“The guy was about nineteen, and he looked pretty cool. He was tall and muscular, with short-cropped sandy hair and a friendly smile. He wore an orange tank top, cutoffs, sandals, and a leather necklace with five different-colored clay beads. The only thing unsettling about his appearance was a thick white scar that ran from just beneath his right eye to his jaw, like an old knife slash.
“This is Luke,” Annabeth said, and her voice sounded different somehow. I glanced over and could’ve sworn she was blushing. She saw me looking, and her expression hardened again. “He’s your counselor for now.”
---
“The counselor, Luke, came over. He had the Hermes family resemblance, too. It was marred by that scar on his right cheek, but his smile was intact.
“Found you a sleeping bag,” he said. “And here, I stole you some toiletries from the camp store.”
I couldn’t tell if he was kidding about the stealing part.
I said, “Thanks.”
“No prob.” Luke sat next to me, pushed his back against the wall. “Tough first day?”
“I don’t belong here,” I said. “I don’t even believe in gods.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s how we all started. Once you start believing in them? It doesn’t get any easier.”
The bitterness in his voice surprised me, because Luke seemed like a pretty easygoing guy. He looked like he could handle just about anything.
“So your dad is Hermes?” I asked.
He pulled a switchblade out of his back pocket, and for a second I thought he was going to gut me, but he just scraped the mud off the sole of his sandal. “Yeah. Hermes.”
---
“Luke looked up and managed a smile. “Don’t worry about it, Percy. The campers here, they’re mostly good people. After all, we’re extended family, right? We take care of each other.”
He seemed to understand how lost I felt, and I was grateful for that, because an older guy like him—even if he was a counselor—should’ve steered clear of an uncool middle-schooler like me. But Luke had welcomed me into the cabin. He’d even stolen me some toiletries, which was the nicest thing anybody had done for me all day.
I decided to ask him my last big question, the one that had been bothering me all afternoon. “Clarisse, from Ares, was joking about me being ‘Big Three’ material. Then Annabeth . . . twice, she said I might be ‘the one.’ She said I should talk to the Oracle. What was that all about?”
Luke folded his knife. “I hate prophecies.”
“What do you mean?”
His face twitched around the scar. “Let’s just say I messed things up for everybody else. The last two years, ever since my trip to the Garden of the Hesperides went sour, Chiron hasn’t allowed any more quests. Annabeth’s been dying to get out into the world. She pestered Chiron so much he finally told her he already knew her fate. He’d had a prophecy from the Oracle. He wouldn’t tell her the whole thing, but he said Annabeth wasn’t destined to go on a quest yet. She had to wait until . . . somebody special came to the camp.”
“Somebody special?”
“Don’t worry about it, kid,” Luke said. “Annabeth wants to think every new camper who comes through here is the omen she’s been waiting for. Now, come on, it’s dinnertime.”
---
I started to understand Luke’s bitterness and how he seemed to resent his father, Hermes. So okay, maybe gods had important things to do. But couldn’t they call once in a while, or thunder, or something? Dionysus could make Diet Coke appear out of thin air. Why couldn’t my dad, whoever he was, make a phone appear?
---
We moved on to dueling in pairs. Luke announced he would be my partner, since this was my first time.
“Good luck,” one of the campers told me. “Luke’s the best swordsman in the last three hundred years.”
“Maybe he’ll go easy on me,” I said.
The camper snorted.
--- “The other campers steered clear of me as much as possible. Cabin eleven was too nervous to have sword class with me after what I’d done to the Ares folks in the woods, so my lessons with Luke became one-on-one. He pushed me harder than ever, and wasn’t afraid to bruise me up in the process.
“You’re going to need all the training you can get,” he promised, as we were working with swords and flaming torches. “Now let’s try that viper-beheading strike again. Fifty more repetitions.”
---
“Luke came running up the hill, carrying a pair of basketball shoes.
“Hey!” he panted. “Glad I caught you.”
Annabeth blushed, the way she always did when Luke was around.
“Just wanted to say good luck,” Luke told me. “And I thought . . . um, maybe you could use these.”
He handed me the sneakers, which looked pretty normal. They even smelled kind of normal.
Luke said, “Maia!”
