Chapter Text
"Because some old ladies cut yarn."
"What?" Percy's mom pulled the wheel sharply to the right, leaving him barely a moment to glimpse the figure that she'd swerved to avoid—a great hulking shadow. "What do you mean, three old ladies cut yarn?"
"What was that?" Percy asked, suddenly very confused. Why had he mentioned that to his mother?
"We're almost there," his mother said, ignoring his question. "Another mile. Please. Please. Please."
Percy didn't know where there was, but he found himself leaning forward in the car, anticipating the arrival. Percy suddenly came to the realization that he didn't know where they were, either. It didn't look like Montauk anymore. It didn't really look like New York anymore. Percy wasn't sure if his mom was seeing this, too, but outside, it quickly shifted from rain and darkness to golden hills, dotted with moody-looking lakes, angry woods, and a few herds of perturbed cows that seemed strangely shocked and irritated by the rain that seemed to follow their car. A flat checkerboard of neighborhoods interrupted the strawberry fields that they'd just been approaching.
The heavy rain seemed to weigh down the buildings, hiding the tops of skyscrapers and a hazy, angry-looking bay that hadn't been there before.
A thick sadness weighed on Percy’s chest on top of the fear and confusion that told him he’d been to San Francisco before, but he didn't remember anything like that happening. It was hard enough to convince Smelly Gabe to let them go to Montauk (which was definitely never happening ever again, judging by the state of the Camaro), let alone across the country.
He thought numbly about Mrs. Dodds, when she'd grown pointed teeth and leathery wings in the museum gallery. He felt dangerously like he was floating as the car hit a rock and jerked briefly into the air. She really hadn't been human and she'd meant to kill him.
Then he thought about Mr. Brunner ... and the sword he'd thrown him… maybe it was his ADHD acting up, but his teacher's face and name melted from his mind. How had he gotten the sword? His hair stood on end like he was the electrostatics physics lab experiment. First, there was the Light, glaring, the Noise, ear-shattering, and the Heat, mind-melting. The car exploded.
For a moment, he felt dangerously weightless, like he couldn't possibly be tethered to the Earth by gravity anymore, like he must be flying, knocked out of orbit to a Mirror Earth, a kind of new planet to support life that NASA was trying so hard to find, like he was in a pressure-cooker and a frying pan all at the same time.
"Ow." Percy peeled his forehead off the back of the driver's seat and touched the back of his hand on it, sure he had left some of his skin behind on the steaming leather. "Ow," he repeated, shallowly, like his chest had a thousand tons of concrete weighing down his lungs.
"Percy!" his mom shouted.
"I'm okay... ."
He tried to lift the heavy fog from his mind. He wasn't dead, first of all.The car hadn't really exploded. They'd swerved into a ditch on the left side of the road, scaring a cow so badly it fell down dead right beside them. The driver's-side doors were wedged in mud and cow-droppings. The roof had cracked like Humpty Dumpty and rain poured in angrily.
Not even the king of the gods could put that back together again.
Lightning. It had to be lightning.
"Percy," his mother said, "we have to ..." Her voice faltered. He could see she was a little confused, too, for a moment. Then she blinked, and it seemed to make sense to her again.
Percy looked back, over his shoulder, like he'd been the one driving and was checking his blind spots in order to change lanes. In a crash of lightning, through the mud-spattered rear windshield that the back windshield wipers were desperately trying to clean, he saw the figure steadily gaining on them on the side of the road. The sight of it made his skin crawl. It was so big, Percy almost mistook it for a car, glowing eyes as headlights, but he realized it must be a huge guy, bigger than any football player he'd ever seen. He seemed to be holding a blanket over his head, making his top half huge and fuzzy. His upraised arms gave the impression of large horns.
He swallowed thickly. "Mom—"
"Percy," his mother said, the most serious he'd ever seen her. "Get out of the car."
His mother threw her weight against the driver's-side door. It was jammed shut, and only served to make us sink a little deeper into the mud. Percy rammed his shoulder against his. Stuck too. Desperately, he looked to the cracked roof, metal still glowing hot from the lightning, but his mom had a better idea.
