shouted, “Colors!”
The standard-bearers stepped forward. They wore
lion-skincapes and held poles decorated with each cohort’s
emblems. The last to present his standard was Jacob,
the legion’s eagle bearer. He held a long pole with absolutely
nothing on top. The job was supposed to be a big
honor, but Jacob obviously hated it. Even though Reyna
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insisted on following tradition, every time the eagleless
pole was raised, Hazel could feel embarrassment rippling
through the legion.
Reyna brought her pegasus to a halt.
“Romans!” she announced. “You’ve probably heard
about the incursion today. Two gorgons were swept into
the river by this newcomer, Percy Jackson. Juno herself
guided him here, and proclaimed him a son of Neptune.”
The kids in the back rows craned their necks to see
Percy. He raised his hand and said, “Hi.”
“He seeks to join the legion,” Reyna continued.
“What do the auguries say?”
“I have read the entrails!” Octavian announced, as
if he’d killed a lion with his bare hands rather than ripping
up a stuffed panda pillow. “The auguries are favor
able. He is qualified to serve!”
The campers gave a shout: “Ave!” Hail!
Frank was a little late with his “ave,” so it came out
as a high-pitched echo. The other legionnaires snickered.
Reyna motioned the senior officers forward—one
from each cohort. Octavian, as the most senior centurion,
turned to Percy.
“Recruit,” he asked, “do you have credentials? Letters
of reference?”
Hazel remembered this from her own arrival. A lot
of kids brought letters from older demigods in the outside
world, adults who were veterans of the camp. Some recruits
had rich and famous sponsors. Some were third-or
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fourth-generation campers. A good letter could get you a
position in the better cohorts, sometimes even special
jobs like legion messenger, which made you exempt from
the grunt work like digging ditches or conjugating Latin
verbs.
Percy shifted. “Letters? Um, no.”
Octavian wrinkled his nose.
Unfair! Hazel wanted to shout. Percy had carried a
goddess into camp. What better recommendation could
you want?
But Octavian’s family had been sending kids to
camp for over a century. He loved reminding recruits that
they were less important than he was.
“No letters,” Octavian said regretfully. “Will any legionnaires
stand for him?”
“I will!” Frank stepped forward. “He saved my life!”
Immediately there were shouts of protest from the
other cohorts. Reyna raised her hand for quiet and glared
at Frank.
“Frank Zhang,” she said, “for the second time
today, I remind you that you are on probatio. Your godly
parent has not even claimed you yet. You’re not eligible to
stand for another camper until you’ve earned your first
stripe.”
Frank looked like he might die of embarrassment.
Hazel couldn’t leave him hanging. She stepped out
of line and said, “What Frank means is that Percy saved
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both our lives. I am a full member of the legion. I will
stand for Percy Jackson.”
Frank glanced at her gratefully, but the other
campers started to mutter. Hazel was barely eligible.
She’d only gotten her stripe a few weeks ago, and the “act
of valor” that earned it for her had been mostly an accident.
Besides, she was a daughter of Pluto, and a member
of the disgraced Fifth Cohort. She wasn’t doing Percy
much of a favor by giving him her support.
Reyna wrinkled her nose, but she turned to Octavian.
The augur smiled and shrugged, like the idea amused
him.
Why not? Hazel thought. Putting Percy in the Fifth
would make him less of a threat, and Octavian liked to
keep all his enemies in one place.
“Very well,” Reyna announced. “Hazel Levesque,
you may stand for the recruit. Does your cohort accept
him?”
The other cohorts started coughing, trying not to
laugh. Hazel knew what they were thinking: Another
loser for the Fifth.
Frank pounded his shield against the ground. The
other members of the Fifth followed his lead, though they
didn’t seem very excited. Their centurions, Dakota and
Gwen, exchanged pained looks, like: Here we go again.
“My cohort has spoken,” Dakota said. “We accept
the recruit.”
Reyna looked at Percy with pity. “Congratulations,
Percy Jackson. You stand on probatio. You will be given a
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tablet with your name and cohort. In one year’s time, or
as soon as you complete an act of valor, you will become a
full member of the Twelfth Legion Fulminata. Serve
Rome, obey the rules of the legion, and defend the camp
with honor. Senatus Populusque Romanus!”
The rest of the legion echoed the cheer.
Reyna wheeled her pegasus away from Percy, like
she was glad to be done with him. Skippy spread his
beautiful wings. Hazel couldn’t help feeling a pang of
envy. She’d give anything for a horse like that, but it
would never happen. Horses were for officers only, or
barbarian cavalry, not for Roman legionnaires.
“Centurions,” Reyna said, “you and your troops
have one hour for dinner. Then we will meet on the Field
of Mars. The First and Second Cohorts will defend. The
Third, Fourth, and Fifth will attack. Good fortune!”
A bigger cheer went up—for the war games and for
dinner. The cohorts broke ranks and ran for the mess
hall.
Hazel waved at Percy, who made his way through
the crowd with Nico at his side. To Hazel’s surprise, Nico
was beaming at her.
“Good job, Sis,” he said. “That took guts, standing
for him.”
He had never called her Sis before. She wondered if
that was what he had called Bianca.
One of the guards had given Percy his probatio
nameplate. Percy strung it on his leather necklace with
the strange beads.
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“Thanks, Hazel,” he said. “Um, what exactly does it
mean—your standing for me?”
“I guarantee your good behavior,” Hazel explained.
“I teach you the rules, answer your questions, make sure
you don’t disgrace the legion.”
“And…if I do something wrong?”
“Then I get killed along with you,” Hazel said.
“Hungry? Let’s eat.”
AT LEAST THE CAMP FOOD WAS GOOD. Invisible wind
spirits—aurae—waited on the campers and seemed to
know exactly what everyone wanted. They blew plates
and cups around so quickly, the mess hall looked like a
delicious hurricane. If you got up too fast, you were likely
to get beaned by beans or potted by a pot roast.
Hazel got shrimp gumbo—her favorite comfort
food. It made her think about being a little girl in New Orleans,
before her curse set in and her mom got so bitter.
Percy got a cheeseburger and a strange-looking soda that
was bright blue. Hazel didn’t understand that, but Percy
tried it and grinned.
“This makes me happy,” he said. “I don’t know
why…but it does.”
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Just for a moment, one of the aurae became visible—
an elfin girl in a white silk dress. She giggled as she
topped off Percy’s glass, then disappeared in a gust.
The mess hall seemed especially noisy tonight.
Laughter echoed off the walls. War banners rustled from
cedar ceiling beams as aurae blew back and forth, keeping
everyone’s plates full. The campers dined Roman
style, sitting on couches around low tables. Kids were
constantly getting up and trading places, spreading rumors
about who liked whom and all the other gossip.
As usual, the Fifth Cohort took the place of least
honor. Their tables were at the back of the dining hall
next to the kitchen. Hazel’s table was always the least
crowded. Tonight it was she and Frank, as usual, with
Percy and Nico and their centurion Dakota, who sat
there, Hazel figured, because he felt obligated to welcome
the new recruit.
Dakota reclined glumly on his couch, mixing sugar
into his drink and chugging it. He was a beefy guy with
curly black hair and eyes that didn’t quite line up straight,
so Hazel felt like the world was leaning whenever she
looked at him. It wasn’t a good sign that he was drinking
so much so early in the night.
“So.” He burped, waving his goblet. “Welcome to
the Percy, party.” He frowned. “Party, Percy. Whatever.”
“Um, thanks,” Percy said, but his attention was focused
on Nico. “I was wondering if we could talk, you
know…about where I might have seen you before.”
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“Sure,” Nico said a little too quickly. “The thing is, I
spend most of my time in the Underworld. So unless I
met you there somehow—”
Dakota belched. “Ambassador from Pluto, they call
him. Reyna’s never sure what to do with this guy when he
visits.
You should have seen her face when he showed up
with Hazel, asking Reyna to take her in. Um, no offense.”
“None taken.” Nico seemed relieved to change the
topic. “Dakota was really helpful, standing for Hazel.”
Dakota blushed. “Yeah, well…She seemed like a
good kid. Turned out I was right. Last month, when she
saved me from, uh, you know.”
“Oh, man!” Frank looked up from his fish and
chips. “Percy, you should have seen her! That’s how Hazel
got her stripe. The unicorns decided to stampede—”
“It was nothing,” Hazel said.
“Nothing?” Frank protested. “Dakota would’ve gotten
trampled! You stood right in front of them, shooed
them away, saved his hide. I’ve never seen anything like
it.”
Hazel bit her lip. She didn’t like to talk about it,
and she felt uncomfortable, the way Frank made her
sound like a hero. In truth, she’d been mostly afraid that
the unicorns would hurt themselves in their panic. Their
horns were precious metal—silver and gold—so she’d
managed to turn them aside simply by concentrating,
steering the animals by their horns and guiding them
back to the stables. It had gotten her a full place in the
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legion, but it had also started rumors about her strange
powers—rumors that reminded her of the bad old days.
Percy studied her. Those sea-green eyes made her
unsettled.
“Did you and Nico grow up together?” he asked.
“No,” Nico answered for her. “I found out that
Hazel was my sister only recently. She’s from New
Orleans.”
That was true, of course, but not the whole truth.
Nico let people think he’d stumbled upon her in modern
New Orleans and brought her to camp. It was easier than
telling the real story.
Hazel had tried to pass herself off as a modern kid.
It wasn’t easy. Thankfully, demigods didn’t use a lot of
technology at camp. Their powers tended to make electronic
gadgets go haywire. But the first time she went on
furlough to Berkeley, she had nearly had a stroke. Televisions,
computers, iPods, the Internet…It made her glad to
get back to the world of ghosts, unicorns, and gods. That
seemed much less of a fantasy than the twenty-first
century.
Nico was still talking about the children of Pluto.
“There aren’t many of us,” he said, “so we have to stick together.
When I found Hazel—”
“You have other sisters?” Percy asked, almost as if
he knew the answer. Hazel wondered again when he and
Nico had met, and what her brother was hiding.
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“One,” Nico admitted. “But she died. I saw her spirit
a few times in the Underworld, except that the last time
I went down there...”
To bring her back, Hazel thought, though Nico
didn’t say that.
“She was gone.” Nico’s voice turned hoarse. “She
used to be in Elysium—like, the Underworld paradise—
but she chose to be reborn into a new life. Now I’ll
never see her again. I was just lucky to find Hazel…in
New Orleans, I mean.”
Dakota grunted. “Unless you believe the rumors.
Not saying that I do.”
“Rumors?” Percy asked.
From across the room, Don the faun yelled,
“Hazel!”
Hazel had never been so glad to see the faun. He
wasn’t allowed in camp, but of course he always managed
to get in. He was working his way toward their table, grinning
at everybody, sneaking food off plates, and pointing
at campers: “Hey! Call me!” A flying pizza smacked him
in the head, and he disappeared behind a couch. Then he
popped up, still grinning, and made his way over.
“My favorite girl!” He smelled like a wet goat
wrapped in old cheese. He leaned over their couches and
checked out their food. “Say, new kid, you going to eat
that?”
Percy frowned. “Aren’t fauns vegetarian?”
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“Not the cheeseburger, man! The plate!” He sniffed
Percy’s hair. “Hey…what’s that smell?”
“Don!” Hazel said. “Don’t be rude.”
“No, man, I just—”
Their house god Vitellius shimmered into existence,
standing half embedded in Frank’s couch. “Fauns in
the dining hall! What are we coming to? Centurion
Dakota, do your duty!”
“I am,” Dakota grumbled into his goblet. “I’m having
dinner!”
Don was still sniffing around Percy. “Man, you’ve
got an empathy link with a faun!”
Percy leaned away from him. “A what?”
“An empathy link! It’s real faint, like somebody’s
suppressed it, but—”
“I know what!” Nico stood suddenly. “Hazel, how
about we give you and Frank time to get Percy oriented?
Dakota and I can visit the praetor’s table. Don and Vitellius,
you come too. We can discuss strategies for the war
games.”
“Strategies for losing?” Dakota muttered.
“Death Boy is right!” Vitellius said. “This legion
fights worse than we did in Judea, and that was the first
time we lost our eagle. Why, if I were in charge—”
“Could I just eat the silverware first?” Don asked.
“Let’s go!” Nico stood and grabbed Don and Vitelli
us by the ears.
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Nobody but Nico could actually touch the Lares.
Vitellius spluttered with outrage as he was dragged off to
the praetor’s table.
“Ow!” Don protested. “Man, watch the ’fro!”
“Come on, Dakota!” Nico called over his shoulder.
The centurion got up reluctantly. He wiped his
mouth—uselessly, since it was permanently stained red.
“Back soon.” He shook all over, like a dog trying to get
dry. Then he staggered away, his goblet sloshing.
“What was that about?” Percy asked. “And what’s
wrong with Dakota?”
Frank sighed. “He’s okay. He’s a son of Bacchus,
the wine god. He’s got a drinking problem.”
Percy’s eyes widened. “You let him drink wine?”
“Gods, no!” Hazel said. “That would be a disaster.
He’s addicted to red Kool-Aid. Drinks it with three times
the normal sugar, and he’s already ADHD—you know, attention
deficit/hyperactive. One of these days, his head is
going to explode.”
Percy looked over at the praetor’s table. Most of the
senior officers were in deep conversation with Reyna.
Nico and his two captives, Don and Vitellius, stood on the
periphery. Dakota was running back and forth along a
line of stacked shields, banging his goblet on them like
they were a xylophone.
“ADHD,” Percy said. “You don’t say.”
Hazel tried not to laugh. “Well…most demigods
are. Or dyslexic. Just being a demigod means that our
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brains are wired differently. Like you—you said you had
trouble reading.”
“Are you guys that way too?” Percy asked.
“I don’t know,” Hazel admitted. “Maybe. Back in
my day, they just called kids like us ‘lazy.’”
Percy frowned. “Back in your day?”
Hazel cursed herself.
Luckily for her, Frank spoke up: “I wish I was
ADHD or dyslexic. All I got is lactose intolerance.”
Percy grinned. “Seriously?”
Frank might’ve been the silliest demigod ever, but
Hazel thought he was cute when he pouted. His shoulders
slumped. “And I love ice cream, too.…”
Percy laughed. Hazel couldn’t help joining in. It
was good to sit at dinner and actually feel like she was
among friends.
“Okay, so tell me,” Percy said, “why is it bad to be
in the Fifth Cohort? You guys are great.”
The compliment made Hazel’s toes tingle.
“It’s…complicated. Aside from being Pluto’s kid, I want to
ride horses.”
“That’s why you use a cavalry sword?”
She nodded. “It’s stupid, I guess. Wishful thinking.
There’s only one pegasus at camp—Reyna’s. The unicorns
are just kept for medicine, because the shavings off their
horns cure poison and stuff. Anyway, Roman fighting is
always done on foot. Cavalry…they kind of look down on
that. So they look down on me.”
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“Their loss,” Percy said. “What about you, Frank?”
“Archery,” he muttered. “They don’t like that
either, unless you’re a child of Apollo. Then you’ve got an
excuse. I hope my dad is Apollo, but I don’t know. I can’t
do poetry very well. And I’m not sure I want to be related
to Octavian.”
“Can’t blame you,” Percy said. “But you’re excellent
with the bow—the way you pegged those gorgons? Forget
what other people think.”
Frank’s face turned as red as Dakota’s Kool-Aid.
“Wish I could. They all think I should be a sword fighter
because I’m big and bulky.” He looked down at his body,
like he couldn’t quite believe it was his. “They say I’m too
stocky for an archer. Maybe if my dad would ever claim
me…”
They ate in silence for a few minutes. A dad who
wouldn’t claim you…Hazel knew that feeling. She sensed
Percy could relate, too.
“You asked about the Fifth,” she said at last. “Why
it’s the worst cohort. That actually started way before us.”
She pointed to the back wall, where the legion’s
standards were on display. “See the empty pole in the
middle?”
“The eagle,” Percy said.
Hazel was stunned. “How’d you know?”
Percy shrugged. “Vitellius was talking about how
the legion lost its eagle a long time ago—the first time, he
said. He acted like it was a huge disgrace. I’m guessing
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that’s what’s missing. And from the way you and Reyna
were talking earlier, I’m guessing your eagle got lost a
second time, more recently, and it had something to do
with the Fifth Cohort.”
Hazel made a mental note not to underestimate
Percy again. When he’d first arrived, she’d thought he was
a little goofy from the questions he’d asked—about the
Feast of Tuna and all—but clearly he was smarter than he
let on.
“You’re right,” she said. “That’s exactly what
happened.”
“So what is this eagle, anyway? Why is it a big
deal?”
Frank looked around to make sure no one was
eavesdropping. “It’s the symbol of the whole camp—a big
eagle made of gold. It’s supposed to protect us in battle
and make our enemies afraid. Each legion’s eagle gave it
all sorts of power, and ours came from Jupiter himself.
Supposedly Julius Caesar nicknamed our legion ‘Fulminata’—
armed with lightning—because of what the eagle
could do.”
“I don’t like lightning,” Percy said.
“Yeah, well,” Hazel said, “it didn’t make us invincible.
The Twelfth lost its eagle the first time way back in
ancient days, during the Jewish Rebellion.”
“I think I saw a movie like that,” Percy said.
Hazel shrugged. “Could be. There have been lots of
books and movies about legions losing their eagles. Unfortunately
it happened quite a few times. The eagle was
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so important…well, archaeologists have never recovered a
single eagle from ancient Rome. Each legion guarded
theirs to the last man, because it was charged with power
from the gods. They’d rather hide it or melt it down than
surrender it to an enemy.
The Twelfth was lucky the first time. We got our
eagle back. But the second time…”
“You guys were there?” Percy asked.
They both shook their heads.
“I’m almost as new as you.” Frank tapped his probatio
plate. “Just got here last month. But everyone’s
heard the story. It’s bad luck to even talk about this.
There was this huge expedition to Alaska back in the
eighties.…”
“That prophecy you noticed in the temple,” Hazel
continued, “the one about the seven demigods and the
Doors of Death? Our senior praetor at the time was Michael
Varus, from the Fifth Cohort. Back then the Fifth
was the best in camp. He thought it would bring glory to
the legion if he could figure out the prophecy and make it
come true—save the world from storm and fire and all
that. He talked to the augur, and the augur said the answer
was in Alaska. But he warned Michael it wasn’t time
yet. The prophecy wasn’t for him.”
“But he went anyway,” Percy guessed. “What
happened?”
Frank lowered his voice. “Long, gruesome story. Almost
the entire Fifth Cohort was wiped out. Most of legion’s
Imperial gold weapons were lost, along with the
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eagle. The survivors went crazy or refused to talk about
what had attacked them.”
I know, Hazel thought solemnly. But she kept
silent.
“Since the eagle was lost,” Frank continued, “the
camp has been getting weaker. Quests are more dangerous.
Monsters attack the borders more often. Morale is
lower. The last month or so, things have been getting
much worse, much faster.”
“And the Fifth Cohort took the blame,” Percy
guessed. “So now everyone thinks we’re cursed.”
Hazel realized her gumbo was cold. She sipped a
spoonful, but the comfort food didn’t taste very comforting.
“We’ve been the outcasts of the legion since…well,
since the Alaska disaster. Our reputation got better when
Jason became praetor—”
“The kid who’s missing?” Percy asked.
“Yeah,” Frank said. “I never met him. Before my
time. But I hear he was a good leader. He practically grew
up in the Fifth Cohort. He didn’t care what people
thought about us. He started to rebuild our reputation.
Then he disappeared.”
“Which put us back at square one,” Hazel said bitterly.
“Made us look cursed all over again. I’m sorry,
Percy. Now you know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
Percy sipped his blue soda and gazed thoughtfully
across the dining hall. “I don’t even know where I come
from…but I’ve got a feeling this isn’t the first time I’ve
been an underdog.” He focused on Hazel and managed a
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smile. “Besides, joining the legion is better than being
chased through the wilderness by monsters. I’ve got myself
some new friends. Maybe together we can turn things
around for the Fifth Cohort, huh?”
A horn blew at the end of the hall. The officers at
the praetor’s table got to their feet—even Dakota, his
mouth vampire-red from Kool-Aid.
“The games begin!” Reyna announced. The
campers cheered and rushed to collect their equipment
from the stacks along the walls.
“So we’re the attacking team?” Percy asked over the
noise. “Is that good?”
Hazel shrugged. “Good news: we get the elephant.
Bad news—”
“Let me guess,” said Percy. “The Fifth Cohort always
loses.”
Frank slapped Percy on the shoulder. “I love this
guy. Come on, new friend. Let’s go chalk up my thirteenth
defeat in a row!”
AS HE MARCHED TO THE WAR GAMES, Frank replayed
the day in his mind. He couldn’t believe how close he’d
come to death.
That morning on sentry duty, before Percy showed
up, Frank had almost told Hazel his secret. The two of
them had been standing for hours in the chilly fog, watching
the commuter traffic on Highway 24. Hazel had been
complaining about the cold.
“I’d give anything to be warm,” she said, her teeth
chattering. “I wish we had a fire.” Even with her armor
on, she looked great. Frank liked the way her cinnamontoast–
colored hair curled around the edges of her helmet,
and the way her chin dimpled when she frowned. She was
tiny compared to Frank, which made him feel like a big
clumsy ox. He wanted to put his arms around her to
warm her up, but he’d never do that. She’d probably hit
him, and he’d lose the only friend he had at camp.
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I could make a really impressive fire, he thought.
Of course, it would only burn for a few minutes, and then
I’d die.…
It was scary that he even considered it. Hazel had
that effect on him. Whenever she wanted something, he
had the irrational urge to provide it. He wanted to be the
old-fashioned knight riding to her rescue, which was stupid,
as she was way more capable at everything than he
was.
He imagined what his grandmother would say:
Frank Zhang riding to the rescue? Ha! He’d fall off his
horse and break his neck.
Hard to believe it had been only six weeks since
he’d left his grandmother’s house—six weeks since his
mom’s funeral.
Everything had happened since then: wolves arriving
at his grandmother’s door, the journey to Camp
Jupiter, the weeks he’d spent in the Fifth Cohort trying
not to be a complete failure. Through it all, he’d kept the
half-burned piece of firewood wrapped in a cloth in his
coat pocket.
Keep it close, his grandmother had warned. As long
as it is safe, you are safe.
The problem was that it burned so easily. He remembered
the trip south from Vancouver. When the temperature
dropped below freezing near Mount Hood,
Frank had brought out the piece of tinder and held it in
his hands, imagining how nice it would be to have some
fire. Immediately, the charred end blazed with a searing
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yellow flame. It lit up the night and warmed Frank to the
bone, but he could feel his life slipping away, as if he were
being consumed rather than the wood. He’d thrust the
flame into a snowbank. For a horrible moment it kept
burning. When it finally went out, Frank got his panic under
control. He wrapped the piece of wood and put it back
in his coat pocket, determined not to bring it out again.
But he couldn’t forget it.
It was as though someone had said, “Whatever you
do, don’t think about that stick bursting into flame!”
So of course, that’s all he thought about.
On sentry duty with Hazel, he would try to take his
mind off it. He loved spending time with her. He asked
her about growing up in New Orleans, but she got edgy at
his questions, so they made small talk instead. Just for
fun, they tried to speak French to each other. Hazel had
some Creole blood on her mother’s side. Frank had taken
French in school. Neither of them was very fluent, and
Louisiana French was so different from Canadian French
it was almost impossible to converse. When Frank asked
Hazel how her beef was feeling today, and she replied that
his shoe was green, they decided to give up.
Then Percy Jackson had arrived.
Sure, Frank had seen kids fight monsters before.
He’d fought plenty of them himself on his journey from
Vancouver. But he’d never seen gorgons. He’d never seen
a goddess in person. And the way Percy had controlled
the Little Tiber—wow. Frank wished he had powers like
that.
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He could still feel the gorgons’ claws pressing into
his arms and smell their snaky breath—like dead mice
and poison. If not for Percy, those grotesque hags would
have carried him away. He’d be a pile of bones in the back
of a Bargain Mart by now.
After the incident at the river, Reyna had sent
Frank to the armory, which had given him way too much
time to think.
While he polished swords, he remembered Juno,
warning them to unleash Death.
Unfortunately Frank had a pretty good idea of what
the goddess meant. He had tried to hide his shock when
Juno had appeared, but she looked exactly like his grandmother
had described—right down to the goatskin cape.
She chose your path years ago, Grandmother had
told him. And it will not be easy.
Frank glanced at his bow in the corner of the armory.
He’d feel better if Apollo would claim him as a son.
Frank had been sure his godly parent would speak up on
his sixteenth birthday, which had passed two weeks ago.
Sixteen was an important milestone for Romans. It
had been Frank’s first birthday at camp. But nothing had
happened. Now Frank hoped he would be claimed on the
Feast of Fortuna, though from what Juno had said, they’d
be in a battle for their lives on that day.
His father had to be Apollo. Archery was the only
thing Frank was good at. Years ago, his mother had told
him that their family name, Zhang, meant “master of
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bows” in Chinese. That must have been a hint about his
dad.
Frank put down his polishing rags. He looked at
the ceiling. “Please, Apollo, if you’re my dad, tell me. I
want to be an archer like you.”
“No, you don’t,” a voice grumbled.
Frank jumped out of his seat. Vitellius, the Fifth
Cohort’s Lar, was shimmering behind him. His full name
was Gaius Vitellius Reticulus, but the other cohorts called
him Vitellius the Ridiculous.
“Hazel Levesque sent me to check on you,” Vitellius
said, hiking up his sword belt. “Good thing, too. Look at
the state of this armor!”
Vitellius wasn’t one to talk. His toga was baggy, his
tunic barely fit over his belly, and his scabbard fell off his
belt every three seconds, but Frank didn’t bother pointing
that out.
“As for archers,” the ghost said, “they’re wimps!
Back in my day, archery was a job for barbarians. A good
Roman should be in the fray, gutting his enemy with
spear and sword like a civilized man! That’s how we did it
in the Punic Wars. Roman up, boy!”
Frank sighed. “I thought you were in Caesar’s
army.”
“I was!”
“Vitellius, Caesar was hundreds of years after the
Punic Wars. You couldn’t have been alive that long.”
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“Questioning my honor?” Vitellius looked so mad,
his purple aura glowed. He drew his ghostly gladius and
yelled, “Take that!”
He ran the sword, which was about as deadly as a
laser pointer, through Frank’s chest a few times.
“Ouch,” Frank said, just to be nice.
Vitellius looked satisfied and put his sword away.
“Perhaps you’ll think twice about doubting your elders
next time! Now…it was your sixteenth birthday recently,
wasn’t it?”
Frank nodded. He wasn’t sure how Vitellius knew
this, since Frank hadn’t told anyone except Hazel, but
ghosts had ways of finding out secrets. Eavesdropping
while invisible was probably one of them.
“So that’s why you’re such a grumpy gladiator,” the
Lar said. “Understandable. The sixteenth birthday is your
day of manhood! Your godly parent should have claimed
you, no doubt about it, even if with only a small omen.
Perhaps he thought you were younger. You look younger,
you know, with that pudgy baby face.”“Thanks for reminding
me,” Frank muttered.
“Yes, I remember my sixteenth,” Vitellius said happily.
“Wonderful omen! A chicken in my underpants.”
“Excuse me?”
Vitellius puffed up with pride. “That’s right! I was
at the river changing my clothes for my Liberalia. Rite of
passage into manhood, you know. We did things properly
back then. I’d taken off my childhood toga and was washing
up to don the adult one. Suddenly, a pure-white
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chicken ran out of nowhere, dove into my loincloth, and
ran off with it. I wasn’t wearing it at the time.”
“That’s good,” Frank said. “And can I just say: Too
much information?”
“Mm.” Vitellius wasn’t listening. “That was the sign
I was descended from Aesculapius, the god of medicine. I
took my cognomen, my third name, Reticulus, because it
meant undergarment, to remind me of the blessed day
when a chicken stole my loincloth.”
“So…your name means Mr. Underwear?”
“Praise the gods! I became a surgeon in the legion,
and the rest is history.” He spread his arms generously.
“Don’t give up, boy. Maybe your father is running late.
Most omens are not as dramatic as a chicken, of course. I
knew a fellow once who got a dung beetle—”
“Thanks, Vitellius,” Frank said. “But I have to fin
ish polishing this armor—”
“And the gorgon’s blood?”
Frank froze. He hadn’t told anyone about that. As
far as he knew, only Percy had seen him pocket the vials
at the river, and they hadn’t had a chance to talk about it.
“Come now,” Vitellius chided. “I’m a healer. I know
the legends about gorgon’s blood. Show me the vials.”
Reluctantly, Frank brought out the two ceramic
flask she’d retrieved from the Little Tiber. Spoils of war
were often left behind when a monster dissolved—sometimes
a tooth, or a weapon, or even the monster’s entire
head. Frank had known what the two vials were
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immediately. By tradition they belonged to Percy, who
had killed the gorgons, but Frank couldn’t help thinking,
What if I could use them?
“Yes.” Vitellius studied the vials approvingly.
“Blood takenfrom the right side of a gorgon’s body can
cure any disease, even bring the dead back to life. The
goddess Minerva once gave a vial of it to my divine ancestor,
Aesculapius. But blood taken from the left side of
a gorgon—instantly fatal. So, which is which?”
Frank looked down at the vials. “I don’t know.
They’re identical.”
“Ha! But you’re hoping the right vial could solve
your problem with the burned stick, eh? Maybe break
your curse?”
Frank was so stunned, he couldn’t talk.
“Oh, don’t worry, boy.” The ghost chuckled. “I
won’t tell anyone. I’m a Lar, a protector of the cohort! I
wouldn’t do anything to endanger you.”
“You stabbed me through the chest with your
sword.”
“Trust me, boy! I have sympathy for you, carrying
the curse of that Argonaut.”
“The ... what?”
Vitellius waved away the question. “Don’t be modest.
You’ve got ancient roots. Greek as well as Roman. It’s
no wonder Juno—” He tilted his head, as if listening to a
voice from above. His face went slack. His entire aura
flickered green. “But I’ve said enough! At any rate, I’ll let
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you work out who gets the gorgon’s blood. I suppose that
newcomer Percy could use it too, with his memory
problem.”
Frank wondered what Vitellius had been about to
say and what had made him so scared, but he got the feeling
that for once Vitellius was going to keep his mouth
shut.
He looked down at the two vials. He hadn’t even
thought of Percy’s needing them. He felt guilty that he’d
been intending to use the blood for himself. “Yeah. Of
course. He should have it.”
“Ah, but if you want my advice…” Vitellius looked
up nervously again. “You should both wait on that gorgon
blood. If my sources are right, you’re going to need it on
your quest.”
“Quest?”
The doors of the armory flew open.
Reyna stormed in with her metal greyhounds. Vitellius
vanished. He might have liked chickens, but he did
not like the praetor’s dogs.
“Frank.” Reyna looked troubled. “That’s enough
with the armor. Go find Hazel. Get Percy Jackson down
here. He’s been up there too long. I don’t want Octavian…”
She hesitated. “Just get Percy down here.”
So Frank had run all the way to Temple Hill.
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Walking back, Percy had asked tons of questions
about Hazel’s brother, Nico, but Frank didn’t know that
much.
“He’s okay,” Frank said. “He’s not like Hazel—”
“How do you mean?” Percy asked.
“Oh, um…” Frank coughed. He’d meant that Hazel
was better looking and nicer, but he decided not to say
that. “Nico is kind of mysterious. He makes everybody
else nervous, being the son of Pluto, and all.”
“But not you?”
Frank shrugged. “Pluto’s cool. It’s not his fault he
runs the Underworld. He just got bad luck when the gods
were dividing up the world, you know? Jupiter got the
sky, Neptune got the sea, and Pluto got the shaft.”
“Death doesn’t scare you?”
Frank almost wanted to laugh. Not at all! Got a
match?
Instead he said, “Back in the old times, like the
Greek times, when Pluto was called Hades, he was more
of a death god. When he became Roman, he got more…I
don’t know, respectable. He became the god of wealth,
too. Everything under the earth belongs to him. So I don’t
think of him as being real scary.”
Percy scratched his head. “How does a god become
Roman? If he’s Greek, wouldn’t he stay Greek?”
Frank walked a few steps, thinking about that. Vitellius
would’ve given Percy an hour-long lecture on the
subject, probably with a PowerPoint presentation, but
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Frank took his best shot. “The way Romans saw it, they
adopted the Greek stuff and perfected it.”
Percy made a sour face. “Perfected it? Like there
was something wrong with it?”
Frank remembered what Vitellius had said: You’ve
got ancient roots. Greek as well as Roman. His grandmother
had said something similar.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Rome was more successful
than Greece. They made this huge empire. The
gods became a bigger deal in Roman times—more powerful
and widely known. That’s why they’re still around
today. So many civilizations base themselves on Rome.
The gods changed to Roman because that’s where the
center of power was. Jupiter was…well, more responsible
as a Roman god than he had been when he was Zeus.
Mars became a lot more important and disciplined.”
“And Juno became a hippie bag lady,” Percy noted.
“So you’re saying the old Greek gods—they just changed
permanently to Roman? There’s nothing left of the
Greek?”
“Uh…” Frank looked around to make sure there
were no campers or Lares nearby, but the main gates
were still a hundred yards away. “That’s a sensitive topic.
Some people say Greek influence is still around, like it’s
still a part of the gods’ personalities. I’ve heard stories of
demigods occasionally leaving Camp Jupiter. They reject
Roman training and try to follow the older Greek
style—like being solo heroes instead of working as a team
the way the legion does. And back in the ancient days,
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when Rome fell, the eastern half of the empire survived—
the Greek half.”
Percy stared at him. “I didn’t know that.”
“It was called Byzantium.” Frank liked saying that
word. It sounded cool. “The eastern empire lasted another
thousand years, but it was always more Greek than Roman.
For those of us who follow the Roman way, it’s kind
of a sore subject. That’s why, whatever country we settle
in, Camp Jupiter is always in the west—the Roman part
of the territory. The east is considered bad luck.”
“Huh.” Percy frowned.
Frank couldn’t blame him for feeling confused. The
Greek/Roman stuff gave him a headache, too.
They reached the gates.
“I’ll take you to the baths to get you cleaned up,”
Frank said. “But first…about those vials I found at the
river.”
“Gorgon’s blood,” Percy said. “One vial heals. One
is deadly poison.”
Frank’s eyes widened. “You know about that?
Listen, I wasn’t going to keep them. I just—”
“I know why you did it, Frank.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.” Percy smiled. “If I’d come into camp carrying
a vial of poison, that would’ve looked bad. You were
trying to protect me.”
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“Oh…right.” Frank wiped the sweat off his palms.
“But if we could figure out which vial was which, it might
heal your memory.”
Percy’s smile faded. He gazed across the hills.
“Maybe…I guess. But you should hang on to those vials
for now. There’s a battle coming. We may need them to
save lives.”
Frank stared at him, a little bit in awe. Percy had a
chance to get his memory back, and he was willing to wait
in case someone else needed the vial more? Romans were
supposed to be unselfish and help their comrades, but
Frank wasn’t sure anyone else at camp would have made
that choice.
“So you don’t remember anything?” Frank asked.
“Family, friends?”
Percy fingered the clay beads around his neck.
“Only glimpses. Murky stuff. A girlfriend…I thought she’d
be at camp.” He looked at Frank carefully, as if making a
decision. “Her name was Annabeth. You don’t know her,
do you?”
Frank shook his head. “I know everybody at camp,
but no Annabeth. What about your family? Is your mom
mortal?”
“I guess so…she’s probably worried out of her
mind. Does your mom get to see you much?”
Frank stopped at the bathhouse entrance. He
grabbed some towels from the supply shed. “She died.”
Percy knit his brow. “How?”
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Usually Frank would lie. He’d say an accident and
shut off the conversation. Otherwise his emotions got out
of control. He couldn’t cry at Camp Jupiter. He couldn’t
show weakness. But with Percy, Frank found it easier to
talk.
“She died in the war,” he said. “Afghanistan.”
“She was in the military?”
“Canadian. Yeah.”
“Canada? I didn’t know—”
“Most Americans don’t.” Frank sighed. “But yeah,
Canada has troops there. My mom was a captain. She was
one of the first women to die in combat. She saved some
soldiers who were pinned down by enemy fire. She…she
didn’t make it. The funeral was right before I came down
here.”
Percy nodded. He didn’t ask for more details,
which Frank appreciated. He didn’t say he was sorry, or
make any of the well-meaning comments Frank always
hated: Oh, you poor guy. That must be so hard on you.
You have my deepest condolences.
It was like Percy had faced death before, like he
knew about grief. What mattered was listening. You
didn’t need to say you were sorry. The only thing that
helped was moving on—moving forward.
“How about you show me the baths now?” Percy
suggested. “I’m filthy.”
Frank managed a smile. “Yeah. You kind of are.”
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As they walked into the steam room, Frank thought
of his grandmother, his mom, and his cursed childhood,
thanks to Juno and her piece of firewood. He almost
wished he could forget his past, the way Percy had.
FRANK DIDN’T REMEMBER MUCH ABOUT the funeral
itself.
But he remembered the hours leading up to it—his
grand mother coming out into the backyard to find him
shooting arrows at her porcelain collection.
His grandmother’s house was a rambling gray
stone mansion on twelve acres in North Vancouver. Her
backyard ran straight into Lynn Canyon Park.
The morning was cold and drizzly, but Frank didn’t
feel the chill. He wore a black wool suit and a black overcoat
that had once belonged to his grandfather. Frank had
been startled and upset to find that they fit him fine. The
clothes smelled like wet mothballs and jasmine. The fabric
was itchy but warm. With his bow and quiver, he probably
looked like a very dangerous butler.
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He’d loaded some of his grandmother’s porcelain
in a wagon and toted it into the yard, where he set up targets
on old fence posts at the edge of the property. He’d
been shooting so long, his fingers were starting to lose
their feeling. With every arrow, he imagined he was striking
down his problems.
Snipers in Afghanistan. Smash. A teapot exploded
with an arrow through the middle.
The sacrifice medal, a silver disk on a red-andblack
ribbon, given for death in the line of duty, presented
to Frank as if it were something important, something
that made everything all right. Thwack. A teacup spun into
the woods.
The officer who came to tell him: “Your mother is a
hero.
Captain Emily Zhang died trying to save her
comrades.”
Crack. A blue-and-white plate split into pieces.
His grandmother’s chastisement: Men do not cry.
Especially Zhang men. You will endure, Fai.
No one called him Fai except his grandmother.
What sort of name is Frank? she would scold. That
is not a Chinese name.
I’m not Chinese, Frank thought, but he didn’t dare
say that. His mother had told him years ago: There is no
arguing with Grandmother. It’ll only make you suffer
worse. She’d been right. And now Frank had no one except
his grandmother.
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Thud. A fourth arrow hit the fence post and stuck
there, quivering.
“Fai,” said his grandmother.
Frank turned.
She was clutching a shoebox-sized mahogany chest
that Frank had never seen before. With her high-collared
black dress and severe bun of gray hair, she looked like a
school teacher from the 1800s.
She surveyed the carnage: her porcelain in the wagon,
the shards of her favorite tea sets scattered over the
lawn, Frank’s arrows sticking out of the ground, the trees,
the fence posts, and one in the head of a smiling garden
gnome.
Frank thought she would yell, or hit him with the
box. He’d never done anything this bad before. He’d never
felt so angry.
Grandmother’s face was full of bitterness and disapproval.
She looked nothing like Frank’s mom. He
wondered how his mother had turned out to be so
nice—always laughing, always gentle. Frank couldn’t imagine
his mom growing up with Grandmother any more
than he could imagine her on the battlefield—though the
two situations probably weren’t that different.
He waited for Grandmother to explode. Maybe he’d
be grounded and wouldn’t have to go to the funeral. He
wanted to hurt her for being so mean all the time, for letting
his mother go off to war, for scolding him to get over
it. All she cared about was her stupid collection.
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“Stop this ridiculous behavior,” Grandmother said.
She didn’t sound very irritated. “It is beneath you.”
To Frank’s astonishment, she kicked aside one of
her favorite teacups.
“The car will be here soon,” she said. “We must
talk.”
Frank was dumbfounded. He looked more closely
at the mahogany box. For a horrible moment, he
wondered if it contained his mother’s ashes, but that was
impossible. Grandmother had told him there would be a
military burial. Then why did Grandmother hold the box
so gingerly, as if its contents grieved her?
“Come inside,” she said. Without waiting to see if
he would follow, she turned and marched toward the
house.
In the parlor, Frank sat on a velvet sofa, surrounded
by vintage family photos, porcelain vases that had
been too large for his wagon, and red Chinese calligraphy
banners. Frank didn’t know what the calligraphy said.
He’d never had much interest in learning. He didn’t know
most of the people in the photographs, either.
Whenever Grandmother started lecturing him
about his ancestors—how they’d come over from China
and prospered in the import/export business, eventually
becoming one of the wealthiest Chinese families in Vancouver—
well, it was boring. Frank was fourth-generation
Canadian. He didn’t care about China and all these musty
antiques. The only Chinese characters he could recognize
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were his family name: Zhang. Master of bows. That was
cool.
Grandmother sat next to him, her posture stiff, her
hands folded over the box.
“Your mother wanted you to have this,” she said
with reluctance. “She kept it since you were a baby. When
she went away to the war, she entrusted it to me. But now
she is gone. And soon you will be going, too.”
Frank’s stomach fluttered. “Going? Where?”
“I am old,” Grandmother said, as if that were a surprising
announcement. “I have my own appointment with
Death soon enough. I cannot teach you the skills you will
need, and I cannot keep this burden. If something were to
happen to it,
I would never forgive myself. You would die.”
Frank wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. It sounded
like she had said his life depended on that box. He
wondered why he’d never seen it before. She must have
kept it locked in the attic—the one room Frank was forbidden
to explore. She’d always said she kept her most
valuable treasures up there.
She handed the box to him. He opened the lid with
trembling fingers. Inside, cushioned in velvet lining, was
a terrifying, life-altering, incredibly important…piece of
wood.
It looked like driftwood—hard and smooth, sculpted
into a wavy shape. It was about the size of a TV remote
control. The tip was charred. Frank touched the
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burned end. It still felt warm. The ashes left a black
smudge on his finger.
“It’s a stick,” he said. He couldn’t figure out why
Grandmother was acting so tense and serious about it.
Her eyes glittered. “Fai, do you know of prophecies?
Do you know of the gods?”
The questions made him uncomfortable. He
thought about Grandmother’s silly gold statues of
Chinese immortals, her superstitions about putting furniture
in certain places and avoiding unlucky numbers.
Prophecies made him think of fortune cookies, which
weren’t even Chinese—not really—but the bullies at
school teased him about stupid stuff like that: Confucius
say …all that garbage. Frank had never even been to China.
He wanted nothing to do with it. But of course,
Grandmother didn’t want to hear that.
“A little, Grandmother,” he said. “Not much.”
“Most would have scoffed at your mother’s tale,”
she said, “But I did not. I know of prophecies and gods.
Greek, Roman, Chinese—they intertwine in our family. I
did not question what she told me about your father.”
“Wait ... what?”
“Your father was a god,” she said plainly.
If Grandmother had had a sense of humor, Frank
would have thought she was kidding. But Grandmother
never teased. Was she going senile?
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“Stop gaping at me!” she snapped. “My mind is not
addled. Haven’t you ever wondered why your father never
came back?”
“He was…” Frank faltered. Losing his mother was
painful enough. He didn’t want to think about his father,
too. “He was in the army, like Mom. He went missing in
action. In Iraq.”
“Bah. He was a god. He fell in love with your mother
because she was a natural warrior. She was like
me—strong, brave, good, beautiful.”
Strong and brave, Frank could believe. Picturing
Grandmother as good or beautiful was more difficult.
He still suspected she might be losing her marbles,
but he asked, “What kind of god?”
“Roman,” she said. “Beyond that, I don’t know.
Your mother wouldn’t say, or perhaps she didn’t know
herself. It is no surprise a god would fall in love with her,
given our family. He must have known she was of ancient
blood.”
“Wait…we’re Chinese. Why would Roman gods
want to date Chinese Canadians?”
Grandmother’s nostrils flared. “If you bothered to
learn the family history, Fai, you might know this. China
and Rome are not so different, nor as separate as you
might believe. Our family is from Gansu Province, a town
once called Li-Jien. And before that…as I said, ancient
blood. The blood of princes and heroes.”
Frank just stared at her.
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She sighed in exasperation. “My words are wasted
on this young ox! You will learn the truth when you go to
camp.
Perhaps your father will claim you. But for now, I
must explain the firewood.”
She pointed at the big stone fireplace. “Shortly after
you were born, a visitor appeared at our hearth. Your
mother and I sat here on the couch, just where you and I
are sitting. You were a tiny thing, swaddled in a blue
blanket, and she cradled you in her arms.”
It sounded like a sweet memory, but Grandmother
told it in a bitter tone, as if she knew, even then, that
Frank would turn into a big lumbering oaf.
“A woman appeared at the fire,” she continued.
“She was a white woman—a gwai poh—dressed in blue
silk, with a strange cloak like the skin of a goat.”
“A goat,” Frank said numbly.
Grandmother scowled. “Yes, clean your ears, Fai
Zhang! I’m too old to tell every story twice! The woman
with the goatskin was a goddess. I can always tell these
things. She smiled at the baby—at you—and she told your
mother, in perfect Mandarin, no less: ‘He will close the
circle. He will return your family to its roots and bring
you great honor.’”
Grandmother snorted. “I do not argue with goddesses,
but perhaps this one did not see the future clearly.
Whatever the case, she said, ‘He will go to camp and restore
your reputation there. He will free Thanatos from
his icy chains—’”
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“Wait, who?”
“Thanatos,” Grandmother said impatiently. “The
Greek name for Death. Now may I continue without interruptions?
The goddess said, ‘The blood of Pylos is
strong in this child from his mother’s side. He will have
the Zhang family gift, but he will also have the powers of
his father.’”
Suddenly Frank’s family history didn’t seem so boring.
He desperately wanted to ask what it all
meant—powers, gifts, blood of Pylos. What was this
camp, and who was his father? But he didn’t want to interrupt
Grandmother again. He wanted her to keep
talking.
“No power comes without a price, Fai,” she said.
“Before the goddess disappeared, she pointed at the fire
and said, ‘He will be the strongest of your clan, and the
greatest. But the Fates have decreed he will also be the
most vulnerable. His life will burn bright and short. As
soon as that piece of tinder is consumed—that stick at the
edge of the fire—your son is destined to die.’”
Frank could hardly breathe. He looked at the box in
his lap, and the smudge of ash on his finger. The story
sounded ridiculous, but suddenly the piece of driftwood
seemed more sinister, colder and heavier. “This…this—”
“Yes, my thick-headed ox,” Grandmother said.
“That is the very stick. The goddess disappeared, and I
snatched the wood from the fire immediately. We have
kept it ever since.”
“If it burns up, I die?”
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“It is not so strange,” Grandmother said. “Roman,
Chinese—the destinies of men can often be predicted, and
sometimes guarded against, at least for a time. The firewood
is in your possession now. Keep it close. As long as
it is safe, you are safe.”
Frank shook his head. He wanted to protest that
this was just a stupid legend. Maybe Grandmother was
trying to scare him as some sort of revenge for breaking
her porcelain.
But her eyes were defiant. She seemed to be challenging
Frank: If you do not believe it, burn it.
Frank closed the box. “If it’s so dangerous, why not
seal the wood in something that won’t burn, like plastic or
steel? Why not put it in a safe deposit box?”
“What would happen,” Grandmother wondered, “if
we coated the stick in another substance. Would you, too,
suffocate? I do not know. Your mother would not take the
risk. She couldn’t bear to part with it, for fear something
would go wrong. Banks can be robbed. Buildings can
burn down. Strange things conspire when one tries to
cheat fate. Your mother thought the stick was only safe in
her possession, until she went to war. Then she gave it to
me.”
Grandmother exhaled sourly. “Emily was foolish,
going to war, though I suppose I always knew it was her
destiny. She hoped to meet your father again.”
“She thought…she thought he’d be in
Afghanistan?”
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Grandmother spread her hands, as if this was beyond
her understanding. “She went. She died bravely. She
thought the family gift would protect her. No doubt that’s
how she saved those soldiers. But the gift has never kept
our family safe. It did not help my father, or his father. It
did not help me. And now you have become a man. You
must follow the path.”
“But…what path? What’s our gift—archery?”
“You and your archery! Foolish boy. Soon you will
find out. Tonight, after the funeral, you must go south.
Your mother said if she did not come back from combat,
Lupa would send messengers. They will escort you to a
place where the children of the gods can be trained for
their destiny.”
Frank felt as if he were being shot with arrows, his
heart splitting into porcelain shards. He didn’t understand
most of what Grandmother said, but one thing was
clear: she was kicking him out.
“You’d just let me go?” he asked. “Your last
family?”
Grandmother’s mouth quivered. Her eyes looked
moist. Frank was shocked to realize she was near tears.
She’d lost her husband years ago, then her daughter, and
now she was about to send away her only grandson. But
she rose from the couch and stood tall, her posture as stiff
and correct as ever.
“When you arrive at camp,” she instructed, “you
must speak to the praetor in private. Tell her your great-
grandfather was Shen Lun. It has been many years since
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the San Francisco incident. Hopefully they will not kill
you for what he did, but you might want to beg forgiveness
for his actions.”
“This is sounding better and better,” Frank
mumbled.
“The goddess said you would bring our family full
circle.” Grandmother’s voice had no trace of sympathy.
“She chose your path years ago, and it will not be easy.
But now it is time for the funeral. We have obligations.
Come. The car will be waiting.”
The ceremony was a blur: solemn faces, the patter
of rain on the graveside awning, the crack of rifles from
the honor guard, the casket sinking into the earth.
That night, the wolves came. They howled on the
front porch. Frank came out to meet them. He took his
travel pack, his warmest clothes, his bow and his quiver.
His mother’s sacrifice medal was tucked in his pack. The
charred stick was wrapped carefully in three layers of
cloth in his coat pocket, next to his heart.
His journey south began—to the Wolf House in
Sonoma, and eventually to Camp Jupiter, where he spoke
to Reyna privately as Grandmother had instructed. He
begged forgiveness for the great-grandfather he knew
nothing about. Reyna let him join the legion. She never
did tell him what his great-grandfather had done, but she
obviously knew. Frank could tell it was bad.
“I judge people by their own merits,” Reyna had
told him. “But do not mention the name Shen Lun to
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anyone else. It must remain our secret, or you’ll be
treated badly.”
Unfortunately, Frank didn’t have many merits. His
first month at camp was spent knocking over rows of
weapons, breaking chariots, and tripping entire cohorts
as they marched. His favorite job was caring for Hannibal
the elephant, but he’d managed to mess that up, too—giving
Hannibal indigestion by feeding him peanuts. Who
knew elephants could be peanut-intolerant? Frank
figured Reyna was regretting her decision to let him join.
Every day, he woke up wondering if the stick would
somehow catch fire and burn, and he would cease to exist.
All of this ran through Frank’s head as he walked with
Hazel and Percy to the war games. He thought about the
stick wrapped inside his coat pocket, and what it meant
that Juno had appeared at camp. Was he about to die? He
hoped not. He hadn’t brought his family any honor
yet—that was for sure. Maybe Apollo would claim him
today and explain his powers and gifts.
Once they got out of camp, the Fifth Cohort formed
two lines behind their centurions, Dakota and Gwen.
They marched north, skirting the edge of the city, and
headed to the Field of Mars—the largest, flattest part of
the valley. The grass was cropped short by all the unicorns,
bulls, and homeless fauns that grazed here. The
earth was pitted with explosion craters and scarred with
trenches from past games. At the north end of the field
stood their target. The engineers had built a stone fortress
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with an iron portcullis, guard towers, scorpion ballistae,
water cannons, and no doubt many other nasty surprises
for the defenders to use.
“They did a good job today,” Hazel noted. “That’s
bad for us.”
“Wait,” Percy said. “You’re telling me that fortress
was built today?”
Hazel grinned. “Legionnaires are trained to build.
If we had to, we could break down the entire camp and
rebuild it somewhere else. Take maybe three or four days,
but we could do it.”
“Let’s not,” Percy said. “So you attack a different
fort every night?”
“Not every night,” Frank said. “We have different
training exercises. Sometimes death ball—um, which is
like paint-ball, except with…you know, poison and acid
and fire balls. Sometimes we do chariots and gladiator
competitions, sometimes war games.”
Hazel pointed at the fort. “Somewhere inside, the
First and Second Cohorts are keeping their banners. Our
job is to get inside and capture them without getting
slaughtered. We do that, we win.”
Percy’s eyes lit up. “Like capture-the-flag. I think I
like capture-the-flag.”
Frank laughed. “Yeah, well…it’s harder than it
sounds. We have to get past those scorpions and water
cannons on the walls, fight through the inside of the fortress,
find the banners, and defeat the guards, all while
protecting our own banners and troops from capture. And
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our cohort is in competition with the other two attacking
cohorts. We sort of work together, but not really. The cohort
that captures the banners gets all the glory.”
Percy stumbled, trying to keep time with the left-
right marching rhythm. Frank sympathized. He’d spent
his first two weeks falling down.
“So why are we practicing this, anyway?” Percy
asked. “Do you guys spend a lot of time laying siege to
fortified cities?”
“Teamwork,” Hazel said. “Quick thinking. Tactics.
Battle skills. You’d be surprised what you can learn in the
war games.”
“Like who will stab you in the back,” Frank said.
“Especially that,” Hazel agreed.
They marched to the center of the Field of Mars
and formed ranks. The Third and Fourth Cohorts assembled
as far as possible from the Fifth. The centurions
for the attacking side gathered for a conference. In the
sky above them, Reyna circled on her pegasus, Scipio,
ready to play referee.
Half a dozen giant eagles flew in formation behind
her—prepared for ambulance airlift duty if necessary. The
only person not participating in the game was Nico di Angelo,
“Pluto’s ambassador,” who had climbed an observation
tower about a hundred yards from the fort and would
be watching with binoculars.
Frank propped his pilum against his shield and
checked Percy’s armor. Every strap was correct. Every
piece of armor was properly adjusted.
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“You did it right,” he said in amazement. “Percy,
you must’ve done war games before.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
The only thing that wasn’t regulation was Percy’s
glowing bronze sword—not Imperial gold, and not a gladius.
The blade was leaf-shaped, and the writing on the
hilt was Greek.
Looking at it made Frank uneasy. Percy frowned.
“We can use real weapons, right?”
“Yeah,” Frank agreed. “For sure. I’ve just never
seen a sword like that.”
“What if I hurt somebody?”
“We heal them,” Frank said. “Or try to. The legion
medics are pretty good with ambrosia and nectar, and
unicorn draught.”
“No one dies,” Hazel said. “Well, not usually. And if
they do—”
Frank imitated the voice of Vitellius: “They’re
wimps! Backin my day, we died all the time, and we liked
it!”
Hazel laughed. “Just stay with us, Percy. Chances
are we’ll get the worst duty and get eliminated early.
They’ll throw us at the walls first to soften up the defenses.
Then the Third and Fourth Cohorts will march in
and get the honors, if they can even breach the fort.”
Horns blew. Dakota and Gwen walked back from
the officers’ conference, looking grim.
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“All right, here’s the plan!” Dakota took a quick
swig of Kool-Aid from his travel flask. “They’re throwing
us at the walls first to soften up the defenses.”
The whole cohort groaned.
“I know, I know,” Gwen said. “But maybe this time
we’ll have some luck!”
Leave it to Gwen to be the optimist. Everybody
liked her because she took care of her people and tried to
keep their spirits up. She could even control Dakota during
his hyperactive bug-juice fits. Still, the campers
grumbled and complained. Nobody believed in luck for
the Fifth.
“First line with Dakota,” Gwen said. “Lock shields
and advance in turtle formation to the main gates. Try to
stay in one piece. Draw their fire. Second line—” Gwen
turned to Frank’s row without much enthusiasm. “You
seventeen, from Bobby over, take charge of the elephant
and the scaling ladders. Try a flanking attack on the western
wall. Maybe we can spread the defenders too thin.
Frank, Hazel, Percy…well, just do whatever. Show Percy
the ropes. Try to keep him alive.” She turned back to the
whole cohort. “If anybody gets over the wall first, I’ll
make sure you get the Mural Crown. Victory for the
Fifth!”
The cohort cheered half heartedly and broke ranks.
Percy frowned. “‘Do whatever?’”
“Yeah,” Hazel sighed. “Big vote of confidence.”
“What’s the Mural Crown?” he asked.
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“Military medal,” Frank said. He’d been forced to
memorize all the possible awards. “Big honor for the first
soldier to breach an enemy fort. You’ll notice nobody in
the Fifth is wearing one. Usually we don’t even get into
the fort because we’re burning or drowning or…”
He faltered, and looked at Percy. “Water cannons.”
“What?” Percy asked.
“The cannons on the walls,” Frank said, “they draw
water from the aqueduct. There’s a pump system—heck, I
don’t know how they work, but they’re under a lot of pressure.
If you could control them, like you controlled the
river—”
“Frank!” Hazel beamed. “That’s brilliant!”
Percy didn’t look so sure. “I don’t know how I did
that at the river. I’m not sure I can control the cannons
from this far away.”
“We’ll get you closer.” Frank pointed to the eastern
wall of the fort, where the Fifth Cohort wouldn’t be attacking.
“That’s where the defense will be weakest. They’ll
never take three kids seriously. I think we can sneak up
pretty close before they see us.”
“Sneak up how?” Percy asked.
Frank turned to Hazel. “Can you do that thing
again?”
She punched him in the chest. “You said you
wouldn’t tell anybody!”
Immediately Frank felt terrible. He’d gotten so
caught up in the idea...
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Hazel muttered under her breath. “Never mind. It’s
fine.
Percy, he’s talking about the trenches. The Field of
Mars is riddled with tunnels from over the years. Some
are collapsed, or buried deep, but a lot of them are still
passable. I’m pretty good at finding them and using them.
I can even collapse them if I have to.”
“Like you did with the gorgons,” Percy said, “to
slow them down.”
Frank nodded approvingly. “I told you Pluto was
cool. He’s the god of everything under the earth. Hazel
can find caves, tunnels, trapdoors—”
“And it was our secret,” she grumbled.
Frank felt himself blushing. “Yeah, sorry. But if we
can get close—”
“And if I can knock out the water cannons…” Percy
nodded, like he was warming to the idea. “What do we do
then?”
Frank checked his quiver. He always stocked up on
special arrows. He’d never gotten to use them before, but
maybe tonight was the night. Maybe he could finally do
something good enough to get Apollo’s attention.
“The rest is up to me,” he said. “Let’s go.”
FRANK HAD NEVER FELT SO SURE of anything, which
made him nervous. Nothing he planned ever went right.
He always managed to break, ruin, burn, sit on, or knock
over something important. Yet he knew this strategy
would work.
Hazel found them a tunnel with no problem. In
fact, Frank had a sneaking suspicion she didn’t just find
tunnels. It was as though tunnels manufactured themselves
to suit her needs. Passages that had been filled in
years ago suddenly unfilled, changing direction to lead
Hazel where she wanted to go. They crept along by the
light of Percy’s glowing sword,
Riptide. Above, they heard the sounds of
battle—kids shout ing, Hannibal the elephant bellowing
with glee, scorpion bolts exploding, and water cannons
firing. The tunnel shook. Dirt rained down on them.
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Frank slipped his hand inside his armor. The piece
of wood was still safe and secure in his coat pocket,
though one good shot from a scorpion might set his lifeline
on fire.…
Bad Frank, he chided himself. Fire is the “F-word.”
Don’t think about it.
“There’s an opening just ahead,” Hazel announced.
“We’ll come up ten feet from the east wall.”
“How can you tell?” Percy asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m sure.”
“Could we tunnel straight under the wall?” Frank
wondered.
“No,” Hazel said. “The engineers were smart. They
built the walls on old foundations that go down to bedrock.
And don’t ask how I know. I just do.”
Frank stumbled over something and cursed. Percy
brought this sword around for more light. The thing
Frank had tripped on was gleaming silver.
He crouched down.
“Don’t touch it!” Hazel said.
Frank’s hand stopped a few inches from the chunk
of metal. It looked like a giant Hershey’s Kiss, about the
size of his fist.
“It’s massive,” he said. “Silver?”
“Platinum.” Hazel sounded scared out of her wits.
“It’ll go away in a second. Please don’t touch it. It’s
dangerous.”
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Frank didn’t understand how a lump of metal could
be dangerous, but he took Hazel seriously. As they
watched, the chunk of platinum sank into the ground.
He stared at Hazel. “How did you know?”
In the light of Percy’s sword, Hazel looked as
ghostly as a Lar. “I’ll explain later,” she promised.
Another explosion rocked the tunnel, and they
forged ahead.
They popped out of a hole just where Hazel had
predicted. In front of them, the fort’s east wall loomed.
Off to their left, Frank could see the main line of the Fifth
Cohort advancing in turtle formation, shields forming a
shell over their heads and sides. They were trying to reach
the main gates, but the defenders above pelted them with
rocks and shot flaming bolts from the scorpions, blasting
craters around their feet. A water cannon discharged with
a jaw-rattling THRUM, and a jet of liquid carved a trench
in the dirt right in front of the cohort.
Percy whistled. “That’s a lot of pressure, all right.”
The Third and Fourth Cohorts weren’t even advancing.
They stood back and laughed, watching their “allies”
get beat up. The defenders clustered on the wall above the
gates, yelling insults at the tortoise formation as it
staggered back and forth. War games had deteriorated into
“beat up the Fifth.”
Frank’s vision went red with anger.
“Let’s shake things up.” He reached in his quiver
and pulled out an arrow heavier than the rest. The iron
tip was shaped like the nose cone of a rocket. An ultra
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thin gold rope trailed from the fletching. Shooting it accurately
up the wall would take more force and skill than
most archers could manage, but Frank had strong arms
and good aim.
Maybe Apollo is watching, he thought hopefully.
“What does that do?” Percy asked. “Grappling
hook?”
“It’s called a hydra arrow,” Frank said. “Can you
knock out the water cannons?”
A defender appeared on the wall above them.
“Hey!” he shouted to his buddies. “Check it out! More
victims!”
“Percy,” Frank said, “now would be good.”
More kids came across the battlements to laugh at
them. A few ran to the nearest water cannon and swung
the barrel toward Frank.
Percy closed his eyes. He raised his hand.
Up on the wall, somebody yelled, “Open wide,
losers!”
KA-BOOM!
The cannon exploded in a starburst of blue, green,
and white. Defenders screamed as a watery shock wave
flattened them against the battlements. Kids toppled over
the walls but were snatched by giant eagles and carried to
safety. Then the entire eastern wall shuddered as the explosion
backed up through the pipelines. One after another,
the water cannons on the battlements exploded. The
scorpions’ fires were doused. Defenders scattered in
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confusion or were tossed through the air, giving the rescue
eagles quite a workout. At the main gates, the Fifth
Cohort forgot about their formation. Mystified, they
lowered their shields and stared at the chaos.
Frank shot his arrow. It streaked upward, carrying
its glittering rope. When it reached the top, the metal
point fractured into a dozen lines that lashed out and
wrapped around anything they could find—parts of the
wall, a scorpion, a broken water cannon, and a couple of
defending campers, who yelped and found themselves
slammed against the battlements as anchors. From the
main rope, handholds extended at two-foot intervals,
making a ladder.
“Go!” Frank said.
Percy grinned. “You first, Frank. This is your
party.”
Frank hesitated. Then he slung his bow on his back
and began to climb. He was halfway up before the defenders
recovered their senses enough to sound the alarm.
Frank glanced back at Fifth Cohort’s main group.
They were staring up at him, dumbfounded.
“Well?” Frank screamed. “Attack!”
Gwen was the first to unfreeze. She grinned and repeated
the order. A cheer went up from the battlefield.
Hannibal the elephant trumpeted with happiness, but
Frank couldn’t afford to watch. He clambered to the top
of the wall, where three defenders were trying to hack
down his rope ladder.
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One good thing about being big, clumsy, and clad
in metal:Frank was like a heavily armored bowling ball.
He launched himself at the defenders, and they toppled
like pins. Frank got to his feet. He took command of the
battlements, sweeping his pilum back and forth and
knocking down defenders. Some shot arrows. Some tried
to get under his guard with their swords, but Frank felt
unstoppable. Then Hazel appeared next to him, swinging
her big cavalry sword like she was born for battle.
Percy leaped onto the wall and raised Riptide.
“Fun,” he said.
Together they cleared the defenders off the walls.
Below them the gates broke. Hannibal barreled into the
fort, arrows and rocks bouncing harmlessly off his Kevlar
armor.
The Fifth Cohort charged in behind the elephant,
and the battle went hand-to-hand.
Finally, from the edge of the Field of Mars, a battle
cry went up. The Third and Fourth Cohorts ran to join the
fight.
“A little late,” Hazel grumbled.
“We can’t let them get the banners,” Frank said.
“No,” Percy agreed. “Those are ours.”
No more talk was necessary. They moved like a
team, as if the three of them had been working together
for years. They rushed down the interior steps and into
the enemy base.
AFTER THAT, THE BATTLE WAS MAYHEM.
Frank, Percy, and Hazel waded through the enemy,
plowing down anyone who stood in their way. The First
and Second Cohorts—pride of Camp Jupiter, a well-oiled,
highly disciplined war machine—fell apart under the assault
and the sheer novelty of being on the losing side.
Part of their problem was Percy. He fought like a
demon, whirling through the defenders’ ranks in a completely
unorthodox style, rolling under their feet, slashing
with his sword instead of stabbing like a Roman would,
whacking campers with the flat of his blade, and generally
causing mass panic. Octavian screamed in a shrill
voice—maybe ordering the First Cohort to stand their
ground, maybe trying to sing soprano—but Percy put a
stop to it. He somer saulted over a line of shields and
slammed the butt of his sword into Octavian’s helmet.
The centurion collapsed like a sock puppet.
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Frank shot arrows until his quiver was empty,
using blunt-tipped missiles that wouldn’t kill but left
some nasty bruises. He broke his pilum over a defender’s
head, then reluctantly drew his gladius.
Meanwhile, Hazel climbed onto Hannibal’s back.
She charged toward the center of the fort, grinning down
at her friends. “Let’s go, slowpokes!”
Gods of Olympus, she’s beautiful, Frank thought.
They ran to the center of the base. The inner keep
was virtually unguarded. Obviously the defenders never
dreamed an assault would get this far. Hannibal busted
down the huge doors. Inside, the First and Second Cohort
standard-bearers were sitting around a table playing
Mythomagic with cards and figurines. The cohort’s emblems
were propped carelessly against one wall.
Hazel and Hannibal rode straight into the room,
and the standard-bearers fell backward out of their
chairs. Hannibal stepped on the table, and game pieces
scattered.
By the time the rest of the cohort caught up with
them, Percy and Frank had disarmed the enemies,
grabbed the banners, and climbed onto Hannibal’s back
with Hazel. They marched out of the keep triumphantly
with the enemy colors.
The Fifth Cohort formed ranks around them. Together
they paraded out of the fort, past stunned enemies
and lines of equally mystified allies.
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Reyna circled low overhead on her pegasus. “The
game is won!” She sounded as if she were trying not to
laugh. “Assemble for honors!”
Slowly the campers regrouped on the Field of Mars.
Frank saw plenty of minor injuries—some burns, broken
bones, black eyes, cuts and gashes, plus a lot of very interesting
hairdos from fires and exploding water cannons—
but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.
He slid off the elephant. His comrades swarmed
him, pounding him on the back and complimenting him.
Frank wondered if he was dreaming. It was the best night
of his life—until he saw Gwen.
“Help!” somebody yelled. A couple of campers
rushed out of the fortress, carrying a girl on a stretcher.
They set her down, and other kids started running over.
Even from a distance, Frank could tell it was Gwen. She
was in bad shape. She lay on her side on the stretcher
with a pilum sticking out of her armor—almost like she
was holding it between her chest and her arm, but there
was too much blood.
Frank shook his head in disbelief. “No, no, no…” he
muttered as he ran to her side.
The medics barked at everyone to stand back and
give her air. The whole legion fell silent as the healers
worked—trying to get gauze and powdered unicorn horn
under Gwen’s armor to stop the bleeding, trying to force
some nectar into her mouth. Gwen didn’t move. Her face
was ashen gray.
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Finally one of the medics looked up at Reyna and
shook his head.
For a moment, there was no sound except water
from the ruined cannons trickling down the walls of the
fort. Hannibal nuzzled Gwen’s hair with his trunk.
Reyna surveyed the campers from her pegasus. Her
expression was as hard and dark as iron. “There will be an
investigation. Whoever did this, you cost the legion a
good officer. Honorable death is one thing, but this ... ”
Frank wasn’t sure what she meant. Then he noticed
the marks engraved in the wooden shaft of the pilum: CHT
I LEGIO XII F. The weapon belonged to the First Cohort,
and the point was sticking out the front of her armor.
Gwen had been speared from behind—possibly after the
game had ended.
Frank scanned the crowd for Octavian. The centurion
was watching with more interest than concern, as if
he were examining one of his stupid gutted teddy bears.
He didn’t have a pilum.
Blood roared in Frank’s ears. He wanted to strangle
Octavian with his bare hands, but at that moment, Gwen
gasped.
Everyone stepped back. Gwen opened her eyes. The
color came back to her face.
“Wh-what is it?” She blinked. “What’s everyone
staring at?” She didn’t seem to notice the seven-foot harpoon
sticking out through her chest.
Behind Frank, a medic whispered, “There’s no way.
She was dead. She has to be dead.”
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Gwen tried to sit up, but couldn’t. “There was a
river, and a man asking…for a coin? I turned around and
the exit door was open. So I just…I just left. I don’t understand.
What’s happened?”
Everyone stared at her in horror. Nobody tried to
help.
“Gwen.” Frank knelt next to her. “Don’t try to get
up. Just close your eyes for a second, okay?”
“Why? What—”
“Just trust me.”
Gwen did what he asked.
Frank grabbed the shaft of the pilum below its tip,
but his hands were shaking. The wood was slick. “Percy,
Hazel—help me.”
One of the medics realized what he was planning.
“Don’t!” he said. “You might—”
“What?” Hazel snapped. “Make it worse?”
Frank took a deep breath. “Hold her steady. One,
two, three!”
He pulled the pilum out from the front. Gwen
didn’t even wince. The blood stopped quickly.
Hazel bent down to examine the wound. “It’s closing
on its own,” she said. “I don’t know how, but—”
“I feel fine,” Gwen protested. “What’s everyone
worried about?”
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With Frank and Percy’s help, she got to her feet.
Frank glowered at Octavian, but the centurion’s face was
a mask of polite concern.
Later, Frank thought. Deal with him later.
“Gwen,” Hazel said gently, “there’s no easy way to
say this. You were dead. Somehow you came back.”
“I…what?” She stumbled against Frank. Her hand
pressed against the ragged hole in her armor.
“How—how?”
“Good question.” Reyna turned to Nico, who was
watching grimly from the edge of the crowd. “Is this some
power of Pluto?”
Nico shook his head. “Pluto never lets people return
from the dead.”
He glanced at Hazel as if warning her to stay quiet.
Frank wondered what that was about, but he didn’t have
time to think about it.
A thunderous voice rolled across the field: Death
loses its hold. This is only the beginning.
Campers drew weapons. Hannibal trumpeted
nervously. Scipio reared, almost throwing Reyna.
“I know that voice,” Percy said. He didn’t sound
pleased.
In the midst of the legion, a column of fire blasted
into the air. Heat seared Frank’s eyelashes. Campers who
had been soaked by the cannons found their clothes
instantly steam-dried. Everyone scrambled backward as a
huge soldier stepped out of the explosion.
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Frank didn’t have much hair, but what he did have
stood straight up. The soldier was ten feet tall, dressed in
Canadian Forces desert camouflage. He radiated confidence
and power. His black hair was cut in a flat-topped
wedge like Frank’s. His face was angular and brutal,
marked with old knife scars. His eyes were covered with
infrared goggles that glowed from inside. He wore a utility
belt with a sidearm, a knife holster, and several grenades.
In his hands was an oversized M16 rifle.
The worst thing was that Frank felt drawn to him.
As everyone else stepped back, Frank stepped forward.
He realized the soldier was silently willing him to
approach.
Frank desperately wanted to run away and hide,
but he couldn’t. He took three more steps. Then he sank
to one knee.
The other campers followed his example and knelt.
Even Reyna dismounted.
“That’s good,” the soldier said. “Kneeling is good.
It’s been a long time since I’ve visited Camp Jupiter.”
Frank noticed that one person wasn’t kneeling.
Percy Jackson, his sword still in hand, was glaring at the
giant soldier.
“You’re Ares,” Percy said. “What do you want?”
A collective gasp went up from two hundred
campers and an elephant. Frank wanted to say something
to excuse Percy and placate the god, but he didn’t know
what. He was afraid the war god would blast his new
friend with that extra-large M16.
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Instead, the god bared his brilliant white teeth.
“You’ve got spunk, demigod,” he said. “Ares is my
Greek form. But to these followers, to the children of
Rome, I am Mars—patron of the empire, divine father of
Romulus and Remus.”
“We’ve met,” Percy said. “We…we had a fight.…”
The god scratched his chin, as if trying to recall. “I
fight a lot of people. But I assure you—you’ve never
fought me as Mars. If you had, you’d be dead. Now, kneel,
as befits a child of Rome, before you try my patience.”
Around Mars’s feet, the ground boiled in a circle of
flame.
“Percy,” Frank said, “please.”
Percy clearly didn’t like it, but he knelt.
Mars scanned the crowd. “Romans, lend me your
ears!” He laughed—a good, hearty bellow, so infectious it
almost made Frank smile, though he was still shivering
with fear. “I’ve always wanted to say that. I come from
Olympus with a message. Jupiter doesn’t like us communicating
directly with mortals, especially nowadays, but
he has allowed this exception, as you Romans have always
been my special people. I’m only permitted to speak
for a few minutes, so listen up.”
He pointed at Gwen. “This one should be dead, yet
she’s not. The monsters you fight no longer return to Tartarus
when they are slain. Some mortals who died long
ago are now walking the earth again.”
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Was it Frank’s imagination, or did the god glare at
Nico di Angelo?
“Thanatos has been chained,” Mars announced.
“The Doors of Death have been forced open, and no one is
policing them—at least, not impartially. Gaea allows our
enemies to pour forth into the world of mortals. Her sons
the giants are mustering armies against you—armies that
you will not be able to kill. Unless Death is unleashed to
return to his duties, you will be overrun. You must find
Thanatos and free him from the giants. Only he can reverse
the tide.”
Mars looked around, and noticed that everyone
was still silently kneeling. “Oh, you can get up now. Any
questions?”
Reyna rose uneasily. She approached the god, followed
by Octavian, who was bowing and scraping like a
champion groveler.
“Lord Mars,” Reyna said, “we are honored.”
“Beyond honored,” said Octavian. “So far beyond
honored—”
“Well?” Mars snapped.
“Well,” Reyna said, “Thanatos is the god of death,
the lieutenant of Pluto?”
“Right,” the god said.
“And you’re saying that he’s been captured by
giants.”
“Right.”
“And therefore people will stop dying?”
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“Not all at once,” Mars said. “But the barriers
between life and death will continue to weaken. Those
who know how to take advantage of this will exploit it.
Monsters are already harder to dispatch. Soon they will
be completely impossible to kill. Some demigods will also
be able to find their way back from the Underworld—like
your friend Centurion Shishkebab.”
Gwen winced. “Centurion Shish kebab?”
“If left unchecked,” Mars continued, “even mortals
will eventually find it impossible to die. Can you imagine
a world in which no one dies—ever?”
Octavian raised his hand. “But, ah, mighty all-
powerful Lord Mars, if we can’t die, isn’t that a good
thing? If we can stay alive indefinitely—”
“Don’t be foolish, boy!” Mars bellowed. “Endless
slaughter with no conclusion? Carnage without any
point? Enemies that rise again and again and can never
be killed? Is that what you want?”
“You’re the god of war,” Percy spoke up. “Don’t you
want endless carnage?”
Mars’s infrared goggles glowed brighter. “Insolent,
aren’t you? Perhaps I have fought you before. I can understand
why I’d want to kill you. I’m the god of Rome,
child. I am the god of military might used for a righteous
cause. I protect the legions. I am happy to crush my enemies
underfoot, but I don’t fight without reason. I don’t
want war without end.
You will discover this. You will serve me.”
“Not likely,” Percy said.
171/589
Again, Frank waited for the god to strike him down,
but Mars just grinned like they were two old buddies talking
trash.
“I order a quest!” the god announced. “You will go
north and find Thanatos in the land beyond the gods. You
will free him and thwart the plans of the giants. Beware
Gaea! Beware her son, the eldest giant!”
Next to Frank, Hazel made a squeaking sound.
“The land beyond the gods?”
Mars stared down at her, his grip tightening on his
M16. “That’s right, Hazel Levesque. You know what I
mean. Everyone here remembers the land where the legion
lost its honor! Perhaps if the quest succeeds, and you
return by the Feast of Fortuna…perhaps then your honor
will be restored. If you don’t succeed, there won’t be any
camp left to return to. Rome will be overrun, its legacy
lost forever. So my advice is: Don’t fail.”
Octavian somehow managed to bow even lower.
“Um, Lord Mars, just one tiny thing. A quest requires a
prophecy, a mystical poem to guide us! We used to get
them from the Sibylline books, but now it’s up to the augur
to glean the will of gods. So if I could just run and get
about seventy stuffed animals and possibly a knife—”
“You’re the augur?” the god interrupted.
“Y-yes, my lord.”
Mars pulled a scroll from his utility belt. “Anyone
got a pen?”
The legionnaires stared at him.
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Mars sighed. “Two hundred Romans, and no one’s
got a pen? Never mind!”
He slung his M16 onto his back and pulled out a
hand grenade. There were many screaming Romans.
Then the grenade morphed into a ballpoint pen, and Mars
began to write.
Frank looked at Percy with wide eyes. He mouthed:
Can your sword do grenade form?
Percy mouthed back, No. Shut up.
“There!” Mars finished writing and threw the scroll
at Octavian. “A prophecy. You can add it to your books,
engrave it on your floor, whatever.”
Octavian read the scroll. “This says, ‘Go to Alaska.
Find Thanatos and free him. Come back by sundown on
June twenty-fourth or die.’”
“Yes,” Mars said. “Is that not clear?”
“Well, my lord…usually prophecies are unclear.
They’re wrapped in riddles. They rhyme, and…”
Mars casually popped another grenade off his belt.
“Yes?”
“The prophecy is clear!” Octavian announced. “A
quest!”
“Good answer.” Mars tapped the grenade to his
chin. “Now, what else? There was something else.…Oh,
yes.”
He turned to Frank. “C’mere, kid.”
No, Frank thought. The burned stick in his coat
pocket felt heavier. His legs turned wobbly. A sense of
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dread settled over him, worse than the day the military
officer had come to the door.
He knew what was coming, but he couldn’t stop it.
He stepped forward against his will.
Mars grinned. “Nice job taking the wall, kid. Who’s
the ref for this game?”
Reyna raised her hand.
“You see that play, ref?” Mars demanded. “That
was my kid. First over the wall, won the game for his
team. Unless you’re blind, that was an MVP play. You’re
not blind, are you?”
Reyna looked like she was trying to swallow a
mouse. “No, Lord Mars.”
“Then make sure he gets the Mural Crown,” Mars
demanded. “My kid, here!” he yelled at the legion, in case
anyone hadn’t heard. Frank wanted to melt into the dirt.
“Emily Zhang’s son,” Mars continued. “She was a
good soldier. Good woman. This kid Frank proved his
stuff tonight. Happy late birthday, kid. Time you stepped
up to a real man’s weapon.”
He tossed Frank his M16. For a split second Frank
though the’d be crushed under the weight of the massive
assault rifle, but the gun changed in midair, becoming
smaller and thinner. When Frank caught it, the weapon
was a spear. It had a shaft of Imperial gold and a strange
point like a white bone, flickering with ghostly light.
“The tip is a dragon’s tooth,” Mars said. “You
haven’t learned to use your mom’s talents yet, have you?
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Well—that spear will give you some breathing room until
you do. You get three charges out of it, so use it wisely.”
Frank didn’t understand, but Mars acted like the
matter was closed. “Now, my kid Frank Zhang is gonna
lead the quest to free Thanatos, unless there are any
objections?”
Of course, no one said a word. But many of the
campers glared at Frank with envy, jealousy, anger,
bitterness.
“You can take two companions,” Mars said. “Those
are the rules. One of them needs to be this kid.”
He pointed at Percy. “He’s gonna learn some respect
for Mars on this trip, or die trying. As for the
second, I don’t care. Pick whomever you want. Have one
of your senate debates. You all are good at those.”
The god’s image flickered. Lightning crackled
across the sky.
“That’s my cue,” Mars said. “Until next time, Romans.
Do not disappoint me!”
The god erupted in flames, and then he was gone.
Reyna turned toward Frank. Her expression was
part amazement, part nausea, like she’d finally managed
to swallow that mouse. She raised her arm in a Roman salute.
“Ave, Frank Zhang, son of Mars.”
The whole legion followed her lead, but Frank
didn’t want their attention anymore. His perfect night
had been ruined.
175/589
Mars was his father. The god of war was sending
him to Alaska. Frank had been handed more than a spear
for his birthday. He’d been handed a death sentence.
PERCY SLEPT LIKE A MEDUSA VICTIM—which is to say,
like a rock.
He hadn’t crashed in a safe, comfortable bed
since…well, he couldn’t even remember. Despite his insane
day and the million thoughts running through his
head, his body took over and said: You will sleep now.
He had dreams, of course. He always had dreams,
but they passed like blurred images from the window of a
train. He saw a curly-haired faun in ragged clothes running
to catch up with him.
“I don’t have any spare change,” Percy called.
“What?” the faun said. “No, Percy. It’s me, Grover!
Stay put! We’re on our way to find you. Tyson is close—at
least we think he’s the closest. We’re trying to get a lock
on your position.”
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“What?” Percy called, but the faun disappeared in
the fog.
Then Annabeth was running along beside him,
reaching out her hand. “Thank the gods!” she called. “For
months and months we couldn’t see you! Are you all
right?”
Percy remembered what Juno had said—for
months he has been slumbering, but now he is awake.
The goddess had intentionally kept him hidden, but why?
“Are you real?” he asked Annabeth.
He wanted so much to believe it he felt like Hannibal
the elephant was standing on his chest. But her face
began to dissolve. She cried, “Stay put! It’ll be easier for
Tyson to find you! Stay where you are!”
Then she was gone. The images accelerated. He
saw a huge ship in a dry dock, workers scrambling to finish
the hull, a guy with a blowtorch welding a bronze
dragon figurehead to the prow. He saw the war god stalking
toward him in the surf, a sword in his hands.
The scene shifted. Percy stood on the Field of Mars,
looking up at the Berkeley Hills. Golden grass rippled,
and a face appeared in the landscape—a sleeping woman,
her features formed from shadows and folds in the terrain.
Her eyes remained closed, but her voice spoke in
Percy’s mind:
So this is the demigod who destroyed my son Kronos.
You don’t look like much, Percy Jackson, but you’re
valuable to me. Come north. Meet Alcyoneus. Juno can
play her little games with Greeks and Romans, but in the
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end, you will be my pawn. You will be the key to the
gods’ defeat.
Percy’s vision turned dark. He stood in a theater-
sized version of the camp’s headquarters—a principia
with walls of ice and freezing mist hanging in the air. The
floor was littered with skeletons in Roman armor and Imperial
gold weapons encrusted with frost. In the back of
the room sat an enormous shadowy figure. His skin glinted
of gold and silver, as if he were an automaton like
Reyna’s dogs. Behind him stood a collection of ruined
emblems, tattered banners, and a large golden eagle on a
staff of iron.
The giant’s voice boomed in the vast chamber.
“This will be fun, son of Neptune. It’s been eons since I
broke a demigod of your caliber. I await you atop the ice.”
Percy woke, shivering. For a moment he didn’t
know where he was. Then he remembered: Camp Jupiter,
the Fifth Cohort barracks. He lay in his bunk, staring at
the ceiling and trying to control his racing heartbeat.
A golden giant was waiting to break him. Wonderful.
But what unnerved him more was that sleeping woman’s
face in the hills. You will be my pawn. Percy didn’t
play chess, but he was pretty sure that being a pawn was
bad. They died a lot.
Even the friendlier parts of his dream were disturbing.
A faun named Grover was looking for him. Maybe
that’s why Don had detected a—what had he called
it?—an empathy link. Somebody named Tyson was
searching for him, too, and Annabeth had warned Percy
to stay where he was.
179/589
He sat up in his bunk. His roommates were rushing
around, getting dressed and brushing their teeth. Dakota
was wrapping himself in a long piece of red-speckled
cloth—a toga. One of the Lares was giving him pointers
on where to tuck and fold.
“Breakfast time?” Percy asked hopefully.
Frank’s head popped up from the bunk below. He
had bags under his eyes like he hadn’t slept well. “A quick
breakfast. Then we’ve got the senate meeting.”
Dakota’s head was stuck in his toga. He staggered
around like a Kool-Aid-stained ghost.
“Um,” Percy said, “should I wear my bed sheets?”
Frank snorted. “That’s just for the senators.
There’re ten of them, elected yearly. You’ve got to be at
camp five years to qualify.”
“So how come we’re invited to the meeting?”
“Because…you know, the quest.” Frank sounded
worried, like he was afraid Percy would back out. “We
have to be in on the discussion. You, me, Hazel. I mean, if
you’re willing…”
Frank probably didn’t mean to guilt him, but
Percy’she art felt pulled like taffy. He had sympathy for
Frank. Getting claimed by the war god in front of the
whole camp—what a nightmare. Plus, how could Percy
say no to that big pouty baby face? Frank had been given
a huge task that would most likely get him killed. He was
scared. He needed Percy’s help.
180/589
And the three of them had made a good team last
night. Hazel and Frank were solid, dependable people.
They’d accepted Percy like family. Still, he didn’t like the
idea of this quest, especially since it came from Mars, and
especially after his dreams.
“I, um…I’d better get ready.…” He climbed out of
bed and got dressed. The whole time, he thought about
Annabeth. Help was on the way. He could have his old life
back. All he had to do was stay put.
At breakfast, Percy was conscious of everyone looking
at him. They were whispering about the previous
night:
“Two gods in one day…”
“Un-Roman fighting…”
“Water cannon up my nose…”
He was too hungry to care. He filled up on pancakes,
eggs, bacon, waffles, apples, and several glasses of
orange juice. He probably would have eaten more, but
Reyna announced that the senate would now convene in
the city, and all the folks in togas got up to leave.
“Here we go.” Hazel fidgeted with a stone that
looked like a two-carat ruby.
The ghost Vitellius appeared next to them in a
purple shimmer. “Bona fortuna, you three! Ah, senate
meetings. I remember the one when Caesar was assassinated.
Why, the amount of blood on his toga—”
“Thanks, Vitellius,” Frank interrupted. “We should
get going.”
181/589
Reyna and Octavian led the procession of senators
out of camp, with Reyna’s metal greyhounds dashing back
and forth along the road. Hazel, Frank, and Percy trailed
behind. Percynoticed Nico di Angelo in the group, wearing
a black toga and talking with Gwen, who looked a
little pale but surprisingly good considering she’d been
dead the night before. Nico waved at Percy, then went
back to his conversation, leaving Percy more sure than
ever that Hazel’s brother was trying to avoid him.
Dakota stumbled along in his red-speckled robe. A
lot of other senators seemed to be having trouble with
their togas, too—hiking up their hems, trying to keep the
cloth from slipping off their shoulders. Percy was glad he
was wearing a regular purple T-shirt and jeans.
“How could Romans move, in those things?” he
wondered.
“They were just for formal occasions,” Hazel said.
“Like tuxedos. I bet the ancient Romans hated togas as
much as we do. By the way, you didn’t bring any weapons,
did you?”
Percy’s hand went to his pocket, where his pen always
stayed. “Why? Are we not supposed to?”
“No weapons allowed inside the Pomerian Line,”
she said.
“The what line?”
“Pomerian,” Frank said. “The city limits. Inside is a
sacred ‘safe zone.’ Legions can’t march through. No
weapons allowed. That’s so senate meetings don’t get
bloody.”
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“Like Julius Caesar getting assassinated?” Percy
asked.
Frank nodded. “Don’t worry. Nothing like that has
happened in months.”
Percy hoped he was kidding.
As they got closer to the city, Percy could appreciate
how beautiful it was. The tiled roofs and gold domes
gleamed in the sun. Gardens bloomed with honeysuckle
and roses. The central plaza was paved in white and gray
stone, decorated with statues, fountains, and gilded
columns. In the surrounding neighborhoods, cobblestone
streets were lined with freshly painted town houses,
shops, cafés, and parks. In the distance rose the coliseum
and the horse racing arena.
Percy didn’t notice they’d reached the city limits
until the senators in front of him started slowing down.
On the side of the road stood a white marble
statue—a life-size muscular man with curly hair, no arms,
and an irritated expression. Maybe he looked mad because
he’d been carved only from the waist up. Below
that, he was just a big block of marble.
“Single file, please!” the statue said. “Have your IDs
ready.”
Percy looked to his left and right. He hadn’t noticed
before, but a line of identical statues ringed the city at intervals
of about a hundred yards.
The senators passed through easily. The statue
checked the tattoos on their forearms and called each
senator by name. “Gwendolyn, senator, Fifth Cohort, yes.
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Nico di Angelo, ambassador of Pluto—very well. Reyna,
praetor, of course. Hank, senator, Third Cohort—oh, nice
shoes, Hank! Ah, who have we here?”
Hazel, Frank, and Percy were the last ones.
“Terminus,” Hazel said, “this is Percy Jackson.
Percy, this is Terminus, the god of boundaries.”
“New, eh?” said the god. “Yes, probatio tablet.
Fine. Ah, weapon in your pocket? Take it out! Take it
out!”
Percy didn’t know how Terminus could tell, but he
took out his pen.
“Quite dangerous,” Terminus said. “Leave it in the
tray. Wait, where’s my assistant? Julia!”
A little girl about six years old peeked out from behind
the base of the statue. She had pigtails, a pink dress,
and an impish grin with two missing teeth.
“Julia?” Terminus glanced behind him, and Julia
scurried in the other direction. “Where did that girl go?”
Terminus looked the other way and caught sight of
Julia before she could hide. The little girl squealed with
delight.
“Oh, there you are,” said the statue. “Front and
center. Bring the tray.”
Julia scrambled out and brushed off her dress. She
picked up a tray and presented it to Percy. On it were several
paring knives, a corkscrew, an oversized container of
sun lotion, and a water bottle.
184/589
“You can pick up your weapon on the way out,”
Terminus said. “Julia will take good care of it. She’s a
trained professional.”
The little girl nodded. “Pro-fess-ion-al.” She said
each syllable carefully, like she’d been practicing.
Percy glanced at Hazel and Frank, who didn’t seem
to find anything odd about this. Still, he wasn’t wild about
handing over a deadly weapon to a kid.
“The thing is,” he said, “the pen returns to my
pocket automatically, so even if I give it up—”
“Not to worry,” Terminus assured him. “We’ll make
sure it doesn’t wander off. Won’t we, Juila?”
“Yes, Mr. Terminus.”
Reluctantly, Percy put his pen on the tray.
“Now, a few rules, since you’re new,” Terminus
said. “You are entering the boundaries of the city proper.
Keep the peace inside the line. Yield to chariot traffic
while walking on public roads. When you get to the Senate
House, sit on the left-hand side. And, down there—do
you see where I’m pointing?”
“Um,” Percy said, “you don’t have any hands.”
Apparently this was a sore point for Terminus. His
marble face turned a dark shade of gray. “A smart aleck,
eh? Well, Mr. Rule Flouter, right down there in the forum—
Julia, point for me, please—”
Julia dutifully set down the security tray and pointed
toward the main plaza.
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“The shop with the blue awning,” Terminus continued,
“that’s the general store. They sell tape measures.
Buy one! I want those pants exactly one inch above the
ankles and that hair regulation cut. And tuck your shirt
in.”
Hazel said, “Thank you, Terminus. We need to get
going.”
“Fine, fine, you may pass,” the god said testily. “But
stay on the right side of the road! And that rock right
there—No, Hazel, look where I’m pointing. That rock is
entirely too close to that tree. Move it two inches to the
left.”
Hazel did what she was told, and they continued
down the path, Terminus still shouting orders at them
while Julia did cartwheels across the grass.
“Is he always like that?” Percy asked.
“No,” Hazel admitted. “Today he was laid back.
Usually he’s more obsessive/compulsive.”
“He inhabits every boundary stone around the
city,” Frank said. “Kind of our last line of defense if the
city’s attacked.”
“Terminus isn’t so bad,” Hazel added. “Just don’t
make him angry, or he’ll force you to measure every blade
of grass in the valley.”
Percy filed that information. “And the kid? Julia?”
Hazel grinned. “Yeah, she’s a cutie. Her parents live
in the city. Come on. We’d better catch up to the
senators.”
186/589
As they approached the forum, Percy was struck by
the sheer number of people. College-age kids were
hanging out at the fountain. Several of them waved at the
senators as they passed. One guy in his late twenties
stood at a bakery counter, flirting with a young woman
who was buying coffee. An older couple was watching a
little boy in diapers and a miniature Camp Jupiter shirt
toddle after seagulls. Merchants were opening their shops
for the day, putting out signs in
Latin that advertised pottery, jewelry, and half-
price tickets for the Hippodrome.
“All these people are demigods?” Percy asked.
“Or descended from demigods,” Hazel said. “Like I
told you, it’s a good place to go to college or raise a family
without worrying about monster attacks every day.
Maybe two, three hundred people live here? The veterans
act as, like, advisers and reserve forces as needed, but
mostly they’re just citizens living their lives.”
Percy imagined what that would be like: getting an
apartment in this tiny replica of Rome, protected by the
legion and Terminus the OCD border god. He imagined
holding hands with Annabeth at a café. Maybe when they
were older, watching their own kid chase seagulls across
the forum…
He shook the idea out of his head. He couldn’t afford
to indulge in that kind of thinking. Most of his
memories were gone, but he knew this place wasn’t his
home. He belonged somewhere else, with his other
friends.
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Besides, Camp Jupiter was in danger. If Juno was
right, an attack was coming in less than five days. Percy
imagined that sleeping woman’s face—the face of
Gaea—forming in the hills above camp. He imagined
hordes of monsters descending into this valley.
If you don’t succeed, Mars had warned, there won’t
be any camp left to return to. Rome will be overrun, its
legacy lost forever.
He thought about the little girl Julia, the families
with kids, his new friends in the Fifth Cohort, even those
silly fauns. He didn’t want to picture what might happen
to them if this place was destroyed.
The senators made their way to a big white-domed
building on the west end of the forum. Percy paused at
the doorway, trying not to think about Julius Caesar getting
slashed to death at a senate meeting. Then he took a
deep breath and followed Hazel and Frank inside.
THE SENATE HOUSE INTERIOR looked like a high
school lecture hall. A semicircle of tiered seats faced a
dais with a podium and two chairs. The chairs were
empty, but one had a small velvet package on the seat.
Percy, Hazel, and Frank sat on the left side of the
semicircle. The ten senators and Nico di Angelo occupied
the rest of the front row. The upper rows were filled with
several dozeng hosts and a few older veterans from the
city, all in formal togas. Octavian stood in front with a
knife and a Beanie Babylion, just in case anyone needed
to consult the god of cutesy collectibles. Reyna walked to
the podium and raised her hand for attention.
“Right, this is an emergency meeting,” she said.
“We won’t stand on formalities.”
“I love formalities!” a ghost complained.
Reyna shot him a cross look.
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“First of all,” she said, “we’re not here to vote on
the quest itself. The quest has been issued by Mars Ultor,
patron of Rome. We will obey his wishes. Nor are we here
to debate the choice of Frank Zhang’s companions.”
“All three from the Fifth Cohort?” called out Hank
from the Third. “That’s not fair.”
“And not smart,” said the boy next to him. “We
know the Fifth will mess up. They should take somebody
good.”
Dakota got up so fast, he spilled Kool-Aid from his
flask. “We were plenty good last night when we whipped
yourpodex, Larry!”
“Enough, Dakota,” Reyna said. “Let’s leave Larry’s
podexout of this. As quest leader, Frank has the right to
choose his companions. He has chosen Percy Jackson and
HazelLevesque.”
A ghost from the second row yelled, “Absurdus!
Frank Zhang isn’t even a full member of the legion! He’s
on probatio.A quest must be led by someone of centurion
rank or higher. This is completely—”
“Cato,” Reyna snapped. “We must obey the wishes
of MarsUltor. That means certain ... adjustments.”
Reyna clapped her hands, and Octavian came forward.
He set down his knife and Beanie Baby and took
the velvet package from the chair.
“Frank Zhang,” he said, “come forward.”
Frank glanced nervously at Percy. Then he got to
his feet and approached the augur.
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“It is my…pleasure,” Octavian said, forcing out the
last word, “to bestow upon you the Mural Crown for being
first over the walls in siege warfare.” Octavian handed
him a bronze badge shaped like a laurel wreath. “Also, by
order of Praetor Reyna, to promote you to the rank of
centurion.”
He handed Frank another badge, a bronze crescent,
and the senate exploded in protest.
“He’s still a probie!” one yelled.
“Impossible!” said another.
“Water cannon up my nose!” yelled a third.
“Silence!” Octavian’s voice sounded a lot more
commanding than it had the previous night on the battlefield.
“Ourpraetor recognizes that no one below the rank
of centurion may lead a quest. For good or ill, Frank must
lead this quest—so our praetor has decreed that Frank
Zhang must be made centurion.”
Suddenly Percy understood what an effective
speaker Octavian was. He sounded reasonable and supportive,
but his expression was pained. He carefully crafted
his words to put all the responsibility on Reyna. This
was her idea, he seemed to say.
If it went wrong, Reyna was to blame. If only
Octavian had been the one in charge, things would have
been done more sensibly. But alas, he had no choice but
to support Reyna, because Octavian was a loyal Roman
soldier.
Octavian managed to convey all that without saying
it, simultaneously calming the senate and sympathizing
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with them. For the first time, Percy realized this scrawny,
funny-looking scarecrow of a kid might be a dangerous
enemy.
Reyna must have recognized this too. A look of irritation
flashed across her face. “There is an opening for
centurion,” she said. “One of our officers, also a senator,
has decided to step down. After ten years in the legion,
she will retire to the city and attend college. Gwen of the
Fifth Cohort, we thank you for your service.”
Everyone turned to Gwen, who managed a brave
smile. She looked tired from the previous night’s ordeal,
but also relieved. Percy couldn’t blame her. Compared to
getting skewered with a pilum, college sounded pretty
good.
“As praetor,” Reyna continued, “I have the right to
replace officers. I admit it’s unusual for a camper on probatio
to rise directly to the rank of centurion, but I think
we can agree…last night was unusual. Frank Zhang, your
ID, please.”
Frank removed the lead tablet from around his
neck and handed it to Octavian.
“Your arm,” Octavian said.
Frank held up his forearm. Octavian raised his
hands to the heavens. “We accept Frank Zhang, Son of
Mars, to the Twelfth Legion Fulminata for his first year of
service. Do you pledge your life to the senate and people
of Rome?”
Frank muttered something like “Ud-dud.” Then he
cleared his throat and managed: “I do.”
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The senators shouted, “Senatus Populusque
Romanus!”
Fire blazed on Frank’s arm. For a moment his eyes
filled with terror, and Percy was afraid his friend might
pass out. Then the smoke and flame died, and new marks
were seared onto Frank’s skin: SPQR, an image of crossed
spears, and a single stripe, representing the first year of
service.
“You may sit down.” Octavian glanced at the audience
as if to say: This wasn’t my idea, folks.“Now,” Reyna
said, “we must discuss the quest.”
The senators shifted and muttered as Frank returned
to his seat.
“Did it hurt?” Percy whispered.
Frank looked at his forearm, which was still steaming.
“Yeah. A lot.” He seemed mystified by the badges in
his hand—the centurion’s mark and the Mural
Crown—like he wasn’t sure what to do with them.
“Here.” Hazel’s eyes shone with pride. “Let me.”
She pinned the medals to Frank’s shirt.
Percy smiled. He’d only known Frank for a day, but
he felt proud of him too. “You deserve it, man,” he said.
“What you did last night? Natural leadership.”
Frank scowled. “But centurion—”
“Centurion Zhang,” called Octavian. “Did you hear
the question?”
Frank blinked. “Um…sorry. What?”
193/589
Octavian turned to the senate and smirked, like
What did I tell you?
“I was asking,” Octavian said like he was talking to
a three-year-old, “if you have a plan for the quest. Do you
even know where you are going?”
“Um...”
Hazel put her hand on Frank’s shoulder and stood.
“Weren’t you listening last night, Octavian? Mars was
pretty clear. We’re going to the land beyond the
gods—Alaska.”
The senators squirmed in their togas. Some of the
ghosts shimmered and disappeared. Even Reyna’s metal
dogs rolled over on their backs and whimpered.
Finally Senator Larry stood. “I know what Mars
said, but that’s crazy. Alaska is cursed! They call it the
land beyond the gods for a reason. It’s so far north, the
Roman gods have no power there. The place is swarming
with monsters. No demigod has come back from there
alive since—”
“Since you lost your eagle,” Percy said.
Larry was so startled, he fell back on his podex.
“Look,” Percy continued, “I know I’m new here. I
know you guys don’t like to mention that massacre in the
nineteen-eighties—”
“He mentioned it!” one of the ghosts whimpered.
“—But don’t you get it?” Percy continued. “The
Fifth Cohort led that expedition. We failed, and we have
to be responsible for making things right. That’s why
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Mars is sending us. This giant, the son of Gaea—he’s the
one who defeated your forces thirty years ago. I’m sure of
it. Now he’s sitting up there in Alaska with a chained
death god, and all your old equipment. He’s mustering his
armies and sending them south to attack this camp.”
“Really?” Octavian said. “You seem to know a lot
about our enemy’s plans, Percy Jackson.”
Most insults Percy could shrug off—being called
weak or stupid or whatever. But it dawned on him that
Octavian was calling him a spy—a traitor. That was such a
foreign concept to Percy, so not who he was, he almost
couldn’t process the slur. When he did, his shoulders
tensed. He was tempted to smack Octavian on the head
again, but he realized Octavian was baiting him, trying to
make him look unstable.
Percy took a deep breath.
“We’re going to confront this son of Gaea,” he said,
managing to keep his composure. “We’ll get back your
eagle and unchain this god…” He glanced at Hazel.
“Thanatos, right?”
She nodded. “Letus, in Roman. But his old Greek
name is Thanatos. When it comes to Death…we’re happy
to let him stay Greek.”
Octavian sighed in exasperation. “Well, whatever
you call him…how do you expect to do all this and get
back by the Feast of Fortuna? That’s the evening of the
twenty-fourth. It’s the twentieth now. Do you even know
where to look? Do you even know who this son of Gaea
is?”
195/589
“Yes.” Hazel spoke with such certainty that even
Percy was surprised. “I don’t know exactly where to look,
but I have a pretty good idea. The giant’s name is
Alcyoneus.”
That name seemed to lower the temperature in the
room by fifty degrees. The senators shivered.
Reyna gripped her podium. “How do you know
this, Hazel? Because you’re a child of Pluto?”
Nico di Angelo had been so quiet, Percy had almost
forgotten he was there. Now he stood in his black toga.
“Praetor, if I may,” he said. “Hazel and I…we
learned a little about the giants from our father. Each giant
was bred specifically to oppose one of the twelve
Olympian gods—tousurp that god’s domain. The king of
giants was Porphyrion, the anti-Jupiter. But the eldest giant
was Alcyoneus. He was born to oppose Pluto. That’s
why we know of him in particular.”
Reyna frowned. “Indeed? You sound quite familiar
with him.”
Nico picked at the edge of his toga. “Anyway…the
giants were hard to kill. According to prophecy, they
could only be defeated by gods and demigods working
together.”
Dakota belched. “Sorry, did you say gods and demigods…
like fighting side by side? That could never
happen!”
“It has happened,” Nico said. “In the first giant
war, the gods called on heroes to join them, and they were
victorious. Whether it could happen again, I don’t know.
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But with Alcyoneus ... he was different. He was completely
immortal, impossible to kill by god or demigod, as
long as he remained in his home territory—the place
where he was born.”
Nico paused to let that sink in. “And if Alcyoneus
has been reborn in Alaska—”
“Then he can’t be defeated there,” Hazel finished.
“Ever. By any means. Which is why our nineteen-eighties
expedition was doomed to fail.”
Another round of arguing and shouting broke out.
“The quest is impossible!” shouted a senator.
“We’re doomed!” cried a ghost.
“More Kool-Aid!” yelled Dakota.
“Silence!” Reyna called. “Senators, we must act like
Romans. Mars has given us this quest, and we have to believe
it is possible. These three demigods must travel to
Alaska. They must free Thanatos and return before the
Feast of Fortuna. If they can retrieve the lost eagle in the
process, so much the better. All we can do is advise them
and make sure they have a plan.”
Reyna looked at Percy without much hope. “You do
have a plan?”
Percy wanted to step forward bravely and say, No, I
don’t!
That was the truth, but looking around at all the
nervous faces, Percy knew he couldn’t say it.
“First, I need to understand something.” He turned
toward Nico. “I thought Pluto was the god of the dead.
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Now I hear about this other guy, Thanatos, and the Doors
of Death from that prophecy—the Prophecy of Seven.
What does all that mean?”
Nico took a deep breath. “Okay. Pluto is the god of
the Underworld, but the actual god of death, the one
who’s responsible for making sure souls go to the afterlife
and stay there—that’s Pluto’s lieutenant, Thanatos. He’s
like…well, imagine Life and Death are two different countries.
Everybody would like to be in Life, right? So there’s
a guarded border to keep people from crossing back over
without permission. But it’s a big border, with lots of
holes in the fence. Pluto tries to seal up the breaches, but
new ones keep popping up all the time. That’s why he depends
on Thanatos, who’s like the border patrol, the
police.”
“Thanatos catches souls,” Percy said, “and deports
them back to the Underworld.”
“Exactly,” Nico said. “But now Thanatos has been
captured, chained up.”
Frank raised his hand. “Uh…how do you chain
Death?”
“It’s been done before,” Nico said. “In the old days,
a guy named Sisyphus tricked Death and tied him up.
Another time, Hercules wrestled him to the ground.”
“And now a giant has captured him,” Percy said.
“So if we could free Thanatos, then the dead would stay
dead?” He glanced at Gwen. “Um…no offense.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Nico said.
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Octavian rolled his eyes. “Why does that not surprise
me?”
“You mean the Doors of Death,” Reyna said, ignoring
Octavian. “They are mentioned in the Prophecy of
Seven, which sent the first expedition to Alaska—”
Cato the ghost snorted. “We all know how that
turned out! We Lares remember!”
The other ghosts grumbled in agreement.
Nico put his finger to his lips. Suddenly all the
Lares went silent. Some looked alarmed, like their
mouths had been glued together. Percy wished he had
that power over certain living people…like Octavian, for
instance.
“Thanatos is only part of the solution,” Nico explained.
“The Doors of Death…well, that’s a concept even
I don’t completely understand. There are many ways into
the Underworld—the River Styx, the Door of Orpheus—
plussmaller escape routes that open up from time to
time. With Thanatos imprisoned, all those exits will be
easier to use. Sometimes it might work to our advantage
and let a friendly soul come back—like Gwen here. More
often, it will benefit evil souls and monsters, the sneaky
ones who are looking to escape. Now, the Doors of
Death—those are the personal doors of Thanatos, his fast
lane between Life and Death. Only Thanatos is supposed
to know where they are, and the location shifts over the
ages. If I understand correctly, the Doors of Death have
been forced open. Gaea’s minions have seized control of
them—”
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“Which means Gaea controls who can come back
from the dead,” Percy guessed.
Nico nodded. “She can pick and choose who to let
out—the worst monsters, the most evil souls. If we rescue
Thanatos, that means at least he can catch souls again
and send them below. Monsters will die when we kill
them, like they used to, and we’ll get a little breathing
room. But unless we’re able to retake the Doors of Death,
our enemies won’t stay down for long. They’ll have an
easy way back to the world of the living.”
“So we can catch them and deport them,” Percy
summed up, “but they’ll just keep coming back across.”
“In a depressing nutshell, yes,” Nico said.
Frank scratched his head. “But Thanatos knows
where the doors are, right? If we free him, he can retake
them.”
“I don’t think so,” Nico said. “Not alone. He’s no
match for Gaea. That would take a massive quest…an
army of the best demigods.”
“Foes bear arms to the Doors of Death,” Reyna
said. “That’s the Prophecy of Seven…” She looked at
Percy, and for just a moment he could see how scared she
was. She did a good job of hiding it, but Percy wondered if
she’d had nightmares about Gaea too—if she’d seen visions
of what would happen when the camp was invaded
by monsters that couldn’t be killed. “If this begins the ancient
prophecy, we don’t have resources to send an army
to these Doors of Death and protect the camp. I can’t
imagine even sparing seven demigods—”
200/589
“First things first.” Percy tried to sound confident,
though he could feel the level of panic rising in the room.
“I don’t know who the seven are, or what that old prophecy
means, exactly. But first we have to free Thanatos.
Mars told us we only needed three people for the quest to
Alaska. Let’s concentrate on succeeding with that and getting
back before the Feast of Fortuna. Then we can worry
about the Doors of Death.”
“Yeah,” Frank said in a small voice. “That’s probably
enough for one week.”
“So you do have a plan?” Octavian asked
skeptically.
Percy looked at his teammates. “We go to Alaska as
fast as possible...”
“And we improvise,” Hazel said.
“A lot,” Frank added.
Reyna studied them. She looked like she was mentally
writing her own obituary.
“Very well,” she said. “Nothing remains except for
us to vote what support we can give the quest—transportation,
money, magic, weapons.”
“Praetor, if I may,” Octavian said.
“Oh, great,” Percy muttered. “Here it comes.”
“The camp is in grave danger,” Octavian said. “Two
gods have warned us we will be attacked four days from
now. We must not spread our resources too thin, especially
by funding projects that have a slim chance of
success.”
201/589
Octavian looked at the three of them with pity, as if
to say, Poor little things. “Mars has clearly chosen the
least likely candidates for this quest. Perhaps that is because
he considers them the most expendable. Perhaps
Mars is playing the long odds. Whatever the case, he
wisely didn’t order a massive expedition, nor did he ask
us to fund their adventure. I say we keep our resources
here and defend the camp. This is where the battle will be
lost or won. If these three succeed, wonderful! But they
should do so by their own ingenuity.”
An uneasy murmur passed through the crowd.
Frank jumped to his feet. Before he could start a fight,
Percy said, “Fine! No problem. But at least give us transportation.
Gaea is the earth goddess, right? Going overland,
across the earth—I’m guessing we should avoid that.
Plus, it’ll be too slow.”
Octavian laughed. “Would you like us to charter
you an airplane?”
The idea made Percy nauseous. “No. Air travel…I
have a feeling that would be bad, too. But a boat. Can you
at least give us a boat?”
Hazel made a grunting sound. Percy glanced over.
She shook her head and mouthed, Fine. I’m fine.
“A boat!” Octavian turned to the senators. “The son
of Neptune wants a boat. Sea travel has never been the
Roman way, but he isn’t much of a Roman!”
“Octavian,” Reyna said sternly, “a boat is little
enough to ask. And providing no other aid seems very—”
202/589
“Traditional!” Octavian exclaimed. “It is very traditional.
Let us see if these questers have the strength to
survive without help, like true Romans!”
More muttering filled the chamber. The senators’
eyes moved back and forth between Octavian and Reyna,
watching the test of wills.
Reyna straightened in her chair. “Very well,” she
said tightly. “We’ll put it to a vote. Senators, the motion is
as follows: The quest shall go to Alaska. The senate shall
provide full access to the Roman navy docked at Alameda.
No other aid will be forthcoming. The three adventurers
will survive or fail on their own merits. All in favor?”
Every senator’s hand went up.
“The motion is passed.” Reyna turned to Frank.
“Centurion, your party is excused. The senate has other
matters to discuss. And, Octavian, if I may confer with
you for a moment.”
Percy was incredibly glad to see the sunlight. In
that dark hall, with all those eyes on him, he’d felt like the
world was riding on his shoulders—and he was fairly sure
he’d had that experience before.
He filled his lungs with fresh air.
Hazel picked up a large emerald from the path and
slipped it in her pocket. “So…we’re pretty much toast?”
Frank nodded miserably. “If either of you wants to
back out, I wouldn’t blame you.”
“Are you kidding?” Hazel said. “And pull sentry
duty for the rest of the week?”
203/589
Frank managed a smile. He turned to Percy.
Percy gazed across the forum. Stay put, Annabeth
had said in his dream. But if he stayed put, this camp
would be destroyed. He looked up at the hills, and imagined
Gaea’s face smiling in the shadows and ridges. You
can’t win, little demigod, she seemed to say. Serve me by
staying, or serve me by going.
Percy made a silent vow: After the Feast of For-
tuna, he would find Annabeth. But for now, he had to act.
He couldn’t let Gaea win.
“I’m with you,” he told Frank. “Besides, I want to
check out the Roman navy.”
They were only halfway across the forum when
some called, “Jackson!” Percy turned and saw Octavian
jogging toward them.
“What do you want?” Percy asked.
Octavian smiled. “Already decided I’m your enemy?
That’s a rash choice, Percy. I’m a loyal Roman.”
Frank snarled. “You backstabbing, slimy—” Both
Percy and Hazel had to restrain him.
“Oh, dear,” Octavian said. “Hardly the right behavior
for a new centurion. Jackson, I only followed you because
Reyna charged me with a message. She wants you
to report to the principia without your—ah—two lackeys,
here. Reyna will meet you there after the senate adjourns.
She’d like a private word with you before you leave on
your quest.”
“What about?” Percy said.
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“I’m sure I don’t know.” Octavian smiled wickedly.
“The last person she had a private talk with was Jason
Grace. And that was the last time I ever saw him. Good
luck and good bye, Percy Jackson.”
PERCY WAS GLAD RIPTIDE HAD RETURNED to his pocket.
Judging from Reyna’s expression, he thought he might
need to defend himself.
She stormed into the principia with her purple
cloak billowing, and her greyhounds at her feet. Percy was
sitting in one of the praetor chairs that he’d pulled to the
visitor’s side, which maybe wasn’t the proper thing to do.
He started to get up.
“Stay seated,” Reyna growled. “You leave after
lunch. We have a lot to discuss.”
She plunked down her dagger so hard, the jellybean
bowl rattled. Aurum and Argentum took their posts
on her left and right and fixed their ruby eyes on Percy.
“What’d I do wrong?” Percy asked. “If it’s about the
chair—”
206/589
“It’s not you.” Reyna scowled. “I hate senate meetings.
When Octavian gets talking…”
Percy nodded. “You’re a warrior. Octavian is a talker.
Put him in front of the senate, and suddenly he becomes
the powerful one.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You’re smarter than you
look.”
“Gee, thanks. I hear Octavian might get elected
praetor, assuming the camp survives that long.”
“Which brings us to the subject of doomsday,”
Reyna said, “and how you might help prevent it. But before
I place the fate of Camp Jupiter in your hands, we
need to get a few things straight.”
She sat down and put a ring on the table—a band of
silver etched with a sword-and-torch design, like Reyna’s
tattoo.
“Do you know what this is?”
“The sign of your mom,” Percy said. “The…uh, war
goddess.” He tried to remember the name but he didn’t
want to get it wrong—something like bologna. Or salami?
“Bellona, yes.” Reyna scrutinized him carefully.
“You don’t remember where you saw this ring before?
You really don’t remember me or my sister, Hylla?”
Percy shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“It would’ve been four years ago.”
“Just before you came to camp.”
Reyna frowned. “How did you—?”
207/589
“You’ve got four stripes on your tattoo. Four years.”
Reyna looked at her forearm. “Of course. It seems
so long ago. I suppose you wouldn’t recall me even if you
had your memory. I was just a little girl—one attendant
among so many at the spa. But you spoke with my sister,
just before you and that other one, Annabeth, destroyed
our home.”
Percy tried to remember. He really did. For some
reason, Annabeth and he had visited a spa and decided to
destroy it. He couldn’t imagine why. Maybe they hadn’t
liked the deep-tissue massage? Maybe they’d gotten bad
manicures?
“It’s a blank,” he said. “Since your dogs aren’t attacking
me, I hope you’ll believe me. I’m telling the
truth.”
Aurum and Argentum snarled. Percy got the feeling
they were thinking, Please lie. Please lie.
Reyna tapped the silver ring.
“I believe you’re sincere,” she said. “But not everyone
at camp does. Octavian thinks you’re a spy. He thinks
you were sent here by Gaea to find our weaknesses and
distract us. He believes the old legends about the Greeks.”
“Old legends?”
Reyna’s hand rested halfway between her dagger
and the jelly beans. Percy had a feeling that if she made a
sudden move, she wouldn’t be grabbing for the candy.
“Some believe Greek demigods still exist,” she said,
“heroes who follow the older forms of the gods. There are
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legends of battles between Roman and Greek heroes in
relatively modern times—the American Civil War, for instance.
I have no proof of this, and if our Lares know anything,
they refuse to say. But Octavian believes the Greeks
are still around, plotting our downfall, working with the
forces of Gaea. He thinks you are one of them.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“I believe you came from somewhere,” she said.
“You’re important, and dangerous. Two gods have taken a
special interest in you since you arrived, so I can’t believe
you’d work against Olympus…or Rome.” She shrugged.
“Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps the gods sent you
here to test my judgment. But I think…I think you were
sent here to make up for the loss of Jason.”
Jason ... Percy couldn’t go very far in this camp
without hearing that name.
“The way you talk about him…” Percy said. “Were
you two a couple?”
Reyna’s eyes bored into him—like the eyes of a
hungry wolf. Percy had seen enough hungry wolves to
know.
“We might have been,” Reyna said, “given time.
Praetors work closely together. It’s common for them to
become romantically involved. But Jason was only
praetor for a few months before he disappeared. Ever
since then, Octavian has been pestering me, agitating for
new elections. I’ve resisted. I need a partner in
power—but I’d prefer someone like Jason. A warrior, not
a schemer.”
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She waited. Percy realized she was sending him a
silent invitation.
His throat went dry. “Oh ... you mean ... oh.”
“I believe the gods sent you to help me,” Reyna
said. “I don’t understand where you come from, any more
than I understood it four years ago. But I think your arrival
is some sort of repayment. You destroyed my home
once. Now you’ve been sent to save my home. I don’t hold
a grudge against you for the past, Percy. My sister hates
you still, it’s true, but Fate brought me here to Camp
Jupiter. I’ve done well. All I ask is that you work with me
for the future. I intend to save this camp.”
The metal dogs glared at him, their mouths frozen
in snarl mode. Percy found Reyna’s eyes a lot harder to
meet.
“Look, I’ll help,” he promised. “But I’m new here.
You’ve got a lot of good people who know this camp better
than I do. If we succeed on this quest, Hazel and
Frank will be heroes. You could ask one of them—”
“Please,” Reyna said. “No one will follow a child of
Pluto. There’s something about that girl…rumors about
where she came from.…No, she won’t do. As for Frank
Zhang, he has a good heart, but he’s hopelessly naïve and
inexperienced. Besides, if the others found out about his
family history at this camp—”
“Family history?”
“The point is, Percy, you are the real power on this
quest. You are a seasoned veteran. I’ve seen what you can
do. A son of Neptune wouldn’t be my first choice, but if
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you return successfully from this mission, the legion
might be saved. The praetorship will be yours for the taking.
Together, you and I could expand the power of Rome.
We could raise an army and find the Doors of Death,
crush Gaea’s forces once and for all. You would find me a
very helpful…friend.”
She said that word like it could have several meanings,
and he could pick which one.
Percy’s feet started tapping on the floor, anxious to
run. “Reyna…I’m honored, and all. Seriously. But I’ve got
a girlfriend. And I don’t want power, or a praetorship.”
Percy was afraid he’d make her mad. Instead she
just raised her eyebrows.
“A man who turns down power?” she said. “That’s
not very Roman of you. Just think about it. In four days, I
have to make a choice. If we are to fight off an invasion,
we must have two strong praetors. I’d prefer you, but if
you fail on your quest, or don’t come back, or refuse my
offer…Well, I’ll work with Octavian. I mean to save this
camp, Percy Jackson. Things are worse than you realize.”
Percy remembered what Frank said about the monster
attacks getting more frequent. “How bad?”
Reyna’s nails dug into the table. “Even the senate
doesn’t know the whole truth. I’ve asked Octavian not to
share his auguries, or we’d have mass panic. He’s seen a
great army marching south, more than we can possibly
defeat. They’re led by a giant—”
“Alcyoneus?”
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“I don’t think so. If he is truly invulnerable in
Alaska, he’d be foolish to come here himself. It must be
one of his brothers.”
“Great,” Percy said. “So we’ve got two giants to
worry about.”
The praetor nodded. “Lupa and her wolves are trying
to slow them down, but this force is too strong even
for them. The enemy will be here soon—by the Feast of
Fortuna at the very latest.”
Percy shuddered. He’d seen Lupa in action. He
knew all about the wolf goddess and her pack. If this enemy
was too powerful for Lupa, Camp Jupiter didn’t
stand a chance.
Reyna read his expression. “Yes, it’s bad, but not
hopeless.
If you succeed in bringing back our eagle, if you release
Death so we can actually kill our enemies, then we
stand a chance. And there’s one more possibility.…”
Reyna slid the silver ring across the table. “I can’t
give you much help, but your journey will take you close
to Seattle. I’m asking you for a favor, which may also help
you. Find my sister Hylla.”
“Your sister…the one who hates me?”
“Oh, yes,” Reyna agreed. “She would love to kill
you. But show her that ring as a token from me, and she
may help you instead.”
“May?”
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“I can’t speak for her. In fact…” Reyna frowned. “In
fact I haven’t spoken to her in weeks. She’s gone silent.
With these armies passing through—”
“You want me to check on her,” Percy guessed.
“Make sure she’s okay.”
“Partially, yes. I can’t imagine she’s been overcome.
My sister has a powerful force. Her territory is well defended.
But if you can find her, she could offer you valuable
help. It could mean the difference between success and
failure on your quest. And if you tell her what’s happening
here—”
“She might send help?” Percy asked.
Reyna didn’t answer, but Percy could see the desperation
in her eyes. She was terrified, grasping for anything
that could save her camp. No wonder she wanted
Percy’s help. She was the only praetor. The defense of the
camp rested on her shoulders alone.
Percy took the ring. “I’ll find her. Where do I look?
What kind force does she have?”
“Don’t worry. Just go to Seattle. They’ll find you.”
That didn’t sound encouraging, but Percy slipped
the ring onto his leather necklace with his beads and his
probatio tablet. “Wish me luck.”
“Fight well, Percy Jackson,” Reyna said. “And
thank you.”
He could tell the audience was over. Reyna was
having trouble holding herself together, keeping up the
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image of the confident commander. She needed some
time by herself.
But at the door of the principia, Percy couldn’t resist
turning. “How did we destroy your home—that spa
where you lived?”
The metal greyhounds growled. Reyna snapped her
fingers to silence them.
“You destroyed the power of our mistress,” she
said. “You freed some prisoners who took revenge on all
of us who lived on the island. My sister and I…well, we
survived. It was difficult. But in the long run, I think we
are better off away from that place.”
“Still, I’m sorry,” Percy said. “If I hurt you, I’m
sorry.”
Reyna gazed at him for a long time, as if trying to
translate his words. “An apology? Not very Roman at all,
Percy Jackson. You’d make an interesting praetor. I hope
you’ll think about my offer.”
LUNCH FELT LIKE A FUNERAL PARTY. Everybody ate.
People talked in hushed tones. Nobody seemed particularly
happy. The other campers kept glancing over at
Percy like he was the corpse of honor.
Reyna made a brief speech wishing them luck.
Octavian ripped open a Beanie Baby and pronounced
grave omens and hard times ahead, but predicted the
camp would be saved by an unexpected hero (whose initials
were probably OCTAVIAN). Then the other campers
went off to their afternoon classes—gladiator fighting,
Latin lessons, paintball with ghosts, eagle training, and a
dozen other activities that sounded better than a suicide
quest. Percy followed Hazel and Frank to the barracks to
pack.
Percy didn’t have much. He’d cleaned up his backpack
from his trip south and had kept most of his Bargain
Mart supplies.
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He had a fresh pair of jeans and an extra purple T-
shirt from the camp quarter master, plus some nectar,
ambrosia, snacks, a little mortal money, and camping
supplies. At lunch, Reyna had handed him a scroll of introduction
from the praetor and camp senate. Supposedly,
any retired legionnaires they met on the trip
would help them if shown the letter. He also kept his
leather necklace with the beads, the silver ring, and the
probatio tablet, and of course he had Riptide in his
pocket.
He folded his tattered orange T-shirt and left it on
his bunk.
“I’ll be back,” he said. He felt pretty stupid talking
to a T-shirt, but he was really thinking of Annabeth, and
his old life. “I’m not leaving for good. But I have to help
these guys. They took me in. They deserve to survive.”
The T-shirt didn’t answer, thankfully.
One of their roommates, Bobby, gave them a ride
to the border of the valley on Hannibal the elephant.
From the hilltops, Percy could see everything below. The
Little Tiber snaked across golden pastures where the unicorns
were grazing. The temples and forums of New
Rome gleamed in the sunlight. On the Field of Mars, engineers
were hard at work, pulling down the remains of
last night’s fort and setting up barricades for a game of
death ball. A normal day for Camp Jupiter—but on the
northern horizon, storm clouds were gathering. Shadows
moved across the hills, and Percy imagined the face of
Gaea getting closer and closer.
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Work with me for the future, Reyna had said. I intend
to save this camp.
Looking down at the valley, Percy understood why
she cared so much. Even though he was new to Camp
Jupiter, he felt a fierce desire to protect this place. A safe
haven where demigods could build their lives—he wanted
that to be part of his future. Maybe not the way Reyna
imagined, but if he could share this place with
Annabeth…
They got off the elephant. Bobby wished them a
safe journey. Hannibal wrapped the three questers with
his trunk. Then the elephant taxi service headed back into
the valley.
Percy sighed. He turned to Hazel and Frank and
tried to think of something upbeat to say.
A familiar voice said, “IDs, please.”
A statue of Terminus appeared at the summit of the
hill. The god’s marble face frowned irritably. “Well? Come
along!”
“You again?” Percy asked. “I thought you just
guarded the city.”
Terminus huffed. “Glad to see you, too, Mr. Rule
Flouter. Normally, yes, I guard the city, but for international
departures, I like to provide extra security at the
camp borders. You really should’ve allowed two hours before
your planned departure time, you know. But we’ll
have to make do. Now, come over here so I can pat you
down.”
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“But you don’t have—” Percy stopped himself. “Uh,
sure.”
He stood next to the armless statue. Terminus conducted
a rigorous mental pat down.
“You seem to be clean,” Terminus decided. “Do you
have anything to declare?”
“Yes,” Percy said. “I declare this is stupid.”
“Hmph! Probatio tablet: Percy Jackson, Fifth Cohort,
son of Neptune. Fine, go. Hazel Levesque, daughter
of Pluto. Fine. Any foreign currency or, ahem, precious
metals to declare?”
“No,” she muttered.
“Are you sure?” Terminus asked. “Because last
time—”
“No!”
“Well, this is a grumpy bunch,” said the god. “Quest
travelers! Always in a rush. Now, let’s see—Frank Zhang.
Ah! Centurion? Well done, Frank. And that haircut is regulation
perfect. I approve! Off you go, then, Centurion
Zhang. Do you need any directions today?”
“No. No, I guess not.”
“Just down to the BART station,” Terminus said
anyway. “Change trains at Twelfth Street in Oakland. You
want Fruitvale Station. From there, you can walk or take
the bus to Alameda.”
“You guys don’t have a magical BART train or some
thing?” Percy asked.
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“Magic trains!” Terminus scoffed. “You’ll be wanting
your own security lane and a pass to the executive
lounge next. Just travel safely, and watch out for Polybotes.
Talk about scofflaws—bah! I wish I could throttle
him with my bare hands.”
“Wait—who?” Percy asked.
Terminus made a straining expression, like he was
flexing his nonexistent biceps. “Ah, well. Just be careful of
him. I imagine he can smell a son of Neptune a mile away.
Out you go, now. Good luck!”
An invisible force kicked them across the boundary.
When Percy looked back, Terminus was gone. In fact,
the entire valley was gone. The Berkeley Hills seemed to
be free of any Roman camp.
Percy looked at his friends. “Any idea what Terminus
was talking about? Watch out for…Political
something or other?”
“Poh-LIB-uh-tease?” Hazel sounded out the name
carefully. “Never heard of him.”
“Sounds Greek,” Frank said.
“That narrows it down.” Percy sighed. “Well, we
probably just appeared on the smell radar for every monster
within five miles. We’d better get moving.”
It took them two hours to reach the docks in Alameda.
Compared to Percy’s last few months, the trip was easy.
No monsters attacked. Nobody looked at Percy like he
was a homeless wild child.
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Frank had stored his spear, bow, and quiver in a
long bag made for skis. Hazel’s cavalry sword was
wrapped in a bedroll slung on her back. Together the
three of them looked like normal high schoolers on their
way to an overnight trip. They walked to Rockridge Station,
bought their tickets with mortal money, and hopped
on the BART train.
They got off in Oakland. They had to walk through
some rough neighborhoods, but nobody bothered them.
When ever the local gang members came close enough to
look in Percy’s eyes, they quickly veered away. He’d perfected
his wolf stare over the last few months—a look that
said: However bad you think you are, I’m worse. After
strangling sea monsters and running over gorgons in a
police car, Percy wasn’t scared of gangs. Pretty much
nothing in the mortal world scared him anymore.
In the late afternoon, they made it to the Alameda
docks. Percy looked out over San Francisco Bay and
breathed in the salty sea air. Immediately he felt better.
This was his father’s domain. Whatever they faced, he’d
have the upper hand as long as they were at sea.
Dozens of boats were moored at the
docks—everything from fifty-foot yachts to ten-foot fishing
boats. He scanned the slips for some sort of magic
vessel—a trireme, maybe, or a dragon-headed warship
like he’d seen in his dreams.
“Um…you guys know what we’re looking for?”
Hazel and Frank shook their heads.
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“I didn’t even know we had a navy.” Hazel sounded
as if she wished there wasn’t one.
“Oh…” Frank pointed. “You don’t think…?”
At the end of the dock was a tiny boat, like a
dinghy, covered in a purple tarp. Embroidered in faded
gold along the canvas was S.P.Q.R.
Percy’s confidence wavered. “No way.”
He uncovered the boat, his hands working the
knots like he’d been doing it his whole life. Under the tarp
was an old steel rowboat with no oars. The boat had been
painted dark blue at one point, but the hull was so crusted
with tar and salt it looked like one massive nautical
bruise.
On the bow, the name Pax was still readable,
lettered in gold. Painted eyes drooped sadly at the water
level, as if the boat were about to fall asleep. On board
were two benches, some steel wool, an old cooler, and a
mound of frayed rope with one end tied to the mooring.
At the bottom of the boat, aplastic bag and two empty
Coke cans floated in several inches of scummy water.
“Behold,” Frank said. “The mighty Roman navy.”
“There’s got to be a mistake,” Hazel said. “This is a
piece of junk.”
Percy imagined Octavian laughing at them, but he
decided not to let it get him down. The Pax was still a
boat. He jumped aboard, and the hull hummed under his
feet, responding to his presence. He gathered up the
garbage in the cooler and put it on the dock. He willed the
scummy water to flow over the sides and out of the boat.
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Then he pointed at the steel wool and it flew across the
floor, scrubbing and polishing so fast, the steel began to
smoke. When it was done, the boat was clean. Percy pointed
at the rope, and it untied itself from the dock.
No oars, but that didn’t matter. Percy could tell
that the boat was ready to move, just awaiting his
command.
“This’ll do,” he said. “Hop in.”
Hazel and Frank looked a little stunned, but they
climbed aboard. Hazel seemed especially nervous. When
they had settled on the seats, Percy concentrated, and the
boat slipped away from the dock.
Juno was right, you know. The sleepy voice of
Gaea whispered in Percy’s mind, startling him so badly
the boat rocked.You could have chosen a new life in the
sea. You would have been safe from me there. Now it’s
too late. You chose pain and misery. You’re part of my
plan, now—my important little pawn.
“Get off my ship,” Percy growled.
“Uh, what?” Frank asked.
Percy waited, but the voice of Gaea was silent.
“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s see what this rowboat can
do.”
He turned the boat to the north, and in no time
they were speeding along at fifteen knots, heading for the
Golden Gate Bridge.
HAZEL HATED BOATS.
She got seasick so easily, it was more like sea
plague. She hadn’t mentioned this to Percy. She didn’t
want to mess up the quest, but she remembered how horrible
her life had been when she and her mother had
moved to Alaska—no roads. Everywhere they went, they’d
had to take the train or a boat.
She hoped her condition might have improved
since she’d come back from the dead. Obviously not. And
this little boat, the Pax, looked so much like that other
boat they’d had in Alaska. It brought back bad
memories.…
As soon as they left the dock, Hazel’s stomach started
to churn. By the time they passed the piers along the
San Francisco Embarcadero, she felt so woozy she
thought she was hallucinating. They sped by a pack of sea
lions lounging on the docks, and she swore she saw an old
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homeless guy sitting among them. From across the water,
the old man pointed a bony finger at Percy and mouthed
something like Don’t even think about it.
“Did you see that?” Hazel asked.
Percy’s face was red in the sunset. “Yeah. I’ve been
here before. I…I don’t know. I think I was looking for my
girlfriend.”
“Annabeth,” Frank said. “You mean, on your way to
Camp
Jupiter?”
Percy frowned. “No. Before that.” He scanned the
city like he was still looking for Annabeth until they
passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and turned north.
Hazel tried to settle her stomach by thinking of
pleasant things—the euphoria she’d felt last night when
they’d won the war games, riding Hannibal into the enemy
keep, Frank’s sudden transformation into a leader.
He’d looked like a different person when he’d scaled the
walls, calling on the Fifth Cohort to attack. The way he’d
swept the defenders off the battlements…Hazel had never
seen him like that before. She’d been so proud to pin the
centurion’s badge to his shirt.
Then her thoughts turned to Nico. Before they had
left, her brother had pulled her aside to wish her luck.
Hazel hoped he’d stay at Camp Jupiter to help defend it,
but he said he’d be leaving today—heading back to the
Underworld.
“Dad needs all the help he can get,” he said. “The
Fields of Punishment look like a prison riot. The Furies
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can barely keep order. Besides…I’m going to try to track
some of the escaping souls. Maybe I can find the Doors of
Death from the other side.”
“Be careful,” Hazel said. “If Gaea is guarding those
doors—”
“Don’t worry.” Nico smiled. “I know how to stay
hidden. Just take care of yourself. The closer you get to
Alaska…I’m not sure if it’ll make the blackouts better or
worse.”
Take care of myself, Hazel thought bitterly. As if
there was any way the quest would end well for her.
“If we free Thanatos,” Hazel told Nico, “I may never
see you again. Thanatos will send me back to the
Underworld.…”
Nico took her hand. His fingers were so pale, it was
hard to believe Hazel and he shared the same godly
father.
“I wanted to give you a chance at Elysium,” he said.
“That was the best I could do for you. But now, I wish
there was another way. I don’t want to lose my sister.”
He didn’t say the word again, but Hazel knew
that’s what he was thinking. For once, she didn’t feel jealous
of Bianca di Angelo. She just wished that she had
more time with Nico and her friends at camp. She didn’t
want to die a second time.
“Good luck, Hazel,” he said. Then he melted into
the shadows—just like her father had seventy years
before.
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The boat shuddered, jolting Hazel back to the
present. They entered the Pacific currents and skirted the
rocky coastline of Marin County.
Frank held his ski bag across his lap. It passed over
Hazel’s knees like the safety bar on an amusement ride,
which made her think of the time Sammy had taken her
to the carnival during Mardi Gras.…She quickly pushed
that memory aside. She couldn’t risk a blackout.
“You okay?” Frank asked. “You look queasy.”
“Seasickness,” she confessed. “I didn’t think it
would be this bad.”
Frank pouted like it was somehow his fault. He
started digging in his pack. “I’ve got some nectar. And
some crackers. Um, my grandmother says ginger helps…I
don’t have any of that, but—”
“It’s okay.” Hazel mustered a smile. “That’s sweet
of you, though.”
Frank pulled out a saltine. It snapped in his big fingers.
Cracker exploded everywhere.
Hazel laughed. “Gods, Frank.…Sorry. I shouldn’t
laugh.”
“Uh, no problem,” he said sheepishly. “Guess you
don’t want that one.”
Percy wasn’t paying much attention. He kept his
eyes fixed on the shoreline. As they passed Stinson Beach,
he pointed inland, where a single mountain rose above
the green hills.
“That looks familiar,” he said.
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“Mount Tam,” Frank said. “Kids at camp are always
talking about it. Big battle happened on the summit, at
the old Titan base.”
Percy frowned. “Were either of you there?”
“No,” Hazel said. “That was back in August, before
I—um, before I got to camp. Jason told me about it. The
legion destroyed the enemy’s palace and about a million
monsters. Jason had to battle Krios—hand-to-hand com
bat with a Titan, if you can imagine.”
“I can imagine,” Percy muttered.
Hazel wasn’t sure what he meant, but Percy did remind
her of Jason, even though they looked nothing
alike. They had the same aura of quiet power, plus a kind
of sadness, like they’d seen their destiny and knew it was
only a matter of time before they met a monster they
couldn’t beat.
Hazel understood the feeling. She watched the sun
set in the ocean, and she knew she had less than a week to
live. Whether or not their quest succeeded, her journey
would be over by the Feast of Fortuna.
She thought about her first death, and the months
leading up to it—her house in Seward, the six months
she’d spent in Alaska, taking that little boat into Resurrection
Bay at night, visiting that cursed island.
She realized her mistake too late. Her vision went
black, and she slipped back in time.
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Their rental house was a clapboard box suspended on pilings
over the bay. When the train from Anchorage rolled
by, the furniture shook and the pictures rattled on the
walls. At night, Hazel fell asleep to the sound of icy water
lapping against the rocks under the floorboards. The wind
made the building creak and groan.
They had one room, with a hot plate and an icebox
for a kitchen. One corner was curtained off for Hazel,
where she kept her mattress and storage chest. She’d
pinned her drawings and old photos of New Orleans on
the walls, but that only made her homesickness worse.
Her mother was rarely home. She didn’t go by
Queen Marie anymore. She was just Marie, the hired
help. She’d cook and clean all day at the diner on Third
Avenue for fishermen, railroad workers, and the occasional
crew of navy men. She’d come home smelling like
Pine-Sol and fried fish.
At night, Marie Levesque would transform. The
Voice took over, giving Hazel orders, putting her to work
on their horrible project.
Winter was the worst. The Voice stayed longer because
of the constant darkness. The cold was so intense,
Hazel thought she would never be warm again.
When summer came, Hazel couldn’t get enough
sun. Every day of summer vacation, she stayed away from
home as long as she could, but she couldn’t walk around
town. It was a small community. The other kids spread
rumors about her—the witch’s child who lived in the old
shack by the docks. If she came too close, the kids jeered
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at her or threw bottles and rocks. The adults weren’t
much better.
Hazel could’ve made their lives miserable. She
could’ve given them diamonds, pearls, or gold. Up here in
Alaska, gold was easy. There was so much in the hills,
Hazel could’ve buried the town without half trying. But
she didn’t really hate the locals for pushing her away. She
couldn’t blame them.
She spent the day walking the hills. She attracted
ravens. They’d caw at her from the trees and wait for the
shiny things that always appeared in her footsteps. The
curse never seemed to bother them. She saw brown bears,
too, but they kept their distance. When Hazel got thirsty,
she’d find a snowmelt waterfall and drink cold, clean water
until her throat hurt. She’d climb as high as she could
and let the sunshine warm her face.
It wasn’t a bad way to pass the time, but she knew
eventually she’d have to go home.
Sometimes she thought about her father—that
strange pale man in the silver-and-black suit. Hazel
wished he’d come back and protect her from her mother,
maybe use his powers to get rid of that awful Voice. If he
was a god, he should be able to do that.
She looked up at the ravens and imagined they
were his emissaries. Their eyes were dark and maniacal,
like his. She wondered if they reported her movements to
her father.
But Pluto had warned her mother about Alaska. It
was a land beyond the gods. He couldn’t protect them
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here. If he was watching Hazel, he didn’t speak to her.
She often wondered if she had imagined him. Her old life
seemed as distant as the radio programs she listened to,
or President Roosevelt talking about the war. Occasionally
the locals would discuss the Japanese and some fighting
on the outer islands of Alaska, but even that seemed
far away—not nearly as scary as Hazel’s problem.
One day in midsummer, she stayed out later than
usual, chasing a horse.
She’d seen it first when she had heard a crunching
sound behind her. She turned and saw a gorgeous tan
roan stallion with a black mane—just like the one she’d
ridden her last day in New Orleans, when Sammy had
taken her to the stables. It could’ve been the same horse,
though that was impossible. It was eating something off
the path, and for a second, Hazel had the crazy impression
it was munching one of the gold nuggets that always
appeared in her wake.
“Hey, fella,” she called.
The horse looked at her warily.
Hazel figured it must belong to someone. It was too
well groomed, its coat too sleek for a wild horse. If she
could get close enough…What? She could find its owner?
Return it?
No, she thought. I just want to ride again.
She got within ten feet, and the horse bolted. She
spent the rest of the afternoon trying to catch it—getting
maddeningly close before it ran away again.
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She lost track of time, which was easy to do with
the summer sun staying up so long. Finally she stopped at
a creek for a drink and looked at the sky, thinking it must
be around three in the afternoon. Then she heard a train
whistle from down in the valley. She realized it had to be
the evening run to Anchorage, which meant it was ten at
night.
She glared at the horse, grazing peacefully across
the creek. “Are you trying to get me in trouble?”
The horse whinnied. Then…Hazel must’ve imagined
it. The horse sped away in a blur of black and tan,
faster than forked lightning—almost too quick for her
eyes to register. Hazel didn’t understand how, but the
horse was definitely gone.
She stared at the spot where the horse had stood. A
wisp of steam curled from the ground.
The train whistle echoed through the hills again,
and she realized how much trouble she was in. She ran
for home.
Her mother wasn’t there. For a second Hazel felt
relieved. Maybe her mom had had to work late. Maybe tonight
they wouldn’t have to make the journey.
Then she saw the wreckage. Hazel’s curtain was
pulled down. Her storage chest was open and her few
clothes strewn across the floor. Her mattress had been
shredded as if a lion had attacked it. Worst of all, her
drawing pad was ripped to pieces. Her colored pencils
were all broken. Pluto’s birthday gift, Hazel’s only luxury,
had been destroyed. Pinned to the wall was a note in red
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on the last piece of drawing paper, in writing that was not
her mother’s: Wicked girl. I’m waiting at the island.
Don’t disappoint me. Hazel sobbed in despair. She
wanted to ignore the summons. She wanted to run away,
but there was nowhere to go. Besides, her mother was
trapped. The Voice had promised that they were almost
done with their task. If Hazel kept helping, her mother
would be freed. Hazel didn’t trust the Voice, but she
didn’t see any other option.
She took the rowboat—a little skiff her mother had
bought with a few gold nuggets from a fisherman, who
had a tragic accident with his nets the next day. They had
only one boat, but Hazel’s mother seemed capable on occasion
of reaching the island without any transportation.
Hazel had learned not to ask about that.
Even in midsummer, chunks of ice swirled in Resurrection
Bay. Seals glided by her boat, looking at Hazel
hopefully, sniffing for fish scraps. In the middle of the
bay, the glistening back of a whale raked the surface.
As always, the rocking of the boat made her stomach
queasy. She stopped once to be sick over the side. The
sun was finally going down over the mountains, turning
the sky blood red.
She rowed toward the bay’s mouth. After several
minutes, she turned and looked ahead. Right in front of
her, out of the fog, the island materialized—an acre of
pine trees, boulders, and snow with a black sand beach.
If the island had a name, she didn’t know it. Once
Hazel had made the mistake of asking the townsfolk, but
they had stared at her like she was crazy.
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“Ain’t no island there,” said one old fisherman, “or
my boat would’ve run into it a thousand times.”
Hazel was about fifty yards from the shore when a
raven landed on the boat’s stern. It was a greasy black
bird almost as large as an eagle, with a jagged beak like an
obsidian knife.
Its eyes glittered with intelligence, so Hazel wasn’t
much surprised when it talked.
“Tonight,” it croaked. “The last night.”
Hazel let the oars rest. She tried to decide if the
raven was warning her, or advising her, or making a
promise.
“Are you from my father?” she asked.
The raven tilted its head. “The last night. Tonight.”
It pecked at the boat’s prow and flew toward the
island.
The last night, Hazel told herself. She decided to
take it as a promise. No matter what she tells me, I will
make this the last night.
That gave her enough strength to row on. The boat
slid ashore, cracking through a fine layer of ice and black
silt.
Over the months, Hazel and her mother had worn a
path from the beach into the woods. She hiked inland,
careful to stick to the trail. The island was full of dangers,
both natural and magical. Bears rustled in the undergrowth.
Glowing white spirits, vaguely human, drifted
through the trees. Hazel didn’t know what they were, but
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she knew they were watching her, hoping she’d stray into
their clutches.
At the center of the island, two massive black
boulders formed the entrance to a tunnel. Hazel made her
way into the cavern she called the Heart of the Earth.
It was the only truly warm place Hazel had found
since moving to Alaska. The air smelled of freshly turned
soil. The sweet, moist heat made Hazel feel drowsy, but
she fought to stay awake. She imagined that if she fell
asleep here, her body would sink into the earthen floor
and turn to mulch.
The cave was as large as a church sanctuary, like
the St. Louis Cathedral back home on Jackson Square.
The walls glowed with luminescent mosses—green, red,
and purple. The whole chamber thrummed with energy,
an echoing boom, boom, boom that reminded Hazel of a
heartbeat. Perhaps it was just the sea’s waves battering
the island, but Hazel didn’t think so. This place was alive.
The earth was asleep, but it pulsated with power. Its
dreams were so malicious, so fitful, that Hazel felt herself
losing her grip on reality.
