THE HEALER| Heroes of Olympus

V

Through a fog of pain, I heard the ship's figurehead, Festus the bronze dragon, creaking in alarm and shooting fire, as well Jasper apologizing. 

Dimly, I wondered if we'd hit an iceberg – but in the Adriatic, in the middle of summer?

The ship rocked to port with a massive commotion, like telephone poles snapping in half. Jasper helped me up and we raced to the deck.

"Gahh!" Leo yelled. "It's eating the oars!"

What is?  I wondered.

Everyone else was scrambling. Jason jumped over Hazel and Frank who had fallen, with his sword drawn, and raced towards the stern. Piper was already on the quarterdeck, shooting food from her cornucopia and yelling, "Hey! HEY! Eat this, ya stupid turtle!"

Turtle?

I sprinted up the steps, shook my arm activating my bracelet, which instantly transformed into a bow and armor along my arm. By the time I reached the helm, I had already fired one arrow and was nocking the second.

Leo frantically worked the ship's controls. "Oars won't retract. Get it away! Get it away!"

Up in the rigging, Nico's face was slack with shock.

"Styx – it's huge!" he yelled. "Port! Go port!"

Coach Hedge was the last one on deck. He compensated for that with enthusiasm. He bounded up the steps, waving his baseball bat, and without hesitation goat-galloped to the stern and leaped over the rail with a gleeful "Ha-HA!"

 The boat shuddered. More oars snapped, and Leo yelled, "No, no, no! Dang slimy-shelled son of a mother!"

I reached the stern and couldn't believe what I saw.When I heard the word turtle, I thought of a cute little thing the size of a jewelry box, sittingon a rock in the middle of a fishpond. When I heard huge, my mind tried to adjust – okay, perhaps it was like the Galapagos tortoise I'd seen in the zoo once, with a shell big enough to ride on.

I did not envision a creature the size of an island. When I saw the massive dome of craggy black and brown squares, the word turtle simply did not compute. Its shell was more like a landmass – hills of bone, shiny pearl valleys, kelp and moss forests, rivers of seawater trickling down the grooves of its carapace.

On the ship's starboard side, another part of the monster rose from the water like a submarine. Lares of Rome ... was that its head?

Its gold eyes were the size of wading pools, with dark sideways slits for pupils. Its skin glistened like wet army camouflage – brown flecked with green and yellow. Its red, toothless mouth could've swallowed the Athena Parthenos in one bite.

I watched as it snapped off half a dozen oars.

"Stop that!" Leo wailed.

Coach Hedge clambered around the turtle's shell, whacking at it uselessly with his baseball bat and yelling, "Take that! And that!"

Jason flew from the stern and landed on the creature's head. He stabbed his golden sword straight between its eyes, but the blade slipped sideways, as if the turtle's skin were greased steel. I shot arrows at the monster's eyes with no success. The turtle's filmy inner eyelids blinked with uncanny precision, deflecting each shot. Piper shot cantaloupes into the water, yelling,

"Fetch, ya stupid turtle!"

But the turtle seemed fixated on eating the Argo II.

"How did it get so close?" I demanded.

Leo threw his hands up in exasperation. "Must be that shell. Guess it's invisible to sonar. It's a freaking stealth turtle!"

"Can the ship fly?'"Piper asked.