by Rick Riordan
The king smiled. Suddenly he didn’t strike Jason as a harmless old man in a bathrobe. His eyes had a merry glow to them—the look of a madman who knew he was mad, accepted his madness, and enjoyed it. “Yes, gold has many uses. I think that must be why I was brought back, eh Lit? To bankroll our patron.”
Lit nodded. “That and my good sword arm.”
Jason glanced at his friends. Suddenly the air in the room seemed much colder.
“So you do have a patron,” Jason said. “You work for the giants.”
King Midas waved his hand dismissively. “Well, I don’t care for giants myself, of course. But even supernatural armies need to get paid. I do owe my patron a great debt. I tried to explain that to the last group that came through, but they were very unfriendly. Wouldn’t cooperate at all.”
Jason slipped his hand into his pocket and grabbed his gold coin. “The last group?”
“Hunters,” Lit snarled. “Blasted girls from Artemis.”
Jason felt a spark of electricity—a literal spark—travel down his spine. He caught a whiff of electrical fire like he’d just melted some of the springs in the sofa.
His sister had been here.
“When?” he demanded. “What happened?”
Lit shrugged. “Few days ago? I didn’t get to kill them, unfortunately. They were looking for some evil wolves, or something. Said they were following a trail, heading west. Missing demigod—I don’t recall.”
Percy Jackson, Jason thought. Annabeth had mentioned the Hunters were looking for him. And in Jason’s dream of the burned-out house in the redwoods, he’d heard enemy wolves baying. Hera had called them her keepers. It had to be connected somehow.
Midas scratched his donkey ears. “Very unpleasant young ladies, those Hunters,” he recalled. “They absolutely refused to be turned into gold. Much of the security system outside I installed to keep that sort of thing from happening again, you know. I don’t have time for those who aren’t serious investors.”
Jason stood warily and glanced at his friends. They got the message.
“Well,” Piper said, managing a smile. “It’s been a great visit. Welcome back to life. Thanks for the gold bag.”
“Oh, but you can’t leave!” Midas said. “I know you’re not serious investors, but that’s all right! I have to rebuild my collection.”
Lit was smiling cruelly. The king rose, and Leo and Piper moved away from him.
“Don’t worry,” the king assured them. “You don’t have to be turned to gold. I give all my guests a choice—join my collection, or die at the hands of Lityerses. Really, it’s good either way.”
Piper tried to use her charmspeak. “Your Majesty, you can’t—”
Quicker than any old man should’ve been able to move, Midas lashed out and grabbed her wrist.
“No!” Jason yelled.
But a frost of gold spread over Piper, and in a heartbeat she was a glittering statue. Leo tried to summon fire, but he’d forgotten his power wasn’t working. Midas touched his hand, and Leo transformed into solid metal.
Jason was so horrified he couldn’t move. His friends—just gone. And he hadn’t been able to stop it.
Midas smiled apologetically. “Gold trumps fire, I’m afraid.” He waved around him at all the gold curtains and furniture. “In this room, my power dampens all others: fire… even charmspeak. Which leaves me only one more trophy to collect.”
“Hedge!” Jason yelled. “Need help in here!”
For once, the satyr didn’t charge in. Jason wondered if the lasers had gotten him, or if he was sitting at the bottom of a trap pit.
Midas chuckled. “No goat to the rescue? Sad. But don’t worry, my boy. It’s really not painful. Lit can tell you.”
Jason fixed on an idea. “I choose combat. You said I could choose to fight Lit instead.”
Midas looked mildly disappointed, but he shrugged. “I said you could die fighting Lit. But of course, if you wish.”
The king backed away, and Lit raised his sword.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” Lit said. “I am the Reaper of Men!”
“Come on, Cornhusker.” Jason summoned his own weapon. This time it came up as a javelin, and Jason was glad for the extra length.
“Oh, gold weapon!” Midas said. “Very nice.”
Lit charged.
The guy was fast. He slashed and sliced, and Jason could barely dodge the strikes, but his mind went into a different mode—analyzing patterns, learning Lit’s style, which was all offense, no defense.
