by Rick Riordan
This is not Mrs O’Leary, I reminded myself. This is an untamed monster. It will kill me and all my friends.
It pounced again. This time, I brought Riptide up in a deadly arc. The hellhound disintegrated into dust and fur.
More monsters surged forward – snakes and giants and telkhines – but the Minotaur roared at them and they backed off.
‘One on one?’ I called. ‘Just like old times?’
The Minotaur’s nostrils quivered. He seriously needed to keep a pack of Aloe Vera Kleenex in his armour pocket, because that nose was wet and red and pretty gross. He unstrapped his axe and swung it around.
It was beautiful in a harsh I’m going to gut you like a fish kind of way. Each of its twin blades was shaped like an omega – – the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Maybe that was because the axe would be the last thing his victims ever saw. The shaft was about the same height as the Minotaur, bronze wrapped in leather. Tied around the base of each blade were lots of bead necklaces. I realized they were Camp Half-Blood beads – necklaces taken from defeated demigods.
I was so mad I imagined my eyes glowing just like the Minotaur’s. I raised my sword. The monster army cheered for the Minotaur, but the sound died when I dodged his first swing and sliced his axe in half, right between the handholds.
‘Moo?’ he grunted.
‘HAAA!’ I spun and kicked him in the snout. He staggered backwards, trying to regain his footing, then lowered his head to charge.
He never got the chance. My sword flashed – slicing off one horn, then the other. He tried to grab me. I rolled away, picking up half of his broken axe. The other monsters backed up in stunned silence, making a circle around us. The Minotaur bellowed in rage. He was never very smart to begin with, but now his anger made him reckless. He charged me and I ran for the edge of the bridge, breaking through a line of dracaenae.
The Minotaur must’ve smelled victory. He thought I was trying to get away. His minions cheered. At the edge of the bridge, I turned and braced the axe against the railing to receive his charge. The Minotaur didn’t even slow down.
CRUNCH.
He looked down in surprise at the axe handle sprouting from his breastplate.
‘Thanks for playing,’ I told him.
I lifted him by his legs and tossed him over the side of the bridge. Even as he fell, he was disintegrating, turning back into dust, his essence returning to Tartarus.
I turned towards his army. It was now roughly one hundred and ninety-nine to one. I did the natural thing. I charged them.
You’re going to ask how the ‘invincible’ thing worked – if I magically dodged every weapon, or if the weapons hit me and just didn’t harm me. Honestly, I don’t remember. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to let these monsters invade my hometown.
I sliced through armour like it was made of paper. Snake-women exploded. Hellhounds melted to shadow. I slashed and stabbed and whirled and I might have even laughed once or twice – a crazy laugh that scared me as much as it did my enemies. I was aware of the Apollo campers behind me shooting arrows, disrupting every attempt by the enemy to rally. Finally the monsters turned and fled – about twenty left alive out of two hundred.
I followed with the Apollo campers at my heels.
‘Yes!’ yelled Michael Yew. ‘That’s what I’m talking about!’
We drove them back towards the Brooklyn side of the bridge. The sky was growing pale in the east. I could see the toll stations ahead.
‘Percy!’ Annabeth yelled. ‘You’ve already routed them. Pull back! We’re overextended!’
Some part of me knew she was right, but I was doing so well. I wanted to destroy every last monster.
Then I saw the crowd at the base of the bridge. The retreating monsters were running straight towards their reinforcements. It was small group, maybe thirty or forty demigods in battle armour, mounted on skeletal horses. One of them held a purple banner with the black scythe design.
The lead horseman trotted forward. He took off his helm and I recognized Kronos himself, his eyes like molten gold.
Annabeth and the Apollo campers faltered. The monsters we’d been pursuing reached the Titan’s line and were absorbed into the new force. Kronos gazed in our direction. He was a quarter of a mile away, but I swear I could see him smile.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘we pull back.’
The Titan lord’s men drew their swords and charged. The hooves of their skeletal horses thundered against the pavement. Our archers shot a volley, bringing down several of the enemy, but they just kept riding.
‘Retreat!’ I told my friends. ‘I’ll hold them!’
In a matter of seconds they were on me.
