by Rick Riordan
That’s not a compliment. Miss Springtime used to sit next to me at family dinners, and she was not shy about sharing her halitosis. Imagine the odor of a bin full of wet mulch and earthworm poop. Yes, I just love spring.
Inside the greenhouse, the plants had taken over. I found that frightening, since most of them were cacti. By the doorway squatted a pineapple cactus the size of a cracker barrel, its yellow spines like shish-kebab skewers. In the back corner stood a majestic Joshua tree, its shaggy branches holding up the roof. Against the opposite wall bloomed a massive prickly pear, dozens of bristly paddles topped with purple fruit that looked delicious, except for the fact that each one had more spikes than Ares’s favorite mace. Metal tables groaned under the weight of other succulents—pickleweed, spinystar, cholla, and dozens more I couldn’t name. Surrounded by so many thorns and flowers, in such oppressive heat, I had a flashback to Iggy Pop’s 2003 Coachella set.
“I’m back!” Grover announced. “And I brought friends!”
Silence.
Even at sunset, the temperature inside was so high, and the air so thick, I imagined I would die of heatstroke in approximately four minutes. And I was a former sun god.
At last the first dryad appeared. A chlorophyll bubble ballooned from the side of the prickly pear and burst into green mist. The droplets coalesced into a small girl with emerald skin, spiky yellow hair, and a fringe dress made entirely of cactus bristles. Her glare was almost as pointed as her dress. Fortunately, it was directed at Grover, not me.
“Where have you been?” she demanded.
“Ah.” Grover cleared his throat. “I got called away. Magical summons. I’ll tell you all about it later. But look, I brought Apollo! And Meg, daughter of Demeter!”
He showed off Meg like she was a fabulous prize on The Price Is Right.
“Hmph,” said the dryad. “I suppose daughters of Demeter are okay. I’m Prickly Pear. Or Pear for short.”
“Hi,” Meg said weakly.
The dryad narrowed her eyes at me. Given her spiny dress, I hoped she wasn’t a hugger. “You’re Apollo as in the god Apollo?” she asked. “I don’t believe it.”
“Some days, neither do I,” I admitted.
Grover scanned the room. “Where are the others?”
Right on cue, another chlorophyll bubble popped over one of the succulents. A second dryad appeared—a large young woman in a muumuu like the husk of an artichoke. Her hair was a forest of dark green triangles. Her face and arms glistened as if they’d just been oiled. (At least I hoped it was oil and not sweat.)
“Oh!” she cried, seeing our battered appearances. “Are you hurt?”
Pear rolled her eyes. “Al, knock it off.”
“But they look hurt!” Al shuffled forward. She took my hand. Her touch was cold and greasy. “Let me take care of these cuts, at least. Grover, why didn’t you heal these poor people?”
“I tried!” the satyr protested. “They just took a lot of damage!”
That could be my life motto, I thought: He takes a lot of damage.
Al ran her fingertips over my cuts, leaving trails of goo like slug tracks. It was not a pleasant sensation, but it did ease the pain.
“You’re Aloe Vera,” I realized. “I used to make healing ointments out of you.”
She beamed. “He remembers me! Apollo remembers me!”
In the back of the room, a third dryad emerged from the trunk of the Joshua tree—a male dryad, which was quite rare. His skin was as brown as his tree’s bark, his olive hair long and wild, his clothes weathered khaki. He might have been an explorer just returning from the outback.
“I’m Joshua,” he said. “Welcome to Aeithales.”
And at that moment, Meg McCaffrey decided to faint.
I could have told her that swooning in front of an attractive boy was never cool. The strategy hadn’t worked for me once in thousands of years. Nevertheless, being a good friend, I caught her before she could nose-dive into the gravel.
“Oh, poor girl!” Aloe Vera gave Grover another critical look. “She’s exhausted and overheated. Haven’t you let her rest?”
“She’s been asleep all afternoon!”
“Well, she’s dehydrated.” Aloe put her hand on Meg’s forehead. “She needs water.”
Pear sniffed. “Don’t we all.”
