FRANK WAS RELIEVED WHEN THE WHEELS FELL OFF.
He’d already thrown up twice from the back of the
chariot, which was not fun at the speed of sound. The
horse seemed to bend time and space as he ran, blurring
the landscape and making Frank feel like he’d just drunk
a gallon of whole milk without his lactose-intolerance
medicine. Ella didn’t help matters. She kept muttering:
‘Seven hundred and fifty miles per hour. Eight hundred.
Eight hundred and three. Fast. Very fast.’
The horse sped north across Puget Sound, zooming
past islands and fishing boats and very surprised pods of
whales. The landscape ahead began to look familiar –
Crescent Beach, Boundary Bay. Frank had gone sailing
here once on a school trip. They’d crossed into Canada.
The horse rocketed onto dry land. He followed Highway
99 north, running so fast that the cars seemed to be
standing still. Finally, just as they were getting into
Vancouver, the chariot wheels began to smoke.
‘Hazel!’ Frank yelled. ‘We’re breaking up!’
She got the message and pulled the reins. The horse
didn’t seem happy about it, but he slowed to subsonic as
they zipped through the city streets. They crossed the
Ironworkers bridge into North Vancouver, and the chariot
started to rattle dangerously. At last Arion stopped at the
top of a wooded hill. He snorted with satisfaction, as if to
say, That’s how we run, fools. The smoking chariot
collapsed, spilling Percy, Frank and Ella onto the wet,
mossy ground.
Frank stumbled to his feet. He tried to blink the yellow
spots out of his eyes. Percy groaned and started
unhitching Arion from the ruined chariot. Ella fluttered
around in dizzy circles, bonking into the trees and
muttering, ‘Tree. Tree. Tree.’
Only Hazel seemed unaffected by the ride. Grinning
with pleasure, she slid off the horse’s back. ‘That was fun!’
‘Yeah.’ Frank swallowed back his nausea. ‘So much
fun.’
Arion whinnied.
‘He says he needs to eat,’ Percy translated. ‘No wonder.
He probably burned about six million calories.’
Hazel studied the ground at her feet and frowned. ‘I’m
not sensing any gold around here … Don’t worry, Arion. I’ll
find you some. In the meantime, why don’t you go graze?
We’ll meet you –’
The horse zipped off, leaving a trail of steam in his
wake.
Hazel knitted her eyebrows. ‘Do you think he’ll come
back?’
‘I don’t know,’ Percy said. ‘He seems kind of … spirited.’
Frank almost hoped the horse would stay away. He
didn’t say that, of course. He could tell Hazel was
distressed by the idea of losing her new friend. But Arion
scared him, and Frank was pretty sure the horse knew it.
Hazel and Percy started salvaging supplies from the
chariot wreckage. There had been a few boxes of random
Amazon merchandise in the front, and Ella shrieked with
delight when she found a shipment of books. She
snatched up a copy of The Birds of North America,
fluttered to the nearest branch, and began scratching
through the pages so fast, Frank wasn’t sure if she was
reading or shredding.
Frank leaned against a tree, trying to control his vertigo.
He still hadn’t recovered from his Amazon imprisonment
– getting kicked across the lobby, disarmed, caged and
insulted as a baby man by an egomaniacal horse. That
hadn’t exactly helped his self-esteem.
Even before that, the vision he had shared with Hazel
had left him rattled. He felt closer to her now. He knew he’d
done the right thing in giving her the piece of firewood. A
huge weight had been taken off his shoulders.
On the other hand, he’d seen the Underworld firsthand.
He had felt what it was like to sit forever doing nothing, just
regretting your mistakes. He’d looked up at those creepy
gold masks on the judges of the dead and realized that he
would stand before them some day, maybe very soon.
Frank had always dreamed of seeing his mother again
when he died. But maybe that wasn’t possible for
demigods. Hazel had been in Asphodel for something
like seventy years and never found her mom. Frank
hoped he and his mom would both end up in Elysium. But
if Hazel hadn’t got there – sacrificing her life to stop Gaia,
taking responsibility for her actions so that her mother
wouldn’t end up in Punishment – what chance did Frank
have? He’d never done anything that heroic.