Gaea wanted to consume her identity, just as she’d
overwhelmed Hazel’s mother. She wanted to consume
every human, god, and demigod that dared to walk across
her surface.
You all belong to me, Gaea murmured like a lullaby.
Surrender. Return to the earth.
No, Hazel thought. I’m Hazel Levesque. You can’t
have me.
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Marie Levesque stood over the pit. In six months,
her hair had turned as gray as lint. She’d lost weight. Her
hands were gnarled from hard work. She wore snow boots
and waders and a stained white shirt from the diner. She
never would have been mistaken for a queen.
“It’s too late.” Her mother’s frail voice echoed
through the cavern. Hazel realized with a shock that it
was her voice—not Gaea’s.
“Mother?”
Marie turned. Her eyes were open. She was awake
and conscious. This should have made Hazel feel relieved,
but it made her nervous. The Voice had never relinquished
control while they were on the island.
“What have I done?” her mother asked helplessly.
“Oh, Hazel, what did I do to you?”
She stared in horror at the thing in the pit.
For months they’d been coming here, four or five
nights a week as the Voice required. Hazel had cried,
she’d collapsed with exhaustion, she’d pleaded, she’d given
in to despair. But the Voice that controlled her mother
had urged her on relentlessly. Bring valuables from the
earth. Use your powers, child. Bring my most valuable
possession to me.
At first, her efforts had brought only scorn. The fissure
in the earth had filled with gold and precious stones,
bubbling in a thick soup of petroleum. It looked like a
dragon’s treasure dumped in a tar pit. Then, slowly, a
rock spire began to grow like a massive tulip bulb. It
emerged so gradually, night after night, that Hazel had
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trouble judging its progress. Often she concentrated all
night on raising it, until her mind and soul were exhausted,
but she didn’t notice any difference. Yet the spire
did grow. Now Hazel could see how much she’d accomplished.
The thing was two stories high, a swirl of rocky
tendrils jutting like a spear tip from the oily morass. Inside,
something glowed with heat. Hazel couldn’t see it
clearly, but she knew what was happening. A body was
forming out of silver and gold, with oil for blood and raw
diamonds for a heart. Hazel was resurrecting the son of
Gaea. He was almost ready to wake.
Her mother fell to her knees and wept. “I’m sorry,
Hazel. I’m so sorry.” She looked helpless and alone, horribly
sad. Hazel should have been furious. Sorry? She’d
lived in fear of her mother for years. She’d been scolded
and blamed for her mother’s unfortunate life. She’d been
treated like a freak, dragged away from her home in New
Orleans to this cold wilderness, and worked like a slave by
a merciless evil goddess. Sorry didn’t cut it. She should
have despised her mother.
But she couldn’t make herself feel angry.
Hazel knelt and put her arm around her mother.
There was hardly anything left of her—just skin and
bones and stained work clothes. Even in the warm cave,
she was trembling.
“What can we do?” Hazel said. “Tell me how to stop
it.”
Her mother shook her head. “She let me go. She
knows it’s too late. There’s nothing we can do.”
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“She…the Voice?” Hazel was afraid to get her hopes
up, but if her mother was really freed, then nothing else
mattered. They could get out of here. They could run
away, back to New Orleans. “Is she gone?”
Her mother glanced fearfully around the cave. “No,
she’s here. There’s only one more thing she needs from
me. For that, she needs my free will.”
Hazel didn’t like the sound of that.
“Let’s get out of here,” she urged. “That thing in the
rock…it’s going to hatch.”
“Soon,” her mother agreed. She looked at Hazel so
tenderly.…Hazel couldn’t remember the last time she’d
seen that kind of affection in her mother’s eyes. She felt a
sob building in her chest.
“Pluto warned me,” her mother said. “He told me
my wish was too dangerous.”
“Your—your wish?”
“All the wealth under the earth,” she said. “He controlled
it. I wanted it. I was so tired of being poor, Hazel.
So tired. First I summoned him…just to see if I could. I
never thought the old gris-gris spell would work on a
god. But he courted me, told me I was brave and beautiful.…”
She stared at her bent, calloused hands. “When you
were born, he was so pleased and proud. He promised me
anything. He swore on the River Styx. I asked for all the
riches he had. He warned me the greediest wishes cause
the greatest sorrows. But I insisted. I imagined living like
a queen—the wife of a god! And you…you received the
curse.”
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Hazel felt as if she were expanding to the breaking
point, just like that spire in the pit. Her misery would
soon become too great to hold inside, and her skin would
shatter. “That’s why I can find things under the earth?”
“And why they bring only sorrow.” Her mother gestured
listlessly around the cavern. “That’s how she found
me, how she was able to control me. I was angry with
your father. I blamed him for my problems. I blamed you.
I was so bitter, I listened to Gaea’s voice. I was a fool.”
“There’s got to be something we can do,” Hazel
said. “Tell me how to stop her.”
The ground trembled. Gaea’s disembodied voice
echoed through the cave.
My eldest rises, she said, the most precious thing
in the earth —and you have brought him from the
depths, Hazel Levesque. You have made him anew. His
awakening cannot be stopped. Only one thing remains.
Hazel clenched her fists. She was terrified, but now
that her mother was free, she felt like she could confront
her enemy at last. This creature, this evil goddess, had
ruined their lives. Hazel wasn’t going to let her win.
“I won’t help you anymore!” she yelled.
But I am done with your help, girl. I brought you
here for one reason only. Your mother required…
incentive.
Hazel’s throat constricted. “Mother?”
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“I’m sorry, Hazel. If you can forgive me,
please—know that it was only because I loved you. She
promised to let you live if—”
“If you sacrifice yourself,” Hazel said, realizing the
truth. “She needs you to give your life willingly to raise
that—that thing.”
Alcyoneus, Gaea said. Eldest of the giants. He must
rise first, and this will be his new homeland—far from
the gods. He will walk these icy mountains and forests.
He will raise an army of monsters. While the gods are
divided, fighting each other in this mortal World War, he
will send forth his armies to destroy Olympus.
The earth goddess’s dreams were so powerful, they
cast shadows across the cave walls—ghastly shifting images
of Nazi armies raging across Europe, Japanese
planes destroying American cities. Hazel finally understood.
The gods of Olympus would take sides in the battle
as they always did in human wars. While the gods fought
each other to a bloody standstill, an army of monsters
would rise in the north. Alcyoneus would revive his brother
giants and send them forth to conquer the world. The
weakened gods would fall. The mortal conflict would rage
for decades until all civilization was swept away, and the
earth goddess awakened fully. Gaea would rule forever.
All this, the goddess purred, because your mother
was greedy and cursed you with the gift of finding
riches. In my sleeping state, I would have needed decades
more, perhaps even centuries, before I found the
power to resurrect Alcyoneus myself. But now he will
wake, and soon, so shall I!
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With terrible certainty, Hazel knew what would
happen next. The only thing Gaea needed was a willing
sacrifice—a soul to be consumed for Alcyoneus to awaken.
Her mother would step into the fissure and touch that
horrible spire—and she would be absorbed.
“Hazel, go.” Her mother rose unsteadily. “She’ll let
you live, but you must hurry.”
Hazel believed it. That was the most horrible thing.
Gaea would honor the bargain and let Hazel live. Hazel
would survive to see the end of the world, knowing that
she’d caused it.
“No.” Hazel made her decision. “I won’t live. Not
for that.”
She reached deep into her soul. She called on her
father, the Lord of the Underworld, and summoned all
the riches that lay in his vast realm. The cavern shook.
Around the spire of Alcyoneus, oil bubbled, then
churned and erupted like a boiling cauldron.
Don’t be foolish, Gaea said, but Hazel detected concern
in her tone, maybe even fear. You will destroy yourself
for nothing! Your mother will still die!
Hazel almost wavered. She remembered her father’s
promise: someday her curse would be washed away; a
descendant of Neptune would bring her peace. He’d even
said she might find a horse of her own. Maybe that
strange stallion in the hills was meant for her. But none of
that would happen if she died now. She’d never see
Sammy again, or return to New Orleans. Her life would
be thirteen short, bitter years with an unhappy ending.
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She met her mother’s eyes. For once, her mother
didn’t look sad or angry. Her eyes shone with pride.
“You were my gift, Hazel,” she said. “My most precious
gift. I was foolish to think I needed anything else.”
She kissed Hazel’s forehead and held her close. Her
warmth gave Hazel the courage to continue. They would
die, but not as sacrifices to Gaea. Instinctively Hazel knew
that their final act would reject Gaea’s power. Their souls
would go to the Underworld, and Alcyoneus would not
rise—at least not yet.
Hazel summoned the last of her willpower. The air
turned searing hot. The spire began to sink. Jewels and
chunks of gold shot from the fissure with such force, they
cracked the cavern walls and sent shrapnel flying, stinging
Hazel’s skin through her jacket.
Stop this! Gaea demanded. You cannot prevent his
rise. At best, you will delay him—a few decades. Half a
century. Would you trade your lives for that?
Hazel gave her an answer.
The last night, the raven had said.
The fissure exploded. The roof crumbled. Hazel
sank into her mother’s arms, into the darkness, as oil
filled her lungs and the island collapsed into the bay.
“HAZEL!” FRANK SHOOK HER ARMS, sounding panicked.
“Come on, please! Wake up!”
She opened her eyes. The night sky blazed with
stars. The rocking of the boat was gone. She was lying on
solid ground, her bundled sword and pack beside her.
She sat up groggily, her head spinning. They were
on a cliff overlooking a beach. About a hundred feet away,
the ocean glinted in the moonlight. The surf washed
gently against the stern of their beached boat. To her
right, hugging the edge of the cliff, was a building like a
small church with a search light in the steeple. A lighthouse,
Hazel guessed. Behind them, fields of tall grass
rustled in the wind.
“Where are we?” she asked.
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Frank exhaled. “Thank the gods you’re awake!
We’re in Mendocino, about a hundred and fifty miles
north of the Golden Gate.”
“A hundred and fifty miles?” Hazel groaned. “I’ve
been out that long?”
Percy knelt beside her, the sea wind sweeping his
hair. He put his hand on her forehead as if checking for a
fever. “We couldn’t wake you. Finally we decided to bring
you ashore. We thought maybe the seasickness—”
“It wasn’t seasickness.” She took a deep breath. She
couldn’t hide the truth from them anymore. She remembered
what Nico had said: If a flashback like that
happens when you’re in combat ...
“I—I haven’t been honest with you,” she said.
“What happened was a blackout. I have them once in a
while.”
“A blackout?” Frank took Hazel’s hand, which
startled her…though pleasantly so. “Is it medical? Why
haven’t I noticed before?”
“I try to hide it,” she admitted. “I’ve been lucky so
far, but it’s getting worse. It’s not medical…not really.
Nico says it’s a side effect from my past, from where he
found me.”
Percy’s intense green eyes were hard to read. She
couldn’t tell whether he was concerned or wary.
“Where exactly did Nico find you?” he asked.
Hazel’s tongue felt like cotton. She was afraid if she
started talking, she’d slip back into the past, but they
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deserved to know. If she failed them on this quest, zonked
out when they needed her most…she couldn’t bear that
idea.
“I’ll explain,” she promised. She clawed through
her pack. Stupidly, she’d forgotten to bring a water bottle.
“Is…is there anything to drink?”
“Yeah.” Percy muttered a curse in Greek. “That was
dumb.
I left my supplies down at the boat.”
Hazel felt bad asking them to take care of her, but
she’d woken up parched and exhausted, as if she’d lived
the last few hours in both the past and the present. She
shouldered her pack and sword. “Never mind. I can
walk.…”
“Don’t even think about it,” Frank said. “Not until
you’ve had some food and water. I’ll get the supplies.”
“No, I’ll go.” Percy glanced at Frank’s hand on
Hazel’s. Then he scanned the horizon as if he sensed
trouble, but there was nothing to see—just the lighthouse
and the field of grass stretching inland. “You two stay
here. I’ll be right back.”
“You sure?” Hazel said feebly. “I don’t want you
to—”
“It’s fine,” said Percy. “Frank, just keep your eyes
open. Something about this place…I don’t know.”
“I’ll keep her safe,” Frank promised.
Percy dashed off.
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Once they were alone, Frank seemed to realize he
was still holding Hazel’s hand. He cleared his throat and
let go.
“I, um…I think I understand your blackouts,” he
said. “And where you come from.”
Her heartbeat stumbled. “You do?”
“You seem so different from other girls I’ve met.”
He blinked, then rushed on. “Not like…bad different. Just
the way you talk. The things that surprise you—like songs,
or
TV shows, or slang people use. You talk about your
life like it happened a long time ago. You were born in a
different time, weren’t you? You came from the
Underworld.”
Hazel wanted to cry—not because she was sad, but
because it was such a relief to hear someone say the truth.
Frank didn’t act revolted or scared. He didn’t look at her
as if she were a ghost or some awful undead zombie.
“Frank, I—”
“We’ll figure it out,” he promised. “You’re alive
now. We’re going to keep you that way.”
The grass rustled behind them. Hazel’s eyes stung
in the cold wind.
“I don’t deserve a friend like you,” she said. “You
don’t know what I am…what I’ve done.”
“Stop that.” Frank scowled. “You’re great! Besides,
you’re not the only one with secrets.”
Hazel stared at him. “I’m not?”
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Frank started to say something. Then he tensed.
“What?” Hazel asked.
“The wind’s stopped.”
She looked around and noticed he was right. The
air had become perfectly still.
“So?” she asked.
Frank swallowed. “So why is the grass still
moving?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Hazel saw dark shapes
ripple through the field.
“Hazel!” Frank tried to grab her arms, but it was
too late.
Something knocked him backward. Then a force
like agrassy hurricane wrapped around Hazel and
dragged her intothe fields.
HAZEL WAS AN EXPERT ON WEIRD. She’d seen her
mother possessed by an earth goddess. She’d created a giant
out of gold. She’d destroyed an island, died, and come
back from the Underworld.
But getting kidnapped by a field of grass? That was
new.
She felt as if she were trapped in a funnel cloud of
plants. She’d heard of modern-day singers jumping into
crowds of fans and getting passed overhead by thousands
of hands. She imagined this was similar—only she was
moving a thousand times faster, and the grass blades weren’t
adoring fans.
She couldn’t sit up. She couldn’t touch the ground.
Her sword was still in her bedroll, strapped to her back,
but she couldn’t reach it. The plants kept her off balance,
tossing her around, slicing her face and arms. She could
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barely make out the stars through the tumble of green,
yellow, and black.
Frank’s shouting faded into the distance.
It was hard to think clearly, but Hazel knew one
thing: She was moving fast. Wherever she was being
taken, she’d soon be too far away for her friends to find
her.
She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the tumbling
and tossing. She sent her thoughts into the earth below
her. Gold, silver—she’d settle for anything that might
disrupt her kidnappers.
She felt nothing. Riches under the earth—zero.
She was about to despair when she felt a huge cold
spot pass beneath her. She locked onto it with all her concentration,
dropping a mental anchor. Suddenly the
ground rumbled. The swirl of plants released her and she
was thrown upward like a catapult projectile.
Momentarily weightless, she opened her eyes. She
twisted her body in midair. The ground was about twenty
feet below her. Then she was falling. Her combat training
kicked in. She’d practiced dropping from giant eagles before.
She tucked into a roll, turned the impact into a
somersault, and came up standing.
She unslung her bedroll and drew her sword. A few
yards to her left, an outcropping of rock the size of a garage
jutted from the sea of grass. Hazel realized it was her
anchor. She’d caused the rock to appear.
The grass rippled around it. Angry voices hissed in
dismay at the massive clump of stone that had broken
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their progress. Before they could regroup, Hazel ran to
the rock and clambered to the top.
The grass swayed and rustled around her like the
tentacles of a gigantic undersea anemone. Hazel could
sense her kidnappers’ frustration.
“Can’t grow on this, can you?” she yelled. “Go away,
you bunch of weeds! Leave me alone!”
“Schist,” said an angry voice from the grass.
Hazel raised her eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
“Schist! Big pile of schist!”
A nun at St. Agnes Academy had once washed
Hazel’s mouth with lye soap for saying something very
similar, sos he wasn’t sure how to respond. Then, all
around her rock island, the kidnappers materialized from
the grass. At first glance they looked like Valentine angels—
a dozen chubby little Cupid babies. As they stepped
closer, Hazel realized they were neither cute nor angelic.
They were the size of toddlers, with rolls of baby
fat, but their skin had a strange greenish hue, as if chlorophyll
ran through their veins. They had dry, brittle wings
like corn-husks, and tufts of white hair like corn silk.
Their faces were haggard, pitted with kernels of grain.
Their eyes were solid green, and their teeth were canine
fangs.
The largest creature stepped forward. He wore a
yellow loincloth, and his hair was spiky, like the bristles
on a stalk of wheat. He hissed at Hazel and waddled back
and forth so quickly, she was afraid his loincloth might
fall off.
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“Hate this schist!” the creature complained.
“Wheat cannot grow!”
“Sorghum cannot grow!” another piped up.
“Barley!” yelled a third. “Barley cannot grow. Curse
this schist!”
Hazel’s knees wobbled. The little creatures might
have been funny if they weren’t surrounding her, staring
up at her with those pointed teeth and hungry green eyes.
They were like Cupid piranhas.
“Y-you mean the rock?” she managed. “This rock is
called schist?”
“Yes, greenstone! Schist!” the first creature yelled.
“Nasty rock.”
Hazel began to understand how she’d summoned
it. “It’s a precious stone. It’s valuable?”
“Bah!” said the one in the yellow loincloth. “Foolish
native people made jewelry from it, yes. Valuable? Maybe.
Not as good as wheat.”
“Or sorghum!”
“Or barley!”
The others chimed in, calling out different types of
grain. They circled the rock, making no effort to climb
it—at least not yet. If they decided to swarm her, there
was no way she could fend off all of them.
“You’re Gaea’s servants,” she guessed, just to keep
them talking. Maybe Percy and Frank weren’t too far
away. Maybe they’d be able to see her, standing so tall
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above the fields. She wished that her sword glowed like
Percy’s.
The yellow-diapered Cupid snarled. “We are the
karpoi,spirits of the grain. Children of the Earth Mother,
yes! We have been her attendants since forever. Before
nasty humans cultivated us, we were wild. We will be
again. Wheat will destroy all!”
“No, sorghum will rule!”
“Barley shall dominate!”
The others joined in, each karpos cheering for his
own variety.
“Right.” Hazel swallowed her revulsion. “So you’re
Wheat, then—you in the yellow, um, britches.”
“Hmmmm,” said Wheat. “Come down from your
schist, demigod. We must take you to our mistress’s
army. They will reward us. They will kill you slowly!”
“Tempting,” Hazel said, “but no thanks.”
“I will give you wheat!” said Wheat, as if this were a
very fine offer in exchange for her life. “So much wheat!”
Hazel tried to think. How far had she been carried?
How long would it take her friends to find her? The karpoi
were getting bolder, approaching the rock in twos and
threes, scratching at the schist to see if it would hurt
them.
“Before I get down…” She raised her voice, hoping
it would carry over the fields. “Um, explain something to
me, would you? If you’re grain spirits, shouldn’t you be
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on the gods’ side? Isn’t the goddess of agriculture
Ceres—”
“Evil name!” Barley wailed.
“Cultivates us!” Sorghum spat. “Makes us grow in
disgusting rows. Lets humans harvest us. Pah! When
Gaea is mistress of the world again, we will grow wild,
yes!”
“Well, naturally,” Hazel said. “So this army of hers,
where you’re taking me in exchange for wheat—”
“Or barley,” Barley offered.
“Yeah,” Hazel agreed. “This army is where, now?”
“Just over the ridge!” Sorghum clapped his hands
excitedly. “The Earth Mother—oh, yes!—she told us:
‘Look for the daughter of Pluto who lives again. Find her!
Bring her alive! I have many tortures planned for her.’
The giant Polybotes will reward us for your life! Then we
will march south to destroy the Romans. We can’t be
killed, you know. But you can, yes.”
“That’s wonderful.” Hazel tried to sound enthusiastic.
It wasn’t easy, knowing Gaea had special revenge
planned for her. “So you—you can’t be killed because Alcyoneus
has captured Death, is that it?”
“Exactly!” Barley said.
“And he’s keeping him chained in Alaska,” Hazel
said, “at…let’s see, what’s the name of that place?”
Sorghum started to answer, but Wheat flew at him
and knocked him down. The karpoi began to fight, dissolving
into funnel clouds of grain. Hazel considered
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making a run for it. Then Wheat re-formed, holding
Sorghum in a headlock. “Stop!” he yelled at the others.
“Multigrain fighting is not allowed!”
The karpoi solidified into chubby Cupid piranhas
again.
Wheat pushed Sorghum away.
“Oh, clever demigod,” he said. “Trying to trick us
into giving secrets. No, you’ll never find the lair of
Alcyoneus.”
“I already know where it is,” she said with false
confidence. “He’s on the island in Resurrection Bay.”
“Ha!” Wheat sneered. “That place sank beneath the
waves long ago. You should know that! Gaea hates you for
it. When you thwarted her plans, she was forced to sleep
again. Decades and decades! Alcyoneus—not until the
dark times was he able to rise.”
“The nineteen-eighties,” Barley agreed. “Horrible!
Horrible!”
“Yes,” Wheat said. “And our mistress still sleeps.
Alcyoneus was forced to bide his time in the north, waiting,
planning. Only now does Gaea begin to stir. Oh, but
she remembers you, and so does her son!”
Sorghum cackled with glee. “You will never find the
prison of Thanatos. All of Alaska is the giant’s home. He
could be keeping Death anywhere! Years it would take
you to find him, and your poor camp has only days. Better
you surrender. We will give you grain. So much grain.”
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Hazel’s sword felt heavy. She’d dreaded returning
to Alaska, but at least she’d had an idea where to start
looking for Thanatos. She’d assumed that the island
where she had died hadn’t been completely destroyed, or
possibly had risen again when Alcyoneus woke. She had
hoped that his base would be there. But if the island was
really gone, she had no idea how to find the giant. Alaska
was huge. They could search for decades and never find
him.
“Yes,” Wheat said, sensing her anguish. “Give up.”
Hazel gripped her spatha. “Never!” She raised her
voice again, hoping it would somehow reach her friends.
“If I have to destroy you all, I will. I am the daughter of
Pluto!”
The karpoi advanced. They gripped the rock, hissing
as if it were scalding hot, but they began to climb.
“Now you will die,” Wheat promised, gnashing his
teeth. “You will feel the wrath of grain!”
Suddenly there was a whistling sound. Wheat’s
snarl froze. He looked down at the golden arrow that had
just pierced his chest. Then he dissolved into pieces of
Chex Mix.
FOR A HEARTBEAT, HAZEL WAS just as stunned as the
karpoi.Then Frank and Percy burst into the open and
began to massacre every source of fiber they could find.
Frank shot an arrow through Barley, who crumbled into
seeds. Percy slashed Riptide through Sorghum and
charged toward Millet and Oats. Hazel jumped down and
joined the fight.
Within minutes, the karpoi had been reduced to
piles of seeds and various breakfast cereals. Wheat started
to re-form, but Percy pulled a lighter from his pack
and sparked a flame.
“Try it,” he warned, “and I’ll set this whole field on
fire. Stay dead. Stay away from us, or the grass gets it!”
Frank winced like the flame terrified him. Hazel
didn’t understand why, but she shouted at the grain piles
anyway: “He’ll do it! He’s crazy!”
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The remnants of the karpoi scattered in the wind.
Frank climbed the rock and watched them go.
Percy extinguished his lighter and grinned at
Hazel.
“Thanks for yelling. We wouldn’t have found you
otherwise.
How’d you hold them off so long?”
She pointed to the rock. “A big pile of schist.”
“Excuse me?”
“Guys,” Frank called from the top of the rock. “You
need to see this.”
Percy and Hazel climbed up to join him. As soon as
Hazel saw what he was looking at, she inhaled sharply.
“Percy, no light! Put up your sword!”
“Schist!” He touched the sword tip, and Riptide
shrank back into a pen.
Down below them, an army was on the move.
The field dropped into a shallow ravine, where a
country road wound north and south. On the opposite
side of the road, grassy hills stretched to the horizon,
empty of civilization except for one darkened convenience
store at the top of the nearest rise.
The whole ravine was full of monsters—column
after column marching south, so many and so close,
Hazel was amazed they hadn’t heard her shouting.
She, Frank, and Percy crouched against the rock.
They watched in disbelief as several dozen large, hairy
humanoids passed by, dressed in tattered bits of armor
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and animal fur. The creatures had six arms each, three
sprouting on either side, so they looked like cavemen
evolved from insects.
“Gegenes,” Hazel whispered. “The Earthborn.”
“You’ve fought them before?” Percy asked.
She shook her head. “Just heard about them in
monster class at camp.” She’d never liked monster
class—reading Pliny the Elder and those other musty authors
who described legendary monsters from the edges
of the Roman Empire. Hazel believed in monsters, but
some of the descriptions were so wild, she had thought
they must be just ridiculous rumors.
Only now, a whole army of those rumors was
marching by.
“The Earthborn fought the Argonauts,” she murmured.
“And those things behind them—”
“Centaurs,” Percy said. “But…that’s not right. Centaurs
are good guys.”
Frank made a choking sound. “That’s not what we
were taught at camp. Centaurs are crazy, always getting
drunk and killing heroes.”
Hazel watched as the horse-men cantered past.
They were human from the waist up, palomino from the
waist down. They were dressed in barbarian armor of
hide and bronze, armed with spears and slings. At first,
Hazel thought they were wearing Viking helmets. Then
she realized they had actual horns jutting from their
shaggy hair.
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“Are they supposed to have bull’s horns?” she
asked.
“Maybe they’re a special breed,” Frank said. “Let’s
not ask them, okay?”
Percy gazed farther down the road and his face
went slack. “My gods ... Cyclopes.”
Sure enough, lumbering after the centaurs was a
battalion of one-eyed ogres, both male and female, each
about ten feet tall, wearing armor cobbled out of junkyard
metal. Six of the monsters were yoked like oxen, pulling a
two-story-tall siege tower fitted with a giant scorpion
ballista.
Percy pressed the sides of his head. “Cyclopes. Centaurs.
This is wrong. All wrong.”
The monster army was enough to make anyone
despair, but Hazel realized that something else was going
on with Percy. He looked pale and sickly in the moonlight,
as if his memories were trying to come back, scrambling
his mind in the process.
She glanced at Frank. “We need to get him back to
the boat. The sea will make him feel better.”
“No argument,” Frank said. “There are too many of
them. The camp…we have to warn the camp.”
“They know,” Percy groaned. “Reyna knows.”
A lump formed in Hazel’s throat. There was no way
the legion could fight so many. If they were only a few
hundred miles north of Camp Jupiter, their quest was
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already doomed. They could never make it to Alaska and
back in time.
“Come on,” she urged. “Let’s…”
Then she saw the giant.
When he appeared over the ridge, Hazel couldn’t
quite believe her eyes. He was taller than the siege
tower—thirty feet, at least—with scaly reptilian legs like a
Komodo dragon from the waist down and green-blue armor
from the waist up. His breastplate was shaped like
rows of hungry monstrous faces, their mouths open as if
demanding food. His face was human, but his hair was
wild and green, like a mop of seaweed. As he turned his
head from side to side, snakes dropped from his dreadlocks.
Viper dandruff—gross.
He was armed with a massive trident and a
weighted net.
Just the sight of those weapons made Hazel’s stomach
clench. She’d faced that type of fighter in gladiator
training many times. It was the trickiest, sneakiest, most
evil combat style she knew. This giant was a supersize
retiarius.
“Who is he?” Frank’s voice quivered. “That’s not—”
“Not Alcyoneus,” Hazel said weakly. “One of his
brothers, I think. The one Terminus mentioned. The
grain spirit mentioned him, too. That’s Polybotes.”
She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she could feel
the giant’s aura of power even from here. She remembered
that feeling from the Heart of the Earth as she
had raised Alcyoneus—as if she were standing near a
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powerful magnet, and all the iron in her blood was being
drawn toward it. This giant was another child of Gaea—a
creature of the earth so malevolent and powerful, he radiated
his own gravitational field.
Hazel knew they should leave. Their hiding place
on top of the rock would be in plain sight to a creature
that tall if he chose to look in their direction. But she
sensed something important was about to happen. She
and her friends crept a little farther down the schist and
kept watching.
As the giant got close, a Cyclops woman broke
ranks and ran back to speak with him. She was enormous,
fat, and horribly ugly, wearing a chain-mail dress like a
muumuu—but next to the giant she looked like a child.
She pointed to the closed-up convenience store on
top of the nearest hill and muttered something about
food. The giant snapped back an answer, as if he was annoyed.
The female Cyclopes barked an order to her
kindred, and three of them followed her up the hill.
When they were halfway to the store, a searing
light turned night into day. Hazel was blinded. Below her,
the enemy army dissolved into chaos, monsters screaming
in pain and outrage. Hazel squinted. She felt like
she’d just stepped out of a dark theater into a sunny
afternoon.
“Too pretty!” the Cyclopes shrieked. “Burns our
eye!”
The store on the hill was encased in a rainbow,
closer and brighter than any Hazel had ever seen. The
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light was anchored at the store, shooting up into the
heavens, bathing the countryside in a weird kaleidoscopic
glow.
The lady Cyclops hefted her club and charged at the
store. As she hit the rainbow, her whole body began to
steam. She wailed in agony and dropped her club, retreating
with multicolored blisters all over her arms and face.
“Horrible goddess!” she bellowed at the store.
“Give us snacks!”
The other monsters went crazy, charging the convenience
store, then running away as the rainbow light
burned them. Some threw rocks, spears, swords, and
even pieces of their armor, all of which burned up in
flames of pretty colors.
Finally the giant leader seemed to realize that his
troops were throwing away perfectly good equipment.
“Stop!” he roared.
With some difficulty, he managed to shout and
push and pummel his troops into submission. When
they’d quieted down, he approached the rainbow-shielded
store himself and stalked around the borders of the light.
“Goddess!” he shouted. “Come out and surrender!”
No answer from the store. The rainbow continued
to shimmer.
The giant raised his trident and net. “I am Polybotes!
Kneel before me so I may destroy you quickly.”
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Apparently, no one in the store was impressed. A
tiny dark object came sailing out the window and landed
at the giant’s feet. Polybotes yelled, “Grenade!”
He covered his face. His troops hit the ground.
When the thing did not explode, Polybotes bent
down cautiously and picked it up.
He roared in outrage. “A Ding Dong? You dare insult
me with a Ding Dong?” He threw the cake back at the
shop, and it vaporized in the light.
The monsters got to their feet. Several muttered
hungrily, “Ding Dongs? Where Ding Dongs?”
“Let’s attack,” said the lady Cyclops. “I am hungry.
My boys want snacks!”
“No!” Polybotes said. “We’re already late. Alcyoneus
wants us at the camp in four days’ time. You Cyclopes
move inexcusably slowly. We have no time for
minor goddesses!”
He aimed that last comment at the store, but got no
response.
The lady Cyclops growled. “The camp, yes. Vengeance!
The orange and purple ones destroyed my home.
Now Ma Gasket will destroy theirs! Do you hear me, Leo?
Jason? Piper? I come to annihilate you!”
The other Cyclopes bellowed in approval. The rest
of the monsters joined in.
Hazel’s whole body tingled. She glanced at her
friends. “Jason,” she whispered. “She fought Jason. He
might still be alive.”
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Frank nodded. “Do those other names mean anything
to you?”
Hazel shook her head. She didn’t know any Leo or
Piper at camp. Percy still looked sickly and dazed. If the
names meant anything to him, he didn’t show it.
Hazel pondered what the Cyclops had said: Orange
and purple ones. Purple—obviously the color of Camp
Jupiter. But orange…Percy had shown up in a tattered orange
shirt. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Below them, the army began to march south again,
but the giant Polybotes stood to one side, frowning and
sniffing the air.
“Sea god,” he muttered. To Hazel’s horror, he
turned in their direction. “I smell sea god.”
Percy was shaking. Hazel put her hand on his
shoulder and tried to press him flat against the rock.
The lady Cyclops Ma Gasket snarled. “Of course
you smell sea god! The sea is right over there!”
“More than that,” Polybotes insisted. “I was born to
destroy Neptune. I can sense…” He frowned, turning his
head and shaking out a few more snakes.
“Do we march or sniff the air?” Ma Gasket scolded.
“I don’t get Ding Dongs, you don’t get sea god!”
Polybotes growled. “Very well. March! March!” He
took one last look at the rainbow-encased store, then
raked his fingers through his hair. He brought out three
snakes that seemed larger than the rest, with white markings
around their necks. “A gift, goddess! My name,
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Polybotes, means ‘Many-to-Feed!’ Here are some hungry
mouths for you. See if your store gets many customers
with these sentries outside.”
He laughed wickedly and threw the snakes into the
tall grass on the hillside.
Then he marched south, his massive Komodo legs
shaking the earth. Gradually, the last column of monsters
passed over the hills and disappeared into the night.
Once they were gone, the blinding rainbow shut off
like a spotlight.
Hazel, Frank, and Percy were left alone in the dark,
staring across the road at a closed-up convenience store.
“That was different,” Frank muttered.
Percy shuddered violently. Hazel knew he needed
help, or rest, or something. Seeing that army seemed to
have triggered some kind of memory, leaving him shell-
shocked. They should get him back to the boat.
On the other hand, a huge stretch of grassland lay
between them and the beach. Hazel got the feeling the
karpoi wouldn’t stay away forever. She didn’t like the idea
of the three of them making their way back to the boat in
the middle of the night. And she couldn’t shake the
dreadful feeling that if she hadn’t summoned that schist,
she’d be a captive of the giant right now.
“Let’s go to the store,” she said. “If there’s a goddess
inside, maybe she can help us.”
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“Except a bunch of snake things are guarding the
hill now,” Frank said. “And that burning rainbow might
comeback.”
They both looked at Percy, who was shaking like he
had hypothermia.
“We’ve got to try,” Hazel said.
Frank nodded grimly. “Well…any goddess who
throws a Ding Dong at a giant can’t be all bad. Let’s go.”
FRANK HATED DING DONGS. He hated snakes. And he
hated his life. Not necessarily in that order.
As he trudged up the hill, he wished that he could
pass out like Hazel—just go into a trance and experience
some other time, like before he got drafted for this insane
quest, before he found out his dad was a godly drill sergeant
with an ego problem.
His bow and spear slapped against his back. He
hated the spear, too. The moment he got it, he silently
swore he’d never use it. A real man’s weapon—Mars was
a moron.
Maybe there had been a mix-up. Wasn’t there some
sort of DNA test for gods’ kids? Perhaps the godly nursery
had accidentally switched Frank with one of Mars’s buff
little bully babies. No way would Frank’s mother have
gotten involved with that blustering war god.
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She was a natural warrior, Grandmother’s voice
argued.
It is no surprise a god would fall in love with her,
given our family. Ancient blood. The blood of princes
and heroes.
Frank shook the thought out of his head. He was no
prince or hero. He was a lactose-intolerant klutz, who
couldn’t even protect his friend from getting kidnapped
by wheat.
His new medals felt cold against his chest: the centurion’s
crescent, the Mural Crown. He should’ve been
proud of them, but he felt like he’d only gotten them because
his dad had bullied Reyna.
Frank didn’t know how his friends could stand to
be around him. Percy had made it clear that he hated
Mars, and Frank couldn’t blame him. Hazel kept watching
Frank out of the corner of her eye, like she was afraid
he might turn into a muscle-bound freak.
Frank looked down at his body and sighed. Correction:
even more of a muscle-bound freak. If Alaska really
was a land beyond the gods, Frank might stay there. He
wasn’t sure he had anything to return to.
Don’t whine, his grandmother would say. Zhang
men do not whine.
She was right. Frank had a job to do. He had to
complete this impossible quest, which at the moment
meant reaching the convenience store alive.
As they got closer, Frank worried that the store
might burst into rainbow light and vaporize them, but the
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building stayed dark. The snakes Polybotes had dropped
seemed to have vanished.
They were twenty yards from the porch when
something hissed in the grass behind them.
“Go!” Frank yelled.
Percy stumbled. While Hazel helped him up, Frank
turned and nocked an arrow.
He shot blindly. He thought he’d grabbed an exploding
arrow, but it was only a signal flare. It skidded
through the grass, bursting into orange flame and whistling:
WOO!
At least it illuminated the monster. Sitting in a
patch of withered yellow grass was a lime-colored snake
as short and thick as Frank’s arm. Its head was ringed
with a mane of spiky white fins. The creature stared at the
arrow zipping by as if wondering, What the heck is that?
Then it fixed its large, yellow eyes on Frank. It advanced
like an inchworm, hunching up in the middle.
Wherever it touched, the grass withered and died.
Frank heard his friends climbing the steps of the
store. He didn’t dare turn and run. He and the snake
studied each other. The snake hissed, flames billowing
from its mouth.
“Nice creepy reptile,” Frank said, very aware of the
driftwood in his coat pocket. “Nice poisonous, fire-
breathing reptile.”
“Frank!” Hazel yelled behind him. “Come on!”
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The snake sprang at him. It sailed through the air
so fast, there wasn’t time to nock an arrow. Frank swung
his bow and smacked the monster down the hill. It spun
out of sight, wailing, “Screeeee!”
Frank felt proud of himself until he looked at his
bow, which was steaming where it had touched the snake.
He watched in disbelief as the wood crumbled to dust.
He heard an outraged hiss, answered by two more
hisses farther downhill.
Frank dropped his disintegrating bow and ran for
the porch. Percy and Hazel pulled him up the steps. When
Frank turned, he saw all three monsters circling in the
grass, breathing fire and turning the hillside brown with
their poisonous touch. They didn’t seem able or willing to
come closer to the store, but that wasn’t much comfort to
Frank. He’d lost his bow.
“We’ll never get out of here,” he said miserably.
“Then we’d better go in.” Hazel pointed to the
hand-painted sign over the door: RAINBOW ORGANIC
FOODS &LIFESTYLES.
Frank had no idea what that meant, but it sounded
better than flaming poisonous snakes. He followed his
friends inside.
As they stepped through the door, lights came on. Flute
music started up like they’d walked onto a stage. The wide
aisles were lined with bins of nuts and dried fruit, baskets
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of apples, and clothing racks with tie-dyed shirts and
gauzy Tinker
Bell–type dresses. The ceiling was covered in wind
chimes. Along the walls, glass cases displayed crystal
balls, geodes, macramé dream catchers, and a bunch of
other strange stuff. Incense must have been burning
somewhere. It smelled like a bouquet of flowers was on
fire.
“Fortune-teller’s shop?” Frank wondered.
“Hope not,” Hazel muttered.
Percy leaned against her. He looked worse than
ever, like he’d been hit with a sudden flu. His face
glistened with sweat. “Sit down…” he muttered. “Maybe
water.”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “Let’s find you a place to rest.”
The floorboards creaked under their feet. Frank
navigated between two Neptune statue fountains.
A girl popped up from behind the granola bins.
“Help you?”
Frank lurched backward, knocking over one of the
fountains. A stone Neptune crashed to the floor. The sea
god’s head rolled off and water spewed out of his neck,
spraying a rack of tie-dyed man satchels.
“Sorry!” Frank bent down to clean up the mess. He
almost goosed the girl with his spear.
“Eep!” she said. “Hold it! It’s okay!”
Frank straightened slowly, trying not to cause any
more damage. Hazel looked mortified. Percy turned a
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sickly shade of green as he stared at the decapitated
statue of his dad.
The girl clapped her hands. The fountain dissolved
into mist. The water evaporated. She turned to Frank.
“Really, it’s no problem. Those Neptune fountains are so
grumpy-looking, they bum me out.”
She reminded Frank of the college-age hikers he
some times saw in Lynn Canyon Park behind his grandmother’s
house. She was short and muscular, with lace-
up boots, cargo shorts, and a bright yellow T-shirt that
read R.O.F.L. Rainbow Organic Foods & Lifestyles. She
looked young, but her hair was frizzy white, sticking out
on either side of her head like the white of a giant fried
egg.
Frank tried to remember how to speak. The girl’s
eyes were really distracting. The irises changed color from
gray to black to white.
“Uh…sorry about the fountain,” he managed. “We
were just—”
“Oh, I know!” the girl said. “You want to browse.
It’s all right. Demigods are welcome. Take your time.
You’re not like those awful monsters. They just want to
use the restroom and never buy anything!”
She snorted. Her eyes flashed with lightning. Frank
glanced at Hazel to see if he’d imagined it, but Hazel
looked just as surprised.
From the back of the store, a woman’s voice called:
“Fleecy? Don’t scare the customers, now. Bring them
here, will you?”
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“Your name is Fleecy?” Hazel asked.
Fleecy giggled. “Well, in the language of the nebulae
it’s actually—” She made a series of crackling and
blowing noises that reminded Frank of a thunderstorm
giving way to a nice cold front. “But you can call me
Fleecy.”
“Nebulae. . .” Percy muttered in a daze. “Cloud
nymphs.”
Fleecy beamed. “Oh, I like this one! Usually no one
knows about cloud nymphs. But dear me, he doesn’t look
so good. Come to the back. My boss wants to meet you.
We’ll get your friend fixed up.”
Fleecy led them through the produce aisle, between
rows of eggplants, kiwis, lotus fruit, and pomegranates.
At the back of the store, behind a counter with an old-
fashioned cash register, stood a middle-aged woman with
olive skin, long black hair, rimless glasses, and a T-shirt
that read: The Goddess Is Alive! She wore amber necklaces
and turquoise rings. She smelled like rose petals.
She looked friendly enough, but something about
her made Frank feel shaky, like he wanted to cry. It took
him a second, then he realized what it was—the way she
smiled with just one corner of her mouth, the warm
brown color of her eyes, the tilt of her head, like she was
considering a question. She reminded Frank of his
mother.
“Hello!” She leaned over the counter, which was
lined with dozens of little statues—waving Chinese cats,
meditating Buddhas, Saint Francis bobble heads, and
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novelty dippy drinking birds with top hats. “So glad
you’re here. I’m Iris!”
Hazel’s eyes widened. “Not the Iris—the rainbow
goddess?”
Iris made a face. “Well, that’s my official job, yes.
But I don’t define myself by my corporate identity. In my
spare time, I run this!” She gestured around her proudly.
“The R.O.F.L. Co-op—an employee-run cooperative promoting
healthy alternative lifestyles and organic foods.”
Frank stared at her. “But you throw Ding Dongs at
monsters.”
Iris looked horrified. “Oh, they’re not Ding Dongs.”
She rummaged under the counter and brought out a
package of chocolate-covered cakes that looked exactly
like Ding Dongs. “These are gluten-free, no-sugar-added,
vitamin-enriched, soy-free, goat-milk-and-seaweed-based
cupcake simulations.”
“All natural!” Fleecy chimed in.
“I stand corrected.” Frank suddenly felt as queasy
as Percy.
Iris smiled. “You should try one, Frank. You’re
lactose intolerant, aren’t you?”
“How did you—”
“I know these things. Being the messenger god-
dess…well, I do learn a lot, hearing all the communications
from the gods and so on.” She tossed the cakes on
the counter. “Besides, those monsters should be glad to
have some healthy snacks. Always eating junk food and
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heroes. They’re so unenlightened. I couldn’t have them
tromping through my store, tearing up things and disturbing
our feng shui.”
Percy leaned against the counter. He looked like he
was going to throw up all over the goddess’s feng shui.
“Monsters marching south,” he said with difficulty. “Going
to destroy our camp. Couldn’t you stop them?”
“Oh, I’m strictly nonviolent,” Iris said. “I can act in
self-defense, but I won’t be drawn into any more Olympian
aggression, thank you very much. I’ve been reading
about Buddhism. And Taoism. I haven’t decided between
them.”
“But…” Hazel looked mystified. “Aren’t you a Greek
goddess?”
Iris crossed her arms. “Don’t try to put me in a box,
demigod! I’m not defined by my past.”
“Um, okay,” Hazel said. “Could you at least help
our friend here? I think he’s sick.”
Percy reached across the counter. For a second
Frank was afraid he wanted the cupcakes. “Iris-message,”
he said. “Can you send one?”
Frank wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “Iris-message?”
“It’s…” Percy faltered. “Isn’t that something you
do?”
Iris studied Percy more closely. “Interesting. You’re
from Camp Jupiter, and yet…Oh, I see. Juno is up to her
tricks.”
“What?” Hazel asked.
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Iris glanced at her assistant, Fleecy. They seemed
to have a silent conversation. Then the goddess pulled a
vial from behind the counter and sprayed some
honeysuckle-smelling oil around Percy’s face. “There, that
should balance your chakra. As for Iris-messages—that’s
an ancient way of communication. The Greeks used it.
The Romans never took to it—always relying on their
road systems and giant eagles and whatnot. But yes, I
imagine…Fleecy, could you give it a try?”
“Sure, boss!”
Iris winked at Frank. “Don’t tell the other gods, but
Fleecy handles most of my messages these days. She’s
wonderful at it, really, and I don’t have time to answer all
those requests personally. It messes up my wa.”
“Your wa?” Frank asked.
“Mmm. Fleecy, why don’t you take Percy and Hazel
into the back? You can get them something to eat while
you arrange their messages. And for Percy…yes, memory
sickness. I imagine that old Polybotes…well, meeting him
in a state of amnesia can’t be good for a child of P—that is
to say, Neptune. Fleecy, give him a cup of green tea with
organic honey and wheat germ and some of my medicinal
powder number five. That should fix him up.”
Hazel frowned. “What about Frank?”
Iris turned to him. She tilted her head quizzically,
just the way his mother used to—as if Frank were the
biggest question in the room.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Iris said. “Frank and I have a lot
to talk about.”
FRANK WOULD’VE PREFERRED TO go with his friends,
even if it meant he had to endure green tea with wheat
germ. But Iris roped her arm through his and led him to a
café table at a bay window. Frank set his spear on the
floor. He sat across from Iris. Outside in the dark, the
snake monsters restlessly patrolled the hillside, spewing
fire and poisoning the grass.
“Frank, I know how you feel,” Iris said. “I imagine
that half-burned stick in your pocket gets heavier every
day.”
Frank couldn’t breathe. His hand went instinctively
to his coat. “How do you—?”
“I told you. I know things. I was Juno’s messenger
for ages. I know why she gave you a reprieve.”
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“A reprieve?” Frank brought out the piece of firewood
and unwrapped it from its cloth. As unwieldy as
Mars’s spear was, the piece of tinder was worse. Iris was
right. It weighed him down.
“Juno saved you for a reason,” the goddess said.
“She wants you to serve her plan. If she hadn’t appeared
that day when you were a baby and warned your mother
about the firewood, you would’ve died. You were born
with too many gifts. That sort of power tends to burn out
a mortal life.”
“Too many gifts?” Frank felt his ears getting warm
with anger. “I don’t have any gifts!”
“That’s not true, Frank.” Iris swiped her hand in
front of her like she was cleaning a windshield. A miniature
rainbow appeared. “Think about it.”
An image shimmered in the rainbow. Frank saw
himself when he was four years old, running across
Grandmother’s backyard. His mother leaned out the window
of the attic, high above, waving and calling to get his
attention. Frank wasn’t supposed to be in the backyard by
himself. He didn’t know why his mother was up in the attic,
but she told him to stay by the house, not to go too far.
Frank did exactly the opposite. He squealed with delight
and ran to the edge of the woods, where he came face to
face with a grizzly bear.
Until Frank saw that scene in the rainbow, the
memory had been so hazy, he thought he’d dreamed it.
Now he could appreciate just how surreal the experience
had been. The bear regarded the little boy, and it was difficult
to tell who was more startled. Then Frank’s mother
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appeared at his side. There was no way she should have
been able to get down from the attic so fast. She put herself
between the bear and Frank and told him to run to
the house. This time, Frank obeyed. When he turned at
the back porch, he saw his mother coming out of the
woods. The bear was gone. Frank asked what had
happened. His mother smiled. Mama Bear just needed
directions, she said.
The scene in the rainbow changed. Frank saw himself
as a six-year-old, curling up in his mother’s lap even
though he was much too big for that. His mother’s long
black hair was pulled back. Her arms were around him.
She wore her rimless glasses that Frank always liked to
steal, and her fuzzy gray fleece pullover that smelled like
cinnamon. She was telling him stories about heroes, pretending
they were all related to Frank: one was Xu Fu,
who sailed in search of the elixir of life. The rainbow image
had no sound, but Frank remembered his mother’s
words: He was your great-great-great-…She would poke
Frank’s stomach every time she said great-, dozens of
times, until he was giggling uncontrollably.
Then there was Sung Guo, also called Seneca Gracchus,
who fought twelve Roman dragons and sixteen
Chinese dragons in the western deserts of China. He was
the strongest dragon of all, you see, his mother said.
That’s how he could beat them! Frank didn’t know what
that meant, but it sounded exciting.
Then she poked his belly with so many greats,
Frank rolled onto the floor to escape the tickling. And
your very oldest ancestor that we know of: he was the
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Prince of Pylos! Hercules fought him once. It was a hard
fight!
Did we win? Frank asked.
His mother laughed, but there was sadness in her
voice. No, our ancestor lost. But it wasn’t easy for Hercules.
Imagine trying to fight a swarm of bees. That’s
how it was. Even Hercules had trouble!
The comment made no sense to Frank, then or
now. His ancestor had been a beekeeper?
Frank hadn’t thought about these stories in years,
but now they came back to him as clearly as his mother’s
face. It hurt to see her again. Frank wanted to go back to
that time. He wanted to be a little kid and curl up on her
lap.
In the rainbow image, little Frank asked where
their family was from. So many heroes! Were they from
Pylos, or Rome, or China, or Canada?
His mother smiled, tilting her head as if considering
how to answer.
Li-Jien, she said at last. Our family is from many
places, but our home is Li-Jien. Always remember,
Frank: you have a special gift. You can be anything.
The rainbow dissolved, leaving just Iris and Frank.
“I don’t understand.” His voice was hoarse.
“Your mother explained it,” Iris said. “You can be
anything.”
It sounded like one of those stupid things parents
say to boost your self-esteem—a worn-out slogan that
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could be printed on Iris’s T-shirts, right along with The
Goddess Is Alive! and My Other Car Is a Magic Carpet!
But the way Iris said it, it sounded like a challenge.
Frank pressed his hand against his pants pocket,
where he kept his mother’s sacrifice medal. The silver
medallion was cold as ice.
“I can’t be anything,” Frank insisted. “I’ve got zero
skills.”
“What have you tried?” Iris asked. “You wanted to
be an archer. You managed that pretty well. You’ve only
scratched the surface. Your friends Hazel and
Percy—they’re both stretched between worlds: Greek and
Roman, the past and the present. But you are stretched
more than either of them.
Your family is ancient—the blood of Pylos on your
mother’s side, and your father is Mars. No wonder Juno
wants you to be one of her seven heroes. She wants you to
fight the giants and Gaea. But think about this: What do
you want?”
“I don’t have any choice,” Frank said. “I’m the son
of the stupid war god. I have to go on this quest and—”
“Have to,” Iris said. “Not want to. I used to think
like that. Then I got tired of being everyone’s servant.
Fetch goblets of wine for Jupiter. Deliver letters for Juno.
Send messages back and forth across the rainbow for anyone
with a golden drachma.”
“A golden what?”
“Not important. But I learned to let go. I started
R.O.F.L., and now I’m free of that baggage. You can let
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go, too. Maybe you can’t escape fate. Someday that piece
of wood will burn. I foresee that you’ll be holding it when
it happens, and your life will end—”
“Thanks,” Frank muttered.
“—but that just makes your life more precious! You
don’t have to be what your parents and your grandmother
expect.
You don’t have to follow the war god’s orders, or
Juno’s. Do your own thing, Frank! Find a new path!”
Frank thought about that. The idea was thrilling:
reject the gods, his destiny, his dad. He didn’t want to be
a war god’s son. His mother had died in a war. Frank had
lost everything thanks to a war. Mars clearly didn’t know
the first thing about him. Frank didn’t want to be a hero.
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked. “You want
me to abandon the quest, let Camp Jupiter be destroyed?
My friends are counting on me.”
Iris spread her hands. “I can’t tell you what to do,
Frank.
But do what you want, not what they tell you to do.
Where did conforming ever get me? I spent five millennia
serving everyone else, and I never discovered my own
identity. What’s my sacred animal? No one bothered to
give me one. Where are my temples? They never made
any. Well, fine! I’ve found peace here at the co-op. You
could stay with us, if you want.
Become a ROFLcopter.”
“A what, now?”
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“The point is you have options. If you continue this
quest…what happens when you free Thanatos? Will it be
good for your family? Your friends?”
Frank remembered what his grandmother had
said: she had an appointment with Death. Grandmother
infuriated him sometimes; but still, she was his only living
family, the only person alive who loved him. If
Thanatos stayed chained up, Frank might not lose her.
And Hazel—somehow she had come back from the
Underworld. If Death took her again, Frank wouldn’t be
able to stand it. Not to mention Frank’s own problem: according
to Iris, he should have died when he was a baby.
All that stood between him and Death was a half-burned
stick. Would Thanatos take him away, too?
Frank tried to imagine staying here with Iris, putting
on a R.O.F.L. shirt, selling crystals and dream catchers
to demigod travelers and lobbing gluten-free cupcake
simulations at passing monsters. Meanwhile, an undying
army would overrun Camp Jupiter.
You can be anything, his mother had said.
No, he thought. I can’t be that selfish.
“I have to go,” he said. “It’s my job.”
Iris sighed. “I expected as much, but I had to try.
The task ahead of you…Well, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,
especially a nice boy like you. If you must go, at least
I can offer some advice. You’ll need help finding
Thanatos.”“You know where the giants are hiding him?”
Frank asked.
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Iris gazed thoughtfully at the wind chimes swaying
on the ceiling. “No…Alaska is beyond the gods’ sphere of
control. The location is shielded from my sight. But there
is someone who would know. Seek out the seer Phineas.
He’s blind, but he can see the past, present, and future.
He knows many things. He can tell you where Thanatos is
being held.”
“Phineas…” Frank said. “Wasn’t there a story about
him?”
Iris nodded reluctantly. “In the old days, he committed
horrible crimes. He used his gift of sight for evil.
Jupiter sent the harpies to plague him. The Argonauts—
including your ancestor, by the way—”
“The prince of Pylos?”
Iris hesitated. “Yes, Frank. Though his gift, his
story…that you must discover on your own. Suffice it to
say, the Argonauts drove away the harpies in exchange for
Phineas’s help. That was eons ago, but I understand
Phineas has returned to the mortal world. You’ll find him
in Portland, Oregon, which is on your way north. But you
must promise me one thing. If he’s still plagued by
harpies, do not kill them, no matter what Phineas promises
you. Win his help some other way. The harpies are
not evil. They’re my sisters.”
“Your sisters?”
“I know. I don’t look old enough to be the harpies’
sister, but it’s true. And Frank…there’s another problem.
If you’re determined to leave, you’ll have to clear those
basilisks off the hill.”
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“You mean the snakes?”
“Yes,” Iris said. “Basilisk means ‘little crown,’
which is a cute name for something that’s not very cute.
I’d prefer not to have them killed. They’re living
creatures, after all. But you won’t be able to leave until
they’re gone. If your friends try to battle them…well, I
foresee see bad things happening. Only you have the abil
ity to kill the monsters.”
“But how?”
She glanced down at the floor. Frank realized that
she was looking at his spear.
“I wish there was another way,” she said. “If you
had some weasels, for instance. Weasels are deadly to
basilisks.”
“Fresh out of weasels,” Frank admitted.
“Then you will have to use your father’s gift. Are
you sure you wouldn’t like to live here instead? We make
excellent lactose-free rice milk.”
Frank rose. “How do I use the spear?”
“You’ll have to handle that on your own. I can’t advocate
violence. While you’re doing battle, I’ll check on
your friends. I hope Fleecy found the right medicinal
herbs. The last time, we had a mix-up.…Well, I don’t
think those heroes wanted to be daisies.”
The goddess stood. Her glasses flashed, and Frank
saw his own reflection in the lenses. He looked serious
and grim, nothing like the little boy he’d seen in those
rainbow images.
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“One last bit of advice, Frank,” she said. “You’re
destined to die holding that piece of firewood, watching it
burn. But perhaps if you didn’t keep it yourself. Perhaps if
you trusted someone enough to hold it for you…”
Frank’s fingers curled around the tinder. “Are you
offering?”
Iris laughed gently. “Oh, dear, no. I’d lose it in this
collection. It would get mixed up with my crystals, or I’d
sell it as a driftwood paperweight by accident. No, I
meant a demigod friend. Someone close to your heart.”
Hazel, Frank thought immediately. There was no
one he trusted more. But how could he confess his secret?
If he admitted how weak he was, that his whole life depended
on a half-burned stick…Hazel would never see
him as a hero. He’d never be her knight in armor. And
how could he expect her to take that kind of burden from
him?
He wrapped up the tinder and slipped it back into
his coat. “Thanks ... thanks, Iris.”
She squeezed his hand. “Don’t lose hope, Frank.
Rainbows always stand for hope.”
She made her way toward the back of the store,
leaving Frank alone.
“Hope,” Frank grumbled. “I’d rather have a few
good weasels.”
He picked up his father’s spear and marched out to
face the basilisks.
FRANK MISSED HIS BOW.
He wanted to stand on the porch and shoot the
snakes from a distance. A few well-placed exploding arrows,
a few craters in the hillside—problem solved.
Unfortunately, a quiver full of arrows wouldn’t do
Frank much good if he couldn’t shoot them. Besides, he
had no idea where the basilisks were. They’d stopped
blowing fire as soon as he came outside.
He stepped off the porch and leveled his golden
spear. He didn’t like fighting up close. He was too slow
and bulky. He’d done okay during the war games, but this
was real. There were no giant eagles ready to snatch him
up and take him to the medics if he made a mistake.
You can be anything. His mother’s voice echoed in
his mind.
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Great, he thought. I want to be good with a spear.
And immune to poison—and fire.
Something told Frank his wish had not been granted.
The spear felt just as awkward in his hands.
Patches of flame still smoldered on the hillside. The
acrid smoke burned in Frank’s nose. The withered grass
crunched under his feet.
He thought about those stories his mother used to
tell—generations of heroes who had battled Hercules,
fought dragons, and sailed monster-infested seas. Frank
didn’t understand how he could have evolved from a line
like that, or how his family had migrated from Greece
through the Roman Empire all the way to China, but
some unsettling ideas were starting to form. For the first
time, he started to wonder about this Prince of Pylos, and
his great-grandfather Shen Lun’s disgrace at Camp
Jupiter, and what the family powers might be.
The gift has never kept our family safe, Grandmother
had warned.
A reassuring thought as Frank hunted poisonous
fire- breathing devil snakes.
The night was quiet except for the crackle of brush
fires. Every time a breeze made the grass rustle, Frank
thought about the grain spirits who’d captured Hazel.
Hopefully they’d gone south with the giant Polybotes.
Frank didn’t need any more problems right now.
He crept downhill, his eyes stinging from the
smoke. Then, about twenty feet ahead, he saw a burst of
flame.
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He considered throwing his spear. Stupid idea.
Then he’d be without a weapon. Instead he advanced toward
the fire.
He wished he had the gorgon’s blood vials, but they
were back at the boat. He wondered if gorgon blood could
cure basilisk poison.…But even if he had the vials and
managed to choose the right one, he doubted he’d have
time to take it before he crumbled to dust like his bow.
He emerged in a clearing of burned grass and
found himself face-to-face with a basilisk.
The snake rose up on its tail. It hissed, and expanded
the collar of white spikes around its neck. Little
crown, Frank remembered. That’s what “basilisk” meant.
He had thought basilisks were huge dragon like monsters
that could petrify you with their eyes. Somehow the real
basilisk was even more terrible. As tiny as it was, this
extra-small package of fire, poison, and evil would be
much harder to kill than a large, bulky lizard. Frank had
seen how fast it could move.
The monster fixed its pale yellow eyes on Frank.
Why wasn’t it attacking?
Frank’s golden spear felt cold and heavy. The
dragon-tooth point dipped toward the ground all on its
own—like a dowsing rod searching for water.
“Stop that.” Frank struggled to the lift the spear.
He’d have enough trouble jabbing the monster without
his spear fighting against him. Then he heard the grass
rustle on either side of him. The other two basilisks
slithered into the clearing.
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Frank had walked straight into an ambush.
FRANK SWEPT HIS SPEAR BACK AND FORTH. “Stay
back!” His voice sounded squeaky. “I’ve got .. .
um…amazing powers—and stuff.”
The basilisks hissed in three-part harmony. Maybe
they were laughing.
The spear tip was almost too heavy to lift now, as if
the jagged white triangle of bone was trying to touch the
earth. Then something clicked in the back of Frank’s
mind: Mars had said the tip was a dragon’s tooth. Hadn’t
there been some story about dragon’s teeth planted in the
ground? Something he’d read in monster class at camp…?
The basilisks circled him, taking their time. Maybe
they were hesitating because of the spear. Maybe they just
couldn’t believe how stupid Frank was.
It seemed like madness, but Frank let the spear tip
drop. He drove it into the ground. Crack.
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When he lifted it out, the tip was gone—broken off
in the dirt.
Wonderful. Now he had a golden stick.
Some crazy part of him wanted to bring out his
piece of firewood. If he was going to die anyway, maybe
he could set off a massive blaze—incinerate the basilisks,
so at least his friends could get away.
Before he could get up the courage, the ground
rumbled at his feet. Dirt spewed everywhere, and a skeletal
hand clawed the air. The basilisks hissed and backed
up.
Frank couldn’t blame them. He watched in horror
as a human skeleton crawled out of the ground. It took on
flesh as if someone were pouring gelatin over its bones,
covering them in glowing, transparent gray skin. Then
ghostly clothes enveloped it—a muscle shirt, camo pants,
and army boots. Everything about the creature was gray:
gray clothes on gray flesh on gray bones.
It turned toward Frank. Its skull grinned beneath
an expressionless gray face. Frank whimpered like a
puppy. His legs shook so badly he had to support himself
with the spear shaft. The skeleton warrior was waiting,
Frank realized—waiting for orders.
“Kill the basilisks!” he yelped. “Not me!”
The skeletal warrior leaped into action. He grabbed
the nearest snake, and though his gray flesh began to
smoke on contact, he strangled the basilisk with one hand
and flung down its limp body. The other two basilisks
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hissed with rage. One sprang at Frank, but he knocked it
aside with the butt of his spear.
The other snake belched fire directly in the skeleton’s
face. The warrior marched forward and stomped the
basilisk’s head under his boot.
Frank turned toward the last basilisk, which was
curled at the edge of the clearing studying them. Frank’s
Imperial gold spear shaft was steaming, but unlike his
bow, it didn’t seem to be crumbling from the basilisk’s
touch. The skeleton warrior’s right foot and hand were
slowly dissolving from poison. His head was on fire, but
otherwise he looked pretty good.
The basilisk did the smart thing. It turned to flee.
In a blur of motion, the skeleton pulled something from
his shirt and flung it across the clearing, impaling the basilisk
in the dirt. Frank thought it was a knife. Then he
realized it was one of the skeleton’s own ribs.
Frank was glad his stomach was empty. “That…that
was gross.”
The skeleton stumbled over to the basilisk. It
pulled out its rib and used it to cut off the creature’s head.
The basilisk dissolved into ashes. Then the skeleton decapitated
the other two monster carcasses and kicked all
the ashes to disperse them. Frank remembered the two
gorgons in the Tiber—the way the river had pulled apart
their remains to keep them from re-forming. “You’re
making sure they don’t come back,” Frank realized.
“Or slowing them down, anyway.”
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The skeleton warrior stood at attention in front of
Frank. Its poisoned foot and hand were mostly gone. Its
head was still burning.
“What—what are you?” Frank asked. He wanted to
add, Please don’t hurt me.
The skeleton saluted with its stump of a hand. Then
it began to crumble, sinking back into the ground.
“Wait!” Frank said. “I don’t even know what to call
you! Tooth Man? Bones? Gray?”
As its face disappeared beneath the dirt, the warrior
seemed to grin at the last name—or maybe that was
just its skeletal teeth showing. Then it was gone, leaving
Frank alone with his pointless spear.
“Gray,” he muttered. “Okay ... but...”
He examined the tip of his spear. Already, a new
dragon tooth was starting to grow out of the golden shaft.
You get three charges out of it, Mars had said, so
use it wisely.
Frank heard footsteps behind him. Percy and Hazel
ran into the clearing. Percy looked better, except he was
carrying a-tie-dyed man satchel from R.O.F.L.—definitely
not his style. Riptide was in his hand. Hazel had drawn
her spatha.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Percy turned in a circle, looking for enemies. “Iris
told us you were out here battling the basilisks by yourself,
and we were like, What? We came as fast as we
could. What happened?”
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“I’m not sure,” Frank admitted.
Hazel crouched next to the dirt where Gray disappeared.
“I sense death. Either my brother has been here
or…the basilisks are dead?”
Percy stared at him in awe. “You killed them all?”
Frank swallowed. He already felt like enough of a
misfit without trying to explain his new undead minion.
Three charges. Frank could call on Gray twice
more. But he’d sensed malevolence in the skeleton. It was
no pet. It was a vicious, undead killing force, barely controlled
by the power of Mars. Frank got the feeling it
would do what he said—but if his friends happened to be
in the line of fire, oh well. And if Frank was a little slow
giving it directions, it might start killing whatever was in
its path, including its master.
Mars had told him the spear would give him
breathing room until he learned to use his mother’s talents.
Which meant Frank needed to learn those tal
ents—fast.
“Thanks a lot, Dad,” he grumbled.
“What?” Hazel asked. “Frank, are you okay?”
“I’ll explain later,” he said. “Right now, there’s a
blind man in Portland we’ve got to see.”
PERCY ALREADY FELT LIKE THE lamest demigod in the
history of lame. The purse was the final insult.
They’d left R.O.F.L. in a hurry, so maybe Iris hadn’t
meant the bag as a criticism. She’d quickly stuffed it with
vitamin-enriched pastries, dried fruit leather, macrobiotic
beef jerky, and a few crystals for good luck. Then she’d
shoved it at Percy:
Here, you’ll need this. Oh, that looks good.The
purse—sorry, masculine accessory bag—was rainbow tie-
dyed with a peace symbol stitched in wooden beads and
the slogan Hug the Whole World. Percy wished it said
Hug the Commode. He felt like the bag was a comment
on his mas sive, incredible uselessness. As they sailed
north, he put the man satchel as far away from him as he
could, but the boat was small.
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He couldn’t believe how he’d broken down when
his friends had needed him. First, he’d been dumb
enough to leave them alone when he had run back to the
boat, and Hazel had gotten kidnapped. Then he’d
watched that army marching south and had some kind of
nervous breakdown.
Embarrassing? Yeah. But he couldn’t help it. When
he’d seen those evil centaurs and Cyclopes, it had seemed
so wrong, so backward, that he thought his head would
explode. And the giant Polybotes…that giant had given
him a feeling the opposite of what he felt when he stood
in the ocean. Percy’s energy had drained out of him, leaving
him weak and feverish, like his insides were eroding.
Iris’s medicinal tea had helped his body feel better,
but his mind still hurt. He’d heard stories about amputees
who had phantom pains where their missing legs and
arms used to be. That’s how his mind felt—like his missing
memories were aching.
Worst of all, the farther north Percy went, the more
those memories faded. He had started to feel better at
Camp Jupiter, remembering random names and faces.
But now even Annabeth’s face was getting dimmer. At
R.O.F.L., when he’d tried to send an Iris-message to Annabeth,
Fleecy had just shaken her head sadly.
It’s like you’re dialing somebody, she said, but
you’ve forgotten the number. Or someone is jamming the
signal. Sorry, dear. I just can’t connect you.
He was terrified that he’d lose Annabeth’s face
completely when he got to Alaska. Maybe he’d wake up
one day and not remember her name.
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Still, he had to concentrate on the quest. The sight
of that enemy army had shown him what they were up
against. It was early in the morning of June 21, now. They
had to get to Alaska, find Thanatos, locate the legion’s
standard, and make it back to Camp Jupiter by the evening
of June 24. Four days. Meanwhile, the enemy had
only a few hundred miles to march.
Percy guided the boat through the strong currents
off the northern California coast. The wind was cold, but
it felt good, clearing some of the confusion from his head.
He bent his will to push the boat as hard as he could. The
hull rattled as the Pax plowed its way north.
Meanwhile, Hazel and Frank traded stories about
the events at Rainbow Organic Foods. Frank explained
about the blind seer Phineas in Portland, and how Iris
had said that he might be able to tell them where to find
Thanatos. Frank wouldn’t say how he had managed to kill
the basilisks, but Percy got the feeling it had something to
do with the broken point of his spear. Whatever had
happened, Frank sounded more scared of the spear than
the basilisks.
When he was done, Hazel told Frank about their
time with Fleecy.
“So this Iris-message worked?” Frank asked.
Hazel gave Percy a sympathetic look. She didn’t
mention his failure to contact Annabeth.
“I got in touch with Reyna,” she said. “You’re supposed
to throw a coin into a rainbow and say this incantation,
like O Iris, goddess of the rainbow, accept my
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offering. Except Fleecy kind of changed it. She gave us
her—what did she call it—her direct number? So I had to
say, O Fleecy, do me a solid. Show Reyna at Camp
Jupiter. I felt kind of stupid, but it worked. Reyna’s image
appeared in the rainbow, like in a two-way video call. She
was in the baths. Scared her out of her mind.”
“That I would’ve paid to see,” Frank said. “I
mean—her expression. Not, you know, the baths.”
“Frank!” Hazel fanned her face like she needed air.
It was an old-fashioned gesture, but cute, somehow.
“Anyway, we told Reyna about the army, but like Percy
said, she pretty much already knew. It doesn’t change
anything. She’s doing what she can to shore up the defenses.
Unless we unleash Death, and get back with the
eagle—”
“The camp can’t stand against that army,” Frank
finished. “Not without help.”
After that, they sailed in silence.
Percy kept thinking about Cyclopes and centaurs.
He thought about Annabeth, the satyr Grover, and his
dream of a giant warship under construction.
You came from somewhere, Reyna had said.
Percy wished he could remember. He could call for
help. Camp Jupiter shouldn’t have to fight alone against
the giants. There must be allies out there.
He fingered the beads on his necklace, the lead
probatiotablet, and the silver ring Reyna had given him.
Maybe in Seattle he’d be able to talk to her sister Hylla.
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She might send help—assuming she didn’t kill Percy on
sight.
After a few more hours of navigating, Percy’s eyes
started to droop. He was afraid he’d pass out from exhaustion.
Then he caught a break. A killer whale surfaced
next to the boat, and Percy struck up a mental conversation
with him.
It wasn’t exactly like talking, but it went something
like this: Could you give us a ride north, Percy asked, like
as close to Portland as possible?
Eat seals, the whale responded. Are you seals?
No, Percy admitted. I’ve got a man satchel full of
macrobiotic beef jerky, though.
The whale shuddered. Promise not to feed me this,
and I will take you north.
Deal.
Soon Percy had made a makeshift rope harness and
strapped it around the whale’s upper body. They sped
north under whale-power, and at Hazel and Frank’s insistence,
Percy settled in for a nap.
His dreams were as disjointed and scary as ever.
He imagined himself on Mount Tamalpais, north of
San Francisco, fighting at the old Titan stronghold. That
didn’t make sense. He hadn’t been with the Romans when
they had attacked, but he saw it all clearly: a Titan in armor,
Annabet hand two other girls fighting at Percy’s
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side. One of the girls died in the battle. Percy knelt over
her, watching as she dissolved into stars.
Then he saw the giant warship in its dry dock. The
bronze dragon figurehead glinted in the morning light.
The riggings and armaments were complete, but
something was wrong. A hatch in the deck was open, and
smoke poured from some kind of engine. A boy with curly
black hair was cursing as he pounded the engine with a
wrench. Two other demigods squatted next to him,
watching with concern. One was a teenage guy with short
blond hair. The other was a girl with long dark hair.
“You realize it’s the solstice,” the girl said. “We’re
supposed to leave today.”
“I know that!” The curly-haired mechanic whacked
the engine a few more times. “Could be the fizzrockets.
Could be the samophlange. Could be Gaea messing with
us again. I’m not sure!”
“How long?” the blond guy asked.
“Two, three days?”
“They may not have that long,” the girl warned.
Something told Percy that she meant Camp
Jupiter. Then the scene shifted again.
He saw a boy and his dog roaming over the yellow
hills of California. But as the image became clearer, Percy
realized it wasn’t a boy. It was a Cyclops in ragged jeans
and a flannel shirt. The dog was a shambling mountain of
black fur, easily as big as a rhino. The Cyclops carried a
massive club over his shoulder, but Percy didn’t feel that
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he was an enemy. He kept yelling Percy’s name, calling
him…brother?
“He smells farther away,” the Cyclops moaned to
the dog. “Why does he smell farther?”
“ROOF!” the dog barked, and Percy’s dream
changed again.
He saw a range of snowy mountains, so tall they
broke the clouds. Gaea’s sleeping face appeared in the
shadows of the rocks.
Such a valuable pawn, she said soothingly. Do not
fear, Percy Jackson. Come north! Your friends will die,
yes. But I will preserve you for now. I have great plans
for you.
In a valley between the mountains lay a massive
field of ice. The edge plunged into the sea, hundreds of
feet below, with sheets of frost constantly crumbling into
the water. On top of the ice field stood a legion
camp—ramparts, moats, towers, barracks, just like Camp
Jupiter except three times as large. At the crossroads outside
the principia, a figure in dark robes stood shackled
to the ice. Percy’s vision swept past him, into the
headquarters. There, in the gloom, sat a giant even bigger
than Polybotes. His skin glinted gold. Displayed behind
him were the tattered, frozen banners of a Roman legion,
including a large, golden eagle with its wings spread.
We await you, the giant’s voice boomed. While you
fumble your way north, trying to find me, my armies
will destroy your precious camps—first the Romans,
then the others. You cannot win, little demigod.
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Percy lurched awake in cold gray daylight, rain falling on
his face.
“I thought I slept heavily,” Hazel said. “Welcome to
Portland.”
Percy sat up and blinked. The scene around him
was so different from his dream, he wasn’t sure which
was real. The Pax floated on an iron-black river through
the middle of a city. Heavy clouds hung low overhead.
The cold rain was so light, it seemed suspended in the air.
On Percy’s left were industrial warehouses and railroad
tracks. To his right was a small downtown area—an
almost cozy-looking cluster of towers between the banks
of the river and a line of misty forested hills.
Percy rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “How did we
get here?”
Frank gave him a look like, You won’t believe this.
“The killer whale took us as far as the Columbia River.
Then he passed the harness to a couple of twelve-foot
sturgeons.”
Percy thought Frank had said surgeons. He had
this weird image of giant doctors in scrubs and face
masks, pulling their boat upstream. Then he realized
Frank meant sturgeons, like the fish. He was glad he
hadn’t said anything. Would have been embarrassing, his
being son of the sea god and all.
“Anyway,” Frank continued, “the sturgeons pulled
us for a long time. Hazel and I took turns sleeping. Then
we hit this river—”
“The Willamette,” Hazel offered.
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“Right,” Frank said. “After that, the boat kind of
took over and navigated us here all by itself. Sleep okay?”
As the Pax glided south, Percy told them about his
dreams. He tried to focus on the positive: a warship might
be on the way to help Camp Jupiter. A friendly Cyclops
and a giant dog were looking for him. He didn’t mention
what Gaea had said: Your friends will die.
When Percy described the Roman fort on the ice,
Hazel looked troubled.
“So Alcyoneus is on a glacier,” she said. “That
doesn’t narrow it down much. Alaska has hundreds of
those.”
Percy nodded. “Maybe this seer dude Phineas can
tell us which one.”
The boat docked itself at a wharf. The three demigods
stared up at the buildings of drizzly downtown
Portland.
Frank wiped the rain off his flat-top hair.
“So now we find a blind man in the rain,” Frank
said.
“Yay.”
IT WASN’T AS HARD AS THEY THOUGHT. The screaming
and the weed whacker helped.
They’d brought lightweight Polartec jackets with
their supplies, so they bundled up against the cold rain
and walked for a few blocks through the mostly deserted
streets. This time Percy was smart and brought most of
his supplies from the boat. He even stuffed the macrobiotic
jerky in his coat pocket, in case he needed to threaten
any more killer whales.
They saw some bicycle traffic and a few homeless
guy shuddled in doorways, but the majority of
Portlanders seemed to be staying indoors.
As they made their way down Glisan Street, Percy
looked longingly at the folks in the cafés enjoying coffee
and pastries. He was about to suggest that they stop for
breakfast when he heard a voice down the street yelling:
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“HA! TAKE THAT, STUPID CHICKENS!” followed by the
revving of a small engine and a lot of squawking.
Percy glanced at his friends. “You think—?”
“Probably,” Frank agreed.
They ran toward the sounds.
The next block over, they found a big open parking
lot with tree-lined sidewalks and rows of food trucks facing
the streets on all four sides. Percy had seen food
trucks before, but never so many in once place. Some
were simple white metal boxes on wheels, with awnings
and serving counters. Others were painted blue or purple
or polka-dotted, with big banners out front and colorful
menu boards and tables like do-it-yourself sidewalk cafés.
One advertised Korean/Brazilian fusion tacos, which
sounded like some kind of top-secret radioactive cuisine.
Another offered sushi on a stick. A third was selling deep-
fried ice cream sandwiches. The smell was amazing—
dozens of different kitchens cooking at once.
Percy’s stomach rumbled. Most of the food carts
were open for business, but there was hardly anyone
around. They could get anything they wanted! Deep-fried
ice cream sandwiches? Oh, man, that sounded way better
than wheat germ.
Unfortunately, there was more happening than just
cooking. In the center of the lot, behind all the food
trucks, an old man in a bathrobe was running around
with a weed whacker, screaming at a flock of bird-ladies
who were trying to steal food off a picnic table.
“Harpies,” said Hazel. “Which means—”
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“That’s Phineas,” Frank guessed.
They ran across the street and squeezed between
the Korean/Brazilian truck and a Chinese egg roll burrito
vendor.
The backs of the food trucks weren’t nearly as appetizing
as the fronts. They were cluttered with stacks of
plastic buckets, overflowing garbage cans, and makeshift
clotheslines hung with wet aprons and towels. The parking
lot itself was nothing but a square of cracked asphalt,
marbled with weeds. In the middle was a picnic table
piled high with food from all the different trucks.
The guy in the bathrobe was old and fat. He was
mostly bald, with scars across his forehead and a rim of
stringy white hair. His bathrobe was spattered with
ketchup, and he kept stumbling around in fuzzy pink
bunny slippers, swinging his gas-powered weed whacker
at the half-dozen harpies who were hovering over his picnic
table.
He was clearly blind. His eyes were milky white,
and usually he missed the harpies by a lot, but he was still
doing a pretty good job fending them off.
“Back, dirty chickens!” he bellowed.
Percy wasn’t sure why, but he had a vague sense
that harpies were supposed to be plump. These looked
like they were starving. Their human faces had sunken
eyes and hollow cheeks. Their bodies were covered in
molting feathers, and their wings were tipped with tiny,
shriveled hands. They wore ragged burlap sacks for
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dresses. As they dived for the food, they seemed more
desperate than angry. Percy felt sorry for them.
WHIRRRR! The old man swung his weed whacker.
He grazed one of the harpies’ wings. The harpy yelped in
pain and fluttered off, dropping yellow feathers as she
flew.
Another harpy circled higher than the rest. She
looked younger and smaller than the others, with bright-
red feathers.
She watched carefully for an opening, and when the
old man’s back was turned, she made a wild dive for the
table. She grabbed a burrito in her clawed feet, but before
she could escape, the blind man swung his weed whacker
and smacked her in the back so hard, Percy winced. The
harpy yelped, dropped the burrito, and flew off.
“Hey, stop it!” Percy yelled.
The harpies took that the wrong way. They glanced
over at the three demigods and immediately fled. Most of
them fluttered away and perched in the trees around the
square, staring dejectedly at the picnic table. The red-
feathered one with the hurt back flew unsteadily down Glisan
Street and out of sight.
“Ha!” The blind man yelled in triumph and killed
the power on his weed whacker. He grinned vacantly in
Percy’s direction. “Thank you, strangers! Your help is
most appreciated.”
Percy bit back his anger. He hadn’t meant to help
the old man, but he remembered that they needed information
from him.
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“Uh, whatever.” He approached the old guy, keeping
one eye on the weed whacker. “I’m Percy Jackson.
This is—”
“Demigods!” the old man said. “I can always smell
demigods.”
Hazel frowned. “Do we smell that bad?”
The old man laughed. “Of course not, my dear. But
you’d be surprised how sharp my other senses became
once I was blinded. I’m Phineas. And you—wait, don’t tell
me—”
He reached for Percy’s face and poked him in the
eyes.
“Ow!” Percy complained.
“Son of Neptune!” Phineas exclaimed. “I thought I
smelled the ocean on you, Percy Jackson. I’m also a son of
Neptune, you know.”
“Hey…yeah. Okay.” Percy rubbed his eyes. Just his
luck he was related to this grubby old dude. He hoped all
sons of Neptune didn’t share the same fate. First, you
start carrying a man satchel. Next thing you know, you’re
running around in a bathrobe and pink bunny slippers,
chasing chickens with a weed whacker.
Phineas turned to Hazel. “And here…Oh my, the
smell of gold and deep earth. Hazel Levesque, daughter of
Pluto. And next to you—the son of Mars. But there’s more
to your story, Frank Zhang—”
“Ancient blood,” Frank muttered. “Prince of Pylos.
Blah, blah, blah.”
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“Periclymenus, exactly! Oh, he was a nice fellow. I
loved the Argonauts!”
Frank’s mouth fell open. “W-wait. Perry who?”
Phineas grinned. “Don’t worry. I know about your
family. That story about your great-grandfather? He
didn’t reallydestroy the camp. Now, what an interesting
group. Are you hungry?”
Frank looked like he’d been run over by a truck, but
Phineas had already moved on to other matters. He
waved his hand at the picnic table. In the nearby trees,
the harpies shrieked miserably. As hungry as Percy was,
he couldn’t stand to think about eating with those poor
bird ladies watching him.
“Look, I’m confused,” Percy said. “We need some
information. We were told—”
“—that the harpies were keeping my food away
from me,” Phineas finished, “and if you helped me, I’d
help you.”
“Something like that,” Percy admitted.
Phineas laughed. “That’s old news. Do I look like
I’m missing any meals?”
He patted his belly, which was the size of an overin
flated basketball.
“Um ... no,” Percy said.
Phineas waved his weed whacker in an expansive
gesture. All three of them ducked.
“Things have changed, my friends!” he said. “When
I first got the gift of prophecy, eons ago, it’s true Jupiter
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cursed me. He sent the harpies to steal my food. You see,
I had a bit of a big mouth. I gave away too many secrets
that the gods wanted kept.” He turned to Hazel. “For instance,
you’re supposed to be dead. And you—” He turned
to Frank. “Your life depends on a burned stick.”
Percy frowned. “What are you talking about?”
Hazel blinked like she’d been slapped. Frank
looked like the truck had backed up and run over him
again.
“And you,” Phineas turned to Percy, “well now, you
don’t even know who you are! I could tell you, of course,
but…ha! What fun would that be? And Brigid O’Shaughnessy
shot Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon. And
Darth Vader is actually Luke’s father. And the winner of
the next Super Bowl will be—”
“Got it,” Frank muttered.
Hazel gripped her sword like she was tempted to
pommel-whip the old man. “So you talked too much, and
the gods cursed you. Why did they stop?”
“Oh, they didn’t!” The old man arched his bushy
eyebrows like, Can you believe it? “I had to make a deal
with the Argonauts. They wanted information too, you
see. I told them to kill the harpies, and I’d cooperate.
Well, they drove those nasty creatures away, but Iris
wouldn’t let them kill the harpies. An outrage! So this
time, when my patron brought me back to life—”
“Your patron?” Frank asked.
Phineas gave him a wicked grin. “Why, Gaea, of
course.
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Who do you think opened the Doors of Death?
Your girl friend here understands. Isn’t Gaea your patron,
too?”
Hazel drew her sword. “I’m not his—I don’t—Gaea
is not my patron!”
Phineas looked amused. If he had heard the sword
being drawn, he didn’t seem concerned. “Fine, if you want
to be noble and stick with the losing side, that’s your business.
But Gaea is waking. She’s already rewritten the
rules of life and death! I’m alive again, and in exchange
for my help—a prophecy here, a prophecy there—I get my
fondest wish. The tables have been turned, so to speak.
Now I can eat all I want, all day long, and the harpies
have to watch and starve.”
He revved his weed whacker, and the harpies
wailed in the trees.
“They’re cursed!” the old man said. “They can eat
only food from my table, and they can’t leave Portland.
Since the Doors of Death are open, they can’t even die.
It’s beautiful!”
“Beautiful?” Frank protested. “They’re living
creatures. Why are you so mean to them?”
“They’re monsters!” Phineas said. “And mean?
Those feather-brained demons tormented me for years!”
“But it was their duty,” Percy said, trying to control
himself. “Jupiter ordered them to.”
“Oh, I’m mad at Jupiter, too,” Phineas agreed. “In
time, Gaea will see that the gods are properly punished.
Horrible job they’ve done, ruling the world. But for now,
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I’m enjoying Portland. The mortals take no notice of me.
They think I’m just a crazy old man shooing away
pigeons!”
Hazel advanced on the seer. “You’re awful!” she
told Phineas. “You belong in the Fields of Punishment!”
Phineas sneered. “One dead person to another,
girlie? I wouldn’t be talking. You started this whole thing!
If it weren’t for you, Alcyoneus wouldn’t be alive!”
Hazel stumbled back.
“Hazel?” Frank’s eyes got as wide as quarters.
“What’s he talking about?”
“Ha!” Phineas said. “You’ll find out soon enough,
Frank Zhang. Then we’ll see if you’re still sweet on your
girlfriend.
But that’s not what you’re here about, is it? You
want to find Thanatos. He’s being kept at Alcyoneus’s lair.
I can tell you where that is. Of course I can. But you’ll
have to do me a favor.”
“Forget it,” Hazel snapped. “You’re working for the
enemy.
We should send you back to the Underworld
ourselves.”
“You could try.” Phineas smiled. “But I doubt I’d
stay dead very long. You see, Gaea has shown me the easy
way back. And with Thanatos in chains, there’s no one to
keep me down! Besides, if you kill me, you won’t get my
secrets.”
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Percy was tempted to let Hazel use her sword. In
fact he wanted to strangle the old man himself.
Camp Jupiter, he told himself. Saving the camp is
more important. He remembered Alcyoneus taunting
him in his dreams. If they wasted time searching through
Alaska looking for the giant’s lair, Gaea’s armies would
destroy the Romans…and Percy’s other friends, wherever
they were.
He gritted his teeth. “What’s the favor?”
Phineas licked his lips greedily. “There’s one harpy
who’s quicker than the rest.”
“The red one,” Percy guessed.
“I’m blind! I don’t know colors!” the old man
groused. “At any rate, she’s the only one I have trouble
with. She’s wily, that one. Always does her own thing,
never roosts with the others. She gave me these.”
He pointed at the scars on his forehead.
“Capture that harpy,” he said. “Bring her to me. I
want her tied up where I can keep an eye on her…ah, so to
speak. Harpies hate being tied up. It causes them extreme
pain. Yes, I’ll enjoy that. Maybe I’ll even feed her so that
she lasts longer.”
Percy looked at his friends. They came to a silent
agreement: they would never help this creepy old man.
On the other hand, they had to get his information. They
needed a Plan B.
“Oh, go talk among yourselves,” Phineas said
breezily. “I don’t care. Just remember that without my
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help, your quest will fail. And everyone you love in the
world will die. Now, off with you! Bring me a harpy!”
“WE’LL NEED SOME OF YOUR FOOD.” Percy shouldered
his way around the old man and snatched stuff off the
picnic table—a covered bowl of Thai noodles in mac-andcheese
sauce, and a tubular pastry that looked like a combination
burrito and cinnamon roll.
Before he could lose control and smash the burrito
in Phineas’s face, Percy said, “Come on, guys.” He led his
friends out of the parking lot.
They stopped across the street. Percy took a deep
breath, trying to calm down. The rain had slowed to a
halfhearted drizzle. The cold mist felt good on his face.
“That man…” Hazel smacked the side of a bus-stop
bench.
“He needs to die. Again.”
It was hard to tell in the rain, but she seemed to be
blinking back tears. Her long curly hair was plastered
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down the sides of her face. In the gray light, her gold eyes
looked more like tin.
Percy remembered how confident she’d acted when
they first met—taking control of the situation with the
gorgons and ushering him to safety. She’d comforted him
at the shrine of Neptune and made him feel welcome at
camp.
Now he wanted to return the favor, but he wasn’t
sure how. She looked lost, bedraggled, and thoroughly
depressed.
Percy wasn’t surprised that she had come back
from the Underworld. He’d suspected that for a
while—the way she avoided talking about her past, the
way Nico di Angelo had been so secretive and cautious.
But that didn’t change how Percy saw her. She
seemed... well, alive, like a regular kid with a good heart,
who deserved to grow up and have a future. She wasn’t a
ghoul like Phineas.
“We’ll get him,” Percy promised. “He’s nothing like
you, Hazel. I don’t care what he says.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know the whole
story. I should have been sent to Punishment. I—I’m just
as bad—”
“No, you’re not!” Frank balled his fists. He looked
around like he was searching for anybody who might disagree
with him—enemies he could hit for Hazel’s sake.
“She’s a good person!” he yelled across the street. A few
harpies squawked in the trees, but no one else paid them
any attention.
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Hazel stared at Frank. She reached out tentatively,
as if she wanted to take his hand but was afraid he might
evaporate.
“Frank...” she stammered. “I—I don’t...”
Unfortunately, Frank seemed wrapped up in his
own thoughts.
He slung his spear off his back and gripped it
uneasily.
“I could intimidate that old man,” he offered,
“maybe scare him—”
“Frank, it’s okay,” Percy said. “Let’s keep that as a
backup plan, but I don’t think Phineas can be scared into
cooperating. Besides, you’ve only got two more uses out
of the spear, right?”
Frank scowled at the dragon’s-tooth point, which
had grown back completely overnight. “Yeah. I guess.…”
Percy wasn’t sure what the old seer had meant
about Frank’s family history—his great-grandfather destroying
camp, his Argonaut ancestor, and the bit about a
burned stick controlling Frank’s life. But it had clearly
shaken Frank up. Percy decided not to ask for explanations.
He didn’t want the big guy reduced to tears, especially
in front of Hazel.
“I’ve got an idea.” Percy pointed up the street. “The
red-feathered harpy went that way. Let’s see if we can get
her to talk to us.”
Hazel looked at the food in his hands. “You’re going
to use that as bait?”
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“More like a peace offering,” Percy said. “Come on.
Just try to keep the other harpies from stealing this stuff,
okay?”
Percy uncovered the Thai noodles and unwrapped
the cinnamon burrito. Fragrant steam wafted into the air.
They walked down the street, Hazel and Frank with their
weapons out. The harpies fluttered after them, perching
on trees, mailboxes, and flagpoles, following the smell of
food.
Percy wondered what the mortals saw through the
Mist. Maybe they thought the harpies were pigeons and
the weapons were lacrosse sticks or something. Maybe
they just thought the Thai mac and cheese was so good it
needed an armed escort.
Percy kept a tight grip on the food. He’d seen how
quickly the harpies could snatch things. He didn’t want to
lose his peace offering before he found the red-feathered
harpy.
Finally he spotted her, circling above a stretch of
parkland that ran for several blocks between rows of old
stone buildings. Paths stretched through the park under
huge maple and elm trees, past sculptures and playgrounds
and shady benches. The place reminded Percy
of…some other park. Maybe in his hometown? He
couldn’t remember, but it made him feel homesick.
They crossed the street and found a bench to sit on,
next to a big bronze sculpture of an elephant.
“Looks like Hannibal,” Hazel said.
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“Except it’s Chinese,” Frank said. “My grandmother
has one of those.” He flinched. “I mean, hers isn’t twelve
feet tall. But she imports stuff…from China. We’re
Chinese.” He looked at Hazel and Percy, who were trying
hard not to laugh. “Could I just die from embarrassment
now?” he asked.
“Don’t worry about it, man,” Percy said. “Let’s see if
we can make friends with the harpy.”
He raised the Thai noodles and fanned the smell
upward—spicy peppers and cheesy goodness. The red
harpy circled lower.
“We won’t hurt you,” Percy called up in a normal
voice. “We just want to talk. Thai noodles for a chance to
talk, okay?”
The harpy streaked down in a flash of red and
landed on the elephant statue.
She was painfully thin. Her feathery legs were like
sticks. Her face would have been pretty except for her
sunken cheeks. She moved in jerky birdlike twitches, her
coffee-brown eyes darting restlessly, her fingers clawing
at her plumage, her earlobes, her shaggy red hair.
“Cheese,” she muttered, looking sideways. “Ella
doesn’t like cheese.”
Percy hesitated. “Your name is Ella?”
“Ella. Aella. ‘Harpy.’ In English. In Latin. Ella
doesn’t like cheese.” She said all that without taking a
breath or making eye contact. Her hands snatched at her
hair, her burlap dress, the raindrops, whatever moved.
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Quicker than Percy could blink, she lunged,
snatched the cinnamon burrito, and appeared atop the
elephant again.
“Gods, she’s fast!” Hazel said.
“And heavily caffeinated,” Frank guessed.
Ella sniffed the burrito. She nibbled at the edge and
shuddered from head to foot, cawing like she was dying.
“Cinnamon is good,” she pronounced. “Good for harpies.
Yum.”
She started to eat, but the bigger harpies swooped
down. Before Percy could react, they began pummeling
Ella with their wings, snatching at the burrito.
“Nnnnnnooo.” Ella tried to hide under her wings as
her sisters ganged up on her, scratching with their claws.
“N-no,” she stuttered. “N-n-no!”
“Stop it!” Percy yelled. He and his friends ran to
help, but it was too late. A big yellow harpy grabbed the
burrito and the whole flock scattered, leaving Ella cowering
and shivering on top of the elephant.
Hazel touched the harpy’s foot. “I’m so sorry. Are
you okay?”
Ella poked her head out of her wings. She was still
trembling. With her shoulders hunched, Percy could see
the bleeding gash on her back where Phineas had hit her
with the weed whacker. She picked at her feathers,
pulling out tufts of plumage. “S-small Ella,” she stuttered
angrily. “W-weak Ella. No cinnamon for Ella. Only
cheese.”
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Frank glared across the street, where the other
harpies were sitting in a maple tree, tearing the burrito to
shreds. “We’ll get you something else,” he promised.
Percy set down the Thai noodles. He realized that
Ella was different, even for a harpy. But after watching
her get picked on, he was sure of one thing: whatever else
happened, he was going to help her.
“Ella,” he said, “we want to be your friends. We can
get you more food, but—”
“Friends,” Ella said. “‘Ten seasons. 1994 to 2004.’”
She glanced sideways at Percy, then looked in the air and
started reciting to the clouds. “‘A half-blood of the eldest
gods, shall reach sixteen against all odds.’ Sixteen. You’re
sixteen. Page sixteen, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
‘Ingredients: Bacon, Butter.’”
Percy’s ears were ringing. He felt dizzy, like he’d
just plunged a hundred feet underwater and back up
again. “Ella…what was that you said?”
“‘Bacon.’” She caught a raindrop out of the air.
“‘Butter.’”
“No, before that. Those lines…I know those lines.”
Next to him, Hazel shivered. “It does sound familiar,
like…I don’t know, like a prophecy. Maybe it’s
something she heard Phineas say?”
At the name Phineas, Ella squawked in terror and
flew away.
“Wait!” Hazel called. “I didn’t mean—Oh, gods, I’m
stupid.”
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“It’s all right.” Frank pointed. “Look.”
Ella wasn’t moving as quickly now. She flapped her
way to the top of a three-story red brick building and
scuttled out of sight over the roof. A single red feather
fluttered down to the street.
“You think that’s her nest?” Frank squinted at the
sign on the building. “Multnomah County Library?”
Percy nodded. “Let’s see if it’s open.”
They ran across the street and into the lobby.
A library wouldn’t have been Percy’s first choice for
someplace to visit. With his dyslexia, he had enough
trouble reading signs. A whole building full of books?
That sounded about as much fun as Chinese water torture
or getting his teeth extracted.
As they jogged through the lobby, Percy figured
Annabeth would like this place. It was spacious and
brightly lit, with big vaulted windows. Books and architecture,
that was definitely her....
He froze in his tracks.
“Percy?” Frank asked. “What’s wrong?”
Percy tried desperately to concentrate. Where had
those thoughts come from? Architecture, books…Annabeth
had taken him to the library once, back home
in—in—The memory faded. Percy slammed his fist into
the side of a bookshelf.
“Percy?” Hazel asked gently.
He was so angry, so frustrated with his missing
memories that he wanted to punch another bookshelf, but
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his friends’ concerned faces brought him back to the
present.
“I’m—I’m all right,” he lied. “Just got dizzy for a
sec. Let’s find a way to the roof.”
It took them a while, but they finally found a stairwell
with roof access. At the top was a door with a handle
alarm, but someone had propped it open with a copy of
War and Peace.
Outside, Ella the harpy huddled in a nest of books
under a makeshift cardboard shelter.
Percy and his friends advanced slowly, trying not to
scare her. Ella didn’t pay them any attention. She picked
at her feathers and muttered under her breath, like she
was practicing lines for a play.
Percy got within five feet and knelt down. “Hi.
Sorry we scared you. Look, I don’t have much food, but…”
He took some of the macrobiotic jerky out of his
pocket. Ella lunged and snatched it immediately. She
huddled back in her nest, sniffing the jerky, but sighed
and tossed it away. “N-not from his table. Ella cannot eat.
Sad. Jerky would be good for harpies.”“Not from…Oh,
right,” Percy said. “That’s part of the curse. You can only
eat his food.”
“There has to be a way,” Hazel said.
“‘Photosynthesis,’” Ella muttered. “‘Noun. Biology.
The synthesis of complex organic materials.’ ‘It was the
best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness... ’”
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“What is she saying?” Frank whispered.
Percy stared at the mound of books around her.
They all looked old and mildewed. Some had prices written
in marker on the covers, like the library had gotten rid
of them in a clearance sale.
“She’s quoting books,” Percy guessed.
“Farmer’s Almanac 1965,” Ella said. “‘Start breed
ing animals, January twenty-sixth.’”
“Ella,” he said, “have you read all of these?”
She blinked. “More. More downstairs. Words.
Words calm Ella down. Words, words, words.”
Percy picked up a book at random—a tattered copy
ofA History of Horseracing. “Ella, do you remember the,
um, third paragraph on page sixty-two—”
“‘Secretariat,’” Ella said instantly, “‘favored three to
two-in the 1973 Kentucky Derby, finished at standing
track record of one fifty-nine and two fifths.’”
Percy closed the book. His hands were shaking.
“Word for word.”
“That’s amazing,” Hazel said.
“She’s a genius chicken,” Frank agreed.
Percy felt uneasy. He was starting to form a terrible
idea about why Phineas wanted to capture Ella, and it
wasn’t because she’d scratched him. Percy remembered
that line she’d recited, A half-blood of the eldest gods. He
was sure it was about him.
“Ella,” he said, “we’re going to find a way to break
the curse. Would you like that?”
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“‘It’s Impossible,’” she said. “‘Recorded in English
by Perry Como, 1970.’”
“Nothing’s impossible,” Percy said. “Now, look, I’m
going to say his name. You don’t have to run away. We’re
going to save you from the curse. We just need to figure
out a way to beat ... Phineas.”
He waited for her to bolt, but she just shook her
head vigorously. “N-n-no! No Phineas. Ella is quick. Too
quick for him. B-but he wants to ch-chain Ella. He hurts
Ella.”
She tried to reach the gash on her back.
“Frank,” Percy said, “you have first-aid supplies?”
“On it.” Frank brought out a thermos full of nectar
and explained its healing properties to Ella. When he
scooted closer, she recoiled and started to shriek. Then
Hazel tried, and Ella let her pour some nectar on her
back. The wound began to close.
Hazel smiled. “See? That’s better.”
“Phineas is bad,” Ella insisted. “And weed whackers.
And cheese.”
“Absolutely,” Percy agreed. “We won’t let him hurt
youagain. We need to figure out how to trick him, though.
You harpies must know him better than anybody. Is there
any way we can trick him?”
“N-no,” Ella said. “Tricks are for kids. 50 Tricks to
Teach Your Dog, by Sophie Collins, call number sixthree-
six—”
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“Okay, Ella.” Hazel spoke in a soothing voice, like
she was trying to calm a horse. “But does Phineas have
any weaknesses?”
“Blind. He’s blind.”
Frank rolled his eyes, but Hazel continued patiently,
“Right. Besides that?”
“Chance,” she said. “Games of chance. Two to one.
Bad odds. Call or fold.”
Percy’s spirits rose. “You mean he’s a gambler?”
“Phineas s-sees big things. Prophecies. Fates. God
stuff. Not small stuff. Random. Exciting. And he is blind.”
Frank rubbed his chin. “Any idea what she means?”
Percy watched the harpy pick at her burlap dress.
He felt incredibly sorry for her, but he was also starting to
realize just how smart she was.
“I think I get it,” he said. “Phineas sees the future.
He knows tons of important events. But he can’t see small
things—like random occurrences, spontaneous games of
chance. That makes gambling exciting for him. If we can
tempt him into making a bet…”
Hazel nodded slowly. “You mean if he loses, he has
to tell us where Thanatos is. But what do we have to
wager? What kind of game do we play?”
“Something simple, with high stakes,” Percy said.
“Like two choices. One you live, one you die. And the
prize has to be something Phineas wants…I mean, besides
Ella. That’s off the table.”
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“Sight,” Ella muttered. “Sight is good for blind
men.
Healing…nope, nope. Gaea won’t do that for
Phineas. Gaea keeps Phineas b-blind, dependent on Gaea.
Yep.”
Frank and Percy exchanged a meaningful look.
“Gorgon’s blood,” they said simultaneously.
“What?” Hazel asked.
Frank brought out the two ceramic vials he’d retrieved
from the Little Tiber. “Ella’s a genius,” he said.
“Unless we die.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Percy said. “I’ve got a
plan.”
THE OLD MAN WAS RIGHT WHERE they’d left him, in
the middle of the food truck parking lot. He sat on his picnic
bench with his bunny slippers propped up, eating a
plate of greasy shish kebab. His weed whacker was at his
side. His bathrobe was smeared with barbecue sauce.
“Welcome back!” he called cheerfully. “I hear the
flutter of nervous little wings. You’ve brought me my
harpy?”
“She’s here,” Percy said. “But she’s not yours.”
Phineas sucked the grease off his fingers. His milky
eyes seemed fixed on a point just above Percy’s head. “I
see…Well, actually, I’m blind, so I don’t see. Have you
come to kill me, then? If so, good luck completing your
quest.”
“I’ve come to gamble.”
The old man’s mouth twitched. He put down his
shishkebab and leaned toward Percy. “A gamble…how
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interesting. Information in exchange for the harpy? Winner
take all?”
“No,” Percy said. “The harpy isn’t part of the deal.”
Phineas laughed. “Really? Perhaps you don’t understand
her value.”
“She’s a person,” Percy said. “She isn’t for sale.”
“Oh, please! You’re from the Roman camp, aren’t
you? Rome was built on slavery. Don’t get all high and
mighty with me. Besides, she isn’t even human. She’s a
monster. A wind spirit. A minion of Jupiter.”
Ella squawked. Just getting her into the parking lot
had been a major challenge, but now she started backing
away, muttering, “‘Jupiter. Hydrogen and helium. Sixty-
three satellites.’ No minions. Nope.”
Hazel put her arm around Ella’s wings. She seemed
to be the only one who could touch the harpy without
causing lots of screaming and twitching.
Frank stayed at Percy’s side. He held his spear
ready, as if the old man might charge them.
Percy brought out the ceramic vials. “I have a different
wager. We’ve got two flasks of gorgon’s blood. One
kills. One heals. They look exactly the same. Even we
don’t know which is which. If you choose the right one, it
could cure your blindness.”
Phineas held out his hands eagerly. “Let me feel
them. Let me smell them.”
“Not so fast,” Percy said. “First you agree to the
terms.”
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“Terms…” Phineas was breathing shallowly. Percy
could tell he was hungry to take the offer. “Prophecy and
sight ... I’d be unstoppable. I could own this city. I’d build
my palace here, surrounded by food trucks. I could capture
that harpy myself!”
“N-noo,” Ella said nervously. “Nope, nope, nope.”
A villainous laugh is hard to pull off when you’re
wearing pink bunny slippers, but Phineas gave it his best
shot. “Very well, demigod. What are your terms?”
“You get to choose a vial,” Percy said. “No uncork
ing, no sniffing before you decide.”
“That’s not fair! I’m blind.”
“And I don’t have your sense of smell,” Percy
countered. “You can hold the vials. And I’ll swear on the
River Styx that they look identical. They’re exactly what I
told you: gorgon’s blood, one vial from the left side of the
monster, one from the right. And I swear that none of us
knows which is which.”
Percy looked back at Hazel. “Uh, you’re our Underworld
expert. With all this weird stuff going on with
Death, is an oath on the River Styx still binding?”
“Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “To break such
a vow…Well, just don’t do it. There are worse things than
death.” Phineas stroked his beard. “So I choose which vial
to drink. You have to drink the other one. We swear to
drink at the same time.”
“Right,” Percy said.
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“The loser dies, obviously,” Phineas said. “That
kind ofpoison would probably keep even me from coming
back tolife…for a long time, at least. My essence would be
scattered and degraded. So I’m risking quite a lot.”
“But if you win, you get everything,” Percy said. “If
Idie, my friends will swear to leave you in peace and not
take revenge. You’d have your sight back, which even
Gaea won’t give you.”
The old man’s expression soured. Percy could tell
he’d struck a nerve. Phineas wanted to see. As much as
Gaea had given him, he resented being kept in the dark.
“If I lose,” the old man said, “I’ll be dead, unable to
give you information. How does that help you?”
Percy was glad he’d talked this through with his
friends ahead of time. Frank had suggested the answer.
“You write down the location of Alcyoneus’s lair
ahead of time,” Percy said. “Keep it to yourself, but swear
on the River Styx it’s specific and accurate. You also have
to swear that if you lose and die, the harpies will be released
from their curse.”
“Those are high stakes,” Phineas grumbled. “You
face death, Percy Jackson. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to
hand over the harpy?”
“Not an option.”
Phineas smiled slowly. “So you are starting to understand
her worth. Once I have my sight, I’ll capture her
myself, you know. Whoever controls that harpy…well, I
was a king once. This gamble could make me a king
again.”
331/589
“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” Percy said. “Do
we have a deal?”
Phineas tapped his nose thoughtfully. “I can’t foresee
the outcome. Annoying how that works. A completely
unexpected gamble…it makes the future cloudy. But I can
tell you this, Percy Jackson—a bit of free advice. If you
survive today, you’re not going to like your future. A big
sacrifice is coming, and you won’t have the courage to
make it. That will cost you dearly. It will cost the world
dearly. It might be easier if you just choose the poison.”
Percy’s mouth tasted like Iris’s sour green tea. He
wanted to think the old man was just psyching him out,
but something told him the prediction was true. He remembered
Juno’s warning when he’d chosen to go to
Camp Jupiter: You will feel pain, misery, and loss beyond
anything you’ve ever known. But you might have a
chance to save your old friends and family.
In the trees around the parking lot, the harpies
gathered to watch as if they sensed what was at stake.
Frank and Hazel studied Percy’s face with concern. He’d
assured them the odds weren’t as bad as fifty-fifty. He did
have a plan. Of course, the plan could backfire. His
chance of survival might be a hundred percent—or zero.
He hadn’t mentioned that.
“Do we have a deal?” he asked again.
Phineas grinned. “I swear on the River Styx to
abide by the terms, just as you have described them.
Frank Zhang, you’re the descendant of an Argonaut. I
trust your word. If I win, do you and your friend Hazel
swear to leave me in peace, and not seek revenge?”
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Frank’s hands were clenched so tight Percy thought
he might break his gold spear, but he managed to
grumble, “I swear it on the River Styx.”
“I also swear,” Hazel said.
“Swear,” Ella muttered. “‘Swear not by the moon,
the inconstant moon.’”
Phineas laughed. “In that case, find me something
to write with. Let’s get started.”
Frank borrowed a napkin and a pen from a food truck
vendor. Phineas scribbled something on the napkin and
put it in his bathrobe pocket. “I swear this is the location
of Alcyoneus’s lair. Not that you’ll live long enough to
read it.”
Percy drew his sword and swept all the food off the
picnic table. Phineas sat on one side. Percy sat on the
other.
Phineas held out his hands. “Let me feel the vials.”
Percy gazed at the hills in the distance. He imagined
the shadowy face of a sleeping woman. He sent his
thoughts into the ground beneath him and hoped the
goddess was listening.
Okay, Gaea, he said. I’m calling your bluff. You
say I’m a valuable pawn. You say you’ve got plans for
me, and you’re going to spare me until I make it north.
Who’s more valuable to you—me, or this old man? Because
one of us is about to die.
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Phineas curled his fingers in a grasping motion.
“Losing your nerve, Percy Jackson? Let me have them.”
Percy passed him the vials.
The old man compared their weight. He ran his fingers
along the ceramic surfaces. Then he set them both on
the table and rested one hand lightly on each. A tremor
passed through the ground—a mild earthquake, just
strong enough to make Percy’s teeth chatter. Ella cawed
nervously.
The vial on the left seemed to shake slightly more
than the one on the right.
Phineas grinned wickedly. He closed his fingers
around the left-hand vial. “You were a fool, Percy Jackson.
I choose this one. Now we drink.”
Percy took the vial on the right. His teeth were
chattering.
The old man raised his vial. “A toast to the sons of
Neptune.”
They both uncorked their vials and drank.
Immediately, Percy doubled over, his throat burning.
His mouth tasted like gasoline.
“Oh, gods,” Hazel said behind him.
“Nope!” Ella said. “Nope, nope, nope.”
Percy’s vision blurred. He could see Phineas grinning
in triumph, sitting up straighter, blinking his eyes in
anticipation.
“Yes!” he cried. “Any moment now, my sight will
return!”
334/589
Percy had chosen wrong. He’d been stupid to take
such a risk. He felt like broken glass was working its way
through his stomach, into his intestines.
“Percy!” Frank gripped his shoulders. “Percy, you
can’t die!”
He gasped for breath…and suddenly his vision
cleared.
At the same moment, Phineas hunched over like
he’d been punched.
“You—you can’t!” the old man wailed. “Gaea,
you—you—”
He staggered to his feet and stumbled away from
the table, clutching his stomach. “I’m too valuable!”
Steam came out of his mouth. A sickly yellow vapor
rose from his ears, his beard, his blind eyes.
“Unfair!” he screamed. “You tricked me!”
He tried to claw the piece of paper out of his robe
pocket, but his hands crumbled, his fingers turning to
sand.
Percy rose unsteadily. He didn’t feel cured of anything
in particular. His memory hadn’t magically returned.
But the pain had stopped.
“No one tricked you,” Percy said. “You made your
choice freely, and I hold you to your oath.” The blind king
wailed in agony. He turned in a circle, steaming and
slowly disintegrating until there was nothing left but an
old, stained bathrobe and a pair of bunny slippers.
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“Those,” Frank said, “are the most disgusting spoils
of war ever.”
A woman’s voice spoke in Percy’s mind. A gamble,
Percy Jackson. It was a sleepy whisper, with just a hint of
grudging admiration. You forced me to choose, and you
are more important to my plans than the old seer. But do
not press your luck. When your death comes, I promise it
will be much more painful than gorgon’s blood.
Hazel prodded the robe with her sword. There was
nothing underneath—no sign that Phineas was trying to
re-form. She looked at Percy in awe. “That was either the
bravest thing I’ve ever seen, or the stupidest.”
Frank shook his head in disbelief. “Percy, how did
you know? You were so confident he’d choose the
poison.”
“Gaea,” Percy said. “She wants me to make it to
Alaska. She thinks…I’m not sure. She thinks she can use
me as part of her plan. She influenced Phineas to choose
the wrong vial.”
Frank stared in horror at the remains of the old
man. “Gaea would kill her own servant rather than you?
That’s what you were betting on?”
“Plans,” Ella muttered. “Plans and plots. The lady
in the ground. Big plans for Percy. Macrobiotic jerky for
Ella.”
Percy handed her the whole bag of jerky and she
squeaked with joy. “Nope, nope, nope,” she muttered,
half-singing. “Phineas, nope. Food and words for Ella,
yep.”
336/589
Percy crouched over the bathrobe and pulled the
old man’s note out of the pocket. It read: HUBBARD
GLACIER.
All that risk for two words. He handed the note to
Hazel.
“I know where that is,” she said. “It’s pretty famous.
But we’ve got a long, long way to go.”
In the trees around the parking lot, the other
harpies finally overcame their shock. They squawked with
excitement and flew at the nearest food trucks, diving
through the service windows and raiding the kitchens.
Cooks shouted in many languages. Trucks shook back and
forth. Feathers and food boxes flew everywhere.
“We’d better get back to the boat,” Percy said.
“We’re running out of time.”
EVEN BEFORE SHE GOT ON THE BOAT, Hazel felt
queasy.
She kept thinking about Phineas with steam coming
out of his eyes, his hands crumbling to dust. Percy
had assured her that she wasn’t like Phineas. But she
was. She’d done something even worse than torment
harpies.
You started this whole thing! Phineas had said. If it
weren’t for you, Alcyoneus wouldn’t be alive!
As the boat sped down the Columbia River, Hazel
tried to forget. She helped Ella make a nest out of old
books and magazines they’d liberated from the library’s
recycling bin.
They hadn’t really planned on taking the harpy
with them, but Ella acted like the matter was decided.
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“Friends,” she muttered. “‘Ten seasons. 1994 to
2004.’ Friends melt Phineas and give Ella jerky. Ella will
go with her friends.”
Now she was roosting comfortably in the stern,
nibbling bits of jerky and reciting random lines from
Charles Dickens and 50 Tricks to Teach Your Dog.
Percy knelt in the bow, steering them toward the
ocean with his freaky mind-over-water powers. Hazel sat
next to Frank on the center bench, their shoulders touching,
which made her feel as jittery as a harpy.
She remembered how Frank stood up for her in
Portland, shouting, “She’s a good person!” like he was
ready to take on anybody who denied it.
She remembered the way he had looked on the hillside
in Mendocino, alone in a clearing of poisoned grass
with his spear in hand, fires burning all around him and
the ashes of three basilisks at his feet.
A week ago, if someone had suggested that Frank
was a child of Mars, Hazel would have laughed. Frank
was much too sweet and gentle for that. She had always
felt protective of him because of his clumsiness and his
knack for getting into trouble.
Since they’d left camp, she saw him differently. He
had more courage than she’d realized. He was the one
looking out for her. She had to admit that the change was
kind of nice.
The river widened into the ocean. The Pax turned
north. As they sailed, Frank kept her spirits up by telling
her silly jokes—Why did the Minotaur cross the road?
339/589
How many fauns does it take to change a lightbulb? He
pointed out buildings along the coastline that reminded
him of places in Vancouver.
The sky started to darken, the sea turning the same
rusty color as Ella’s wings. June 21 was almost over. The
Feast of Fortuna would happen in the evening, exactly
seventy-two hours from now.
Finally Frank brought out some food from his
pack—sodas and muffins he’d scavenged from Phineas’s
table. He passed them around.
“It’s okay, Hazel,” he said quietly. “My mom used
to say you shouldn’t try to carry a problem alone. But if
you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay.”
Hazel took a shaky breath. She was afraid to
talk—not just because she was embarrassed. She didn’t
want to black out and slip into the past.
“You were right,” she said, “when you guessed I
came back from the Underworld. I’m…I’m an escapee. I
shouldn’t be alive.”
She felt like a dam had broken. The story flooded
out. She explained how her mother had summoned Pluto
and fallen in love with the god. She explained her mother’s
wish for all the riches in the earth, and how that had
turned into Hazel’s curse. She described her life in New
Orleans—everything except her boyfriend Sammy. Looking
at Frank, she couldn’t bring herself to talk about that.
She described the Voice, and how Gaea had slowly
taken over her mother’s mind. She explained how they
had moved to Alaska, how Hazel had helped to raise the
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giant Alcyoneus, and how she had died, sinking the island
into Resurrection Bay.
She knew Percy and Ella were listening, but she
spoke mostly to Frank. When she had finished, she was
afraid to look at him. She waited for him to move away
from her, maybe tell her she was a monster after all.
Instead, he took her hand. “You sacrificed yourself
to stop the giant from waking. I could never be that
brave.”
She felt her pulse throbbing in her neck. “It wasn’t
bravery. I let my mother die. I cooperated with Gaea too
long. I almost let her win.”
“Hazel,” said Percy. “You stood up to a goddess all
by yourself. You did the right…” His voice trailed off, as if
he’d had an unpleasant thought. “What happened in the
Underworld…I mean, after you died? You should’ve gone
to Elysium. But if Nico brought you back—”
“I didn’t go to Elysium.” Her mouth felt dry as
sand. “Please don’t ask…”
But it was too late. She remembered her descent into
the darkness, her arrival on the banks of the River Styx,
and her consciousness began to slip.
“Hazel?” Frank asked.
“‘Slip Sliding Away,’” Ella muttered. “Number five
U.S. single. Paul Simon. Frank, go with her. Simon says,
Frank, go with her.”
Hazel had no idea what Ella was talking about, but
her vision darkened as she clung to Frank’s hand.
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She found herself back in the Underworld, and this
time Frank was at her side.
They stood in Charon’s boat, crossing the Styx. Debris
swirled in the dark waters—a deflated birthday balloon, a
child’s pacifier, a little plastic bride and groom from the
top of a cake—all the remnants of human lives cut short.
“Wh-where are we?” Frank stood at her side, shimmering
with a ghostly purple light as if he’d become a Lar.
“It’s my past.” Hazel felt strangely calm. “It’s just
an echo. Don’t worry.”
The boatman turned and grinned. One moment he
was a handsome African man in an expensive silk suit.
The next moment he was a skeleton in a dark robe.
“’Course you shouldn’t worry,” he said with a British accent.
He addressed Hazel, as if he couldn’t see Frank at
all. “Told you I’d take you across, didn’t I? ’Sall right you
don’t have a coin. Wouldn’t be proper, leaving Pluto’s
daughter on the wrong side of the river.”
The boat slid onto a dark beach. Hazel led Frank to
the black gates of Erebos. The spirits parted for them,
sensing she was a child of Pluto. The giant three-headed
dog Cerberus growled in the gloom, but he let them pass.
Inside the gates, they walked into a large pavilion and
stood before the judges’ bench. Three black-robed figures
in golden masks stared down at Hazel.
Frank whimpered. “Who—?”
“They’ll decide my fate,” she said. “Watch.”
342/589
Just as before, the judges asked her no questions.
They simply looked into her mind, pulling thoughts from
her head and examining them like a collection of old
photos.
“Thwarted Gaea,” the first judge said. “Prevented
Alcyoneus from waking.”
“But she raised the giant in the first place,” the
second judge argued. “Guilty of cowardice, weakness.”
“She is young,” said the third judge. “Her mother’s
life hung in the balance.”
“My mother.” Hazel found the courage to speak.
“Where is she? What is her fate?”
The judges regarded her, their golden masks frozen
in creepy smiles. “Your mother…”
The image of Marie Levesque shimmered above the
judges. She was frozen in time, hugging Hazel as the cave
collapsed, her eyes shut tight.
“An interesting question,” the second judge said.
“The division of fault.”
“Yes,” said the first judge. “The child died for a
noble cause. She prevented many deaths by delaying the
giant’s rise. She had courage to stand against the might of
Gaea.”
“But she acted too late,” the third judge said sadly.
“She is guilty of aiding and abetting an enemy of the
gods.”
343/589
“The mother influenced her,” said the first judge.
“The child can have Elysium. Eternal Punishment for
Marie Levesque.”
“No!” Hazel shouted. “No, please! That’s not fair.”
The judges tilted their heads in unison. Gold
masks, Hazel thought. Gold has always been cursed for
me. She wondered if the gold was poisoning their
thoughts somehow, so that they’d never give her a fair
trial.
“Beware, Hazel Levesque,” the first judge warned.
“Would you take full responsibility? You could lay this
guilt on your mother’s soul. That would be reasonable.
You were destined for great things. Your mother diverted
your path. See what you might have been.…”
Another image appeared above the judges. Hazel
saw herself as a little girl, grinning, with her hands
covered in finger paint. The image aged. Hazel saw herself
growing up—her hair became longer, her eyes sadder.
She saw herself on her thirteenth birthday, riding across
the fields on her borrowed horse. Sammy laughed as he
raced after her: What are you running from? I’m not that
ugly, am I? She saw herself in Alaska, trudging down
Third Street in the snow and darkness on her way home
from school.
Then the image aged even more. Hazel saw herself
at twenty. She looked so much like her mother, her hair
gathered back in braids, her golden eyes flashing with
amusement. She wore a white dress—a wedding dress?
She was smiling so warmly, Hazel knew instinctively she
must be looking at someone special—someone she loved.
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The sight didn’t make her feel bitter. She didn’t
even wonder whom she would have married. Instead she
thought: My mother might’ve looked like this if she’d let
go of her anger, if Gaea hadn’t twisted her.
“You lost this life,” the first judge said simply. “Special
circumstances. Elysium for you. Punishment for your
mother.”
“No,” Hazel said. “No, it wasn’t all her fault. She
was misled. She loved me. At the end, she tried to protect
me.”
“Hazel,” Frank whispered. “What are you doing?”
She squeezed his hand, urging him to be silent. The
judges paid him no attention.
Finally the second judge sighed. “No resolution.
Not enough good. Not enough evil.”
“The blame must be divided,” the first judge
agreed. “Both souls will be consigned to the Fields of Asphodel.
I’m sorry, Hazel Levesque. You could have been a
hero.”
She passed through the pavilion, into yellow fields
that went on forever. She led Frank through a crowd of
spirits to a grove of black poplar trees.
“You gave up Elysium,” Frank said in amazement,
“so your mother wouldn’t suffer?”
“She didn’t deserve Punishment,” Hazel said.
“But…what happens now?”
“Nothing,” Hazel said. “Nothing…for all eternity.”
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They drifted aimlessly. Spirits around them
chattered like bats—lost and confused, not remembering
their past or even their names.
Hazel remembered everything. Perhaps that was
because she was a daughter of Pluto, but she never forgot
who she was, or why she was there.
“Remembering made my afterlife harder,” she told
Frank, who still drifted next to her as a glowing purple
Lar. “So many times I tried to walk to my father’s
palace.…” She pointed to a large black castle in the distance.
“I could never reach it. I can’t leave the Fields of
Asphodel.”
“Did you ever see your mother again?”
Hazel shook her head. “She wouldn’t know me,
even if I could find her. These spirits…it’s like an eternal
dream for them, an endless trance. This is the best I could
do for her.”
Time was meaningless, but after an eternity, she
and Frank sat together under a black poplar tree, listening
to the screams from the Fields of Punishment. In the
distance, under the artificial sunlight of Elysium, the Isles
of the Blest glittered like emeralds in a sparkling blue
lake. White sails cut across water and the souls of great
heroes basked on the beaches in perpetual bliss.
“You didn’t deserve Asphodel,” Frank protested.
“You should be with the heroes.”
“This is just an echo,” Hazel said. “We’ll wake up,
Frank. It only seems like forever.”
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“That’s not the point!” he protested. “Your life was
taken from you. You were going to grow up to be a beautiful
woman. You...”
His face turned a darker shade of purple. “You were
going to marry someone,” he said quietly. “You would
have had a good life. You lost all that.”
Hazel swallowed back a sob. It hadn’t been this
hard in Asphodel the first time, when she was on her own.
Having Frank with her made her feel so much sadder. But
she was determined not to get angry about her fate.
Hazel thought about that image of herself as an
adult, smiling and in love. She knew it wouldn’t take
much bitterness to sour her expression and make her look
exactly like Queen Marie. I deserve better, her mother always
said. Hazel couldn’t allow herself to feel that way.
“I’m sorry, Frank,” she said. “I think your mother
was wrong. Sometimes sharing a problem doesn’t make it
easier to carry.”
“But it does.” Frank slipped his hand into his coat
pocket.
“In fact…since we’ve got eternity to talk, there’s
something I want to tell you.”
He brought out an object wrapped in cloth, about
the same size as a pair of glasses. When he unfolded it,
Hazel saw a half-burned piece of driftwood, glowing with
purple light.
She frowned. “What is…” Then the truth hit her, as
cold and harsh as a blast of winter wind. “Phineas said
your life depends on a burned stick—”
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“It’s true,” Frank said. “This is my lifeline, literally.”
He told her how the goddess Juno had appeared
when he was a baby, how his grandmother had snatched
the piece of wood from the fireplace. “Grandmother said I
had gifts—some talent we got from our ancestor, the Argonaut.
That, and my dad’s being Mars…” He shrugged.
“I’m supposed to be too powerful or something. That’s
why my life can burn up so easily. Iris said I would die
holding this, watching it burn.”
Frank turned the piece of tinder in his fingers.
Even in his ghostly purple form, he looked so big and
sturdy. Hazel figured he would be huge when he was an
adult—as strong and healthy as an ox. She couldn’t believe
his life depended on something as small as a stick.
“Frank, how can you carry it around with you?” she
asked. “Aren’t you terrified something will happen to it?”
“That’s why I’m telling you.” He held out the firewood.
“I know it’s a lot to ask, but would you keep it for
me?”
Hazel’s head spun. Until now, she’d accepted
Frank’s presence in her blackout. She’d led him along,
numbly replaying her past, because it seemed only fair to
show him the truth.
But now she wondered if Frank was really experiencing
this with her, or if she was just imagining his presence.
Why would he trust her with his life?
“Frank,” she said, “you know who I am. I’m Pluto’s
daughter. Everything I touch goes wrong. Why would you
trust me?”
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“You’re my best friend.” He placed the firewood in
her hands. “I trust you more than anybody.”
She wanted to tell him he was making a mistake.
She wanted to give it back. But before she could say anything,
a shadow fell over them.
“Our ride is here,” Frank guessed.
Hazel had almost forgotten she was reliving her
past. Nicodi Angelo stood over her in his black overcoat,
his Stygian iron sword at his side. He didn’t notice Frank,
but he locked eyes with Hazel and seemed to read her
whole life.
“You’re different,” he said. “A child of Pluto. You
remember your past.”
“Yes,” Hazel said. “And you’re alive.”
Nico studied her like he was reading a menu, decid
ing whether or not to order.
“I’m Nico di Angelo,” he said. “I came looking for
my sister. Death has gone missing, so I thought…I
thought I could bring her back and no one would notice.”
“Back to life?” Hazel asked. “Is that possible?”
“It should have been.” Nico sighed. “But she’s gone.
She chose to be reborn into a new life. I’m too late.”
“I’m sorry.”
He held out his hand. “You’re my sister too. You
deserve another chance. Come with me.”
“HAZEL.” PERCY WAS SHAKING HER SHOULDER.
“Wake up. We’ve reached Seattle.”
She sat up groggily, squinting in the morning sunlight.
“Frank?”
Frank groaned, rubbing his eyes. “Did we just…was
I just—?”
“You both passed out,” Percy said. “I don’t know
why, but Ella told me not to worry about it. She said you
were…sharing?”
“Sharing,” Ella agreed. She crouched in the stern,
preening her wing feathers with her teeth, which didn’t
look like a very effective form of personal hygiene. She
spit out some red fluff. “Sharing is good. No more blackouts.
Biggest American blackout, August 14, 2003. Hazel
shared. No more blackouts.” Percy scratched his head.
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“Yeah…we’ve been having conversations like that all
night. I still don’t know what she’stalking about.”
Hazel pressed her hand against her coat pocket.
She could feel the piece of firewood, wrapped in cloth.
She looked at Frank. “You were there.”
He nodded. He didn’t say anything, but his expression
was clear: He’d meant what he said. He wanted her
to keep the piece of tinder safe. She wasn’t sure whether
she felt honored or scared. No one had ever trusted her
with something so important.
“Wait,” Percy said. “You mean you guys shared a
blackout? Are you guys both going to pass out from now
on?”
“Nope,” Ella said. “Nope, nope, nope. No more
blackouts. More books for Ella. Books in Seattle.”
Hazel gazed over the water. They were sailing
through a large bay, making their way toward a cluster of
downtown buildings. Neighborhoods rolled across a
series of hills. From the tallest one rose an odd white
tower with a saucer on the top, like a spaceship from the
old Flash Gordon movies Sammy used to love.
No more blackouts? Hazel thought. After enduring
them for so long, the idea seemed too good to be true.
How could Ella be sure they were gone? Yet Hazel
did feel different . .. more grounded, as if she wasn’t trying
to live in two time periods anymore. Every muscle in
her body began to relax. She felt as if she’d finally slipped
out of a lead jacket she’d been wearing for months. Somehow,
having Frank with her during the blackout had
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helped. She’d relived her entire past, right through to the
present. No wall she had to worry about was the future—
assuming shehad one.
Percy steered the boat toward the downtown docks.
As they got closer, Ella scratched nervously at her nest of
books.
Hazel started to feel edgy, too. She wasn’t sure why.
It was a bright, sunny day, and Seattle looked like a beautiful
place, with inlets and bridges, wooded islands
dotting the bay, and snowcapped mountains rising in the
distance. Still, she felt as if she were being watched.
“Um…why are we stopping here?” she asked.
Percy showed them the silver ring on his necklace.
“Reyna has a sister here. She asked me to find her and
show her this.”
“Reyna has a sister?” Frank asked, like the idea terrified
him.
Percy nodded. “Apparently Reyna thinks her sister
could send help for the camp.”
“Amazons,” Ella muttered. “Amazon country.
Hmm. Ella will find libraries instead. Doesn’t like
Amazons. Fierce. Shields. Swords. Pointy. Ouch.”
Frank reached for his spear. “Amazons? Like…female
warriors?”
“That would make sense,” Hazel said. “If Reyna’s
sister is also a daughter of Bellona, I can see why she’d
join the Amazons. But…is it safe for us to be here?”
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“Nope, nope, nope,” Ella said. “Get books instead.
No Amazons.”
“We have to try,” Percy said. “I promised Reyna.
Besides, the Pax isn’t doing too great. I’ve been pushing it
pretty hard.”
Hazel looked down at her feet. Water was leaking
between the floorboards. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” Percy agreed. “We’ll either need to fix it or
find a new boat. I’m pretty much holding it together with
my willpower at this point. Ella, do you have any idea
where we can find the Amazons?”
“And, um,” Frank said nervously, “they don’t, like,
kill men on sight, do they?”
Ella glanced at the downtown docks, only a few
hundred yards away. “Ella will find friends later. Ella will
fly away now.”
And she did.
“Well…” Frank picked a single red feather out of
the air. “That’s encouraging.”
They docked at the wharf. They barely had time to
unload their supplies before the Pax shuddered and broke
into pieces. Most of it sank, leaving only a board with a
painted eye and another with the letter P bobbing in the
waves.
“Guess we’re not fixing it,” Hazel said. “What
now?”
Percy stared at the steep hills of downtown Seattle.
“We hope the Amazons will help.”
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They explored for hours. They found some great salty caramel
chocolate at a candy store. They bought some coffee
so strong, Hazel’s head felt like a vibrating gong. They
stopped at a sidewalk café and had some excellent grilled
salmon sandwiches.
Once they saw Ella zooming between high-rise
towers, a large book clutched in each foot. But they found
no Amazons. All the while, Hazel was aware of the time
ticking by. June 22 now, and Alaska was still a long way
away.
Finally they wandered south of downtown, into a
plaza surrounded by smaller glass and brick buildings.
Hazel’s nerves started tingling. She looked around, sure
she was being watched.
“There,” she said.
The office building on their left had a single word
etched on the glass doors: AMAZON.
“Oh,” Frank said. “Uh, no, Hazel. That’s a modern
thing. They’re a company, right? They sell stuff on the Internet.
They’re not actually Amazons.”
“Unless…” Percy walked through the doors. Hazel
had a bad feeling about this place, but she and Frank
followed.
The lobby was like an empty fish tank—glass walls,
a glossy black floor, a few token plants, and pretty much
nothing else. Against the back wall, a black stone staircase
led up and down. In the middle of the room stood a young
woman in a black pantsuit, with long auburn hair and a
security guard’s earpiece. Her name tag said kinzie. Her
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smile was friendly enough, but her eyes reminded Hazel
of the policemen in New Orleans who used to patrol the
French Quarter at night. They always seemed to look
through you, as if they were thinking about who might attack
them next.
Kinzie nodded at Hazel, ignoring the boys. “May I
help you?”
“Um…I hope so,” Hazel said. “We’re looking for
Amazons.”
Kinzie glanced at Hazel’s sword, then Frank’s
spear, though neither should have been visible through
the Mist.
“This is the main campus for Amazon,” she said
cautiously. “Did you have an appointment with someone,
or—”
“Hylla,” Percy interrupted. “We’re looking for a girl
named—”
Kinzie moved so fast, Hazel’s eyes almost couldn’t
follow. She kicked Frank in the chest and sent him flying
backward across the lobby. She pulled a sword out of thin
air, swept Percy off his feet with the flat of the blade, and
pressed the point under his chin.
Too late, Hazel reached for her sword. A dozen
more girls in black flooded up the staircase, swords in
hand, and surrounded her.
Kinzie glared down at Percy. “First rule: Males
don’t speak without permission. Second rule, trespassing
on our territory is punishable by death. You’ll meet
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Queen Hylla, all right. She’ll be the one deciding your
fate.”
The Amazons confiscated the trio’s weapons and
marchedthem down so many flights of stairs, Hazel lost
count.
Finally they emerged in a cavern so big it could
have accommodated ten high schools, sports fields and
all. Stark fluorescent lights glowed along the rock ceiling.
Conveyor belts wound through the room like water slides,
carrying boxes in every direction. Aisles of metal shelves
stretched out forever, stacked high with crates of merchandise.
Cranes hummed and robotic arms whirred,
folding cardboard boxes, packing shipments, and taking
things on and off the belts. Some of the shelves were so
tall they were only accessible by ladders and catwalks,
which ran across the ceiling like theaters scaffolding.
Hazel remembered newsreels she’d seen as a child.
She’d always been impressed by the scenes of factories
building planes and guns for the war effort—hundreds
and hundreds of weapons coming off the line every day.
But that was nothing compared to this, and almost all the
work was being done by computers and robots. The only
humans Hazel could see were some black-suited security
women patrolling the catwalks, and some men in orange
jumpsuits, like prison uniforms, driving forklifts through
the aisles, delivering more pallets of boxes. The men wore
iron collars around their necks.
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“You keep slaves?” Hazel knew it might be dangerous
to speak, but she was so outraged she couldn’t stop
herself.
“The men?” Kinzie snorted. “They’re not slaves.
They just know their place. Now, move.”
They walked so far, Hazel’s feet began to hurt. She
thought they must surely be getting to the end of the
warehouse when Kinzie opened a large set of double
doors and led them into another cavern, just as big as the
first.
“The Underworld isn’t this big,” Hazel complained,
which probably wasn’t true, but it felt that way to her feet.
Kinzie smiled smugly. “You admire our base of operations?
Yes, our distribution system is worldwide. It
took many years and most of our fortune to build. Now,
finally, we’re turning a profit. The mortals don’t realize
they are funding the Amazon kingdom. Soon, we’ll be
richer than any mortal nation. Then—when the weak
mortals depend on us for everything—the revolution will
begin!”
“What are you going to do?” Frank grumbled.
“Cancel free shipping?”
A guard slammed the hilt of her sword into his gut.
Percy tried to help him, but two more guards pushed him
back at sword point.
“You’ll learn respect,” Kinzie said. “It’s males like
you who have ruined the mortal world. The only harmonious
society is one run by women. We are stronger,
wiser—”
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“More humble,” Percy said. The guards tried to hit
him, but Percy ducked. “Stop it!” Hazel said. Surprisingly,
the guards listened. “Hylla is going to judge us, right?”
Hazel asked. “So take us to her. We’re wasting time.” Kinzie
nodded. “Perhaps you’re right. We have more important
problems. And time…time is definitely an is-
sue.”“What do you mean?” Hazel asked. A guard grunted.
“We could take them straight to Otrera.
Might win her favor that way.”“No!” Kinzie snarled.
“I’d sooner wear an iron collar and drive a forklift. Hylla
is queen.”“Until tonight,” another guard muttered. Kinzie
gripped her sword. For a second Hazel thought the
Amazons might start fighting one another, but Kinzie
seemed to get her anger under control. “Enough,” she
said. “Let’s go.” They crossed a lane of forklift traffic, navigated
a maze of conveyor belts, and ducked under a row
of robotic arms that were packing up boxes.
Most of the merchandise looked pretty ordinary:
books, electronics, baby diapers. But against one wall sat
a war chariot with a big bar code on the side. Hanging
from the yoke was a sign that read: ONLY ONE LEFT IN
STOCK. ORDER SOON! (MORE ON THE WAY)
Finally they entered a smaller cavern that looked
like a combination loading zone and throne room. The
walls were lined with metal shelves six stories high, decorated
with war banners, painted shields, and the stuffed
heads of dragons, hydras, giant lions, and wild boars.
Standing guard along either side were dozens of forklifts
modified for war. An iron-collared male drove each machine,
but an Amazon warrior stood on a platform in
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back, manning a giant mounted crossbow. The prongs of
each forklift had been sharpened into oversized sword
blades.
The shelves in this room were stacked with cages
containing live animals. Hazel couldn’t believe what she
was seeing—black mastiffs, giant eagles, a lion-eagle hybrid
that must’ve been a gryphon, and a red ant the size of
a compact car.
She watched in horror as a forklift zipped into the
room, picked up a cage with a beautiful white pegasus,
and sped away while the horse whinnied in protest.
“What are you doing to that poor animal?” Hazel
demanded.
Kinzie frowned. “The pegasus? It’ll be fine.
Someone must’ve ordered it. The shipping and handling
charges are steep, but—”
“You can buy a pegasus online?” Percy asked.
Kinzie glared at him. “Obviously you can’t, male.
But Amazons can. We have followers all over the world.
They need supplies. This way.”
At the end of the warehouse was a dais constructed
from pallets of books: stacks of vampire novels, walls of
James Patterson thrillers, and a throne made from about
a thousand copies of something called The Five Habits of
Highly Aggressive Women.
At the base of the steps, several Amazons in camouflage
were having a heated argument while a young woman—
Queen Hylla, Hazel assumed—watched and
listened from her throne.
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Hylla was in her twenties, lithe and lean as a tiger.
She wore a black leather jumpsuit and black boots. She
had no crown, but around her waist was a strange belt
made of interlocking gold links, like the pattern of a
labyrinth. Hazel couldn’t believe how much she looked
like Reyna—a little older, perhaps, but with the same long
black hair, the same dark eyes, and the same hard expression,
like she was trying to decide which of the Amazons
before her most deserved death.
Kinzie took one look at the argument and grunted
with distaste. “Otrera’s agents, spreading their lies.”
“What?” Frank asked.
Then Hazel stopped so abruptly, the guards behind
her stumbled. A few feet from the queen’s throne, two
Amazons guarded a cage. Inside was a beautiful
horse—not the winged kind, but a majestic and powerful
stallion with a honey-colored coat and a black mane. His
fierce brown eyes regarded Hazel, and she could swear he
looked impatient, as if thinking: About time you got here.
“It’s him,” Hazel murmured.
“Him, who?” Percy asked.
Kinzie scowled in annoyance, but when she saw
where Hazel was looking, her expression softened. “Ah,
yes. Beautiful, isn’t he?”
Hazel blinked to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating.
It was the same horse she’d chased in Alaska. She
was sure of it…but that was impossible. No horse could
live that long.
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“Is he…” Hazel could hardly control her voice. “Is
he for sale?”
The guards all laughed.
“That’s Arion,” Kinzie said patiently, as if she understood
Hazel’s fascination. “He’s a royal treasure of the
Amazons—to be claimed only by our most courageous
warrior, if you believe the prophecy.”
“Prophecy?” Hazel asked.
Kinzie’s expression became pained, almost embar
rassed. “Never mind. But no, he’s not for sale.”
“Then why is he in a cage?”
Kinzie grimaced. “Because…he is difficult.”
Right on cue, the horse slammed his head against
the cage door. The metal bars shuddered, and the guards
retreated nervously.
Hazel wanted to free that horse. She wanted it
more than anything she had ever wanted before. But
Percy, Frank, and a dozen Amazon guards were staring at
her, so she tried to mask her emotions. “Just asking,” she
managed. “Let’s see the queen.”
The argument at the front of the room grew louder.
Finally the queen noticed Hazel’s group approaching, and
she snapped, “Enough!”
The arguing Amazons shut up immediately. The
queen waved them aside and beckoned Kinzie forward.
Kinzie shoved Hazel and her friends toward the
throne. “My queen, these demigods—”
The queen shot to her feet. “You!”
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She glared at Percy Jackson with murderous rage.
Percy muttered something in Ancient Greek that
Hazel was pretty sure the nuns at St. Agnes wouldn’t have
liked.
“Clipboard,” he said. “Spa. Pirates.”
This made no sense to Hazel, but the queen nodded.
She stepped down from her dais of best sellers and
drew a dagger from her belt.
“You were incredibly foolish to come here,” she
said. “You destroyed my home. You made my sister and
me exiles and prisoners.”
“Percy,” Frank said uneasily. “What’s the scary woman
with the dagger talking about?”
“Circe’s Island,” Percy said. “I just remembered.
The gorgon’s blood—maybe it’s starting to heal my mind.
TheSea of Monsters. Hylla…she welcomed us at the
docks, took us to see her boss. Hylla worked for the
sorceress.”
Hylla bared her perfect white teeth. “Are you telling
me you’ve had amnesia? You know, I might actually believe
you.
Why else would you be stupid enough to come
here?”
“We’ve come in peace,” Hazel insisted. “What did
Percy do?”
“Peace?” The queen raised her eyebrows at Hazel.
“What did he do? This male destroyed Circe’s school of
magic!”
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“Circe turned me into a guinea pig!” Percy
protested.
“No excuses!” Hylla said. “Circe was a wise and
generous employer. I had room and board, a good health
plan, dental, pet leopards, free potions—everything! And
this demigod with his friend, the blonde—”
“Annabeth.” Percy tapped his forehead like he
wanted the memories to come back faster. “That’s right. I
was there with Annabeth.”
“You released our captives—Blackbeard and his
pirates.” She turned to Hazel. “Have you ever been kidnapped
by pirates? It isn’t fun. They burned our spa to
the ground. My sister and I were their prisoners for
months. Fortunately we were daughters of Bellona. We
learned to fight quickly. If we hadn’t…” She shuddered.
“Well, the pirates learned torespect us. Eventually we
made our way to California where we—” She hesitated as
if the memory was painful. “Where my sister and I parted
ways.”
She stepped toward Percy until they were nose-tonose.
She ran her dagger under his chin. “Of course, I survived
and prospered. I have risen to be queen of the
Amazons. So perhaps I should thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Percy said.
The queen dug her knife in a little deeper. “Never
mind. I think I’ll kill you.”
“Wait!” Hazel yelped. “Reyna sent us! Your sister!
Look at the ring on his necklace.”
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Hylla frowned. She lowered her knife to Percy’s
necklace until the point rested on the silver ring. The color
drained from her face.
“Explain this.” She glared at Hazel. “Quickly.”
Hazel tried. She described Camp Jupiter. She told
the Amazons about Reyna being their praetor, and the
army of monsters that was marching south. She told them
about their quest to free Thanatos in Alaska.
As Hazel talked, another group of Amazons entered
the room. One was taller and older than the rest, with
plaited silver hair and fine silk robes like a Roman matron.
The other Amazons made way for her, treating her
with such respect that Hazel wondered if she was Hylla’s
mother—until she noticed how Hylla and the older woman
stared daggers at each other.
“So we need your help,” Hazel finished her story.
“Reyna needs your help.”
Hylla gripped Percy’s leather cord and yanked it off
his neck—beads, ring, probatio tablet and all.
“Reyna…that foolish girl—”
“Well!” the older woman interrupted. “Romans
need our help?” She laughed, and the Amazons around
her joined in.
“How many times did we battle the Romans in my
day?” the woman asked. “How many times have they
killed our sisters in battle? When I was queen—”
“Otrera,” Hylla interrupted, “you are here as a
guest. You are not queen anymore.”
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The older woman spread her hands and made a
mocking bow. “As you say—at least, until tonight. But I
speak the truth, Queen Hylla.” She said the word like a
taunt. “I’ve been brought back by the Earth Mother herself!
I bring tidings of a new war. Why should Amazons
follow Jupiter, that foolish king of Olympus, when we can
follow a queen? When I take command—”
“If you take command,” Hylla said. “But for now, I
am queen. My word is law.”
“I see.” Otrera looked at the assembled Amazons,
who were standing very still, as if they’d found themselves
in a pit with two wild tigers. “Have we become so weak
that we listen to male demigods? Will you spare the life of
this son of Neptune, even though he once destroyed your
home? Perhaps you’ll let him destroy your new home,
too!”
Hazel held her breath. The Amazons looked back
and forth between Hylla and Otrera, watching for any
sign of weakness.
“I will pass judgment,” Hylla said in an icy tone,
“once I have all the facts. That is how I rule—by reason,
not fear. First, I will talk with this one.” She jabbed a finger
toward Hazel. “It is my duty to hear out a female warrior
before I sentence her or her allies to death. That is
the Amazon way. Or have your years in the Underworld
muddled your memory, Otrera?”
The older woman sneered, but she didn’t try to
argue.
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Hylla turned to Kinzie. “Take these males to the
holding cells. The rest of you, leave us.”
Otrera raised her hand to the crowd. “As our queen
commands. But any of you who would like to hear more
about Gaea, and our glorious future with her, come with
me!”
About half the Amazons followed her out of the
room. Kinzie snorted with disgust, then she and her
guards hauled Percy and Frank away.
Soon Hylla and Hazel were alone except for the
queen’s personal guards. At Hylla’s signal, even they
moved out of earshot.