“Take her to the Cistern,” Al said. “Mellie should be awake by now. I’ll be along in a minute.”
Grover perked up. “Mellie’s here? They made it?”
“They arrived this morning,” said Joshua.
“What about the search parties?” Grover pressed. “Any word?”
The dryads exchanged troubled glances.
“The news isn’t good,” Joshua said. “Only one group has come back so far, and—”
“Excuse me,” I pleaded. “I have no idea what any of you are talking about, but Meg is heavy. Where should I put her?”
Grover stirred. “Right. Sorry, I’ll show you.” He draped Meg’s left arm over his shoulders, taking half her weight. Then he faced the dryads. “Guys, how about we all meet at the Cistern for dinner? We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
Joshua nodded. “I’ll alert the other greenhouses. And, Grover, you promised us enchiladas. Three days ago.”
“I know.” Grover sighed. “I’ll get more.”
Together, the two of us lugged Meg out of the greenhouse.
As we dragged her across the hillside, I asked Grover my most burning question: “Dryads eat enchiladas?”
He looked offended. “Of course! You expect them just to eat fertilizer?”
“Well…yes.”
“Stereotyping,” he muttered.
I decided that was my cue to change the subject.
“Did I imagine it,” I asked, “or did Meg faint because she heard the name of this place? Aeithales. That’s ancient Greek for evergreen, if I recall correctly.”
It seemed an odd name for a place in the desert. Then again, no odder than dryads eating enchiladas.
“We found the name carved into the old doorsill,” Grover said. “There’s a lot we don’t know about the ruins, but like I said, this site has a lot of nature energy. Whoever lived here and started the greenhouses…they knew what they were doing.”
I wished I could say the same. “Weren’t the dryads born in those greenhouses? Don’t they know who planted them?”
“Most were too young when the house burned down,” Grover said. “Some of the older plants might know more, but they’ve gone dormant. Or”—he nodded toward the destroyed greenhouses—“they’re no longer with us.”
We observed a moment of silence for the departed succulents.
Grover steered us toward the largest of the brick cylinders. Judging from its size and position in the center of the ruins, I guessed it must have once been the central support column for the structure. At ground level, rectangular openings ringed the circumference like medieval castle windows. We dragged Meg through one of these and found ourselves in a space very much like the well where we’d fought the strixes.
The top was open to the sky. A spiral ramp led downward, but fortunately only twenty feet before reaching the bottom. In the center of the dirt floor, like the hole in a giant donut, glittered a dark blue pool, cooling the air and making the space feel comfortable and welcoming. Around the pool lay a ring of sleeping bags. Blooming cacti overflowed from alcoves built into the walls.
The Cistern was not a fancy structure—nothing like the dining pavilion at Camp Half-Blood, or the Waystation in Indiana—but inside it I immediately felt better, safer. I understood what Grover had been talking about. This place resonated with soothing energy.
We got Meg to the bottom of the ramp without tripping and falling, which I considered a major accomplishment. We set her down on one of the sleeping bags, then Grover scanned the room.
“Mellie?” he called. “Gleeson? Are you guys here?”
The name Gleeson sounded vaguely familiar to me, but, as usual, I
couldn’t place it.
No chlorophyll bubbles popped from the plants. Meg turned on her side and muttered in her sleep…something about Peaches. Then, at the edge of the pond, wisps of white fog began to gather. They fused into the shape of a petite woman in a silvery dress. Her dark hair floated around her as if she were underwater, revealing her slightly pointed ears. In a sling over one shoulder she held a sleeping baby perhaps seven months old, with hooved feet and tiny goat horns on his head. His fat cheek was squished against his mother’s clavicle. His mouth was a veritable cornucopia of drool.
The cloud nymph (for surely that’s what she was) smiled at Grover. Her brown eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. She held one finger to her lips, indicating that she’d rather not wake the baby. I couldn’t blame her. Satyr babies at that age are loud and rambunctious, and can teethe their way through several metal cans a day.
Grover whispered, “Mellie, you made it!”
“Grover, dear.” She looked down at the sleeping form of Meg, then tilted her head at me. “Are you…Are you him?”