He straightened and looked around, trying to get his
bearings.
To the south, across Vancouver Harbor, the downtown
skyline gleamed red in the sunset. To the north, the hills
and rainforests of Lynn Canyon Park snaked between the
subdivisions of North Vancouver until they gave way to
the wilderness.
Frank had explored this park for years. He spotted a
bend in the river that looked familiar. He recognized a
dead pine tree that had been split by lightning in a nearby
clearing. Frank knew this hill.
‘I’m practically home,’ he said. ‘My grandmother’s house
is right over there.’
Hazel squinted. ‘How far?’
‘Just over the river and through the woods.’
Percy raised an eyebrow. ‘Seriously? To Grandmother’s
house we go?’
Frank cleared his throat. ‘Yeah, anyway.’
Hazel clasped her hands in prayer. ‘Frank, please tell
me she’ll let us spend the night. I know we’re on a
deadline, but we’ve got to rest, right? And Arion saved us
some time. Maybe we could get an actual cooked meal?’
‘And a hot shower?’ Percy pleaded. ‘And a bed with,
like, sheets and a pillow?’
Frank tried to imagine Grandmother’s face if he showed
up with two heavily armed friends and a harpy. Everything
had changed since his mother’s funeral, since the
morning the wolves had taken him south. He’d been so
angry about leaving. Now, he couldn’t imagine going
back.
Still, he and his friends were exhausted. They’d been
travelling for more than two days without decent food or
sleep. Grandmother could give them supplies. And
maybe she could answer some questions that were
brewing in the back of Frank’s mind – a growing suspicion
about his family gift.
‘It’s worth a try,’ Frank decided. ‘To Grandmother’s
house we go.’
Frank was so distracted, he would have walked right into
the ogres’ camp. Fortunately Percy pulled him back.
They crouched next to Hazel and Ella behind a fallen
log and peered into the clearing.
‘Bad,’ Ella murmured. ‘This is bad for harpies.’
It was fully dark now. Around a blazing campfire sat half
a dozen shaggy-haired humanoids. Standing up, they
probably would’ve been eight feet tall – tiny compared to
the giant Polybotes or even the Cyclopes they’d seen in
California, but that didn’t make them any less scary. They
wore only knee-length surfer shorts. Their skin was
sunstroke red – covered with tattoos of dragons, hearts
and bikini-clad women. Hanging from a spit over the fire
was a skinned animal, maybe a boar, and the ogres were
tearing off chunks of meat with their clawlike fingernails,
laughing and talking as they ate, baring pointy teeth. Next
to the ogres sat several mesh bags filled with bronze
spheres like cannonballs. The spheres must have been
hot, because they steamed in the cool evening air.
Two hundred yards beyond the clearing, the lights of
the Zhang mansion glowed through the trees. So close,
Frank thought. He wondered if they could sneak around
the monsters, but when he looked left and right, he saw
more campfires in either direction, as if the ogres had
surrounded the property. Frank’s fingers dug into the tree
bark. His grandmother might be alone inside the house,
trapped.
‘What are these guys?’ he whispered.
‘Canadians,’ Percy said.
Frank leaned away from him. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Uh, no offence,’ Percy said. ‘That’s what Annabeth
called them when I fought them before. She said they live
in the north, in Canada.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Frank grumbled, ‘we’re in Canada. I’m
Canadian. But I’ve never seen those things before.’
Ella plucked a feather from her wings and turned it in
her fingers. ‘Laistrygonians,’ she said. ‘Cannibals.
Northern giants. Sasquatch legend. Yep, yep. They’re not
birds. Not birds of North America.’
‘That’s what they’re called,’ Percy agreed. ‘Laistry – uh,
whatever Ella said.’
Frank scowled at the dudes in the clearing. ‘They could
be mistaken for Bigfoot. Maybe that’s where the legend
came from. Ella, you’re pretty smart.’
‘Ella is smart,’ she agreed. She shyly offered Frank her
feather.
