Percy Jackson The Complete Collection (34 page)

‘Too many delays!’ the monster bellowed. Then he sniffed the air. ‘You smell good! Like goats!’

‘Oh.’ Grover forced a weak giggle. ‘Do you like it? It’s
Eau de Chévre
. I wore it just for you.’

‘Mmmm!’ The Cyclops bared his pointed teeth. ‘Good enough to eat!’

‘Oh, you’re such a flirt!’

‘No more delays!’

‘But dear, I’m not done!’

‘Tomorrow!’

‘No, no. Ten more days.’

‘Five!’

‘Oh, well, seven then. If you insist.’

‘Seven! That is less than five, right?’

‘Certainly. Oh yes.’

The monster grumbled, still not happy with his deal, but he left Grover to his weaving and rolled the boulder back into place.

Grover closed his eyes and took a shaky breath, trying to calm his nerves.

‘Hurry, Percy,’ he muttered. ‘Please, please, please!’

I woke to a ship’s whistle and a voice on the intercom – some guy with an Australian accent who sounded way too happy.

‘Good morning, passengers! We’ll be at sea all day today. Excellent weather for the poolside mambo party! Don’t forget million-dollar bingo in the Kraken Lounge at one o’clock, and for our
special guests
, disembowelling practice on the Promenade!’

I sat up in bed. ‘What did he say?’

Tyson groaned, still half asleep. He was lying face down on the couch, his feet so far over the edge they were in the
bathroom. ‘The happy man said … bowling practice?’

I hoped he was right, but then there was an urgent knock on the suite’s interior door. Annabeth stuck her head in – her blonde hair in a rat’s nest. ‘
Disembowelling
practice?’

Once we were all dressed, we ventured out into the ship and were surprised to see other people. A dozen senior citizens were heading to breakfast. A dad was taking his kids to the pool for a morning swim. Crew members in crisp white uniforms strolled the deck, tipping their hats to the passengers.

Nobody asked who we were. Nobody paid us much attention. But there was something wrong.

As the family of swimmers passed us, the dad told his kids, ‘We are on a cruise. We are having fun.’

‘Yes,’ his three kids said in unison, their expressions blank. ‘We are having a blast. We will swim in the pool.’

They wandered off.

‘Good morning,’ a crew member told us, his eyes glazed. ‘We are all enjoying ourselves aboard the
Princess Andromeda
. Have a nice day.’ He drifted away.

‘Percy, this is weird,’ Annabeth whispered. ‘They’re all in some kind of trance.’

Then we passed a cafeteria and saw our first monster. It was a hellhound – a black mastiff with its front paws up on the buffet counter and its muzzle buried in the scrambled eggs. It must’ve been young, because it was small compared to most – no bigger than a grizzly bear. Still, my blood turned cold. I’d almost got killed by one of those before.

The weird thing was, a middle-aged couple was standing in the buffet queue right behind the devil dog, patiently
waiting their turn for the eggs. They didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary.

‘Not hungry any more,’ Tyson murmured.

Before Annabeth or I could reply, a reptilian voice came from down the corridor, ‘Ssssix more joined yesssterday.’

Annabeth gestured frantically towards the nearest hiding place – the women’s room – and all three of us ducked inside. I was so freaked out it didn’t even occur to me to be embarrassed.

Something – or more like
two
somethings – slithered past the restroom door, making sounds like sandpaper against the carpet.

‘Yesss,’ a second reptilian voice said. ‘He drawssss them. Ssssoon we will be sssstrong.’

The things slithered into the cafeteria with a cold hissing that might have been snake laughter.

Annabeth looked at me. ‘We have to get out of here.’

‘You think I
want
to be in the girls’ restroom?’

‘I mean the ship, Percy! We have to get off the ship.’

‘Smells bad,’ Tyson agreed. ‘And dogs eat all the eggs. Annabeth is right. We must leave the restroom and ship.’