White bird’s wings sprouted out of the heels, startling me so much, I dropped them. The shoes flapped around on the ground until the wings folded up and disappeared.
“Awesome!” Grover said.
Luke smiled. “Those served me well when I was on my quest. Gift from Dad. Of course, I don’t use them much these days. . . .” His expression turned sad.
I didn’t know what to say. It was cool enough that Luke had come to say good-bye. I’d been afraid he might resent me for getting so much attention the last few days. But here he was giving me a magic gift. . . . It made me blush almost as much as Annabeth.
“Hey, man,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Listen, Percy . . .” Luke looked uncomfortable. “A lot of hopes are riding on you. So just . . . kill some monsters for me, okay?"
We shook hands. Luke patted Grover’s head between his horns, then gave a good-bye hug to Annabeth, who looked like she might pass out.
After Luke was gone, I told her, “You’re hyperventilating.”
“Am not.”
“You let him capture the flag instead of you, didn’t you?”
“Oh . . . why do I want to go anywhere with you, Percy?” --- Then I was looking through the mist at strawberry fields, and the Long Island Sound in the distance. We seemed to be on the porch of the Big House. Standing with his back to us at the railing was a sandy-haired guy in shorts and an orange tank top. He was holding a bronze sword and seemed to be staring intently at something down in the meadow.”
“Luke!” I called.
He turned, eyes wide. I could swear he was standing three feet in front of me through a screen of mist, except I could only see the part of him that appeared in the rainbow.
“Percy!” His scarred face broke into a grin. “Is that Annabeth, too? Thank the gods! Are you guys okay?”
“We’re . . . uh . . . fine,” Annabeth stammered. She was madly straightening her dirty T-shirt, trying to comb the loose hair out of her face. “We thought—Chiron—I mean—”
“He’s down at the cabins.” Luke’s smile faded. “We’re having some issues with the campers. Listen, is everything cool with you? Is Grover all right?”
“I’m right here,” Grover called. He held the nozzle out to one side and stepped into Luke’s line of vision.
“What kind of issues?”
Just then a big Lincoln Continental pulled into the car wash with its stereo turned to maximum hip-hop. As the car slid into the next stall, the bass from the subwoofers vibrated so much, it shook the pavement.
“Chiron had to—what’s that noise?” Luke yelled.
“I’ll take care of it!” Annabeth yelled back, looking very relieved to have an excuse to get out of sight. “Grover, come on!”
“What?” Grover said. “But—”
“Give Percy the nozzle and come on!” she ordered.
Grover muttered something about girls being harder to understand than the Oracle at Delphi, then he handed me the spray gun and followed Annabeth.
I readjusted the hose so I could keep the rainbow going and still see Luke.
“Chiron had to break up a fight,”“Luke shouted to me over the music. “Things are pretty tense here, Percy. Word leaked out about the Zeus–Poseidon standoff. We’re still not sure how—probably the same scumbag who summoned the hellhound. Now the campers are starting to take sides. It’s shaping up like the Trojan War all over again. Aphrodite, Ares, and Apollo are backing Poseidon, more or less. Athena is backing Zeus.”
I shuddered to think that Clarisse’s cabin would ever be on my dad’s side for anything. In the next stall, I heard Annabeth and some guy arguing with each other, then the music’s volume decreased drastically.
“So what’s your status?” Luke asked me. “Chiron will be sorry he missed you.”
I told him pretty much everything, including my dreams. It felt so good to see him, to feel like I was back at camp even for a few minutes, that I didn’t “realize how long I had talked until the beeper went off on the spray machine, and I realized I only had one more minute before the water shut off.
“I wish I could be there,” Luke told me. “We can’t help much from here, I’m afraid, but listen . . . it had to be Hades who took the master bolt. He was there at Olympus at the winter solstice. I was chaperoning a field trip and we saw him.”
“But Chiron said the gods can’t take each other’s magic items directly.”
“That’s true,” Luke said, looking troubled. “Still . . . Hades has the helm of darkness. How could anybody else sneak into the throne room and steal the master bolt? You’d have to be invisible.”
We were both silent, until Luke seemed to realize what he’d said.
“Oh, hey,” he protested. “I didn’t mean Annabeth. She and I have known each other forever. She would never . . . I mean, she’s like a little sister to“me.”
