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Lately, Luke’s been having these dreams.
They’re different, somehow, to the typical kind of demigod dream he’s used to. If they were just visions of ruined temples or weeping oracles or images of Ladon as it slashed its talon down his face, he’d probably ignore them. Realistically, he wouldn’t even remember them after waking up.
No — these are unique in a way Luke can’t quite quantify. They’re not like the nightmares he normally gets. They stay in his mind long after he wakes up, and they don’t stop, no matter which god he prays to or how much of his food he scrapes into the fire.
They usually always start the same way:
Luke is standing on a river bank made of glass.
Alright. A little misleading. Specifically, the sand is what’s made of glass. It’s not the cloudy-looking, sea-kissed, wave-softened seaglass that people collect and make decorations out of. This is black, and sharp, and instead of seashells, it’s covered in old broken pottery sherds.
The river itself looks more appealing — it flows, dark-blue, through the ground like a ribbon, and shimmers in the low light — but it smells like sulphur and waste, and so, in the dreams, Luke always tries to avoid breathing too deeply.
Of course, none of this is particularly interesting. Demigods dream of places they’ve never been all the time, and rivers have always been important in the myths. Luke could name a dozen sacred streams off the top of his head — the Styx, the Acheron, the Tiber, Troy’s Scamander and its Simois.
No. All of this is par for the course, or as close to it as you can get as a half-blood having magical dreams. It’s only when Luke begins to walk away from the river and onto the endless plain of glassy ground that things begin to deviate from the norm.
If Luke walks for long enough — which, somehow, he always does — then eventually he comes to a table. It’s the kind of beautiful, mahogany thing you’d see in stately homes or in hotel conference rooms; fleur-de-lis engraved into the legs, polished wood still smelling of varnish, little depressions at even intervals where you might put an inkwell. Actually, it’s not much of a table at all. It’s like a very long desk.
Even though the table is enormous, there are only two seats, positioned opposite each other. ne is thronelike, elegant, and its metal surface shines in shades of bronze and grey. The other is wooden and rotted and small.
Luke doesn’t like being near the table. He hates the lacquered smell of the varnish and the metallic smell of the throne and the rotted smell of the wood.
That doesn’t seem to matter, though. Just like how something compels him to walk away from the glass beach, something — some deep, primal, animal instinct inside his mind — always drives him to lay his hand on the back of the chair.
Then, usually, he’ll wake up.
——
At first, Luke assumes it’s a fluke. Of course he does.
There’s nothing particularly weird about glass on a beach. Glass literally comes from sand. Magical rivers? Those are a dime a dozen. Anyway, demigods dream of places they’ve never been all the time. Once, while they were still on the run with Thalia, Annabeth had a series of hyper-realistic nightmares involving drachmas coming to life, which turned out to just be because there was some exhibition on coinage going on in a foreign museum. She ended up buying the catalogue from a used book store in Vermont. It’s still in the Athena cabin somewhere.
So, even though these dreams feel different, Luke assumes it’s a fluke. If he wakes up to a sheen of sweat covering his skin and pooling in his bedsheets — well, there are plenty of reasons for that. It’s been a hot summer, for one thing, and for another, he’s been working out a lot. His scar’s healed, but it still bothers him when he lies on the wrong side sometimes. Sleeping badly is par for the course. It’s really not anything out of the ordinary.
Just in case, though, he’s been scraping more and more of his food into the braziers at dinner. Just in case, he’s been muttering prayers — hail, Morpheus, you who rule the world of dreams; hail, Hecate, lightbringing nightwanderer; hail, Hypnos, all-vanquisher — before he goes to sleep.
None of it’s worked so far. The dreams haven’t stopped. And of course, that’s fine, because nothing bad has happened yet, and until he feels that pull in his gut and starts walking towards that table, they’re completely normal demigod dreams.
But, you know. He does it all anyway.
Just in case.
——
Luke is standing on the glass river bank. He feels like there’s more glass than before; if possible, it seems like the sheer amount of it lying on the shore increases every time. It’s everywhere, and whenever he looks down, he sees his own disfigured face reflected in the black fragments. Luke’s not sure exactly how he can see his reflection, or how he can tell the glass is black. As far as he can tell, there’s no source for the light here. There’s no sun to hang in the sky, no stars to adorn the heavens, no moon to gaze upon the ground.
Luke doesn’t like to think about that, so he starts walking.
Eventually — inevitably — he comes to the long polished table. That’s another reason he knows these dreams — at least, parts of them — aren’t just your garden variety of demigod vision. No matter what direction Luke walks in, whether he follows the river downstream or walks up the bank trying to find its source, he’ll always arrive at the table with its two lonely chairs. He’s tested it before.
Here’s the thing, though.
When Luke gets there, the dream doesn’t stop. It doesn’t end when he lays a hand on the frame of the chair, or when his fingers brush over the decayed wooden armrests. It keeps going. It keeps going, all the way until he’s hooped his fingers into the woven wicker backrest, pulled it towards him, and taken a seat.
——
August arrives, and so the summer session draws to an end.
All things considered, Luke doesn’t actually mind the end of the summer. Camp Half-Blood is pretty much climate controlled, so the only discernible difference between seasons is the number of campers, and that just makes the winter even more appealing. Luke loves and sometimes even likes his siblings, but shepherding around flocks of prepubescent demigods all through May, June and July gets exhausting, so the off-season’s a chance to relax — and gods, does he need it.
Technically speaking, Luke’s been sleeping just fine. His routine hasn’t changed at all. He goes to bed at lights-out and he gets up a couple of hours before breakfast, so he can shower and shave and be dressed and dry before the hot water’s gone and the Apollo kids start singing acapella covers of Britney Spears while washing their hair.
Luke’s been sleeping just fine. Actually, now that there are fewer people around and the cabins are quieter, he should be sleeping better than normal.
He isn’t, though.
Ever since the dreams started, he’s been waking up feeling exhausted. It’s not just the standard type of mental haze that comes with skipping out on beauty sleep, and it’s not just feeling a little more lethargic than normal in the morning, when it’s dark and early and he doesn’t feel like nicking his chin on a misangled razor.
This is different. This is the kind of tiredness that soaks into your bones and seeps into your muscles; it’s the skeletal ache that comes with years of sickness and insomnia and sleep deprivation. It’s like he hasn’t been sleeping at all.