I shuddered. If Annabeth and Tyson were actually
agreeing
about something, I figured I’d better listen.

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.’

Annabeth volunteered to go alone since she had the cap of invisibility, but I convinced her it was too dangerous. Either we all went together, or nobody went.

‘Nobody!’ Tyson voted. ‘Please?’

But in the end he came along, nervously chewing on his huge fingernails. We stopped at our cabin long enough to gather our stuff. We figured whatever happened, we would
not
be staying another night aboard the zombie cruise ship, even if they did have million-dollar bingo. I made sure Riptide was in my pocket and the vitamins and flask from Hermes were at the top of my bag. I didn’t want Tyson to carry everything, but he insisted, and Annabeth told me not to worry about it. Tyson could carry three full duffel bags over his shoulder as easily as I could carry a backpack.

We sneaked through the corridors, following the ship’s
YOU ARE HERE
signs towards the admiralty suite. Annabeth scouted ahead invisibly. We hid whenever someone passed by, but most of the people we saw were just glassy-eyed zombie passengers.

As we came up the stairs to deck thirteen, where the admiralty suite was supposed to be, Annabeth hissed, ‘Hide!’ and shoved us into a supply closet.

I heard a couple of guys coming down the hall.

‘You see that Aethiopian drakon in the cargo hold?’ one of them said.

The other laughed. ‘Yeah, it’s awesome.’

Annabeth was still invisible, but she squeezed my arm hard. I got a feeling I should know that second guy’s voice.

‘I hear they got two more coming,’ the familiar voice said. ‘They keep arriving at this rate, oh, man – no contest!’

The voices faded down the corridor.

‘That was Chris Rodriguez!’ Annabeth took off her cap and turned visible. ‘You remember – from Cabin Eleven.’

I sort of recalled Chris from the summer before. He was one of those undetermined campers who got stuck in the Hermes cabin because his Olympian dad or mom never claimed him. Now that I thought about it, I realized I hadn’t seen Chris at camp this summer. ‘What’s another half-blood doing here?’

Annabeth shook her head, clearly troubled.

We kept going down the corridor. I didn’t need maps any more to know I was getting close to Luke. I sensed something cold and unpleasant – the presence of evil.

‘Percy.’ Annabeth stopped suddenly. ‘Look.’

She stood in front of a glass wall looking down into the multistorey canyon that ran through the middle of the ship. At the bottom was the Promenade – a mall full of shops – but that’s not what had caught Annabeth’s attention.

A group of monsters had assembled in front of the candy store: a dozen Laistrygonian giants like the ones who’d attacked me with dodgeballs, 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 armour 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 armour stabbed the dummy through its belly and ripped upwards. 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 ten metres 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 favourite cousins. Come right in.’

The stateroom was beautiful, and it was horrible.

The beautiful part: huge windows curved along the back wall, looking out over the stern of the ship. Green sea and blue sky stretched all the way to the horizon. A Persian rug covered the floor. Two plush sofas occupied the middle of the room, with a canopied bed in one corner and a mahogany dining table in the other. The table was loaded with food: pizza boxes, bottles of soda and a stack of roast beef sandwiches on a silver platter.

The horrible part: on a velvet dais at the back of the room lay a three-metre-long golden casket. A sarcophagus, engraved with Ancient Greek scenes of cities in flames and heroes dying grisly deaths. Despite the sunlight streaming through the windows, the casket made the whole room feel cold.

‘Well,’ Luke said, spreading his arms proudly. ‘A little nicer than Cabin Eleven, huh?’

He’d changed since last summer. Instead of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, he wore a button-down shirt, khaki trousers 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 centre 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 two and a half metres 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 behaviour. 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 dishonour her –’

‘I didn’t dishonour her!’ Luke snapped. ‘The gods dishonoured 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.

‘Travelling with a
Cyclops,
’ Luke chided. ‘Talk about dishonouring 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 of 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 … thirty, thirty-one, seventy-five, twelve? 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 towards 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 colour 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.’