I wondered if Annabeth would like that description. In the stall next to us, the music stopped completely. A man screamed in terror, car doors slammed, and the Lincoln peeled out of the car wash.
“You’d better go see what that was,” Luke said. “Listen, are you wearing the flying shoes? I’ll feel better if I know they’ve done you some good.”
“Oh . . . uh, yeah!” I tried not to sound like a guilty liar. “Yeah, they’ve come in handy.”
“Really?” He grinned. “They fit and everything?”
The water shut off. The mist started to evaporate.
“Well, take care of yourself out there in Denver,” Luke called, his voice getting fainter. “And tell Grover it’ll be better this time! Nobody will get turned into a pine tree if he just—”
But the mist was gone, and Luke’s image faded to nothing. I was alone in a wet, empty car wash stall.
--- She put down her Oreo, uneaten. “Like you said, Percy, a seven-year-old half-blood wouldn’t have made it very far alone. Athena guided me toward help. Thalia was twelve. Luke was fourteen. They’d both run away from home, like me. They were happy to take me with them. They were . . . amazing monster-fighters, even without training. We traveled north from Virginia without any real plans, fending off monsters for about two weeks before Grover found us.”
“I was supposed to escort Thalia to camp,” he said, sniffling. “Only Thalia. I had strict orders from Chiron: don’t do anything that would slow down the rescue. We knew Hades was after her, see, but I couldn’t just leave Luke and Annabeth by themselves. I thought . . . I thought I could lead all three of them to safety. It was my fault the Kindly Ones caught up with us. I froze. I got scared on the way back to camp and took some wrong turns. If I’d just been a little quicker . . .”
“Stop it,” Annabeth said. “No one blames you. Thalia didn’t blame you either.”
“She sacrificed herself to save us,” he said miserably. “Her death was my fault. The Council “of Cloven Elders said so.”
“Because you wouldn’t leave two other half-bloods behind?” I said. “That’s not fair.”
“Percy’s right,” Annabeth said. “I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for you, Grover. Neither would Luke. We don’t care what the council says.”
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
THE LIGHTNING THIEF;
“The guy was about nineteen, and he looked pretty cool. He was tall and muscular, with short-cropped sandy hair and a friendly smile. He wore an orange tank top, cutoffs, sandals, and a leather necklace with five different-colored clay beads. The only thing unsettling about his appearance was a thick white scar that ran from just beneath his right eye to his jaw, like an old knife slash.
“This is Luke,” Annabeth said, and her voice sounded different somehow. I glanced over and could’ve sworn she was blushing. She saw me looking, and her expression hardened again. “He’s your counselor for now.”
---
“The counselor, Luke, came over. He had the Hermes family resemblance, too. It was marred by that scar on his right cheek, but his smile was intact.
“Found you a sleeping bag,” he said. “And here, I stole you some toiletries from the camp store.”
I couldn’t tell if he was kidding about the stealing part.
I said, “Thanks.”
“No prob.” Luke sat next to me, pushed his back against the wall. “Tough first day?”
“I don’t belong here,” I said. “I don’t even believe in gods.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s how we all started. Once you start believing in them? It doesn’t get any easier.”
The bitterness in his voice surprised me, because Luke seemed like a pretty easygoing guy. He looked like he could handle just about anything.
“So your dad is Hermes?” I asked.
He pulled a switchblade out of his back pocket, and for a second I thought he was going to gut me, but he just scraped the mud off the sole of his sandal. “Yeah. Hermes.”
---
“Luke looked up and managed a smile. “Don’t worry about it, Percy. The campers here, they’re mostly good people. After all, we’re extended family, right? We take care of each other.”
He seemed to understand how lost I felt, and I was grateful for that, because an older guy like him—even if he was a counselor—should’ve steered clear of an uncool middle-schooler like me. But Luke had welcomed me into the cabin. He’d even stolen me some toiletries, which was the nicest thing anybody had done for me all day.
I decided to ask him my last big question, the one that had been bothering me all afternoon. “Clarisse, from Ares, was joking about me being ‘Big Three’ material. Then Annabeth . . . twice, she said I might be ‘the one.’ She said I should talk to the Oracle. What was that all about?”