"Climb out the passenger's side!" His mother told him. "Percy— run. Do you see that big tree?"
"What?"
Another crack of lightning, and through the sizzling hole in the roof he saw the tree she must have meant: a hulking pine at the peak of the hill, right by an overpass with a tunnel.
"That's the property line," his mom said. "Get over that hill. Run and don't look back. Yell for help. Don't stop until you reach the door."
Door?
Percy couldn't see how that could be the property line. It was a tunnel, that had to be public property, right?
"Mom, you're coming too."
Her face was pale; her eyes as sad as when she looked at the ocean and thought no one was watching.
"No!" Percy shouted. "You are coming with me. You can't leave me."
The man holding a blanket over his head steadily gained on us, making grunting, snorting noises like the reminiscent of the gurgling cows on the field nearby. As he got closer, Percy realized no way was that a blanket, because his hands—thick, meaty hands—were swinging at his sides as he lumbered over. And that bulky, fuzzy mass... that was his head. And the points that looked like horns … suddenly glinted threatening as Percy realized—those were really horns.
"He doesn't want us," Percy's mother told him. "He wants you. Besides, I can't cross the property line."
"But..." Us?
"We don't have time, Percy. Go. Please."
Percy got mad, then. Anger swelled in his chest—for his mother, for the angry rain hitting us heavily like mini torpedos, for the horned man that was lumbering towards us slowly and deliberately like, like a bull.
He climbed across to the passenger side and forced the door open into the darkness. "We're going together. Come on, Mom."
"I told you—"
"Mom! I won't leave you."
Percy didn't wait for her to respond. He tumbled outside, dragging his mom from the car when she was too slow to move.
They pulled each other forward against the heavy head wind. Percy felt, suddenly, like one of those math problems in his pre-algebra class. If the wind-speed is x and Percy and his mom are moving at y miles per hour, how long will it take for the horned thing to catch up to them and eat them?
Glancing back over his shoulder, Percy got his first clear look at it, with no smoke from the sizzling car to obscure it. Easily seven feet tall, his muscles looked like he was hiding basketballs under thick leathery skin. His bright, white Fruit of the Looms tighty-whities stood in stark contrast to the thick, shag carpet like hair growing on the rest of his body. A bull's tail peeked out from behind him.
Head and tail of a bull, body of a man. No.
Percy recognized the monster, all right. He had been in one of the first stories his teacher (who was his teacher?) told the class. One of the first myths. He couldn't be real.
He blinked the rain out of his eyes. "That's—"
"Pasiphae's son," his mother said. "I wish I'd known—how badly they want to kill you."
"But he's the Min—"
"Don't say his name," she warned him. "Names have power."
The pine tree was too far—several hundred yards uphill at least.They were never going to make it.
Again, Percy looked at the monster. How far away was he?
The bull-man hunched over their car—snuffling, nuzzling. He took in great, big breaths so loud Percy could hear them over the thunder. Percy wasn't sure why he bothered, since they were barely fifty feet away.
"Mom, w-why…? What's he doing? Doesn't he see us?"
"No, his sight and hearing are terrible," she said. "He goes by smell. But he'll figure out where we are soon enough."
The bull-man roared. He must've realized they weren't in the car because he picked up Gabe's Camaro by the hole in the roof, raised it over his head and threw it down the road, where it skidded in a blaze of sparks for about half a mile before coming to a stop in front of a distressed cow that had been peacefully crossing the road right by a Cattle-Crossing road sign. The gas tank exploded.
Not a scratch, Percy remembered Gabe warning them.
Oops. The bull-man looked a little too angry to give them his insurance details.
"Percy," his mom said. "When he sees us, he'll charge. Wait until the last second, then jump out of the way. Directly sideways. He can't change directions very well once he's charging. Do you understand?"
"How do you know all this?"
"I've been worried about an attack for a long time. I should have expected this. I was selfish, keeping you near me."
"Keeping me near you? But—"
Another enraged roar lined up perfectly with the next crack of thunder. The bull-man started tromping uphill, faster now.
He'd smelled them.
The pine tree was still so far away, and the hill was getting steeper and slicker and harder to climb, and their shoes were sinking into the mud.