The queen turned toward Hazel. Her anger dissolved,
and Hazel saw desperation in her eyes. The queen
looked like one of her caged animals being whisked off on
a conveyor belt.
“We must talk,” Hylla said. “We don’t have much
time. By midnight, I will most likely be dead.”
HAZEL CONSIDERED MAKING A RUN FOR IT.
She didn’t trust Queen Hylla, and she certainly
didn’t trust that other lady, Otrera. Only three guards
were left in the room. All of them kept their distance.
Hylla was armed with just a dagger. This deep underground,
Hazel might be able to cause an earthquake in
the throne room, or summon a big pile of schist or gold. If
she could cause a distraction, she might be able to escape
and find her friends.
Unfortunately, she’d seen the Amazons fight. Even
though the queen had only a dagger, Hazel suspected she
could use it pretty well. And Hazel was unarmed. They
hadn’t searched her, which meant thankfully they hadn’t
taken Frank’s firewood from her coat pocket, but her
sword was gone.
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The queen seemed to be reading her thoughts.
“Forget about escape. Of course, we’d respect you for trying.
But we’d have to kill you.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
Hylla shrugged. “The least I can do. I believe you
come in peace. I believe Reyna sent you.”
“But you won’t help?”
The queen studied the necklace she’d taken from
Percy. “It’s complicated,” she said. “Amazons have always
had a rocky relationship with other demigods—especially
male demigods. We fought for King Priam in the Trojan
War, but Achilles killed our queen, Penthesilea. Years before
that, Hercules stole Queen Hippolyta’s belt—this belt
I’m wearing. It took us centuries to recover it. Long before
that, at the very beginning of the Amazon nation, a
hero named Bellerophon killed our first queen, Otrera.”
“You mean the lady—”
“—who just left, yes. Otrera, our first queen, daugh
ter of Ares.”
“Mars?”
Hylla made a sour face. “No, definitely Ares. Otrera
lived long before Rome, in a time when all demigods were
Greek. Unfortunately, some of our warriors still prefer the
old ways. Children of Ares…they are always the worst.”
“The old ways…” Hazel had heard rumors about
Greek demigods. Octavian believed they existed and were
secretly plotting against Rome. But she’d never really believed
it, even when Percy came to camp. He just didn’t
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strike her as an evil, scheming Greek. “You mean the
Amazons are a mix…Greekand Roman?”
Hylla continued to examine the necklace—the clay
beads, the probatio tablet. She slipped Reyna’s silver ring
off the cord and put it on her own finger. “I suppose they
don’t teach you about that at Camp Jupiter. The gods
have many aspects. Mars, Ares. Pluto, Hades. Being immortal,
they tend to accumulate personalities. They are
Greek, Roman, American—a combination of all the cultures
they’ve influenced over the eons. Do you
understand?”
“I—I’m not sure. Are all Amazons demigods?”
The queen spread her hands. “We all have some
immortal blood, but many of my warriors are descended
from demigods. Some have been Amazons for countless
generations. Others are children of minor gods. Kinzie,
the one who brought you here, is the daughter of a
nymph. Ah—here she is now.”
The girl with the auburn hair approached the
queen and bowed.
“The prisoners are safely locked away,” Kinzie re
ported. “But...”
“Yes?” the queen asked.
Kinzie swallowed like she had a bad taste in her
mouth. “Otrera made sure her followers are guarding the
cells. I’m sorry, my queen.”
Hylla pursed her lips. “No matter. Stay with us,
Kinzie. We were just talking about our, ah, situation.”
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“Otrera,” Hazel guessed. “Gaea brought her back
from the dead to throw you Amazons into civil war.”
The queen exhaled. “If that was her plan, it is working.
Otrera is a legend among our people. She plans to
take back the throne and lead us to war against the Romans.
Many of my sisters will follow her.”
“Not all,” Kinzie grumbled.
“But Otrera is a spirit!” Hazel said. “She isn’t
even—”
“Real?” The queen studied Hazel carefully. “I
worked with the sorceress Circe for many years. I know a
returned soul when I see one. When did you die,
Hazel—Nineteen twenty? Nineteen thirty?”
“Nineteen forty-two,” Hazel said. “But—but I
wasn’t sent by Gaea. I came back to stop her. This is my
second chance.”
“Your second chance…” Hylla gazed at the rows of
battle forklifts, now empty. “I know about second
chances. That boy,
Percy Jackson—he destroyed my old life. You
wouldn’t have recognized me back then. I wore dresses
and makeup. I was a glorified secretary, an accursed Barbie
doll.”
Kinzie made a three-fingered claw over her heart,
like the voodoo gestures Hazel’s mom once used for
warding off the Evil Eye.
“Circe’s island was a safe place for Reyna and me,”
the queen continued. “We were daughters of the war
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goddess, Bellona. I wanted to protect Reyna from all that
violence. Then Percy Jackson unleashed the pirates. They
kidnapped us, and Reyna and I learned to be tough. We
found out that we were good with weapons. The past four
years, I’ve wanted to kill Percy Jackson for what he made
us endure.”
“But Reyna became the praetor of Camp Jupiter,”
Hazel said. “You became the queen of the Amazons.
Maybe this was your destiny.”
Hylla fingered the necklace in her hand. “I may not
be queen for much longer.”
“You will prevail!” Kinzie insisted.
“As the Fates decree,” Hylla said without
enthusiasm.
“You see, Hazel, Otrera has challenged me to a
duel. Every Amazon has that right. Tonight at midnight,
we’ll battle for the throne.”
“But…you’re good, right?” Hazel asked.
Hylla managed a dry smile. “Good, yes, but Otrera
is the founder of the Amazons.”
“She’s a lot older. Maybe she’s out of practice, having
been dead for so long.”
“I hope you’re right, Hazel. You see, it’s a battle to
the death....”
She waited for that to sink in. Hazel remembered
what Phineas had said in Portland—how he had had a
shortcut back from death, thanks to Gaea. She
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remembered how the gorgons had tried to re-form in the
Tiber.
“Even if you kill her,” Hazel said, “she’ll just come
back. As long as Thanatos is chained, she won’t stay
dead.”
“Exactly,” Hylla said. “Otrera has already told us
that she can’t die. So even if I manage to defeat her tonight,
she’ll simply return and challenge me again tomorrow.
There is no law against challenging the queen multiple
times. She can insist on fighting me every night, until
she finally wears me down. I can’t win.”
Hazel gazed at the throne. She imagined Otrera sitting
there with her fine robes and her silver hair, ordering
herwarriors to attack Rome. She imagined the voice of
Gaeafilling this cavern.
“There has to be a way,” she said. “Don’t Amazons
have…special powers or something?”
“No more than other demigods,” Hylla said. “We
can die, just like any mortal. There is a group of archers
who follow the goddess Artemis. They are often mistaken
for Amazons, but the Hunters forsake the company of
men in exchange for almost endless life. We
Amazons—we would prefer to live life to the fullest. We
love, we fight, we die.”
“I thought you hated men.”
Hylla and Kinzie both laughed.
“Hate men?” said the queen. “No, no, we like men.
We just like to show them who’s in charge. But that’s beside
the point. If I could, I would rally our troops and ride
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to my sister’s aid. Unfortunately, my power is tenuous.
When I am killed in combat—and it’s only a matter of
time—Otrera will be queen. She will march to Camp
Jupiter with our forces, but she will not go to help my sister.
She’ll go to join the giant’s army.”
“We’ve got to stop her,” Hazel said. “My friends
and I killed Phineas, one of Gaea’s other servants in Portland.
Maybe we can help!”
The queen shook her head. “You can’t interfere. As
queen, I must fight my own battles. Besides, your friends
are imprisoned. If I let them go, I’ll look weak. Either I
execute you three as trespassers, or Otrera will do so
when she becomes queen.”
Hazel’s heart sank. “So I guess we’re both dead. Me
for the second time.”
In the corner cage, the stallion Arion whinnied angrily.
He reared and slammed his hooves against the bars.
“The horse seems to feel your despair,” the queen
said. “Interesting. He’s immortal, you know—the son of
Neptune and Ceres.”
Hazel blinked. “Two gods had a horse for a kid?”
“Long story.”
“Oh.” Hazel’s face felt hot with embarrassment.
“He’s the fastest horse in the world,” Hylla said.
“Pegasus is more famous, with his wings, but Arion runs
like the wind over land and sea. No creature is faster. It
took us years to capture him—one of our greatest prizes.
But it did us no good. The horse will not allow anyone to
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ride him. I think he hates Amazons. And he is expensive
to keep. He will eat anything, but he prefers gold.”
The back of Hazel’s neck tingled. “He eats gold?”
She remembered the horse following her in Alaska
so many years ago. She had thought he was eating nuggets
of gold that appeared in her footsteps.
She knelt and pressed her hand against the floor.
Immediately, the stone cracked. A chunk of gold ore the
size of a plum was pushed out of the earth. Hazel stood,
examining her prize.
Hylla and Kinzie stared at her.
“How did you…?” The queen gasped. “Hazel, be
careful!”
Hazel approached the stallion’s cage. She put her
hand between the bars, and Arion gingerly ate the chunk
of gold from her palm.
“Unbelievable,” Kinzie said. “The last girl who tried
that—”
“Now has a metal arm,” the queen finished. She
studied Hazel with new interest, as if deciding whether or
not to say more. “Hazel…we spent years hunting for this
horse. It was foretold that the most courageous female
warrior would someday master Arion and ride him to victory,
ushering in a new era of prosperity for the Amazons.
Yet no Amazon can touch him, much less control him.
Even Otrera tried and failed. Two others died attempting
to ride him.”
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That probably should’ve worried Hazel, but she
couldn’t imagine this beautiful horse hurting her. She put
her hand through the bars again and stroked Arion’s
nose. He nuzzled her arm, murmuring contentedly, as if
asking, More gold? Yum.
“I would feed you more, Arion.” Hazel glanced
pointedly at the queen. “But I think I’m scheduled for an
execution.”
Queen Hylla looked from Hazel to the horse and
back again. “Unbelievable.”
“The prophecy,” Kinzie said. “Is it possible…?”
Hazel could almost see the gears turning inside the
queen’s head, formulating a plan. “You have courage,
Hazel Levesque. And it seems Arion has chosen you.
Kinzie?”
“Yes, my queen?”
“You said Otrera’s followers are guarding the
cells?”
Kinzie nodded. “I should have foreseen that. I’m
sorry—”
“No, it’s fine.” The queen’s eyes gleamed—the way
Hannibal the elephant’s did whenever he was unleashed
to destroy a fortress. “It would be embarrassing for Otrera
if her followers failed in their duties—if, for instance, they
were overcome by an outsider and a prison break
occurred.”
Kinzie began to smile. “Yes, my queen. Most
embarrassing.”
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“Of course,” Hylla continued, “none of my guards
would know a thing about this. Kinzie would not spread
the word to allow an escape.”
“Certainly not,” Kinzie agreed.
“And we couldn’t help you.” The queen raised her
eyebrows at Hazel. “But if you somehow overpowered the
guards and freed your friends…if, for instance, you took
one of the guards’ Amazon cards—”
“With one-click purchasing enabled,” Kinzie said,
“which will open the jail cells with one click.”
“If—gods forbid!—something like that were to happen,”
the queen continued, “you would find your friends’
weapons and supplies in the guard station next to the
cells. And who knows? If you made your way back to this
throne room while I was off preparing for my duel…well,
as I mentioned, Arionis a very fast horse. It would be a
shame if he were stolen and used for an escape.”
Hazel felt like she’d been plugged into a wall socket.
Electricity surged through her whole body. Arion…Arion
could be hers. All she had to do was rescue her friends
and fight her way through an entire nation of highly
trained warriors. “Queen Hylla,” she said, “I—I’m not
much of a fighter.”
“Oh, there are many kinds of fighting, Hazel. I have
a feeling you’re quite resourceful. And if the prophecy is
correct, you will help the Amazon nation achieve prosperity.
If you succeed on your quest to free Thanatos, for
instance—”
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“—then Otrera wouldn’t come back if she were
killed,”
Hazel said. “You’d only have to defeat her…um,
every night until we succeed.”
The queen nodded grimly. “It seems we both have
impossible tasks ahead of us.”
“But you’re trusting me,” said Hazel. “And I trust
you. You will win, as many times as it takes.”
Hylla held out Percy’s necklace and poured it into
Hazel’s hands.
“I hope you’re right,” the queen said. “But the sooner
you succeed the better, yes?”
Hazel slipped the necklace into her pocket. She
shook the queen’s hand, wondering if it was possible to
make a friend so fast—especially one who was about to
send her to jail.
“This conversation never happened,” Hylla told
Kinzie. “Take our prisoner to the cells and hand her over
to Otrera’s guards. And, Kinzie, be sure you leave before
anything unfortunate happens. I don’t want my loyal followers
held accountable for a prison break.”
The queen smiled mischievously, and for the first
time, Hazel felt jealous of Reyna. She wished that she had
a sister like this.
“Good-bye, Hazel Levesque,” the queen said. “If we
both die tonight…well, I’m glad I met you.”
THE AMAZON JAIL WAS AT THE TOP OF a storage aisle,
sixty feet in the air.
Kinzie led her up three different ladders to a metal
catwalk, then tied Hazel’s hands loosely behind her back
and pushed her along past crates of jewelry.
A hundred feet ahead, under the harsh glow of
fluorescent lights, a row of chain-link cages hung suspended
from cables. Percy and Frank were in two of the
cages, talking to each other in hushed tones. Next to them
on the catwalk, three bored-looking Amazon guards
leaned against their spears and gazed at little black tablets
in their hands like they were reading.
Hazel thought the tablets looked too thin for books.
Then it occurred to her they might be some sort of
tiny—what did modern people call them?—laptop computers.
SecretAmazon technology, perhaps. Hazel found
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the idea almost as unsettling as the battle forklifts
downstairs.
“Get moving, girl,” Kinzie ordered, loud enough for
the guards to hear. She prodded Hazel in the back with
her sword.
Hazel walked as slowly as she could, but her mind
was racing. She needed to come up with a brilliant rescue
plan. So far she had nothing. Kinzie had made sure she
could break her bonds easily, but she’d still be empty-
handed against three trained warriors, and she had to act
before they put her in a cage.
She passed a pallet of crates marked 24-CARAT BLUE
TOPAZ RINGS, then another labeled SILVER FRIENDSHIP
BRACELETS. An electronic display next to the friendship
bracelets read:People who bought this item also bought
GARDEN GNOMESOLAR PATIO LIGHT and FLAMING
SPEAR OF DEATH. Buy all three and save 12%!
Hazel froze. Gods of Olympus, she was stupid.
Silver. Topaz. She sent out her senses, searching for
precious metals, and her brain almost exploded from the
feedback. She was standing next to a six-story-tall mountain
of jewelry. But in front of her, from here to the
guards, was nothing but prison cages.
“What is it?” Kinzie hissed. “Keep moving! They’ll
get suspicious.”
“Make them come here,” Hazel muttered over her
shoulder.
“Why—”
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“Please.”
The guards frowned in their direction.
“What are you staring at?” Kinzie yelled at them.
“Here’s the third prisoner. Come get her.”
The nearest guard set down her reading tablet.
“Why can’t you walk another thirty paces, Kinzie?”
“Um, because—”
“Ooof!” Hazel fell to her knees and tried to put on
her best seasick face. “I’m feeling nauseous! Can’t…walk.
Amazons ... too ... scary.”
“There you go,” Kinzie told the guards. “Now, are
you going to come take the prisoner, or should I tell
Queen Hylla you’re not doing your duty?”
The nearest guard rolled her eyes and trudged over.
Hazel had hoped the other two guards would come too,
but she’d have to worry about that later.
The first guard grabbed Hazel’s arm. “Fine. I’ll take
custody of the prisoner. But if I were you, Kinzie, I
wouldn’t worry about Hylla. She won’t be queen much
longer.”
“We’ll see, Doris.” Kinzie turned to leave. Hazel
waited until her steps receded down the catwalk.
The guard Doris pulled on Hazel’s arm. “Well?
Come on.”
Hazel concentrated on the wall of jewelry next to
her:forty large boxes of silver bracelets. “Not…feeling so
good.”
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“You are not throwing up on me,” Doris growled.
She tried to yank Hazel to her feet, but Hazel went limp,
like a kid throwing a fit in a store. Next to her, the boxes
began to tremble.
“Lulu!” Doris yelled to one of her comrades. “Help
me with this lame little girl.”
Amazons named Doris and Lulu? Hazel thought.
Okay ...
The second guard jogged over. Hazel figured this
was her best chance. Before they could haul her to her
feet, she yelled, “Ooooh!” and flattened herself against the
catwalk.
Doris started to say, “Oh, give me a—”
The entire pallet of jewelry exploded with a sound
like a thousand slot machines hitting the jackpot. A tidal
wave of silver friendship bracelets poured across the catwalk,
washing Doris and Lulu right over the railing.
They would’ve fallen to their deaths, but Hazel
wasn’t that mean. She summoned a few hundred bracelets,
which leaped at the guards and lashed around their
ankles, leaving them hanging upside down from the bottom
of the catwalk, screaming like lame little girls.
Hazel turned toward the third guard. She broke her
bonds, which were about as sturdy as toilet paper. She
picked up one of the fallen guards’ spears. She was terrible
with spears, but she hoped the third Amazon didn’t
know that.
“Should I kill you from here?” Hazel snarled. “Or
are you going to make me come over there?”
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The guard turned and ran.
Hazel shouted over the side to Doris and Lulu.
“Amazon cards! Pass them up, unless you want me to
undo those friendship bracelets and let you drop!”
Four and a half seconds later, Hazel had two
Amazon cards. She raced over to the cages and swiped a
card. The doors popped open.
Frank stared at her in astonishment. “Hazel, that
was…amazing.”
Percy nodded. “I will never wear jewelry again.”
“Except this.” Hazel tossed him his necklace. “Our
weapons and supplies are at the end of the catwalk. We
should hurry. Pretty soon—”
Alarms began wailing throughout the cavern.
“Yeah,” she said, “that’ll happen. Let’s go!”
The first part of the escape was easy. They retrieved their
things with no problem, then started climbing down the
ladder. Every time Amazons swarmed beneath them, demanding
their surrender, Hazel made a crate of jewelry
explode, burying their enemies in a Niagara Falls of gold
and silver. When they got to the bottom of the ladder,
they found a scene that looked like Mardi Gras Armageddon—
Amazons trapped up to their necks in bead necklaces,
several more upside down in a mountain of
amethyst earrings, and a battle forklift buried in silver
charm bracelets.
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“You, Hazel Levesque,” Frank said, “are entirely
freaking incredible.”
She wanted to kiss him right there, but they had no
time. They ran back to the throne room.
They stumbled across one Amazon who must’ve
been loyal to Hylla. As soon as she saw the escapees, she
turned away like they were invisible.
Percy started to ask, “What the—”
“Some of them want us to escape,” Hazel said. “I’ll
explain later.”
The second Amazon they met wasn’t so friendly.
She was dressed in full armor, blocking the throne-room
entrance. She spun her spear with lightning speed, but
this time Percy was ready. He drew Riptide and stepped
into battle. As the Amazon jabbed at him, he sidestepped,
cut her spear shaft in half, and slammed the hilt of his
sword against her helmet.
The guard crumpled.
“Mars Almighty,” Frank said. “How did you—that
wasn’t any Roman technique!”
Percy grinned. “The graecus has some moves, my
friend. After you.”
They ran into the throne room. As promised, Hylla
and her guards had cleared out. Hazel dashed over to Arion’s
cage and swiped an Amazon card across the lock. In
stantly the stallion burst forth, rearing in triumph.
Percy and Frank stumbled backward.
“Um…is that thing tame?” Frank said.
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The horse whinnied angrily.
“I don’t think so,” Percy guessed. “He just said, ‘I
will trample you to death, silly Chinese Canadian baby
man.’”
“You speak horse?” Hazel asked.
“‘Baby man’?” Frank spluttered.
“Speaking to horses is a Poseidon thing,” Percy
said. “Uh, I mean a Neptune thing.”
“Then you and Arion should get along fine,” Hazel
said. “He’s a son of Neptune too.”
Percy turned pale. “Excuse me?”
If they hadn’t been in such a bad situation, Percy’s
expression might have made her laugh. “The point is, he’s
fast. He can get us out of here.”
Frank did not look thrilled. “Three of us can’t fit on
one horse, can we? We’ll fall off, or slow him down, or—”
Arion whinnied again.
“Ouch,” Percy said. “Frank, the horse says you’re
a—you know, actually, I’m not going to translate that.
Anyway, he says there’s a chariot in the warehouse, and
he’s willing to pull it.”
“There!” someone yelled from the back of the
throne room. A dozen Amazons charged in, followed by
males in orange jumpsuits. When they saw Arion, they
backed up quickly and headed for the battle forklifts.
Hazel vaulted onto Arion’s back.
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She grinned down at her friends. “I remember seeing
that chariot. Follow me, guys!”
She galloped into the larger cavern and scattered a
crowd of males. Percy knocked out an Amazon. Frank
swept two more off their feet with his spear. Hazel could
feel Arion straining to run. He wanted to go full speed,
but he needed more room. They had to make it outside.
Hazel bowled into a patrol of Amazons, who
scattered in terror at the sight of the horse. For once,
Hazel’s spatha felt exactly the right length. She swung it
at everyone who came within reach. No Amazon dared
challenge her.
Percy and Frank ran after her. Finally they reached
the chariot. Arion stopped by the yoke, and Percy set to
work with the reins and harness.
“You’ve done this before?” Frank asked.
Percy didn’t need to answer. His hands flew. In no
time the chariot was ready. He jumped aboard and yelled,
“Frank, come on! Hazel, go!”
A battle cry went up behind them. A full army of
Amazons stormed into the warehouse. Otrera herself
stood astride a battle forklift, her silver hair flowing as
she swung her mounted crossbow toward the chariot.
“Stop them!” she yelled.
Hazel spurred Arion. They raced across the cavern,
weaving around pallets and forklifts. An arrow whizzed
past Hazel’s head. Something exploded behind her, but
she didn’t look back.
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“The stairs!” Frank yelled. “No way this horse can
pull a chariot up that many flights of—OH MY GODS!”
Thankfully the stairs were wide enough for the
chariot, because Arion didn’t even slow down. He shot up
the steps with the chariot rattling and groaning. Hazel
glanced back a few times to make sure Frank and Percy
hadn’t fallen off. Their knuckles were white on the sides
of the chariot, their teeth chattering like windup Halloween
skulls.
Finally they reached the lobby. Arion crashed
through the main doors into the plaza and scattered a
bunch of guys in business suits.
Hazel felt the tension in Arion’s rib cage. The fresh
air was making him crazy to run, but Hazel pulled back
on his reins.
“Ella!” Hazel shouted at the sky. “Where are you?
We have to leave!”
For a horrible second, she was afraid the harpy
might be too far away to hear. She might be lost, or captured
by the Amazons.
Behind them a battle forklift clattered up the stairs
and roared through the lobby, a mob of Amazons behind
it.
“Surrender!” Otrera screamed.
The forklift raised its razor-sharp tines.
“Ella!” Hazel cried desperately.
In a flash of red feathers, Ella landed in the chariot.
“Ella is here. Amazons are pointy. Go now.”
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“Hold on!” Hazel warned. She leaned forward and
said, “Arion, run!”
The world seemed to elongate. Sunlight bent
around them. Arion shot away from the Amazons and
sped through downtown Seattle. Hazel glanced back and
saw a line of smoking pavement where Arion’s hooves
had touched the ground. He thundered toward the docks,
leaping over cars, barreling through intersections.
Hazel screamed at the top of her lungs, but it was a
scream of delight. For the first time in her life—in her two
lives—she felt absolutely unstoppable. Arion reached the
water and leaped straight off the docks.
Hazel’s ears popped. She heard a roar that she later
realized was a sonic boom, and Arion tore over Puget
Sound, seawater turning to steam in his wake as the skyline
of Seattle receded behind them.
FRANK WAS RELIEVED WHEN THE WHEELS FELL OFF.
He’d already thrown up twice from the back of the
chariot, which was not fun at the speed of sound. The
horse seemed to bend time and space as he ran, blurring
the landscape and making Frank feel like he’d just drunk
a gallon of whole milk without his lactose-intolerance
medicine. Ella didn’t help matters. She kept muttering:
“Seven hundred and fifty miles per hour. Eight hundred.
Eight hundred and three. Fast. Very fast.”
The horse sped north across Puget Sound, zooming
past islands and fishing boats and very surprised pods of
whales. The landscape ahead began to look familiar—
Crescent Beach, Boundary Bay. Frank had gone sailing
here once on a school trip. They’d crossed into
Canada.
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The horse rocketed onto dry land. He followed
Highway 99 north, running so fast, the cars seemed to be
standing still.
Finally, just as they were getting into Vancouver,
the chariot wheels began to smoke.
“Hazel!” Frank yelled. “We’re breaking up!”
She got the message and pulled the reins. The
horse didn’t seem happy about it, but he slowed to subsonic
as they zipped through the city streets. They crossed
the Ironworkers bridge into North Vancouver, and the
chariot started to rattle dangerously. At last Arion
stopped at the top of a wooded hill. He snorted with satisfaction,
as if to say, That’s how we run, fools. The
smoking chariot collapsed, spilling Percy, Frank, and Ella
onto the wet, mossy ground.
Frank stumbled to his feet. He tried to blink the
yellow spots out of his eyes. Percy groaned and started
unhitching Arion from the ruined chariot. Ella fluttered
around in dizzy circles, bonking into the trees and muttering,
“Tree. Tree. Tree.”
Only Hazel seemed unaffected by the ride. Grinning
with pleasure, she slid off the horse’s back. “That
was fun!”
“Yeah.” Frank swallowed back his nausea. “So
much fun.”
Arion whinnied.
“He says he needs to eat,” Percy translated. “No
wonder. He probably burned about six million calories.”
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Hazel studied the ground at her feet and frowned.
“I’m not sensing any gold around here.…Don’t worry, Arion.
I’ll find you some. In the meantime, why don’t you go
graze? We’ll meet you—”
The horse zipped off, leaving a trail of steam in his
wake.
Hazel knit her eyebrows. “Do you think he’ll come
back?”
“I don’t know,” Percy said. “He seems kind
of…spirited.”
Frank almost hoped the horse would stay away. He
didn’t say that, of course. He could tell Hazel was distressed
by the idea of losing her new friend. But Arion
scared him, and Frank was pretty sure the horse knew it.
Hazel and Percy started salvaging supplies from
the chariot wreckage. There had been a few boxes of random
Amazon merchandise in the front, and Ella shrieked
with delight when she found a shipment of books. She
snatched up a copy of The Birds of North America,
fluttered to the nearest branch, and began scratching
through the pages so fast, Frank wasn’t sure if she was
reading or shredding.
Frank leaned against a tree, trying to control his
vertigo. He still hadn’t recovered from his Amazon imprisonment—
getting kicked across the lobby, disarmed,
caged, and insulted as a baby man by an egomaniacal
horse. That hadn’t exactly helped his self-esteem.
Even before that, the vision he had shared with
Hazel had left him rattled. He felt closer to her now. He
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knew he’d done the right thing in giving her the piece of
firewood. A huge weight had been taken off his shoulders.
On the other hand, he’d seen the Underworld
firsthand. He had felt what it was like to sit forever doing
nothing, just regretting your mistakes. He’d looked up at
those creepy goldmasks on the judges of the dead and
realized that he would stand before them someday,
maybe very soon.
Frank had always dreamed of seeing his mother
again when he died. But maybe that wasn’t possible for
demigods. Hazel had been in Asphodel for something like
seventy years and never found her mom. Frank hoped he
and his mom would both end up in Elysium. But if Hazel
hadn’t gotten there—sacrificing her life to stop Gaea, taking
responsibility for her actions so that her mother
wouldn’t end up in Punishment—what chance did Frank
have? He’d never done anything that heroic.
He straightened and looked around, trying to get
his bearings.
To the south, across Vancouver Harbor, the downtown
skyline gleamed red in the sunset. To the north, the
hills and rain forests of Lynn Canyon Park snaked
between the subdivisions of North Vancouver until they
gave way to the wilderness.
Frank had explored this park for years. He spotted
a bend in the river that looked familiar. He recognized a
dead pine tree that had been split by lightning in a nearby
clearing. Frank knew this hill.
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“I’m practically home,” he said. “My grandmother’s
house is right over there.”
Hazel squinted. “How far?”
“Just over the river and through the woods.”
Percy raised an eyebrow. “Seriously? To Grandmother’s
house we go?”
Frank cleared his throat. “Yeah, anyway.”
Hazel clasped her hands in prayer. “Frank, please
tell me she’ll let us spend the night. I know we’re on a
deadline, but we’ve got to rest, right? And Arion saved us
some time. Maybe we could get an actual cooked meal?”
“And a hot shower?” Percy pleaded. “And a bed
with, like, sheets and a pillow?”
Frank tried to imagine Grandmother’s face if he
showed up with two heavily armed friends and a harpy.
Everything had changed since his mother’s funeral, since
the morning the wolves had taken him south. He’d been
so angry about leaving. Now, he couldn’t imagine going
back.
Still, he and his friends were exhausted. They’d
been traveling for more than two days without decent
food or sleep. Grandmother could give them supplies.
And maybe she could answer some questions that were
brewing in the back of Frank’s mind—a growing suspicion
about his family gift.
“It’s worth a try,” Frank decided. “To Grandmother’s
house we go.”
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Frank was so distracted, he would have walked right into
the ogres’ camp. Fortunately Percy pulled him back.
They crouched next to Hazel and Ella behind a
fallen log and peered into the clearing.
“Bad,” Ella murmured. “This is bad for harpies.”
It was fully dark now. Around a blazing campfire
sat half a dozen shaggy-haired humanoids. Standing up,
they probably would’ve been eight feet tall—tiny compared
to the giant Polybotes or even the Cyclopes they’d
seen in California, but that didn’t make them any less
scary. They wore only knee-length surfer shorts. Their
skin was sunstroke red—covered with tattoos of dragons,
hearts, and bikini-clad women. Hanging from a spit over
the fire was a skinned animal, maybe a boar, and the
ogres were tearing off chunks of meat with their clawlike
fingernails, laughing and talking as they ate, baring
pointy teeth. Next to the ogres sat several mesh bags filled
with bronze spheres like cannonballs. The spheres must
have been hot, because they steamed in the cool evening
air.
Two hundred yards beyond the clearing, the lights
of the Zhang mansion glowed through the trees. So close,
Frank thought. He wondered if they could sneak around
the monsters, but when he looked left and right, he saw
more campfires in either direction, as if the ogres had
surrounded the property. Frank’s fingers dug into the tree
bark. His grandmother might be alone inside the house,
trapped.
“What are these guys?” he whispered.
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“Canadians,” Percy said.
Frank leaned away from him. “Excuse me?”
“Uh, no offense,” Percy said. “That’s what Anna
beth called them when I fought them before. She said
they live in the north, in Canada.”
“Yeah, well,” Frank grumbled, “we’re in Canada.
I’m Canadian. But I’ve never seen those things before.”
Ella plucked a feather from her wings and turned it
in her fingers. “Laistrygonians,” she said. “Cannibals.
Northern giants. Sasquatch legend. Yep, yep. They’re not
birds. Not birds of North America.”
“That’s what they’re called,” Percy agreed.
“Laistry—uh, whatever Ella said.”
Frank scowled at the dudes in the clearing. “They
could be mistaken for Bigfoot. Maybe that’s where the legend
came from. Ella, you’re pretty smart.”
“Ella is smart,” she agreed. She shyly offered Frank
her feather.
“Oh…thanks.” He stuck the feather in his pocket,
then noticed Hazel was glaring at him. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She turned to Percy. “So your memory
is coming back? Do you remember how you beat these
guys?”
“Sort of,” Percy said. “It’s still fuzzy. I think I had
help. We killed them with Celestial bronze, but that was
before ... you know.”
“Before Death got kidnapped,” Hazel said. “So now,
they might not die at all.”
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Percy nodded. “Those bronze cannonballs…those
are bad news. I think we used some of them against the
giants. They catch fire and blow up.”
Frank’s hand went to his coat pocket. Then he remembered
Hazel had his piece of driftwood. “If we cause
any explosions,” he said, “the ogres at the other camps
will come running. I think they’ve surrounded the house,
which means there could be fifty or sixty of these guys in
the woods.”
“So it’s a trap.” Hazel looked at Frank with concern.
“What about your grandmother? We’ve got to help her.”
Frank felt a lump in his throat. Never in a million
years had he thought his grandmother would need rescuing,
but now he started running combat scenarios in his
mind—the way he had back at camp during the war
games.
“We need a distraction,” he decided. “If we can
draw this group into the woods, we might sneak through
without alerting the others.”
“I wish Arion was here,” Hazel said. “I could get the
ogres to chase me.”
Frank slipped his spear off his back. “I’ve got another
idea.”
Frank didn’t want to do this. The idea of summoning
Gray scared him even more than Hazel’s horse. But he
didn’t see another way.
“Frank, you can’t charge out there!” Hazel said.
“That’s suicide!”
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“I’m not charging,” Frank said. “I’ve got a friend.
Just…nobody scream, okay?”
He jabbed the spear into the ground, and the point
broke off.
“Oops,” Ella said. “No spear point. Nope, nope.”
The ground trembled. Gray’s skeletal hand broke
the surface. Percy fumbled for his sword, and Hazel made
a sound like a cat with a hairball. Ella disappeared and re-
materialized at the top of the nearest tree.
“It’s okay,” Frank promised. “He’s under control!”
Gray crawled out of the ground. He showed no sign
of damage from his previous encounter with the basilisks.
He was good as a new in his camouflage and combat
boots, translucent gray flesh covering his bones like
glowing Jell-O. He turned his ghostly eyes toward Frank,
waiting for orders.
“Frank, that’s a spartus,” Percy said. “A skeleton
warrior. They’re evil. They’re killers. They’re—”
“I know,” Frank said bitterly. “But it’s a gift from
Mars. Right now that’s all I’ve got. Okay, Gray. Your orders:
attack that group of ogres. Lead them off to the
west, causing a diversion so we can—”
Unfortunately, Gray lost interest after the word
“ogres.” Maybe he only understood simple sentences. He
charged toward the ogres’ campfire.
“Wait!” Frank said, but it was too late. Gray pulled
two of his own ribs from his shirt and ran around the fire,
stabbing the ogres in the back with such blinding speed
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they didn’t even have time to yell. Six extremely
surprised-looking Laistrygonians fell sideways like a
circle of dominoes and crumbled into dust.
Gray stomped around, kicking their ashes apart as
they tried to re-form. When he seemed satisfied that they
weren’t coming back, Gray stood at attention, saluted
smartly in Frank’s direction, and sank into the forest
floor.
Percy stared at Frank. “How—”
“No Laistrygonians.” Ella fluttered down and
landed next to them. “Six minus six is zero. Spears are
good for subtraction. Yep.”
Hazel looked at Frank as if he’d turned into a zombie
skeleton himself. Frank thought his heart might shatter,
but he couldn’t blame her. Children of Mars were all
about violence. Mars’s symbol was a bloody spear for
good reason. Why shouldn’t Hazel be appalled?
He glared down at broken tip of his spear. He
wished he had any father but Mars. “Let’s go,” he said.
“My grandmother might be in trouble.”
THEY STOPPED AT THE FRONT PORCH. As Frank had
feared, a loose ring of campfires glowed in the woods,
completely surrounding the property, but the house itself
seemed untouched.
Grandmother’s wind chimes jangled in the night
breeze. Her wicker chair sat empty, facing the road.
Lights shone through the downstairs windows, but Frank
decided against ringing the doorbell. He didn’t know how
late it was, or if Grandmother was asleep or even home.
Instead he checked the stone elephant statue in the
corner—a tiny duplicate of the one in Portland. The spare
key was still tucked under its foot.
He hesitated at the door.
“What’s wrong?” Percy asked.
Frank remembered the morning he’d opened this
door for the military officer who had told him about his
mother. He remembered walking down these steps to her
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funeral, holding his piece of firewood in his coat for the
first time. He remembered standing here and watching
the wolves come out of the woods—Lupa’s minions, who
would lead him to Camp Jupiter. That seemed so long
ago, but it had only been six weeks.
Now he was back. Would Grandmother hug him?
Would she say, Frank, thank the gods you’ve come! I’m
surrounded by monsters!
More likely she’d scold him, or mistake them for
intruders and chase them off with a frying pan.
“Frank?” Hazel asked.
“Ella is nervous,” the harpy muttered from her
perch on the railing. “The elephant—the elephant is looking
at Ella.”
“It’ll be fine.” Frank’s hand was shaking so badly he
could barely fit the key in the lock. “Just stay together.”
Inside, the house smelled closed-up and musty.
Usually the air was scented with jasmine incense, but all
the burners were empty.
They examined the living room, the dining room,
the kitchen. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink, which
wasn’t right. Grandmother’s maid came every day—unless
she’d been scared off by the giants.
Or eaten for lunch, Frank thought. Ella had said
the Laistrygonians were cannibals.
He pushed that thought aside. Monsters ignored
regular mortals. At least, they usually did.
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In the parlor, Buddha statues and Taoist immortals
grinned at them like psycho clowns. Frank remembered
Iris, the rainbow goddess, who’d been dabbling in
Buddhism and Taoism. Frank figured one visit to this
creepy old house would cure her of that.
Grandmother’s large porcelain vases were strung
with cobwebs. Again—that wasn’t right. She insisted that
her collection be dusted regularly. Looking at the porcelain,
Frank felt a twinge of guilt for having destroyed so
many pieces the day of the funeral. It seemed silly to him
now—getting angry at Grandmother when he had so
many others to be angry at: Juno, Gaea, the giants, his
dad Mars. Especially Mars.
The fireplace was dark and cold.
Hazel hugged her chest as if to keep the piece of
firewood from jumping into the hearth. “Is that—”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “That’s it.”
“That’s what?” Percy asked.
Hazel’s expression was sympathetic, but that just
made Frank feel worse. He remembered how terrified,
how repulsed she had looked when he had summoned
Gray.
“It’s the fireplace,” he told Percy, which sounded
stupidly obvious. “Come on. Let’s check upstairs.”
The steps creaked under their feet. Frank’s old
room was the same. None of his things had been
touched—his extra bow and quiver (he’d have to grab
those later), his spelling awards from school (yeah, he
probably was the only non-dyslexic spelling champion
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demigod in the world, as if he weren’t enough of a freak
already), and his photos of his mom—in her flak jacket
and helmet, sitting on a Humvee in Kandahar Province;
in her soccer coach uniform, the season she’d coached
Frank’s team; in her military dress uniform, her hands on
Frank’s shoulders, the time she’d visited his school for career
day.
“Your mother?” Hazel asked gently. “She’s
beautiful.”
Frank couldn’t answer. He felt a little embarrassed—
a sixteen-year-old guy with a bunch of pictures of
his mom.
How hopelessly lame was that? But mostly he felt
sad. Six weeks since he’d been here. In some ways it
seemed like forever. But when he looked at his mom’s
smiling face in those photos, the pain of losing her was as
fresh as ever.
They checked the other bedrooms. The middle two
were empty. A dim light flickered under the last
door—Grandmother’s room.
Frank knocked quietly. No one answered. He
pushed open her door. Grandmother lay in bed, looking
gaunt and frail, her white hair spread around her face like
a basilisk’s crown. A single candle burned on the night-
stand. At her bedside sat a large man in beige Canadian
Forces fatigues. Despite the gloom, he wore dark
sunglasses with blood red light glowing behind the lenses.
“Mars,” Frank said.
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The god looked up impassively. “Hey, kid. Come on
in. Tell your friends to take a hike.”
“Frank?” Hazel whispered. “What do mean, Mars?
Is your grandmother ... is she okay?”
Frank glanced at his friends. “You don’t see him?”
“See who?” Percy gripped his sword. “Mars?
Where?”
The war god chuckled. “Nah, they can’t see me.
Figured it was better this time. Just a private conversation—
father/son, right?”
Frank clenched his fists. He counted to ten before
he trusted himself to speak.
“Guys, it’s…it’s nothing. Listen, why don’t you take
the middle bedrooms?”
“Roof,” Ella said. “Roofs are good for harpies.”
“Sure,” Frank said in a daze. “There’s probably food
in the kitchen. Would you give me a few minutes alone
with my grandmother? I think she—”
His voice broke. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to cry
orscream or punch Mars in the glasses—maybe all three.
Hazel laid her hand on his arm. “Of course, Frank.
Come on, Ella, Percy.”
Frank waited until his friends’ steps receded. Then
he walked into the bedroom and closed the door.
“Is it really you?” he asked Mars. “This isn’t a trick
or illusion or something?”
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The god shook his head. “You’d prefer it if it wasn’t
me?”
“Yes,” Frank confessed.
Mars shrugged. “Can’t blame you. Nobody welcomes
war—not if they’re smart. But war finds everyone
sooner or later. It’s inevitable.”
“That’s stupid,” Frank said. “War isn’t inevitable. It
kills people. It—”
“—took your mom,” Mars finished.
Frank wanted to smack the calm look off his face,
but maybe that was just Mars’s aura making him feel aggressive.
He looked down at his grandmother, sleeping
peacefully. He wished she would wake up. If anyone could
take on a war god, his grandmother could.
“She’s ready to die,” Mars said. “She’s been ready
for weeks, but she’s holding on for you.”
“For me?” Frank was so stunned he almost forgot
his anger. “Why? How could she know I was coming
back? I didn’t know!”
“The Laistrygonians outside knew,” Mars said. “I
imagine a certain goddess told them.”
Frank blinked. “Juno?”
The war god laughed so loudly the windows rattled,
but Grandmother didn’t even stir. “Juno? Boar’s
whiskers, kid. Not Juno! You’re Juno’s secret weapon.
She wouldn’t sell you out. No, I meant Gaea. Obviously
she’s been keeping track of you. I think you worry her
more than Percy or Jason or any of the seven.”
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Frank felt like the room was tilting. He wished
there were another chair to sit in. “The seven…you mean
in the ancient prophecy, the Doors of Death? I’m one of
the seven? And Jason, and—”
“Yes, yes.” Mars waved his hand impatiently.
“Come on, boy. You’re supposed to be a good tactician.
Think it through! Obviously your friends are being
groomed for that mission too, assuming you make it back
from Alaska alive. Juno aims to unite the Greeks and Romans
and send them against the giants. She believes it’s
the only way to stop Gaea.”
Mars shrugged, clearly unconvinced of the plan.
“Anyway, Gaea doesn’t want you to be one of the seven.
Percy Jackson…she believes she can control him. All of
the others have weaknesses she can exploit. But you—you
worry her. She’d rather kill you right away. That’s why
she summoned the Laistrygonians. They’ve been here for
days, waiting.”
Frank shook his head. Was Mars playing some kind
of trick? No way would a goddess be worried about
Frank, especially when there was somebody like Percy
Jackson to worry about.
“No weaknesses?” he asked. “I’m nothing but weaknesses.
My life depends on a piece of wood!”
Mars grinned. “You’re selling yourself short. Anyway,
Gaea has these Laistrygonians convinced that if they
eat the last member of your family—that being
you—they’ll inherit your family gift. Whether that’s true
or not, I don’t know. But the Laistrygonians are hungry to
try.”
404/589
Frank’s stomach twisted into a knot. Gray had
killed six of the ogres, but judging from the campfires
around the property, there were dozens more—all waiting
to cook Frank for breakfast.
“I’m going to throw up,” he said.
“No, you’re not.” Mars snapped his fingers, and
Frank’s queasiness disappeared. “Battle jitters. Happens
to everybody.”
“But my grandmother—”
“Yeah, she’s been waiting to talk to you. The ogres
have left her alone so far. She’s the bait, see? Now that
you’re here, I imagine they’ve already smelled your presence.
They’ll attack in the morning.”
“Get us out of here, then!” Frank demanded. “Snap
your fingers and blow up the cannibals.”
“Ha! That would be fun. But I don’t fight my kids’
battles for them. The Fates have clear ideas about what
jobs belong to gods, and what has to be done by mortals.
This is your quest, kid. And, uh, in case you haven’t
figured it out yet, your spear won’t be ready to use again
for twenty-four hours, so I hope you’ve learned how to
use the family gift. Otherwise, you’re gonna be breakfast
for cannibals.”
The family gift. Frank had wanted to talk with
Grandmother about it, but now he had no one to consult
but Mars. He stared at the war god, who was smiling with
absolutely no sympathy.
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“Periclymenus.” Frank sounded out the word carefully,
like a spelling-bee challenge. “He was my ancestor,
a Greek prince, an Argonaut. He died fighting Hercules.”
Mars rolled his hand in a “go on” gesture.
“He had an ability that helped him in combat,”
Frank said. “Some sort of gift from the gods. My mom
said he fought like a swarm of bees.”
Mars laughed. “True enough. What else?”
“Somehow, the family got to China. I think, like in
the days of the Roman Empire, one of Pericylmenus’s
descendants served in a legion. My mom used to talk
about a guy named Seneca Gracchus, but he also had a
Chinese name, Sung Guo. I think—well, this is the part I
don’t know, but Reyna always said there were many lost
legions. The Twelfth founded Camp Jupiter. Maybe there
was another legion that disappeared into the east.”
Mars clapped silently. “Not bad, kid. Ever heard of
the Battle of Carrhae? Huge disaster for the Romans.
They fought these guys called the Parthians on the eastern
border of the empire. Fifteen thousand Romans died.
Ten thousand more were taken prisoner.”
“And one of the prisoners was my ancestor
SenecaGracchus?”
“Exactly,” Mars agreed. “The Parthians put the captured
legionnaires to work, since they were pretty good
fighters. Except then Parthia got invaded again from the
other direction—”
“By the Chinese,” Frank guessed. “And the Roman
prisoners got captured again.”
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“Yeah. Kind of embarrassing. Anyway, that’s how a
Roman legion got to China. The Romans eventually put
down roots and built a new hometown called—”
“Li-Jien,” Frank said. “My mother said that was our
ancestral home. Li-Jien. Legion.”
Mars looked pleased. “Now you’re getting it. And
old Seneca Gracchus, he had your family’s gift.”
“My mom said he fought dragons,” Frank remembered.
“She said he was…he was the most powerful
dragon of all.”
“He was good,” Mars admitted. “Not good enough
to avoid the bad luck of his legion, but good. He settled in
China, passed the family gift to his kids, and so on. Eventually
your family emigrated to North America and got involved
with Camp Jupiter—”
“Full circle,” Frank finished. “Juno said I would
bring the family full circle.”
“We’ll see.” Mars nodded at his grandmother. “She
wanted to tell you all this herself, but I figured I’d cover
some of it since the old bird hasn’t got much strength. So
do you understand your gift?”
Frank hesitated. He had an idea, but it seemed
crazy—even crazier than a family moving from Greece to
Rome to China to Canada. He didn’t want to say it aloud.
He didn’t want to be wrong and have Mars laugh at him.
“I—I think so. But against an army of those ogres—”
“Yeah, it’ll be tough.” Mars stood and stretched.
“When your grandmother wakes up in the morning, she’ll
offer you some help. Then I imagine she’ll die.”
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“What? But I have to save her! She can’t just leave
me.”
“She’s lived a full life,” Mars said. “She’s ready to
move on. Don’t be selfish.”
“Selfish!”
“The old woman only stuck around this long out of
a sense of duty. Your mom was the same way. That’s why
I loved her. She always put her duty first, ahead of
everything. Even her life.”
“Even me.”
Mars took off his sunglasses. Where his eyes
should’ve been, miniature spheres of fire boiled like nuclear
explosions. “Self-pity isn’t helpful, kid. It isn’t worthy
of you. Even without the family gift, your mom gave you
your most important traits—bravery, loyalty, brains. Now
you’ve got to decide how to use them. In the morning,
listen to your grandmother. Take her advice. You can still
free Thanatos and save the camp.”
“And leave my grandmother behind to die.”
“Life is only precious because it ends, kid. Take it
from a god. You mortals don’t know how lucky you are.”
“Yeah,” Frank muttered. “Real lucky.”
Mars laughed—a harsh metallic sound. “Your mom
used to tell me this Chinese proverb. Eat bitter—”
“Eat bitter, taste sweet,” Frank said. “I hate that
proverb.”
“But it’s true. What do they call it these days—no
pain, no gain? Same concept. You do the easy thing, the
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appealing thing, the peaceful thing, mostly it turns out
sour in the end. But if you take the hard path—ah, that’s
how you reap the sweet rewards. Duty. Sacrifice. They
mean something.”
Frank was so disgusted he could hardly speak. This
was his father?
Sure, Frank understood about his mom being a
hero. He understood she’d saved lives and been really
brave. But she’d left him alone. That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t
right.
“I’ll be going,” Mars promised. “But first—you said
you were weak. That’s not true. You want to know why
Juno spared you, Frank? Why that piece of wood didn’t
burn yet?
It’s because you’ve got a role to play. You think
you’re not as good as the other Romans. You think Percy
Jackson is better than you.”
“He is,” Frank grumbled. “He battled you and
won.”
Mars shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe so. But every hero
has a fatal flaw. Percy Jackson? He’s too loyal to his
friends. He can’t give them up, not for anything. He was
told that, years ago. And someday soon, he’s going to face
a sacrifice he can’t make. Without you, Frank—without
your sense of duty—he’s going to fail. The whole war will
go sideways, and Gaea will destroy our world.”
Frank shook his head. He couldn’t hear this.
“War is a duty,” Mars continued. “The only real
choice is whether you accept it, and what you fight for.
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The legacy of Rome is on the line—five thousand years of
law, order, civilization. The gods, the traditions, the cultures
that shaped the world you live in: it’s all going to
crumble, Frank, unless you win this. I think that’s worth
fighting for. Think about it.”
“What’s mine?” Frank asked.
Mars raised an eyebrow. “Your what?”
“Fatal flaw. You said all heroes have one.”
The god smiled dryly. “You gotta answer that your
self, Frank. But you’re finally asking the right questions.
Now, get some sleep. You need the rest.”
The god waved his hand. Frank’s eyes felt heavy.
He collapsed, and everything went dark.
“Fai,” said a familiar voice, harsh and impatient.
Frank blinked his eyes. Sunlight streamed into the
room.
“Fai, get up. As much as I would like to slap that ridiculous
face of yours, I am in no condition to get out of
bed.”
“Grandmother?”
She came into focus, looking down at him from the
bed. He lay sprawled on the floor. Someone had put a
blanket over him during the night and a pillow under his
head, but he had no idea how it had happened.
“Yes, my silly ox.” Grandmother still looked horribly
weak and pale, but her voice was as steely as ever.
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“Now, get up. The ogres have surrounded the house. We
have much to discuss if you and your friends are to escape
here alive.”
ONE LOOK OUT THE WINDOW, and Frank knew he was
in trouble.
At the edge of the lawn, the Laistrygonians were
stacking bronze cannonballs. Their skin gleamed red.
Their shaggy hair, tattoos, and claws didn’t look any prettier
in the morning light.
Some carried clubs or spears. A few confused ogres
carried surfboards, like they’d shown up at the wrong
party. All of them were in a festive mood—giving each
other high fives, tying plastic bibs around their necks,
breaking out the knives and forks. One ogre had fired up
a portable barbecue and was dancing in an apron that
said KISS THE COOK.
The scene would’ve been almost funny, except
Frank knew he was the main course.
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“I’ve sent your friends to the attic,” Grandmother
said.
“You can join them when we’re done.”
“The attic?” Frank turned. “You told me I could
never go in there.”
“That’s because we keep weapons in the attic, silly
boy. Do you think this is the first time monsters have attacked
our family?”
“Weapons,” Frank grumbled. “Right. I’ve never
handled weapons before.”
Grandmother’s nostrils flared. “Was that sarcasm,
Fai Zhang?”
“Yes, Grandmother.”
“Good. There may be hope for you yet. Now, sit.
You must eat.”
She waved her hand at the nightstand, where
someone had set a glass of orange juice and a plate of
poached eggs and bacon on toast—Frank’s favorite
breakfast.
Despite his troubles, Frank suddenly felt hungry.
He looked at Grandmother in astonishment. “Did you—”
“Make you breakfast? By Buddha’s monkey, of
course not! And it wasn’t the house staff. Too dangerous
for them here. No, your girlfriend Hazel made that for
you. And brought you a blanket and pillow last night. And
picked out some clean clothes for you in your bedroom.
By the way, you should shower. You smell like burning
horse hair.”
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Frank opened and closed his mouth like a fish. He
couldn’t make sounds come out. Hazel had done all that
for him? Frank had been sure he’d destroyed any chance
with her last night when he had summoned Gray.
“She’s...um...she’s not—”
“Not your girlfriend?” Grandmother guessed.
“Well, she should be, you dolt! Don’t let her get away. You
need strong women in your life, if you haven’t noticed.
Now, to business.”
Frank ate while Grandmother gave him a sort of
military briefing. In the daylight, her skin was so translucent,
her veins seemed to glow. Her breathing sounded
like a crackly paper bag inflating and deflating, but she
spoke with firmness and clarity.
She explained that the ogres had been surrounding
the house for three days, waiting for Frank to show up.
“They want to cook you and eat you,” she said dis
tastefully, “which is ridiculous. You’d taste terrible.”
“Thank you, Grandmother.”
She nodded. “I admit, I was somewhat pleased
when they said you were coming back. I am glad to see
you one last time, even if your clothes are dirty and you
need a haircut. Is this how you represent your family?”
“I’ve been a little busy, Grandmother.”
“No excuse for sloppiness. At any rate, your friends
have slept and eaten. They are taking stock of the
weapons in the attic. I told them you would be along
shortly, but there are too many ogres to fend off for long.
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We must speak of your escape plan. Look in my
nightstand.”
Frank opened the drawer and pulled out a sealed
envelope.
“You know the airfield at the end of the park?”
Grandmother asked. “Could you find it again?”
Frank nodded mutely. It was about three miles to
the north, down the main road through the canyon.
Grandmother had taken him there sometimes when she
would charter planes to bring in special shipments from
China.
“There is a pilot standing by to leave at a moment’s
notice,” Grandmother said. “He is an old family friend. I
have a letter for him in that envelope, asking him to take
you north.”
“But—”
“Do not argue, boy,” she muttered. “Mars has been
visiting me these last few days, keeping me company. He
told me of your quest. Find Death in Alaska and release
him. Do your duty.”
“But if I succeed, you’ll die. I’ll never see you
again.”
“That is true,” Grandmother agreed. “But I’ll die
anyway. I’m old. I thought I made that clear. Now, did
your praetor give you letters of introduction?”
“Uh, yes, but—”
“Good. Show those to the pilot as well. He’s a veter
an of the legion. In case he has any doubts, or gets cold
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feet, those credentials will make him honor-bound to help
you in any way possible. All you have to do is reach the
airfield.”
The house rumbled. Outside a ball of fire exploded
in midair, lighting up the entire room.
“The ogres are getting restless,” Grandmother said.
“We must hurry. Now, about your powers, I hope you’ve
figured them out.”
“Uh...”
Grandmother muttered some curses in rapid-fire
Mandarin. “Gods of your ancestors, boy! Have you
learned nothing?”
“Yes!” He stammered out the details of his discussion
with Mars the night before, but he felt much more
tongue-tied in front of Grandmother. “The gift of Periclymenus…
I think, I think he was a son of Poseidon, I mean
Neptune, I mean…” Frank spread his hands. “The sea
god.”
Grandmother nodded grudgingly. “He was the
grandson of Poseidon, but good enough. How did your
brilliant intellect arrive at this fact?”
“A seer in Portland…he said something about my
great-grandfather, Shen Lun. The seer said he was
blamed for the 1906 earthquake that destroyed San Fran
cisco and the old location of Camp Jupiter.”
“Go on.”
“At camp, they said a descendant of Neptune had
caused the disaster. Neptune is the god of earthquakes.
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But…but I don’t think great-grandfather actually did it.
Causing earthquakes isn’t our gift.”
“No,” Grandmother agreed. “But yes, he was
blamed. He was unpopular as a descendant of Neptune.
He was unpopular because his real gift was much
stranger than causing earthquakes. And he was unpopular
because he was Chinese. A Chinese boy had never before
claimed Roman blood. An ugly truth—but there is no
denying it. He was falsely accused, forced out in shame.”
“So…if he didn’t do anything wrong, why did you
tell me to apologize for him?”
Grandmother’s cheeks flushed. “Because apologizing
for something you didn’t do is better than dying for it!
I wasn’t sure if the camp would hold you to blame. I did
not know if the prejudice of the Romans had eased.”
Frank swallowed down his breakfast. He’d been
teased in school and on the streets sometimes, but not
that much, and never at Camp Jupiter. Nobody at camp,
not once, had made fun of him for being Asian. Nobody
cared about that. They only made fun of him because he
was clumsy and slow. He couldn’t imagine what it had
been like for his great-grandfather, accused of destroying
the entire camp, drummed out of the legion for
something he didn’t do.
“And our real gift?” Grandmother asked. “Have you
at least figured out what it is?”
His mother’s old stories swirled in Frank’s head.
Fighting like a swarm of bees. He was the greatest
dragon of all. He remembered his mother’s appearing
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next to him in the backyard, as if she’d flown from the attic.
He remembered her coming out of the woods, saying
that she’d given a mama grizzly bear directions.
“You can be anything,” Frank said. “That’s what
she always told me.”
Grandmother huffed. “Finally, a dim light goes on
in that head of yours. Yes, Fai Zhang. Your mother was
not simply boosting your self-esteem. She was telling you
the literal truth.”
“But…” Another explosion shook the house. Ceiling
plaster fell like snow. Frank was so bewildered he barely
noticed.
“Anything?”
“Within reason,” Grandmother said. “Living things.
It helps if you know the creature well. It also helps if you
are in a life-and-death situation, such as combat. Why do
you look so surprised, Fai? You have always said you are
not comfort able in your own body. We all feel that
way—all of us with the blood of Pylos. This gift was only
given once to a mortal family. We are unique among
demigods. Poseidon must have been feeling especially
generous when he blessed our ancestor—or especially
spiteful. The gift has often proven a curse. It did not save
your mother.…”
Outside, a cheer went up from the ogres. Someone
shouted, “Zhang! Zhang!”
“You must go, silly boy,” Grandmother said. “Our
time is up.”
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“But—I don’t know how to use my power. I’ve never—
I can’t—”
“You can,” Grandmother said. “Or you will not survive
to realize your destiny. I don’t like this Prophecy of
Seven that Mars told me about. Seven is an unlucky number
in Chinese—a ghost number. But there is nothing we
can do about that. Now, go! Tomorrow evening is the
Feast of Fortuna. You have no time to waste. Don’t worry
about me. I will die in my own time, in my own way. I
have no intention of being devoured by those ridiculous
ogres. Go!”
Frank turned at the door. He felt like his heart was
being squeezed through a juicer, but he bowed formally.
“Thank you, Grandmother,” he said. “I will make you
proud.”
She muttered something under her breath. Frank
almost thought she had said, You have.
He stared at her, dumbfounded, but her expression
immediately soured. “Stop gaping, boy! Go shower and
dress!Comb your hair! My last image of you, and you
show me messy hair?”
He patted down his hair and bowed again.
His last image of Grandmother was of her glaring
out the window, as if thinking about the terrible scolding
she would give the ogres when they invaded her home.
FRANK TOOK THE QUICKEST POSSIBLE SHOWER, put
on the clothes Hazel had set out—an olive-green shirt
with beige cargo pants, really?—then grabbed his spare
bow and quiver and bounded up the attic stairs.
The attic was full of weapons. His family had collected
enough ancient armaments to supply an army.
Shields, spears, and quivers of arrows hung along one
wall—almost as many as in the Camp Jupiter armory. At
the back window, a scorpion crossbow was mounted and
loaded, ready for action. At the front window stood
something that looked like a machine gun with a cluster
of barrels.
“Rocket launcher?” he wondered aloud.
“Nope, nope,” said a voice from the corner. “Potatoes.
Ella doesn’t like potatoes.”
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The harpy had made a nest for herself between two
old steamer trunks. She was sitting in a pile of Chinese
scrolls, reading seven or eight at once.
“Ella,” Frank said, “where are the others?”
“Roof.” She glanced upward, then returned to her
reading, alternately picking at her feathers and turning
pages. “Roof. Ogre-watching. Ella doesn’t like ogres.
Potatoes.”
“Potatoes?” Frank didn’t understand until he
swiveled the machine gun around. Its eight barrels were
loaded with spuds. At the base of the gun, a basket was
filled with more edible ammunition.
He looked out the window—the same window his
mom had watched him from when he had met the bear.
Down in the yard, the ogres were milling around, shoving
each other, occasionally yelling at the house, and throwing
bronze cannonballs that exploded in midair.
“They have cannonballs,” Frank said. “And we have
a potato gun.”
“Starch,” Ella said thoughtfully. “Starch is bad for
ogres.”
The house shook from another explosion. Frank
needed to reach the roof and see how Percy and Hazel
were doing, but he felt bad leaving Ella alone.
He knelt next to her, careful not to get too close.
“Ella, it’s not safe here with the ogres. We’re going to be
flying to Alaska soon. Will you come with us?”
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Ella twitched uncomfortably. “Alaska. Six hundred
twenty-six thousand, four hundred twenty-five square
miles.
State mammal: the moose.”
Suddenly she switched to Latin, which Frank could
just barely follow thanks to his classes at Camp Jupiter:
“To the north, beyond the gods, lies the legion’s
crown. Falling from ice, the son of Neptune shall
drown—” She stopped and scratched her disheveled red
hair. “Hmm. Burned. The rest is burned.”
Frank could hardly breathe. “Ella, was…was that a
prophecy? Where did you read that?”
“Moose,” Ella said, savoring the word. “Moose.
Moose. Moose.”
The house shook again. Dust rained down from the
rafters. Outside, an ogre bellowed, “Frank Zhang! Show
yourself!”
“Nope,” Ella said. “Frank shouldn’t. Nope.”
“Just…stay here, okay?” Frank said. “I’ve got to go
help Hazel and Percy.”
He pulled down the ladder to the roof.
“Morning,” Percy said grimly. “Beautiful day, huh?” He
wore the same clothes as the day before—jeans, his purple
T-shirt, and Polartec jacket—but they’d obviously been
freshly washed. He held his sword in one hand and a
garden hose in the other. Why there was a garden hose on
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the roof, Frank wasn’t sure, but every time the giants sent
up a cannonball, Percy summoned a high-powered blast
of water and detonated the sphere in midair. Then Frank
remembered—his family was descended from Poseidon,
too. Grandmother had said their house had been attacked
before. Maybe they had put a hose up here for just that
reason.
Hazel patrolled the widow’s walk between the two
attic gables. She looked so good, it made Frank’s chest
hurt. She wore jeans, a cream-colored jacket, and a white
shirt that made her skin look as warm as cocoa. Her curly
hair fell around her shoulders. When she came close,
Frank could smell jasmine shampoo.
She gripped her sword. When she glanced at Frank,
her eyes flashed with concern. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Why are you smiling?”
“Oh, uh, nothing,” he managed. “Thanks for breakfast.
And the clothes. And…not hating me.”
Hazel looked baffled. “Why would I hate you?”
Frank’s face burned. He wished he’d kept his
mouth shut, but it was too late now. Don’t let her get
away, his grandmother had said. You need strong
women.
“It’s just…last night,” he stammered. “When I
summoned the skeleton. I thought…I thought that you
thought…I was repulsive ... or something.”
Hazel raised her eyebrows. She shook her head in
dismay. “Frank, maybe I was surprised. Maybe I was
scared of that thing. But repulsed? The way you
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commanded it, so confident and everything—like, Oh, by
the way, guys, I have this all-powerful spartus we can
use. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t repulsed, Frank. I was
impressed.”
Frank wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. “You
were…impressed ... by me?”
Percy laughed. “Dude, it was pretty amazing.”
“Honest?” Frank asked.
“Honest,” Hazel promised. “But right now, we have
other problems to worry about. Okay?”
She gestured at the army of ogres, who were getting
increasingly bold, shuffling closer and closer to the house.
Percy readied the garden hose. “I’ve got one more
trick up my sleeve. Your lawn has a sprinkler system. I
can blow it up and cause some confusion down there, but
that’ll destroy your water pressure. No pressure, no hose,
and those cannonballs are going to plow right into the
house.”
Hazel’s praise was still ringing in Frank’s ears,
making it difficult to think. Dozens of ogres were camped
on his lawn, waiting to tear him apart, and Frank could
barely control the urge to grin.
Hazel didn’t hate him. She was impressed.
He forced himself to concentrate. He remembered
what his grandmother had told him about the nature of
his gift, and how he had to leave her here to die.
You’ve got a role to play, Mars had said.
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Frank couldn’t believe he was Juno’s secret
weapon, or that this big Prophecy of the Seven depended
on him. But Hazel and Percy were counting on him. He
had to do his best.
He thought about that weird partial prophecy Ella
had recited in the attic, about the son of Neptune
drowning.
You don’t understand her true value, Phineas had
told them in Portland. The old blind man had thought
that controlling Ella would make him a king.
All these puzzle pieces swirled around in Frank’s
mind. He got the feeling that when they finally connected,
they would create a picture he didn’t like.
“Guys, I’ve got an escape plan.” He told his friends
about the plane waiting at the airfield, and his grandmother’s
note for the pilot. “He’s a legion veteran. He’ll
help us.”
“But Arion’s not back,” Hazel said. “And what
about your grandmother? We can’t just leave her.”
Frank choked back a sob. “Maybe—maybe Arion
will find us. As for my grandmother…she was pretty clear.
She said she’d be okay.”
It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it was as much as
Frank could manage.
“There’s another problem,” Percy said. “I’m not
good with air travel. It’s dangerous for a son of Neptune.”
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“You’ll have to risk it.…and so will I,” Frank said.
“By the way, we’re related.” Percy almost stumbled off the
roof. “What?”
Frank gave them the five-second version:
“Periclymenus.
Ancestor on my mom’s side. Argonaut. Grandson
of Poseidon.”
Hazel’s mouth fell open. “You’re a—a descendant of
Neptune? Frank, that’s—”
“Crazy? Yeah. And there’s this ability my family
has, supposedly. But I don’t know how to use it. If I can’t
figure it out—”
Another massive cheer went up from the Laistrygonians.
Frank realized they were staring up at him, pointing
and waving and laughing. They had spotted their
breakfast.
“Zhang!” they yelled. “Zhang!”
Hazel stepped closer to him. “They keep doing that.
Why are they yelling your name?”
“Never mind,” Frank said. “Listen, we’ve got to protect
Ella, take her with us.”
“Of course,” Hazel said. “The poor thing needs our
help.”
“No,” Frank said. “I mean yes, but it’s not just that.
She recited a prophecy downstairs. I think…I think it was
about this quest.”
He didn’t want to tell Percy the bad news, about a
son of Neptune drowning, but he repeated the lines.
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Percy’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know how a son of
Neptune can drown. I can breathe underwater. But the
crown of the legion—”
“That’s got to be the eagle,” Hazel said.
Percy nodded. “And Ella recited something like this
once before, in Portland—a line from the old Great
Prophecy.”
“The what?” Frank asked.
“Tell you later.” Percy turned his garden hose and
shot another cannonball out of the sky.
It exploded in an orange fireball. The ogres clapped
with appreciation and yelled, “Pretty! Pretty!”
“The thing is,” Frank said, “Ella remembers
everything she reads. She said something about the page
being burned, like she’d read a damaged text of
prophecies.”
Hazel’s eyes widened. “Burned books of prophecy?
You don’t think—but that’s impossible!”
“The books Octavian wanted, back at camp?” Percy
guessed.
Hazel whistled under her breath. “The lost Sibylline
books that outlined the entire destiny of Rome. If Ella
actually read a copy somehow, and memorized it—”
“Then she’s the most valuable harpy in the world,”
Frank said. “No wonder Phineas wanted to capture her.”
“Frank Zhang!” an ogre shouted from below. He
was bigger than the rest, wearing a lion’s cape like a Roman
standard bearer and a plastic bib with a lobster on it.
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“Come down, son of Mars! We’ve been waiting for you.
Come, be our honored guest!”
Hazel gripped Frank’s arm. “Why do I get the feeling
that ‘honored guest’ means the same thing as
‘dinner’?”
Frank wished Mars were still there. He could use
somebody to snap his fingers and make his battle jitters
go away.
Hazel believes in me, he thought. I can do this.
He looked at Percy. “Can you drive?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Grandmother’s car is in the garage. It’s an old Ca
dillac. The thing is like a tank. If you can get it started—”
“We’ll still have to break through a line of ogres,”
Hazel said.
“The sprinkler system,” Percy said. “Use it as a
distraction?”
“Exactly,” Frank said. “I’ll buy you as much time as
I can. Get Ella, and get in the car. I’ll try to meet you in
the garage, but don’t wait for me.”
Percy frowned. “Frank—”
“Give us your answer, Frank Zhang!” the ogre
yelled up. “Come down, and we will spare the others—
your friends, your poor old granny. We only want
you!”
“They’re lying,” Percy muttered.
“Yeah, I got that,” Frank agreed. “Go!”
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His friends ran for the ladder.
Frank tried to control the beating of his heart. He
grinned and yelled, “Hey, down there! Who’s hungry?”
The ogres cheered as Frank paced along the widow’s walk
and waved like a rock star.
Frank tried to summon his family power. He imagined
himself as a fire-breathing dragon. He strained and
clenched his fist and thought about dragons so hard,
beads of sweat popped up on his forehead. He wanted to
sweep down on the enemy and destroy them. That would
be extremely cool. But nothing happened. He had no clue
how to change himself. He had never even seen a real
dragon. For a panicky moment, he wondered if Grandmother
had played some sort of cruel joke on him. Maybe
he’d misunderstood the gift. Maybe Frank was the only
member of the family who hadn’t inherited it. That would
be just his luck.
The ogres started to become restless. The cheering
turned to catcalls. A few Laistrygonians hefted their
cannonballs.
“Hold on!” Frank yelled. “You don’t want to char
me, do you? I won’t taste very good that way.”
“Come down!” they yelled. “Hungry!”
Time for Plan B. Frank just wished he had one.
“Do you promise to spare my friends?” Frank
asked. “Do you swear on the River Styx?”
The ogres laughed. One threw a cannonball that
arced over Frank’s head and blew up the chimney. By
some miracle, Frank wasn’t hit with shrapnel.
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“I’ll take that as a no,” he muttered. Then he
shouted down:
“Okay, fine! You win! I’ll be right down. Wait
there!” The ogres cheered, but their leader in the lion’sskin
cape scowled suspiciously. Frank wouldn’t have
much time. He descended the ladder into the attic. Ella
was gone. He hoped that was a good sign. Maybe they’d
gotten her to the Cadillac. He grabbed an extra quiver of
arrows labeled assorted varieties in his mother’s neat
printing. Then he ran to the machine gun.
He swiveled the barrel, took aim at the lead ogre,
and pressed the trigger. Eight high-powered spuds blasted
the giant in the chest, propelling him backward with
such force that he crashed into a stack of bronze cannonballs,
which promptly exploded, leaving a smoking crater
in the yard.
Apparently starch was bad for ogres.
While the rest of the monsters ran around in confusion,
Frank pulled his bow and rained arrows on them.
Some of the missiles detonated on impact. Others
splintered like buckshot and left the giants with some
painful new tattoos. One hit an ogre and instantly turned
him into a potted rosebush.
Unfortunately, the ogres recovered quickly. They
began throwing cannonballs—dozens at a time. The whole
house groaned under the impact. Frank ran for the stairs.
The attic disintegrated behind him. Smoke and fire
poured down the second-floor hallway.
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“Grandmother!” he cried, but the heat was so intense,
he couldn’t reach her room. He raced to the ground
floor, clinging to the banister as the house shook and
huge chunks of the ceiling collapsed.
The base of the staircase was a smoking crater. He
leaped over it and stumbled through the kitchen. Choking
from the ash and soot, he burst into the garage. The Cadillac’s
headlights were on. The engine was running and
the garage door was opening.
“Get in!” Percy yelled.
Frank dove in the back next to Hazel. Ella was
curled up in the front, her head tucked under her wings,
muttering,
“Yikes. Yikes. Yikes.”
Percy gunned the engine. They shot out of the garage
before it was fully open, leaving a Cadillac-shaped
hole of splintered wood.
The ogres ran to intercept, but Percy shouted at the
top of his lungs, and the irrigation system exploded. A
hundred geysers shot into the air along with clods of dirt,
pieces of pipe, and very heavy sprinkler heads.
The Cadillac was going about forty when they hit
the first ogre, who disintegrated on impact. By the time
the other monsters overcame their confusion, the Cadillac
was half a mile down the road. Flaming cannonballs burst
behind them.
Frank glanced back and saw his family mansion on
fire, the walls collapsing inward and smoke billowing into
the sky. He saw a large black speck—maybe a
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buzzard—circling up from the fire. It might’ve been
Frank’s imagination, but he thought it had flown out of
the second-story window.
“Grandmother?” he murmured.
It seemed impossible, but she had promised she
would die in her own way, not at the hands of the ogres.
Frank hoped she had been right.
They drove through the woods and headed north.
“About three miles!” Frank said. “You can’t miss
it!”
Behind them, more explosions ripped through the
forest. Smoke boiled into the sky.
“How fast can Laistrygonians run?” Hazel asked.
“Let’s not find out,” Percy said.
The gates of the airfield appeared before
them—only a few hundred yards away. A private jet idled
on the runway. Its stairs were down.
The Cadillac hit a pothole and went airborne.
Frank’s head slammed into the ceiling. When the wheels
touched the ground, Percy floored the brakes, and they
swerved to a stop just inside the gates.
Frank climbed out and drew his bow. “Get to the
plane! They’re coming!”
The Laistrygonians were closing in with alarming
speed. The first line of ogres burst out of the woods and
barreled toward the airfield—five hundred yards away,
four hundred yards...
432/589
Percy and Hazel managed to get Ella out of the Cadillac,
but as soon as the harpy saw the airplane, she
began to shriek.
“N-n-no!” she yelped. “Fly with wings! N-n-no
airplanes.”
“It’s okay,” Hazel promised. “We’ll protect you!”
Ella made a horrible, painful wail like she was being
burned.
Percy held up his hands in exasperation. “What do
we do? We can’t force her.”
“No,” Frank agreed. The ogres were three hundred
yards out.
“She’s too valuable to leave behind,” Hazel said.
Then she winced at her own words. “Gods, I’m sorry, Ella.
I sound as bad as Phineas. You’re a living thing, not a
treasure.”“No planes. N-n-no planes.” Ella was
hyperventilating.
The ogres were almost in throwing distance.
Percy’s eyes lit up. “I’ve got an idea. Ella, can you
hide in the woods? Will you be safe from the ogres?”
“Hide,” she agreed. “Safe. Hiding is good for
harpies. Ellais quick. And small. And fast.”
“Okay,” Percy said. “Just stay around this area. I
can send a friend to meet you and take you to Camp
Jupiter.”
Frank unslung his bow and nocked an arrow. “A
friend?”
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Percy waved his hand in a tell you later gesture.
“Ella, would you like that? Would you like my friend to
take you to Camp Jupiter and show you our home?”
“Camp,” Ella muttered. Then in Latin: “‘Wisdom’s
daughter walks alone, the Mark of Athena burns
through Rome.’”
“Uh, right,” Percy said. “That sounds important,
but we can talk about that later. You’ll be safe at camp. All
the books and food you want.”
“No planes,” she insisted.
“No planes,” Percy agreed.
“Ella will hide now.” Just like that, she was gone—a
red streak disappearing into the woods.
“I’ll miss her,” Hazel said sadly.
“We’ll see her again,” Percy promised, but he
frowned uneasily, as if he were really troubled by that last
bit of prophecy—the thing about Athena.
An explosion sent the airfield’s gate spinning into
the air.
Frank tossed his grandmother’s letter to Percy.
“Show that to the pilot! Show him your letter from Reyna
too! We’ve got to take off now.”
Percy nodded. He and Hazel ran for the plane.
Frank took cover behind the Cadillac and started
firing at the ogres. He targeted the largest clump of enemies
and shot a tulip-shaped arrow. Just as he’d hoped,
it was a hydra.
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Ropes lashed out like squid tentacles, and the entire
front row of ogres plowed face first into the dirt.
Frank heard the plane’s engines rev.
He shot three more arrows as fast as he could,
blasting enormous craters in the ogres’ ranks. The survivors
were only a hundred yards away, and some of the
brighter ones stumbled to a stop, realizing that they were
now within hurling range.
“Frank!” Hazel shrieked. “Come on!”
A fiery cannonball hurtled toward him in a slow
arc. Frank knew instantly it was going to hit the plane. He
nocked an arrow. I can do this, he thought. He let the arrow
fly. It intercepted the cannonball midair, detonating
a massive fireball. Another two cannonballs sailed toward
him. Frank ran.
Behind him, metal groaned as the Cadillac exploded.
He dove into the plane just as the stairs started to
rise.
The pilot must’ve understood the situation just
fine. There was no safety announcement, no pre-flight
drink, and no waiting for clearance. He pushed the
throttle, and the plane shot down the runway. Another
blast ripped through the runway behind them, but then
they were in the air.
Frank looked down and saw the airstrip riddled
with craters like a piece of burning Swiss cheese. Swaths
of Lynn Canyon Park were on fire. A few miles to the
south, a swirling pyre of flames and black smoke was all
that remained of the Zhang family mansion.
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So much for Frank being impressive. He’d failed to
save his grandmother. He’d failed to use his powers. He
hadn’t even saved their harpy friend. When Vancouver
disappeared in the clouds below, Frank buried his head in
his hands and started to cry.
The plane banked to the left.
Over the intercom, the pilot’s voice said, “Senatus
Populusque Romanus, my friends. Welcome aboard. Next
stop: Anchorage, Alaska.”
AIRPLANES OR CANNIBALS? NO CONTEST.
Percy would’ve preferred driving Grandma Zhang’s
Cadillac all the way to Alaska with fireball-throwing
ogres on his tail rather than sitting in a luxury Gulf
stream.
He’d flown before. The details were hazy, but he remembered
a pegasus named Blackjack. He’d even been in
a plane once or twice. But a son of Neptune (Poseidon,
whatever)didn’t belong in the air. Every time the plane hit
a spot of turbulence, Percy’s heart raced, and he was sure
Jupiter was slapping them around.
He tried to focus as Frank and Hazel talked. Hazel
was reassuring Frank that he’d done everything he could
for his grandmother. Frank had saved them from the Laistrygonians
and gotten them out of Vancouver. He’d
been incredibly brave.
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Frank kept his head down like he was ashamed to
have been crying, but Percy didn’t blame him. The poor
guy had just lost his grandmother and seen his house go
up in flames. As far as Percy was concerned, shedding a
few tears about something like that didn’t make you any
less of a man, especially when you had just fended off an
army of ogres that wanted to eat you for breakfast.
Percy still couldn’t get over the fact that Frank was
a distant relative. Frank would be his…what? Greattimes-
a-thousand nephew? Too weird for words.
Frank refused to explain exactly what his “family
gift” was, but as they flew north, Frank did tell them
about his conversation with Mars the night before. He explained
the prophecy Juno had issued when he was a
baby—about his life being tied to a piece of firewood, and
how he had asked Hazel to keep it for him.
Some of that, Percy had already figured out. Hazel
and Frank had obviously shared some crazy experiences
when they had blacked out together, and they’d made
some sort of deal. It also explained why even now, out of
habit, Frank kept checking his coat pocket, and why he
was so nervous around fire. Still, Percy couldn’t imagine
what kind of courage it had taken for Frank to embark on
a quest, knowing that one small flame could snuff out his
life.
“Frank,” he said, “I’m proud to be related to you.”
Frank’s ears turned red. With his head lowered, his
military haircut made a sharp black arrow pointing down.
“Juno has some sort of plan for us, about the Prophecy of
Seven.”
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“Yeah,” Percy grumbled. “I didn’t like her as Hera. I
don’t like her any better as Juno.” Hazel tucked her feet
underneath her. She studied Percy with her luminescent
golden eyes, and he wondered how she could be so calm.
She was the youngest one on the quest, but she was always
holding them together and comforting them. Now
they were flying to Alaska, where she had died once before.
They would try to free Thanatos, who might take her
back to the Underworld. Yet she didn’t show any fear. It
made
Percy feel silly for being scared of airplane
turbulence.
“You’re a son of Poseidon, aren’t you?” she asked.
“You are a Greek demigod.”
Percy gripped his leather necklace. “I started to remember
in Portland, after the gorgon’s blood. It’s been
coming back to me slowly since then. There’s another
camp—Camp Half-Blood.”
Just saying the name made Percy feel warm inside.
Good memories washed over him: the smell of strawberry
fields in the warm summer sun, fireworks lighting up the
beach on the Fourth of July, satyrs playing panpipes at
the nightly campfire, and a kiss at the bottom of the canoe
lake.
Hazel and Frank stared at him as though he’d
slipped into another language.
“Another camp,” Hazel repeated. “A Greek camp?
Gods, if Octavian found out—”
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“He’d declare war,” Frank said. “He’s always been
sure the Greeks were out there, plotting against us. He
thought Percy was a spy.”
“That’s why Juno sent me,” Percy said. “Uh, I
mean, not to spy. I think it was some kind of exchange.
Your friend
Jason—I think he was sent to my camp. In my
dreams, I saw a demigod that might have been him. He
was working with some other demigods on this flying
warship. I think they’re coming to Camp Jupiter to help.”
Frank tapped nervously on the back of his seat.
“Mars said Juno wants to unite the Greeks and Romans
to fight Gaea. But, jeez—Greeks and Romans have a long
history of bad blood.”
Hazel took a deep breath. “That’s probably why the
gods have kept us apart this long. If a Greek warship appeared
in the sky above Camp Jupiter, and Reyna didn’t
know it was friendly—”
“Yeah,” Percy agreed. “We’ve got to be careful how
we explain this when we get back.”
“If we get back,” Frank said.
Percy nodded reluctantly. “I mean, I trust you guys.
I hope you trust me. I feel…well, I feel as close to you two
as to any of my old friends at Camp Half-Blood. But with
the other demigods, at both camps—there’s going to be a
lot of suspicion.”
Hazel did something he wasn’t expecting. She
leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. It was totally a
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sisterly kiss. But she smiled with such affection, it
warmed Percy right down to his feet.
“Of course we trust you,” she said. “We’re a family
now. Aren’t we, Frank?”
“Sure,” he said. “Do I get a kiss?”
Hazel laughed, but there was nervous tension in it.
“Anyway, what do we do now?”
Percy took a deep breath. Time was slipping away.
They were almost halfway through June twenty-
third, and tomorrow was the Feast of Fortuna. “I’ve got to
contact a friend—to keep my promise to Ella.”
“How?” Frank said. “One of those Iris-messages?”
“Still not working,” Percy said sadly. “I tried it last
night at your grandmother’s house. No luck. Maybe it’s
because my memories are still jumbled. Or the gods
aren’t allowing a connection. I’m hoping I can contact my
friend in my dreams.”
Another bump of turbulence made him grab his
seat. Below them, snowcapped mountains broke through
a blanket of clouds.
“I’m not sure I can sleep,” Percy said. “But I need to
try. We can’t leave Ella by herself with those ogres
around.”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “We’ve still got hours to fly.
Take the couch, man.”
Percy nodded. He felt lucky to have Hazel and
Frank watching out for him. What he’d said to them was
true—he trusted them. In the weird, terrifying, horrible
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experience of losing his memory and getting ripped out of
his old life—Hazel and Frank were the bright spots.
He stretched out, closed his eyes, and dreamed he
was falling from a mountain of ice toward a cold sea.
The dream shifted. He was back in Vancouver, standing
in front of the ruins of the Zhang mansion. The Laistrygonians
were gone. The mansion was reduced to a burned-
out shell. A crew of firefighters was packing up their
equipment, getting ready to move out. The lawn looked
like a war zone, with smoking craters and trenches from
the blown-out irrigation pipes.
At the edge of the forest, a giant shaggy black dog
was bounding around, sniffing the trees. The firefighters
completely ignored him.
Beside one of the craters knelt a Cyclops in oversized
jeans, boots, and a massive flannel shirt. His messy
brown hair was spattered with rain and mud. When he
raised his head, his big brown eye was red from crying.
“Close!” he moaned. “So close, but gone!”
It broke Percy’s heart to hear the pain and worry in
the big guy’s voice, but he knew they only had a few
seconds to talk. The edges of the vision were already dissolving.
If Alaska was the land beyond the gods, Percy
figured the farther north he went, the harder it would be
to communicate with his friends, even in his dreams.
“Tyson!” he called.
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The Cyclops looked around frantically. “Percy?
Brother?”
“Tyson, I’m okay. I’m here—well, not really.”
Tyson grabbed the air like he was trying to catch
butterflies. “Can’t see you! Where is my brother?”
“Tyson, I’m flying to Alaska. I’m okay. I’ll be back.
Just find Ella. She’s a harpy with red feathers. She’s hiding
in the woods around the house.”
“Find a harpy? A red harpy?”
“Yes! Protect her, okay? She’s my friend. Get her
back to California. There’s a demigod camp in the Oakland
Hills—Camp Jupiter. Meet me above the Caldecott
Tunnel.”
“Oakland Hills ... California ... Caldecott Tunnel.”
He shouted to the dog: “Mrs. O’Leary! We must find a
harpy!”
“WOOF!” said the dog.
Tyson’s face started to dissolve. “My brother is
okay? My brother is coming back? I miss you!”
“I miss you, too.” Percy tried to keep his voice from
cracking. “I’ll see you soon. Just be careful! There’s a gi
ant’s army marching south. Tell Annabeth—”
The dream shifted.
Percy found himself standing in the hills north of
Camp Jupiter, looking down at the Field of Mars and New
Rome. At the legion’s fort, horns were blowing. Campers
scrambled to muster.
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The giant’s army was arrayed to Percy’s left and
right—centaurs with bull’s horns, the six-armed Earth-
born, and evil Cyclopes in scrap-metal armor. The Cyclopes’
siege tower cast a shadow across the feet of the giant
Polybotes, who grinned down at the Roman camp. He
paced eagerly across the hill, snakes dropping from his
green dreadlocks, his dragon legs stomping down small
trees. On his green-blue armor, the decorative faces of
hungry monsters seemed to blink in the shadows.
“Yes,” he chuckled, planting his trident in the
ground. “Blow your little horns, Romans. I’ve come to
destroy you! Stheno!”
The gorgon scrambled out of the bushes. Her lime
green viper hair and Bargain Mart vest clashed horribly
with the giant’s color scheme.
“Yes, master!” she said. “Would you like a Puppyin-
a-
Blanket?”
She held up a tray of free samples.
“Hmm,” Polybotes said. “What sort of puppy?”
“Ah, they’re not actually puppies. They’re tiny hot
dogs in crescent rolls, but they’re on sale this week—”
“Bah! Never mind, then! Are our forces ready to
attack?”
“Oh—” Stheno stepped back quickly to avoid getting
flattened by the giant’s foot. “Almost, great one. Ma
Gasket and half her Cyclopes stopped in Napa. Something
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about a winery tour? They promised to be here by tomorrow
evening.”
“What?” The giant looked around, as if just noticing
that a big portion of his army was missing. “Gah!
That Cyclops woman will give me an ulcer. Winery tour?”
“I think there was cheese and crackers, too,”
Stheno said helpfully. “Though Bargain Mart has a much
better deal.”
Polybotes ripped an oak tree out of the ground and
threw it into the valley. “Cyclopes! I tell you, Stheno,
when I destroy Neptune and take over the oceans, we will
renegotiate the Cyclopes’ labor contract. Ma Gasket will
learn her place!Now, what news from the north?”
“The demigods have left for Alaska,” Stheno said.
“They fly straight to their death. Ah, small ‘d’ death, I
mean. Not our prisoner Death. Although, I suppose
they’re flying to him too.”
Polybotes growled. “Alcyoneus had better spare the
son of Neptune as he promised. I want that one chained
at my feet, so I can kill him when the time is ripe. His
blood shall water the stones of Mount Olympus and wake
the Earth Mother! What word from the Amazons?”
“Only silence,” Stheno said. “We do not yet know
the winner of last night’s duel, but it is only a matter of
time before Otrera prevails and comes to our aid.”
“Hmm.” Polybotes absently scratched some vipers
out of his hair. “Perhaps it’s just as well we wait, then. Tomorrow
at sundown is Fortuna’s Feast. By then, we must
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invade—Amazons or no. In the meantime, dig in! We set
up camp here, on high ground.”
“Yes, great one!” Stheno announced to the troops:
“Puppiesin-Blankets for everyone!”
The monsters cheered.
Polybotes spread his hands in front of him, taking
in the valley like a panoramic picture. “Yes, blow your
little horns, demigods. Soon, the legacy of Rome will be
destroyed for the last time!”
The dream faded.
Percy woke with a jolt as the plane started its
descent.
Hazel laid her hand on his shoulder. “Sleep okay?”
Percy sat up groggily. “How long was I out?”
Frank stood in the aisle, wrapping his spear and
new bow in his ski bag. “A few hours,” he said. “We’re almost
there.”
Percy looked out the window. A glittering inlet of
the sea snaked between snowy mountains. In the distance,
a city was carved out of the wilderness, surrounded
by lush green forestson one side and icy black beaches on
the other.
“Welcome to Alaska,” Hazel said. “We’re beyond
the help of the gods.”
THE PILOT SAID THE PLANE COULDN’T WAIT for them,
but that was okay with Percy. If they survived till the next
day, he hoped they could find a different way
back—anything but a plane.
He should’ve been depressed. He was stuck in
Alaska, the giant’s home territory, out of contact with his
old friends just as his memories were coming back. He
had seen an image of Polybotes’s army about to invade
Camp Jupiter. He’d learned that the giants planned to use
him as some kind of blood sacrifice to awaken Gaea. Plus,
tomorrow evening was the Feast of Fortuna. He, Frank,
and Hazel had an impossible task to complete before
then. At best, they would unleash Death, who might take
Percy’s two friends to the Underworld. Not much to look
forward to.
Still, Percy felt strangely invigorated. His dream of
Tyson had lifted his spirits. He remembered Tyson, his
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brother. They’d fought together, celebrated victories,
shared good times at
Camp Half-Blood. He remembered his home, and
that gave him a new determination to succeed. He was
fighting for two camps now—two families.
Juno had stolen his memory and sent him to Camp
Jupiter for a reason. He understood that now. He still
wanted to punch her in her godly face, but at least he got
her reasoning. If the two camps could work together, they
stood a chance of stopping their mutual enemies. Separately,
both camps were doomed.
There were other reasons Percy wanted to save
Camp Jupiter. Reasons he didn’t dare put into
words—not yet, anyway. Suddenly he saw a future for
himself and for Annabeth that he’d never imagined
before.
As they took a taxi into downtown Anchorage,
Percy told Frank and Hazel about his dreams. They
looked anxious but not surprised when he told them
about the giant’s army closing in on camp.
Frank choked when he heard about Tyson. “You
have a half-brother who’s a Cyclops?”
“Sure,” Percy said. “Which makes him your great-
great-great—”
“Please.” Frank covered his ears. “Enough.”
“As long as he can get Ella to camp,” Hazel said.
“I’m worried about her.”
448/589
Percy nodded. He was still thinking about the lines
of prophecy the harpy had recited—about the son of Neptune
drowning, and the mark of Athena burning through
Rome.
He wasn’t sure what the first part meant, but he
was starting to have an idea about the second. He tried to
set the question aside. He had to survive this quest first.
The taxi turned on Highway One, which looked
more like a small street to Percy, and took them north toward
downtown. It was late afternoon, but the sun was
still high in the sky.
“I can’t believe how much this place has grown,”
Hazel muttered.
The taxi driver grinned in the rearview mirror.
“Been a long time since you visited, miss?”
“About seventy years,” Hazel said.
The driver slid the glass partition closed and drove
on in silence.
According to Hazel, almost none of the buildings
were the same, but she pointed out features of the landscape:
the vast forests ringing the city, the cold, gray waters
of Cook Inlet tracing the north edge of town, and the
Chugach Mountains rising grayish-blue in the distance,
capped with snow even in June. Percy had never smelled
air this clean before. The town itself had a weather-beaten
look to it, with closed stores, rusted-out cars, and worn
apartment complexes lining the road, but it was still
beautiful. Lakes and huge stretches of woods cut through
449/589
the middle. The arctic sky was an amazing combination of
turquoise and gold.
Then there were the giants. Dozens of bright-blue
men, each thirty feet tall with gray frosty hair, were wading
through the forests, fishing in the bay, and striding
across the mountains. The mortals didn’t seem to notice
them. The taxi passed within a few yards of one who was
sitting at the edge of a lake washing his feet, but the
driver didn’t panic.
“Um…” Frank pointed at the blue guy.
“Hyperboreans,” Percy said. He was amazed he remembered
that name. “Northern giants. I fought some
when Kronos invaded Manhattan.”
“Wait,” Frank said. “When who did what?”
“Long story. But these guys look…I don’t know,
peaceful.”
“They usually are,” Hazel agreed. “I remember
them. They’re everywhere in Alaska, like bears.”
“Bears?” Frank said nervously.
“The giants are invisible to mortals,” Hazel said.
“They never bothered me, though one almost stepped on
me by accident once.”
That sounded fairly bothersome to Percy, but the
taxi kept driving. None of the giants paid them any attention.
One stood right at the intersection of Northern
Lights Road, straddling the highway, and they drove
between his legs. The Hyperborean was cradling a Native
American totem pole wrapped in furs, humming to it like
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a baby. If the guy hadn’t been the size of a building, he
would’ve been almost cute.
The taxi drove through downtown, past a bunch of
tourists’ shops advertising furs, Native American art, and
gold. Percy hoped Hazel wouldn’t get agitated and make
the jewelry shops explode.
As the driver turned and headed toward the seashore,
Hazel knocked on the glass partition. “Here is
good. Can you let us out?”
They paid the driver and stepped onto Fourth
Street. Compared to Vancouver, downtown Anchorage
was tiny—more like a college campus than a city, but
Hazel looked amazed.
“It’s huge,” she said. “That—that’s where the
Gitchell Hotel used to be. My mom and I stayed there our
first week in Alaska. And they’ve moved City Hall. It used
to be there.”
She led them in a daze for a few blocks. They didn’t
really have a plan beyond finding the fastest way to the
Hubbard Glacier, but Percy smelled something cooking
nearby—sausage, maybe? He realized he hadn’t eaten
since that morning at Grandma Zhang’s.
“Food,” he said. “Come on.”
They found a café right by the beach. It was bustling
with people, but they scored a table at the window
and perused the menus.
Frank whooped with delight. “Twenty-four-hour
breakfast!”
451/589
“It’s, like, dinnertime,” Percy said, though he
couldn’t tell from looking outside. The sun was so high, it
could’ve been noon.
“I love breakfast,” Frank said. “I’d eat breakfast,
breakfast, and breakfast if I could. Though, um, I’m sure
the food here isn’t as good as Hazel’s.”
Hazel elbowed him, but her smile was playful.
Seeing them like that made Percy happy. Those two
definitely needed to get together. But it also made him
sad. He thought about Annabeth, and wondered if he’d
live long enough to see her again.
Think positive, he told himself.
“You know,” he said, “breakfast sounds great.”
They all ordered massive plates of eggs, pancakes,
and reindeer sausage, though Frank looked a little worried
about the reindeer. “You think it’s okay that we’re
eating Rudolph?”
“Dude,” Percy said, “I could eat Prancer and Blitzen,
too. I’m hungry.”
The food was excellent. Percy had never seen anyone
eat as fast as Frank. The red-nosed reindeer did not
stand a chance.
Between bites of blueberry pancake, Hazel drew a
squiggly curve and an X on her napkin. “So this is what
I’m thinking. We’re here.” She tapped X. “Anchorage.”
“It looks like a seagull’s face,” Percy said. “And
we’re the eye.”
452/589
Hazel glared at him. “It’s a map, Percy. Anchorage
is at the top of this sliver of ocean, Cook Inlet. There’s a
big peninsula of land below us, and my old home town,
Seward, is at the bottom of the peninsula, here.” She drew
another X at the base of the seagull’s throat. “That’s the
closest town to the Hubbard Glacier. We could go around
by sea, I guess, but it would take forever. We don’t have
that kind of time.”
Frank polished off the last of his Rudolph. “But
land is dangerous,” he said. “Land means Gaea.”
Hazel nodded. “I don’t see that we’ve got much
choice, though. We could have asked our pilot to fly us
down, but I don’t know…his plane might be too big for
the little Seward airport. And if we chartered another
plane—”
“No more planes,” Percy said. “Please.”
Hazel held up her hand in a placating gesture. “It’s
okay. There’s a train that goes from here to Seward. We
might be able to catch one tonight. It only takes a couple
of hours.”
She drew a dotted line between the two X’s.
“You just cut off the seagull’s head,” Percy noted.
Hazel sighed. “It’s the train line. Look, from Se-
ward, the Hubbard Glacier is down here somewhere.” She
tapped the lower right corner of her napkin. “That’s
where Alcyoneus is.”
“But you’re not sure how far?” Frank asked.
453/589
Hazel frowned and shook her head. “I’m pretty
sure it’s only accessible by boat or plane.”
“Boat,” Percy said immediately.
“Fine,” Hazel said. “It shouldn’t be too far from Se-
ward. If we can get to Seward safely.”
Percy gazed out the window. So much to do, and
only twenty-four hours left. This time tomorrow, the
Feast of Fortuna would be starting. Unless they unleashed
Death and made it back to camp, the giant’s army
would flood into the valley. The Romans would be the
main course at a monster dinner.
Across the street, a frosty black sand beach led
down to the sea, which was as smooth as steel. The ocean
here felt different—still powerful, but freezing, slow, and
primal. No gods controlled that water, at least no gods
Percy knew. Neptune wouldn’t be able to protect him.
Percy wondered if he could even manipulate water here,
or breathe underwater.
A Hyperborean giant lumbered across the street.
Nobody in the café noticed. The giant stepped into the
bay, cracking the ice under his sandals, and thrust his
hands in the water. He brought out a killer whale in one
fist. Apparently that wasn’t what he wanted, because he
threw the whale back and kept wading.
“Good breakfast,” Frank said. “Who’s ready for a
train ride?”
454/589
The station wasn’t far. They were just in time to buy tickets
for the last train south. As his friends climbed on
board, Percy said, “Be with you in a sec,” and ran back into
the station.
He got change from the gift shop and stood in front
of the pay phone.
He’d never used a pay phone before. They were
strange antiques to him, like his mom’s turntable or his
teacher Chiron’s Frank Sinatra cassette tapes. He wasn’t
sure how many coins it would take, or if he could even
make the call go through, assuming he remembered the
number correctly.
Sally Jackson, he thought.
That was his mom’s name. And he had a stepdad…
Paul.
What did they think had happened to Percy?
Maybe they had already held a memorial service. As near
as he could figure, he’d lost seven months of his life. Sure,
most of that had been during the school year, but
still…not cool.
He picked up the receiver and punched in a New
York number—his mom’s apartment. Voice mail. Percy
should have figured. It would be like, midnight in New
York. They wouldn’t recognize this number.
Hearing Paul’s voice on the recording hit Percy in
the gut so hard, he could barely speak at the tone.
“Mom,” he said. “Hey, I’m alive. Her a put me to
sleep for a while, and then she took my memory, and…”
His voice faltered. How he could possibly explain all this?
455/589
“Anyway, I’m okay. I’m sorry. I’m on a quest—” He
winced. He shouldn’t have said that. His mom knew all
about quests, and now she’d be worried. “I’ll make it
home. I promise. Love you.”
He put down the receiver. He stared at the phone,
hoping it would ring back. The train whistle sounded. The
conductor shouted, “All aboard.”
Percy ran. He made it just as they were pulling up
the steps, then climbed to the top of the double-decker
car and slid into his seat.
Hazel frowned. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he croaked. “Just…made a call.”
She and Frank seemed to get that. They didn’t ask
for details.
Soon they were heading south along the coast,
watching the landscape go by. Percy tried to think about
the quest, but for an ADHD kid like him, the train wasn’t
the easiest place to concentrate.
Cool things kept happening outside. Bald eagles
soared overhead. The train raced over bridges and along
cliffs where glacial waterfalls tumbled thousands of feet
down the rocks. They passed forests buried in snowdrifts,
big artillery guns (to set off small avalanches and prevent
uncontrolled ones, Hazel explained), and lakes so clear,
they reflected the mountains like mirrors, so the world
looked upside down.
Brown bears lumbered through the meadows.
Hyperborean giants kept appearing in the strangest
places. One was lounging in a lake like it was a hot tub.
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Another was using a pine tree as a toothpick. A third sat
in a snowdrift, playing with two live moose like they were
action figures. The train was full of tourists ohhing and
ahhing and snapping pictures, but Percy felt sorry they
couldn’t see the Hyperboreans. They were missing the
really good shots.
Meanwhile, Frank studied a map of Alaska that
he’d found in the seat pocket. He located Hubbard Glacier,
which looked discouragingly far away from Seward.
He kept running his finger along the coastline, frowning
with concentration.
“What are you thinking?” Percy asked.
“Just…possibilities,” Frank said.
Percy didn’t know what that meant, but he let it go.
After about an hour, Percy started to relax. They
bought hot chocolate from the dining car. The seats were
warm and comfortable, and he thought about taking a
nap.
Then a shadow passed overhead. Tourists murmured
in excitement and started taking pictures.
“Eagle!” one yelled.
“Eagle?” said another.
“Huge eagle!” said a third.
“That’s no eagle,” Frank said.
Percy looked up just in time to see the creature
make a second pass. It was definitely larger than an eagle,
with a sleek black body the size of a Labrador retriever.
Its wingspan was at least ten feet across.
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“There’s another one!” Frank pointed. “Strike that.
Three, four. Okay, we’re in trouble.”
The creatures circled the train like vultures, delighting
the tourists. Percy wasn’t delighted. The monsters
had glowing red eyes, sharp beaks, and vicious
talons.
Percy felt for his pen in his pocket. “Those things
look familiar....”
“Seattle,” Hazel said. “The Amazons had one in a
cage. They’re—”
Then several things happened at once. The emergency
brake screeched, pitching them forward. Tourists
screamed and tumbled through the aisles. The monsters
swooped down, shattering the glass roof of the car, and
the entire train toppled off the rails.
PERCY WENT WEIGHTLESS.
His vision blurred. Claws grabbed his arms and lifted
him into the air. Below, train wheels squealed and
metal crashed. Glass shattered. Passengers screamed.
When his eyesight cleared, he saw the beast that
was carrying him aloft. It had the body of a pan-
ther—sleek, black, and feline—with the wings and head of
an eagle. Its eyes glowed blood-red.
Percy squirmed. The monster’s front talons were
wrapped around his arms like steel bands. He couldn’t
free himself or reach his sword. He rose higher and higher
in the cold wind. Percy had no idea where the monster
was taking him, but he was pretty sure he wouldn’t like it
when he got there.
He yelled—mostly out of frustration. Then
something whistled by his ear. An arrow sprouted from
the monster’s neck. The creature shrieked and let go.
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Percy fell, crashing through tree branches until he
slammed into a snowbank. He groaned, looking up at a
massive pine tree he’d just shredded.
He managed to stand. Nothing seemed broken.
Frank stood to his left, shooting down the creatures as
fast as he could. Hazel was at his back, swinging her
sword at any monster that came close, but there were too
many swarming around them—at least a dozen.
Percy drew Riptide. He sliced the wing off one
monster and sent it spiraling into a tree, then sliced
through another that burst into dust. But the defeated
ones began to re-form immediately.
“What are these things?” he yelled.
“Gryphons!” Hazel said. “We have to get them away
from the train!”
Percy saw what she meant. The train cars had
fallen over, and their roofs had shattered. Tourists were
stumbling around in shock. Percy didn’t see anybody seriously
injured, but the gryphons were swooping toward
anything that moved. The only thing keeping them away
from the mortals was a glowing gray warrior in camouflage—
Frank’s pet spartus.
Percy glanced over and noticed Frank’s spear was
gone. “Used your last charge?”
“Yeah.” Frank shot another gryphon out of the sky.
“I had to help the mortals. The spear just dissolved.”
Percy nodded. Part of him was relieved. He didn’t
like the skeleton warrior. Part of him was disappointed,
because that was one less weapon they had at their
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disposal. But he didn’t fault Frank. Frank had done the
right thing.
“Let’s move the fight!” Percy said. “Away from the
tracks!” They stumbled through the snow, smacking and
slicing gryphons that re-formed from dust every time they
were killed.
Percy had had no experience with gryphons. He’d
always imagined them as huge noble animals, like lions
with wings, but these things reminded him more of vicious
pack hunters—flying hyenas.
About fifty yards from the tracks, the trees gave
way to an open marsh. The ground was so spongy and icy,
Percy felt like he was racing across Bubble Wrap. Frank
was running out of arrows. Hazel was breathing hard.
Percy’s own sword swings were getting slower. He realized
they were alive only because the gryphons weren’t
trying to kill them. The gryphons wanted to pick them up
and carry them off somewhere.
Maybe to their nests, Percy thought.
Then he tripped over something in the tall grass—a
circle of scrap metal about the size of a tractor tire. It was
a massive bird’s nest—a gryphon’s nest—the bottom
littered with old pieces of jewelry, an Imperial gold dagger,
a dented centurion’s badge, and two pumpkin-sized
eggs that looked like real gold.
Percy jumped into the nest. He pressed his sword
tip against one of the eggs. “Back off, or I break it!”
The gryphons squawked angrily. They buzzed
around the nest and snapped their beaks, but they didn’t
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attack. Hazel and Frank stood back to back with Percy,
their weapons ready.
“Gryphons collect gold,” Hazel said. “They’re crazy
for it. Look—more nests over there.”
Frank nocked his last arrow. “So if these are their
nests, where were they trying to take Percy? That thing
was flying away with him.”
Percy’s arms still throbbed where the gryphon had
grabbed him. “Alcyoneus,” he guessed. “Maybe they’re
working for him. Are these things smart enough to take
orders?”
“I don’t know,” Hazel said. “I never fought them
when I lived here. I just read about them at camp.”
“Weaknesses?” Frank asked. “Please tell me they
have weaknesses.”
Hazel scowled. “Horses. They hate horses—natural
enemies, or something. I wish Arion was here!”
The gryphons shrieked. They swirled around the
nest with their red eyes glowing.
“Guys,” Frank said nervously, “I see legion relics in
this nest.”
“I know,” Percy said.
“That means other demigods died here, or—”
“Frank, it’ll be okay,” Percy promised.
One of the gryphons dived in. Percy raised his
sword, ready to stab the egg. The monster veered off, but
the other gryphons were losing their patience. Percy
couldn’t keep this standoff going much longer.
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He glanced around the fields, desperately trying to
formulate a plan. About a quarter mile away, a Hyperborean
giant was sitting in the bog, peacefully picking
mud from between his toes with a broken tree trunk.
“I’ve got an idea,” Percy said. “Hazel—all the gold
in these nests. Do you think you can use it to cause a
distraction?”
“I—I guess.”
“Just give us enough time for a head start. When I
say go, run for that giant.”
Frank gaped at him. “You want us to run toward a
giant?”
“Trust me,” Percy said. “Ready? Go!”
Hazel thrust her hand upward. From a dozen nests
across the marsh, golden objects shot into the air—jewelry,
weapons, coins, gold nuggets, and most importantly,
gryphon eggs. The monsters shrieked and flew after their
eggs, frantic to save them.
Percy and his friends ran. Their feet splashed and
crunched through the frozen marsh. Percy poured on
speed, but he could hear the gryphons closing behind
them, and now the monsters were really angry.
The giant hadn’t noticed the commotion yet. He
was inspecting his toes for mud, his face sleepy and
peaceful, his white whiskers glistening with ice crystals.
Around his neck was a necklace of found objects—garbage
cans, car doors, moose antlers, camping equipment, even
a toilet. Apparently he’d been cleaning up the wilderness.
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Percy hated to disturb him, especially since it
meant taking shelter under the giant’s thighs, but they
didn’t have much choice.
“Under!” he told his friends. “Crawl under!”
They scrambled between the massive blue legs and
flattened themselves in the mud, crawling as close as they
could to his loincloth. Percy tried to breathe through his
mouth, but it wasn’t the most pleasant hiding spot.
“What’s the plan?” Frank hissed. “Get flattened by
a blue rump?”
“Lay low,” Percy said. “Only move if you have to.”
The gryphons arrived in a wave of angry beaks,
talons, and wings, swarming around the giant, trying to
get under his legs.
The giant rumbled in surprise. He shifted. Percy
had to roll to avoid getting crushed by his large hairy rear.
The Hyperborean grunted, a little more irritated. He
swatted at the gryphons, but they squawked in outrage
and began pecking at his legs and hands.
“Ruh?” the giant bellowed. “Ruh!”
He took a deep breath and blew out a wave of cold
air. Even under the protection of the giant’s legs, Percy
could feel the temperature drop. The gryphons’ shrieking
stopped abruptly, replaced by the thunk, thunk, thunk of
heavy objects hitting the mud.
“Come on,” Percy told his friends. “Carefully.”
They squirmed out from under the giant. All
around the marsh, trees were glazed with frost. A huge
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swath of the bog was covered in fresh snow. Frozen
gryphons stuck out of the ground like feathery Popsicle
sticks, their wings still spread, beaks open, eyes wide with
surprise.
Percy and his friends scrambled away, trying to
keep out of the giant’s vision, but the big guy was too busy
to notice them. He was trying to figure out how to string a
frozen gryphon onto his necklace.
“Percy…” Hazel wiped the ice and mud from her
face. “How did you know the giant could do that?”
“I almost got hit by Hyperborean breath once,” he
said. “We’d better move. The gryphons won’t stay frozen
forever.”
THEY WALKED OVERLAND FOR ABOUT an hour, keeping
the train tracks in sight but staying in the cover of the
trees as much as possible. Once they heard a helicopter
flying in the direction of the train wreck. Twice they heard
the screech of gryphons, but they sounded a long way off.
As near as Percy could figure, it was about midnight
when the sun finally set. It got cold in the woods.
The stars were so thick, Percy was tempted to stop and
gawk at them. Then the northern lights cranked up. They
reminded Percy of his mom’s gas stovetop back home,
when she had the flame on low—waves of ghostly blue
flames rippling back and forth.
“That’s amazing,” Frank said.
“Bears,” Hazel pointed. Sure enough, a couple of
brown bears were lumbering in the meadow a few hundred
feet away, their coats gleaming in the starlight.
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“They won’t bother us,” Hazel promised. “Just give them
a wide berth.”
Percy and Frank didn’t argue.
As they trudged on, Percy thought about all the
crazy places he’d seen. None of them had left him speechless
like Alaska. He could see why it was a land beyond
the gods. Everything here was rough and untamed. There
were no rules, no prophecies, no destinies—just the harsh
wilderness and a bunch of animals and monsters. Mortals
and demigods came here at their own risk.
Percy wondered if this was what Gaea wanted—for
the whole world to be like this. He wondered if that would
be such a bad thing.
Then he put the thought aside. Gaea wasn’t a gentle
goddess. Percy had heard what she planned to do. She
wasn’t like the Mother Earth you might read about in a
children’s fairy tale. She was vengeful and violent. If she
ever woke up fully, she’d destroy human civilization.
After another couple of hours, they stumbled
across a tiny village between the railroad tracks and a
two-lane road. The city limit sign said: MOOSE PASS.
Standing next to the sign was an actual moose. For a
second, Percy thought it might be some sort of statue for
advertising. Then the animal bounded into the woods.
They passed a couple of houses, a post office, and
some trailers. Everything was dark and closed up. On the
other end of town was a store with a picnic table and an
old rusted petrol pump in front.
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The store had a hand-painted sign that read:
MOOSE PASS GAS.
“That’s just wrong,” Frank said.
By silent agreement they collapsed around the picnic
table.
Percy’s feet felt like blocks of ice—very sore blocks
of ice. Hazel put her head in her hands and passed out,
snoring. Frank took out his last sodas and some granola
bars from the train ride and shared them with Percy.
They ate in silence, watching the stars, until Frank
said, “Did you mean what you said earlier?”
Percy looked across the table. “About what?”
In the starlight, Frank’s face might have been alabaster,
like an old Roman statue. “About…being proud
that we’re related.”
Percy tapped his granola bar on the table. “Well,
let’s see. You single-handedly took out three basilisks
while I was sipping green tea and wheat germ. You held
off an army of Laistrygonians so that our plane could take
off in Vancouver. You saved my life by shooting down that
gryphon. And you gave up the last charge on your magic
spear to help some defenseless mortals. You are, hands
down, the nicest child of the war god I’ve ever
met…maybe the only nice one. So what do you think?”
Frank stared up at the northern lights, still cooking
across the stars on low heat. “It’s just…I was supposed to
be in charge of this quest, the centurion, and all. I feel like
you guys have had to carry me.”
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“Not true,” Percy said.
“I’m supposed to have these powers I haven’t
figured out how to use,” Frank said bitterly. “Now I don’t
have a spear, and I’m almost out of arrows. And…I’m
scared.”
“I’d be worried if you weren’t scared,” Percy said.
“We’re all scared.”
“But the Feast of Fortuna is…” Frank thought about
it.
“It’s after midnight, isn’t it? That means it’s June
twenty-fourth now. The feast starts tonight at sundown.
We have to find our way to Hubbard Glacier, defeat a giant
who is undefeatable in his home territory, and get
back to Camp Jupiter before they’re overrun—all in less
than eighteen hours.”
“And when we free Thanatos,” Percy said, “he
might claim your life. And Hazel’s. Believe me, I’ve been
thinking about it.”
Frank gazed at Hazel, still snoring lightly. Her face
was buried under a mass of curly brown hair.
“She’s my best friend,” Frank said. “I lost my mom,
my grandmother…I can’t lose her, too.”
Percy thought about his old life—his mom in New
York, Camp Half-Blood, Annabeth. He’d lost all of that
for eight months. Even now, with the memories coming
back…he’d never been this far away from home before.
He’d been to the Underworld and back. He’d faced death
dozens of times. But sitting at this picnic table, thousands
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of miles away, beyond the power of Olympus, he’d never
been so alone—except for Hazel and Frank.
“I’m not going to lose either of you,” he promised.
“I’m not going to let that happen. And, Frank, you are a
leader. Hazel would say the same thing. We need you.”
Frank lowered his head. He seemed lost in thought.
Finally he leaned forward until his head bumped the picnic
table. He started to snore in harmony with Hazel.
Percy sighed. “Another inspiring speech from Jackson,”
he said to himself. “Rest up, Frank. Big day ahead.”
* * *
At dawn, the store opened up. The owner was a little surprised
to find three teenagers crashed out on his picnic
table, but when Percy explained that they had stumbled
away from last night’s train wreck, the guy felt sorry for
them and treated them to breakfast. He called a friend of
his, an Inuit native who had a cabin close to Seward. Soon
they were rumbling along the road in a beat-up Ford
pickup that had been new about the time Hazel was born.
Hazel and Frank sat in back. Percy rode up front
with the leathery old man, who smelled like smoked salmon.
He told Percy stories about Bear and Raven, the
Inuit gods, and all Percy could think was that he hoped he
didn’t meet them. He had enough enemies already.
The truck broke down a few miles outside Seward.
The driver didn’t seem surprised, as though this
happened to him several times a day. He said they could
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wait for him to fix the engine, but since Seward was only a
few miles away, they decided to walk it.
By midmorning, they climbed over a rise in the
road and saw a small bay ringed with mountains. The
town was a thin crescent on the right-hand shore, with
wharves extending into the water and a cruise ship in the
harbor.
Percy shuddered. He’d had bad experiences with
cruise ships.
“Seward,” Hazel said. She didn’t sound happy to
see her old home.
They’d already lost a lot of time, and Percy didn’t
like how fast the sun was rising. The road curved around
the hillside, but it looked like they could get to town faster
going straight across the meadows.
Percy stepped off the road. “Come on.”
The ground was squishy, but he didn’t think much
about it until Hazel shouted, “Percy, no!”
His next step went straight through the ground. He
sank like a stone until the earth closed over his head—and
the earth swallowed him.
“YOUR BOW!” HAZEL SHOUTED.
Frank didn’t ask questions. He dropped his pack
and slipped the bow off his shoulder.
Hazel’s heart raced. She hadn’t thought about this
boggy soil—muskeg—since before she had died. Now, too
late, she remembered the dire warnings the locals had
given her. Marshy silt and decomposed plants made a
surface that looked completely solid, but it was even
worse than quicksand. It could be twenty feet deep or
more, and impossible to escape.
She tried not to think what would happen if it were
deeper than the length of the bow.
“Hold one end,” she told Frank. “Don’t let go.”
She grabbed the other end, took a deep breath, and
jumped into the bog. The earth closed over her head.
Instantly, she was frozen in a memory.
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Not now! she wanted to scream. Ella said I was
done with blackouts!
Oh, but my dear, said the voice of Gaea, this is not
one of your blackouts. This is a gift from me.
Hazel was back in New Orleans. She and her mother
sat in the park near their apartment, having a picnic
breakfast. She remembered this day. She was seven years
old. Her mother had just sold Hazel’s first precious stone:
a small diamond. Neither of them had yet realized Hazel’s
curse.
Queen Marie was in an excellent mood. She had
bought orange juice for Hazel and champagne for herself,
and beignets sprinkled with chocolate and powdered sugar.
She’d even bought Hazel a new box of crayons and a
pad of paper. They sat together, Queen Marie humming
cheerfully while Hazel drew pictures.
The French Quarter woke up around them, ready
for Mardi Gras. Jazz bands practiced. Floats were being
decorated with fresh-cut flowers. Children laughed and
chased each other, decked in so many colored necklaces
they could barely walk. The sunrise turned the sky to red
gold, and the warm steamy air smelled of magnolias and
roses.
It had been the happiest morning of Hazel’s life.
“You could stay here.” Her mother smiled, but her
eyes were blank white. The voice was Gaea’s.
“This is fake,” Hazel said.
She tried to get up, but the soft bed of grass made
her lazy and sleepy. The smell of baked bread and melting
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chocolate was intoxicating. It was the morning of Mardi
Gras, and the world seemed full of possibilities. Hazel
could almost believe she had a bright future.
“What is real?” asked Gaea, speaking through her
mother’s face. “Is your second life real, Hazel? You’re
supposed to be dead. Is it real that you’re sinking into a
bog, suffocating?”
“Let me help my friend!” Hazel tried to force herself
back to reality. She could imagine her hand clenched
on the end of the bow, but even that was starting to feel
fuzzy. Her grip was loosening. The smell of magnolias and
roses was overpowering.
Her mother offered her a beignet.
No, Hazel thought. This isn’t my mother. This is
Gaea tricking me.
“You want your old life back,” Gaea said. “I can give
you that. This moment can last for years. You can grow up
in New Orleans, and your mother will adore you. You’ll
never have to deal with the burden of your curse. You can
be with Sammy—”
“It’s an illusion!” Hazel said, choking on the sweet
scent of flowers.
“You are an illusion, Hazel Levesque. You were
only brought back to life because the gods have a task for
you. I may have used you, but Nico used you and lied
about it. You should be glad I captured him.”
“Captured?” A feeling of panic rose in Hazel’s
chest. “What do you mean?”
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Gaea smiled, sipping her champagne. “The boy
should have known better than to search for the Doors.
But no matter—it’s not really your concern. Once you release
Thanatos, you’ll be thrown back into the Underworld
to rot forever. Frank and Percy won’t stop that
from happening. Would real friends ask you to give up
your life? Tell me who is lying, and who tells you the
truth.”
Hazel started to cry. Bitterness welled up inside
her. She’d lost her life once. She didn’t want to die again.
“That’s right,” Gaea purred. “You were destined to
marry Sammy. Do you know what happened to him after
you died in Alaska? He grew up and moved to Texas. He
married and had a family. But he never forgot you. He always
wondered why you disappeared. He’s dead now—a
heart attack in the nineteen-sixties. The life you could’ve
had together always haunted him.”
“Stop it!” Hazel screamed. “You took that from
me!”
“And you can have it again,” Gaea said. “I have you
in my embrace, Hazel. You’ll die anyway. If you give up,
at least I can make it pleasant for you. Forget saving Percy
Jackson. He belongs to me. I’ll keep him safe in the earth
until I’m ready to use him. You can have an entire life in
your final moments—you can grow up, marry Sammy. All
you have to do is let go.”
Hazel tightened her grip on the bow. Below her,
something grabbed her ankles, but she didn’t panic. She
knew it was Percy, suffocating, desperately grasping for a
chance at life.
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Hazel glared at the goddess. “I’ll never cooperate
with you! LET—US—GO!”
Her mother’s face dissolved. The New Orleans
morning melted into darkness. Hazel was drowning in
mud, one hand on the bow, Percy’s hands around her
ankles, deep in the darkness. Hazel wiggled the end of the
bow frantically. Frank pulled her up with such force it
nearly popped her arm out of the socket.
When she opened her eyes, she was lying in the
grass, covered in muck. Percy sprawled at her feet, coughing
and spitting mud.
Frank hovered over them, yelling, “Oh, gods! Oh,
gods! Oh, gods!”
He yanked some extra clothes from his bag and
started toweling off Hazel’s face, but it didn’t do much
good. He dragged Percy farther from the muskeg.
“You were down there so long!” Frank cried. “I
didn’t think—oh, gods, don’t ever do something like that
again!”
He wrapped Hazel in a bear hug.
“Can’t—breathe,” she choked out.
“Sorry!” Frank went back to toweling and fussing
over them. Finally he got them to the side of the road,
where they sat and shivered and spit up mud clods.
Hazel couldn’t feel her hands. She wasn’t sure if
she was cold or in shock, but she managed to explain
about the muskeg, and the vision she’d seen while she
was under. Not the part about Sammy—that was still too
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painful to say out loud—but she told them about Gaea’s
offer of a fake life, and the goddess’ claim that she’d captured
her brother Nico. Hazel didn’t want to keep that to
herself. She was afraid the despair would overwhelm her.
Percy rubbed his shoulders. His lips were blue.
“You—you saved me, Hazel. We’ll figure out what
happened to Nico, I promise.”
Hazel squinted at the sun, which was now high in
the sky.
The warmth felt good, but it didn’t stop her trembling.
“Does it seem like Gaea let us go too easily?”
Percy plucked a mud clod from his hair. “Maybe
she still wants us as pawns. Maybe she was just saying
things to mess with your mind.”
“She knew what to say,” Hazel agreed. “She knew
how to get to me.”
Frank put his jacket around her shoulders. “This is
a real life. You know that, right? We’re not going to let
you die again.”
He sounded so determined. Hazel didn’t want to
argue, but she didn’t see how Frank could stop Death. She
pressed her coat pocket, where Frank’s half-burned firewood
was still securely wrapped. She wondered what
would’ve happened to him if she’d sunk in the mud
forever. Maybe that would have saved him. Fire couldn’t
have gotten to the wood down there.
She would have made any sacrifice to keep Frank
safe. Perhaps she hadn’t always felt that strongly, but
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Frank had trusted her with his life. He believed in her.
She couldn’t bear the thought of any harm coming to him.
She glanced at the rising sun.…Time was running
out. She thought about Hylla, the Amazon Queen back in
Seattle. Hylla would have dueled Otrera two nights in a
row by now, assuming she had survived. She was counting
on Hazel to release Death.
She managed to stand. The wind coming off Resurrection
Bay was just as cold as she remembered. “We
should get going. We’re losing time.”
Percy gazed down the road. His lips were returning
to their normal color. “Any hotels or something where we
could clean off? I mean...hotels that accept mud people?”
“I’m not sure,” Hazel admitted.
She looked at the town below and couldn’t believe
how much it had grown since 1942. The main harbor had
moved east as the town had expanded. Most of the buildings
were new to her, but the grid of downtown streets
seemed familiar. She thought she recognized some warehouses
along the shore. “I might know a place we can
freshen up.”
WHEN THEY GOT INTO TOWN, Hazel followed the same
route she’d used seventy years ago—the last night of her
life, when she’d come home from the hills and found her
mother missing.
She led her friends along Third Avenue. The railroad
station was still there. The big white two-story Se-
ward Hotel was still in business, though it had expanded
to twice its old size. They thought about stopping there,
but Hazel didn’t think it would be a good idea to traipse
into the lobby covered in mud, nor was she sure the hotel
would give a room to three minors.
Instead, they turned toward the shoreline. Hazel
couldn’t believe it, but her old home was still there, leaning
over the water on barnacle-encrusted piers. The roof
sagged. The walls were perforated with holes like buckshot.
The door was boarded-up, and a hand-painted sign
read: ROOMS—STORAGE—AVAILABLE.
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“Come on,” she said.
“Uh, you sure it’s safe?” Frank asked.
Hazel found an open window and climbed inside.
Her friends followed. The room hadn’t been used in a
long time. Their feet kicked up dust that swirled in the
buckshot beams of sunlight. Mouldering cardboard boxes
were stacked along the walls. Their faded labels read:
Greeting Cards, Assorted Seasonal. Why several hundred
boxes of season’s greetings hadwound up crumbling to
dust in a warehouse in Alaska, Hazel had no idea, but it
felt like a cruel joke: as if the cards were for all the holidays
she’d never gotten to celebrate—decades of Christmases,
Easters, birthdays, Valentine’s Days.
“It’s warmer in here, at least,” Frank said. “Guess
no running water? Maybe I can go shopping. I’m not as
muddy as you guys. I could find us some clothes.”
Hazel only half heard him.
She climbed over a stack of boxes in the corner that
used to be her sleeping area. An old sign was propped
against the wall: GOLD PROSPECTING SUPPLIES. She
thought she’dfind a bare wall behind it, but when she
moved the sign, most of her photos and drawings were
still pinned there. The sign must have protected them
from sunlight and the elements. They seemed not to have
aged. Her crayon drawings of New Orleans looked so
childish. Had she really made them? Her mother stared
out at her from one photograph, smiling in front of her
business sign: QUEEN MARIE’S GRIS-GRIS—CHARMS SOLD,
FORTUNES TOLD.
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Next to that was a photo of Sammy at the carnival.
He was frozen in time with his crazy grin, his curly black
hair, and those beautiful eyes. If Gaea was telling the
truth, Sammy had been dead for over forty years. Had he
really remembered Hazel all that time? Or had he forgotten
the peculiar girl he used to go riding with—the girl
who shared one kiss and a birthday cupcake with him before
disappearing forever?
Frank’s fingers hovered over the photo. “Who…?”
He saw that she was crying and clamped back his question.
“Sorry, Hazel. This must be really hard. Do you want
some time—”
“No,” she croaked. “No, it’s fine.”
“Is that your mother?” Percy pointed to the photo
of QueenMarie. “She looks like you. She’s beautiful.”
Then Percy studied the picture of Sammy. “Who is
that?”
Hazel didn’t understand why he looked so spooked.
“That’s…that’s Sammy. He was my—uh—friend from New
Orleans.” She forced herself not to look at Frank.
“I’ve seen him before,” Percy said.
“You couldn’t have,” Hazel said. “That was in 1941.
He’s…he’s probably dead now.”
Percy frowned. “I guess. Still…” He shook his head,
like the thought was too uncomfortable.
Frank cleared his throat. “Look, we passed a store
on the last block. We’ve got a little money left. Maybe I
should go get you guys some food and clothes and—I
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don’t know—a hundred boxes of wet wipes or
something?”
Hazel put the gold prospecting sign back over her
mementos. She felt guilty even looking at that old picture
of Sammy, with Frank trying to be so sweet and supportive.
It didn’t do her any good to think about her old life.
“That would be great,” she said. “You’re the best,
Frank.”
The floorboards creaked under his feet. “Well…I’m
the only one not completely covered in mud, anyway. Be
back soon.”
Once he was gone, Percy and Hazel made temporary
camp. They took off their jackets and tried to scrape
off the mud. They found some old blankets in a crate and
used them to clean up. They discovered that boxes of
greeting cards made pretty good places to rest if you arranged
them like mattresses.
Percy set his sword on the floor where it glowed
with a faint bronze light. Then he stretched out on a bed
of Merry Christmas 1982.
“Thank you for saving me,” he said. “I should’ve
told you that earlier.”
Hazel shrugged. “You would have done the same
for me.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “But when I was down in the
mud, I remembered that line from Ella’s prophecy—about
the son of Neptune drowning. I thought. ‘This is what it
means. I’m drowning in the earth.’ I was sure I was dead.”
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His voice quavered like it had his first day at Camp
Jupiter, when Hazel had shown him the shrine of Neptune.
Back then she had wondered if Percy was the answer
to her problems—the descendant of Neptune that
Pluto had promised would take away her curse someday.
Percy had seemed so intimidating and powerful, like a
real hero.
Only now, she knew that Frank was a descendant
of
Neptune, too. Frank wasn’t the most impressive-
looking hero in the world, but he’d trusted her with his
life. He tried so hard to protect her. Even his clumsiness
was endearing.
She’d never felt more confused—and since she had
spent her whole life confused, that was saying a lot.
“Percy,” she said, “that prophecy might not have
been complete. Frank thought Ella was remembering a
burned page. Maybe you’ll drown someone else.”
He looked at her cautiously. “You think so?”
Hazel felt strange reassuring him. He was so much
older, and more in command. But she nodded confidently.
“You’re going to make it back home. You’re going to
see your girlfriend Annabeth.”
“You’ll make it back, too, Hazel,” he insisted.
“We’re not going to let anything happen to you. You’re too
valuable to me, to the camp, and especially to Frank.”
Hazel picked up an old valentine. The lacy white
paper fell apart in her hands. “I don’t belong in this
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century. Nico only brought me back so I could correct my
mistakes, maybe get into Elysium.”
“There’s more to your destiny than that,” he said.
“We’re supposed to fight Gaea together. I’m going to need
you at my side way longer than just today. And
Frank—you can see the guy is crazy about you. This life is
worth fighting for, Hazel.”
She closed her eyes. “Please, don’t get my hopes up.
I can’t—”
The window creaked open. Frank climbed in, triumphantly
holding some shopping bags. “Success!”
He showed off his prizes. From a hunting store,
he’d gotten a new quiver of arrows for himself, some rations,
and a coil of rope.
“For the next time we run across muskeg,” he said.
From a local tourist shop, he had bought three sets
of fresh clothes, some towels, some soap, some bottled
water, and, yes, a huge box of wet wipes. It wasn’t exactly
a hot shower, but Hazel ducked behind a wall of greeting
card boxes to clean up and change. Soon she was feeling
much better.
This is your last day, she reminded herself. Don’t
get too comfortable.
The Feast of Fortuna—all the luck that happened
today, good or bad, was supposed to be an omen of the
entire year to come. One way or another, their quest
would end this evening.
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She slipped the piece of driftwood into her new
coatpocket. Somehow, she’d have to make sure it stayed
safe, no matter what happened to her. She could bear her
own death as long as her friends survived.
“So,” she said. “Now we find a boat to Hubbard
Glacier.”
She tried to sound confident, but it wasn’t easy. She
wished Arion were still with her. She’d much rather ride
into battle on that beautiful horse. Ever since they’d left
Vancouver, she’d been calling to him in her thoughts,
hoping he would hear her and come find her, but that was
just wishful thinking.
Frank patted his stomach. “If we’re going to battle
to the death, I want lunch first. I found the perfect place.”
Frank led them to a shopping plaza near the wharf, where
an old railway car had been converted to a diner. Hazel
had no memory of the place from the 1940s, but the food
smelled amazing. While Frank and Percy ordered, Hazel
wandered down to the docks and asked some questions.
When she came back, she needed cheering up. Even the
cheeseburger and fries didn’t do the trick.
“We’re in trouble,” she said. “I tried to get a boat.
But…I miscalculated.”
“No boats?” Frank asked.
“Oh, I can get a boat,” Hazel said. “But the glacier is
farther than I thought. Even at top speed, we couldn’t get
there until tomorrow morning.”
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Percy turned pale. “Maybe I could make the boat go
faster?”
“Even if you could,” Hazel said, “from what the
captains tell me, it’s treacherous—icebergs, mazes of
channels to navigate. You’d have to know where you were
going.”
“A plane?” Frank asked.
Hazel shook her head. “I asked the boat captains
about that. They said we could try, but it’s a tiny airfield.
You have to charter a plane two, three weeks in advance.”
They ate in silence after that. Hazel’s cheeseburger
was excellent, but she couldn’t concentrate on it. She’d
eaten about three bites when a raven settled on the telephone
pole above and began to croak at them.
Hazel shivered. She was afraid it would speak to
her like the other raven, so many years ago: The last
night. Tonight. She wondered if ravens always appeared
to children of Pluto when they were about to die. She
hoped Nico was still alive, and Gaea had just been lying to
make her unsettled. Hazel had a bad feeling that the goddess
was telling the truth.
Nico had told her that he’d search for the Doors of
Death from the other side. If he’d been captured by
Gaea’s forces,
Hazel might’ve lost the only family she had.
She stared at her cheeseburger.
Suddenly, the raven’s cawing changed to a
strangled yelp.
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Frank got up so fast that he almost toppled the picnic
table. Percy drew his sword.
Hazel followed their eyes. Perched on top of the
pole where the raven had been, a fat ugly gryphon glared
down at them. It burped, and raven feathers fluttered
from its beak.
Hazel stood and unsheathed her spatha.
Frank nocked an arrow. He took aim, but the
gryphon shrieked so loudly the sound echoed off the
mountains. Frank flinched, and his shot went wide.
“I think that’s a call for help,” Percy warned. “We
have to get out of here.”
With no clear plan, they ran for the docks. The
gryphon dove after them. Percy slashed at it with his
sword, but the gryphon veered out of reach.
They took the steps to the nearest pier and raced to
the end. The gryphon swooped after them, its front claws
extended for the kill. Hazel raised her sword, but an icy
wall of water slammed sideways into the gryphon and
washed it into the bay. The gryphon squawked and
flapped its wings. It managed to scramble onto the pier,
where it shook its black fur like a wet dog.
Frank grunted. “Nice one, Percy.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t know if I could still do that
in Alaska. But bad news—look over there.” About a mile
away, over the mountains, a black cloud was swirling—a
whole flock of gryphons, dozens at least. There was no
way they could fight that many, and no boat could take
them away fast enough.
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Frank nocked another arrow. “Not going down
without a fight.”
Percy raised Riptide. “I’m with you.”
Then Hazel heard a sound in the distance—like the
whinnying of a horse. She must’ve been imagining it, but
she cried out desperately, “Arion! Over here!”
A tan blur came ripping down the street and onto
the pier. The stallion materialized right behind the
gryphon, brought down his front hooves, and smashed
the monster to dust.
Hazel had never been so happy in her life. “Good
horse! Really good horse!”
Frank backed up and almost fell off the pier.
“How—?”
“He followed me!” Hazel beamed. “Because he’s the
best—horse—EVER! Now, get on!”
“All three of us?” Percy said. “Can he handle it?”
Arion whinnied indignantly.
“All right, no need to be rude,” Percy said. “Let’s
go.”
They climbed on, Hazel in front, Frank and Percy
balancing precariously behind her. Frank wrapped his
arms around her waist, and Hazel thought that if this was
going to be her last day on earth—it wasn’t a bad way to
go out.
“Run, Arion!” she cried. “To Hubbard Glacier!”
The horse shot across the water, his hooves turning
the top of the sea to steam.
RIDING ARION, HAZEL FELT POWERFUL, unstoppable,
absolutely in control—a perfect combination of horse and
human. She wondered if this was what it was like to be a
centaur.
The boat captains in Seward had warned her it was
three hundred nautical miles to the Hubbard Glacier, a
hard, dangerous journey, but Arion had no trouble. He
raced over the water at the speed of sound, heating the air
around them so that Hazel didn’t even feel the cold. On
foot, she never would have felt so brave. On horseback,
she couldn’t wait to charge into battle.
Frank and Percy didn’t look so happy. When Hazel
glanced back, their teeth were clenched and their eyeballs
were bouncing around in their heads. Frank’s cheeks
jiggled from the g-force. Percy sat in back, hanging on
tight, desperately trying not to slip off the horse’s rear.
Hazel hoped that didn’t happen. The way Arion was
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moving, she might not notice he was gone for fifty or sixty
miles.
They raced through icy straits, past blue fjords and
cliffs with waterfalls spilling into the sea. Arion jumped
over a breaching humpback whale and kept galloping,
startling a pack of seals off an iceberg.
It seemed like only minutes before they zipped into
a narrow bay. The water turned the consistency of shaved
ice in blue sticky syrup. Arion came to a halt on a frozen
turquoise slab.
A half a mile away stood Hubbard Glacier. Even
Hazel, who’d seen glaciers before, couldn’t quite process
what she was looking at. Purple snowcapped mountains
marched off in either direction, with clouds floating
around their middles like fluffy belts. In a massive valley
between two of the largest peaks, a ragged wall of ice rose
out of the sea, filling the entire gorge. The glacier was
blue and white with streaks of black, so that it looked like
a hedge of dirty snow left behind on a sidewalk after a
snowplow had gone by, only four million times as large.
As soon as Arion stopped, Hazel felt the temperature
drop. All that ice was sending off waves of cold, turning
the bay into the world’s largest refrigerator. The eeriest
thing was a sound like thunder that rolled across the
water.
“What is that?” Frank gazed at the clouds above the
glacier. “A storm?”
“No,” Hazel said. “Ice cracking and shifting. Millions
of tons of ice.”
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“You mean that thing is breaking up?” Frank asked.
As if on cue, a sheet of ice silently calved off the
side of the glacier and crashed into the sea, spraying water
and frozen shrapnel several stories high. A millisecond
later the sound hit them—a BOOM almost as jarring as
Arion hitting the sound barrier.
“We can’t get close to that thing!” Frank said.
“We have to,” Percy said. “The giant is at the top.”
Arion nickered.
“Jeez, Hazel,” Percy said, “tell your horse to watch
his language.”
Hazel tried not to laugh. “What did he say?”
“With the cussing removed? He said he can get us
to the top.”
Frank looked incredulous. “I thought the horse
couldn’t fly!”
This time Arion whinnied so angrily, even Hazel
could guess he was cursing.
“Dude,” Percy told the horse, “I’ve gotten suspended
for saying less than that. Hazel, he promises you’ll see
what he can do as soon as you give the word.”
“Um, hold on, then, you guys,” Hazel said
nervously. “Arion, giddyup!”
Arion shot toward the glacier like a runaway rocket,
barreling straight across the slush like he wanted to play
chicken with the mountain of ice.
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The air grew colder. The crackling of the ice grew
louder. As Arion closed the distance, the glacier loomed
so large, Hazel got vertigo just trying to take it all in. The
side was riddled with crevices and caves, spiked with
jagged ridges like ax blades. Pieces were constantly crumbling
off—some no larger than snowballs, some the size of
houses.
When they were about fifty yards from the base, a
thunderclap rattled Hazel’s bones, and a curtain of ice
that would have covered Camp Jupiter calved away and
fell toward them.
“Look out!” Frank shouted, which seemed a little
unnecessary to Hazel.
Arion was way ahead of him. In a burst of speed, he
zigzagged through the debris, leaping over chunks of ice
and clambering up the face of the glacier.
Percy and Frank both cussed like horses and held
on desperately while Hazel wrapped her arms around Arion’s
neck. Somehow, they managed not to fall off as Arion
scaled the cliffs, jumping from foothold to foothold with
impossible speed and agility. It was like falling down a
mountain in reverse.
Then it was over. Arion stood proudly at the top of
a ridge of ice that loomed over the void. The sea was now
three hundred feet below them.
Arion whinnied a challenge that echoed off the
mountains. Percy didn’t translate, but Hazel was pretty
sure Arion was calling out to any other horses that might
be in the bay: Beat that, ya punks!
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Then he turned and ran inland across the top of the
glacier, leaping a chasm fifty feet across.
“There!” Percy pointed.
The horse stopped. Ahead of them stood a frozen
Roman camp like a giant-sized ghastly replica of Camp
Jupiter. The trenches bristled with ice spikes. The snow-
brick ramparts glared blinding white. Hanging from the
guard towers, banners of frozen blue cloth shimmered in
the arctic sun.
There was no sign of life. The gates stood wide
open. No sentries walked the walls. Still, Hazel had an uneasy
feeling in her gut. She remembered the cave in Resurrection
Bay where she’d worked to raise Alcyoneus—
the oppressive sense of malice and the constant
boom, boom, boom, like Gaea’s heartbeat. This place felt
similar, as if the earth were trying to wake up and consume
everything—as if the mountains on either side
wanted to crush them and the entire glacier to pieces.
Arion trotted skittishly.
“Frank,” Percy said, “how about we go on foot from
here?”
Frank sighed with relief. “Thought you’d never
ask.”
They dismounted and took some tentative steps.
The ice seemed stable, covered with a fine carpet of snow
so that it wasn’t too slippery.
Hazel urged Arion forward. Percy and Frank
walked on either side, sword and bow ready. They approached
the gates without being challenged. Hazel was
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trained to spot pits, snares, trip lines, and all sorts of other
traps Roman legions had faced for eons in enemy territory,
but she saw nothing—just the yawning icy gates
and the frozen banners crackling in the wind.
She could see straight down the Via Praetoria. At
the crossroads, in front of the snow-brick principia, a tall,
dark- robed figure stood, bound in icy chains.
“Thanatos,” Hazel murmured.
She felt as if her soul were being pulled forward,
drawn toward Death like dust toward a vacuum. Her vision
went dark. She almost fell off Arion, but Frank caught
her and propped her up.
“We’ve got you,” he promised. “Nobody’s taking
you away.”
Hazel gripped his hand. She didn’t want to let go.
He was so solid, so reassuring, but Frank couldn’t protect
her from Death. His own life was as fragile as a half-
burned piece of wood.
“I’m all right,” she lied.
Percy looked around uneasily. “No defenders? No
giant? This has to be a trap.”
“Obviously,” Frank said. “But I don’t think we have
a choice.”
Before Hazel could change her mind, she urged
Arion through the gates. The layout was so familiar—cohort
barracks, baths, armory. It was an exact replica of
Camp Jupiter, except three times as big. Even on
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horseback, Hazel felt tiny and insignificant, as if they
were moving through a model city constructed by the
gods.
They stopped ten feet from the robed figure.
Now that she was here, Hazel felt a reckless urge to
finish the quest. She knew she was in more danger than
when she’d been fighting the Amazons, or fending off the
gryphons, or climbing the glacier on Arion’s back. Instinctively
she knew that Thanatos could simply touch
her, and she would die.
But she also had a feeling that if she didn’t see the
quest through, if she didn’t face her fate bravely, she
would still die—in cowardice and failure. The judges of
the dead wouldn’t be lenient to her a second time.
Arion cantered back and forth, sensing her
disquiet.
“Hello?” Hazel forced out the word. “Mr. Death?”
The hooded figure raised his head.
Instantly, the whole camp stirred to life. Figures in
Roman armor emerged from the barracks, the principia,
the armory, and the canteen, but they weren’t human.
They were shades—the chattering ghosts Hazel had lived
with for decades in the Fields of Asphodel. Their bodies
weren’t much more than wisps of black vapor, but they
managed to hold together sets of scale armor, greaves,
and helmets. Frost-covered swords were strapped to their
waists. Pila and dented shields floated in their smoky
hands. The plumes on the centurions’ helmets were
frozen and ragged. Most of the shades were on foot, but
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two soldiers burst out of the stables in a golden chariot
pulled by ghostly black steeds.
When Arion saw the horses, he stamped the
ground in outrage.
Frank gripped his bow. “Yep, here’s the trap.”
THE GHOSTS FORMED RANKS AND ENCIRCLED the
crossroads. There were about a hundred in all—not an entire
legion, but more than a cohort. Some carried the
tattered lightning bolt banners of the Twelfth Legion,
Fifth Cohort—Michael
Varus’s doomed expedition from the 1980s. Others
carried standards and insignia Hazel didn’t recognize, as
if they’d died at different times, on different
quests—maybe not even from Camp Jupiter.
Most were armed with Imperial gold
weapons—more Imperial gold than the entire Twelfth Legion
possessed. Hazel could feel the combined power of
all that gold humming around her, even scarier than the
crackling of the glacier. She wondered if she could use her
power to control the weapons, maybe disarm the ghosts,
but she was afraid to try. Imperial gold wasn’t just a precious
metal. It was deadly to demigods and monsters.
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Trying to control that much at once would be like trying
to control plutonium in a reactor. If she failed, she might
wipe Hubbard Glacier off the map and kill her friends.
“Thanatos!” Hazel turned to the robed figure.
“We’re here to rescue you. If you control these shades, tell
them—”
Her voice faltered. The god’s hood fell away and his
robes dropped off as he spread his wings, leaving him in
only a sleeveless black tunic belted at the waist. He was
the most beautiful man Hazel had ever seen.
His skin was the color of teakwood, dark and
glistening like Queen Marie’s old séance table. His eyes
were as honey gold as Hazel’s. He was lean and muscular,
with a regal face and black hair flowing down his
shoulders. His wings glimmered in shades of blue, black,
and purple.
Hazel reminded herself to breathe.
Beautiful was the right word for Thanatos—not
handsome, or hot, or anything like that. He was beautiful
the way an angel is beautiful—timeless, perfect, remote.
“Oh,” she said in a small voice.
The god’s wrists were shackled in icy manacles,
with chains that ran straight into the glacier floor. His
feet were bare, shackled around the ankles and also
chained.
“It’s Cupid,” Frank said.
“A really buff Cupid,” Percy agreed.
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“You compliment me,” Thanatos said. His voice
was as gorgeous as he was—deep and melodious. “I am
frequently mistaken for the god of love. Death has more
in common with Love than you might imagine. But I am
Death. I assure you.”
Hazel didn’t doubt it. She felt as if she were made
of ashes. Any second, she might crumble and be sucked
into the vacuum. She doubted Thanatos even needed to
touch her to kill her. He could simply tell her to die. She
would keel over on the spot, her soul obeying that beautiful
voice and those kind eyes.
“We’re—we’re here to save you,” she managed.
“Where’s Alcyoneus?”
“Save me…?” Thanatos narrowed his eyes. “Do you
understand what you are saying, Hazel Levesque? Do you
understand what that will mean?”
Percy stepped forward. “We’re wasting time.”
He swung his sword at the god’s chains. Celestial
bronze rang against the ice, but Riptide stuck to the chain
like glue. Frost began creeping up the blade. Percy pulled
frantically. Frank ran to help. Together, they just managed
to yank Riptide free before the frost reached their
hands.