Luke folded his knife. “I hate prophecies.”
“What do you mean?”
His face twitched around the scar. “Let’s just say I messed things up for everybody else. The last two years, ever since my trip to the Garden of the Hesperides went sour, Chiron hasn’t allowed any more quests. Annabeth’s been dying to get out into the world. She pestered Chiron so much he finally told her he already knew her fate. He’d had a prophecy from the Oracle. He wouldn’t tell her the whole thing, but he said Annabeth wasn’t destined to go on a quest yet. She had to wait until . . . somebody special came to the camp.”
“Somebody special?”
“Don’t worry about it, kid,” Luke said. “Annabeth wants to think every new camper who comes through here is the omen she’s been waiting for. Now, come on, it’s dinnertime.”
---
I started to understand Luke’s bitterness and how he seemed to resent his father, Hermes. So okay, maybe gods had important things to do. But couldn’t they call once in a while, or thunder, or something? Dionysus could make Diet Coke appear out of thin air. Why couldn’t my dad, whoever he was, make a phone appear?
---
We moved on to dueling in pairs. Luke announced he would be my partner, since this was my first time.
“Good luck,” one of the campers told me. “Luke’s the best swordsman in the last three hundred years.”
“Maybe he’ll go easy on me,” I said.
The camper snorted.
---
“The other campers steered clear of me as much as possible. Cabin eleven was too nervous to have sword class with me after what I’d done to the Ares folks in the woods, so my lessons with Luke became one-on-one. He pushed me harder than ever, and wasn’t afraid to bruise me up in the process.
“You’re going to need all the training you can get,” he promised, as we were working with swords and flaming torches. “Now let’s try that viper-beheading strike again. Fifty more repetitions.”
---
“Luke came running up the hill, carrying a pair of basketball shoes.
“Hey!” he panted. “Glad I caught you.”
Annabeth blushed, the way she always did when Luke was around.
“Just wanted to say good luck,” Luke told me. “And I thought . . . um, maybe you could use these.”
He handed me the sneakers, which looked pretty normal. They even smelled kind of normal.
Luke said, “Maia!”
White bird’s wings sprouted out of the heels, startling me so much, I dropped them. The shoes flapped around on the ground until the wings folded up and disappeared.
“Awesome!” Grover said.
Luke smiled. “Those served me well when I was on my quest. Gift from Dad. Of course, I don’t use them much these days. . . .” His expression turned sad.
I didn’t know what to say. It was cool enough that Luke had come to say good-bye. I’d been afraid he might resent me for getting so much attention the last few days. But here he was giving me a magic gift. . . . It made me blush almost as much as Annabeth.
“Hey, man,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Listen, Percy . . .” Luke looked uncomfortable. “A lot of hopes are riding on you. So just . . . kill some monsters for me, okay?"
We shook hands. Luke patted Grover’s head between his horns, then gave a good-bye hug to Annabeth, who looked like she might pass out.
After Luke was gone, I told her, “You’re hyperventilating.”
“Am not.”
“You let him capture the flag instead of you, didn’t you?”
“Oh . . . why do I want to go anywhere with you, Percy?”
---
Then I was looking through the mist at strawberry fields, and the Long Island Sound in the distance. We seemed to be on the porch of the Big House. Standing with his back to us at the railing was a sandy-haired guy in shorts and an orange tank top. He was holding a bronze sword and seemed to be staring intently at something down in the meadow.”
“Luke!” I called.
He turned, eyes wide. I could swear he was standing three feet in front of me through a screen of mist, except I could only see the part of him that appeared in the rainbow.
“Percy!” His scarred face broke into a grin. “Is that Annabeth, too? Thank the gods! Are you guys okay?”
“We’re . . . uh . . . fine,” Annabeth stammered. She was madly straightening her dirty T-shirt, trying to comb the loose hair out of her face. “We thought—Chiron—I mean—”
“He’s down at the cabins.” Luke’s smile faded. “We’re having some issues with the campers. Listen, is everything cool with you? Is Grover all right?”
“I’m right here,” Grover called. He held the nozzle out to one side and stepped into Luke’s line of vision.
“What kind of issues?”
