The next few days were . . . weird.
For Y/N, not much had changed, but with Percy, it was something else.
Then again, with a Cyclops for brother, he wasn't anymore the cool guy who'd retrieved Zeus's lightning bolt last summer. Now he was Percy Jackson, the poor schmuck with the ugly monster for a brother.
Of course, Y/N didn't share that opinion, but Percy looked at everyone with a lethal glare.
"He's not my real brother!" he protested as Tyson wasn't around. "He's more like a half-brother on the monstrous side of the family. Like . . . a half-brother twice removed, or something."
Y/N rolled his eyes. "Yes, Percy." It was the fifth time today.
A girl from Aphrodite's cabin walked by and asked Percy if he needed to borrow some eyeliner for his eye. . . . "Oh sorry, eyes."
As she walked away laughing, Y/N said, "Ignore her."
"It isn't your fault you have a monster for a brother," Annabeth added.
"He's not my brother!" Percy snapped. "And he's not a monster, either!"
"Hey, don't get mad at us," Y/N retorted.
"And technically, he is a monster," Annabeth said. "Cyclopes are the most deceitful, treacherous—"
"Tyson is not!" Percy told her. "What have you got against Cyclopes, anyway?"
Annabeth's ears turned pink. Y/N felt like there was something she wasn't telling them—something bad. But it would have to be for later.
"Percy," he said, "if Tyson isn't a monster, and if he is not deceitful and treacherous, then why do you deny he's your brother?"
"He's just not my real brother," Percy grumbled. "We don't have the same mother. . . ."
"Oh really?" Y/N retorted. "Is that really why? Because you don't have the same mother? I'll tell you what I think. You don't want Tyson to be your brother because that would be admitting your father fooled around with someone else than your mother. And, I think that, deep down, you do see him as a monster. Since yesterday, every time he's around, you're ashamed, and you try to avoid being seen near him. Why? Because you do see him as a monster and he is your brother!"
"You think so?" Percy said.
"Yes."
"Well, you're wrong!"
And, without saying one more word, Percy stormed off.
The only person at camp who had no problem with Tyson was Beckendorf from the Hephaestus cabin. The blacksmith god had always worked with Cyclopes in his forges, so Beckendorf took Tyson down to the armory to teach him metalworking. He said he'd have Tyson crafting magic items like a master in no time.
As for Y/N, he took his first riding lesson on a pegasus with Silena Beauregard, one of the nicer girls from Aphrodite's cabin. He wasn't very good at it, and he fell several times. Just as well he could transform into an eagle, otherwise you could have scraped him off the ground.
He worked out in the arena with Athena's cabin. He wouldn't have said no to testing himself against the Ares, but it seemed they wouldn't stop their blade from cutting his head off if it ever came close to his throat.
In the evenings, he did border patrol. Even though Tantalus had insisted they forget trying to protect the camp, some of the campers had quietly kept it up, working out a schedule during their free times.
From the top of Half-Blood Hill, he watched the dryads come and go, singing to the dying pine tree. Satyrs brought their reed pipes and played nature magic songs, and for a while the pine needles seemed to get fuller. The flowers on the hill smelled a little sweeter and the grass looked greener. But as soon as the music stopped, the sickness crept back into the air. The whole hill seemed to be infected, dying from the poison that had sunk into the tree's roots.
The reed pipes reminded Y/N of Grover. Where was he?
At night, he still dreamed. Always the same dream.
At first, he had thought Hera, his mother, showed him all this, giving him a glimpse of what could possibly happen in the future. But as the year had gone on, he had realized it wasn't her. She no longer came to see him in his dreams, but everything else played again and again, on a loop.
He'd have liked this to stop. A night without dreams, completely and utterly dark, would be a blessing. But it went on.
The ocean stretching forever below him, the Amphisbaena behind his back. He fell, and he broke through the ice. He ran, the ground collapsing under his feet, then jumped. The sky and the earth were going to crush everything between them; he was going to get crushed. All of New York asleep, the street deserted. . . .
The morning of the race was hot and humid. Fog lay low on the ground like sauna steam. Millions of birds were roosting in the trees—fat gray-and-white pigeons, except they didn't coo like regular pigeons. They made this annoying metallic screeching sound that reminded Y/N of submarine radar.
The racetrack had been built in a grassy field between the archery range and the woods. Hephaestus's cabin had used the bronze bulls, which were completely tame since they had had their heads smashed in, to plow an oval track in a matter of minutes.
There were rows of stone steps for the spectators—Tantalus, the satyrs, a few dryads, and all of the campers who weren't participating. Mr. D didn't show. He never got up before ten o'clock.
