“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.”
I got to the sword-fighters arena and found that Luke had had the same idea. His gym bag was plopped at the edge of the stage. He was working solo, whaling on battle dummies with a sword I’d never seen before. It must’ve been a regular steel blade, because he was slashing the dummies’ heads right off, stabbing through their straw-stuffed guts. His orange counselor’s shirt was dripping with sweat. His expression was so intense, his life might’ve really been in danger. I watched, fascinated, as he disemboweled the whole row of dummies, hacking off limbs and basically reducing them to a pile of straw and armor.
They were only dummies, but I still couldn’t help being awed by Luke’s skill. The guy was an incredible fighter. It made me wonder, again, how he possibly could’ve failed at his quest.
Finally, he saw me, and stopped mid-swing. “Percy.”
“Um, sorry,” I said, embarrassed. “I just—”
“It’s okay,” he said, lowering his sword. “Just doing some last-minute practice.”
“Those dummies won’t be bothering anybody anymore.”
Luke shrugged. “We build new ones every summer.”
Now that his sword wasn’t swirling around, I could see something odd about it. The blade was two different types of metal—one edge bronze, the other steel.
Luke noticed me looking at it. “Oh, this? New toy. This is Backbiter.”
“Backbiter?”
Luke turned the blade in the light so it glinted wickedly. “One side is celestial bronze. The other is tempered steel. Works on mortals and immortals both.”
I thought about what Chiron had told me when I started my quest—that a hero should never harm mortals unless absolutely necessary.
“I didn’t know they could make weapons like that.”
“They probably can’t,” Luke agreed. “It’s one of a kind.”
He gave me a tiny smile, then slid the sword into “ its scabbard. “Listen, I was going to come looking for you. What do you say we go down to the woods one last time, look for something to fight?”
I don’t know why I hesitated. I should’ve felt relieved that Luke was being so friendly. Ever since I’d gotten back from the quest, he’d been acting a little distant. I was afraid he might resent me for all the attention I’d gotten.
“You think it’s a good idea?” I asked. “I mean—”
“Aw, come on.” He rummaged in his gym bag and pulled out a six-pack of Cokes. “Drinks are on me.”
I stared at the Cokes, wondering where the heck he’d gotten them. There were no regular mortal sodas at the camp store. No way to smuggle them in unless you talked to a satyr, maybe.
Of course, the magic dinner goblets would fill with anything you want, but it just didn’t taste the same as a real Coke, straight out of the can.
Sugar and caffeine. My willpower crumbled.
“Sure,” I decided. “Why not?”
We walked down to the woods and kicked around for some kind of monster to fight, but it was too hot. All the monsters with any sense must’ve been taking siestas in their nice cool caves.
We found a shady spot by the creek where I’d broken Clarisse’s spear during my first capture the flag game. We sat on a big rock, drank our Cokes, and watched the sunlight in the woods.
After a while Luke said, “You miss being on a quest?”
“With monsters attacking me every three feet? Are you kidding?”
Luke raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, I miss it,” I admitted. “You?”
A shadow passed over his face. I was used to hearing from the girls how good-looking Luke was, but at the moment, he looked weary, and angry, and not at all handsome. His blond hair was gray in the sunlight. The scar on his face looked deeper than usual. I could imagine him as an old man.
“I’ve lived at Half-Blood Hill year-round since I was fourteen,” he told me. “Ever since Thalia . . . well, you know. I trained, and trained, and trained. I never got to be a normal teenager, out there in the real world. Then they threw me one quest, and when I came back, it was like, ‘Okay, ride’s over. Have a nice life.’”
He crumpled his Coke can and threw into the creek, which really shocked me. One of the first things you learn at Camp Half-Blood is: Don’t litter. You’ll hear from the nymphs and the naiads. They’ll get even. You’ll crawl into bed one night and find your sheets filled with centipedes and mud.
“The heck with laurel wreaths,” Luke said. “I’m not going to end up like those dusty trophies in the Big House attic.”
“You make it sound like you’re leaving.”
Luke gave “me a twisted smile. “Oh, I’m leaving, all right, Percy. I brought you down here to say good-bye.” He snapped his fingers. A small fire burned a hole in the ground at my feet. Out crawled something glistening black, about the size of my hand. A scorpion.
I started to go for my pen.
“I wouldn’t,” Luke cautioned. “Pit scorpions can jump up to fifteen feet. Its stinger can pierce right through your clothes. You’ll be dead in sixty seconds.”
“Luke, what—”
Then it hit me.”
You will be betrayed by one who calls you a friend.
“You,” I said.
He stood calmly and brushed off his jeans.
The scorpion paid him no attention. It kept its beady black eyes on me, clamping its pincers as it crawled onto my shoe.
“I saw a lot out there in the world, Percy,” Luke said. “Didn’t you feel it—the darkness gathering, the monsters growing stronger? Didn’t you realize how useless it all is? All the heroics—being pawns of the gods. They should’ve been overthrown thousands of years ago, but they’ve hung on, thanks to us half-bloods.”
I couldn’t believe this was happening.
“Luke . . . you’re talking about our parents,” I said.
He laughed. “That’s supposed to make me love them? Their precious ‘Western civilization’ is a disease, Percy. It’s killing the world. The only way to stop it is to burn it to the ground, start over with something more honest.”
“You’re as crazy as Ares.”
His eyes flared. “Ares is a fool. He never realized the true master he was serving. If I had time, Percy, I could explain. But I’m afraid you won’t live that long.”
The scorpion crawled onto my pants leg.
There had to be a way out of this. I needed time to think.
“Kronos,” I said. “That’s who you serve.”
The air got colder.
“You should be careful with names,” Luke warned.
“Kronos got you to steal the master bolt and the helm. He spoke to you in your dreams.”
Luke’s eye twitched. “He spoke to you, too, Percy. You should’ve listened.”
“He’s brainwashing you, Luke.”
“You’re wrong. He showed me that my talents are being wasted. You know what my quest was two years ago, Percy? My father, Hermes, wanted me to steal a golden apple from the Garden of the Hesperides and return it to Olympus. After all the training I’d done, that was the best he could think up.”
“That’s not an easy quest,” I said. “Hercules did it.”
“Exactly,” Luke said. “Where’s the glory in repeating what others have done? All the gods know how to do is replay their past. My heart wasn’t in it. The dragon in the garden gave me this”—he pointed angrily at his scar—“and when I came back, all I got was pity. I wanted to pull Olympus down stone by stone right then, but I bided my time. I began to dream of Kronos. He convinced me to steal something worthwhile, something no hero had ever had the courage to take. When we went on that winter-solstice field trip, while the other campers were asleep, I snuck into the throne room and took Zeus’s master bolt right from his chair. Hades’s helm of darkness, too. You wouldn’t believe how easy it was. The Olympians are so arrogant; they never dreamed someone would dare steal from them. Their security is horrible. I was halfway across New Jersey before I heard the storms rumbling, and I knew they’d discovered my theft.”
The scorpion was sitting on my knee now, staring at me with its glittering eyes. I tried to keep my voice level.
“So why didn’t you bring the items to Kronos?”
Luke’s smile wavered. “I . . . I got overconfident. Zeus sent out his sons and daughters to find the stolen bolt— Artemis, Apollo, my father, Hermes. “But it was Ares who caught me. I could have beaten him, but I wasn’t careful enough. He disarmed me, took the items of power, threatened to return them to Olympus and burn me alive. Then Kronos’s voice came to me and told me what to say. I put the idea in Ares’s head about a great war between the gods. I said all he had to do was hide the items away for a while and watch the others fight. Ares got a wicked gleam in his eyes. I knew he was hooked. He let me go, and I returned to Olympus before anyone noticed my absence.” Luke drew his new sword. He ran his thumb down the flat of the blade, as if he were hypnotized by its beauty. “Afterward, the Lord of the Titans . . . h-he punished me with nightmares. I swore not to fail again. Back at Camp Half-Blood, in my dreams, I was told that a second hero would arrive, one who could be tricked into taking the bolt and the helm the rest of the way—from Ares down to Tartarus.”