The bull-man closed in. Another few seconds and he'd be on top of them.
My mother must've been exhausted, but she shouted. "Go, Percy! Separate! Remember what I said."
He didn't want to split up, but Percy had the feeling his mom was right—this was their only chance. Percy changed direction so fast he was sure he should've torn his ACL, and saw the bull-man right above him. His beady eyes glowed hatefully. He reeked like rotten meat, which burned the inside of his nostrils.
He charged.
The fear in his stomach made him stumble back, but he knew he could never outrun that thing. He forced himself to hold his ground, hold, hold, hold, and at the last moment, he sprang to the side, stumbling to the uneven ground.
The bull-man stormed past like an eighteen wheeler, then bellowed when his horns didn't impale Percy's chest, and turned, but not toward Percy this time, toward his mother.
No. Not again, he thought. And then his head hurt. When had this happened before?
They'd reached the crest of the hill and the pine tree. Down the other side Percy could see a steep drop, to the flooded highway below and a dark tunnel that might provide some relief from the rain. But that was a quarter mile away. They'd never make it.
The bull-man grunted, eyes trained on Percy's mother, who was now stumbling unsteadily downhill, back toward the road and the ruined car, trying to lead him away from Percy.
"Run, Percy!" she told him. "I can't go any farther. Run!"
Instead, Percy stood there, frozen in fear, as the monster charged her. She tried to leap to the right, but the bull-man had learned from last time. He grabbed her by the neck as she struggled.
"Mom!"
She caught his eye. "Go!"
Then, the bull-man closed his fists around his mother's neck, and she melted into light, a shimmering hologram turned to dust. She was... gone?
"No! Not again, not again, not my Mom!"
Anger burned through him. It was the strangest sense of déjà vu as strength seemed to curdle his blood—the same energy that had burned through him at the museum, when Ms. Dodds grew talons.
He didn't get to do that. He wasn't allowed to take his mom.
He tore off his red rain jacket.
"Hey!" Percy screamed, waving the jacket like a flag, running to the bull-man's left flank. "Hey, stupid! Ground beef!"
The monster bellowed with rage. He turned toward Percy, shaking erratically like an engine working much too hard.
He had an idea—a stupid one, granted, but at this point, it didn't really matter to him if he lived. He put his back to the enormous pine and waved his red jacket enticingly, thinking, at the last moment...
It didn't happen like that.
Percy had a sudden, inescapable feeling that none of his plans ever did.
The bull-man was too fast, his arms too far apart for Percy to sidestep.
Time slowed down.
His legs tensed. Percy couldn't jump sideways, so he leaped straight up, feet planted on the bull-man's enormous head, using it as a springboard for a midair 180° and landing on his neck.
How did he do that? Percy didn't have the time to figure it out. A millisecond later, the hulking head head slammed back into the tree.
The bull-man staggered, trying to shake him off, but Percy locked his arms around his horns to keep from being thrown, palms bleeding from holding on to razor-sharp horns.
Percy's head hurt.
He needed, he needed something… he couldn't think. He felt a tug in his gut, and realized, suddenly, that he was looking down the steep drop onto the flooded highway below, as the bull-man tried to throw him off. The water… the highway wasn't wet anymore.
The water rose up, like a wall, like a waterbed, almost.
The bull-man wheeled backward, toward the drop, trying to buck him off in frustration. Percy seethed, remembering how the bull-man had squeezed the life out of his mother, made her disappear again. He got both hands around one horn, pulled backward. The horn cracked off with the sound of thunder.
The bull-man roared and catapulted him through the air. He landed flat on his back in the mud. Percy's head smacked against a rock. His vision was blurry, but he could feel the horn in his hands.
The bull-man charged.
Anger burned through Percy so hot it felt like fire. He stopped, dropped, and rolled to the side just in time to drive the horn straight into the bull-man's thick trunk.
Percy had only a glimpse of the bull-man disintegrating as he took one step up and stumbled backward, falling down the steep fall, eyes closed, into cushioning water.
The monster was gone.