At first, he tries not to let it affect him. Sleepless nights are just something you have to get used to, as a demigod. When Luke was alone on the run, long before he met Thalia, he’d sometimes spend days on end without so much closing his eyes, terrified and afraid that a monster might just kill him in his sleep. It got easier with Thalia around, and easier still when they met Annabeth, but still, Luke’s used to feeling so tired he could collapse at any minute.
That’s why he ignores the heaviness in his limbs and just gets on with his life.
——
For the first time since the dreams began, Luke is not on the black beach.
Actually, scratch that. Luke’s not even near the river. Luke skips straight past the glass shore and the blue vein of the water. He’s sure that if he turned his head towards that neverending black horizon, it’d all still be there — the sulphuric air, the cold mirror of the water, the shattered little ostraka lying on the shore in place of scallop shells — but he can’t see it. He is already sitting down at the table, in exactly the same spot as last time.
It’s not exactly comfortable, but Luke doesn’t dare to move. He doesn’t even dare to lift his gaze away from his wrists or the warp of the dark woodgrain. In the impossible light, he can see every seashell spiral in the skin of his fingertips. He can see every hair lining his arms. He can feel someone watching him.
Eventually, he wakes up.
——
The next night, Luke dumps his entire dinner plate — beef, bread, blueberries and all — into the fire. It seems ridiculous. It feels ridiculous. The gods have never answered his prayers before, and anyway, Luke doesn’t believe in omens, so he doesn’t really know what he expects to happen. He’s not sure what he wants to happen.
He still does it, though. He thinks he likes the ritual of it.
——
Obviously, it doesn’t work. No matter how much of his food Luke sacrifices, no matter which deities he invokes — come as a protectress, triple Hecate; be my guardian, Hypnos; cast your cloak over me, Morpheus — it doesn’t work. Maybe he should’ve expected it. He definitely should’ve expected it.
He’s back at the long varnished table, vision firmly fixed on his hands and hands resting uncomfortably on the wood. Through the gaps of his fingers, Luke can see his own mutilated face reflected in the lacquered mahogany, and sure, that makes him uncomfortable in another way, but it’s better than looking up. He can feel someone watching him. He doesn’t want to meet their eyes. He doesn’t want to know what’ll happen if he does.
Luke Castellan, says a voice, and that makes him look up.
Luckily for him, there are no eyes to meet, because the man on the other side of the table doesn’t have a face. All the component parts of a person are there, but it’s like looking at someone through a wet windshield or an old, foggy beer glass. There’s the vague shape of a mouth, but no clear colour to the man’s lips; there’s the arc of a brow bone, but no real contours, no distinct difference between the bridge of the nose and the curve of the forehead. The details are just missing.
It’s a pleasure to meet you, says the man, and the dream ends.
Luke does not believe in omens.
——
They get a new camper in the second week of September. It’s kind of a weird time for it — most of the new kids come in at the start of summer — but not unheard of. Sometimes, half-bloods who normally only stay for the summer will see something suspicious and come back in mid-January, or sixth-graders who’ve just started getting attention from monsters will arrive right before spring break. Most people don’t get to be picky about when they’re attacked.
Anyway.
Luke sets up a spot for the kid in the Hermes cabin, with a little inflatable mattress taking the place of a real bed. Telling a preteen he has to sleep on the floor doesn’t exactly feel good, but that’s the way things are. It’s been like this as long as Luke remembers. Even before he took over as head counsellor, the Hermes cabin was chronically overcrowded, and the situation hasn’t improved since.
Sure, people do get claimed — Athena’s pretty reliable about recognising her own children, and Aphrodite is good about giving hers makeovers to confirm their parentage — but most never do. Maybe they’re the offspring of minor gods, who don’t have cabins to send their kids to. Maybe the Olympians are just lazy. Probably both.
Once, Luke entertained the idea of trying to manually sort campers, but he abandoned that plan a long time ago. It had been implausible then, and it’s implausible now. Sure, you could throw every kid who shows a gift for guitar into the Apollo cabin, but there are dozens of other minor deities associated with music, just like how nature gods are a dime a dozen. Most kids have never even met their godly parent, so it’s not like you could ask them t—
“When am I going to find out who my mother is?”
Luke looks down. The kid sitting on the airbed is a scrawny creature maybe a year or two older than Annabeth, with glossy black hair and eyes to match. He’s wearing the standard orange Camp Half-Blood shirt, but it’s pretty clearly too big for him, and the collar hangs off his collarbone like a cobweb off a branch. Luke makes a mental note to check the camp store for a smaller one.
“What was your name, again?” he asks.
“Ethan.” Ethan swallows. “Ethan Nakamura.”
“Well, Ethan,” Luke says, “That’s a good question. You’ll have to wait and see if — I mean, until you’re determined.”
Close one, there. Luke can’t just go around saying things like if you’re determined. Technically, it would be the more honest thing to say, but he can’t say it, no matter how true it is. He’s not qualified to talk about the unsympathetic, uncaring nature of the divine with a tween.
“How long until I get determined?”
One of Luke’s sisters, who’s one of the few Hermes cabin residents to stay year round and to even be a child of Hermes, laughs at that. Luke makes a mental note to sign her up for dishwashing duty with the harpies.
“That’s another good question,” Luke tells Ethan. He hates doing this. It never gets easier. “I don’t know.”
——
It’s a pleasure to meet you, son of Hermes, says the man sitting across from him. You’re everything I hoped you would be, and more.
A small, instinctive part of Luke’s mind likes hearing that. He likes the idea of being something. He likes the concept of surpassing someone’s expectations for once. It reminds him of the prophecy given by that voiceless son of Apollo he and Thalia ran into in Virginia: Your choices will change the world.
The bigger, less instinctive part of Luke’s mind starts setting off alarm bells as soon as the man says son of Hermes, so he asks,
“Why do you know who I am?”
Of course, there are plenty of good reasons why this man could know who he is. For example, it could be because when he and Thalia were on the run and desperate for money, Luke had a brief stint modelling beachwear for American Eagle. Maybe this guy’s just really into men’s fashion. Maybe Luke is currently sitting across the table from the god of reasonably priced swim shorts.