“You summoned the hellhound, that night in the forest.”
“We had to make Chiron think the camp wasn’t safe for you, so he would start you on your quest. We had to confirm his fears that Hades was after you. And it worked.”
“The flying shoes were cursed,” I said. “They were supposed to drag me and the backpack into Tartarus.” “And they would have, if you’d been wearing them. But you gave them to the satyr, which wasn’t part of the plan. Grover messes up everything he touches. He even confused the curse.”
Luke looked down at the scorpion, which was now sitting on my thigh. “You should have died in Tartarus, Percy. But don’t worry, I’ll leave you with my little friend to set things right.”
“Thalia gave her life to save you,” I said, gritting my teeth. “And this is how you repay her?”
“Don’t speak of Thalia!” he shouted. “The gods let her die! That’s one of the many things they will pay for.”
“You’re being used, Luke. You and Ares both. Don’t listen to Kronos.”
“I’ve been used?” Luke’s voice turned shrill. “Look at yourself. What has your dad ever done for you? Kronos will rise. You’ve only delayed his plans. He will cast the Olympians into Tartarus and drive humanity back to their caves. All except the strongest—the ones who serve him.”
“Call off the bug,” I said. “If you’re so strong, fight me yourself.”
Luke smiled. “Nice try, Percy. But I’m not Ares. You can’t bait me. My lord is waiting, and he’s got plenty of quests for me to undertake.”
“Luke—”
“Good-bye, Percy. There is a new Golden Age coming. You won’t be part of it.”
He slashed his sword in an arc and disappeared in a ripple of darkness.
The scorpion lunged.
---
“I can’t believe that Luke . . .” Annabeth’s voice faltered. Her expression turned angry and sad. “Yes. Yes, I can believe it. May the gods curse him. . . . He was never the same after his quest.”
“This must be reported to Olympus,” Chiron murmured. “I will go at once.”
“Luke is out there right now,” I said. “I have to go after him.”
Chiron shook his head. “No, Percy. The gods—”
“Won’t even talk about Kronos,” I snapped. “Zeus declared the matter closed!”
“Percy, I know this is hard. But you must not rush out for vengeance. You aren’t ready.”
I didn’t like it, but part of me suspected Chiron was right. One look at my hand, and I knew I wasn’t going to be sword fighting any time soon. “Chiron . . . your prophecy from the Oracle . . . it was about Kronos, wasn’t it? Was I in it? And Annabeth?”
Chiron glanced nervously at the ceiling. “Percy, it isn’t my place—”
“You’ve been ordered not to talk to me about it, haven’t you?”
His eyes were sympathetic, but sad. “You will be a great hero, child. I will do my best to prepare you. But if I’m right about the path ahead of you . . .”
Thunder boomed overhead, rattling the windows.
“All right!” Chiron shouted. “Fine!”
He sighed in frustration. “The gods have their reasons, Percy. Knowing too much of your future is never a good thing.”
Every camper knew the story behind the tree. Six years ago, Grover, Annabeth, and two other demigods named Thalia and Luke had come to Camp Half-Blood chased by an army of monsters. When they got cornered on top of this hill, Thalia, a daughter of Zeus, had made her last stand here to give her friends time to reach safety. As she was dying, her father, Zeus, took pity on her and changed her into a pine tree. Her spirit had reinforced the magic borders of the camp, protecting it from monsters. The pine had been here ever since, strong and healthy.
“But now, its needles were yellow. A huge pile of dead ones littered the base of the tree. In the center of the trunk, three feet from the ground, was a puncture mark the size of a bullet hole, oozing green sap.
A sliver of ice ran through my chest. Now I understood why the camp was in danger. The magical borders were failing because Thalia’s tree was dying.
Someone had poisoned it. ----
“Chiron,” I said. “What about the tree? What happened?”
He shook his head sadly. “The poison used on Thalia’s pine is something from the Underworld, Percy. Some venom even I have never seen. It must have come from a monster quite deep in the pits of Tartarus.”
“Then we know who’s responsible. Kro—”
“Do not invoke the titan lord’s name, Percy. Especially not here, not now.”
“But last summer he tried to cause a civil war in Olympus! This has to be his idea. He’d get Luke to do it, that traitor.”
“Perhaps,” Chiron said. “But I fear I am being held responsible because I did not prevent it and I cannot cure it. The tree has only a few weeks of life left unless . . .”
“Unless what?” Annabeth asked.
“No,” Chiron said. “A foolish thought. The whole valley is feeling the shock of the poison. The magical borders are deteriorating. The camp itself is dying. Only one source of magic would be strong enough to reverse the poison, and it was lost centuries ago.” ---
After the satyrs filed in to dinner, the Hermes cabin brought up the rear. They were always the biggest cabin. Last summer, it had been led by Luke, the guy who’d fought with Thalia and Annabeth on top of Half-Blood Hill. For a while, before Poseidon had claimed me, I’d lodged in the Hermes cabin. Luke had befriended me . . . and then he’d tried to kill me.
---
[...] and they had those elfish features all Hermes’s kids had: upturned eyebrows, sarcastic smiles, a gleam in their eyes whenever they looked at you—like they were about to drop a firecracker down your shirt.
---
After lunch, I worked out in the arena with Apollo’s cabin. Swordplay had always been my strength. People said I was better at it than any camper in the last hundred years, except maybe Luke. People always compared me to Luke.
---
The whole hill seemed to be infected, dying from the poison that had sunk into the tree’s roots. The longer I sat there, the angrier I got.
Luke had done this. I remembered his sly smile, the dragon-claw scar across his face. He’d pretended to be my friend, and the whole time he’d been Kronos’s number-one servant.
I opened the palm of my hand. The scar Luke had given me last summer was fading, but I could still see it—a white asterisk-shaped wound where his pit scorpion had stung me.
I thought about what Luke had told me right before he’d tried to kill me: Good-bye, Percy. There is a new Golden Age coming. You won’t be part of it.
---
“Um, thanks,” I said. “But Lord Hermes, why are you helping me?”
He gave me a melancholy smile. “Perhaps because I hope that you can save many people on this quest, Percy. Not just your friend Grover.”
“I stared at him. “You don’t mean . . . Luke?”
Hermes didn’t answer.
“Look,” I said. “Lord Hermes, I mean, thanks and everything, but you might as well take back your gifts. Luke can’t be saved. Even if I could find him . . . he told me he wanted to tear down Olympus stone by stone. He betrayed everybody he knew. He—he hates you especially.”
Hermes gazed up at the stars. “My dear young cousin, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the eons, it’s that you can’t give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it. It doesn’t matter if they hate you, or embarrass you, or simply don’t appreciate your genius for inventing the Internet—”
“You invented the Internet?”
It was my idea, Martha said.
Rats are delicious, George said.
“It was my idea!” Hermes said. “I mean the Internet, not the rats. But that’s not the point. Percy, do you understand what I’m saying about family?”
“I—I’m not sure.”
“You will some day.” Hermes got up and brushed the sand off his legs. “In the meantime, I must be going.” ---
Then I heard another voice outside—one that chilled me worse than any monster’s.
“—only a matter of time. Don’t push me, Agrius!”
It was Luke, beyond a doubt. I could never forget his voice.
“I’m not pushing you!” another guy growled. His voice was deeper and even angrier than Luke’s. “I’m just saying, if this gamble doesn’t pay off—”
“It’ll pay off,” Luke snapped. “They’ll take the bait. Now, come, we’ve got to get to the admiralty suite and check on the casket.”
Their voices receded down the corridor.
Tyson whimpered. “Leave now?”
Annabeth and I exchanged looks and came to a silent agreement.
“We can’t,” I told Tyson.