Michael and his archers tried to retreat, but Annabeth stayed right beside me, fighting with her knife and mirrored shield as we slowly backed up the bridge.
Kronos’s cavalry swirled around us, slashing and yelling insults. The Titan himself advanced leisurely, like he had all the time in the world. Being the Lord of Time, I guess he did.
I tried to wound his men, not kill. That slowed me down, but these weren’t monsters. They were demigods who’d fallen under Kronos’s spell. I couldn’t see faces under their battle helmets, but some of them had probably been my friends. I slashed the legs off their horses and made the skeletal mounts disintegrate. After the first few demigods took a spill, the rest figured out they’d better dismount and fight me on foot.
Annabeth and I stayed shoulder to shoulder, facing opposite directions. A dark shape passed over me and I dared to glance up. Blackjack and Porkpie were swooping in, kicking our enemies in the helmets and flying away like very large kamikaze pigeons.
We’d almost made it to the middle of the bridge when something strange happened. I felt a chill down my spine – like that old saying about someone walking on your grave. Behind me, Annabeth cried out in pain.
‘Annabeth!’ I turned in time to see her fall, clutching her arm. A demigod with a bloody knife stood over her.
In a flash, I understood what had happened. He’d been trying to stab me. Judging from the position of his blade, he would’ve taken me – maybe by sheer luck – in the small of my back, my only weak point.
Annabeth had intercepted the knife with her own body.
But why? She didn’t know about my weak spot. No one did.
I locked eyes with the enemy demigod. He wore an eye patch under his war helm: Ethan Nakamura, the son of Nemesis. Somehow he’d survived the explosion on the Princess Andromeda. I slammed him in the face with my sword hilt so hard I dented his helm.
‘Get back!’ I slashed the air in a wide arc, driving the rest of the demigods away from Annabeth. ‘No one touches her!’
‘Interesting,’ Kronos said.
He towered above me on his skeletal horse, his scythe in one hand. He studied the scene with narrowed eyes as if he could sense that I’d just come close to death, the way a wolf can smell fear.
‘Bravely fought, Percy Jackson,’ he said. ‘But it’s time to surrender – or the girl dies.’
‘Percy, don’t,’ Annabeth groaned. Her shirt was soaked with blood. I had to get her out of here.
‘Blackjack!’ I yelled.
As fast as light, the pegasus swooped down and clamped his teeth on the straps of Annabeth’s armour. They soared away over the river before the enemy could even react.
Kronos snarled. ‘Some day soon, I am going to make pegasus soup. But in the meantime …’ He dismounted, his scythe glistening in the dawn light. ‘I’ll settle for another dead demigod.’
I met his first strike with Riptide. The impact shook the entire bridge, but I held my ground. Kronos’s smile wavered.
With a yell, I kicked his legs out from under him. His scythe skittered across the pavement. I stabbed downward, but he rolled aside and regained his footing. His scythe flew back to his hands.
‘So …’ He studied me, looking mildly annoyed. ‘You had the courage to visit the Styx. I had to pressure Luke in many wa
ys to convince him. If only you had supplied my host body instead … but no matter. I am still more powerful. I am a TITAN.’
He struck the bridge with the butt of his scythe, and a wave of pure force blasted me backwards. Cars went careening. Demigods – even Luke’s own men – were blown off the edge of the bridge. Suspension cords whipped around and I skidded halfway back to Manhattan.
I got unsteadily to my feet. The remaining Apollo campers had almost made it to the end of the bridge – except for Michael Yew, who was perched on one of the suspension cables a few metres away from me. His last arrow was notched in his bow.
‘Michael, go!’ I screamed.
‘Percy, the bridge!’ he called. ‘It’s already weak!’
At first I didn’t understand. Then I looked down and saw fissures in the pavement. Patches of the road were half melted from Greek fire. The bridge had taken a beating from Kronos’s blast and the exploding arrows.
‘Break it!’ Michael yelled. ‘Use your powers!’