The man smiles. Luke thinks he’s smiling, at least — it’s difficult to really tell, what with the formlessness of his face. His features are too vague to make out. It’s like trying to see through an Iris-Message, or read writing through a crystal; there’s a glimmer of something, a word here or there, but then the light scatters before anything detailed is discernible.
You have long been of interest to me, promises the man. I have great hope in you.
—
Luke’s not sleeping fine anymore.
Actually, he’s barely sleeping at all.
It’s deliberate. See, he’s been trying to wean himself off the need for rest all fall, like an alcoholic cutting down from three drinks a day to just one or two. At first, Luke tried going cold turkey, and didn't sleep at all for two days straight. The dreams stopped, obviously, but the exhaustion made him feel delirious and unreal, and he almost cut off his own wrist in a training session, so that plan got scrapped pretty quick. Luke likes having both hands.
Now, though, he’s got into a rhythm. He stays up until the moon begins to vanish behind the treeline, then sleeps for a couple of hours, relying on the brightness of the dawn sunlight to wake him up before the dreams can start. It’s been working so far.
It gets a little boring — Luke hates sitting still, hates not having anything to do with his hands or any sword to swing around — but that’s the price he’s been paying for peace of mind. If he could, he’d go for walks, but loitering near the stables or the volleyball court or the strawberry fields would just attract the cleaning harpies, and dishwashing duty isn’t something Luke feels like signing himself up for. Instead, he sits at the door of the cabin and stargazes.
He used to do it as a practical thing; when he and Thalia were on the run and didn’t have a chance to use maps or even calendars, they’d try to figure out the month by what constellations they could see. Luke wasn’t much good, but Thalia had it down to an art. Probably something to do with having Zeus for a father. She’d point up at the little clusters of stars and recite their names like roll call in a classroom; the Pleiades, the Great Bear, Orion the Hunter.
Luke could probably name a few constellations if he tried, but nowadays, he just likes to look at them. He likes the way the memories — him and Thalia, on the run, camping out by lakes and under bridges and equipped with nothing except each other and hate for their parents — glow in the back of his mind. He likes the way the stars shine, like ammonite shells fossilised into the black soil of the night, and he likes the way the Milky Way ribbons across the wine-dark sky like a river. He likes the fact that it’s all so bright.
See, that’s what Luke misses most, when he’s stuck in those long dreams with the smooth-voiced man and the varnished table and the water and the thick air and the beach and the stream.
He misses the light.
——
You have long been of interest to me, assures the man. I have great hope in you, Luke Castellan.
Luke’s eyes hurt.
Well, fine. That’s nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, it’s perfectly logical; eye strain is a natural consequence of sleep deprivation. Vaguely, he feels grateful that it’s so dark in here. It makes his head ache less.
Still, that’s not what matters right now.
“But that doesn’t explain my question,” Luke asks. “Why do you know who I am?”
For a while, nothing happens. Then, with serpentine grace, the man reaches across the table and seizes Luke by the jaw. He’s so close that Luke can hear his watch ticking, like a rattlesnake shaking its segmented tail at a predator.
You are presumptuous, the man informs him, to speak back to me. Perhaps I should punish you for your insolence, as my children certainly would.
The man hasn’t let go of his jaw, and the pads of his fingers dig hard into Luke’s cheeks in a way that makes his molars hurt. It’s the kind of dull, compressive pain that comes with setting broken ankles and adjusting armour that’s too tight and sterile plasticky orthodontists’ offices.
Maybe, Luke thinks absurdly, my wisdom teeth are finally growing in. Then: Wait, children?
He doesn’t get a chance to follow that train of thought. The man isn’t done talking.
Perhaps I should nurture such traits. Perhaps I should reward your boldness. Perhaps I should show you what I can offer. Perhaps, the man muses, I ought to give you an incentive to trust me.
—
Initially, Luke thinks he’s standing in the strawberry fields at Camp Half-Blood.
It’s an easy mistake to make. See, at first glance, the place he’s standing in does look a whole lot like camp.
The hills that undulate into the endless distance are soft and tremulous with wildflowers. Almost everything is covered in a carpet of thick, Christmas-green grass, and, where there isn’t grass, Luke can see erratic, dense patches of what he thinks is wheat. Off to the right, partitioned from the rest of the meadow by a narrow, slow-moving river, there’s an enormous copse of apple trees. Their branches seem almost gilded in the late-afternoon light, and, unpruned, saplings jut out the ground at random intervals.
A warm breeze ripples through the field. The air tastes liquid, pure, sweetbitter. Overhead, the sun is red and distended. Luke is completely alone.
Okay, not quite.
Luke thinks he’s alone. He can’t be completely sure. Even though he can’t hear any songbirds trilling in the trees or see any fish swimming in the gentle current of the river, there might still be people — dryads and naiads, oreads and alseids — inhabiting this place. Nymphs, after all, are like vermin. They live in everything. They’re in the clouds, the weeds, the reeds that embalm the sandy shoreline of the creek.
So, Luke might be alone. He can’t be sure yet.
There’s only one way to know, though, so he turns to face the red sun and the dark flower of the tree and the silver trail of the river, and starts walking.
——
Chiron’s planning a field trip to Olympus.
Luke gets to find out first, because being head counsellor of the Hermes cabin comes with fun perks and privileges like that. He’s also the eldest and most responsible one in camp, which means Chiron values his input on ways to prevent a herd of demigod tweens destroying the seat of the gods.
Honestly, the whole idea is stupid. Luke isn’t even clear on what the point of this trip is, and he still knows it’s stupid. If they’re just visiting Olympus to marvel at the architecture and admire all the marble statuary, then that’s a waste of time for everyone except Annabeth.
Getting to talk curfews and sleeping arrangements with a three thousand year old centaur is just great. It’s fantastic. It really makes up for the years of suffering. If someone had told nine-year old Luke that one day he’d be telling Chiron which campers would start making out if left in a room together, he probably wouldn’t have even cared that his mother was holding together her consciousness like a grade schooler holding together an arts-and-crafts project with staples and Elmer’s glue.
“No,” says Luke over the pool table, and knocks a stray billiards ball away from his diagram with the hilt of his sword. “You can’t put Aphrodite and Hephaestus next together. Have you seen the way Silena and Charles look at each other? They’ll be too focused on each other to control their siblings.”
“You may be right,” Chiron agrees. “It may be necessary to rethink this setup.”
Luke wishes he didn’t have a fucking brain to rethink with.