“We have to find out what Luke is up to,” Annabeth agreed. “And if possible, we’re going to beat him up, bind him in chains, and drag him to Mount Olympus.”
---
We kept going down the corridor. I didn’t need maps anymore to know I was getting close to Luke. I sensed something cold and unpleasant—the presence of evil.
---
“A group of monsters had assembled in front of the candy store: a dozen Laistrygonian giants like the ones who’d attacked me with dodge balls, two hellhounds, and a few even stranger creatures—humanoid females with twin serpent tails instead of legs.
The monsters made a semicircle around a young guy in Greek armor who was hacking on a straw dummy. A lump formed in my throat when I realized the dummy was wearing an orange Camp Half-Blood T-shirt. As we watched, the guy in armor stabbed the dummy through its belly and ripped upward. Straw flew everywhere. The monsters cheered and howled.
Annabeth stepped away from the window. Her face was ashen.
“Come on,” I told her, trying to sound braver than I felt. “The sooner we find Luke the better.”
At the end of the hallway were double oak doors that looked like they must lead somewhere important. When we were thirty feet away, Tyson stopped. “Voices inside.”
“You can hear that far?” I asked.
Tyson closed his eye like he was concentrating hard. Then his voice changed, becoming a husky approximation of Luke’s. “—the prophecy ourselves. The fools “won’t know which way to turn.”
Before I could react, Tyson’s voice changed again, becoming deeper and gruffer, like the other guy we’d heard talking to Luke outside the cafeteria. “You really think the old horseman is gone for good?”
Tyson laughed Luke’s laugh. “They can’t trust him. Not with the skeletons in his closet. The poisoning of the tree was the final straw.”
Annabeth shivered. “Stop that, Tyson! How do you do that? It’s creepy.”
Tyson opened his eye and looked puzzled. “Just listening.”
“Keep going,” I said. “What else are they saying?”
Tyson closed his eye again.
He hissed in the gruff man’s voice: “Quiet!” Then Luke’s voice, whispering: “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Tyson said in the gruff voice. “Right outside.”
Too late, I realized what was happening.
I just had time to say, “Run!” when the doors of the stateroom burst open and there was Luke, flanked by two hairy giants armed with javelins, their bronze tips aimed right at our chests.
“Well,” Luke said with a crooked smile. “If it isn’t my two favorite cousins. Come right in.”
“Well,” Luke said, spreading his arms proudly. “A little nicer than Cabin Eleven, huh?”
He’d changed since the last summer. Instead of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, he wore a button-down shirt, khaki pants, and leather loafers. His sandy hair, which used to be so unruly, was now clipped short. He looked like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.
He still had the scar under his eye—a jagged white line from his battle with a dragon. And propped against the sofa was his magical sword, Backbiter, glinting strangely with its half-steel, half-Celestial bronze blade that could kill both mortals and monsters.
“Sit,” he told us. He waved his hand and three dining chairs scooted themselves into the center of the room.”
None of us sat.
Luke’s large friends were still pointing their javelins at us. They looked like twins, but they weren’t human. They stood about eight feet tall, for one thing, and wore only blue jeans, probably because their enormous chests were already shag-carpeted with thick brown fur. They had claws for fingernails, feet like paws. Their noses were snoutlike, and their teeth were all pointed canines.
“Where are my manners?” Luke said smoothly. “These are my assistants, Agrius and Oreius. Perhaps you’ve heard of them.”
I said nothing. Despite the javelins pointed at me, it wasn’t the bear twins who scared me.
I’d imagined meeting Luke again many times since he’d tried to kill me last summer. I’d pictured myself boldly standing up to him, challenging him to a duel. But now that we were face-to-face, I could barely stop my hands from shaking.
“You don’t know Agrius and Oreius’s story?” Luke asked. “Their mother . . . well, it’s sad, really. Aphrodite ordered the young woman to fall in love. She refused and ran to Artemis for help. Artemis let her become one of her maiden huntresses, but Aphrodite got her revenge. She bewitched the young woman into falling in love with a bear. When Artemis found out, she abandoned the girl in disgust. Typical of the gods, wouldn’t you say? They fight with one another and the poor humans get caught in the middle. The girl’s twin sons here, Agrius and Oreius, have no love for Olympus. They like half-bloods well enough, though . . .”
“For lunch,” Agrius growled. His gruff voice was the one I’d heard talking with Luke earlier.
“Hehe! Hehe!” His brother Oreius laughed, licking his fur-lined lips. He kept laughing like he was having an asthmatic fit until Luke and Agrius both stared at him.
“Shut up, you idiot!” Agrius growled. “Go punish yourself!”
Oreius whimpered. He trudged over to the corner of the room, slumped onto a stool, and banged his forehead against the dining table, making the silver plates rattle.
Luke acted like this was perfectly normal behavior. “He made himself comfortable on the sofa and propped his feet up on the coffee table. “Well, Percy, we let you survive another year. I hope you appreciated it. How’s your mom? How’s school?”
“You poisoned Thalia’s tree.”
Luke sighed. “Right to the point, eh? Okay, sure I poisoned the tree. So what?”
“How could you?” Annabeth sounded so angry I thought she’d explode. “Thalia saved your life! Our lives! How could you dishonor her—”
“I didn’t dishonor her!” Luke snapped. “The gods dishonored her, Annabeth! If Thalia were alive, she’d be on my side.”
“Liar!”
“If you knew what was coming, you’d understand—”
“I understand you want to destroy the camp!” she yelled. “You’re a monster!”
Luke shook his head. “The gods have blinded you. Can’t you imagine a world without them, Annabeth? What good is that ancient history you study? Three thousand years of baggage! The West is rotten to the core. It has to be destroyed. Join me! We can start the world anew. We could use your intelligence, Annabeth.”
“Because you have none of your own!”
His eyes narrowed. “I know you, Annabeth. You deserve better than tagging along on some hopeless quest to save the camp. Half-Blood Hill will be overrun by monsters within the month. The heroes who survive will have no choice but to join us or be hunted to extinction. You really want to be on a losing team . . . with company like this?” Luke pointed at Tyson.
“Hey!” I said.
“Traveling with a Cyclops,” Luke chided. “Talk about dishonoring Thalia’s memory! I’m surprised at you, Annabeth. You of all people—”
“Stop it!” she shouted.
I didn’t know what Luke was talking about, but Annabeth buried her head in her hands like she was about to cry.
“Leave her alone,” I said. “And leave Tyson out this.”
Luke laughed. “Oh, yeah, I heard. Your father claimed him.”
I must have looked surprised, because Luke smiled. “Yes, Percy, I know all about that. And about your plan to find the Fleece. What were those coordinates, again . . . 30, 31, 75, 12? You see, I still have friends at camp who keep me posted.”
“Spies, you mean.”
He shrugged. “How many insults from your father can you stand, Percy? You think he’s grateful to you? You think Poseidon cares for you any more than he cares for this monster?”
Tyson clenched his fists and made a rumbling sound down in his throat.
Luke just chuckled. “The gods are so using you, Percy. Do you have any idea what’s in store for you if you reach your sixteenth birthday? Has Chiron even told you the prophecy?”
I wanted to get in Luke’s face and tell him off, but as usual, he knew just how to throw me off balance.
Sixteenth birthday?
I mean, I knew Chiron had received a prophecy from the Oracle many years ago. I knew part of it was about me. But, if I reached my sixteenth birthday? I didn’t like the sound of that.
“I know what I need to know,” I managed. “Like, who my enemies are.”
“Then you’re a fool.”
Tyson smashed the nearest dining chair to splinters. “Percy is not a fool!”
Before I could stop him, he charged Luke. His fists came down toward Luke’s head—a double overhead blow that would’ve knocked a hole in titanium—but the bear twins intercepted. They each caught one of Tyson’s arms and stopped him cold. They pushed him back and Tyson stumbled. He fell to the carpet so hard the deck shook.