‘Oh … thanks.’ He stuck the feather in his pocket, then
noticed Hazel was glaring at him. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’ She turned to Percy. ‘So your memory is
coming back? Do you remember how you beat these
guys?’
‘Sort of,’ Percy said. ‘It’s still fuzzy. I think I had help. We
killed them with Celestial bronze, but that was
before … you know.’
‘Before Death got kidnapped,’ Hazel said. ‘So now, they
might not die at all.’
Percy nodded. ‘Those bronze cannonballs … those are
bad news. I think we used some of them against the
giants. They catch fire and blow up.’
Frank’s hand went to his coat pocket. Then he
remembered Hazel had his piece of driftwood. ‘If we cause
any explosions,’ he said, ‘the ogres at the other camps will
come running. I think they’ve surrounded the house, which
means there could be fifty or sixty of these guys in the
woods.’
‘So it’s a trap.’ Hazel looked at Frank with concern.
‘What about your grandmother? We’ve got to help her.’
Frank felt a lump in his throat. Never in a million years
had he thought his grandmother would need rescuing, but
now he started running combat scenarios in his mind –
the way he had back at camp during the war games.
‘We need a distraction,’ he decided. ‘If we can draw this
group into the woods, we might sneak through without
alerting the others.’
‘I wish Arion was here,’ Hazel said. ‘I could get the ogres
to chase me.’
Frank slipped his spear off his back. ‘I’ve got another
idea.’
Frank didn’t want to do this. The idea of summoning
Grey scared him even more than Hazel’s horse. But he
didn’t see another way.
‘Frank, you can’t charge out there!’ Hazel said. ‘That’s
suicide!’
‘I’m not charging,’ Frank said. ‘I’ve got a friend.
Just … nobody scream, okay?’
He jabbed the spear into the ground, and the point
broke off.
‘Oops,’ Ella said. ‘No spear point. Nope, nope.’
The ground trembled. Grey’s skeletal hand broke the
surface. Percy fumbled for his sword, and Hazel made a
sound like a cat with a hairball. Ella disappeared and
rematerialized at the top of the nearest tree.
‘It’s okay,’ Frank promised. ‘He’s under control!’
Grey crawled out of the ground. He showed no sign of
damage from his previous encounter with the basilisks.
He was good as a new in his camouflage and combat
boots, translucent grey flesh covering his bones like
glowing Jell-O. He turned his ghostly eyes towards Frank,
waiting for orders.
‘Frank, that’s a spartus,’ Percy said. ‘A skeleton warrior.
They’re evil. They’re killers. They’re –’
‘I know,’ Frank said bitterly. ‘But it’s a gift from Mars.
Right now that’s all I’ve got. Okay, Grey. Your orders:
attack that group of ogres. Lead them off to the west,
causing a diversion so we can –’
Unfortunately, Grey lost interest after the word ‘ogres’.
Maybe he only understood simple sentences. He
charged towards the ogres’ campfire.
‘Wait!’ Frank said, but it was too late. Grey pulled two of
his own ribs from his shirt and ran around the fire,
stabbing the ogres in the back with such blinding speed
they didn’t even have time to yell. Six extremely
surprised-looking Laistrygonians fell sideways like a circle
of dominoes and crumbled into dust.
Grey stomped around, kicking their ashes apart as they
tried to re-form. When he seemed satisfied that they
weren’t coming back, Grey stood at attention, saluted
smartly in Frank’s direction, and sank into the forest floor.
Percy stared at Frank. ‘How –’
‘No Laistrygonians.’ Ella fluttered down and landed next
to them. ‘Six minus six is zero. Spears are good for
subtraction. Yep.’
Hazel looked at Frank as if he’d turned into a zombie
skeleton himself. Frank thought his heart might shatter,
but he couldn’t blame her. Children of Mars were all about
violence. Mars’s symbol was a bloody spear for good
reason. Why shouldn’t Hazel be appalled?
He glared down at broken tip of his spear. He wished he
had any father but Mars. ‘Let’s go,’ he s
0 comments:
Post a Comment