He doesn’t say that, though. He keeps his mouth shut because he is a responsible adult, and even if his life will probably be short and miserable, the powers that be have decided this is a good use of his time.
“Look, do we have a map or anything of Olympus? It’d be nice to know what we’re dealing with. Maybe there’s a side room we can use, some chamber across the hall where we could put people?”
Chiron pauses to think. He’s not in his wheelchair at the moment, and his tail flicks back and forth in perfect sync with the pendulum clock in the corner of the room.
“As a matter of fact, I believe we do. One moment,” he says, and trots into the hallway. A moment later, he trots back in, holding a crumpled, aged-looking scroll in one hand and a pen in the other. He spreads it out across the worn felt of the pool table, pressing down the corners with his palms.
“Ignore the annotations,” Chiron apologises. “Those aren’t relevant anymore. Aphrodite had the bathrooms renovated after Princess Diana died.”
Luke isn’t entirely sure what the people’s princess ever had to do with the bathroom design of Olympus, but he decides not to worry about that. Because the powers that be have decided this is also a good use of his time.
Chiron clears his throat. Clearly, he’s expecting some sort of sage advice on how the social groups of Camp Half-Blood must be navigated in order to prevent World War Three.
“Alright,” Luke says. “I’m ignoring them. Maybe we should just put all the cabins with older head counsellors together, so we can chaperone each other.”
Chiron makes an unintelligible, but somehow distinctly equine, noise, and grimaces.
“We tried, several years ago. One of your older brothers managed to get into the wine cellar. In short, there were some… undesirable consequences.”
“Okay,” says Luke.
“Several campers were politely asked to not return the next year. The Hermes cabin was almost permanently banned.”
Luke wishes the Hermes cabin had been permanently banned. Maybe he wouldn’t have to have this stupid meeting; he’s been standing still too long, and he’s itching to move in some way. Worse, there’s a headache forming in his brain, the pressurised kind that feels like someone’s knocking hard against the inside of your temples. In an attempt to alleviate the pain, Luke pinches the bridge of his nose and tips his head back to face the whitewashed ceiling.
Well. Mostly whitewashed. There’s an enormous brown damp mark directly above his head that looks kind of like the Creation of Adam. It’d be impressive if it weren’t so depressing.
“Look,” he says eventually, pulling his gaze away from the damp stain, “That’s obviously not going to happen again, because I’m not going to raid the wine cellar.”
Chiron inclines his head politely.
“I apologise if I implied that.”
“Not at all. Anyway, I’m not going to do that, so I don’t think it matters if we put some of the cabins that skew older together. If you want, we can balance it out with the Hermes cabin, since that’s pretty mixed in terms of age.” He taps the blade of his sword against the room on the map marked PRONAOS. “This is the smaller room, right? So we’ll put the less populated cabins there. Dionysus, Demeter, so on. Hephaestus too, since I think Beckendorf will be able to control things. Maybe Athena?”
Luke pauses. The nose-pinch thing hasn’t worked; if anything, the pain is worse, and he’s developed a slamming sensation in his temples that pulses in time to his heartbeat. Pronaos, antechamber, La Creazione di Adamo.
He must look off, or have been silent for too long, because the next thing he notices is Chiron asking,
“Luke, is everything alright?”
“Sure,” Luke replies, maybe slightly too quickly. “Sorry. Lost in thought. Um. Look, just — I can figure out logistics myself. Leave the map with me.”
“Of course,” says Chiron. “The trip is not for some time. Take as long as you need.”
——
Your talents are wasted here, says Kronos, stepping away and seating himself at the table again.
Tentatively, Luke reaches up to massage his jaw; he can still feel the pressure in his teeth where the Lord of Time’s cold fingers had been. He runs his tongue over his molars, half-expecting them to feel broken or cracked, but they’re perfectly intact. His dentist would be pleased. Or not. Luke doesn’t floss..
My children are poor rulers. They harbour no respect for their parents, and no love for their children. You know this best of all.
Luke swallows.
This is why I chose you, Luke Castellan. This is why I am still, now, choosing you. You know, better than any other demigod alive, the true nature of the gods. You understand their selfishness, their arrogance, their hubris. You have seen the destruction they wreak on everything they touch.
Luke wants to go home.
He misses his mom. He misses the way her old moth-eaten cashmere cardigans had smelled. He misses the scream of the highway from the front yard. He misses the way splinters pulled from the wooden bench of that ratty old rope swing would dig into his fingers. He misses the taste of oversweetened Kool-Aid and the burn of cookie smoke in his nostrils.
But he can’t go home, so instead he says, “You said that you chose me. For what?”
Kronos casts his hand over the polished wood of the table, revealing the white image of a lightning bolt. Even though it’s not real — nothing more than an illusion, projected onto the varnished mahogany — it glows appealingly, like phosphorus, or plutonium powder in a lead sarcophagus.
“The master bolt,” he murmurs when he remembers how to breathe.
Be silent, snaps Kronos. I am not yet done.
Luke is silent.
As Kronos passes his other hand across the table, the shape of a dark, almost hazy-looking hoplite helmet appears. It’s not just pure black; it’s darker. The shine from the wood lacquer disappears into the image, and, for a second, Luke almost believes he can feel the dim light around him being absorbed in, too.
Hades’ helm of darkness, Kronos informs him, and Zeus’ master bolt. Both gods are fiercely protective of their symbols of power; to lose such an object, or for any other god to come into possession of one, would upset the balance of power on Olympus. Zeus and Hades would certainly go to war if either suspected another god to have stolen their belongings.
Luke isn’t sure whether he’s allowed to speak yet, so he just nods. His jaw still hurts. Is it possible to sprain your teeth in a dream?
You understand, Luke. To steal the helm and the bolt would be to provoke war. To provoke war would be to overturn the rule of the gods. To overturn the rule of the gods would be to create a better world. A Golden Age. A purer world. A return to the old ways.
This part is familiar, actually. Luke remembers that phrase — the Golden Age — from the myths. Crops that sprouted, uncultivated and unsown, from the earth. No war. No famine. No disease. No demigods dying young, and no monsters around to kill them. Of course, though, the Golden Age had come to an end. Prometheus had pissed off the gods by daring to give humans fire, so they’d decided it was fair to torture Prometheus and then also send Pandora into the world with a literal jar of pure evil.