The rain had stopped. The storm still rumbled distantly, like a promise. His head felt like it was cracked open, but the water brought him safely down to the cement of the highway.
Percy must have smelled like livestock because after about a minute of trembling with grief a cow came up and nudged him curiously.
Reflexively, he brought the horn up, ready to do what he had to do, but the cow just looked so concerned, like she thought was a hideously misshapen baby cow who'd just lost his mother and was going to lay on the concrete like a worm in the rain only to dry up and die when the sun inevitably arrived.
Percy couldn't imagine the sun ever arriving. This was it, for him. He couldn't go on.
"You're right, of course," said a hideous voice next to him.
Percy jumped. For a second, he thought it was his mom, but he couldn't imagine her having a voice that ugly. Instead, the old lady sitting in the bushes was somehow more repulsive than the bull-man had been. She wore a dress made of tie-dyed cloth, old quilts, plastic grocery bags, and, it seemed like, her own hair to patch up the holes. She smiled with exactly three teeth.
He was irrationally angry that she was smiling. His tears burned the skin of his cheeks.
“This isn’t a maintenance tunnel,” she said, like she was telling him a secret. “It’s the entrance to camp.”
Camp. Yes, that’s where his mother said they were going.
Something was wrong.
The old lady raised her eyebrows. “Not much time, child. You need to make your choice.”
“Who are you?” Percy asked, hollowly, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. "What choice?"
“Oh, you can call me June.” The old lady’s lips quirked up in amusement. “It is June, isn’t it? They named the month after me!”
Percy's head hurt. He couldn't think of anything to say. "Choice?"
“Yes, a choice,” June said. “You could leave me here and go to the ocean. You’d make it there safely, I guarantee. In the sea, no monster would bother you. You could begin a new life, live to a ripe old age, and escape a great deal of pain and misery that is in your future.”
"I can't, I can't…?" Percy didn't see how he could live in the sea. A boat? He didn't really see how he could live at all. He didn't have anyone. "Or?" he asked, hazily.
“Or you could do a good deed for an old lady,” she said. “Carry me to the camp with you.”
“Carry you?” Percy didn't know if he could carry himself to camp. June hiked up her skirts to show him swollen purple feet.
Percy stared numbly.
“I can’t get there by myself,” she said. “Carry me to camp—across the highway, through the tunnel, across the river.”
It didn’t sound easy. June looked pretty heavy.
“And I’d carry you to this camp because—?”
“Because it’s a kindness!” she said. “And if you don’t, the gods will destroy each other, Kronos will rise, and your mom will certainly die. But you’d be safe hidden at the bottom of the sea.…”
Percy swallowed. How… how could he be safe at the bottom of the sea? No, his mom.
“If I go to the camp,” he said, “will I get my mom back?”
“Eventually, maybe,” June said. “But be warned, you will sacrifice much! You will need to accept the quest that will be offered to you, restore what was stolen to the rightful owners, and clear your name."
Percy sat up, to get a look at the door and the tunnel, and saw two armed guards in ancient armor standing to each side of it.
“What about, what about those, those guards at the door?” Percy asked. His eyes closed, heavily.
June smiled, flashing those three teeth at him again. “Oh, they’ll let you in, dear. You can trust those two. So, what do you say? Will you help a defenseless old woman?"
She was lighter than he expected her to be. Her calloused hands clung to his neck which ached in remembrance of the impact against the big pine.
Percy was glad that the bull-man wasn't here because he couldn't run. June seemed to gain ten pounds with every step. His heart pounded. His ribs ached.
One of the guards yelled. One of them drew a sword. No, Percy thought, no. He could not fight another… no.
Fifty feet from the door. Thirty feet.
One of the guards stepped forward, arms outstretched.
"Please," Percy said. He squeezed his eyes shut. June is slipping and his knees are buckling.
"Okay, you’re obviously a demigod. But who’s—?” a girl's voice cut through the ringing pain in his head. “Never mind. Just get inside.”
Percy couldn't open his eyes. He couldn't help remembering, strangely, how he'd made a claw with his hands to slam the door shut on Smelly Gabe, just before they'd left for Montauk. The door opened.