“That won’t work,” Thanatos said simply. “As for
the giant, he is close. These shades are not mine. They are
his.”
Thanatos’s eyes scanned the ghost soldiers. They
shifted uncomfortably, as if an arctic wind were rattling
through their ranks.
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“So how do we get you out?” Hazel demanded.
Thanatos turned his attention back to her.
“Daughter of Pluto, child of my master, you of all people
should not wish me released.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Hazel’s eyes stung,
but she was done being afraid. She’d been a scared little
girl seventy years ago. She’d lost her mother because she
acted too late. Now she was a soldier of Rome. She wasn’t
going to fail again. She wasn’t going to let down her
friends.
“Listen, Death.” She drew her cavalry sword, and
Arion reared in defiance. “I didn’t come back from the
Underworld and travel thousands of miles to be told that
I’m stupid for setting you free. If I die, I die. I’ll fight this
whole army if I have to. Just tell us how to break your
chains.”
Thanatos studied her for a heartbeat. “Interesting.
You do understand that these shades were once demigods
like you. They fought for Rome. They died without completing
their heroic quests. Like you, they were sent to Asphodel.
Now Gaea has promised them a second life if they
fight for her today. Of course, if you release me and defeat
them, they will have to return to the Underworld where
they belong. For treason against the gods, they will face
eternal punishment. They are not so different from you,
Hazel Levesque. Are you sure you want to release me and
damn these souls forever?”
Frank clenched his fists. “That’s not fair! Do you
want to be freed or not?”
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“Fair…” Death mused. “You’d be amazed how often
I hear that word, Frank Zhang, and how meaningless it is.
Is it fair that your life will burn so short and bright? Was
it fair when I guided your mother to the Underworld?”
Frank staggered like he’d been punched.
“No,” Death said sadly. “Not fair. And yet it was her
time. There is no fairness in Death. If you free me, I will
do my duty. But of course these shades will try to stop
you.”
“So if we let you go,” Percy summed up, “we get
mobbed by a bunch of black vapor dudes with gold
swords. Fine. How do we break those chains?”
Thanatos smiled. “Only the fire of life can melt the
chains of death.”
“Without the riddles, please?” Percy asked.
Frank drew a shaky breath. “It isn’t a riddle.”
“Frank, no,” Hazel said weakly. “There’s got to be
another way.”
Laughter boomed across the glacier. A rumbling
voice said: “My friends. I’ve waited so long!”
Standing at the gates of the camp was Alcyoneus.
He was even larger than the giant Polybotes they’d seen
in California. He had metallic golden skin, armor made
from platinum links, and an iron staff the size of a totem
pole. His rust-red dragon legs pounded against the ice as
he entered the camp. Precious stones glinted in his red
braided hair.
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Hazel had never seen him fully formed, but she
knew him better than she knew her own parents. She had
made him. For months, she had raised gold and gems
from the earth to create this monster. She knew the diamonds
he used for a heart. She knew the oil that ran in
his veins instead of blood. More than anything, she
wanted to destroy him.
The giant approached, grinning at her with his solid
silver teeth.
“Ah, Hazel Levesque,” he said, “you cost me dearly!
If not for you, I would have risen decades ago, and this
world would already be Gaea’s. But no matter!”
He spread his hands, showing off the ranks of
ghostly soldiers. “Welcome, Percy Jackson! Welcome,
Frank Zhang! I am Alcyoneus, the bane of Pluto, the new
master of Death. And this is your new legion.”
NO FAIRNESS IN DEATH. Those words kept ringing in
Frank’s head.
The golden giant didn’t scare him. The army of
shades didn’t scare him. But the thought of freeing
Thanatos made Frank want to curl into the fetal position.
This god had taken his mother.
Frank understood what he had to do to break those
chains. Mars had warned him. He’d explained why he
loved Emily Zhang so much: She always put her duty
first, ahead of everything. Even her life.
Now it was Frank’s turn.
His mother’s sacrifice medal felt warm in his pocket.
He finally understood his mother’s choice, saving her
comrades at the cost of her own life. He got what Mars
had been trying to tell him—Duty. Sacrifice. They mean
something.
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In Frank’s chest, a hard knot of anger and resentment—
a lump of grief he’d been carrying since the funeral—
finally began to dissolve. He understood why his
mother never came home. Some things were worth dying
for.
“Hazel.” He tried to keep his voice steady. “That
package you’re keeping for me? I need it.”
Hazel glanced at him in dismay. Sitting on Arion,
she looked like a queen, powerful and beautiful, her
brown hair swept over her shoulders and a wreath of icy
mist around her head. “Frank, no. There has to be another
way.”
“Please. I—I know what I’m doing.”
Thanatos smiled and lifted his manacled wrists.
“You’re right, Frank Zhang. Sacrifices must be made.”
Great. If Death approved of his plan, Frank was
pretty sure he wasn’t going to like the results.
The giant Alcyoneus stepped forward, his reptilian
feet shaking the ground. “What package do you speak of,
Frank Zhang? Have you brought me a present?”
“Nothing for you, Golden Boy,” Frank said. “Except
a whole lot of pain.”
The giant roared with laughter. “Spoken like a child
of Mars! Too bad I have to kill you. And this one...my, my,
I’ve been waiting to meet the famous Percy Jackson.”
The giant grinned. His silver teeth made his mouth
look like a car grille.
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“I’ve followed your progress, son of Neptune,” said
Alcyoneus. “Your fight with Kronos? Well done. Gaea
hates you above all others…except perhaps for that upstart
Jason Grace. I’m sorry I can’t kill you right away, but
my brother Polybotes wishes to keep you as a pet. He
thinks it will be amusing when he destroys Neptune to
have the god’s favorite son on a leash. After that, of
course, Gaea has plans for you.”
“Yeah, flattering.” Percy raised Riptide. “But actually
I’m the son of Poseidon. I’m from Camp Half-Blood.”
The ghosts stirred. Some drew swords and lifted
shields. Alcyoneus raised his hand, gesturing for them to
wait.
“Greek, Roman, it doesn’t matter,” the giant said
easily. “We will crush both camps underfoot. You see, the
Titans didn’t think big enough. They planned to destroy
the godsin their new home of America. We giants know
better! To kill a weed, you must pull up its roots. Even
now, while my forces destroy your little Roman camp, my
brother Porphyrionis preparing for the real battle in the
ancient lands! We will destroy the gods at their source.”
The ghosts pounded their swords against their
shields. The sound echoed across the mountains.
“The source?” Frank asked. “You mean Greece?”
Alcyoneus chuckled. “No need to worry about that,
son of Mars. You won’t live long enough to see our ultimate
victory.
I will replace Pluto as lord of the Underworld. I
already have Death in my custody. With Hazel Levesque
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in my service, I will have all the riches under the earth as
well!”
Hazel gripped her spatha. “I don’t do service.”
“Oh, but you gave me life!” Alcyoneus said. “True,
we hoped to awaken Gaea during World War II. That
would’ve been glorious. But really, the world is in almost
as bad a shape now. Soon, your civilization will be wiped
out. The Doors of Death will stand open. Those who serve
us will never perish. Alive or dead, you three will join my
army.”
Percy shook his head. “Fat chance, Golden Boy.
You’re going down.”
“Wait.” Hazel spurred her horse toward the giant.
“I raised this monster from the earth. I’m the daughter of
Pluto. It’s my place to kill him.”
“Ah, little Hazel.” Alcyoneus planted his staff on
the ice. His hair glittered with millions of dollars’ worth of
gems. “Are you sure you will not join us of your own free
will? You could be quite ... precious to us. Why die
again?” Hazel’s eyes flashed with anger. She looked down
at Frank and pulled the wrapped-up piece of firewood
from her coat.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” he said.
She pursed her lips. “You’re my best friend, too,
Frank. I should have told you that.” She tossed him the
stick. “Do what you have to. And Percy…can you protect
him?”
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Percy gazed at the ranks of ghostly Romans.
“Against a small army? Sure, no problem.”
“Then I’ve got Golden Boy,” Hazel said.
She charged the giant.
FRANK UNWRAPPED THE FIREWOOD and knelt at the
feet of Th anatos.
He was aware of Percy standing over him, swinging
his sword and yelling in defiance as the ghosts closed in.
He heard the giant bellow and Arion whinny angrily, but
he didn’t dare look.
His hands trembling, he held his piece of tinder
next to the chains on Death’s right leg. He thought about
flames, and instantly the wood blazed.
Horrible warmth spread through Frank’s body. The
icy metal began to melt, the flame so bright it was more
blinding than the ice.
“Good,” Thanatos said. “Very good, Frank Zhang.”
Frank had heard about people’s lives flashing before
their eyes, but now he experienced it literally. He saw
his mother the day she left for Afghanistan. She smiled
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and hugged him. He tried to breath in her jasmine scent
so he’d never forget it.
I will always be proud of you, Frank, she said.
Someday, you’ll travel even farther than I. You’ll bring
our family full circle. Years from now, our descendants
will be telling stories about the hero Frank Zhang, their
great-, great-, great-—She poked him in the belly for old
times’ sake. It would be the last time Frank smiled for
months.
He saw himself at the picnic bench in Moose Pass,
watching the stars and the northern lights as Hazel
snored softly beside him, Percy saying, Frank, you are a
leader. We need you.
He saw Percy disappearing into the muskeg, then
Hazel diving after him. Frank remembered how alone he
had felt holding on to the bow, how utterly powerless. He
had pleaded with the Olympian gods—even Mars—to help
his friends, but he knew they were beyond the gods’
reach.
With a clank, the first chain broke. Quickly, Frank
stabbed the firewood at the chain on Death’s other leg.
He risked a glance over his shoulder.
Percy was fighting like a whirlwind. In fact…he was
a whirlwind. A miniature hurricane of water and ice vapor
churned around him as he waded through the enemy,
knocking Roman ghosts away, deflecting arrows and
spears. Since when did he have that power?
He moved through the enemy lines, and even
though he seemed to be leaving Frank undefended, the
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enemy was completely focused on Percy. Frank wasn’t
sure why—then he saw Percy’s goal. One of the black vapory
ghosts was wearing the lion’s-skin cape of a standard
bearer and holding a pole with a golden eagle, icicles
frozen to its wings. The legion’s standard.
Frank watched as Percy plowed through a line of
legionnaires, scattering their shields with his personal
cyclone. He knocked down the standard bearer and
grabbed the eagle.
“You want it back?” he shouted at the ghosts.
“Come and get it!”
He drew them away, and Frank couldn’t help being
awed by his bold strategy. As much as those shades
wanted to keep Thanatos chained, they were Roman spirits.
Their minds were fuzzy at best, like the ghosts Frank
had seen in Asphodel, but they remembered one thing
clearly: they were supposed to protect their eagle.
Still, Percy couldn’t fight off that many enemies
forever. Maintaining a storm like that had to be difficult.
Despite the cold, his face was already beaded with sweat.
Frank looked for Hazel. He couldn’t see her or the
giant.
“Watch your fire, boy,” Death warned. “You don’t
have any to waste.”
Frank cursed. He’d gotten so distracted, he hadn’t
noticed the second chain had melted.
He moved his fire to the shackles on the god’s right
hand. The piece of tinder was almost half gone now.
Frank started to shiver. More images flashed through his
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mind. He saw Mars sitting at his grandmother’s bedside,
looking at Frank with those nuclear explosion eyes:
You’re Juno’s secret weapon. Have you figured out your
gift yet?
He heard his mother say: You can be anything.
Then he saw Grandmother’s stern face, her skin as
thin as rice paper, her white hair spread across her pillow.
Yes, Fai Zhang. Your mother was not simply boosting
your self-esteem. She was telling you the literal truth.
He thought of the grizzly bear his mother had intercepted
at the edge of the woods. He thought of the
large black bird circling over the flames of their family
mansion.
The third chain snapped. Frank thrust the tinder at
the last shackle. His body was racked with pain. Yellow
splotches danced in his eyes.
He saw Percy at the end of the Via Principalis,
holding off the army of ghosts. He’d overturned the chariot
and destroyed several buildings, but every time he
threw off a wave of attackers in his hurricane, the ghosts
simply got up and charged again. Every time Percy
slashed one of them down with his sword, the ghost reformed
immediately. Percy had backed up almost as far
as he could go. Behind him was the side gate of the camp,
and about twenty feet beyond that, the edge of the glacier.
As for Hazel, she and Alcyoneus had managed to
destroy most of the barracks in their battle. Now they
were fighting in the wreckage at the main gate. Arion was
playing a dangerous game of tag, charging around the
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giant while Alyconeus swiped at them with his staff,
knocking over walls and cleaving massive chasms in the
ice. Only Arion’s speed kept them alive.
Finally, Death’s last chain snapped. With a desperate
yelp, Frank jabbed his firewood into a pile of snow
and extinguished the flame. His pain faded. He was still
alive. But when he took out the piece of tinder, it was no
more than a stub, smaller than a candy bar.
Thanatos raised his arms.
“Free,” he said with satisfaction.
“Great.” Frank blinked the spots from his eyes.
“Then do something!”
Thanatos gave him a calm smile. “Do something?
Of course. I will watch. Those who die in this battle will
stay dead.”
“Thanks,” Frank muttered, slipping his firewood
into his coat. “Very helpful.”
“You’re most welcome,” Thanatos said agreeably.
“Percy!” Frank yelled. “They can die now!”
Percy nodded understanding, but he looked worn
out. His hurricane was slowing down. His strikes were
getting slower. The entire ghostly army had him surrounded,
gradually forcing him toward the edge of the glacier.
Frank drew his bow to help. Then he dropped it.
Normal arrows from a hunting store in Seward wouldn’t
do any good. Frank would have to use his gift.
He thought he understood his powers at last. Something
about watching the firewood burn, smelling the
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acrid smoke of his own life, had made him feel strangely
confident.
Is it fair your life burns so short and bright? Death
had asked.
“No such thing as fair,” Frank told himself. “If I’m
going to burn, it might as well be bright.”
He took one step toward Percy. Then, from across
the camp, Hazel yelled in pain. Arion screamed as the giant
got a lucky shot. His staff sent horse and rider tumbling
over the ice, crashing into the ramparts.
“Hazel!” Frank glanced back at Percy, wishing he
had his spear. If he could just summon Gray…but he
couldn’t be in two places at once.
“Go help her!” Percy yelled, holding the golden
eagle aloft. “I’ve got these guys!”
Percy didn’t have them. Frank knew that. The son
of Poseidon was about to be overwhelmed, but Frank ran
to Hazel’s aid.
She was half-buried in a collapsed pile of snow-
bricks. Arion stood over her, trying to protect her, rearing
and swatting at the giant with his front hooves.
The giant laughed. “Hello, little pony. You want to
play?”
Alcyoneus raised his icy staff.
Frank was too far away to help…but he imagined
himself rushing forward, his feet leaving the ground.
Be anything.
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He remembered the bald eagles they’d seen on the
train ride. His body became smaller and lighter. His arms
stretched into wings, and his sight became a thousand
times sharper. He soared upward, then dove at the giant
with his talons extended, his razor-sharp claws raking
across the giant’s eyes.
Alcyoneus bellowed in pain. He staggered backward
as Frank landed in front of Hazel and returned to
his normal form.
“Frank…” She stared at him in amazement, a cap of
snow dripping off her head. “What just…how did—?”
“Fool!” Alcyoneus shouted. His face was slashed,
black oil dripping into his eyes instead of blood, but the
wounds were already closing. “I am immortal in my
homeland, Frank Zhang! And thanks to your friend
Hazel, my new homeland is Alaska. You cannot kill me
here!”
“We’ll see,” Frank said. Power coursed through his
arms and legs. “Hazel, get back on your horse.”
The giant charged, and Frank charged to meet him.
He remembered the bear he’d met face to face when he
was a child. As he ran, his body became heavier, thicker,
rippling with muscles. He crashed into the giant as a full-
grown grizzly, a thousand pounds of pure force. He was
still small compared to Alcyoneus, but he slammed into
the giant with such momentum, Alcyoneus toppled into
an icy watchtower that collapsed on top of him.
Frank sprang at the giant’s head. A swipe of his
claw was like a heavyweight fighter swinging a chain saw.
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Frank bashed the giant’s face back and forth until his
metallic features began to dent.
“Urgg,” the giant mumbled in a stupor.
Frank changed to his regular form. His backpack
was still with him. He grabbed the rope he’d bought in Se-
ward, quickly made a noose, and fastened it around the
giant’s scaly dragon foot.
“Hazel, here!” He tossed her the other end of the
rope. “I’ve got an idea, but we’ll have to—”
“Kill—uh—you—uh…” Alcyoneus muttered.
Frank ran to the giant’s head, picked up the nearest
heavy object he could find—a legion shield—and slammed
it into the giant’s nose.
The giant said, “Urgg.”
Frank looked back at Hazel. “How far can Arion
pull this guy?”
Hazel just stared at him. “You—you were a bird.
Then a bear. And—”
“I’ll explain later,” Frank said. “We need to drag
this guy inland, as fast and far as we can.”
“But Percy!” Hazel said.
Frank cursed. How could he have forgotten?
Through the ruins of the camp, he saw Percy with
his back to the edge of the cliff. His hurricane was gone.
He held Riptide in one hand and the legion’s golden eagle
in the other. The entire army of shades edged forward,
their weapons bristling.
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“Percy!” Frank yelled.
Percy glanced over. He saw the fallen giant and
seemed to understand what was happening. He yelled
something that was lost in the wind, probably: Go!
Then he slammed Riptide into the ice at his feet.
The entire glacier shuddered. Ghosts fell to their knees.
Behind Percy, a wave surged up from the bay—a wall of
gray water even taller than the glacier. Water shot from
the chasms and crevices in the ice. As the wave hit, the
back half of the camp crumbled. The entire edge of the
glacier peeled away, cascading into the void—carrying
buildings, ghosts, and Percy Jackson over the edge.
FRANK WAS SO STUNNED THAT Hazel had to yell his
name a dozen times before he realized Alcyoneus was getting
up again.
He slammed his shield into the giant’s nose until
Alcyoneus began to snore. Meanwhile the glacier kept
crumbling, the edge getting closer and closer.
Thanatos glided toward them on his black wings,
his expression serene.
“Ah, yes,” he said with satisfaction. “There go some
souls. Drowning, drowning. You’d best hurry, my friends,
or you’ll drown, too.”
“But Percy…” Frank could barely speak his friend’s
name. “Is he—?”
“Too soon to tell. As for this one…” Thanatos
looked down at Alcyoneus with distaste. “You’ll never kill
him here. You know what to do?”
517/589
Frank nodded numbly. “I think so.”
“Then our business is complete.”
Frank and Hazel exchanged nervous looks.
“Um…” Hazel faltered. “You mean you
won’t…you’re not going to—”“Claim your life?” Thanatos
asked. “Well, let’s see…”
He pulled a pure-black iPad from thin air. Death
tapped the screen a few times, and all Frank could think
was: Please don’t let there be an app for reaping souls.
“I don’t see you on the list,” Thanatos said. “Pluto
gives me specific orders for escaped souls, you see. For
some reason, he has not issued a warrant for yours. Perhaps
he feels your life is not finished, or it could be an
oversight. If you’d like me to call and ask—”
“No!” Hazel yelped. “That’s okay.”
“Are you sure?” Death asked helpfully. “I have
video conferencing enabled. I have his Skype address
here somewhere...”
“Really, no.” Hazel looked as if several thousand
pounds of worry had just been lifted from her shoulders.
“Thank you.”
“Urgg,” Alcyoneus mumbled.
Frank hit him over the head again.
Death looked up from his iPad. “As for you, Frank
Zhang, it isn’t your time, either. You’ve got a little fuel left
to burn. But don’t think I’m doing either of you a favor.
We will meet again under less pleasant circumstances.”
518/589
The cliff was still crumbling, the edge only twenty
feet away now. Arion whinnied impatiently. Frank knew
they had to leave, but there was one more question he had
to ask.
“What about the Doors of Death?” he said. “Where
are they? How do we close them?”
“Ah, yes.” A look of irritation flickered across
Thanatos’s face. “The Doors of Me. Closing them would
be good, but I fear it is beyond my power. How you would
do it, I haven’t the faintest idea. I can’t tell you exactly
where they are. The location isn’t…well, it’s not entirely a
physical place. They must be located through questing. I
can tell you to start your search in Rome. The original
Rome. You will need a special guide. Only one sort of
demigod can read the signs that will ultimately lead you
to the Doors of Me.”
Cracks appeared in the ice under their feet. Hazel
patted Arion’s neck to keep him from bolting.
“What about my brother?” she asked. “Is Nico
alive?”
Thanatos gave her a strange look—possibly pity,
though that didn’t seem like an emotion Death would understand.
“You will find the answer in Rome. And now I
must fly south to your Camp Jupiter. I have a feeling
there will be many souls to reap, very soon. Farewell,
demigods, until we meet again.”
Thanatos dissipated into black smoke.
The cracks widened in the ice under Frank’s feet.
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“Hurry!” he told Hazel. “We’ve got to take Alcyoneus
about ten miles due north!”
He climbed onto the giant’s chest and Arion took
off, racing across the ice, dragging Alcyoneus like the
world’s ugliest sled.
It was a short trip.
Arion rode the glacier like a highway, zipping
across the ice, leaping crevices, and skidding down slopes
that would’ve made a snowboarder’s eyes light up.
Frank didn’t have to knock out Alcyoneus too many
times, because the giant’s head kept bouncing and hitting
the ice. As they raced along, the half-conscious Golden
Boy mumbled a tune that sounded like “Jingle Bells.”
Frank felt pretty stunned himself. He’d just turned
into an eagle and a bear. He could still feel fluid energy
rippling through his body, like he was halfway between a
solid and liquid state.
Not only that: Hazel and he had released Death,
and both of them had survived. And Percy…Frank swallowed
down his fear. Percy had gone over the side of the
glacier to save them.
The son of Neptune shall drown.
No. Frank refused to believe Percy was dead. They
hadn’t come all this way just to lose their friend. Frank
would find him—but first they had to deal with
Alcyoneus.
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He visualized the map he had been studying on the
train from Anchorage. He knew roughly where they were
going, but there were no signs or markers on top of the
glacier. He’d just have to take his best guess.
Finally Arion zoomed between two mountains into
a valley of ice and rocks, like a massive bowl of frozen
milk with bits of Cocoa Puffs. The giant’s golden skin
paled as if it were turning to brass. Frank felt a subtle vibration
in his own body, like a tuning fork pressed against
his sternum. He knew he’d crossed into friendly territory—
home territory.
“Here!” Frank shouted.
Arion veered to one side. Hazel cut the rope, and
Alcyoneus went skidding past. Frank leaped off just before
the giant slammed into a boulder.
Immediately Alcyoneus jumped to his feet. “What?
Where? Who?”
His nose was bent in an odd direction. His wounds
had healed, though his golden skin had lost some of its
luster. He looked around for his iron staff, which was still
back at Hubbard Glacier. Then he gave up and pounded
the nearest boulder to pieces with his fist.
“You dare take me for a sleigh ride?” He tensed
and sniffed the air. “That smell…like snuffed-out souls.
Thanatos is free, eh? Bah! It doesn’t matter. Gaea still
controls the Doors of Death. Now, why have you brought
me here, son of Mars?”
“To kill you,” Frank said. “Next question?”
521/589
The giant’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve never known a
child of Mars who can change his form, but that doesn’t
mean you can defeat me. Do you think your stupid soldier
of a father gave you the strength to face me in one-on-one
combat?”
Hazel drew her sword. “How about two on one?”
The giant growled and charged at Hazel, but Arion
nimbly darted out of the way. Hazel slashed her sword
across the back of the giant’s calf. Black oil spouted from
the wound.
Alcyoneus stumbled. “You can’t kill me, Thanatos
or no!”
Hazel made a grabbing gesture with her free hand.
An invisible force yanked the giant’s jewel-encrusted hair
back ward. Hazel rushed in, slashed his other leg, and
raced away before he could regain his balance.
“Stop that!” Alcyoneus shouted. “This is Alaska. I
am immortal in my homeland!”
“Actually,” Frank said, “I have some bad news
about that. See, I got more from my dad than strength.”
The giant snarled. “What are you talking about, war
brat?”
“Tactics,” Frank said. “That’s my gift from Mars. A
battle can be won before it’s ever fought by choosing the
right ground.” He pointed over his shoulder. “We crossed
the border a few hundred yards back. You’re not in Alaska
anymore. Can’t you feel it, Al? You want to get to Alaska,
you have to go through me.”
522/589
Slowly, understanding dawned in the giant’s eyes.
He looked down incredulously at his wounded legs. Oil
still poured from his calves, turning the ice black.
“Impossible!” the giant bellowed. “I’ll—I’ll—Gah!”
He charged at Frank, determined to reach the international
boundary. For a split second, Frank doubted
his plan. If he couldn’t use his gift again, if he froze, he
was dead. Then he remembered his grandmother’s
instructions:
It helps if you know the creature well. Check.
It also helps if you are in a life-and-death situ
ation, such as combat. Double check.
The giant kept coming. Twenty yards. Ten yards.
“Frank?” Hazel called nervously.
Frank stood his ground. “I got this.”
Just before Alcyoneus smashed into him, Frank
changed. He’d always felt too big and clumsy. Now he
used that feeling. His body swelled to massive size. His
skin thickened. His arms changed to stout front legs. His
mouth grew tusks and his nose elongated. He became the
animal he knew best—the one he’d cared for, fed, bathed,
and even given indigestion to at Camp Jupiter.
Alcyoneus slammed into a full-grown ten-ton
elephant.
The giant staggered sideways. He screamed in frustration
and slammed into Frank again, but Alcyoneus was
completely out of his weight division. Frank head-butted
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him so hard Alcyoneus flew backward and landed spreadeagled
on the ice.
“You—can’t—kill me,” Alcyoneus growled. “You
can’t—”
Frank turned back to his normal form. He walked
up to the giant, whose oily wounds were steaming. The
gems fell out of his hair and sizzled in the snow. His
golden skin began to corrode, breaking into chunks.
Hazel dismounted and stood next to Frank, her
sword ready. “May I?”
Frank nodded. He looked into the giant’s seething
eyes. “Here’s a tip, Alcyoneus. Next time you choose the
biggest state for your home, don’t set up base in the part
that’s only ten miles wide. Welcome to Canada, idiot.”
Hazel’s sword came down on the giant’s neck. Alcyoneus
dissolved into a pile of very expensive rocks.
For a while Hazel and Frank stood together, watching
the remains of the giant melt into the ice. Frank
picked up his rope.
“An elephant?” Hazel asked.
Frank scratched his neck. “Yeah. It seemed like a
good idea.”
He couldn’t read her expression. He was afraid he’d
finally done something so weird that she’d never want to
be around him again. Frank Zhang: lumbering klutz,
child of Mars, part-time pachyderm.
524/589
Then she kissed him—a real kiss on the lips, much
better than the kind of kiss she’d given Percy on the
airplane.
“You are amazing,” she said. “And you make a very
hand some elephant.”
Frank felt so flustered that he thought his boots
might melt through the ice. Before he could say anything,
a voice echoed across the valley:
You haven’t won.
Frank looked up. Shadows were shifting across the
nearest mountain, forming the face of a sleeping woman.
You will never reach home in time, taunted the
voice of Gaea. Even now, Thanatos is attending the death
of Camp Jupiter, the final destruction of your Roman
friends.
The mountain rumbled as if the whole earth were
laughing. The shadows disappeared.
Hazel and Frank looked at each other. Neither said
a word. They climbed onto Arion and sped back toward
Glacier Bay.
PERCY WAS WAITING FOR THEM. He looked mad.
He stood at the edge of the glacier, leaning on the
staff with the golden eagle, gazing down at the wreckage
he’d caused: several hundred acres of newly open water
dotted with icebergs and flotsam from the ruined camp.
The only remains on the glacier were the main
gates, which listed sideways, and a tattered blue banner
lying over a pile of snow-bricks.
When they ran up to him, Percy said, “Hey,” like
they were just meeting for lunch or something.
“You’re alive!” Frank marveled.
Percy frowned. “The fall? That was nothing. I fell
twice that far from the St. Louis Arch.”
“You did what?” Hazel asked.
“Never mind. The important thing was I didn’t
drown.”
526/589
“So the prophecy was incomplete!” Hazel grinned.
“It probably said something like: The son of Neptune will
drown a whole bunch of ghosts.”
Percy shrugged. He was still looking at Frank like
he was miffed. “I got a bone to pick with you, Zhang. You
can turn into an eagle? And a bear?”
“And an elephant,” Hazel said proudly.
“An elephant.” Percy shook his head in disbelief.
“That’s your family gift? You can change shape?”
Frank shuffled his feet. “Um…yeah. Periclymenus,
my ancestor, the Argonaut—he could do that. He passed
down the ability.”
“And he got that gift from Poseidon,” Percy said.
“That’s completely unfair. I can’t turn into animals.”
Frank stared at him. “Unfair? You can breathe underwater
and blow up glaciers and summon freaking hurricanes—
and it’s unfair that I can be an elephant?”
Percy considered. “Okay. I guess you got a point.
But next time I say you’re totally beast—”
“Just shut up,” Frank said. “Please.”
Percy cracked a smile.
“If you guys are done,” Hazel said, “we need to go.
Camp Jupiter is under attack. They could use that gold
eagle.”
Percy nodded. “One thing first, though. Hazel,
there’s about a ton of Imperial gold weapons and armor
at the bottom of the bay now, plus a really nice chariot.
I’m betting that stuff could come in handy.…”
527/589
It took them a long time—too long—but they all
knew those weapons could make the difference between
victory and defeat if they got them back to camp in time.
Hazel used her abilities to levitate some items from
the bottom of the sea. Percy swam down and brought up
more. Even Frank helped by turning into a seal, which
was kind of cool, though Percy claimed his breath smelled
like fish.
It took all three of them to raise the chariot, but finally
they’d managed to haul everything ashore to a black
sand beach near the base of the glacier. They couldn’t fit
everything in the chariot, but they used Frank’s rope to
strap down most of the gold weapons and the best pieces
of armor.
“It looks like Santa’s sleigh,” Frank said. “Can Arion
even pull that much?”
Arion huffed.
“Hazel,” Percy said, “I am seriously going to wash
your horse’s mouth with soap. He says, yes, he can pull it,
but he needs food.”
Hazel picked up an old Roman dagger, a pugio. It
was bent and dull, so it wouldn’t be much good in a fight,
but it looked like solid Imperial gold.
“Here you go, Arion,” she said. “High-performance
fuel.”
The horse took the dagger in his teeth and chewed
it like an apple. Frank made a silent oath never to put his
hand near that horse’s mouth.
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“I’m not doubting Arion’s strength,” he said carefully,
“but will the chariot hold up? The last one—”
“This one has Imperial gold wheels and axle,” Percy
said. “It should hold.”
“If not,” Hazel said, “this is going to be a short trip.
But we’re out of time. Come on!”
Frank and Percy climbed into the chariot. Hazel
swung up onto Arion’s back.
“Giddyup!” she yelled.
The horse’s sonic boom echoed across the bay.
They sped south, avalanches tumbling down the mountains
as they passed.
FOUR HOURS.
That’s how long it took the fastest horse on the
planet to get from Alaska to San Francisco Bay, heading
straight over the water down the Northwest Coast.
That’s also how long it took for Percy’s memory to
return completely. The process had started in Portland
when he had drunk the gorgon’s blood, but his past life
had still been maddeningly fuzzy. Now, as they headed
back into the Olympian gods’ territory, Percy remembered
everything: the war with Kronos, his sixteenth
birthday at Camp Half-Blood, his trainer Chiron the centaur,
his best friend Grover, his brother Tyson, and most
of all Annabeth—two great months of dating, and then
BOOM. He’d been abducted by the alien known as Hera.
Or Juno…whatever.
530/589
Eight months of his life stolen. Next time Percy saw
the Queen of Olympus, he was definitely going to give her
a goddess-sized slap upside the head.
His friends and family must be going out of their
minds. If Camp Jupiter was in such bad trouble, he could
only guess what Camp Half-Blood must be facing without
him.
Even worse: Saving both camps would be only the
beginning. According to Alcyoneus, the real war would
happen far away, in the homeland of the gods. The giants
intended to attack the original Mount Olympus and destroy
the gods forever.
Percy knew that giants couldn’t die unless demigods
and gods fought them together. Nico had told him
that. Annabeth had mentioned it too, back in August,
when she’d speculated that the giants might be part of the
new Great Prophecy—what the Romans called the
Prophecy of Seven. (That was the downside of dating the
smartest girl at camp: You learn stuff.)
He understood Juno’s plan: Unite the Roman and
Greek demigods to create an elite team of heroes, then
somehow convince the gods to fight alongside them. But
first, they had to save Camp Jupiter.
The coastline began to look familiar. They raced
past the Mendocino lighthouse. Shortly afterward, Mount
Tam and the Marin headlands loomed out of the fog. Arion
shot straight under the Golden Gate Bridge into San
Francisco Bay.
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They tore through Berkeley and into the Oakland
Hills. When they reached the hilltop above the Caldecott
Tunnel, Arion shuddered like a broken car and came to a
stop, his chest heaving.
Hazel patted his sides lovingly. “You did great,
Arion.”
The horse was too tired even to cuss: Of course I
did great. What did you expect?
Percy and Frank jumped off the chariot. Percy
wished there’d been comfortable seats or an in-flight
meal. His legs were wobbly. His joints were so stiff, he
could barely walk. If he went into battle like this, the enemy
would call him Old Man Jackson.
Frank didn’t look much better. He hobbled to the
top of the hill and peered down at the camp. “Guys…you
need to see this.”
When Percy and Hazel joined him, Percy’s heart
sank. The battle had begun, and it wasn’t going well. The
Twelfth Legion was arrayed on the Field of Mars, trying
to protect the city. Scorpions fired into the ranks of the
Earthborn. Hannibal the elephant plowed down monsters
right and left, but the defenders were badly outnumbered.
On her pegasus Scipio, Reyna flew around the giant
Polybotes, trying to keep him occupied. The Lares had
formed shimmering purple lines against a mob of black,
vaporous shades in ancient armor. Veteran demigods
from the city had joined the battle, and were pushing
their shield wall against an onslaught of wild centaurs.
Giant eagles circled the battlefield, doing aerial combat
532/589
with two snake-haired ladies in green Bargain Mart
vests—Stheno and Euryale.
The legion itself was taking the brunt of the attack,
but their formation was breaking. Each cohort was an island
in a sea of enemies. The Cyclopes’ siege tower shot
glowing green cannonballs into the city, blasting craters
in the forum, reducing houses to ruins. As Percy watched,
a cannonball hit the Senate House and the dome partially
collapsed.
“We’re too late,” Hazel said.
“No,” Percy said. “They’re still fighting. We can do
this.”
“Where’s Lupa?” Frank asked, desperation creeping
into his voice. “She and the wolves…they should be
here.”
Percy thought about his time with the wolf goddess.
He’d come to respect her teachings, but he’d also
learned that wolves had limits. They weren’t front-line
fighters. They only attacked when they had vastly superior
numbers, and usually under the cover of darkness.
Besides, Lupa’s first rule was self-sufficiency. She would
help her children as much as she could, train them to
fight—but in the end, they were either predator or prey.
Romans had to fight for themselves. They had to prove
their worth or die. That was Lupa’s way.
“She did what she could,” Percy said. “She slowed
down the army on its way south. Now it’s up to us. We’ve
got to get the gold eagle and these weapons to the legion.”
533/589
“But Arion is out of steam!” Hazel said. “We can’t
haul this stuff ourselves.”
“Maybe we don’t have to.” Percy scanned the hilltops.
If Tyson had gotten his dream message in Vancouver,
help might be close.
He whistled as loud as he could—a good New York
cab whistle that would’ve been heard all the way from
Times Square to Central Park.
Shadows rippled in the trees. A huge black shape
bounded out of nowhere—a mastiff the size of an SUV,
with a Cyclops and a harpy on her back.
“Hellhound!” Frank scrambled backward.
“It’s okay!” Percy grinned. “These are friends.”
“Brother!” Tyson climbed off and ran toward Percy.
Percy tried to brace himself, but it was no good. Tyson
slammed into him and smothered him in a hug. For a few
seconds, Percy could only see black spots and lots of flannel.
Then Tyson let go and laughed with delight, looking
Percy over with that massive baby brown eye.
“You are not dead!” he said. “I like it when you are
not dead!”
Ella fluttered to the ground and began preening her
feathers. “Ella found a dog,” she announced. “A large dog.
And a Cyclops.”
Was she blushing? Before Percy could decide, his
black mastiff pounced on him, knocking Percy to the
ground and barking so loudly that even Arion backed up.
534/589
“Hey, Mrs. O’Leary,” Percy said. “Yeah, I love you
too, girl. Good dog.”
Hazel made a squeaking sound. “You have a hellhound
named Mrs. O’Leary?”“Long story.” Percy managed
to get to his feet and wipe off the dog slobber. “You
can ask your brother…”
His voice wavered when he saw Hazel’s expression.
He’d almost forgotten that Nico di Angelo was missing.
Hazel had told him what Thanatos had said about
searching for the Doors of Death in Rome, and Percy was
anxious to find Nico for his own reasons—to wring the
kid’s neck for having pretended he didn’t know Percy
when he first came to camp. Still, he was Hazel’s brother,
and finding him was a conversation for another time.
“Sorry,” he said. “But yeah, this is my dog, Mrs.
O’Leary. Tyson—these are my friends, Frank and Hazel.”
Percy turned to Ella, who was counting all the
barbs in one of her feathers.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “We were worried about
you.”
“Ella is not strong,” she said. “Cyclopes are strong.
Tyson found Ella. Tyson took care of Ella.”
Percy raised his eyebrows. Ella was blushing.
“Tyson,” he said, “you big charmer, you.”
Tyson turned the same color as Ella’s plumage.
“Um…No.” He leaned down and whispered nervously,
loud enough for all the others to hear: “She is pretty.”
535/589
Frank tapped his head like he was afraid his brain
had short-circuited. “Anyway, there’s this battle
happening.”
“Right,” Percy agreed. “Tyson, where’s Annabeth?
Is any other help coming?”
Tyson pouted. His big brown eye got misty. “The
big ship is not ready. Leo says tomorrow, maybe two days.
Then they will come.”
“We don’t have two minutes,” Percy said. “Okay,
here’s the plan.”
As quickly as possible, he pointed out which were
the good guys and the bad guys on the battlefield. Tyson
was alarmed to learn that bad Cyclopes and bad centaurs
were in the giant’s army. “I have to hit pony-men?”
“Just scare them away,” Percy promised.
“Um, Percy?” Frank looked at Tyson with trepidation.
“I just…don’t want our friend here getting hurt. Is
Tyson afighter?”
Percy smiled. “Is he a fighter? Frank, you’re looking
at General Tyson of the Cyclops army. And by the
way, Tyson, Frank is a descendant of Poseidon.”
“Brother!” Tyson crushed Frank in a hug.
Percy stifled a laugh. “Actually he’s more like a
great-great-…Oh, never mind. Yeah, he’s your brother.”
“Thanks,” Frank mumbled through a mouthful of
flannel. “But if the legion mistakes Tyson for an enemy—”
536/589
” I’ve got it!” Hazel ran to the chariot and dug out
the biggest Roman helmet she could find, plus an old Roman
banner embroidered with SPQR.
She handed them to Tyson. “Put those on, big guy.
Then our friends will know you’re on our team.”
“Yay!” Tyson said. “I’m on your team!”
The helmet was ridiculously small, and he put the
cape on backward, like a SPQR baby bib.
“It’ll do,” Percy said. “Ella, just stay here. Stay
safe.”
“Safe,” Ella repeated. “Ella likes being safe. Safety
in numbers. Safety deposit boxes. Ella will go with
Tyson.”
“What?” Percy said. “Oh…fine. Whatever. Just
don’t get hurt. And Mrs. O’Leary—”
“ROOOF!”
“How do you feel about pulling a chariot?”
THEY WERE, WITHOUT A DOUBT, the strangest reinforcements
in Roman military history. Hazel rode Arion,
who had recovered enough to carry one person at normal
horse speed, though he cursed about his aching hooves all
the way downhill.
Frank transformed into a bald eagle—which Percy
still found totally unfair—and soared above them. Tyson
ran down the hill, waving his club and yelling, “Bad pony-
men! BOO!” while Ella fluttered around him, reciting
facts from the Old Farmer’s Almanac.
As for Percy, he rode Mrs. O’Leary into battle with
a chariot full of Imperial gold equipment clanking and
clink ing behind, the golden eagle standard of the Twelfth
Legion raised high above him.
They skirted the perimeter of the camp and took
the northernmost bridge over the Little Tiber, charging
onto the Field of Mars at the western edge of the battle. A
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horde of Cyclopes was hammering away at the campers of
the Fifth Cohort, who were trying to keep their shields
locked just to stay alive.
Seeing them in trouble, Percy felt a surge of protective
rage. These were the kids who’d taken him in. This
was his family.
He shouted, “Fifth Cohort!” and slammed into the
nearest Cyclops. The last things the poor monster saw
were Mrs. O’Leary’s teeth.
After the Cyclops disintegrated—and stayed disintegrated,
thanks to Death—Percy leaped off his hellhound
and slashed wildly through the other monsters.
Tyson charged at the Cyclops leader, Ma Gasket,
her chain-mail dress spattered with mud and decorated
with broken spears.
She gawked at Tyson and started to say, “Who—?”
Tyson hit her in the head so hard, she spun in a
circle and landed on her rump.
“Bad Cyclops Lady!” he bellowed. “General Tyson
says GO AWAY!”
He hit her again, and Ma Gasket broke into dust.
Meanwhile Hazel charged around on Arion, slicing
her spatha through one Cyclops after another, while
Frank blinded the enemies with his talons.
Once every Cyclops within fifty yards had been reduced
to ashes, Frank landed in front of his troops and
transformed into a human. His centurion’s badge and
Mural Crown gleamed on his winter jacket.
539/589
“Fifth Cohort!” he bellowed. “Get your Imperial
gold weapons right here!”
The campers recovered from their shock and
mobbed the chariot. Percy did his best to hand out equipment
quickly.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Dakota urged, grinning like a
madman as he swigged red Kool-Aid from his flask. “Our
comrades need help!”
Soon the Fifth Cohort was equipped with new
weapons and shields and helmets. They weren’t exactly
consistent. In fact they looked like they’d been shopping
at a King Midas clearance sale. But they were suddenly
the most powerful cohort in the legion.
“Follow the eagle!” Frank ordered. “To battle!”
The campers cheered. As Percy and Mrs. O’Leary
charged onward, the entire cohort followed—forty extremely
shiny gold-plated warriors screaming for blood.
They slammed into a herd of wild centaurs that
were attacking the Third Cohort. When the campers of
the Third saw the eagle standard, they shouted insanely
and fought with renewed effort.
The centaurs didn’t stand a chance. The two cohorts
crushed them like a vise. Soon there was nothing
left but piles of dust and assorted hooves and horns.
Percy hoped Chiron would forgive him, but these centaurs
weren’t like the Party Ponies he’d met before. They
were some other breed. They had to be defeated.
“Form ranks!” the centurions shouted. The two cohorts
came together, their military training kicking in.
540/589
Shields locked, they marched into battle against the
Earthborn.
Frank shouted, “Pila!”
A hundred spears bristled. When Frank yelled,
“Fire!” they sailed through the air—a wave of death cutting
through the six-armed monsters. The campers drew
swords and advanced toward the center of the battle.
At the base of the aqueduct, the First and Second
Cohorts were trying to encircle Polybotes, but they were
taking a pounding. The remaining Earthborn threw barrage
after barrage of stone and mud. Karpoi grain spirits—
those horrible little piranha Cupids—were rushing
through the tall grass abducting campers at random,
pulling them away from the line. The giant himself kept
shaking basilisks out of his hair. Every time one landed,
the Romans panicked and ran. Judging from their corroded
shields and the smoking plumes on their helmets,
they’d already learned about the basilisks’ poison and fire.
Reyna soared above the giant, diving in with her
javelin whenever he turned his attention to the ground
troops. Her purple cloak snapped in the wind. Her golden
armor gleamed. Polybotes jabbed his trident and swung
his weighted net, but Scipio was almost as nimble as
Arion.
Then Reyna noticed the Fifth Cohort marching to
their aid with the eagle. She was so stunned, the giant almost
swatted her out of the air, but Scipio dodged. Reyna
locked eyes with Percy and gave him a huge smile.
541/589
“Romans!” Her voice boomed across the fields.
“Rally to the eagle!”
Demigods and monsters alike turned and gawked
as Percy bounded forward on his hellhound.
“What is this?” Polybotes demanded. “What is
this?”
Percy felt a rush of power coursing through the
standard’s staff. He raised the eagle and shouted,
“Twelfth Legion Fulminata!”
Thunder shook the valley. The eagle let loose a
blinding flash, and a thousand tendrils of lightning exploded
from its golden wings—arcing in front of Percy
like the branches of an enormous deadly tree, connecting
with the nearest monsters, leaping from one to another,
completely ignoring the Roman forces.
When the lightning stopped, the First and Second
Cohorts were facing one surprised-looking giant
and several hundred smoking piles of ash. The enemy’s
center line had been charred to oblivion.
The look on Octavian’s face was priceless. The centurion
stared at Percy with shock, then outrage. Then,
when his own troops started to cheer, he had no choice
except to join the shouting: “Rome! Rome!”
The giant Polybotes backed up uncertainly, but
Percy knew the battle wasn’t over.
The Fourth Cohort was still surrounded by Cyclopes.
Even Hannibal the elephant was having a hard
542/589
time wading through so many monsters. His black Kevlar
armor was ripped so that his label just said ant.
The veterans and Lares on the eastern flank were
being pushed toward the city. The monsters’ siege tower
was still hurling explosive green fireballs into the streets.
The gorgons had disabled the giant eagles and now flew
unchallenged over the giant’s remaining centaurs and the
Earthborn, trying to rally them.
“Stand your ground!” Stheno yelled. “I’ve got free
samples!”
Polybotes bellowed. A dozen fresh basilisks fell out
of his hair, turning the grass to poison yellow. “You think
this changes anything, Percy Jackson? I cannot be destroyed!
Come forward, son of Neptune. I will break you!”
Percy dismounted. He handed Dakota the standard.
“You are the cohort’s senior centurion. Take care of
this.” Dakota blinked, then he straightened with pride. He
dropped his Kool-Aid flask and took the eagle. “I will
carry it with honor.”
“Frank, Hazel, Tyson,” Percy said, “help the Fourth
Cohort. I’ve got a giant to kill.”
He raised Riptide, but before he could advance,
horns blew in the northern hills. Another army appeared
on the ridge—hundreds of warriors in black-and-gray
camouflage, armed with spears and shields. Interspersed
among their ranks were a dozen battle forklifts, their
sharpened tines gleaming in the sunset and flaming bolts
nocked in their crossbows.
“Amazons,” Frank said. “Great.”
543/589
Polybotes laughed. “You, see? Our reinforcements
have arrived! Rome will fall today!”
The Amazons lowered their spears and charged
down the hill. Their forklifts barreled into battle. The giant’s
army cheered—until the Amazons changed course
and headed straight for the monsters’ intact eastern flank.
“Amazons, forward!” On the largest forklift stood a
girl who looked like an older version of Reyna, in black
combat armor with a glittering gold belt around her waist.
“Queen Hylla!” said Hazel. “She survived!”
The Amazon queen shouted: “To my sister’s aid!
Destroy the monsters!”
“Destroy!” Her troops’ cry echoed through the
valley.
Reyna wheeled her pegasus toward Percy. Her eyes
gleamed. Her expression said: I could hug you right now.
She shouted, “Romans! Advance!”
The battlefield descended into absolute chaos.
Amazon and Roman lines swung toward the enemy like
the Doors of Death themselves.
But Percy had only one goal. He pointed at the
giant.
“You. Me. To the finish.”
They met by the aqueduct, which had somehow survived
the battle so far. Polybotes fixed that. He swiped his
544/589
trident and smashed the nearest brick arch, unleashing a
waterfall.
“Go on, then, son of Neptune!” Polybotes taunted.
“Let me see your power! Does water do your bidding?
Does it heal you? But I am born to oppose Neptune.”
The giant thrust his hand under the water. As the
torrent passed through his fingers it turned dark green.
He flung some at Percy, who instinctively deflected it with
his will. The liquid splattered the ground in front of him.
With a nasty hiss, the grass withered and smoked.
“My touch turns water to poison,” Polybotes said.
“Let’s see what it does to your blood!”
He threw his net at Percy, but Percy rolled out of
the way. He diverted the waterfall straight into the giant’s
face. While Polybotes was blinded, Percy charged. He
plunged Riptide into the giant’s belly then withdrew it
and vaulted away, leaving the giant roaring in pain.
The strike would have dissolved any lesser monster,
but Polybotes just staggered and looked down at the
golden ichor —the blood of immortals—spilling from his
wound. The cut was already closing.
“Good try, demigod,” he snarled. “But I will break
you still.”
“Gotta catch me first,” Percy said.
He turned and bolted toward the city.
“What?” the giant yelled incredulously. “You run,
coward? Stand still and die!”
545/589
Percy had no intention of doing that. He knew he
couldn’t kill Polybotes alone. But he did have a plan.
He passed Mrs. O’Leary, who looked up curiously
with a gorgon wriggling in her mouth.
“I’m fine!” Percy yelled as he ran by, followed by a
giant screaming bloody murder.
He jumped over a burning scorpion and ducked as
Hannibal threw a Cyclops across his path. Out of the
corner of his eye, he saw Tyson pounding the Earthborn
into the ground like a game of whack-a-mole. Ella was
fluttering above him, dodging missiles and calling out advice:
“The groin. The Earthborn’s groin is sensitive.”
SMASH!
“Good. Yes. Tyson found its groin.”
“Percy needs help?” Tyson called.
“I’m good!”
“Die!” Polybotes yelled, closing fast. Percy kept
running.
In the distance, he saw Hazel and Arion galloping
across the battlefield, cutting down centaurs and karpoi.
One grain spirit yelled, “Wheat! I’ll give you wheat!” but
Arion stomped him into a pile of breakfast cereal. Queen
Hylla and Reyna joined forces, forklift and pegasus riding
together, scattering the dark shades of fallen warriors.
Frank turned himself into an elephant and stomped
through some Cyclopes, and Dakota held the golden eagle
high, blasting lightning at any monsters that dared to
challenge the Fifth Cohort.
546/589
All that was great, but Percy needed a different
kind of help. He needed a god.
He glanced back and saw the giant almost within
arm’s reach. To buy some time, Percy ducked behind one
of the aqueduct’s columns. The giant swung his trident.
When the column crumbled, Percy used the unleashed
water to guide the collapse—bringing down several tons
of bricks on the giant’s head.
Percy bolted for the city limits.
“Terminus!” he yelled.
The nearest statue of the god was about sixty feet
ahead. His stone eyes snapped open as Percy ran toward
him.
“Completely unacceptable!” he complained. “Buildings
on fire! Invaders! Get them out of here, Percy
Jackson!”
“I’m trying,” he said. “But there’s this giant,
Polybotes.”
“Yes, I know! Wait—Excuse me a moment.” Terminus
closed his eyes in concentration. A flaming green
cannonball sailed overhead and suddenly vaporized. “I
can’t stop all the missiles,” Terminus complained. “Why
can’t they be civilized and attack more slowly? I’m only
one god.”
“Help me kill the giant,” Percy said, “and this will
all be over. A god and demigod working together—that’s
the only way to kill him.”
547/589
Terminus sniffed. “I guard borders. I don’t kill giants.
It’s not in my job description.”
“Terminus, come on!” Percy took another step forward,
and the god shrieked indignantly.
“Stop right there, young man! No weapons inside
the Pomerian Line!”
“But we’re under attack.”
“I don’t care! Rules are rules. When people don’t
follow the rules, I get very, very angry.”
Percy smiled. “Hold that thought.”
He sprinted back toward the giant. “Hey, ugly!”
“Rarrr!” Polybotes burst from the ruins of the
aqueduct. The water was still pouring over him, turning
to poison and creating a steaming marsh around his feet.
“You…you will die slowly,” the giant promised. He
picked up his trident, now dripping with green venom.
All around them, the battle was winding down. As
the last monsters were mopped up, Percy’s friends started
gathering, forming a ring around the giant.
“I will take you prisoner, Percy Jackson,” Polybotes
snarled. “I will torture you under the sea. Every day the
water will heal you, and every day I will bring you closer
to death.”
“Great offer,” Percy said. “But I think I’ll just kill
you instead.”
Polybotes bellowed in rage. He shook his head, and
more basilisks flew from his hair.
548/589
“Get back!” Frank warned.
Fresh chaos spread through the ranks. Hazel
spurred Arion and put herself between the basilisks and
the campers. Frank changed form—shrinking into
something lean and furry…a weasel? Percy thought Frank
had lost his mind, but when Frank charged the basilisks,
they absolutely freaked out. They slithered away with
Frank chasing after them in hot weasely pursuit.
Polybotes pointed his trident and ran toward Percy.
As the giant reached the Pomerian Line, Percy jumped
aside like a bullfighter. Polybotes barreled across the city
limits.
“THAT’S IT!” Terminus cried. “That’s AGAINST
THE RULES!”
Polybotes frowned, obviously confused that he was
being told off by a statue. “What are you?” he growled.
“Shut up!”
He pushed the statue over and turned back to
Percy.
“Now I’m MAD!” Terminus shrieked. “I’m
strangling you. Feel that? Those are my hands around
your neck, you big bully. Get over here! I’m going to head-
butt you so hard—”
“Enough!” The giant stepped on the statue and
broke Terminus in three pieces—pedestal, body, and
head.
“You DIDN’T!” shouted Terminus. “Percy Jackson,
you’ve got yourself a deal! Let’s kill this upstart.”
549/589
The giant laughed so hard that he didn’t realize
Percy was charging until it was too late. Percy jumped up,
vaulting off the giant’s knee, and drove Riptide straight
through one of the metal mouths on Polybotes’s breastplate,
sinking the Celestial bronze hilt-deep in his chest.
The giant stumbled backward, tripping over Terminus’s
pedestal and crashing to the ground.
While he was trying to get up, clawing at the sword
in his chest, Percy hefted the head of the statue.
“You’ll never win!” the giant groaned. “You cannot
defeat me alone.”
“I’m not alone.” Percy raised the stone head above
the giant’s face. “I’d like you to meet my friend Terminus.
He’s a god!”
Too late, awareness and fear dawned in the giant’s
face. Percy smashed the god’s head as hard as he could into
the Polybotes’s nose, and the giant dissolved, crumbling
into a steaming heap of seaweed, reptile skin, and
poisonous muck.
Percy staggered away, completely exhausted.
“Ha!” said the head of Terminus. “That will teach
him to obey the rules of Rome.”
For a moment, the battlefield was silent except for
a few fires burning, and a few retreating monsters
screaming in panic.
A ragged circle of Romans and Amazons stood
around Percy. Tyson, Ella, and Mrs. O’Leary were there.
Frank and Hazel were grinning at him with pride. Arion
was nibbling contentedly on a golden shield.
550/589
The Romans began to chant, “Percy! Percy!”
They mobbed him. Before he knew it, they were
raising him on a shield. The cry changed to, “Praetor!
Praetor!”
Among the chanters was Reyna herself, who held
up her hand and grasped Percy’s in congratulation. Then
the mob of cheering Romans carried him around the Pomerian
Line, carefully avoiding Terminus’s borders, and
escorted him back home to Camp Jupiter.
THE FEAST OF FORTUNA HAD NOTHING to do with
tuna, which was fine with Percy.
Campers, Amazons and Lares crowded the mess
hall for a lavish dinner. Even the fauns were invited, since
they’d helped out by bandaging the wounded after the
battle. Wind nymphs zipped around the room, delivering
orders of pizza, burgers, steaks, salads, Chinese food, and
burritos, all flying at terminal velocity.
Despite the exhausting battle, everyone was in
good spirits. Casualties had been light, and the few
campers who’d previously died and come back to life, like
Gwen, hadn’t been taken to the Underworld. Maybe
Thanatos had turned a blind eye. Or maybe Pluto had given
those folks a pass, like he had for Hazel. Whatever the
case, nobody complained.
Colorful Amazon and Roman banners hung side-
by-side from the rafters. The restored golden eagle stood
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proudly behind the praetor’s table, and the walls were
decorated with cornucopias—magical horns of plenty that
spilled out recycling waterfalls of fruit, chocolate, and
fresh-baked cookies.
The cohorts mingled freely with the Amazons,
jumping from couch to couch as they pleased, and for
once the soldiers of the Fifth were welcome everywhere.
Percy changed seats so many times, he lost track of his
dinner.
There was a lot of flirting and arm-wrestling—
which seemed to be the same thing for the
Amazons. At one point Percy was cornered by Kinzie, the
Amazon who’d disarmed him in Seattle. He had to explain
that he already had a girlfriend. Fortunately Kinzie
took it well. She told him what had happened after they’d
left Seattle—how Hylla had defeated her challenger
Otrera in two consecutive duels to the death, so that the
Amazons were now calling their queen Hylla Twice-Kill.
“Otrera stayed dead the second time,” Kinzie said,
batting her eyes. “We have you to thank for that. If you
ever need a new girlfriend…well, I think you’d look great
in an iron collar and an orange jumpsuit.”
Percy couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. He politely
thanked her and changed seats.
Once everyone had eaten and the plates stopped
flying, Reyna made a short speech. She formally welcomed
the Amazons, thanking them for their help. Then
she hugged her siste rand everybody applauded.
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Reyna raised her hands for quiet. “My sister and I
haven’t always seen eye to eye—”
Hylla laughed. “That’s an understatement.”
“She joined the Amazons,” Reyna continued. “I
joined Camp Jupiter. But looking around this room, I
think we both made good choices. Strangely, our destinies
were made possible by the hero you all just raised to
praetor on the battlefield—Percy Jackson.”
More cheering. The sisters raised their glasses to
Percy and beckoned him forward.
Everybody asked for a speech, but Percy didn’t
know what to say. He protested that he really wasn’t the
best person for praetor, but the campers drowned him
out with applause. Reyna took away his probatio neck
plate. Octavian shot him a dirty look, then turned to the
crowd and smiled like this was all his idea. He ripped
open a teddy bear and pronounced good omens for the
coming year—Fortuna would bless them!He passed his
hand over Percy’s arm and shouted: “Percy Jackson, son
of Neptune, first year of service!”
The Roman symbols burned onto Percy’s arm: a
trident, SPQR, and a single stripe. It felt like someone was
pressing a hot iron into his skin, but Percy managed not
to scream.
Octavian embraced him and whispered, “I hope it
hurt.”
Then Reyna gave him an eagle medal and purple
cloak, symbols of the praetor. “You earned these, Percy.”
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Queen Hylla pounded him on the back. “And I’ve
decided not to kill you.”
“Um, thanks,” Percy said.
He made his way around the mess hall one more
time, because all the campers wanted him at their table.
Vitellius the Lar followed, stumbling over his shimmering
purple toga and readjusting his sword, telling everyone
how he’d predicted Percy’s rise to greatness.
“I demanded he join the Fifth Cohort!” the ghost
said proudly. “Spotted his talent right away!”
Don the faun popped up in a nurse’s hat, a stack of
cookies in each hand. “Man, congrats and stuff! Awesome!
Hey, do you have any spare change?”
All the attention embarrassed Percy, but he was
happy to see how well Hazel and Frank were being
treated. Everyone called them the saviors of Rome, and
they deserved it. There was even talk about reinstating
Frank’s great-grandfather, Shen Lun, to the legion’s roll
of honor. Apparently he hadn’t caused the 1906 earthquake
after all.
Percy sat for a while with Tyson and Ella, who were
honored guests at Dakota’s table. Tyson kept calling for
peanut-butter sandwiches, eating them as fast as the
nymphs could deliver. Ella perched at his shoulder on top
of the couch and nibbled furiously on cinnamon rolls.
“Cinnamon rolls are good for harpies,” she said.
“June twenty-fourth is a good day. Roy Disney’s birthday,
and Fortuna’s Feast, and Independence Day for Zanzibar.
And Tyson.”
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She glanced at Tyson, then blushed and looked
away.
After dinner, the entire legion got the night off. Percy and
hisfriends drifted down to the city, which wasn’t quite recovered
from the battle, but the fires were out, most of
the debris had been swept up, and the citizens were determined
to celebrate.
At the Pomerian Line, the statue of Terminus wore
a paper party hat.
“Welcome, praetor!” he said. “You need any giants’
faces smashed while you’re in town, just let me
know.”“Thanks, Terminus,” Percy said. “I’ll keep that in
mind.”
“Yes, good. Your praetor’s cape is an inch too low
on the left. There—that’s better. Where is my assistant?
Julia!”
The little girl ran out from behind the pedestal. She
was wearing a green dress tonight, and her hair was still
in pigtails. When she smiled, Percy saw that her front
teeth were starting to come in. She held up a box full of
party hats.
Percy tried to decline, but Julia gave him the big
adoring eyes.
“Ah, sure,” he said. “I’ll take the blue crown.”
She offered Hazel a gold pirate hat. “I’m gonna be
Percy Jackson when I grow up,” she told Hazel solemnly.
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Hazel smiled and ruffled her hair. “That’s a good
thing to be, Julia.”
“Although,” Frank said, picking out a hat shaped
like apolar bear’s head, “Frank Zhang would be good too.”
“Frank!” Hazel said.
They put on their hats and continued to the forum,
which was lit up with multicolored lanterns. The fountains
glowed purple. The coffee shops were doing a brisk
business, and street musicians filled the air with the
sounds of guitar, lyre, panpipes, and armpit noises.
(Percy didn’t get that last one. Maybe it was an old Roman
musical tradition.)
The goddess Iris must’ve been in a party mood too.
As Percy and his friends strolled past the damaged Senate
House, a dazzling rainbow appeared in the night sky. Unfortunately
the goddess sent another blessing, too—a
gentle rain of gluten-free R.O.F.L. cupcake simulations,
which Percy figured would either make cleaning up
harder, or rebuilding easier. The cupcakes would make
great bricks.
For a while, Percy wandered the streets with Hazel
and Frank, who kept brushing shoulders.
Finally he said, “I’m a little tired, guys. You go
ahead.”
Hazel and Frank protested, but Percy could tell
they wanted some time alone.
As he headed back to camp, he saw Mrs. O’Leary
playing with Hannibal in the Field of Mars. Finally, she’d
found a playmate she could roughhouse with. They
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frolicked around, slamming into each other, breaking fortifications,
and generally having an excellent time.
At the fort gates, Percy stopped and gazed across
the valley. It seemed like so long ago that he’d stood here
with Hazel, getting his first good view of camp. Now he
was more interested in watching the eastern horizon.
Tomorrow, maybe the next day, his friends from
Camp
Half-Blood would arrive. As much as he cared
about Camp Jupiter, he couldn’t wait to see Annabeth
again. He yearned for his old life—New York and Camp
Half-Blood—but something told him it might be a while
before he returned home. Gaea and the giants weren’t
done causing trouble—not by a long shot.
Reyna had given him the second praetor’s house on
the Via Principalis, but as soon as Percy looked inside, he
knew he couldn’t stay there. It was nice, but it was also
full of Jason Grace’s stuff. Percy already felt uneasy taking
Jason’s title of praetor. He didn’t want to take the
guy’s house, too. Things would be awkward enough when
Jason came back—and Percy was sure that he would be
on that dragon-headed warship.
Percy headed back to the Fifth Cohort barracks and
climbed into his bunk. He passed out instantly.
He dreamed he was carrying Juno across the Little Tiber.
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She was disguised as a crazy old bag lady, smiling
and singing an Ancient Greek lullaby as her leathery
hands gripped Percy’s neck.
“Do you still want to slap me, dear?” she asked.
Percy stopped midstream. He let go and dumped
the goddess in the river.
The moment she hit the water, she vanished and
reappeared on the shore. “Oh, my,” she cackled, “that
wasn’t very heroic, even in a dream!”
“Eight months,” Percy said. “You stole eight
months of my life for a quest that took a week. Why?”
Juno tutted disapprovingly. “You mortals and your
short lives. Eight months is nothing, my dear. I lost eight
centuries once, missed most of the Byzantine Empire.”
Percy summoned the power of the river. It swirled
around him, spinning into a froth of whitewater.
“Now, now,” Juno said. “Don’t get testy. If we are
to defeat Gaea, our plans must be timed perfectly. First, I
needed Jason and his friends to free me from my
prison—”
“Your prison? You were in prison and they let you
out?”
“Don’t sound so surprised, dear! I’m a sweet old
woman. At any rate, you weren’t needed at Camp Jupiter
until now, to save the Romans at their moment of
greatest crisis. The eight months between…well, I do have
other plans brewing, my boy. Opposing Gaea, working behind
Jupiter’s back, protecting your friends—it’s a full
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time job! If I had to guard you from Gaea’s monsters and
schemes as well, and keep you hidden from your friends
back east all that time—no, much better you take a safe
nap. You would have been a distraction—a loose cannon.”
“A distraction.” Percy felt the water rising with his
anger, spinning faster around him. “A loose cannon.”
“Exactly. I’m glad you understand.”
Percy sent a wave crashing down on the old woman,
but Juno simply disappeared and materialized
farther down the shore.
“My,” she said, “you are in a bad mood. But you
know I’m right. Your timing here was perfect. They trust
you now. You are a hero of Rome. And while you slept,
Jason Grace has learned to trust the Greeks. They’ve had
time to build the Argo II. Together, you and Jason will
unite the camps.”
“Why me?” Percy demanded. “You and I never got
along. Why would you want a loose cannon on your
team?”
“Because I know you, Percy Jackson. In many
ways, you are impulsive, but when it comes to your
friends, you are as constant as a compass needle. You are
unswervingly loyal, and you inspire loyalty. You are the
glue that will unite the seven.”
“Great,” Percy said. “I always wanted to be glue.”
Juno laced her crooked fingers. “The Heroes of
Olympus must unite! After your victory over Kronos in
Manhattan…well, I fear that wounded Jupiter’s self-
esteem.”
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“Because I was right,” Percy said. “And he was
wrong.”
The old lady shrugged. “He should be used to that,
after so many eons married to me, but alas! My proud
and obstinate husband refuses to ask mere demigods for
help again. He believes the giants can be fought without
you, and Gaea can be forced back to her slumbers. I know
better. But you must prove yourself. Only by sailing to the
ancient lands and closing the Doors of Death will you
convince Jupiter that you are worthy of fighting side-byside
with the gods. It will be the greatest quest since
Aeneas sailed from Troy!”
“And if we fail?” Percy said. “If Romans and Greeks
don’t get along?”
“Then Gaea has already won. I’ll tell you this, Percy
Jackson. The one who will cause you the most trouble is
the one closest to you—the one who hates me most.”
“Annabeth?” Percy felt his anger rising again. “You
never liked her. Now you’re calling her a troublemaker?
You don’t know her at all. She’s the person I most want
watching my back.”
The goddess smiled dryly. “We will see, young
hero. She has a hard task ahead of her when you arrive in
Rome. Whether she is up to it…I do not know.”
Percy summoned a fist of water and smashed it
down at the old lady. When the wave receded, she was
gone.
The river swirled out of Percy’s control. He sank into
the darkness of the whirlpool.
THE NEXT MORNING, PERCY, HAZEL, AND FRANK ate
break fast early, then headed into the city before the senate
was due to convene. As Percy was a praetor now, he
could go pretty much wherever he wanted, whenever he
wanted.
On the way, they passed the stables, where Tyson
and Mrs. O’Leary were sleeping in. Tyson snored on a bed
of hay next to the unicorns, a blissful look on his face like
he was dreaming of ponies. Mrs. O’Leary had rolled on
her back and covered her ears with her paws. On the
stable roof, Ella roosted in a pile of old Roman scrolls, her
head tucked under her wings.
When they got to the forum, they sat by the fountains
and watched the sun come up. The citizens were
already busy sweeping up cupcake simulations, confetti,
and party hats from last night’s celebration. The engineer
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corps was working on a new arch that would commemorate
the victory over Polybotes.
Hazel said she’d even heard talk of a formal triumph
for the three of them—a parade around the city followed
by a week of games and celebrations—but Percy
knew they’d never get the chance. They didn’t have time.
Percy told them about his dream of Juno.
Hazel frowned. “The gods were busy last night.
Show him, Frank.”
Frank reached into his coat pocket. Percy thought
he might bring out his piece of firewood, but instead he
produced a thin paperback book and a note on red
stationery.
“These were on my pillow this morning.” He passed
them to Percy. “Like the Tooth Fairy visited.”
The book was The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Percy
had never heard of it, but he could guess who sent it. The
letter read: Good job, kid. A real man’s best weapon is his
mind. This was your mom’s favorite book. Give it a read.
P.S.—I hope your friend Percy has learned some respect
for me.
“Wow.” Percy handed back the book. “Maybe Mars
is different than Ares. I don’t think Ares can read.”
Frank flipped through the pages. “There’s a lot in
hereabout sacrifice, knowing the cost of war. Back in Vancouver,
Mars told me I’d have to put my duty ahead of my
life or the entire war would go sideways. I thought he
meant freeing Thanatos, but now…I don’t know. I’m still
alive, so maybe the worst is yet to come.”
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He glanced nervously at Percy, and Percy got the
feeling Frank wasn’t telling him everything. He wondered
if Mars had said something about him, but Percy wasn’t
sure he wanted to know.
Besides, Frank had already given enough. He had
watched his family home burn down. He’d lost his mother
and his grandmother.
“You risked your life,” Percy said. “You were willing
to burn up to save the quest. Mars can’t expect more than
that.”
“Maybe,” Frank said doubtfully.
Hazel squeezed Frank’s hand.
They seemed more comfortable around each other
this morning, not quite as nervous and awkward. Percy
wondered if they’d started dating. He hoped so, but he
decided it was better not to ask.
“Hazel, how about you?” Percy asked. “Any word
from Pluto?”
She looked down. Several diamonds popped out of
the ground at her feet. “No,” she admitted. “In a way, I
think he sent a message through Thanatos. My name
wasn’t on that list of escaped souls. It should have been.”
“You think your dad is giving you a pass?” Percy
asked.
Hazel shrugged. “Pluto can’t visit me or even talk to
me without acknowledging I’m alive. Then he’d have to
enforce the laws of death and have Thanatos bring me
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back to the Underworld. I think my dad is turning a blind
eye. I think—I think he wants me to find Nico.”
Percy glanced at the sunrise, hoping to see a warship
descending from the sky. So far, nothing.
“We’ll find your brother,” Percy promised. “As soon
as the ship gets here, we’ll sail for Rome.”
Hazel and Frank exchanged uneasy looks, like
they’d already talked about this.
“Percy…” Frank said. “If you want us to come
along, we’re in. But are you sure? I mean…we know
you’ve got tons of friends at the other camp. And you
could pick anyone at Camp Jupiter now. If we’re not part
of the seven, we’d understand—”
“Are you kidding?” Percy said. “You think I’d leave
my team behind? After surviving Fleecy’s wheat germ,
running from cannibals, and hiding under blue giant
butts in Alaska? Come on!”
The tension broke. All three of them started cracking
up, maybe a little too much, but it was a relief to be
alive, with the warm sun shining, and not worrying—at
least for the moment—about sinister faces appearing in
the shadows of the hills.
Hazel took a deep breath. “The prophecy Ella gave
us—about the child of wisdom, and the mark of Athena
burning through Rome…do you know what that’s about?”
Percy remembered his dream. Juno had warned
that Annabeth had a difficult job ahead of her, and that
she’d cause trouble for the quest. He couldn’t believe that,
but still…it worried him.
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“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I think there’s more
to the prophecy. Maybe Ella can remember the rest of it.”
Frank slipped his book into his pocket. “We need to
take her with us—I mean, for her own safety. If Octavian
finds out Ella has the Sibylline Books memorized…”
Percy shuddered. Octavian used prophecies to keep
his power at camp. Now that Percy had taken away his
chance at praetor, Octavian would be looking for other
ways to exert influence. If he got hold of Ella…
“You’re right,” Percy said. “We’ve got to protect
her. I just hope we can convince her—”
“Percy!” Tyson came running across the forum,
Ella fluttering behind him with a scroll in her talons.
When they reached the fountain, Ella dropped the scroll
in Percy’s lap.
“Special delivery,” she said. “From an aura. A wind
spirit.
Yes, Ella got a special delivery.”
“Good morning, brothers!” Tyson had hay in his
hair and peanut butter in his teeth. “The scroll is from
Leo. He is funny and small.”
The scroll looked unremarkable, but when Percy
spread it across his lap, a video recording flickered on the
parchment. A kid in Greek armor grinned up at them. He
had an impish face, curly black hair, and wild eyes, like
he’d just had several cups of coffee. He was sitting in a
dark room with timber walls like a ship’s cabin. Oil lamps
swung back and forth on the ceiling.
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Hazel stifled a scream.
“What?” Frank asked. “What’s wrong?”
Slowly, Percy realized the curly-haired kid looked
familiar—and not just from his dreams. He’d seen that
face in an old photo.
“Hey!” said the guy in the video. “Greetings from
your friends at Camp Half-Blood, et cetera. This is Leo.
I’m the…” He looked off screen and yelled: “What’s my
title? Am I like admiral, or captain, or—”
A girl’s voice yelled back, “Repair boy.”
“Very funny, Piper,” Leo grumbled. He turned back
to the parchment screen. “So yeah, I’m ... ah ... supreme
commander of the Argo II. Yeah, I like that! Anyway,
we’re gonna be sailing toward you in about, I dunno, an
hour in this big mother warship. We’d appreciate it if
you’d not, like, blow us out of the sky or anything. So
okay! If you could tell the Romans that. See you soon.
Yours in demigodishness, and all that. Peace out.”
The parchment turned blank.
“It can’t be,” Hazel said.
“What?” Frank asked. “You know that guy?”
Hazel looked like she’d seen a ghost. Percy understood
why. He remembered the photo in Hazel’s abandoned
house in Seward. The kid on the warship looked
exactly like Hazel’s old boyfriend.
“It’s Sammy Valdez,” she said. “But how…how—”
“It can’t be,” Percy said. “That guy’s name is Leo.
And it’s been seventy-something years. It has to be a…”
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He wanted to say a coincidence, but he couldn’t
make himself believe that. Over the past few years he’d
seen a lot of things: destiny, prophecy, magic, monsters,
fate. But he’d never yet run across a coincidence.
They were interrupted by horns blowing in the distance.
The senators came marching into the forum with
Reyna at the lead.
“It’s meeting time,” Percy said. “Come on. We’ve
got to warn them about the warship.”
“Why should we trust these Greeks?” Octavian was
saying.
He’d been pacing the senate floor for five minutes,
going on and on, trying to counter what Percy had told
them about Juno’s plan and the Prophecy of Seven.
The senate shifted restlessly, but most of them
were too afraid to interrupt Octavian while he was on a
roll. Meanwhile the sun climbed in the sky, shining
through the broken senate roof and giving Octavian a natural
spotlight.
The Senate House was packed. Queen Hylla, Frank,
and Hazel sat in the front row with the senators. Veterans
and ghosts filled the back rows. Even Tyson and Ella had
been allowed to sit in the back. Tyson kept waving and
grinning at Percy.
Percy and Reyna occupied matching praetors’
chairs on the dais, which made Percy self-conscious. It
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wasn’t easy looking dignified wearing a bed sheet and a
purple cape.
“The camp is safe,” Octavian continued. “I’ll be the
first to congratulate our heroes for bringing back the legion’s
eagle and so much Imperial gold! Truly we have
been blessed with good fortune. But why do more? Why
tempt fate?”
“I’m glad you asked.” Percy stood, taking the question
as an opening.
Octavian stammered, “I wasn’t—”
“—part of the quest,” Percy said. “Yes, I know. And
you’re wise to let me explain, since I was.”
Some of the senators snickered. Octavian had no
choice but to sit down and try not to look embarrassed.
“Gaea is waking,” Percy said. “We’ve defeated two
of her giants, but that’s only the beginning. The real war
will take place in the old land of the gods. The quest will
take us to Rome, and eventually to Greece.”
An uneasy ripple spread through the senate.
“I know, I know,” Percy said. “You’ve always
thought of the Greeks as your enemies. And there’s a
good reason for that. I think the gods have kept our two
camps apart because whenever we meet, we fight. But
that can change. It has to change if we’re to defeat Gaea.
That’s what the Prophecy of Seven means. Seven demigods,
Greek and Roman, will have to close the Doors of
Death together.”
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“Ha!” shouted a Lar from the back row. “The last
time a praetor tried to interpret the Prophecy of Seven, it
was Michael Varus, who lost our eagle in Alaska! Why
should we believe you now?”
Octavian smiled smugly. Some of his allies in the
senate began nodding and grumbling. Even some of the
veterans looked uncertain.
“I carried Juno across the Tiber,” Percy reminded
them, speaking as firmly as he could. “She told me that
the Prophecy of Seven is coming to pass. Mars also appeared
to you in person. Do you think two of your most
important gods would appear at camp if the situation
wasn’t serious?”
“He’s right,” Gwen said from the second row. “I, for
one, trust Percy’s word. Greek or not, he restored the
honor of the legion. You saw him on the battlefield last
night. Would anyone here say he is not a true hero of
Rome?”
Nobody argued. A few nodded in agreement.
Reyna stood. Percy watched her anxiously. Her
opinion could change everything—for better or worse.
“You claim this is a combined quest,” she said.
“You claim Juno intends for us to work with this—this
other group, Camp
Half-Blood. Yet the Greeks have been our enemies
for eons.
They are known for their deceptions.”
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“Maybe so,” Percy said. “But enemies can become
friends. A week ago, would you have thought Romans and
Amazons would be fighting side by side?”
Queen Hylla laughed. “He’s got a point.”
“The demigods of Camp Half-Blood have already
been working with Camp Jupiter,” Percy said. “We just
didn’t realize it. During the Titan War last summer, while
you were attacking Mount Othrys, we were defending
Mount Olympus in Manhattan. I fought Kronos myself.”
Reyna backed up, almost tripping over her toga.
“You… what?”
“I know it’s hard to believe,” Percy said. “But I
think I’ve earned your trust. I’m on your side. Hazel and
Frank—I’m sure they’re meant to go with me on this
quest. The other four are on their way from Camp Half-
Blood right now. One of them is Jason Grace, your old
praetor.”
“Oh, come on!” Octavian shouted. “He’s making
things up, now.”
Reyna frowned. “It is a lot to believe. Jason is coming
back with a bunch of Greek demigods? You say they’re
going to appear in the sky in a heavily armed warship, but
we shouldn’t be worried.”
“Yes.” Percy looked over the rows of nervous,
doubtful spectators. “Just let them land. Hear them out.
Jason will backup everything I’m telling you. I swear it on
my life.”
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“On your life?” Octavian looked meaningfully at the
senate. “We will remember that, if this turns out to be a
trick.”
Right on cue, a messenger rushed into the Senate
House, gasping as if he’d run all the way from camp.
“Praetors! I’m sorry to interrupt, but our scouts report—”
“Ship!” Tyson said happily, pointing at the hole in
the ceiling. “Yay!
Sure enough, a Greek warship appeared out of the
clouds, about a half a mile away, descending toward the
Senate House. As it got closer, Percy could see bronze
shields glinting along the sides, billowing sails, and a
familiar-looking figurehead shaped like a metal dragon.
On the tallest mast, a big white flag of truce snapped in
the wind.
The Argo II. It was the most incredible ship he’d
ever seen.
“Praetors!” the messenger cried. “What are your
orders?”
Octavian shot to his feet. “You need to ask?” His
face was red with rage. He was strangling his teddy bear.
“The omens are horrible! This is a trick, a deception. Beware
Greeks bearing gifts!”
He jabbed a finger at Percy. “His friends are attacking
in a warship. He has led them here. We must attack!”
“No,” Percy said firmly. “You all raised me as
praetor for a reason. I will fight to defend this camp with
my life. But these aren’t enemies. I say we stand ready,
but do not attack. Let them land. Let them speak. If it is a
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trick, then I will fight with you, as I did last night. But it is
not a trick.”
All eyes turned toward Reyna.
She studied the approaching warship. Her expression
hardened. If she vetoed Percy’s orders…well, he
didn’t know what would happen. Chaos and confusion, at
the very least.
Most likely, the Romans would follow her lead.
She’d been their leader much longer than Percy.
“Hold your fire,” Reyna said. “But have the legion
stand ready. Percy Jackson is your duly chosen praetor.
We will trus this word—unless we are given clear reason
not to. Senators, let us adjourn to the forum and meet
our…new friends.”
The senators stampeded out of the auditorium—
whether from excitement or panic, Percy wasn’t
sure. Tyson ran after them, yelling, “Yay! Yay!” with Ella
fluttering around his head.
Octavian gave Percy a disgusted look, then threw
down his teddy bear and followed the crowd.
Reyna stood at Percy’s shoulder.
“I support you, Percy,” she said. “I trust your judgment.
But for all our sakes, I hope we can keep the peace
between our campers and your Greek friends.”
“We will,” he promised. “You’ll see.”
She glanced up at the warship. Her expression
turned a little wistful. “You say Jason is aboard…I hope
that’s true.
573/589
I’ve missed him.”
She marched outside, leaving Percy alone with
Hazel and Frank.
“They’re coming down right in the forum,” Frank
said nervously. “Terminus is going to have a heart attack.”
“Percy,” Hazel said, “you swore on your life. Romans
take that seriously. If anything goes wrong, even by
accident, Octavian is going to kill you. You know that,
right?”
Percy smiled. He knew the stakes were high. He
knew this day could go horribly wrong. But he also knew
that Annabeth was on that ship. If things went right, this
would be the best day of his life.
He threw one arm around Hazel and one arm
around Frank.
“Come on,” he said. “Let me introduce you to my
other family.”
Glossary
absurdus out of place, discordant
Achilles the mightiest of the Greek demigods who fought
in the Trojan War
Aesculapius the Roman god of medicine and healing
Alcyoneus the eldest of the giants born to Gaea,
destined to fight Pluto
Amazons a nation of all-female warriors
Anaklusmos Riptide. The name of Percy Jackson’s
sword.
argentum silver
Argonauts a band of Greek heroes who accompanied
Jason on his quest to find the Golden Fleece. Their
name comes from their ship, the Argo, which was
named after its builder, Argus.
augury a sign of something coming, an omen; the practice
of divining the future
aurae invisible wind spirits
aurum gold
basilisk snake, literally “little crown”
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Bellerophon a Greek demigod, son of Poseidon, whodefeated
monsters while riding on Pegasus
Bellona the Roman goddess of war
Byzantium the eastern empire that lasted another 1,000
years after Rome fell, under Greek influence
Celestial bronze a rare metal deadly to monsters
Centaur a race of creatures that is half human, half
horse
centurion an officer of the Roman army
Cerberus the three-headed dog that guards the gates of-
the Underworld
Ceres the Roman goddess of agriculture
Charon the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the-
newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron,
which divide the world of the living from the world of
the dead
cognomen third name
cohort a Roman military unit
Cyclops a member of a primordial race of giants
(Cyclopes, pl.), each with a single eye in the middle
of his or herforehead
denarius (denarii, pl.) the most common coin in the
Roman currency system
drachma the silver coin of ancient Greece
Elysium the final resting place of the souls of the heroic
and the virtuous in the Underworld
Erebos a place of darkness between Earth and Hades
576/589
faun a Roman forest god, part goat and part man. Greek
form: satyr
Fields of Asphodel the section of the Underworld
where the souls of people who lived lives of equal
good and evil rest
Fields of Punishment the section of the Underworld
where evil souls are eternally tortured
Fortuna the Roman goddess of fortune and good luck
Fulminata armed with lightning. A Roman legion under
Julius Caesar whose emblem was a lightning bolt
(fulmen).
Gaea the earth goddess; mother of Titans, giants, Cyclopes,
and other monsters. Known to the Romans as
Terra
Gegenes earthborn monsters
gladius a short sword
gorgons three monstrous sisters (Stheno, Euryale, and
Medusa) who have hair of living, venomous snakes;
Medusa’s eyes can turn the beholder to stone
graecus Greek; enemy; outsider
greaves shin armor
gris-gris a voodoo amulet that protects from evil or
brings luck
harpy a winged female creature that snatches things
Hercules the Roman equivalent of Heracles; the son of
Jupiter and Alcmene, who was born with great
strength
577/589
Hyperboreans peaceful northern giants
ichor the golden blood of immortals
Imperial gold a rare metal deadly to monsters, consec
rated at the Pantheon; its existence was a closely
guarded secret of the emperors
Iris the rainbow goddess
Juno Roman goddess of women, marriage, and fertility;
sister and wife of Jupiter; mother of Mars. Greek
form: Hera
Jupiter Roman king of the gods; also called Jupiter Optimus
Maximus (the best and the greatest). Greek
form: Zeus
karpoi grain spirits
Laistrygonians tall cannibals from the north, possibly
the source of the Sasquatch legend
Lar house god, ancestral spirit (Lares, pl.)
legion the major unit of the Roman army, consisting of
infantry and cavalry troops
legionnaire a member of a legion
Liberalia a Roman festival that celebrated a boy’s rite of
passage into manhood
Lupa the sacred Roman she-wolf that nursed the foundling
twins Romulus and Remus
Mars the Roman god of war; also called Mars Ultor. Patronof
the empire; divine father of Romulus and
Remus. Greekform: Ares
578/589
Minerva Roman goddess of wisdom. Greek form:
Athena
Mist magic force that disguises things from mortals
Mount Othrys the base of the Titans during the ten-
year war with the Olympian gods; Saturn’s
headquarters
muster formal military inspection
nebulae cloud nymphs
Neptune the Roman god of the sea. Greek form:
Poseidon
Otrera first Amazon queen, daughter of Ares
pallium a cloak or mantle worn by the Romans
Pantheon a temple to all the gods of Ancient Rome
Penthesilea a queen of the Amazons; daughter of Ares
andOtrera, another Amazon queen
Periclymenus a Greek prince of Pylos and a son ofPoseidon,
who granted him the ability to shape-shift. He
was renowned for his strength and participated in
the voyage of the Argonauts.
Phineas a son of Poseidon, who had the gift of prophecy.
When he revealed too much of the plans of the gods,
Zeuspunished him by blinding him.
pilum a Roman spear
Pluto the Roman god of death and riches. Greek equival
ent: Hades
Polybotes the giant son of Gaea, the Earth Mother
579/589
praetor an elected Roman magistrate and commander
of the army
Priam the king of Troy during the Trojan War
principia the headquarters of a Roman camp
probatio testing period for a new recruit in a legion
pugio a Roman dagger
Queen Hippolyta’s belt Hippolyta wore a golden waist
belt, a gift from her father, Ares, that signified her
Amazonian queenship and also gave her strength.
retiarius Roman gladiator who fought with a net and
trident
River Styx the river that forms the boundary
betweenEarth and the Underworld
Romulus and Remus the twin sons of Mars and the
priestess Rhea Silvia who were thrown into the
RiverTiber by their human father, Amulius. They
were rescued and raised by a she-wolf and, upon
reaching adulthood, founded Rome.
Saturn the Roman god of agriculture, the son of Uranus
and Gaea and the father of Jupiter. Greek equivalent:
Kronos
scorpion ballista a Roman missile siege weapon that
launched a large projectile at a distant target
Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR) “The Senate
and People of Rome”; refers to the government of the
Roman Republic and is used as an official emblem of
Rome
shades spirits
580/589
Sibylline Books a collection of prophecies in rhyme
writtenin Greek. Tarquinius Superbus, a king of
Rome, bought them from a prophetess named Sibyl
and consulted them in times of great danger.
spartus a skeleton warrior
spatha a cavalry sword
Stygian iron like Celestial bronze and Imperial gold,
amagical metal capable of killing monsters
Tartarus husband of Gaea; spirit of the abyss; father of
the giants; also the lowest region of the world
Terminus the Roman god of boundaries and landmarks
Thanatos the Greek god of death. Roman equivalent:
Letus
Tiber River the third-longest river in Italy. Rome was-
founded on its banks. In ancient Rome, executed
criminals were thrown into the river.
trireme a type of warship
triumph a ceremonial procession for Roman generals
and their troops in celebration of a great military
victory
Trojan War the war that was waged against the city of
Troyby the Greeks after Paris of Troy took Helen
from her husband, Menelaus, the king of Sparta. It
started with a quarrel between the goddesses Athena,
Hera, and Aphrodite.
Coming Fall 2012
The Heroes of Olympus, Book Three
THE MARK OF ATHENA
Praise for The Percy
Jackson Series by Rick
Riordan:
The Lightning Thief
“Perfectly paced, with electrifying moments chasing each
other like heartbeats.”
—The New York Times Book Review
The Sea of Monsters
? “In a feat worthy of his heroic subjects, Riordan
crafts a sequel stronger than his compelling debut.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The Titan’s Curse
“All in all, a winner of Olympic proportions.”
—School Library Journal
The Battle of the Labyrinth
? “Look no further for the next Harry Potter; meet Percy
Jackson, as legions of fans already have.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The Last Olympian
583/589
“The hordes of young readers who have devoured Rick
Riordan’s books…will no doubt gulp down this concluding
volume as greedily as they would a plateful of ambrosia,
or maybe pizza.”
—The Wall Street Journal
Praise for The Kane
Chronicles by Rick Riordan:
The Red Pyramid
? “The first volume in the Kane Chronicles, this fantasy
adventure delivers what fans loved about the Percy Jackson
and the Olympians series: young protagonists with
previously unsuspected magical powers, a riveting story
marked by headlong adventure, a complex background
rooted in ancient mythology, and wry, witty twenty-firstcentury
narration.”
—ALA Booklist (starred review)
“Riordan fans young and old will eat this new book up.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Fans of the Riordan magic—equal parts danger, myth,
and irreverence—will embrace this new series with open
arms.”
—Horn Book
“This tale explodes into action from chapter one.…Readers
pining for Percy Jackson will find new heroes in
Carter and Sadie Kane.”
—Kirkus Reviews
585/589
“Once again, Riordan masterfully meshes modern life
with mythology and history, reinvigorating dusty artifacts
such as the Rosetta stone and revitalizing ancient Egyptian
story lines.”
—The Los Angeles Times
? “A truly original take on Egyptian mythology…A must-
have book.”
—School Library Journal (starred review)
The Throne of Fire
? “…Riordan kickstarts the action, never lets up on the
gas, balances laughs and losses with a sure hand, and expertly
sets up the coming climactic struggle without
(thankfully) ending on a cliff-hanger. It’s a grand ride so
far, showing nary a sign of slowing down.”
—School Library Journal (starred review)
“As in his earlier novels for children, Riordan combines
hard-hitting action scenes, powerful magic, and comic relief
with the internal waves of love, jealousy, and self-
doubt that make his young heroes so very human. Lit by
flashes of humor, this fantasy adventure is an engaging
addition to the Kane Chronicles series.”
—Booklist
Praise for The Heroes of
Olympus Book One: The Lost
Hero by Rick Riordan:
“Riordan’s storytelling is as polished as ever, brimming
with wit, action, and heart—his devotees won’t be
disappointed.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Percy Jackson fans can rest easy: this first book in Riordan’s
Heroes of Olympus spin-off series is a fast-paced
adventure with enough familiar elements to immediately
hook those eager to revisit his modern world of mythological
mayhem. Rotating among his three protagonists, Riordan’s
storytelling is as polished as ever, brimming with
wit, action, and heart—his devotees won’t be
disappointed.”
—Publishers Weekly
“With appealing new characters within a familiar framework,
this spin-off will satisfy the demand for more.”
—Booklist
“Riordan excels at clever plot devices and at creating an
urgent sense of cliff-hanging danger. His interjection of
humor by incongruous juxtaposition…provides some
588/589
welcome relief. The young heroes deal with issues familiar
to teens today: Who am I? Can I live up to the expectations
of others? Having read the first series is helpful but
not essential, and the complex plot is made for sequels.”
—School Library Journal
“Riordan extends the franchise in a logical direction while
maximizing the elements that made the first series so
popular: irreverent heroes, plenty of tension-filled moments
fighting monsters, and authentic classical mythology
mixed in with modern life. Completely in control of
pacing and tone, he balances a faultless comic banter
against deeper notes that reveal the characters’ vulnerabilities.
With Percy Jackson slated to make an appearance
in later volumes, fans nostalgic for the old books should
find in this new series everything they’ve been pining for.”
—Horn Book
About the
Author
Rick Riordan is
the
author
of
the
New York Times #1
bestselling
The
Heroes
of
Olympus,
Book
One:
The Lost
Hero;
The
Heroes
of
Olympus,
Book
Two:
The Son of
Neptune;
the
New York Times #1
best-selling
The
Kane
Chronicles,
Book
One:
The Red Pyramid;
The
Kane
Chronicles,
Book
Two:
The Throne of Fire;
as
well
as
the
five
books
in
the
New York Times #1
best-selling
Percy
Jackson
and
the
Olympians
series.
His
previous
novels
for
adults
include
the
hugely
popular
TresNavarre
series,
winner
of
the
top
three
awards
in
the
mystery
genre.
He
lives
in
San
Antonio,
Texas,
with
his
wife
and
two
sons.
To
learn
more
about
Rick,
visit
his
Web
site
at
www.rickriordan.
com.
Indeterminate
This document was created with Prince, a great way of getting web content onto paper.)
Copyright © 2011 by Rick Riordan
All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion
Books, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part
of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without
written permission from the publisher. For information
address Disney • Hyperion Books, 114 Fifth
Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690. First
Edition
ISBN 978-1-4231-4059-7
Map illustration on pp. viii–ix by Kayley LeFaiver
Visit www.disneyhyperionbooks.com
Table of
Contents
Also By Rick Riordan
I Percy
II Percy
III Percy
IV Percy
V Hazel
VI Hazel
VII Hazel
VIII Hazel
IX Frank
X Frank
XI Frank
XII Frank
XIII Percy
XIV Percy
XV Percy
XVI Percy
XVII Hazel
XVIII Hazel
XIX Hazel
XX Hazel
XXI Frank
XXII Frank
XXIII Frank
XXIV Frank
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XXV
XXVI Percy
XXVII Percy
XXVIII Percy
XXIX Hazel
XXX Hazel
XXXI Hazel
XXXII Hazel
XXXIII Frank
XXXIV Frank
XXXV Frank
XXXVI Frank
XXXVII Percy
XXXVIII Percy
XXXIX Percy
XL Percy
XLI Hazel
XLII Hazel
XLIII Hazel
XLIV Hazel
XLV Frank
XLVI Frank
XLVII Frank
XLVIII Frank
XLIX Percy
L Percy
LI Percy
LII Percy
Glossary
Coming Fall 2012
The Percy Jackson Series
6/589
The Kane Chronicles
The Throne of Fire
The Heroes of Olympus
About the Author
Also by Rick Riordan
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book One:
The Lightning Thief
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book Two:
The Sea of Monsters
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book Three:
The Titan’s Curse
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book Four:
The Battle of the Labyrinth
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book Five:
The Last Olympian
The Kane Chronicles, Book One:
The Red Pyramid
The Kane Chronicles, Book Two:
The Throne of Fire
The Heroes of Olympus, Book One:
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The Lost Hero
To Becky, who shares my sanctuary in New Rome. Even
Hera could never make me forget you.
THE SNAKE-HAIRED LADIES WERE starting to annoy
Percy.
They should have died three days ago when he
dropped a crate of bowling balls on them at the Napa Bargain
Mart. They should have died two days ago when he
ran over them with a police car in Martinez. They definitely
should have died this morning when he cut off their
heads in Tilden Park.
No matter how many times Percy killed them and
watched them crumble to powder, they just kept re-forming
like large evil dust bunnies. He couldn’t even seem to
outrun them.
He reached the top of the hill and caught his
breath. How long since he’d last killed them? Maybe two
hours. They never seemed to stay dead longer than that.
12/589
The past few days, he’d hardly slept. He’d eaten
whatever he could scrounge—vending machine gummi
bears, stale bagels, even a Jack in the Crack burrito,
which was a new personal low. His clothes were torn,
burned, and splattered with monster slime.
He’d only survived this long because the two snakehaired-
ladies—gorgons, they called themselves—couldn’t
seem to kill him either. Their claws didn’t cut his skin.
Their teeth broke whenever they tried to bite him. But
Percy couldn’t keep going much longer. Soon he’d collapse
from exhaustion, and then—as hard as he was to
kill, he was pretty sure the gorgons would find a way.
Where to run?
He scanned his surroundings. Under different circumstances,
he might’ve enjoyed the view. To his left,
golden hills rolled inland, dotted with lakes, woods, and a
few herds of cows. To his right, the flatlands of Berkeley
and Oakland marched west—a vast checkerboard of
neighborhoods, with several million people who probably
did not want their morning interrupted by two monsters
and a filthy demigod.
Farther west, San Francisco Bay glittered under a
silvery haze. Past that, a wall of fog had swallowed most
of San Francisco, leaving just the tops of skyscrapers and
the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.
A vague sadness weighed on Percy’s chest. Something
told him he’d been to San Francisco before. The
city had some connection to Annabeth—the only person
he could remember from his past. His memory of her was
frustratingly dim. The wolf had promised he would see
13/589
her again and regain his memory—if he succeeded in his
journey.
Should he try to cross the bay?
It was tempting. He could feel the power of the
ocean just over the horizon. Water always revived him.
Salt water was the best. He’d discovered that two days ago
when he had strangled a sea monster in the Carquinez
Strait. If he could reach the bay, he might be able to make
a last stand. Maybe he could even drown the gorgons. But
the shore was at least two miles away. He’d have to cross
an entire city.
He hesitated for another reason. The she-wolf Lupa
had taught him to sharpen his senses—to trust the instincts
that had been guiding him south. His homing
radar was tingling like crazy now. The end of his journey
was close—almost right under his feet. But how could that
be? There was nothing on the hilltop.
The wind changed. Percy caught the sour scent of
reptile. A hundred yards down the slope, something
rustled through the woods—snapping branches, crunching
leaves, hissing.
Gorgons.
For the millionth time, Percy wished their noses
weren’t so good. They had always said they could smell
him because he was a demigod—the half-blood son of
some old Roman god. Percy had tried rolling in mud,
splashing through creeks, even keeping air-freshener
sticks in his pockets so he’d have that new car smell; but
apparently demigod stink was hard to mask.
14/589
He scrambled to the west side of the summit. It was
too steep to descend. The slope plummeted eighty feet,
straight to the roof of an apartment complex built into the
hillside. Fifty feet below that, a highway emerged from
the hill’s base and wound its way toward Berkeley.
Great. No other way off the hill. He’d managed to
get himself cornered.
He stared at the stream of cars flowing west toward
San Francisco and wished he were in one of them. Then
he realized the highway must cut through the hill. There
must be a tunnel…right under his feet.
His internal radar went nuts. He was in the right
place, just too high up. He had to check out that tunnel.
He needed a way down to the highway—fast.
He slung off his backpack. He’d managed to grab a
lot of supplies at the Napa Bargain Mart: a portable GPS,
duct tape, lighter, superglue, water bottle, camping roll, a
Comfy Panda Pillow Pet (as seen on TV), and a Swiss
army knife—pretty much every tool a modern demigod
could want. But he had nothing that would serve as a
parachute or a sled.
That left him two options: jump eighty feet to his
death, or stand and fight. Both options sounded pretty
bad.
He cursed and pulled his pen from his pocket.
The pen didn’t look like much, just a regular cheap
ballpoint, but when Percy uncapped it, it grew into a
glowing bronze sword. The blade balanced perfectly. The
leather grip fit his hand like it had been custom designed
15/589
for him. Etched along the guard was an Ancient Greek
word Percy somehow understood: Anaklusmos—Riptide.
He’d woken up with this sword his first night at the
Wolf House—two months ago? More? He’d lost track.
He’d found himself in the courtyard of a burned-out mansion
in the middle of the woods, wearing shorts, an
orange T-shirt, and a leather necklace with a bunch of
strange clay beads. Riptide had been in his hand, but
Percy had had no idea how he’d gotten there, and only the
vaguest idea who he was. He’d been barefoot, freezing,
and confused. And then the wolves came....
Right next to him, a familiar voice jolted him back
to the present: “There you are!”
Percy stumbled away from the gorgon, almost falling
off the edge of the hill.
It was the smiley one—Beano.
Okay, her name wasn’t really Beano. As near as
Percy could figure, he was dyslexic, because words got
twisted around when he tried to read. The first time he’d
seen the gorgon, posing as a Bargain Mart greeter with a
big green button that read: Welcome! My name is
STHENO, he’d thought it said BEANO.
She was still wearing her green Bargain Mart employee
vest over a flower-print dress. If you looked just at
her body, you might think she was somebody’s dumpy old
grandmother—until you looked down and realized she
had rooster feet. Or you looked up and saw bronze boar
tusks sticking out of the corners of her mouth. Her eyes
16/589
glowed red, and her hair was a writhing nest of bright
green snakes.
The most horrible thing about her? She was still
holding her big silver platter of free samples: Crispy
Cheese ’n’ Wieners. Her platter was dented from all the
times Percyhad killed her, but those little samples looked
perfectly fine. Stheno just kept toting them across California
so she could offer Percy a snack before she killed him.
Percy didn’t know why she kept doing that, but if he ever
needed a suit of armor, he was going to make it out of
Crispy Cheese ’n’ Wieners. They were indestructible.
“Try one?” Stheno offered.
Percy fended her off with his sword. “Where’s your
sister?”
“Oh, put the sword away,” Stheno chided. “You
know by now that even Celestial bronze can’t kill us for
long. Have a Cheese ’n’ Wiener! They’re on sale this week,
and I’d hate to kill you on an empty stomach.”
“Stheno!” The second gorgon appeared on Percy’s
right so fast, he didn’t have time to react. Fortunately she
was too busy glaring at her sister to pay him much attention.
“I told you to sneak up on him and kill him!”
Stheno’s smile wavered. “But, Euryale…” She said
the nameso it rhymed with Muriel. “Can’t I give him a
sample first?”
“No, you imbecile!” Euryale turned toward Percy
and bared her fangs.
Except for her hair, which was a nest of coral
snakes instead of green vipers, she looked exactly like her
17/589
sister. Her Bargain Mart vest, her flowery dress, even her
tusks were decorated with 50% off stickers. Her name
badge read: Hello! My name is DIE, DEMIGOD SCUM!
“You’ve led us on quite a chase, Percy Jackson,”
Euryale said. “But now you’re trapped, and we’ll have our
revenge!”
“The Cheese ’n’ Wieners are only $2.99,” Stheno
added helpfully. “Grocery department, aisle three.”
Euryale snarled. “Stheno, the Bargain Mart was a front!
You’re going native! Now, put down that ridiculous
tray and help me kill this demigod. Or have you forgotten
that he’s the one who vaporized Medusa?”
Percy stepped back. Six more inches, and he’d be
tumbling through thin air. “Look, ladies, we’ve been over
this. I don’t even remember killing Medusa. I don’t remember
anything! Can’t we just call a truce and talk
about your weekly specials?”
Stheno gave her sister a pouty look, which was hard
to do with giant bronze tusks. “Can we?”
“No!” Euryale’s red eyes bored into Percy. “I don’t
care what you remember, son of the sea god. I can smell
Medusa’s blood on you. It’s faint, yes, several years old,
but you were the last one to defeat her. She still has not
returned from Tartarus. It’s your fault!”
Percy didn’t really get that. The whole “dying then
returning from Tartarus” concept gave him a headache.
Of course, so did the idea that a ballpoint pen could turn
into a sword, or that monsters could disguise themselves
with something called the Mist, or that Percy was the son
18/589
of a barnacle-encrusted god from five thousand years ago.
But he did believe it. Even though his memory was
erased, he knew he was a demigod the same way he knew
his name was Percy Jackson. From his very first conversation
with Lupa the wolf, he’d accepted that this crazy
messed-up world of gods and monsters was his reality.
Which pretty much sucked.
“How about we call it a draw?” he said. “I can’t kill
you. You can’t kill me. If you’re Medusa’s sisters—like the
Medusa who turned people to stone—shouldn’t I be petrified
by now?”
“Heroes!” Euryale said with disgust. “They always
bring that up, just like our mother! ‘Why can’t you turn
people to stone? Your sister can turn people to stone.’
Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, boy! That was Medusa’s
curse alone. She was the most hideous one in the family.
She got all the luck!”
Stheno looked hurt. “Mother said I was the most
hideous.”
“Quiet!” Euryale snapped. “As for you, Percy Jackson,
it’s true you bear the mark of Achilles. That makes
you a little tougher to kill. But don’t worry. We’ll find a
way.”
“The mark of what?”
“Achilles,” Stheno said cheerfully. “Oh, he was gorgeous!
Dipped in the River Styx as a child, you know, so
he was invulnerable except for a tiny spot on his ankle.
That’s what happened to you, dear. Someone must’ve
dumped you in the Styx and made your skin like iron. But
19/589
not to worry. Heroes like you always have a weak spot.
We just have to find it, and then we can kill you. Won’t
that be lovely? Have a Cheese ’n’ Wiener!”
Percy tried to think. He didn’t remember any dip in
the Styx. Then again, he didn’t remember much of anything.
His skin didn’t feel like iron, but it would explain
how he’d held out so long against the gorgons.
Maybe if he just fell down the mountain…would he
survive? He didn’t want to risk it—not without something
to slow the fall, or a sled, or…
He looked at Stheno’s large silver platter of free
samples.
Hmm...
“Reconsidering?” Stheno asked. “Very wise, dear. I
added some gorgon’s blood to these, so your death will be
quick and painless.”
Percy’s throat constricted. “You added your blood
to the Cheese ’n’ Wieners?”
“Just a little.” Stheno smiled. “A tiny nick on my
arm, but you’re sweet to be concerned. Blood from our
right side can cure anything, you know, but blood from
our left side is deadly—”
“You dimwit!” Euryale screeched. “You’re not supposed
to tell him that! He won’t eat the wieners if you tell
him they’re poisoned!”
Stheno looked stunned. “He won’t? But I said it
would be quick and painless.”
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“Never mind!” Euryale’s fingernails grew into
claws. “We’ll kill him the hard way—just keep slashing
until we find the weak spot. Once we defeat Percy Jackson,
we’ll be more famous than Medusa! Our patron will
reward us greatly!”
Percy gripped his sword. He’d have to time his
move perfectly—a few seconds of confusion, grab the platter
with his left hand...
Keep them talking, he thought.
“Before you slash me to bits,” he said, “who’s this
patron you mentioned?”
Euryale sneered. “The goddess Gaea, of course! The
one who brought us back from oblivion! You won’t live
long enough to meet her, but your friends below will soon
face her wrath. Even now, her armies are marching south.
At the Feast of Fortune, she’ll awaken, and the demigods
will be cut down like—like—”
“Like our low prices at Bargain Mart!” Stheno
suggested.
“Gah!” Euryale stormed toward her sister. Percy
took the opening. He grabbed Stheno’s platter, scattering
poisoned Cheese ’n’ Wieners, and slashed Riptide across
Euryale’s waist, cutting her in half.
He raised the platter, and Stheno found herself fa
cing her own greasy reflection.
“Medusa!” she screamed.
Her sister Euryale had crumbled to dust, but she
was already starting to re-form, like a snowman un
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melting. “Stheno, you fool!” she gurgled as her half-made
face rose from the mound of dust. “That’s just your own
reflection! Get him!”
Percy slammed the metal tray on top of Stheno’s
head, and she passed out cold.
He put the platter behind his butt, said a silent
prayer to whatever Roman god oversaw stupid sledding
tricks, and jumped off the side of the hill.
THE THING ABOUT PLUMMETING DOWNHILL at fifty
miles an hour on a snack platter—if you realize it’s a bad
idea when you’re halfway down, it’s too late.
Percy narrowly missed a tree, glanced off a boulder,
and spun a three-sixty as he shot toward the highway.
The stupid snack tray did not have power steering. He
heard the gorgon sisters screaming and caught a glimpse
of Euryale’s coral-snake hair at the top of the hill, but he
didn’t have time to worry about it. The roof of the apartment
building loomed below him like the prow of a
battleship. Head-on collision in ten, nine, eight…
He managed to swivel sideways to avoid breaking
his legs on impact. The snack platter skittered across the
roof and sailed through the air. The platter went one way.
Percy went the other.
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As he fell toward the highway, a horrible scenario
flashed through his mind: his body smashing against an
SUV’s windshield, some annoyed commuter trying to
push him off with the wipers. Stupid sixteen-year-old kid
falling from the sky! I’m late!
Miraculously, a gust of wind blew him to one
side—just enough to miss the highway and crash into a
clump of bushes. It wasn’t a soft landing, but it was better
than asphalt.
Percy groaned. He wanted to lie there and pass out,
but he had to keep moving.
He struggled to his feet. His hands were scratched
up, but no bones seemed to be broken. He still had his
backpack. Somewhere on the sled ride he’d lost his sword,
but Percy knew it would eventually reappear in his pocket
in pen form. That was part of its magic.
He glanced up the hill. The gorgons were hard to
miss, with their colorful snake hair and their bright green
Bargain Mart vests. They were picking their way down the
slope, going slower than Percy but with a lot more control.
Those chicken feet must’ve been good for climbing.
Percy figured he had maybe five minutes before they
reached him.
Next to him, a tall chain-link fence separated the
highway from a neighborhood of winding streets, cozy
houses, and talleucalyptus trees. The fence was probably
there to keep people from getting onto the highway and
doing stupid things—like sledding into the fast lane on
snack trays—but the chain-link was full of big holes. Percy
could easily slip through into the neighborhood. Maybe
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he could find a car and drive west to the ocean. He didn’t
like stealing cars, but over the past few weeks, in life-anddeath
situations, he’d “borrowed” several, including a police
cruiser. He’d meant to return them, but they never
seemed to last very long.
He glanced east. Just as he’d figured, a hundred
yardsuphill the highway cut through the base of the cliff.
Two tunnel entrances, one for each direction of traffic,
stared down at him like eye sockets of a giant skull. In the
middle, where the nose would have been, a cement wall
jutted from the hillside, with a metal door like the entrance
to a bunker.
It might have been a maintenance tunnel. That’s
probably what mortals thought, if they noticed the door at
all. But they couldn’t see through the Mist. Percy knew
the door was more than that.
Two kids in armor flanked the entrance. They wore
a bizarre mix of plumed Roman helmets, breastplates,
scabbards, blue jeans, purple T-shirts, and white athletic
shoes. The guard on the right looked like a girl, though it
was hard to tell for sure with all the armor. The one on
the left was a stocky guy with a bow and quiver on his
back. Both kids held long wooden staffs with iron spear
tips, like old-fashioned harpoons.
Percy’s internal radar was pinging like crazy. After
so many horrible days, he’d finally reached his goal. His
instincts told him that if he could make it inside that
door, he might find safety for the first time since the
wolves had sent him south.
So why did he feel such dread?
25/589
Farther up the hill, the gorgons were scrambling
over the roof of the apartment complex. Three minutes
away—maybe less.
Part of him wanted to run to the door in the hill.
He’d have to cross to the median of the highway, but then
it would be a short sprint. He could make it before the
gorgons reached him.
Part of him wanted to head west to the ocean.
That’s where he’d be safest. That’s where his power would
be greatest. Those Roman guards at the door made him
uneasy. Something inside him said: This isn’t my territory.
This is dangerous.
“You’re right, of course,” said a voice next to him.
Percy jumped. At first he thought Beano had managed
to sneak up on him again, but the old lady sitting in
the bushes was even more repulsive than a gorgon. She
looked like a hippie who’d been kicked to the side of the
road maybe forty years ago, where she’d been collecting
trash and rags ever since. She wore a dress made of tie-
dyed cloth, ripped-up quilts, and plastic grocery bags. Her
frizzy mop of hair was gray-brown, like root-beer foam,
tied back with a peace-sign headband. Warts and moles
covered her face. When she smiled, she showed exactly
three teeth.
“It isn’t a maintenance tunnel,” she confided. “It’s
the entrance to camp.”
A jolt went up Percy’s spine. Camp. Yes, that’s
where he was from. A camp. Maybe this was his home.
Maybe Annabeth was close by.
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But something felt wrong.
The gorgons were still on the roof of the apartment
building. Then Stheno shrieked in delight and pointed in
Percy’s direction.
The old hippie lady raised her eyebrows. “Not
much time, child. You need to make your choice.”
“Who are you?” Percy asked, though he wasn’t sure
he wanted to know. The last thing he needed was another
harmless mortal who turned out to be a monster.
“Oh, you can call me June.” The old lady’s eyes
sparkled as if she’d made an excellent joke. “It is June,
isn’t it? They named the month after me!”
“Okay…Look, I should go. Two gorgons are coming.
I don’t want them to hurt you.”
June clasped her hands over her heart. “How
sweet! But that’s part of your choice!”
“My choice…” Percy glanced nervously toward the
hill. The gorgons had taken off their green vests. Wings
sprouted from their backs—small bat wings, which glinted
like brass.
Since when did they have wings? Maybe they were
ornamental. Maybe they were too small to get a gorgon
into the air. Then the two sisters leaped off the apartment
building and soared toward him.
Great. Just great.
“Yes, a choice,” June said, as if she were in no
hurry. “You could leave me here at the mercy of the gorgons
and go to the ocean. You’d make it there safely, I
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guarantee. The gorgons will be quite happy to attack me
and let you go. In the sea, no monster would bother you.
You could begin a new life, live to a ripe old age, and escape
a great deal of pain and misery that is in your
future.”
Percy was pretty sure he wasn’t going to like the
second option. “Or?”
“Or you could do a good deed for an old lady,” she
said. “Carry me to the camp with you.”
“Carry you?” Percy hoped she was kidding. Then
June hiked up her skirts and showed him her swollen
purple feet.
“I can’t get there by myself,” she said. “Carry me to
camp—across the highway, through the tunnel, across the
river.”
Percy didn’t know what river she meant, but it
didn’t sound easy. June looked pretty heavy.
The gorgons were only fifty yards away now—leisurely
gliding toward him as if they knew the hunt was almost
over.
Percy looked at the old lady. “And I’d carry you to
this camp because—?”
“Because it’s a kindness!” she said. “And if you
don’t, the gods will die, the world we know will perish,
and everyone from your old life will be destroyed. Of
course, you wouldn’t remember them, so I suppose it
won’t matter. You’d be safe at the bottom of the sea.…”
28/589
Percy swallowed. The gorgons shrieked with
laughter as they soared in for the kill.
“If I go to the camp,” he said, “will I get my
memory back?”
“Eventually,” June said. “But be warned, you will
sacrifice much! You’ll lose the mark of Achilles. You’ll feel
pain, misery, and loss beyond anything you’ve ever
known. But you might have a chance to save your old
friends and family, to reclaim your old life.”
The gorgons were circling right overhead. They
were probably studying the old woman, trying to figure
out who the new player was before they struck.
“What about those guards at the door?” Percy
asked.
June smiled. “Oh, they’ll let you in, dear. You can
trust those two. So, what do you say? Will you help a defenseless
old woman?”
Percy doubted June was defenseless. At worst, this
was a trap. At best, it was some kind of test.
Percy hated tests. Since he’d lost his memory, his
whole life was one big fill-in-the-blank. He was
____________________, from
____________________. He felt like
____________________, and if the monsters caught
him, he’d be ____________________.
Then he thought about Annabeth, the only part of
his old life he was sure about. He had to find her.
“I’ll carry you.” He scooped up the old woman.
29/589
She was lighter than he expected. Percy tried to ignore
her sour breath and her calloused hands clinging to
his neck. He made it across the first lane of traffic. A
driver honked. Another yelled something that was lost in
the wind. Most just swerved and looked irritated, as if
they had to deal with a lot of ratty teenagers carrying old
hippie women across the freeway here in Berkeley.
A shadow fell over him. Stheno called down gleefully,
“Clever boy! Found a goddess to carry, did you?”
A goddess?
June cackled with delight, muttering, “Whoops!” as
a car almost killed them.
Somewhere off to his left, Euryale screamed, “Get
them! Two prizes are better than one!”
Percy bolted across the remaining lanes. Somehow
he made it to the median alive. He saw the gorgons
swooping down, cars swerving as the monsters passed
overhead. He wondered what the mortals saw through
the Mist—giant pelicans? Off-course hang gliders? The
wolf Lupa had told him that mortal minds could believe
just about anything—except the truth.
Percy ran for the door in the hillside. June got
heavier with every step. Percy’s heart pounded. His ribs
ached.
One of the guards yelled. The guy with the bow
nocked an arrow. Percy shouted, “Wait!”
But the boy wasn’t aiming at him. The arrow flew
over Percy’s head. A gorgon wailed in pain. The second
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guard readied her spear, gesturing frantically at Percy to
hurry.
Fifty feet from the door. Thirty feet.
“Gotcha!” shrieked Euryale. Percy turned as an arrow
thudded into her forehead. Euryale tumbled into the
fast lane. A truck slammed into her and carried her backward
a hundred yards, but she just climbed over the cab,
pulled the arrow out of her head, and launched back into
the air.
Percy reached the door. “Thanks,” he told the
guards. “Good shot.”
“That should’ve killed her!” the archer protested.
“Welcome to my world,” Percy muttered.
“Frank,” the girl said. “Get them inside, quick!
Those are gorgons.”
“Gorgons?” The archer’s voice squeaked. It was
hard to tell much about him under the helmet, but he
looked stout like a wrestler, maybe fourteen or fifteen.
“Will the door hold them?”
In Percy’s arms, June cackled. “No, no it won’t. Onward,
Percy Jackson! Through the tunnel, over the river!”
“Percy Jackson?” The female guard was darker-
skinned, with curly hair sticking out the sides of her helmet.
She looked younger than Frank—maybe thirteen.
Her sword scabbard came down almost to her ankle. Still,
she sounded like she was the one in charge. “Okay, you’re
obviously a demigod. But who’s the—?” She glanced at
June. “Never mind. Just get inside. I’ll hold them off.”
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“Hazel,” the boy said. “Don’t be crazy.”
“Go!” she demanded.
Frank cursed in another language—was that Lat
in?—and opened the door. “Come on!”
Percy followed, staggering under the weight of the
old lady, who was definitely getting heavier. He didn’t
know how that girl Hazel would hold off the gorgons by
herself, but he was too tired to argue.
The tunnel cut through solid rock, about the width
and height of a school hallway. At first, it looked like a
typical maintenance tunnel, with electric cables, warning
signs, and fuse boxes on the walls, lightbulbs in wire
cages along the ceiling. As they ran deeper into the hillside,
the cement floor changed to tiled mosaic. The lights
changed to reed torches, which burned but didn’t smoke.
A few hundred yards ahead, Percy saw a square of
daylight.
The old lady was heavier now than a pile of sandbags.
Percy’s arms shook from the strain. June mumbled
a song in Latin, like a lullaby, which didn’t help Percy
concentrate.
Behind them, the gorgons’ voices echoed in the
tunnel. Hazel shouted. Percy was tempted to dump June
and runback to help, but then the entire tunnel shook
with the rumble of falling stone. There was a squawking
sound, just like the gorgons had made when Percy had
dropped a crate of bowling balls on them in Napa. He
glanced back. The west end of the tunnel was now filled
with dust.
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“Shouldn’t we check on Hazel?” he asked.
“She’ll be okay—I hope,” Frank said. “She’s good
underground. Just keep moving! We’re almost there.”
“Almost where?”
June chuckled. “All roads lead there, child. You
should know that.”
“Detention?” Percy asked.
“Rome, child,” the old woman said. “Rome.”
Percy wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. True, his
memory was gone. His brain hadn’t felt right since he had
woken up at the Wolf House. But he was pretty sure
Rome wasn’t in California.
They kept running. The glow at the end of the tunnel
grew brighter, and finally they burst into sunlight.
Percy froze. Spread out at his feet was a bowl-
shaped valley several miles wide. The basin floor was
rumpled with smaller hills, golden plains, and stretches of
forest. A small clear rivercut a winding course from a lake
in the center and around the perimeter, like a capital G.
The geography could’ve been anywhere in northern
California—live oaks and eucalyptus trees, gold hills and
blue skies. That big inland mountain—what was it called,
Mount Diablo?—rose in the distance, right where it
should be.
But Percy felt like he’d stepped into a secret world.
In the center of the valley, nestled by the lake, was a small
city of white marble buildings with red-tiled roofs. Some
had domes and columned porticoes, like national
33/589
monuments. Others looked like palaces, with golden
doors and large gardens. He could see an open plaza with
freestanding columns, fountains, and statues. A fivestory-
tall Roman coliseum gleamed in the sun, next to a
long oval arena like a racetrack.
Across the lake to the south, another hill was dotted
with even more impressive buildings—temples, Percy
guessed. Several stone bridges crossed the river as it
wound through the valley, and in the north, a long line of
brickwork arches stretched from the hills into the town.
Percy thought it looked like an elevated train track. Then
he realized it must be an aqueduct.
The strangest part of the valley was right below
him. About two hundred yards away, just across the river,
was some sort of military encampment. It was about a
quarter mile square, with earthen ramparts on all four
sides, the tops lined with sharpened spikes. Outside the
walls ran a dry moat, also studded with spikes. Wooden
watchtowers rose at each corner, manned by sentries with
oversized, mounted crossbows. Purple banners hung
from the towers. A wide gateway opened on the far side of
camp, leading toward the city. A narrower gate stood
closed on the riverbank side. Inside, the fortress bustled
with activity: dozens of kids going to and from barracks,
carrying weapons, polishing armor. Percy heard the clank
of hammers at a forge and smelled meat cooking over a
fire.
Something about this place felt very familiar, yet
not quite right.
“Camp Jupiter,” Frank said. “We’ll be safe once—”
34/589
Footsteps echoed in the tunnel behind them. Hazel
burst into the light. She was covered with stone dust and
breathing hard. She’d lost her helmet, so her curly brown
hair fell around her shoulders. Her armor had long slash
marks in front from the claws of a gorgon. One of the
monsters had tagged her with a 50% off sticker.
“I slowed them down,” she said. “But they’ll be here
any second.”
Frank cursed. “We have to get across the river.”
June squeezed Percy’s neck tighter. “Oh, yes,
please. I can’t get my dress wet.”
Percy bit his tongue. If this lady was a goddess, she
must’ve been the goddess of smelly, heavy, useless hippies.
But he’d come this far. He’d better keep lugging her
along.
It’s a kindness, she’d said. And if you don’t, the
gods will die, the world we know will perish, and everyone
from your old life will be destroyed.
If this was a test, he couldn’t afford to get an F.
He stumbled a few times as they ran for the river.
Frank and Hazel kept him on his feet.
They reached the riverbank, and Percy stopped to
catch his breath. The current was fast, but the river didn’t
look deep. Only a stone’s throw across stood the gates of
the fort.
“Go, Hazel.” Frank nocked two arrows at once. “Escort
Percy so the sentries don’t shoot him. It’s my turn to
hold off the baddies.”
35/589
Hazel nodded and waded into the stream.
Percy started to follow, but something made him
hesitate. Usually he loved the water, but this river
seemed…powerful, and not necessarily friendly.
“The Little Tiber,” said June sympathetically. “It
flows with the power of the original Tiber, river of the empire.
This is your last chance to back out, child. The mark
of Achilles is a Greek blessing. You can’t retain it if you
cross into Roman territory. The Tiber will wash it away.”
Percy was too exhausted to understand all that, but
he got the main point. “If I cross, I won’t have iron skin
anymore?”
June smiled. “So what will it be? Safety, or a future
of pain and possibility?”
Behind him, the gorgons screeched as they flew
from the tunnel. Frank let his arrows fly.
From the middle of the river, Hazel yelled, “Percy,
come on!”
Up on the watchtowers, horns blew. The sentries
shouted and swiveled their crossbows toward the
gorgons.
Annabeth, Percy thought. He forged into the river.
It was icy cold, much swifter than he’d imagined, but that
didn’t bother him. New strength surged through his
limbs. His senses tingled like he’d been injected with caffeine.
He reached the other side and put the old woman
down as the camp’s gates opened. Dozens of kids in armor
poured out.
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Hazel turned with a relieved smile. Then she
looked over Percy’s shoulder, and her expression changed
to horror. “Frank!”
Frank was halfway across the river when the gorgons
caught him. They swooped out of the sky and
grabbed him by either arm. He screamed in pain as their
claws dug into his skin.
The sentries yelled, but Percy knew they couldn’t
get a clear shot. They’d end up killing Frank. The other
kids drew swords and got ready to charge into the water,
but they’d be too late.
There was only one way.
Percy thrust out his hands. An intense tugging sensation
filled his gut, and the Tiber obeyed his will. The
river surged. Whirlpools formed on either side of Frank.
Giant watery hands erupted from the stream, copying
Percy’s movements. The giant hands grabbed the gorgons,
who dropped Frank in surprise. Then the hands lifted
the squawking monsters in a liquid vise grip.
Percy heard the other kids yelping and backing
away, but he stayed focused on his task. He made a
smashing gesture with his fists, and the giant hands
plunged the gorgons into the Tiber. The monsters hit bottom
and broke into dust. Glittering clouds of gorgon essence
struggled to re-form, but the river pulled them
apart like a blender. Soon every trace of the gorgons was
swept downstream. The whirlpools vanished, and the current
returned to normal.
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Percy stood on the riverbank. His clothes and his
skin steamed as if the Tiber’s waters had given him an
acid bath. He felt exposed, raw…vulnerable.
In the middle of the Tiber, Frank stumbled around,
looking stunned but perfectly fine. Hazel waded out and
helped him ashore. Only then did Percy realize how quiet
the other kids had become.
Everyone was staring at him. Only the old lady
June looked unfazed.
“Well, that was a lovely trip,” she said. “Thank you,
Percy Jackson, for bringing me to Camp Jupiter.”
One of the girls made a choking sound.
“Percy…Jackson?”
She sounded as if she recognized his name. Percy
focused on her, hoping to see a familiar face.
She was obviously a leader. She wore a regal purple
cloak over her armor. Her chest was decorated with
medals. She must have been about Percy’s age, with dark,
piercing eyes and long black hair. Percy didn’t recognize
her, but the girl stared at him as if she’d seen him in her
nightmares.
June laughed with delight. “Oh, yes. You’ll have
such fun together!”
Then, just because the day hadn’t been weird
enough already, the old lady began to glow and change
form. She grew until she was a shining, seven-foot-tall
goddess in a blue dress, with a cloak that looked like
goat’s skin over her shoulders. Her face was stern and
stately. In her hand was a staff topped with a lotus flower.
38/589
If it was possible for the campers to look more
stunned, they did. The girl with the purple cloak knelt.
The others followed her lead. One kid got down so hastily
he almost impaled himself on his sword.
Hazel was the first to speak. “Juno.”
She and Frank also fell to their knees, leaving Percy
the only one standing. He knew he should probably kneel
too, but after carrying the old lady so far, he didn’t feel
like showing her that much respect.
“Juno, huh?” he said. “If I passed your test, can I
have my memory and my life back?”
The goddess smiled. “In time, Percy Jackson, if you
succeed here at camp. You’ve done well today, which is a
good start. Perhaps there’s hope for you yet.”
She turned to the other kids. “Romans, I present to
you the son of Neptune. For months he has been slumbering,
but now he is awake. His fate is in your hands.
The Feast of Fortune comes quickly, and Death must be
unleashed if you are to stand any hope in the battle. Do
not fail me!”
Juno shimmered and disappeared. Percy looked at
Hazel and Frank for some kind of explanation, but they
seemed just as confused as he was. Frank was holding
something Percy hadn’t noticed before—two small clay
flasks with cork stoppers, like potions, one in each hand.
Percy had no idea where they’d come from, but he saw
Frank slip them into his pockets. Frank gave him a look
like: We’ll talk about it later.
39/589
The girl in the purple cloak stepped forward. She
examined Percy warily, and Percy couldn’t shake the feeling
that she wanted to run him through with her dagger.
“So,” she said coldly, “a son of Neptune, who comes
to us with the blessing of Juno.”
“Look,” he said, “my memory’s a little fuzzy. Um,
it’s gone, actually. Do I know you?”
The girl hesitated. “I am Reyna, praetor of the
Twelfth Legion. And…no, I don’t know you.”
That last part was a lie. Percy could tell from her
eyes. But he also understood that if he argued with her
about it here, in front of her soldiers, she wouldn’t appreciate
it.
“Hazel,” said Reyna, “bring him inside. I want to
question him at the principia. Then we’ll send him to
Octavian. We must consult the auguries before we decide
what to do with him.”
“What do you mean,” Percy asked, “‘decide what to
do with’ me?”
Reyna’s hand tightened on her dagger. Obviously
she was not used to having her orders questioned. “Before
we accept anyone into camp, we must interrogate them
and read the auguries. Juno said your fate is in our hands.
We have to know whether the goddess has brought us as a
new recruit.…”
Reyna studied Percy as if she found that doubtful.
“Or,” she said more hopefully, “if she’s brought us
an enemy to kill.”
PERCY WASN’T SCARED OF GHOSTS, which was lucky.
Half the people in camp were dead.
Shimmering purple warriors stood outside the armory,
polishing ethereal swords. Others hung out in front
of the barracks. A ghostly boy chased a ghostly dog down
the street. And at the stables, a big glowing red dude with
the head of a wolf guarded a herd of…Were those
unicorns?
None of the campers paid the ghosts much attention,
but as Percy’s entourage walked by, with Reyna in
the lead and Frank and Hazel on either side, all the spirits
stopped what they were doing and stared at Percy. A few
looked angry. The little boy ghost shrieked something like
“Greggus!” and turned invisible.
Percy wished he could turn invisible too. After
weeks on his own, all this attention made him uneasy. He
41/589
stayed between Hazel and Frank and tried to look
inconspicuous.
“Am I seeing things?” he asked. “Or are those—”
“Ghosts?” Hazel turned. She had startling eyes, like
fourteen-karat gold. “They’re Lares. House gods.”
“House gods,” Percy said. “Like…smaller than real
gods, but larger than apartment gods?”
“They’re ancestral spirits,” Frank explained. He’d
removed his helmet, revealing a babyish face that didn’t
go with his military haircut or his big burly frame. He
looked like a toddler who’d taken steroids and joined the
Marines.
“The Lares are kind of like mascots,” he continued.
“Mostlythey’re harmless, but I’ve never seen them so
agitated.”
“They’re staring at me,” Percy said. “That ghost kid
called me Greggus. My name isn’t Greg.”
“Graecus,” Hazel said. “Once you’ve been here
awhile, you’ll start understanding Latin. Demigods have a
natural sense for it. Graecus means Greek.”
“Is that bad?” Percy asked.
Frank cleared his throat. “Maybe not. You’ve got
that type of complexion, the dark hair and all. Maybe they
think you’re actually Greek. Is your family from there?”
“Don’t know. Like I said, my memory is gone.”
“Or maybe…” Frank hesitated.
“What?” Percy asked.
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“Probably nothing,” Frank said. “Romans and
Greeks have an old rivalry. Sometimes Romans use graecus
as an insult for someone who’s an outsider—an enemy.
I wouldn’t worry about it.”
He sounded pretty worried.
They stopped at the center of camp, where two
wide stone-paved roads met at a T.
A street sign labeled the road to the main gates as
via praetoria. The other road, cutting across the middle of
camp, was labeled via principalis. Under those markers
were hand-painted signs like berkeley 5 miles; NEW ROME
1 MILE; OLD ROME 7280 MILES; HADES 2310 MILES (pointing
straight down); RENO 208 MILES, AND CERTAIN DEATH: YOU
ARE HERE!
For certain death, the place looked pretty clean and
orderly. The buildings were freshly whitewashed, laid out
in neat grids like the camp had been designed by a fussy
math teacher. The barracks had shady porches, where
campers lounged in hammocks or played cards and drank
sodas. Each dorm had a different collection of banners
out front displaying Roman numerals and various animals—
eagle, bear, wolf, horse, and something that looked
like a hamster.
Along the Via Praetoria, rows of shops advertised
food, armor, weapons, coffee, gladiator equipment, and
toga rentals. A chariot dealership had a big advertisement
out front: CAESAR XLS W/ANTILOCK BRAKES, NO DENARII
DOWN!
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At one corner of the crossroads stood the most impressive
building—a two-story wedge of white marble
with a columned portico like an old-fashioned bank. Roman
guards stood out front. Over the doorway hung a big
purple banner with the gold letters SPQR embroidered inside
a laurel wreath.
“Your headquarters?” Percy asked.
Reyna faced him, her eyes still cold and hostile.
“It’s called the principia.”
She scanned the mob of curious campers who had
followed them from the river. “Everyone back to your duties.
I’ll give you an update at evening muster. Remember,
we have war games after dinner.”
The thought of dinner made Percy’s stomach
rumble. The scent of barbecue from the dining hall made
his mouth water. The bakery down the street smelled
pretty wonderful too, but he doubted Reyna would let
him get an order to go.
The crowd dispersed reluctantly. Some muttered
comments about Percy’s chances.
“He’s dead,” said one.
“Would be those two who found him,” said another.
“Yeah,” muttered another. “Let him join the Fifth
Cohort. Greeks and geeks.”
Several kids laughed at that, but Reyna scowled at
them, and they cleared off.
“Hazel,” Reyna said. “Come with us. I want your report
on what happened at the gates.”
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“Me too?” Frank said. “Percy saved my life. We’ve
got to let him—”
Reyna gave Frank such a harsh look, he stepped
back.
“I’d remind you, Frank Zhang,” she said, “you are
on probatio yourself. You’ve caused enough trouble this
week.”
Frank’s ears turned red. He fiddled with a little tablet
on a cord around his neck. Percy hadn’t paid much attention
to it, but it looked like a name tag made out of
lead.
“Go to the armory,” Reyna told him. “Check our inventory.
I’ll call you if I need you.”
“But—” Frank caught himself. “Yes, Reyna.”
He hurried off.
Reyna waved Hazel and Percy toward the
headquarters. “Now, Percy Jackson, let’s see if we can improve
your memory.”
The principia was even more impressive inside. On the
ceiling glittered a mosaic of Romulus and Remus under
their adopted mama she-wolf (Lupa had told Percy that
story a million times). The floor was polished marble. The
walls were draped in velvet, so Percy felt like he was inside
the world’s most expensive camping tent. Along the
back wall stood a display of banners and wooden poles
studded with bronze medals—military symbols, Percy
guessed. In the center was one empty display stand, as if
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the main banner had been taken down for cleaning or
something.
In the back corner, a stairwell led down. It was
blocked by a row of iron bars like a prison door. Percy
wondered what was down there—monsters? Treasure?
Amnesiac demigods who had gotten on Reyna’s bad side?
In the center of the room, a long wooden table was
cluttered with scrolls, notebooks, tablet computers, daggers,
and a large bowl filled with jelly beans, which
seemed kind of out of place. Two life-sized statues of
greyhounds—one silver, one gold—flanked the table.
Reyna walked behind the table and sat in one of two high-
backed chairs. Percy wished he could sit in the other, but
Hazel remained standing. Percy got the feeling he was
supposed to also.
“So…” he started to say.
The dog statues bared their teeth and growled.
Percy froze. Normally he liked dogs, but these
glared at him with ruby eyes. Their fangs looked sharp as
razors.
“Easy, guys,” Reyna told the greyhounds.
They stopped growling, but kept eyeing Percy as
though they were imagining him in a doggie bag.
“They won’t attack,” Reyna said, “unless you try to
steal something, or unless I tell them to. That’s Argentum
and Aurum.”
“Silver and Gold,” Percy said. The Latin meanings
popped into his head like Hazel had said they would. He
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almost asked which dog was which. Then he realized that
that was a stupid question.
Reyna set her dagger on the table. Percy had the
vague feeling he’d seen her before. Her hair was black and
glossy as volcanic rock, woven in a single braid down her
back. She had the poise of a sword fighter—relaxed yet vigilant,
as if ready to spring into action at any moment.
The worry lines around her eyes made her look older than
she probably was.
“We have met,” he decided. “I don’t remember
when. Please, if you can tell me anything—”
“First things first,” Reyna said. “I want to hear your
story. What do you remember? How did you get here?
And don’t lie. My dogs don’t like liars.”
Argentum and Aurum snarled to emphasize the
point.
Percy told his story—how he’d woken up at the
ruined mansion in the woods of Sonoma. He described
his time with Lupa and her pack, learning their language
of gestures and expressions, learning to survive and fight.
Lupa had taught him about demigods, monsters,
and gods. She’d explained that she was one of the guardian
spirits of Ancient Rome. Demigods like Percy were still
responsible for carrying on Roman traditions in modern
times—fighting monsters, serving the gods, protecting
mortals, and upholding the memory of the empire. She’d
spent weeks training him, until he was as strong and
tough and vicious as a wolf. When she was satisfied with
his skills, she’d sent him south, telling him that if he
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survived the journey, he might find a new home and regain
his memory.
None of it seemed to surprise Reyna. In fact, she
seemed to find it pretty ordinary—except for one thing.
“No memory at all?” she asked. “You still remember
nothing?”
“Fuzzy bits and pieces.” Percy glanced at the greyhounds.
He didn’t want to mention Annabeth. It seemed
too private, and he was still confused about where to find
her. He was sure they’d met at a camp—but this one
didn’t feel like the right place.
Also, he was reluctant to share his one clear
memory: Annabeth’s face, her blond hair and gray eyes,
the way she laughed, threw her arms around him, and
gave him a kiss whenever he did something stupid.
She must have kissed me a lot, Percy thought.
He feared that if he spoke about that memory to
anyone, it would evaporate like a dream. He couldn’t risk
that.
Reyna spun her dagger. “Most of what you’re describing
is normal for demigods. At a certain age, one way
or another, we find our way to the Wolf House. We’re
tested and trained.
If Lupa thinks we’re worthy, she sends us south to
join the legion. But I’ve never heard of someone losing his
memory. How did you find Camp Jupiter?”
Percy told her about the last three days—the gorgons
who wouldn’t die, the old lady who turned out to be
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a goddess, and finally meeting Hazel and Frank at the
tunnel in the hill.
Hazel took the story from there. She described
Percy as brave and heroic, which made him uncomfortable.
All he’d done was carry a hippie bag lady.
Reyna studied him. “You’re old for a recruit. You’re
what, sixteen?”
“I think so,” Percy said.
“If you spent that many years on your own, without
training or help, you should be dead. A son of Neptune?
You’d have a powerful aura that would attract all kinds of
monsters.”
“Yeah,” Percy said. “I’ve been told that I smell.”
Reyna almost cracked a smile, which gave Percy
hope. Maybe she was human after all.
“You must’ve been somewhere before the Wolf
House,” she said.
Percy shrugged. Juno had said something about
him slumbering, and he did have a vague feeling that he’d
been asleep—maybe for a long time. But that didn’t make
sense.
Reyna sighed. “Well, the dogs haven’t eaten you, so
I suppose you’re telling the truth.”
“Great,” Percy said. “Next time, can I take a
polygraph?”
Reyna stood. She paced in front of the banners.
Her metal dogs watched her go back and forth.
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“Even if I accept that you’re not an enemy,” she
said, “you’re not a typical recruit. The Queen of Olympus
simply doesn’t appear at camp, announcing a new demigod.
The last time a major god visited us in person like
that…” She shook her head. “I’ve only heard legends
about such things. And a son of Neptune…that’s not a
good omen. Especially now.”
“What’s wrong with Neptune?” Percy asked. “And
what do you mean, ‘especially now’?”
Hazel shot him a warning look.
Reyna kept pacing. “You’ve fought Medusa’s sisters,
who haven’t been seen in thousands of years. You’ve
agitated our Lares, who are calling you a graecus. And
you wear strange symbols—that shirt, the beads on your
necklace. What do they mean?”
Percy looked down at his tattered orange T-shirt. It
might have had words on it at one point, but they were
too faded to read. He should have thrown the shirt away
weeks ago. It was worn to shreds, but he couldn’t bear to
get rid of it. He just kept washing it in streams and water
fountains as best he could and putting it back on.
As for the necklace, the four clay beads were each
decorated with a different symbol. One showed a trident.
Another displayed a miniature Golden Fleece. The third
was etched with the design of a maze, and the last had an
image of a building—maybe the Empire State Building?—
with names Percy didn’t recognize engraved around
it. The beads felt important, like pictures from a family album,
but he couldn’t remember what they meant.
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“I don’t know,” he said.
“And your sword?” Reyna asked.
Percy checked his pocket. The pen had reappeared
as it always did. He pulled it out, but then realized he’d
never shown Reyna the sword. Hazel and Frank hadn’t
seen it either. How had Reyna known about it?
Too late to pretend it didn’t exist.…He uncapped
the pen. Riptide sprang to full form. Hazel gasped. The
greyhounds barked apprehensively.
“What is that?” Hazel asked. “I’ve never seen a
sword like that.”
“I have,” Reyna said darkly. “It’s very old—a Greek
design. We used to have a few in the armory before…” She
stopped herself. “The metal is called Celestial bronze. It’s
deadly to monsters, like Imperial gold, but even rarer.”
“Imperial gold?” Percy asked.
Reyna unsheathed her dagger. Sure enough, the
blade was gold. “The metal was consecrated in ancient
times, at the Pantheon in Rome. Its existence was a
closely guarded secret of the emperors—a way for their
champions to slay monsters that threatened the empire.
We used to have more weapons like this, but now…well,
we scrape by. I use this dagger. Hazel has a spatha, a cavalry
sword. Most legionnaires use a shorter sword called a
gladius. But that weapon of yours is not Roman at all. It’s
another sign you’re not a typical demigod. And your
arm...”
“What about it?” Percy asked.
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Reyna held up her own forearm. Percy hadn’t noticed
before, but she had a tattoo on the inside: the letters
SPQR, a crossed sword and torch, and under that, four
parallel lines like score marks.
Percy glanced at Hazel.
“We all have them,” she confirmed, holding up her
arm. “All full members of the legion do.”
Hazel’s tattoo also had the letters SPQR, but she
only had one score mark, and her emblem was different: a
black glyph like a cross with curved arms and a head:
Percy looked at his own arms. A few scrapes, some mud,
and a fleck of Crispy Cheese ’n’ Wiener, but no tattoos.
“So you’ve never been a member of the legion,”
Reyna said. “These marks can’t be removed. I thought
perhaps…” She shook her head, as if dismissing an idea.
Hazel leaned forward. “If he’s survived as a loner
all this time, maybe he’s seen Jason.” She turned to Percy.
“Have you ever met a demigod like us before? A guy in a
purple shirt, with marks on his arm—”
“Hazel.” Reyna’s voice tightened. “Percy’s got
enough to worry about.”
Percy touched the point of his sword, and Riptide
shrank back into a pen. “I haven’t seen anyone like you
guys before. Who’s Jason?”
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Reyna gave Hazel an irritated look. “He is…he was
my colleague.” She waved her hand at the second empty
chair. “The legion normally has two elected praetors.
Jason Grace, son of Jupiter, was our other praetor until
he disappeared last October.”
Percy tried to calculate. He hadn’t paid much attention
to the calendar out in the wilderness, but Juno had
mentioned that it was now June. “You mean he’s been
gone eight months, and you haven’t replaced him?”
“He might not be dead,” Hazel said. “We haven’t
given up.”
Reyna grimaced. Percy got the feeling this guy
Jason might’ve been more to her than just a colleague.
“Elections only happen in two ways,” Reyna said.
“Either the legion raises someone on a shield after a major
success on the battlefield—and we haven’t had any
major battles—or we hold a ballot on the evening of June
24, at the Feast of Fortuna. That’s in five days.”
Percy frowned. “You have a feast for tuna?”
“Fortuna,” Hazel corrected. “She’s the goddess of
luck. Whatever happens on her feast day can affect the
entire rest of the year. She can grant the camp good
luck…or really bad luck.”
Reyna and Hazel both glanced at the empty display
stand, as if thinking about what was missing.
A chill went down Percy’s back. “The Feast of Fortune…
The gorgons mentioned that. So did Juno. They
said the camp was going to be attacked on that day,
something about a big bad goddess named Gaea, and an
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army, and Death being unleashed. You’re telling me that
day is this week?”
Reyna’s fingers tightened around the hilt of her
dagger.
“You will say nothing about that outside this
room,” she ordered. “I will not have you spreading more
panic in the camp.”
“So it’s true,” Percy said. “Do you know what’s going
to happen? Can we stop it?”
Percy had just met these people. He wasn’t sure he
even liked Reyna. But he wanted to help. They were demigods,
the same as him. They had the same enemies.
Besides, Percy remembered what Juno had told him: it
wasn’t just this camp at risk. His old life, the gods, and
the entire world might be destroyed. Whatever was coming
down, it was huge.
“We’ve talked enough for now,” Reyna said. “Hazel,
take him to Temple Hill. Find Octavian. On the way you
can answer Percy’s questions. Tell him about the legion.”
“Yes, Reyna.”
Percy still had so many questions, his brain felt like
it would melt. But Reyna made it clear the audience was
over. She sheathed her dagger. The metal dogs stood and
growled, inching toward Percy.
“Good luck with the augury, Percy Jackson,” she
said. “If Octavian lets you live, perhaps we can compare
notes…about your past.”
ON THE WAY OUT OF CAMP, Hazel bought him an espresso
drink and a cherry muffin from Bombilo the two-
headed coffee merchant.
Percy inhaled the muffin. The coffee was great.
Now, Percy thought, if he could just get a shower, a
change of clothes, and some sleep, he’d be golden. Maybe
even Imperial golden.
He watched a bunch of kids in swimsuits and towels
head into a building that had steam coming out of a
row of chimneys. Laughter and watery sounds echoed
from inside, like it was an indoor pool—Percy’s kind of
place.
“Bath house,” Hazel said. “We’ll get you in there
before dinner, hopefully. You haven’t lived until you’ve
had a Roman bath.” Percy sighed with anticipation.
55/589
As they approached the front gate, the barracks got
bigger and nicer. Even the ghosts looked better—with fancier
armor and shinier auras. Percy tried to decipher the
banners and symbols hanging in front of the buildings.
“You guys are divided into different cabins?” he
asked.
“Sort of.” Hazel ducked as a kid riding a giant eagle
swooped overhead. “We have five cohorts of about forty
kids each. Each cohort is divided into barracks of
ten—like roommates, kind of.”
Percy had never been great at math, but he tried to
multiply. “You’re telling me there’s two hundred kids at
camp?”
“Roughly.”
“And all of them are children of the gods? The gods
have been busy.”
Hazel laughed. “Not all of them are children of majorgods.
There are hundreds of minor Roman gods. Plus,
a lot of the campers are legacies—second or third generation.