Just then a big Lincoln Continental pulled into the car wash with its stereo turned to maximum hip-hop. As the car slid into the next stall, the bass from the subwoofers vibrated so much, it shook the pavement.
“Chiron had to—what’s that noise?” Luke yelled.
“I’ll take care of it!” Annabeth yelled back, looking very relieved to have an excuse to get out of sight. “Grover, come on!”
“What?” Grover said. “But—”
“Give Percy the nozzle and come on!” she ordered.
Grover muttered something about girls being harder to understand than the Oracle at Delphi, then he handed me the spray gun and followed Annabeth.
I readjusted the hose so I could keep the rainbow going and still see Luke.
“Chiron had to break up a fight,”“Luke shouted to me over the music. “Things are pretty tense here, Percy. Word leaked out about the Zeus–Poseidon standoff. We’re still not sure how—probably the same scumbag who summoned the hellhound. Now the campers are starting to take sides. It’s shaping up like the Trojan War all over again. Aphrodite, Ares, and Apollo are backing Poseidon, more or less. Athena is backing Zeus.”
I shuddered to think that Clarisse’s cabin would ever be on my dad’s side for anything. In the next stall, I heard Annabeth and some guy arguing with each other, then the music’s volume decreased drastically.
“So what’s your status?” Luke asked me. “Chiron will be sorry he missed you.”
I told him pretty much everything, including my dreams. It felt so good to see him, to feel like I was back at camp even for a few minutes, that I didn’t “realize how long I had talked until the beeper went off on the spray machine, and I realized I only had one more minute before the water shut off.
“I wish I could be there,” Luke told me. “We can’t help much from here, I’m afraid, but listen . . . it had to be Hades who took the master bolt. He was there at Olympus at the winter solstice. I was chaperoning a field trip and we saw him.”
“But Chiron said the gods can’t take each other’s magic items directly.”
“That’s true,” Luke said, looking troubled. “Still . . . Hades has the helm of darkness. How could anybody else sneak into the throne room and steal the master bolt? You’d have to be invisible.”
We were both silent, until Luke seemed to realize what he’d said.
“Oh, hey,” he protested. “I didn’t mean Annabeth. She and I have known each other forever. She would never . . . I mean, she’s like a little sister to“me.”
I wondered if Annabeth would like that description. In the stall next to us, the music stopped completely. A man screamed in terror, car doors slammed, and the Lincoln peeled out of the car wash.
“You’d better go see what that was,” Luke said. “Listen, are you wearing the flying shoes? I’ll feel better if I know they’ve done you some good.”
“Oh . . . uh, yeah!” I tried not to sound like a guilty liar. “Yeah, they’ve come in handy.”
“Really?” He grinned. “They fit and everything?”
The water shut off. The mist started to evaporate.
“Well, take care of yourself out there in Denver,” Luke called, his voice getting fainter. “And tell Grover it’ll be better this time! Nobody will get turned into a pine tree if he just—”
But the mist was gone, and Luke’s image faded to nothing. I was alone in a wet, empty car wash stall.
---
She put down her Oreo, uneaten. “Like you said, Percy, a seven-year-old half-blood wouldn’t have made it very far alone. Athena guided me toward help. Thalia was twelve. Luke was fourteen. They’d both run away from home, like me. They were happy to take me with them. They were . . . amazing monster-fighters, even without training. We traveled north from Virginia without any real plans, fending off monsters for about two weeks before Grover found us.”
“I was supposed to escort Thalia to camp,” he said, sniffling. “Only Thalia. I had strict orders from Chiron: don’t do anything that would slow down the rescue. We knew Hades was after her, see, but I couldn’t just leave Luke and Annabeth by themselves. I thought . . . I thought I could lead all three of them to safety. It was my fault the Kindly Ones caught up with us. I froze. I got scared on the way back to camp and took some wrong turns. If I’d just been a little quicker . . .”
“Stop it,” Annabeth said. “No one blames you. Thalia didn’t blame you either.”
“She sacrificed herself to save us,” he said miserably. “Her death was my fault. The Council “of Cloven Elders said so.”
“Because you wouldn’t leave two other half-bloods behind?” I said. “That’s not fair.”
“Percy’s right,” Annabeth said. “I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for you, Grover. Neither would Luke. We don’t care what the council says.”