“If you mean Apollo,” I said, “I’m afraid so.”
Mellie pursed her lips. “I’d heard rumors, but I didn’t believe them. You poor thing. How are you holding up?”
In times past, I would have scoffed at any nymph who dared to call me poor thing. Of course, few nymphs would have shown me such consideration. Usually they were too busy running away from me. Now, Mellie’s show of concern caused a lump to form in my throat. I was tempted to rest my head on her other shoulder and sob out my troubles.
“I—I’m fine,” I managed. “Thank you.”
“And your sleeping friend here?” she asked.
“Just exhausted, I think.” Though I wondered if that was the whole story with Meg. “Aloe Vera said she would be along in a few minutes to care for her.”
Mellie looked worried. “All right. I’ll make sure Aloe doesn’t overdo it.”
“Overdo it?”
Grover coughed. “Where’s Gleeson?”
Mellie scanned the room, as if just realizing this Gleeson person was not present. “I don’t know. As soon as we got here, I went dormant for the day. He said he was going into town to pick up some camping supplies. What time is it?”
“After sunset,” Grover said.
“He should’ve been back by now.” Mellie’s form shimmered with agitation, becoming so hazy I was afraid the baby might fall right through her body.
“Gleeson is your husband?” I guessed. “A satyr?”
“Yes, Gleeson Hedge,” Mellie said.
I remembered him then, vaguely—the satyr who had sailed with the demigod heroes of the Argo II. “Do you know where he went?”
“We passed an army-surplus store as we drove in, down the hill. He loves army-surplus stores.” Mellie turned to Grover. “He may have just gotten distracted, but…I don’t suppose you could go check on him?”
At that moment, I realized just how exhausted Grover Underwood must be. His eyes were even redder than Mellie’s. His shoulders drooped. His reed pipes dangled listlessly from his neck. Unlike Meg and me, he hadn’t slept since last night in the Labyrinth. He’d used the cry of Pan, gotten us to safety, then spent all day guarding us, waiting for the dryads to wake up. Now he was being asked to make another excursion to check on Gleeson Hedge.
Still, he mustered a smile. “Sure thing, Mellie.”
She gave him a peck on the cheek. “You’re the best lord of the Wild ever!”
Grover blushed. “Watch Meg McCaffrey until we get back, would you? Come on, Apollo. Let’s go shopping.”
EVEN after four thousand years, I could still learn important life lessons. For instance: Never go shopping with a satyr.
Finding the store took forever, because Grover kept getting sidetracked. He stopped to chat with a yucca. He gave directions to a family of ground squirrels. He smelled smoke and led us on a chase across the desert until he found a burning cigarette someone had dropped onto the road.
“This is how fires start,” he said, then responsibly disposed of the cigarette butt by eating it.
I didn’t see anything within a mile radius that could have caught fire. I was reasonably sure rocks and dirt were not flammable, but I never argue with people who eat cigarettes. We continued our search for the army-surplus store.
Night fell. The western horizon glowed—not with the usual orange of mortal light pollution, but with the ominous red of a distant inferno. Smoke blotted out the stars. The temperature barely cooled. The air still smelled bitter and wrong.
I remembered the wave of flames that had nearly incinerated us in the Labyrinth. The heat seemed to have had a personality—a resentful malevolence. I could imagine such waves coursing beneath the surface of the desert, washing through the Labyrinth, turning the mortal terrain above into an even more uninhabitable wasteland.
I thought about my dream of the woman in molten chains, standing on a platform above a pool of lava. Despite my fuzzy memories, I was sure that woman was the Erythraean Sibyl, the next Oracle we had to free from the emperors. Something told me she was imprisoned in the very center of…whatever was generating those subterranean fires. I did not relish the idea of finding her.
“Grover,” I said, “in the greenhouse, you mentioned something about search parties?”
He glanced over, swallowing painfully, as if the cigarette butt were still stuck in his throat. “The heartiest satyrs and dryads—they’ve been fanning out across the area for months.” He fixed his eyes on the road. “We don’t have many searchers. With the fires and the heat, the cacti are the only nature spirits that can still manifest. So far, only a few have come back alive. The rest…we don’t know.”