Maybe their parents were demigods. Or their
grandparents.”
Percy blinked. “Children of demigods?”
“Why? Does that surprise you?”
Percy wasn’t sure. The last few weeks he’d been so
worried about surviving day to day. The idea of living
long enough to be an adult and have kids of his own—that
seemed like an impossible dream.
“These Legos—”
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“Legacies,” Hazel corrected.
“They have powers like a demigod?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes not. But they can be
trained. All the best Roman generals and emperors—you
know, they all claimed to be descended from gods. Most
of the time, they were telling the truth. The camp augur
we’re going to meet, Octavian, he’s a legacy, descendant
of Apollo. He’s got the gift of prophecy, supposedly.”
“Supposedly?”
Hazel made a sour face. “You’ll see.”
That didn’t make Percy feel so great, if this dude
Octavian had Percy’s fate in his hands.
“So the divisions,” he asked, “the cohorts,
whatever—you’re divided according to who your godly
parent is?”
Hazel stared at him. “What a horrible idea! No, the
officers decide where to assign recruits. If we were divided
according to god, the cohorts would be all uneven.
I’d be alone.”
Percy felt a twinge of sadness, like he’d been in that
situation. “Why? What’s your ancestry?”
Before she could answer, someone behind them
yelled, “Wait!”
A ghost ran toward them—an old man with a
medicine-ball belly and toga so long he kept tripping on
it. He caught up to them and gasped for air, his purple
aura flickering around him.
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“This is him?” the ghost panted. “A new recruit for
the Fifth, perhaps?”
“Vitellius,” Hazel said, “we’re sort of in a hurry.”
The ghost scowled at Percy and walked around
him, inspecting him like a used car. “I don’t know,” he
grumbled. “We need only the best for the cohort. Does he
have all his teeth? Can he fight? Does he clean stables?”
“Yes, yes, and no,” Percy said. “Who are you?”
“Percy, this is Vitellius.” Hazel’s expression said:
Just humor him. “He’s one of our Lares; takes an interest
in new recruits.”
On a nearby porch, other ghosts snickered as Vitellius
paced back and forth, tripping over his toga and hiking
up his sword belt.
“Yes,” Vitellius said, “back in Caesar’s day—that’s
Julius Caesar, mind you—the Fifth Cohort was
something! Twelfth Legion Fulminata, pride of Rome!
But these days? Disgraceful what we’ve come to. Look at
Hazel here, using a spatha. Ridiculous weapon for a Roman
legionnaire—that’s for cavalry! And you, boy—you
smell like a Greek sewer. Haven’t you had a bath?”
“I’ve been a little busy fighting gorgons,” Percy
said.
“Vitellius,” Hazel interrupted, “we’ve got to get
Percy’s augury before he can join. Why don’t you check on
Frank? He’s in the armory doing inventory. You know
how much he values your help.”
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The ghost’s furry purple eyebrows shot up. “Mars
Almighty! They let the probatio check the armor? We’ll
be ruined!”
He stumbled off down the street, stopping every
few feet to pick up his sword or rearrange his toga.
“O-h-h-kay,” Percy said.
“Sorry,” Hazel said. “He’s eccentric, but he’s one of
the oldest Lares. Been around since the legion was
founded.”
“He called the legion…Fulminata?” Percy said.
“‘Armed with Lightning,’” Hazel translated. “That’s
our motto. The Twelfth Legion was around for the entire
Roman Empire. When Rome fell, a lot of legions just disappeared.
We went underground, acting on secret orders
from Jupiter himself: stay alive, recruit demigods and
their children, keep Rome going. We’ve been doing that
ever since, moving around to wherever Roman influence
was strongest. The last few centuries, we’ve been in
America.”
As bizarre as that sounded, Percy had no trouble
believing it. In fact, it sounded familiar, like something
he’d always known.
“And you’re in the Fifth Cohort,” he guessed,
“which maybe isn’t the most popular?”
Hazel scowled. “Yeah. I joined up last September.”
“So…just a few weeks before that guy Jason
disappeared.”
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Percy knew he’d hit a sore spot. Hazel looked
down. She was silent long enough to count every paving
stone.
“Come on,” she said at last. “I’ll show you my favorite
view.”
They stopped outside the main gates. The fort was situated
on the highest point in the valley, so they could see
pretty much everything.
The road led down to the river and divided. One
path led south across a bridge, up to the hill with all the
temples. The other road led north into the city, a miniature
version of Ancient Rome. Unlike the military camp,
the city looked chaotic and colorful, with buildings
crowded together at haphazard angles. Even from this far
away, Percy could see people gathered in the plaza, shoppers
milling around an open-air market, parents with
kids playing in the parks.
“You’ve got families here?” he asked.
“In the city, absolutely,” Hazel said. “When you’re
accepted into the legion, you do ten years of service. After
that, you can muster out whenever you want. Most demigods
go into the mortal world. But for some—well, it’s
pretty dangerous out there. This valley is a sanctuary. You
can go to college in the city, get married, have kids, retire
when you get old. It’s the only safe place on earth for
people like us. So yeah, a lot of veterans make their
homes there, under the protection of the legion.”
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Adult demigods. Demigods who could live without
fear, get married, raise a family. Percy couldn’t quite wrap
his mind around that. It seemed too good to be true. “But
if this valley is attacked?”
Hazel pursed her lips. “We have defenses. The borders
are magical. But our strength isn’t what it used to be.
Lately, the monster attacks have been increasing. What
you said about the gorgons not dying…we’ve noticed that
too, with other monsters.”
“Do you know what’s causing it?”
Hazel looked away. Percy could tell that she was
holding something back—something she wasn’t supposed
to say.
“It’s—it’s complicated,” she said. “My brother says
Death isn’t—”
She was interrupted by an elephant.
Someone behind them shouted, “Make way!”
Hazel dragged Percy out of the road as a demigod
rode past on a full-grown pachyderm covered in black
Kevlar armor. The word elephant was printed on the side
of his armor, which seemed a little obvious to Percy.
The elephant thundered down the road and turned
north, heading toward a big open field where some fortifications
were under construction.
Percy spit dust out of his mouth. “What the—?”
“Elephant,” Hazel explained.
“Yeah, I read the sign. Why do you have an ele
phant in a bulletproof vest?”
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“War games tonight,” Hazel said. “That’s Hannibal.
If we didn’t include him, he’d get upset.”
“We can’t have that.”
Hazel laughed. It was hard to believe she’d looked
so moody a moment ago. Percy wondered what she’d
been about to say. She had a brother. Yet she had claimed
she’d be alone if the camp sorted her by her godly parent.
Percy couldn’t figure her out. She seemed nice and
easy going, mature for somebody who couldn’t have been
more than thirteen. But she also seemed to be hiding a
deep sadness, like she felt guilty about something.
Hazel pointed south across the river. Dark clouds
were gathering over Temple Hill. Red flashes of lightning
washed the monuments in blood-colored light.
“Octavian is busy,” Hazel said. “We’d better get
over there.”
On the way, they passed some goat-legged guys hanging
out on the side of the road.
“Hazel!” one of them cried.
He trotted over with a big grin on his face. He wore
a faded Hawaiian shirt and nothing for pants except thick
brown goat fur. His massive Afro jiggled. His eyes were
hidden behind little round rainbow-tinted glasses. He
held a cardboard sign that read: WILL WORK SING TALK go
away for denarii.
“Hi, Don,” Hazel said. “Sorry, we don’t have
time—”
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“Oh, that’s cool! That’s cool!” Don trotted along
with them. “Hey, this guy’s new!” He grinned at Percy.
“Do you have three denarii for the bus? Because I left my
wallet at home, and I’ve got to get to work, and—”
“Don,” Hazel chided. “Fauns don’t have wallets. Or
jobs. Or homes. And we don’t have buses.”
“Right,” he said cheerfully, “but do you have
denarii?”
“Your name is Don the Faun?” Percy asked.
“Yeah. So?”
“Nothing.” Percy tried to keep a straight face. “Why
don’t fauns have jobs? Shouldn’t they work for the
camp?”
Don bleated. “Fauns! Work for the camp!
Hilarious!”
“Fauns are, um, free spirits,” Hazel explained.
“They hang out here because, well, it’s a safe place to
hang out and beg. We tolerate them, but—”
“Oh, Hazel is awesome,” Don said. “She’s so nice!
All the other campers are like, ‘Go away, Don.’ But she’s
like, ‘Please go away, Don.’ I love her!”
The faun seemed harmless, but Percy still found
him unsettling. He couldn’t shake the feeling that fauns
should be more than just homeless guys begging for
denarii.
Don looked at the ground in front of them and
gasped. “Score!”
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He reached for something, but Hazel screamed,
“Don, no!”
She pushed him out of the way and snatched up a
small shiny object. Percy caught a glimpse of it before
Hazel slipped it into her pocket. He could have sworn it
was a diamond.
“Come on, Hazel,” Don complained. “I could’ve
bought a year’s worth of doughnuts with that!”
“Don, please,” Hazel said. “Go away.”
She sounded shaken, like she’d just saved Don
from a charging bulletproof elephant.
The faun sighed. “Aw, I can’t stay mad at you. But I
swear, it’s like you’re good luck. Every time you walk
by—”
“Good-bye, Don,” Hazel said quickly. “Let’s go,
Percy.”
She started jogging. Percy had to sprint to catch up.
“What was that about?” Percy asked. “That diamond
in the road—”
“Please,” she said. “Don’t ask.”
They walked in uneasy silence the rest of the way to
TempleHill. A crooked stone path led past a crazy assortment
of tiny altars and massive domed vaults. Statues of
gods seemed to follow Percy with their eyes.
Hazel pointed out the Temple of Bellona. “Goddess
of war,” she said. “That’s Reyna’s mom.” Then they
passed a massive red crypt decorated with human skulls
on iron spikes.
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“Please tell me we’re not going in there,” Percy
said.
Hazel shook her head. “That’s the Temple of Mars
Ultor.”
“Mars ... Ares, the war god?”
“That’s his Greek name,” Hazel said. “But, yeah,
same guy. Ultor means ‘the Avenger.’ He’s the second-
most important god of Rome.”
Percy wasn’t thrilled to hear that. For some reason,
just looking at the ugly red building made him feel angry.
He pointed toward the summit. Clouds swirled
over the largest temple, a round pavilion with a ring of
white columns supporting a domed roof. “I’m guessing
that’s Zeus—uh, I mean, Jupiter’s? That’s where we’re
heading?”
“Yeah.” Hazel sounded edgy. “Octavian reads auguries
there—the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.”
Percy had to think about it, but the Latin words
clicked into English. “Jupiter…the best and the greatest?”
“Right.”
“What’s Neptune’s title?” Percy asked. “The coolest
and most awesome?”
“Um, not quite.” Hazel gestured to a small blue
building the size of a toolshed. A cobweb-covered trident
was nailed above the door.
Percy peeked inside. On a small altar sat a bowl
with three dried-up, moldy apples.
His heart sank. “Popular place.”
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“I’m sorry, Percy,” Hazel said. “It’s just…Romans
were always scared of the sea. They only used ships if they
had to. Even in modern times, having a child of Neptune
around has always been a bad omen. The last time one
joined the legion
…well, it was 1906, when Camp Jupiter was located
across the bay in San Francisco. There was this huge
earthquake—”
“You’re telling me a child of Neptune caused that?”
“So they say.” Hazel looked apologetic. “Anyway…
Romans fear Neptune, but they don’t love him
much.” Percy stared at the cobwebs on the trident. Great,
he thought. Even if he joined the camp, he would never be
loved. His best hope was to be scary to his new camp-
mates. Maybe if he did really well, they’d give him some
moldy apples.
Still…standing at Neptune’s altar, he felt something
stirring inside him, like waves rippling through his veins.
He reached in his backpack and dug out the last bit
of food from his trip—a stale bagel. It wasn’t much, but he
set it on the altar.
“Hey…uh, Dad.” He felt pretty stupid talking to a
bowl of fruit. “If you can hear me, help me out, okay? Give
me my memory back. Tell me—tell me what to do.”
His voice cracked. He hadn’t meant to get emotional,
but he was exhausted and scared, and he’d been lost
for so long, he would’ve given anything for some guidance.
He wanted to know something about his life for
sure, without grabbing for missing memories.
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Hazel put her hand on his shoulder. “It’ll be okay.
You’re here now. You’re one of us.”
He felt awkward, depending on an eighth-grade girl
he barely knew for comfort, but he was glad she was
there.
Above them, thunder rumbled. Red lightning lit up
the hill.
“Octavian’s almost done,” Hazel said. “Let’s go.”
Compared to Neptune’s tool shed, Jupiter’s temple was
definitely optimus and maximus.
The marble floor was etched with fancy mosaics
and Latin inscriptions. Sixty feet above, the domed ceiling
sparkled gold. The whole temple was open to the wind.
In the center stood a marble altar, where a kid in a
toga was doing some sort of ritual in front of a massive
golden statue of the big dude himself: Jupiter the sky god,
dressed in a silk XXXL purple toga, holding a lightning
bolt.
“It doesn’t look like that,” Percy muttered.
“What?” Hazel asked.
“The master bolt,” Percy said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I—” Percy frowned. For a second, he’d thought he
remembered something. Now it was gone. “Nothing, I
guess.”
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The kid at the altar raised his hands. More red
lightning flashed in the sky, shaking the temple. Then he
put his hands down, and the rumbling stopped. The
clouds turned from gray to white and broke apart.
A pretty impressive trick, considering the kid didn’t
look like much. He was tall and skinny, with straw-
colored hair, oversized jeans, a baggy T-shirt, and a
drooping toga. He looked like a scarecrow wearing a bed
sheet.
“What’s he doing?” Percy murmured.
The guy in the toga turned. He had a crooked smile
and a slightly crazy look in his eyes, like he’d just been
playing an intense video game. In one hand he held a
knife. In the other hand was something like a dead anim
al. That didn’t make him look any less crazy.
“Percy,” Hazel said, “this is Octavian.”
“The graecus!” Octavian announced. “How
interesting.”
“Uh, hi,” Percy said. “Are you killing small
animals?”
Octavian looked at the fuzzy thing in his hand and
laughed. “No, no. Once upon a time, yes. We used to read
the will of the gods by examining animal guts—chickens,
goats, that sort of thing. Nowadays, we use these.”
He tossed the fuzzy thing to Percy. It was a disemboweled
teddy bear. Then Percy noticed that there was a
whole pile of mutilated stuffed animals at the foot of
Jupiter’s statue.
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“Seriously?” Percy asked.
Octavian stepped off the dais. He was probably
about eighteen, but so skinny and sickly pale, he could’ve
passed for younger. At first he looked harmless, but as he
got closer, Percy wasn’t so sure. Octavian’s eyes glittered
with harsh curiosity, like he might gut Percy just as easily
as a teddy bear if he thought he could learn something
from it.
Octavian narrowed his eyes. “You seem nervous.”
“You remind me of someone,” Percy said. “I can’t
remember who.”
“Possibly my namesake, Octavian—Augustus
Caesar. Everyone says I bear a remarkable resemblance.”
Percy didn’t think that was it, but he couldn’t pin
down the memory. “Why did you call me ‘the Greek’?”
“I saw it in the auguries.” Octavian waved his knife
at the pile of stuffing on the altar. “The message said: The
Greek has arrived. Or possibly: The goose has cried. I’m
thinking the first interpretation is correct. You seek to
join the legion?”
Hazel spoke for him. She told Octavian everything
that had happened since they met at the tunnel—the gorgons,
the fight at the river, the appearance of Juno, their
conversation with Reyna.
When she mentioned Juno, Octavian looked
surprised.
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“Juno,” he mused. “We call her Juno Moneta. Juno
the Warner. She appears in times of crisis, to counsel
Rome about great threats.”
He glanced at Percy, as if to say: like mysterious
Greeks, for instance.
“I hear the Feast of Fortuna is this week,” Percy
said. “The gorgons warned there’d be an invasion on that
day. Did you see that in your stuffing?”
“Sadly, no.” Octavian sighed. “The will of the gods
is hard to discern. And these days, my vision is even
darker.”
“Don’t you have…I don’t know,” Percy said, “an oracle
or something?”
“An oracle!” Octavian smiled. “What a cute idea.
No, I’m afraid we’re fresh out of oracles. Now, if we’d
gone questing for the Sibylline books, like I
recommended—”
“The Siba-what?” Percy asked.
“Books of prophecy,” Hazel said, “which Octavian
is obsessed with. Romans used to consult them when disasters
happened. Most people believe they burned up
when Rome fell.”
“Some people believe that,” Octavian corrected.
“Unfortunately our present leadership won’t authorize a
quest to look for them—”
“Because Reyna isn’t stupid,” Hazel said.
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“—so we have only a few remaining scraps from the
books,” Octavian continued. “A few mysterious predictions,
like these.”
He nodded to the inscriptions on the marble floor.
Percy stared at the lines of words, not really expecting to
understand them. He almost choked.
“That one.” He pointed, translating as he read
aloud:“Seven half-bloods shall answer the call. To storm
or fire the world must fall—”
“Yes, yes.” Octavian finished it without looking:
“An oath to keep with a final breath, and foes bear arms
to the Doors of Death.”
“I—I know that one.” Percy thought thunder was
shaking the temple again. Then he realized his whole
body was trembling. “That’s important.”
Octavian arched an eyebrow. “Of course it’s important.
We call it the Prophecy of Seven, but it’s several
thousand years old. We don’t know what it means. Every
time someone tries to interpret it…Well, Hazel can tell
you. Bad things happen.”
Hazel glared at him. “Just read the augury for
Percy. Can he join the legion or not?”
Percy could almost see Octavian’s mind working,
calculating whether or not Percy would be useful. He held
out his hand for Percy’s backpack. “That’s a beautiful specimen.
May I?”
Percy didn’t understand what he meant, but
Octavian snatched the Bargain Mart panda pillow that
was sticking out of the top of his pack. It was just a silly
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stuffed toy, but Percy had carried it a long way. He was
kind of fond of it. Octavian turned toward the altar and
raised his knife.
“Hey!” Percy protested.
Octavian slashed open the panda’s belly and
poured its stuffing over the altar. He tossed the panda
carcass aside, muttered a few words over the fluff, and
turned with a big smile on his face.
“Good news!” he said. “Percy may join the legion.
We’ll assign him a cohort at evening muster. Tell Reyna
that I approve.”
Hazel’s shoulders relaxed. “Uh…great. Come on,
Percy.”
“Oh, and Hazel,” Octavian said. “I’m happy to welcome
Percy into the legion. But when the election for
praetor comes up, I hope you’ll remember—”
“Jason isn’t dead,” Hazel snapped. “You’re the augur.
You’re supposed to be looking for him!”
“Oh, I am!” Octavian pointed at the pile of gutted
stuffed animals. “I consult the gods every day! Alas, after
eight months, I’ve found nothing. Of course, I’m still
looking. But if Jason doesn’t return by the Feast of For-
tuna, we must act. We can’t have a power vacuum any
longer. I hope you’ll support me for praetor. It would
mean so much to me.”
Hazel clenched her fists. “Me. Support. You?”
Octavian took off his toga, setting it and his knife
on the altar. Percy noticed seven lines on Octavian’s
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arm—seven years of camp, Percy guessed. Octavian’s
mark was a harp, the symbol of Apollo.
“After all,” Octavian told Hazel, “I might be able to
help you. It would be a shame if those awful rumors about
you kept circulating…or, gods forbid, if they turned out to
be true.”
Percy slipped his hand into his pocket and grabbed
his pen. This guy was blackmailing Hazel. That was obvious.
One sign from Hazel, and Percy was ready to bust
out Riptide and see how Octavian liked being at the other
end of a blade.
Hazel took a deep breath. Her knuckles were white.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Excellent,” Octavian said. “By the way, your brother
is here.”
Hazel stiffened. “My brother? Why?”
Octavian shrugged. “Why does your brother do
anything? He’s waiting for you at your father’s shrine.
Just…ah, don’t invite him to stay too long. He has a disturbing
effect on the others. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I
have to keep searching for our poor lost friend, Jason.
Nice to meet you, Percy.”
Hazel stormed out of the pavilion, and Percy followed.
He was sure he’d never been so glad to leave a
temple in his life.
As Hazel marched down the hill, she cursed in Latin.
Percy didn’t understand all of it, but he got son of a
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gorgon, power-hungry snake, and a few choice suggestions
about where Octavian could stick his knife.
“I hate that guy,” she muttered in English. “If I had
my way—”
“He won’t really get elected praetor, will he?” Percy
asked.
“I wish I could be certain. Octavian has a lot of
friends, most of them bought. The rest of the campers are
afraid of him.”
“Afraid of that skinny little guy?”
“Don’t underestimate him. Reyna’s not so bad by
herself, but if Octavian shares her power…” Hazel
shuddered. “Let’s go see my brother. He’ll want to meet
you.”
Percy didn’t argue. He wanted to meet this mysterious
brother, maybe learn something about Hazel’s background—
who her dad was, what secret she was hiding.
Percy couldn’t believe she’d done anything to be guilty
about. She seemed too nice. But Octavian had acted like
he had some first-class dirt on her.
Hazel led Percy to a black crypt built into the side
of the hill. Standing in front was a teenage boy in black
jeans and an aviator jacket.
“Hey,” Hazel called. “I’ve brought a friend.”
The boy turned. Percy had another one of those
weird flashes: like this was somebody he should know.
The kid was almost as pale as Octavian, but with dark
eyes and messy black hair. He didn’t look anything like
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Hazel. He wore a silver skull ring, a chain for a belt, and a
black T-shirt with skull designs. At his side hung a pure-
black sword.
For a microsecond when he saw Percy, the boy
seemed shocked—panicked even, like he’d been caught in
a searchlight.
“This is Percy Jackson,” Hazel said. “He’s a good
guy. Percy, this is my brother, the son of Pluto.”
The boy regained his composure and held out his
hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’m Nico di
Angelo.”
HAZEL FELT LIKE SHE’D JUST INTRODUCED two nuclear
bombs. Now she was waiting to see which one exploded
first.
Until that morning, her brother Nico had been the
most powerful demigod she knew. The others at Camp
Jupiter saw him as a traveling oddball, about as harmless
as the fauns. Hazel knew better. She hadn’t grown up
with Nico, hadn’t even known him very long. But she
knew Nico was more dangerous than Reyna, or Octavian,
or maybe even Jason.
Then she’d met Percy.
At first, when she saw him stumbling up the highway
with the old lady in his arms, Hazel had thought he
might be a god in disguise. Even though he was beat up,
dirty, and stooped with exhaustion, he’d had an aura of
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power. He had the good looks of a Roman god, with sea-
green eyes and wind blown black hair.
She’d ordered Frank not to fire on him. She
thought the gods might be testing them. She’d heard
myths like that: a kid with an old lady begs for shelter,
and when the rude mortals refuse—boom, they get turned
into banana slugs.
Then Percy had controlled the river and destroyed
the gorgons. He’d turned a pen into a bronze sword. He’d
stirred up the whole camp with talk about the graecus.
A son of the sea god...
Long ago, Hazel had been told that a descendant of
Neptune would save her. But could Percy really take away
her curse? It seemed too much to hope for.
Percy and Nico shook hands. They studied each
other warily, and Hazel fought the urge to run. If these
two busted out the magic swords, things could get ugly.
Nico didn’t appear scary. He was skinny and sloppy
in his rumpled black clothes. His hair, as always, looked
like he’d just rolled out of bed.
Hazel remembered when she’d met him. The first
time she’d seen him draw that black sword of his, she’d
almost laughed. The way he called it “Stygian iron,” all
serious-like—he’d looked ridiculous. This scrawny white
boy was no fighter. She certainly hadn’t believed they
were related.
She had changed her mind about that quick
enough.
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Percy scowled. “I—I know you.”
Nico raised his eyebrows. “Do you?” He looked at
Hazel for explanation.
Hazel hesitated. Something about her brother’s reaction
wasn’t right. He was trying hard to act casual, but
when he had first seen Percy, Hazel had noticed his momentary
look of panic. Nico already knew Percy. She was
sure of it. Why was he pretending otherwise?
Hazel forced herself to speak. “Um…Percy’s lost his
memory.” She told her brother what had happened since
Percy had arrived at the gates.
“So, Nico…” she continued carefully, “I
thought…you know, you travel all over. Maybe you’ve met
demigods like Percy before, or...”
Nico’s expression turned as dark as Tartarus. Hazel
didn’t understand why, but she got the message: Drop it.
“This story about Gaea’s army,” Nico said. “You
warned Reyna?”
Percy nodded. “Who is Gaea, anyway?”
Hazel’s mouth went dry. Just hearing that name…It
was all she could do to keep her knees from buckling. She
remembered a woman’s soft sleepy voice, a glowing cave,
and feeling her lungs fill with black oil.
“She’s the earth goddess.” Nico glanced at the
ground as if it might be listening. “The oldest goddess of
all. She’s in a deep sleep most of the time, but she hates
the gods and their children.”
“Mother Earth…is evil?” Percy asked.
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“Very,” Nico said gravely. “She convinced her son,
the Titan Kronos—um, I mean, Saturn—to kill his dad,
Uranus, and take over the world. The Titans ruled for a
long time. Then the Titans’ children, the Olympian gods,
overthrew them.”
“That story seems familiar,” Percy sounded surprised,
like an old memory had partially surfaced. “But I
don’t think I ever heard the part about Gaea.”
Nico shrugged. “She got mad when the gods took
over. She took a new husband—Tartarus, the spirit of the
abyss—and gave birth to a race of giants. They tried to
destroy Mount Olympus, but the gods finally beat them.
At least…the first time.”
“The first time?” Percy repeated.
Nico glanced at Hazel. He probably wasn’t meaning
to make her feel guilty, but she couldn’t help it. If Percy
knew the truth about her, and the horrible things she’d
done…
“Last summer,” Nico continued, “Saturn tried to
make a comeback. There was a second Titan war. The Romans
at Camp Jupiter stormed his headquarters on
Mount Othrys, across the bay, and destroyed his throne.
Saturn disappeared—” He hesitated, watching Percy’s
face. Hazel got the feeling her brother was nervous that
more of Percy’s memory might come back.
“Um, anyway,” Nico continued, “Saturn probably
faded back to the abyss. We all thought the war was over.
Now it looks like the Titans’ defeat stirred up Gaea. She’s
starting to wake. I’ve heard reports of giants being
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reborn. If they mean to challenge the gods again, they’ll
probably start by destroying the demigods.…”
“You’ve told Reyna this?” Percy asked.
“Of course.” Nico’s jaw tensed. “The Romans don’t
trust me. That’s why I was hoping she’d listen to you.
Children of Pluto…well, no offense, but they think we’re
even worse than children of Neptune. We’re bad luck.”
“They let Hazel stay here,” Percy noted.
“That’s different,” Nico said.
“Why?”
“Percy,” Hazel cut in, “look, the giants aren’t the
worst problem. Even ... even Gaea isn’t the worst problem.
The thing you noticed about the gorgons, how they
wouldn’t die, that’s our biggest worry.” She looked at
Nico. She was getting dangerously close to her own secret
now, but for some reason Hazel trusted Percy. Maybe because
he was also an outsider, maybe because he’d saved
Frank at the river. He deserved to know what they were
facing.
“Nico and I,” she said carefully, “we think that
what’s happening is…Death isn’t—”
Before she could finish, a shout came from down
the hill.
Frank jogged toward them, wearing his jeans,
purple camp shirt, and denim jacket. His hands were
covered with grease from cleaning weapons.
As it did every time she saw Frank, Hazel’s heart
performed a little skip-beat tap-dance—which really
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irritated her. Sure, he was a good friend—one of the only
people at camp who didn’t treat her as if she had a contagious
disease. But she didn’t like him in that way.
He was three years older than she was, and he
wasn’t exactly Prince Charming, with that strange combination
of baby face and bulky wrestler’s body. He
looked like a cuddly koala bear with muscles. The fact
that everyone always tried to pair them up—the two
biggest losers at camp! You guys are perfect for each
other—just made Hazel more determined not to like him.
But her heart wasn’t with the program. It went nuts
whenever Frank was around. She hadn’t felt like that
since ... well, since Sammy.
Stop it, she thought. You’re here for one reason—
and it isn’t to get a new boyfriend.
Besides, Frank didn’t know her secret. If he knew,
he wouldn’t be so nice to her.
He reached the shrine. “Hey, Nico…”
“Frank.” Nico smiled. He seemed to find Frank
amusing, maybe because Frank was the only one at camp
who wasn’t uneasy around the children of Pluto.
“Reyna sent me to get Percy,” Frank said. “Did
Octavian accept you?”
“Yeah,” Percy said. “He slaughtered my panda.”
“He…Oh. The augury? Yeah, teddy bears must have
nightmares about that guy. But you’re in! We need to get
you cleaned up before evening muster.”
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Hazel realized the sun was getting low over the
hills. How had the day gone so fast? “You’re right,” she
said. “We’d better—”
“Frank,” Nico interrupted, “why don’t you take
Percy down? Hazel and I will be along soon.”
Uh-oh, Hazel thought. She tried not to look
anxious.
“That’s—that’s a good idea,” she managed. “Go
ahead, guys. We’ll catch up.”
Percy looked at Nico one more time, as though he
was still trying to place a memory. “I’d like to talk with
you some more. I can’t shake the feeling—”
“Sure,” Nico agreed. “Later. I’ll be staying
overnight.”
“You will?” Hazel blurted. The campers were going
to love that—the son of Neptune and the son of Pluto arriving
on the same day. Now all they needed was some
black cats and broken mirrors.
“Go on, Percy,” Nico said. “Settle in.” He turned to
Hazel, and she got the sense that the worst part of her day
was yet to come. “My sister and I need to talk.”
“You know him, don’t you,” Hazel said.
They sat on the roof of Pluto’s shrine, which was
covered with bones and diamonds. As far as Hazel knew,
the bones had always been there. The diamonds were her
fault. If she sat anywhere too long, or just got anxious,
they started popping up all around her like mushrooms
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after a rain. Several million dollars’ worth of stones
glittered on the roof, but fortunately the other campers
wouldn’t touch them. They knew better than to steal from
temples—especially Pluto’s—and the fauns never came up
here.
Hazel shuddered, remembering her close call with
Don that afternoon. If she hadn’t moved quickly and
snatched that diamond off the road…She didn’t want to
think about it. She didn’t need another death on her
conscience.
Nico swung his feet like a little kid. His Stygian iron
sword lay by his side, next to Hazel’s spatha. He gazed
across the valley, where construction crews were working
in the Field of Mars, building fortifications for tonight’s
games.
“Percy Jackson.” He said the name like an incantation.
“Hazel, I have to be careful what I say. Important
things are at work here. Some secrets need to stay secret.
You of all people—you should understand that.”
Hazel’s cheeks felt hot. “But he’s not like…like me?”
“No,” Nico said. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more. I
can’t interfere. Percy has to find his own way at this
camp.”
“Is he dangerous?” she asked.
Nico managed a dry smile. “Very. To his enemies.
But he’s not a threat to Camp Jupiter. You can trust him.”
“Like I trust you,” Hazel said bitterly.
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Nico twisted his skull ring. Around him, bones
began to quiver as if they were trying to form a new skeleton.
Whenever he got moody, Nico had that effect on the
dead, kind of like Hazel’s curse. Between them, they represented
Pluto’s two spheres of control: death and riches.
Sometimes Hazel thought Nico had gotten the better end
of the deal.
“Look, I know this is hard,” Nico said. “But you
have a second chance. You can make things right.”
“Nothing about this is right,” Hazel said. “If they
find out the truth about me—”
“They won’t,” Nico promised. “They’ll call a quest
soon. They have to. You’ll make me proud. Trust me,
Bi—”
He caught himself, but Hazel knew what he’d almost
called her: Bianca. Nico’s real sister—the one he’d
grown up with. Nico might care about Hazel, but she’d
never be Bianca. Hazel was the simply the next best thing
Nico could manage—a consolation prize from the
Underworld.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Hazel’s mouth tasted like metal, as if gold nuggets
were popping up under her tongue. “Then it’s true about
Death? Is Alcyoneus to blame?”
“I think so,” Nico said. “It’s getting bad in the
Underworld. Dad’s going crazy trying to keep things under
control. From what Percy said about the gorgons,
things are getting worse up here, too. But look, that’s why
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you’re here. All that stuff in your past—you can make
something good come out of it.
You belong at Camp Jupiter.”
That sounded so ridiculous, Hazel almost laughed.
She didn’t belong in this place. She didn’t even belong in
this century.
She should have known better than to focus on the
past, but she remembered the day when her old life had
been shattered. The blackout hit her so suddenly, she
didn’t even have time to say, Uh-oh. She shifted back in
time. Not a dream or a vision. The memory washed over
her with such perfect clarity, she felt she was actually
there.
Her most recent birthday. She’d just turned thirteen.
But not last December—December 17, 1941, the last
day she had lived in New Orleans.
HAZEL WAS WALKING HOME ALONE from the riding
stables. Despite the cold evening, she was buzzing with
warmth. Sammy had just kissed her on the cheek.
The day had been full of ups and downs. Kids at
school had teased her about her mother, calling her a
witch and a lot of other names. That had been going on
for a long time, of course, but it was getting worse. Rumors
were spreading about Hazel’s curse. The school was
called St. Agnes Academy for Colored Children and Indians,
a name that hadn’t changed in a hundred years. Just
like its name, the place masked a whole lot of cruelty under
a thin veneer of kindness.
Hazel didn’t understand how other black kids could
be so mean. They should’ve known better, since they
themselves had to put up with name-calling all the time.
But they yelled at her and stole her lunch, always asking
for those famous jewels: “Where’s those cursed
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diamonds, girl? Gimme some or I’ll hurt you!” They
pushed her away at the water fountain, and threw rocks at
her if she tried to approach them on the playground.
Despite how horrible they were, Hazel never gave
them diamonds or gold. She didn’t hate anyone that
much. Besides, she had one friend—Sammy—and that
was enough.
Sammy liked to joke that he was the perfect St.
Agnes student. He was Mexican American, so he considered
himself colored and Indian. “They should give me
a double scholarship,” he said.
He wasn’t big or strong, but he had a crazy smile
and he made Hazel laugh.
That afternoon he’d taken her to the stables where
he worked as a groom. It was a “whites only” riding club,
of course, but it was closed on weekdays, and with the
war on, there was talk that the club might have to shut
down completely until the Japanese were whipped and
the soldiers came back home. Sammy could usually sneak
Hazel in to help take care of the horses. Once in a while
they’d go riding.
Hazel loved horses. They seemed to be the only living
things that weren’t scared of her. People hated her.
Cats hissed. Dogs growled. Even the stupid hamster in
Miss Finley’s classroom squeaked in terror when she gave
it a carrot. But horses didn’t mind. When she was in the
saddle, she could ride so fast that there was no chance of
gemstones cropping up in her wake. She almost felt free
of her curse.
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That afternoon, she’d taken out a tan roan stallion
with a gorgeous black mane. She galloped into the fields
so swiftly, she left Sammy behind. By the time he caught
up, he and his horse were both winded.
“What are you running from?” He laughed. “I’m
not that ugly, am I?”
It was too cold for a picnic, but they had one anyway,
sitting under a magnolia tree with the horses
tethered to a split-rail fence. Sammy had brought her a
cupcake with a birthday candle, which had gotten
smashed on the ride but was still the sweetest thing Hazel
had ever seen. They broke it in half and shared it.
Sammy talked about the war. He wished he were
old enough to go. He asked Hazel if she would write him
letters if he were a soldier going overseas.
“’Course, dummy,” she said.
He grinned. Then, as if moved by a sudden impulse,
he lurched forward and kissed her on the cheek.
“Happy birthday, Hazel.”
It wasn’t much. Just one kiss, and not even on the
lips. But Hazel felt like she was floating. She hardly remembered
the ride back to the stables, or telling Sammy
good-bye. He said, “See you tomorrow,” like he always
did. But she would never see him again.
By the time she got back to the French Quarter, it
was getting dark. As she approached home, her warm
feeling faded, replaced by dread.
Hazel and her mother—Queen Marie, she liked to
be called—lived in an old apartment above a jazz club.
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Despite the beginning of the war, there was a festive
mood in the air. New recruits would roam the streets,
laughing and talking about fighting the Japanese. They’d
get tattoos in the parlors or propose to their sweethearts
right on the sidewalk. Some would go upstairs to Hazel’s
mother to have their fortunes read or to buy charms from
Marie Levesque, the famous grisgris queen.
“Did you hear?” one would say. “Two bits for this
good-luck charm. I took it to a guy I know, and he says it’s
a real silver nugget. Worth twenty dollars! That voodoo
woman is crazy!”
For a while, that kind of talk brought Queen Marie
a lot of business. Hazel’s curse had started out slowly. At
first it seemed like a blessing. The precious stones and
gold only appeared once in a while, never in huge quantities.
QueenMarie paid her bills. They ate steak for dinner
once a week. Hazel even got a new dress. But then stories
started spreading. The locals began to realize how many
horrible things happened to people who bought those
good-luck charms or got paid with Queen Marie’s treasure.
Charlie Gasceaux lost his arm in a harvester while
wearing a gold bracelet. Mr. Henry at the general store
dropped dead from a heart attack after Queen Marie
settled her tab with a ruby.
Folks started whispering about Hazel—how she
could find cursed jewels just by walking down the street.
These days only out-of-towners came to visit her mother,
and not so many of them, either. Hazel’s mom had
become short-tempered. She gave Hazel resentful looks.
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Hazel climbed the stairs as quietly as she could, in
case her mother had a customer. In the club downstairs,
the band was tuning their instruments. The bakery next
door had started making beignets for tomorrow morning,
filling the stairwell with the smell of melting butter.
When she got to the top, Hazel thought she heard
two voices inside the apartment. But when she peeked into
the parlor, her mother was sitting alone at the séance
table, her eyes closed, as if in a trance.
Hazel had seen her that way many times, pretending
to talk to spirits for her clients—but not ever when she
was by herself. Queen Marie had always told Hazel her
gris-gris was “bunk and hokum.” She didn’t really believe
in charms or fortune telling or ghosts. She was just a performer,
like a singer or an actress, doing a show for
money.
But Hazel knew her mother did believe in some
magic. Hazel’s curse wasn’t hokum. Queen Marie just
didn’t want to think it was her fault—that somehow she
had made Hazel the way she was.
“It was your blasted father,” Queen Marie would
grumble in her darker moods. “Coming here in his fancy
silver-and black suit. The one time I actually summon a
spirit, and what do I get? Fulfills my wish and ruins my
life. I should’ve been a real queen. It’s his fault you
turned out this way.”
She would never explain what she meant, and
Hazel had learned not to ask about her father. It just
made her mother angrier.
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As Hazel watched, Queen Marie muttered
something to herself. Her face was calm and relaxed.
Hazel was struck by how beautiful she looked, without
her scowl and the creases in her brow. She had a lush
mane of gold-brown hair like Hazel’s, and the same dark
complexion, brown as a roasted coffee bean. She wasn’t
wearing the fancy saffron robes or gold bangles she wore
to impress clients—just a simple white dress. Still, she
had a regal air, sitting straight and dignified in her gilded
chair as if she really were a queen.
“You’ll be safe there,” she murmured. “Far from the
gods.”
Hazel stifled a scream. The voice coming from her
mother’s mouth wasn’t hers. It sounded like an older woman’s.
The tone was soft and soothing, but also commanding—
like a hypnotist giving orders.
Queen Marie tensed. She grimaced in her trance,
then spoke in her normal voice: “It’s too far. Too cold.
Too dangerous. He told me not to.”
The other voice responded: “What has he ever done
for you? He gave you a poisoned child! But we can use her
gift for good. We can strike back at the gods. You will be
under my protection in the north, far from the gods’ domain.
I’ll make my son your protector. You’ll live like a
queen at last.”
Queen Marie winced. “But what about Hazel…”
Then her face contorted in a sneer. Both voices
spoke in unison, as if they’d found something to agree on:
“A poisoned child.”
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Hazel fled down the stairs, her pulse racing.
At the bottom, she ran into a man in a dark suit. He
gripped her shoulders with strong, cold fingers.
“Easy, child,” the man said.
Hazel noticed the silver skull ring on his finger,
then the strange fabric of his suit. In the shadows, the solid
black wool seemed to shift and boil, forming images of
faces in agony, as if lost souls were trying to escape from
the folds of his clothes.
His tie was black with platinum stripes. His shirt
was tombstone gray. His face—Hazel’s heart nearly
leaped out of her throat. His skin was so white it looked
almost blue, like cold milk. He had a flap of greasy black
hair. His smile was kind enough, but his eyes were fiery
and angry, full of mad power. Hazel had seen that look in
the newsreels at the movie theater. This man looked like
that awful Adolf Hitler. He had no mustache, but otherwise
he could’ve been Hitler’s twin—or his father.
Hazel tried to pull away. Even when the man let go,
she couldn’t seem to move. His eyes froze her in place.
“Hazel Levesque,” he said in a melancholy voice.
“You’ve grown.”
Hazel started to tremble. At the base of the stairs,
the cement stoop cracked under the man’s feet. A glittering
stone popped up from the concrete like the earth had
spit out a watermelon seed. The man looked at it, unsurprised.
He bent down.
“Don’t!” Hazel cried. “It’s cursed!”
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He picked up the stone—a perfectly formed emerald.
“Yes, it is. But not to me. So beautiful…worth more
than this building, I imagine.” He slipped the emerald in
his pocket. “I’m sorry for your fate, child. I imagine you
hate me.”
Hazel didn’t understand. The man sounded sad, as
if he were personally responsible for her life. Then the
truth hither: a spirit in silver and black, who’d fulfilled
her mother’s wishes and ruined her life.
Her eyes widened. “You? You’re my…”
He cupped his hand under her chin. “I am Pluto.
Life is never easy for my children, but you have a special
burden. Now that you’re thirteen, we must make
provisions—”
She pushed his hand away.
“You did this to me?” she demanded. “You cursed
me and my mother? You left us alone?”
Her eyes stung with tears. This rich white man in a
fine suit was her father? Now that she was thirteen, he
showed up for the first time and said he was sorry?
“You’re evil!” she shouted. “You ruined our lives!”
Pluto’s eyes narrowed. “What has your mother told
you, Hazel? Has she never explained her wish? Or told
you why you were born under a curse?”
Hazel was too angry to speak, but Pluto seemed to
read the answers in her face.
“No…” He sighed. “I suppose she wouldn’t. Much
easier to blame me.”
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“What do you mean?”
Pluto sighed. “Poor child. You were born too soon.
I cannot see your future clearly, but someday you will find
your place. A descendant of Neptune will wash away your
curse and give you peace. I fear, though, that is not for
many years.…”
Hazel didn’t follow any of that. Before she could respond,
Pluto held out his hand. A sketchpad and a box of
colored pencils appeared in his palm.
“I understand you enjoy art and horseback riding,”
he said. “These are for your art. As for the horse…” His
eyes gleamed. “That, you’ll have to manage yourself. Now
I must speak with your mother. Happy birthday, Hazel.”
He turned and headed up the stairs—just like that,
as if he’d checked Hazel off his “to do” list and had
already forgotten her. Happy birthday. Go draw a picture.
See you in another thirteen years.
She was so stunned, so angry, so upside-down confused
that she just stood paralyzed at the base of the
steps. She wanted to throw down the colored pencils and
stomp on them. She wanted to charge after Pluto and kick
him. She wanted to run away, find Sammy, steal a horse,
leave town and never come back. But she didn’t do any of
those things.
Above her, the apartment door opened, and Pluto
stepped inside.
Hazel was still shivering from his cold touch, but
she crep tup the stairs to see what he would do. What
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would he say to Queen Marie? Who would speak
back—Hazel’s mother, or that awful voice?
When she reached the doorway, Hazel heard arguing.
She peeked in. Her mother seemed back to normal—
screaming and angry, throwing things around the
parlor while Pluto tried to reason with her.
“Marie, it’s insanity,” he said. “You’ll be far beyond
my power to protect you.”
“Protect me?” Queen Marie yelled. “When have you
ever protected me?”
Pluto’s dark suit shimmered, as if the souls trapped
in the fabric were getting agitated.
“You have no idea,” he said. “I’ve kept you alive,
you and the child. My enemies are everywhere among
gods and men. Now with the war on, it will only get
worse. You must stay where I can—”
“The police think I’m a murderer!” Queen Marie
shouted. “My clients want to hang me as a witch! And
Hazel—her curse is getting worse. Your protection is
killing us.”
Pluto spread his hands in a pleading gesture. “Marie,
please—”
“No!” Queen Marie turned to the closet, pulled out
a leather valise, and threw it on the table. “We’re leaving,”
she announced. “You can keep your protection. We’re going
north.”
“Marie, it’s a trap,” Pluto warned. “Whoever’s whispering
in your ear, whoever’s turning you against me—”
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“You turned me against you!” She picked up a porcelain
vase and threw it at him. It shattered on the floor,
and precious stones spilled everywhere—emeralds, rubies,
diamonds. Hazel’s entire collection.
“You won’t survive,” Pluto said. “If you go north,
you’ll both die. I can foresee that clearly.”
“Get out!” she said.
Hazel wished Pluto would stay and argue.
Whatever her mother was talking about, Hazel didn’t like
it. But her father slashed his hand across the air and dissolved
into shadows…like he really was a spirit.
Queen Marie closed her eyes. She took a deep
breath. Hazel was afraid the strange voice might possess
her again. But when she spoke, she was her regular self.
“Hazel,” she snapped, “come out from behind that
door.”
Trembling, Hazel obeyed. She clutched the sketch-
pad and colored pencils to her chest.
Her mother studied her like she was a bitter disappointment.
A poisoned child, the voices had said.
“Pack a bag,” she ordered. “We’re moving.”
“Wh-where?” Hazel asked.
“Alaska,” Queen Marie answered. “You’re going to
make yourself useful. We’re going to start a new life.”
The way her mother said that, it sounded as if they
were going to create a “new life” for someone else—or
something else.
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“What did Pluto mean?” Hazel asked. “Is he really
my father? He said you made a wish—”
“Go to your room!” her mother shouted. “Pack!”
Hazel fled, and suddenly she was ripped out of the
past.
Nico was shaking her shoulders. “You did it again.”
Hazel blinked. They were still sitting on the roof of
Pluto’s shrine. The sun was lower in the sky. More diamonds
had surfaced around her, and her eyes stung from
crying.
“S-sorry,” she murmured.
“Don’t be,” Nico said. “Where were you?”
“My mother’s apartment. The day we moved.”
Nico nodded. He understood her history better
than most people could. He was also a kid from the
1940s. He’d been born only a few years after Hazel, and
had been locked away in a magic hotel for decades. But
Hazel’s past was much worse than Nico’s. She’d caused so
much damage and misery.…
“You have to work on controlling those memories,”
Nico warned. “If a flashback like that happens when
you’re in combat—”
“I know,” she said. “I’m trying.”
Nico squeezed her hand. “It’s okay. I think it’s a
side effect from…you know, your time in the Underworld.
Hopefully it’ll get easier.”
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Hazel wasn’t so sure. After eight months, the blackouts
seemed to be getting worse, as if her soul were attempting
to live in two different time periods at once. No
one had ever come back from the dead before—at least,
not the way she had. Nico was trying to reassure her, but
neither of them knew what would happen.
“I can’t go north again,” Hazel said. “Nico, if I have
to go back to where it happened—”
“You’ll be fine,” he promised. “You’ll have friends
this time. Percy Jackson—he’s got a role to play in this.
You can sense that, can’t you? He’s a good person to have
at your side.”
Hazel remembered what Pluto told her long ago: A
descendant of Neptune will wash away your curse and
give you peace.
Was Percy the one? Maybe, but Hazel sensed it
wouldn’t be so easy. She wasn’t sure even Percy could
survive what was waiting in the north.
“Where did he come from?” she asked. “Why do the
ghosts call him the Greek?”
Before Nico could respond, horns blew across the
river. The legionnaires were gathering for evening
muster.
“We’d better get down there,” Nico said. “I have a
feeling tonight’s war games are going to be interesting.”
ON THE WAY BACK, HAZEL TRIPPED OVER A GOLD BAR.
She should have known not to run so fast, but she
was afraid of being late for muster. The Fifth Cohort had
the nicest centurions in camp. Still, even they would have
to punish her if she was tardy. Roman punishments were
harsh: scrubbing the streets with a toothbrush, cleaning
the bull pens at the coliseum, getting sewn inside a sack
full of angry weasels and dumped into the Little
Tiber—the options were not great.
The gold bar popped out of the ground just in time
for her foot to hit it. Nico tried to catch her, but she took a
spill and scraped her hands.
“You okay?” Nico knelt next to her and reached for
the bar of gold.
“Don’t!” Hazel warned.
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Nico froze. “Right. Sorry. It’s just…jeez. That thing
is huge.” He pulled a flask of nectar from his aviator jacket
and poured a little on Hazel’s hands. Immediately the
cuts started to heal. “Can you stand?”
He helped her up. They both stared at the gold. It
was the size of a bread loaf, stamped with a serial number
and the words u.s. treasury.
Nico shook his head. “How in Tartarus—?”
“I don’t know,” Hazel said miserably. “It could’ve
been buried there by robbers or dropped off a wagon a
hundred years ago. Maybe it migrated from the nearest
bank vault. Whatever’s in the ground, anywhere close to
me—it just pops up. And the more valuable it is—”
“The more dangerous it is.” Nico frowned. “Should
we cover it up? If the fauns find it…”
Hazel imagined a mushroom cloud billowing up
from the road, char-broiled fauns tossed in every direction.
It was too horrible to consider. “It should sink back
underground after I leave, eventually, but just to be
sure…”
She’d been practicing this trick, but never with
something so heavy and dense. She pointed at the gold
bar and tried to concentrate.
The gold levitated. She channeled her anger, which
wasn’t hard—she hated that gold, she hated her curse, she
hated thinking about her past and all the ways she’d
failed. Her fingers tingled. The gold bar glowed with heat.
Nico gulped. “Um, Hazel, are you sure…?”
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She made a fist. The gold bent like putty. Hazel
forced it to twist into a giant, lumpy ring. Then she flicked
her hand toward the ground. Her million-dollar doughnut
slammed into the earth. It sank so deep, nothing was left
but a scar of fresh dirt.
Nico’s eyes widened. “That was…terrifying.”
Hazel didn’t think it was so impressive compared
to the powers of a guy who could reanimate skeletons and
bring people back from the dead, but it felt good to surprise
him for a change.
Inside the camp, horns blew again. The cohorts
would be starting roll call, and Hazel had no desire to be
sewn into a sack of weasels.
“Hurry!” she told Nico, and they ran for the gates.
The first time Hazel had seen the legion assemble, she’d
been so intimidated, she’d almost slunk back to the barracks
to hide. Even after being at camp for nine months,
she still found it an impressive sight.
The first four cohorts, each forty kids strong, stood
in rows in front of their barracks on either side of the Via
Praetoria. The Fifth Cohort assembled at the very end, in
front of the principia, since their barracks were tucked in
the back corner of camp next to the stables and the latrines.
Hazel had to run right down the middle of the legion
to reach her place.
The campers were dressed for war. Their polished
chain mail and greaves gleamed over purple T-shirts and
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jeans. Sword-and-skull designs decorated their helmets.
Even their leather combat boots looked ferocious with
their iron cleats, great for marching through mud or
stomping on faces.
In front of the legionnaires, like a line of giant
dominoes, stood their red and gold shields, each the size
of a refrigerator door. Every legionnaire carried a harpoonlike
spear called a pilum,a gladius, a dagger, and
about a hundred pounds of other equipment. If you were
out of shape when you came to the legion, you didn’t stay
that way for long. Just walking around in your armor was
a full-body workout.
Hazel and Nico jogged down the street as everyone
was coming to attention, so their entrance was really obvious.
Their footsteps echoed on the stones. Hazel tried to
avoid eye contact, but she caught Octavian at the head of
the First Cohort smirking at her, looking smug in his
plumed centurion’s helmet with a dozen medals pinned
on his chest.
Hazel was still seething from his blackmail threats
earlier. Stupid augur and his gift of prophecy—of all the
people at camp to discover her secrets, why did it have to
be him? She was sure he would have told on her weeks
ago, except that he knew her secrets were worth more to
him as leverage. She wished she’d kept that bar of gold so
she could hit him in the face with it.
She ran past Reyna, who was cantering back and
forth on her pegasus Scipio—nicknamed Skippy because
he was the color of peanut butter. The metal dogs Aurum
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and Argentum trotted at her side. Her purple officer’s
cape billowed behind her.
“Hazel Levesque,” she called, “so glad you could
join us.”
Hazel knew better than to respond. She was missing
most of her equipment, but she hurried to her place in
line next to Frank and stood at attention. Their lead centurion,
a big seventeen-year-old guy named Dakota, was
just calling her name—the last one on the roll.
“Present!” she squeaked.
Thank the gods. Technically, she wasn’t late.
Nico joined Percy Jackson, who was standing off to
one side with a couple of guards. Percy’s hair was wet
from the baths. He’d put on fresh clothes, but he still
looked uncomfortable. Hazel couldn’t blame him. He was
about to be introduced to two hundred heavily armed
kids.
The Lares were the last ones to fall in. Their purple
forms flickered as they jockeyed for places. They had an
annoying habit of standing halfway inside living people,
so that the ranks looked like a blurry photograph, but finally
the centurions got them sorted out.
Octavian shouted, “Colors!”
The standard-bearers stepped forward. They wore
lion-skincapes and held poles decorated with each cohort’s
emblems. The last to present his standard was Jacob,
the legion’s eagle bearer. He held a long pole with absolutely
nothing on top. The job was supposed to be a big
honor, but Jacob obviously hated it. Even though Reyna
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insisted on following tradition, every time the eagleless
pole was raised, Hazel could feel embarrassment rippling
through the legion.
Reyna brought her pegasus to a halt.
“Romans!” she announced. “You’ve probably heard
about the incursion today. Two gorgons were swept into
the river by this newcomer, Percy Jackson. Juno herself
guided him here, and proclaimed him a son of Neptune.”
The kids in the back rows craned their necks to see
Percy. He raised his hand and said, “Hi.”
“He seeks to join the legion,” Reyna continued.
“What do the auguries say?”
“I have read the entrails!” Octavian announced, as
if he’d killed a lion with his bare hands rather than ripping
up a stuffed panda pillow. “The auguries are favor
able. He is qualified to serve!”
The campers gave a shout: “Ave!” Hail!
Frank was a little late with his “ave,” so it came out
as a high-pitched echo. The other legionnaires snickered.
Reyna motioned the senior officers forward—one
from each cohort. Octavian, as the most senior centurion,
turned to Percy.
“Recruit,” he asked, “do you have credentials? Letters
of reference?”
Hazel remembered this from her own arrival. A lot
of kids brought letters from older demigods in the outside
world, adults who were veterans of the camp. Some recruits
had rich and famous sponsors. Some were third-or
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fourth-generation campers. A good letter could get you a
position in the better cohorts, sometimes even special
jobs like legion messenger, which made you exempt from
the grunt work like digging ditches or conjugating Latin
verbs.
Percy shifted. “Letters? Um, no.”
Octavian wrinkled his nose.
Unfair! Hazel wanted to shout. Percy had carried a
goddess into camp. What better recommendation could
you want?
But Octavian’s family had been sending kids to
camp for over a century. He loved reminding recruits that
they were less important than he was.
“No letters,” Octavian said regretfully. “Will any legionnaires
stand for him?”
“I will!” Frank stepped forward. “He saved my life!”
Immediately there were shouts of protest from the
other cohorts. Reyna raised her hand for quiet and glared
at Frank.
“Frank Zhang,” she said, “for the second time
today, I remind you that you are on probatio. Your godly
parent has not even claimed you yet. You’re not eligible to
stand for another camper until you’ve earned your first
stripe.”
Frank looked like he might die of embarrassment.
Hazel couldn’t leave him hanging. She stepped out
of line and said, “What Frank means is that Percy saved
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both our lives. I am a full member of the legion. I will
stand for Percy Jackson.”
Frank glanced at her gratefully, but the other
campers started to mutter. Hazel was barely eligible.
She’d only gotten her stripe a few weeks ago, and the “act
of valor” that earned it for her had been mostly an accident.
Besides, she was a daughter of Pluto, and a member
of the disgraced Fifth Cohort. She wasn’t doing Percy
much of a favor by giving him her support.
Reyna wrinkled her nose, but she turned to Octavian.
The augur smiled and shrugged, like the idea amused
him.
Why not? Hazel thought. Putting Percy in the Fifth
would make him less of a threat, and Octavian liked to
keep all his enemies in one place.
“Very well,” Reyna announced. “Hazel Levesque,
you may stand for the recruit. Does your cohort accept
him?”
The other cohorts started coughing, trying not to
laugh. Hazel knew what they were thinking: Another
loser for the Fifth.
Frank pounded his shield against the ground. The
other members of the Fifth followed his lead, though they
didn’t seem very excited. Their centurions, Dakota and
Gwen, exchanged pained looks, like: Here we go again.
“My cohort has spoken,” Dakota said. “We accept
the recruit.”
Reyna looked at Percy with pity. “Congratulations,
Percy Jackson. You stand on probatio. You will be given a
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tablet with your name and cohort. In one year’s time, or
as soon as you complete an act of valor, you will become a
full member of the Twelfth Legion Fulminata. Serve
Rome, obey the rules of the legion, and defend the camp
with honor. Senatus Populusque Romanus!”
The rest of the legion echoed the cheer.
Reyna wheeled her pegasus away from Percy, like
she was glad to be done with him. Skippy spread his
beautiful wings. Hazel couldn’t help feeling a pang of
envy. She’d give anything for a horse like that, but it
would never happen. Horses were for officers only, or
barbarian cavalry, not for Roman legionnaires.
“Centurions,” Reyna said, “you and your troops
have one hour for dinner. Then we will meet on the Field
of Mars. The First and Second Cohorts will defend. The
Third, Fourth, and Fifth will attack. Good fortune!”
A bigger cheer went up—for the war games and for
dinner. The cohorts broke ranks and ran for the mess
hall.
Hazel waved at Percy, who made his way through
the crowd with Nico at his side. To Hazel’s surprise, Nico
was beaming at her.
“Good job, Sis,” he said. “That took guts, standing
for him.”
He had never called her Sis before. She wondered if
that was what he had called Bianca.
One of the guards had given Percy his probatio
nameplate. Percy strung it on his leather necklace with
the strange beads.
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“Thanks, Hazel,” he said. “Um, what exactly does it
mean—your standing for me?”
“I guarantee your good behavior,” Hazel explained.
“I teach you the rules, answer your questions, make sure
you don’t disgrace the legion.”
“And…if I do something wrong?”
“Then I get killed along with you,” Hazel said.
“Hungry? Let’s eat.”
AT LEAST THE CAMP FOOD WAS GOOD. Invisible wind
spirits—aurae—waited on the campers and seemed to
know exactly what everyone wanted. They blew plates
and cups around so quickly, the mess hall looked like a
delicious hurricane. If you got up too fast, you were likely
to get beaned by beans or potted by a pot roast.
Hazel got shrimp gumbo—her favorite comfort
food. It made her think about being a little girl in New Orleans,
before her curse set in and her mom got so bitter.
Percy got a cheeseburger and a strange-looking soda that
was bright blue. Hazel didn’t understand that, but Percy
tried it and grinned.
“This makes me happy,” he said. “I don’t know
why…but it does.”
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Just for a moment, one of the aurae became visible—
an elfin girl in a white silk dress. She giggled as she
topped off Percy’s glass, then disappeared in a gust.
The mess hall seemed especially noisy tonight.
Laughter echoed off the walls. War banners rustled from
cedar ceiling beams as aurae blew back and forth, keeping
everyone’s plates full. The campers dined Roman
style, sitting on couches around low tables. Kids were
constantly getting up and trading places, spreading rumors
about who liked whom and all the other gossip.
As usual, the Fifth Cohort took the place of least
honor. Their tables were at the back of the dining hall
next to the kitchen. Hazel’s table was always the least
crowded. Tonight it was she and Frank, as usual, with
Percy and Nico and their centurion Dakota, who sat
there, Hazel figured, because he felt obligated to welcome
the new recruit.
Dakota reclined glumly on his couch, mixing sugar
into his drink and chugging it. He was a beefy guy with
curly black hair and eyes that didn’t quite line up straight,
so Hazel felt like the world was leaning whenever she
looked at him. It wasn’t a good sign that he was drinking
so much so early in the night.
“So.” He burped, waving his goblet. “Welcome to
the Percy, party.” He frowned. “Party, Percy. Whatever.”
“Um, thanks,” Percy said, but his attention was focused
on Nico. “I was wondering if we could talk, you
know…about where I might have seen you before.”
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“Sure,” Nico said a little too quickly. “The thing is, I
spend most of my time in the Underworld. So unless I
met you there somehow—”
Dakota belched. “Ambassador from Pluto, they call
him. Reyna’s never sure what to do with this guy when he
visits.
You should have seen her face when he showed up
with Hazel, asking Reyna to take her in. Um, no offense.”
“None taken.” Nico seemed relieved to change the
topic. “Dakota was really helpful, standing for Hazel.”
Dakota blushed. “Yeah, well…She seemed like a
good kid. Turned out I was right. Last month, when she
saved me from, uh, you know.”
“Oh, man!” Frank looked up from his fish and
chips. “Percy, you should have seen her! That’s how Hazel
got her stripe. The unicorns decided to stampede—”
“It was nothing,” Hazel said.
“Nothing?” Frank protested. “Dakota would’ve gotten
trampled! You stood right in front of them, shooed
them away, saved his hide. I’ve never seen anything like
it.”
Hazel bit her lip. She didn’t like to talk about it,
and she felt uncomfortable, the way Frank made her
sound like a hero. In truth, she’d been mostly afraid that
the unicorns would hurt themselves in their panic. Their
horns were precious metal—silver and gold—so she’d
managed to turn them aside simply by concentrating,
steering the animals by their horns and guiding them
back to the stables. It had gotten her a full place in the
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legion, but it had also started rumors about her strange
powers—rumors that reminded her of the bad old days.
Percy studied her. Those sea-green eyes made her
unsettled.
“Did you and Nico grow up together?” he asked.
“No,” Nico answered for her. “I found out that
Hazel was my sister only recently. She’s from New
Orleans.”
That was true, of course, but not the whole truth.
Nico let people think he’d stumbled upon her in modern
New Orleans and brought her to camp. It was easier than
telling the real story.
Hazel had tried to pass herself off as a modern kid.
It wasn’t easy. Thankfully, demigods didn’t use a lot of
technology at camp. Their powers tended to make electronic
gadgets go haywire. But the first time she went on
furlough to Berkeley, she had nearly had a stroke. Televisions,
computers, iPods, the Internet…It made her glad to
get back to the world of ghosts, unicorns, and gods. That
seemed much less of a fantasy than the twenty-first
century.
Nico was still talking about the children of Pluto.
“There aren’t many of us,” he said, “so we have to stick together.
When I found Hazel—”
“You have other sisters?” Percy asked, almost as if
he knew the answer. Hazel wondered again when he and
Nico had met, and what her brother was hiding.
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“One,” Nico admitted. “But she died. I saw her spirit
a few times in the Underworld, except that the last time
I went down there...”
To bring her back, Hazel thought, though Nico
didn’t say that.
“She was gone.” Nico’s voice turned hoarse. “She
used to be in Elysium—like, the Underworld paradise—
but she chose to be reborn into a new life. Now I’ll
never see her again. I was just lucky to find Hazel…in
New Orleans, I mean.”
Dakota grunted. “Unless you believe the rumors.
Not saying that I do.”
“Rumors?” Percy asked.
From across the room, Don the faun yelled,
“Hazel!”
Hazel had never been so glad to see the faun. He
wasn’t allowed in camp, but of course he always managed
to get in. He was working his way toward their table, grinning
at everybody, sneaking food off plates, and pointing
at campers: “Hey! Call me!” A flying pizza smacked him
in the head, and he disappeared behind a couch. Then he
popped up, still grinning, and made his way over.
“My favorite girl!” He smelled like a wet goat
wrapped in old cheese. He leaned over their couches and
checked out their food. “Say, new kid, you going to eat
that?”
Percy frowned. “Aren’t fauns vegetarian?”
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“Not the cheeseburger, man! The plate!” He sniffed
Percy’s hair. “Hey…what’s that smell?”
“Don!” Hazel said. “Don’t be rude.”
“No, man, I just—”
Their house god Vitellius shimmered into existence,
standing half embedded in Frank’s couch. “Fauns in
the dining hall! What are we coming to? Centurion
Dakota, do your duty!”
“I am,” Dakota grumbled into his goblet. “I’m having
dinner!”
Don was still sniffing around Percy. “Man, you’ve
got an empathy link with a faun!”
Percy leaned away from him. “A what?”
“An empathy link! It’s real faint, like somebody’s
suppressed it, but—”
“I know what!” Nico stood suddenly. “Hazel, how
about we give you and Frank time to get Percy oriented?
Dakota and I can visit the praetor’s table. Don and Vitellius,
you come too. We can discuss strategies for the war
games.”
“Strategies for losing?” Dakota muttered.
“Death Boy is right!” Vitellius said. “This legion
fights worse than we did in Judea, and that was the first
time we lost our eagle. Why, if I were in charge—”
“Could I just eat the silverware first?” Don asked.
“Let’s go!” Nico stood and grabbed Don and Vitelli
us by the ears.
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Nobody but Nico could actually touch the Lares.
Vitellius spluttered with outrage as he was dragged off to
the praetor’s table.
“Ow!” Don protested. “Man, watch the ’fro!”
“Come on, Dakota!” Nico called over his shoulder.
The centurion got up reluctantly. He wiped his
mouth—uselessly, since it was permanently stained red.
“Back soon.” He shook all over, like a dog trying to get
dry. Then he staggered away, his goblet sloshing.
“What was that about?” Percy asked. “And what’s
wrong with Dakota?”
Frank sighed. “He’s okay. He’s a son of Bacchus,
the wine god. He’s got a drinking problem.”
Percy’s eyes widened. “You let him drink wine?”
“Gods, no!” Hazel said. “That would be a disaster.
He’s addicted to red Kool-Aid. Drinks it with three times
the normal sugar, and he’s already ADHD—you know, attention
deficit/hyperactive. One of these days, his head is
going to explode.”
Percy looked over at the praetor’s table. Most of the
senior officers were in deep conversation with Reyna.
Nico and his two captives, Don and Vitellius, stood on the
periphery. Dakota was running back and forth along a
line of stacked shields, banging his goblet on them like
they were a xylophone.
“ADHD,” Percy said. “You don’t say.”
Hazel tried not to laugh. “Well…most demigods
are. Or dyslexic. Just being a demigod means that our
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brains are wired differently. Like you—you said you had
trouble reading.”
“Are you guys that way too?” Percy asked.
“I don’t know,” Hazel admitted. “Maybe. Back in
my day, they just called kids like us ‘lazy.’”
Percy frowned. “Back in your day?”
Hazel cursed herself.
Luckily for her, Frank spoke up: “I wish I was
ADHD or dyslexic. All I got is lactose intolerance.”
Percy grinned. “Seriously?”
Frank might’ve been the silliest demigod ever, but
Hazel thought he was cute when he pouted. His shoulders
slumped. “And I love ice cream, too.…”
Percy laughed. Hazel couldn’t help joining in. It
was good to sit at dinner and actually feel like she was
among friends.
“Okay, so tell me,” Percy said, “why is it bad to be
in the Fifth Cohort? You guys are great.”
The compliment made Hazel’s toes tingle.
“It’s…complicated. Aside from being Pluto’s kid, I want to
ride horses.”
“That’s why you use a cavalry sword?”
She nodded. “It’s stupid, I guess. Wishful thinking.
There’s only one pegasus at camp—Reyna’s. The unicorns
are just kept for medicine, because the shavings off their
horns cure poison and stuff. Anyway, Roman fighting is
always done on foot. Cavalry…they kind of look down on
that. So they look down on me.”
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“Their loss,” Percy said. “What about you, Frank?”
“Archery,” he muttered. “They don’t like that
either, unless you’re a child of Apollo. Then you’ve got an
excuse. I hope my dad is Apollo, but I don’t know. I can’t
do poetry very well. And I’m not sure I want to be related
to Octavian.”
“Can’t blame you,” Percy said. “But you’re excellent
with the bow—the way you pegged those gorgons? Forget
what other people think.”
Frank’s face turned as red as Dakota’s Kool-Aid.
“Wish I could. They all think I should be a sword fighter
because I’m big and bulky.” He looked down at his body,
like he couldn’t quite believe it was his. “They say I’m too
stocky for an archer. Maybe if my dad would ever claim
me…”
They ate in silence for a few minutes. A dad who
wouldn’t claim you…Hazel knew that feeling. She sensed
Percy could relate, too.
“You asked about the Fifth,” she said at last. “Why
it’s the worst cohort. That actually started way before us.”
She pointed to the back wall, where the legion’s
standards were on display. “See the empty pole in the
middle?”
“The eagle,” Percy said.
Hazel was stunned. “How’d you know?”
Percy shrugged. “Vitellius was talking about how
the legion lost its eagle a long time ago—the first time, he
said. He acted like it was a huge disgrace. I’m guessing
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that’s what’s missing. And from the way you and Reyna
were talking earlier, I’m guessing your eagle got lost a
second time, more recently, and it had something to do
with the Fifth Cohort.”
Hazel made a mental note not to underestimate
Percy again. When he’d first arrived, she’d thought he was
a little goofy from the questions he’d asked—about the
Feast of Tuna and all—but clearly he was smarter than he
let on.
“You’re right,” she said. “That’s exactly what
happened.”
“So what is this eagle, anyway? Why is it a big
deal?”
Frank looked around to make sure no one was
eavesdropping. “It’s the symbol of the whole camp—a big
eagle made of gold. It’s supposed to protect us in battle
and make our enemies afraid. Each legion’s eagle gave it
all sorts of power, and ours came from Jupiter himself.
Supposedly Julius Caesar nicknamed our legion ‘Fulminata’—
armed with lightning—because of what the eagle
could do.”
“I don’t like lightning,” Percy said.
“Yeah, well,” Hazel said, “it didn’t make us invincible.
The Twelfth lost its eagle the first time way back in
ancient days, during the Jewish Rebellion.”
“I think I saw a movie like that,” Percy said.
Hazel shrugged. “Could be. There have been lots of
books and movies about legions losing their eagles. Unfortunately
it happened quite a few times. The eagle was
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so important…well, archaeologists have never recovered a
single eagle from ancient Rome. Each legion guarded
theirs to the last man, because it was charged with power
from the gods. They’d rather hide it or melt it down than
surrender it to an enemy.
The Twelfth was lucky the first time. We got our
eagle back. But the second time…”
“You guys were there?” Percy asked.
They both shook their heads.
“I’m almost as new as you.” Frank tapped his probatio
plate. “Just got here last month. But everyone’s
heard the story. It’s bad luck to even talk about this.
There was this huge expedition to Alaska back in the
eighties.…”
“That prophecy you noticed in the temple,” Hazel
continued, “the one about the seven demigods and the
Doors of Death? Our senior praetor at the time was Michael
Varus, from the Fifth Cohort. Back then the Fifth
was the best in camp. He thought it would bring glory to
the legion if he could figure out the prophecy and make it
come true—save the world from storm and fire and all
that. He talked to the augur, and the augur said the answer
was in Alaska. But he warned Michael it wasn’t time
yet. The prophecy wasn’t for him.”
“But he went anyway,” Percy guessed. “What
happened?”
Frank lowered his voice. “Long, gruesome story. Almost
the entire Fifth Cohort was wiped out. Most of legion’s
Imperial gold weapons were lost, along with the
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eagle. The survivors went crazy or refused to talk about
what had attacked them.”
I know, Hazel thought solemnly. But she kept
silent.
“Since the eagle was lost,” Frank continued, “the
camp has been getting weaker. Quests are more dangerous.
Monsters attack the borders more often. Morale is
lower. The last month or so, things have been getting
much worse, much faster.”
“And the Fifth Cohort took the blame,” Percy
guessed. “So now everyone thinks we’re cursed.”
Hazel realized her gumbo was cold. She sipped a
spoonful, but the comfort food didn’t taste very comforting.
“We’ve been the outcasts of the legion since…well,
since the Alaska disaster. Our reputation got better when
Jason became praetor—”
“The kid who’s missing?” Percy asked.
“Yeah,” Frank said. “I never met him. Before my
time. But I hear he was a good leader. He practically grew
up in the Fifth Cohort. He didn’t care what people
thought about us. He started to rebuild our reputation.
Then he disappeared.”
“Which put us back at square one,” Hazel said bitterly.
“Made us look cursed all over again. I’m sorry,
Percy. Now you know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
Percy sipped his blue soda and gazed thoughtfully
across the dining hall. “I don’t even know where I come
from…but I’ve got a feeling this isn’t the first time I’ve
been an underdog.” He focused on Hazel and managed a
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smile. “Besides, joining the legion is better than being
chased through the wilderness by monsters. I’ve got myself
some new friends. Maybe together we can turn things
around for the Fifth Cohort, huh?”
A horn blew at the end of the hall. The officers at
the praetor’s table got to their feet—even Dakota, his
mouth vampire-red from Kool-Aid.
“The games begin!” Reyna announced. The
campers cheered and rushed to collect their equipment
from the stacks along the walls.
“So we’re the attacking team?” Percy asked over the
noise. “Is that good?”
Hazel shrugged. “Good news: we get the elephant.
Bad news—”
“Let me guess,” said Percy. “The Fifth Cohort always
loses.”
Frank slapped Percy on the shoulder. “I love this
guy. Come on, new friend. Let’s go chalk up my thirteenth
defeat in a row!”
AS HE MARCHED TO THE WAR GAMES, Frank replayed
the day in his mind. He couldn’t believe how close he’d
come to death.
That morning on sentry duty, before Percy showed
up, Frank had almost told Hazel his secret. The two of
them had been standing for hours in the chilly fog, watching
the commuter traffic on Highway 24. Hazel had been
complaining about the cold.
“I’d give anything to be warm,” she said, her teeth
chattering. “I wish we had a fire.” Even with her armor
on, she looked great. Frank liked the way her cinnamontoast–
colored hair curled around the edges of her helmet,
and the way her chin dimpled when she frowned. She was
tiny compared to Frank, which made him feel like a big
clumsy ox. He wanted to put his arms around her to
warm her up, but he’d never do that. She’d probably hit
him, and he’d lose the only friend he had at camp.
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I could make a really impressive fire, he thought.
Of course, it would only burn for a few minutes, and then
I’d die.…
It was scary that he even considered it. Hazel had
that effect on him. Whenever she wanted something, he
had the irrational urge to provide it. He wanted to be the
old-fashioned knight riding to her rescue, which was stupid,
as she was way more capable at everything than he
was.
He imagined what his grandmother would say:
Frank Zhang riding to the rescue? Ha! He’d fall off his
horse and break his neck.
Hard to believe it had been only six weeks since
he’d left his grandmother’s house—six weeks since his
mom’s funeral.
Everything had happened since then: wolves arriving
at his grandmother’s door, the journey to Camp
Jupiter, the weeks he’d spent in the Fifth Cohort trying
not to be a complete failure. Through it all, he’d kept the
half-burned piece of firewood wrapped in a cloth in his
coat pocket.
Keep it close, his grandmother had warned. As long
as it is safe, you are safe.
The problem was that it burned so easily. He remembered
the trip south from Vancouver. When the temperature
dropped below freezing near Mount Hood,
Frank had brought out the piece of tinder and held it in
his hands, imagining how nice it would be to have some
fire. Immediately, the charred end blazed with a searing
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yellow flame. It lit up the night and warmed Frank to the
bone, but he could feel his life slipping away, as if he were
being consumed rather than the wood. He’d thrust the
flame into a snowbank. For a horrible moment it kept
burning. When it finally went out, Frank got his panic under
control. He wrapped the piece of wood and put it back
in his coat pocket, determined not to bring it out again.
But he couldn’t forget it.
It was as though someone had said, “Whatever you
do, don’t think about that stick bursting into flame!”
So of course, that’s all he thought about.
On sentry duty with Hazel, he would try to take his
mind off it. He loved spending time with her. He asked
her about growing up in New Orleans, but she got edgy at
his questions, so they made small talk instead. Just for
fun, they tried to speak French to each other. Hazel had
some Creole blood on her mother’s side. Frank had taken
French in school. Neither of them was very fluent, and
Louisiana French was so different from Canadian French
it was almost impossible to converse. When Frank asked
Hazel how her beef was feeling today, and she replied that
his shoe was green, they decided to give up.
Then Percy Jackson had arrived.
Sure, Frank had seen kids fight monsters before.
He’d fought plenty of them himself on his journey from
Vancouver. But he’d never seen gorgons. He’d never seen
a goddess in person. And the way Percy had controlled
the Little Tiber—wow. Frank wished he had powers like
that.
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He could still feel the gorgons’ claws pressing into
his arms and smell their snaky breath—like dead mice
and poison. If not for Percy, those grotesque hags would
have carried him away. He’d be a pile of bones in the back
of a Bargain Mart by now.
After the incident at the river, Reyna had sent
Frank to the armory, which had given him way too much
time to think.
While he polished swords, he remembered Juno,
warning them to unleash Death.
Unfortunately Frank had a pretty good idea of what
the goddess meant. He had tried to hide his shock when
Juno had appeared, but she looked exactly like his grandmother
had described—right down to the goatskin cape.
She chose your path years ago, Grandmother had
told him. And it will not be easy.
Frank glanced at his bow in the corner of the armory.
He’d feel better if Apollo would claim him as a son.
Frank had been sure his godly parent would speak up on
his sixteenth birthday, which had passed two weeks ago.
Sixteen was an important milestone for Romans. It
had been Frank’s first birthday at camp. But nothing had
happened. Now Frank hoped he would be claimed on the
Feast of Fortuna, though from what Juno had said, they’d
be in a battle for their lives on that day.
His father had to be Apollo. Archery was the only
thing Frank was good at. Years ago, his mother had told
him that their family name, Zhang, meant “master of
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bows” in Chinese. That must have been a hint about his
dad.
Frank put down his polishing rags. He looked at
the ceiling. “Please, Apollo, if you’re my dad, tell me. I
want to be an archer like you.”
“No, you don’t,” a voice grumbled.
Frank jumped out of his seat. Vitellius, the Fifth
Cohort’s Lar, was shimmering behind him. His full name
was Gaius Vitellius Reticulus, but the other cohorts called
him Vitellius the Ridiculous.
“Hazel Levesque sent me to check on you,” Vitellius
said, hiking up his sword belt. “Good thing, too. Look at
the state of this armor!”
Vitellius wasn’t one to talk. His toga was baggy, his
tunic barely fit over his belly, and his scabbard fell off his
belt every three seconds, but Frank didn’t bother pointing
that out.
“As for archers,” the ghost said, “they’re wimps!
Back in my day, archery was a job for barbarians. A good
Roman should be in the fray, gutting his enemy with
spear and sword like a civilized man! That’s how we did it
in the Punic Wars. Roman up, boy!”
Frank sighed. “I thought you were in Caesar’s
army.”
“I was!”
“Vitellius, Caesar was hundreds of years after the
Punic Wars. You couldn’t have been alive that long.”
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“Questioning my honor?” Vitellius looked so mad,
his purple aura glowed. He drew his ghostly gladius and
yelled, “Take that!”
He ran the sword, which was about as deadly as a
laser pointer, through Frank’s chest a few times.
“Ouch,” Frank said, just to be nice.
Vitellius looked satisfied and put his sword away.
“Perhaps you’ll think twice about doubting your elders
next time! Now…it was your sixteenth birthday recently,
wasn’t it?”
Frank nodded. He wasn’t sure how Vitellius knew
this, since Frank hadn’t told anyone except Hazel, but
ghosts had ways of finding out secrets. Eavesdropping
while invisible was probably one of them.
“So that’s why you’re such a grumpy gladiator,” the
Lar said. “Understandable. The sixteenth birthday is your
day of manhood! Your godly parent should have claimed
you, no doubt about it, even if with only a small omen.
Perhaps he thought you were younger. You look younger,
you know, with that pudgy baby face.”“Thanks for reminding
me,” Frank muttered.
“Yes, I remember my sixteenth,” Vitellius said happily.
“Wonderful omen! A chicken in my underpants.”
“Excuse me?”
Vitellius puffed up with pride. “That’s right! I was
at the river changing my clothes for my Liberalia. Rite of
passage into manhood, you know. We did things properly
back then. I’d taken off my childhood toga and was washing
up to don the adult one. Suddenly, a pure-white
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chicken ran out of nowhere, dove into my loincloth, and
ran off with it. I wasn’t wearing it at the time.”
“That’s good,” Frank said. “And can I just say: Too
much information?”
“Mm.” Vitellius wasn’t listening. “That was the sign
I was descended from Aesculapius, the god of medicine. I
took my cognomen, my third name, Reticulus, because it
meant undergarment, to remind me of the blessed day
when a chicken stole my loincloth.”
“So…your name means Mr. Underwear?”
“Praise the gods! I became a surgeon in the legion,
and the rest is history.” He spread his arms generously.
“Don’t give up, boy. Maybe your father is running late.
Most omens are not as dramatic as a chicken, of course. I
knew a fellow once who got a dung beetle—”
“Thanks, Vitellius,” Frank said. “But I have to fin
ish polishing this armor—”
“And the gorgon’s blood?”
Frank froze. He hadn’t told anyone about that. As
far as he knew, only Percy had seen him pocket the vials
at the river, and they hadn’t had a chance to talk about it.
“Come now,” Vitellius chided. “I’m a healer. I know
the legends about gorgon’s blood. Show me the vials.”
Reluctantly, Frank brought out the two ceramic
flask she’d retrieved from the Little Tiber. Spoils of war
were often left behind when a monster dissolved—sometimes
a tooth, or a weapon, or even the monster’s entire
head. Frank had known what the two vials were
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immediately. By tradition they belonged to Percy, who
had killed the gorgons, but Frank couldn’t help thinking,
What if I could use them?
“Yes.” Vitellius studied the vials approvingly.
“Blood takenfrom the right side of a gorgon’s body can
cure any disease, even bring the dead back to life. The
goddess Minerva once gave a vial of it to my divine ancestor,
Aesculapius. But blood taken from the left side of
a gorgon—instantly fatal. So, which is which?”
Frank looked down at the vials. “I don’t know.
They’re identical.”
“Ha! But you’re hoping the right vial could solve
your problem with the burned stick, eh? Maybe break
your curse?”
Frank was so stunned, he couldn’t talk.
“Oh, don’t worry, boy.” The ghost chuckled. “I
won’t tell anyone. I’m a Lar, a protector of the cohort! I
wouldn’t do anything to endanger you.”
“You stabbed me through the chest with your
sword.”
“Trust me, boy! I have sympathy for you, carrying
the curse of that Argonaut.”
“The ... what?”
Vitellius waved away the question. “Don’t be modest.
You’ve got ancient roots. Greek as well as Roman. It’s
no wonder Juno—” He tilted his head, as if listening to a
voice from above. His face went slack. His entire aura
flickered green. “But I’ve said enough! At any rate, I’ll let
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you work out who gets the gorgon’s blood. I suppose that
newcomer Percy could use it too, with his memory
problem.”
Frank wondered what Vitellius had been about to
say and what had made him so scared, but he got the feeling
that for once Vitellius was going to keep his mouth
shut.
He looked down at the two vials. He hadn’t even
thought of Percy’s needing them. He felt guilty that he’d
been intending to use the blood for himself. “Yeah. Of
course. He should have it.”
“Ah, but if you want my advice…” Vitellius looked
up nervously again. “You should both wait on that gorgon
blood. If my sources are right, you’re going to need it on
your quest.”
“Quest?”
The doors of the armory flew open.
Reyna stormed in with her metal greyhounds. Vitellius
vanished. He might have liked chickens, but he did
not like the praetor’s dogs.
“Frank.” Reyna looked troubled. “That’s enough
with the armor. Go find Hazel. Get Percy Jackson down
here. He’s been up there too long. I don’t want Octavian…”
She hesitated. “Just get Percy down here.”
So Frank had run all the way to Temple Hill.
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Walking back, Percy had asked tons of questions
about Hazel’s brother, Nico, but Frank didn’t know that
much.
“He’s okay,” Frank said. “He’s not like Hazel—”
“How do you mean?” Percy asked.
“Oh, um…” Frank coughed. He’d meant that Hazel
was better looking and nicer, but he decided not to say
that. “Nico is kind of mysterious. He makes everybody
else nervous, being the son of Pluto, and all.”
“But not you?”
Frank shrugged. “Pluto’s cool. It’s not his fault he
runs the Underworld. He just got bad luck when the gods
were dividing up the world, you know? Jupiter got the
sky, Neptune got the sea, and Pluto got the shaft.”
“Death doesn’t scare you?”
Frank almost wanted to laugh. Not at all! Got a
match?
Instead he said, “Back in the old times, like the
Greek times, when Pluto was called Hades, he was more
of a death god. When he became Roman, he got more…I
don’t know, respectable. He became the god of wealth,
too. Everything under the earth belongs to him. So I don’t
think of him as being real scary.”
Percy scratched his head. “How does a god become
Roman? If he’s Greek, wouldn’t he stay Greek?”
Frank walked a few steps, thinking about that. Vitellius
would’ve given Percy an hour-long lecture on the
subject, probably with a PowerPoint presentation, but
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Frank took his best shot. “The way Romans saw it, they
adopted the Greek stuff and perfected it.”
Percy made a sour face. “Perfected it? Like there
was something wrong with it?”
Frank remembered what Vitellius had said: You’ve
got ancient roots. Greek as well as Roman. His grandmother
had said something similar.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Rome was more successful
than Greece. They made this huge empire. The
gods became a bigger deal in Roman times—more powerful
and widely known. That’s why they’re still around
today. So many civilizations base themselves on Rome.
The gods changed to Roman because that’s where the
center of power was. Jupiter was…well, more responsible
as a Roman god than he had been when he was Zeus.
Mars became a lot more important and disciplined.”
“And Juno became a hippie bag lady,” Percy noted.
“So you’re saying the old Greek gods—they just changed
permanently to Roman? There’s nothing left of the
Greek?”
“Uh…” Frank looked around to make sure there
were no campers or Lares nearby, but the main gates
were still a hundred yards away. “That’s a sensitive topic.
Some people say Greek influence is still around, like it’s
still a part of the gods’ personalities. I’ve heard stories of
demigods occasionally leaving Camp Jupiter. They reject
Roman training and try to follow the older Greek
style—like being solo heroes instead of working as a team
the way the legion does. And back in the ancient days,
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when Rome fell, the eastern half of the empire survived—
the Greek half.”
Percy stared at him. “I didn’t know that.”
“It was called Byzantium.” Frank liked saying that
word. It sounded cool. “The eastern empire lasted another
thousand years, but it was always more Greek than Roman.
For those of us who follow the Roman way, it’s kind
of a sore subject. That’s why, whatever country we settle
in, Camp Jupiter is always in the west—the Roman part
of the territory. The east is considered bad luck.”
“Huh.” Percy frowned.
Frank couldn’t blame him for feeling confused. The
Greek/Roman stuff gave him a headache, too.
They reached the gates.
“I’ll take you to the baths to get you cleaned up,”
Frank said. “But first…about those vials I found at the
river.”
“Gorgon’s blood,” Percy said. “One vial heals. One
is deadly poison.”
Frank’s eyes widened. “You know about that?
Listen, I wasn’t going to keep them. I just—”
“I know why you did it, Frank.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.” Percy smiled. “If I’d come into camp carrying
a vial of poison, that would’ve looked bad. You were
trying to protect me.”
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“Oh…right.” Frank wiped the sweat off his palms.
“But if we could figure out which vial was which, it might
heal your memory.”
Percy’s smile faded. He gazed across the hills.
“Maybe…I guess. But you should hang on to those vials
for now. There’s a battle coming. We may need them to
save lives.”
Frank stared at him, a little bit in awe. Percy had a
chance to get his memory back, and he was willing to wait
in case someone else needed the vial more? Romans were
supposed to be unselfish and help their comrades, but
Frank wasn’t sure anyone else at camp would have made
that choice.
“So you don’t remember anything?” Frank asked.
“Family, friends?”
Percy fingered the clay beads around his neck.
“Only glimpses. Murky stuff. A girlfriend…I thought she’d
be at camp.” He looked at Frank carefully, as if making a
decision. “Her name was Annabeth. You don’t know her,
do you?”
Frank shook his head. “I know everybody at camp,
but no Annabeth. What about your family? Is your mom
mortal?”
“I guess so…she’s probably worried out of her
mind. Does your mom get to see you much?”
Frank stopped at the bathhouse entrance. He
grabbed some towels from the supply shed. “She died.”
Percy knit his brow. “How?”
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Usually Frank would lie. He’d say an accident and
shut off the conversation. Otherwise his emotions got out
of control. He couldn’t cry at Camp Jupiter. He couldn’t
show weakness. But with Percy, Frank found it easier to
talk.
“She died in the war,” he said. “Afghanistan.”
“She was in the military?”
“Canadian. Yeah.”
“Canada? I didn’t know—”
“Most Americans don’t.” Frank sighed. “But yeah,
Canada has troops there. My mom was a captain. She was
one of the first women to die in combat. She saved some
soldiers who were pinned down by enemy fire. She…she
didn’t make it. The funeral was right before I came down
here.”
Percy nodded. He didn’t ask for more details,
which Frank appreciated. He didn’t say he was sorry, or
make any of the well-meaning comments Frank always
hated: Oh, you poor guy. That must be so hard on you.
You have my deepest condolences.
It was like Percy had faced death before, like he
knew about grief. What mattered was listening. You
didn’t need to say you were sorry. The only thing that
helped was moving on—moving forward.
“How about you show me the baths now?” Percy
suggested. “I’m filthy.”
Frank managed a smile. “Yeah. You kind of are.”
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As they walked into the steam room, Frank thought
of his grandmother, his mom, and his cursed childhood,
thanks to Juno and her piece of firewood. He almost
wished he could forget his past, the way Percy had.
FRANK DIDN’T REMEMBER MUCH ABOUT the funeral
itself.
But he remembered the hours leading up to it—his
grand mother coming out into the backyard to find him
shooting arrows at her porcelain collection.
His grandmother’s house was a rambling gray
stone mansion on twelve acres in North Vancouver. Her
backyard ran straight into Lynn Canyon Park.
The morning was cold and drizzly, but Frank didn’t
feel the chill. He wore a black wool suit and a black overcoat
that had once belonged to his grandfather. Frank had
been startled and upset to find that they fit him fine. The
clothes smelled like wet mothballs and jasmine. The fabric
was itchy but warm. With his bow and quiver, he probably
looked like a very dangerous butler.
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He’d loaded some of his grandmother’s porcelain
in a wagon and toted it into the yard, where he set up targets
on old fence posts at the edge of the property. He’d
been shooting so long, his fingers were starting to lose
their feeling. With every arrow, he imagined he was striking
down his problems.
Snipers in Afghanistan. Smash. A teapot exploded
with an arrow through the middle.
The sacrifice medal, a silver disk on a red-andblack
ribbon, given for death in the line of duty, presented
to Frank as if it were something important, something
that made everything all right. Thwack. A teacup spun into
the woods.
The officer who came to tell him: “Your mother is a
hero.
Captain Emily Zhang died trying to save her
comrades.”
Crack. A blue-and-white plate split into pieces.
His grandmother’s chastisement: Men do not cry.
Especially Zhang men. You will endure, Fai.
No one called him Fai except his grandmother.
What sort of name is Frank? she would scold. That
is not a Chinese name.
I’m not Chinese, Frank thought, but he didn’t dare
say that. His mother had told him years ago: There is no
arguing with Grandmother. It’ll only make you suffer
worse. She’d been right. And now Frank had no one except
his grandmother.
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Thud. A fourth arrow hit the fence post and stuck
there, quivering.
“Fai,” said his grandmother.
Frank turned.
She was clutching a shoebox-sized mahogany chest
that Frank had never seen before. With her high-collared
black dress and severe bun of gray hair, she looked like a
school teacher from the 1800s.
She surveyed the carnage: her porcelain in the wagon,
the shards of her favorite tea sets scattered over the
lawn, Frank’s arrows sticking out of the ground, the trees,
the fence posts, and one in the head of a smiling garden
gnome.
Frank thought she would yell, or hit him with the
box. He’d never done anything this bad before. He’d never
felt so angry.
Grandmother’s face was full of bitterness and disapproval.
She looked nothing like Frank’s mom. He
wondered how his mother had turned out to be so
nice—always laughing, always gentle. Frank couldn’t imagine
his mom growing up with Grandmother any more
than he could imagine her on the battlefield—though the
two situations probably weren’t that different.
He waited for Grandmother to explode. Maybe he’d
be grounded and wouldn’t have to go to the funeral. He
wanted to hurt her for being so mean all the time, for letting
his mother go off to war, for scolding him to get over
it. All she cared about was her stupid collection.
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“Stop this ridiculous behavior,” Grandmother said.
She didn’t sound very irritated. “It is beneath you.”
To Frank’s astonishment, she kicked aside one of
her favorite teacups.
“The car will be here soon,” she said. “We must
talk.”
Frank was dumbfounded. He looked more closely
at the mahogany box. For a horrible moment, he
wondered if it contained his mother’s ashes, but that was
impossible. Grandmother had told him there would be a
military burial. Then why did Grandmother hold the box
so gingerly, as if its contents grieved her?
“Come inside,” she said. Without waiting to see if
he would follow, she turned and marched toward the
house.
In the parlor, Frank sat on a velvet sofa, surrounded
by vintage family photos, porcelain vases that had
been too large for his wagon, and red Chinese calligraphy
banners. Frank didn’t know what the calligraphy said.
He’d never had much interest in learning. He didn’t know
most of the people in the photographs, either.
Whenever Grandmother started lecturing him
about his ancestors—how they’d come over from China
and prospered in the import/export business, eventually
becoming one of the wealthiest Chinese families in Vancouver—
well, it was boring. Frank was fourth-generation
Canadian. He didn’t care about China and all these musty
antiques. The only Chinese characters he could recognize
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were his family name: Zhang. Master of bows. That was
cool.
Grandmother sat next to him, her posture stiff, her
hands folded over the box.
“Your mother wanted you to have this,” she said
with reluctance. “She kept it since you were a baby. When
she went away to the war, she entrusted it to me. But now
she is gone. And soon you will be going, too.”
Frank’s stomach fluttered. “Going? Where?”
“I am old,” Grandmother said, as if that were a surprising
announcement. “I have my own appointment with
Death soon enough. I cannot teach you the skills you will
need, and I cannot keep this burden. If something were to
happen to it,
I would never forgive myself. You would die.”
Frank wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. It sounded
like she had said his life depended on that box. He
wondered why he’d never seen it before. She must have
kept it locked in the attic—the one room Frank was forbidden
to explore. She’d always said she kept her most
valuable treasures up there.
She handed the box to him. He opened the lid with
trembling fingers. Inside, cushioned in velvet lining, was
a terrifying, life-altering, incredibly important…piece of
wood.
It looked like driftwood—hard and smooth, sculpted
into a wavy shape. It was about the size of a TV remote
control. The tip was charred. Frank touched the
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burned end. It still felt warm. The ashes left a black
smudge on his finger.
“It’s a stick,” he said. He couldn’t figure out why
Grandmother was acting so tense and serious about it.
Her eyes glittered. “Fai, do you know of prophecies?
Do you know of the gods?”
The questions made him uncomfortable. He
thought about Grandmother’s silly gold statues of
Chinese immortals, her superstitions about putting furniture
in certain places and avoiding unlucky numbers.
Prophecies made him think of fortune cookies, which
weren’t even Chinese—not really—but the bullies at
school teased him about stupid stuff like that: Confucius
say …all that garbage. Frank had never even been to China.
He wanted nothing to do with it. But of course,
Grandmother didn’t want to hear that.
“A little, Grandmother,” he said. “Not much.”
“Most would have scoffed at your mother’s tale,”
she said, “But I did not. I know of prophecies and gods.
Greek, Roman, Chinese—they intertwine in our family. I
did not question what she told me about your father.”
“Wait ... what?”
“Your father was a god,” she said plainly.
If Grandmother had had a sense of humor, Frank
would have thought she was kidding. But Grandmother
never teased. Was she going senile?
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“Stop gaping at me!” she snapped. “My mind is not
addled. Haven’t you ever wondered why your father never
came back?”
“He was…” Frank faltered. Losing his mother was
painful enough. He didn’t want to think about his father,
too. “He was in the army, like Mom. He went missing in
action. In Iraq.”
“Bah. He was a god. He fell in love with your mother
because she was a natural warrior. She was like
me—strong, brave, good, beautiful.”
Strong and brave, Frank could believe. Picturing
Grandmother as good or beautiful was more difficult.
He still suspected she might be losing her marbles,
but he asked, “What kind of god?”
“Roman,” she said. “Beyond that, I don’t know.
Your mother wouldn’t say, or perhaps she didn’t know
herself. It is no surprise a god would fall in love with her,
given our family. He must have known she was of ancient
blood.”
“Wait…we’re Chinese. Why would Roman gods
want to date Chinese Canadians?”
Grandmother’s nostrils flared. “If you bothered to
learn the family history, Fai, you might know this. China
and Rome are not so different, nor as separate as you
might believe. Our family is from Gansu Province, a town
once called Li-Jien. And before that…as I said, ancient
blood. The blood of princes and heroes.”
Frank just stared at her.
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She sighed in exasperation. “My words are wasted
on this young ox! You will learn the truth when you go to
camp.
Perhaps your father will claim you. But for now, I
must explain the firewood.”
She pointed at the big stone fireplace. “Shortly after
you were born, a visitor appeared at our hearth. Your
mother and I sat here on the couch, just where you and I
are sitting. You were a tiny thing, swaddled in a blue
blanket, and she cradled you in her arms.”
It sounded like a sweet memory, but Grandmother
told it in a bitter tone, as if she knew, even then, that
Frank would turn into a big lumbering oaf.
“A woman appeared at the fire,” she continued.
“She was a white woman—a gwai poh—dressed in blue
silk, with a strange cloak like the skin of a goat.”
“A goat,” Frank said numbly.
Grandmother scowled. “Yes, clean your ears, Fai
Zhang! I’m too old to tell every story twice! The woman
with the goatskin was a goddess. I can always tell these
things. She smiled at the baby—at you—and she told your
mother, in perfect Mandarin, no less: ‘He will close the
circle. He will return your family to its roots and bring
you great honor.’”
Grandmother snorted. “I do not argue with goddesses,
but perhaps this one did not see the future clearly.
Whatever the case, she said, ‘He will go to camp and restore
your reputation there. He will free Thanatos from
his icy chains—’”
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“Wait, who?”
“Thanatos,” Grandmother said impatiently. “The
Greek name for Death. Now may I continue without interruptions?
The goddess said, ‘The blood of Pylos is
strong in this child from his mother’s side. He will have
the Zhang family gift, but he will also have the powers of
his father.’”
Suddenly Frank’s family history didn’t seem so boring.
He desperately wanted to ask what it all
meant—powers, gifts, blood of Pylos. What was this
camp, and who was his father? But he didn’t want to interrupt
Grandmother again. He wanted her to keep
talking.
“No power comes without a price, Fai,” she said.
“Before the goddess disappeared, she pointed at the fire
and said, ‘He will be the strongest of your clan, and the
greatest. But the Fates have decreed he will also be the
most vulnerable. His life will burn bright and short. As
soon as that piece of tinder is consumed—that stick at the
edge of the fire—your son is destined to die.’”
Frank could hardly breathe. He looked at the box in
his lap, and the smudge of ash on his finger. The story
sounded ridiculous, but suddenly the piece of driftwood
seemed more sinister, colder and heavier. “This…this—”
“Yes, my thick-headed ox,” Grandmother said.
“That is the very stick. The goddess disappeared, and I
snatched the wood from the fire immediately. We have
kept it ever since.”
“If it burns up, I die?”
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“It is not so strange,” Grandmother said. “Roman,
Chinese—the destinies of men can often be predicted, and
sometimes guarded against, at least for a time. The firewood
is in your possession now. Keep it close. As long as
it is safe, you are safe.”
Frank shook his head. He wanted to protest that
this was just a stupid legend. Maybe Grandmother was
trying to scare him as some sort of revenge for breaking
her porcelain.
But her eyes were defiant. She seemed to be challenging
Frank: If you do not believe it, burn it.
Frank closed the box. “If it’s so dangerous, why not
seal the wood in something that won’t burn, like plastic or
steel? Why not put it in a safe deposit box?”
“What would happen,” Grandmother wondered, “if
we coated the stick in another substance. Would you, too,
suffocate? I do not know. Your mother would not take the
risk. She couldn’t bear to part with it, for fear something
would go wrong. Banks can be robbed. Buildings can
burn down. Strange things conspire when one tries to
cheat fate. Your mother thought the stick was only safe in
her possession, until she went to war. Then she gave it to
me.”
Grandmother exhaled sourly. “Emily was foolish,
going to war, though I suppose I always knew it was her
destiny. She hoped to meet your father again.”
“She thought…she thought he’d be in
Afghanistan?”
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Grandmother spread her hands, as if this was beyond
her understanding. “She went. She died bravely. She
thought the family gift would protect her. No doubt that’s
how she saved those soldiers. But the gift has never kept
our family safe. It did not help my father, or his father. It
did not help me. And now you have become a man. You
must follow the path.”
“But…what path? What’s our gift—archery?”
“You and your archery! Foolish boy. Soon you will
find out. Tonight, after the funeral, you must go south.
Your mother said if she did not come back from combat,
Lupa would send messengers. They will escort you to a
place where the children of the gods can be trained for
their destiny.”
Frank felt as if he were being shot with arrows, his
heart splitting into porcelain shards. He didn’t understand
most of what Grandmother said, but one thing was
clear: she was kicking him out.
“You’d just let me go?” he asked. “Your last
family?”
Grandmother’s mouth quivered. Her eyes looked
moist. Frank was shocked to realize she was near tears.
She’d lost her husband years ago, then her daughter, and
now she was about to send away her only grandson. But
she rose from the couch and stood tall, her posture as stiff
and correct as ever.
“When you arrive at camp,” she instructed, “you
must speak to the praetor in private. Tell her your great-
grandfather was Shen Lun. It has been many years since
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the San Francisco incident. Hopefully they will not kill
you for what he did, but you might want to beg forgiveness
for his actions.”
“This is sounding better and better,” Frank
mumbled.
“The goddess said you would bring our family full
circle.” Grandmother’s voice had no trace of sympathy.
“She chose your path years ago, and it will not be easy.
But now it is time for the funeral. We have obligations.
Come. The car will be waiting.”
The ceremony was a blur: solemn faces, the patter
of rain on the graveside awning, the crack of rifles from
the honor guard, the casket sinking into the earth.
That night, the wolves came. They howled on the
front porch. Frank came out to meet them. He took his
travel pack, his warmest clothes, his bow and his quiver.
His mother’s sacrifice medal was tucked in his pack. The
charred stick was wrapped carefully in three layers of
cloth in his coat pocket, next to his heart.
His journey south began—to the Wolf House in
Sonoma, and eventually to Camp Jupiter, where he spoke
to Reyna privately as Grandmother had instructed. He
begged forgiveness for the great-grandfather he knew
nothing about. Reyna let him join the legion. She never
did tell him what his great-grandfather had done, but she
obviously knew. Frank could tell it was bad.
“I judge people by their own merits,” Reyna had
told him. “But do not mention the name Shen Lun to
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anyone else. It must remain our secret, or you’ll be
treated badly.”
Unfortunately, Frank didn’t have many merits. His
first month at camp was spent knocking over rows of
weapons, breaking chariots, and tripping entire cohorts
as they marched. His favorite job was caring for Hannibal
the elephant, but he’d managed to mess that up, too—giving
Hannibal indigestion by feeding him peanuts. Who
knew elephants could be peanut-intolerant? Frank
figured Reyna was regretting her decision to let him join.
Every day, he woke up wondering if the stick would
somehow catch fire and burn, and he would cease to exist.
All of this ran through Frank’s head as he walked with
Hazel and Percy to the war games. He thought about the
stick wrapped inside his coat pocket, and what it meant
that Juno had appeared at camp. Was he about to die? He
hoped not. He hadn’t brought his family any honor
yet—that was for sure. Maybe Apollo would claim him
today and explain his powers and gifts.
Once they got out of camp, the Fifth Cohort formed
two lines behind their centurions, Dakota and Gwen.
They marched north, skirting the edge of the city, and
headed to the Field of Mars—the largest, flattest part of
the valley. The grass was cropped short by all the unicorns,
bulls, and homeless fauns that grazed here. The
earth was pitted with explosion craters and scarred with
trenches from past games. At the north end of the field
stood their target. The engineers had built a stone fortress
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with an iron portcullis, guard towers, scorpion ballistae,
water cannons, and no doubt many other nasty surprises
for the defenders to use.
“They did a good job today,” Hazel noted. “That’s
bad for us.”
“Wait,” Percy said. “You’re telling me that fortress
was built today?”
Hazel grinned. “Legionnaires are trained to build.
If we had to, we could break down the entire camp and
rebuild it somewhere else. Take maybe three or four days,
but we could do it.”
“Let’s not,” Percy said. “So you attack a different
fort every night?”
“Not every night,” Frank said. “We have different
training exercises. Sometimes death ball—um, which is
like paint-ball, except with…you know, poison and acid
and fire balls. Sometimes we do chariots and gladiator
competitions, sometimes war games.”
Hazel pointed at the fort. “Somewhere inside, the
First and Second Cohorts are keeping their banners. Our
job is to get inside and capture them without getting
slaughtered. We do that, we win.”
Percy’s eyes lit up. “Like capture-the-flag. I think I
like capture-the-flag.”
Frank laughed. “Yeah, well…it’s harder than it
sounds. We have to get past those scorpions and water
cannons on the walls, fight through the inside of the fortress,
find the banners, and defeat the guards, all while
protecting our own banners and troops from capture. And
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our cohort is in competition with the other two attacking
cohorts. We sort of work together, but not really. The cohort
that captures the banners gets all the glory.”
Percy stumbled, trying to keep time with the left-
right marching rhythm. Frank sympathized. He’d spent
his first two weeks falling down.
“So why are we practicing this, anyway?” Percy
asked. “Do you guys spend a lot of time laying siege to
fortified cities?”
“Teamwork,” Hazel said. “Quick thinking. Tactics.
Battle skills. You’d be surprised what you can learn in the
war games.”
“Like who will stab you in the back,” Frank said.
“Especially that,” Hazel agreed.
They marched to the center of the Field of Mars
and formed ranks. The Third and Fourth Cohorts assembled
as far as possible from the Fifth. The centurions
for the attacking side gathered for a conference. In the
sky above them, Reyna circled on her pegasus, Scipio,
ready to play referee.
Half a dozen giant eagles flew in formation behind
her—prepared for ambulance airlift duty if necessary. The
only person not participating in the game was Nico di Angelo,
“Pluto’s ambassador,” who had climbed an observation
tower about a hundred yards from the fort and would
be watching with binoculars.
Frank propped his pilum against his shield and
checked Percy’s armor. Every strap was correct. Every
piece of armor was properly adjusted.
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“You did it right,” he said in amazement. “Percy,
you must’ve done war games before.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
The only thing that wasn’t regulation was Percy’s
glowing bronze sword—not Imperial gold, and not a gladius.
The blade was leaf-shaped, and the writing on the
hilt was Greek.
Looking at it made Frank uneasy. Percy frowned.
“We can use real weapons, right?”
“Yeah,” Frank agreed. “For sure. I’ve just never
seen a sword like that.”
“What if I hurt somebody?”
“We heal them,” Frank said. “Or try to. The legion
medics are pretty good with ambrosia and nectar, and
unicorn draught.”
“No one dies,” Hazel said. “Well, not usually. And if
they do—”
Frank imitated the voice of Vitellius: “They’re
wimps! Backin my day, we died all the time, and we liked
it!”
Hazel laughed. “Just stay with us, Percy. Chances
are we’ll get the worst duty and get eliminated early.
They’ll throw us at the walls first to soften up the defenses.
Then the Third and Fourth Cohorts will march in
and get the honors, if they can even breach the fort.”
Horns blew. Dakota and Gwen walked back from
the officers’ conference, looking grim.
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“All right, here’s the plan!” Dakota took a quick
swig of Kool-Aid from his travel flask. “They’re throwing
us at the walls first to soften up the defenses.”
The whole cohort groaned.
“I know, I know,” Gwen said. “But maybe this time
we’ll have some luck!”
Leave it to Gwen to be the optimist. Everybody
liked her because she took care of her people and tried to
keep their spirits up. She could even control Dakota during
his hyperactive bug-juice fits. Still, the campers
grumbled and complained. Nobody believed in luck for
the Fifth.
“First line with Dakota,” Gwen said. “Lock shields
and advance in turtle formation to the main gates. Try to
stay in one piece. Draw their fire. Second line—” Gwen
turned to Frank’s row without much enthusiasm. “You
seventeen, from Bobby over, take charge of the elephant
and the scaling ladders. Try a flanking attack on the western
wall. Maybe we can spread the defenders too thin.
Frank, Hazel, Percy…well, just do whatever. Show Percy
the ropes. Try to keep him alive.” She turned back to the
whole cohort. “If anybody gets over the wall first, I’ll
make sure you get the Mural Crown. Victory for the
Fifth!”
The cohort cheered half heartedly and broke ranks.
Percy frowned. “‘Do whatever?’”
“Yeah,” Hazel sighed. “Big vote of confidence.”
“What’s the Mural Crown?” he asked.
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“Military medal,” Frank said. He’d been forced to
memorize all the possible awards. “Big honor for the first
soldier to breach an enemy fort. You’ll notice nobody in
the Fifth is wearing one. Usually we don’t even get into
the fort because we’re burning or drowning or…”
He faltered, and looked at Percy. “Water cannons.”
“What?” Percy asked.
“The cannons on the walls,” Frank said, “they draw
water from the aqueduct. There’s a pump system—heck, I
don’t know how they work, but they’re under a lot of pressure.
If you could control them, like you controlled the
river—”
“Frank!” Hazel beamed. “That’s brilliant!”
Percy didn’t look so sure. “I don’t know how I did
that at the river. I’m not sure I can control the cannons
from this far away.”
“We’ll get you closer.” Frank pointed to the eastern
wall of the fort, where the Fifth Cohort wouldn’t be attacking.
“That’s where the defense will be weakest. They’ll
never take three kids seriously. I think we can sneak up
pretty close before they see us.”
“Sneak up how?” Percy asked.
Frank turned to Hazel. “Can you do that thing
again?”
She punched him in the chest. “You said you
wouldn’t tell anybody!”
Immediately Frank felt terrible. He’d gotten so
caught up in the idea...
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Hazel muttered under her breath. “Never mind. It’s
fine.
Percy, he’s talking about the trenches. The Field of
Mars is riddled with tunnels from over the years. Some
are collapsed, or buried deep, but a lot of them are still
passable. I’m pretty good at finding them and using them.
I can even collapse them if I have to.”
“Like you did with the gorgons,” Percy said, “to
slow them down.”
Frank nodded approvingly. “I told you Pluto was
cool. He’s the god of everything under the earth. Hazel
can find caves, tunnels, trapdoors—”
“And it was our secret,” she grumbled.
Frank felt himself blushing. “Yeah, sorry. But if we
can get close—”
“And if I can knock out the water cannons…” Percy
nodded, like he was warming to the idea. “What do we do
then?”
Frank checked his quiver. He always stocked up on
special arrows. He’d never gotten to use them before, but
maybe tonight was the night. Maybe he could finally do
something good enough to get Apollo’s attention.
“The rest is up to me,” he said. “Let’s go.”
FRANK HAD NEVER FELT SO SURE of anything, which
made him nervous. Nothing he planned ever went right.
He always managed to break, ruin, burn, sit on, or knock
over something important. Yet he knew this strategy
would work.
Hazel found them a tunnel with no problem. In
fact, Frank had a sneaking suspicion she didn’t just find
tunnels. It was as though tunnels manufactured themselves
to suit her needs. Passages that had been filled in
years ago suddenly unfilled, changing direction to lead
Hazel where she wanted to go. They crept along by the
light of Percy’s glowing sword,
Riptide. Above, they heard the sounds of
battle—kids shout ing, Hannibal the elephant bellowing
with glee, scorpion bolts exploding, and water cannons
firing. The tunnel shook. Dirt rained down on them.
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Frank slipped his hand inside his armor. The piece
of wood was still safe and secure in his coat pocket,
though one good shot from a scorpion might set his lifeline
on fire.…
Bad Frank, he chided himself. Fire is the “F-word.”
Don’t think about it.
“There’s an opening just ahead,” Hazel announced.
“We’ll come up ten feet from the east wall.”
“How can you tell?” Percy asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m sure.”
“Could we tunnel straight under the wall?” Frank
wondered.
“No,” Hazel said. “The engineers were smart. They
built the walls on old foundations that go down to bedrock.
And don’t ask how I know. I just do.”
Frank stumbled over something and cursed. Percy
brought this sword around for more light. The thing
Frank had tripped on was gleaming silver.
He crouched down.
“Don’t touch it!” Hazel said.
Frank’s hand stopped a few inches from the chunk
of metal. It looked like a giant Hershey’s Kiss, about the
size of his fist.
“It’s massive,” he said. “Silver?”
“Platinum.” Hazel sounded scared out of her wits.
“It’ll go away in a second. Please don’t touch it. It’s
dangerous.”
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Frank didn’t understand how a lump of metal could
be dangerous, but he took Hazel seriously. As they
watched, the chunk of platinum sank into the ground.
He stared at Hazel. “How did you know?”
In the light of Percy’s sword, Hazel looked as
ghostly as a Lar. “I’ll explain later,” she promised.
Another explosion rocked the tunnel, and they
forged ahead.
They popped out of a hole just where Hazel had
predicted. In front of them, the fort’s east wall loomed.
Off to their left, Frank could see the main line of the Fifth
Cohort advancing in turtle formation, shields forming a
shell over their heads and sides. They were trying to reach
the main gates, but the defenders above pelted them with
rocks and shot flaming bolts from the scorpions, blasting
craters around their feet. A water cannon discharged with
a jaw-rattling THRUM, and a jet of liquid carved a trench
in the dirt right in front of the cohort.
Percy whistled. “That’s a lot of pressure, all right.”
The Third and Fourth Cohorts weren’t even advancing.
They stood back and laughed, watching their “allies”
get beat up. The defenders clustered on the wall above the
gates, yelling insults at the tortoise formation as it
staggered back and forth. War games had deteriorated into
“beat up the Fifth.”
Frank’s vision went red with anger.
“Let’s shake things up.” He reached in his quiver
and pulled out an arrow heavier than the rest. The iron
tip was shaped like the nose cone of a rocket. An ultra
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thin gold rope trailed from the fletching. Shooting it accurately
up the wall would take more force and skill than
most archers could manage, but Frank had strong arms
and good aim.
Maybe Apollo is watching, he thought hopefully.
“What does that do?” Percy asked. “Grappling
hook?”
“It’s called a hydra arrow,” Frank said. “Can you
knock out the water cannons?”
A defender appeared on the wall above them.
“Hey!” he shouted to his buddies. “Check it out! More
victims!”
“Percy,” Frank said, “now would be good.”
More kids came across the battlements to laugh at
them. A few ran to the nearest water cannon and swung
the barrel toward Frank.
Percy closed his eyes. He raised his hand.
Up on the wall, somebody yelled, “Open wide,
losers!”
KA-BOOM!
The cannon exploded in a starburst of blue, green,
and white. Defenders screamed as a watery shock wave
flattened them against the battlements. Kids toppled over
the walls but were snatched by giant eagles and carried to
safety. Then the entire eastern wall shuddered as the explosion
backed up through the pipelines. One after another,
the water cannons on the battlements exploded. The
scorpions’ fires were doused. Defenders scattered in
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confusion or were tossed through the air, giving the rescue
eagles quite a workout. At the main gates, the Fifth
Cohort forgot about their formation. Mystified, they
lowered their shields and stared at the chaos.
Frank shot his arrow. It streaked upward, carrying
its glittering rope. When it reached the top, the metal
point fractured into a dozen lines that lashed out and
wrapped around anything they could find—parts of the
wall, a scorpion, a broken water cannon, and a couple of
defending campers, who yelped and found themselves
slammed against the battlements as anchors. From the
main rope, handholds extended at two-foot intervals,
making a ladder.
“Go!” Frank said.
Percy grinned. “You first, Frank. This is your
party.”
Frank hesitated. Then he slung his bow on his back
and began to climb. He was halfway up before the defenders
recovered their senses enough to sound the alarm.
Frank glanced back at Fifth Cohort’s main group.
They were staring up at him, dumbfounded.
“Well?” Frank screamed. “Attack!”
Gwen was the first to unfreeze. She grinned and repeated
the order. A cheer went up from the battlefield.
Hannibal the elephant trumpeted with happiness, but
Frank couldn’t afford to watch. He clambered to the top
of the wall, where three defenders were trying to hack
down his rope ladder.
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One good thing about being big, clumsy, and clad
in metal:Frank was like a heavily armored bowling ball.
He launched himself at the defenders, and they toppled
like pins. Frank got to his feet. He took command of the
battlements, sweeping his pilum back and forth and
knocking down defenders. Some shot arrows. Some tried
to get under his guard with their swords, but Frank felt
unstoppable. Then Hazel appeared next to him, swinging
her big cavalry sword like she was born for battle.
Percy leaped onto the wall and raised Riptide.
“Fun,” he said.
Together they cleared the defenders off the walls.
Below them the gates broke. Hannibal barreled into the
fort, arrows and rocks bouncing harmlessly off his Kevlar
armor.
The Fifth Cohort charged in behind the elephant,
and the battle went hand-to-hand.
Finally, from the edge of the Field of Mars, a battle
cry went up. The Third and Fourth Cohorts ran to join the
fight.
“A little late,” Hazel grumbled.
“We can’t let them get the banners,” Frank said.
“No,” Percy agreed. “Those are ours.”
No more talk was necessary. They moved like a
team, as if the three of them had been working together
for years. They rushed down the interior steps and into
the enemy base.
AFTER THAT, THE BATTLE WAS MAYHEM.
Frank, Percy, and Hazel waded through the enemy,
plowing down anyone who stood in their way. The First
and Second Cohorts—pride of Camp Jupiter, a well-oiled,
highly disciplined war machine—fell apart under the assault
and the sheer novelty of being on the losing side.
Part of their problem was Percy. He fought like a
demon, whirling through the defenders’ ranks in a completely
unorthodox style, rolling under their feet, slashing
with his sword instead of stabbing like a Roman would,
whacking campers with the flat of his blade, and generally
causing mass panic. Octavian screamed in a shrill
voice—maybe ordering the First Cohort to stand their
ground, maybe trying to sing soprano—but Percy put a
stop to it. He somer saulted over a line of shields and
slammed the butt of his sword into Octavian’s helmet.
The centurion collapsed like a sock puppet.
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Frank shot arrows until his quiver was empty,
using blunt-tipped missiles that wouldn’t kill but left
some nasty bruises. He broke his pilum over a defender’s
head, then reluctantly drew his gladius.
Meanwhile, Hazel climbed onto Hannibal’s back.
She charged toward the center of the fort, grinning down
at her friends. “Let’s go, slowpokes!”
Gods of Olympus, she’s beautiful, Frank thought.
They ran to the center of the base. The inner keep
was virtually unguarded. Obviously the defenders never
dreamed an assault would get this far. Hannibal busted
down the huge doors. Inside, the First and Second Cohort
standard-bearers were sitting around a table playing
Mythomagic with cards and figurines. The cohort’s emblems
were propped carelessly against one wall.
Hazel and Hannibal rode straight into the room,
and the standard-bearers fell backward out of their
chairs. Hannibal stepped on the table, and game pieces
scattered.
By the time the rest of the cohort caught up with
them, Percy and Frank had disarmed the enemies,
grabbed the banners, and climbed onto Hannibal’s back
with Hazel. They marched out of the keep triumphantly
with the enemy colors.
The Fifth Cohort formed ranks around them. Together
they paraded out of the fort, past stunned enemies
and lines of equally mystified allies.
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Reyna circled low overhead on her pegasus. “The
game is won!” She sounded as if she were trying not to
laugh. “Assemble for honors!”
Slowly the campers regrouped on the Field of Mars.
Frank saw plenty of minor injuries—some burns, broken
bones, black eyes, cuts and gashes, plus a lot of very interesting
hairdos from fires and exploding water cannons—
but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.
He slid off the elephant. His comrades swarmed
him, pounding him on the back and complimenting him.
Frank wondered if he was dreaming. It was the best night
of his life—until he saw Gwen.
“Help!” somebody yelled. A couple of campers
rushed out of the fortress, carrying a girl on a stretcher.
They set her down, and other kids started running over.
Even from a distance, Frank could tell it was Gwen. She
was in bad shape. She lay on her side on the stretcher
with a pilum sticking out of her armor—almost like she
was holding it between her chest and her arm, but there
was too much blood.
Frank shook his head in disbelief. “No, no, no…” he
muttered as he ran to her side.
The medics barked at everyone to stand back and
give her air. The whole legion fell silent as the healers
worked—trying to get gauze and powdered unicorn horn
under Gwen’s armor to stop the bleeding, trying to force
some nectar into her mouth. Gwen didn’t move. Her face
was ashen gray.
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Finally one of the medics looked up at Reyna and
shook his head.
For a moment, there was no sound except water
from the ruined cannons trickling down the walls of the
fort. Hannibal nuzzled Gwen’s hair with his trunk.
Reyna surveyed the campers from her pegasus. Her
expression was as hard and dark as iron. “There will be an
investigation. Whoever did this, you cost the legion a
good officer. Honorable death is one thing, but this ... ”
Frank wasn’t sure what she meant. Then he noticed
the marks engraved in the wooden shaft of the pilum: CHT
I LEGIO XII F. The weapon belonged to the First Cohort,
and the point was sticking out the front of her armor.
Gwen had been speared from behind—possibly after the
game had ended.
Frank scanned the crowd for Octavian. The centurion
was watching with more interest than concern, as if
he were examining one of his stupid gutted teddy bears.
He didn’t have a pilum.
Blood roared in Frank’s ears. He wanted to strangle
Octavian with his bare hands, but at that moment, Gwen
gasped.
Everyone stepped back. Gwen opened her eyes. The
color came back to her face.
“Wh-what is it?” She blinked. “What’s everyone
staring at?” She didn’t seem to notice the seven-foot harpoon
sticking out through her chest.
Behind Frank, a medic whispered, “There’s no way.
She was dead. She has to be dead.”
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Gwen tried to sit up, but couldn’t. “There was a
river, and a man asking…for a coin? I turned around and
the exit door was open. So I just…I just left. I don’t understand.
What’s happened?”
Everyone stared at her in horror. Nobody tried to
help.
“Gwen.” Frank knelt next to her. “Don’t try to get
up. Just close your eyes for a second, okay?”
“Why? What—”
“Just trust me.”
Gwen did what he asked.
Frank grabbed the shaft of the pilum below its tip,
but his hands were shaking. The wood was slick. “Percy,
Hazel—help me.”
One of the medics realized what he was planning.
“Don’t!” he said. “You might—”
“What?” Hazel snapped. “Make it worse?”
Frank took a deep breath. “Hold her steady. One,
two, three!”
He pulled the pilum out from the front. Gwen
didn’t even wince. The blood stopped quickly.
Hazel bent down to examine the wound. “It’s closing
on its own,” she said. “I don’t know how, but—”
“I feel fine,” Gwen protested. “What’s everyone
worried about?”
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With Frank and Percy’s help, she got to her feet.
Frank glowered at Octavian, but the centurion’s face was
a mask of polite concern.
Later, Frank thought. Deal with him later.
“Gwen,” Hazel said gently, “there’s no easy way to
say this. You were dead. Somehow you came back.”
“I…what?” She stumbled against Frank. Her hand
pressed against the ragged hole in her armor.
“How—how?”
“Good question.” Reyna turned to Nico, who was
watching grimly from the edge of the crowd. “Is this some
power of Pluto?”
Nico shook his head. “Pluto never lets people return
from the dead.”
He glanced at Hazel as if warning her to stay quiet.
Frank wondered what that was about, but he didn’t have
time to think about it.
A thunderous voice rolled across the field: Death
loses its hold. This is only the beginning.
Campers drew weapons. Hannibal trumpeted
nervously. Scipio reared, almost throwing Reyna.
“I know that voice,” Percy said. He didn’t sound
pleased.
In the midst of the legion, a column of fire blasted
into the air. Heat seared Frank’s eyelashes. Campers who
had been soaked by the cannons found their clothes
instantly steam-dried. Everyone scrambled backward as a
huge soldier stepped out of the explosion.
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Frank didn’t have much hair, but what he did have
stood straight up. The soldier was ten feet tall, dressed in
Canadian Forces desert camouflage. He radiated confidence
and power. His black hair was cut in a flat-topped
wedge like Frank’s. His face was angular and brutal,
marked with old knife scars. His eyes were covered with
infrared goggles that glowed from inside. He wore a utility
belt with a sidearm, a knife holster, and several grenades.
In his hands was an oversized M16 rifle.
The worst thing was that Frank felt drawn to him.
As everyone else stepped back, Frank stepped forward.
He realized the soldier was silently willing him to
approach.
Frank desperately wanted to run away and hide,
but he couldn’t. He took three more steps. Then he sank
to one knee.
The other campers followed his example and knelt.
Even Reyna dismounted.
“That’s good,” the soldier said. “Kneeling is good.
It’s been a long time since I’ve visited Camp Jupiter.”
Frank noticed that one person wasn’t kneeling.
Percy Jackson, his sword still in hand, was glaring at the
giant soldier.
“You’re Ares,” Percy said. “What do you want?”
A collective gasp went up from two hundred
campers and an elephant. Frank wanted to say something
to excuse Percy and placate the god, but he didn’t know
what. He was afraid the war god would blast his new
friend with that extra-large M16.
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Instead, the god bared his brilliant white teeth.
“You’ve got spunk, demigod,” he said. “Ares is my
Greek form. But to these followers, to the children of
Rome, I am Mars—patron of the empire, divine father of
Romulus and Remus.”
“We’ve met,” Percy said. “We…we had a fight.…”
The god scratched his chin, as if trying to recall. “I
fight a lot of people. But I assure you—you’ve never
fought me as Mars. If you had, you’d be dead. Now, kneel,
as befits a child of Rome, before you try my patience.”
Around Mars’s feet, the ground boiled in a circle of
flame.
“Percy,” Frank said, “please.”
Percy clearly didn’t like it, but he knelt.
Mars scanned the crowd. “Romans, lend me your
ears!” He laughed—a good, hearty bellow, so infectious it
almost made Frank smile, though he was still shivering
with fear. “I’ve always wanted to say that. I come from
Olympus with a message. Jupiter doesn’t like us communicating
directly with mortals, especially nowadays, but
he has allowed this exception, as you Romans have always
been my special people. I’m only permitted to speak
for a few minutes, so listen up.”
He pointed at Gwen. “This one should be dead, yet
she’s not. The monsters you fight no longer return to Tartarus
when they are slain. Some mortals who died long
ago are now walking the earth again.”
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Was it Frank’s imagination, or did the god glare at
Nico di Angelo?
“Thanatos has been chained,” Mars announced.
“The Doors of Death have been forced open, and no one is
policing them—at least, not impartially. Gaea allows our
enemies to pour forth into the world of mortals. Her sons
the giants are mustering armies against you—armies that
you will not be able to kill. Unless Death is unleashed to
return to his duties, you will be overrun. You must find
Thanatos and free him from the giants. Only he can reverse
the tide.”
Mars looked around, and noticed that everyone
was still silently kneeling. “Oh, you can get up now. Any
questions?”
Reyna rose uneasily. She approached the god, followed
by Octavian, who was bowing and scraping like a
champion groveler.
“Lord Mars,” Reyna said, “we are honored.”
“Beyond honored,” said Octavian. “So far beyond
honored—”
“Well?” Mars snapped.
“Well,” Reyna said, “Thanatos is the god of death,
the lieutenant of Pluto?”
“Right,” the god said.
“And you’re saying that he’s been captured by
giants.”
“Right.”
“And therefore people will stop dying?”
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“Not all at once,” Mars said. “But the barriers
between life and death will continue to weaken. Those
who know how to take advantage of this will exploit it.
Monsters are already harder to dispatch. Soon they will
be completely impossible to kill. Some demigods will also
be able to find their way back from the Underworld—like
your friend Centurion Shishkebab.”
Gwen winced. “Centurion Shish kebab?”
“If left unchecked,” Mars continued, “even mortals
will eventually find it impossible to die. Can you imagine
a world in which no one dies—ever?”
Octavian raised his hand. “But, ah, mighty all-
powerful Lord Mars, if we can’t die, isn’t that a good
thing? If we can stay alive indefinitely—”
“Don’t be foolish, boy!” Mars bellowed. “Endless
slaughter with no conclusion? Carnage without any
point? Enemies that rise again and again and can never
be killed? Is that what you want?”
“You’re the god of war,” Percy spoke up. “Don’t you
want endless carnage?”
Mars’s infrared goggles glowed brighter. “Insolent,
aren’t you? Perhaps I have fought you before. I can understand
why I’d want to kill you. I’m the god of Rome,
child. I am the god of military might used for a righteous
cause. I protect the legions. I am happy to crush my enemies
underfoot, but I don’t fight without reason. I don’t
want war without end.
You will discover this. You will serve me.”
“Not likely,” Percy said.
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Again, Frank waited for the god to strike him down,
but Mars just grinned like they were two old buddies talking
trash.
“I order a quest!” the god announced. “You will go
north and find Thanatos in the land beyond the gods. You
will free him and thwart the plans of the giants. Beware
Gaea! Beware her son, the eldest giant!”
Next to Frank, Hazel made a squeaking sound.
“The land beyond the gods?”
Mars stared down at her, his grip tightening on his
M16. “That’s right, Hazel Levesque. You know what I
mean. Everyone here remembers the land where the legion
lost its honor! Perhaps if the quest succeeds, and you
return by the Feast of Fortuna…perhaps then your honor
will be restored. If you don’t succeed, there won’t be any
camp left to return to. Rome will be overrun, its legacy
lost forever. So my advice is: Don’t fail.”
Octavian somehow managed to bow even lower.
“Um, Lord Mars, just one tiny thing. A quest requires a
prophecy, a mystical poem to guide us! We used to get
them from the Sibylline books, but now it’s up to the augur
to glean the will of gods. So if I could just run and get
about seventy stuffed animals and possibly a knife—”
“You’re the augur?” the god interrupted.
“Y-yes, my lord.”
Mars pulled a scroll from his utility belt. “Anyone
got a pen?”
The legionnaires stared at him.
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Mars sighed. “Two hundred Romans, and no one’s
got a pen? Never mind!”
He slung his M16 onto his back and pulled out a
hand grenade. There were many screaming Romans.
Then the grenade morphed into a ballpoint pen, and Mars
began to write.
Frank looked at Percy with wide eyes. He mouthed:
Can your sword do grenade form?
Percy mouthed back, No. Shut up.
“There!” Mars finished writing and threw the scroll
at Octavian. “A prophecy. You can add it to your books,
engrave it on your floor, whatever.”
Octavian read the scroll. “This says, ‘Go to Alaska.
Find Thanatos and free him. Come back by sundown on
June twenty-fourth or die.’”
“Yes,” Mars said. “Is that not clear?”
“Well, my lord…usually prophecies are unclear.
They’re wrapped in riddles. They rhyme, and…”
Mars casually popped another grenade off his belt.
“Yes?”
“The prophecy is clear!” Octavian announced. “A
quest!”
“Good answer.” Mars tapped the grenade to his
chin. “Now, what else? There was something else.…Oh,
yes.”
He turned to Frank. “C’mere, kid.”
No, Frank thought. The burned stick in his coat
pocket felt heavier. His legs turned wobbly. A sense of
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dread settled over him, worse than the day the military
officer had come to the door.
He knew what was coming, but he couldn’t stop it.
He stepped forward against his will.
Mars grinned. “Nice job taking the wall, kid. Who’s
the ref for this game?”
Reyna raised her hand.
“You see that play, ref?” Mars demanded. “That
was my kid. First over the wall, won the game for his
team. Unless you’re blind, that was an MVP play. You’re
not blind, are you?”
Reyna looked like she was trying to swallow a
mouse. “No, Lord Mars.”
“Then make sure he gets the Mural Crown,” Mars
demanded. “My kid, here!” he yelled at the legion, in case
anyone hadn’t heard. Frank wanted to melt into the dirt.
“Emily Zhang’s son,” Mars continued. “She was a
good soldier. Good woman. This kid Frank proved his
stuff tonight. Happy late birthday, kid. Time you stepped
up to a real man’s weapon.”
He tossed Frank his M16. For a split second Frank
though the’d be crushed under the weight of the massive
assault rifle, but the gun changed in midair, becoming
smaller and thinner. When Frank caught it, the weapon
was a spear. It had a shaft of Imperial gold and a strange
point like a white bone, flickering with ghostly light.
“The tip is a dragon’s tooth,” Mars said. “You
haven’t learned to use your mom’s talents yet, have you?
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Well—that spear will give you some breathing room until
you do. You get three charges out of it, so use it wisely.”
Frank didn’t understand, but Mars acted like the
matter was closed. “Now, my kid Frank Zhang is gonna
lead the quest to free Thanatos, unless there are any
objections?”
Of course, no one said a word. But many of the
campers glared at Frank with envy, jealousy, anger,
bitterness.
“You can take two companions,” Mars said. “Those
are the rules. One of them needs to be this kid.”
He pointed at Percy. “He’s gonna learn some respect
for Mars on this trip, or die trying. As for the
second, I don’t care. Pick whomever you want. Have one
of your senate debates. You all are good at those.”
The god’s image flickered. Lightning crackled
across the sky.
“That’s my cue,” Mars said. “Until next time, Romans.
Do not disappoint me!”
The god erupted in flames, and then he was gone.
Reyna turned toward Frank. Her expression was
part amazement, part nausea, like she’d finally managed
to swallow that mouse. She raised her arm in a Roman salute.
“Ave, Frank Zhang, son of Mars.”
The whole legion followed her lead, but Frank
didn’t want their attention anymore. His perfect night
had been ruined.
175/589
Mars was his father. The god of war was sending
him to Alaska. Frank had been handed more than a spear
for his birthday. He’d been handed a death sentence.
PERCY SLEPT LIKE A MEDUSA VICTIM—which is to say,
like a rock.
He hadn’t crashed in a safe, comfortable bed
since…well, he couldn’t even remember. Despite his insane
day and the million thoughts running through his
head, his body took over and said: You will sleep now.
He had dreams, of course. He always had dreams,
but they passed like blurred images from the window of a
train. He saw a curly-haired faun in ragged clothes running
to catch up with him.
“I don’t have any spare change,” Percy called.
“What?” the faun said. “No, Percy. It’s me, Grover!
Stay put! We’re on our way to find you. Tyson is close—at
least we think he’s the closest. We’re trying to get a lock
on your position.”
177/589
“What?” Percy called, but the faun disappeared in
the fog.
Then Annabeth was running along beside him,
reaching out her hand. “Thank the gods!” she called. “For
months and months we couldn’t see you! Are you all
right?”
Percy remembered what Juno had said—for
months he has been slumbering, but now he is awake.
The goddess had intentionally kept him hidden, but why?
“Are you real?” he asked Annabeth.
He wanted so much to believe it he felt like Hannibal
the elephant was standing on his chest. But her face
began to dissolve. She cried, “Stay put! It’ll be easier for
Tyson to find you! Stay where you are!”
Then she was gone. The images accelerated. He
saw a huge ship in a dry dock, workers scrambling to finish
the hull, a guy with a blowtorch welding a bronze
dragon figurehead to the prow. He saw the war god stalking
toward him in the surf, a sword in his hands.
The scene shifted. Percy stood on the Field of Mars,
looking up at the Berkeley Hills. Golden grass rippled,
and a face appeared in the landscape—a sleeping woman,
her features formed from shadows and folds in the terrain.
Her eyes remained closed, but her voice spoke in
Percy’s mind:
So this is the demigod who destroyed my son Kronos.
You don’t look like much, Percy Jackson, but you’re
valuable to me. Come north. Meet Alcyoneus. Juno can
play her little games with Greeks and Romans, but in the
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end, you will be my pawn. You will be the key to the
gods’ defeat.
Percy’s vision turned dark. He stood in a theater-
sized version of the camp’s headquarters—a principia
with walls of ice and freezing mist hanging in the air. The
floor was littered with skeletons in Roman armor and Imperial
gold weapons encrusted with frost. In the back of
the room sat an enormous shadowy figure. His skin glinted
of gold and silver, as if he were an automaton like
Reyna’s dogs. Behind him stood a collection of ruined
emblems, tattered banners, and a large golden eagle on a
staff of iron.
The giant’s voice boomed in the vast chamber.
“This will be fun, son of Neptune. It’s been eons since I
broke a demigod of your caliber. I await you atop the ice.”
Percy woke, shivering. For a moment he didn’t
know where he was. Then he remembered: Camp Jupiter,
the Fifth Cohort barracks. He lay in his bunk, staring at
the ceiling and trying to control his racing heartbeat.
A golden giant was waiting to break him. Wonderful.
But what unnerved him more was that sleeping woman’s
face in the hills. You will be my pawn. Percy didn’t
play chess, but he was pretty sure that being a pawn was
bad. They died a lot.
Even the friendlier parts of his dream were disturbing.
A faun named Grover was looking for him. Maybe
that’s why Don had detected a—what had he called
it?—an empathy link. Somebody named Tyson was
searching for him, too, and Annabeth had warned Percy
to stay where he was.
179/589
He sat up in his bunk. His roommates were rushing
around, getting dressed and brushing their teeth. Dakota
was wrapping himself in a long piece of red-speckled
cloth—a toga. One of the Lares was giving him pointers
on where to tuck and fold.
“Breakfast time?” Percy asked hopefully.
Frank’s head popped up from the bunk below. He
had bags under his eyes like he hadn’t slept well. “A quick
breakfast. Then we’ve got the senate meeting.”
Dakota’s head was stuck in his toga. He staggered
around like a Kool-Aid-stained ghost.
“Um,” Percy said, “should I wear my bed sheets?”
Frank snorted. “That’s just for the senators.
There’re ten of them, elected yearly. You’ve got to be at
camp five years to qualify.”
“So how come we’re invited to the meeting?”
“Because…you know, the quest.” Frank sounded
worried, like he was afraid Percy would back out. “We
have to be in on the discussion. You, me, Hazel. I mean, if
you’re willing…”
Frank probably didn’t mean to guilt him, but
Percy’she art felt pulled like taffy. He had sympathy for
Frank. Getting claimed by the war god in front of the
whole camp—what a nightmare. Plus, how could Percy
say no to that big pouty baby face? Frank had been given
a huge task that would most likely get him killed. He was
scared. He needed Percy’s help.
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And the three of them had made a good team last
night. Hazel and Frank were solid, dependable people.
They’d accepted Percy like family. Still, he didn’t like the
idea of this quest, especially since it came from Mars, and
especially after his dreams.
“I, um…I’d better get ready.…” He climbed out of
bed and got dressed. The whole time, he thought about
Annabeth. Help was on the way. He could have his old life
back. All he had to do was stay put.
At breakfast, Percy was conscious of everyone looking
at him. They were whispering about the previous
night:
“Two gods in one day…”
“Un-Roman fighting…”
“Water cannon up my nose…”
He was too hungry to care. He filled up on pancakes,
eggs, bacon, waffles, apples, and several glasses of
orange juice. He probably would have eaten more, but
Reyna announced that the senate would now convene in
the city, and all the folks in togas got up to leave.
“Here we go.” Hazel fidgeted with a stone that
looked like a two-carat ruby.
The ghost Vitellius appeared next to them in a
purple shimmer. “Bona fortuna, you three! Ah, senate
meetings. I remember the one when Caesar was assassinated.
Why, the amount of blood on his toga—”
“Thanks, Vitellius,” Frank interrupted. “We should
get going.”
181/589
Reyna and Octavian led the procession of senators
out of camp, with Reyna’s metal greyhounds dashing back
and forth along the road. Hazel, Frank, and Percy trailed
behind. Percynoticed Nico di Angelo in the group, wearing
a black toga and talking with Gwen, who looked a
little pale but surprisingly good considering she’d been
dead the night before. Nico waved at Percy, then went
back to his conversation, leaving Percy more sure than
ever that Hazel’s brother was trying to avoid him.
Dakota stumbled along in his red-speckled robe. A
lot of other senators seemed to be having trouble with
their togas, too—hiking up their hems, trying to keep the
cloth from slipping off their shoulders. Percy was glad he
was wearing a regular purple T-shirt and jeans.
“How could Romans move, in those things?” he
wondered.
“They were just for formal occasions,” Hazel said.
“Like tuxedos. I bet the ancient Romans hated togas as
much as we do. By the way, you didn’t bring any weapons,
did you?”
Percy’s hand went to his pocket, where his pen always
stayed. “Why? Are we not supposed to?”
“No weapons allowed inside the Pomerian Line,”
she said.
“The what line?”
“Pomerian,” Frank said. “The city limits. Inside is a
sacred ‘safe zone.’ Legions can’t march through. No
weapons allowed. That’s so senate meetings don’t get
bloody.”
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“Like Julius Caesar getting assassinated?” Percy
asked.
Frank nodded. “Don’t worry. Nothing like that has
happened in months.”
Percy hoped he was kidding.
As they got closer to the city, Percy could appreciate
how beautiful it was. The tiled roofs and gold domes
gleamed in the sun. Gardens bloomed with honeysuckle
and roses. The central plaza was paved in white and gray
stone, decorated with statues, fountains, and gilded
columns. In the surrounding neighborhoods, cobblestone
streets were lined with freshly painted town houses,
shops, cafés, and parks. In the distance rose the coliseum
and the horse racing arena.
Percy didn’t notice they’d reached the city limits
until the senators in front of him started slowing down.
On the side of the road stood a white marble
statue—a life-size muscular man with curly hair, no arms,
and an irritated expression. Maybe he looked mad because
he’d been carved only from the waist up. Below
that, he was just a big block of marble.
“Single file, please!” the statue said. “Have your IDs
ready.”
Percy looked to his left and right. He hadn’t noticed
before, but a line of identical statues ringed the city at intervals
of about a hundred yards.
The senators passed through easily. The statue
checked the tattoos on their forearms and called each
senator by name. “Gwendolyn, senator, Fifth Cohort, yes.
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Nico di Angelo, ambassador of Pluto—very well. Reyna,
praetor, of course. Hank, senator, Third Cohort—oh, nice
shoes, Hank! Ah, who have we here?”
Hazel, Frank, and Percy were the last ones.
“Terminus,” Hazel said, “this is Percy Jackson.
Percy, this is Terminus, the god of boundaries.”
“New, eh?” said the god. “Yes, probatio tablet.
Fine. Ah, weapon in your pocket? Take it out! Take it
out!”
Percy didn’t know how Terminus could tell, but he
took out his pen.
“Quite dangerous,” Terminus said. “Leave it in the
tray. Wait, where’s my assistant? Julia!”
A little girl about six years old peeked out from behind
the base of the statue. She had pigtails, a pink dress,
and an impish grin with two missing teeth.
“Julia?” Terminus glanced behind him, and Julia
scurried in the other direction. “Where did that girl go?”
Terminus looked the other way and caught sight of
Julia before she could hide. The little girl squealed with
delight.
“Oh, there you are,” said the statue. “Front and
center. Bring the tray.”
Julia scrambled out and brushed off her dress. She
picked up a tray and presented it to Percy. On it were several
paring knives, a corkscrew, an oversized container of
sun lotion, and a water bottle.
184/589
“You can pick up your weapon on the way out,”
Terminus said. “Julia will take good care of it. She’s a
trained professional.”
The little girl nodded. “Pro-fess-ion-al.” She said
each syllable carefully, like she’d been practicing.
Percy glanced at Hazel and Frank, who didn’t seem
to find anything odd about this. Still, he wasn’t wild about
handing over a deadly weapon to a kid.
“The thing is,” he said, “the pen returns to my
pocket automatically, so even if I give it up—”
“Not to worry,” Terminus assured him. “We’ll make
sure it doesn’t wander off. Won’t we, Juila?”
“Yes, Mr. Terminus.”
Reluctantly, Percy put his pen on the tray.
“Now, a few rules, since you’re new,” Terminus
said. “You are entering the boundaries of the city proper.
Keep the peace inside the line. Yield to chariot traffic
while walking on public roads. When you get to the Senate
House, sit on the left-hand side. And, down there—do
you see where I’m pointing?”
“Um,” Percy said, “you don’t have any hands.”
Apparently this was a sore point for Terminus. His
marble face turned a dark shade of gray. “A smart aleck,
eh? Well, Mr. Rule Flouter, right down there in the forum—
Julia, point for me, please—”
Julia dutifully set down the security tray and pointed
toward the main plaza.
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“The shop with the blue awning,” Terminus continued,
“that’s the general store. They sell tape measures.
Buy one! I want those pants exactly one inch above the
ankles and that hair regulation cut. And tuck your shirt
in.”
Hazel said, “Thank you, Terminus. We need to get
going.”
“Fine, fine, you may pass,” the god said testily. “But
stay on the right side of the road! And that rock right
there—No, Hazel, look where I’m pointing. That rock is
entirely too close to that tree. Move it two inches to the
left.”
Hazel did what she was told, and they continued
down the path, Terminus still shouting orders at them
while Julia did cartwheels across the grass.
“Is he always like that?” Percy asked.
“No,” Hazel admitted. “Today he was laid back.
Usually he’s more obsessive/compulsive.”
“He inhabits every boundary stone around the
city,” Frank said. “Kind of our last line of defense if the
city’s attacked.”
“Terminus isn’t so bad,” Hazel added. “Just don’t
make him angry, or he’ll force you to measure every blade
of grass in the valley.”
Percy filed that information. “And the kid? Julia?”
Hazel grinned. “Yeah, she’s a cutie. Her parents live
in the city. Come on. We’d better catch up to the
senators.”
186/589
As they approached the forum, Percy was struck by
the sheer number of people. College-age kids were
hanging out at the fountain. Several of them waved at the
senators as they passed. One guy in his late twenties
stood at a bakery counter, flirting with a young woman
who was buying coffee. An older couple was watching a
little boy in diapers and a miniature Camp Jupiter shirt
toddle after seagulls. Merchants were opening their shops
for the day, putting out signs in
Latin that advertised pottery, jewelry, and half-
price tickets for the Hippodrome.