It was a desperate thought – no way it would work – but I stabbed Riptide into the bridge. The magic blade sank to its hilt in tarmac. Salt water shot from the crack like I’d hit a geyser. I pulled out my blade and the fissure grew. The bridge shook and began to crumble. Chunks the size of houses fell into the East River. Kronos’s demigods cried out in alarm and scrambled backwards. Some were knocked off their feet. Within a few seconds, a twenty-metre chasm opened in the Williamsburg Bridge between Kronos and me.
The vibrations died. Kronos’s men crept to the edge and looked at the forty-metre drop into the river.
I didn’t feel safe, though. The suspension cables were still attached. The men could get across that way if they were brave enough. Or maybe Kronos had a magic way to span the gap.
The Titan lord studied the problem. He looked behind him at the rising sun, then smiled across the chasm. He raised his scythe in a mock salute. ‘Until this evening, Jackson.’
He mounted his horse, whirled around and galloped back to Brooklyn followed by his warriors.
I turned to thank Michael Yew, but the words died in my throat. Five metres away, a bow lay in the street. Its owner was nowhere to be seen.
‘No!’ I searched the wreckage on my side of the bridge. I stared down at the river. Nothing.
I yelled in anger and frustration. The sound carried forever in the morning stillness. I was about to whistle for Blackjack to help me search when my mom’s phone rang. The LCD display said I had a call from Finklestein & Associates – probably a demigod calling on a borrowed phone.
I picked up, hoping for good news. Of course, I was wrong.
‘Percy?’ Silena Beauregard sounded like she’d been crying. ‘Plaza Hotel. You’d better come quickly and bring a healer from Apollo’s cabin. It’s … it’s Annabeth.’
12 Rachel Makes a Bad Deal
I grabbed Will Solace from the Apollo cabin and told the rest of his siblings to keep searching for Michael Yew. We borrowed a Yamaha FZI from a sleeping biker and drove to the Plaza Hotel at speeds that would’ve given my mom a heart attack. I’d never driven a motorcycle before, but it wasn’t any harder than riding a pegasus.
Along the way, I noticed a lot of empty pedestals that usually held statues. Plan twenty-three seemed to be working. I didn’t know if that was good or bad.
It only took us five minutes to reach the Plaza – an old-fashioned white stone hotel with a gabled blue roof, sitting at the south-east corner of Central Park.
Tactically speaking, the Plaza wasn’t the best place for a headquarters. It wasn’t the tallest building in town or the most centrally located. But it had old-school style and had attracted a lot of famous demigods over the years, like the Beatles and Alfred Hitchcock, so I figured we were in good company.
I gunned the Yamaha over the kerb and swerved to a stop at the fountain outside the hotel.
Will and I hopped off. The statue at the top of the fountain called down, ‘Oh, fine. I suppose you want me to watch your bike, too!’
She was a life-size bronze standing in the middle of a granite bowl. She wore only a bronze sheet around her legs, and she was holding a basket of metal fruit. I’d never paid her too much attention before. Then again she’d never talked to me before.
‘Are you supposed to be Demeter?’ I asked.
A bronze apple sailed over my head.
‘Everyone thinks I’m Demeter!’ she complained. ‘I’m Pompona, the Roman goddess of plenty, but why should you care? Nobody cares about the minor gods. If you cared about the minor gods, you wouldn’t be losing this war! Three cheers for Morpheus and Hecate, I say!’
‘Watch the bike,’ I told her.
Pompona cursed in Latin and threw more fruit as Will and I ran towards the hotel.
I’d never actually been inside the Plaza. The lobby was impressive with the crystal chandeliers and the passed-out rich people, but I didn’t pay much attention. A couple of Hunters gave us directions to the elevators, and we rode up to the penthouse suites.
Demigods had completely taken over the top floors. Campers and Hunters were crashed out on sofas, washing up in the bathrooms, ripping silk draperies to bandage their wounds and helping themselves to snacks and sodas from the mini-bars. A couple of timber wolves were drinking out of the toilets. I was relieved to see that so many of my friends had made it through the night alive, but everybody looked beaten up.
‘Percy!’ Jake Mason clapped me on the shoulder. ‘We’re getting reports –’
‘Later,’ I said. ‘Where’s Annabeth?’
‘The terrace. She’s alive, man, but …’
I pushed past him.
