Page 19 of Wrath of the Triple Goddess

My classes went okay. I hadn’t done my homework, but that wasn’t unusual.

Back in August, my stepdad Paul had tried to help me organize my schoolwork when he saw that it was way too much for me to keep straight on my own. He suggested I think of homework as triage. “Look at your assignments like they’re wounded patients,” he’d said, “and handle them in order of severity. ‘Okay, you need immediate attention, or you’ll die. You can wait a bit. You aren’t that bad—go home, take some aspirin, and call me tomorrow.’”

I gave my homework a lot of aspirin.

Paul’s system worked most of the time. I could usually tell which projects were important and which ones my teachers had only assigned because they felt they had to and they didn’t want to grade any more than I wanted to do them. Having a teacher in the family can be handy.

I was feeling pretty good by the end of the school day. I hadn’t failed any quizzes. I hadn’t fallen asleep. Miraculously, my history teacher said, “Very good, Mr. Jackson,” when I answered a question, which was probably a sign she was actually a monster, but I wasn’t going to judge unless she attacked me. Some of my best friends are monsters.

After swim practice I waited in front of AHS, my hair still smelling of chlorine. I was looking forward to seeing my friends, even Hecuba and Gale.

That’s the weird thing about pets, I guess. Even when they’re a total pain, they still manage to burrow their way into your heart. I kept looking down 37th Avenue, expecting a huge hellhound to come barreling over the horizon, possibly dragging Annabeth on roller skates.

Twenty minutes passed. For an ADHD guy like me, that translated into about forty Percy hours. Maybe Grover and Annabeth had gotten stuck in a traffic jam…walking across the river to Queens. Maybe the pets had pulled them off course to Hackensack. It could be nothing.

Having no cell phone is something I’d gotten used to. Yes, it sucked not to be able to look things up quickly, scroll through funny videos, or text my friends to see where they were. But none of my friends could have cell phones either, so it didn’t matter much. Plus, watching cats ride Roombas or frat dudes failing at backflips is cool, but not worth getting eaten by monsters. Every year or so, I borrowed a mortal’s cell phone to see if the magic had worn off or gotten weaker—if maybe I could use a phone now without causing a Great Monster Migration and a Kill Percy Rodeo. Every year, the experiment failed. Once I touched a phone screen, the average time until a monster showed up was thirty-six seconds.

Long story short: I had no way of knowing where Grover and Annabeth were. Iris-messages only worked in certain situations, like I said before, and if the person you’re trying to reach is moving—for instance, being dragged across the Tri-State Area by a hellhound—an Iris-message often won’t connect.

So I waited. After an hour, I started to panic. If something had happened to Annabeth and Grover and I was just standing here not helping…If they’d been swallowed by Janet and her gang of moray eels, or if the manse had exploded from a buildup of polecat gas…

I took out Riptide. With the tip of the blade, I etched a message on the sidewalk:Went to Gramercy.

That was another trick I’d only learned in the last month. One day when I was bored, sitting on a sidewalk while my mom shopped for clothes for her first author signing, I discovered that Riptide could sketch glowing lines on asphalt that no regular mortals could see. The markings lasted about three hours before fading away—less if it rained. It made me wonder why I’d never seen Celestial bronze graffiti around from other demigods. Maybe they’d never gotten bored enough to try it. Or maybe their weapons didn’t have a side hustle as writing utensils.

I began walking back to Manhattan, taking the route I figured Annabeth and Grover would take so I would intercept them if they were still coming my way.

I still hadn’t met them when I got to the Upper East Side. By the time I reached East 60th, I was so concerned I started to jog.

It was still a long way to Gramercy Park, with crosswalk lights that didn’t cooperate and plenty of cars and pedestrians to navigate. I got honked at, cursed at, scowled at, and almost creamed a few times by motorized delivery bikes, but I am a native New Yorker. Such obstacles barely slowed me down.

A block out, I spotted Annabeth running toward the manse from the opposite direction. A chunk of ice formed in my stomach. Apparently, Grover hadn’t come to pick her up, either.

We met in front of the house.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Fine, you?”

“Yeah, but…I guess I lost track of time studying. Grover never showed. I thought maybe he fell asleep, or…” Her voice faltered when she looked at the mansion. “Oh, gods.”

I was so anxious I had troubling focusing through the Mist.

When the facade of Hecate’s house finally revealed itself, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The front windows were all broken, their shattered glass strewn across the garden as if the panes had been busted from within. Several tombstone tiles had fallen off the walls. Blue smoke billowed from the front porch, where the massive three-paneled door had exploded outward, like someone had hit it with a battering ram from the inside.

“Grover,” we both said at once.

And we ran into the disaster zone.

Somewhere under the wreckage of the front door, the animal-headed knockers were moaning…in pain? Since they were made of metal, I figured they could wait.

Inside, our campsite was smoldering. The blue smoke was coming from some broken vials that had gotten mixed in with our now-shredded bedrolls. The benches had been reduced to kindling. The piano was flipped upside down. On the side walls, the stained-glass windows had been smashed, revealing nothing behind them but brick walls. The stairs were littered with heaps of fur and splatters of pink that I really hoped weren’t blood.

“An attack?” I wondered aloud.

My heart dragged like an anchor. If we’d left Grover alone and he’d gotten besieged by a Hecate-hating horde of monsters, I would never forgive myself.

“I don’t think so.” Annabeth’s voice quavered as she snuffed out the bedrolls with wet towels. “Those windows, the doors—everything looks like it was busted from the inside.”

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