by Rick Riordan
‘You worry too much. That journey is never safe for demigods, and it’s much too far. Besides, Victory runs rampant in Olympia. As long as that’s the case, there is no way the demigods can win this war.’
Jason didn’t understand what that meant either, but he nodded. ‘Very well. I will report as much to King Porphyrion. Thank you for the, er, meal.’
Over at the fountain, Michael Varus called, ‘Wait.’
Jason bit back a curse. He’d been trying to ignore the dead praetor, but now Varus walked over, surrounded in a hazy white aura, his deep-set eyes like sinkholes. At his side hung an Imperial gold gladius.
‘You must stay,’ Varus said.
Antinous shot the ghost an irritated look. ‘What’s the problem, legionnaire? If Iros wants to leave, let him. He smells bad!’
The other ghosts laughed nervously. Across the courtyard, Piper shot Jason a worried glance. A little further away, Annabeth casually palmed a carving knife from the nearest platter of meat.
Varus rested his hand on the pommel of his sword. Despite the heat, his breastplate was glazed with ice. ‘I lost my cohort twice in Alaska – once in life, once in death to a Graecus named Percy Jackson. Still I have come here to answer Gaia’s call. Do you know why?’
Jason swallowed. ‘Stubbornness?’
‘This is a place of longing,’ Varus said. ‘All of us are drawn here, sustained not only by Gaia’s power but also by our strongest desires. Eurymachus’s greed. Antinous’s cruelty.’
‘You flatter me,’ the ghoul muttered.
‘Hasdrubal’s hatred,’ Varus continued. ‘Hippias’s bitterness. My ambition. And you, Iros. What has drawn you here? What does a beggar most desire? Perhaps a home?’
An uncomfortable tingle started at the base of Jason’s skull – the same feeling he got when a huge electrical storm was about to break.
‘I should be going,’ he said. ‘Messages to carry.’
Michael Varus drew his sword. ‘My father is Janus, the god of two faces. I am used to seeing through masks and deceptions. Do you know, Iros, why we are so sure the demigods will not pass our island undetected?’
Jason silently ran through his repertoire of Latin cuss words. He tried to calculate how long it would take him to get out his emergency flare and fire it. Hopefully he could buy enough time for the girls to find shelter before this mob of dead guys slaughtered him.
He turned to Antinous. ‘Look, are you in charge here or not? Maybe you should muzzle your Roman.’
The ghoul took a deep breath. The arrow rattled in his throat. ‘Ah, but this might be entertaining. Go on, Varus.’
The dead praetor raised his sword. ‘Our desires reveal us. They show us for who we really are. Someone has come for you, Jason Grace.’
Behind Varus, the crowd parted. The shimmering ghost of a woman drifted forward, and Jason felt as if his bones were turning to dust.
‘My dearest,’ said his mother’s ghost. ‘You have come home.’
III
Jason
Somehow he knew her. He recognized her dress – a flowery green-and-red wraparound, like the skirt of a Christmas tree. He recognized the colourful plastic bangles on her wrists that had dug into his back when she hugged him goodbye at the Wolf House. He recognized her hair, an over-teased corona of dyed blonde curls and her scent of lemons and aerosol.
Her eyes were blue like Jason’s, but they gleamed with fractured light, like she’d just come out of a bunker after a nuclear war – hungrily searching for familiar details in a changed world.
‘Dearest.’ She held out her arms.
Jason’s vision tunnelled. The ghosts and ghouls no longer mattered.
His Mist disguise burned off. His posture straightened. His joints stopped aching. His walking stick turned back into an Imperial gold gladius.
The burning sensation didn’t stop. He felt as if layers of his life were being seared away – his months at Camp Half-Blood, his years at Camp Jupiter, his training with Lupa the wolf goddess. He was a scared and vulnerable two-year-old again. Even the scar on his lip, from when he’d tried to eat a stapler as a toddler, stung like a fresh wound.
‘Mom?’ he managed.
‘Yes, dearest.’ Her image flickered. ‘Come, embrace me.’
‘You’re – you’re not real.’