June reached in front of his face and pried his eyes open with her crusty fingers. "Look where you're going! What lies ahead of you will define the rest of your life!"
Percy stumbled forward into the dark tunnel.
"I can, I can help?" says the other guard, a boy, hands outstretched to help Percy with June.
"You have your own burden to carry, son of Mars. To each, his own burden," June said.
The son of Mars stopped short, so the girl stepped through the doorway first.
Percy followed, staggering under the old lady's growing weight. She continued to hold his eyes open so he couldn't blink.
At first, it resembled a typical maintenance tunnel, with electric cables, warning signs, and fuse boxes on the walls. Percy stared blankly at the girl's back, at the glittering armor she wore. His gaze slid down to her shoes as the cement floor changed to mosaic tiles.
The old lady was heavier than anything Percy had ever lifted before. She felt heavier than the sky. Percy’s arms shook and his legs buckled once more. He thought about leaning against the wall of the tunnel for a moment. June whispered a song in Latin, some sort of lullaby, and Percy's eyes fought her fingers trying to close again.
"Don't worry. We're almost there," the girl assured him.
“Where?” Percy could barely force himself to say.
June laughed. “All roads lead there, child. You should know that."
“...Detention?” Percy asked, squinting.
“Rome, child,” the old woman said. “Rome.”
Percy wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. He didn't think they were in New York, true, but Rome? He didn't think…
Faint blue-grey light eventually replaced the torch-light and he found himself under a cloudy sky.
"River…?" he whispered, remembering June had said something about a river, as he looked at the valley below. There... a small silvery river winded from a central lake around the perimeter, like a capital G.
Something about this place felt very familiar, yet not quite right. He shivered.
June pulled Percy's eyes open wider. “Oh, yes, please. I can’t get my dress wet.”
Percy bit his tongue. Anger ripped through his grief, his fear, and his absolute exhaustion.
It’s a kindness, she’d said. He didn't want to be kind. He wanted his mom. She'd said maybe he could get his mom back.
He needed to pass this test.
He stumbled most of the way to the river. The guards didn't dare touch him or help after June's warning that they had their own burdens to carry.
They reached the riverbank. Percy stopped. The current was fast, but he could see the bottom of the river. Percy didn't know how he could get across without the current knocking his knees to the side.
“Go,” said the boy, catching the girl's eyes. “Escort him so the sentries don’t shoot him.”
She nodded and waded into the stream.
Percy started to follow, but something made him hesitate. Usually he loved the water, but this river seemed…powerful, and not necessarily friendly. It looked cold and uninviting.
“The Little Tiber,” said June. “It flows with the power of the original Tiber, river of the empire. This is your last chance to back out, child. Soon, they'll know you're here.”
Percy was too exhausted to understand any of that.
June smiled. “So what will it be? Safety, or a future of pain and possibility?”
Mom, Percy thought. He stepped into the icy river. Instead of falling immediately, new strength surged through him. He reached the other side and put the old woman down. The camp’s gates opened. Many kids in armor poured out.
Percy's knees buckled. He fell cross-legged to the ground. Hard.
“Well, that was a lovely trip,” June said. “Thank you, Percy Jackson, for bringing me to Camp Jupiter.”
Then, just because his day hadn’t been strange enough already, the old lady began to glow, growing until she was seven-feet-tall in a blue dress, with some sort of goat’s skin cloak draped over her shoulders. Her face was stern, stately. She had all her teeth, Percy noticed.
Everyone looked stunned. A woman in a purple cloak knelt. The others followed her lead.
“Lady Juno,” someone said.
“Juno, huh?” he said, deliriously, eyes slipping closed, stretching her name out. “If I passed... your test, can I have... my mom... back?”
“That's not for me to decide, Percy Jackson. You have much to achieve before that will ever become possible. You will face far, far worse than the Minotaur if you ever hope to succeed. You’ve done well today, which is a good start. Perhaps there’s hope for you yet."
She paused. “Romans, I present to you the son of Neptune. His fate is in the hands of the gods, as well as his own. You must help him in his quest to return something that was stolen and prevent a war between the gods. Jason Grace must also be on this quest. There will be another messenger. Do not fail me!”