Under different circumstances, I would’ve loved the view from the terrace. It looked straight down onto Central Park. The morning was clear and bright – perfect for a picnic or a hike, or pretty much anything except fighting monsters.
Annabeth lay on a lounge chair. Her face was pale and beaded with sweat. Even though she was covered in blankets, she shivered. Silena Beauregard was wiping her forehead with a cool cloth.
Will and I pushed through a crowd of Athena kids. Will unwrapped Annabeth’s bandages to examine the wound and I wanted to faint. The bleeding had stopped but the gash looked deep. The skin around the cut was a horrible shade of green.
‘Annabeth …’ I choked up. She’d taken that knife for me. How could I have let that happen?
‘Poison on the dagger,’ she mumbled. ‘Pretty stupid of me, huh?’
Will Solace exhaled with relief. ‘It’s not so bad, Annabeth. A few more minutes and we would’ve been in trouble, but the venom hasn’t gotten past the shoulder yet. Just lie still. Somebody hand me some nectar.’
I grabbed a flask. Will cleaned out the wound with the godly drink while I held Annabeth’s hand.
‘Ow,’ she said. ‘Ow, ow!’ She gripped my fingers so tight they turned purple, but she stayed still like Will asked. Silena muttered words of encouragement. Will put some silver paste over the wound and hummed words in Ancient Greek – a hymn to Apollo. Then he applied fresh bandages and stood up shakily.
The healing must’ve taken a lot of his energy. He looked almost as pale as Annabeth.
‘That should do it,’ he said. ‘But we’re going to need some mortal supplies.’
He grabbed a piece of hotel stationery, jotted down some notes and handed it to one of the Athena guys. ‘There’s a pharmacy on Fifth. Normally, I would never steal –’
‘I would,’ Travis volunteered.
Will glared at him. ‘Leave cash or drachmas to pay, whatever you’ve got, but this is an emergency. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to have a lot more people to treat.’
Nobody disagreed. There was hardly a single demigod who hadn’t already been wounded … except me.
‘Come on, guys,’ Travis Stoll said. ‘Let’s give Annabeth some space. We’ve got a pharmacy to raid – I mean, visit.’
The demigods shuffled back inside. Jake Mason grabbed my shoulder as he was l
eaving. ‘We’ll talk later, but it’s under control. I’m using Annabeth’s shield to keep an eye on things. The enemy withdrew at sunrise; not sure why. We’ve got a lookout at each bridge and tunnel.’
‘Thanks, man,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Just take your time.’
He closed the terrace doors behind him – leaving Silena, Annabeth and me alone.
Silena pressed a cool cloth to Annabeth’s forehead. ‘This is all my fault.’
‘No,’ Annabeth said weakly. ‘Silena, how is it your fault?’
‘I’ve never been any good at camp,’ she murmured. ‘Not like you or Percy. If I were a better fighter …’
Her mouth trembled. Ever since Beckendorf died she’d been getting worse, and every time I looked at her it made me angry about his death all over again. Her expression reminded me of glass – like she might break any minute. I swore to myself that if I ever found the spy who’d cost her boyfriend his life, I would give him to Mrs O’Leary as a chew toy.
‘You’re a great camper,’ I told Silena. ‘You’re the best pegasus rider we have. And you get along with people. Believe me, anyone who can make friends with Clarisse has talent.’
She stared at me like I’d just given her an idea. ‘That’s it! We need the Ares cabin. I can talk to Clarisse. I know I can convince her to help us.’
‘Whoa, Silena. Even if you could get off the island, Clarisse is pretty stubborn. Once she gets angry –’
‘Please,’ Silena said. ‘I can take a pegasus. I know I can make it back to camp. Let me try.’
I exchanged looks with Annabeth. She nodded slightly.
I didn’t like the idea. I didn’t think Silena stood a chance of convincing Clarisse to fight. On the other hand, Silena was so distracted right now that she would just get herself hurt in battle. Maybe sending her back to camp would give her something else to focus on.
‘All right,’ I told her. ‘I can’t think of anybody better to try.’
Silena threw her arms around me. Then she pushed back awkwardly, glancing at Annabeth. ‘Um – sorry. Thank you, Percy! I won’t let you down!’