“All these people are demigods?” Percy asked.
“Or descended from demigods,” Hazel said. “Like I
told you, it’s a good place to go to college or raise a family
without worrying about monster attacks every day.
Maybe two, three hundred people live here? The veterans
act as, like, advisers and reserve forces as needed, but
mostly they’re just citizens living their lives.”
Percy imagined what that would be like: getting an
apartment in this tiny replica of Rome, protected by the
legion and Terminus the OCD border god. He imagined
holding hands with Annabeth at a café. Maybe when they
were older, watching their own kid chase seagulls across
the forum…
He shook the idea out of his head. He couldn’t afford
to indulge in that kind of thinking. Most of his
memories were gone, but he knew this place wasn’t his
home. He belonged somewhere else, with his other
friends.
187/589
Besides, Camp Jupiter was in danger. If Juno was
right, an attack was coming in less than five days. Percy
imagined that sleeping woman’s face—the face of
Gaea—forming in the hills above camp. He imagined
hordes of monsters descending into this valley.
If you don’t succeed, Mars had warned, there won’t
be any camp left to return to. Rome will be overrun, its
legacy lost forever.
He thought about the little girl Julia, the families
with kids, his new friends in the Fifth Cohort, even those
silly fauns. He didn’t want to picture what might happen
to them if this place was destroyed.
The senators made their way to a big white-domed
building on the west end of the forum. Percy paused at
the doorway, trying not to think about Julius Caesar getting
slashed to death at a senate meeting. Then he took a
deep breath and followed Hazel and Frank inside.
THE SENATE HOUSE INTERIOR looked like a high
school lecture hall. A semicircle of tiered seats faced a
dais with a podium and two chairs. The chairs were
empty, but one had a small velvet package on the seat.
Percy, Hazel, and Frank sat on the left side of the
semicircle. The ten senators and Nico di Angelo occupied
the rest of the front row. The upper rows were filled with
several dozeng hosts and a few older veterans from the
city, all in formal togas. Octavian stood in front with a
knife and a Beanie Babylion, just in case anyone needed
to consult the god of cutesy collectibles. Reyna walked to
the podium and raised her hand for attention.
“Right, this is an emergency meeting,” she said.
“We won’t stand on formalities.”
“I love formalities!” a ghost complained.
Reyna shot him a cross look.
189/589
“First of all,” she said, “we’re not here to vote on
the quest itself. The quest has been issued by Mars Ultor,
patron of Rome. We will obey his wishes. Nor are we here
to debate the choice of Frank Zhang’s companions.”
“All three from the Fifth Cohort?” called out Hank
from the Third. “That’s not fair.”
“And not smart,” said the boy next to him. “We
know the Fifth will mess up. They should take somebody
good.”
Dakota got up so fast, he spilled Kool-Aid from his
flask. “We were plenty good last night when we whipped
yourpodex, Larry!”
“Enough, Dakota,” Reyna said. “Let’s leave Larry’s
podexout of this. As quest leader, Frank has the right to
choose his companions. He has chosen Percy Jackson and
HazelLevesque.”
A ghost from the second row yelled, “Absurdus!
Frank Zhang isn’t even a full member of the legion! He’s
on probatio.A quest must be led by someone of centurion
rank or higher. This is completely—”
“Cato,” Reyna snapped. “We must obey the wishes
of MarsUltor. That means certain ... adjustments.”
Reyna clapped her hands, and Octavian came forward.
He set down his knife and Beanie Baby and took
the velvet package from the chair.
“Frank Zhang,” he said, “come forward.”
Frank glanced nervously at Percy. Then he got to
his feet and approached the augur.
190/589
“It is my…pleasure,” Octavian said, forcing out the
last word, “to bestow upon you the Mural Crown for being
first over the walls in siege warfare.” Octavian handed
him a bronze badge shaped like a laurel wreath. “Also, by
order of Praetor Reyna, to promote you to the rank of
centurion.”
He handed Frank another badge, a bronze crescent,
and the senate exploded in protest.
“He’s still a probie!” one yelled.
“Impossible!” said another.
“Water cannon up my nose!” yelled a third.
“Silence!” Octavian’s voice sounded a lot more
commanding than it had the previous night on the battlefield.
“Ourpraetor recognizes that no one below the rank
of centurion may lead a quest. For good or ill, Frank must
lead this quest—so our praetor has decreed that Frank
Zhang must be made centurion.”
Suddenly Percy understood what an effective
speaker Octavian was. He sounded reasonable and supportive,
but his expression was pained. He carefully crafted
his words to put all the responsibility on Reyna. This
was her idea, he seemed to say.
If it went wrong, Reyna was to blame. If only
Octavian had been the one in charge, things would have
been done more sensibly. But alas, he had no choice but
to support Reyna, because Octavian was a loyal Roman
soldier.
Octavian managed to convey all that without saying
it, simultaneously calming the senate and sympathizing
191/589
with them. For the first time, Percy realized this scrawny,
funny-looking scarecrow of a kid might be a dangerous
enemy.
Reyna must have recognized this too. A look of irritation
flashed across her face. “There is an opening for
centurion,” she said. “One of our officers, also a senator,
has decided to step down. After ten years in the legion,
she will retire to the city and attend college. Gwen of the
Fifth Cohort, we thank you for your service.”
Everyone turned to Gwen, who managed a brave
smile. She looked tired from the previous night’s ordeal,
but also relieved. Percy couldn’t blame her. Compared to
getting skewered with a pilum, college sounded pretty
good.
“As praetor,” Reyna continued, “I have the right to
replace officers. I admit it’s unusual for a camper on probatio
to rise directly to the rank of centurion, but I think
we can agree…last night was unusual. Frank Zhang, your
ID, please.”
Frank removed the lead tablet from around his
neck and handed it to Octavian.
“Your arm,” Octavian said.
Frank held up his forearm. Octavian raised his
hands to the heavens. “We accept Frank Zhang, Son of
Mars, to the Twelfth Legion Fulminata for his first year of
service. Do you pledge your life to the senate and people
of Rome?”
Frank muttered something like “Ud-dud.” Then he
cleared his throat and managed: “I do.”
192/589
The senators shouted, “Senatus Populusque
Romanus!”
Fire blazed on Frank’s arm. For a moment his eyes
filled with terror, and Percy was afraid his friend might
pass out. Then the smoke and flame died, and new marks
were seared onto Frank’s skin: SPQR, an image of crossed
spears, and a single stripe, representing the first year of
service.
“You may sit down.” Octavian glanced at the audience
as if to say: This wasn’t my idea, folks.“Now,” Reyna
said, “we must discuss the quest.”
The senators shifted and muttered as Frank returned
to his seat.
“Did it hurt?” Percy whispered.
Frank looked at his forearm, which was still steaming.
“Yeah. A lot.” He seemed mystified by the badges in
his hand—the centurion’s mark and the Mural
Crown—like he wasn’t sure what to do with them.
“Here.” Hazel’s eyes shone with pride. “Let me.”
She pinned the medals to Frank’s shirt.
Percy smiled. He’d only known Frank for a day, but
he felt proud of him too. “You deserve it, man,” he said.
“What you did last night? Natural leadership.”
Frank scowled. “But centurion—”
“Centurion Zhang,” called Octavian. “Did you hear
the question?”
Frank blinked. “Um…sorry. What?”
193/589
Octavian turned to the senate and smirked, like
What did I tell you?
“I was asking,” Octavian said like he was talking to
a three-year-old, “if you have a plan for the quest. Do you
even know where you are going?”
“Um...”
Hazel put her hand on Frank’s shoulder and stood.
“Weren’t you listening last night, Octavian? Mars was
pretty clear. We’re going to the land beyond the
gods—Alaska.”
The senators squirmed in their togas. Some of the
ghosts shimmered and disappeared. Even Reyna’s metal
dogs rolled over on their backs and whimpered.
Finally Senator Larry stood. “I know what Mars
said, but that’s crazy. Alaska is cursed! They call it the
land beyond the gods for a reason. It’s so far north, the
Roman gods have no power there. The place is swarming
with monsters. No demigod has come back from there
alive since—”
“Since you lost your eagle,” Percy said.
Larry was so startled, he fell back on his podex.
“Look,” Percy continued, “I know I’m new here. I
know you guys don’t like to mention that massacre in the
nineteen-eighties—”
“He mentioned it!” one of the ghosts whimpered.
“—But don’t you get it?” Percy continued. “The
Fifth Cohort led that expedition. We failed, and we have
to be responsible for making things right. That’s why
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Mars is sending us. This giant, the son of Gaea—he’s the
one who defeated your forces thirty years ago. I’m sure of
it. Now he’s sitting up there in Alaska with a chained
death god, and all your old equipment. He’s mustering his
armies and sending them south to attack this camp.”
“Really?” Octavian said. “You seem to know a lot
about our enemy’s plans, Percy Jackson.”
Most insults Percy could shrug off—being called
weak or stupid or whatever. But it dawned on him that
Octavian was calling him a spy—a traitor. That was such a
foreign concept to Percy, so not who he was, he almost
couldn’t process the slur. When he did, his shoulders
tensed. He was tempted to smack Octavian on the head
again, but he realized Octavian was baiting him, trying to
make him look unstable.
Percy took a deep breath.
“We’re going to confront this son of Gaea,” he said,
managing to keep his composure. “We’ll get back your
eagle and unchain this god…” He glanced at Hazel.
“Thanatos, right?”
She nodded. “Letus, in Roman. But his old Greek
name is Thanatos. When it comes to Death…we’re happy
to let him stay Greek.”
Octavian sighed in exasperation. “Well, whatever
you call him…how do you expect to do all this and get
back by the Feast of Fortuna? That’s the evening of the
twenty-fourth. It’s the twentieth now. Do you even know
where to look? Do you even know who this son of Gaea
is?”
195/589
“Yes.” Hazel spoke with such certainty that even
Percy was surprised. “I don’t know exactly where to look,
but I have a pretty good idea. The giant’s name is
Alcyoneus.”
That name seemed to lower the temperature in the
room by fifty degrees. The senators shivered.
Reyna gripped her podium. “How do you know
this, Hazel? Because you’re a child of Pluto?”
Nico di Angelo had been so quiet, Percy had almost
forgotten he was there. Now he stood in his black toga.
“Praetor, if I may,” he said. “Hazel and I…we
learned a little about the giants from our father. Each giant
was bred specifically to oppose one of the twelve
Olympian gods—tousurp that god’s domain. The king of
giants was Porphyrion, the anti-Jupiter. But the eldest giant
was Alcyoneus. He was born to oppose Pluto. That’s
why we know of him in particular.”
Reyna frowned. “Indeed? You sound quite familiar
with him.”
Nico picked at the edge of his toga. “Anyway…the
giants were hard to kill. According to prophecy, they
could only be defeated by gods and demigods working
together.”
Dakota belched. “Sorry, did you say gods and demigods…
like fighting side by side? That could never
happen!”
“It has happened,” Nico said. “In the first giant
war, the gods called on heroes to join them, and they were
victorious. Whether it could happen again, I don’t know.
196/589
But with Alcyoneus ... he was different. He was completely
immortal, impossible to kill by god or demigod, as
long as he remained in his home territory—the place
where he was born.”
Nico paused to let that sink in. “And if Alcyoneus
has been reborn in Alaska—”
“Then he can’t be defeated there,” Hazel finished.
“Ever. By any means. Which is why our nineteen-eighties
expedition was doomed to fail.”
Another round of arguing and shouting broke out.
“The quest is impossible!” shouted a senator.
“We’re doomed!” cried a ghost.
“More Kool-Aid!” yelled Dakota.
“Silence!” Reyna called. “Senators, we must act like
Romans. Mars has given us this quest, and we have to believe
it is possible. These three demigods must travel to
Alaska. They must free Thanatos and return before the
Feast of Fortuna. If they can retrieve the lost eagle in the
process, so much the better. All we can do is advise them
and make sure they have a plan.”
Reyna looked at Percy without much hope. “You do
have a plan?”
Percy wanted to step forward bravely and say, No, I
don’t!
That was the truth, but looking around at all the
nervous faces, Percy knew he couldn’t say it.
“First, I need to understand something.” He turned
toward Nico. “I thought Pluto was the god of the dead.
197/589
Now I hear about this other guy, Thanatos, and the Doors
of Death from that prophecy—the Prophecy of Seven.
What does all that mean?”
Nico took a deep breath. “Okay. Pluto is the god of
the Underworld, but the actual god of death, the one
who’s responsible for making sure souls go to the afterlife
and stay there—that’s Pluto’s lieutenant, Thanatos. He’s
like…well, imagine Life and Death are two different countries.
Everybody would like to be in Life, right? So there’s
a guarded border to keep people from crossing back over
without permission. But it’s a big border, with lots of
holes in the fence. Pluto tries to seal up the breaches, but
new ones keep popping up all the time. That’s why he depends
on Thanatos, who’s like the border patrol, the
police.”
“Thanatos catches souls,” Percy said, “and deports
them back to the Underworld.”
“Exactly,” Nico said. “But now Thanatos has been
captured, chained up.”
Frank raised his hand. “Uh…how do you chain
Death?”
“It’s been done before,” Nico said. “In the old days,
a guy named Sisyphus tricked Death and tied him up.
Another time, Hercules wrestled him to the ground.”
“And now a giant has captured him,” Percy said.
“So if we could free Thanatos, then the dead would stay
dead?” He glanced at Gwen. “Um…no offense.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Nico said.
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Octavian rolled his eyes. “Why does that not surprise
me?”
“You mean the Doors of Death,” Reyna said, ignoring
Octavian. “They are mentioned in the Prophecy of
Seven, which sent the first expedition to Alaska—”
Cato the ghost snorted. “We all know how that
turned out! We Lares remember!”
The other ghosts grumbled in agreement.
Nico put his finger to his lips. Suddenly all the
Lares went silent. Some looked alarmed, like their
mouths had been glued together. Percy wished he had
that power over certain living people…like Octavian, for
instance.
“Thanatos is only part of the solution,” Nico explained.
“The Doors of Death…well, that’s a concept even
I don’t completely understand. There are many ways into
the Underworld—the River Styx, the Door of Orpheus—
plussmaller escape routes that open up from time to
time. With Thanatos imprisoned, all those exits will be
easier to use. Sometimes it might work to our advantage
and let a friendly soul come back—like Gwen here. More
often, it will benefit evil souls and monsters, the sneaky
ones who are looking to escape. Now, the Doors of
Death—those are the personal doors of Thanatos, his fast
lane between Life and Death. Only Thanatos is supposed
to know where they are, and the location shifts over the
ages. If I understand correctly, the Doors of Death have
been forced open. Gaea’s minions have seized control of
them—”
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“Which means Gaea controls who can come back
from the dead,” Percy guessed.
Nico nodded. “She can pick and choose who to let
out—the worst monsters, the most evil souls. If we rescue
Thanatos, that means at least he can catch souls again
and send them below. Monsters will die when we kill
them, like they used to, and we’ll get a little breathing
room. But unless we’re able to retake the Doors of Death,
our enemies won’t stay down for long. They’ll have an
easy way back to the world of the living.”
“So we can catch them and deport them,” Percy
summed up, “but they’ll just keep coming back across.”
“In a depressing nutshell, yes,” Nico said.
Frank scratched his head. “But Thanatos knows
where the doors are, right? If we free him, he can retake
them.”
“I don’t think so,” Nico said. “Not alone. He’s no
match for Gaea. That would take a massive quest…an
army of the best demigods.”
“Foes bear arms to the Doors of Death,” Reyna
said. “That’s the Prophecy of Seven…” She looked at
Percy, and for just a moment he could see how scared she
was. She did a good job of hiding it, but Percy wondered if
she’d had nightmares about Gaea too—if she’d seen visions
of what would happen when the camp was invaded
by monsters that couldn’t be killed. “If this begins the ancient
prophecy, we don’t have resources to send an army
to these Doors of Death and protect the camp. I can’t
imagine even sparing seven demigods—”
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“First things first.” Percy tried to sound confident,
though he could feel the level of panic rising in the room.
“I don’t know who the seven are, or what that old prophecy
means, exactly. But first we have to free Thanatos.
Mars told us we only needed three people for the quest to
Alaska. Let’s concentrate on succeeding with that and getting
back before the Feast of Fortuna. Then we can worry
about the Doors of Death.”
“Yeah,” Frank said in a small voice. “That’s probably
enough for one week.”
“So you do have a plan?” Octavian asked
skeptically.
Percy looked at his teammates. “We go to Alaska as
fast as possible...”
“And we improvise,” Hazel said.
“A lot,” Frank added.
Reyna studied them. She looked like she was mentally
writing her own obituary.
“Very well,” she said. “Nothing remains except for
us to vote what support we can give the quest—transportation,
money, magic, weapons.”
“Praetor, if I may,” Octavian said.
“Oh, great,” Percy muttered. “Here it comes.”
“The camp is in grave danger,” Octavian said. “Two
gods have warned us we will be attacked four days from
now. We must not spread our resources too thin, especially
by funding projects that have a slim chance of
success.”
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Octavian looked at the three of them with pity, as if
to say, Poor little things. “Mars has clearly chosen the
least likely candidates for this quest. Perhaps that is because
he considers them the most expendable. Perhaps
Mars is playing the long odds. Whatever the case, he
wisely didn’t order a massive expedition, nor did he ask
us to fund their adventure. I say we keep our resources
here and defend the camp. This is where the battle will be
lost or won. If these three succeed, wonderful! But they
should do so by their own ingenuity.”
An uneasy murmur passed through the crowd.
Frank jumped to his feet. Before he could start a fight,
Percy said, “Fine! No problem. But at least give us transportation.
Gaea is the earth goddess, right? Going overland,
across the earth—I’m guessing we should avoid that.
Plus, it’ll be too slow.”
Octavian laughed. “Would you like us to charter
you an airplane?”
The idea made Percy nauseous. “No. Air travel…I
have a feeling that would be bad, too. But a boat. Can you
at least give us a boat?”
Hazel made a grunting sound. Percy glanced over.
She shook her head and mouthed, Fine. I’m fine.
“A boat!” Octavian turned to the senators. “The son
of Neptune wants a boat. Sea travel has never been the
Roman way, but he isn’t much of a Roman!”
“Octavian,” Reyna said sternly, “a boat is little
enough to ask. And providing no other aid seems very—”
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“Traditional!” Octavian exclaimed. “It is very traditional.
Let us see if these questers have the strength to
survive without help, like true Romans!”
More muttering filled the chamber. The senators’
eyes moved back and forth between Octavian and Reyna,
watching the test of wills.
Reyna straightened in her chair. “Very well,” she
said tightly. “We’ll put it to a vote. Senators, the motion is
as follows: The quest shall go to Alaska. The senate shall
provide full access to the Roman navy docked at Alameda.
No other aid will be forthcoming. The three adventurers
will survive or fail on their own merits. All in favor?”
Every senator’s hand went up.
“The motion is passed.” Reyna turned to Frank.
“Centurion, your party is excused. The senate has other
matters to discuss. And, Octavian, if I may confer with
you for a moment.”
Percy was incredibly glad to see the sunlight. In
that dark hall, with all those eyes on him, he’d felt like the
world was riding on his shoulders—and he was fairly sure
he’d had that experience before.
He filled his lungs with fresh air.
Hazel picked up a large emerald from the path and
slipped it in her pocket. “So…we’re pretty much toast?”
Frank nodded miserably. “If either of you wants to
back out, I wouldn’t blame you.”
“Are you kidding?” Hazel said. “And pull sentry
duty for the rest of the week?”
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Frank managed a smile. He turned to Percy.
Percy gazed across the forum. Stay put, Annabeth
had said in his dream. But if he stayed put, this camp
would be destroyed. He looked up at the hills, and imagined
Gaea’s face smiling in the shadows and ridges. You
can’t win, little demigod, she seemed to say. Serve me by
staying, or serve me by going.
Percy made a silent vow: After the Feast of For-
tuna, he would find Annabeth. But for now, he had to act.
He couldn’t let Gaea win.
“I’m with you,” he told Frank. “Besides, I want to
check out the Roman navy.”
They were only halfway across the forum when
some called, “Jackson!” Percy turned and saw Octavian
jogging toward them.
“What do you want?” Percy asked.
Octavian smiled. “Already decided I’m your enemy?
That’s a rash choice, Percy. I’m a loyal Roman.”
Frank snarled. “You backstabbing, slimy—” Both
Percy and Hazel had to restrain him.
“Oh, dear,” Octavian said. “Hardly the right behavior
for a new centurion. Jackson, I only followed you because
Reyna charged me with a message. She wants you
to report to the principia without your—ah—two lackeys,
here. Reyna will meet you there after the senate adjourns.
She’d like a private word with you before you leave on
your quest.”
“What about?” Percy said.
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“I’m sure I don’t know.” Octavian smiled wickedly.
“The last person she had a private talk with was Jason
Grace. And that was the last time I ever saw him. Good
luck and good bye, Percy Jackson.”
PERCY WAS GLAD RIPTIDE HAD RETURNED to his pocket.
Judging from Reyna’s expression, he thought he might
need to defend himself.
She stormed into the principia with her purple
cloak billowing, and her greyhounds at her feet. Percy was
sitting in one of the praetor chairs that he’d pulled to the
visitor’s side, which maybe wasn’t the proper thing to do.
He started to get up.
“Stay seated,” Reyna growled. “You leave after
lunch. We have a lot to discuss.”
She plunked down her dagger so hard, the jellybean
bowl rattled. Aurum and Argentum took their posts
on her left and right and fixed their ruby eyes on Percy.
“What’d I do wrong?” Percy asked. “If it’s about the
chair—”
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“It’s not you.” Reyna scowled. “I hate senate meetings.
When Octavian gets talking…”
Percy nodded. “You’re a warrior. Octavian is a talker.
Put him in front of the senate, and suddenly he becomes
the powerful one.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You’re smarter than you
look.”
“Gee, thanks. I hear Octavian might get elected
praetor, assuming the camp survives that long.”
“Which brings us to the subject of doomsday,”
Reyna said, “and how you might help prevent it. But before
I place the fate of Camp Jupiter in your hands, we
need to get a few things straight.”
She sat down and put a ring on the table—a band of
silver etched with a sword-and-torch design, like Reyna’s
tattoo.
“Do you know what this is?”
“The sign of your mom,” Percy said. “The…uh, war
goddess.” He tried to remember the name but he didn’t
want to get it wrong—something like bologna. Or salami?
“Bellona, yes.” Reyna scrutinized him carefully.
“You don’t remember where you saw this ring before?
You really don’t remember me or my sister, Hylla?”
Percy shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“It would’ve been four years ago.”
“Just before you came to camp.”
Reyna frowned. “How did you—?”
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“You’ve got four stripes on your tattoo. Four years.”
Reyna looked at her forearm. “Of course. It seems
so long ago. I suppose you wouldn’t recall me even if you
had your memory. I was just a little girl—one attendant
among so many at the spa. But you spoke with my sister,
just before you and that other one, Annabeth, destroyed
our home.”
Percy tried to remember. He really did. For some
reason, Annabeth and he had visited a spa and decided to
destroy it. He couldn’t imagine why. Maybe they hadn’t
liked the deep-tissue massage? Maybe they’d gotten bad
manicures?
“It’s a blank,” he said. “Since your dogs aren’t attacking
me, I hope you’ll believe me. I’m telling the
truth.”
Aurum and Argentum snarled. Percy got the feeling
they were thinking, Please lie. Please lie.
Reyna tapped the silver ring.
“I believe you’re sincere,” she said. “But not everyone
at camp does. Octavian thinks you’re a spy. He thinks
you were sent here by Gaea to find our weaknesses and
distract us. He believes the old legends about the Greeks.”
“Old legends?”
Reyna’s hand rested halfway between her dagger
and the jelly beans. Percy had a feeling that if she made a
sudden move, she wouldn’t be grabbing for the candy.
“Some believe Greek demigods still exist,” she said,
“heroes who follow the older forms of the gods. There are
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legends of battles between Roman and Greek heroes in
relatively modern times—the American Civil War, for instance.
I have no proof of this, and if our Lares know anything,
they refuse to say. But Octavian believes the Greeks
are still around, plotting our downfall, working with the
forces of Gaea. He thinks you are one of them.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“I believe you came from somewhere,” she said.
“You’re important, and dangerous. Two gods have taken a
special interest in you since you arrived, so I can’t believe
you’d work against Olympus…or Rome.” She shrugged.
“Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps the gods sent you
here to test my judgment. But I think…I think you were
sent here to make up for the loss of Jason.”
Jason ... Percy couldn’t go very far in this camp
without hearing that name.
“The way you talk about him…” Percy said. “Were
you two a couple?”
Reyna’s eyes bored into him—like the eyes of a
hungry wolf. Percy had seen enough hungry wolves to
know.
“We might have been,” Reyna said, “given time.
Praetors work closely together. It’s common for them to
become romantically involved. But Jason was only
praetor for a few months before he disappeared. Ever
since then, Octavian has been pestering me, agitating for
new elections. I’ve resisted. I need a partner in
power—but I’d prefer someone like Jason. A warrior, not
a schemer.”
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She waited. Percy realized she was sending him a
silent invitation.
His throat went dry. “Oh ... you mean ... oh.”
“I believe the gods sent you to help me,” Reyna
said. “I don’t understand where you come from, any more
than I understood it four years ago. But I think your arrival
is some sort of repayment. You destroyed my home
once. Now you’ve been sent to save my home. I don’t hold
a grudge against you for the past, Percy. My sister hates
you still, it’s true, but Fate brought me here to Camp
Jupiter. I’ve done well. All I ask is that you work with me
for the future. I intend to save this camp.”
The metal dogs glared at him, their mouths frozen
in snarl mode. Percy found Reyna’s eyes a lot harder to
meet.
“Look, I’ll help,” he promised. “But I’m new here.
You’ve got a lot of good people who know this camp better
than I do. If we succeed on this quest, Hazel and
Frank will be heroes. You could ask one of them—”
“Please,” Reyna said. “No one will follow a child of
Pluto. There’s something about that girl…rumors about
where she came from.…No, she won’t do. As for Frank
Zhang, he has a good heart, but he’s hopelessly naïve and
inexperienced. Besides, if the others found out about his
family history at this camp—”
“Family history?”
“The point is, Percy, you are the real power on this
quest. You are a seasoned veteran. I’ve seen what you can
do. A son of Neptune wouldn’t be my first choice, but if
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you return successfully from this mission, the legion
might be saved. The praetorship will be yours for the taking.
Together, you and I could expand the power of Rome.
We could raise an army and find the Doors of Death,
crush Gaea’s forces once and for all. You would find me a
very helpful…friend.”
She said that word like it could have several meanings,
and he could pick which one.
Percy’s feet started tapping on the floor, anxious to
run. “Reyna…I’m honored, and all. Seriously. But I’ve got
a girlfriend. And I don’t want power, or a praetorship.”
Percy was afraid he’d make her mad. Instead she
just raised her eyebrows.
“A man who turns down power?” she said. “That’s
not very Roman of you. Just think about it. In four days, I
have to make a choice. If we are to fight off an invasion,
we must have two strong praetors. I’d prefer you, but if
you fail on your quest, or don’t come back, or refuse my
offer…Well, I’ll work with Octavian. I mean to save this
camp, Percy Jackson. Things are worse than you realize.”
Percy remembered what Frank said about the monster
attacks getting more frequent. “How bad?”
Reyna’s nails dug into the table. “Even the senate
doesn’t know the whole truth. I’ve asked Octavian not to
share his auguries, or we’d have mass panic. He’s seen a
great army marching south, more than we can possibly
defeat. They’re led by a giant—”
“Alcyoneus?”
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“I don’t think so. If he is truly invulnerable in
Alaska, he’d be foolish to come here himself. It must be
one of his brothers.”
“Great,” Percy said. “So we’ve got two giants to
worry about.”
The praetor nodded. “Lupa and her wolves are trying
to slow them down, but this force is too strong even
for them. The enemy will be here soon—by the Feast of
Fortuna at the very latest.”
Percy shuddered. He’d seen Lupa in action. He
knew all about the wolf goddess and her pack. If this enemy
was too powerful for Lupa, Camp Jupiter didn’t
stand a chance.
Reyna read his expression. “Yes, it’s bad, but not
hopeless.
If you succeed in bringing back our eagle, if you release
Death so we can actually kill our enemies, then we
stand a chance. And there’s one more possibility.…”
Reyna slid the silver ring across the table. “I can’t
give you much help, but your journey will take you close
to Seattle. I’m asking you for a favor, which may also help
you. Find my sister Hylla.”
“Your sister…the one who hates me?”
“Oh, yes,” Reyna agreed. “She would love to kill
you. But show her that ring as a token from me, and she
may help you instead.”
“May?”
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“I can’t speak for her. In fact…” Reyna frowned. “In
fact I haven’t spoken to her in weeks. She’s gone silent.
With these armies passing through—”
“You want me to check on her,” Percy guessed.
“Make sure she’s okay.”
“Partially, yes. I can’t imagine she’s been overcome.
My sister has a powerful force. Her territory is well defended.
But if you can find her, she could offer you valuable
help. It could mean the difference between success and
failure on your quest. And if you tell her what’s happening
here—”
“She might send help?” Percy asked.
Reyna didn’t answer, but Percy could see the desperation
in her eyes. She was terrified, grasping for anything
that could save her camp. No wonder she wanted
Percy’s help. She was the only praetor. The defense of the
camp rested on her shoulders alone.
Percy took the ring. “I’ll find her. Where do I look?
What kind force does she have?”
“Don’t worry. Just go to Seattle. They’ll find you.”
That didn’t sound encouraging, but Percy slipped
the ring onto his leather necklace with his beads and his
probatio tablet. “Wish me luck.”
“Fight well, Percy Jackson,” Reyna said. “And
thank you.”
He could tell the audience was over. Reyna was
having trouble holding herself together, keeping up the
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image of the confident commander. She needed some
time by herself.
But at the door of the principia, Percy couldn’t resist
turning. “How did we destroy your home—that spa
where you lived?”
The metal greyhounds growled. Reyna snapped her
fingers to silence them.
“You destroyed the power of our mistress,” she
said. “You freed some prisoners who took revenge on all
of us who lived on the island. My sister and I…well, we
survived. It was difficult. But in the long run, I think we
are better off away from that place.”
“Still, I’m sorry,” Percy said. “If I hurt you, I’m
sorry.”
Reyna gazed at him for a long time, as if trying to
translate his words. “An apology? Not very Roman at all,
Percy Jackson. You’d make an interesting praetor. I hope
you’ll think about my offer.”
LUNCH FELT LIKE A FUNERAL PARTY. Everybody ate.
People talked in hushed tones. Nobody seemed particularly
happy. The other campers kept glancing over at
Percy like he was the corpse of honor.
Reyna made a brief speech wishing them luck.
Octavian ripped open a Beanie Baby and pronounced
grave omens and hard times ahead, but predicted the
camp would be saved by an unexpected hero (whose initials
were probably OCTAVIAN). Then the other campers
went off to their afternoon classes—gladiator fighting,
Latin lessons, paintball with ghosts, eagle training, and a
dozen other activities that sounded better than a suicide
quest. Percy followed Hazel and Frank to the barracks to
pack.
Percy didn’t have much. He’d cleaned up his backpack
from his trip south and had kept most of his Bargain
Mart supplies.
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He had a fresh pair of jeans and an extra purple T-
shirt from the camp quarter master, plus some nectar,
ambrosia, snacks, a little mortal money, and camping
supplies. At lunch, Reyna had handed him a scroll of introduction
from the praetor and camp senate. Supposedly,
any retired legionnaires they met on the trip
would help them if shown the letter. He also kept his
leather necklace with the beads, the silver ring, and the
probatio tablet, and of course he had Riptide in his
pocket.
He folded his tattered orange T-shirt and left it on
his bunk.
“I’ll be back,” he said. He felt pretty stupid talking
to a T-shirt, but he was really thinking of Annabeth, and
his old life. “I’m not leaving for good. But I have to help
these guys. They took me in. They deserve to survive.”
The T-shirt didn’t answer, thankfully.
One of their roommates, Bobby, gave them a ride
to the border of the valley on Hannibal the elephant.
From the hilltops, Percy could see everything below. The
Little Tiber snaked across golden pastures where the unicorns
were grazing. The temples and forums of New
Rome gleamed in the sunlight. On the Field of Mars, engineers
were hard at work, pulling down the remains of
last night’s fort and setting up barricades for a game of
death ball. A normal day for Camp Jupiter—but on the
northern horizon, storm clouds were gathering. Shadows
moved across the hills, and Percy imagined the face of
Gaea getting closer and closer.
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Work with me for the future, Reyna had said. I intend
to save this camp.
Looking down at the valley, Percy understood why
she cared so much. Even though he was new to Camp
Jupiter, he felt a fierce desire to protect this place. A safe
haven where demigods could build their lives—he wanted
that to be part of his future. Maybe not the way Reyna
imagined, but if he could share this place with
Annabeth…
They got off the elephant. Bobby wished them a
safe journey. Hannibal wrapped the three questers with
his trunk. Then the elephant taxi service headed back into
the valley.
Percy sighed. He turned to Hazel and Frank and
tried to think of something upbeat to say.
A familiar voice said, “IDs, please.”
A statue of Terminus appeared at the summit of the
hill. The god’s marble face frowned irritably. “Well? Come
along!”
“You again?” Percy asked. “I thought you just
guarded the city.”
Terminus huffed. “Glad to see you, too, Mr. Rule
Flouter. Normally, yes, I guard the city, but for international
departures, I like to provide extra security at the
camp borders. You really should’ve allowed two hours before
your planned departure time, you know. But we’ll
have to make do. Now, come over here so I can pat you
down.”
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“But you don’t have—” Percy stopped himself. “Uh,
sure.”
He stood next to the armless statue. Terminus conducted
a rigorous mental pat down.
“You seem to be clean,” Terminus decided. “Do you
have anything to declare?”
“Yes,” Percy said. “I declare this is stupid.”
“Hmph! Probatio tablet: Percy Jackson, Fifth Cohort,
son of Neptune. Fine, go. Hazel Levesque, daughter
of Pluto. Fine. Any foreign currency or, ahem, precious
metals to declare?”
“No,” she muttered.
“Are you sure?” Terminus asked. “Because last
time—”
“No!”
“Well, this is a grumpy bunch,” said the god. “Quest
travelers! Always in a rush. Now, let’s see—Frank Zhang.
Ah! Centurion? Well done, Frank. And that haircut is regulation
perfect. I approve! Off you go, then, Centurion
Zhang. Do you need any directions today?”
“No. No, I guess not.”
“Just down to the BART station,” Terminus said
anyway. “Change trains at Twelfth Street in Oakland. You
want Fruitvale Station. From there, you can walk or take
the bus to Alameda.”
“You guys don’t have a magical BART train or some
thing?” Percy asked.
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“Magic trains!” Terminus scoffed. “You’ll be wanting
your own security lane and a pass to the executive
lounge next. Just travel safely, and watch out for Polybotes.
Talk about scofflaws—bah! I wish I could throttle
him with my bare hands.”
“Wait—who?” Percy asked.
Terminus made a straining expression, like he was
flexing his nonexistent biceps. “Ah, well. Just be careful of
him. I imagine he can smell a son of Neptune a mile away.
Out you go, now. Good luck!”
An invisible force kicked them across the boundary.
When Percy looked back, Terminus was gone. In fact,
the entire valley was gone. The Berkeley Hills seemed to
be free of any Roman camp.
Percy looked at his friends. “Any idea what Terminus
was talking about? Watch out for…Political
something or other?”
“Poh-LIB-uh-tease?” Hazel sounded out the name
carefully. “Never heard of him.”
“Sounds Greek,” Frank said.
“That narrows it down.” Percy sighed. “Well, we
probably just appeared on the smell radar for every monster
within five miles. We’d better get moving.”
It took them two hours to reach the docks in Alameda.
Compared to Percy’s last few months, the trip was easy.
No monsters attacked. Nobody looked at Percy like he
was a homeless wild child.
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Frank had stored his spear, bow, and quiver in a
long bag made for skis. Hazel’s cavalry sword was
wrapped in a bedroll slung on her back. Together the
three of them looked like normal high schoolers on their
way to an overnight trip. They walked to Rockridge Station,
bought their tickets with mortal money, and hopped
on the BART train.
They got off in Oakland. They had to walk through
some rough neighborhoods, but nobody bothered them.
When ever the local gang members came close enough to
look in Percy’s eyes, they quickly veered away. He’d perfected
his wolf stare over the last few months—a look that
said: However bad you think you are, I’m worse. After
strangling sea monsters and running over gorgons in a
police car, Percy wasn’t scared of gangs. Pretty much
nothing in the mortal world scared him anymore.
In the late afternoon, they made it to the Alameda
docks. Percy looked out over San Francisco Bay and
breathed in the salty sea air. Immediately he felt better.
This was his father’s domain. Whatever they faced, he’d
have the upper hand as long as they were at sea.
Dozens of boats were moored at the
docks—everything from fifty-foot yachts to ten-foot fishing
boats. He scanned the slips for some sort of magic
vessel—a trireme, maybe, or a dragon-headed warship
like he’d seen in his dreams.
“Um…you guys know what we’re looking for?”
Hazel and Frank shook their heads.
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“I didn’t even know we had a navy.” Hazel sounded
as if she wished there wasn’t one.
“Oh…” Frank pointed. “You don’t think…?”
At the end of the dock was a tiny boat, like a
dinghy, covered in a purple tarp. Embroidered in faded
gold along the canvas was S.P.Q.R.
Percy’s confidence wavered. “No way.”
He uncovered the boat, his hands working the
knots like he’d been doing it his whole life. Under the tarp
was an old steel rowboat with no oars. The boat had been
painted dark blue at one point, but the hull was so crusted
with tar and salt it looked like one massive nautical
bruise.
On the bow, the name Pax was still readable,
lettered in gold. Painted eyes drooped sadly at the water
level, as if the boat were about to fall asleep. On board
were two benches, some steel wool, an old cooler, and a
mound of frayed rope with one end tied to the mooring.
At the bottom of the boat, aplastic bag and two empty
Coke cans floated in several inches of scummy water.
“Behold,” Frank said. “The mighty Roman navy.”
“There’s got to be a mistake,” Hazel said. “This is a
piece of junk.”
Percy imagined Octavian laughing at them, but he
decided not to let it get him down. The Pax was still a
boat. He jumped aboard, and the hull hummed under his
feet, responding to his presence. He gathered up the
garbage in the cooler and put it on the dock. He willed the
scummy water to flow over the sides and out of the boat.
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Then he pointed at the steel wool and it flew across the
floor, scrubbing and polishing so fast, the steel began to
smoke. When it was done, the boat was clean. Percy pointed
at the rope, and it untied itself from the dock.
No oars, but that didn’t matter. Percy could tell
that the boat was ready to move, just awaiting his
command.
“This’ll do,” he said. “Hop in.”
Hazel and Frank looked a little stunned, but they
climbed aboard. Hazel seemed especially nervous. When
they had settled on the seats, Percy concentrated, and the
boat slipped away from the dock.
Juno was right, you know. The sleepy voice of
Gaea whispered in Percy’s mind, startling him so badly
the boat rocked.You could have chosen a new life in the
sea. You would have been safe from me there. Now it’s
too late. You chose pain and misery. You’re part of my
plan, now—my important little pawn.
“Get off my ship,” Percy growled.
“Uh, what?” Frank asked.
Percy waited, but the voice of Gaea was silent.
“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s see what this rowboat can
do.”
He turned the boat to the north, and in no time
they were speeding along at fifteen knots, heading for the
Golden Gate Bridge.
HAZEL HATED BOATS.
She got seasick so easily, it was more like sea
plague. She hadn’t mentioned this to Percy. She didn’t
want to mess up the quest, but she remembered how horrible
her life had been when she and her mother had
moved to Alaska—no roads. Everywhere they went, they’d
had to take the train or a boat.
She hoped her condition might have improved
since she’d come back from the dead. Obviously not. And
this little boat, the Pax, looked so much like that other
boat they’d had in Alaska. It brought back bad
memories.…
As soon as they left the dock, Hazel’s stomach started
to churn. By the time they passed the piers along the
San Francisco Embarcadero, she felt so woozy she
thought she was hallucinating. They sped by a pack of sea
lions lounging on the docks, and she swore she saw an old
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homeless guy sitting among them. From across the water,
the old man pointed a bony finger at Percy and mouthed
something like Don’t even think about it.
“Did you see that?” Hazel asked.
Percy’s face was red in the sunset. “Yeah. I’ve been
here before. I…I don’t know. I think I was looking for my
girlfriend.”
“Annabeth,” Frank said. “You mean, on your way to
Camp
Jupiter?”
Percy frowned. “No. Before that.” He scanned the
city like he was still looking for Annabeth until they
passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and turned north.
Hazel tried to settle her stomach by thinking of
pleasant things—the euphoria she’d felt last night when
they’d won the war games, riding Hannibal into the enemy
keep, Frank’s sudden transformation into a leader.
He’d looked like a different person when he’d scaled the
walls, calling on the Fifth Cohort to attack. The way he’d
swept the defenders off the battlements…Hazel had never
seen him like that before. She’d been so proud to pin the
centurion’s badge to his shirt.
Then her thoughts turned to Nico. Before they had
left, her brother had pulled her aside to wish her luck.
Hazel hoped he’d stay at Camp Jupiter to help defend it,
but he said he’d be leaving today—heading back to the
Underworld.
“Dad needs all the help he can get,” he said. “The
Fields of Punishment look like a prison riot. The Furies
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can barely keep order. Besides…I’m going to try to track
some of the escaping souls. Maybe I can find the Doors of
Death from the other side.”
“Be careful,” Hazel said. “If Gaea is guarding those
doors—”
“Don’t worry.” Nico smiled. “I know how to stay
hidden. Just take care of yourself. The closer you get to
Alaska…I’m not sure if it’ll make the blackouts better or
worse.”
Take care of myself, Hazel thought bitterly. As if
there was any way the quest would end well for her.
“If we free Thanatos,” Hazel told Nico, “I may never
see you again. Thanatos will send me back to the
Underworld.…”
Nico took her hand. His fingers were so pale, it was
hard to believe Hazel and he shared the same godly
father.
“I wanted to give you a chance at Elysium,” he said.
“That was the best I could do for you. But now, I wish
there was another way. I don’t want to lose my sister.”
He didn’t say the word again, but Hazel knew
that’s what he was thinking. For once, she didn’t feel jealous
of Bianca di Angelo. She just wished that she had
more time with Nico and her friends at camp. She didn’t
want to die a second time.
“Good luck, Hazel,” he said. Then he melted into
the shadows—just like her father had seventy years
before.
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The boat shuddered, jolting Hazel back to the
present. They entered the Pacific currents and skirted the
rocky coastline of Marin County.
Frank held his ski bag across his lap. It passed over
Hazel’s knees like the safety bar on an amusement ride,
which made her think of the time Sammy had taken her
to the carnival during Mardi Gras.…She quickly pushed
that memory aside. She couldn’t risk a blackout.
“You okay?” Frank asked. “You look queasy.”
“Seasickness,” she confessed. “I didn’t think it
would be this bad.”
Frank pouted like it was somehow his fault. He
started digging in his pack. “I’ve got some nectar. And
some crackers. Um, my grandmother says ginger helps…I
don’t have any of that, but—”
“It’s okay.” Hazel mustered a smile. “That’s sweet
of you, though.”
Frank pulled out a saltine. It snapped in his big fingers.
Cracker exploded everywhere.
Hazel laughed. “Gods, Frank.…Sorry. I shouldn’t
laugh.”
“Uh, no problem,” he said sheepishly. “Guess you
don’t want that one.”
Percy wasn’t paying much attention. He kept his
eyes fixed on the shoreline. As they passed Stinson Beach,
he pointed inland, where a single mountain rose above
the green hills.
“That looks familiar,” he said.
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“Mount Tam,” Frank said. “Kids at camp are always
talking about it. Big battle happened on the summit, at
the old Titan base.”
Percy frowned. “Were either of you there?”
“No,” Hazel said. “That was back in August, before
I—um, before I got to camp. Jason told me about it. The
legion destroyed the enemy’s palace and about a million
monsters. Jason had to battle Krios—hand-to-hand com
bat with a Titan, if you can imagine.”
“I can imagine,” Percy muttered.
Hazel wasn’t sure what he meant, but Percy did remind
her of Jason, even though they looked nothing
alike. They had the same aura of quiet power, plus a kind
of sadness, like they’d seen their destiny and knew it was
only a matter of time before they met a monster they
couldn’t beat.
Hazel understood the feeling. She watched the sun
set in the ocean, and she knew she had less than a week to
live. Whether or not their quest succeeded, her journey
would be over by the Feast of Fortuna.
She thought about her first death, and the months
leading up to it—her house in Seward, the six months
she’d spent in Alaska, taking that little boat into Resurrection
Bay at night, visiting that cursed island.
She realized her mistake too late. Her vision went
black, and she slipped back in time.
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Their rental house was a clapboard box suspended on pilings
over the bay. When the train from Anchorage rolled
by, the furniture shook and the pictures rattled on the
walls. At night, Hazel fell asleep to the sound of icy water
lapping against the rocks under the floorboards. The wind
made the building creak and groan.
They had one room, with a hot plate and an icebox
for a kitchen. One corner was curtained off for Hazel,
where she kept her mattress and storage chest. She’d
pinned her drawings and old photos of New Orleans on
the walls, but that only made her homesickness worse.
Her mother was rarely home. She didn’t go by
Queen Marie anymore. She was just Marie, the hired
help. She’d cook and clean all day at the diner on Third
Avenue for fishermen, railroad workers, and the occasional
crew of navy men. She’d come home smelling like
Pine-Sol and fried fish.
At night, Marie Levesque would transform. The
Voice took over, giving Hazel orders, putting her to work
on their horrible project.
Winter was the worst. The Voice stayed longer because
of the constant darkness. The cold was so intense,
Hazel thought she would never be warm again.
When summer came, Hazel couldn’t get enough
sun. Every day of summer vacation, she stayed away from
home as long as she could, but she couldn’t walk around
town. It was a small community. The other kids spread
rumors about her—the witch’s child who lived in the old
shack by the docks. If she came too close, the kids jeered
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at her or threw bottles and rocks. The adults weren’t
much better.
Hazel could’ve made their lives miserable. She
could’ve given them diamonds, pearls, or gold. Up here in
Alaska, gold was easy. There was so much in the hills,
Hazel could’ve buried the town without half trying. But
she didn’t really hate the locals for pushing her away. She
couldn’t blame them.
She spent the day walking the hills. She attracted
ravens. They’d caw at her from the trees and wait for the
shiny things that always appeared in her footsteps. The
curse never seemed to bother them. She saw brown bears,
too, but they kept their distance. When Hazel got thirsty,
she’d find a snowmelt waterfall and drink cold, clean water
until her throat hurt. She’d climb as high as she could
and let the sunshine warm her face.
It wasn’t a bad way to pass the time, but she knew
eventually she’d have to go home.
Sometimes she thought about her father—that
strange pale man in the silver-and-black suit. Hazel
wished he’d come back and protect her from her mother,
maybe use his powers to get rid of that awful Voice. If he
was a god, he should be able to do that.
She looked up at the ravens and imagined they
were his emissaries. Their eyes were dark and maniacal,
like his. She wondered if they reported her movements to
her father.
But Pluto had warned her mother about Alaska. It
was a land beyond the gods. He couldn’t protect them
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here. If he was watching Hazel, he didn’t speak to her.
She often wondered if she had imagined him. Her old life
seemed as distant as the radio programs she listened to,
or President Roosevelt talking about the war. Occasionally
the locals would discuss the Japanese and some fighting
on the outer islands of Alaska, but even that seemed
far away—not nearly as scary as Hazel’s problem.
One day in midsummer, she stayed out later than
usual, chasing a horse.
She’d seen it first when she had heard a crunching
sound behind her. She turned and saw a gorgeous tan
roan stallion with a black mane—just like the one she’d
ridden her last day in New Orleans, when Sammy had
taken her to the stables. It could’ve been the same horse,
though that was impossible. It was eating something off
the path, and for a second, Hazel had the crazy impression
it was munching one of the gold nuggets that always
appeared in her wake.
“Hey, fella,” she called.
The horse looked at her warily.
Hazel figured it must belong to someone. It was too
well groomed, its coat too sleek for a wild horse. If she
could get close enough…What? She could find its owner?
Return it?
No, she thought. I just want to ride again.
She got within ten feet, and the horse bolted. She
spent the rest of the afternoon trying to catch it—getting
maddeningly close before it ran away again.
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She lost track of time, which was easy to do with
the summer sun staying up so long. Finally she stopped at
a creek for a drink and looked at the sky, thinking it must
be around three in the afternoon. Then she heard a train
whistle from down in the valley. She realized it had to be
the evening run to Anchorage, which meant it was ten at
night.
She glared at the horse, grazing peacefully across
the creek. “Are you trying to get me in trouble?”
The horse whinnied. Then…Hazel must’ve imagined
it. The horse sped away in a blur of black and tan,
faster than forked lightning—almost too quick for her
eyes to register. Hazel didn’t understand how, but the
horse was definitely gone.
She stared at the spot where the horse had stood. A
wisp of steam curled from the ground.
The train whistle echoed through the hills again,
and she realized how much trouble she was in. She ran
for home.
Her mother wasn’t there. For a second Hazel felt
relieved. Maybe her mom had had to work late. Maybe tonight
they wouldn’t have to make the journey.
Then she saw the wreckage. Hazel’s curtain was
pulled down. Her storage chest was open and her few
clothes strewn across the floor. Her mattress had been
shredded as if a lion had attacked it. Worst of all, her
drawing pad was ripped to pieces. Her colored pencils
were all broken. Pluto’s birthday gift, Hazel’s only luxury,
had been destroyed. Pinned to the wall was a note in red
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on the last piece of drawing paper, in writing that was not
her mother’s: Wicked girl. I’m waiting at the island.
Don’t disappoint me. Hazel sobbed in despair. She
wanted to ignore the summons. She wanted to run away,
but there was nowhere to go. Besides, her mother was
trapped. The Voice had promised that they were almost
done with their task. If Hazel kept helping, her mother
would be freed. Hazel didn’t trust the Voice, but she
didn’t see any other option.
She took the rowboat—a little skiff her mother had
bought with a few gold nuggets from a fisherman, who
had a tragic accident with his nets the next day. They had
only one boat, but Hazel’s mother seemed capable on occasion
of reaching the island without any transportation.
Hazel had learned not to ask about that.
Even in midsummer, chunks of ice swirled in Resurrection
Bay. Seals glided by her boat, looking at Hazel
hopefully, sniffing for fish scraps. In the middle of the
bay, the glistening back of a whale raked the surface.
As always, the rocking of the boat made her stomach
queasy. She stopped once to be sick over the side. The
sun was finally going down over the mountains, turning
the sky blood red.
She rowed toward the bay’s mouth. After several
minutes, she turned and looked ahead. Right in front of
her, out of the fog, the island materialized—an acre of
pine trees, boulders, and snow with a black sand beach.
If the island had a name, she didn’t know it. Once
Hazel had made the mistake of asking the townsfolk, but
they had stared at her like she was crazy.
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“Ain’t no island there,” said one old fisherman, “or
my boat would’ve run into it a thousand times.”
Hazel was about fifty yards from the shore when a
raven landed on the boat’s stern. It was a greasy black
bird almost as large as an eagle, with a jagged beak like an
obsidian knife.
Its eyes glittered with intelligence, so Hazel wasn’t
much surprised when it talked.
“Tonight,” it croaked. “The last night.”
Hazel let the oars rest. She tried to decide if the
raven was warning her, or advising her, or making a
promise.
“Are you from my father?” she asked.
The raven tilted its head. “The last night. Tonight.”
It pecked at the boat’s prow and flew toward the
island.
The last night, Hazel told herself. She decided to
take it as a promise. No matter what she tells me, I will
make this the last night.
That gave her enough strength to row on. The boat
slid ashore, cracking through a fine layer of ice and black
silt.
Over the months, Hazel and her mother had worn a
path from the beach into the woods. She hiked inland,
careful to stick to the trail. The island was full of dangers,
both natural and magical. Bears rustled in the undergrowth.
Glowing white spirits, vaguely human, drifted
through the trees. Hazel didn’t know what they were, but
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she knew they were watching her, hoping she’d stray into
their clutches.
At the center of the island, two massive black
boulders formed the entrance to a tunnel. Hazel made her
way into the cavern she called the Heart of the Earth.
It was the only truly warm place Hazel had found
since moving to Alaska. The air smelled of freshly turned
soil. The sweet, moist heat made Hazel feel drowsy, but
she fought to stay awake. She imagined that if she fell
asleep here, her body would sink into the earthen floor
and turn to mulch.
The cave was as large as a church sanctuary, like
the St. Louis Cathedral back home on Jackson Square.
The walls glowed with luminescent mosses—green, red,
and purple. The whole chamber thrummed with energy,
an echoing boom, boom, boom that reminded Hazel of a
heartbeat. Perhaps it was just the sea’s waves battering
the island, but Hazel didn’t think so. This place was alive.
The earth was asleep, but it pulsated with power. Its
dreams were so malicious, so fitful, that Hazel felt herself
losing her grip on reality.
Gaea wanted to consume her identity, just as she’d
overwhelmed Hazel’s mother. She wanted to consume
every human, god, and demigod that dared to walk across
her surface.
You all belong to me, Gaea murmured like a lullaby.
Surrender. Return to the earth.
No, Hazel thought. I’m Hazel Levesque. You can’t
have me.
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Marie Levesque stood over the pit. In six months,
her hair had turned as gray as lint. She’d lost weight. Her
hands were gnarled from hard work. She wore snow boots
and waders and a stained white shirt from the diner. She
never would have been mistaken for a queen.
“It’s too late.” Her mother’s frail voice echoed
through the cavern. Hazel realized with a shock that it
was her voice—not Gaea’s.
“Mother?”
Marie turned. Her eyes were open. She was awake
and conscious. This should have made Hazel feel relieved,
but it made her nervous. The Voice had never relinquished
control while they were on the island.
“What have I done?” her mother asked helplessly.
“Oh, Hazel, what did I do to you?”
She stared in horror at the thing in the pit.
For months they’d been coming here, four or five
nights a week as the Voice required. Hazel had cried,
she’d collapsed with exhaustion, she’d pleaded, she’d given
in to despair. But the Voice that controlled her mother
had urged her on relentlessly. Bring valuables from the
earth. Use your powers, child. Bring my most valuable
possession to me.
At first, her efforts had brought only scorn. The fissure
in the earth had filled with gold and precious stones,
bubbling in a thick soup of petroleum. It looked like a
dragon’s treasure dumped in a tar pit. Then, slowly, a
rock spire began to grow like a massive tulip bulb. It
emerged so gradually, night after night, that Hazel had
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trouble judging its progress. Often she concentrated all
night on raising it, until her mind and soul were exhausted,
but she didn’t notice any difference. Yet the spire
did grow. Now Hazel could see how much she’d accomplished.
The thing was two stories high, a swirl of rocky
tendrils jutting like a spear tip from the oily morass. Inside,
something glowed with heat. Hazel couldn’t see it
clearly, but she knew what was happening. A body was
forming out of silver and gold, with oil for blood and raw
diamonds for a heart. Hazel was resurrecting the son of
Gaea. He was almost ready to wake.
Her mother fell to her knees and wept. “I’m sorry,
Hazel. I’m so sorry.” She looked helpless and alone, horribly
sad. Hazel should have been furious. Sorry? She’d
lived in fear of her mother for years. She’d been scolded
and blamed for her mother’s unfortunate life. She’d been
treated like a freak, dragged away from her home in New
Orleans to this cold wilderness, and worked like a slave by
a merciless evil goddess. Sorry didn’t cut it. She should
have despised her mother.
But she couldn’t make herself feel angry.
Hazel knelt and put her arm around her mother.
There was hardly anything left of her—just skin and
bones and stained work clothes. Even in the warm cave,
she was trembling.
“What can we do?” Hazel said. “Tell me how to stop
it.”
Her mother shook her head. “She let me go. She
knows it’s too late. There’s nothing we can do.”
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“She…the Voice?” Hazel was afraid to get her hopes
up, but if her mother was really freed, then nothing else
mattered. They could get out of here. They could run
away, back to New Orleans. “Is she gone?”
Her mother glanced fearfully around the cave. “No,
she’s here. There’s only one more thing she needs from
me. For that, she needs my free will.”
Hazel didn’t like the sound of that.
“Let’s get out of here,” she urged. “That thing in the
rock…it’s going to hatch.”
“Soon,” her mother agreed. She looked at Hazel so
tenderly.…Hazel couldn’t remember the last time she’d
seen that kind of affection in her mother’s eyes. She felt a
sob building in her chest.
“Pluto warned me,” her mother said. “He told me
my wish was too dangerous.”
“Your—your wish?”
“All the wealth under the earth,” she said. “He controlled
it. I wanted it. I was so tired of being poor, Hazel.
So tired. First I summoned him…just to see if I could. I
never thought the old gris-gris spell would work on a
god. But he courted me, told me I was brave and beautiful.…”
She stared at her bent, calloused hands. “When you
were born, he was so pleased and proud. He promised me
anything. He swore on the River Styx. I asked for all the
riches he had. He warned me the greediest wishes cause
the greatest sorrows. But I insisted. I imagined living like
a queen—the wife of a god! And you…you received the
curse.”
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Hazel felt as if she were expanding to the breaking
point, just like that spire in the pit. Her misery would
soon become too great to hold inside, and her skin would
shatter. “That’s why I can find things under the earth?”
“And why they bring only sorrow.” Her mother gestured
listlessly around the cavern. “That’s how she found
me, how she was able to control me. I was angry with
your father. I blamed him for my problems. I blamed you.
I was so bitter, I listened to Gaea’s voice. I was a fool.”
“There’s got to be something we can do,” Hazel
said. “Tell me how to stop her.”
The ground trembled. Gaea’s disembodied voice
echoed through the cave.
My eldest rises, she said, the most precious thing
in the earth —and you have brought him from the
depths, Hazel Levesque. You have made him anew. His
awakening cannot be stopped. Only one thing remains.
Hazel clenched her fists. She was terrified, but now
that her mother was free, she felt like she could confront
her enemy at last. This creature, this evil goddess, had
ruined their lives. Hazel wasn’t going to let her win.
“I won’t help you anymore!” she yelled.
But I am done with your help, girl. I brought you
here for one reason only. Your mother required…
incentive.
Hazel’s throat constricted. “Mother?”
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“I’m sorry, Hazel. If you can forgive me,
please—know that it was only because I loved you. She
promised to let you live if—”
“If you sacrifice yourself,” Hazel said, realizing the
truth. “She needs you to give your life willingly to raise
that—that thing.”
Alcyoneus, Gaea said. Eldest of the giants. He must
rise first, and this will be his new homeland—far from
the gods. He will walk these icy mountains and forests.
He will raise an army of monsters. While the gods are
divided, fighting each other in this mortal World War, he
will send forth his armies to destroy Olympus.
The earth goddess’s dreams were so powerful, they
cast shadows across the cave walls—ghastly shifting images
of Nazi armies raging across Europe, Japanese
planes destroying American cities. Hazel finally understood.
The gods of Olympus would take sides in the battle
as they always did in human wars. While the gods fought
each other to a bloody standstill, an army of monsters
would rise in the north. Alcyoneus would revive his brother
giants and send them forth to conquer the world. The
weakened gods would fall. The mortal conflict would rage
for decades until all civilization was swept away, and the
earth goddess awakened fully. Gaea would rule forever.
All this, the goddess purred, because your mother
was greedy and cursed you with the gift of finding
riches. In my sleeping state, I would have needed decades
more, perhaps even centuries, before I found the
power to resurrect Alcyoneus myself. But now he will
wake, and soon, so shall I!
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With terrible certainty, Hazel knew what would
happen next. The only thing Gaea needed was a willing
sacrifice—a soul to be consumed for Alcyoneus to awaken.
Her mother would step into the fissure and touch that
horrible spire—and she would be absorbed.
“Hazel, go.” Her mother rose unsteadily. “She’ll let
you live, but you must hurry.”
Hazel believed it. That was the most horrible thing.
Gaea would honor the bargain and let Hazel live. Hazel
would survive to see the end of the world, knowing that
she’d caused it.
“No.” Hazel made her decision. “I won’t live. Not
for that.”
She reached deep into her soul. She called on her
father, the Lord of the Underworld, and summoned all
the riches that lay in his vast realm. The cavern shook.
Around the spire of Alcyoneus, oil bubbled, then
churned and erupted like a boiling cauldron.
Don’t be foolish, Gaea said, but Hazel detected concern
in her tone, maybe even fear. You will destroy yourself
for nothing! Your mother will still die!
Hazel almost wavered. She remembered her father’s
promise: someday her curse would be washed away; a
descendant of Neptune would bring her peace. He’d even
said she might find a horse of her own. Maybe that
strange stallion in the hills was meant for her. But none of
that would happen if she died now. She’d never see
Sammy again, or return to New Orleans. Her life would
be thirteen short, bitter years with an unhappy ending.
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She met her mother’s eyes. For once, her mother
didn’t look sad or angry. Her eyes shone with pride.
“You were my gift, Hazel,” she said. “My most precious
gift. I was foolish to think I needed anything else.”
She kissed Hazel’s forehead and held her close. Her
warmth gave Hazel the courage to continue. They would
die, but not as sacrifices to Gaea. Instinctively Hazel knew
that their final act would reject Gaea’s power. Their souls
would go to the Underworld, and Alcyoneus would not
rise—at least not yet.
Hazel summoned the last of her willpower. The air
turned searing hot. The spire began to sink. Jewels and
chunks of gold shot from the fissure with such force, they
cracked the cavern walls and sent shrapnel flying, stinging
Hazel’s skin through her jacket.
Stop this! Gaea demanded. You cannot prevent his
rise. At best, you will delay him—a few decades. Half a
century. Would you trade your lives for that?
Hazel gave her an answer.
The last night, the raven had said.
The fissure exploded. The roof crumbled. Hazel
sank into her mother’s arms, into the darkness, as oil
filled her lungs and the island collapsed into the bay.
“HAZEL!” FRANK SHOOK HER ARMS, sounding panicked.
“Come on, please! Wake up!”
She opened her eyes. The night sky blazed with
stars. The rocking of the boat was gone. She was lying on
solid ground, her bundled sword and pack beside her.
She sat up groggily, her head spinning. They were
on a cliff overlooking a beach. About a hundred feet away,
the ocean glinted in the moonlight. The surf washed
gently against the stern of their beached boat. To her
right, hugging the edge of the cliff, was a building like a
small church with a search light in the steeple. A lighthouse,
Hazel guessed. Behind them, fields of tall grass
rustled in the wind.
“Where are we?” she asked.
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Frank exhaled. “Thank the gods you’re awake!
We’re in Mendocino, about a hundred and fifty miles
north of the Golden Gate.”
“A hundred and fifty miles?” Hazel groaned. “I’ve
been out that long?”
Percy knelt beside her, the sea wind sweeping his
hair. He put his hand on her forehead as if checking for a
fever. “We couldn’t wake you. Finally we decided to bring
you ashore. We thought maybe the seasickness—”
“It wasn’t seasickness.” She took a deep breath. She
couldn’t hide the truth from them anymore. She remembered
what Nico had said: If a flashback like that
happens when you’re in combat ...
“I—I haven’t been honest with you,” she said.
“What happened was a blackout. I have them once in a
while.”
“A blackout?” Frank took Hazel’s hand, which
startled her…though pleasantly so. “Is it medical? Why
haven’t I noticed before?”
“I try to hide it,” she admitted. “I’ve been lucky so
far, but it’s getting worse. It’s not medical…not really.
Nico says it’s a side effect from my past, from where he
found me.”
Percy’s intense green eyes were hard to read. She
couldn’t tell whether he was concerned or wary.
“Where exactly did Nico find you?” he asked.
Hazel’s tongue felt like cotton. She was afraid if she
started talking, she’d slip back into the past, but they
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deserved to know. If she failed them on this quest, zonked
out when they needed her most…she couldn’t bear that
idea.
“I’ll explain,” she promised. She clawed through
her pack. Stupidly, she’d forgotten to bring a water bottle.
“Is…is there anything to drink?”
“Yeah.” Percy muttered a curse in Greek. “That was
dumb.
I left my supplies down at the boat.”
Hazel felt bad asking them to take care of her, but
she’d woken up parched and exhausted, as if she’d lived
the last few hours in both the past and the present. She
shouldered her pack and sword. “Never mind. I can
walk.…”
“Don’t even think about it,” Frank said. “Not until
you’ve had some food and water. I’ll get the supplies.”
“No, I’ll go.” Percy glanced at Frank’s hand on
Hazel’s. Then he scanned the horizon as if he sensed
trouble, but there was nothing to see—just the lighthouse
and the field of grass stretching inland. “You two stay
here. I’ll be right back.”
“You sure?” Hazel said feebly. “I don’t want you
to—”
“It’s fine,” said Percy. “Frank, just keep your eyes
open. Something about this place…I don’t know.”
“I’ll keep her safe,” Frank promised.
Percy dashed off.
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Once they were alone, Frank seemed to realize he
was still holding Hazel’s hand. He cleared his throat and
let go.
“I, um…I think I understand your blackouts,” he
said. “And where you come from.”
Her heartbeat stumbled. “You do?”
“You seem so different from other girls I’ve met.”
He blinked, then rushed on. “Not like…bad different. Just
the way you talk. The things that surprise you—like songs,
or
TV shows, or slang people use. You talk about your
life like it happened a long time ago. You were born in a
different time, weren’t you? You came from the
Underworld.”
Hazel wanted to cry—not because she was sad, but
because it was such a relief to hear someone say the truth.
Frank didn’t act revolted or scared. He didn’t look at her
as if she were a ghost or some awful undead zombie.
“Frank, I—”
“We’ll figure it out,” he promised. “You’re alive
now. We’re going to keep you that way.”
The grass rustled behind them. Hazel’s eyes stung
in the cold wind.
“I don’t deserve a friend like you,” she said. “You
don’t know what I am…what I’ve done.”
“Stop that.” Frank scowled. “You’re great! Besides,
you’re not the only one with secrets.”
Hazel stared at him. “I’m not?”
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Frank started to say something. Then he tensed.
“What?” Hazel asked.
“The wind’s stopped.”
She looked around and noticed he was right. The
air had become perfectly still.
“So?” she asked.
Frank swallowed. “So why is the grass still
moving?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Hazel saw dark shapes
ripple through the field.
“Hazel!” Frank tried to grab her arms, but it was
too late.
Something knocked him backward. Then a force
like agrassy hurricane wrapped around Hazel and
dragged her intothe fields.
HAZEL WAS AN EXPERT ON WEIRD. She’d seen her
mother possessed by an earth goddess. She’d created a giant
out of gold. She’d destroyed an island, died, and come
back from the Underworld.
But getting kidnapped by a field of grass? That was
new.
She felt as if she were trapped in a funnel cloud of
plants. She’d heard of modern-day singers jumping into
crowds of fans and getting passed overhead by thousands
of hands. She imagined this was similar—only she was
moving a thousand times faster, and the grass blades weren’t
adoring fans.
She couldn’t sit up. She couldn’t touch the ground.
Her sword was still in her bedroll, strapped to her back,
but she couldn’t reach it. The plants kept her off balance,
tossing her around, slicing her face and arms. She could
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barely make out the stars through the tumble of green,
yellow, and black.
Frank’s shouting faded into the distance.
It was hard to think clearly, but Hazel knew one
thing: She was moving fast. Wherever she was being
taken, she’d soon be too far away for her friends to find
her.
She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the tumbling
and tossing. She sent her thoughts into the earth below
her. Gold, silver—she’d settle for anything that might
disrupt her kidnappers.
She felt nothing. Riches under the earth—zero.
She was about to despair when she felt a huge cold
spot pass beneath her. She locked onto it with all her concentration,
dropping a mental anchor. Suddenly the
ground rumbled. The swirl of plants released her and she
was thrown upward like a catapult projectile.
Momentarily weightless, she opened her eyes. She
twisted her body in midair. The ground was about twenty
feet below her. Then she was falling. Her combat training
kicked in. She’d practiced dropping from giant eagles before.
She tucked into a roll, turned the impact into a
somersault, and came up standing.
She unslung her bedroll and drew her sword. A few
yards to her left, an outcropping of rock the size of a garage
jutted from the sea of grass. Hazel realized it was her
anchor. She’d caused the rock to appear.
The grass rippled around it. Angry voices hissed in
dismay at the massive clump of stone that had broken
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their progress. Before they could regroup, Hazel ran to
the rock and clambered to the top.
The grass swayed and rustled around her like the
tentacles of a gigantic undersea anemone. Hazel could
sense her kidnappers’ frustration.
“Can’t grow on this, can you?” she yelled. “Go away,
you bunch of weeds! Leave me alone!”
“Schist,” said an angry voice from the grass.
Hazel raised her eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
“Schist! Big pile of schist!”
A nun at St. Agnes Academy had once washed
Hazel’s mouth with lye soap for saying something very
similar, sos he wasn’t sure how to respond. Then, all
around her rock island, the kidnappers materialized from
the grass. At first glance they looked like Valentine angels—
a dozen chubby little Cupid babies. As they stepped
closer, Hazel realized they were neither cute nor angelic.
They were the size of toddlers, with rolls of baby
fat, but their skin had a strange greenish hue, as if chlorophyll
ran through their veins. They had dry, brittle wings
like corn-husks, and tufts of white hair like corn silk.
Their faces were haggard, pitted with kernels of grain.
Their eyes were solid green, and their teeth were canine
fangs.
The largest creature stepped forward. He wore a
yellow loincloth, and his hair was spiky, like the bristles
on a stalk of wheat. He hissed at Hazel and waddled back
and forth so quickly, she was afraid his loincloth might
fall off.
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“Hate this schist!” the creature complained.
“Wheat cannot grow!”
“Sorghum cannot grow!” another piped up.
“Barley!” yelled a third. “Barley cannot grow. Curse
this schist!”
Hazel’s knees wobbled. The little creatures might
have been funny if they weren’t surrounding her, staring
up at her with those pointed teeth and hungry green eyes.
They were like Cupid piranhas.
“Y-you mean the rock?” she managed. “This rock is
called schist?”
“Yes, greenstone! Schist!” the first creature yelled.
“Nasty rock.”
Hazel began to understand how she’d summoned
it. “It’s a precious stone. It’s valuable?”
“Bah!” said the one in the yellow loincloth. “Foolish
native people made jewelry from it, yes. Valuable? Maybe.
Not as good as wheat.”
“Or sorghum!”
“Or barley!”
The others chimed in, calling out different types of
grain. They circled the rock, making no effort to climb
it—at least not yet. If they decided to swarm her, there
was no way she could fend off all of them.
“You’re Gaea’s servants,” she guessed, just to keep
them talking. Maybe Percy and Frank weren’t too far
away. Maybe they’d be able to see her, standing so tall
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above the fields. She wished that her sword glowed like
Percy’s.
The yellow-diapered Cupid snarled. “We are the
karpoi,spirits of the grain. Children of the Earth Mother,
yes! We have been her attendants since forever. Before
nasty humans cultivated us, we were wild. We will be
again. Wheat will destroy all!”
“No, sorghum will rule!”
“Barley shall dominate!”
The others joined in, each karpos cheering for his
own variety.
“Right.” Hazel swallowed her revulsion. “So you’re
Wheat, then—you in the yellow, um, britches.”
“Hmmmm,” said Wheat. “Come down from your
schist, demigod. We must take you to our mistress’s
army. They will reward us. They will kill you slowly!”
“Tempting,” Hazel said, “but no thanks.”
“I will give you wheat!” said Wheat, as if this were a
very fine offer in exchange for her life. “So much wheat!”
Hazel tried to think. How far had she been carried?
How long would it take her friends to find her? The karpoi
were getting bolder, approaching the rock in twos and
threes, scratching at the schist to see if it would hurt
them.
“Before I get down…” She raised her voice, hoping
it would carry over the fields. “Um, explain something to
me, would you? If you’re grain spirits, shouldn’t you be
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on the gods’ side? Isn’t the goddess of agriculture
Ceres—”
“Evil name!” Barley wailed.
“Cultivates us!” Sorghum spat. “Makes us grow in
disgusting rows. Lets humans harvest us. Pah! When
Gaea is mistress of the world again, we will grow wild,
yes!”
“Well, naturally,” Hazel said. “So this army of hers,
where you’re taking me in exchange for wheat—”
“Or barley,” Barley offered.
“Yeah,” Hazel agreed. “This army is where, now?”
“Just over the ridge!” Sorghum clapped his hands
excitedly. “The Earth Mother—oh, yes!—she told us:
‘Look for the daughter of Pluto who lives again. Find her!
Bring her alive! I have many tortures planned for her.’
The giant Polybotes will reward us for your life! Then we
will march south to destroy the Romans. We can’t be
killed, you know. But you can, yes.”
“That’s wonderful.” Hazel tried to sound enthusiastic.
It wasn’t easy, knowing Gaea had special revenge
planned for her. “So you—you can’t be killed because Alcyoneus
has captured Death, is that it?”
“Exactly!” Barley said.
“And he’s keeping him chained in Alaska,” Hazel
said, “at…let’s see, what’s the name of that place?”
Sorghum started to answer, but Wheat flew at him
and knocked him down. The karpoi began to fight, dissolving
into funnel clouds of grain. Hazel considered
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making a run for it. Then Wheat re-formed, holding
Sorghum in a headlock. “Stop!” he yelled at the others.
“Multigrain fighting is not allowed!”
The karpoi solidified into chubby Cupid piranhas
again.
Wheat pushed Sorghum away.
“Oh, clever demigod,” he said. “Trying to trick us
into giving secrets. No, you’ll never find the lair of
Alcyoneus.”
“I already know where it is,” she said with false
confidence. “He’s on the island in Resurrection Bay.”
“Ha!” Wheat sneered. “That place sank beneath the
waves long ago. You should know that! Gaea hates you for
it. When you thwarted her plans, she was forced to sleep
again. Decades and decades! Alcyoneus—not until the
dark times was he able to rise.”
“The nineteen-eighties,” Barley agreed. “Horrible!
Horrible!”
“Yes,” Wheat said. “And our mistress still sleeps.
Alcyoneus was forced to bide his time in the north, waiting,
planning. Only now does Gaea begin to stir. Oh, but
she remembers you, and so does her son!”
Sorghum cackled with glee. “You will never find the
prison of Thanatos. All of Alaska is the giant’s home. He
could be keeping Death anywhere! Years it would take
you to find him, and your poor camp has only days. Better
you surrender. We will give you grain. So much grain.”
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Hazel’s sword felt heavy. She’d dreaded returning
to Alaska, but at least she’d had an idea where to start
looking for Thanatos. She’d assumed that the island
where she had died hadn’t been completely destroyed, or
possibly had risen again when Alcyoneus woke. She had
hoped that his base would be there. But if the island was
really gone, she had no idea how to find the giant. Alaska
was huge. They could search for decades and never find
him.
“Yes,” Wheat said, sensing her anguish. “Give up.”
Hazel gripped her spatha. “Never!” She raised her
voice again, hoping it would somehow reach her friends.
“If I have to destroy you all, I will. I am the daughter of
Pluto!”
The karpoi advanced. They gripped the rock, hissing
as if it were scalding hot, but they began to climb.
“Now you will die,” Wheat promised, gnashing his
teeth. “You will feel the wrath of grain!”
Suddenly there was a whistling sound. Wheat’s
snarl froze. He looked down at the golden arrow that had
just pierced his chest. Then he dissolved into pieces of
Chex Mix.
FOR A HEARTBEAT, HAZEL WAS just as stunned as the
karpoi.Then Frank and Percy burst into the open and
began to massacre every source of fiber they could find.
Frank shot an arrow through Barley, who crumbled into
seeds. Percy slashed Riptide through Sorghum and
charged toward Millet and Oats. Hazel jumped down and
joined the fight.
Within minutes, the karpoi had been reduced to
piles of seeds and various breakfast cereals. Wheat started
to re-form, but Percy pulled a lighter from his pack
and sparked a flame.
“Try it,” he warned, “and I’ll set this whole field on
fire. Stay dead. Stay away from us, or the grass gets it!”
Frank winced like the flame terrified him. Hazel
didn’t understand why, but she shouted at the grain piles
anyway: “He’ll do it! He’s crazy!”
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The remnants of the karpoi scattered in the wind.
Frank climbed the rock and watched them go.
Percy extinguished his lighter and grinned at
Hazel.
“Thanks for yelling. We wouldn’t have found you
otherwise.
How’d you hold them off so long?”
She pointed to the rock. “A big pile of schist.”
“Excuse me?”
“Guys,” Frank called from the top of the rock. “You
need to see this.”
Percy and Hazel climbed up to join him. As soon as
Hazel saw what he was looking at, she inhaled sharply.
“Percy, no light! Put up your sword!”
“Schist!” He touched the sword tip, and Riptide
shrank back into a pen.
Down below them, an army was on the move.
The field dropped into a shallow ravine, where a
country road wound north and south. On the opposite
side of the road, grassy hills stretched to the horizon,
empty of civilization except for one darkened convenience
store at the top of the nearest rise.
The whole ravine was full of monsters—column
after column marching south, so many and so close,
Hazel was amazed they hadn’t heard her shouting.
She, Frank, and Percy crouched against the rock.
They watched in disbelief as several dozen large, hairy
humanoids passed by, dressed in tattered bits of armor
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and animal fur. The creatures had six arms each, three
sprouting on either side, so they looked like cavemen
evolved from insects.
“Gegenes,” Hazel whispered. “The Earthborn.”
“You’ve fought them before?” Percy asked.
She shook her head. “Just heard about them in
monster class at camp.” She’d never liked monster
class—reading Pliny the Elder and those other musty authors
who described legendary monsters from the edges
of the Roman Empire. Hazel believed in monsters, but
some of the descriptions were so wild, she had thought
they must be just ridiculous rumors.
Only now, a whole army of those rumors was
marching by.
“The Earthborn fought the Argonauts,” she murmured.
“And those things behind them—”
“Centaurs,” Percy said. “But…that’s not right. Centaurs
are good guys.”
Frank made a choking sound. “That’s not what we
were taught at camp. Centaurs are crazy, always getting
drunk and killing heroes.”
Hazel watched as the horse-men cantered past.
They were human from the waist up, palomino from the
waist down. They were dressed in barbarian armor of
hide and bronze, armed with spears and slings. At first,
Hazel thought they were wearing Viking helmets. Then
she realized they had actual horns jutting from their
shaggy hair.
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“Are they supposed to have bull’s horns?” she
asked.
“Maybe they’re a special breed,” Frank said. “Let’s
not ask them, okay?”
Percy gazed farther down the road and his face
went slack. “My gods ... Cyclopes.”
Sure enough, lumbering after the centaurs was a
battalion of one-eyed ogres, both male and female, each
about ten feet tall, wearing armor cobbled out of junkyard
metal. Six of the monsters were yoked like oxen, pulling a
two-story-tall siege tower fitted with a giant scorpion
ballista.
Percy pressed the sides of his head. “Cyclopes. Centaurs.
This is wrong. All wrong.”
The monster army was enough to make anyone
despair, but Hazel realized that something else was going
on with Percy. He looked pale and sickly in the moonlight,
as if his memories were trying to come back, scrambling
his mind in the process.
She glanced at Frank. “We need to get him back to
the boat. The sea will make him feel better.”
“No argument,” Frank said. “There are too many of
them. The camp…we have to warn the camp.”
“They know,” Percy groaned. “Reyna knows.”
A lump formed in Hazel’s throat. There was no way
the legion could fight so many. If they were only a few
hundred miles north of Camp Jupiter, their quest was
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already doomed. They could never make it to Alaska and
back in time.
“Come on,” she urged. “Let’s…”
Then she saw the giant.
When he appeared over the ridge, Hazel couldn’t
quite believe her eyes. He was taller than the siege
tower—thirty feet, at least—with scaly reptilian legs like a
Komodo dragon from the waist down and green-blue armor
from the waist up. His breastplate was shaped like
rows of hungry monstrous faces, their mouths open as if
demanding food. His face was human, but his hair was
wild and green, like a mop of seaweed. As he turned his
head from side to side, snakes dropped from his dreadlocks.
Viper dandruff—gross.
He was armed with a massive trident and a
weighted net.
Just the sight of those weapons made Hazel’s stomach
clench. She’d faced that type of fighter in gladiator
training many times. It was the trickiest, sneakiest, most
evil combat style she knew. This giant was a supersize
retiarius.
“Who is he?” Frank’s voice quivered. “That’s not—”
“Not Alcyoneus,” Hazel said weakly. “One of his
brothers, I think. The one Terminus mentioned. The
grain spirit mentioned him, too. That’s Polybotes.”
She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she could feel
the giant’s aura of power even from here. She remembered
that feeling from the Heart of the Earth as she
had raised Alcyoneus—as if she were standing near a
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powerful magnet, and all the iron in her blood was being
drawn toward it. This giant was another child of Gaea—a
creature of the earth so malevolent and powerful, he radiated
his own gravitational field.
Hazel knew they should leave. Their hiding place
on top of the rock would be in plain sight to a creature
that tall if he chose to look in their direction. But she
sensed something important was about to happen. She
and her friends crept a little farther down the schist and
kept watching.
As the giant got close, a Cyclops woman broke
ranks and ran back to speak with him. She was enormous,
fat, and horribly ugly, wearing a chain-mail dress like a
muumuu—but next to the giant she looked like a child.
She pointed to the closed-up convenience store on
top of the nearest hill and muttered something about
food. The giant snapped back an answer, as if he was annoyed.
The female Cyclopes barked an order to her
kindred, and three of them followed her up the hill.
When they were halfway to the store, a searing
light turned night into day. Hazel was blinded. Below her,
the enemy army dissolved into chaos, monsters screaming
in pain and outrage. Hazel squinted. She felt like
she’d just stepped out of a dark theater into a sunny
afternoon.
“Too pretty!” the Cyclopes shrieked. “Burns our
eye!”
The store on the hill was encased in a rainbow,
closer and brighter than any Hazel had ever seen. The
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light was anchored at the store, shooting up into the
heavens, bathing the countryside in a weird kaleidoscopic
glow.
The lady Cyclops hefted her club and charged at the
store. As she hit the rainbow, her whole body began to
steam. She wailed in agony and dropped her club, retreating
with multicolored blisters all over her arms and face.
“Horrible goddess!” she bellowed at the store.
“Give us snacks!”
The other monsters went crazy, charging the convenience
store, then running away as the rainbow light
burned them. Some threw rocks, spears, swords, and
even pieces of their armor, all of which burned up in
flames of pretty colors.
Finally the giant leader seemed to realize that his
troops were throwing away perfectly good equipment.
“Stop!” he roared.
With some difficulty, he managed to shout and
push and pummel his troops into submission. When
they’d quieted down, he approached the rainbow-shielded
store himself and stalked around the borders of the light.
“Goddess!” he shouted. “Come out and surrender!”
No answer from the store. The rainbow continued
to shimmer.
The giant raised his trident and net. “I am Polybotes!
Kneel before me so I may destroy you quickly.”
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Apparently, no one in the store was impressed. A
tiny dark object came sailing out the window and landed
at the giant’s feet. Polybotes yelled, “Grenade!”
He covered his face. His troops hit the ground.
When the thing did not explode, Polybotes bent
down cautiously and picked it up.
He roared in outrage. “A Ding Dong? You dare insult
me with a Ding Dong?” He threw the cake back at the
shop, and it vaporized in the light.
The monsters got to their feet. Several muttered
hungrily, “Ding Dongs? Where Ding Dongs?”
“Let’s attack,” said the lady Cyclops. “I am hungry.
My boys want snacks!”
“No!” Polybotes said. “We’re already late. Alcyoneus
wants us at the camp in four days’ time. You Cyclopes
move inexcusably slowly. We have no time for
minor goddesses!”
He aimed that last comment at the store, but got no
response.
The lady Cyclops growled. “The camp, yes. Vengeance!
The orange and purple ones destroyed my home.
Now Ma Gasket will destroy theirs! Do you hear me, Leo?
Jason? Piper? I come to annihilate you!”
The other Cyclopes bellowed in approval. The rest
of the monsters joined in.
Hazel’s whole body tingled. She glanced at her
friends. “Jason,” she whispered. “She fought Jason. He
might still be alive.”
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Frank nodded. “Do those other names mean anything
to you?”
Hazel shook her head. She didn’t know any Leo or
Piper at camp. Percy still looked sickly and dazed. If the
names meant anything to him, he didn’t show it.
Hazel pondered what the Cyclops had said: Orange
and purple ones. Purple—obviously the color of Camp
Jupiter. But orange…Percy had shown up in a tattered orange
shirt. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Below them, the army began to march south again,
but the giant Polybotes stood to one side, frowning and
sniffing the air.
“Sea god,” he muttered. To Hazel’s horror, he
turned in their direction. “I smell sea god.”
Percy was shaking. Hazel put her hand on his
shoulder and tried to press him flat against the rock.
The lady Cyclops Ma Gasket snarled. “Of course
you smell sea god! The sea is right over there!”
“More than that,” Polybotes insisted. “I was born to
destroy Neptune. I can sense…” He frowned, turning his
head and shaking out a few more snakes.
“Do we march or sniff the air?” Ma Gasket scolded.
“I don’t get Ding Dongs, you don’t get sea god!”
Polybotes growled. “Very well. March! March!” He
took one last look at the rainbow-encased store, then
raked his fingers through his hair. He brought out three
snakes that seemed larger than the rest, with white markings
around their necks. “A gift, goddess! My name,
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Polybotes, means ‘Many-to-Feed!’ Here are some hungry
mouths for you. See if your store gets many customers
with these sentries outside.”
He laughed wickedly and threw the snakes into the
tall grass on the hillside.
Then he marched south, his massive Komodo legs
shaking the earth. Gradually, the last column of monsters
passed over the hills and disappeared into the night.
Once they were gone, the blinding rainbow shut off
like a spotlight.
Hazel, Frank, and Percy were left alone in the dark,
staring across the road at a closed-up convenience store.
“That was different,” Frank muttered.
Percy shuddered violently. Hazel knew he needed
help, or rest, or something. Seeing that army seemed to
have triggered some kind of memory, leaving him shell-
shocked. They should get him back to the boat.
On the other hand, a huge stretch of grassland lay
between them and the beach. Hazel got the feeling the
karpoi wouldn’t stay away forever. She didn’t like the idea
of the three of them making their way back to the boat in
the middle of the night. And she couldn’t shake the
dreadful feeling that if she hadn’t summoned that schist,
she’d be a captive of the giant right now.
“Let’s go to the store,” she said. “If there’s a goddess
inside, maybe she can help us.”
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“Except a bunch of snake things are guarding the
hill now,” Frank said. “And that burning rainbow might
comeback.”
They both looked at Percy, who was shaking like he
had hypothermia.
“We’ve got to try,” Hazel said.
Frank nodded grimly. “Well…any goddess who
throws a Ding Dong at a giant can’t be all bad. Let’s go.”
FRANK HATED DING DONGS. He hated snakes. And he
hated his life. Not necessarily in that order.
As he trudged up the hill, he wished that he could
pass out like Hazel—just go into a trance and experience
some other time, like before he got drafted for this insane
quest, before he found out his dad was a godly drill sergeant
with an ego problem.
His bow and spear slapped against his back. He
hated the spear, too. The moment he got it, he silently
swore he’d never use it. A real man’s weapon—Mars was
a moron.
Maybe there had been a mix-up. Wasn’t there some
sort of DNA test for gods’ kids? Perhaps the godly nursery
had accidentally switched Frank with one of Mars’s buff
little bully babies. No way would Frank’s mother have
gotten involved with that blustering war god.
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She was a natural warrior, Grandmother’s voice
argued.
It is no surprise a god would fall in love with her,
given our family. Ancient blood. The blood of princes
and heroes.
Frank shook the thought out of his head. He was no
prince or hero. He was a lactose-intolerant klutz, who
couldn’t even protect his friend from getting kidnapped
by wheat.
His new medals felt cold against his chest: the centurion’s
crescent, the Mural Crown. He should’ve been
proud of them, but he felt like he’d only gotten them because
his dad had bullied Reyna.
Frank didn’t know how his friends could stand to
be around him. Percy had made it clear that he hated
Mars, and Frank couldn’t blame him. Hazel kept watching
Frank out of the corner of her eye, like she was afraid
he might turn into a muscle-bound freak.
Frank looked down at his body and sighed. Correction:
even more of a muscle-bound freak. If Alaska really
was a land beyond the gods, Frank might stay there. He
wasn’t sure he had anything to return to.
Don’t whine, his grandmother would say. Zhang
men do not whine.
She was right. Frank had a job to do. He had to
complete this impossible quest, which at the moment
meant reaching the convenience store alive.
As they got closer, Frank worried that the store
might burst into rainbow light and vaporize them, but the
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building stayed dark. The snakes Polybotes had dropped
seemed to have vanished.
They were twenty yards from the porch when
something hissed in the grass behind them.
“Go!” Frank yelled.
Percy stumbled. While Hazel helped him up, Frank
turned and nocked an arrow.
He shot blindly. He thought he’d grabbed an exploding
arrow, but it was only a signal flare. It skidded
through the grass, bursting into orange flame and whistling:
WOO!
At least it illuminated the monster. Sitting in a
patch of withered yellow grass was a lime-colored snake
as short and thick as Frank’s arm. Its head was ringed
with a mane of spiky white fins. The creature stared at the
arrow zipping by as if wondering, What the heck is that?
Then it fixed its large, yellow eyes on Frank. It advanced
like an inchworm, hunching up in the middle.
Wherever it touched, the grass withered and died.
Frank heard his friends climbing the steps of the
store. He didn’t dare turn and run. He and the snake
studied each other. The snake hissed, flames billowing
from its mouth.
“Nice creepy reptile,” Frank said, very aware of the
driftwood in his coat pocket. “Nice poisonous, fire-
breathing reptile.”
“Frank!” Hazel yelled behind him. “Come on!”
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The snake sprang at him. It sailed through the air
so fast, there wasn’t time to nock an arrow. Frank swung
his bow and smacked the monster down the hill. It spun
out of sight, wailing, “Screeeee!”
Frank felt proud of himself until he looked at his
bow, which was steaming where it had touched the snake.
He watched in disbelief as the wood crumbled to dust.
He heard an outraged hiss, answered by two more
hisses farther downhill.
Frank dropped his disintegrating bow and ran for
the porch. Percy and Hazel pulled him up the steps. When
Frank turned, he saw all three monsters circling in the
grass, breathing fire and turning the hillside brown with
their poisonous touch. They didn’t seem able or willing to
come closer to the store, but that wasn’t much comfort to
Frank. He’d lost his bow.
“We’ll never get out of here,” he said miserably.
“Then we’d better go in.” Hazel pointed to the
hand-painted sign over the door: RAINBOW ORGANIC
FOODS &LIFESTYLES.
Frank had no idea what that meant, but it sounded
better than flaming poisonous snakes. He followed his
friends inside.
As they stepped through the door, lights came on. Flute
music started up like they’d walked onto a stage. The wide
aisles were lined with bins of nuts and dried fruit, baskets
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of apples, and clothing racks with tie-dyed shirts and
gauzy Tinker
Bell–type dresses. The ceiling was covered in wind
chimes. Along the walls, glass cases displayed crystal
balls, geodes, macramé dream catchers, and a bunch of
other strange stuff. Incense must have been burning
somewhere. It smelled like a bouquet of flowers was on
fire.
“Fortune-teller’s shop?” Frank wondered.
“Hope not,” Hazel muttered.
Percy leaned against her. He looked worse than
ever, like he’d been hit with a sudden flu. His face
glistened with sweat. “Sit down…” he muttered. “Maybe
water.”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “Let’s find you a place to rest.”
The floorboards creaked under their feet. Frank
navigated between two Neptune statue fountains.
A girl popped up from behind the granola bins.
“Help you?”
Frank lurched backward, knocking over one of the
fountains. A stone Neptune crashed to the floor. The sea
god’s head rolled off and water spewed out of his neck,
spraying a rack of tie-dyed man satchels.
“Sorry!” Frank bent down to clean up the mess. He
almost goosed the girl with his spear.
“Eep!” she said. “Hold it! It’s okay!”
Frank straightened slowly, trying not to cause any
more damage. Hazel looked mortified. Percy turned a
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sickly shade of green as he stared at the decapitated
statue of his dad.
The girl clapped her hands. The fountain dissolved
into mist. The water evaporated. She turned to Frank.
“Really, it’s no problem. Those Neptune fountains are so
grumpy-looking, they bum me out.”
She reminded Frank of the college-age hikers he
some times saw in Lynn Canyon Park behind his grandmother’s
house. She was short and muscular, with lace-
up boots, cargo shorts, and a bright yellow T-shirt that
read R.O.F.L. Rainbow Organic Foods & Lifestyles. She
looked young, but her hair was frizzy white, sticking out
on either side of her head like the white of a giant fried
egg.
Frank tried to remember how to speak. The girl’s
eyes were really distracting. The irises changed color from
gray to black to white.
“Uh…sorry about the fountain,” he managed. “We
were just—”
“Oh, I know!” the girl said. “You want to browse.
It’s all right. Demigods are welcome. Take your time.
You’re not like those awful monsters. They just want to
use the restroom and never buy anything!”
She snorted. Her eyes flashed with lightning. Frank
glanced at Hazel to see if he’d imagined it, but Hazel
looked just as surprised.
From the back of the store, a woman’s voice called:
“Fleecy? Don’t scare the customers, now. Bring them
here, will you?”
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“Your name is Fleecy?” Hazel asked.
Fleecy giggled. “Well, in the language of the nebulae
it’s actually—” She made a series of crackling and
blowing noises that reminded Frank of a thunderstorm
giving way to a nice cold front. “But you can call me
Fleecy.”
“Nebulae. . .” Percy muttered in a daze. “Cloud
nymphs.”
Fleecy beamed. “Oh, I like this one! Usually no one
knows about cloud nymphs. But dear me, he doesn’t look
so good. Come to the back. My boss wants to meet you.
We’ll get your friend fixed up.”
Fleecy led them through the produce aisle, between
rows of eggplants, kiwis, lotus fruit, and pomegranates.
At the back of the store, behind a counter with an old-
fashioned cash register, stood a middle-aged woman with
olive skin, long black hair, rimless glasses, and a T-shirt
that read: The Goddess Is Alive! She wore amber necklaces
and turquoise rings. She smelled like rose petals.
She looked friendly enough, but something about
her made Frank feel shaky, like he wanted to cry. It took
him a second, then he realized what it was—the way she
smiled with just one corner of her mouth, the warm
brown color of her eyes, the tilt of her head, like she was
considering a question. She reminded Frank of his
mother.
“Hello!” She leaned over the counter, which was
lined with dozens of little statues—waving Chinese cats,
meditating Buddhas, Saint Francis bobble heads, and
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novelty dippy drinking birds with top hats. “So glad
you’re here. I’m Iris!”
Hazel’s eyes widened. “Not the Iris—the rainbow
goddess?”
Iris made a face. “Well, that’s my official job, yes.
But I don’t define myself by my corporate identity. In my
spare time, I run this!” She gestured around her proudly.
“The R.O.F.L. Co-op—an employee-run cooperative promoting
healthy alternative lifestyles and organic foods.”
Frank stared at her. “But you throw Ding Dongs at
monsters.”
Iris looked horrified. “Oh, they’re not Ding Dongs.”
She rummaged under the counter and brought out a
package of chocolate-covered cakes that looked exactly
like Ding Dongs. “These are gluten-free, no-sugar-added,
vitamin-enriched, soy-free, goat-milk-and-seaweed-based
cupcake simulations.”
“All natural!” Fleecy chimed in.
“I stand corrected.” Frank suddenly felt as queasy
as Percy.
Iris smiled. “You should try one, Frank. You’re
lactose intolerant, aren’t you?”
“How did you—”
“I know these things. Being the messenger god-
dess…well, I do learn a lot, hearing all the communications
from the gods and so on.” She tossed the cakes on
the counter. “Besides, those monsters should be glad to
have some healthy snacks. Always eating junk food and
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heroes. They’re so unenlightened. I couldn’t have them
tromping through my store, tearing up things and disturbing
our feng shui.”
Percy leaned against the counter. He looked like he
was going to throw up all over the goddess’s feng shui.
“Monsters marching south,” he said with difficulty. “Going
to destroy our camp. Couldn’t you stop them?”
“Oh, I’m strictly nonviolent,” Iris said. “I can act in
self-defense, but I won’t be drawn into any more Olympian
aggression, thank you very much. I’ve been reading
about Buddhism. And Taoism. I haven’t decided between
them.”
“But…” Hazel looked mystified. “Aren’t you a Greek
goddess?”
Iris crossed her arms. “Don’t try to put me in a box,
demigod! I’m not defined by my past.”
“Um, okay,” Hazel said. “Could you at least help
our friend here? I think he’s sick.”
Percy reached across the counter. For a second
Frank was afraid he wanted the cupcakes. “Iris-message,”
he said. “Can you send one?”
Frank wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “Iris-message?”
“It’s…” Percy faltered. “Isn’t that something you
do?”
Iris studied Percy more closely. “Interesting. You’re
from Camp Jupiter, and yet…Oh, I see. Juno is up to her
tricks.”
“What?” Hazel asked.
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Iris glanced at her assistant, Fleecy. They seemed
to have a silent conversation. Then the goddess pulled a
vial from behind the counter and sprayed some
honeysuckle-smelling oil around Percy’s face. “There, that
should balance your chakra. As for Iris-messages—that’s
an ancient way of communication. The Greeks used it.
The Romans never took to it—always relying on their
road systems and giant eagles and whatnot. But yes, I
imagine…Fleecy, could you give it a try?”
“Sure, boss!”
Iris winked at Frank. “Don’t tell the other gods, but
Fleecy handles most of my messages these days. She’s
wonderful at it, really, and I don’t have time to answer all
those requests personally. It messes up my wa.”
“Your wa?” Frank asked.
“Mmm. Fleecy, why don’t you take Percy and Hazel
into the back? You can get them something to eat while
you arrange their messages. And for Percy…yes, memory
sickness. I imagine that old Polybotes…well, meeting him
in a state of amnesia can’t be good for a child of P—that is
to say, Neptune. Fleecy, give him a cup of green tea with
organic honey and wheat germ and some of my medicinal
powder number five. That should fix him up.”
Hazel frowned. “What about Frank?”
Iris turned to him. She tilted her head quizzically,
just the way his mother used to—as if Frank were the
biggest question in the room.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Iris said. “Frank and I have a lot
to talk about.”
FRANK WOULD’VE PREFERRED TO go with his friends,
even if it meant he had to endure green tea with wheat
germ. But Iris roped her arm through his and led him to a
café table at a bay window. Frank set his spear on the
floor. He sat across from Iris. Outside in the dark, the
snake monsters restlessly patrolled the hillside, spewing
fire and poisoning the grass.
“Frank, I know how you feel,” Iris said. “I imagine
that half-burned stick in your pocket gets heavier every
day.”
Frank couldn’t breathe. His hand went instinctively
to his coat. “How do you—?”
“I told you. I know things. I was Juno’s messenger
for ages. I know why she gave you a reprieve.”
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“A reprieve?” Frank brought out the piece of firewood
and unwrapped it from its cloth. As unwieldy as
Mars’s spear was, the piece of tinder was worse. Iris was
right. It weighed him down.
“Juno saved you for a reason,” the goddess said.
“She wants you to serve her plan. If she hadn’t appeared
that day when you were a baby and warned your mother
about the firewood, you would’ve died. You were born
with too many gifts. That sort of power tends to burn out
a mortal life.”
“Too many gifts?” Frank felt his ears getting warm
with anger. “I don’t have any gifts!”
“That’s not true, Frank.” Iris swiped her hand in
front of her like she was cleaning a windshield. A miniature
rainbow appeared. “Think about it.”
An image shimmered in the rainbow. Frank saw
himself when he was four years old, running across
Grandmother’s backyard. His mother leaned out the window
of the attic, high above, waving and calling to get his
attention. Frank wasn’t supposed to be in the backyard by
himself. He didn’t know why his mother was up in the attic,
but she told him to stay by the house, not to go too far.
Frank did exactly the opposite. He squealed with delight
and ran to the edge of the woods, where he came face to
face with a grizzly bear.
Until Frank saw that scene in the rainbow, the
memory had been so hazy, he thought he’d dreamed it.
Now he could appreciate just how surreal the experience
had been. The bear regarded the little boy, and it was difficult
to tell who was more startled. Then Frank’s mother
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appeared at his side. There was no way she should have
been able to get down from the attic so fast. She put herself
between the bear and Frank and told him to run to
the house. This time, Frank obeyed. When he turned at
the back porch, he saw his mother coming out of the
woods. The bear was gone. Frank asked what had
happened. His mother smiled. Mama Bear just needed
directions, she said.
The scene in the rainbow changed. Frank saw himself
as a six-year-old, curling up in his mother’s lap even
though he was much too big for that. His mother’s long
black hair was pulled back. Her arms were around him.
She wore her rimless glasses that Frank always liked to
steal, and her fuzzy gray fleece pullover that smelled like
cinnamon. She was telling him stories about heroes, pretending
they were all related to Frank: one was Xu Fu,
who sailed in search of the elixir of life. The rainbow image
had no sound, but Frank remembered his mother’s
words: He was your great-great-great-…She would poke
Frank’s stomach every time she said great-, dozens of
times, until he was giggling uncontrollably.
Then there was Sung Guo, also called Seneca Gracchus,
who fought twelve Roman dragons and sixteen
Chinese dragons in the western deserts of China. He was
the strongest dragon of all, you see, his mother said.
That’s how he could beat them! Frank didn’t know what
that meant, but it sounded exciting.
Then she poked his belly with so many greats,
Frank rolled onto the floor to escape the tickling. And
your very oldest ancestor that we know of: he was the
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Prince of Pylos! Hercules fought him once. It was a hard
fight!
Did we win? Frank asked.
His mother laughed, but there was sadness in her
voice. No, our ancestor lost. But it wasn’t easy for Hercules.
Imagine trying to fight a swarm of bees. That’s
how it was. Even Hercules had trouble!
The comment made no sense to Frank, then or
now. His ancestor had been a beekeeper?
Frank hadn’t thought about these stories in years,
but now they came back to him as clearly as his mother’s
face. It hurt to see her again. Frank wanted to go back to
that time. He wanted to be a little kid and curl up on her
lap.
In the rainbow image, little Frank asked where
their family was from. So many heroes! Were they from
Pylos, or Rome, or China, or Canada?
His mother smiled, tilting her head as if considering
how to answer.
Li-Jien, she said at last. Our family is from many
places, but our home is Li-Jien. Always remember,
Frank: you have a special gift. You can be anything.
The rainbow dissolved, leaving just Iris and Frank.
“I don’t understand.” His voice was hoarse.
“Your mother explained it,” Iris said. “You can be
anything.”
It sounded like one of those stupid things parents
say to boost your self-esteem—a worn-out slogan that
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could be printed on Iris’s T-shirts, right along with The
Goddess Is Alive! and My Other Car Is a Magic Carpet!
But the way Iris said it, it sounded like a challenge.
Frank pressed his hand against his pants pocket,
where he kept his mother’s sacrifice medal. The silver
medallion was cold as ice.
“I can’t be anything,” Frank insisted. “I’ve got zero
skills.”
“What have you tried?” Iris asked. “You wanted to
be an archer. You managed that pretty well. You’ve only
scratched the surface. Your friends Hazel and
Percy—they’re both stretched between worlds: Greek and
Roman, the past and the present. But you are stretched
more than either of them.
Your family is ancient—the blood of Pylos on your
mother’s side, and your father is Mars. No wonder Juno
wants you to be one of her seven heroes. She wants you to
fight the giants and Gaea. But think about this: What do
you want?”
“I don’t have any choice,” Frank said. “I’m the son
of the stupid war god. I have to go on this quest and—”
“Have to,” Iris said. “Not want to. I used to think
like that. Then I got tired of being everyone’s servant.
Fetch goblets of wine for Jupiter. Deliver letters for Juno.
Send messages back and forth across the rainbow for anyone
with a golden drachma.”
“A golden what?”
“Not important. But I learned to let go. I started
R.O.F.L., and now I’m free of that baggage. You can let
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go, too. Maybe you can’t escape fate. Someday that piece
of wood will burn. I foresee that you’ll be holding it when
it happens, and your life will end—”
“Thanks,” Frank muttered.
“—but that just makes your life more precious! You
don’t have to be what your parents and your grandmother
expect.
You don’t have to follow the war god’s orders, or
Juno’s. Do your own thing, Frank! Find a new path!”
Frank thought about that. The idea was thrilling:
reject the gods, his destiny, his dad. He didn’t want to be
a war god’s son. His mother had died in a war. Frank had
lost everything thanks to a war. Mars clearly didn’t know
the first thing about him. Frank didn’t want to be a hero.
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked. “You want
me to abandon the quest, let Camp Jupiter be destroyed?
My friends are counting on me.”
Iris spread her hands. “I can’t tell you what to do,
Frank.
But do what you want, not what they tell you to do.
Where did conforming ever get me? I spent five millennia
serving everyone else, and I never discovered my own
identity. What’s my sacred animal? No one bothered to
give me one. Where are my temples? They never made
any. Well, fine! I’ve found peace here at the co-op. You
could stay with us, if you want.
Become a ROFLcopter.”
“A what, now?”
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“The point is you have options. If you continue this
quest…what happens when you free Thanatos? Will it be
good for your family? Your friends?”
Frank remembered what his grandmother had
said: she had an appointment with Death. Grandmother
infuriated him sometimes; but still, she was his only living
family, the only person alive who loved him. If
Thanatos stayed chained up, Frank might not lose her.
And Hazel—somehow she had come back from the
Underworld. If Death took her again, Frank wouldn’t be
able to stand it. Not to mention Frank’s own problem: according
to Iris, he should have died when he was a baby.
All that stood between him and Death was a half-burned
stick. Would Thanatos take him away, too?
Frank tried to imagine staying here with Iris, putting
on a R.O.F.L. shirt, selling crystals and dream catchers
to demigod travelers and lobbing gluten-free cupcake
simulations at passing monsters. Meanwhile, an undying
army would overrun Camp Jupiter.
You can be anything, his mother had said.
No, he thought. I can’t be that selfish.
“I have to go,” he said. “It’s my job.”
Iris sighed. “I expected as much, but I had to try.
The task ahead of you…Well, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,
especially a nice boy like you. If you must go, at least
I can offer some advice. You’ll need help finding
Thanatos.”“You know where the giants are hiding him?”
Frank asked.
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Iris gazed thoughtfully at the wind chimes swaying
on the ceiling. “No…Alaska is beyond the gods’ sphere of
control. The location is shielded from my sight. But there
is someone who would know. Seek out the seer Phineas.
He’s blind, but he can see the past, present, and future.
He knows many things. He can tell you where Thanatos is
being held.”
“Phineas…” Frank said. “Wasn’t there a story about
him?”
Iris nodded reluctantly. “In the old days, he committed
horrible crimes. He used his gift of sight for evil.
Jupiter sent the harpies to plague him. The Argonauts—
including your ancestor, by the way—”
“The prince of Pylos?”
Iris hesitated. “Yes, Frank. Though his gift, his
story…that you must discover on your own. Suffice it to
say, the Argonauts drove away the harpies in exchange for
Phineas’s help. That was eons ago, but I understand
Phineas has returned to the mortal world. You’ll find him
in Portland, Oregon, which is on your way north. But you
must promise me one thing. If he’s still plagued by
harpies, do not kill them, no matter what Phineas promises
you. Win his help some other way. The harpies are
not evil. They’re my sisters.”
“Your sisters?”
“I know. I don’t look old enough to be the harpies’
sister, but it’s true. And Frank…there’s another problem.
If you’re determined to leave, you’ll have to clear those
basilisks off the hill.”
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“You mean the snakes?”
“Yes,” Iris said. “Basilisk means ‘little crown,’
which is a cute name for something that’s not very cute.
I’d prefer not to have them killed. They’re living
creatures, after all. But you won’t be able to leave until
they’re gone. If your friends try to battle them…well, I
foresee see bad things happening. Only you have the abil
ity to kill the monsters.”
“But how?”
She glanced down at the floor. Frank realized that
she was looking at his spear.
“I wish there was another way,” she said. “If you
had some weasels, for instance. Weasels are deadly to
basilisks.”
“Fresh out of weasels,” Frank admitted.
“Then you will have to use your father’s gift. Are
you sure you wouldn’t like to live here instead? We make
excellent lactose-free rice milk.”
Frank rose. “How do I use the spear?”
“You’ll have to handle that on your own. I can’t advocate
violence. While you’re doing battle, I’ll check on
your friends. I hope Fleecy found the right medicinal
herbs. The last time, we had a mix-up.…Well, I don’t
think those heroes wanted to be daisies.”
The goddess stood. Her glasses flashed, and Frank
saw his own reflection in the lenses. He looked serious
and grim, nothing like the little boy he’d seen in those
rainbow images.
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“One last bit of advice, Frank,” she said. “You’re
destined to die holding that piece of firewood, watching it
burn. But perhaps if you didn’t keep it yourself. Perhaps if
you trusted someone enough to hold it for you…”
Frank’s fingers curled around the tinder. “Are you
offering?”
Iris laughed gently. “Oh, dear, no. I’d lose it in this
collection. It would get mixed up with my crystals, or I’d
sell it as a driftwood paperweight by accident. No, I
meant a demigod friend. Someone close to your heart.”
Hazel, Frank thought immediately. There was no
one he trusted more. But how could he confess his secret?
If he admitted how weak he was, that his whole life depended
on a half-burned stick…Hazel would never see
him as a hero. He’d never be her knight in armor. And
how could he expect her to take that kind of burden from
him?
He wrapped up the tinder and slipped it back into
his coat. “Thanks ... thanks, Iris.”
She squeezed his hand. “Don’t lose hope, Frank.
Rainbows always stand for hope.”
She made her way toward the back of the store,
leaving Frank alone.
“Hope,” Frank grumbled. “I’d rather have a few
good weasels.”
He picked up his father’s spear and marched out to
face the basilisks.
FRANK MISSED HIS BOW.
He wanted to stand on the porch and shoot the
snakes from a distance. A few well-placed exploding arrows,
a few craters in the hillside—problem solved.
Unfortunately, a quiver full of arrows wouldn’t do
Frank much good if he couldn’t shoot them. Besides, he
had no idea where the basilisks were. They’d stopped
blowing fire as soon as he came outside.
He stepped off the porch and leveled his golden
spear. He didn’t like fighting up close. He was too slow
and bulky. He’d done okay during the war games, but this
was real. There were no giant eagles ready to snatch him
up and take him to the medics if he made a mistake.
You can be anything. His mother’s voice echoed in
his mind.
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Great, he thought. I want to be good with a spear.
And immune to poison—and fire.
Something told Frank his wish had not been granted.
The spear felt just as awkward in his hands.
Patches of flame still smoldered on the hillside. The
acrid smoke burned in Frank’s nose. The withered grass
crunched under his feet.
He thought about those stories his mother used to
tell—generations of heroes who had battled Hercules,
fought dragons, and sailed monster-infested seas. Frank
didn’t understand how he could have evolved from a line
like that, or how his family had migrated from Greece
through the Roman Empire all the way to China, but
some unsettling ideas were starting to form. For the first
time, he started to wonder about this Prince of Pylos, and
his great-grandfather Shen Lun’s disgrace at Camp
Jupiter, and what the family powers might be.
The gift has never kept our family safe, Grandmother
had warned.
A reassuring thought as Frank hunted poisonous
fire- breathing devil snakes.
The night was quiet except for the crackle of brush
fires. Every time a breeze made the grass rustle, Frank
thought about the grain spirits who’d captured Hazel.
Hopefully they’d gone south with the giant Polybotes.
Frank didn’t need any more problems right now.
He crept downhill, his eyes stinging from the
smoke. Then, about twenty feet ahead, he saw a burst of
flame.
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He considered throwing his spear. Stupid idea.
Then he’d be without a weapon. Instead he advanced toward
the fire.
He wished he had the gorgon’s blood vials, but they
were back at the boat. He wondered if gorgon blood could
cure basilisk poison.…But even if he had the vials and
managed to choose the right one, he doubted he’d have
time to take it before he crumbled to dust like his bow.
He emerged in a clearing of burned grass and
found himself face-to-face with a basilisk.
The snake rose up on its tail. It hissed, and expanded
the collar of white spikes around its neck. Little
crown, Frank remembered. That’s what “basilisk” meant.
He had thought basilisks were huge dragon like monsters
that could petrify you with their eyes. Somehow the real
basilisk was even more terrible. As tiny as it was, this
extra-small package of fire, poison, and evil would be
much harder to kill than a large, bulky lizard. Frank had
seen how fast it could move.
The monster fixed its pale yellow eyes on Frank.
Why wasn’t it attacking?
Frank’s golden spear felt cold and heavy. The
dragon-tooth point dipped toward the ground all on its
own—like a dowsing rod searching for water.
“Stop that.” Frank struggled to the lift the spear.
He’d have enough trouble jabbing the monster without
his spear fighting against him. Then he heard the grass
rustle on either side of him. The other two basilisks
slithered into the clearing.
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Frank had walked straight into an ambush.
FRANK SWEPT HIS SPEAR BACK AND FORTH. “Stay
back!” His voice sounded squeaky. “I’ve got .. .
um…amazing powers—and stuff.”
The basilisks hissed in three-part harmony. Maybe
they were laughing.
The spear tip was almost too heavy to lift now, as if
the jagged white triangle of bone was trying to touch the
earth. Then something clicked in the back of Frank’s
mind: Mars had said the tip was a dragon’s tooth. Hadn’t
there been some story about dragon’s teeth planted in the
ground? Something he’d read in monster class at camp…?
The basilisks circled him, taking their time. Maybe
they were hesitating because of the spear. Maybe they just
couldn’t believe how stupid Frank was.
It seemed like madness, but Frank let the spear tip
drop. He drove it into the ground. Crack.
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When he lifted it out, the tip was gone—broken off
in the dirt.
Wonderful. Now he had a golden stick.
Some crazy part of him wanted to bring out his
piece of firewood. If he was going to die anyway, maybe
he could set off a massive blaze—incinerate the basilisks,
so at least his friends could get away.
Before he could get up the courage, the ground
rumbled at his feet. Dirt spewed everywhere, and a skeletal
hand clawed the air. The basilisks hissed and backed
up.
Frank couldn’t blame them. He watched in horror
as a human skeleton crawled out of the ground. It took on
flesh as if someone were pouring gelatin over its bones,
covering them in glowing, transparent gray skin. Then
ghostly clothes enveloped it—a muscle shirt, camo pants,
and army boots. Everything about the creature was gray:
gray clothes on gray flesh on gray bones.
It turned toward Frank. Its skull grinned beneath
an expressionless gray face. Frank whimpered like a
puppy. His legs shook so badly he had to support himself
with the spear shaft. The skeleton warrior was waiting,
Frank realized—waiting for orders.
“Kill the basilisks!” he yelped. “Not me!”
The skeletal warrior leaped into action. He grabbed
the nearest snake, and though his gray flesh began to
smoke on contact, he strangled the basilisk with one hand
and flung down its limp body. The other two basilisks
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hissed with rage. One sprang at Frank, but he knocked it
aside with the butt of his spear.
The other snake belched fire directly in the skeleton’s
face. The warrior marched forward and stomped the
basilisk’s head under his boot.
Frank turned toward the last basilisk, which was
curled at the edge of the clearing studying them. Frank’s
Imperial gold spear shaft was steaming, but unlike his
bow, it didn’t seem to be crumbling from the basilisk’s
touch. The skeleton warrior’s right foot and hand were
slowly dissolving from poison. His head was on fire, but
otherwise he looked pretty good.
The basilisk did the smart thing. It turned to flee.
In a blur of motion, the skeleton pulled something from
his shirt and flung it across the clearing, impaling the basilisk
in the dirt. Frank thought it was a knife. Then he
realized it was one of the skeleton’s own ribs.
Frank was glad his stomach was empty. “That…that
was gross.”
The skeleton stumbled over to the basilisk. It
pulled out its rib and used it to cut off the creature’s head.
The basilisk dissolved into ashes. Then the skeleton decapitated
the other two monster carcasses and kicked all
the ashes to disperse them. Frank remembered the two
gorgons in the Tiber—the way the river had pulled apart
their remains to keep them from re-forming. “You’re
making sure they don’t come back,” Frank realized.
“Or slowing them down, anyway.”
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The skeleton warrior stood at attention in front of
Frank. Its poisoned foot and hand were mostly gone. Its
head was still burning.
“What—what are you?” Frank asked. He wanted to
add, Please don’t hurt me.
The skeleton saluted with its stump of a hand. Then
it began to crumble, sinking back into the ground.
“Wait!” Frank said. “I don’t even know what to call
you! Tooth Man? Bones? Gray?”
As its face disappeared beneath the dirt, the warrior
seemed to grin at the last name—or maybe that was
just its skeletal teeth showing. Then it was gone, leaving
Frank alone with his pointless spear.
“Gray,” he muttered. “Okay ... but...”
He examined the tip of his spear. Already, a new
dragon tooth was starting to grow out of the golden shaft.
You get three charges out of it, Mars had said, so
use it wisely.
Frank heard footsteps behind him. Percy and Hazel
ran into the clearing. Percy looked better, except he was
carrying a-tie-dyed man satchel from R.O.F.L.—definitely
not his style. Riptide was in his hand. Hazel had drawn
her spatha.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Percy turned in a circle, looking for enemies. “Iris
told us you were out here battling the basilisks by yourself,
and we were like, What? We came as fast as we
could. What happened?”
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“I’m not sure,” Frank admitted.
Hazel crouched next to the dirt where Gray disappeared.
“I sense death. Either my brother has been here
or…the basilisks are dead?”
Percy stared at him in awe. “You killed them all?”
Frank swallowed. He already felt like enough of a
misfit without trying to explain his new undead minion.
Three charges. Frank could call on Gray twice
more. But he’d sensed malevolence in the skeleton. It was
no pet. It was a vicious, undead killing force, barely controlled
by the power of Mars. Frank got the feeling it
would do what he said—but if his friends happened to be
in the line of fire, oh well. And if Frank was a little slow
giving it directions, it might start killing whatever was in
its path, including its master.
Mars had told him the spear would give him
breathing room until he learned to use his mother’s talents.
Which meant Frank needed to learn those tal
ents—fast.
“Thanks a lot, Dad,” he grumbled.
“What?” Hazel asked. “Frank, are you okay?”
“I’ll explain later,” he said. “Right now, there’s a
blind man in Portland we’ve got to see.”
PERCY ALREADY FELT LIKE THE lamest demigod in the
history of lame. The purse was the final insult.
They’d left R.O.F.L. in a hurry, so maybe Iris hadn’t
meant the bag as a criticism. She’d quickly stuffed it with
vitamin-enriched pastries, dried fruit leather, macrobiotic
beef jerky, and a few crystals for good luck. Then she’d
shoved it at Percy:
Here, you’ll need this. Oh, that looks good.The
purse—sorry, masculine accessory bag—was rainbow tie-
dyed with a peace symbol stitched in wooden beads and
the slogan Hug the Whole World. Percy wished it said
Hug the Commode. He felt like the bag was a comment
on his mas sive, incredible uselessness. As they sailed
north, he put the man satchel as far away from him as he
could, but the boat was small.
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He couldn’t believe how he’d broken down when
his friends had needed him. First, he’d been dumb
enough to leave them alone when he had run back to the
boat, and Hazel had gotten kidnapped. Then he’d
watched that army marching south and had some kind of
nervous breakdown.
Embarrassing? Yeah. But he couldn’t help it. When
he’d seen those evil centaurs and Cyclopes, it had seemed
so wrong, so backward, that he thought his head would
explode. And the giant Polybotes…that giant had given
him a feeling the opposite of what he felt when he stood
in the ocean. Percy’s energy had drained out of him, leaving
him weak and feverish, like his insides were eroding.
Iris’s medicinal tea had helped his body feel better,
but his mind still hurt. He’d heard stories about amputees
who had phantom pains where their missing legs and
arms used to be. That’s how his mind felt—like his missing
memories were aching.
Worst of all, the farther north Percy went, the more
those memories faded. He had started to feel better at
Camp Jupiter, remembering random names and faces.
But now even Annabeth’s face was getting dimmer. At
R.O.F.L., when he’d tried to send an Iris-message to Annabeth,
Fleecy had just shaken her head sadly.
It’s like you’re dialing somebody, she said, but
you’ve forgotten the number. Or someone is jamming the
signal. Sorry, dear. I just can’t connect you.
He was terrified that he’d lose Annabeth’s face
completely when he got to Alaska. Maybe he’d wake up
one day and not remember her name.
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Still, he had to concentrate on the quest. The sight
of that enemy army had shown him what they were up
against. It was early in the morning of June 21, now. They
had to get to Alaska, find Thanatos, locate the legion’s
standard, and make it back to Camp Jupiter by the evening
of June 24. Four days. Meanwhile, the enemy had
only a few hundred miles to march.
Percy guided the boat through the strong currents
off the northern California coast. The wind was cold, but
it felt good, clearing some of the confusion from his head.
He bent his will to push the boat as hard as he could. The
hull rattled as the Pax plowed its way north.
Meanwhile, Hazel and Frank traded stories about
the events at Rainbow Organic Foods. Frank explained
about the blind seer Phineas in Portland, and how Iris
had said that he might be able to tell them where to find
Thanatos. Frank wouldn’t say how he had managed to kill
the basilisks, but Percy got the feeling it had something to
do with the broken point of his spear. Whatever had
happened, Frank sounded more scared of the spear than
the basilisks.
When he was done, Hazel told Frank about their
time with Fleecy.
“So this Iris-message worked?” Frank asked.
Hazel gave Percy a sympathetic look. She didn’t
mention his failure to contact Annabeth.
“I got in touch with Reyna,” she said. “You’re supposed
to throw a coin into a rainbow and say this incantation,
like O Iris, goddess of the rainbow, accept my
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offering. Except Fleecy kind of changed it. She gave us
her—what did she call it—her direct number? So I had to
say, O Fleecy, do me a solid. Show Reyna at Camp
Jupiter. I felt kind of stupid, but it worked. Reyna’s image
appeared in the rainbow, like in a two-way video call. She
was in the baths. Scared her out of her mind.”
“That I would’ve paid to see,” Frank said. “I
mean—her expression. Not, you know, the baths.”
“Frank!” Hazel fanned her face like she needed air.
It was an old-fashioned gesture, but cute, somehow.
“Anyway, we told Reyna about the army, but like Percy
said, she pretty much already knew. It doesn’t change
anything. She’s doing what she can to shore up the defenses.
Unless we unleash Death, and get back with the
eagle—”
“The camp can’t stand against that army,” Frank
finished. “Not without help.”
After that, they sailed in silence.
Percy kept thinking about Cyclopes and centaurs.
He thought about Annabeth, the satyr Grover, and his
dream of a giant warship under construction.
You came from somewhere, Reyna had said.
Percy wished he could remember. He could call for
help. Camp Jupiter shouldn’t have to fight alone against
the giants. There must be allies out there.
He fingered the beads on his necklace, the lead
probatiotablet, and the silver ring Reyna had given him.
Maybe in Seattle he’d be able to talk to her sister Hylla.
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She might send help—assuming she didn’t kill Percy on
sight.
After a few more hours of navigating, Percy’s eyes
started to droop. He was afraid he’d pass out from exhaustion.
Then he caught a break. A killer whale surfaced
next to the boat, and Percy struck up a mental conversation
with him.
It wasn’t exactly like talking, but it went something
like this: Could you give us a ride north, Percy asked, like
as close to Portland as possible?
Eat seals, the whale responded. Are you seals?
No, Percy admitted. I’ve got a man satchel full of
macrobiotic beef jerky, though.
The whale shuddered. Promise not to feed me this,
and I will take you north.
Deal.
Soon Percy had made a makeshift rope harness and
strapped it around the whale’s upper body. They sped
north under whale-power, and at Hazel and Frank’s insistence,
Percy settled in for a nap.
His dreams were as disjointed and scary as ever.
He imagined himself on Mount Tamalpais, north of
San Francisco, fighting at the old Titan stronghold. That
didn’t make sense. He hadn’t been with the Romans when
they had attacked, but he saw it all clearly: a Titan in armor,
Annabet hand two other girls fighting at Percy’s
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side. One of the girls died in the battle. Percy knelt over
her, watching as she dissolved into stars.
Then he saw the giant warship in its dry dock. The
bronze dragon figurehead glinted in the morning light.
The riggings and armaments were complete, but
something was wrong. A hatch in the deck was open, and
smoke poured from some kind of engine. A boy with curly
black hair was cursing as he pounded the engine with a
wrench. Two other demigods squatted next to him,
watching with concern. One was a teenage guy with short
blond hair. The other was a girl with long dark hair.
“You realize it’s the solstice,” the girl said. “We’re
supposed to leave today.”
“I know that!” The curly-haired mechanic whacked
the engine a few more times. “Could be the fizzrockets.
Could be the samophlange. Could be Gaea messing with
us again. I’m not sure!”
“How long?” the blond guy asked.
“Two, three days?”
“They may not have that long,” the girl warned.
Something told Percy that she meant Camp
Jupiter. Then the scene shifted again.
He saw a boy and his dog roaming over the yellow
hills of California. But as the image became clearer, Percy
realized it wasn’t a boy. It was a Cyclops in ragged jeans
and a flannel shirt. The dog was a shambling mountain of
black fur, easily as big as a rhino. The Cyclops carried a
massive club over his shoulder, but Percy didn’t feel that
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he was an enemy. He kept yelling Percy’s name, calling
him…brother?
“He smells farther away,” the Cyclops moaned to
the dog. “Why does he smell farther?”
“ROOF!” the dog barked, and Percy’s dream
changed again.
He saw a range of snowy mountains, so tall they
broke the clouds. Gaea’s sleeping face appeared in the
shadows of the rocks.
Such a valuable pawn, she said soothingly. Do not
fear, Percy Jackson. Come north! Your friends will die,
yes. But I will preserve you for now. I have great plans
for you.
In a valley between the mountains lay a massive
field of ice. The edge plunged into the sea, hundreds of
feet below, with sheets of frost constantly crumbling into
the water. On top of the ice field stood a legion
camp—ramparts, moats, towers, barracks, just like Camp
Jupiter except three times as large. At the crossroads outside
the principia, a figure in dark robes stood shackled
to the ice. Percy’s vision swept past him, into the
headquarters. There, in the gloom, sat a giant even bigger
than Polybotes. His skin glinted gold. Displayed behind
him were the tattered, frozen banners of a Roman legion,
including a large, golden eagle with its wings spread.
We await you, the giant’s voice boomed. While you
fumble your way north, trying to find me, my armies
will destroy your precious camps—first the Romans,
then the others. You cannot win, little demigod.
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Percy lurched awake in cold gray daylight, rain falling on
his face.
“I thought I slept heavily,” Hazel said. “Welcome to
Portland.”
Percy sat up and blinked. The scene around him
was so different from his dream, he wasn’t sure which
was real. The Pax floated on an iron-black river through
the middle of a city. Heavy clouds hung low overhead.
The cold rain was so light, it seemed suspended in the air.
On Percy’s left were industrial warehouses and railroad
tracks. To his right was a small downtown area—an
almost cozy-looking cluster of towers between the banks
of the river and a line of misty forested hills.
Percy rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “How did we
get here?”
Frank gave him a look like, You won’t believe this.
“The killer whale took us as far as the Columbia River.
Then he passed the harness to a couple of twelve-foot
sturgeons.”
Percy thought Frank had said surgeons. He had
this weird image of giant doctors in scrubs and face
masks, pulling their boat upstream. Then he realized
Frank meant sturgeons, like the fish. He was glad he
hadn’t said anything. Would have been embarrassing, his
being son of the sea god and all.
“Anyway,” Frank continued, “the sturgeons pulled
us for a long time. Hazel and I took turns sleeping. Then
we hit this river—”
“The Willamette,” Hazel offered.
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“Right,” Frank said. “After that, the boat kind of
took over and navigated us here all by itself. Sleep okay?”
As the Pax glided south, Percy told them about his
dreams. He tried to focus on the positive: a warship might
be on the way to help Camp Jupiter. A friendly Cyclops
and a giant dog were looking for him. He didn’t mention
what Gaea had said: Your friends will die.
When Percy described the Roman fort on the ice,
Hazel looked troubled.
“So Alcyoneus is on a glacier,” she said. “That
doesn’t narrow it down much. Alaska has hundreds of
those.”
Percy nodded. “Maybe this seer dude Phineas can
tell us which one.”
The boat docked itself at a wharf. The three demigods
stared up at the buildings of drizzly downtown
Portland.
Frank wiped the rain off his flat-top hair.
“So now we find a blind man in the rain,” Frank
said.
“Yay.”
IT WASN’T AS HARD AS THEY THOUGHT. The screaming
and the weed whacker helped.
They’d brought lightweight Polartec jackets with
their supplies, so they bundled up against the cold rain
and walked for a few blocks through the mostly deserted
streets. This time Percy was smart and brought most of
his supplies from the boat. He even stuffed the macrobiotic
jerky in his coat pocket, in case he needed to threaten
any more killer whales.
They saw some bicycle traffic and a few homeless
guy shuddled in doorways, but the majority of
Portlanders seemed to be staying indoors.
As they made their way down Glisan Street, Percy
looked longingly at the folks in the cafés enjoying coffee
and pastries. He was about to suggest that they stop for
breakfast when he heard a voice down the street yelling:
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“HA! TAKE THAT, STUPID CHICKENS!” followed by the
revving of a small engine and a lot of squawking.
Percy glanced at his friends. “You think—?”
“Probably,” Frank agreed.
They ran toward the sounds.
The next block over, they found a big open parking
lot with tree-lined sidewalks and rows of food trucks facing
the streets on all four sides. Percy had seen food
trucks before, but never so many in once place. Some
were simple white metal boxes on wheels, with awnings
and serving counters. Others were painted blue or purple
or polka-dotted, with big banners out front and colorful
menu boards and tables like do-it-yourself sidewalk cafés.
One advertised Korean/Brazilian fusion tacos, which
sounded like some kind of top-secret radioactive cuisine.
Another offered sushi on a stick. A third was selling deep-
fried ice cream sandwiches. The smell was amazing—
dozens of different kitchens cooking at once.
Percy’s stomach rumbled. Most of the food carts
were open for business, but there was hardly anyone
around. They could get anything they wanted! Deep-fried
ice cream sandwiches? Oh, man, that sounded way better
than wheat germ.
Unfortunately, there was more happening than just
cooking. In the center of the lot, behind all the food
trucks, an old man in a bathrobe was running around
with a weed whacker, screaming at a flock of bird-ladies
who were trying to steal food off a picnic table.
“Harpies,” said Hazel. “Which means—”
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“That’s Phineas,” Frank guessed.
They ran across the street and squeezed between
the Korean/Brazilian truck and a Chinese egg roll burrito
vendor.
The backs of the food trucks weren’t nearly as appetizing
as the fronts. They were cluttered with stacks of
plastic buckets, overflowing garbage cans, and makeshift
clotheslines hung with wet aprons and towels. The parking
lot itself was nothing but a square of cracked asphalt,
marbled with weeds. In the middle was a picnic table
piled high with food from all the different trucks.
The guy in the bathrobe was old and fat. He was
mostly bald, with scars across his forehead and a rim of
stringy white hair. His bathrobe was spattered with
ketchup, and he kept stumbling around in fuzzy pink
bunny slippers, swinging his gas-powered weed whacker
at the half-dozen harpies who were hovering over his picnic
table.
He was clearly blind. His eyes were milky white,
and usually he missed the harpies by a lot, but he was still
doing a pretty good job fending them off.
“Back, dirty chickens!” he bellowed.
Percy wasn’t sure why, but he had a vague sense
that harpies were supposed to be plump. These looked
like they were starving. Their human faces had sunken
eyes and hollow cheeks. Their bodies were covered in
molting feathers, and their wings were tipped with tiny,
shriveled hands. They wore ragged burlap sacks for
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dresses. As they dived for the food, they seemed more
desperate than angry. Percy felt sorry for them.
WHIRRRR! The old man swung his weed whacker.
He grazed one of the harpies’ wings. The harpy yelped in
pain and fluttered off, dropping yellow feathers as she
flew.
Another harpy circled higher than the rest. She
looked younger and smaller than the others, with bright-
red feathers.
She watched carefully for an opening, and when the
old man’s back was turned, she made a wild dive for the
table. She grabbed a burrito in her clawed feet, but before
she could escape, the blind man swung his weed whacker
and smacked her in the back so hard, Percy winced. The
harpy yelped, dropped the burrito, and flew off.
“Hey, stop it!” Percy yelled.
The harpies took that the wrong way. They glanced
over at the three demigods and immediately fled. Most of
them fluttered away and perched in the trees around the
square, staring dejectedly at the picnic table. The red-
feathered one with the hurt back flew unsteadily down Glisan
Street and out of sight.
“Ha!” The blind man yelled in triumph and killed
the power on his weed whacker. He grinned vacantly in
Percy’s direction. “Thank you, strangers! Your help is
most appreciated.”
Percy bit back his anger. He hadn’t meant to help
the old man, but he remembered that they needed information
from him.
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“Uh, whatever.” He approached the old guy, keeping
one eye on the weed whacker. “I’m Percy Jackson.
This is—”
“Demigods!” the old man said. “I can always smell
demigods.”
Hazel frowned. “Do we smell that bad?”
The old man laughed. “Of course not, my dear. But
you’d be surprised how sharp my other senses became
once I was blinded. I’m Phineas. And you—wait, don’t tell
me—”
He reached for Percy’s face and poked him in the
eyes.
“Ow!” Percy complained.
“Son of Neptune!” Phineas exclaimed. “I thought I
smelled the ocean on you, Percy Jackson. I’m also a son of
Neptune, you know.”
“Hey…yeah. Okay.” Percy rubbed his eyes. Just his
luck he was related to this grubby old dude. He hoped all
sons of Neptune didn’t share the same fate. First, you
start carrying a man satchel. Next thing you know, you’re
running around in a bathrobe and pink bunny slippers,
chasing chickens with a weed whacker.
Phineas turned to Hazel. “And here…Oh my, the
smell of gold and deep earth. Hazel Levesque, daughter of
Pluto. And next to you—the son of Mars. But there’s more
to your story, Frank Zhang—”
“Ancient blood,” Frank muttered. “Prince of Pylos.
Blah, blah, blah.”
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“Periclymenus, exactly! Oh, he was a nice fellow. I
loved the Argonauts!”
Frank’s mouth fell open. “W-wait. Perry who?”
Phineas grinned. “Don’t worry. I know about your
family. That story about your great-grandfather? He
didn’t reallydestroy the camp. Now, what an interesting
group. Are you hungry?”
Frank looked like he’d been run over by a truck, but
Phineas had already moved on to other matters. He
waved his hand at the picnic table. In the nearby trees,
the harpies shrieked miserably. As hungry as Percy was,
he couldn’t stand to think about eating with those poor
bird ladies watching him.
“Look, I’m confused,” Percy said. “We need some
information. We were told—”
“—that the harpies were keeping my food away
from me,” Phineas finished, “and if you helped me, I’d
help you.”
“Something like that,” Percy admitted.
Phineas laughed. “That’s old news. Do I look like
I’m missing any meals?”
He patted his belly, which was the size of an overin
flated basketball.
“Um ... no,” Percy said.
Phineas waved his weed whacker in an expansive
gesture. All three of them ducked.
“Things have changed, my friends!” he said. “When
I first got the gift of prophecy, eons ago, it’s true Jupiter
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cursed me. He sent the harpies to steal my food. You see,
I had a bit of a big mouth. I gave away too many secrets
that the gods wanted kept.” He turned to Hazel. “For instance,
you’re supposed to be dead. And you—” He turned
to Frank. “Your life depends on a burned stick.”
Percy frowned. “What are you talking about?”
Hazel blinked like she’d been slapped. Frank
looked like the truck had backed up and run over him
again.
“And you,” Phineas turned to Percy, “well now, you
don’t even know who you are! I could tell you, of course,
but…ha! What fun would that be? And Brigid O’Shaughnessy
shot Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon. And
Darth Vader is actually Luke’s father. And the winner of
the next Super Bowl will be—”
“Got it,” Frank muttered.
Hazel gripped her sword like she was tempted to
pommel-whip the old man. “So you talked too much, and
the gods cursed you. Why did they stop?”
“Oh, they didn’t!” The old man arched his bushy
eyebrows like, Can you believe it? “I had to make a deal
with the Argonauts. They wanted information too, you
see. I told them to kill the harpies, and I’d cooperate.
Well, they drove those nasty creatures away, but Iris
wouldn’t let them kill the harpies. An outrage! So this
time, when my patron brought me back to life—”
“Your patron?” Frank asked.
Phineas gave him a wicked grin. “Why, Gaea, of
course.
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Who do you think opened the Doors of Death?
Your girl friend here understands. Isn’t Gaea your patron,
too?”
Hazel drew her sword. “I’m not his—I don’t—Gaea
is not my patron!”
Phineas looked amused. If he had heard the sword
being drawn, he didn’t seem concerned. “Fine, if you want
to be noble and stick with the losing side, that’s your business.
But Gaea is waking. She’s already rewritten the
rules of life and death! I’m alive again, and in exchange
for my help—a prophecy here, a prophecy there—I get my
fondest wish. The tables have been turned, so to speak.
Now I can eat all I want, all day long, and the harpies
have to watch and starve.”
He revved his weed whacker, and the harpies
wailed in the trees.
“They’re cursed!” the old man said. “They can eat
only food from my table, and they can’t leave Portland.
Since the Doors of Death are open, they can’t even die.
It’s beautiful!”
“Beautiful?” Frank protested. “They’re living
creatures. Why are you so mean to them?”
“They’re monsters!” Phineas said. “And mean?
Those feather-brained demons tormented me for years!”
“But it was their duty,” Percy said, trying to control
himself. “Jupiter ordered them to.”
“Oh, I’m mad at Jupiter, too,” Phineas agreed. “In
time, Gaea will see that the gods are properly punished.
Horrible job they’ve done, ruling the world. But for now,
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I’m enjoying Portland. The mortals take no notice of me.
They think I’m just a crazy old man shooing away
pigeons!”
Hazel advanced on the seer. “You’re awful!” she
told Phineas. “You belong in the Fields of Punishment!”
Phineas sneered. “One dead person to another,
girlie? I wouldn’t be talking. You started this whole thing!
If it weren’t for you, Alcyoneus wouldn’t be alive!”
Hazel stumbled back.
“Hazel?” Frank’s eyes got as wide as quarters.
“What’s he talking about?”
“Ha!” Phineas said. “You’ll find out soon enough,
Frank Zhang. Then we’ll see if you’re still sweet on your
girlfriend.
But that’s not what you’re here about, is it? You
want to find Thanatos. He’s being kept at Alcyoneus’s lair.
I can tell you where that is. Of course I can. But you’ll
have to do me a favor.”
“Forget it,” Hazel snapped. “You’re working for the
enemy.
We should send you back to the Underworld
ourselves.”
“You could try.” Phineas smiled. “But I doubt I’d
stay dead very long. You see, Gaea has shown me the easy
way back. And with Thanatos in chains, there’s no one to
keep me down! Besides, if you kill me, you won’t get my
secrets.”
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Percy was tempted to let Hazel use her sword. In
fact he wanted to strangle the old man himself.
Camp Jupiter, he told himself. Saving the camp is
more important. He remembered Alcyoneus taunting
him in his dreams. If they wasted time searching through
Alaska looking for the giant’s lair, Gaea’s armies would
destroy the Romans…and Percy’s other friends, wherever
they were.
He gritted his teeth. “What’s the favor?”
Phineas licked his lips greedily. “There’s one harpy
who’s quicker than the rest.”
“The red one,” Percy guessed.
“I’m blind! I don’t know colors!” the old man
groused. “At any rate, she’s the only one I have trouble
with. She’s wily, that one. Always does her own thing,
never roosts with the others. She gave me these.”
He pointed at the scars on his forehead.
“Capture that harpy,” he said. “Bring her to me. I
want her tied up where I can keep an eye on her…ah, so to
speak. Harpies hate being tied up. It causes them extreme
pain. Yes, I’ll enjoy that. Maybe I’ll even feed her so that
she lasts longer.”
Percy looked at his friends. They came to a silent
agreement: they would never help this creepy old man.
On the other hand, they had to get his information. They
needed a Plan B.
“Oh, go talk among yourselves,” Phineas said
breezily. “I don’t care. Just remember that without my
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help, your quest will fail. And everyone you love in the
world will die. Now, off with you! Bring me a harpy!”
“WE’LL NEED SOME OF YOUR FOOD.” Percy shouldered
his way around the old man and snatched stuff off the
picnic table—a covered bowl of Thai noodles in mac-andcheese
sauce, and a tubular pastry that looked like a combination
burrito and cinnamon roll.
Before he could lose control and smash the burrito
in Phineas’s face, Percy said, “Come on, guys.” He led his
friends out of the parking lot.
They stopped across the street. Percy took a deep
breath, trying to calm down. The rain had slowed to a
halfhearted drizzle. The cold mist felt good on his face.
“That man…” Hazel smacked the side of a bus-stop
bench.
“He needs to die. Again.”
It was hard to tell in the rain, but she seemed to be
blinking back tears. Her long curly hair was plastered
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down the sides of her face. In the gray light, her gold eyes
looked more like tin.
Percy remembered how confident she’d acted when
they first met—taking control of the situation with the
gorgons and ushering him to safety. She’d comforted him
at the shrine of Neptune and made him feel welcome at
camp.
Now he wanted to return the favor, but he wasn’t
sure how. She looked lost, bedraggled, and thoroughly
depressed.
Percy wasn’t surprised that she had come back
from the Underworld. He’d suspected that for a
while—the way she avoided talking about her past, the
way Nico di Angelo had been so secretive and cautious.
But that didn’t change how Percy saw her. She
seemed... well, alive, like a regular kid with a good heart,
who deserved to grow up and have a future. She wasn’t a
ghoul like Phineas.
“We’ll get him,” Percy promised. “He’s nothing like
you, Hazel. I don’t care what he says.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know the whole
story. I should have been sent to Punishment. I—I’m just
as bad—”
“No, you’re not!” Frank balled his fists. He looked
around like he was searching for anybody who might disagree
with him—enemies he could hit for Hazel’s sake.
“She’s a good person!” he yelled across the street. A few
harpies squawked in the trees, but no one else paid them
any attention.
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Hazel stared at Frank. She reached out tentatively,
as if she wanted to take his hand but was afraid he might
evaporate.
“Frank...” she stammered. “I—I don’t...”
Unfortunately, Frank seemed wrapped up in his
own thoughts.
He slung his spear off his back and gripped it
uneasily.
“I could intimidate that old man,” he offered,
“maybe scare him—”
“Frank, it’s okay,” Percy said. “Let’s keep that as a
backup plan, but I don’t think Phineas can be scared into
cooperating. Besides, you’ve only got two more uses out
of the spear, right?”
Frank scowled at the dragon’s-tooth point, which
had grown back completely overnight. “Yeah. I guess.…”
Percy wasn’t sure what the old seer had meant
about Frank’s family history—his great-grandfather destroying
camp, his Argonaut ancestor, and the bit about a
burned stick controlling Frank’s life. But it had clearly
shaken Frank up. Percy decided not to ask for explanations.
He didn’t want the big guy reduced to tears, especially
in front of Hazel.
“I’ve got an idea.” Percy pointed up the street. “The
red-feathered harpy went that way. Let’s see if we can get
her to talk to us.”
Hazel looked at the food in his hands. “You’re going
to use that as bait?”
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“More like a peace offering,” Percy said. “Come on.
Just try to keep the other harpies from stealing this stuff,
okay?”
Percy uncovered the Thai noodles and unwrapped
the cinnamon burrito. Fragrant steam wafted into the air.
They walked down the street, Hazel and Frank with their
weapons out. The harpies fluttered after them, perching
on trees, mailboxes, and flagpoles, following the smell of
food.
Percy wondered what the mortals saw through the
Mist. Maybe they thought the harpies were pigeons and
the weapons were lacrosse sticks or something. Maybe
they just thought the Thai mac and cheese was so good it
needed an armed escort.
Percy kept a tight grip on the food. He’d seen how
quickly the harpies could snatch things. He didn’t want to
lose his peace offering before he found the red-feathered
harpy.
Finally he spotted her, circling above a stretch of
parkland that ran for several blocks between rows of old
stone buildings. Paths stretched through the park under
huge maple and elm trees, past sculptures and playgrounds
and shady benches. The place reminded Percy
of…some other park. Maybe in his hometown? He
couldn’t remember, but it made him feel homesick.
They crossed the street and found a bench to sit on,
next to a big bronze sculpture of an elephant.
“Looks like Hannibal,” Hazel said.
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“Except it’s Chinese,” Frank said. “My grandmother
has one of those.” He flinched. “I mean, hers isn’t twelve
feet tall. But she imports stuff…from China. We’re
Chinese.” He looked at Hazel and Percy, who were trying
hard not to laugh. “Could I just die from embarrassment
now?” he asked.
“Don’t worry about it, man,” Percy said. “Let’s see if
we can make friends with the harpy.”
He raised the Thai noodles and fanned the smell
upward—spicy peppers and cheesy goodness. The red
harpy circled lower.
“We won’t hurt you,” Percy called up in a normal
voice. “We just want to talk. Thai noodles for a chance to
talk, okay?”
The harpy streaked down in a flash of red and
landed on the elephant statue.
She was painfully thin. Her feathery legs were like
sticks. Her face would have been pretty except for her
sunken cheeks. She moved in jerky birdlike twitches, her
coffee-brown eyes darting restlessly, her fingers clawing
at her plumage, her earlobes, her shaggy red hair.
“Cheese,” she muttered, looking sideways. “Ella
doesn’t like cheese.”
Percy hesitated. “Your name is Ella?”
“Ella. Aella. ‘Harpy.’ In English. In Latin. Ella
doesn’t like cheese.” She said all that without taking a
breath or making eye contact. Her hands snatched at her
hair, her burlap dress, the raindrops, whatever moved.