“Too bad, Cyclops,” Luke said. “Looks like my grizzly friends together are more than a match for your strength. Maybe I should let them—”
“Luke,” I cut in. “Listen to me. Your father sent us.”
His face turned the color of pepperoni. “Don’t—even— mention him.”
“He told us to take this boat. I thought it was just for a ride, but he sent us here to find you. He told me he won’t give up on you, no matter how angry you are.”
“Angry?” Luke roared. “Give up on me? He abandoned me, Percy! I want Olympus destroyed! Every throne crushed to rubble! You tell Hermes it’s going to happen, too. Each time a half-blood joins us, the Olympians grow weaker and we grow stronger. He grows stronger.” Luke pointed to the gold sarcophagus.
The box creeped me out, but I was determined not to show it. “So?” I demanded. “What’s so special . . .”
Then it hit me, what might be inside the sarcophagus. The temperature in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees. “Whoa, you don’t mean—”
“He is re-forming,” Luke said. “Little by little, we’re calling his life force out of the pit. With every recruit who pledges our cause, another small piece appears—”
“That’s disgusting!” Annabeth said.”
“Luke sneered at her. “Your mother was born from Zeus’s split skull, Annabeth. I wouldn’t talk. Soon there will be enough of the titan lord so that we can make him whole again. We will piece together a new body for him, a work worthy of the forges of Hephaestus.”
“You’re insane,” Annabeth said.”
“Join us and you’ll be rewarded. We have powerful friends, sponsors rich enough to buy this cruise ship and much more. Percy, your mother will never have to work again. You can buy her a mansion. You can have power, fame—whatever you want. Annabeth, you can realize your dream of being an architect. You can build a monument to last a thousand years. A temple to the lords of the next age!”
“Go to Tartarus,” she said.
Luke sighed. “A shame.”
He picked up something that looked like a TV remote and pressed a red button. Within seconds the door of the stateroom opened and two uniformed crew members came in, armed with nightsticks. They had the same glassy-eyed look as the other mortals I’d seen, but I had a feeling this wouldn’t make them any less dangerous in a fight.
“Ah, good, security,” Luke said, “I’m afraid we have some stowaways.”
“Yes, sir,” they said dreamily.
Luke turned to Oreius. “It’s time to feed the Aethiopian drakon. Take these fools below and show them how it’s done.”
Oreius grinned stupidly. “Hehe! Hehe!”
“Let me go, too,” Agrius grumbled. “My brother is worthless. That Cyclops—”
“Is no threat,” Luke said. He glanced back at the golden casket, as if something were troubling him. “Agrius, stay here. We have important matters to discuss.”
“But—”
“Oreius, don’t fail me. Stay in the hold to make sure the drakon is properly fed.” Oreius prodded us with his javelin and herded us out of the stateroom, followed by the two human security guards.
---
“A half-blood hideout.” I looked at Annabeth in awe. “You made this place?”
“Thalia and I,” she said quietly. “And Luke.”
That shouldn’t have bothered me. I mean, I knew Thalia and Luke had taken care of Annabeth when she was little. I knew the three of them had been runaways together, hiding from monsters, surviving on their own before Grover found them and tried to get them to Half-Blood Hill. But whenever Annabeth talked about the time she’d spent with them, I kind of felt . . . I don’t know. Uncomfortable?
No. That’s not the word.
The word was jealous.
“So . . .” I said. “You don’t think Luke will look for us here?”
She shook her head. “We made a dozen safe houses like this. I doubt Luke even remembers where they are. Or cares.”
---
Once he was gone, I sat down across from Annabeth. “Hey, I’m sorry about, you know, seeing Luke.”
“It’s not your fault.” She unsheathed her knife and started cleaning the blade with a rag.
“He let us go too easily,” I said.
I hoped I’d been imagining it, but Annabeth nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. What we overheard him say about a gamble, and ‘they’ll take the bait’ . . . I think he was talking about us.”
“The Fleece is the bait? Or Grover?”
She studied the edge of her knife. “I don’t know, Percy. Maybe he wants the Fleece for himself. Maybe he’s hoping we’ll do the hard work and then he can steal it from us. I just can’t believe he would poison the tree.”
“What did he mean,” I asked, “that Thalia would’ve been on his side?”
“He’s wrong.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
Annabeth glared at me, and I started to wish I hadn’t asked her about this while she was holding a knife.
“Percy, you know who you remind me of most? Thalia. You guys are so much alike it’s scary. I mean, either you would’ve been best friends or you would’ve strangled each other.”
“Let’s go with ‘best friends.’”
“Thalia got angry with her dad sometimes. So do you. Would you turn against Olympus because of that?”
I stared at the quiver of arrows in the corner. “No.”
“Okay, then. Neither would she. Luke’s wrong.” Annabeth stuck her knife blade into the dirt.
I wanted to ask her about the prophecy Luke had mentioned and what it had to do with my sixteenth birthday. But I figured she wouldn’t tell me. Chiron had made it pretty clear that I wasn’t allowed to hear it until the gods decided otherwise.
“So what did Luke mean about Cyclopes?” I asked. “He said you of all people—”
“I know what he said. He . . . he was talking about the real reason Thalia died.”
I waited, not sure what to say.
Annabeth drew a shaky breath. “You can never trust a Cyclops, Percy. Six years ago, on the night Grover was leading us to Half-Blood Hill—”
---
Annabeth twisted her Yankees cap in her hands. “Percy, I don’t know the full prophecy, but it warns about a half-blood child of the Big Three—the next one who lives to the age of sixteen. That’s the real reason Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades swore a pact after World War II not to have any more kids. The next child of the Big Three who reaches sixteen will be a dangerous weapon.”
“Why?”
“Because that hero will decide the fate of Olympus. He or she will make a decision that either saves the Age of the Gods, or destroys it.”
I let that sink in. I don’t get seasick, but suddenly I felt ill. “That’s why Kronos didn’t kill me last summer.”
She nodded. “You could be very useful to him. If he can get you on his side, the gods will be in serious trouble.”
“But if it’s me in the prophecy—”
---
“I looked at Annabeth. “The reason you hate Cyclopes so much . . . the story about how Thalia really died. What happened?” It was hard to see her expression in the dark. “I guess you deserve to know,” she said finally. “The night Grover was escorting us to camp, he got confused, took some wrong turns. You remember he told you that once?” I nodded. “Well, the worst wrong turn was into a Cyclops’s lair in Brooklyn.” “They’ve got Cyclopes in Brooklyn?” I asked. “You wouldn’t believe how many, but that’s not the point. This Cyclops, he tricked us. He managed to split us up inside this maze of corridors in an old house in Flatbush. “And he could sound like anyone, Percy. Just the way Tyson did aboard the Princess Andromeda. He lured us, one at time. Thalia thought she was running to save Luke. Luke thought he heard me scream for help. And me . . . I was alone in the dark. I was seven years old. I couldn’t even find the exit.” She brushed the hair out of her face. “I remember finding the main room. There were bones all over the floor. And there were Thalia and Luke and Grover, tied up and gagged, hanging from the ceiling like smoked hams. The Cyclops was starting a fire in the middle of the floor. I drew my knife, but he heard me. He turned and smiled. He spoke, and somehow he knew my dad’s voice. I guess he just plucked it out of my mind. He said, ‘Now, Annabeth, don’t you worry. I love you. You can stay here with me. You can stay forever.’” “I shivered. The way she told it—even now, six years later—freaked me out worse than any ghost story I’d ever heard. “What did you do?” “I stabbed him in the foot.” I stared at her. “Are you kidding? You were seven years old and you stabbed a grown Cyclops in the foot?” “Oh, he would’ve killed me. But I surprised him. It gave me just enough time to run to Thalia and cut the ropes on her hands. She took it from there.” “Yeah, but still . . . that was pretty brave, Annabeth.” She shook her head. “We barely got out alive. I still have nightmares, Percy. The way that Cyclops talked in my father’s voice. It was his fault we took so long getting to camp. All the monsters who’d been chasing us had time to catch up. That’s really why Thalia died. If it hadn’t been for that Cyclops, “she’d still be alive today.”
