DIARY 4/2
My name is Luke.
Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up with this diary. My life is pretty crazy.
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For three days, Thalia and I had been following the goat across Virginia. I wasn’t sure why. To me, the goat didn’t look like anything special, but Thalia was more agitated than I’d ever seen her before. _________________________
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Anyway, this goat would pop up at random times, always in the distance. Whenever we tried to catch up to it, the goat would vanish and appear farther away, as if it was leading us somewhere.
Me, I would’ve left it alone. Thalia wouldn’t explain why she thought it was important, but she and I had been adventuring together long enough that I’d learned to trust her judgment. So we followed the goat.
Early in the morning, we made it into Richmond. We trudged across a narrow bridge over a lazy green river, past wooded parks and Civil War cemeteries. As we got closer to the center of town, we navigated through sleepy neighborhoods of red brick town houses wedged close together, with white-columned porches and tiny gardens.
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After walking another mile, my feet felt like they were melting inside my shoes. I hoped we could find a place to rest, maybe get some food. Instead, we found the goat.
The street we were following opened up into a big circular park. Stately red brick mansions faced the roundabout. In the middle of the circle, atop a twenty- foot white marble pedestal, was a bronze dude sitting on horseback. Grazing at the base of the monument was the goat.
“Hide!” Thalia pulled me behind a row of rosebushes.
“It’s just a goat,” I said for the millionth time. “Why—?”
“It’s special,” Thalia insisted. “_________ Her name is Amaltheia.”
She’d never mentioned the goat’s name before. I wondered why she sounded so nervous.
Thalia isn’t scared of much. _________________but if you saw her walking down the street you’d clear a path. She wears black leather boots, black jeans, and a tattered leather jacket studded with punk rock buttons. Her hair is dark and choppy like a feral animal’s. Her intense blue eyes bore into you as if she’s considering the best way to beat you to a pulp.
Anything that scared her, I had to take seriously.
“So you’ve seen this goat before?” I asked.
She nodded reluctantly. “____________ Amaltheia led me out of the city. And later, that night you and I met...she led me to you.”
I stared at Thalia. As far as I knew, our meeting had been an accident. We literally ran into each other in a dragon’s cave outside Charleston and teamed up to stay alive. Thalia had never mentioned a goat.
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Thalia was right. The goat was just standing there, less than a hundred yards away, contentedly nibbling grass at the base of the monument.
I was no expert on barnyard animals, but Amaltheia did look strange now that we were closer. She had curlicue horns like a ram, but the swollen udders of a girl goat. And her shaggy gray fur...was it glowing? Wisps of light seemed to cling to her like a cloud of neon, making her look blurry and ghostly.
A couple of cars looped around the traffic circle, but nobody seemed to notice the radioactive goat. That didn’t surprise me. There’s some sort of magical camouflage that keeps______________from seeing the true appearance________. Thalia and I weren’t sure what this force was called or how it worked, but it was pretty powerful. __________ might see the goat as just a stray dog, or they might not see it at all.
Thalia grabbed my wrist. “Come on. Let’s try to talk to it.”
“First we hide from the goat,” I said. “Now you want to talk to the goat?”
Thalia dragged me out of the rosebushes and pulled me across the street. I didn’t protest. When Thalia gets an idea in her head, you just have to go with it. She always gets her way.
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____She’s my only friend._______________________________________
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I took a step back, resisting the urge to grab my weapon. Oh, by the way, my weapon was a golf club. Feel free to laugh. ________________________ Now all I had was a nine-iron that I carried on my back. Not exactly epic. If the goat went commando on us, I’d be in trouble.
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Suddenly the mist thickened and swelled around Amaltheia. __________________
“You sure about this?” I asked Thalia.
She turned to me. “Amaltheia leads me to good things. The last time she appeared, she led me to you.”
The compliment warmed me like a cup of hot chocolate. I’m a sucker that way. Thalia can flash those blue eyes, give me one kind word, and she can get me to do pretty much whatever. But I couldn’t help wondering: back in Charleston, had the goat led her to me, or simply led her into a dragon’s cave?
I exhaled. “Okay. Creepy mansion, here we come.”
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It felt like my heart was trying to climb my throat, but I charged at the drapes and whacked them with my golf club.
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" ____________”
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“Fire,” I said. “You mentioned fire.”