‘Of course she is real.’ Michael Varus’s voice sounded far away. ‘Did you think Gaia would let such an important spirit languish in the Underworld? She is your mother, Beryl Grace, star of television, sweetheart to the king of Olympus, who rejected her not once but twice, in both his Greek and Roman aspects. She deserves justice as much as any of us.’
Jason’s heart felt wobbly. The suitors crowded around him, watching.
I’m their entertainment, Jason realized. The ghosts probably found this even more amusing than two beggars fighting to the death.
Piper’s voice cut through the buzzing in his head. ‘Jason, look at me.’
She stood twenty feet away, holding her ceramic amphora. Her smile was gone. Her gaze was fierce and commanding – as impossible to ignore as the blue harpy feather in her hair. ‘That isn’t your mother. Her voice is working some kind of magic on you – like charmspeak, but more dangerous. Can’t you sense it?’
‘She’s right.’ Annabeth climbed onto the nearest table. She kicked aside a platter, startling a dozen suitors. ‘Jason, that’s only a remnant of your mother, like an ara, maybe, or –’
‘A remnant!’ His mother’s ghost sobbed. ‘Yes, look what I have been reduced to. It’s Jupiter’s fault. He abandoned us. He wouldn’t help me! I didn’t want to leave you in Sonoma, my dear, but Juno and Jupiter gave me no choice. They wouldn’t allow us to stay together. Why fight for them now? Join these suitors. Lead them. We can be a family again!’
Jason felt hundreds of eyes on him.
This has been the story of my life, he thought bitterly. Everyone had always watched him, expecting him to lead the way. From the moment he’d arrived at Camp Jupiter, the Roman demigods had treated him like a prince in waiting. Despite his attempts to alter his destiny – joining the worst cohort, trying to change the camp traditions, taking the least glamorous missions and befriending the least popular kids – he had been made praetor anyway. As a son of Jupiter, his future had been assured.
He remembered what Hercules had said to him at the Straits of Gibraltar: It’s not easy being a son of Zeus. Too much pressure. Eventually, it can make a guy snap.
Now Jason was here, drawn as taut as a bowstring.
‘You left me,’ he told his mother. ‘That wasn’t Jupiter or Juno. That was you.’
Beryl Grace stepped forward. The worry lines around her eyes, the pained tightness in her mouth reminded Jason of his sister, Thalia.
‘Dearest, I told you I would come back. Those were my last words to you. Don’t you remember?’
Jason shivered. In the ruins of the Wolf House his mother had hugged him one last time. She had smiled, but her eyes were full of tears.
It’s all right, she had promised. But even as a little kid Jason had known it wasn’t all right. Wait here. I will be back for you, dearest. I will see you soon.
She hadn’t come back. Instead, Jason had wandered the ruins, crying and alone, calling for his mother and for Thalia – until the wolves came for him.
His mother’s unkept promise was at the core of who he was. He’d built his whole life around the irritation of her words, like the grain of sand at the centre of a pearl.
People lie. Promises are broken.
That was why, as much as it chafed him, Jason followed rules. He kept his promises. He never wanted to abandon anyone the way he’d been abandoned and lied to.
Now his mom was back, erasing the one certainty Jason had about her – that she’d left him forever.
Across the table, Antinous raised his goblet. ‘So pleased to meet you, son of Jupiter. Listen to your mother. You have many grievances against the gods. Why not join us? I gather these
two serving girls are your friends? We will spare them. You wish to have your mother remain in the world? We can do that. You wish to be a king –’
‘No.’ Jason’s mind was spinning. ‘No, I don’t belong with you.’
Michael Varus regarded him with cold eyes. ‘Are you so sure, my fellow praetor? Even if you defeat the giants and Gaia, would you return home like Odysseus did? Where is your home now? With the Greeks? With the Romans? No one will accept you. And, if you get back, who’s to say you won’t find ruins like this?’
Jason scanned the palace courtyard. Without the illusory balconies and colonnades, there was nothing but a heap of rubble on a barren hilltop. Only the fountain seemed real, spewing forth sand like a reminder of Gaia’s limitless power.
‘You were a legion officer,’ he told Varus. ‘A leader of Rome.’
‘So were you,’ Varus said. ‘Loyalties change.’