"Right!" Tantalus announced as the teams began to assemble. A naiad had brought him a big platter of pastries, and as Tantalus spoke, his right hand chased a chocolate éclair across the judge's table. "You all know the rules. A quarter-mile track. Twice around to win. Two horses per chariot. Each team will consist of a driver and a fighter. Weapons are allowed. Dirty tricks are expected. But try not to kill anybody!" Tantalus smiled at them like they were all naughty children. "Any killing will result in harsh punishment. No s'mores at the campfire for a week! Now ready your chariots!"
Y/N was with Annabeth. The chariot they had built—well, that she had built, for the most part—looked way better than he had expected. And was way more resistant. He could jump hard on it without anything wobbling or almost.
Percy—he was with Tyson—approached them. He told them about a dream he had had last night.
Apparently, Grover had managed to create something called an empathy link between himself and Percy, allowing them to speak in their dreams. And Grover was in trouble. He was lost in the Sea of Monsters, trapped by Polyphemus the Cyclops, who didn't eat him only because he was half blind and thought Grover a lady Cyclops—that last part was very strange, but Percy spoke so fast Y/N couldn't ask a question. Moreover, Polyphemus had something that radiated nature magic so powerful it attracted all the satyrs, who were thinking they had found the great god Pan.
In short, they had twelve days to find and save Grover before Polyphemus ate him up.
"Uh . . . wait," Y/N said. "So, you tell us Grover's lost in the Sea of Monsters, in the hands of Polyphemus. In order to survive he's wearing a wedding dress. Polyphemus wants to marry him, but he has told him he must first finish the bridal train, which gives him twelve days. Right?"
"Right," Percy said.
Annabeth looked suspicious.
"You're trying to distract us," she decided.
"What? No I'm not!" Percy said.
"Oh, right! Like Grover would just happen to stumble across the one thing that could save the camp."
"What do you mean?"
Annabeth rolled her eyes. "Go back to your chariot, Percy."
"I'm not making this up. He's in trouble, Annabeth. You believe me, eh, Y/N?"
"Listen, Percy," Annabeth said before Y/N could open his mouth. "An empathy link is so hard to do. I mean, it's more likely you really were dreaming."
"The Oracle," Y/N said. "We could consult the Oracle."
Annabeth frowned.
Before she could answer, the conch horn sounded.
"Charioteers!" Tantalus called. "To your mark!"
"We'll talk later," Annabeth told Percy, "after Y/N and I win."
As he walked to his chariot, Y/N noticed how many more pigeons were in the trees now—screeching like crazy, making the whole forest rustle. Nobody else seemed to be paying them much attention. Their beaks glinted strangely. Their eyes seemed shinier than regular birds.
You should know that Greek chariots are built in a rush. Basically they're made of a wooden basket, open at the back, mounted on an axle between two wheels. The carriage is made of such light wood that if you wipe out making the hairpin turns at either end of the track, you'll probably tip over and crush both the chariot and yourself. It's an even better rush than skateboarding.
"Y/N, here." Annabeth was holding him a set of javelins. They were all very, very, very sharp.
"Um. . . . Annabeth, you don't expect me to throw them, right?"
"Of course I do," she said, as if making small talk. "You just have to throw them at the wheels."
"Charioteers!" Tantalus shouted. "Attend your marks!"
"Come on," Annabeth said.
She took the reins. Y/N placed himself behind her.
Tantalus waved his hand and the starting signal dropped. The chariots roared to life. Hooves thundered against the dirt. The crowd cheered.
Almost immediately there was a loud nasty crack! Y/N looked back in time to see the Apollo chariot flip over. The Hermes chariot had rammed into it—maybe by mistake, maybe not. The riders were thrown free, but their panicked horses dragged the golden chariot diagonally across the track. The Hermes team, Travis and Connor Stoll, were laughing at their good luck, but not for long. The Apollo horses crashed into theirs, and the Hermes chariot flipped too, leaving a pile of broken wood and four rearing horses in the dust.
Two chariots down in the first twenty feet. What a fabulous sport!
His chariot was already ahead of the others. Annabeth was making the turn around the first post.
He looked behind and saw Percy and Tyson's chariot, just behind Ares chariot led by Clarisse, neck and neck with the Hephaestus chariot led by Beckendorf.
"See ya!" he shouted, waving at them and laughing because of the adrenaline.
He looked up, and his grin faltered.
The pigeons had risen from the trees. They were spiraling like a huge tornado, heading toward the track.
"Birds!" he cried.
"What?" Annabeth yelled.
They were whipping along so fast it was hard to hear or see anything.
Percy and Tyson's chariot was starting to gain on them, only ten feet behind. And Tyson had a ten-foot pole. Y/N had no doubt he was able to overthrow their chariot with a simple twist of this pole.
He pulled a javelin from his collection and took aim at the wheels. He was about to throw when he heard the screaming.