![[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.”
THE LIGHTNING THIEF pt 2;
I got to the sword-fighters arena and found that Luke had had the same idea. His gym bag was plopped at the edge of the stage. He was working solo, whaling on battle dummies with a sword I’d never seen before. It must’ve been a regular steel blade, because he was slashing the dummies’ heads right off, stabbing through their straw-stuffed guts. His orange counselor’s shirt was dripping with sweat. His expression was so intense, his life might’ve really been in danger. I watched, fascinated, as he disemboweled the whole row of dummies, hacking off limbs and basically reducing them to a pile of straw and armor.
They were only dummies, but I still couldn’t help being awed by Luke’s skill. The guy was an incredible fighter. It made me wonder, again, how he possibly could’ve failed at his quest.
Finally, he saw me, and stopped mid-swing. “Percy.”
“Um, sorry,” I said, embarrassed. “I just—”
“It’s okay,” he said, lowering his sword. “Just doing some last-minute practice.”
“Those dummies won’t be bothering anybody anymore.”
Luke shrugged. “We build new ones every summer.”
Now that his sword wasn’t swirling around, I could see something odd about it. The blade was two different types of metal—one edge bronze, the other steel.
Luke noticed me looking at it. “Oh, this? New toy. This is Backbiter.”
“Backbiter?”
Luke turned the blade in the light so it glinted wickedly. “One side is celestial bronze. The other is tempered steel. Works on mortals and immortals both.”
I thought about what Chiron had told me when I started my quest—that a hero should never harm mortals unless absolutely necessary.
“I didn’t know they could make weapons like that.”
“They probably can’t,” Luke agreed. “It’s one of a kind.”
He gave me a tiny smile, then slid the sword into “ its scabbard. “Listen, I was going to come looking for you. What do you say we go down to the woods one last time, look for something to fight?”
I don’t know why I hesitated. I should’ve felt relieved that Luke was being so friendly. Ever since I’d gotten back from the quest, he’d been acting a little distant. I was afraid he might resent me for all the attention I’d gotten.
“You think it’s a good idea?” I asked. “I mean—”
“Aw, come on.” He rummaged in his gym bag and pulled out a six-pack of Cokes. “Drinks are on me.”
I stared at the Cokes, wondering where the heck he’d gotten them. There were no regular mortal sodas at the camp store. No way to smuggle them in unless you talked to a satyr, maybe.
Of course, the magic dinner goblets would fill with anything you want, but it just didn’t taste the same as a real Coke, straight out of the can.
Sugar and caffeine. My willpower crumbled.
“Sure,” I decided. “Why not?”
We walked down to the woods and kicked around for some kind of monster to fight, but it was too hot. All the monsters with any sense must’ve been taking siestas in their nice cool caves.
We found a shady spot by the creek where I’d broken Clarisse’s spear during my first capture the flag game. We sat on a big rock, drank our Cokes, and watched the sunlight in the woods.
After a while Luke said, “You miss being on a quest?”
“With monsters attacking me every three feet? Are you kidding?”
Luke raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, I miss it,” I admitted. “You?”
A shadow passed over his face. I was used to hearing from the girls how good-looking Luke was, but at the moment, he looked weary, and angry, and not at all handsome. His blond hair was gray in the sunlight. The scar on his face looked deeper than usual. I could imagine him as an old man.
“I’ve lived at Half-Blood Hill year-round since I was fourteen,” he told me. “Ever since Thalia . . . well, you know. I trained, and trained, and trained. I never got to be a normal teenager, out there in the real world. Then they threw me one quest, and when I came back, it was like, ‘Okay, ride’s over. Have a nice life.’”
He crumpled his Coke can and threw into the creek, which really shocked me. One of the first things you learn at Camp Half-Blood is: Don’t litter. You’ll hear from the nymphs and the naiads. They’ll get even. You’ll crawl into bed one night and find your sheets filled with centipedes and mud.
“The heck with laurel wreaths,” Luke said. “I’m not going to end up like those dusty trophies in the Big House attic.”
“You make it sound like you’re leaving.”
Luke gave “me a twisted smile. “Oh, I’m leaving, all right, Percy. I brought you down here to say good-bye.”
He snapped his fingers. A small fire burned a hole in the ground at my feet. Out crawled something glistening black, about the size of my hand. A scorpion.
I started to go for my pen.
“I wouldn’t,” Luke cautioned. “Pit scorpions can jump up to fifteen feet. Its stinger can pierce right through your clothes. You’ll be dead in sixty seconds.”
“Luke, what—”
Then it hit me.”
You will be betrayed by one who calls you a friend.
“You,” I said.
He stood calmly and brushed off his jeans.
The scorpion paid him no attention. It kept its beady black eyes on me, clamping its pincers as it crawled onto my shoe.
“I saw a lot out there in the world, Percy,” Luke said. “Didn’t you feel it—the darkness gathering, the monsters growing stronger? Didn’t you realize how useless it all is? All the heroics—being pawns of the gods. They should’ve been overthrown thousands of years ago, but they’ve hung on, thanks to us half-bloods.”
I couldn’t believe this was happening.
“Luke . . . you’re talking about our parents,” I said.
He laughed. “That’s supposed to make me love them? Their precious ‘Western civilization’ is a disease, Percy. It’s killing the world. The only way to stop it is to burn it to the ground, start over with something more honest.”
“You’re as crazy as Ares.”
His eyes flared. “Ares is a fool. He never realized the true master he was serving. If I had time, Percy, I could explain. But I’m afraid you won’t live that long.”
The scorpion crawled onto my pants leg.
There had to be a way out of this. I needed time to think.
“Kronos,” I said. “That’s who you serve.”
The air got colder.
“You should be careful with names,” Luke warned.
“Kronos got you to steal the master bolt and the helm. He spoke to you in your dreams.”
Luke’s eye twitched. “He spoke to you, too, Percy. You should’ve listened.”
“He’s brainwashing you, Luke.”
“You’re wrong. He showed me that my talents are being wasted. You know what my quest was two years ago, Percy? My father, Hermes, wanted me to steal a golden apple from the Garden of the Hesperides and return it to Olympus. After all the training I’d done, that was the best he could think up.”
“That’s not an easy quest,” I said. “Hercules did it.”
“Exactly,” Luke said. “Where’s the glory in repeating what others have done? All the gods know how to do is replay their past. My heart wasn’t in it. The dragon in the garden gave me this”—he pointed angrily at his scar—“and when I came back, all I got was pity. I wanted to pull Olympus down stone by stone right then, but I bided my time. I began to dream of Kronos. He convinced me to steal something worthwhile, something no hero had ever had the courage to take. When we went on that winter-solstice field trip, while the other campers were asleep, I snuck into the throne room and took Zeus’s master bolt right from his chair. Hades’s helm of darkness, too. You wouldn’t believe how easy it was. The Olympians are so arrogant; they never dreamed someone would dare steal from them. Their security is horrible. I was halfway across New Jersey before I heard the storms rumbling, and I knew they’d discovered my theft.”
The scorpion was sitting on my knee now, staring at me with its glittering eyes. I tried to keep my voice level.
“So why didn’t you bring the items to Kronos?”
Luke’s smile wavered. “I . . . I got overconfident. Zeus sent out his sons and daughters to find the stolen bolt— Artemis, Apollo, my father, Hermes. “But it was Ares who caught me. I could have beaten him, but I wasn’t careful enough. He disarmed me, took the items of power, threatened to return them to Olympus and burn me alive. Then Kronos’s voice came to me and told me what to say. I put the idea in Ares’s head about a great war between the gods. I said all he had to do was hide the items away for a while and watch the others fight. Ares got a wicked gleam in his eyes. I knew he was hooked. He let me go, and I returned to Olympus before anyone noticed my absence.” Luke drew his new sword. He ran his thumb down the flat of the blade, as if he were hypnotized by its beauty. “Afterward, the Lord of the Titans . . . h-he punished me with nightmares. I swore not to fail again. Back at Camp Half-Blood, in my dreams, I was told that a second hero would arrive, one who could be tricked into taking the bolt and the helm the rest of the way—from Ares down to Tartarus.”
