~ { Shadow and Beauty } ~

Fish-Horse Guys

   He concentrated, and fire flickered over his fingers. For a split second, Leo was excited, because he hadn't expected it to work underwater. Then his plan started working a little too well. Fire raced up his arm and over his body until he was completely shrouded in a thin veil of flame. He tried to breathe, but he was inhaling pure heat.

   "Leo!" Frank flailed backward like he was falling off a bar stool. Instead of racing to Leo's aid, he hugged the wall to get as far away as possible.

   Leo forced himself to stay calm. He understood what was going on. The fire itself couldn't hurt him. He willed the flames to die and counted to five. He took a shallow breath. He had oxygen again.

   Frank stopped trying to merge with the cave wall. "You're... you're okay?"

   "Yeah," Leo grumbled. "Thanks for the assist."

   "I—I'm sorry." Frank looked so horrified and ashamed it was hard for Leo to stay mad at him. "I just... what happened?"

   "Clever magic," Leo said. "There's a thin layer of oxygen around us, like an extra skin. Must be self-regenerating. That's how we're breathing and staying dry. The oxygen gave the fire fuel—except the fire also suffocated me."

   "I really don't..." Frank gulped. "I don't like that fire summoning you do." He started getting cozy with the wall again.

   Leo didn't mean to, but he couldn't help laughing. "Man, I'm not going to attack you."

   "Fire," Frank repeated, like that one word explained everything.

   Leo remembered what Hazel had said—that his fire made Frank nervous. He'd seen the discomfort in Frank's face before, but Leo hadn't taken it seriously. Frank seemed way more powerful and scary than Leo was.

   Now it occurred to him that Frank might have had a bad experience with fire. Leo's own mom had died in a machine shop blaze. Leo had been blamed for it. He'd grown up being called a freak, an arsonist, because whenever he got angry, things burned.

   "Sorry I laughed," he said, and he meant it. "My mom died in a fire. I understand being afraid of it. Did, uh... did something like that happen with you?"

   Frank seemed to be weighing how much to say. "My house... my grandmother's place. It burned down. But it's more than that..." He stared at the sea urchins on the floor. "Annabeth said I could trust the crew. Even you."

   "Even me, huh?" Leo wondered how that had come up in conversation. "Wow, high praise."

   "My weakness..." Frank started, like the words cut his mouth. "There's this piece of firewood—"

   The abalone door rolled open.

   Leo turned and found himself face-to-face with Lima Bean Man, who wasn't actually a man at all. Now that Leo could see him clearly, the guy was by far the weirdest creature he'd ever met, and that was saying a lot.

   From the waist up, he was more or less human—a thin, bare-chested dude with a dagger in his belt and a band of seashells strapped across his chest like a bandolier. His skin was green, his beard scraggly brown, and his longish hair was tied back in a seaweed bandana. A pair of lobster claws stuck up from his head like horns, turning and snapping at random.

   Leo decided he didn't look so much like Chiron. He looked more like the poster Leo's mom used to keep in her workspace—that old Mexican bandit Pancho Villa, except with seashells and lobster horns.

   From the waist down, the guy was more complicated. He had the forelegs of a blue-green horse, sort of like a centaur, but toward the back, his horse body morphed into a long fishy tail about ten feet long, with a rainbow- colored, V-shaped tail fin.