You know. Since a curse amphora is an obvious and totally justified way to punish those pesky mortals and teach them their place.
-
“Okay, everyone,” Luke says into the throng of prepubescent demigods. “Attention, please.”
The throng of prepubescent demigods ignores him. Stray Hermes kids and unclaimed campers run around the elegantly polished floors, sneakers skidding against the marble. The acoustics of the room they’ve ended up in are kind of strange — they remind Luke of being at a pool, with the way sound echoes off the walls — and shrieks of laughter ring in the air like windchimes above an open door.
“Everyone,” Luke says, louder this time, snapping his fingers. “Do I have your attention?”
There are a group of Apollo children sitting off to one side, playing some kind of complicated hand-clapping game. One of them — not Michael Yew, one of his brothers who looks a lot like him — gives Luke a vaguely interested stare, then returns his attention to the rhythm of the game.
“Hey! Listen to me!” yells Luke, which finally gets the Hermes campers to stop running around like startled ducks and the Apollo children to stop clapping what had begun to sound like a bizarre, body-percussion rendition of Born in the USA. “Thank you. Look, I know it’s not ideal, but remember that we’re only here for a night. Find a spot on the floor with your cabin. Bathrooms are down the hall and to the left. Lights out in half an hour.“
A groan rises up from the Hermes section of the room.
“Lights out in twenty minutes,” Luke amends. “Time starts now. Get going.”
Dutifully, a cluster of campers begin shuffling towards the hallway. A couple of the Apollo kids hold back to wrap up the game they were playing, then trail after their siblings, toothbrushes and toothpaste in hand. For a while, he can still hear their footsteps drag and screech against the polished marble floors; then the echo fades, and the chamber goes quiet.
Luke isn’t alone. A few of the Aphrodite girls — Silena and a couple of her younger sisters — haven’t left yet, and are instead sitting in a circle braiding each other’s hair. Still, they’re on the other side of the room and not looking at him and seem very invested in fishtails and French twists and whatever other crap Aphrodite girls do in their free time, so Luke backs towards the nearest wall and presses his head against the tile.
It’s an East Coast winter, the mercury hovering at a crisp twenty Fahrenheit, but somehow the marble walls of Olympus still feel sweaty and hot. The inside of Luke’s mouth feels at once dry and weirdly wet, like when you’re about to throw up.
Luke hopes he doesn’t throw up. Cleaning his own puke from the shiny marble Olympus floor is not on his bucket list. Neither is being known as “puke guy” to the legion of half-blood tweens he’s supervising. Once, when he’d first arrived at camp, there’d been an incident where a Demeter camper a few years older than him developed a pretty violent and ironic case of hayfever, and she’d been nicknamed Booger Bailey for the entire summer. Luke doesn’t feel like following in her footsteps. Or snotsteps.
Luke closes his eyes. He doesn’t know how long he shuts them for, but when he remembers to open them again, Silena Beauregard is sitting in front of him.
“So,” says Silena idly, drawing her knees to her chest, “how come the rooming arrangements ended up like this?”
Luke blinks at her whilst his eyes refocus. He thinks this is a ridiculously uninteresting thing to ask. He doesn’t say that, though. Because that would be rude. Obviously.
“Oh, you know. Logistics. It’s riveting,” he says. “I have to be with Hermes, of course, and we’re huge. Some of the cabins skew younger, so we didn’t want to leave them unsupervised. That’s why we’ve got Athena with Hephaestus.”
“Oh,” says Silena. “Riveting.”
“Yep,” says Luke.
For a while, neither of them speak. One of the Aphrodite girls sitting on the other side of the room begins laughing uncontrollably at something the other one must’ve said. The tiled walls are cold against the back of Luke’s neck. A faint incensey smell perfumes the air. It reminds him of being ten; Luke used to sleep in churches when he was on the run. Compline services and chapel choirs. Nunc dimittis.
“If you don’t mind me saying,” Silena begins, “You don’t look too great.”
Luke cracks what he hopes is a good-natured, yet tired, smile.
“Is it that obvious?I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” he replies. It’s an easy thing for him to say; it’s true. “Maybe I’m coming down with something.”
Silena grimaces sympathetically. “It’s that time of year. Flu season.”
“Yep,” he replies. He fixes his gaze on the hearth in the centre of the room, in hopes something about it - the light, the heat, the gentle crackle of wood - will soothe the nauseous feeling in his throat. All it does is make him feel like he needs to sneeze.
“Okay. I should go and brush my teeth. But I hope you feel better soon,” says Silena. She pats him on the shoulder, then rises to her feet. “Eat some ambrosia and get some sleep?”
“Sure,” A miniature pool of sweat has formed in the dip between his collarbones. It runs down Luke’s chest in dribbles whenever he breathes too hard. “I’ll try.”
-
Luke almost gets away with it, which is the weird part.
He doesn’t have a getaway pegasus or anything, and even if he did, flying seems like a bad idea when you’ve just stolen the personal nuke of the god of the sky — not to mention Hades’ helm, too. Hijacking one of those touristy horse-drawn carriages would be easy, but that would require knowing how to drive one, which Luke doesn’t, and causing an equine traffic accident in the middle of New York wouldn’t exactly be conducive to a subtle escape.
Instead, carrying both the Master Bolt and the Helm of Darkness in his Smithsonian Museum novelty tote bag, Luke hops a turnstile and takes the subway.
Okay. Not exactly true.
Luke takes the subway six stops. His original plan had been to take it to the end of the line, just to get underground and away from the Empire State Building, but somewhere between 59th and 86th, he notices an old woman staring at him from the other end of the carriage, and something about her hairless, liver-spotted scalp, jaundiced eyes and toothless smile freaks him out enough that he gets off at the next station he can.
Of course, Luke’s pretty sure it’s nothing. It’s New York. It’s winter. It’s the middle of the night. When an old, creepy-looking woman stares at you in an empty subway carriage, it’s probably because she got dealt a bad batch of meth, not because she’s an ancient deity come to take your soul to Tartarus for your crimes against the king of the gods.
Probably.
Anyway. Luke tries to distract himself until the next stop. Then he speedwalks off the subway and steals a car.
It’s not like he’d been planning to steal a car. It just happens. One moment, he’s running through his mental list of ugly, gummy old women who punish sinners in the myths, and the next, he’s opening the door of a shiny-looking, illegally-parked, black Chevrolet.