“You summoned the hellhound, that night in the forest.”
“We had to make Chiron think the camp wasn’t safe for you, so he would start you on your quest. We had to confirm his fears that Hades was after you. And it worked.”
“The flying shoes were cursed,” I said. “They were supposed to drag me and the backpack into Tartarus.”
“And they would have, if you’d been wearing them. But you gave them to the satyr, which wasn’t part of the plan. Grover messes up everything he touches. He even confused the curse.”
Luke looked down at the scorpion, which was now sitting on my thigh. “You should have died in Tartarus, Percy. But don’t worry, I’ll leave you with my little friend to set things right.”
“Thalia gave her life to save you,” I said, gritting my teeth. “And this is how you repay her?”
“Don’t speak of Thalia!” he shouted. “The gods let her die! That’s one of the many things they will pay for.”
“You’re being used, Luke. You and Ares both. Don’t listen to Kronos.”
“I’ve been used?” Luke’s voice turned shrill. “Look at yourself. What has your dad ever done for you? Kronos will rise. You’ve only delayed his plans. He will cast the Olympians into Tartarus and drive humanity back to their caves. All except the strongest—the ones who serve him.”
“Call off the bug,” I said. “If you’re so strong, fight me yourself.”
Luke smiled. “Nice try, Percy. But I’m not Ares. You can’t bait me. My lord is waiting, and he’s got plenty of quests for me to undertake.”
“Luke—”
“Good-bye, Percy. There is a new Golden Age coming. You won’t be part of it.”
He slashed his sword in an arc and disappeared in a ripple of darkness.
The scorpion lunged.
---
“I can’t believe that Luke . . .” Annabeth’s voice faltered. Her expression turned angry and sad. “Yes. Yes, I can believe it. May the gods curse him. . . . He was never the same after his quest.”
“This must be reported to Olympus,” Chiron murmured. “I will go at once.”
“Luke is out there right now,” I said. “I have to go after him.”
Chiron shook his head. “No, Percy. The gods—”
“Won’t even talk about Kronos,” I snapped. “Zeus declared the matter closed!”
“Percy, I know this is hard. But you must not rush out for vengeance. You aren’t ready.”
I didn’t like it, but part of me suspected Chiron was right. One look at my hand, and I knew I wasn’t going to be sword fighting any time soon. “Chiron . . . your prophecy from the Oracle . . . it was about Kronos, wasn’t it? Was I in it? And Annabeth?”
Chiron glanced nervously at the ceiling. “Percy, it isn’t my place—”
“You’ve been ordered not to talk to me about it, haven’t you?”
His eyes were sympathetic, but sad. “You will be a great hero, child. I will do my best to prepare you. But if I’m right about the path ahead of you . . .”
Thunder boomed overhead, rattling the windows.
“All right!” Chiron shouted. “Fine!”
He sighed in frustration. “The gods have their reasons, Percy. Knowing too much of your future is never a good thing.”
SEA OF MONSTERS;
“But now, its needles were yellow. A huge pile of dead ones littered the base of the tree. In the center of the trunk, three feet from the ground, was a puncture mark the size of a bullet hole, oozing green sap.
A sliver of ice ran through my chest. Now I understood why the camp was in danger. The magical borders were failing because Thalia’s tree was dying.
Someone had poisoned it.
----
“Chiron,” I said. “What about the tree? What happened?”
He shook his head sadly. “The poison used on Thalia’s pine is something from the Underworld, Percy. Some venom even I have never seen. It must have come from a monster quite deep in the pits of Tartarus.”
“Then we know who’s responsible. Kro—”
“Do not invoke the titan lord’s name, Percy. Especially not here, not now.”
“But last summer he tried to cause a civil war in Olympus! This has to be his idea. He’d get Luke to do it, that traitor.”
“Perhaps,” Chiron said. “But I fear I am being held responsible because I did not prevent it and I cannot cure it. The tree has only a few weeks of life left unless . . .”
“Unless what?” Annabeth asked.
“No,” Chiron said. “A foolish thought. The whole valley is feeling the shock of the poison. The magical borders are deteriorating. The camp itself is dying. Only one source of magic would be strong enough to reverse the poison, and it was lost centuries ago.”
---
After the satyrs filed in to dinner, the Hermes cabin brought up the rear. They were always the biggest cabin. Last summer, it had been led by Luke, the guy who’d fought with Thalia and Annabeth on top of Half-Blood Hill. For a while, before Poseidon had claimed me, I’d lodged in the Hermes cabin. Luke had befriended me . . . and then he’d tried to kill me.
---
[...] and they had those elfish features all Hermes’s kids had: upturned eyebrows, sarcastic smiles, a gleam in their eyes whenever they looked at you—like they were about to drop a firecracker down your shirt.
---
After lunch, I worked out in the arena with Apollo’s cabin. Swordplay had always been my strength. People said I was better at it than any camper in the last hundred years, except maybe Luke. People always compared me to Luke.
---
The whole hill seemed to be infected, dying from the poison that had sunk into the tree’s roots. The longer I sat there, the angrier I got.
Luke had done this. I remembered his sly smile, the dragon-claw scar across his face. He’d pretended to be my friend, and the whole time he’d been Kronos’s number-one servant.
I opened the palm of my hand. The scar Luke had given me last summer was fading, but I could still see it—a white asterisk-shaped wound where his pit scorpion had stung me.
I thought about what Luke had told me right before he’d tried to kill me: Good-bye, Percy. There is a new Golden Age coming. You won’t be part of it.
---
“Um, thanks,” I said. “But Lord Hermes, why are you helping me?”
He gave me a melancholy smile. “Perhaps because I hope that you can save many people on this quest, Percy. Not just your friend Grover.”
“I stared at him. “You don’t mean . . . Luke?”
Hermes didn’t answer.
“Look,” I said. “Lord Hermes, I mean, thanks and everything, but you might as well take back your gifts. Luke can’t be saved. Even if I could find him . . . he told me he wanted to tear down Olympus stone by stone. He betrayed everybody he knew. He—he hates you especially.”
Hermes gazed up at the stars. “My dear young cousin, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the eons, it’s that you can’t give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it. It doesn’t matter if they hate you, or embarrass you, or simply don’t appreciate your genius for inventing the Internet—”
“You invented the Internet?”
It was my idea, Martha said.
Rats are delicious, George said.
“It was my idea!” Hermes said. “I mean the Internet, not the rats. But that’s not the point. Percy, do you understand what I’m saying about family?”
“I—I’m not sure.”
“You will some day.” Hermes got up and brushed the sand off his legs. “In the meantime, I must be going.”
---
Then I heard another voice outside—one that chilled me worse than any monster’s.
“—only a matter of time. Don’t push me, Agrius!”
It was Luke, beyond a doubt. I could never forget his voice.
“I’m not pushing you!” another guy growled. His voice was deeper and even angrier than Luke’s. “I’m just saying, if this gamble doesn’t pay off—”
“It’ll pay off,” Luke snapped. “They’ll take the bait. Now, come, we’ve got to get to the admiralty suite and check on the casket.”
Their voices receded down the corridor.
Tyson whimpered. “Leave now?”
Annabeth and I exchanged looks and came to a silent agreement.
“We can’t,” I told Tyson.
“We have to find out what Luke is up to,” Annabeth agreed. “And if possible, we’re going to beat him up, bind him in chains, and drag him to Mount Olympus.”
---
We kept going down the corridor. I didn’t need maps anymore to know I was getting close to Luke. I sensed something cold and unpleasant—the presence of evil.
