He muttered, “Ow,” and burst into a cloud of green flame, which I figured was going to make Babycakes pretty upset.
Standing in the smoke was my friend Annabeth. Her face was grimy and scratched. She had a ragged backpack slung over her shoulder, her baseball cap tucked in her pocket, a bronze knife in her hand, and a wild look in her storm-gray eyes, like she’d just been chased a thousand miles by ghosts.
Matt Sloan, who’d been standing there dumbfounded the whole time, finally came to his senses. He blinked at Annabeth, as if he dimly recognized her from my notebook picture. “That’s the girl…That’s the girl—”
Annabeth punched him in the nose and knocked him flat. “And you,” she told him, “lay off my friend.”
The gym was in flames. Kids were still running around screaming. I heard sirens wailing and a garbled voice over the intercom. Through the glass windows of the exit doors, I could see the headmaster, Mr. Bonsai, wrestling with the lock, a crowd of teachers piling up behind him.
“Annabeth…” I stammered. “How did you…how long have you…”
“Pretty much all morning.” She sheathed her bronze knife. “I’ve been trying to find a good time to talk to you, but you were never alone.”
“The shadow I saw this morning—that was—” My face felt hot. “Oh my gods, you were looking in my bedroom window?”
“There’s no time to explain!” she snapped, though she looked a little red-faced herself. “I just didn’t want to—”
“There!” a woman screamed. The doors burst open and the adults came pouring in.
“Meet me outside,” Annabeth told me. “And him.” She pointed to Tyson, who was still sitting dazed against the wall. Annabeth gave him a look of distaste that I didn’t quite understand. “You’d better bring him.”
“What?”
“No time!” she said. “Hurry!”
She put on her Yankees baseball cap, which was a magic gift from her mom, and instantly vanished.
That left me standing alone in the middle of the burning gymnasium when the headmaster came charging in with half the faculty and a couple of police officers.
“Percy Jackson?” Mr. Bonsai said. “What…how…”
Over by the broken wall, Tyson groaned and stood up from the pile of cinder blocks. “Head hurts.”
Matt Sloan was coming around, too. He focused on me with a look of terror. “Percy did it, Mr. Bonsai! He set the whole building on fire. Coach Nunley will tell you! He saw it all!”
Coach Nunley had been dutifully reading his magazine, but just my luck—he chose that moment to look up when Sloan said his name. “Eh? Yeah. Mm-hmm.”
The other adults turned toward me. I knew they would never believe me, even if I could tell them the truth.
I grabbed Riptide out of my ruined jeans, told Tyson, “Come on!” and jumped through the gaping hole in the side of the building.
THREE
WE HAIL THE TAXI OF ETERNAL TORMENT
Annabeth was waiting for us in an alley down Church Street. She pulled Tyson and me off the sidewalk just as a fire truck screamed past, heading for Meriwether Prep.
“Where’d you find him?” she demanded, pointing at Tyson.
Now, under different circumstances, I would’ve been really happy to see her. We’d made our peace last summer, despite the fact that her mom was Athena and didn’t get along with my dad. I’d missed Annabeth probably more than I wanted to admit.
But I’d just been attacked by cannibal giants, Tyson had saved my life three or four times, and all Annabeth could do was glare at him like he was the problem.
“He’s my friend,” I told her.
“Is he homeless?”
“What does that have to do with anything? He can hear you, you know. Why don’t you ask him?”
She looked surprised. “He can talk?”
“I talk,” Tyson admitted. “You are pretty.”
“Ah! Gross!” Annabeth stepped away from him.
I couldn’t believe she was being so rude. I examined Tyson’s hands, which I was sure must’ve been badly scorched by the flaming dodge balls, but they looked fine—grimy and scarred, with dirty fingernails the size of potato chips—but they always looked like that. “Tyson,” I said in disbelief. “Your hands aren’t even burned.”
“Of course not,” Annabeth muttered. “I’m surprised the Laistrygonians had the guts to attack you with him around.”
Tyson seemed fascinated by Annabeth’s blond hair. He tried to touch it, but she smacked his hand away.
“Annabeth,” I said, “what are you talking about? Laistry-what?”
“Laistrygonians. The monsters in the gym. They’re a race of giant cannibals who live in the far north. Odysseus ran into them once, but I’ve never seen them as far south as New York before.”
“Laistry—I can’t even say that. What would you call them in English?”
She thought about it for a moment. “Canadians,” she decided. “Now come on, we have to get out of here.”
“The police’ll be after me.”
“That’s the least of our problems,” she said. “Have you been having the dreams?”
“The dreams…about Grover?”
Her face turned pale. “Grover? No, what about Grover?”
I told her my dream. “Why? What were you dreaming about?”
Her eyes looked stormy, like her mind was racing a million miles an hour.
“Camp,” she said at last. “Big trouble at camp.”
“My mom was saying the same thing! But what kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know exactly. Something’s wrong. We have to get there right away. Monsters have been chasing me all the way from Virginia, trying to stop me. Have you had a lot of attacks?”
I shook my head. “None all year…until today.”
“None? But how…” Her eyes drifted to Tyson. “Oh.”
“What do mean, ‘oh’?”
Tyson raised his hand like he was still in class. “Canadians in the gym called Percy something…Son of the Sea God?”
Annabeth and I exchanged looks.
I didn’t know how I could explain, but I figured Tyson deserved the truth after almost getting killed.
“Big guy,” I said, “you ever hear those old stories about the Greek gods? Like Zeus, Poseidon, Athena—”
“Yes,” Tyson said.
“Well…those gods are still alive. They kind of follow Western Civilization around, living in the strongest countries, so like now they’re in the U.S. And sometimes they have kids with mortals. Kids called half-bloods.”
“Yes,” Tyson said, like he was still waiting for me to get to the point.
“Uh, well, Annabeth and I are half-bloods,” I said. “We’re like…heroes-in-training. And whenever monsters pick up our scent, they attack us. That’s what those giants were in the gym. Monsters.”
“Yes.”
I stared at him. He didn’t seem surprised or confused by what I was telling him, which surprised and confused me. “So…you believe me?”