Jason countered, sidestepped, and blocked. Lit seemed surprised to find him still alive.
“What is that style?” Lit growled. “You don’t fight like a Greek.”
“Legion training,” Jason said, though he wasn’t sure how he knew that. “It’s Roman.”
“Roman?” Lit struck again, and Jason deflected his blade. “What is Roman?”
“News flash,” Jason said. “While you were dead, Rome defeated Greece. Created the greatest empire of all time.”
“Impossible,” Lit said. “Never even heard of them.”
Jason spun on one heel, smacked Lit in the chest with the butt of his javelin, and sent him toppling into Midas’s throne.
“Oh, dear,” Midas said. “Lit?”
“I’m fine,” Lit growled.
“You’d better help him up,” Jason said.
Lit cried, “Dad, no!”
Too late. Midas put his hand on his son’s shoulder, and suddenly a very angry-looking gold statue was sitting on Midas’s throne.
“Curses!” Midas wailed. “That was a naughty trick, demigod. I’ll get you for that.” He patted Lit’s golden shoulder. “Don’t worry, son. I’ll get you down to the river right after I collect this prize.”
Midas raced forward. Jason dodged, but the old man was fast, too. Jason kicked the coffee table into the old man’s legs and knocked him over, but Midas wouldn’t stay down for long.
Then Jason glanced at Piper’s golden statue. Anger washed over him. He was the son of Zeus. He could not fail his friends.
He felt a tugging sensation in his gut, and the air pressure dropped so rapidly that his ears popped. Midas must’ve felt it too, because he stumbled to his feet and grabbed his donkey ears.
“Ow! What are you doing?” he demanded. “My power is supreme here!”
Thunder rumbled. Outside, the sky turned black.
“You know another good use for gold?” Jason said.
Midas raised his eyebrows, suddenly excited. “Yes?”
“It’s an excellent conductor of electricity.”
Jason raised his javelin, and the ceiling exploded. A lightning bolt ripped through the roof like it was an eggshell, connected with the tip of Jason’s spear, and sent out arcs of energy that blasted the sofas to shreds. Chunks of ceiling plaster crashed down. The chandelier groaned and snapped offits chain, and Midas screamed as it pinned him to the floor. The glass immediately turned into gold.
When the rumbling stopped, freezing rain poured into the building. Midas cursed in Ancient Greek, thoroughly pinned under his chandelier. The rain soaked everything, turning the gold chandelier back to glass. Piper and Leo were slowly changing too, along with the other statues in the room.
Then the front door burst open, and Coach Hedge charged in, club ready. His mouth was covered with dirt, snow, and grass.
“What’d I miss?” he asked.
“Where were you?” Jason demanded. His head was spinning from summoning the lightning bolt, and it was all he could do to keep from passing out. “I was screaming for help.”
Hedge belched. “Getting a snack. Sorry. Who needs killing?”
“No one, now!” Jason said. “Just grab Leo. I’ll get Piper.”
“Don’t leave me like this!” Midas wailed.
All around him the statues of his victims were turning to flesh—his daughter, his barber, and a whole lot of angry-looking guys with swords.
Jason grabbed Piper’s golde
n bag and his own supplies.
Then he threw a rug over the golden statue of Lit on the throne. Hopefully that would keep the Reaper of Men from turning back to flesh—at least until after Midas’s victims did.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jason told Hedge. “I think these guys will want some quality time with Midas.”
XXXIII
PIPER
PIPER WOKE UP COLD AND SHIVERING.
She’d had the worst dream about an old guy with donkey ears chasing her around and shouting, You’re it!
“Oh, god.” Her teeth chattered. “He turned me to gold!”
“You’re okay now.” Jason leaned over and tucked a warm blanket around her, but she still felt as cold as a Boread.
She blinked, trying to figure out where they were. Next to her, a campfire blazed, turning the air sharp with smoke. Firelight flickered against rock walls. They were in a shallow cave, but it didn’t offer much protection. Outside, the wind howled. Snow blew sideways. It might’ve been day or night. The storm made it too dark to tell.
“L-L-Leo?” Piper managed.