---
“A group of monsters had assembled in front of the candy store: a dozen Laistrygonian giants like the ones who’d attacked me with dodge balls, two hellhounds, and a few even stranger creatures—humanoid females with twin serpent tails instead of legs.
“Scythian Dracaenae,” Annabeth whispered. “Dragon women.”
The monsters made a semicircle around a young guy in Greek armor who was hacking on a straw dummy. A lump formed in my throat when I realized the dummy was wearing an orange Camp Half-Blood T-shirt. As we watched, the guy in armor stabbed the dummy through its belly and ripped upward. Straw flew everywhere. The monsters cheered and howled.
Annabeth stepped away from the window. Her face was ashen.
“Come on,” I told her, trying to sound braver than I felt. “The sooner we find Luke the better.”
At the end of the hallway were double oak doors that looked like they must lead somewhere important. When we were thirty feet away, Tyson stopped. “Voices inside.”
“You can hear that far?” I asked.
Tyson closed his eye like he was concentrating hard. Then his voice changed, becoming a husky approximation of Luke’s. “—the prophecy ourselves. The fools “won’t know which way to turn.”
Before I could react, Tyson’s voice changed again, becoming deeper and gruffer, like the other guy we’d heard talking to Luke outside the cafeteria. “You really think the old horseman is gone for good?”
Tyson laughed Luke’s laugh. “They can’t trust him. Not with the skeletons in his closet. The poisoning of the tree was the final straw.”
Annabeth shivered. “Stop that, Tyson! How do you do that? It’s creepy.”
Tyson opened his eye and looked puzzled. “Just listening.”
“Keep going,” I said. “What else are they saying?”
Tyson closed his eye again.
He hissed in the gruff man’s voice: “Quiet!” Then Luke’s voice, whispering: “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Tyson said in the gruff voice. “Right outside.”
Too late, I realized what was happening.
I just had time to say, “Run!” when the doors of the stateroom burst open and there was Luke, flanked by two hairy giants armed with javelins, their bronze tips aimed right at our chests.
“Well,” Luke said with a crooked smile. “If it isn’t my two favorite cousins. Come right in.”
SEA OF MONSTERS pt 2;
---
“Well,” Luke said, spreading his arms proudly. “A little nicer than Cabin Eleven, huh?”
He’d changed since the last summer. Instead of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, he wore a button-down shirt, khaki pants, and leather loafers. His sandy hair, which used to be so unruly, was now clipped short. He looked like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.
He still had the scar under his eye—a jagged white line from his battle with a dragon. And propped against the sofa was his magical sword, Backbiter, glinting strangely with its half-steel, half-Celestial bronze blade that could kill both mortals and monsters.
“Sit,” he told us. He waved his hand and three dining chairs scooted themselves into the center of the room.”
None of us sat.
Luke’s large friends were still pointing their javelins at us. They looked like twins, but they weren’t human. They stood about eight feet tall, for one thing, and wore only blue jeans, probably because their enormous chests were already shag-carpeted with thick brown fur. They had claws for fingernails, feet like paws. Their noses were snoutlike, and their teeth were all pointed canines.
“Where are my manners?” Luke said smoothly. “These are my assistants, Agrius and Oreius. Perhaps you’ve heard of them.”
I said nothing. Despite the javelins pointed at me, it wasn’t the bear twins who scared me.
I’d imagined meeting Luke again many times since he’d tried to kill me last summer. I’d pictured myself boldly standing up to him, challenging him to a duel. But now that we were face-to-face, I could barely stop my hands from shaking.
“You don’t know Agrius and Oreius’s story?” Luke asked. “Their mother . . . well, it’s sad, really. Aphrodite ordered the young woman to fall in love. She refused and ran to Artemis for help. Artemis let her become one of her maiden huntresses, but Aphrodite got her revenge. She bewitched the young woman into falling in love with a bear. When Artemis found out, she abandoned the girl in disgust. Typical of the gods, wouldn’t you say? They fight with one another and the poor humans get caught in the middle. The girl’s twin sons here, Agrius and Oreius, have no love for Olympus. They like half-bloods well enough, though . . .”
“For lunch,” Agrius growled. His gruff voice was the one I’d heard talking with Luke earlier.
“Hehe! Hehe!” His brother Oreius laughed, licking his fur-lined lips. He kept laughing like he was having an asthmatic fit until Luke and Agrius both stared at him.
“Shut up, you idiot!” Agrius growled. “Go punish yourself!”
Oreius whimpered. He trudged over to the corner of the room, slumped onto a stool, and banged his forehead against the dining table, making the silver plates rattle.
Luke acted like this was perfectly normal behavior. “He made himself comfortable on the sofa and propped his feet up on the coffee table. “Well, Percy, we let you survive another year. I hope you appreciated it. How’s your mom? How’s school?”
“You poisoned Thalia’s tree.”
Luke sighed. “Right to the point, eh? Okay, sure I poisoned the tree. So what?”
“How could you?” Annabeth sounded so angry I thought she’d explode. “Thalia saved your life! Our lives! How could you dishonor her—”
“I didn’t dishonor her!” Luke snapped. “The gods dishonored her, Annabeth! If Thalia were alive, she’d be on my side.”
“Liar!”
“If you knew what was coming, you’d understand—”
“I understand you want to destroy the camp!” she yelled. “You’re a monster!”
Luke shook his head. “The gods have blinded you. Can’t you imagine a world without them, Annabeth? What good is that ancient history you study? Three thousand years of baggage! The West is rotten to the core. It has to be destroyed. Join me! We can start the world anew. We could use your intelligence, Annabeth.”
“Because you have none of your own!”
His eyes narrowed. “I know you, Annabeth. You deserve better than tagging along on some hopeless quest to save the camp. Half-Blood Hill will be overrun by monsters within the month. The heroes who survive will have no choice but to join us or be hunted to extinction. You really want to be on a losing team . . . with company like this?” Luke pointed at Tyson.
“Hey!” I said.
“Traveling with a Cyclops,” Luke chided. “Talk about dishonoring Thalia’s memory! I’m surprised at you, Annabeth. You of all people—”
“Stop it!” she shouted.
I didn’t know what Luke was talking about, but Annabeth buried her head in her hands like she was about to cry.
“Leave her alone,” I said. “And leave Tyson out this.”
Luke laughed. “Oh, yeah, I heard. Your father claimed him.”
I must have looked surprised, because Luke smiled. “Yes, Percy, I know all about that. And about your plan to find the Fleece. What were those coordinates, again . . . 30, 31, 75, 12? You see, I still have friends at camp who keep me posted.”
“Spies, you mean.”
He shrugged. “How many insults from your father can you stand, Percy? You think he’s grateful to you? You think Poseidon cares for you any more than he cares for this monster?”
Tyson clenched his fists and made a rumbling sound down in his throat.
Luke just chuckled. “The gods are so using you, Percy. Do you have any idea what’s in store for you if you reach your sixteenth birthday? Has Chiron even told you the prophecy?”
I wanted to get in Luke’s face and tell him off, but as usual, he knew just how to throw me off balance.
Sixteenth birthday?
I mean, I knew Chiron had received a prophecy from the Oracle many years ago. I knew part of it was about me. But, if I reached my sixteenth birthday? I didn’t like the sound of that.
“I know what I need to know,” I managed. “Like, who my enemies are.”
“Then you’re a fool.”
Tyson smashed the nearest dining chair to splinters. “Percy is not a fool!”
Before I could stop him, he charged Luke. His fists came down toward Luke’s head—a double overhead blow that would’ve knocked a hole in titanium—but the bear twins intercepted. They each caught one of Tyson’s arms and stopped him cold. They pushed him back and Tyson stumbled. He fell to the carpet so hard the deck shook.
“Too bad, Cyclops,” Luke said. “Looks like my grizzly friends together are more than a match for your strength. Maybe I should let them—”
“Luke,” I cut in. “Listen to me. Your father sent us.”