Legally speaking, Luke can’t drive. Practically speaking, he’s kind of great at it.
As far as he knows, it’s something to do with having Hermes as his shoddy excuse of a father; he’s got a natural talent at piloting most vehicles. Back on his fools’ errand to the Garden of the Hesperides, he’d successfully driven a mail van all the way from Cincinnati to Tulsa on his first time behind the wheel. He probably would’ve made it further, but he’d crashed after a colony of Myrmekes started chasing him. Sure, you could put it down to beginner’s luck, but the Stolls have done it too — at least, they claim they’ve done it.
Luke still isn’t sure whether to believe Connor’s story about the Maserati.
Anyway. Under normal circumstances, Luke might be less willing to use his father’s gifts. He usually hates the way he can feel the keys in the pockets of the people he passes, the way that locks tremble and open themselves when he brushes his fingers over them, the way people’s eyes glaze over if he slips a hand into their pocket.
These aren’t normal circumstances, though, so he tosses the tote bag with the helm and the bolt into the shotgun seat, waves a hand over the ignition, and starts driving.
——
The storms start about halfway across New Jersey, and Luke ditches the Chevrolet somewhere past Princeton.
Ideally, he’d have driven a lot further — maybe down south, anywhere away from New York — but as he learns pretty quickly, there’s not a lot of gas in the tank, and Luke doesn’t have any mortal money to buy more. He’s pretty sure the teenage attendants at Texaco won’t accept drachmas. And sure, he could’ve changed cars, but for some reason, there are hardly any vehicles on the road. Maybe because it’s four in the morning. Maybe because it’s almost Christmas. There’s hardly anything on the radio, either; Luke had turned it on out of curiosity, but the only stations broadcasting are a Spanish-language music channel playing Christmas songs, and the 24-hour news.
Some washed-up film star who Luke has only vaguely heard of, dead in a DUI crash. Feliz Navidad! Weather takes a sharp turn for the worse; warning to truckers. Feliz Navidad! Construction works cause traffic chaos across New England. Feliz Navidad!
He manages to parallel park on a random patch of turf, which, even with his bizarre child-of-Hermes car-kinesis, is a lot harder than stealing either the helm or the bolt. Then, he gets out and starts walking towards the treeline.
It’s bad weather, even for December, and so cold that fat snowflakes accumulate onto Luke’s head and bare arms. He isn’t cold, though. Actually, he’s kind of hot. The bolt emits a warm, electric glow that he can feel even through the canvas of his Smithsonian tote, and, whenever he reaches up to shift the straps on his arm, or jostles the bag against his leg, a wave of pure heat passes through his body.
For a while, he just hikes like that, using Zeus’ personal weapon as a personal space heater, feeling snow pack into ice beneath his feet, and trying not to think too hard about anything. The sky is mostly cloudy, but the white halo of the moon is still visible, and, intermittently, Luke catches glimpses of Orion on the low horizon. Apart from the constant drone of traffic noise, it’s pretty peaceful.
Wait.
Traffic noise?
Here’s the problem; Luke’s not walking towards any traffic, especially nothing that loud. Hell, he’s nowhere near a residential area, let alone a highway. The roads had been dead all the way here. There’s no reason for the engine roar buzzing in his ears, no logic behind the mechanical screeching overpowering his senses, not unless —
“Well, well, well,” says a low voice from behind Luke, and he turns around.
In front of him, katana in hand, is Ares. His enormous mirrored Ray-Bans obscure most of his expression, but his mouth is twisted into a manic, gleeful smile, and rows of sharp white teeth shine like icicles beneath. There’s a black trenchcoat thrown over one shoulder, and, if Luke looks closely at the leather, he can see what looks like a human hand sewn into the fabric. It even has fingernails.
Luke decides to not think too deeply about that. Instead, he says,
“Ares.”
“Me,” Ares agrees, and swings himself off of his motorcycle. “You know, kid, I’m surprised you’d do something like this. You always seemed so straight-laced. Completely fucking insufferable, but straight-laced. Ironic that I’m saying this, considering, you know, who your dad is, but how’d a good Hermes boy like you turn to a life of crime?”
As casually as possible, like he were pulling a pack of gum out of his pocket or checking his watch, Luke draws his sword. The bronze blade glows unnervingly in the black haze of the night, and it shudders in time with his trembling hands. Hopefully Ares thinks he’s shivering, not scared.
“You know how teenagers are,” he replies, and hopes his voice doesn’t sound as shaky as it feels. “I’ve been going through a rebellious phase.”
Then, he raises his sword, and swings right at Ares’ face.
With all the grace of a lion sinking its teeth into flesh, Ares parries, deflecting Luke’s slash down towards the ground and carving a gash into the snow. As his weapon arcs through the air, it morphs from a katana into the kind of standard Greek sword you might expect to see in the Camp armoury — leaf shaped blade, animal bone grip, engraved scenes of torture and death all around the hilt.
You know. The usual.
The bag with the bolt and the helm is still on Luke’s shoulder, and, since he’s not sure what else to do with it, he just leaves it there. Of course, he could just toss it in front of him for Ares to take, but that wouldn’t guarantee anything. Somehow, Luke has a feeling Ares is the kind of god to smite first, ask questions later.
Luke backs away, raising his sword to block a returning strike at his stomach; the sheer force of the impact makes his wrists ache and his teeth rattle like a set of human maracas. He directs a stab at Ares’ chest, just to try and get even, but that doesn’t land either, and all Luke manages to do is cleave some needles off a nearby evergreen.
Shit. Shit again.
He needs to think of something to say, anything that might make Ares back off. The problem is figuring out what, though. Luke’s got this feeling that I want to overthrow your entire family and reinstate the King of the Titans as ruler of earth! won’t earn him much clemency.
“Hey, Ares,” Luke calls, and dodges a slash meant for his upper thigh. “Don’t you want to know why I did it? You know, why I decided to steal them?”
Ares, halfway through an upward swing, stops and lowers his sword. It’s not exactly easy to read his expression, what with the sunglasses and snow blurring the air, but Luke’s pretty sure he can make out a single raised eyebrow. Either that, or the god of war has a very blond caterpillar living above his Ray-Bans. Luke never knew the Olympians had such awful taste in designer eyewear.