‘You think I belong with this crowd?’ Jason asked. ‘A bunch of dead losers waiting for a free handout from Gaia, whining that the world owes them something?’
Around the courtyard, ghosts and ghouls rose to their feet and drew weapons.
‘Beware!’ Piper yelled at the crowd. ‘Every man in this palace is your enemy. Each one will stab you in the back at the first chance!’
Over the last few weeks, Piper’s charmspeak had become truly powerful. She spoke the truth, and the crowd believed her. They looked sideways at one another, hands clenching the hilts of their swords.
Jason’s mother stepped towards him. ‘Dearest, be sensible. Give up your quest. Your Argo II could never make the trip to Athens. Even if it did, there’s the matter of the Athena Parthenos.’
A tremor passed through him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t feign ignorance, my dearest. Gaia knows about your friend Reyna and Nico the son of Hades and the satyr Hedge. To kill them, the Earth Mother has sent her most dangerous son – the hunter who never rests. But you don’t have to die.’
The ghouls and ghosts closed in – two hundred of them facing Jason in anticipation, as if he might lead them in the national anthem.
The hunter who never rests.
Jason didn’t know who that was, but he had to warn Reyna and Nico.
Which meant he had to get out of here alive.
He looked at Annabeth and Piper. Both stood ready, waiting for his cue.
He forced himself to meet his mother’s eyes. She looked like the same woman who’d abandoned him in the Sonoma woods fourteen years ago. But Jason wasn’t a toddler any more. He was a battle veteran, a demigod who’d faced death countless times.
And what he saw in front of him wasn’t his mother – at least, not what his mother should be – caring, loving, selflessly protective.
A remnant, Annabeth had called her.
Michael Varus had told him that the spirits here were sustained by their strongest desires. The spirit of Beryl Grace literally glowed with need. Her eyes demanded Jason’s attention. Her arms reached out, desperate to possess him.
‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘What brought you here?’
‘I want life!’ she cried. ‘Youth! Beauty! Your father could have made me immortal. He could have taken me to Olympus, but he abandoned me. You can set things right, Jason. You are my proud warrior!’
Her lemony scent turned acrid, as if she were starting to burn.
Jason remembered something Thalia had told him. Their mother had become increasingly unstable, until her despair had driven her crazy. She had died in a car accident, the result of her driving while drunk.
The watered wine in Jason’s stomach churned. He decided that if he lived through this day he would never drink alcohol again.
‘You’re a mania,’ Jason decided, the word coming to him from his studies at Camp Jupiter long ago. ‘A spirit of insanity. That’s what you’ve been reduced to.’
‘I am all that remains,’ Beryl Grace agreed. Her image flickered through a spectrum of colours. ‘Embrace me, son. I am all you have left.’
The memory of the South Wind spoke in his mind: You can’t choose your parentage. But you can choose your legacy.
Jason felt like he was being reassembled, one layer at a time. His heartbeat steadied. The chill left his bones. His skin warmed in the afternoon sun.
‘No,’ he croaked. He glanced at Annabeth and Piper. ‘My loyalties haven’t changed. My family has just expanded. I’m a child of Greece and Rome.’ He looked back at his mother for the last time. ‘I’m no child of yours.’
He made the ancient sign of warding off evil – three fingers thrust out from the heart – and the ghost of Beryl Grace disappeared with a soft hiss, like a sigh of relief.
The ghoul Antinous tossed aside his goblet. He studied Jason with a look of lazy disgust. ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I suppose we’ll just kill you.’
All around Jason, the enemies closed in.
IV
Jason
The fight was going great – until he got stabbed.
Jason slashed his gladius in a wide arc, vaporizing the nearest suitors, then he vaulted onto the table and jumped right over Antinous’s head. In midair he willed his blade to extend into a javelin – a trick he’d never tried with this sword – but somehow he knew it would work.
He landed on his feet holding a six-foot-long pilum. As Antinous turned to face him, Jason thrust the Imperial gold point through the ghoul’s chest.
Antinous looked down incredulously. ‘You –’
‘Enjoy the Fields of Punishment.’ Jason yanked out his pilum and Antinous crumbled to dirt.
Jason kept fighting, spinning his javelin – slicing through ghosts, knocking ghouls off their feet.