His face turned the color of pepperoni. “Don’t—even— mention him.”
“He told us to take this boat. I thought it was just for a ride, but he sent us here to find you. He told me he won’t give up on you, no matter how angry you are.”
“Angry?” Luke roared. “Give up on me? He abandoned me, Percy! I want Olympus destroyed! Every throne crushed to rubble! You tell Hermes it’s going to happen, too. Each time a half-blood joins us, the Olympians grow weaker and we grow stronger. He grows stronger.” Luke pointed to the gold sarcophagus.
The box creeped me out, but I was determined not to show it. “So?” I demanded. “What’s so special . . .”
Then it hit me, what might be inside the sarcophagus. The temperature in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees. “Whoa, you don’t mean—”
“He is re-forming,” Luke said. “Little by little, we’re calling his life force out of the pit. With every recruit who pledges our cause, another small piece appears—”
“That’s disgusting!” Annabeth said.”
“Luke sneered at her. “Your mother was born from Zeus’s split skull, Annabeth. I wouldn’t talk. Soon there will be enough of the titan lord so that we can make him whole again. We will piece together a new body for him, a work worthy of the forges of Hephaestus.”
“You’re insane,” Annabeth said.”
“Join us and you’ll be rewarded. We have powerful friends, sponsors rich enough to buy this cruise ship and much more. Percy, your mother will never have to work again. You can buy her a mansion. You can have power, fame—whatever you want. Annabeth, you can realize your dream of being an architect. You can build a monument to last a thousand years. A temple to the lords of the next age!”
“Go to Tartarus,” she said.
Luke sighed. “A shame.”
He picked up something that looked like a TV remote and pressed a red button. Within seconds the door of the stateroom opened and two uniformed crew members came in, armed with nightsticks. They had the same glassy-eyed look as the other mortals I’d seen, but I had a feeling this wouldn’t make them any less dangerous in a fight.
“Ah, good, security,” Luke said, “I’m afraid we have some stowaways.”
“Yes, sir,” they said dreamily.
Luke turned to Oreius. “It’s time to feed the Aethiopian drakon. Take these fools below and show them how it’s done.”
Oreius grinned stupidly. “Hehe! Hehe!”
“Let me go, too,” Agrius grumbled. “My brother is worthless. That Cyclops—”
“Is no threat,” Luke said. He glanced back at the golden casket, as if something were troubling him. “Agrius, stay here. We have important matters to discuss.”
“But—”
“Oreius, don’t fail me. Stay in the hold to make sure the drakon is properly fed.” Oreius prodded us with his javelin and herded us out of the stateroom, followed by the two human security guards.
---
“A half-blood hideout.” I looked at Annabeth in awe. “You made this place?”
“Thalia and I,” she said quietly. “And Luke.”
That shouldn’t have bothered me. I mean, I knew Thalia and Luke had taken care of Annabeth when she was little. I knew the three of them had been runaways together, hiding from monsters, surviving on their own before Grover found them and tried to get them to Half-Blood Hill. But whenever Annabeth talked about the time she’d spent with them, I kind of felt . . . I don’t know. Uncomfortable?
No. That’s not the word.
The word was jealous.
“So . . .” I said. “You don’t think Luke will look for us here?”
She shook her head. “We made a dozen safe houses like this. I doubt Luke even remembers where they are. Or cares.”
---
Once he was gone, I sat down across from Annabeth. “Hey, I’m sorry about, you know, seeing Luke.”
“It’s not your fault.” She unsheathed her knife and started cleaning the blade with a rag.
“He let us go too easily,” I said.
I hoped I’d been imagining it, but Annabeth nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. What we overheard him say about a gamble, and ‘they’ll take the bait’ . . . I think he was talking about us.”
“The Fleece is the bait? Or Grover?”
She studied the edge of her knife. “I don’t know, Percy. Maybe he wants the Fleece for himself. Maybe he’s hoping we’ll do the hard work and then he can steal it from us. I just can’t believe he would poison the tree.”
“What did he mean,” I asked, “that Thalia would’ve been on his side?”
“He’s wrong.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
Annabeth glared at me, and I started to wish I hadn’t asked her about this while she was holding a knife.
“Percy, you know who you remind me of most? Thalia. You guys are so much alike it’s scary. I mean, either you would’ve been best friends or you would’ve strangled each other.”
“Let’s go with ‘best friends.’”
“Thalia got angry with her dad sometimes. So do you. Would you turn against Olympus because of that?”
I stared at the quiver of arrows in the corner. “No.”
“Okay, then. Neither would she. Luke’s wrong.” Annabeth stuck her knife blade into the dirt.
I wanted to ask her about the prophecy Luke had mentioned and what it had to do with my sixteenth birthday. But I figured she wouldn’t tell me. Chiron had made it pretty clear that I wasn’t allowed to hear it until the gods decided otherwise.
“So what did Luke mean about Cyclopes?” I asked. “He said you of all people—”
“I know what he said. He . . . he was talking about the real reason Thalia died.”
I waited, not sure what to say.
Annabeth drew a shaky breath. “You can never trust a Cyclops, Percy. Six years ago, on the night Grover was leading us to Half-Blood Hill—”
---
Annabeth twisted her Yankees cap in her hands. “Percy, I don’t know the full prophecy, but it warns about a half-blood child of the Big Three—the next one who lives to the age of sixteen. That’s the real reason Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades swore a pact after World War II not to have any more kids. The next child of the Big Three who reaches sixteen will be a dangerous weapon.”
“Why?”
“Because that hero will decide the fate of Olympus. He or she will make a decision that either saves the Age of the Gods, or destroys it.”
I let that sink in. I don’t get seasick, but suddenly I felt ill. “That’s why Kronos didn’t kill me last summer.”
She nodded. “You could be very useful to him. If he can get you on his side, the gods will be in serious trouble.”
“But if it’s me in the prophecy—”
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“I looked at Annabeth. “The reason you hate Cyclopes so much . . . the story about how Thalia really died. What happened?”
It was hard to see her expression in the dark.
“I guess you deserve to know,” she said finally. “The night Grover was escorting us to camp, he got confused, took some wrong turns. You remember he told you that once?”
I nodded.
“Well, the worst wrong turn was into a Cyclops’s lair in Brooklyn.”
“They’ve got Cyclopes in Brooklyn?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t believe how many, but that’s not the point. This Cyclops, he tricked us. He managed to split us up inside this maze of corridors in an old house in Flatbush. “And he could sound like anyone, Percy. Just the way Tyson did aboard the Princess Andromeda. He lured us, one at time. Thalia thought she was running to save Luke. Luke thought he heard me scream for help. And me . . . I was alone in the dark. I was seven years old. I couldn’t even find the exit.”
She brushed the hair out of her face. “I remember finding the main room. There were bones all over the floor. And there were Thalia and Luke and Grover, tied up and gagged, hanging from the ceiling like smoked hams. The Cyclops was starting a fire in the middle of the floor. I drew my knife, but he heard me. He turned and smiled. He spoke, and somehow he knew my dad’s voice. I guess he just plucked it out of my mind. He said, ‘Now, Annabeth, don’t you worry. I love you. You can stay here with me. You can stay forever.’”
“I shivered. The way she told it—even now, six years later—freaked me out worse than any ghost story I’d ever heard. “What did you do?”
“I stabbed him in the foot.”
I stared at her. “Are you kidding? You were seven years old and you stabbed a grown Cyclops in the foot?”
“Oh, he would’ve killed me. But I surprised him. It gave me just enough time to run to Thalia and cut the ropes on her hands. She took it from there.”
“Yeah, but still . . . that was pretty brave, Annabeth.”
She shook her head. “We barely got out alive. I still have nightmares, Percy. The way that Cyclops talked in my father’s voice. It was his fault we took so long getting to camp. All the monsters who’d been chasing us had time to catch up. That’s really why Thalia died. If it hadn’t been for that Cyclops, “she’d still be alive today.”
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