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Quicker than Percy could blink, she lunged,
snatched the cinnamon burrito, and appeared atop the
elephant again.
“Gods, she’s fast!” Hazel said.
“And heavily caffeinated,” Frank guessed.
Ella sniffed the burrito. She nibbled at the edge and
shuddered from head to foot, cawing like she was dying.
“Cinnamon is good,” she pronounced. “Good for harpies.
Yum.”
She started to eat, but the bigger harpies swooped
down. Before Percy could react, they began pummeling
Ella with their wings, snatching at the burrito.
“Nnnnnnooo.” Ella tried to hide under her wings as
her sisters ganged up on her, scratching with their claws.
“N-no,” she stuttered. “N-n-no!”
“Stop it!” Percy yelled. He and his friends ran to
help, but it was too late. A big yellow harpy grabbed the
burrito and the whole flock scattered, leaving Ella cowering
and shivering on top of the elephant.
Hazel touched the harpy’s foot. “I’m so sorry. Are
you okay?”
Ella poked her head out of her wings. She was still
trembling. With her shoulders hunched, Percy could see
the bleeding gash on her back where Phineas had hit her
with the weed whacker. She picked at her feathers,
pulling out tufts of plumage. “S-small Ella,” she stuttered
angrily. “W-weak Ella. No cinnamon for Ella. Only
cheese.”
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Frank glared across the street, where the other
harpies were sitting in a maple tree, tearing the burrito to
shreds. “We’ll get you something else,” he promised.
Percy set down the Thai noodles. He realized that
Ella was different, even for a harpy. But after watching
her get picked on, he was sure of one thing: whatever else
happened, he was going to help her.
“Ella,” he said, “we want to be your friends. We can
get you more food, but—”
“Friends,” Ella said. “‘Ten seasons. 1994 to 2004.’”
She glanced sideways at Percy, then looked in the air and
started reciting to the clouds. “‘A half-blood of the eldest
gods, shall reach sixteen against all odds.’ Sixteen. You’re
sixteen. Page sixteen, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
‘Ingredients: Bacon, Butter.’”
Percy’s ears were ringing. He felt dizzy, like he’d
just plunged a hundred feet underwater and back up
again. “Ella…what was that you said?”
“‘Bacon.’” She caught a raindrop out of the air.
“‘Butter.’”
“No, before that. Those lines…I know those lines.”
Next to him, Hazel shivered. “It does sound familiar,
like…I don’t know, like a prophecy. Maybe it’s
something she heard Phineas say?”
At the name Phineas, Ella squawked in terror and
flew away.
“Wait!” Hazel called. “I didn’t mean—Oh, gods, I’m
stupid.”
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“It’s all right.” Frank pointed. “Look.”
Ella wasn’t moving as quickly now. She flapped her
way to the top of a three-story red brick building and
scuttled out of sight over the roof. A single red feather
fluttered down to the street.
“You think that’s her nest?” Frank squinted at the
sign on the building. “Multnomah County Library?”
Percy nodded. “Let’s see if it’s open.”
They ran across the street and into the lobby.
A library wouldn’t have been Percy’s first choice for
someplace to visit. With his dyslexia, he had enough
trouble reading signs. A whole building full of books?
That sounded about as much fun as Chinese water torture
or getting his teeth extracted.
As they jogged through the lobby, Percy figured
Annabeth would like this place. It was spacious and
brightly lit, with big vaulted windows. Books and architecture,
that was definitely her....
He froze in his tracks.
“Percy?” Frank asked. “What’s wrong?”
Percy tried desperately to concentrate. Where had
those thoughts come from? Architecture, books…Annabeth
had taken him to the library once, back home
in—in—The memory faded. Percy slammed his fist into
the side of a bookshelf.
“Percy?” Hazel asked gently.
He was so angry, so frustrated with his missing
memories that he wanted to punch another bookshelf, but
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his friends’ concerned faces brought him back to the
present.
“I’m—I’m all right,” he lied. “Just got dizzy for a
sec. Let’s find a way to the roof.”
It took them a while, but they finally found a stairwell
with roof access. At the top was a door with a handle
alarm, but someone had propped it open with a copy of
War and Peace.
Outside, Ella the harpy huddled in a nest of books
under a makeshift cardboard shelter.
Percy and his friends advanced slowly, trying not to
scare her. Ella didn’t pay them any attention. She picked
at her feathers and muttered under her breath, like she
was practicing lines for a play.
Percy got within five feet and knelt down. “Hi.
Sorry we scared you. Look, I don’t have much food, but…”
He took some of the macrobiotic jerky out of his
pocket. Ella lunged and snatched it immediately. She
huddled back in her nest, sniffing the jerky, but sighed
and tossed it away. “N-not from his table. Ella cannot eat.
Sad. Jerky would be good for harpies.”“Not from…Oh,
right,” Percy said. “That’s part of the curse. You can only
eat his food.”
“There has to be a way,” Hazel said.
“‘Photosynthesis,’” Ella muttered. “‘Noun. Biology.
The synthesis of complex organic materials.’ ‘It was the
best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness... ’”
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“What is she saying?” Frank whispered.
Percy stared at the mound of books around her.
They all looked old and mildewed. Some had prices written
in marker on the covers, like the library had gotten rid
of them in a clearance sale.
“She’s quoting books,” Percy guessed.
“Farmer’s Almanac 1965,” Ella said. “‘Start breed
ing animals, January twenty-sixth.’”
“Ella,” he said, “have you read all of these?”
She blinked. “More. More downstairs. Words.
Words calm Ella down. Words, words, words.”
Percy picked up a book at random—a tattered copy
ofA History of Horseracing. “Ella, do you remember the,
um, third paragraph on page sixty-two—”
“‘Secretariat,’” Ella said instantly, “‘favored three to
two-in the 1973 Kentucky Derby, finished at standing
track record of one fifty-nine and two fifths.’”
Percy closed the book. His hands were shaking.
“Word for word.”
“That’s amazing,” Hazel said.
“She’s a genius chicken,” Frank agreed.
Percy felt uneasy. He was starting to form a terrible
idea about why Phineas wanted to capture Ella, and it
wasn’t because she’d scratched him. Percy remembered
that line she’d recited, A half-blood of the eldest gods. He
was sure it was about him.
“Ella,” he said, “we’re going to find a way to break
the curse. Would you like that?”
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“‘It’s Impossible,’” she said. “‘Recorded in English
by Perry Como, 1970.’”
“Nothing’s impossible,” Percy said. “Now, look, I’m
going to say his name. You don’t have to run away. We’re
going to save you from the curse. We just need to figure
out a way to beat ... Phineas.”
He waited for her to bolt, but she just shook her
head vigorously. “N-n-no! No Phineas. Ella is quick. Too
quick for him. B-but he wants to ch-chain Ella. He hurts
Ella.”
She tried to reach the gash on her back.
“Frank,” Percy said, “you have first-aid supplies?”
“On it.” Frank brought out a thermos full of nectar
and explained its healing properties to Ella. When he
scooted closer, she recoiled and started to shriek. Then
Hazel tried, and Ella let her pour some nectar on her
back. The wound began to close.
Hazel smiled. “See? That’s better.”
“Phineas is bad,” Ella insisted. “And weed whackers.
And cheese.”
“Absolutely,” Percy agreed. “We won’t let him hurt
youagain. We need to figure out how to trick him, though.
You harpies must know him better than anybody. Is there
any way we can trick him?”
“N-no,” Ella said. “Tricks are for kids. 50 Tricks to
Teach Your Dog, by Sophie Collins, call number sixthree-
six—”
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“Okay, Ella.” Hazel spoke in a soothing voice, like
she was trying to calm a horse. “But does Phineas have
any weaknesses?”
“Blind. He’s blind.”
Frank rolled his eyes, but Hazel continued patiently,
“Right. Besides that?”
“Chance,” she said. “Games of chance. Two to one.
Bad odds. Call or fold.”
Percy’s spirits rose. “You mean he’s a gambler?”
“Phineas s-sees big things. Prophecies. Fates. God
stuff. Not small stuff. Random. Exciting. And he is blind.”
Frank rubbed his chin. “Any idea what she means?”
Percy watched the harpy pick at her burlap dress.
He felt incredibly sorry for her, but he was also starting to
realize just how smart she was.
“I think I get it,” he said. “Phineas sees the future.
He knows tons of important events. But he can’t see small
things—like random occurrences, spontaneous games of
chance. That makes gambling exciting for him. If we can
tempt him into making a bet…”
Hazel nodded slowly. “You mean if he loses, he has
to tell us where Thanatos is. But what do we have to
wager? What kind of game do we play?”
“Something simple, with high stakes,” Percy said.
“Like two choices. One you live, one you die. And the
prize has to be something Phineas wants…I mean, besides
Ella. That’s off the table.”
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“Sight,” Ella muttered. “Sight is good for blind
men.
Healing…nope, nope. Gaea won’t do that for
Phineas. Gaea keeps Phineas b-blind, dependent on Gaea.
Yep.”
Frank and Percy exchanged a meaningful look.
“Gorgon’s blood,” they said simultaneously.
“What?” Hazel asked.
Frank brought out the two ceramic vials he’d retrieved
from the Little Tiber. “Ella’s a genius,” he said.
“Unless we die.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Percy said. “I’ve got a
plan.”
THE OLD MAN WAS RIGHT WHERE they’d left him, in
the middle of the food truck parking lot. He sat on his picnic
bench with his bunny slippers propped up, eating a
plate of greasy shish kebab. His weed whacker was at his
side. His bathrobe was smeared with barbecue sauce.
“Welcome back!” he called cheerfully. “I hear the
flutter of nervous little wings. You’ve brought me my
harpy?”
“She’s here,” Percy said. “But she’s not yours.”
Phineas sucked the grease off his fingers. His milky
eyes seemed fixed on a point just above Percy’s head. “I
see…Well, actually, I’m blind, so I don’t see. Have you
come to kill me, then? If so, good luck completing your
quest.”
“I’ve come to gamble.”
The old man’s mouth twitched. He put down his
shishkebab and leaned toward Percy. “A gamble…how
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interesting. Information in exchange for the harpy? Winner
take all?”
“No,” Percy said. “The harpy isn’t part of the deal.”
Phineas laughed. “Really? Perhaps you don’t understand
her value.”
“She’s a person,” Percy said. “She isn’t for sale.”
“Oh, please! You’re from the Roman camp, aren’t
you? Rome was built on slavery. Don’t get all high and
mighty with me. Besides, she isn’t even human. She’s a
monster. A wind spirit. A minion of Jupiter.”
Ella squawked. Just getting her into the parking lot
had been a major challenge, but now she started backing
away, muttering, “‘Jupiter. Hydrogen and helium. Sixty-
three satellites.’ No minions. Nope.”
Hazel put her arm around Ella’s wings. She seemed
to be the only one who could touch the harpy without
causing lots of screaming and twitching.
Frank stayed at Percy’s side. He held his spear
ready, as if the old man might charge them.
Percy brought out the ceramic vials. “I have a different
wager. We’ve got two flasks of gorgon’s blood. One
kills. One heals. They look exactly the same. Even we
don’t know which is which. If you choose the right one, it
could cure your blindness.”
Phineas held out his hands eagerly. “Let me feel
them. Let me smell them.”
“Not so fast,” Percy said. “First you agree to the
terms.”
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“Terms…” Phineas was breathing shallowly. Percy
could tell he was hungry to take the offer. “Prophecy and
sight ... I’d be unstoppable. I could own this city. I’d build
my palace here, surrounded by food trucks. I could capture
that harpy myself!”
“N-noo,” Ella said nervously. “Nope, nope, nope.”
A villainous laugh is hard to pull off when you’re
wearing pink bunny slippers, but Phineas gave it his best
shot. “Very well, demigod. What are your terms?”
“You get to choose a vial,” Percy said. “No uncork
ing, no sniffing before you decide.”
“That’s not fair! I’m blind.”
“And I don’t have your sense of smell,” Percy
countered. “You can hold the vials. And I’ll swear on the
River Styx that they look identical. They’re exactly what I
told you: gorgon’s blood, one vial from the left side of the
monster, one from the right. And I swear that none of us
knows which is which.”
Percy looked back at Hazel. “Uh, you’re our Underworld
expert. With all this weird stuff going on with
Death, is an oath on the River Styx still binding?”
“Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “To break such
a vow…Well, just don’t do it. There are worse things than
death.” Phineas stroked his beard. “So I choose which vial
to drink. You have to drink the other one. We swear to
drink at the same time.”
“Right,” Percy said.
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“The loser dies, obviously,” Phineas said. “That
kind ofpoison would probably keep even me from coming
back tolife…for a long time, at least. My essence would be
scattered and degraded. So I’m risking quite a lot.”
“But if you win, you get everything,” Percy said. “If
Idie, my friends will swear to leave you in peace and not
take revenge. You’d have your sight back, which even
Gaea won’t give you.”
The old man’s expression soured. Percy could tell
he’d struck a nerve. Phineas wanted to see. As much as
Gaea had given him, he resented being kept in the dark.
“If I lose,” the old man said, “I’ll be dead, unable to
give you information. How does that help you?”
Percy was glad he’d talked this through with his
friends ahead of time. Frank had suggested the answer.
“You write down the location of Alcyoneus’s lair
ahead of time,” Percy said. “Keep it to yourself, but swear
on the River Styx it’s specific and accurate. You also have
to swear that if you lose and die, the harpies will be released
from their curse.”
“Those are high stakes,” Phineas grumbled. “You
face death, Percy Jackson. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to
hand over the harpy?”
“Not an option.”
Phineas smiled slowly. “So you are starting to understand
her worth. Once I have my sight, I’ll capture her
myself, you know. Whoever controls that harpy…well, I
was a king once. This gamble could make me a king
again.”
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“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” Percy said. “Do
we have a deal?”
Phineas tapped his nose thoughtfully. “I can’t foresee
the outcome. Annoying how that works. A completely
unexpected gamble…it makes the future cloudy. But I can
tell you this, Percy Jackson—a bit of free advice. If you
survive today, you’re not going to like your future. A big
sacrifice is coming, and you won’t have the courage to
make it. That will cost you dearly. It will cost the world
dearly. It might be easier if you just choose the poison.”
Percy’s mouth tasted like Iris’s sour green tea. He
wanted to think the old man was just psyching him out,
but something told him the prediction was true. He remembered
Juno’s warning when he’d chosen to go to
Camp Jupiter: You will feel pain, misery, and loss beyond
anything you’ve ever known. But you might have a
chance to save your old friends and family.
In the trees around the parking lot, the harpies
gathered to watch as if they sensed what was at stake.
Frank and Hazel studied Percy’s face with concern. He’d
assured them the odds weren’t as bad as fifty-fifty. He did
have a plan. Of course, the plan could backfire. His
chance of survival might be a hundred percent—or zero.
He hadn’t mentioned that.
“Do we have a deal?” he asked again.
Phineas grinned. “I swear on the River Styx to
abide by the terms, just as you have described them.
Frank Zhang, you’re the descendant of an Argonaut. I
trust your word. If I win, do you and your friend Hazel
swear to leave me in peace, and not seek revenge?”
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Frank’s hands were clenched so tight Percy thought
he might break his gold spear, but he managed to
grumble, “I swear it on the River Styx.”
“I also swear,” Hazel said.
“Swear,” Ella muttered. “‘Swear not by the moon,
the inconstant moon.’”
Phineas laughed. “In that case, find me something
to write with. Let’s get started.”
Frank borrowed a napkin and a pen from a food truck
vendor. Phineas scribbled something on the napkin and
put it in his bathrobe pocket. “I swear this is the location
of Alcyoneus’s lair. Not that you’ll live long enough to
read it.”
Percy drew his sword and swept all the food off the
picnic table. Phineas sat on one side. Percy sat on the
other.
Phineas held out his hands. “Let me feel the vials.”
Percy gazed at the hills in the distance. He imagined
the shadowy face of a sleeping woman. He sent his
thoughts into the ground beneath him and hoped the
goddess was listening.
Okay, Gaea, he said. I’m calling your bluff. You
say I’m a valuable pawn. You say you’ve got plans for
me, and you’re going to spare me until I make it north.
Who’s more valuable to you—me, or this old man? Because
one of us is about to die.
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Phineas curled his fingers in a grasping motion.
“Losing your nerve, Percy Jackson? Let me have them.”
Percy passed him the vials.
The old man compared their weight. He ran his fingers
along the ceramic surfaces. Then he set them both on
the table and rested one hand lightly on each. A tremor
passed through the ground—a mild earthquake, just
strong enough to make Percy’s teeth chatter. Ella cawed
nervously.
The vial on the left seemed to shake slightly more
than the one on the right.
Phineas grinned wickedly. He closed his fingers
around the left-hand vial. “You were a fool, Percy Jackson.
I choose this one. Now we drink.”
Percy took the vial on the right. His teeth were
chattering.
The old man raised his vial. “A toast to the sons of
Neptune.”
They both uncorked their vials and drank.
Immediately, Percy doubled over, his throat burning.
His mouth tasted like gasoline.
“Oh, gods,” Hazel said behind him.
“Nope!” Ella said. “Nope, nope, nope.”
Percy’s vision blurred. He could see Phineas grinning
in triumph, sitting up straighter, blinking his eyes in
anticipation.
“Yes!” he cried. “Any moment now, my sight will
return!”
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Percy had chosen wrong. He’d been stupid to take
such a risk. He felt like broken glass was working its way
through his stomach, into his intestines.
“Percy!” Frank gripped his shoulders. “Percy, you
can’t die!”
He gasped for breath…and suddenly his vision
cleared.
At the same moment, Phineas hunched over like
he’d been punched.
“You—you can’t!” the old man wailed. “Gaea,
you—you—”
He staggered to his feet and stumbled away from
the table, clutching his stomach. “I’m too valuable!”
Steam came out of his mouth. A sickly yellow vapor
rose from his ears, his beard, his blind eyes.
“Unfair!” he screamed. “You tricked me!”
He tried to claw the piece of paper out of his robe
pocket, but his hands crumbled, his fingers turning to
sand.
Percy rose unsteadily. He didn’t feel cured of anything
in particular. His memory hadn’t magically returned.
But the pain had stopped.
“No one tricked you,” Percy said. “You made your
choice freely, and I hold you to your oath.” The blind king
wailed in agony. He turned in a circle, steaming and
slowly disintegrating until there was nothing left but an
old, stained bathrobe and a pair of bunny slippers.
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“Those,” Frank said, “are the most disgusting spoils
of war ever.”
A woman’s voice spoke in Percy’s mind. A gamble,
Percy Jackson. It was a sleepy whisper, with just a hint of
grudging admiration. You forced me to choose, and you
are more important to my plans than the old seer. But do
not press your luck. When your death comes, I promise it
will be much more painful than gorgon’s blood.
Hazel prodded the robe with her sword. There was
nothing underneath—no sign that Phineas was trying to
re-form. She looked at Percy in awe. “That was either the
bravest thing I’ve ever seen, or the stupidest.”
Frank shook his head in disbelief. “Percy, how did
you know? You were so confident he’d choose the
poison.”
“Gaea,” Percy said. “She wants me to make it to
Alaska. She thinks…I’m not sure. She thinks she can use
me as part of her plan. She influenced Phineas to choose
the wrong vial.”
Frank stared in horror at the remains of the old
man. “Gaea would kill her own servant rather than you?
That’s what you were betting on?”
“Plans,” Ella muttered. “Plans and plots. The lady
in the ground. Big plans for Percy. Macrobiotic jerky for
Ella.”
Percy handed her the whole bag of jerky and she
squeaked with joy. “Nope, nope, nope,” she muttered,
half-singing. “Phineas, nope. Food and words for Ella,
yep.”
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Percy crouched over the bathrobe and pulled the
old man’s note out of the pocket. It read: HUBBARD
GLACIER.
All that risk for two words. He handed the note to
Hazel.
“I know where that is,” she said. “It’s pretty famous.
But we’ve got a long, long way to go.”
In the trees around the parking lot, the other
harpies finally overcame their shock. They squawked with
excitement and flew at the nearest food trucks, diving
through the service windows and raiding the kitchens.
Cooks shouted in many languages. Trucks shook back and
forth. Feathers and food boxes flew everywhere.
“We’d better get back to the boat,” Percy said.
“We’re running out of time.”
EVEN BEFORE SHE GOT ON THE BOAT, Hazel felt
queasy.
She kept thinking about Phineas with steam coming
out of his eyes, his hands crumbling to dust. Percy
had assured her that she wasn’t like Phineas. But she
was. She’d done something even worse than torment
harpies.
You started this whole thing! Phineas had said. If it
weren’t for you, Alcyoneus wouldn’t be alive!
As the boat sped down the Columbia River, Hazel
tried to forget. She helped Ella make a nest out of old
books and magazines they’d liberated from the library’s
recycling bin.
They hadn’t really planned on taking the harpy
with them, but Ella acted like the matter was decided.
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“Friends,” she muttered. “‘Ten seasons. 1994 to
2004.’ Friends melt Phineas and give Ella jerky. Ella will
go with her friends.”
Now she was roosting comfortably in the stern,
nibbling bits of jerky and reciting random lines from
Charles Dickens and 50 Tricks to Teach Your Dog.
Percy knelt in the bow, steering them toward the
ocean with his freaky mind-over-water powers. Hazel sat
next to Frank on the center bench, their shoulders touching,
which made her feel as jittery as a harpy.
She remembered how Frank stood up for her in
Portland, shouting, “She’s a good person!” like he was
ready to take on anybody who denied it.
She remembered the way he had looked on the hillside
in Mendocino, alone in a clearing of poisoned grass
with his spear in hand, fires burning all around him and
the ashes of three basilisks at his feet.
A week ago, if someone had suggested that Frank
was a child of Mars, Hazel would have laughed. Frank
was much too sweet and gentle for that. She had always
felt protective of him because of his clumsiness and his
knack for getting into trouble.
Since they’d left camp, she saw him differently. He
had more courage than she’d realized. He was the one
looking out for her. She had to admit that the change was
kind of nice.
The river widened into the ocean. The Pax turned
north. As they sailed, Frank kept her spirits up by telling
her silly jokes—Why did the Minotaur cross the road?
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How many fauns does it take to change a lightbulb? He
pointed out buildings along the coastline that reminded
him of places in Vancouver.
The sky started to darken, the sea turning the same
rusty color as Ella’s wings. June 21 was almost over. The
Feast of Fortuna would happen in the evening, exactly
seventy-two hours from now.
Finally Frank brought out some food from his
pack—sodas and muffins he’d scavenged from Phineas’s
table. He passed them around.
“It’s okay, Hazel,” he said quietly. “My mom used
to say you shouldn’t try to carry a problem alone. But if
you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay.”
Hazel took a shaky breath. She was afraid to
talk—not just because she was embarrassed. She didn’t
want to black out and slip into the past.
“You were right,” she said, “when you guessed I
came back from the Underworld. I’m…I’m an escapee. I
shouldn’t be alive.”
She felt like a dam had broken. The story flooded
out. She explained how her mother had summoned Pluto
and fallen in love with the god. She explained her mother’s
wish for all the riches in the earth, and how that had
turned into Hazel’s curse. She described her life in New
Orleans—everything except her boyfriend Sammy. Looking
at Frank, she couldn’t bring herself to talk about that.
She described the Voice, and how Gaea had slowly
taken over her mother’s mind. She explained how they
had moved to Alaska, how Hazel had helped to raise the
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giant Alcyoneus, and how she had died, sinking the island
into Resurrection Bay.
She knew Percy and Ella were listening, but she
spoke mostly to Frank. When she had finished, she was
afraid to look at him. She waited for him to move away
from her, maybe tell her she was a monster after all.
Instead, he took her hand. “You sacrificed yourself
to stop the giant from waking. I could never be that
brave.”
She felt her pulse throbbing in her neck. “It wasn’t
bravery. I let my mother die. I cooperated with Gaea too
long. I almost let her win.”
“Hazel,” said Percy. “You stood up to a goddess all
by yourself. You did the right…” His voice trailed off, as if
he’d had an unpleasant thought. “What happened in the
Underworld…I mean, after you died? You should’ve gone
to Elysium. But if Nico brought you back—”
“I didn’t go to Elysium.” Her mouth felt dry as
sand. “Please don’t ask…”
But it was too late. She remembered her descent into
the darkness, her arrival on the banks of the River Styx,
and her consciousness began to slip.
“Hazel?” Frank asked.
“‘Slip Sliding Away,’” Ella muttered. “Number five
U.S. single. Paul Simon. Frank, go with her. Simon says,
Frank, go with her.”
Hazel had no idea what Ella was talking about, but
her vision darkened as she clung to Frank’s hand.
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She found herself back in the Underworld, and this
time Frank was at her side.
They stood in Charon’s boat, crossing the Styx. Debris
swirled in the dark waters—a deflated birthday balloon, a
child’s pacifier, a little plastic bride and groom from the
top of a cake—all the remnants of human lives cut short.
“Wh-where are we?” Frank stood at her side, shimmering
with a ghostly purple light as if he’d become a Lar.
“It’s my past.” Hazel felt strangely calm. “It’s just
an echo. Don’t worry.”
The boatman turned and grinned. One moment he
was a handsome African man in an expensive silk suit.
The next moment he was a skeleton in a dark robe.
“’Course you shouldn’t worry,” he said with a British accent.
He addressed Hazel, as if he couldn’t see Frank at
all. “Told you I’d take you across, didn’t I? ’Sall right you
don’t have a coin. Wouldn’t be proper, leaving Pluto’s
daughter on the wrong side of the river.”
The boat slid onto a dark beach. Hazel led Frank to
the black gates of Erebos. The spirits parted for them,
sensing she was a child of Pluto. The giant three-headed
dog Cerberus growled in the gloom, but he let them pass.
Inside the gates, they walked into a large pavilion and
stood before the judges’ bench. Three black-robed figures
in golden masks stared down at Hazel.
Frank whimpered. “Who—?”
“They’ll decide my fate,” she said. “Watch.”
342/589
Just as before, the judges asked her no questions.
They simply looked into her mind, pulling thoughts from
her head and examining them like a collection of old
photos.
“Thwarted Gaea,” the first judge said. “Prevented
Alcyoneus from waking.”
“But she raised the giant in the first place,” the
second judge argued. “Guilty of cowardice, weakness.”
“She is young,” said the third judge. “Her mother’s
life hung in the balance.”
“My mother.” Hazel found the courage to speak.
“Where is she? What is her fate?”
The judges regarded her, their golden masks frozen
in creepy smiles. “Your mother…”
The image of Marie Levesque shimmered above the
judges. She was frozen in time, hugging Hazel as the cave
collapsed, her eyes shut tight.
“An interesting question,” the second judge said.
“The division of fault.”
“Yes,” said the first judge. “The child died for a
noble cause. She prevented many deaths by delaying the
giant’s rise. She had courage to stand against the might of
Gaea.”
“But she acted too late,” the third judge said sadly.
“She is guilty of aiding and abetting an enemy of the
gods.”
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“The mother influenced her,” said the first judge.
“The child can have Elysium. Eternal Punishment for
Marie Levesque.”
“No!” Hazel shouted. “No, please! That’s not fair.”
The judges tilted their heads in unison. Gold
masks, Hazel thought. Gold has always been cursed for
me. She wondered if the gold was poisoning their
thoughts somehow, so that they’d never give her a fair
trial.
“Beware, Hazel Levesque,” the first judge warned.
“Would you take full responsibility? You could lay this
guilt on your mother’s soul. That would be reasonable.
You were destined for great things. Your mother diverted
your path. See what you might have been.…”
Another image appeared above the judges. Hazel
saw herself as a little girl, grinning, with her hands
covered in finger paint. The image aged. Hazel saw herself
growing up—her hair became longer, her eyes sadder.
She saw herself on her thirteenth birthday, riding across
the fields on her borrowed horse. Sammy laughed as he
raced after her: What are you running from? I’m not that
ugly, am I? She saw herself in Alaska, trudging down
Third Street in the snow and darkness on her way home
from school.
Then the image aged even more. Hazel saw herself
at twenty. She looked so much like her mother, her hair
gathered back in braids, her golden eyes flashing with
amusement. She wore a white dress—a wedding dress?
She was smiling so warmly, Hazel knew instinctively she
must be looking at someone special—someone she loved.
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The sight didn’t make her feel bitter. She didn’t
even wonder whom she would have married. Instead she
thought: My mother might’ve looked like this if she’d let
go of her anger, if Gaea hadn’t twisted her.
“You lost this life,” the first judge said simply. “Special
circumstances. Elysium for you. Punishment for your
mother.”
“No,” Hazel said. “No, it wasn’t all her fault. She
was misled. She loved me. At the end, she tried to protect
me.”
“Hazel,” Frank whispered. “What are you doing?”
She squeezed his hand, urging him to be silent. The
judges paid him no attention.
Finally the second judge sighed. “No resolution.
Not enough good. Not enough evil.”
“The blame must be divided,” the first judge
agreed. “Both souls will be consigned to the Fields of Asphodel.
I’m sorry, Hazel Levesque. You could have been a
hero.”
She passed through the pavilion, into yellow fields
that went on forever. She led Frank through a crowd of
spirits to a grove of black poplar trees.
“You gave up Elysium,” Frank said in amazement,
“so your mother wouldn’t suffer?”
“She didn’t deserve Punishment,” Hazel said.
“But…what happens now?”
“Nothing,” Hazel said. “Nothing…for all eternity.”
345/589
They drifted aimlessly. Spirits around them
chattered like bats—lost and confused, not remembering
their past or even their names.
Hazel remembered everything. Perhaps that was
because she was a daughter of Pluto, but she never forgot
who she was, or why she was there.
“Remembering made my afterlife harder,” she told
Frank, who still drifted next to her as a glowing purple
Lar. “So many times I tried to walk to my father’s
palace.…” She pointed to a large black castle in the distance.
“I could never reach it. I can’t leave the Fields of
Asphodel.”
“Did you ever see your mother again?”
Hazel shook her head. “She wouldn’t know me,
even if I could find her. These spirits…it’s like an eternal
dream for them, an endless trance. This is the best I could
do for her.”
Time was meaningless, but after an eternity, she
and Frank sat together under a black poplar tree, listening
to the screams from the Fields of Punishment. In the
distance, under the artificial sunlight of Elysium, the Isles
of the Blest glittered like emeralds in a sparkling blue
lake. White sails cut across water and the souls of great
heroes basked on the beaches in perpetual bliss.
“You didn’t deserve Asphodel,” Frank protested.
“You should be with the heroes.”
“This is just an echo,” Hazel said. “We’ll wake up,
Frank. It only seems like forever.”
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“That’s not the point!” he protested. “Your life was
taken from you. You were going to grow up to be a beautiful
woman. You...”
His face turned a darker shade of purple. “You were
going to marry someone,” he said quietly. “You would
have had a good life. You lost all that.”
Hazel swallowed back a sob. It hadn’t been this
hard in Asphodel the first time, when she was on her own.
Having Frank with her made her feel so much sadder. But
she was determined not to get angry about her fate.
Hazel thought about that image of herself as an
adult, smiling and in love. She knew it wouldn’t take
much bitterness to sour her expression and make her look
exactly like Queen Marie. I deserve better, her mother always
said. Hazel couldn’t allow herself to feel that way.
“I’m sorry, Frank,” she said. “I think your mother
was wrong. Sometimes sharing a problem doesn’t make it
easier to carry.”
“But it does.” Frank slipped his hand into his coat
pocket.
“In fact…since we’ve got eternity to talk, there’s
something I want to tell you.”
He brought out an object wrapped in cloth, about
the same size as a pair of glasses. When he unfolded it,
Hazel saw a half-burned piece of driftwood, glowing with
purple light.
She frowned. “What is…” Then the truth hit her, as
cold and harsh as a blast of winter wind. “Phineas said
your life depends on a burned stick—”
347/589
“It’s true,” Frank said. “This is my lifeline, literally.”
He told her how the goddess Juno had appeared
when he was a baby, how his grandmother had snatched
the piece of wood from the fireplace. “Grandmother said I
had gifts—some talent we got from our ancestor, the Argonaut.
That, and my dad’s being Mars…” He shrugged.
“I’m supposed to be too powerful or something. That’s
why my life can burn up so easily. Iris said I would die
holding this, watching it burn.”
Frank turned the piece of tinder in his fingers.
Even in his ghostly purple form, he looked so big and
sturdy. Hazel figured he would be huge when he was an
adult—as strong and healthy as an ox. She couldn’t believe
his life depended on something as small as a stick.
“Frank, how can you carry it around with you?” she
asked. “Aren’t you terrified something will happen to it?”
“That’s why I’m telling you.” He held out the firewood.
“I know it’s a lot to ask, but would you keep it for
me?”
Hazel’s head spun. Until now, she’d accepted
Frank’s presence in her blackout. She’d led him along,
numbly replaying her past, because it seemed only fair to
show him the truth.
But now she wondered if Frank was really experiencing
this with her, or if she was just imagining his presence.
Why would he trust her with his life?
“Frank,” she said, “you know who I am. I’m Pluto’s
daughter. Everything I touch goes wrong. Why would you
trust me?”
348/589
“You’re my best friend.” He placed the firewood in
her hands. “I trust you more than anybody.”
She wanted to tell him he was making a mistake.
She wanted to give it back. But before she could say anything,
a shadow fell over them.
“Our ride is here,” Frank guessed.
Hazel had almost forgotten she was reliving her
past. Nicodi Angelo stood over her in his black overcoat,
his Stygian iron sword at his side. He didn’t notice Frank,
but he locked eyes with Hazel and seemed to read her
whole life.
“You’re different,” he said. “A child of Pluto. You
remember your past.”
“Yes,” Hazel said. “And you’re alive.”
Nico studied her like he was reading a menu, decid
ing whether or not to order.
“I’m Nico di Angelo,” he said. “I came looking for
my sister. Death has gone missing, so I thought…I
thought I could bring her back and no one would notice.”
“Back to life?” Hazel asked. “Is that possible?”
“It should have been.” Nico sighed. “But she’s gone.
She chose to be reborn into a new life. I’m too late.”
“I’m sorry.”
He held out his hand. “You’re my sister too. You
deserve another chance. Come with me.”
“HAZEL.” PERCY WAS SHAKING HER SHOULDER.
“Wake up. We’ve reached Seattle.”
She sat up groggily, squinting in the morning sunlight.
“Frank?”
Frank groaned, rubbing his eyes. “Did we just…was
I just—?”
“You both passed out,” Percy said. “I don’t know
why, but Ella told me not to worry about it. She said you
were…sharing?”
“Sharing,” Ella agreed. She crouched in the stern,
preening her wing feathers with her teeth, which didn’t
look like a very effective form of personal hygiene. She
spit out some red fluff. “Sharing is good. No more blackouts.
Biggest American blackout, August 14, 2003. Hazel
shared. No more blackouts.” Percy scratched his head.
350/589
“Yeah…we’ve been having conversations like that all
night. I still don’t know what she’stalking about.”
Hazel pressed her hand against her coat pocket.
She could feel the piece of firewood, wrapped in cloth.
She looked at Frank. “You were there.”
He nodded. He didn’t say anything, but his expression
was clear: He’d meant what he said. He wanted her
to keep the piece of tinder safe. She wasn’t sure whether
she felt honored or scared. No one had ever trusted her
with something so important.
“Wait,” Percy said. “You mean you guys shared a
blackout? Are you guys both going to pass out from now
on?”
“Nope,” Ella said. “Nope, nope, nope. No more
blackouts. More books for Ella. Books in Seattle.”
Hazel gazed over the water. They were sailing
through a large bay, making their way toward a cluster of
downtown buildings. Neighborhoods rolled across a
series of hills. From the tallest one rose an odd white
tower with a saucer on the top, like a spaceship from the
old Flash Gordon movies Sammy used to love.
No more blackouts? Hazel thought. After enduring
them for so long, the idea seemed too good to be true.
How could Ella be sure they were gone? Yet Hazel
did feel different . .. more grounded, as if she wasn’t trying
to live in two time periods anymore. Every muscle in
her body began to relax. She felt as if she’d finally slipped
out of a lead jacket she’d been wearing for months. Somehow,
having Frank with her during the blackout had
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helped. She’d relived her entire past, right through to the
present. No wall she had to worry about was the future—
assuming shehad one.
Percy steered the boat toward the downtown docks.
As they got closer, Ella scratched nervously at her nest of
books.
Hazel started to feel edgy, too. She wasn’t sure why.
It was a bright, sunny day, and Seattle looked like a beautiful
place, with inlets and bridges, wooded islands
dotting the bay, and snowcapped mountains rising in the
distance. Still, she felt as if she were being watched.
“Um…why are we stopping here?” she asked.
Percy showed them the silver ring on his necklace.
“Reyna has a sister here. She asked me to find her and
show her this.”
“Reyna has a sister?” Frank asked, like the idea terrified
him.
Percy nodded. “Apparently Reyna thinks her sister
could send help for the camp.”
“Amazons,” Ella muttered. “Amazon country.
Hmm. Ella will find libraries instead. Doesn’t like
Amazons. Fierce. Shields. Swords. Pointy. Ouch.”
Frank reached for his spear. “Amazons? Like…female
warriors?”
“That would make sense,” Hazel said. “If Reyna’s
sister is also a daughter of Bellona, I can see why she’d
join the Amazons. But…is it safe for us to be here?”
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“Nope, nope, nope,” Ella said. “Get books instead.
No Amazons.”
“We have to try,” Percy said. “I promised Reyna.
Besides, the Pax isn’t doing too great. I’ve been pushing it
pretty hard.”
Hazel looked down at her feet. Water was leaking
between the floorboards. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” Percy agreed. “We’ll either need to fix it or
find a new boat. I’m pretty much holding it together with
my willpower at this point. Ella, do you have any idea
where we can find the Amazons?”
“And, um,” Frank said nervously, “they don’t, like,
kill men on sight, do they?”
Ella glanced at the downtown docks, only a few
hundred yards away. “Ella will find friends later. Ella will
fly away now.”
And she did.
“Well…” Frank picked a single red feather out of
the air. “That’s encouraging.”
They docked at the wharf. They barely had time to
unload their supplies before the Pax shuddered and broke
into pieces. Most of it sank, leaving only a board with a
painted eye and another with the letter P bobbing in the
waves.
“Guess we’re not fixing it,” Hazel said. “What
now?”
Percy stared at the steep hills of downtown Seattle.
“We hope the Amazons will help.”
353/589
They explored for hours. They found some great salty caramel
chocolate at a candy store. They bought some coffee
so strong, Hazel’s head felt like a vibrating gong. They
stopped at a sidewalk café and had some excellent grilled
salmon sandwiches.
Once they saw Ella zooming between high-rise
towers, a large book clutched in each foot. But they found
no Amazons. All the while, Hazel was aware of the time
ticking by. June 22 now, and Alaska was still a long way
away.
Finally they wandered south of downtown, into a
plaza surrounded by smaller glass and brick buildings.
Hazel’s nerves started tingling. She looked around, sure
she was being watched.
“There,” she said.
The office building on their left had a single word
etched on the glass doors: AMAZON.
“Oh,” Frank said. “Uh, no, Hazel. That’s a modern
thing. They’re a company, right? They sell stuff on the Internet.
They’re not actually Amazons.”
“Unless…” Percy walked through the doors. Hazel
had a bad feeling about this place, but she and Frank
followed.
The lobby was like an empty fish tank—glass walls,
a glossy black floor, a few token plants, and pretty much
nothing else. Against the back wall, a black stone staircase
led up and down. In the middle of the room stood a young
woman in a black pantsuit, with long auburn hair and a
security guard’s earpiece. Her name tag said kinzie. Her
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smile was friendly enough, but her eyes reminded Hazel
of the policemen in New Orleans who used to patrol the
French Quarter at night. They always seemed to look
through you, as if they were thinking about who might attack
them next.
Kinzie nodded at Hazel, ignoring the boys. “May I
help you?”
“Um…I hope so,” Hazel said. “We’re looking for
Amazons.”
Kinzie glanced at Hazel’s sword, then Frank’s
spear, though neither should have been visible through
the Mist.
“This is the main campus for Amazon,” she said
cautiously. “Did you have an appointment with someone,
or—”
“Hylla,” Percy interrupted. “We’re looking for a girl
named—”
Kinzie moved so fast, Hazel’s eyes almost couldn’t
follow. She kicked Frank in the chest and sent him flying
backward across the lobby. She pulled a sword out of thin
air, swept Percy off his feet with the flat of the blade, and
pressed the point under his chin.
Too late, Hazel reached for her sword. A dozen
more girls in black flooded up the staircase, swords in
hand, and surrounded her.
Kinzie glared down at Percy. “First rule: Males
don’t speak without permission. Second rule, trespassing
on our territory is punishable by death. You’ll meet
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Queen Hylla, all right. She’ll be the one deciding your
fate.”
The Amazons confiscated the trio’s weapons and
marchedthem down so many flights of stairs, Hazel lost
count.
Finally they emerged in a cavern so big it could
have accommodated ten high schools, sports fields and
all. Stark fluorescent lights glowed along the rock ceiling.
Conveyor belts wound through the room like water slides,
carrying boxes in every direction. Aisles of metal shelves
stretched out forever, stacked high with crates of merchandise.
Cranes hummed and robotic arms whirred,
folding cardboard boxes, packing shipments, and taking
things on and off the belts. Some of the shelves were so
tall they were only accessible by ladders and catwalks,
which ran across the ceiling like theaters scaffolding.
Hazel remembered newsreels she’d seen as a child.
She’d always been impressed by the scenes of factories
building planes and guns for the war effort—hundreds
and hundreds of weapons coming off the line every day.
But that was nothing compared to this, and almost all the
work was being done by computers and robots. The only
humans Hazel could see were some black-suited security
women patrolling the catwalks, and some men in orange
jumpsuits, like prison uniforms, driving forklifts through
the aisles, delivering more pallets of boxes. The men wore
iron collars around their necks.
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“You keep slaves?” Hazel knew it might be dangerous
to speak, but she was so outraged she couldn’t stop
herself.
“The men?” Kinzie snorted. “They’re not slaves.
They just know their place. Now, move.”
They walked so far, Hazel’s feet began to hurt. She
thought they must surely be getting to the end of the
warehouse when Kinzie opened a large set of double
doors and led them into another cavern, just as big as the
first.
“The Underworld isn’t this big,” Hazel complained,
which probably wasn’t true, but it felt that way to her feet.
Kinzie smiled smugly. “You admire our base of operations?
Yes, our distribution system is worldwide. It
took many years and most of our fortune to build. Now,
finally, we’re turning a profit. The mortals don’t realize
they are funding the Amazon kingdom. Soon, we’ll be
richer than any mortal nation. Then—when the weak
mortals depend on us for everything—the revolution will
begin!”
“What are you going to do?” Frank grumbled.
“Cancel free shipping?”
A guard slammed the hilt of her sword into his gut.
Percy tried to help him, but two more guards pushed him
back at sword point.
“You’ll learn respect,” Kinzie said. “It’s males like
you who have ruined the mortal world. The only harmonious
society is one run by women. We are stronger,
wiser—”
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“More humble,” Percy said. The guards tried to hit
him, but Percy ducked. “Stop it!” Hazel said. Surprisingly,
the guards listened. “Hylla is going to judge us, right?”
Hazel asked. “So take us to her. We’re wasting time.” Kinzie
nodded. “Perhaps you’re right. We have more important
problems. And time…time is definitely an is-
sue.”“What do you mean?” Hazel asked. A guard grunted.
“We could take them straight to Otrera.
Might win her favor that way.”“No!” Kinzie snarled.
“I’d sooner wear an iron collar and drive a forklift. Hylla
is queen.”“Until tonight,” another guard muttered. Kinzie
gripped her sword. For a second Hazel thought the
Amazons might start fighting one another, but Kinzie
seemed to get her anger under control. “Enough,” she
said. “Let’s go.” They crossed a lane of forklift traffic, navigated
a maze of conveyor belts, and ducked under a row
of robotic arms that were packing up boxes.
Most of the merchandise looked pretty ordinary:
books, electronics, baby diapers. But against one wall sat
a war chariot with a big bar code on the side. Hanging
from the yoke was a sign that read: ONLY ONE LEFT IN
STOCK. ORDER SOON! (MORE ON THE WAY)
Finally they entered a smaller cavern that looked
like a combination loading zone and throne room. The
walls were lined with metal shelves six stories high, decorated
with war banners, painted shields, and the stuffed
heads of dragons, hydras, giant lions, and wild boars.
Standing guard along either side were dozens of forklifts
modified for war. An iron-collared male drove each machine,
but an Amazon warrior stood on a platform in
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back, manning a giant mounted crossbow. The prongs of
each forklift had been sharpened into oversized sword
blades.
The shelves in this room were stacked with cages
containing live animals. Hazel couldn’t believe what she
was seeing—black mastiffs, giant eagles, a lion-eagle hybrid
that must’ve been a gryphon, and a red ant the size of
a compact car.
She watched in horror as a forklift zipped into the
room, picked up a cage with a beautiful white pegasus,
and sped away while the horse whinnied in protest.
“What are you doing to that poor animal?” Hazel
demanded.
Kinzie frowned. “The pegasus? It’ll be fine.
Someone must’ve ordered it. The shipping and handling
charges are steep, but—”
“You can buy a pegasus online?” Percy asked.
Kinzie glared at him. “Obviously you can’t, male.
But Amazons can. We have followers all over the world.
They need supplies. This way.”
At the end of the warehouse was a dais constructed
from pallets of books: stacks of vampire novels, walls of
James Patterson thrillers, and a throne made from about
a thousand copies of something called The Five Habits of
Highly Aggressive Women.
At the base of the steps, several Amazons in camouflage
were having a heated argument while a young woman—
Queen Hylla, Hazel assumed—watched and
listened from her throne.
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Hylla was in her twenties, lithe and lean as a tiger.
She wore a black leather jumpsuit and black boots. She
had no crown, but around her waist was a strange belt
made of interlocking gold links, like the pattern of a
labyrinth. Hazel couldn’t believe how much she looked
like Reyna—a little older, perhaps, but with the same long
black hair, the same dark eyes, and the same hard expression,
like she was trying to decide which of the Amazons
before her most deserved death.
Kinzie took one look at the argument and grunted
with distaste. “Otrera’s agents, spreading their lies.”
“What?” Frank asked.
Then Hazel stopped so abruptly, the guards behind
her stumbled. A few feet from the queen’s throne, two
Amazons guarded a cage. Inside was a beautiful
horse—not the winged kind, but a majestic and powerful
stallion with a honey-colored coat and a black mane. His
fierce brown eyes regarded Hazel, and she could swear he
looked impatient, as if thinking: About time you got here.
“It’s him,” Hazel murmured.
“Him, who?” Percy asked.
Kinzie scowled in annoyance, but when she saw
where Hazel was looking, her expression softened. “Ah,
yes. Beautiful, isn’t he?”
Hazel blinked to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating.
It was the same horse she’d chased in Alaska. She
was sure of it…but that was impossible. No horse could
live that long.
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“Is he…” Hazel could hardly control her voice. “Is
he for sale?”
The guards all laughed.
“That’s Arion,” Kinzie said patiently, as if she understood
Hazel’s fascination. “He’s a royal treasure of the
Amazons—to be claimed only by our most courageous
warrior, if you believe the prophecy.”
“Prophecy?” Hazel asked.
Kinzie’s expression became pained, almost embar
rassed. “Never mind. But no, he’s not for sale.”
“Then why is he in a cage?”
Kinzie grimaced. “Because…he is difficult.”
Right on cue, the horse slammed his head against
the cage door. The metal bars shuddered, and the guards
retreated nervously.
Hazel wanted to free that horse. She wanted it
more than anything she had ever wanted before. But
Percy, Frank, and a dozen Amazon guards were staring at
her, so she tried to mask her emotions. “Just asking,” she
managed. “Let’s see the queen.”
The argument at the front of the room grew louder.
Finally the queen noticed Hazel’s group approaching, and
she snapped, “Enough!”
The arguing Amazons shut up immediately. The
queen waved them aside and beckoned Kinzie forward.
Kinzie shoved Hazel and her friends toward the
throne. “My queen, these demigods—”
The queen shot to her feet. “You!”
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She glared at Percy Jackson with murderous rage.
Percy muttered something in Ancient Greek that
Hazel was pretty sure the nuns at St. Agnes wouldn’t have
liked.
“Clipboard,” he said. “Spa. Pirates.”
This made no sense to Hazel, but the queen nodded.
She stepped down from her dais of best sellers and
drew a dagger from her belt.
“You were incredibly foolish to come here,” she
said. “You destroyed my home. You made my sister and
me exiles and prisoners.”
“Percy,” Frank said uneasily. “What’s the scary woman
with the dagger talking about?”
“Circe’s Island,” Percy said. “I just remembered.
The gorgon’s blood—maybe it’s starting to heal my mind.
TheSea of Monsters. Hylla…she welcomed us at the
docks, took us to see her boss. Hylla worked for the
sorceress.”
Hylla bared her perfect white teeth. “Are you telling
me you’ve had amnesia? You know, I might actually believe
you.
Why else would you be stupid enough to come
here?”
“We’ve come in peace,” Hazel insisted. “What did
Percy do?”
“Peace?” The queen raised her eyebrows at Hazel.
“What did he do? This male destroyed Circe’s school of
magic!”
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“Circe turned me into a guinea pig!” Percy
protested.
“No excuses!” Hylla said. “Circe was a wise and
generous employer. I had room and board, a good health
plan, dental, pet leopards, free potions—everything! And
this demigod with his friend, the blonde—”
“Annabeth.” Percy tapped his forehead like he
wanted the memories to come back faster. “That’s right. I
was there with Annabeth.”
“You released our captives—Blackbeard and his
pirates.” She turned to Hazel. “Have you ever been kidnapped
by pirates? It isn’t fun. They burned our spa to
the ground. My sister and I were their prisoners for
months. Fortunately we were daughters of Bellona. We
learned to fight quickly. If we hadn’t…” She shuddered.
“Well, the pirates learned torespect us. Eventually we
made our way to California where we—” She hesitated as
if the memory was painful. “Where my sister and I parted
ways.”
She stepped toward Percy until they were nose-tonose.
She ran her dagger under his chin. “Of course, I survived
and prospered. I have risen to be queen of the
Amazons. So perhaps I should thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Percy said.
The queen dug her knife in a little deeper. “Never
mind. I think I’ll kill you.”
“Wait!” Hazel yelped. “Reyna sent us! Your sister!
Look at the ring on his necklace.”
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Hylla frowned. She lowered her knife to Percy’s
necklace until the point rested on the silver ring. The color
drained from her face.
“Explain this.” She glared at Hazel. “Quickly.”
Hazel tried. She described Camp Jupiter. She told
the Amazons about Reyna being their praetor, and the
army of monsters that was marching south. She told them
about their quest to free Thanatos in Alaska.
As Hazel talked, another group of Amazons entered
the room. One was taller and older than the rest, with
plaited silver hair and fine silk robes like a Roman matron.
The other Amazons made way for her, treating her
with such respect that Hazel wondered if she was Hylla’s
mother—until she noticed how Hylla and the older woman
stared daggers at each other.
“So we need your help,” Hazel finished her story.
“Reyna needs your help.”
Hylla gripped Percy’s leather cord and yanked it off
his neck—beads, ring, probatio tablet and all.
“Reyna…that foolish girl—”
“Well!” the older woman interrupted. “Romans
need our help?” She laughed, and the Amazons around
her joined in.
“How many times did we battle the Romans in my
day?” the woman asked. “How many times have they
killed our sisters in battle? When I was queen—”
“Otrera,” Hylla interrupted, “you are here as a
guest. You are not queen anymore.”
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The older woman spread her hands and made a
mocking bow. “As you say—at least, until tonight. But I
speak the truth, Queen Hylla.” She said the word like a
taunt. “I’ve been brought back by the Earth Mother herself!
I bring tidings of a new war. Why should Amazons
follow Jupiter, that foolish king of Olympus, when we can
follow a queen? When I take command—”
“If you take command,” Hylla said. “But for now, I
am queen. My word is law.”
“I see.” Otrera looked at the assembled Amazons,
who were standing very still, as if they’d found themselves
in a pit with two wild tigers. “Have we become so weak
that we listen to male demigods? Will you spare the life of
this son of Neptune, even though he once destroyed your
home? Perhaps you’ll let him destroy your new home,
too!”
Hazel held her breath. The Amazons looked back
and forth between Hylla and Otrera, watching for any
sign of weakness.
“I will pass judgment,” Hylla said in an icy tone,
“once I have all the facts. That is how I rule—by reason,
not fear. First, I will talk with this one.” She jabbed a finger
toward Hazel. “It is my duty to hear out a female warrior
before I sentence her or her allies to death. That is
the Amazon way. Or have your years in the Underworld
muddled your memory, Otrera?”
The older woman sneered, but she didn’t try to
argue.
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Hylla turned to Kinzie. “Take these males to the
holding cells. The rest of you, leave us.”
Otrera raised her hand to the crowd. “As our queen
commands. But any of you who would like to hear more
about Gaea, and our glorious future with her, come with
me!”
About half the Amazons followed her out of the
room. Kinzie snorted with disgust, then she and her
guards hauled Percy and Frank away.
Soon Hylla and Hazel were alone except for the
queen’s personal guards. At Hylla’s signal, even they
moved out of earshot.
The queen turned toward Hazel. Her anger dissolved,
and Hazel saw desperation in her eyes. The queen
looked like one of her caged animals being whisked off on
a conveyor belt.
“We must talk,” Hylla said. “We don’t have much
time. By midnight, I will most likely be dead.”
HAZEL CONSIDERED MAKING A RUN FOR IT.
She didn’t trust Queen Hylla, and she certainly
didn’t trust that other lady, Otrera. Only three guards
were left in the room. All of them kept their distance.
Hylla was armed with just a dagger. This deep underground,
Hazel might be able to cause an earthquake in
the throne room, or summon a big pile of schist or gold. If
she could cause a distraction, she might be able to escape
and find her friends.
Unfortunately, she’d seen the Amazons fight. Even
though the queen had only a dagger, Hazel suspected she
could use it pretty well. And Hazel was unarmed. They
hadn’t searched her, which meant thankfully they hadn’t
taken Frank’s firewood from her coat pocket, but her
sword was gone.
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The queen seemed to be reading her thoughts.
“Forget about escape. Of course, we’d respect you for trying.
But we’d have to kill you.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
Hylla shrugged. “The least I can do. I believe you
come in peace. I believe Reyna sent you.”
“But you won’t help?”
The queen studied the necklace she’d taken from
Percy. “It’s complicated,” she said. “Amazons have always
had a rocky relationship with other demigods—especially
male demigods. We fought for King Priam in the Trojan
War, but Achilles killed our queen, Penthesilea. Years before
that, Hercules stole Queen Hippolyta’s belt—this belt
I’m wearing. It took us centuries to recover it. Long before
that, at the very beginning of the Amazon nation, a
hero named Bellerophon killed our first queen, Otrera.”
“You mean the lady—”
“—who just left, yes. Otrera, our first queen, daugh
ter of Ares.”
“Mars?”
Hylla made a sour face. “No, definitely Ares. Otrera
lived long before Rome, in a time when all demigods were
Greek. Unfortunately, some of our warriors still prefer the
old ways. Children of Ares…they are always the worst.”
“The old ways…” Hazel had heard rumors about
Greek demigods. Octavian believed they existed and were
secretly plotting against Rome. But she’d never really believed
it, even when Percy came to camp. He just didn’t
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strike her as an evil, scheming Greek. “You mean the
Amazons are a mix…Greekand Roman?”
Hylla continued to examine the necklace—the clay
beads, the probatio tablet. She slipped Reyna’s silver ring
off the cord and put it on her own finger. “I suppose they
don’t teach you about that at Camp Jupiter. The gods
have many aspects. Mars, Ares. Pluto, Hades. Being immortal,
they tend to accumulate personalities. They are
Greek, Roman, American—a combination of all the cultures
they’ve influenced over the eons. Do you
understand?”
“I—I’m not sure. Are all Amazons demigods?”
The queen spread her hands. “We all have some
immortal blood, but many of my warriors are descended
from demigods. Some have been Amazons for countless
generations. Others are children of minor gods. Kinzie,
the one who brought you here, is the daughter of a
nymph. Ah—here she is now.”
The girl with the auburn hair approached the
queen and bowed.
“The prisoners are safely locked away,” Kinzie re
ported. “But...”
“Yes?” the queen asked.
Kinzie swallowed like she had a bad taste in her
mouth. “Otrera made sure her followers are guarding the
cells. I’m sorry, my queen.”
Hylla pursed her lips. “No matter. Stay with us,
Kinzie. We were just talking about our, ah, situation.”
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“Otrera,” Hazel guessed. “Gaea brought her back
from the dead to throw you Amazons into civil war.”
The queen exhaled. “If that was her plan, it is working.
Otrera is a legend among our people. She plans to
take back the throne and lead us to war against the Romans.
Many of my sisters will follow her.”
“Not all,” Kinzie grumbled.
“But Otrera is a spirit!” Hazel said. “She isn’t
even—”
“Real?” The queen studied Hazel carefully. “I
worked with the sorceress Circe for many years. I know a
returned soul when I see one. When did you die,
Hazel—Nineteen twenty? Nineteen thirty?”
“Nineteen forty-two,” Hazel said. “But—but I
wasn’t sent by Gaea. I came back to stop her. This is my
second chance.”
“Your second chance…” Hylla gazed at the rows of
battle forklifts, now empty. “I know about second
chances. That boy,
Percy Jackson—he destroyed my old life. You
wouldn’t have recognized me back then. I wore dresses
and makeup. I was a glorified secretary, an accursed Barbie
doll.”
Kinzie made a three-fingered claw over her heart,
like the voodoo gestures Hazel’s mom once used for
warding off the Evil Eye.
“Circe’s island was a safe place for Reyna and me,”
the queen continued. “We were daughters of the war
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goddess, Bellona. I wanted to protect Reyna from all that
violence. Then Percy Jackson unleashed the pirates. They
kidnapped us, and Reyna and I learned to be tough. We
found out that we were good with weapons. The past four
years, I’ve wanted to kill Percy Jackson for what he made
us endure.”
“But Reyna became the praetor of Camp Jupiter,”
Hazel said. “You became the queen of the Amazons.
Maybe this was your destiny.”
Hylla fingered the necklace in her hand. “I may not
be queen for much longer.”
“You will prevail!” Kinzie insisted.
“As the Fates decree,” Hylla said without
enthusiasm.
“You see, Hazel, Otrera has challenged me to a
duel. Every Amazon has that right. Tonight at midnight,
we’ll battle for the throne.”
“But…you’re good, right?” Hazel asked.
Hylla managed a dry smile. “Good, yes, but Otrera
is the founder of the Amazons.”
“She’s a lot older. Maybe she’s out of practice, having
been dead for so long.”
“I hope you’re right, Hazel. You see, it’s a battle to
the death....”
She waited for that to sink in. Hazel remembered
what Phineas had said in Portland—how he had had a
shortcut back from death, thanks to Gaea. She
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remembered how the gorgons had tried to re-form in the
Tiber.
“Even if you kill her,” Hazel said, “she’ll just come
back. As long as Thanatos is chained, she won’t stay
dead.”
“Exactly,” Hylla said. “Otrera has already told us
that she can’t die. So even if I manage to defeat her tonight,
she’ll simply return and challenge me again tomorrow.
There is no law against challenging the queen multiple
times. She can insist on fighting me every night, until
she finally wears me down. I can’t win.”
Hazel gazed at the throne. She imagined Otrera sitting
there with her fine robes and her silver hair, ordering
herwarriors to attack Rome. She imagined the voice of
Gaeafilling this cavern.
“There has to be a way,” she said. “Don’t Amazons
have…special powers or something?”
“No more than other demigods,” Hylla said. “We
can die, just like any mortal. There is a group of archers
who follow the goddess Artemis. They are often mistaken
for Amazons, but the Hunters forsake the company of
men in exchange for almost endless life. We
Amazons—we would prefer to live life to the fullest. We
love, we fight, we die.”
“I thought you hated men.”
Hylla and Kinzie both laughed.
“Hate men?” said the queen. “No, no, we like men.
We just like to show them who’s in charge. But that’s beside
the point. If I could, I would rally our troops and ride
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to my sister’s aid. Unfortunately, my power is tenuous.
When I am killed in combat—and it’s only a matter of
time—Otrera will be queen. She will march to Camp
Jupiter with our forces, but she will not go to help my sister.
She’ll go to join the giant’s army.”
“We’ve got to stop her,” Hazel said. “My friends
and I killed Phineas, one of Gaea’s other servants in Portland.
Maybe we can help!”
The queen shook her head. “You can’t interfere. As
queen, I must fight my own battles. Besides, your friends
are imprisoned. If I let them go, I’ll look weak. Either I
execute you three as trespassers, or Otrera will do so
when she becomes queen.”
Hazel’s heart sank. “So I guess we’re both dead. Me
for the second time.”
In the corner cage, the stallion Arion whinnied angrily.
He reared and slammed his hooves against the bars.
“The horse seems to feel your despair,” the queen
said. “Interesting. He’s immortal, you know—the son of
Neptune and Ceres.”
Hazel blinked. “Two gods had a horse for a kid?”
“Long story.”
“Oh.” Hazel’s face felt hot with embarrassment.
“He’s the fastest horse in the world,” Hylla said.
“Pegasus is more famous, with his wings, but Arion runs
like the wind over land and sea. No creature is faster. It
took us years to capture him—one of our greatest prizes.
But it did us no good. The horse will not allow anyone to
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ride him. I think he hates Amazons. And he is expensive
to keep. He will eat anything, but he prefers gold.”
The back of Hazel’s neck tingled. “He eats gold?”
She remembered the horse following her in Alaska
so many years ago. She had thought he was eating nuggets
of gold that appeared in her footsteps.
She knelt and pressed her hand against the floor.
Immediately, the stone cracked. A chunk of gold ore the
size of a plum was pushed out of the earth. Hazel stood,
examining her prize.
Hylla and Kinzie stared at her.
“How did you…?” The queen gasped. “Hazel, be
careful!”
Hazel approached the stallion’s cage. She put her
hand between the bars, and Arion gingerly ate the chunk
of gold from her palm.
“Unbelievable,” Kinzie said. “The last girl who tried
that—”
“Now has a metal arm,” the queen finished. She
studied Hazel with new interest, as if deciding whether or
not to say more. “Hazel…we spent years hunting for this
horse. It was foretold that the most courageous female
warrior would someday master Arion and ride him to victory,
ushering in a new era of prosperity for the Amazons.
Yet no Amazon can touch him, much less control him.
Even Otrera tried and failed. Two others died attempting
to ride him.”
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That probably should’ve worried Hazel, but she
couldn’t imagine this beautiful horse hurting her. She put
her hand through the bars again and stroked Arion’s
nose. He nuzzled her arm, murmuring contentedly, as if
asking, More gold? Yum.
“I would feed you more, Arion.” Hazel glanced
pointedly at the queen. “But I think I’m scheduled for an
execution.”
Queen Hylla looked from Hazel to the horse and
back again. “Unbelievable.”
“The prophecy,” Kinzie said. “Is it possible…?”
Hazel could almost see the gears turning inside the
queen’s head, formulating a plan. “You have courage,
Hazel Levesque. And it seems Arion has chosen you.
Kinzie?”
“Yes, my queen?”
“You said Otrera’s followers are guarding the
cells?”
Kinzie nodded. “I should have foreseen that. I’m
sorry—”
“No, it’s fine.” The queen’s eyes gleamed—the way
Hannibal the elephant’s did whenever he was unleashed
to destroy a fortress. “It would be embarrassing for Otrera
if her followers failed in their duties—if, for instance, they
were overcome by an outsider and a prison break
occurred.”
Kinzie began to smile. “Yes, my queen. Most
embarrassing.”
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“Of course,” Hylla continued, “none of my guards
would know a thing about this. Kinzie would not spread
the word to allow an escape.”
“Certainly not,” Kinzie agreed.
“And we couldn’t help you.” The queen raised her
eyebrows at Hazel. “But if you somehow overpowered the
guards and freed your friends…if, for instance, you took
one of the guards’ Amazon cards—”
“With one-click purchasing enabled,” Kinzie said,
“which will open the jail cells with one click.”
“If—gods forbid!—something like that were to happen,”
the queen continued, “you would find your friends’
weapons and supplies in the guard station next to the
cells. And who knows? If you made your way back to this
throne room while I was off preparing for my duel…well,
as I mentioned, Arionis a very fast horse. It would be a
shame if he were stolen and used for an escape.”
Hazel felt like she’d been plugged into a wall socket.
Electricity surged through her whole body. Arion…Arion
could be hers. All she had to do was rescue her friends
and fight her way through an entire nation of highly
trained warriors. “Queen Hylla,” she said, “I—I’m not
much of a fighter.”
“Oh, there are many kinds of fighting, Hazel. I have
a feeling you’re quite resourceful. And if the prophecy is
correct, you will help the Amazon nation achieve prosperity.
If you succeed on your quest to free Thanatos, for
instance—”
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“—then Otrera wouldn’t come back if she were
killed,”
Hazel said. “You’d only have to defeat her…um,
every night until we succeed.”
The queen nodded grimly. “It seems we both have
impossible tasks ahead of us.”
“But you’re trusting me,” said Hazel. “And I trust
you. You will win, as many times as it takes.”
Hylla held out Percy’s necklace and poured it into
Hazel’s hands.
“I hope you’re right,” the queen said. “But the sooner
you succeed the better, yes?”
Hazel slipped the necklace into her pocket. She
shook the queen’s hand, wondering if it was possible to
make a friend so fast—especially one who was about to
send her to jail.
“This conversation never happened,” Hylla told
Kinzie. “Take our prisoner to the cells and hand her over
to Otrera’s guards. And, Kinzie, be sure you leave before
anything unfortunate happens. I don’t want my loyal followers
held accountable for a prison break.”
The queen smiled mischievously, and for the first
time, Hazel felt jealous of Reyna. She wished that she had
a sister like this.
“Good-bye, Hazel Levesque,” the queen said. “If we
both die tonight…well, I’m glad I met you.”
THE AMAZON JAIL WAS AT THE TOP OF a storage aisle,
sixty feet in the air.
Kinzie led her up three different ladders to a metal
catwalk, then tied Hazel’s hands loosely behind her back
and pushed her along past crates of jewelry.
A hundred feet ahead, under the harsh glow of
fluorescent lights, a row of chain-link cages hung suspended
from cables. Percy and Frank were in two of the
cages, talking to each other in hushed tones. Next to them
on the catwalk, three bored-looking Amazon guards
leaned against their spears and gazed at little black tablets
in their hands like they were reading.
Hazel thought the tablets looked too thin for books.
Then it occurred to her they might be some sort of
tiny—what did modern people call them?—laptop computers.
SecretAmazon technology, perhaps. Hazel found
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the idea almost as unsettling as the battle forklifts
downstairs.
“Get moving, girl,” Kinzie ordered, loud enough for
the guards to hear. She prodded Hazel in the back with
her sword.
Hazel walked as slowly as she could, but her mind
was racing. She needed to come up with a brilliant rescue
plan. So far she had nothing. Kinzie had made sure she
could break her bonds easily, but she’d still be empty-
handed against three trained warriors, and she had to act
before they put her in a cage.
She passed a pallet of crates marked 24-CARAT BLUE
TOPAZ RINGS, then another labeled SILVER FRIENDSHIP
BRACELETS. An electronic display next to the friendship
bracelets read:People who bought this item also bought
GARDEN GNOMESOLAR PATIO LIGHT and FLAMING
SPEAR OF DEATH. Buy all three and save 12%!
Hazel froze. Gods of Olympus, she was stupid.
Silver. Topaz. She sent out her senses, searching for
precious metals, and her brain almost exploded from the
feedback. She was standing next to a six-story-tall mountain
of jewelry. But in front of her, from here to the
guards, was nothing but prison cages.
“What is it?” Kinzie hissed. “Keep moving! They’ll
get suspicious.”
“Make them come here,” Hazel muttered over her
shoulder.
“Why—”
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“Please.”
The guards frowned in their direction.
“What are you staring at?” Kinzie yelled at them.
“Here’s the third prisoner. Come get her.”
The nearest guard set down her reading tablet.
“Why can’t you walk another thirty paces, Kinzie?”
“Um, because—”
“Ooof!” Hazel fell to her knees and tried to put on
her best seasick face. “I’m feeling nauseous! Can’t…walk.
Amazons ... too ... scary.”
“There you go,” Kinzie told the guards. “Now, are
you going to come take the prisoner, or should I tell
Queen Hylla you’re not doing your duty?”
The nearest guard rolled her eyes and trudged over.
Hazel had hoped the other two guards would come too,
but she’d have to worry about that later.
The first guard grabbed Hazel’s arm. “Fine. I’ll take
custody of the prisoner. But if I were you, Kinzie, I
wouldn’t worry about Hylla. She won’t be queen much
longer.”
“We’ll see, Doris.” Kinzie turned to leave. Hazel
waited until her steps receded down the catwalk.
The guard Doris pulled on Hazel’s arm. “Well?
Come on.”
Hazel concentrated on the wall of jewelry next to
her:forty large boxes of silver bracelets. “Not…feeling so
good.”
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“You are not throwing up on me,” Doris growled.
She tried to yank Hazel to her feet, but Hazel went limp,
like a kid throwing a fit in a store. Next to her, the boxes
began to tremble.
“Lulu!” Doris yelled to one of her comrades. “Help
me with this lame little girl.”
Amazons named Doris and Lulu? Hazel thought.
Okay ...
The second guard jogged over. Hazel figured this
was her best chance. Before they could haul her to her
feet, she yelled, “Ooooh!” and flattened herself against the
catwalk.
Doris started to say, “Oh, give me a—”
The entire pallet of jewelry exploded with a sound
like a thousand slot machines hitting the jackpot. A tidal
wave of silver friendship bracelets poured across the catwalk,
washing Doris and Lulu right over the railing.
They would’ve fallen to their deaths, but Hazel
wasn’t that mean. She summoned a few hundred bracelets,
which leaped at the guards and lashed around their
ankles, leaving them hanging upside down from the bottom
of the catwalk, screaming like lame little girls.
Hazel turned toward the third guard. She broke her
bonds, which were about as sturdy as toilet paper. She
picked up one of the fallen guards’ spears. She was terrible
with spears, but she hoped the third Amazon didn’t
know that.
“Should I kill you from here?” Hazel snarled. “Or
are you going to make me come over there?”
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The guard turned and ran.
Hazel shouted over the side to Doris and Lulu.
“Amazon cards! Pass them up, unless you want me to
undo those friendship bracelets and let you drop!”
Four and a half seconds later, Hazel had two
Amazon cards. She raced over to the cages and swiped a
card. The doors popped open.
Frank stared at her in astonishment. “Hazel, that
was…amazing.”
Percy nodded. “I will never wear jewelry again.”
“Except this.” Hazel tossed him his necklace. “Our
weapons and supplies are at the end of the catwalk. We
should hurry. Pretty soon—”
Alarms began wailing throughout the cavern.
“Yeah,” she said, “that’ll happen. Let’s go!”
The first part of the escape was easy. They retrieved their
things with no problem, then started climbing down the
ladder. Every time Amazons swarmed beneath them, demanding
their surrender, Hazel made a crate of jewelry
explode, burying their enemies in a Niagara Falls of gold
and silver. When they got to the bottom of the ladder,
they found a scene that looked like Mardi Gras Armageddon—
Amazons trapped up to their necks in bead necklaces,
several more upside down in a mountain of
amethyst earrings, and a battle forklift buried in silver
charm bracelets.
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“You, Hazel Levesque,” Frank said, “are entirely
freaking incredible.”
She wanted to kiss him right there, but they had no
time. They ran back to the throne room.
They stumbled across one Amazon who must’ve
been loyal to Hylla. As soon as she saw the escapees, she
turned away like they were invisible.
Percy started to ask, “What the—”
“Some of them want us to escape,” Hazel said. “I’ll
explain later.”
The second Amazon they met wasn’t so friendly.
She was dressed in full armor, blocking the throne-room
entrance. She spun her spear with lightning speed, but
this time Percy was ready. He drew Riptide and stepped
into battle. As the Amazon jabbed at him, he sidestepped,
cut her spear shaft in half, and slammed the hilt of his
sword against her helmet.
The guard crumpled.
“Mars Almighty,” Frank said. “How did you—that
wasn’t any Roman technique!”
Percy grinned. “The graecus has some moves, my
friend. After you.”
They ran into the throne room. As promised, Hylla
and her guards had cleared out. Hazel dashed over to Arion’s
cage and swiped an Amazon card across the lock. In
stantly the stallion burst forth, rearing in triumph.
Percy and Frank stumbled backward.
“Um…is that thing tame?” Frank said.
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The horse whinnied angrily.
“I don’t think so,” Percy guessed. “He just said, ‘I
will trample you to death, silly Chinese Canadian baby
man.’”
“You speak horse?” Hazel asked.
“‘Baby man’?” Frank spluttered.
“Speaking to horses is a Poseidon thing,” Percy
said. “Uh, I mean a Neptune thing.”
“Then you and Arion should get along fine,” Hazel
said. “He’s a son of Neptune too.”
Percy turned pale. “Excuse me?”
If they hadn’t been in such a bad situation, Percy’s
expression might have made her laugh. “The point is, he’s
fast. He can get us out of here.”
Frank did not look thrilled. “Three of us can’t fit on
one horse, can we? We’ll fall off, or slow him down, or—”
Arion whinnied again.
“Ouch,” Percy said. “Frank, the horse says you’re
a—you know, actually, I’m not going to translate that.
Anyway, he says there’s a chariot in the warehouse, and
he’s willing to pull it.”
“There!” someone yelled from the back of the
throne room. A dozen Amazons charged in, followed by
males in orange jumpsuits. When they saw Arion, they
backed up quickly and headed for the battle forklifts.
Hazel vaulted onto Arion’s back.
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She grinned down at her friends. “I remember seeing
that chariot. Follow me, guys!”
She galloped into the larger cavern and scattered a
crowd of males. Percy knocked out an Amazon. Frank
swept two more off their feet with his spear. Hazel could
feel Arion straining to run. He wanted to go full speed,
but he needed more room. They had to make it outside.
Hazel bowled into a patrol of Amazons, who
scattered in terror at the sight of the horse. For once,
Hazel’s spatha felt exactly the right length. She swung it
at everyone who came within reach. No Amazon dared
challenge her.
Percy and Frank ran after her. Finally they reached
the chariot. Arion stopped by the yoke, and Percy set to
work with the reins and harness.
“You’ve done this before?” Frank asked.
Percy didn’t need to answer. His hands flew. In no
time the chariot was ready. He jumped aboard and yelled,
“Frank, come on! Hazel, go!”
A battle cry went up behind them. A full army of
Amazons stormed into the warehouse. Otrera herself
stood astride a battle forklift, her silver hair flowing as
she swung her mounted crossbow toward the chariot.
“Stop them!” she yelled.
Hazel spurred Arion. They raced across the cavern,
weaving around pallets and forklifts. An arrow whizzed
past Hazel’s head. Something exploded behind her, but
she didn’t look back.
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“The stairs!” Frank yelled. “No way this horse can
pull a chariot up that many flights of—OH MY GODS!”
Thankfully the stairs were wide enough for the
chariot, because Arion didn’t even slow down. He shot up
the steps with the chariot rattling and groaning. Hazel
glanced back a few times to make sure Frank and Percy
hadn’t fallen off. Their knuckles were white on the sides
of the chariot, their teeth chattering like windup Halloween
skulls.
Finally they reached the lobby. Arion crashed
through the main doors into the plaza and scattered a
bunch of guys in business suits.
Hazel felt the tension in Arion’s rib cage. The fresh
air was making him crazy to run, but Hazel pulled back
on his reins.
“Ella!” Hazel shouted at the sky. “Where are you?
We have to leave!”
For a horrible second, she was afraid the harpy
might be too far away to hear. She might be lost, or captured
by the Amazons.
Behind them a battle forklift clattered up the stairs
and roared through the lobby, a mob of Amazons behind
it.
“Surrender!” Otrera screamed.
The forklift raised its razor-sharp tines.
“Ella!” Hazel cried desperately.
In a flash of red feathers, Ella landed in the chariot.
“Ella is here. Amazons are pointy. Go now.”
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“Hold on!” Hazel warned. She leaned forward and
said, “Arion, run!”
The world seemed to elongate. Sunlight bent
around them. Arion shot away from the Amazons and
sped through downtown Seattle. Hazel glanced back and
saw a line of smoking pavement where Arion’s hooves
had touched the ground. He thundered toward the docks,
leaping over cars, barreling through intersections.
Hazel screamed at the top of her lungs, but it was a
scream of delight. For the first time in her life—in her two
lives—she felt absolutely unstoppable. Arion reached the
water and leaped straight off the docks.
Hazel’s ears popped. She heard a roar that she later
realized was a sonic boom, and Arion tore over Puget
Sound, seawater turning to steam in his wake as the skyline
of Seattle receded behind them.
FRANK WAS RELIEVED WHEN THE WHEELS FELL OFF.
He’d already thrown up twice from the back of the
chariot, which was not fun at the speed of sound. The
horse seemed to bend time and space as he ran, blurring
the landscape and making Frank feel like he’d just drunk
a gallon of whole milk without his lactose-intolerance
medicine. Ella didn’t help matters. She kept muttering:
“Seven hundred and fifty miles per hour. Eight hundred.
Eight hundred and three. Fast. Very fast.”
The horse sped north across Puget Sound, zooming
past islands and fishing boats and very surprised pods of
whales. The landscape ahead began to look familiar—
Crescent Beach, Boundary Bay. Frank had gone sailing
here once on a school trip. They’d crossed into
Canada.
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The horse rocketed onto dry land. He followed
Highway 99 north, running so fast, the cars seemed to be
standing still.
Finally, just as they were getting into Vancouver,
the chariot wheels began to smoke.
“Hazel!” Frank yelled. “We’re breaking up!”
She got the message and pulled the reins. The
horse didn’t seem happy about it, but he slowed to subsonic
as they zipped through the city streets. They crossed
the Ironworkers bridge into North Vancouver, and the
chariot started to rattle dangerously. At last Arion
stopped at the top of a wooded hill. He snorted with satisfaction,
as if to say, That’s how we run, fools. The
smoking chariot collapsed, spilling Percy, Frank, and Ella
onto the wet, mossy ground.
Frank stumbled to his feet. He tried to blink the
yellow spots out of his eyes. Percy groaned and started
unhitching Arion from the ruined chariot. Ella fluttered
around in dizzy circles, bonking into the trees and muttering,
“Tree. Tree. Tree.”
Only Hazel seemed unaffected by the ride. Grinning
with pleasure, she slid off the horse’s back. “That
was fun!”
“Yeah.” Frank swallowed back his nausea. “So
much fun.”
Arion whinnied.
“He says he needs to eat,” Percy translated. “No
wonder. He probably burned about six million calories.”
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Hazel studied the ground at her feet and frowned.
“I’m not sensing any gold around here.…Don’t worry, Arion.
I’ll find you some. In the meantime, why don’t you go
graze? We’ll meet you—”
The horse zipped off, leaving a trail of steam in his
wake.
Hazel knit her eyebrows. “Do you think he’ll come
back?”
“I don’t know,” Percy said. “He seems kind
of…spirited.”
Frank almost hoped the horse would stay away. He
didn’t say that, of course. He could tell Hazel was distressed
by the idea of losing her new friend. But Arion
scared him, and Frank was pretty sure the horse knew it.
Hazel and Percy started salvaging supplies from
the chariot wreckage. There had been a few boxes of random
Amazon merchandise in the front, and Ella shrieked
with delight when she found a shipment of books. She
snatched up a copy of The Birds of North America,
fluttered to the nearest branch, and began scratching
through the pages so fast, Frank wasn’t sure if she was
reading or shredding.
Frank leaned against a tree, trying to control his
vertigo. He still hadn’t recovered from his Amazon imprisonment—
getting kicked across the lobby, disarmed,
caged, and insulted as a baby man by an egomaniacal
horse. That hadn’t exactly helped his self-esteem.
Even before that, the vision he had shared with
Hazel had left him rattled. He felt closer to her now. He
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knew he’d done the right thing in giving her the piece of
firewood. A huge weight had been taken off his shoulders.
On the other hand, he’d seen the Underworld
firsthand. He had felt what it was like to sit forever doing
nothing, just regretting your mistakes. He’d looked up at
those creepy goldmasks on the judges of the dead and
realized that he would stand before them someday,
maybe very soon.
Frank had always dreamed of seeing his mother
again when he died. But maybe that wasn’t possible for
demigods. Hazel had been in Asphodel for something like
seventy years and never found her mom. Frank hoped he
and his mom would both end up in Elysium. But if Hazel
hadn’t gotten there—sacrificing her life to stop Gaea, taking
responsibility for her actions so that her mother
wouldn’t end up in Punishment—what chance did Frank
have? He’d never done anything that heroic.
He straightened and looked around, trying to get
his bearings.
To the south, across Vancouver Harbor, the downtown
skyline gleamed red in the sunset. To the north, the
hills and rain forests of Lynn Canyon Park snaked
between the subdivisions of North Vancouver until they
gave way to the wilderness.
Frank had explored this park for years. He spotted
a bend in the river that looked familiar. He recognized a
dead pine tree that had been split by lightning in a nearby
clearing. Frank knew this hill.
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“I’m practically home,” he said. “My grandmother’s
house is right over there.”
Hazel squinted. “How far?”
“Just over the river and through the woods.”
Percy raised an eyebrow. “Seriously? To Grandmother’s
house we go?”
Frank cleared his throat. “Yeah, anyway.”
Hazel clasped her hands in prayer. “Frank, please
tell me she’ll let us spend the night. I know we’re on a
deadline, but we’ve got to rest, right? And Arion saved us
some time. Maybe we could get an actual cooked meal?”
“And a hot shower?” Percy pleaded. “And a bed
with, like, sheets and a pillow?”
Frank tried to imagine Grandmother’s face if he
showed up with two heavily armed friends and a harpy.
Everything had changed since his mother’s funeral, since
the morning the wolves had taken him south. He’d been
so angry about leaving. Now, he couldn’t imagine going
back.
Still, he and his friends were exhausted. They’d
been traveling for more than two days without decent
food or sleep. Grandmother could give them supplies.
And maybe she could answer some questions that were
brewing in the back of Frank’s mind—a growing suspicion
about his family gift.
“It’s worth a try,” Frank decided. “To Grandmother’s
house we go.”
392/589
Frank was so distracted, he would have walked right into
the ogres’ camp. Fortunately Percy pulled him back.
They crouched next to Hazel and Ella behind a
fallen log and peered into the clearing.
“Bad,” Ella murmured. “This is bad for harpies.”
It was fully dark now. Around a blazing campfire
sat half a dozen shaggy-haired humanoids. Standing up,
they probably would’ve been eight feet tall—tiny compared
to the giant Polybotes or even the Cyclopes they’d
seen in California, but that didn’t make them any less
scary. They wore only knee-length surfer shorts. Their
skin was sunstroke red—covered with tattoos of dragons,
hearts, and bikini-clad women. Hanging from a spit over
the fire was a skinned animal, maybe a boar, and the
ogres were tearing off chunks of meat with their clawlike
fingernails, laughing and talking as they ate, baring
pointy teeth. Next to the ogres sat several mesh bags filled
with bronze spheres like cannonballs. The spheres must
have been hot, because they steamed in the cool evening
air.
Two hundred yards beyond the clearing, the lights
of the Zhang mansion glowed through the trees. So close,
Frank thought. He wondered if they could sneak around
the monsters, but when he looked left and right, he saw
more campfires in either direction, as if the ogres had
surrounded the property. Frank’s fingers dug into the tree
bark. His grandmother might be alone inside the house,
trapped.
“What are these guys?” he whispered.
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“Canadians,” Percy said.
Frank leaned away from him. “Excuse me?”
“Uh, no offense,” Percy said. “That’s what Anna
beth called them when I fought them before. She said
they live in the north, in Canada.”
“Yeah, well,” Frank grumbled, “we’re in Canada.
I’m Canadian. But I’ve never seen those things before.”
Ella plucked a feather from her wings and turned it
in her fingers. “Laistrygonians,” she said. “Cannibals.
Northern giants. Sasquatch legend. Yep, yep. They’re not
birds. Not birds of North America.”
“That’s what they’re called,” Percy agreed.
“Laistry—uh, whatever Ella said.”
Frank scowled at the dudes in the clearing. “They
could be mistaken for Bigfoot. Maybe that’s where the legend
came from. Ella, you’re pretty smart.”
“Ella is smart,” she agreed. She shyly offered Frank
her feather.
“Oh…thanks.” He stuck the feather in his pocket,
then noticed Hazel was glaring at him. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She turned to Percy. “So your memory
is coming back? Do you remember how you beat these
guys?”
“Sort of,” Percy said. “It’s still fuzzy. I think I had
help. We killed them with Celestial bronze, but that was
before ... you know.”
“Before Death got kidnapped,” Hazel said. “So now,
they might not die at all.”
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Percy nodded. “Those bronze cannonballs…those
are bad news. I think we used some of them against the
giants. They catch fire and blow up.”
Frank’s hand went to his coat pocket. Then he remembered
Hazel had his piece of driftwood. “If we cause
any explosions,” he said, “the ogres at the other camps
will come running. I think they’ve surrounded the house,
which means there could be fifty or sixty of these guys in
the woods.”
“So it’s a trap.” Hazel looked at Frank with concern.
“What about your grandmother? We’ve got to help her.”
Frank felt a lump in his throat. Never in a million
years had he thought his grandmother would need rescuing,
but now he started running combat scenarios in his
mind—the way he had back at camp during the war
games.
“We need a distraction,” he decided. “If we can
draw this group into the woods, we might sneak through
without alerting the others.”
“I wish Arion was here,” Hazel said. “I could get the
ogres to chase me.”
Frank slipped his spear off his back. “I’ve got another
idea.”
Frank didn’t want to do this. The idea of summoning
Gray scared him even more than Hazel’s horse. But he
didn’t see another way.
“Frank, you can’t charge out there!” Hazel said.
“That’s suicide!”
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“I’m not charging,” Frank said. “I’ve got a friend.
Just…nobody scream, okay?”
He jabbed the spear into the ground, and the point
broke off.
“Oops,” Ella said. “No spear point. Nope, nope.”
The ground trembled. Gray’s skeletal hand broke
the surface. Percy fumbled for his sword, and Hazel made
a sound like a cat with a hairball. Ella disappeared and re-
materialized at the top of the nearest tree.
“It’s okay,” Frank promised. “He’s under control!”
Gray crawled out of the ground. He showed no sign
of damage from his previous encounter with the basilisks.
He was good as a new in his camouflage and combat
boots, translucent gray flesh covering his bones like
glowing Jell-O. He turned his ghostly eyes toward Frank,
waiting for orders.
“Frank, that’s a spartus,” Percy said. “A skeleton
warrior. They’re evil. They’re killers. They’re—”
“I know,” Frank said bitterly. “But it’s a gift from
Mars. Right now that’s all I’ve got. Okay, Gray. Your orders:
attack that group of ogres. Lead them off to the
west, causing a diversion so we can—”
Unfortunately, Gray lost interest after the word
“ogres.” Maybe he only understood simple sentences. He
charged toward the ogres’ campfire.
“Wait!” Frank said, but it was too late. Gray pulled
two of his own ribs from his shirt and ran around the fire,
stabbing the ogres in the back with such blinding speed
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they didn’t even have time to yell. Six extremely
surprised-looking Laistrygonians fell sideways like a
circle of dominoes and crumbled into dust.
Gray stomped around, kicking their ashes apart as
they tried to re-form. When he seemed satisfied that they
weren’t coming back, Gray stood at attention, saluted
smartly in Frank’s direction, and sank into the forest
floor.
Percy stared at Frank. “How—”
“No Laistrygonians.” Ella fluttered down and
landed next to them. “Six minus six is zero. Spears are
good for subtraction. Yep.”
Hazel looked at Frank as if he’d turned into a zombie
skeleton himself. Frank thought his heart might shatter,
but he couldn’t blame her. Children of Mars were all
about violence. Mars’s symbol was a bloody spear for
good reason. Why shouldn’t Hazel be appalled?
He glared down at broken tip of his spear. He
wished he had any father but Mars. “Let’s go,” he said.
“My grandmother might be in trouble.”
THEY STOPPED AT THE FRONT PORCH. As Frank had
feared, a loose ring of campfires glowed in the woods,
completely surrounding the property, but the house itself
seemed untouched.
Grandmother’s wind chimes jangled in the night
breeze. Her wicker chair sat empty, facing the road.
Lights shone through the downstairs windows, but Frank
decided against ringing the doorbell. He didn’t know how
late it was, or if Grandmother was asleep or even home.
Instead he checked the stone elephant statue in the
corner—a tiny duplicate of the one in Portland. The spare
key was still tucked under its foot.
He hesitated at the door.
“What’s wrong?” Percy asked.
Frank remembered the morning he’d opened this
door for the military officer who had told him about his
mother. He remembered walking down these steps to her
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funeral, holding his piece of firewood in his coat for the
first time. He remembered standing here and watching
the wolves come out of the woods—Lupa’s minions, who
would lead him to Camp Jupiter. That seemed so long
ago, but it had only been six weeks.
Now he was back. Would Grandmother hug him?
Would she say, Frank, thank the gods you’ve come! I’m
surrounded by monsters!
More likely she’d scold him, or mistake them for
intruders and chase them off with a frying pan.
“Frank?” Hazel asked.
“Ella is nervous,” the harpy muttered from her
perch on the railing. “The elephant—the elephant is looking
at Ella.”
“It’ll be fine.” Frank’s hand was shaking so badly he
could barely fit the key in the lock. “Just stay together.”
Inside, the house smelled closed-up and musty.
Usually the air was scented with jasmine incense, but all
the burners were empty.
They examined the living room, the dining room,
the kitchen. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink, which
wasn’t right. Grandmother’s maid came every day—unless
she’d been scared off by the giants.
Or eaten for lunch, Frank thought. Ella had said
the Laistrygonians were cannibals.
He pushed that thought aside. Monsters ignored
regular mortals. At least, they usually did.
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In the parlor, Buddha statues and Taoist immortals
grinned at them like psycho clowns. Frank remembered
Iris, the rainbow goddess, who’d been dabbling in
Buddhism and Taoism. Frank figured one visit to this
creepy old house would cure her of that.
Grandmother’s large porcelain vases were strung
with cobwebs. Again—that wasn’t right. She insisted that
her collection be dusted regularly. Looking at the porcelain,
Frank felt a twinge of guilt for having destroyed so
many pieces the day of the funeral. It seemed silly to him
now—getting angry at Grandmother when he had so
many others to be angry at: Juno, Gaea, the giants, his
dad Mars. Especially Mars.
The fireplace was dark and cold.
Hazel hugged her chest as if to keep the piece of
firewood from jumping into the hearth. “Is that—”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “That’s it.”
“That’s what?” Percy asked.
Hazel’s expression was sympathetic, but that just
made Frank feel worse. He remembered how terrified,
how repulsed she had looked when he had summoned
Gray.
“It’s the fireplace,” he told Percy, which sounded
stupidly obvious. “Come on. Let’s check upstairs.”
The steps creaked under their feet. Frank’s old
room was the same. None of his things had been
touched—his extra bow and quiver (he’d have to grab
those later), his spelling awards from school (yeah, he
probably was the only non-dyslexic spelling champion
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demigod in the world, as if he weren’t enough of a freak
already), and his photos of his mom—in her flak jacket
and helmet, sitting on a Humvee in Kandahar Province;
in her soccer coach uniform, the season she’d coached
Frank’s team; in her military dress uniform, her hands on
Frank’s shoulders, the time she’d visited his school for career
day.
“Your mother?” Hazel asked gently. “She’s
beautiful.”
Frank couldn’t answer. He felt a little embarrassed—
a sixteen-year-old guy with a bunch of pictures of
his mom.
How hopelessly lame was that? But mostly he felt
sad. Six weeks since he’d been here. In some ways it
seemed like forever. But when he looked at his mom’s
smiling face in those photos, the pain of losing her was as
fresh as ever.
They checked the other bedrooms. The middle two
were empty. A dim light flickered under the last
door—Grandmother’s room.
Frank knocked quietly. No one answered. He
pushed open her door. Grandmother lay in bed, looking
gaunt and frail, her white hair spread around her face like
a basilisk’s crown. A single candle burned on the night-
stand. At her bedside sat a large man in beige Canadian
Forces fatigues. Despite the gloom, he wore dark
sunglasses with blood red light glowing behind the lenses.
“Mars,” Frank said.
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The god looked up impassively. “Hey, kid. Come on
in. Tell your friends to take a hike.”
“Frank?” Hazel whispered. “What do mean, Mars?
Is your grandmother ... is she okay?”
Frank glanced at his friends. “You don’t see him?”
“See who?” Percy gripped his sword. “Mars?
Where?”
The war god chuckled. “Nah, they can’t see me.
Figured it was better this time. Just a private conversation—
father/son, right?”
Frank clenched his fists. He counted to ten before
he trusted himself to speak.
“Guys, it’s…it’s nothing. Listen, why don’t you take
the middle bedrooms?”
“Roof,” Ella said. “Roofs are good for harpies.”
“Sure,” Frank said in a daze. “There’s probably food
in the kitchen. Would you give me a few minutes alone
with my grandmother? I think she—”
His voice broke. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to cry
orscream or punch Mars in the glasses—maybe all three.
Hazel laid her hand on his arm. “Of course, Frank.
Come on, Ella, Percy.”
Frank waited until his friends’ steps receded. Then
he walked into the bedroom and closed the door.
“Is it really you?” he asked Mars. “This isn’t a trick
or illusion or something?”
402/589
The god shook his head. “You’d prefer it if it wasn’t
me?”
“Yes,” Frank confessed.
Mars shrugged. “Can’t blame you. Nobody welcomes
war—not if they’re smart. But war finds everyone
sooner or later. It’s inevitable.”
“That’s stupid,” Frank said. “War isn’t inevitable. It
kills people. It—”
“—took your mom,” Mars finished.
Frank wanted to smack the calm look off his face,
but maybe that was just Mars’s aura making him feel aggressive.
He looked down at his grandmother, sleeping
peacefully. He wished she would wake up. If anyone could
take on a war god, his grandmother could.
“She’s ready to die,” Mars said. “She’s been ready
for weeks, but she’s holding on for you.”
“For me?” Frank was so stunned he almost forgot
his anger. “Why? How could she know I was coming
back? I didn’t know!”
“The Laistrygonians outside knew,” Mars said. “I
imagine a certain goddess told them.”
Frank blinked. “Juno?”
The war god laughed so loudly the windows rattled,
but Grandmother didn’t even stir. “Juno? Boar’s
whiskers, kid. Not Juno! You’re Juno’s secret weapon.
She wouldn’t sell you out. No, I meant Gaea. Obviously
she’s been keeping track of you. I think you worry her
more than Percy or Jason or any of the seven.”
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Frank felt like the room was tilting. He wished
there were another chair to sit in. “The seven…you mean
in the ancient prophecy, the Doors of Death? I’m one of
the seven? And Jason, and—”
“Yes, yes.” Mars waved his hand impatiently.
“Come on, boy. You’re supposed to be a good tactician.
Think it through! Obviously your friends are being
groomed for that mission too, assuming you make it back
from Alaska alive. Juno aims to unite the Greeks and Romans
and send them against the giants. She believes it’s
the only way to stop Gaea.”
Mars shrugged, clearly unconvinced of the plan.
“Anyway, Gaea doesn’t want you to be one of the seven.
Percy Jackson…she believes she can control him. All of
the others have weaknesses she can exploit. But you—you
worry her. She’d rather kill you right away. That’s why
she summoned the Laistrygonians. They’ve been here for
days, waiting.”
Frank shook his head. Was Mars playing some kind
of trick? No way would a goddess be worried about
Frank, especially when there was somebody like Percy
Jackson to worry about.
“No weaknesses?” he asked. “I’m nothing but weaknesses.
My life depends on a piece of wood!”
Mars grinned. “You’re selling yourself short. Anyway,
Gaea has these Laistrygonians convinced that if they
eat the last member of your family—that being
you—they’ll inherit your family gift. Whether that’s true
or not, I don’t know. But the Laistrygonians are hungry to
try.”
404/589
Frank’s stomach twisted into a knot. Gray had
killed six of the ogres, but judging from the campfires
around the property, there were dozens more—all waiting
to cook Frank for breakfast.
“I’m going to throw up,” he said.
“No, you’re not.” Mars snapped his fingers, and
Frank’s queasiness disappeared. “Battle jitters. Happens
to everybody.”
“But my grandmother—”
“Yeah, she’s been waiting to talk to you. The ogres
have left her alone so far. She’s the bait, see? Now that
you’re here, I imagine they’ve already smelled your presence.
They’ll attack in the morning.”
“Get us out of here, then!” Frank demanded. “Snap
your fingers and blow up the cannibals.”
“Ha! That would be fun. But I don’t fight my kids’
battles for them. The Fates have clear ideas about what
jobs belong to gods, and what has to be done by mortals.
This is your quest, kid. And, uh, in case you haven’t
figured it out yet, your spear won’t be ready to use again
for twenty-four hours, so I hope you’ve learned how to
use the family gift. Otherwise, you’re gonna be breakfast
for cannibals.”
The family gift. Frank had wanted to talk with
Grandmother about it, but now he had no one to consult
but Mars. He stared at the war god, who was smiling with
absolutely no sympathy.
405/589
“Periclymenus.” Frank sounded out the word carefully,
like a spelling-bee challenge. “He was my ancestor,
a Greek prince, an Argonaut. He died fighting Hercules.”
Mars rolled his hand in a “go on” gesture.
“He had an ability that helped him in combat,”
Frank said. “Some sort of gift from the gods. My mom
said he fought like a swarm of bees.”
Mars laughed. “True enough. What else?”
“Somehow, the family got to China. I think, like in
the days of the Roman Empire, one of Pericylmenus’s
descendants served in a legion. My mom used to talk
about a guy named Seneca Gracchus, but he also had a
Chinese name, Sung Guo. I think—well, this is the part I
don’t know, but Reyna always said there were many lost
legions. The Twelfth founded Camp Jupiter. Maybe there
was another legion that disappeared into the east.”
Mars clapped silently. “Not bad, kid. Ever heard of
the Battle of Carrhae? Huge disaster for the Romans.
They fought these guys called the Parthians on the eastern
border of the empire. Fifteen thousand Romans died.
Ten thousand more were taken prisoner.”
“And one of the prisoners was my ancestor
SenecaGracchus?”
“Exactly,” Mars agreed. “The Parthians put the captured
legionnaires to work, since they were pretty good
fighters. Except then Parthia got invaded again from the
other direction—”
“By the Chinese,” Frank guessed. “And the Roman
prisoners got captured again.”
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“Yeah. Kind of embarrassing. Anyway, that’s how a
Roman legion got to China. The Romans eventually put
down roots and built a new hometown called—”
“Li-Jien,” Frank said. “My mother said that was our
ancestral home. Li-Jien. Legion.”
Mars looked pleased. “Now you’re getting it. And
old Seneca Gracchus, he had your family’s gift.”
“My mom said he fought dragons,” Frank remembered.
“She said he was…he was the most powerful
dragon of all.”
“He was good,” Mars admitted. “Not good enough
to avoid the bad luck of his legion, but good. He settled in
China, passed the family gift to his kids, and so on. Eventually
your family emigrated to North America and got involved
with Camp Jupiter—”
“Full circle,” Frank finished. “Juno said I would
bring the family full circle.”
“We’ll see.” Mars nodded at his grandmother. “She
wanted to tell you all this herself, but I figured I’d cover
some of it since the old bird hasn’t got much strength. So
do you understand your gift?”
Frank hesitated. He had an idea, but it seemed
crazy—even crazier than a family moving from Greece to
Rome to China to Canada. He didn’t want to say it aloud.
He didn’t want to be wrong and have Mars laugh at him.
“I—I think so. But against an army of those ogres—”
“Yeah, it’ll be tough.” Mars stood and stretched.
“When your grandmother wakes up in the morning, she’ll
offer you some help. Then I imagine she’ll die.”
407/589
“What? But I have to save her! She can’t just leave
me.”
“She’s lived a full life,” Mars said. “She’s ready to
move on. Don’t be selfish.”
“Selfish!”
“The old woman only stuck around this long out of
a sense of duty. Your mom was the same way. That’s why
I loved her. She always put her duty first, ahead of
everything. Even her life.”
“Even me.”
Mars took off his sunglasses. Where his eyes
should’ve been, miniature spheres of fire boiled like nuclear
explosions. “Self-pity isn’t helpful, kid. It isn’t worthy
of you. Even without the family gift, your mom gave you
your most important traits—bravery, loyalty, brains. Now
you’ve got to decide how to use them. In the morning,
listen to your grandmother. Take her advice. You can still
free Thanatos and save the camp.”
“And leave my grandmother behind to die.”
“Life is only precious because it ends, kid. Take it
from a god. You mortals don’t know how lucky you are.”
“Yeah,” Frank muttered. “Real lucky.”
Mars laughed—a harsh metallic sound. “Your mom
used to tell me this Chinese proverb. Eat bitter—”
“Eat bitter, taste sweet,” Frank said. “I hate that
proverb.”
“But it’s true. What do they call it these days—no
pain, no gain? Same concept. You do the easy thing, the
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appealing thing, the peaceful thing, mostly it turns out
sour in the end. But if you take the hard path—ah, that’s
how you reap the sweet rewards. Duty. Sacrifice. They
mean something.”
Frank was so disgusted he could hardly speak. This
was his father?
Sure, Frank understood about his mom being a
hero. He understood she’d saved lives and been really
brave. But she’d left him alone. That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t
right.
“I’ll be going,” Mars promised. “But first—you said
you were weak. That’s not true. You want to know why
Juno spared you, Frank? Why that piece of wood didn’t
burn yet?
It’s because you’ve got a role to play. You think
you’re not as good as the other Romans. You think Percy
Jackson is better than you.”
“He is,” Frank grumbled. “He battled you and
won.”
Mars shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe so. But every hero
has a fatal flaw. Percy Jackson? He’s too loyal to his
friends. He can’t give them up, not for anything. He was
told that, years ago. And someday soon, he’s going to face
a sacrifice he can’t make. Without you, Frank—without
your sense of duty—he’s going to fail. The whole war will
go sideways, and Gaea will destroy our world.”
Frank shook his head. He couldn’t hear this.
“War is a duty,” Mars continued. “The only real
choice is whether you accept it, and what you fight for.
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The legacy of Rome is on the line—five thousand years of
law, order, civilization. The gods, the traditions, the cultures
that shaped the world you live in: it’s all going to
crumble, Frank, unless you win this. I think that’s worth
fighting for. Think about it.”
“What’s mine?” Frank asked.
Mars raised an eyebrow. “Your what?”
“Fatal flaw. You said all heroes have one.”
The god smiled dryly. “You gotta answer that your
self, Frank. But you’re finally asking the right questions.
Now, get some sleep. You need the rest.”
The god waved his hand. Frank’s eyes felt heavy.
He collapsed, and everything went dark.
“Fai,” said a familiar voice, harsh and impatient.
Frank blinked his eyes. Sunlight streamed into the
room.
“Fai, get up. As much as I would like to slap that ridiculous
face of yours, I am in no condition to get out of
bed.”
“Grandmother?”
She came into focus, looking down at him from the
bed. He lay sprawled on the floor. Someone had put a
blanket over him during the night and a pillow under his
head, but he had no idea how it had happened.
“Yes, my silly ox.” Grandmother still looked horribly
weak and pale, but her voice was as steely as ever.
410/589
“Now, get up. The ogres have surrounded the house. We
have much to discuss if you and your friends are to escape
here alive.”
ONE LOOK OUT THE WINDOW, and Frank knew he was
in trouble.
At the edge of the lawn, the Laistrygonians were
stacking bronze cannonballs. Their skin gleamed red.
Their shaggy hair, tattoos, and claws didn’t look any prettier
in the morning light.
Some carried clubs or spears. A few confused ogres
carried surfboards, like they’d shown up at the wrong
party. All of them were in a festive mood—giving each
other high fives, tying plastic bibs around their necks,
breaking out the knives and forks. One ogre had fired up
a portable barbecue and was dancing in an apron that
said KISS THE COOK.
The scene would’ve been almost funny, except
Frank knew he was the main course.
412/589
“I’ve sent your friends to the attic,” Grandmother
said.
“You can join them when we’re done.”
“The attic?” Frank turned. “You told me I could
never go in there.”
“That’s because we keep weapons in the attic, silly
boy. Do you think this is the first time monsters have attacked
our family?”
“Weapons,” Frank grumbled. “Right. I’ve never
handled weapons before.”
Grandmother’s nostrils flared. “Was that sarcasm,
Fai Zhang?”
“Yes, Grandmother.”
“Good. There may be hope for you yet. Now, sit.
You must eat.”
She waved her hand at the nightstand, where
someone had set a glass of orange juice and a plate of
poached eggs and bacon on toast—Frank’s favorite
breakfast.
Despite his troubles, Frank suddenly felt hungry.
He looked at Grandmother in astonishment. “Did you—”
“Make you breakfast? By Buddha’s monkey, of
course not! And it wasn’t the house staff. Too dangerous
for them here. No, your girlfriend Hazel made that for
you. And brought you a blanket and pillow last night. And
picked out some clean clothes for you in your bedroom.
By the way, you should shower. You smell like burning
horse hair.”
413/589
Frank opened and closed his mouth like a fish. He
couldn’t make sounds come out. Hazel had done all that
for him? Frank had been sure he’d destroyed any chance
with her last night when he had summoned Gray.
“She’s...um...she’s not—”
“Not your girlfriend?” Grandmother guessed.
“Well, she should be, you dolt! Don’t let her get away. You
need strong women in your life, if you haven’t noticed.
Now, to business.”
Frank ate while Grandmother gave him a sort of
military briefing. In the daylight, her skin was so translucent,
her veins seemed to glow. Her breathing sounded
like a crackly paper bag inflating and deflating, but she
spoke with firmness and clarity.
She explained that the ogres had been surrounding
the house for three days, waiting for Frank to show up.
“They want to cook you and eat you,” she said dis
tastefully, “which is ridiculous. You’d taste terrible.”
“Thank you, Grandmother.”
She nodded. “I admit, I was somewhat pleased
when they said you were coming back. I am glad to see
you one last time, even if your clothes are dirty and you
need a haircut. Is this how you represent your family?”
“I’ve been a little busy, Grandmother.”
“No excuse for sloppiness. At any rate, your friends
have slept and eaten. They are taking stock of the
weapons in the attic. I told them you would be along
shortly, but there are too many ogres to fend off for long.
414/589
We must speak of your escape plan. Look in my
nightstand.”
Frank opened the drawer and pulled out a sealed
envelope.
“You know the airfield at the end of the park?”
Grandmother asked. “Could you find it again?”
Frank nodded mutely. It was about three miles to
the north, down the main road through the canyon.
Grandmother had taken him there sometimes when she
would charter planes to bring in special shipments from
China.
“There is a pilot standing by to leave at a moment’s
notice,” Grandmother said. “He is an old family friend. I
have a letter for him in that envelope, asking him to take
you north.”
“But—”
“Do not argue, boy,” she muttered. “Mars has been
visiting me these last few days, keeping me company. He
told me of your quest. Find Death in Alaska and release
him. Do your duty.”
“But if I succeed, you’ll die. I’ll never see you
again.”
“That is true,” Grandmother agreed. “But I’ll die
anyway. I’m old. I thought I made that clear. Now, did
your praetor give you letters of introduction?”
“Uh, yes, but—”
“Good. Show those to the pilot as well. He’s a veter
an of the legion. In case he has any doubts, or gets cold
415/589
feet, those credentials will make him honor-bound to help
you in any way possible. All you have to do is reach the
airfield.”
The house rumbled. Outside a ball of fire exploded
in midair, lighting up the entire room.
“The ogres are getting restless,” Grandmother said.
“We must hurry. Now, about your powers, I hope you’ve
figured them out.”
“Uh...”
Grandmother muttered some curses in rapid-fire
Mandarin. “Gods of your ancestors, boy! Have you
learned nothing?”
“Yes!” He stammered out the details of his discussion
with Mars the night before, but he felt much more
tongue-tied in front of Grandmother. “The gift of Periclymenus…
I think, I think he was a son of Poseidon, I mean
Neptune, I mean…” Frank spread his hands. “The sea
god.”
Grandmother nodded grudgingly. “He was the
grandson of Poseidon, but good enough. How did your
brilliant intellect arrive at this fact?”
“A seer in Portland…he said something about my
great-grandfather, Shen Lun. The seer said he was
blamed for the 1906 earthquake that destroyed San Fran
cisco and the old location of Camp Jupiter.”
“Go on.”
“At camp, they said a descendant of Neptune had
caused the disaster. Neptune is the god of earthquakes.
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But…but I don’t think great-grandfather actually did it.
Causing earthquakes isn’t our gift.”
“No,” Grandmother agreed. “But yes, he was
blamed. He was unpopular as a descendant of Neptune.
He was unpopular because his real gift was much
stranger than causing earthquakes. And he was unpopular
because he was Chinese. A Chinese boy had never before
claimed Roman blood. An ugly truth—but there is no
denying it. He was falsely accused, forced out in shame.”
“So…if he didn’t do anything wrong, why did you
tell me to apologize for him?”
Grandmother’s cheeks flushed. “Because apologizing
for something you didn’t do is better than dying for it!
I wasn’t sure if the camp would hold you to blame. I did
not know if the prejudice of the Romans had eased.”
Frank swallowed down his breakfast. He’d been
teased in school and on the streets sometimes, but not
that much, and never at Camp Jupiter. Nobody at camp,
not once, had made fun of him for being Asian. Nobody
cared about that. They only made fun of him because he
was clumsy and slow. He couldn’t imagine what it had
been like for his great-grandfather, accused of destroying
the entire camp, drummed out of the legion for
something he didn’t do.
“And our real gift?” Grandmother asked. “Have you
at least figured out what it is?”
His mother’s old stories swirled in Frank’s head.
Fighting like a swarm of bees. He was the greatest
dragon of all. He remembered his mother’s appearing
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next to him in the backyard, as if she’d flown from the attic.
He remembered her coming out of the woods, saying
that she’d given a mama grizzly bear directions.
“You can be anything,” Frank said. “That’s what
she always told me.”
Grandmother huffed. “Finally, a dim light goes on
in that head of yours. Yes, Fai Zhang. Your mother was
not simply boosting your self-esteem. She was telling you
the literal truth.”
“But…” Another explosion shook the house. Ceiling
plaster fell like snow. Frank was so bewildered he barely
noticed.
“Anything?”
“Within reason,” Grandmother said. “Living things.
It helps if you know the creature well. It also helps if you
are in a life-and-death situation, such as combat. Why do
you look so surprised, Fai? You have always said you are
not comfort able in your own body. We all feel that
way—all of us with the blood of Pylos. This gift was only
given once to a mortal family. We are unique among
demigods. Poseidon must have been feeling especially
generous when he blessed our ancestor—or especially
spiteful. The gift has often proven a curse. It did not save
your mother.…”
Outside, a cheer went up from the ogres. Someone
shouted, “Zhang! Zhang!”
“You must go, silly boy,” Grandmother said. “Our
time is up.”
418/589
“But—I don’t know how to use my power. I’ve never—
I can’t—”
“You can,” Grandmother said. “Or you will not survive
to realize your destiny. I don’t like this Prophecy of
Seven that Mars told me about. Seven is an unlucky number
in Chinese—a ghost number. But there is nothing we
can do about that. Now, go! Tomorrow evening is the
Feast of Fortuna. You have no time to waste. Don’t worry
about me. I will die in my own time, in my own way. I
have no intention of being devoured by those ridiculous
ogres. Go!”
Frank turned at the door. He felt like his heart was
being squeezed through a juicer, but he bowed formally.
“Thank you, Grandmother,” he said. “I will make you
proud.”
She muttered something under her breath. Frank
almost thought she had said, You have.
He stared at her, dumbfounded, but her expression
immediately soured. “Stop gaping, boy! Go shower and
dress!Comb your hair! My last image of you, and you
show me messy hair?”
He patted down his hair and bowed again.
His last image of Grandmother was of her glaring
out the window, as if thinking about the terrible scolding
she would give the ogres when they invaded her home.
FRANK TOOK THE QUICKEST POSSIBLE SHOWER, put
on the clothes Hazel had set out—an olive-green shirt
with beige cargo pants, really?—then grabbed his spare
bow and quiver and bounded up the attic stairs.
The attic was full of weapons. His family had collected
enough ancient armaments to supply an army.
Shields, spears, and quivers of arrows hung along one
wall—almost as many as in the Camp Jupiter armory. At
the back window, a scorpion crossbow was mounted and
loaded, ready for action. At the front window stood
something that looked like a machine gun with a cluster
of barrels.
“Rocket launcher?” he wondered aloud.
“Nope, nope,” said a voice from the corner. “Potatoes.
Ella doesn’t like potatoes.”
420/589
The harpy had made a nest for herself between two
old steamer trunks. She was sitting in a pile of Chinese
scrolls, reading seven or eight at once.
“Ella,” Frank said, “where are the others?”
“Roof.” She glanced upward, then returned to her
reading, alternately picking at her feathers and turning
pages. “Roof. Ogre-watching. Ella doesn’t like ogres.
Potatoes.”
“Potatoes?” Frank didn’t understand until he
swiveled the machine gun around. Its eight barrels were
loaded with spuds. At the base of the gun, a basket was
filled with more edible ammunition.
He looked out the window—the same window his
mom had watched him from when he had met the bear.
Down in the yard, the ogres were milling around, shoving
each other, occasionally yelling at the house, and throwing
bronze cannonballs that exploded in midair.
“They have cannonballs,” Frank said. “And we have
a potato gun.”
“Starch,” Ella said thoughtfully. “Starch is bad for
ogres.”
The house shook from another explosion. Frank
needed to reach the roof and see how Percy and Hazel
were doing, but he felt bad leaving Ella alone.
He knelt next to her, careful not to get too close.
“Ella, it’s not safe here with the ogres. We’re going to be
flying to Alaska soon. Will you come with us?”
421/589
Ella twitched uncomfortably. “Alaska. Six hundred
twenty-six thousand, four hundred twenty-five square
miles.
State mammal: the moose.”
Suddenly she switched to Latin, which Frank could
just barely follow thanks to his classes at Camp Jupiter:
“To the north, beyond the gods, lies the legion’s
crown. Falling from ice, the son of Neptune shall
drown—” She stopped and scratched her disheveled red
hair. “Hmm. Burned. The rest is burned.”
Frank could hardly breathe. “Ella, was…was that a
prophecy? Where did you read that?”
“Moose,” Ella said, savoring the word. “Moose.
Moose. Moose.”
The house shook again. Dust rained down from the
rafters. Outside, an ogre bellowed, “Frank Zhang! Show
yourself!”
“Nope,” Ella said. “Frank shouldn’t. Nope.”
“Just…stay here, okay?” Frank said. “I’ve got to go
help Hazel and Percy.”
He pulled down the ladder to the roof.
“Morning,” Percy said grimly. “Beautiful day, huh?” He
wore the same clothes as the day before—jeans, his purple
T-shirt, and Polartec jacket—but they’d obviously been
freshly washed. He held his sword in one hand and a
garden hose in the other. Why there was a garden hose on
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the roof, Frank wasn’t sure, but every time the giants sent
up a cannonball, Percy summoned a high-powered blast
of water and detonated the sphere in midair. Then Frank
remembered—his family was descended from Poseidon,
too. Grandmother had said their house had been attacked
before. Maybe they had put a hose up here for just that
reason.
Hazel patrolled the widow’s walk between the two
attic gables. She looked so good, it made Frank’s chest
hurt. She wore jeans, a cream-colored jacket, and a white
shirt that made her skin look as warm as cocoa. Her curly
hair fell around her shoulders. When she came close,
Frank could smell jasmine shampoo.
She gripped her sword. When she glanced at Frank,
her eyes flashed with concern. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Why are you smiling?”
“Oh, uh, nothing,” he managed. “Thanks for breakfast.
And the clothes. And…not hating me.”
Hazel looked baffled. “Why would I hate you?”
Frank’s face burned. He wished he’d kept his
mouth shut, but it was too late now. Don’t let her get
away, his grandmother had said. You need strong
women.
“It’s just…last night,” he stammered. “When I
summoned the skeleton. I thought…I thought that you
thought…I was repulsive ... or something.”
Hazel raised her eyebrows. She shook her head in
dismay. “Frank, maybe I was surprised. Maybe I was
scared of that thing. But repulsed? The way you
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commanded it, so confident and everything—like, Oh, by
the way, guys, I have this all-powerful spartus we can
use. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t repulsed, Frank. I was
impressed.”
Frank wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. “You
were…impressed ... by me?”
Percy laughed. “Dude, it was pretty amazing.”
“Honest?” Frank asked.
“Honest,” Hazel promised. “But right now, we have
other problems to worry about. Okay?”
She gestured at the army of ogres, who were getting
increasingly bold, shuffling closer and closer to the house.
Percy readied the garden hose. “I’ve got one more
trick up my sleeve. Your lawn has a sprinkler system. I
can blow it up and cause some confusion down there, but
that’ll destroy your water pressure. No pressure, no hose,
and those cannonballs are going to plow right into the
house.”
Hazel’s praise was still ringing in Frank’s ears,
making it difficult to think. Dozens of ogres were camped
on his lawn, waiting to tear him apart, and Frank could
barely control the urge to grin.
Hazel didn’t hate him. She was impressed.
He forced himself to concentrate. He remembered
what his grandmother had told him about the nature of
his gift, and how he had to leave her here to die.
You’ve got a role to play, Mars had said.
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Frank couldn’t believe he was Juno’s secret
weapon, or that this big Prophecy of the Seven depended
on him. But Hazel and Percy were counting on him. He
had to do his best.
He thought about that weird partial prophecy Ella
had recited in the attic, about the son of Neptune
drowning.
You don’t understand her true value, Phineas had
told them in Portland. The old blind man had thought
that controlling Ella would make him a king.
All these puzzle pieces swirled around in Frank’s
mind. He got the feeling that when they finally connected,
they would create a picture he didn’t like.
“Guys, I’ve got an escape plan.” He told his friends
about the plane waiting at the airfield, and his grandmother’s
note for the pilot. “He’s a legion veteran. He’ll
help us.”
“But Arion’s not back,” Hazel said. “And what
about your grandmother? We can’t just leave her.”
Frank choked back a sob. “Maybe—maybe Arion
will find us. As for my grandmother…she was pretty clear.
She said she’d be okay.”
It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it was as much as
Frank could manage.
“There’s another problem,” Percy said. “I’m not
good with air travel. It’s dangerous for a son of Neptune.”
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“You’ll have to risk it.…and so will I,” Frank said.
“By the way, we’re related.” Percy almost stumbled off the
roof. “What?”
Frank gave them the five-second version:
“Periclymenus.
Ancestor on my mom’s side. Argonaut. Grandson
of Poseidon.”
Hazel’s mouth fell open. “You’re a—a descendant of
Neptune? Frank, that’s—”
“Crazy? Yeah. And there’s this ability my family
has, supposedly. But I don’t know how to use it. If I can’t
figure it out—”
Another massive cheer went up from the Laistrygonians.
Frank realized they were staring up at him, pointing
and waving and laughing. They had spotted their
breakfast.
“Zhang!” they yelled. “Zhang!”
Hazel stepped closer to him. “They keep doing that.
Why are they yelling your name?”
“Never mind,” Frank said. “Listen, we’ve got to protect
Ella, take her with us.”
“Of course,” Hazel said. “The poor thing needs our
help.”
“No,” Frank said. “I mean yes, but it’s not just that.
She recited a prophecy downstairs. I think…I think it was
about this quest.”
He didn’t want to tell Percy the bad news, about a
son of Neptune drowning, but he repeated the lines.
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Percy’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know how a son of
Neptune can drown. I can breathe underwater. But the
crown of the legion—”
“That’s got to be the eagle,” Hazel said.
Percy nodded. “And Ella recited something like this
once before, in Portland—a line from the old Great
Prophecy.”
“The what?” Frank asked.
“Tell you later.” Percy turned his garden hose and
shot another cannonball out of the sky.
It exploded in an orange fireball. The ogres clapped
with appreciation and yelled, “Pretty! Pretty!”
“The thing is,” Frank said, “Ella remembers
everything she reads. She said something about the page
being burned, like she’d read a damaged text of
prophecies.”
Hazel’s eyes widened. “Burned books of prophecy?
You don’t think—but that’s impossible!”
“The books Octavian wanted, back at camp?” Percy
guessed.
Hazel whistled under her breath. “The lost Sibylline
books that outlined the entire destiny of Rome. If Ella
actually read a copy somehow, and memorized it—”
“Then she’s the most valuable harpy in the world,”
Frank said. “No wonder Phineas wanted to capture her.”
“Frank Zhang!” an ogre shouted from below. He
was bigger than the rest, wearing a lion’s cape like a Roman
standard bearer and a plastic bib with a lobster on it.
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“Come down, son of Mars! We’ve been waiting for you.
Come, be our honored guest!”
Hazel gripped Frank’s arm. “Why do I get the feeling
that ‘honored guest’ means the same thing as
‘dinner’?”
Frank wished Mars were still there. He could use
somebody to snap his fingers and make his battle jitters
go away.
Hazel believes in me, he thought. I can do this.
He looked at Percy. “Can you drive?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Grandmother’s car is in the garage. It’s an old Ca
dillac. The thing is like a tank. If you can get it started—”
“We’ll still have to break through a line of ogres,”
Hazel said.
“The sprinkler system,” Percy said. “Use it as a
distraction?”
“Exactly,” Frank said. “I’ll buy you as much time as
I can. Get Ella, and get in the car. I’ll try to meet you in
the garage, but don’t wait for me.”
Percy frowned. “Frank—”
“Give us your answer, Frank Zhang!” the ogre
yelled up. “Come down, and we will spare the others—
your friends, your poor old granny. We only want
you!”
“They’re lying,” Percy muttered.
“Yeah, I got that,” Frank agreed. “Go!”
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His friends ran for the ladder.
Frank tried to control the beating of his heart. He
grinned and yelled, “Hey, down there! Who’s hungry?”
The ogres cheered as Frank paced along the widow’s walk
and waved like a rock star.
Frank tried to summon his family power. He imagined
himself as a fire-breathing dragon. He strained and
clenched his fist and thought about dragons so hard,
beads of sweat popped up on his forehead. He wanted to
sweep down on the enemy and destroy them. That would
be extremely cool. But nothing happened. He had no clue
how to change himself. He had never even seen a real
dragon. For a panicky moment, he wondered if Grandmother
had played some sort of cruel joke on him. Maybe
he’d misunderstood the gift. Maybe Frank was the only
member of the family who hadn’t inherited it. That would
be just his luck.
The ogres started to become restless. The cheering
turned to catcalls. A few Laistrygonians hefted their
cannonballs.
“Hold on!” Frank yelled. “You don’t want to char
me, do you? I won’t taste very good that way.”
“Come down!” they yelled. “Hungry!”
Time for Plan B. Frank just wished he had one.
“Do you promise to spare my friends?” Frank
asked. “Do you swear on the River Styx?”
The ogres laughed. One threw a cannonball that
arced over Frank’s head and blew up the chimney. By
some miracle, Frank wasn’t hit with shrapnel.
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“I’ll take that as a no,” he muttered. Then he
shouted down:
“Okay, fine! You win! I’ll be right down. Wait
there!” The ogres cheered, but their leader in the lion’sskin
cape scowled suspiciously. Frank wouldn’t have
much time. He descended the ladder into the attic. Ella
was gone. He hoped that was a good sign. Maybe they’d
gotten her to the Cadillac. He grabbed an extra quiver of
arrows labeled assorted varieties in his mother’s neat
printing. Then he ran to the machine gun.
He swiveled the barrel, took aim at the lead ogre,
and pressed the trigger. Eight high-powered spuds blasted
the giant in the chest, propelling him backward with
such force that he crashed into a stack of bronze cannonballs,
which promptly exploded, leaving a smoking crater
in the yard.
Apparently starch was bad for ogres.
While the rest of the monsters ran around in confusion,
Frank pulled his bow and rained arrows on them.
Some of the missiles detonated on impact. Others
splintered like buckshot and left the giants with some
painful new tattoos. One hit an ogre and instantly turned
him into a potted rosebush.
Unfortunately, the ogres recovered quickly. They
began throwing cannonballs—dozens at a time. The whole
house groaned under the impact. Frank ran for the stairs.
The attic disintegrated behind him. Smoke and fire
poured down the second-floor hallway.
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“Grandmother!” he cried, but the heat was so intense,
he couldn’t reach her room. He raced to the ground
floor, clinging to the banister as the house shook and
huge chunks of the ceiling collapsed.
The base of the staircase was a smoking crater. He
leaped over it and stumbled through the kitchen. Choking
from the ash and soot, he burst into the garage. The Cadillac’s
headlights were on. The engine was running and
the garage door was opening.
“Get in!” Percy yelled.
Frank dove in the back next to Hazel. Ella was
curled up in the front, her head tucked under her wings,
muttering,
“Yikes. Yikes. Yikes.”
Percy gunned the engine. They shot out of the garage
before it was fully open, leaving a Cadillac-shaped
hole of splintered wood.
The ogres ran to intercept, but Percy shouted at the
top of his lungs, and the irrigation system exploded. A
hundred geysers shot into the air along with clods of dirt,
pieces of pipe, and very heavy sprinkler heads.
The Cadillac was going about forty when they hit
the first ogre, who disintegrated on impact. By the time
the other monsters overcame their confusion, the Cadillac
was half a mile down the road. Flaming cannonballs burst
behind them.
Frank glanced back and saw his family mansion on
fire, the walls collapsing inward and smoke billowing into
the sky. He saw a large black speck—maybe a
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buzzard—circling up from the fire. It might’ve been
Frank’s imagination, but he thought it had flown out of
the second-story window.
“Grandmother?” he murmured.
It seemed impossible, but she had promised she
would die in her own way, not at the hands of the ogres.
Frank hoped she had been right.
They drove through the woods and headed north.
“About three miles!” Frank said. “You can’t miss
it!”
Behind them, more explosions ripped through the
forest. Smoke boiled into the sky.
“How fast can Laistrygonians run?” Hazel asked.
“Let’s not find out,” Percy said.
The gates of the airfield appeared before
them—only a few hundred yards away. A private jet idled
on the runway. Its stairs were down.
The Cadillac hit a pothole and went airborne.
Frank’s head slammed into the ceiling. When the wheels
touched the ground, Percy floored the brakes, and they
swerved to a stop just inside the gates.
Frank climbed out and drew his bow. “Get to the
plane! They’re coming!”
The Laistrygonians were closing in with alarming
speed. The first line of ogres burst out of the woods and
barreled toward the airfield—five hundred yards away,
four hundred yards...
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Percy and Hazel managed to get Ella out of the Cadillac,
but as soon as the harpy saw the airplane, she
began to shriek.
“N-n-no!” she yelped. “Fly with wings! N-n-no
airplanes.”
“It’s okay,” Hazel promised. “We’ll protect you!”
Ella made a horrible, painful wail like she was being
burned.
Percy held up his hands in exasperation. “What do
we do? We can’t force her.”
“No,” Frank agreed. The ogres were three hundred
yards out.
“She’s too valuable to leave behind,” Hazel said.
Then she winced at her own words. “Gods, I’m sorry, Ella.
I sound as bad as Phineas. You’re a living thing, not a
treasure.”“No planes. N-n-no planes.” Ella was
hyperventilating.
The ogres were almost in throwing distance.
Percy’s eyes lit up. “I’ve got an idea. Ella, can you
hide in the woods? Will you be safe from the ogres?”
“Hide,” she agreed. “Safe. Hiding is good for
harpies. Ellais quick. And small. And fast.”
“Okay,” Percy said. “Just stay around this area. I
can send a friend to meet you and take you to Camp
Jupiter.”
Frank unslung his bow and nocked an arrow. “A
friend?”
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Percy waved his hand in a tell you later gesture.
“Ella, would you like that? Would you like my friend to
take you to Camp Jupiter and show you our home?”
“Camp,” Ella muttered. Then in Latin: “‘Wisdom’s
daughter walks alone, the Mark of Athena burns
through Rome.’”
“Uh, right,” Percy said. “That sounds important,
but we can talk about that later. You’ll be safe at camp. All
the books and food you want.”
“No planes,” she insisted.
“No planes,” Percy agreed.
“Ella will hide now.” Just like that, she was gone—a
red streak disappearing into the woods.
“I’ll miss her,” Hazel said sadly.
“We’ll see her again,” Percy promised, but he
frowned uneasily, as if he were really troubled by that last
bit of prophecy—the thing about Athena.
An explosion sent the airfield’s gate spinning into
the air.
Frank tossed his grandmother’s letter to Percy.
“Show that to the pilot! Show him your letter from Reyna
too! We’ve got to take off now.”
Percy nodded. He and Hazel ran for the plane.
Frank took cover behind the Cadillac and started
firing at the ogres. He targeted the largest clump of enemies
and shot a tulip-shaped arrow. Just as he’d hoped,
it was a hydra.
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Ropes lashed out like squid tentacles, and the entire
front row of ogres plowed face first into the dirt.
Frank heard the plane’s engines rev.
He shot three more arrows as fast as he could,
blasting enormous craters in the ogres’ ranks. The survivors
were only a hundred yards away, and some of the
brighter ones stumbled to a stop, realizing that they were
now within hurling range.
“Frank!” Hazel shrieked. “Come on!”
A fiery cannonball hurtled toward him in a slow
arc. Frank knew instantly it was going to hit the plane. He
nocked an arrow. I can do this, he thought. He let the arrow
fly. It intercepted the cannonball midair, detonating
a massive fireball. Another two cannonballs sailed toward
him. Frank ran.
Behind him, metal groaned as the Cadillac exploded.
He dove into the plane just as the stairs started to
rise.
The pilot must’ve understood the situation just
fine. There was no safety announcement, no pre-flight
drink, and no waiting for clearance. He pushed the
throttle, and the plane shot down the runway. Another
blast ripped through the runway behind them, but then
they were in the air.
Frank looked down and saw the airstrip riddled
with craters like a piece of burning Swiss cheese. Swaths
of Lynn Canyon Park were on fire. A few miles to the
south, a swirling pyre of flames and black smoke was all
that remained of the Zhang family mansion.
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So much for Frank being impressive. He’d failed to
save his grandmother. He’d failed to use his powers. He
hadn’t even saved their harpy friend. When Vancouver
disappeared in the clouds below, Frank buried his head in
his hands and started to cry.
The plane banked to the left.
Over the intercom, the pilot’s voice said, “Senatus
Populusque Romanus, my friends. Welcome aboard. Next
stop: Anchorage, Alaska.”
AIRPLANES OR CANNIBALS? NO CONTEST.
Percy would’ve preferred driving Grandma Zhang’s
Cadillac all the way to Alaska with fireball-throwing
ogres on his tail rather than sitting in a luxury Gulf
stream.
He’d flown before. The details were hazy, but he remembered
a pegasus named Blackjack. He’d even been in
a plane once or twice. But a son of Neptune (Poseidon,
whatever)didn’t belong in the air. Every time the plane hit
a spot of turbulence, Percy’s heart raced, and he was sure
Jupiter was slapping them around.
He tried to focus as Frank and Hazel talked. Hazel
was reassuring Frank that he’d done everything he could
for his grandmother. Frank had saved them from the Laistrygonians
and gotten them out of Vancouver. He’d
been incredibly brave.
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Frank kept his head down like he was ashamed to
have been crying, but Percy didn’t blame him. The poor
guy had just lost his grandmother and seen his house go
up in flames. As far as Percy was concerned, shedding a
few tears about something like that didn’t make you any
less of a man, especially when you had just fended off an
army of ogres that wanted to eat you for breakfast.
Percy still couldn’t get over the fact that Frank was
a distant relative. Frank would be his…what? Greattimes-
a-thousand nephew? Too weird for words.
Frank refused to explain exactly what his “family
gift” was, but as they flew north, Frank did tell them
about his conversation with Mars the night before. He explained
the prophecy Juno had issued when he was a
baby—about his life being tied to a piece of firewood, and
how he had asked Hazel to keep it for him.
Some of that, Percy had already figured out. Hazel
and Frank had obviously shared some crazy experiences
when they had blacked out together, and they’d made
some sort of deal. It also explained why even now, out of
habit, Frank kept checking his coat pocket, and why he
was so nervous around fire. Still, Percy couldn’t imagine
what kind of courage it had taken for Frank to embark on
a quest, knowing that one small flame could snuff out his
life.
“Frank,” he said, “I’m proud to be related to you.”
Frank’s ears turned red. With his head lowered, his
military haircut made a sharp black arrow pointing down.
“Juno has some sort of plan for us, about the Prophecy of
Seven.”
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“Yeah,” Percy grumbled. “I didn’t like her as Hera. I
don’t like her any better as Juno.” Hazel tucked her feet
underneath her. She studied Percy with her luminescent
golden eyes, and he wondered how she could be so calm.
She was the youngest one on the quest, but she was always
holding them together and comforting them. Now
they were flying to Alaska, where she had died once before.
They would try to free Thanatos, who might take her
back to the Underworld. Yet she didn’t show any fear. It
made
Percy feel silly for being scared of airplane
turbulence.
“You’re a son of Poseidon, aren’t you?” she asked.
“You are a Greek demigod.”
Percy gripped his leather necklace. “I started to remember
in Portland, after the gorgon’s blood. It’s been
coming back to me slowly since then. There’s another
camp—Camp Half-Blood.”
Just saying the name made Percy feel warm inside.
Good memories washed over him: the smell of strawberry
fields in the warm summer sun, fireworks lighting up the
beach on the Fourth of July, satyrs playing panpipes at
the nightly campfire, and a kiss at the bottom of the canoe
lake.
Hazel and Frank stared at him as though he’d
slipped into another language.
“Another camp,” Hazel repeated. “A Greek camp?
Gods, if Octavian found out—”
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“He’d declare war,” Frank said. “He’s always been
sure the Greeks were out there, plotting against us. He
thought Percy was a spy.”
“That’s why Juno sent me,” Percy said. “Uh, I
mean, not to spy. I think it was some kind of exchange.
Your friend
Jason—I think he was sent to my camp. In my
dreams, I saw a demigod that might have been him. He
was working with some other demigods on this flying
warship. I think they’re coming to Camp Jupiter to help.”
Frank tapped nervously on the back of his seat.
“Mars said Juno wants to unite the Greeks and Romans
to fight Gaea. But, jeez—Greeks and Romans have a long
history of bad blood.”
Hazel took a deep breath. “That’s probably why the
gods have kept us apart this long. If a Greek warship appeared
in the sky above Camp Jupiter, and Reyna didn’t
know it was friendly—”
“Yeah,” Percy agreed. “We’ve got to be careful how
we explain this when we get back.”
“If we get back,” Frank said.
Percy nodded reluctantly. “I mean, I trust you guys.
I hope you trust me. I feel…well, I feel as close to you two
as to any of my old friends at Camp Half-Blood. But with
the other demigods, at both camps—there’s going to be a
lot of suspicion.”
Hazel did something he wasn’t expecting. She
leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. It was totally a
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sisterly kiss. But she smiled with such affection, it
warmed Percy right down to his feet.
“Of course we trust you,” she said. “We’re a family
now. Aren’t we, Frank?”
“Sure,” he said. “Do I get a kiss?”
Hazel laughed, but there was nervous tension in it.
“Anyway, what do we do now?”
Percy took a deep breath. Time was slipping away.
They were almost halfway through June twenty-
third, and tomorrow was the Feast of Fortuna. “I’ve got to
contact a friend—to keep my promise to Ella.”
“How?” Frank said. “One of those Iris-messages?”
“Still not working,” Percy said sadly. “I tried it last
night at your grandmother’s house. No luck. Maybe it’s
because my memories are still jumbled. Or the gods
aren’t allowing a connection. I’m hoping I can contact my
friend in my dreams.”
Another bump of turbulence made him grab his
seat. Below them, snowcapped mountains broke through
a blanket of clouds.
“I’m not sure I can sleep,” Percy said. “But I need to
try. We can’t leave Ella by herself with those ogres
around.”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “We’ve still got hours to fly.
Take the couch, man.”
Percy nodded. He felt lucky to have Hazel and
Frank watching out for him. What he’d said to them was
true—he trusted them. In the weird, terrifying, horrible
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experience of losing his memory and getting ripped out of
his old life—Hazel and Frank were the bright spots.
He stretched out, closed his eyes, and dreamed he
was falling from a mountain of ice toward a cold sea.
The dream shifted. He was back in Vancouver, standing
in front of the ruins of the Zhang mansion. The Laistrygonians
were gone. The mansion was reduced to a burned-
out shell. A crew of firefighters was packing up their
equipment, getting ready to move out. The lawn looked
like a war zone, with smoking craters and trenches from
the blown-out irrigation pipes.
At the edge of the forest, a giant shaggy black dog
was bounding around, sniffing the trees. The firefighters
completely ignored him.
Beside one of the craters knelt a Cyclops in oversized
jeans, boots, and a massive flannel shirt. His messy
brown hair was spattered with rain and mud. When he
raised his head, his big brown eye was red from crying.
“Close!” he moaned. “So close, but gone!”
It broke Percy’s heart to hear the pain and worry in
the big guy’s voice, but he knew they only had a few
seconds to talk. The edges of the vision were already dissolving.
If Alaska was the land beyond the gods, Percy
figured the farther north he went, the harder it would be
to communicate with his friends, even in his dreams.
“Tyson!” he called.
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The Cyclops looked around frantically. “Percy?
Brother?”
“Tyson, I’m okay. I’m here—well, not really.”
Tyson grabbed the air like he was trying to catch
butterflies. “Can’t see you! Where is my brother?”
“Tyson, I’m flying to Alaska. I’m okay. I’ll be back.
Just find Ella. She’s a harpy with red feathers. She’s hiding
in the woods around the house.”
“Find a harpy? A red harpy?”
“Yes! Protect her, okay? She’s my friend. Get her
back to California. There’s a demigod camp in the Oakland
Hills—Camp Jupiter. Meet me above the Caldecott
Tunnel.”
“Oakland Hills ... California ... Caldecott Tunnel.”
He shouted to the dog: “Mrs. O’Leary! We must find a
harpy!”
“WOOF!” said the dog.
Tyson’s face started to dissolve. “My brother is
okay? My brother is coming back? I miss you!”
“I miss you, too.” Percy tried to keep his voice from
cracking. “I’ll see you soon. Just be careful! There’s a gi
ant’s army marching south. Tell Annabeth—”
The dream shifted.
Percy found himself standing in the hills north of
Camp Jupiter, looking down at the Field of Mars and New
Rome. At the legion’s fort, horns were blowing. Campers
scrambled to muster.
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The giant’s army was arrayed to Percy’s left and
right—centaurs with bull’s horns, the six-armed Earth-
born, and evil Cyclopes in scrap-metal armor. The Cyclopes’
siege tower cast a shadow across the feet of the giant
Polybotes, who grinned down at the Roman camp. He
paced eagerly across the hill, snakes dropping from his
green dreadlocks, his dragon legs stomping down small
trees. On his green-blue armor, the decorative faces of
hungry monsters seemed to blink in the shadows.
“Yes,” he chuckled, planting his trident in the
ground. “Blow your little horns, Romans. I’ve come to
destroy you! Stheno!”
The gorgon scrambled out of the bushes. Her lime
green viper hair and Bargain Mart vest clashed horribly
with the giant’s color scheme.
“Yes, master!” she said. “Would you like a Puppyin-
a-
Blanket?”
She held up a tray of free samples.
“Hmm,” Polybotes said. “What sort of puppy?”
“Ah, they’re not actually puppies. They’re tiny hot
dogs in crescent rolls, but they’re on sale this week—”
“Bah! Never mind, then! Are our forces ready to
attack?”
“Oh—” Stheno stepped back quickly to avoid getting
flattened by the giant’s foot. “Almost, great one. Ma
Gasket and half her Cyclopes stopped in Napa. Something
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about a winery tour? They promised to be here by tomorrow
evening.”
“What?” The giant looked around, as if just noticing
that a big portion of his army was missing. “Gah!
That Cyclops woman will give me an ulcer. Winery tour?”
“I think there was cheese and crackers, too,”
Stheno said helpfully. “Though Bargain Mart has a much
better deal.”
Polybotes ripped an oak tree out of the ground and
threw it into the valley. “Cyclopes! I tell you, Stheno,
when I destroy Neptune and take over the oceans, we will
renegotiate the Cyclopes’ labor contract. Ma Gasket will
learn her place!Now, what news from the north?”
“The demigods have left for Alaska,” Stheno said.
“They fly straight to their death. Ah, small ‘d’ death, I
mean. Not our prisoner Death. Although, I suppose
they’re flying to him too.”
Polybotes growled. “Alcyoneus had better spare the
son of Neptune as he promised. I want that one chained
at my feet, so I can kill him when the time is ripe. His
blood shall water the stones of Mount Olympus and wake
the Earth Mother! What word from the Amazons?”
“Only silence,” Stheno said. “We do not yet know
the winner of last night’s duel, but it is only a matter of
time before Otrera prevails and comes to our aid.”
“Hmm.” Polybotes absently scratched some vipers
out of his hair. “Perhaps it’s just as well we wait, then. Tomorrow
at sundown is Fortuna’s Feast. By then, we must
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invade—Amazons or no. In the meantime, dig in! We set
up camp here, on high ground.”
“Yes, great one!” Stheno announced to the troops:
“Puppiesin-Blankets for everyone!”
The monsters cheered.
Polybotes spread his hands in front of him, taking
in the valley like a panoramic picture. “Yes, blow your
little horns, demigods. Soon, the legacy of Rome will be
destroyed for the last time!”
The dream faded.
Percy woke with a jolt as the plane started its
descent.
Hazel laid her hand on his shoulder. “Sleep okay?”
Percy sat up groggily. “How long was I out?”
Frank stood in the aisle, wrapping his spear and
new bow in his ski bag. “A few hours,” he said. “We’re almost
there.”
Percy looked out the window. A glittering inlet of
the sea snaked between snowy mountains. In the distance,
a city was carved out of the wilderness, surrounded
by lush green forestson one side and icy black beaches on
the other.
“Welcome to Alaska,” Hazel said. “We’re beyond
the help of the gods.”
THE PILOT SAID THE PLANE COULDN’T WAIT for them,
but that was okay with Percy. If they survived till the next
day, he hoped they could find a different way
back—anything but a plane.
He should’ve been depressed. He was stuck in
Alaska, the giant’s home territory, out of contact with his
old friends just as his memories were coming back. He
had seen an image of Polybotes’s army about to invade
Camp Jupiter. He’d learned that the giants planned to use
him as some kind of blood sacrifice to awaken Gaea. Plus,
tomorrow evening was the Feast of Fortuna. He, Frank,
and Hazel had an impossible task to complete before
then. At best, they would unleash Death, who might take
Percy’s two friends to the Underworld. Not much to look
forward to.
Still, Percy felt strangely invigorated. His dream of
Tyson had lifted his spirits. He remembered Tyson, his
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brother. They’d fought together, celebrated victories,
shared good times at
Camp Half-Blood. He remembered his home, and
that gave him a new determination to succeed. He was
fighting for two camps now—two families.
Juno had stolen his memory and sent him to Camp
Jupiter for a reason. He understood that now. He still
wanted to punch her in her godly face, but at least he got
her reasoning. If the two camps could work together, they
stood a chance of stopping their mutual enemies. Separately,
both camps were doomed.
There were other reasons Percy wanted to save
Camp Jupiter. Reasons he didn’t dare put into
words—not yet, anyway. Suddenly he saw a future for
himself and for Annabeth that he’d never imagined
before.
As they took a taxi into downtown Anchorage,
Percy told Frank and Hazel about his dreams. They
looked anxious but not surprised when he told them
about the giant’s army closing in on camp.
Frank choked when he heard about Tyson. “You
have a half-brother who’s a Cyclops?”
“Sure,” Percy said. “Which makes him your great-
great-great—”
“Please.” Frank covered his ears. “Enough.”
“As long as he can get Ella to camp,” Hazel said.
“I’m worried about her.”
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Percy nodded. He was still thinking about the lines
of prophecy the harpy had recited—about the son of Neptune
drowning, and the mark of Athena burning through
Rome.
He wasn’t sure what the first part meant, but he
was starting to have an idea about the second. He tried to
set the question aside. He had to survive this quest first.
The taxi turned on Highway One, which looked
more like a small street to Percy, and took them north toward
downtown. It was late afternoon, but the sun was
still high in the sky.
“I can’t believe how much this place has grown,”
Hazel muttered.
The taxi driver grinned in the rearview mirror.
“Been a long time since you visited, miss?”
“About seventy years,” Hazel said.
The driver slid the glass partition closed and drove
on in silence.
According to Hazel, almost none of the buildings
were the same, but she pointed out features of the landscape:
the vast forests ringing the city, the cold, gray waters
of Cook Inlet tracing the north edge of town, and the
Chugach Mountains rising grayish-blue in the distance,
capped with snow even in June. Percy had never smelled
air this clean before. The town itself had a weather-beaten
look to it, with closed stores, rusted-out cars, and worn
apartment complexes lining the road, but it was still
beautiful. Lakes and huge stretches of woods cut through
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the middle. The arctic sky was an amazing combination of
turquoise and gold.
Then there were the giants. Dozens of bright-blue
men, each thirty feet tall with gray frosty hair, were wading
through the forests, fishing in the bay, and striding
across the mountains. The mortals didn’t seem to notice
them. The taxi passed within a few yards of one who was
sitting at the edge of a lake washing his feet, but the
driver didn’t panic.
“Um…” Frank pointed at the blue guy.
“Hyperboreans,” Percy said. He was amazed he remembered
that name. “Northern giants. I fought some
when Kronos invaded Manhattan.”
“Wait,” Frank said. “When who did what?”
“Long story. But these guys look…I don’t know,
peaceful.”
“They usually are,” Hazel agreed. “I remember
them. They’re everywhere in Alaska, like bears.”
“Bears?” Frank said nervously.
“The giants are invisible to mortals,” Hazel said.
“They never bothered me, though one almost stepped on
me by accident once.”