“Are you seriously asking that?”
Luke swallows. His throat feels uncomfortably cold, and every time he inhales, icy air floods into his sinuses, like pus flooding into a wound gone septic.
He’s never actually had a wound go septic, by some miracle — he’s always scraped by using a combination of rubbing alcohol and ambrosia — but he reckons it’s a similar experience.
“Yes?”
“No, not really,” Ares replies, and swings again.
Luke deflects with a twist of his wrist — a new manoeuvre, something he’d been perfecting so he could teach it to the campers in summer — then drops, rolls, and aims a slash at Ares’ heel. It connects, but barely; drops of gold ichor fleck the wet ground and seep into the melting snow.
On his shoulder, the bag with the helm and the bolt is growing hot, and heavy. He can feel the heat from it leaching into his flesh like wastewater into a canal, and whenever he moves, the canvas strap of the bag digs into his bicep like a shovel into a grave. Luke could drop it, sure, shed a trillion pounds of weight and stand a better chance against Ares, but without the bolt and the helm by his side, there’s nothing stopping the god of war from turning him into demigod jelly where he stands.
Of course, if Luke keeps the bag and loses, he’ll get jellified anyway. All things considered, it’s an easy decision.
As soon as the tote thuds to the ground behind him, a golden flash of moving metal appears in Luke’s peripheral vision, and, like a mongoose lunging towards a cobra, Ares’ sword comes lurching towards his face. Luke moves to parry a moment too late: instead of catching, Ares’ blade slides down his own and drags itself through Luke’s thigh.
Fuck, thinks Luke.
Ares pulls his sword away; there is a thin film of blood already freezing on the tip.
“Remember, demigod,” he says. “Surrender is a completely fair choice. I won’t give you any mercy, obviously, but you can surrender.”
“No,” Luke replies. then drops to the ground to avoid getting impaled like demigod souvlaki.
He can’t feel his right leg anymore; he doesn’t know whether it’s from the cold or blood loss. He doesn’t want to know. His instincts are screaming at him to move, to stand up, to strike at Ares again, but he’s not sure he can. A bleak part of him wonders if there’s any point fighting. Maybe Ares is right. Maybe he should surrender, cut his losses, choose a quick death via vaporisation over slowly bleeding out where he stands. At least the first option would make for an interesting inscription on his gravestone.
Here lies Luke Alexander Castellan. May 26th, 1986 to December 22nd, 2005. Died alone in the wilderness of New Jersey. Not very missed. Remembered fondly for his brief stint as a flipflop model, blasphemy, and also getting liquified by the god of war. RIP.
On reflection, not exactly the way he wants to be remembered.
Besides, the thought of dying— bleeding to death in a snowdrift, or being turned into a grease spot against the side of a pine tree — it’s just not right. Luke can’t surrender. He can’t die here.
Even on that doomed quest to the Garden of the Hesperides, Luke had never really entertained the idea that he’d die; sure, he’d staggered out of the grove covered in blood, and sure, he’d been a cube of ambrosia away from losing an eye, but the idea that he wouldn’t escape with his life had always been out of the question. He wants to live too badly. He’s seen too many sunrises, stood over the ashes of too many monsters, survived too many freezing New England nights where the stars glow a different shade of white and the air grows so cold you can almost taste the ice in it.
No. Absolutely not. Luke isn’t going to surrender. He can’t die here. He’s gotten a taste of life, like it’s some party psychedelic you’d try once out of curiosity, and now he’s hooked on the feeling of existing, not just surviving.
Foolish child, hisses a voice in the back of his skull, so loudly that he almost jumps. If it is your desire to live, why do you stand idle, as though your greatest wish is to rot in the earth, smote by Ares’ hand?
Before Luke has a chance to reply, he sees the flash of a blade coming towards him, and raises his sword to parry.
“What?” he manages at last. “What are ー”
“Remember, Castellan,” says Ares. Luke shuts up and staggers backwards to avoid being decapitated. “You can surrender.”
Pay attention, child, snaps the voice again. Black glass in the shape of white snow crunches and shatters with every step Luke takes. Is it your profound wish to die here?
“No,” he murmurs, and swallows. “No, uh, Lord. I mean. I implore you, please. Help me. Lord.”
You stand no chance against the god of war in combat. You will sooner perish from exhaustion than win. You have failed me once in getting caught; you may still, however, prove yourself useful.
Luke twists to avoid a slash aimed at his sternum, then slashes upwards towards Ares’ face. All he succeeds in doing is slicing off a clump of greasy black hair.
There is no use in fighting. It is what Ares excels in. He delights in the practice of violence. You must, therefore, show him there are greater battles to come if you should live. Offer him the prospect of conflict amongst the gods, conflict throughout the world. Make him see the value of patience.
His breathing is getting shakier and unsteadier by the second. The December air burns his throat like volcanic ash on bare flesh.
“I understand,” Luke breathes, and drops his sword.
At once, Ares cocks an eyebrow. At least, it seems like he cocks an eyebrow. It’s hard to tell, what with the huge Ray-Bans.
“So,” he says, sounding almost surprised, “you’re giving up. I respect that! I respect that you know you’re outmatched. Would you prefer that I liquefied your organs first, or do you want me to freeze-dry your blood to start off with?”
“Um,” says Luke. He really doesn’t want to know what having freeze-dried blood would be like. “Neither. Lord, you don’t understand. Surrender is not the best option for either of us. If I die here 一 that’s it. No more conflict. No more fighting. Hermes gets a bad rep for raising good-for-nothing thief sons and then Olympus goes back to boring peace.”
Ares doesn’t look particularly impressed, but Luke is still alive, which must count for something. He presses on.
“You’re the only one who knows I stole anything, right? Nobody else has seen me. This is between us.”
“That’s right,” says Ares uncertainly.
“Zeus doesn’t know who took the bolt. That’s why he sent his children out looking, right? If he knew it was me, he’d come and take it himself. I’d get turned into dust. Crisis over. But here’s the thing,”
Luke finds himself taking a step forward. The air around him feels crystalline, still; even the snowflakes seem to have slowed their descent. “Zeus has no idea it was me. Why would he suspect me? Why would he suspect Hermes? Realistically, if anyone had taken the bolt, it’d be Poseidon or Hades. He can’t directly challenge either of them, and they’ll both deny it. The conflict doesn’t have to end here. There could be chaos in Olympus for years — hell, even decades.”