The pigeons were swarming—thousands of them dive-bombing the spectators in the stands, attacking the other chariots. Beckendorf was mobbed. His fighter tried to bat the birds away but he couldn't see anything. The chariot veered off course and plowed through the strawberry fields, the mechanical horses steaming.
In the Ares chariot, Clarisse barked an order to her fighter, who quickly threw a screen of camouflage netting over their basket. The birds swarmed around it, pecking and clawing at the fighter's hands as he tried to hold up the net, but Clarisse just gritted her teeth and kept driving. Her skeletal horses seemed immune to the distraction. The pigeons pecked uselessly at their empty sockets and flew through their rib cages, but the stallions kept right on running.
The spectators weren't so lucky. The birds were slashing at any bit of exposed flesh, driving everyone into a panic. Now that the birds were closer, it was clear they weren't normal pigeons. Their eyes were beady and evil-looking. Their beaks were made of bronze, and judging from the yelps of the campers, they must have been razor sharp.
"Stymphalian birds!" Annabeth yelled. She slowed down the chariot at once and Y/N almost bolted out of the basket. His javelins cascaded on his head.
"They'll strip everyone to bones if we don't drive them away!" Annabeth continued. "Heroes, to arms!" But nobody heard her over the screeching of the birds and the general chaos.
Somehow Y/N got on his feet. His sword showed itself just as a wave of birds dived at his face, their metal beaks snapping. He slashed them out of the air and they exploded into dust and feathers, but there were still millions of them left. One nailed him in the back and he almost jumped straight out of the chariot.
The closer they got to the stands, the thicker the cloud of birds became.
Some of the spectators were trying to fight back. The Athena campers were calling for shields. The archers from Apollo's cabin brought out their bows and arrows, ready to slay the menace, but with so many campers mixed in with the birds, it wasn't safe to shoot.
"Too many!" Y/N yelled to Annabeth. "How do you get rid of them?"
She stabbed at a pigeon with her knife. "Hercules used noise! Brass bells! He scared them away with the most horrible sound he could—"
Her eyes got wide. "Y/N . . . Chiron's collection!"
He understood instantly. "You think it'll work?"
She flung the reins.
Clarisse had just pulled across the finish line, completely unopposed, and seemed to notice for the first time how serious the bird problem was.
When she saw them driving away, she yelled, "You're running? The fight is here, cowards!" She drew her sword and charged for the stands.
Annabeth urged their horses into a gallop. The chariot rumbled through the strawberry fields, across the volleyball pit, and lurched to a halt in front of the Big House. They ran inside, tearing down the hallway to Chiron's apartment.
His boom box was still on his nightstand. So were his favorite CDs. Y/N grabbed the most repulsive he could find, Annabeth snatched the boom box, and together they ran back outside.
Down at the track, the chariots were in flames. Wounded campers ran in every direction, with birds shredding their clothes and pulling out their hair, while Tantalus chased breakfast pastries around the stands, every once and while yelling, "Everything's under control! Not to worry!"
Y/N saw Tyson punching pigeons and yelling, "Bad chicken! Bad, bad, bad chicken!"
Ethan leaped right next to Y/N, hiding his bottom with his banana sunhat. Under his hoof he crushed a pigeon.
Y/N and Annabeth pulled up to the finish line. Annabeth got the boom box ready.
Y/N pressed PLAY and started up Chiron's favorite—the All-Time Greatest Hits of Dean Martin.
The demon pigeons went nuts. They started flying in circles, running into each other like they wanted to bash their own brains out. Then they abandoned the track altogether and flew skyward in a huge dark wave.
"Now!" Annabeth shouted. "Archers!"
With clear targets, Apollo archers had flawless aim. Most of them could nock five or six arrows at once. Within minutes, the ground was littered with dead bronze-beaked pigeons, and the survivors were a distant trail of smoke on the horizon.
The camp was saved, but the wreckage wasn't pretty. Most of the chariot had been completely destroyed. Almost everyone was wounded, bleeding from multiple bird pecks. The kids from Aphrodite's cabin were screaming because their hairdos had been ruined and their clothes pooped on.
"Remind me to start eating chicken," Ethan growled next to Y/N. "I'll never go vegetarian with them again!"
"Bravo!" Tantalus said, but he wasn't looking at Y/N or Annabeth. "We have our first winner!" He walked to the finish line and awarded the golden laurels for the race to a stunned-looking Clarisse.
Then he turned and smiled at Percy. "And now to punish the troublemakers who disrupted this race."
The way Tantalus saw it, the Stymphalian birds had simply been minding their own business in the woods and would not have attacked if Annabeth and Percy hadn't disturbed them with their bad chariot driving.
"Why don't you go chasing a donut?" Y/N told him.