Across the courtyard, Annabeth fought like a demon, too. Her drakon-bone sword scythed down any suitors stupid enough to face her.
Over by the sand fountain, Piper had also drawn her sword – the jagged bronze blade she’d taken from Zethes the Boread. She stabbed and parried with her right hand, occasionally shooting tomatoes from the cornucopia in her left, while yelling at the suitors, ‘Save yourselves! I’m too dangerous!’
That must have been exactly what they wanted to hear, because her opponents kept running away, only to freeze in confusion a few yards downhill, then charge back into the fight.
The Greek tyrant Hippias lunged at Piper, his dagger raised, but Piper blasted him point-blank in the chest with a lovely pot roast. He tumbled backwards into the fountain and screamed as he disintegrated.
An arrow whistled towards Jason’s face. He blew it aside with a gust of wind, then cut through a line of sword-wielding ghouls and noticed a dozen suitors regrouping by the fountain to charge Annabeth. He lifted his javelin to the sky. A bolt of lightning ricocheted off the point and blasted the ghosts to ions, leaving a smoking crater where the sand fountain had been.
Over the last few months, Jason had fought many battles, but he’d forgotten what it was like to feel good in combat. Of course he was still afraid, but a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders. For the first time since waking up in Arizona with his memories erased, Jason felt whole. He knew who he was. He had chosen his family, and it had nothing to do with Beryl Grace or even Jupiter. His family included all the demigods who fought at his side, Roman and Greek, new friends and old. He wasn’t going to let anyone break his family apart.
He summoned the winds and flung three ghouls off the side of the hill like rag dolls. He skewered a fourth, then willed his javelin to shrink back to a sword and hacked through another group of spirits.
Soon no more enemies faced him. The remaining ghosts began to disappear on their own. Annabeth cut down Hasdrubal the Carthaginian, and Jason made the mistake of sheathing his sword.
Pain flared in his lower back – so sharp and cold he thought Khione the snow goddess had touched him.
Next to his ear, Michael Varus snarled, ‘Born a Roman, die a Roman.’
The tip of a golden sword jutted through the front of Jason’s
shirt, just below his ribcage.
Jason fell to his knees. Piper’s scream sounded miles away. He felt like he’d been immersed in salty water – his body weightless, his head swaying.
Piper charged towards him. He watched with detached emotion as her sword passed over his head and cut through Michael Varus’s armour with a metallic ka-chunk.
A burst of cold parted Jason’s hair from behind. Dust settled around him, and an empty legionnaire’s helmet rolled across the stones. The evil demigod was gone – but he had made a lasting impression.
‘Jason!’ Piper grabbed his shoulders as he began to fall sideways. He gasped as she pulled the sword out of his back. Then she lowered him to the ground, propping his head against a stone.
Annabeth ran to their side. She had a nasty cut on the side of her neck.
‘Gods.’ Annabeth stared at the wound in Jason’s gut. ‘Oh, gods.’
‘Thanks,’ Jason groaned. ‘I was afraid it might be bad.’
His arms and legs started to tingle as his body went into crisis mode, sending all the blood to his chest. The pain was dull, which surprised him, but his shirt was soaked red. The wound was smoking. He was pretty sure sword wounds weren’t supposed to smoke.
‘You’re going to be fine.’ Piper spoke the words like an order. Her tone steadied his breathing. ‘Annabeth, ambrosia!’
Annabeth stirred. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I got it.’ She ripped through her supply pouch and unwrapped a piece of godly food.
‘We have to stop the bleeding.’ Piper used her dagger to cut fabric from the bottom of her dress. She ripped the cloth into bandages.
Jason dimly wondered how she knew so much first aid. She wrapped the wounds on his back and stomach while Annabeth pushed tiny bites of ambrosia into his mouth.
Annabeth’s fingers trembled. After all the things she’d been through, Jason found it odd that she would freak out now while Piper acted so calm. Then it occurred to him – Annabeth could afford to be scared for him. Piper couldn’t. She was completely focused on trying to save him.
Annabeth fed him another bite. ‘Jason, I – I’m sorry. About your mom. But the way you handled it … that was so brave.’