“Present and un-gold-ified.” Leo was also wrapped in blankets. He didn’t look great, but better than Piper felt. “I got the precious metal treatment too,” he said. “But I came out of it faster. Dunno why. We had to dunk you in the river to get you back completely. Tried to dry you off, but … it’s really, really cold.”
“You’ve got hypothermia,” Jason said. “We risked as much nectar as we could. Coach Hedge did a little nature magic—”
“Sports medicine.” The coach’s ugly face loomed over her. “Kind of a hobby of mine. Your breath might smell like wild mushrooms and Gatorade for a few days, but it’ll pass. You probably won’t die. Probably.”
“Thanks,” Piper said weakly. “How did you beat Midas?”
Jason told her the story, putting most of it down to luck.
The coach snorted. “Kid’s being modest. You should’ve seen him. Hi-yah! Slice! Boom with the lightning!”
“Coach, you didn’t even see it,” Jason said. “You were outside eating the lawn.”
But the satyr was just warming up. “Then I came in with my club, and we dominated that room. Afterward, I told him, ‘Kid, I’m proud of you! If you could just work on your upper body strength—’”
“Coach,” said Jason.
“Yeah?”
“Shut up, please.”
“Sure.” The coach sat down at the fire and started chewing his cudgel.
Jason put his hand on Piper’s forehead and checked her temperature. “Leo, can you stoke the fire?”
“On it.” Leo summoned a baseball-sized clump of flames and lobbed it into the campfire.
“Do I look that bad?” Piper shivered.
“Nah,” Jason said.
“You’re a terrible liar,” she said. “Where are we?”
“Pikes Peak,” Jason said. “Colorado.”
“But that’s, what—five hundred miles from Omaha?”
“Something like that,” Jason agreed. “I harnessed the storm spirits to bring us this far. They didn’t like it—went a little faster than I wanted, almost crashed us into the mountainside before I could get them back in the bag. I’m not going to be trying that again.”
“Why are we here?”
Leo sniffed. “That’s what I asked him.”
Jason gazed into the storm as if watching for something. “That glittery wind trail we saw yesterday? It was still in the sky, though it had faded a lot. I followed it until I couldn’t see it anymore. Then—honestly I’m not sure. I just felt like this was the right place to stop.”
“’Course it is.” Coach Hedge spit out some cudgel splinters. “Aeolus’s floating palace should be anchored above us, right at the peak. This is one of his favorite spots to dock.”
“Maybe that was it.” Jason knit his eyebrows. “I don’t know. Something else, too …”
“The Hunters were heading west,” Piper remembered. “Do you think they’re around here?”
Jason rubbed his forearm as if the tattoos were bothering him. “I don’t see how anyone could survive on the mountain right now. The storm’s pretty bad. It’s already the evening before the solstice, but we didn’t have much choice except to wait out the storm here. We had to give you some time to rest before we tried moving.”
He didn’t need to convince her. The wind howling outside the cave scared her, and she couldn’t stop shivering.
“We have to get you warm.” Jason sat next to her and held out his arms a little awkwardly. “Uh, you mind if I …”
“I suppose.” She tried to sound nonchalant.
He put his arms around her and held her. They scooted closer to the fire. Coach Hedge chewed on his club and spit splinters into the fire.
Leo broke out some cooking supplies and started frying burger patties on an iron skillet. “So, guys, long as you’re cuddled up for story time … something I’ve been meaning to tell you. On the way to Omaha, I had this dream. Kinda hard to understand with the static and the Wheel of Fortune breaking in—”
“Wheel of Fortune?” Piper assumed Leo was kidding, but when he looked up from his burgers, his expression was deadly serious.
“The thing is,” he said, “my dad Hephaestus talked to me.”
Leo told them about his dream. In the firelight, with the wind howling, the story was even creepier. Piper could imagine the static-filled voice of the god warning about giants who were the sons of Tartarus, and about Leo losing some friends along the way.