It didn't help the mood. Tantalus decided that, as friendship was an essential value of Camp Half-Blood, Y/N and Tyson volunteered to help Annabeth and Percy do kitchen patrol—scrubbing pots and platters all afternoon in the underground kitchen with the cleaning harpies. The harpies washed with lava instead of water, to get that extra-clean sparkle and kill ninety-nine point nine percent of all germs, so Y/N, Annabeth and Percy had to wear asbestos gloves and aprons.
Tyson didn't mind. He plunged his bare hands right in and started scrubbing, but the three others had to suffer through hours of hot, dangerous work, especially since there were tons of extra plates. Tantalus had ordered a special luncheon banquet to celebrate Clarisse's chariot victory—a full-course meal featuring country-fried Stymphalian death-bird.
The only good thing about their punishment was that it gave them lots of time to talk.
After listening to Percy's dream about Grover again, Annabeth murmured, "If he's really found it, and if we could retrieve it—"
"Hold on," Y/N said. "Was is it?"
"I'll give you a hint," she said. "What do you get when you skin a ram?"
"Messy?" Percy suggested.
Y/N thought he got it. "A fleece? But . . . so you're talking of the Golden Fleece? Are you serious?"
Annabeth scraped a plateful of death-bird into the lava. "Remember the Gray Sisters? They said they knew the location of the thing Percy seeks. And they mentioned Jason. Three thousand years ago, they told him how to find the Golden Fleece. You do know the story of Jason and the Argonauts?"
"Yes," Percy said. "That old movie with clay skeletons."
Annabeth rolled her eyes.
Y/N whispered, "I don't think that's it, Percy."
"Oh my gods! You are so hopeless."
"What?" Percy demanded.
"Just listen. The real story of the Fleece: there were these two children of Zeus, Cadmus and Europa, okay? They were about to get offered up as human sacrifices, when they prayed to Zeus to save them. So Zeus sent this magical flying ram with golden wool, which picked them up in Greece and carried them all the way to Colchis in Asia Minor. Well, actually it carried Cadmus. Europa fell off and died along the way, but that's not important."
"It was probably to her," Y/N pointed out.
"The point is, when Cadmus got to Colchis, he sacrificed the golden ram to the gods and hung the Fleece in a tree in the middle of the kingdom. The Fleece brought prosperity to the land. Animals stopped getting sick. Plants grew better. Farmers had bumper crops. Plagues never visited. That's why Jason wanted the Fleece. It can revitalize any land where it's placed. It cures sickness, strengthens nature, cleans pollution—"
"It could cure Thalia's tree," Y/N finished.
Annabeth nodded. "And it would totally strengthen the borders of Camp Half-Blood. But the Fleece has been missing for centuries. Tons of heroes have searched for it with no luck."
"But Grover found it," Percy said. "He went looking for Pan and he found the Fleece instead because they both radiate nature magic. It makes sense, Annabeth. We can rescue him and save the camp at the same time. It's perfect!"
Annabeth hesitated. "A little too perfect, don't you think? What if it's a trap?"
"What choice do we have?" Percy asked. "Are you going to help me rescue Grover or not?"
Annabeth glanced at Tyson, who'd lost interest in their conversation and was happily making toy boats out of cups and spoons in the lava.
"Percy," she said under her breath, "we'll have to fight a Cyclops. Polyphemus, the worst of the Cyclopes. And there's only one place his island could be. The Sea of Monsters."
"Where's that?" Y/N asked.
She stared at him like she thought he was playing dumb. "The Sea of Monsters. The same sea Odysseus sailed through, and Jason, and Aeneas, and all the others."
"Yeah, I got that, Wise Girl," he said. "But I doubt it's still in the Mediterranean, right?"
"It used to be in the Mediterranean, yes. But like everything else, it shifts location as the West's center of power shifts."
"But a whole sea full of monsters—how could you hide something like that?" Percy asked. "Wouldn't the mortals notice weird things happening . . . like, ships getting eaten and stuff?"
"Of course they notice," Annabeth said. "They don't understand, but they know something is strange about that part of the ocean. The Sea of Monsters is off the east coast of the U.S. now, just northeast of Florida. The mortals even have a name for it."
"The Bermuda Triangle?" Percy asked.
"Exactly."
To Y/N, this was no stranger than anything else he had learned since coming to Camp Half-Blood.
"Okay . . . so at least we know where to look," he said.
"It's still a huge area, Y/N," Annabeth said. "Searching for one tiny island in monster-infested waters—"
"Hey, I'm the son of the sea god," Percy put in. "This is my home turf. How hard can it be?"
Annabeth knit her eyebrows. "We'll have to talk to Tantalus, get approval for a quest. He'll say no."
"Not if we tell him tonight at the campfire in front of everybody," Y/N said. "The whole camp will hear. They'll pressure him. He won't be able to refuse."
"Maybe." A little bit of hope crept into Annabeth's voice. "We'd better get these dishes done. Hand me the lava spray gun, will you?"