That sounded fairly bothersome to Percy, but the
taxi kept driving. None of the giants paid them any attention.
One stood right at the intersection of Northern
Lights Road, straddling the highway, and they drove
between his legs. The Hyperborean was cradling a Native
American totem pole wrapped in furs, humming to it like
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a baby. If the guy hadn’t been the size of a building, he
would’ve been almost cute.
The taxi drove through downtown, past a bunch of
tourists’ shops advertising furs, Native American art, and
gold. Percy hoped Hazel wouldn’t get agitated and make
the jewelry shops explode.
As the driver turned and headed toward the seashore,
Hazel knocked on the glass partition. “Here is
good. Can you let us out?”
They paid the driver and stepped onto Fourth
Street. Compared to Vancouver, downtown Anchorage
was tiny—more like a college campus than a city, but
Hazel looked amazed.
“It’s huge,” she said. “That—that’s where the
Gitchell Hotel used to be. My mom and I stayed there our
first week in Alaska. And they’ve moved City Hall. It used
to be there.”
She led them in a daze for a few blocks. They didn’t
really have a plan beyond finding the fastest way to the
Hubbard Glacier, but Percy smelled something cooking
nearby—sausage, maybe? He realized he hadn’t eaten
since that morning at Grandma Zhang’s.
“Food,” he said. “Come on.”
They found a café right by the beach. It was bustling
with people, but they scored a table at the window
and perused the menus.
Frank whooped with delight. “Twenty-four-hour
breakfast!”
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“It’s, like, dinnertime,” Percy said, though he
couldn’t tell from looking outside. The sun was so high, it
could’ve been noon.
“I love breakfast,” Frank said. “I’d eat breakfast,
breakfast, and breakfast if I could. Though, um, I’m sure
the food here isn’t as good as Hazel’s.”
Hazel elbowed him, but her smile was playful.
Seeing them like that made Percy happy. Those two
definitely needed to get together. But it also made him
sad. He thought about Annabeth, and wondered if he’d
live long enough to see her again.
Think positive, he told himself.
“You know,” he said, “breakfast sounds great.”
They all ordered massive plates of eggs, pancakes,
and reindeer sausage, though Frank looked a little worried
about the reindeer. “You think it’s okay that we’re
eating Rudolph?”
“Dude,” Percy said, “I could eat Prancer and Blitzen,
too. I’m hungry.”
The food was excellent. Percy had never seen anyone
eat as fast as Frank. The red-nosed reindeer did not
stand a chance.
Between bites of blueberry pancake, Hazel drew a
squiggly curve and an X on her napkin. “So this is what
I’m thinking. We’re here.” She tapped X. “Anchorage.”
“It looks like a seagull’s face,” Percy said. “And
we’re the eye.”
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Hazel glared at him. “It’s a map, Percy. Anchorage
is at the top of this sliver of ocean, Cook Inlet. There’s a
big peninsula of land below us, and my old home town,
Seward, is at the bottom of the peninsula, here.” She drew
another X at the base of the seagull’s throat. “That’s the
closest town to the Hubbard Glacier. We could go around
by sea, I guess, but it would take forever. We don’t have
that kind of time.”
Frank polished off the last of his Rudolph. “But
land is dangerous,” he said. “Land means Gaea.”
Hazel nodded. “I don’t see that we’ve got much
choice, though. We could have asked our pilot to fly us
down, but I don’t know…his plane might be too big for
the little Seward airport. And if we chartered another
plane—”
“No more planes,” Percy said. “Please.”
Hazel held up her hand in a placating gesture. “It’s
okay. There’s a train that goes from here to Seward. We
might be able to catch one tonight. It only takes a couple
of hours.”
She drew a dotted line between the two X’s.
“You just cut off the seagull’s head,” Percy noted.
Hazel sighed. “It’s the train line. Look, from Se-
ward, the Hubbard Glacier is down here somewhere.” She
tapped the lower right corner of her napkin. “That’s
where Alcyoneus is.”
“But you’re not sure how far?” Frank asked.
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Hazel frowned and shook her head. “I’m pretty
sure it’s only accessible by boat or plane.”
“Boat,” Percy said immediately.
“Fine,” Hazel said. “It shouldn’t be too far from Se-
ward. If we can get to Seward safely.”
Percy gazed out the window. So much to do, and
only twenty-four hours left. This time tomorrow, the
Feast of Fortuna would be starting. Unless they unleashed
Death and made it back to camp, the giant’s army
would flood into the valley. The Romans would be the
main course at a monster dinner.
Across the street, a frosty black sand beach led
down to the sea, which was as smooth as steel. The ocean
here felt different—still powerful, but freezing, slow, and
primal. No gods controlled that water, at least no gods
Percy knew. Neptune wouldn’t be able to protect him.
Percy wondered if he could even manipulate water here,
or breathe underwater.
A Hyperborean giant lumbered across the street.
Nobody in the café noticed. The giant stepped into the
bay, cracking the ice under his sandals, and thrust his
hands in the water. He brought out a killer whale in one
fist. Apparently that wasn’t what he wanted, because he
threw the whale back and kept wading.
“Good breakfast,” Frank said. “Who’s ready for a
train ride?”
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The station wasn’t far. They were just in time to buy tickets
for the last train south. As his friends climbed on
board, Percy said, “Be with you in a sec,” and ran back into
the station.
He got change from the gift shop and stood in front
of the pay phone.
He’d never used a pay phone before. They were
strange antiques to him, like his mom’s turntable or his
teacher Chiron’s Frank Sinatra cassette tapes. He wasn’t
sure how many coins it would take, or if he could even
make the call go through, assuming he remembered the
number correctly.
Sally Jackson, he thought.
That was his mom’s name. And he had a stepdad…
Paul.
What did they think had happened to Percy?
Maybe they had already held a memorial service. As near
as he could figure, he’d lost seven months of his life. Sure,
most of that had been during the school year, but
still…not cool.
He picked up the receiver and punched in a New
York number—his mom’s apartment. Voice mail. Percy
should have figured. It would be like, midnight in New
York. They wouldn’t recognize this number.
Hearing Paul’s voice on the recording hit Percy in
the gut so hard, he could barely speak at the tone.
“Mom,” he said. “Hey, I’m alive. Her a put me to
sleep for a while, and then she took my memory, and…”
His voice faltered. How he could possibly explain all this?
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“Anyway, I’m okay. I’m sorry. I’m on a quest—” He
winced. He shouldn’t have said that. His mom knew all
about quests, and now she’d be worried. “I’ll make it
home. I promise. Love you.”
He put down the receiver. He stared at the phone,
hoping it would ring back. The train whistle sounded. The
conductor shouted, “All aboard.”
Percy ran. He made it just as they were pulling up
the steps, then climbed to the top of the double-decker
car and slid into his seat.
Hazel frowned. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he croaked. “Just…made a call.”
She and Frank seemed to get that. They didn’t ask
for details.
Soon they were heading south along the coast,
watching the landscape go by. Percy tried to think about
the quest, but for an ADHD kid like him, the train wasn’t
the easiest place to concentrate.
Cool things kept happening outside. Bald eagles
soared overhead. The train raced over bridges and along
cliffs where glacial waterfalls tumbled thousands of feet
down the rocks. They passed forests buried in snowdrifts,
big artillery guns (to set off small avalanches and prevent
uncontrolled ones, Hazel explained), and lakes so clear,
they reflected the mountains like mirrors, so the world
looked upside down.
Brown bears lumbered through the meadows.
Hyperborean giants kept appearing in the strangest
places. One was lounging in a lake like it was a hot tub.
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Another was using a pine tree as a toothpick. A third sat
in a snowdrift, playing with two live moose like they were
action figures. The train was full of tourists ohhing and
ahhing and snapping pictures, but Percy felt sorry they
couldn’t see the Hyperboreans. They were missing the
really good shots.
Meanwhile, Frank studied a map of Alaska that
he’d found in the seat pocket. He located Hubbard Glacier,
which looked discouragingly far away from Seward.
He kept running his finger along the coastline, frowning
with concentration.
“What are you thinking?” Percy asked.
“Just…possibilities,” Frank said.
Percy didn’t know what that meant, but he let it go.
After about an hour, Percy started to relax. They
bought hot chocolate from the dining car. The seats were
warm and comfortable, and he thought about taking a
nap.
Then a shadow passed overhead. Tourists murmured
in excitement and started taking pictures.
“Eagle!” one yelled.
“Eagle?” said another.
“Huge eagle!” said a third.
“That’s no eagle,” Frank said.
Percy looked up just in time to see the creature
make a second pass. It was definitely larger than an eagle,
with a sleek black body the size of a Labrador retriever.
Its wingspan was at least ten feet across.
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“There’s another one!” Frank pointed. “Strike that.
Three, four. Okay, we’re in trouble.”
The creatures circled the train like vultures, delighting
the tourists. Percy wasn’t delighted. The monsters
had glowing red eyes, sharp beaks, and vicious
talons.
Percy felt for his pen in his pocket. “Those things
look familiar....”
“Seattle,” Hazel said. “The Amazons had one in a
cage. They’re—”
Then several things happened at once. The emergency
brake screeched, pitching them forward. Tourists
screamed and tumbled through the aisles. The monsters
swooped down, shattering the glass roof of the car, and
the entire train toppled off the rails.
PERCY WENT WEIGHTLESS.
His vision blurred. Claws grabbed his arms and lifted
him into the air. Below, train wheels squealed and
metal crashed. Glass shattered. Passengers screamed.
When his eyesight cleared, he saw the beast that
was carrying him aloft. It had the body of a pan-
ther—sleek, black, and feline—with the wings and head of
an eagle. Its eyes glowed blood-red.
Percy squirmed. The monster’s front talons were
wrapped around his arms like steel bands. He couldn’t
free himself or reach his sword. He rose higher and higher
in the cold wind. Percy had no idea where the monster
was taking him, but he was pretty sure he wouldn’t like it
when he got there.
He yelled—mostly out of frustration. Then
something whistled by his ear. An arrow sprouted from
the monster’s neck. The creature shrieked and let go.
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Percy fell, crashing through tree branches until he
slammed into a snowbank. He groaned, looking up at a
massive pine tree he’d just shredded.
He managed to stand. Nothing seemed broken.
Frank stood to his left, shooting down the creatures as
fast as he could. Hazel was at his back, swinging her
sword at any monster that came close, but there were too
many swarming around them—at least a dozen.
Percy drew Riptide. He sliced the wing off one
monster and sent it spiraling into a tree, then sliced
through another that burst into dust. But the defeated
ones began to re-form immediately.
“What are these things?” he yelled.
“Gryphons!” Hazel said. “We have to get them away
from the train!”
Percy saw what she meant. The train cars had
fallen over, and their roofs had shattered. Tourists were
stumbling around in shock. Percy didn’t see anybody seriously
injured, but the gryphons were swooping toward
anything that moved. The only thing keeping them away
from the mortals was a glowing gray warrior in camouflage—
Frank’s pet spartus.
Percy glanced over and noticed Frank’s spear was
gone. “Used your last charge?”
“Yeah.” Frank shot another gryphon out of the sky.
“I had to help the mortals. The spear just dissolved.”
Percy nodded. Part of him was relieved. He didn’t
like the skeleton warrior. Part of him was disappointed,
because that was one less weapon they had at their
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disposal. But he didn’t fault Frank. Frank had done the
right thing.
“Let’s move the fight!” Percy said. “Away from the
tracks!” They stumbled through the snow, smacking and
slicing gryphons that re-formed from dust every time they
were killed.
Percy had had no experience with gryphons. He’d
always imagined them as huge noble animals, like lions
with wings, but these things reminded him more of vicious
pack hunters—flying hyenas.
About fifty yards from the tracks, the trees gave
way to an open marsh. The ground was so spongy and icy,
Percy felt like he was racing across Bubble Wrap. Frank
was running out of arrows. Hazel was breathing hard.
Percy’s own sword swings were getting slower. He realized
they were alive only because the gryphons weren’t
trying to kill them. The gryphons wanted to pick them up
and carry them off somewhere.
Maybe to their nests, Percy thought.
Then he tripped over something in the tall grass—a
circle of scrap metal about the size of a tractor tire. It was
a massive bird’s nest—a gryphon’s nest—the bottom
littered with old pieces of jewelry, an Imperial gold dagger,
a dented centurion’s badge, and two pumpkin-sized
eggs that looked like real gold.
Percy jumped into the nest. He pressed his sword
tip against one of the eggs. “Back off, or I break it!”
The gryphons squawked angrily. They buzzed
around the nest and snapped their beaks, but they didn’t
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attack. Hazel and Frank stood back to back with Percy,
their weapons ready.
“Gryphons collect gold,” Hazel said. “They’re crazy
for it. Look—more nests over there.”
Frank nocked his last arrow. “So if these are their
nests, where were they trying to take Percy? That thing
was flying away with him.”
Percy’s arms still throbbed where the gryphon had
grabbed him. “Alcyoneus,” he guessed. “Maybe they’re
working for him. Are these things smart enough to take
orders?”
“I don’t know,” Hazel said. “I never fought them
when I lived here. I just read about them at camp.”
“Weaknesses?” Frank asked. “Please tell me they
have weaknesses.”
Hazel scowled. “Horses. They hate horses—natural
enemies, or something. I wish Arion was here!”
The gryphons shrieked. They swirled around the
nest with their red eyes glowing.
“Guys,” Frank said nervously, “I see legion relics in
this nest.”
“I know,” Percy said.
“That means other demigods died here, or—”
“Frank, it’ll be okay,” Percy promised.
One of the gryphons dived in. Percy raised his
sword, ready to stab the egg. The monster veered off, but
the other gryphons were losing their patience. Percy
couldn’t keep this standoff going much longer.
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He glanced around the fields, desperately trying to
formulate a plan. About a quarter mile away, a Hyperborean
giant was sitting in the bog, peacefully picking
mud from between his toes with a broken tree trunk.
“I’ve got an idea,” Percy said. “Hazel—all the gold
in these nests. Do you think you can use it to cause a
distraction?”
“I—I guess.”
“Just give us enough time for a head start. When I
say go, run for that giant.”
Frank gaped at him. “You want us to run toward a
giant?”
“Trust me,” Percy said. “Ready? Go!”
Hazel thrust her hand upward. From a dozen nests
across the marsh, golden objects shot into the air—jewelry,
weapons, coins, gold nuggets, and most importantly,
gryphon eggs. The monsters shrieked and flew after their
eggs, frantic to save them.
Percy and his friends ran. Their feet splashed and
crunched through the frozen marsh. Percy poured on
speed, but he could hear the gryphons closing behind
them, and now the monsters were really angry.
The giant hadn’t noticed the commotion yet. He
was inspecting his toes for mud, his face sleepy and
peaceful, his white whiskers glistening with ice crystals.
Around his neck was a necklace of found objects—garbage
cans, car doors, moose antlers, camping equipment, even
a toilet. Apparently he’d been cleaning up the wilderness.
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Percy hated to disturb him, especially since it
meant taking shelter under the giant’s thighs, but they
didn’t have much choice.
“Under!” he told his friends. “Crawl under!”
They scrambled between the massive blue legs and
flattened themselves in the mud, crawling as close as they
could to his loincloth. Percy tried to breathe through his
mouth, but it wasn’t the most pleasant hiding spot.
“What’s the plan?” Frank hissed. “Get flattened by
a blue rump?”
“Lay low,” Percy said. “Only move if you have to.”
The gryphons arrived in a wave of angry beaks,
talons, and wings, swarming around the giant, trying to
get under his legs.
The giant rumbled in surprise. He shifted. Percy
had to roll to avoid getting crushed by his large hairy rear.
The Hyperborean grunted, a little more irritated. He
swatted at the gryphons, but they squawked in outrage
and began pecking at his legs and hands.
“Ruh?” the giant bellowed. “Ruh!”
He took a deep breath and blew out a wave of cold
air. Even under the protection of the giant’s legs, Percy
could feel the temperature drop. The gryphons’ shrieking
stopped abruptly, replaced by the thunk, thunk, thunk of
heavy objects hitting the mud.
“Come on,” Percy told his friends. “Carefully.”
They squirmed out from under the giant. All
around the marsh, trees were glazed with frost. A huge
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swath of the bog was covered in fresh snow. Frozen
gryphons stuck out of the ground like feathery Popsicle
sticks, their wings still spread, beaks open, eyes wide with
surprise.
Percy and his friends scrambled away, trying to
keep out of the giant’s vision, but the big guy was too busy
to notice them. He was trying to figure out how to string a
frozen gryphon onto his necklace.
“Percy…” Hazel wiped the ice and mud from her
face. “How did you know the giant could do that?”
“I almost got hit by Hyperborean breath once,” he
said. “We’d better move. The gryphons won’t stay frozen
forever.”
THEY WALKED OVERLAND FOR ABOUT an hour, keeping
the train tracks in sight but staying in the cover of the
trees as much as possible. Once they heard a helicopter
flying in the direction of the train wreck. Twice they heard
the screech of gryphons, but they sounded a long way off.
As near as Percy could figure, it was about midnight
when the sun finally set. It got cold in the woods.
The stars were so thick, Percy was tempted to stop and
gawk at them. Then the northern lights cranked up. They
reminded Percy of his mom’s gas stovetop back home,
when she had the flame on low—waves of ghostly blue
flames rippling back and forth.
“That’s amazing,” Frank said.
“Bears,” Hazel pointed. Sure enough, a couple of
brown bears were lumbering in the meadow a few hundred
feet away, their coats gleaming in the starlight.
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“They won’t bother us,” Hazel promised. “Just give them
a wide berth.”
Percy and Frank didn’t argue.
As they trudged on, Percy thought about all the
crazy places he’d seen. None of them had left him speechless
like Alaska. He could see why it was a land beyond
the gods. Everything here was rough and untamed. There
were no rules, no prophecies, no destinies—just the harsh
wilderness and a bunch of animals and monsters. Mortals
and demigods came here at their own risk.
Percy wondered if this was what Gaea wanted—for
the whole world to be like this. He wondered if that would
be such a bad thing.
Then he put the thought aside. Gaea wasn’t a gentle
goddess. Percy had heard what she planned to do. She
wasn’t like the Mother Earth you might read about in a
children’s fairy tale. She was vengeful and violent. If she
ever woke up fully, she’d destroy human civilization.
After another couple of hours, they stumbled
across a tiny village between the railroad tracks and a
two-lane road. The city limit sign said: MOOSE PASS.
Standing next to the sign was an actual moose. For a
second, Percy thought it might be some sort of statue for
advertising. Then the animal bounded into the woods.
They passed a couple of houses, a post office, and
some trailers. Everything was dark and closed up. On the
other end of town was a store with a picnic table and an
old rusted petrol pump in front.
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The store had a hand-painted sign that read:
MOOSE PASS GAS.
“That’s just wrong,” Frank said.
By silent agreement they collapsed around the picnic
table.
Percy’s feet felt like blocks of ice—very sore blocks
of ice. Hazel put her head in her hands and passed out,
snoring. Frank took out his last sodas and some granola
bars from the train ride and shared them with Percy.
They ate in silence, watching the stars, until Frank
said, “Did you mean what you said earlier?”
Percy looked across the table. “About what?”
In the starlight, Frank’s face might have been alabaster,
like an old Roman statue. “About…being proud
that we’re related.”
Percy tapped his granola bar on the table. “Well,
let’s see. You single-handedly took out three basilisks
while I was sipping green tea and wheat germ. You held
off an army of Laistrygonians so that our plane could take
off in Vancouver. You saved my life by shooting down that
gryphon. And you gave up the last charge on your magic
spear to help some defenseless mortals. You are, hands
down, the nicest child of the war god I’ve ever
met…maybe the only nice one. So what do you think?”
Frank stared up at the northern lights, still cooking
across the stars on low heat. “It’s just…I was supposed to
be in charge of this quest, the centurion, and all. I feel like
you guys have had to carry me.”
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“Not true,” Percy said.
“I’m supposed to have these powers I haven’t
figured out how to use,” Frank said bitterly. “Now I don’t
have a spear, and I’m almost out of arrows. And…I’m
scared.”
“I’d be worried if you weren’t scared,” Percy said.
“We’re all scared.”
“But the Feast of Fortuna is…” Frank thought about
it.
“It’s after midnight, isn’t it? That means it’s June
twenty-fourth now. The feast starts tonight at sundown.
We have to find our way to Hubbard Glacier, defeat a giant
who is undefeatable in his home territory, and get
back to Camp Jupiter before they’re overrun—all in less
than eighteen hours.”
“And when we free Thanatos,” Percy said, “he
might claim your life. And Hazel’s. Believe me, I’ve been
thinking about it.”
Frank gazed at Hazel, still snoring lightly. Her face
was buried under a mass of curly brown hair.
“She’s my best friend,” Frank said. “I lost my mom,
my grandmother…I can’t lose her, too.”
Percy thought about his old life—his mom in New
York, Camp Half-Blood, Annabeth. He’d lost all of that
for eight months. Even now, with the memories coming
back…he’d never been this far away from home before.
He’d been to the Underworld and back. He’d faced death
dozens of times. But sitting at this picnic table, thousands
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of miles away, beyond the power of Olympus, he’d never
been so alone—except for Hazel and Frank.
“I’m not going to lose either of you,” he promised.
“I’m not going to let that happen. And, Frank, you are a
leader. Hazel would say the same thing. We need you.”
Frank lowered his head. He seemed lost in thought.
Finally he leaned forward until his head bumped the picnic
table. He started to snore in harmony with Hazel.
Percy sighed. “Another inspiring speech from Jackson,”
he said to himself. “Rest up, Frank. Big day ahead.”
* * *
At dawn, the store opened up. The owner was a little surprised
to find three teenagers crashed out on his picnic
table, but when Percy explained that they had stumbled
away from last night’s train wreck, the guy felt sorry for
them and treated them to breakfast. He called a friend of
his, an Inuit native who had a cabin close to Seward. Soon
they were rumbling along the road in a beat-up Ford
pickup that had been new about the time Hazel was born.
Hazel and Frank sat in back. Percy rode up front
with the leathery old man, who smelled like smoked salmon.
He told Percy stories about Bear and Raven, the
Inuit gods, and all Percy could think was that he hoped he
didn’t meet them. He had enough enemies already.
The truck broke down a few miles outside Seward.
The driver didn’t seem surprised, as though this
happened to him several times a day. He said they could
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wait for him to fix the engine, but since Seward was only a
few miles away, they decided to walk it.
By midmorning, they climbed over a rise in the
road and saw a small bay ringed with mountains. The
town was a thin crescent on the right-hand shore, with
wharves extending into the water and a cruise ship in the
harbor.
Percy shuddered. He’d had bad experiences with
cruise ships.
“Seward,” Hazel said. She didn’t sound happy to
see her old home.
They’d already lost a lot of time, and Percy didn’t
like how fast the sun was rising. The road curved around
the hillside, but it looked like they could get to town faster
going straight across the meadows.
Percy stepped off the road. “Come on.”
The ground was squishy, but he didn’t think much
about it until Hazel shouted, “Percy, no!”
His next step went straight through the ground. He
sank like a stone until the earth closed over his head—and
the earth swallowed him.
“YOUR BOW!” HAZEL SHOUTED.
Frank didn’t ask questions. He dropped his pack
and slipped the bow off his shoulder.
Hazel’s heart raced. She hadn’t thought about this
boggy soil—muskeg—since before she had died. Now, too
late, she remembered the dire warnings the locals had
given her. Marshy silt and decomposed plants made a
surface that looked completely solid, but it was even
worse than quicksand. It could be twenty feet deep or
more, and impossible to escape.
She tried not to think what would happen if it were
deeper than the length of the bow.
“Hold one end,” she told Frank. “Don’t let go.”
She grabbed the other end, took a deep breath, and
jumped into the bog. The earth closed over her head.
Instantly, she was frozen in a memory.
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Not now! she wanted to scream. Ella said I was
done with blackouts!
Oh, but my dear, said the voice of Gaea, this is not
one of your blackouts. This is a gift from me.
Hazel was back in New Orleans. She and her mother
sat in the park near their apartment, having a picnic
breakfast. She remembered this day. She was seven years
old. Her mother had just sold Hazel’s first precious stone:
a small diamond. Neither of them had yet realized Hazel’s
curse.
Queen Marie was in an excellent mood. She had
bought orange juice for Hazel and champagne for herself,
and beignets sprinkled with chocolate and powdered sugar.
She’d even bought Hazel a new box of crayons and a
pad of paper. They sat together, Queen Marie humming
cheerfully while Hazel drew pictures.
The French Quarter woke up around them, ready
for Mardi Gras. Jazz bands practiced. Floats were being
decorated with fresh-cut flowers. Children laughed and
chased each other, decked in so many colored necklaces
they could barely walk. The sunrise turned the sky to red
gold, and the warm steamy air smelled of magnolias and
roses.
It had been the happiest morning of Hazel’s life.
“You could stay here.” Her mother smiled, but her
eyes were blank white. The voice was Gaea’s.
“This is fake,” Hazel said.
She tried to get up, but the soft bed of grass made
her lazy and sleepy. The smell of baked bread and melting
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chocolate was intoxicating. It was the morning of Mardi
Gras, and the world seemed full of possibilities. Hazel
could almost believe she had a bright future.
“What is real?” asked Gaea, speaking through her
mother’s face. “Is your second life real, Hazel? You’re
supposed to be dead. Is it real that you’re sinking into a
bog, suffocating?”
“Let me help my friend!” Hazel tried to force herself
back to reality. She could imagine her hand clenched
on the end of the bow, but even that was starting to feel
fuzzy. Her grip was loosening. The smell of magnolias and
roses was overpowering.
Her mother offered her a beignet.
No, Hazel thought. This isn’t my mother. This is
Gaea tricking me.
“You want your old life back,” Gaea said. “I can give
you that. This moment can last for years. You can grow up
in New Orleans, and your mother will adore you. You’ll
never have to deal with the burden of your curse. You can
be with Sammy—”
“It’s an illusion!” Hazel said, choking on the sweet
scent of flowers.
“You are an illusion, Hazel Levesque. You were
only brought back to life because the gods have a task for
you. I may have used you, but Nico used you and lied
about it. You should be glad I captured him.”
“Captured?” A feeling of panic rose in Hazel’s
chest. “What do you mean?”
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Gaea smiled, sipping her champagne. “The boy
should have known better than to search for the Doors.
But no matter—it’s not really your concern. Once you release
Thanatos, you’ll be thrown back into the Underworld
to rot forever. Frank and Percy won’t stop that
from happening. Would real friends ask you to give up
your life? Tell me who is lying, and who tells you the
truth.”
Hazel started to cry. Bitterness welled up inside
her. She’d lost her life once. She didn’t want to die again.
“That’s right,” Gaea purred. “You were destined to
marry Sammy. Do you know what happened to him after
you died in Alaska? He grew up and moved to Texas. He
married and had a family. But he never forgot you. He always
wondered why you disappeared. He’s dead now—a
heart attack in the nineteen-sixties. The life you could’ve
had together always haunted him.”
“Stop it!” Hazel screamed. “You took that from
me!”
“And you can have it again,” Gaea said. “I have you
in my embrace, Hazel. You’ll die anyway. If you give up,
at least I can make it pleasant for you. Forget saving Percy
Jackson. He belongs to me. I’ll keep him safe in the earth
until I’m ready to use him. You can have an entire life in
your final moments—you can grow up, marry Sammy. All
you have to do is let go.”
Hazel tightened her grip on the bow. Below her,
something grabbed her ankles, but she didn’t panic. She
knew it was Percy, suffocating, desperately grasping for a
chance at life.
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Hazel glared at the goddess. “I’ll never cooperate
with you! LET—US—GO!”
Her mother’s face dissolved. The New Orleans
morning melted into darkness. Hazel was drowning in
mud, one hand on the bow, Percy’s hands around her
ankles, deep in the darkness. Hazel wiggled the end of the
bow frantically. Frank pulled her up with such force it
nearly popped her arm out of the socket.
When she opened her eyes, she was lying in the
grass, covered in muck. Percy sprawled at her feet, coughing
and spitting mud.
Frank hovered over them, yelling, “Oh, gods! Oh,
gods! Oh, gods!”
He yanked some extra clothes from his bag and
started toweling off Hazel’s face, but it didn’t do much
good. He dragged Percy farther from the muskeg.
“You were down there so long!” Frank cried. “I
didn’t think—oh, gods, don’t ever do something like that
again!”
He wrapped Hazel in a bear hug.
“Can’t—breathe,” she choked out.
“Sorry!” Frank went back to toweling and fussing
over them. Finally he got them to the side of the road,
where they sat and shivered and spit up mud clods.
Hazel couldn’t feel her hands. She wasn’t sure if
she was cold or in shock, but she managed to explain
about the muskeg, and the vision she’d seen while she
was under. Not the part about Sammy—that was still too
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painful to say out loud—but she told them about Gaea’s
offer of a fake life, and the goddess’ claim that she’d captured
her brother Nico. Hazel didn’t want to keep that to
herself. She was afraid the despair would overwhelm her.
Percy rubbed his shoulders. His lips were blue.
“You—you saved me, Hazel. We’ll figure out what
happened to Nico, I promise.”
Hazel squinted at the sun, which was now high in
the sky.
The warmth felt good, but it didn’t stop her trembling.
“Does it seem like Gaea let us go too easily?”
Percy plucked a mud clod from his hair. “Maybe
she still wants us as pawns. Maybe she was just saying
things to mess with your mind.”
“She knew what to say,” Hazel agreed. “She knew
how to get to me.”
Frank put his jacket around her shoulders. “This is
a real life. You know that, right? We’re not going to let
you die again.”
He sounded so determined. Hazel didn’t want to
argue, but she didn’t see how Frank could stop Death. She
pressed her coat pocket, where Frank’s half-burned firewood
was still securely wrapped. She wondered what
would’ve happened to him if she’d sunk in the mud
forever. Maybe that would have saved him. Fire couldn’t
have gotten to the wood down there.
She would have made any sacrifice to keep Frank
safe. Perhaps she hadn’t always felt that strongly, but
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Frank had trusted her with his life. He believed in her.
She couldn’t bear the thought of any harm coming to him.
She glanced at the rising sun.…Time was running
out. She thought about Hylla, the Amazon Queen back in
Seattle. Hylla would have dueled Otrera two nights in a
row by now, assuming she had survived. She was counting
on Hazel to release Death.
She managed to stand. The wind coming off Resurrection
Bay was just as cold as she remembered. “We
should get going. We’re losing time.”
Percy gazed down the road. His lips were returning
to their normal color. “Any hotels or something where we
could clean off? I mean...hotels that accept mud people?”
“I’m not sure,” Hazel admitted.
She looked at the town below and couldn’t believe
how much it had grown since 1942. The main harbor had
moved east as the town had expanded. Most of the buildings
were new to her, but the grid of downtown streets
seemed familiar. She thought she recognized some warehouses
along the shore. “I might know a place we can
freshen up.”
WHEN THEY GOT INTO TOWN, Hazel followed the same
route she’d used seventy years ago—the last night of her
life, when she’d come home from the hills and found her
mother missing.
She led her friends along Third Avenue. The railroad
station was still there. The big white two-story Se-
ward Hotel was still in business, though it had expanded
to twice its old size. They thought about stopping there,
but Hazel didn’t think it would be a good idea to traipse
into the lobby covered in mud, nor was she sure the hotel
would give a room to three minors.
Instead, they turned toward the shoreline. Hazel
couldn’t believe it, but her old home was still there, leaning
over the water on barnacle-encrusted piers. The roof
sagged. The walls were perforated with holes like buckshot.
The door was boarded-up, and a hand-painted sign
read: ROOMS—STORAGE—AVAILABLE.
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“Come on,” she said.
“Uh, you sure it’s safe?” Frank asked.
Hazel found an open window and climbed inside.
Her friends followed. The room hadn’t been used in a
long time. Their feet kicked up dust that swirled in the
buckshot beams of sunlight. Mouldering cardboard boxes
were stacked along the walls. Their faded labels read:
Greeting Cards, Assorted Seasonal. Why several hundred
boxes of season’s greetings hadwound up crumbling to
dust in a warehouse in Alaska, Hazel had no idea, but it
felt like a cruel joke: as if the cards were for all the holidays
she’d never gotten to celebrate—decades of Christmases,
Easters, birthdays, Valentine’s Days.
“It’s warmer in here, at least,” Frank said. “Guess
no running water? Maybe I can go shopping. I’m not as
muddy as you guys. I could find us some clothes.”
Hazel only half heard him.
She climbed over a stack of boxes in the corner that
used to be her sleeping area. An old sign was propped
against the wall: GOLD PROSPECTING SUPPLIES. She
thought she’dfind a bare wall behind it, but when she
moved the sign, most of her photos and drawings were
still pinned there. The sign must have protected them
from sunlight and the elements. They seemed not to have
aged. Her crayon drawings of New Orleans looked so
childish. Had she really made them? Her mother stared
out at her from one photograph, smiling in front of her
business sign: QUEEN MARIE’S GRIS-GRIS—CHARMS SOLD,
FORTUNES TOLD.
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Next to that was a photo of Sammy at the carnival.
He was frozen in time with his crazy grin, his curly black
hair, and those beautiful eyes. If Gaea was telling the
truth, Sammy had been dead for over forty years. Had he
really remembered Hazel all that time? Or had he forgotten
the peculiar girl he used to go riding with—the girl
who shared one kiss and a birthday cupcake with him before
disappearing forever?
Frank’s fingers hovered over the photo. “Who…?”
He saw that she was crying and clamped back his question.
“Sorry, Hazel. This must be really hard. Do you want
some time—”
“No,” she croaked. “No, it’s fine.”
“Is that your mother?” Percy pointed to the photo
of QueenMarie. “She looks like you. She’s beautiful.”
Then Percy studied the picture of Sammy. “Who is
that?”
Hazel didn’t understand why he looked so spooked.
“That’s…that’s Sammy. He was my—uh—friend from New
Orleans.” She forced herself not to look at Frank.
“I’ve seen him before,” Percy said.
“You couldn’t have,” Hazel said. “That was in 1941.
He’s…he’s probably dead now.”
Percy frowned. “I guess. Still…” He shook his head,
like the thought was too uncomfortable.
Frank cleared his throat. “Look, we passed a store
on the last block. We’ve got a little money left. Maybe I
should go get you guys some food and clothes and—I
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don’t know—a hundred boxes of wet wipes or
something?”
Hazel put the gold prospecting sign back over her
mementos. She felt guilty even looking at that old picture
of Sammy, with Frank trying to be so sweet and supportive.
It didn’t do her any good to think about her old life.
“That would be great,” she said. “You’re the best,
Frank.”
The floorboards creaked under his feet. “Well…I’m
the only one not completely covered in mud, anyway. Be
back soon.”
Once he was gone, Percy and Hazel made temporary
camp. They took off their jackets and tried to scrape
off the mud. They found some old blankets in a crate and
used them to clean up. They discovered that boxes of
greeting cards made pretty good places to rest if you arranged
them like mattresses.
Percy set his sword on the floor where it glowed
with a faint bronze light. Then he stretched out on a bed
of Merry Christmas 1982.
“Thank you for saving me,” he said. “I should’ve
told you that earlier.”
Hazel shrugged. “You would have done the same
for me.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “But when I was down in the
mud, I remembered that line from Ella’s prophecy—about
the son of Neptune drowning. I thought. ‘This is what it
means. I’m drowning in the earth.’ I was sure I was dead.”
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His voice quavered like it had his first day at Camp
Jupiter, when Hazel had shown him the shrine of Neptune.
Back then she had wondered if Percy was the answer
to her problems—the descendant of Neptune that
Pluto had promised would take away her curse someday.
Percy had seemed so intimidating and powerful, like a
real hero.
Only now, she knew that Frank was a descendant
of
Neptune, too. Frank wasn’t the most impressive-
looking hero in the world, but he’d trusted her with his
life. He tried so hard to protect her. Even his clumsiness
was endearing.
She’d never felt more confused—and since she had
spent her whole life confused, that was saying a lot.
“Percy,” she said, “that prophecy might not have
been complete. Frank thought Ella was remembering a
burned page. Maybe you’ll drown someone else.”
He looked at her cautiously. “You think so?”
Hazel felt strange reassuring him. He was so much
older, and more in command. But she nodded confidently.
“You’re going to make it back home. You’re going to
see your girlfriend Annabeth.”
“You’ll make it back, too, Hazel,” he insisted.
“We’re not going to let anything happen to you. You’re too
valuable to me, to the camp, and especially to Frank.”
Hazel picked up an old valentine. The lacy white
paper fell apart in her hands. “I don’t belong in this
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century. Nico only brought me back so I could correct my
mistakes, maybe get into Elysium.”
“There’s more to your destiny than that,” he said.
“We’re supposed to fight Gaea together. I’m going to need
you at my side way longer than just today. And
Frank—you can see the guy is crazy about you. This life is
worth fighting for, Hazel.”
She closed her eyes. “Please, don’t get my hopes up.
I can’t—”
The window creaked open. Frank climbed in, triumphantly
holding some shopping bags. “Success!”
He showed off his prizes. From a hunting store,
he’d gotten a new quiver of arrows for himself, some rations,
and a coil of rope.
“For the next time we run across muskeg,” he said.
From a local tourist shop, he had bought three sets
of fresh clothes, some towels, some soap, some bottled
water, and, yes, a huge box of wet wipes. It wasn’t exactly
a hot shower, but Hazel ducked behind a wall of greeting
card boxes to clean up and change. Soon she was feeling
much better.
This is your last day, she reminded herself. Don’t
get too comfortable.
The Feast of Fortuna—all the luck that happened
today, good or bad, was supposed to be an omen of the
entire year to come. One way or another, their quest
would end this evening.
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She slipped the piece of driftwood into her new
coatpocket. Somehow, she’d have to make sure it stayed
safe, no matter what happened to her. She could bear her
own death as long as her friends survived.
“So,” she said. “Now we find a boat to Hubbard
Glacier.”
She tried to sound confident, but it wasn’t easy. She
wished Arion were still with her. She’d much rather ride
into battle on that beautiful horse. Ever since they’d left
Vancouver, she’d been calling to him in her thoughts,
hoping he would hear her and come find her, but that was
just wishful thinking.
Frank patted his stomach. “If we’re going to battle
to the death, I want lunch first. I found the perfect place.”
Frank led them to a shopping plaza near the wharf, where
an old railway car had been converted to a diner. Hazel
had no memory of the place from the 1940s, but the food
smelled amazing. While Frank and Percy ordered, Hazel
wandered down to the docks and asked some questions.
When she came back, she needed cheering up. Even the
cheeseburger and fries didn’t do the trick.
“We’re in trouble,” she said. “I tried to get a boat.
But…I miscalculated.”
“No boats?” Frank asked.
“Oh, I can get a boat,” Hazel said. “But the glacier is
farther than I thought. Even at top speed, we couldn’t get
there until tomorrow morning.”
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Percy turned pale. “Maybe I could make the boat go
faster?”
“Even if you could,” Hazel said, “from what the
captains tell me, it’s treacherous—icebergs, mazes of
channels to navigate. You’d have to know where you were
going.”
“A plane?” Frank asked.
Hazel shook her head. “I asked the boat captains
about that. They said we could try, but it’s a tiny airfield.
You have to charter a plane two, three weeks in advance.”
They ate in silence after that. Hazel’s cheeseburger
was excellent, but she couldn’t concentrate on it. She’d
eaten about three bites when a raven settled on the telephone
pole above and began to croak at them.
Hazel shivered. She was afraid it would speak to
her like the other raven, so many years ago: The last
night. Tonight. She wondered if ravens always appeared
to children of Pluto when they were about to die. She
hoped Nico was still alive, and Gaea had just been lying to
make her unsettled. Hazel had a bad feeling that the goddess
was telling the truth.
Nico had told her that he’d search for the Doors of
Death from the other side. If he’d been captured by
Gaea’s forces,
Hazel might’ve lost the only family she had.
She stared at her cheeseburger.
Suddenly, the raven’s cawing changed to a
strangled yelp.
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Frank got up so fast that he almost toppled the picnic
table. Percy drew his sword.
Hazel followed their eyes. Perched on top of the
pole where the raven had been, a fat ugly gryphon glared
down at them. It burped, and raven feathers fluttered
from its beak.
Hazel stood and unsheathed her spatha.
Frank nocked an arrow. He took aim, but the
gryphon shrieked so loudly the sound echoed off the
mountains. Frank flinched, and his shot went wide.
“I think that’s a call for help,” Percy warned. “We
have to get out of here.”
With no clear plan, they ran for the docks. The
gryphon dove after them. Percy slashed at it with his
sword, but the gryphon veered out of reach.
They took the steps to the nearest pier and raced to
the end. The gryphon swooped after them, its front claws
extended for the kill. Hazel raised her sword, but an icy
wall of water slammed sideways into the gryphon and
washed it into the bay. The gryphon squawked and
flapped its wings. It managed to scramble onto the pier,
where it shook its black fur like a wet dog.
Frank grunted. “Nice one, Percy.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t know if I could still do that
in Alaska. But bad news—look over there.” About a mile
away, over the mountains, a black cloud was swirling—a
whole flock of gryphons, dozens at least. There was no
way they could fight that many, and no boat could take
them away fast enough.
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Frank nocked another arrow. “Not going down
without a fight.”
Percy raised Riptide. “I’m with you.”
Then Hazel heard a sound in the distance—like the
whinnying of a horse. She must’ve been imagining it, but
she cried out desperately, “Arion! Over here!”
A tan blur came ripping down the street and onto
the pier. The stallion materialized right behind the
gryphon, brought down his front hooves, and smashed
the monster to dust.
Hazel had never been so happy in her life. “Good
horse! Really good horse!”
Frank backed up and almost fell off the pier.
“How—?”
“He followed me!” Hazel beamed. “Because he’s the
best—horse—EVER! Now, get on!”
“All three of us?” Percy said. “Can he handle it?”
Arion whinnied indignantly.
“All right, no need to be rude,” Percy said. “Let’s
go.”
They climbed on, Hazel in front, Frank and Percy
balancing precariously behind her. Frank wrapped his
arms around her waist, and Hazel thought that if this was
going to be her last day on earth—it wasn’t a bad way to
go out.
“Run, Arion!” she cried. “To Hubbard Glacier!”
The horse shot across the water, his hooves turning
the top of the sea to steam.
RIDING ARION, HAZEL FELT POWERFUL, unstoppable,
absolutely in control—a perfect combination of horse and
human. She wondered if this was what it was like to be a
centaur.
The boat captains in Seward had warned her it was
three hundred nautical miles to the Hubbard Glacier, a
hard, dangerous journey, but Arion had no trouble. He
raced over the water at the speed of sound, heating the air
around them so that Hazel didn’t even feel the cold. On
foot, she never would have felt so brave. On horseback,
she couldn’t wait to charge into battle.
Frank and Percy didn’t look so happy. When Hazel
glanced back, their teeth were clenched and their eyeballs
were bouncing around in their heads. Frank’s cheeks
jiggled from the g-force. Percy sat in back, hanging on
tight, desperately trying not to slip off the horse’s rear.
Hazel hoped that didn’t happen. The way Arion was
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moving, she might not notice he was gone for fifty or sixty
miles.
They raced through icy straits, past blue fjords and
cliffs with waterfalls spilling into the sea. Arion jumped
over a breaching humpback whale and kept galloping,
startling a pack of seals off an iceberg.
It seemed like only minutes before they zipped into
a narrow bay. The water turned the consistency of shaved
ice in blue sticky syrup. Arion came to a halt on a frozen
turquoise slab.
A half a mile away stood Hubbard Glacier. Even
Hazel, who’d seen glaciers before, couldn’t quite process
what she was looking at. Purple snowcapped mountains
marched off in either direction, with clouds floating
around their middles like fluffy belts. In a massive valley
between two of the largest peaks, a ragged wall of ice rose
out of the sea, filling the entire gorge. The glacier was
blue and white with streaks of black, so that it looked like
a hedge of dirty snow left behind on a sidewalk after a
snowplow had gone by, only four million times as large.
As soon as Arion stopped, Hazel felt the temperature
drop. All that ice was sending off waves of cold, turning
the bay into the world’s largest refrigerator. The eeriest
thing was a sound like thunder that rolled across the
water.
“What is that?” Frank gazed at the clouds above the
glacier. “A storm?”
“No,” Hazel said. “Ice cracking and shifting. Millions
of tons of ice.”
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“You mean that thing is breaking up?” Frank asked.
As if on cue, a sheet of ice silently calved off the
side of the glacier and crashed into the sea, spraying water
and frozen shrapnel several stories high. A millisecond
later the sound hit them—a BOOM almost as jarring as
Arion hitting the sound barrier.
“We can’t get close to that thing!” Frank said.
“We have to,” Percy said. “The giant is at the top.”
Arion nickered.
“Jeez, Hazel,” Percy said, “tell your horse to watch
his language.”
Hazel tried not to laugh. “What did he say?”
“With the cussing removed? He said he can get us
to the top.”
Frank looked incredulous. “I thought the horse
couldn’t fly!”
This time Arion whinnied so angrily, even Hazel
could guess he was cursing.
“Dude,” Percy told the horse, “I’ve gotten suspended
for saying less than that. Hazel, he promises you’ll see
what he can do as soon as you give the word.”
“Um, hold on, then, you guys,” Hazel said
nervously. “Arion, giddyup!”
Arion shot toward the glacier like a runaway rocket,
barreling straight across the slush like he wanted to play
chicken with the mountain of ice.
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The air grew colder. The crackling of the ice grew
louder. As Arion closed the distance, the glacier loomed
so large, Hazel got vertigo just trying to take it all in. The
side was riddled with crevices and caves, spiked with
jagged ridges like ax blades. Pieces were constantly crumbling
off—some no larger than snowballs, some the size of
houses.
When they were about fifty yards from the base, a
thunderclap rattled Hazel’s bones, and a curtain of ice
that would have covered Camp Jupiter calved away and
fell toward them.
“Look out!” Frank shouted, which seemed a little
unnecessary to Hazel.
Arion was way ahead of him. In a burst of speed, he
zigzagged through the debris, leaping over chunks of ice
and clambering up the face of the glacier.
Percy and Frank both cussed like horses and held
on desperately while Hazel wrapped her arms around Arion’s
neck. Somehow, they managed not to fall off as Arion
scaled the cliffs, jumping from foothold to foothold with
impossible speed and agility. It was like falling down a
mountain in reverse.
Then it was over. Arion stood proudly at the top of
a ridge of ice that loomed over the void. The sea was now
three hundred feet below them.
Arion whinnied a challenge that echoed off the
mountains. Percy didn’t translate, but Hazel was pretty
sure Arion was calling out to any other horses that might
be in the bay: Beat that, ya punks!
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Then he turned and ran inland across the top of the
glacier, leaping a chasm fifty feet across.
“There!” Percy pointed.
The horse stopped. Ahead of them stood a frozen
Roman camp like a giant-sized ghastly replica of Camp
Jupiter. The trenches bristled with ice spikes. The snow-
brick ramparts glared blinding white. Hanging from the
guard towers, banners of frozen blue cloth shimmered in
the arctic sun.
There was no sign of life. The gates stood wide
open. No sentries walked the walls. Still, Hazel had an uneasy
feeling in her gut. She remembered the cave in Resurrection
Bay where she’d worked to raise Alcyoneus—
the oppressive sense of malice and the constant
boom, boom, boom, like Gaea’s heartbeat. This place felt
similar, as if the earth were trying to wake up and consume
everything—as if the mountains on either side
wanted to crush them and the entire glacier to pieces.
Arion trotted skittishly.
“Frank,” Percy said, “how about we go on foot from
here?”
Frank sighed with relief. “Thought you’d never
ask.”
They dismounted and took some tentative steps.
The ice seemed stable, covered with a fine carpet of snow
so that it wasn’t too slippery.
Hazel urged Arion forward. Percy and Frank
walked on either side, sword and bow ready. They approached
the gates without being challenged. Hazel was
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trained to spot pits, snares, trip lines, and all sorts of other
traps Roman legions had faced for eons in enemy territory,
but she saw nothing—just the yawning icy gates
and the frozen banners crackling in the wind.
She could see straight down the Via Praetoria. At
the crossroads, in front of the snow-brick principia, a tall,
dark- robed figure stood, bound in icy chains.
“Thanatos,” Hazel murmured.
She felt as if her soul were being pulled forward,
drawn toward Death like dust toward a vacuum. Her vision
went dark. She almost fell off Arion, but Frank caught
her and propped her up.
“We’ve got you,” he promised. “Nobody’s taking
you away.”
Hazel gripped his hand. She didn’t want to let go.
He was so solid, so reassuring, but Frank couldn’t protect
her from Death. His own life was as fragile as a half-
burned piece of wood.
“I’m all right,” she lied.
Percy looked around uneasily. “No defenders? No
giant? This has to be a trap.”
“Obviously,” Frank said. “But I don’t think we have
a choice.”
Before Hazel could change her mind, she urged
Arion through the gates. The layout was so familiar—cohort
barracks, baths, armory. It was an exact replica of
Camp Jupiter, except three times as big. Even on
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horseback, Hazel felt tiny and insignificant, as if they
were moving through a model city constructed by the
gods.
They stopped ten feet from the robed figure.
Now that she was here, Hazel felt a reckless urge to
finish the quest. She knew she was in more danger than
when she’d been fighting the Amazons, or fending off the
gryphons, or climbing the glacier on Arion’s back. Instinctively
she knew that Thanatos could simply touch
her, and she would die.
But she also had a feeling that if she didn’t see the
quest through, if she didn’t face her fate bravely, she
would still die—in cowardice and failure. The judges of
the dead wouldn’t be lenient to her a second time.
Arion cantered back and forth, sensing her
disquiet.
“Hello?” Hazel forced out the word. “Mr. Death?”
The hooded figure raised his head.
Instantly, the whole camp stirred to life. Figures in
Roman armor emerged from the barracks, the principia,
the armory, and the canteen, but they weren’t human.
They were shades—the chattering ghosts Hazel had lived
with for decades in the Fields of Asphodel. Their bodies
weren’t much more than wisps of black vapor, but they
managed to hold together sets of scale armor, greaves,
and helmets. Frost-covered swords were strapped to their
waists. Pila and dented shields floated in their smoky
hands. The plumes on the centurions’ helmets were
frozen and ragged. Most of the shades were on foot, but
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two soldiers burst out of the stables in a golden chariot
pulled by ghostly black steeds.
When Arion saw the horses, he stamped the
ground in outrage.
Frank gripped his bow. “Yep, here’s the trap.”
THE GHOSTS FORMED RANKS AND ENCIRCLED the
crossroads. There were about a hundred in all—not an entire
legion, but more than a cohort. Some carried the
tattered lightning bolt banners of the Twelfth Legion,
Fifth Cohort—Michael
Varus’s doomed expedition from the 1980s. Others
carried standards and insignia Hazel didn’t recognize, as
if they’d died at different times, on different
quests—maybe not even from Camp Jupiter.
Most were armed with Imperial gold
weapons—more Imperial gold than the entire Twelfth Legion
possessed. Hazel could feel the combined power of
all that gold humming around her, even scarier than the
crackling of the glacier. She wondered if she could use her
power to control the weapons, maybe disarm the ghosts,
but she was afraid to try. Imperial gold wasn’t just a precious
metal. It was deadly to demigods and monsters.
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Trying to control that much at once would be like trying
to control plutonium in a reactor. If she failed, she might
wipe Hubbard Glacier off the map and kill her friends.
“Thanatos!” Hazel turned to the robed figure.
“We’re here to rescue you. If you control these shades, tell
them—”
Her voice faltered. The god’s hood fell away and his
robes dropped off as he spread his wings, leaving him in
only a sleeveless black tunic belted at the waist. He was
the most beautiful man Hazel had ever seen.
His skin was the color of teakwood, dark and
glistening like Queen Marie’s old séance table. His eyes
were as honey gold as Hazel’s. He was lean and muscular,
with a regal face and black hair flowing down his
shoulders. His wings glimmered in shades of blue, black,
and purple.
Hazel reminded herself to breathe.
Beautiful was the right word for Thanatos—not
handsome, or hot, or anything like that. He was beautiful
the way an angel is beautiful—timeless, perfect, remote.
“Oh,” she said in a small voice.
The god’s wrists were shackled in icy manacles,
with chains that ran straight into the glacier floor. His
feet were bare, shackled around the ankles and also
chained.
“It’s Cupid,” Frank said.
“A really buff Cupid,” Percy agreed.
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“You compliment me,” Thanatos said. His voice
was as gorgeous as he was—deep and melodious. “I am
frequently mistaken for the god of love. Death has more
in common with Love than you might imagine. But I am
Death. I assure you.”
Hazel didn’t doubt it. She felt as if she were made
of ashes. Any second, she might crumble and be sucked
into the vacuum. She doubted Thanatos even needed to
touch her to kill her. He could simply tell her to die. She
would keel over on the spot, her soul obeying that beautiful
voice and those kind eyes.
“We’re—we’re here to save you,” she managed.
“Where’s Alcyoneus?”
“Save me…?” Thanatos narrowed his eyes. “Do you
understand what you are saying, Hazel Levesque? Do you
understand what that will mean?”
Percy stepped forward. “We’re wasting time.”
He swung his sword at the god’s chains. Celestial
bronze rang against the ice, but Riptide stuck to the chain
like glue. Frost began creeping up the blade. Percy pulled
frantically. Frank ran to help. Together, they just managed
to yank Riptide free before the frost reached their
hands.
“That won’t work,” Thanatos said simply. “As for
the giant, he is close. These shades are not mine. They are
his.”
Thanatos’s eyes scanned the ghost soldiers. They
shifted uncomfortably, as if an arctic wind were rattling
through their ranks.
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“So how do we get you out?” Hazel demanded.
Thanatos turned his attention back to her.
“Daughter of Pluto, child of my master, you of all people
should not wish me released.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Hazel’s eyes stung,
but she was done being afraid. She’d been a scared little
girl seventy years ago. She’d lost her mother because she
acted too late. Now she was a soldier of Rome. She wasn’t
going to fail again. She wasn’t going to let down her
friends.
“Listen, Death.” She drew her cavalry sword, and
Arion reared in defiance. “I didn’t come back from the
Underworld and travel thousands of miles to be told that
I’m stupid for setting you free. If I die, I die. I’ll fight this
whole army if I have to. Just tell us how to break your
chains.”
Thanatos studied her for a heartbeat. “Interesting.
You do understand that these shades were once demigods
like you. They fought for Rome. They died without completing
their heroic quests. Like you, they were sent to Asphodel.
Now Gaea has promised them a second life if they
fight for her today. Of course, if you release me and defeat
them, they will have to return to the Underworld where
they belong. For treason against the gods, they will face
eternal punishment. They are not so different from you,
Hazel Levesque. Are you sure you want to release me and
damn these souls forever?”
Frank clenched his fists. “That’s not fair! Do you
want to be freed or not?”
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“Fair…” Death mused. “You’d be amazed how often
I hear that word, Frank Zhang, and how meaningless it is.
Is it fair that your life will burn so short and bright? Was
it fair when I guided your mother to the Underworld?”
Frank staggered like he’d been punched.
“No,” Death said sadly. “Not fair. And yet it was her
time. There is no fairness in Death. If you free me, I will
do my duty. But of course these shades will try to stop
you.”
“So if we let you go,” Percy summed up, “we get
mobbed by a bunch of black vapor dudes with gold
swords. Fine. How do we break those chains?”
Thanatos smiled. “Only the fire of life can melt the
chains of death.”
“Without the riddles, please?” Percy asked.
Frank drew a shaky breath. “It isn’t a riddle.”
“Frank, no,” Hazel said weakly. “There’s got to be
another way.”
Laughter boomed across the glacier. A rumbling
voice said: “My friends. I’ve waited so long!”
Standing at the gates of the camp was Alcyoneus.
He was even larger than the giant Polybotes they’d seen
in California. He had metallic golden skin, armor made
from platinum links, and an iron staff the size of a totem
pole. His rust-red dragon legs pounded against the ice as
he entered the camp. Precious stones glinted in his red
braided hair.
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Hazel had never seen him fully formed, but she
knew him better than she knew her own parents. She had
made him. For months, she had raised gold and gems
from the earth to create this monster. She knew the diamonds
he used for a heart. She knew the oil that ran in
his veins instead of blood. More than anything, she
wanted to destroy him.
The giant approached, grinning at her with his solid
silver teeth.
“Ah, Hazel Levesque,” he said, “you cost me dearly!
If not for you, I would have risen decades ago, and this
world would already be Gaea’s. But no matter!”
He spread his hands, showing off the ranks of
ghostly soldiers. “Welcome, Percy Jackson! Welcome,
Frank Zhang! I am Alcyoneus, the bane of Pluto, the new
master of Death. And this is your new legion.”
NO FAIRNESS IN DEATH. Those words kept ringing in
Frank’s head.
The golden giant didn’t scare him. The army of
shades didn’t scare him. But the thought of freeing
Thanatos made Frank want to curl into the fetal position.
This god had taken his mother.
Frank understood what he had to do to break those
chains. Mars had warned him. He’d explained why he
loved Emily Zhang so much: She always put her duty
first, ahead of everything. Even her life.
Now it was Frank’s turn.
His mother’s sacrifice medal felt warm in his pocket.
He finally understood his mother’s choice, saving her
comrades at the cost of her own life. He got what Mars
had been trying to tell him—Duty. Sacrifice. They mean
something.
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In Frank’s chest, a hard knot of anger and resentment—
a lump of grief he’d been carrying since the funeral—
finally began to dissolve. He understood why his
mother never came home. Some things were worth dying
for.
“Hazel.” He tried to keep his voice steady. “That
package you’re keeping for me? I need it.”
Hazel glanced at him in dismay. Sitting on Arion,
she looked like a queen, powerful and beautiful, her
brown hair swept over her shoulders and a wreath of icy
mist around her head. “Frank, no. There has to be another
way.”
“Please. I—I know what I’m doing.”
Thanatos smiled and lifted his manacled wrists.
“You’re right, Frank Zhang. Sacrifices must be made.”
Great. If Death approved of his plan, Frank was
pretty sure he wasn’t going to like the results.
The giant Alcyoneus stepped forward, his reptilian
feet shaking the ground. “What package do you speak of,
Frank Zhang? Have you brought me a present?”
“Nothing for you, Golden Boy,” Frank said. “Except
a whole lot of pain.”
The giant roared with laughter. “Spoken like a child
of Mars! Too bad I have to kill you. And this one...my, my,
I’ve been waiting to meet the famous Percy Jackson.”
The giant grinned. His silver teeth made his mouth
look like a car grille.
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“I’ve followed your progress, son of Neptune,” said
Alcyoneus. “Your fight with Kronos? Well done. Gaea
hates you above all others…except perhaps for that upstart
Jason Grace. I’m sorry I can’t kill you right away, but
my brother Polybotes wishes to keep you as a pet. He
thinks it will be amusing when he destroys Neptune to
have the god’s favorite son on a leash. After that, of
course, Gaea has plans for you.”
“Yeah, flattering.” Percy raised Riptide. “But actually
I’m the son of Poseidon. I’m from Camp Half-Blood.”
The ghosts stirred. Some drew swords and lifted
shields. Alcyoneus raised his hand, gesturing for them to
wait.
“Greek, Roman, it doesn’t matter,” the giant said
easily. “We will crush both camps underfoot. You see, the
Titans didn’t think big enough. They planned to destroy
the godsin their new home of America. We giants know
better! To kill a weed, you must pull up its roots. Even
now, while my forces destroy your little Roman camp, my
brother Porphyrionis preparing for the real battle in the
ancient lands! We will destroy the gods at their source.”
The ghosts pounded their swords against their
shields. The sound echoed across the mountains.
“The source?” Frank asked. “You mean Greece?”
Alcyoneus chuckled. “No need to worry about that,
son of Mars. You won’t live long enough to see our ultimate
victory.
I will replace Pluto as lord of the Underworld. I
already have Death in my custody. With Hazel Levesque
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in my service, I will have all the riches under the earth as
well!”
Hazel gripped her spatha. “I don’t do service.”
“Oh, but you gave me life!” Alcyoneus said. “True,
we hoped to awaken Gaea during World War II. That
would’ve been glorious. But really, the world is in almost
as bad a shape now. Soon, your civilization will be wiped
out. The Doors of Death will stand open. Those who serve
us will never perish. Alive or dead, you three will join my
army.”
Percy shook his head. “Fat chance, Golden Boy.
You’re going down.”
“Wait.” Hazel spurred her horse toward the giant.
“I raised this monster from the earth. I’m the daughter of
Pluto. It’s my place to kill him.”
“Ah, little Hazel.” Alcyoneus planted his staff on
the ice. His hair glittered with millions of dollars’ worth of
gems. “Are you sure you will not join us of your own free
will? You could be quite ... precious to us. Why die
again?” Hazel’s eyes flashed with anger. She looked down
at Frank and pulled the wrapped-up piece of firewood
from her coat.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” he said.
She pursed her lips. “You’re my best friend, too,
Frank. I should have told you that.” She tossed him the
stick. “Do what you have to. And Percy…can you protect
him?”
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Percy gazed at the ranks of ghostly Romans.
“Against a small army? Sure, no problem.”
“Then I’ve got Golden Boy,” Hazel said.
She charged the giant.
FRANK UNWRAPPED THE FIREWOOD and knelt at the
feet of Th anatos.
He was aware of Percy standing over him, swinging
his sword and yelling in defiance as the ghosts closed in.
He heard the giant bellow and Arion whinny angrily, but
he didn’t dare look.
His hands trembling, he held his piece of tinder
next to the chains on Death’s right leg. He thought about
flames, and instantly the wood blazed.
Horrible warmth spread through Frank’s body. The
icy metal began to melt, the flame so bright it was more
blinding than the ice.
“Good,” Thanatos said. “Very good, Frank Zhang.”
Frank had heard about people’s lives flashing before
their eyes, but now he experienced it literally. He saw
his mother the day she left for Afghanistan. She smiled
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and hugged him. He tried to breath in her jasmine scent
so he’d never forget it.
I will always be proud of you, Frank, she said.
Someday, you’ll travel even farther than I. You’ll bring
our family full circle. Years from now, our descendants
will be telling stories about the hero Frank Zhang, their
great-, great-, great-—She poked him in the belly for old
times’ sake. It would be the last time Frank smiled for
months.
He saw himself at the picnic bench in Moose Pass,
watching the stars and the northern lights as Hazel
snored softly beside him, Percy saying, Frank, you are a
leader. We need you.
He saw Percy disappearing into the muskeg, then
Hazel diving after him. Frank remembered how alone he
had felt holding on to the bow, how utterly powerless. He
had pleaded with the Olympian gods—even Mars—to help
his friends, but he knew they were beyond the gods’
reach.
With a clank, the first chain broke. Quickly, Frank
stabbed the firewood at the chain on Death’s other leg.
He risked a glance over his shoulder.
Percy was fighting like a whirlwind. In fact…he was
a whirlwind. A miniature hurricane of water and ice vapor
churned around him as he waded through the enemy,
knocking Roman ghosts away, deflecting arrows and
spears. Since when did he have that power?
He moved through the enemy lines, and even
though he seemed to be leaving Frank undefended, the
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enemy was completely focused on Percy. Frank wasn’t
sure why—then he saw Percy’s goal. One of the black vapory
ghosts was wearing the lion’s-skin cape of a standard
bearer and holding a pole with a golden eagle, icicles
frozen to its wings. The legion’s standard.
Frank watched as Percy plowed through a line of
legionnaires, scattering their shields with his personal
cyclone. He knocked down the standard bearer and
grabbed the eagle.
“You want it back?” he shouted at the ghosts.
“Come and get it!”
He drew them away, and Frank couldn’t help being
awed by his bold strategy. As much as those shades
wanted to keep Thanatos chained, they were Roman spirits.
Their minds were fuzzy at best, like the ghosts Frank
had seen in Asphodel, but they remembered one thing
clearly: they were supposed to protect their eagle.
Still, Percy couldn’t fight off that many enemies
forever. Maintaining a storm like that had to be difficult.
Despite the cold, his face was already beaded with sweat.
Frank looked for Hazel. He couldn’t see her or the
giant.
“Watch your fire, boy,” Death warned. “You don’t
have any to waste.”
Frank cursed. He’d gotten so distracted, he hadn’t
noticed the second chain had melted.
He moved his fire to the shackles on the god’s right
hand. The piece of tinder was almost half gone now.
Frank started to shiver. More images flashed through his
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mind. He saw Mars sitting at his grandmother’s bedside,
looking at Frank with those nuclear explosion eyes:
You’re Juno’s secret weapon. Have you figured out your
gift yet?
He heard his mother say: You can be anything.
Then he saw Grandmother’s stern face, her skin as
thin as rice paper, her white hair spread across her pillow.
Yes, Fai Zhang. Your mother was not simply boosting
your self-esteem. She was telling you the literal truth.
He thought of the grizzly bear his mother had intercepted
at the edge of the woods. He thought of the
large black bird circling over the flames of their family
mansion.
The third chain snapped. Frank thrust the tinder at
the last shackle. His body was racked with pain. Yellow
splotches danced in his eyes.
He saw Percy at the end of the Via Principalis,
holding off the army of ghosts. He’d overturned the chariot
and destroyed several buildings, but every time he
threw off a wave of attackers in his hurricane, the ghosts
simply got up and charged again. Every time Percy
slashed one of them down with his sword, the ghost reformed
immediately. Percy had backed up almost as far
as he could go. Behind him was the side gate of the camp,
and about twenty feet beyond that, the edge of the glacier.
As for Hazel, she and Alcyoneus had managed to
destroy most of the barracks in their battle. Now they
were fighting in the wreckage at the main gate. Arion was
playing a dangerous game of tag, charging around the
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giant while Alyconeus swiped at them with his staff,
knocking over walls and cleaving massive chasms in the
ice. Only Arion’s speed kept them alive.
Finally, Death’s last chain snapped. With a desperate
yelp, Frank jabbed his firewood into a pile of snow
and extinguished the flame. His pain faded. He was still
alive. But when he took out the piece of tinder, it was no
more than a stub, smaller than a candy bar.
Thanatos raised his arms.
“Free,” he said with satisfaction.
“Great.” Frank blinked the spots from his eyes.
“Then do something!”
Thanatos gave him a calm smile. “Do something?
Of course. I will watch. Those who die in this battle will
stay dead.”
“Thanks,” Frank muttered, slipping his firewood
into his coat. “Very helpful.”
“You’re most welcome,” Thanatos said agreeably.
“Percy!” Frank yelled. “They can die now!”
Percy nodded understanding, but he looked worn
out. His hurricane was slowing down. His strikes were
getting slower. The entire ghostly army had him surrounded,
gradually forcing him toward the edge of the glacier.
Frank drew his bow to help. Then he dropped it.
Normal arrows from a hunting store in Seward wouldn’t
do any good. Frank would have to use his gift.
He thought he understood his powers at last. Something
about watching the firewood burn, smelling the
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acrid smoke of his own life, had made him feel strangely
confident.
Is it fair your life burns so short and bright? Death
had asked.
“No such thing as fair,” Frank told himself. “If I’m
going to burn, it might as well be bright.”
He took one step toward Percy. Then, from across
the camp, Hazel yelled in pain. Arion screamed as the giant
got a lucky shot. His staff sent horse and rider tumbling
over the ice, crashing into the ramparts.
“Hazel!” Frank glanced back at Percy, wishing he
had his spear. If he could just summon Gray…but he
couldn’t be in two places at once.
“Go help her!” Percy yelled, holding the golden
eagle aloft. “I’ve got these guys!”
Percy didn’t have them. Frank knew that. The son
of Poseidon was about to be overwhelmed, but Frank ran
to Hazel’s aid.
She was half-buried in a collapsed pile of snow-
bricks. Arion stood over her, trying to protect her, rearing
and swatting at the giant with his front hooves.
The giant laughed. “Hello, little pony. You want to
play?”
Alcyoneus raised his icy staff.
Frank was too far away to help…but he imagined
himself rushing forward, his feet leaving the ground.
Be anything.
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He remembered the bald eagles they’d seen on the
train ride. His body became smaller and lighter. His arms
stretched into wings, and his sight became a thousand
times sharper. He soared upward, then dove at the giant
with his talons extended, his razor-sharp claws raking
across the giant’s eyes.
Alcyoneus bellowed in pain. He staggered backward
as Frank landed in front of Hazel and returned to
his normal form.
“Frank…” She stared at him in amazement, a cap of
snow dripping off her head. “What just…how did—?”
“Fool!” Alcyoneus shouted. His face was slashed,
black oil dripping into his eyes instead of blood, but the
wounds were already closing. “I am immortal in my
homeland, Frank Zhang! And thanks to your friend
Hazel, my new homeland is Alaska. You cannot kill me
here!”
“We’ll see,” Frank said. Power coursed through his
arms and legs. “Hazel, get back on your horse.”
The giant charged, and Frank charged to meet him.
He remembered the bear he’d met face to face when he
was a child. As he ran, his body became heavier, thicker,
rippling with muscles. He crashed into the giant as a full-
grown grizzly, a thousand pounds of pure force. He was
still small compared to Alcyoneus, but he slammed into
the giant with such momentum, Alcyoneus toppled into
an icy watchtower that collapsed on top of him.
Frank sprang at the giant’s head. A swipe of his
claw was like a heavyweight fighter swinging a chain saw.
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Frank bashed the giant’s face back and forth until his
metallic features began to dent.
“Urgg,” the giant mumbled in a stupor.
Frank changed to his regular form. His backpack
was still with him. He grabbed the rope he’d bought in Se-
ward, quickly made a noose, and fastened it around the
giant’s scaly dragon foot.
“Hazel, here!” He tossed her the other end of the
rope. “I’ve got an idea, but we’ll have to—”
“Kill—uh—you—uh…” Alcyoneus muttered.
Frank ran to the giant’s head, picked up the nearest
heavy object he could find—a legion shield—and slammed
it into the giant’s nose.
The giant said, “Urgg.”
Frank looked back at Hazel. “How far can Arion
pull this guy?”
Hazel just stared at him. “You—you were a bird.
Then a bear. And—”
“I’ll explain later,” Frank said. “We need to drag
this guy inland, as fast and far as we can.”
“But Percy!” Hazel said.
Frank cursed. How could he have forgotten?
Through the ruins of the camp, he saw Percy with
his back to the edge of the cliff. His hurricane was gone.
He held Riptide in one hand and the legion’s golden eagle
in the other. The entire army of shades edged forward,
their weapons bristling.
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“Percy!” Frank yelled.
Percy glanced over. He saw the fallen giant and
seemed to understand what was happening. He yelled
something that was lost in the wind, probably: Go!
Then he slammed Riptide into the ice at his feet.
The entire glacier shuddered. Ghosts fell to their knees.
Behind Percy, a wave surged up from the bay—a wall of
gray water even taller than the glacier. Water shot from
the chasms and crevices in the ice. As the wave hit, the
back half of the camp crumbled. The entire edge of the
glacier peeled away, cascading into the void—carrying
buildings, ghosts, and Percy Jackson over the edge.
FRANK WAS SO STUNNED THAT Hazel had to yell his
name a dozen times before he realized Alcyoneus was getting
up again.
He slammed his shield into the giant’s nose until
Alcyoneus began to snore. Meanwhile the glacier kept
crumbling, the edge getting closer and closer.
Thanatos glided toward them on his black wings,
his expression serene.
“Ah, yes,” he said with satisfaction. “There go some
souls. Drowning, drowning. You’d best hurry, my friends,
or you’ll drown, too.”
“But Percy…” Frank could barely speak his friend’s
name. “Is he—?”
“Too soon to tell. As for this one…” Thanatos
looked down at Alcyoneus with distaste. “You’ll never kill
him here. You know what to do?”
517/589
Frank nodded numbly. “I think so.”
“Then our business is complete.”
Frank and Hazel exchanged nervous looks.
“Um…” Hazel faltered. “You mean you
won’t…you’re not going to—”“Claim your life?” Thanatos
asked. “Well, let’s see…”
He pulled a pure-black iPad from thin air. Death
tapped the screen a few times, and all Frank could think
was: Please don’t let there be an app for reaping souls.
“I don’t see you on the list,” Thanatos said. “Pluto
gives me specific orders for escaped souls, you see. For
some reason, he has not issued a warrant for yours. Perhaps
he feels your life is not finished, or it could be an
oversight. If you’d like me to call and ask—”
“No!” Hazel yelped. “That’s okay.”
“Are you sure?” Death asked helpfully. “I have
video conferencing enabled. I have his Skype address
here somewhere...”
“Really, no.” Hazel looked as if several thousand
pounds of worry had just been lifted from her shoulders.
“Thank you.”
“Urgg,” Alcyoneus mumbled.
Frank hit him over the head again.
Death looked up from his iPad. “As for you, Frank
Zhang, it isn’t your time, either. You’ve got a little fuel left
to burn. But don’t think I’m doing either of you a favor.
We will meet again under less pleasant circumstances.”
518/589
The cliff was still crumbling, the edge only twenty
feet away now. Arion whinnied impatiently. Frank knew
they had to leave, but there was one more question he had
to ask.
“What about the Doors of Death?” he said. “Where
are they? How do we close them?”
“Ah, yes.” A look of irritation flickered across
Thanatos’s face. “The Doors of Me. Closing them would
be good, but I fear it is beyond my power. How you would
do it, I haven’t the faintest idea. I can’t tell you exactly
where they are. The location isn’t…well, it’s not entirely a
physical place. They must be located through questing. I
can tell you to start your search in Rome. The original
Rome. You will need a special guide. Only one sort of
demigod can read the signs that will ultimately lead you
to the Doors of Me.”
Cracks appeared in the ice under their feet. Hazel
patted Arion’s neck to keep him from bolting.
“What about my brother?” she asked. “Is Nico
alive?”
Thanatos gave her a strange look—possibly pity,
though that didn’t seem like an emotion Death would understand.
“You will find the answer in Rome. And now I
must fly south to your Camp Jupiter. I have a feeling
there will be many souls to reap, very soon. Farewell,
demigods, until we meet again.”
Thanatos dissipated into black smoke.
The cracks widened in the ice under Frank’s feet.
519/589
“Hurry!” he told Hazel. “We’ve got to take Alcyoneus
about ten miles due north!”
He climbed onto the giant’s chest and Arion took
off, racing across the ice, dragging Alcyoneus like the
world’s ugliest sled.
It was a short trip.
Arion rode the glacier like a highway, zipping
across the ice, leaping crevices, and skidding down slopes
that would’ve made a snowboarder’s eyes light up.
Frank didn’t have to knock out Alcyoneus too many
times, because the giant’s head kept bouncing and hitting
the ice. As they raced along, the half-conscious Golden
Boy mumbled a tune that sounded like “Jingle Bells.”
Frank felt pretty stunned himself. He’d just turned
into an eagle and a bear. He could still feel fluid energy
rippling through his body, like he was halfway between a
solid and liquid state.
Not only that: Hazel and he had released Death,
and both of them had survived. And Percy…Frank swallowed
down his fear. Percy had gone over the side of the
glacier to save them.
The son of Neptune shall drown.
No. Frank refused to believe Percy was dead. They
hadn’t come all this way just to lose their friend. Frank
would find him—but first they had to deal with
Alcyoneus.
520/589
He visualized the map he had been studying on the
train from Anchorage. He knew roughly where they were
going, but there were no signs or markers on top of the
glacier. He’d just have to take his best guess.
Finally Arion zoomed between two mountains into
a valley of ice and rocks, like a massive bowl of frozen
milk with bits of Cocoa Puffs. The giant’s golden skin
paled as if it were turning to brass. Frank felt a subtle vibration
in his own body, like a tuning fork pressed against
his sternum. He knew he’d crossed into friendly territory—
home territory.
“Here!” Frank shouted.
Arion veered to one side. Hazel cut the rope, and
Alcyoneus went skidding past. Frank leaped off just before
the giant slammed into a boulder.
Immediately Alcyoneus jumped to his feet. “What?
Where? Who?”
His nose was bent in an odd direction. His wounds
had healed, though his golden skin had lost some of its
luster. He looked around for his iron staff, which was still
back at Hubbard Glacier. Then he gave up and pounded
the nearest boulder to pieces with his fist.
“You dare take me for a sleigh ride?” He tensed
and sniffed the air. “That smell…like snuffed-out souls.
Thanatos is free, eh? Bah! It doesn’t matter. Gaea still
controls the Doors of Death. Now, why have you brought
me here, son of Mars?”
“To kill you,” Frank said. “Next question?”
521/589
The giant’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve never known a
child of Mars who can change his form, but that doesn’t
mean you can defeat me. Do you think your stupid soldier
of a father gave you the strength to face me in one-on-one
combat?”
Hazel drew her sword. “How about two on one?”
The giant growled and charged at Hazel, but Arion
nimbly darted out of the way. Hazel slashed her sword
across the back of the giant’s calf. Black oil spouted from
the wound.
Alcyoneus stumbled. “You can’t kill me, Thanatos
or no!”
Hazel made a grabbing gesture with her free hand.
An invisible force yanked the giant’s jewel-encrusted hair
back ward. Hazel rushed in, slashed his other leg, and
raced away before he could regain his balance.
“Stop that!” Alcyoneus shouted. “This is Alaska. I
am immortal in my homeland!”
“Actually,” Frank said, “I have some bad news
about that. See, I got more from my dad than strength.”
The giant snarled. “What are you talking about, war
brat?”
“Tactics,” Frank said. “That’s my gift from Mars. A
battle can be won before it’s ever fought by choosing the
right ground.” He pointed over his shoulder. “We crossed
the border a few hundred yards back. You’re not in Alaska
anymore. Can’t you feel it, Al? You want to get to Alaska,
you have to go through me.”
522/589
Slowly, understanding dawned in the giant’s eyes.
He looked down incredulously at his wounded legs. Oil
still poured from his calves, turning the ice black.
“Impossible!” the giant bellowed. “I’ll—I’ll—Gah!”
He charged at Frank, determined to reach the international
boundary. For a split second, Frank doubted
his plan. If he couldn’t use his gift again, if he froze, he
was dead. Then he remembered his grandmother’s
instructions:
It helps if you know the creature well. Check.
It also helps if you are in a life-and-death situ
ation, such as combat. Double check.
The giant kept coming. Twenty yards. Ten yards.
“Frank?” Hazel called nervously.
Frank stood his ground. “I got this.”
Just before Alcyoneus smashed into him, Frank
changed. He’d always felt too big and clumsy. Now he
used that feeling. His body swelled to massive size. His
skin thickened. His arms changed to stout front legs. His
mouth grew tusks and his nose elongated. He became the
animal he knew best—the one he’d cared for, fed, bathed,
and even given indigestion to at Camp Jupiter.
Alcyoneus slammed into a full-grown ten-ton
elephant.
The giant staggered sideways. He screamed in frustration
and slammed into Frank again, but Alcyoneus was
completely out of his weight division. Frank head-butted
523/589
him so hard Alcyoneus flew backward and landed spreadeagled
on the ice.
“You—can’t—kill me,” Alcyoneus growled. “You
can’t—”
Frank turned back to his normal form. He walked
up to the giant, whose oily wounds were steaming. The
gems fell out of his hair and sizzled in the snow. His
golden skin began to corrode, breaking into chunks.
Hazel dismounted and stood next to Frank, her
sword ready. “May I?”
Frank nodded. He looked into the giant’s seething
eyes. “Here’s a tip, Alcyoneus. Next time you choose the
biggest state for your home, don’t set up base in the part
that’s only ten miles wide. Welcome to Canada, idiot.”
Hazel’s sword came down on the giant’s neck. Alcyoneus
dissolved into a pile of very expensive rocks.
For a while Hazel and Frank stood together, watching
the remains of the giant melt into the ice. Frank
picked up his rope.
“An elephant?” Hazel asked.
Frank scratched his neck. “Yeah. It seemed like a
good idea.”
He couldn’t read her expression. He was afraid he’d
finally done something so weird that she’d never want to
be around him again. Frank Zhang: lumbering klutz,
child of Mars, part-time pachyderm.
524/589
Then she kissed him—a real kiss on the lips, much
better than the kind of kiss she’d given Percy on the
airplane.
“You are amazing,” she said. “And you make a very
hand some elephant.”
Frank felt so flustered that he thought his boots
might melt through the ice. Before he could say anything,
a voice echoed across the valley:
You haven’t won.
Frank looked up. Shadows were shifting across the
nearest mountain, forming the face of a sleeping woman.
You will never reach home in time, taunted the
voice of Gaea. Even now, Thanatos is attending the death
of Camp Jupiter, the final destruction of your Roman
friends.
The mountain rumbled as if the whole earth were
laughing. The shadows disappeared.
Hazel and Frank looked at each other. Neither said
a word. They climbed onto Arion and sped back toward
Glacier Bay.
PERCY WAS WAITING FOR THEM. He looked mad.
He stood at the edge of the glacier, leaning on the
staff with the golden eagle, gazing down at the wreckage
he’d caused: several hundred acres of newly open water
dotted with icebergs and flotsam from the ruined camp.
The only remains on the glacier were the main
gates, which listed sideways, and a tattered blue banner
lying over a pile of snow-bricks.
When they ran up to him, Percy said, “Hey,” like
they were just meeting for lunch or something.
“You’re alive!” Frank marveled.
Percy frowned. “The fall? That was nothing. I fell
twice that far from the St. Louis Arch.”
“You did what?” Hazel asked.
“Never mind. The important thing was I didn’t
drown.”
526/589
“So the prophecy was incomplete!” Hazel grinned.
“It probably said something like: The son of Neptune will
drown a whole bunch of ghosts.”
Percy shrugged. He was still looking at Frank like
he was miffed. “I got a bone to pick with you, Zhang. You
can turn into an eagle? And a bear?”
“And an elephant,” Hazel said proudly.
“An elephant.” Percy shook his head in disbelief.
“That’s your family gift? You can change shape?”
Frank shuffled his feet. “Um…yeah. Periclymenus,
my ancestor, the Argonaut—he could do that. He passed
down the ability.”
“And he got that gift from Poseidon,” Percy said.
“That’s completely unfair. I can’t turn into animals.”
Frank stared at him. “Unfair? You can breathe underwater
and blow up glaciers and summon freaking hurricanes—
and it’s unfair that I can be an elephant?”
Percy considered. “Okay. I guess you got a point.
But next time I say you’re totally beast—”
“Just shut up,” Frank said. “Please.”
Percy cracked a smile.
“If you guys are done,” Hazel said, “we need to go.
Camp Jupiter is under attack. They could use that gold
eagle.”
Percy nodded. “One thing first, though. Hazel,
there’s about a ton of Imperial gold weapons and armor
at the bottom of the bay now, plus a really nice chariot.
I’m betting that stuff could come in handy.…”
527/589
It took them a long time—too long—but they all
knew those weapons could make the difference between
victory and defeat if they got them back to camp in time.
Hazel used her abilities to levitate some items from
the bottom of the sea. Percy swam down and brought up
more. Even Frank helped by turning into a seal, which
was kind of cool, though Percy claimed his breath smelled
like fish.
It took all three of them to raise the chariot, but finally
they’d managed to haul everything ashore to a black
sand beach near the base of the glacier. They couldn’t fit
everything in the chariot, but they used Frank’s rope to
strap down most of the gold weapons and the best pieces
of armor.
“It looks like Santa’s sleigh,” Frank said. “Can Arion
even pull that much?”
Arion huffed.
“Hazel,” Percy said, “I am seriously going to wash
your horse’s mouth with soap. He says, yes, he can pull it,
but he needs food.”
Hazel picked up an old Roman dagger, a pugio. It
was bent and dull, so it wouldn’t be much good in a fight,
but it looked like solid Imperial gold.
“Here you go, Arion,” she said. “High-performance
fuel.”
The horse took the dagger in his teeth and chewed
it like an apple. Frank made a silent oath never to put his
hand near that horse’s mouth.
528/589
“I’m not doubting Arion’s strength,” he said carefully,
“but will the chariot hold up? The last one—”
“This one has Imperial gold wheels and axle,” Percy
said. “It should hold.”
“If not,” Hazel said, “this is going to be a short trip.
But we’re out of time. Come on!”
Frank and Percy climbed into the chariot. Hazel
swung up onto Arion’s back.
“Giddyup!” she yelled.
The horse’s sonic boom echoed across the bay.
They sped south, avalanches tumbling down the mountains
as they passed.
FOUR HOURS.
That’s how long it took the fastest horse on the
planet to get from Alaska to San Francisco Bay, heading
straight over the water down the Northwest Coast.
That’s also how long it took for Percy’s memory to
return completely. The process had started in Portland
when he had drunk the gorgon’s blood, but his past life
had still been maddeningly fuzzy. Now, as they headed
back into the Olympian gods’ territory, Percy remembered
everything: the war with Kronos, his sixteenth
birthday at Camp Half-Blood, his trainer Chiron the centaur,
his best friend Grover, his brother Tyson, and most
of all Annabeth—two great months of dating, and then
BOOM. He’d been abducted by the alien known as Hera.
Or Juno…whatever.
530/589
Eight months of his life stolen. Next time Percy saw
the Queen of Olympus, he was definitely going to give her
a goddess-sized slap upside the head.
His friends and family must be going out of their
minds. If Camp Jupiter was in such bad trouble, he could
only guess what Camp Half-Blood must be facing without
him.
Even worse: Saving both camps would be only the
beginning. According to Alcyoneus, the real war would
happen far away, in the homeland of the gods. The giants
intended to attack the original Mount Olympus and destroy
the gods forever.
Percy knew that giants couldn’t die unless demigods
and gods fought them together. Nico had told him
that. Annabeth had mentioned it too, back in August,
when she’d speculated that the giants might be part of the
new Great Prophecy—what the Romans called the
Prophecy of Seven. (That was the downside of dating the
smartest girl at camp: You learn stuff.)
He understood Juno’s plan: Unite the Roman and
Greek demigods to create an elite team of heroes, then
somehow convince the gods to fight alongside them. But
first, they had to save Camp Jupiter.
The coastline began to look familiar. They raced
past the Mendocino lighthouse. Shortly afterward, Mount
Tam and the Marin headlands loomed out of the fog. Arion
shot straight under the Golden Gate Bridge into San
Francisco Bay.
531/589
They tore through Berkeley and into the Oakland
Hills. When they reached the hilltop above the Caldecott
Tunnel, Arion shuddered like a broken car and came to a
stop, his chest heaving.
Hazel patted his sides lovingly. “You did great,
Arion.”
The horse was too tired even to cuss: Of course I
did great. What did you expect?
Percy and Frank jumped off the chariot. Percy
wished there’d been comfortable seats or an in-flight
meal. His legs were wobbly. His joints were so stiff, he
could barely walk. If he went into battle like this, the enemy
would call him Old Man Jackson.
Frank didn’t look much better. He hobbled to the
top of the hill and peered down at the camp. “Guys…you
need to see this.”
When Percy and Hazel joined him, Percy’s heart
sank. The battle had begun, and it wasn’t going well. The
Twelfth Legion was arrayed on the Field of Mars, trying
to protect the city. Scorpions fired into the ranks of the
Earthborn. Hannibal the elephant plowed down monsters
right and left, but the defenders were badly outnumbered.
On her pegasus Scipio, Reyna flew around the giant
Polybotes, trying to keep him occupied. The Lares had
formed shimmering purple lines against a mob of black,
vaporous shades in ancient armor. Veteran demigods
from the city had joined the battle, and were pushing
their shield wall against an onslaught of wild centaurs.
Giant eagles circled the battlefield, doing aerial combat
532/589
with two snake-haired ladies in green Bargain Mart
vests—Stheno and Euryale.
The legion itself was taking the brunt of the attack,
but their formation was breaking. Each cohort was an island
in a sea of enemies. The Cyclopes’ siege tower shot
glowing green cannonballs into the city, blasting craters
in the forum, reducing houses to ruins. As Percy watched,
a cannonball hit the Senate House and the dome partially
collapsed.
“We’re too late,” Hazel said.
“No,” Percy said. “They’re still fighting. We can do
this.”
“Where’s Lupa?” Frank asked, desperation creeping
into his voice. “She and the wolves…they should be
here.”
Percy thought about his time with the wolf goddess.
He’d come to respect her teachings, but he’d also
learned that wolves had limits. They weren’t front-line
fighters. They only attacked when they had vastly superior
numbers, and usually under the cover of darkness.
Besides, Lupa’s first rule was self-sufficiency. She would
help her children as much as she could, train them to
fight—but in the end, they were either predator or prey.
Romans had to fight for themselves. They had to prove
their worth or die. That was Lupa’s way.
“She did what she could,” Percy said. “She slowed
down the army on its way south. Now it’s up to us. We’ve
got to get the gold eagle and these weapons to the legion.”
533/589
“But Arion is out of steam!” Hazel said. “We can’t
haul this stuff ourselves.”
“Maybe we don’t have to.” Percy scanned the hilltops.
If Tyson had gotten his dream message in Vancouver,
help might be close.
He whistled as loud as he could—a good New York
cab whistle that would’ve been heard all the way from
Times Square to Central Park.
Shadows rippled in the trees. A huge black shape
bounded out of nowhere—a mastiff the size of an SUV,
with a Cyclops and a harpy on her back.
“Hellhound!” Frank scrambled backward.
“It’s okay!” Percy grinned. “These are friends.”
“Brother!” Tyson climbed off and ran toward Percy.
Percy tried to brace himself, but it was no good. Tyson
slammed into him and smothered him in a hug. For a few
seconds, Percy could only see black spots and lots of flannel.
Then Tyson let go and laughed with delight, looking
Percy over with that massive baby brown eye.
“You are not dead!” he said. “I like it when you are
not dead!”
Ella fluttered to the ground and began preening her
feathers. “Ella found a dog,” she announced. “A large dog.
And a Cyclops.”
Was she blushing? Before Percy could decide, his
black mastiff pounced on him, knocking Percy to the
ground and barking so loudly that even Arion backed up.
534/589
“Hey, Mrs. O’Leary,” Percy said. “Yeah, I love you
too, girl. Good dog.”
Hazel made a squeaking sound. “You have a hellhound
named Mrs. O’Leary?”“Long story.” Percy managed
to get to his feet and wipe off the dog slobber. “You
can ask your brother…”
His voice wavered when he saw Hazel’s expression.
He’d almost forgotten that Nico di Angelo was missing.
Hazel had told him what Thanatos had said about
searching for the Doors of Death in Rome, and Percy was
anxious to find Nico for his own reasons—to wring the
kid’s neck for having pretended he didn’t know Percy
when he first came to camp. Still, he was Hazel’s brother,
and finding him was a conversation for another time.
“Sorry,” he said. “But yeah, this is my dog, Mrs.
O’Leary. Tyson—these are my friends, Frank and Hazel.”
Percy turned to Ella, who was counting all the
barbs in one of her feathers.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “We were worried about
you.”
“Ella is not strong,” she said. “Cyclopes are strong.
Tyson found Ella. Tyson took care of Ella.”
Percy raised his eyebrows. Ella was blushing.
“Tyson,” he said, “you big charmer, you.”
Tyson turned the same color as Ella’s plumage.
“Um…No.” He leaned down and whispered nervously,
loud enough for all the others to hear: “She is pretty.”
535/589
Frank tapped his head like he was afraid his brain
had short-circuited. “Anyway, there’s this battle
happening.”
“Right,” Percy agreed. “Tyson, where’s Annabeth?
Is any other help coming?”
Tyson pouted. His big brown eye got misty. “The
big ship is not ready. Leo says tomorrow, maybe two days.
Then they will come.”
“We don’t have two minutes,” Percy said. “Okay,
here’s the plan.”
As quickly as possible, he pointed out which were
the good guys and the bad guys on the battlefield. Tyson
was alarmed to learn that bad Cyclopes and bad centaurs
were in the giant’s army. “I have to hit pony-men?”
“Just scare them away,” Percy promised.
“Um, Percy?” Frank looked at Tyson with trepidation.
“I just…don’t want our friend here getting hurt. Is
Tyson afighter?”
Percy smiled. “Is he a fighter? Frank, you’re looking
at General Tyson of the Cyclops army. And by the
way, Tyson, Frank is a descendant of Poseidon.”
“Brother!” Tyson crushed Frank in a hug.
Percy stifled a laugh. “Actually he’s more like a
great-great-…Oh, never mind. Yeah, he’s your brother.”
“Thanks,” Frank mumbled through a mouthful of
flannel. “But if the legion mistakes Tyson for an enemy—”
536/589
” I’ve got it!” Hazel ran to the chariot and dug out
the biggest Roman helmet she could find, plus an old Roman
banner embroidered with SPQR.
She handed them to Tyson. “Put those on, big guy.
Then our friends will know you’re on our team.”
“Yay!” Tyson said. “I’m on your team!”
The helmet was ridiculously small, and he put the
cape on backward, like a SPQR baby bib.
“It’ll do,” Percy said. “Ella, just stay here. Stay
safe.”
“Safe,” Ella repeated. “Ella likes being safe. Safety
in numbers. Safety deposit boxes. Ella will go with
Tyson.”
“What?” Percy said. “Oh…fine. Whatever. Just
don’t get hurt. And Mrs. O’Leary—”
“ROOOF!”
“How do you feel about pulling a chariot?”
THEY WERE, WITHOUT A DOUBT, the strangest reinforcements
in Roman military history. Hazel rode Arion,
who had recovered enough to carry one person at normal
horse speed, though he cursed about his aching hooves all
the way downhill.
Frank transformed into a bald eagle—which Percy
still found totally unfair—and soared above them. Tyson
ran down the hill, waving his club and yelling, “Bad pony-
men! BOO!” while Ella fluttered around him, reciting
facts from the Old Farmer’s Almanac.
As for Percy, he rode Mrs. O’Leary into battle with
a chariot full of Imperial gold equipment clanking and
clink ing behind, the golden eagle standard of the Twelfth
Legion raised high above him.
They skirted the perimeter of the camp and took
the northernmost bridge over the Little Tiber, charging
onto the Field of Mars at the western edge of the battle. A
538/589
horde of Cyclopes was hammering away at the campers of
the Fifth Cohort, who were trying to keep their shields
locked just to stay alive.
Seeing them in trouble, Percy felt a surge of protective
rage. These were the kids who’d taken him in. This
was his family.
He shouted, “Fifth Cohort!” and slammed into the
nearest Cyclops. The last things the poor monster saw
were Mrs. O’Leary’s teeth.
After the Cyclops disintegrated—and stayed disintegrated,
thanks to Death—Percy leaped off his hellhound
and slashed wildly through the other monsters.
Tyson charged at the Cyclops leader, Ma Gasket,
her chain-mail dress spattered with mud and decorated
with broken spears.
She gawked at Tyson and started to say, “Who—?”
Tyson hit her in the head so hard, she spun in a
circle and landed on her rump.
“Bad Cyclops Lady!” he bellowed. “General Tyson
says GO AWAY!”
He hit her again, and Ma Gasket broke into dust.
Meanwhile Hazel charged around on Arion, slicing
her spatha through one Cyclops after another, while
Frank blinded the enemies with his talons.
Once every Cyclops within fifty yards had been reduced
to ashes, Frank landed in front of his troops and
transformed into a human. His centurion’s badge and
Mural Crown gleamed on his winter jacket.
539/589
“Fifth Cohort!” he bellowed. “Get your Imperial
gold weapons right here!”
The campers recovered from their shock and
mobbed the chariot. Percy did his best to hand out equipment
quickly.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Dakota urged, grinning like a
madman as he swigged red Kool-Aid from his flask. “Our
comrades need help!”
Soon the Fifth Cohort was equipped with new
weapons and shields and helmets. They weren’t exactly
consistent. In fact they looked like they’d been shopping
at a King Midas clearance sale. But they were suddenly
the most powerful cohort in the legion.
“Follow the eagle!” Frank ordered. “To battle!”
The campers cheered. As Percy and Mrs. O’Leary
charged onward, the entire cohort followed—forty extremely
shiny gold-plated warriors screaming for blood.
They slammed into a herd of wild centaurs that
were attacking the Third Cohort. When the campers of
the Third saw the eagle standard, they shouted insanely
and fought with renewed effort.
The centaurs didn’t stand a chance. The two cohorts
crushed them like a vise. Soon there was nothing
left but piles of dust and assorted hooves and horns.
Percy hoped Chiron would forgive him, but these centaurs
weren’t like the Party Ponies he’d met before. They
were some other breed. They had to be defeated.
“Form ranks!” the centurions shouted. The two cohorts
came together, their military training kicking in.
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Shields locked, they marched into battle against the
Earthborn.
Frank shouted, “Pila!”
A hundred spears bristled. When Frank yelled,
“Fire!” they sailed through the air—a wave of death cutting
through the six-armed monsters. The campers drew
swords and advanced toward the center of the battle.
At the base of the aqueduct, the First and Second
Cohorts were trying to encircle Polybotes, but they were
taking a pounding. The remaining Earthborn threw barrage
after barrage of stone and mud. Karpoi grain spirits—
those horrible little piranha Cupids—were rushing
through the tall grass abducting campers at random,
pulling them away from the line. The giant himself kept
shaking basilisks out of his hair. Every time one landed,
the Romans panicked and ran. Judging from their corroded
shields and the smoking plumes on their helmets,
they’d already learned about the basilisks’ poison and fire.
Reyna soared above the giant, diving in with her
javelin whenever he turned his attention to the ground
troops. Her purple cloak snapped in the wind. Her golden
armor gleamed. Polybotes jabbed his trident and swung
his weighted net, but Scipio was almost as nimble as
Arion.
Then Reyna noticed the Fifth Cohort marching to
their aid with the eagle. She was so stunned, the giant almost
swatted her out of the air, but Scipio dodged. Reyna
locked eyes with Percy and gave him a huge smile.
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“Romans!” Her voice boomed across the fields.
“Rally to the eagle!”
Demigods and monsters alike turned and gawked
as Percy bounded forward on his hellhound.
“What is this?” Polybotes demanded. “What is
this?”
Percy felt a rush of power coursing through the
standard’s staff. He raised the eagle and shouted,
“Twelfth Legion Fulminata!”
Thunder shook the valley. The eagle let loose a
blinding flash, and a thousand tendrils of lightning exploded
from its golden wings—arcing in front of Percy
like the branches of an enormous deadly tree, connecting
with the nearest monsters, leaping from one to another,
completely ignoring the Roman forces.
When the lightning stopped, the First and Second
Cohorts were facing one surprised-looking giant
and several hundred smoking piles of ash. The enemy’s
center line had been charred to oblivion.
The look on Octavian’s face was priceless. The centurion
stared at Percy with shock, then outrage. Then,
when his own troops started to cheer, he had no choice
except to join the shouting: “Rome! Rome!”
The giant Polybotes backed up uncertainly, but
Percy knew the battle wasn’t over.
The Fourth Cohort was still surrounded by Cyclopes.
Even Hannibal the elephant was having a hard
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time wading through so many monsters. His black Kevlar
armor was ripped so that his label just said ant.
The veterans and Lares on the eastern flank were
being pushed toward the city. The monsters’ siege tower
was still hurling explosive green fireballs into the streets.
The gorgons had disabled the giant eagles and now flew
unchallenged over the giant’s remaining centaurs and the
Earthborn, trying to rally them.
“Stand your ground!” Stheno yelled. “I’ve got free
samples!”
Polybotes bellowed. A dozen fresh basilisks fell out
of his hair, turning the grass to poison yellow. “You think
this changes anything, Percy Jackson? I cannot be destroyed!
Come forward, son of Neptune. I will break you!”
Percy dismounted. He handed Dakota the standard.
“You are the cohort’s senior centurion. Take care of
this.” Dakota blinked, then he straightened with pride. He
dropped his Kool-Aid flask and took the eagle. “I will
carry it with honor.”
“Frank, Hazel, Tyson,” Percy said, “help the Fourth
Cohort. I’ve got a giant to kill.”
He raised Riptide, but before he could advance,
horns blew in the northern hills. Another army appeared
on the ridge—hundreds of warriors in black-and-gray
camouflage, armed with spears and shields. Interspersed
among their ranks were a dozen battle forklifts, their
sharpened tines gleaming in the sunset and flaming bolts
nocked in their crossbows.
“Amazons,” Frank said. “Great.”
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Polybotes laughed. “You, see? Our reinforcements
have arrived! Rome will fall today!”
The Amazons lowered their spears and charged
down the hill. Their forklifts barreled into battle. The giant’s
army cheered—until the Amazons changed course
and headed straight for the monsters’ intact eastern flank.
“Amazons, forward!” On the largest forklift stood a
girl who looked like an older version of Reyna, in black
combat armor with a glittering gold belt around her waist.
“Queen Hylla!” said Hazel. “She survived!”
The Amazon queen shouted: “To my sister’s aid!
Destroy the monsters!”
“Destroy!” Her troops’ cry echoed through the
valley.
Reyna wheeled her pegasus toward Percy. Her eyes
gleamed. Her expression said: I could hug you right now.
She shouted, “Romans! Advance!”
The battlefield descended into absolute chaos.
Amazon and Roman lines swung toward the enemy like
the Doors of Death themselves.
But Percy had only one goal. He pointed at the
giant.
“You. Me. To the finish.”
They met by the aqueduct, which had somehow survived
the battle so far. Polybotes fixed that. He swiped his
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trident and smashed the nearest brick arch, unleashing a
waterfall.
“Go on, then, son of Neptune!” Polybotes taunted.
“Let me see your power! Does water do your bidding?
Does it heal you? But I am born to oppose Neptune.”
The giant thrust his hand under the water. As the
torrent passed through his fingers it turned dark green.
He flung some at Percy, who instinctively deflected it with
his will. The liquid splattered the ground in front of him.
With a nasty hiss, the grass withered and smoked.
“My touch turns water to poison,” Polybotes said.
“Let’s see what it does to your blood!”
He threw his net at Percy, but Percy rolled out of
the way. He diverted the waterfall straight into the giant’s
face. While Polybotes was blinded, Percy charged. He
plunged Riptide into the giant’s belly then withdrew it
and vaulted away, leaving the giant roaring in pain.
The strike would have dissolved any lesser monster,
but Polybotes just staggered and looked down at the
golden ichor —the blood of immortals—spilling from his
wound. The cut was already closing.
“Good try, demigod,” he snarled. “But I will break
you still.”
“Gotta catch me first,” Percy said.
He turned and bolted toward the city.
“What?” the giant yelled incredulously. “You run,
coward? Stand still and die!”
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Percy had no intention of doing that. He knew he
couldn’t kill Polybotes alone. But he did have a plan.
He passed Mrs. O’Leary, who looked up curiously
with a gorgon wriggling in her mouth.
“I’m fine!” Percy yelled as he ran by, followed by a
giant screaming bloody murder.
He jumped over a burning scorpion and ducked as
Hannibal threw a Cyclops across his path. Out of the
corner of his eye, he saw Tyson pounding the Earthborn
into the ground like a game of whack-a-mole. Ella was
fluttering above him, dodging missiles and calling out advice:
“The groin. The Earthborn’s groin is sensitive.”
SMASH!
“Good. Yes. Tyson found its groin.”
“Percy needs help?” Tyson called.
“I’m good!”
“Die!” Polybotes yelled, closing fast. Percy kept
running.
In the distance, he saw Hazel and Arion galloping
across the battlefield, cutting down centaurs and karpoi.
One grain spirit yelled, “Wheat! I’ll give you wheat!” but
Arion stomped him into a pile of breakfast cereal. Queen
Hylla and Reyna joined forces, forklift and pegasus riding
together, scattering the dark shades of fallen warriors.
Frank turned himself into an elephant and stomped
through some Cyclopes, and Dakota held the golden eagle
high, blasting lightning at any monsters that dared to
challenge the Fifth Cohort.
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All that was great, but Percy needed a different
kind of help. He needed a god.
He glanced back and saw the giant almost within
arm’s reach. To buy some time, Percy ducked behind one
of the aqueduct’s columns. The giant swung his trident.
When the column crumbled, Percy used the unleashed
water to guide the collapse—bringing down several tons
of bricks on the giant’s head.
Percy bolted for the city limits.
“Terminus!” he yelled.
The nearest statue of the god was about sixty feet
ahead. His stone eyes snapped open as Percy ran toward
him.
“Completely unacceptable!” he complained. “Buildings
on fire! Invaders! Get them out of here, Percy
Jackson!”
“I’m trying,” he said. “But there’s this giant,
Polybotes.”
“Yes, I know! Wait—Excuse me a moment.” Terminus
closed his eyes in concentration. A flaming green
cannonball sailed overhead and suddenly vaporized. “I
can’t stop all the missiles,” Terminus complained. “Why
can’t they be civilized and attack more slowly? I’m only
one god.”
“Help me kill the giant,” Percy said, “and this will
all be over. A god and demigod working together—that’s
the only way to kill him.”
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Terminus sniffed. “I guard borders. I don’t kill giants.
It’s not in my job description.”
“Terminus, come on!” Percy took another step forward,
and the god shrieked indignantly.
“Stop right there, young man! No weapons inside
the Pomerian Line!”
“But we’re under attack.”
“I don’t care! Rules are rules. When people don’t
follow the rules, I get very, very angry.”
Percy smiled. “Hold that thought.”
He sprinted back toward the giant. “Hey, ugly!”
“Rarrr!” Polybotes burst from the ruins of the
aqueduct. The water was still pouring over him, turning
to poison and creating a steaming marsh around his feet.
“You…you will die slowly,” the giant promised. He
picked up his trident, now dripping with green venom.
All around them, the battle was winding down. As
the last monsters were mopped up, Percy’s friends started
gathering, forming a ring around the giant.
“I will take you prisoner, Percy Jackson,” Polybotes
snarled. “I will torture you under the sea. Every day the
water will heal you, and every day I will bring you closer
to death.”
“Great offer,” Percy said. “But I think I’ll just kill
you instead.”
Polybotes bellowed in rage. He shook his head, and
more basilisks flew from his hair.
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“Get back!” Frank warned.
Fresh chaos spread through the ranks. Hazel
spurred Arion and put herself between the basilisks and
the campers. Frank changed form—shrinking into
something lean and furry…a weasel? Percy thought Frank
had lost his mind, but when Frank charged the basilisks,
they absolutely freaked out. They slithered away with
Frank chasing after them in hot weasely pursuit.
Polybotes pointed his trident and ran toward Percy.
As the giant reached the Pomerian Line, Percy jumped
aside like a bullfighter. Polybotes barreled across the city
limits.
“THAT’S IT!” Terminus cried. “That’s AGAINST
THE RULES!”
Polybotes frowned, obviously confused that he was
being told off by a statue. “What are you?” he growled.
“Shut up!”
He pushed the statue over and turned back to
Percy.
“Now I’m MAD!” Terminus shrieked. “I’m
strangling you. Feel that? Those are my hands around
your neck, you big bully. Get over here! I’m going to head-
butt you so hard—”
“Enough!” The giant stepped on the statue and
broke Terminus in three pieces—pedestal, body, and
head.
“You DIDN’T!” shouted Terminus. “Percy Jackson,
you’ve got yourself a deal! Let’s kill this upstart.”
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The giant laughed so hard that he didn’t realize
Percy was charging until it was too late. Percy jumped up,
vaulting off the giant’s knee, and drove Riptide straight
through one of the metal mouths on Polybotes’s breastplate,
sinking the Celestial bronze hilt-deep in his chest.
The giant stumbled backward, tripping over Terminus’s
pedestal and crashing to the ground.
While he was trying to get up, clawing at the sword
in his chest, Percy hefted the head of the statue.
“You’ll never win!” the giant groaned. “You cannot
defeat me alone.”
“I’m not alone.” Percy raised the stone head above
the giant’s face. “I’d like you to meet my friend Terminus.
He’s a god!”
Too late, awareness and fear dawned in the giant’s
face. Percy smashed the god’s head as hard as he could into
the Polybotes’s nose, and the giant dissolved, crumbling
into a steaming heap of seaweed, reptile skin, and
poisonous muck.
Percy staggered away, completely exhausted.
“Ha!” said the head of Terminus. “That will teach
him to obey the rules of Rome.”
For a moment, the battlefield was silent except for
a few fires burning, and a few retreating monsters
screaming in panic.
A ragged circle of Romans and Amazons stood
around Percy. Tyson, Ella, and Mrs. O’Leary were there.
Frank and Hazel were grinning at him with pride. Arion
was nibbling contentedly on a golden shield.
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The Romans began to chant, “Percy! Percy!”
They mobbed him. Before he knew it, they were
raising him on a shield. The cry changed to, “Praetor!
Praetor!”
Among the chanters was Reyna herself, who held
up her hand and grasped Percy’s in congratulation. Then
the mob of cheering Romans carried him around the Pomerian
Line, carefully avoiding Terminus’s borders, and
escorted him back home to Camp Jupiter.
THE FEAST OF FORTUNA HAD NOTHING to do with
tuna, which was fine with Percy.
Campers, Amazons and Lares crowded the mess
hall for a lavish dinner. Even the fauns were invited, since
they’d helped out by bandaging the wounded after the
battle. Wind nymphs zipped around the room, delivering
orders of pizza, burgers, steaks, salads, Chinese food, and
burritos, all flying at terminal velocity.
Despite the exhausting battle, everyone was in
good spirits. Casualties had been light, and the few
campers who’d previously died and come back to life, like
Gwen, hadn’t been taken to the Underworld. Maybe
Thanatos had turned a blind eye. Or maybe Pluto had given
those folks a pass, like he had for Hazel. Whatever the
case, nobody complained.
Colorful Amazon and Roman banners hung side-
by-side from the rafters. The restored golden eagle stood
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proudly behind the praetor’s table, and the walls were
decorated with cornucopias—magical horns of plenty that
spilled out recycling waterfalls of fruit, chocolate, and
fresh-baked cookies.
The cohorts mingled freely with the Amazons,
jumping from couch to couch as they pleased, and for
once the soldiers of the Fifth were welcome everywhere.
Percy changed seats so many times, he lost track of his
dinner.
There was a lot of flirting and arm-wrestling—
which seemed to be the same thing for the
Amazons. At one point Percy was cornered by Kinzie, the
Amazon who’d disarmed him in Seattle. He had to explain
that he already had a girlfriend. Fortunately Kinzie
took it well. She told him what had happened after they’d
left Seattle—how Hylla had defeated her challenger
Otrera in two consecutive duels to the death, so that the
Amazons were now calling their queen Hylla Twice-Kill.
“Otrera stayed dead the second time,” Kinzie said,
batting her eyes. “We have you to thank for that. If you
ever need a new girlfriend…well, I think you’d look great
in an iron collar and an orange jumpsuit.”
Percy couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. He politely
thanked her and changed seats.
Once everyone had eaten and the plates stopped
flying, Reyna made a short speech. She formally welcomed
the Amazons, thanking them for their help. Then
she hugged her siste rand everybody applauded.
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Reyna raised her hands for quiet. “My sister and I
haven’t always seen eye to eye—”
Hylla laughed. “That’s an understatement.”
“She joined the Amazons,” Reyna continued. “I
joined Camp Jupiter. But looking around this room, I
think we both made good choices. Strangely, our destinies
were made possible by the hero you all just raised to
praetor on the battlefield—Percy Jackson.”
More cheering. The sisters raised their glasses to
Percy and beckoned him forward.
Everybody asked for a speech, but Percy didn’t
know what to say. He protested that he really wasn’t the
best person for praetor, but the campers drowned him
out with applause. Reyna took away his probatio neck
plate. Octavian shot him a dirty look, then turned to the
crowd and smiled like this was all his idea. He ripped
open a teddy bear and pronounced good omens for the
coming year—Fortuna would bless them!He passed his
hand over Percy’s arm and shouted: “Percy Jackson, son
of Neptune, first year of service!”
The Roman symbols burned onto Percy’s arm: a
trident, SPQR, and a single stripe. It felt like someone was
pressing a hot iron into his skin, but Percy managed not
to scream.
Octavian embraced him and whispered, “I hope it
hurt.”
Then Reyna gave him an eagle medal and purple
cloak, symbols of the praetor. “You earned these, Percy.”
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Queen Hylla pounded him on the back. “And I’ve
decided not to kill you.”
“Um, thanks,” Percy said.
He made his way around the mess hall one more
time, because all the campers wanted him at their table.
Vitellius the Lar followed, stumbling over his shimmering
purple toga and readjusting his sword, telling everyone
how he’d predicted Percy’s rise to greatness.
“I demanded he join the Fifth Cohort!” the ghost
said proudly. “Spotted his talent right away!”
Don the faun popped up in a nurse’s hat, a stack of
cookies in each hand. “Man, congrats and stuff! Awesome!
Hey, do you have any spare change?”
All the attention embarrassed Percy, but he was
happy to see how well Hazel and Frank were being
treated. Everyone called them the saviors of Rome, and
they deserved it. There was even talk about reinstating
Frank’s great-grandfather, Shen Lun, to the legion’s roll
of honor. Apparently he hadn’t caused the 1906 earthquake
after all.
Percy sat for a while with Tyson and Ella, who were
honored guests at Dakota’s table. Tyson kept calling for
peanut-butter sandwiches, eating them as fast as the
nymphs could deliver. Ella perched at his shoulder on top
of the couch and nibbled furiously on cinnamon rolls.
“Cinnamon rolls are good for harpies,” she said.
“June twenty-fourth is a good day. Roy Disney’s birthday,
and Fortuna’s Feast, and Independence Day for Zanzibar.
And Tyson.”
555/589
She glanced at Tyson, then blushed and looked
away.
After dinner, the entire legion got the night off. Percy and
hisfriends drifted down to the city, which wasn’t quite recovered
from the battle, but the fires were out, most of
the debris had been swept up, and the citizens were determined
to celebrate.
At the Pomerian Line, the statue of Terminus wore
a paper party hat.
“Welcome, praetor!” he said. “You need any giants’
faces smashed while you’re in town, just let me
know.”“Thanks, Terminus,” Percy said. “I’ll keep that in
mind.”
“Yes, good. Your praetor’s cape is an inch too low
on the left. There—that’s better. Where is my assistant?
Julia!”
The little girl ran out from behind the pedestal. She
was wearing a green dress tonight, and her hair was still
in pigtails. When she smiled, Percy saw that her front
teeth were starting to come in. She held up a box full of
party hats.
Percy tried to decline, but Julia gave him the big
adoring eyes.
“Ah, sure,” he said. “I’ll take the blue crown.”
She offered Hazel a gold pirate hat. “I’m gonna be
Percy Jackson when I grow up,” she told Hazel solemnly.
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Hazel smiled and ruffled her hair. “That’s a good
thing to be, Julia.”
“Although,” Frank said, picking out a hat shaped
like apolar bear’s head, “Frank Zhang would be good too.”
“Frank!” Hazel said.
They put on their hats and continued to the forum,
which was lit up with multicolored lanterns. The fountains
glowed purple. The coffee shops were doing a brisk
business, and street musicians filled the air with the
sounds of guitar, lyre, panpipes, and armpit noises.
(Percy didn’t get that last one. Maybe it was an old Roman
musical tradition.)
The goddess Iris must’ve been in a party mood too.
As Percy and his friends strolled past the damaged Senate
House, a dazzling rainbow appeared in the night sky. Unfortunately
the goddess sent another blessing, too—a
gentle rain of gluten-free R.O.F.L. cupcake simulations,
which Percy figured would either make cleaning up
harder, or rebuilding easier. The cupcakes would make
great bricks.
For a while, Percy wandered the streets with Hazel
and Frank, who kept brushing shoulders.
Finally he said, “I’m a little tired, guys. You go
ahead.”
Hazel and Frank protested, but Percy could tell
they wanted some time alone.
As he headed back to camp, he saw Mrs. O’Leary
playing with Hannibal in the Field of Mars. Finally, she’d
found a playmate she could roughhouse with. They
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frolicked around, slamming into each other, breaking fortifications,
and generally having an excellent time.
At the fort gates, Percy stopped and gazed across
the valley. It seemed like so long ago that he’d stood here
with Hazel, getting his first good view of camp. Now he
was more interested in watching the eastern horizon.
Tomorrow, maybe the next day, his friends from
Camp
Half-Blood would arrive. As much as he cared
about Camp Jupiter, he couldn’t wait to see Annabeth
again. He yearned for his old life—New York and Camp
Half-Blood—but something told him it might be a while
before he returned home. Gaea and the giants weren’t
done causing trouble—not by a long shot.
Reyna had given him the second praetor’s house on
the Via Principalis, but as soon as Percy looked inside, he
knew he couldn’t stay there. It was nice, but it was also
full of Jason Grace’s stuff. Percy already felt uneasy taking
Jason’s title of praetor. He didn’t want to take the
guy’s house, too. Things would be awkward enough when
Jason came back—and Percy was sure that he would be
on that dragon-headed warship.
Percy headed back to the Fifth Cohort barracks and
climbed into his bunk. He passed out instantly.
He dreamed he was carrying Juno across the Little Tiber.
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She was disguised as a crazy old bag lady, smiling
and singing an Ancient Greek lullaby as her leathery
hands gripped Percy’s neck.
“Do you still want to slap me, dear?” she asked.
Percy stopped midstream. He let go and dumped
the goddess in the river.
The moment she hit the water, she vanished and
reappeared on the shore. “Oh, my,” she cackled, “that
wasn’t very heroic, even in a dream!”
“Eight months,” Percy said. “You stole eight
months of my life for a quest that took a week. Why?”
Juno tutted disapprovingly. “You mortals and your
short lives. Eight months is nothing, my dear. I lost eight
centuries once, missed most of the Byzantine Empire.”
Percy summoned the power of the river. It swirled
around him, spinning into a froth of whitewater.
“Now, now,” Juno said. “Don’t get testy. If we are
to defeat Gaea, our plans must be timed perfectly. First, I
needed Jason and his friends to free me from my
prison—”
“Your prison? You were in prison and they let you
out?”
“Don’t sound so surprised, dear! I’m a sweet old
woman. At any rate, you weren’t needed at Camp Jupiter
until now, to save the Romans at their moment of
greatest crisis. The eight months between…well, I do have
other plans brewing, my boy. Opposing Gaea, working behind
Jupiter’s back, protecting your friends—it’s a full
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time job! If I had to guard you from Gaea’s monsters and
schemes as well, and keep you hidden from your friends
back east all that time—no, much better you take a safe
nap. You would have been a distraction—a loose cannon.”
“A distraction.” Percy felt the water rising with his
anger, spinning faster around him. “A loose cannon.”
“Exactly. I’m glad you understand.”
Percy sent a wave crashing down on the old woman,
but Juno simply disappeared and materialized
farther down the shore.
“My,” she said, “you are in a bad mood. But you
know I’m right. Your timing here was perfect. They trust
you now. You are a hero of Rome. And while you slept,
Jason Grace has learned to trust the Greeks. They’ve had
time to build the Argo II. Together, you and Jason will
unite the camps.”
“Why me?” Percy demanded. “You and I never got
along. Why would you want a loose cannon on your
team?”
“Because I know you, Percy Jackson. In many
ways, you are impulsive, but when it comes to your
friends, you are as constant as a compass needle. You are
unswervingly loyal, and you inspire loyalty. You are the
glue that will unite the seven.”
“Great,” Percy said. “I always wanted to be glue.”
Juno laced her crooked fingers. “The Heroes of
Olympus must unite! After your victory over Kronos in
Manhattan…well, I fear that wounded Jupiter’s self-
esteem.”
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“Because I was right,” Percy said. “And he was
wrong.”
The old lady shrugged. “He should be used to that,
after so many eons married to me, but alas! My proud
and obstinate husband refuses to ask mere demigods for
help again. He believes the giants can be fought without
you, and Gaea can be forced back to her slumbers. I know
better. But you must prove yourself. Only by sailing to the
ancient lands and closing the Doors of Death will you
convince Jupiter that you are worthy of fighting side-byside
with the gods. It will be the greatest quest since
Aeneas sailed from Troy!”
“And if we fail?” Percy said. “If Romans and Greeks
don’t get along?”
“Then Gaea has already won. I’ll tell you this, Percy
Jackson. The one who will cause you the most trouble is
the one closest to you—the one who hates me most.”
“Annabeth?” Percy felt his anger rising again. “You
never liked her. Now you’re calling her a troublemaker?
You don’t know her at all. She’s the person I most want
watching my back.”
The goddess smiled dryly. “We will see, young
hero. She has a hard task ahead of her when you arrive in
Rome. Whether she is up to it…I do not know.”
Percy summoned a fist of water and smashed it
down at the old lady. When the wave receded, she was
gone.
The river swirled out of Percy’s control. He sank into
the darkness of the whirlpool.
THE NEXT MORNING, PERCY, HAZEL, AND FRANK ate
break fast early, then headed into the city before the senate
was due to convene. As Percy was a praetor now, he
could go pretty much wherever he wanted, whenever he
wanted.
On the way, they passed the stables, where Tyson
and Mrs. O’Leary were sleeping in. Tyson snored on a bed
of hay next to the unicorns, a blissful look on his face like
he was dreaming of ponies. Mrs. O’Leary had rolled on
her back and covered her ears with her paws. On the
stable roof, Ella roosted in a pile of old Roman scrolls, her
head tucked under her wings.
When they got to the forum, they sat by the fountains
and watched the sun come up. The citizens were
already busy sweeping up cupcake simulations, confetti,
and party hats from last night’s celebration. The engineer
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corps was working on a new arch that would commemorate
the victory over Polybotes.
Hazel said she’d even heard talk of a formal triumph
for the three of them—a parade around the city followed
by a week of games and celebrations—but Percy
knew they’d never get the chance. They didn’t have time.
Percy told them about his dream of Juno.
Hazel frowned. “The gods were busy last night.
Show him, Frank.”
Frank reached into his coat pocket. Percy thought
he might bring out his piece of firewood, but instead he
produced a thin paperback book and a note on red
stationery.
“These were on my pillow this morning.” He passed
them to Percy. “Like the Tooth Fairy visited.”
The book was The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Percy
had never heard of it, but he could guess who sent it. The
letter read: Good job, kid. A real man’s best weapon is his
mind. This was your mom’s favorite book. Give it a read.
P.S.—I hope your friend Percy has learned some respect
for me.
“Wow.” Percy handed back the book. “Maybe Mars
is different than Ares. I don’t think Ares can read.”
Frank flipped through the pages. “There’s a lot in
hereabout sacrifice, knowing the cost of war. Back in Vancouver,
Mars told me I’d have to put my duty ahead of my
life or the entire war would go sideways. I thought he
meant freeing Thanatos, but now…I don’t know. I’m still
alive, so maybe the worst is yet to come.”
563/589
He glanced nervously at Percy, and Percy got the
feeling Frank wasn’t telling him everything. He wondered
if Mars had said something about him, but Percy wasn’t
sure he wanted to know.
Besides, Frank had already given enough. He had
watched his family home burn down. He’d lost his mother
and his grandmother.
“You risked your life,” Percy said. “You were willing
to burn up to save the quest. Mars can’t expect more than
that.”
“Maybe,” Frank said doubtfully.
Hazel squeezed Frank’s hand.
They seemed more comfortable around each other
this morning, not quite as nervous and awkward. Percy
wondered if they’d started dating. He hoped so, but he
decided it was better not to ask.
“Hazel, how about you?” Percy asked. “Any word
from Pluto?”
She looked down. Several diamonds popped out of
the ground at her feet. “No,” she admitted. “In a way, I
think he sent a message through Thanatos. My name
wasn’t on that list of escaped souls. It should have been.”
“You think your dad is giving you a pass?” Percy
asked.
Hazel shrugged. “Pluto can’t visit me or even talk to
me without acknowledging I’m alive. Then he’d have to
enforce the laws of death and have Thanatos bring me
564/589
back to the Underworld. I think my dad is turning a blind
eye. I think—I think he wants me to find Nico.”
Percy glanced at the sunrise, hoping to see a warship
descending from the sky. So far, nothing.
“We’ll find your brother,” Percy promised. “As soon
as the ship gets here, we’ll sail for Rome.”
Hazel and Frank exchanged uneasy looks, like
they’d already talked about this.
“Percy…” Frank said. “If you want us to come
along, we’re in. But are you sure? I mean…we know
you’ve got tons of friends at the other camp. And you
could pick anyone at Camp Jupiter now. If we’re not part
of the seven, we’d understand—”
“Are you kidding?” Percy said. “You think I’d leave
my team behind? After surviving Fleecy’s wheat germ,
running from cannibals, and hiding under blue giant
butts in Alaska? Come on!”
The tension broke. All three of them started cracking
up, maybe a little too much, but it was a relief to be
alive, with the warm sun shining, and not worrying—at
least for the moment—about sinister faces appearing in
the shadows of the hills.
Hazel took a deep breath. “The prophecy Ella gave
us—about the child of wisdom, and the mark of Athena
burning through Rome…do you know what that’s about?”
Percy remembered his dream. Juno had warned
that Annabeth had a difficult job ahead of her, and that
she’d cause trouble for the quest. He couldn’t believe that,
but still…it worried him.
565/589
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I think there’s more
to the prophecy. Maybe Ella can remember the rest of it.”
Frank slipped his book into his pocket. “We need to
take her with us—I mean, for her own safety. If Octavian
finds out Ella has the Sibylline Books memorized…”
Percy shuddered. Octavian used prophecies to keep
his power at camp. Now that Percy had taken away his
chance at praetor, Octavian would be looking for other
ways to exert influence. If he got hold of Ella…
“You’re right,” Percy said. “We’ve got to protect
her. I just hope we can convince her—”
“Percy!” Tyson came running across the forum,
Ella fluttering behind him with a scroll in her talons.
When they reached the fountain, Ella dropped the scroll
in Percy’s lap.
“Special delivery,” she said. “From an aura. A wind
spirit.
Yes, Ella got a special delivery.”
“Good morning, brothers!” Tyson had hay in his
hair and peanut butter in his teeth. “The scroll is from
Leo. He is funny and small.”
The scroll looked unremarkable, but when Percy
spread it across his lap, a video recording flickered on the
parchment. A kid in Greek armor grinned up at them. He
had an impish face, curly black hair, and wild eyes, like
he’d just had several cups of coffee. He was sitting in a
dark room with timber walls like a ship’s cabin. Oil lamps
swung back and forth on the ceiling.
566/589
Hazel stifled a scream.
“What?” Frank asked. “What’s wrong?”
Slowly, Percy realized the curly-haired kid looked
familiar—and not just from his dreams. He’d seen that
face in an old photo.
“Hey!” said the guy in the video. “Greetings from
your friends at Camp Half-Blood, et cetera. This is Leo.
I’m the…” He looked off screen and yelled: “What’s my
title? Am I like admiral, or captain, or—”
A girl’s voice yelled back, “Repair boy.”
“Very funny, Piper,” Leo grumbled. He turned back
to the parchment screen. “So yeah, I’m ... ah ... supreme
commander of the Argo II. Yeah, I like that! Anyway,
we’re gonna be sailing toward you in about, I dunno, an
hour in this big mother warship. We’d appreciate it if
you’d not, like, blow us out of the sky or anything. So
okay! If you could tell the Romans that. See you soon.
Yours in demigodishness, and all that. Peace out.”
The parchment turned blank.
“It can’t be,” Hazel said.
“What?” Frank asked. “You know that guy?”
Hazel looked like she’d seen a ghost. Percy understood
why. He remembered the photo in Hazel’s abandoned
house in Seward. The kid on the warship looked
exactly like Hazel’s old boyfriend.
“It’s Sammy Valdez,” she said. “But how…how—”
“It can’t be,” Percy said. “That guy’s name is Leo.
And it’s been seventy-something years. It has to be a…”
567/589
He wanted to say a coincidence, but he couldn’t
make himself believe that. Over the past few years he’d
seen a lot of things: destiny, prophecy, magic, monsters,
fate. But he’d never yet run across a coincidence.
They were interrupted by horns blowing in the distance.
The senators came marching into the forum with
Reyna at the lead.
“It’s meeting time,” Percy said. “Come on. We’ve
got to warn them about the warship.”
“Why should we trust these Greeks?” Octavian was
saying.
He’d been pacing the senate floor for five minutes,
going on and on, trying to counter what Percy had told
them about Juno’s plan and the Prophecy of Seven.
The senate shifted restlessly, but most of them
were too afraid to interrupt Octavian while he was on a
roll. Meanwhile the sun climbed in the sky, shining
through the broken senate roof and giving Octavian a natural
spotlight.
The Senate House was packed. Queen Hylla, Frank,
and Hazel sat in the front row with the senators. Veterans
and ghosts filled the back rows. Even Tyson and Ella had
been allowed to sit in the back. Tyson kept waving and
grinning at Percy.
Percy and Reyna occupied matching praetors’
chairs on the dais, which made Percy self-conscious. It
568/589
wasn’t easy looking dignified wearing a bed sheet and a
purple cape.
“The camp is safe,” Octavian continued. “I’ll be the
first to congratulate our heroes for bringing back the legion’s
eagle and so much Imperial gold! Truly we have
been blessed with good fortune. But why do more? Why
tempt fate?”
“I’m glad you asked.” Percy stood, taking the question
as an opening.
Octavian stammered, “I wasn’t—”
“—part of the quest,” Percy said. “Yes, I know. And
you’re wise to let me explain, since I was.”
Some of the senators snickered. Octavian had no
choice but to sit down and try not to look embarrassed.
“Gaea is waking,” Percy said. “We’ve defeated two
of her giants, but that’s only the beginning. The real war
will take place in the old land of the gods. The quest will
take us to Rome, and eventually to Greece.”
An uneasy ripple spread through the senate.
“I know, I know,” Percy said. “You’ve always
thought of the Greeks as your enemies. And there’s a
good reason for that. I think the gods have kept our two
camps apart because whenever we meet, we fight. But
that can change. It has to change if we’re to defeat Gaea.
That’s what the Prophecy of Seven means. Seven demigods,
Greek and Roman, will have to close the Doors of
Death together.”
569/589
“Ha!” shouted a Lar from the back row. “The last
time a praetor tried to interpret the Prophecy of Seven, it
was Michael Varus, who lost our eagle in Alaska! Why
should we believe you now?”
Octavian smiled smugly. Some of his allies in the
senate began nodding and grumbling. Even some of the
veterans looked uncertain.
“I carried Juno across the Tiber,” Percy reminded
them, speaking as firmly as he could. “She told me that
the Prophecy of Seven is coming to pass. Mars also appeared
to you in person. Do you think two of your most
important gods would appear at camp if the situation
wasn’t serious?”
“He’s right,” Gwen said from the second row. “I, for
one, trust Percy’s word. Greek or not, he restored the
honor of the legion. You saw him on the battlefield last
night. Would anyone here say he is not a true hero of
Rome?”
Nobody argued. A few nodded in agreement.
Reyna stood. Percy watched her anxiously. Her
opinion could change everything—for better or worse.
“You claim this is a combined quest,” she said.
“You claim Juno intends for us to work with this—this
other group, Camp
Half-Blood. Yet the Greeks have been our enemies
for eons.
They are known for their deceptions.”
570/589
“Maybe so,” Percy said. “But enemies can become
friends. A week ago, would you have thought Romans and
Amazons would be fighting side by side?”
Queen Hylla laughed. “He’s got a point.”
“The demigods of Camp Half-Blood have already
been working with Camp Jupiter,” Percy said. “We just
didn’t realize it. During the Titan War last summer, while
you were attacking Mount Othrys, we were defending
Mount Olympus in Manhattan. I fought Kronos myself.”
Reyna backed up, almost tripping over her toga.
“You… what?”
“I know it’s hard to believe,” Percy said. “But I
think I’ve earned your trust. I’m on your side. Hazel and
Frank—I’m sure they’re meant to go with me on this
quest. The other four are on their way from Camp Half-
Blood right now. One of them is Jason Grace, your old
praetor.”
“Oh, come on!” Octavian shouted. “He’s making
things up, now.”
Reyna frowned. “It is a lot to believe. Jason is coming
back with a bunch of Greek demigods? You say they’re
going to appear in the sky in a heavily armed warship, but
we shouldn’t be worried.”
“Yes.” Percy looked over the rows of nervous,
doubtful spectators. “Just let them land. Hear them out.
Jason will backup everything I’m telling you. I swear it on
my life.”
571/589
“On your life?” Octavian looked meaningfully at the
senate. “We will remember that, if this turns out to be a
trick.”
Right on cue, a messenger rushed into the Senate
House, gasping as if he’d run all the way from camp.
“Praetors! I’m sorry to interrupt, but our scouts report—”
“Ship!” Tyson said happily, pointing at the hole in
the ceiling. “Yay!
Sure enough, a Greek warship appeared out of the
clouds, about a half a mile away, descending toward the
Senate House. As it got closer, Percy could see bronze
shields glinting along the sides, billowing sails, and a
familiar-looking figurehead shaped like a metal dragon.
On the tallest mast, a big white flag of truce snapped in
the wind.
The Argo II. It was the most incredible ship he’d
ever seen.
“Praetors!” the messenger cried. “What are your
orders?”
Octavian shot to his feet. “You need to ask?” His
face was red with rage. He was strangling his teddy bear.
“The omens are horrible! This is a trick, a deception. Beware
Greeks bearing gifts!”
He jabbed a finger at Percy. “His friends are attacking
in a warship. He has led them here. We must attack!”
“No,” Percy said firmly. “You all raised me as
praetor for a reason. I will fight to defend this camp with
my life. But these aren’t enemies. I say we stand ready,
but do not attack. Let them land. Let them speak. If it is a
572/589
trick, then I will fight with you, as I did last night. But it is
not a trick.”
All eyes turned toward Reyna.
She studied the approaching warship. Her expression
hardened. If she vetoed Percy’s orders…well, he
didn’t know what would happen. Chaos and confusion, at
the very least.
Most likely, the Romans would follow her lead.
She’d been their leader much longer than Percy.
“Hold your fire,” Reyna said. “But have the legion
stand ready. Percy Jackson is your duly chosen praetor.
We will trus this word—unless we are given clear reason
not to. Senators, let us adjourn to the forum and meet
our…new friends.”
The senators stampeded out of the auditorium—
whether from excitement or panic, Percy wasn’t
sure. Tyson ran after them, yelling, “Yay! Yay!” with Ella
fluttering around his head.
Octavian gave Percy a disgusted look, then threw
down his teddy bear and followed the crowd.
Reyna stood at Percy’s shoulder.
“I support you, Percy,” she said. “I trust your judgment.
But for all our sakes, I hope we can keep the peace
between our campers and your Greek friends.”
“We will,” he promised. “You’ll see.”
She glanced up at the warship. Her expression
turned a little wistful. “You say Jason is aboard…I hope
that’s true.
573/589
I’ve missed him.”
She marched outside, leaving Percy alone with
Hazel and Frank.
“They’re coming down right in the forum,” Frank
said nervously. “Terminus is going to have a heart attack.”
“Percy,” Hazel said, “you swore on your life. Romans
take that seriously. If anything goes wrong, even by
accident, Octavian is going to kill you. You know that,
right?”
Percy smiled. He knew the stakes were high. He
knew this day could go horribly wrong. But he also knew
that Annabeth was on that ship. If things went right, this
would be the best day of his life.
He threw one arm around Hazel and one arm
around Frank.
“Come on,” he said. “Let me introduce you to my
other family.”
Glossary
absurdus out of place, discordant
Achilles the mightiest of the Greek demigods who fought
in the Trojan War
Aesculapius the Roman god of medicine and healing
Alcyoneus the eldest of the giants born to Gaea,
destined to fight Pluto
Amazons a nation of all-female warriors
Anaklusmos Riptide. The name of Percy Jackson’s
sword.
argentum silver
Argonauts a band of Greek heroes who accompanied
Jason on his quest to find the Golden Fleece. Their
name comes from their ship, the Argo, which was
named after its builder, Argus.
augury a sign of something coming, an omen; the practice
of divining the future
aurae invisible wind spirits
aurum gold
basilisk snake, literally “little crown”
575/589
Bellerophon a Greek demigod, son of Poseidon, whodefeated
monsters while riding on Pegasus
Bellona the Roman goddess of war
Byzantium the eastern empire that lasted another 1,000
years after Rome fell, under Greek influence
Celestial bronze a rare metal deadly to monsters
Centaur a race of creatures that is half human, half
horse
centurion an officer of the Roman army
Cerberus the three-headed dog that guards the gates of-
the Underworld
Ceres the Roman goddess of agriculture
Charon the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the-
newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron,
which divide the world of the living from the world of
the dead
cognomen third name
cohort a Roman military unit
Cyclops a member of a primordial race of giants
(Cyclopes, pl.), each with a single eye in the middle
of his or herforehead
denarius (denarii, pl.) the most common coin in the
Roman currency system
drachma the silver coin of ancient Greece
Elysium the final resting place of the souls of the heroic
and the virtuous in the Underworld
Erebos a place of darkness between Earth and Hades
576/589
faun a Roman forest god, part goat and part man. Greek
form: satyr
Fields of Asphodel the section of the Underworld
where the souls of people who lived lives of equal
good and evil rest
Fields of Punishment the section of the Underworld
where evil souls are eternally tortured
Fortuna the Roman goddess of fortune and good luck
Fulminata armed with lightning. A Roman legion under
Julius Caesar whose emblem was a lightning bolt
(fulmen).
Gaea the earth goddess; mother of Titans, giants, Cyclopes,
and other monsters. Known to the Romans as
Terra
Gegenes earthborn monsters
gladius a short sword
gorgons three monstrous sisters (Stheno, Euryale, and
Medusa) who have hair of living, venomous snakes;
Medusa’s eyes can turn the beholder to stone
graecus Greek; enemy; outsider
greaves shin armor
gris-gris a voodoo amulet that protects from evil or
brings luck
harpy a winged female creature that snatches things
Hercules the Roman equivalent of Heracles; the son of
Jupiter and Alcmene, who was born with great
strength
577/589
Hyperboreans peaceful northern giants
ichor the golden blood of immortals
Imperial gold a rare metal deadly to monsters, consec
rated at the Pantheon; its existence was a closely
guarded secret of the emperors
Iris the rainbow goddess
Juno Roman goddess of women, marriage, and fertility;
sister and wife of Jupiter; mother of Mars. Greek
form: Hera
Jupiter Roman king of the gods; also called Jupiter Optimus
Maximus (the best and the greatest). Greek
form: Zeus
karpoi grain spirits
Laistrygonians tall cannibals from the north, possibly
the source of the Sasquatch legend
Lar house god, ancestral spirit (Lares, pl.)
legion the major unit of the Roman army, consisting of
infantry and cavalry troops
legionnaire a member of a legion
Liberalia a Roman festival that celebrated a boy’s rite of
passage into manhood
Lupa the sacred Roman she-wolf that nursed the foundling
twins Romulus and Remus
Mars the Roman god of war; also called Mars Ultor. Patronof
the empire; divine father of Romulus and
Remus. Greekform: Ares
578/589
Minerva Roman goddess of wisdom. Greek form:
Athena
Mist magic force that disguises things from mortals
Mount Othrys the base of the Titans during the ten-
year war with the Olympian gods; Saturn’s
headquarters
muster formal military inspection
nebulae cloud nymphs
Neptune the Roman god of the sea. Greek form:
Poseidon
Otrera first Amazon queen, daughter of Ares
pallium a cloak or mantle worn by the Romans
Pantheon a temple to all the gods of Ancient Rome
Penthesilea a queen of the Amazons; daughter of Ares
andOtrera, another Amazon queen
Periclymenus a Greek prince of Pylos and a son ofPoseidon,
who granted him the ability to shape-shift. He
was renowned for his strength and participated in
the voyage of the Argonauts.
Phineas a son of Poseidon, who had the gift of prophecy.
When he revealed too much of the plans of the gods,
Zeuspunished him by blinding him.
pilum a Roman spear
Pluto the Roman god of death and riches. Greek equival
ent: Hades
Polybotes the giant son of Gaea, the Earth Mother
579/589
praetor an elected Roman magistrate and commander
of the army
Priam the king of Troy during the Trojan War
principia the headquarters of a Roman camp
probatio testing period for a new recruit in a legion
pugio a Roman dagger
Queen Hippolyta’s belt Hippolyta wore a golden waist
belt, a gift from her father, Ares, that signified her
Amazonian queenship and also gave her strength.
retiarius Roman gladiator who fought with a net and
trident
River Styx the river that forms the boundary
betweenEarth and the Underworld
Romulus and Remus the twin sons of Mars and the
priestess Rhea Silvia who were thrown into the
RiverTiber by their human father, Amulius. They
were rescued and raised by a she-wolf and, upon
reaching adulthood, founded Rome.
Saturn the Roman god of agriculture, the son of Uranus
and Gaea and the father of Jupiter. Greek equivalent:
Kronos
scorpion ballista a Roman missile siege weapon that
launched a large projectile at a distant target
Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR) “The Senate
and People of Rome”; refers to the government of the
Roman Republic and is used as an official emblem of
Rome
shades spirits
580/589
Sibylline Books a collection of prophecies in rhyme
writtenin Greek. Tarquinius Superbus, a king of
Rome, bought them from a prophetess named Sibyl
and consulted them in times of great danger.
spartus a skeleton warrior
spatha a cavalry sword
Stygian iron like Celestial bronze and Imperial gold,
amagical metal capable of killing monsters
Tartarus husband of Gaea; spirit of the abyss; father of
the giants; also the lowest region of the world
Terminus the Roman god of boundaries and landmarks
Thanatos the Greek god of death. Roman equivalent:
Letus
Tiber River the third-longest river in Italy. Rome was-
founded on its banks. In ancient Rome, executed
criminals were thrown into the river.
trireme a type of warship
triumph a ceremonial procession for Roman generals
and their troops in celebration of a great military
victory
Trojan War the war that was waged against the city of
Troyby the Greeks after Paris of Troy took Helen
from her husband, Menelaus, the king of Sparta. It
started with a quarrel between the goddesses Athena,
Hera, and Aphrodite.
Coming Fall 2012
The Heroes of Olympus, Book Three
THE MARK OF ATHENA
Praise for The Percy
Jackson Series by Rick
Riordan:
The Lightning Thief
“Perfectly paced, with electrifying moments chasing each
other like heartbeats.”
—The New York Times Book Review
The Sea of Monsters
? “In a feat worthy of his heroic subjects, Riordan
crafts a sequel stronger than his compelling debut.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The Titan’s Curse
“All in all, a winner of Olympic proportions.”
—School Library Journal
The Battle of the Labyrinth
? “Look no further for the next Harry Potter; meet Percy
Jackson, as legions of fans already have.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The Last Olympian
583/589
“The hordes of young readers who have devoured Rick
Riordan’s books…will no doubt gulp down this concluding
volume as greedily as they would a plateful of ambrosia,
or maybe pizza.”
—The Wall Street Journal
Praise for The Kane
Chronicles by Rick Riordan:
The Red Pyramid
? “The first volume in the Kane Chronicles, this fantasy
adventure delivers what fans loved about the Percy Jackson
and the Olympians series: young protagonists with
previously unsuspected magical powers, a riveting story
marked by headlong adventure, a complex background
rooted in ancient mythology, and wry, witty twenty-firstcentury
narration.”
—ALA Booklist (starred review)
“Riordan fans young and old will eat this new book up.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Fans of the Riordan magic—equal parts danger, myth,
and irreverence—will embrace this new series with open
arms.”
—Horn Book
“This tale explodes into action from chapter one.…Readers
pining for Percy Jackson will find new heroes in
Carter and Sadie Kane.”
—Kirkus Reviews
585/589
“Once again, Riordan masterfully meshes modern life
with mythology and history, reinvigorating dusty artifacts
such as the Rosetta stone and revitalizing ancient Egyptian
story lines.”
—The Los Angeles Times
? “A truly original take on Egyptian mythology…A must-
have book.”
—School Library Journal (starred review)
The Throne of Fire
? “…Riordan kickstarts the action, never lets up on the
gas, balances laughs and losses with a sure hand, and expertly
sets up the coming climactic struggle without
(thankfully) ending on a cliff-hanger. It’s a grand ride so
far, showing nary a sign of slowing down.”
—School Library Journal (starred review)
“As in his earlier novels for children, Riordan combines
hard-hitting action scenes, powerful magic, and comic relief
with the internal waves of love, jealousy, and self-
doubt that make his young heroes so very human. Lit by
flashes of humor, this fantasy adventure is an engaging
addition to the Kane Chronicles series.”
—Booklist
Praise for The Heroes of
Olympus Book One: The Lost
Hero by Rick Riordan:
“Riordan’s storytelling is as polished as ever, brimming
with wit, action, and heart—his devotees won’t be
disappointed.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Percy Jackson fans can rest easy: this first book in Riordan’s
Heroes of Olympus spin-off series is a fast-paced
adventure with enough familiar elements to immediately
hook those eager to revisit his modern world of mythological
mayhem. Rotating among his three protagonists, Riordan’s
storytelling is as polished as ever, brimming with
wit, action, and heart—his devotees won’t be
disappointed.”
—Publishers Weekly
“With appealing new characters within a familiar framework,
this spin-off will satisfy the demand for more.”
—Booklist
“Riordan excels at clever plot devices and at creating an
urgent sense of cliff-hanging danger. His interjection of
humor by incongruous juxtaposition…provides some
588/589
welcome relief. The young heroes deal with issues familiar
to teens today: Who am I? Can I live up to the expectations
of others? Having read the first series is helpful but
not essential, and the complex plot is made for sequels.”
—School Library Journal
“Riordan extends the franchise in a logical direction while
maximizing the elements that made the first series so
popular: irreverent heroes, plenty of tension-filled moments
fighting monsters, and authentic classical mythology
mixed in with modern life. Completely in control of
pacing and tone, he balances a faultless comic banter
against deeper notes that reveal the characters’ vulnerabilities.
With Percy Jackson slated to make an appearance
in later volumes, fans nostalgic for the old books should
find in this new series everything they’ve been pining for.”
—Horn Book
About the
Author
Rick Riordan is
the
author
of
the
New York Times #1
bestselling
The
Heroes
of
Olympus,
Book
One:
The Lost
Hero;
The
Heroes
of
Olympus,
Book
Two:
The Son of
Neptune;
the
New York Times #1
best-selling
The
Kane
Chronicles,
Book
One:
The Red Pyramid;
The
Kane
Chronicles,
Book
Two:
The Throne of Fire;
as
well
as
the
five
books
in
the
New York Times #1
best-selling
Percy
Jackson
and
the
Olympians
series.
His
previous
novels
for
adults
include
the
hugely
popular
TresNavarre
series,
winner
of
the
top
three
awards
in
the
mystery
genre.
He
lives
in
San
Antonio,
Texas,
with
his
wife
and
two
sons.
To
learn
more
about
Rick,
visit
his
Web
site
at
www.rickriordan.
com.