She tried to concentrate on something good: Jason’s arms around her, the warmth slowly spreading into her body, but she was terrified. “I don’t understand. If demigods and gods have to work together to kill the giants, why would the gods stay silent? If they need us—”
“Ha,” said Coach Hedge. “The gods hate needing humans. They like to be needed by humans, but not the other way around. Things will have to get a whole lot worse before Zeus admits he made a mistake closing Olympus.”
“Coach,” Piper said, “that was almost an intelligent comment.”
Hedge huffed. “What? I’m intelligent! I’m not surprised you cupcakes haven’t heard of the Giant War. The gods don’t like to talk about it. Bad PR to admit you needed mortals to help beat an enemy. That’s just embarrassing.”
“There’s more, though,” Jason said. “When I dreamed about Hera in her cage, she said Zeus was acting unusually paranoid. And Hera—she said she went to those ruins because a voice had been speaking in her head. What if someone’s influencing the gods, like Medea influenced us?”
Piper shuddered. She’d had a similar thought—that some force they couldn’t see was manipulating things behind the scenes, helping the giants. Maybe the same force was keeping Enceladus informed about their movements, and had even knocked their dragon out of the sky over Detroit. Perhaps Leo’s sleeping Dirt Woman, or another servant of hers …
Leo set hamburger buns on the skillet to toast. “Yeah, Hephaestus said something similar, like Zeus was acting weirder than usual. But what bothered me was the stuff my dad didn’t say. Like a couple of times he was talking about the demigods, and how he had so many kids and all. I don’t know. He acted like getting the greatest demigods together was going to be almost impossible—like Hera was trying, but it was a really stupid thing to do, and there was some secret Hephaestus wasn’t supposed to tell me.”
Jason shifted. Piper could feel the tension in his arms.
“Chiron was the same way back at camp,” he said. “He mentioned a sacred oath not to discuss—something. Coach, you know anything about that?”
“Nah. I’m just a satyr. They don’t tell us the juicy stuff. Especially an old—” He stopped himself.
“An old guy like you?” Piper asked. “But you’re not that old, are you?”
“Hundred and six,” the coach muttered.
Leo coughed. “Say what?”
“Don’t catch your panties on fire, Valdez. That’
s just fifty-three in human years. Still, yeah, I made some enemies on the Council of Cloven Elders. I’ve been a protector a longtime. But they started saying I was getting unpredictable. Too violent. Can you imagine?”
“Wow.” Piper tried not to look at her friends. “That’s hard to believe.”
Coach scowled. “Yeah, then finally we get a good war going with the Titans, and do they put me on the front lines? No! They send me as far away as possible—the Canadian frontier, can you believe it? Then after the war, they put me out to pasture. The Wilderness School. Bah! Like I’m too old to be helpful just because I like playing offense. All those flower-pickers on the Council—talking about nature.”
“I thought satyrs liked nature,” Piper ventured.
“Shoot, I love nature,” Hedge said. “Nature means big things killing and eating little things! And when you’re a —you know—vertically challenged satyr like me, you get in good shape, you carry a big stick, and you don’t take nothing from no one! That’s nature.” Hedge snorted indignantly. “Flower-pickers. Anyway, I hope you got something vegetarian cooking, Valdez. I don’t do flesh.”
“Yeah, Coach. Don’t eat your cudgel. I got some tofu patties here. Piper’s a vegetarian too. I’ll throw them on in a second.”
The smell of frying burgers filled the air. Piper usually hated the smell of cooking meat, but her stomach rumbled like it wanted to mutiny.
I’m losing it, she thought. Think broccoli. Carrots. Lentils.
Her stomach wasn’t the only thing rebelling. Lying by the fire, with Jason holding her, Piper’s conscience felt like a hot bullet slowing working its way toward her heart. All the guilt she’d been holding in for the last week, since the giant Enceladus had first sent her a dream, was about to kill her.
Her friends wanted to help her. Jason even said he’d walk into a trap to save her dad. And Piper had shut them out.
For all she knew, she’d already doomed her father when she attacked Medea.
She choked back a sob. Maybe she’d done the right thing in Chicago by saving her friends, but she’d only delayed her problem. She could never betray her friends, but the tiniest part of her was desperate enough to think, What if I did?