“What are they are searching for?” I asked. “The source of the fires? The emperor? The Oracle?”
Grover’s hoof-fitted shoes slipped and skidded on the gravel shoulder. “Everything is connected. It has to be. I didn’t know about the Oracle until you told me, but if the emperor is guarding it, the maze is where he would put it. And the maze is the source of our fire problems.”
“When you say maze,” I said, “you mean the Labyrinth?”
“Sort of.” Grover’s lower lip trembled. “The network of tunnels under Southern California—we assume it’s part of the larger Labyrinth, but something’s been happening to it. It’s like this section of the Labyrinth has been…infected. Like it has a fever. Fires have been gathering, strengthening. Sometimes, they mass and spew—There!”
He pointed south. A quarter mile up the nearest hill, a plume of yellow flame vented skyward like the fiery tip of a welding torch. Then it was gone, leaving a patch of molten rock. I considered what would’ve happened if I’d been standing there when the vent flared.
“That’s not normal,” I said.
My ankles felt wobbly, as if I were the one with fake feet.
Grover nodded. “We already had enough problems in California: drought, climate change, pollution, all the usual stuff. But those flames…” His expression hardened. “It’s some kind of magic we don’t understand. Almost a full year I’ve been out here, trying to find the source of the heat and shut it off. I’ve lost so many friends.”
His voice was brittle. I understood about losing friends. Over the centuries, I’d lost many mortals who were dear to me, but at that moment, one in particular came to mind: Heloise the griffin, who had died at the Waystation, defending her nest, defending us all from the attack of Emperor Commodus. I remembered her frail body, her feathers disintegrating into a bed of catnip in Emmie’s roof garden….
Grover knelt and cupped his hand around a clump of weeds. The leaves crumbled.
“Too late,” he muttered. “When I was a seeker, looking for Pan, at least I had hope. I thought I could find Pan and he’d save us all. Now…the god of the Wild is dead.”
I scanned the glittering lights of Palm Springs, trying to imagine Pan in such a place. Humans had done quite a number on the natural world. No wonder P
an had faded and passed on. What remained of his spirit he’d left to his followers—the satyrs and dryads—entrusting them with his mission to protect the wild.
I could have told Pan that was a terrible idea. I once went on vacation and entrusted the realm of music to my follower Nelson Riddle. I came back a few decades later and found pop music infected with sappy violins and backup singers, and Lawrence Welk was playing accordion on prime-time television. Never. Again.
“Pan would be proud of your efforts,” I told Grover.
Even to me that sounded halfhearted.
Grover rose. “My father and my uncle sacrificed their lives searching for Pan. I just wish we had more help carrying on his work. Humans don’t seem to care. Even demigods. Even…”
He stopped himself, but I suspected he was about to say Even gods.
I had to admit he had a point.
Gods wouldn’t normally mourn the loss of a griffin, or a few dryads, or a single ecosystem. Eh, we would think. Doesn’t concern me!
The longer I was mortal, the more affected I was by even the smallest loss.
I hated being mortal.
We followed the road as it skirted the walls of a gated community, leading us toward the neon store signs in the distance. I watched where I put my feet, wondering with each step if a plume of fire might turn me into a Lester flambé.
“You said everything is connected,” I recalled. “You think the third emperor created this burning maze?”
Grover glanced from side to side, as if the third emperor might jump out from behind a palm tree with an ax and a scary mask. Given my suspicions about the emperor’s identity, that might not be too far-fetched.
“Yes,” he said, “but we don’t know how or why. We don’t even know where the emperor’s base is. As far as we can tell, he moves around constantly.”
“And…” I swallowed, afraid to ask. “The emperor’s identity?”
“All we know is that he uses the monogram NH,” said Grover. “For Neos Helios.”
A phantom ground squirrel gnawed its way up my spine. “Greek. Meaning New Sun.”
“Right,” Grover said. “Not a Roman emperor’s name.”