“Chaos. Total war,” murmurs Ares dreamily, in the same way a lovestruck middle schooler might murmur Zac Efron or Justin Bieber. Then he stops, and squints at Luke suspiciously. At least, it seems like that’s what he’s doing. Again, the sunglasses.
“Hold on. And you just get to keep their symbols of power? No, no, no.” The god of war raises his sword again. “Nice try, but you’re totally getting smited. I’m not allowing you to get away with this, half-blood.”
For a second Luke seriously thinks he’s going to get turned into demigod slush. Then, he yells,
“No! Not at all. I was going to give them to you. Nobody would suspect you, after all. Why would a god steal anything directly? You’d have your children run your errands for you.”
“What am I meant to do with them?” Ares probes. “Fucking morons, you half-bloods. You never learn. That just makes your mistake my problem. I have enough problems! Greenpeace, for one thing. Don’t even get me started on those assholes at UNICEF.”
“Isn’t that, like, a peace charity?”
“Ugh. Exactly,” grumbles Ares.
Luke isn’t entirely sure what to say to that. More pressingly, he doesn’t know what to say in response to the whole problem of what does Ares do with the bolt and helm, because he has no idea what the answer was. He’d kind of assumed Ares would just hold onto them, but maybe that’s not a good idea. You know, considering that stealing them was kind of not allowed.
Just as Luke begins to seriously consider suggesting passing them off as souvenir toys from the Olympus gift shop, Kronos’ voice echoes in his temples.
A half-blood child of the Big Three lives among us, not yet brought to your little camp. When the time comes — and come it will — the weapons will be given to him, that he might give them to me.
Cool, thinks Luke. Way better than souvenir toys, and says,
“Look. I haven’t told anyone this, because officially I don’t know this, but Chiron has eyes on a demigod child of the Big Three. We don’t know whose, yet, but privately — we don’t think it’s Zeus.”
Hopefully that part was true, because Luke had made it up.
“When he comes to camp — probably soon — we can find a way of passing the weapons onto him. Zeus will think his brothers have schemed against him. Boom.” What was that phrase Ares had used earlier? “Total war.”
The god of war regards him with cool, dark eyes. His expression is unreadable, statuesque, almost serene. It’s the expression people have when they’ve just received shocking news, but haven’t decided whether it’s a good or bad kind of shocking yet.
It’s an expression he sees on his father a lot.
Fat flakes of snow fall softly around them. The bleeding in his thigh has slowed to a stop. Above, between the gaps in the clouds, the stars are beginning to fade. Must be near dawn.
“I don’t like you, Castellan,” Ares says at last. “But I like your ideas. You have a deal.”
He strides towards the tote bag Luke had abandoned on the floor, and hoists it onto his shoulder as easily as one might pick up a stuffed animal or a bouquet of flowers.
“And remember, son of Hermes. Next time you steal, try not to get caught.”
Without waiting for a reply, Ares holds a hand out towards his motorcycle, snaps his fingers, and disappears in a flash of gilded light.
——
As soon as Ares is gone, Luke collapses.
“Forgive me, Lord,” he rasps. He’s not sure he even has the energy to shut his eyes, so he doesn’t bother trying, and just keeps them open. All he can see is the stars, half-hidden by clouds and glowing unkindly in the black December sky. “I won’t fail you again.”
No, Kronos whispers into the soft folds of Luke’s brain. You certainly will not.
——
It is sometime in late May. Luke can tell from the quality of the light; yellow, warm in a way that he associated with summertime and strawberry fields. He is standing in his mother’s kitchen, holding something that probably used to be a tray of cookies or muffins; at this point, they’re so burnt that he’d never be able to tell. The linoleum kitchen counter is peeling and blackened in places by frying pan-shaped scorch marks. Burning burning burning
A man with tanned skin and tawny hair is leaning on the worktop . He’s not exactly good looking, not in the same way supermodels or movie stars are, but it’s impossible not to stare at him. Maybe it’s the alien quality he has; somehow, he looks out of place for the environment he’s in, as though he were really someone standing, superimposed, against a green screen.
The man fixes his gaze on Luke. His eyes are some indeterminable colour between blue and silver, like the moon in the daytime. There’s a small scratch across his nose, and the scab formed there — gold, not red — catches the light like a piercing whenever he moves.
—
“Did you sleep, Luke?” Annabeth asks him suspiciously, and puts a croissant from the breakfast buffet onto her plate.
It is eight twenty one in the morning. Luke can still feel the stab wound in his thigh twitch as he walks, even with the muscle healed and his skin knitted back together.
“Not much,” he admits sheepishly. “I’m getting soft. I couldn’t sleep on the floor at all. It was way too hard. I can’t believe I ever used to sleep outside every night.”
Annabeth rolls her eyes at him and pours him a glass of orange juice.
“You should have said something. I’m sure someone would’ve found you a spare blanket or something.”
Luke laughs. He has no appetite. The juice in his glass smells like stomach acid and his mother’s house. Soured fruit. Expired Kool-Aid packets. Melted plastic. Burning.
“I’ll keep that in mind for next time.”
——
Hermes looks up at him. There are little black soot smudges on his forearms from the countertop burns.
“What do you want?” he asks helplessly.
“I want to die,” says Luke, in his mother’s voice.
——
The moment his teeth sink into the white meat of the apple, Luke gags, and spits the wet contents of his mouth back out.
There’s something moving under his tongue. There are a dozen little somethings wriggling, crawling, twitching around in the flesh of the fruit, and even as Luke stares down at the imprint of his incisors, the maggots writhing there seem to multiply, until, after a few seconds, they’re the only thing he can see.
For a few beats, all Luke does is stare; the wriggling, writhing larvae, the putrid yellow of their bodies, the juice dripping down his wrist like pus from a sore.
Then he looks up at the tree.
The entire plant, from leaves to trunk to roots, is infested with insects. Clumps of whitish fly eggs decorate the wood like mistletoe, and, circling the gangrenous leaves like birds of prey, bluebottles and botflies swarm. A breeze runs through the branches to ruffle the leaves, and a cascade of rotten apples drop to the ground in its wake, like corpses dropping into the mud of a battlefield.
Luke does not believe in omens.