He nodded, then spread his hands to indicate he had no further details.
An idea buzzed in the back of my head. Fire. _____weapons. Some of the supplies we had in this apartment...the list I’d put into the search engine, hoping for a magic formula.
“What is it?” Thalia asked. “I know that look. You’re on to something.”
“Let me see the keyboard.” I sat at the computer and did a new Web search.
An article popped up immediately.
Thalia peered over my shoulder. “Luke, that would be perfect! But I thought that stuff was just a legend.”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “If it’s real, how do we make it? There’s no recipe here.”
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“Ancient history books,” Thalia said. “________A lot of those are really old. They probably have information that wouldn’t be on the Internet.”
All three of us ran to the shelves. We started pulling out books. Soon _______ library looked like it had been hit by a hurricane, but the old man didn’t seem to care. He tossed titles and flipped through pages as fast as we did. In fact, without him, we never would’ve found the answer. After lots of fruitless searching, he came racing over, tapping a page in an old leather- bound book.
I scanned the list of ingredients, and my excitement built. “This is it. The recipe for Greek fire.”
How had I known to search for it? Perhaps ________________he’s got a way with potions and alchemy.
Perhaps I’d seen the recipe somewhere before, and searching the apartment had triggered that memory.
Everything we needed was in this room. I’d seen all of the ingredients when we’d gone through the supplies from________________________.
Actually, I shouldn’t write down the whole recipe, even in this diary. If someone came across it and learned the secret of Greek fire...well, I don’t want to be responsible for_________________.
I read to the end of the list. There was only one thing missing.
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“It’ll be fine.” I tried to sound confident. “I’ll prepare the mixture. When it’s ready_______________”
“And set the house on fire,” Thalia added.
__________You’ll do that anyway if you succeed. You do understand how dangerous Greek fire is?
I swallowed. “Yeah. It’s magical fire. Whatever it touches, it burns. You can’t put it out with water, or a fire extinguisher, or anything else. But if we can make enough for some kind of bomb__________”
“They’ll burn.” Thalia glanced at the old man. “Please tell me___________.”

___________I don’t think so, he typed. But Greek fire will turn this room into an inferno. It will spread through the entire house in a matter of seconds.
I looked at the empty enclosure. _________we had roughly an hour before sunset. When those bars rose and_________we might have a chance—if we could surprise_______with an explosion, and if we could somehow get around them and reach the escape panel____________ burned alive. Too many ifs.
My mind ran through a dozen different strategies____________________.
“Let’s make the Greek fire,” I said. “Then we’ll figure out the rest.”
Thalia_______ helped me gather the things we needed. We started______and did some extremely dangerous cooking. Time passed too quickly.
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I tried to focus on my work. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I had no choice. Maybe _________lending me some of his alchemy know-how. Or maybe I just got lucky. Finally I had a pot full of goopy black gunk, which I poured into an old glass jelly jar. I sealed the lid.
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I gripped Thalia’s hand. “Now.”
We burst out of the closet and sprinted for the enclosure. Inside, the panel was already closing._________________but I didn’t dare look back. We scrambled into the cage. I lunged for the exit panel, wedging it open with my golf club.
“Go, go, go!” I yelled.
Thalia wriggled through as the metal plate started to bend the golf club.
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Then something grabbed my arm. Thalia pulled me into the chute. The panel closed, snapping my golf club.
We crawled through a metal duct into another bedroom and stumbled for the door.
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And the mansion shook with a massive explosion.
We burst into the hallway, which was already on fire. Flames licked the wallpaper and the carpet steamed. __________ bedroom door had been blown off its hinges, and fire was pouring out like an avalanche, vaporizing everything in its path.
We reached the stairs. The smoke was so thick, I couldn’t see the bottom. We stumbled and coughed, the heat searing my eyes and my lungs. We got to the base of the stairs, and I was beginning to think we’d reach the door,____________________________________________________________________
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My eyes stung from the smoke. I could hardly breathe. I saw Thalia_____________________
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I would’ve lain there stunned and horrified until the fiery ceiling collapsed on me, but Thalia grabbed my arm and yelled, “Hurry!”
We bolted for the front door. I was wondering how we’d open it, when the avalanche of fire poured down the staircase and caught us. The building exploded.
