The House of Hades (Heroes of Olympus Book 4)

sank below the surface.
    Alarm bells sounded on the
Argo II
. Hazel’s friends scrambled on deck, manning the catapults. Hazel heard Piper wailing all the way from the ship.
    It was so disturbing that Hazel almost lost her focus. She forced her mind to split into two parts – one intensely focused on her task, one playing the role Sciron needed to see.
    She screamed in outrage. ‘What did you
do
?’
    ‘Oh, dear …’ Sciron sounded sad, but Hazel got the impression he was hiding a grin under his bandanna. ‘That was an accident, I assure you.’
    ‘My friends will
kill
you now!’
    ‘They can try,’ Sciron said. ‘But in the meantime I think you have time to wash my other foot! Believe me, my dear. My turtle is full now. He doesn’t want you too. You’ll be quite safe, unless you refuse.’
    He levelled the flintlock pistol at her head.
    She hesitated, letting him see her anguish. She couldn’t agree too easily, or he wouldn’t think she was beaten.
    ‘Don’t kick me,’ she said, half-sobbing.
    His eyes twinkled. This was exactly what he expected. She was broken and helpless. Sciron, the son of Poseidon, had won again.
    Hazel could hardly believe this guy had the same father as Percy Jackson. Then she remembered that Poseidon had a changeable personality, like the sea. Maybe his children reflected that. Percy was a child of Poseidon’s better nature – powerful, but gentle and helpful, the kind of sea that spedships safely to distant lands. Sciron was a child of Poseidon’s
other
side – the kind of sea that battered relentlessly at the coastline until it crumbled away, or carried the innocents from shore and let them drown, or smashed ships and killed entire crews without mercy.
    She snatched up the spray bottle Jason had dropped.
    ‘Sciron,’ she growled, ‘your feet are the
least
disgusting thing about you.’
    His green eyes hardened. ‘Just
clean
.’
    She knelt, trying to ignore the smell. She shuffled to one side, forcing Sciron to adjust his stance, but she imagined that the sea was still at her back. She held that vision in her mind as she shuffled sideways again.
    ‘Just get on with it!’ Sciron said.
    Hazel suppressed a smile. She’d managed to turn Sciron one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, but he still saw the water in front of him, the rolling countryside at his back.
    She started to clean.
    Hazel had done plenty of ugly work before. She’d cleaned the unicorn stables at Camp Jupiter. She’d filled and dug latrines for the legion.
    This is nothing, she told herself. But it was hard not to retch when she looked at Sciron’s toes.
    When the kick came, she flew backwards, but she didn’t go far. She landed on her butt in the grass a few yards away.
    Sciron stared at her. ‘But …’
    Suddenly the world shifted. The illusion melted, leaving Sciron totally confused. The sea was at
his
back. He’d only succeeded in kicking Hazel away from the ledge.
    He lowered his flintlock. ‘How –’
    ‘Stand and deliver,’ Hazel told him.
    Jason swooped out of the sky, right over her head, and body-slammed the bandit over the cliff.
    Sciron screamed as he fell, firing his flintlock wildly, but for once hitting nothing. Hazel got to her feet. She reached the cliff’s edge in time to see the turtle lunge and snap Sciron out of the air.
    Jason grinned. ‘Hazel, that was
amazing
. Seriously … Hazel? Hey, Hazel?’
    Hazel collapsed to her knees, suddenly dizzy.
    Distantly, she could hear her friends cheering from the ship below. Jason stood over her, but he was moving in slow motion, his outline blurry, his voice nothing but static.
    Frost crept across the rocks and grass around her. The mound of riches she’d summoned sank back into the earth. The Mist swirled.
    What have I done?
she thought in a panic.
Something went wrong.
    ‘No, Hazel,’ said a deep voice behind her. ‘You have done well.’
    She hardly dared to breathe. She’d only heard that voice once before, but she had replayed it in her mind thousands of times.
    She turned and found herself looking up at her father.
    He was dressed in Roman style – his dark hair close-cropped, his pale angular face clean-shaven. His tunic and toga were of black wool, embroidered with threads of gold. The faces of tormented souls shifted in the fabric. The edge of his togawas lined with the crimson of a senator or a praetor, but the stripe rippled like a river of blood. On Pluto’s ring finger was a massive opal, like a chunk of