I can’t remember how we got out. I can only assume that the shockwave blasted the front door open and pushed us outside.
The next thing I knew, I was sprawled in the traffic circle, coughing and gasping as a tower of fire roared into the evening sky. My throat burned. My eyes felt like they’d been splashed with acid. I looked for Thalia and instead found myself staring at __________. I screamed, somehow found the energy to stand, and ran. I didn’t stop until I was cowering behind the statue of Robert E. Lee.
Yeah, I know. It sounds comical now. But it’s a miracle I didn’t have a heart attack or get hit by a car. Finally Thalia caught up to me, ________________
Together we stood and watched the mansion burn. Bricks crumbled. Black draperies burst into sheets of red fire. The roof collapsed and smoke billowed into the sky.
Thalia let loose a sob. A tear etched through the soot on her face.
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I’d just swallowed the last bite when I heard a faint metal ping from a nearby alley. My ears started tingling. We weren’t alone.
“Someone’s close by,” I said.
Thalia tensed. “How can you be sure?”
I didn’t have an answer, but I rose to my feet. ________________________________________________________________________________ I understood why Amaltheia had wanted Thalia to claim it.
We crept along the wall of the warehouse.
We turned into a dark alleyway that dead-ended at a loading dock piled with old scrap metal.
I pointed at the platform.
Thalia frowned. She whispered, “Are you sure?”
I nodded. “Something’s down there. I sense it.”
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The little girl struggled. She couldn’t have been more than seven years old.
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“No,” I promised. The poor thing wasn’t fighting as hard, but she was shivering like crazy, terrified of us. __________________________________________________
I held her, more to comfort than restrain now. Eventually she stopped kicking. She felt cold. Her ribs were bony under her flannel pajamas. I wondered how long this little girl had gone without eating. She was even younger than I had been when I ran away.
Despite her fear, she looked at me with large eyes. They were startlingly gray, beautiful and intelligent. ______________________________________________________________________________________
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I didn’t want to scare her even worse. “Well, it’s hard to explain, ____________. Where’s your family?”
The little girl’s expression turned hard and angry. Her chin trembled. “My family hates me. They don’t want me. I ran away.”
My heart felt like it was cracking into pieces. She had such pain in her voice—familiar pain. I looked at Thalia, and we made a silent decision right there. We would take care of this kid. ______________________________________________________________________________________
Now we’d found this little girl. It was almost like a second chance.
Thalia knelt next to me. She put her hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “What’s your name, kiddo?”
“Annabeth.”
I couldn’t help smiling. I’d never heard that name before, but it was pretty, and it seemed to fit her. “Nice name,” I told her. “I tell you what, Annabeth. You’re pretty fierce. We could use a fighter like you.”
Her eyes widened. “You could?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said earnestly. Then a sudden thought struck me. ______________________________________________________________________________________
“How’d you like a real ________ weapon?” I asked her. “______________________________________________________________________________________”
Annabeth took the dagger and studied it in awe. I know...she was seven years old at most. What was I thinking giving her a weapon? ______________________________________________________________________________________
Annabeth could use a weapon.
“Knives are only for the bravest and quickest fighters,” I told her. ______________________________________________________________________________________
“They don’t have the reach or power of a sword, but they’re easy to conceal and they can find weak spots in your enemy’s armor. It takes a clever warrior to use a knife. I have a feeling you’re pretty clever.”
Annabeth beamed at me, and for that instant, all my problems seemed to melt. I felt as if I’d done one thing right. I swore to myself I would never let this girl come to harm.
“I am clever!” she said.
Thalia laughed and tousled Annabeth’s hair. Just like that—we had a new companion.
“We’d better get going, Annabeth,” Thalia said. “We have a safe house on the James River. We’ll get you some clothes and food.”
Annabeth’s smile wavered. For a moment, she got that wild look in her eyes again. “You’re...you’re not going to take me back to my family? Promise?”
I swallowed the lump out of my throat. Annabeth was so young, but she’d learned a hard lesson, just like Thalia and I had. ______________________________________________________________________________________
I put my hand on Annabeth’s shoulder. “You’re part of our family now. And I promise I’m not going to fail you like our families did us. Deal?”
“Deal!” she said happily, clutching her new dagger.
Thalia___________ smiled at me with approval. “Now, come on. We can’t stay put for long!”
So here I am on guard duty.
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