The Last Olympian

in the fabric.
    I walked to the edge of the river. “Be free.”
    I dropped the robe in the water and watched as it swirled away, dissolving in the current.
    “Go back to your father,” I told Nico. “Tell him he owes me for letting him go. Find out what’s going to happen to Mount Olympus and convince him to help.”
    Nico stared at me. “I . . . I can’t. He’ll hate me now. I mean . . . even more.”
    “You have to,” I said. “You owe me too.”
    His ears turned red. “Percy, I told you I was sorry. Please . . . let me come with you. I want to fight.”
    “You’ll be more help down here.”
    “You mean you don’t trust me anymore,” he said miserably.
    I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what I meant. I was too stunned by what I’d just done in battle to think clearly.
    “Just go back to your father,” I said, trying not to sound too harsh. “Work on him. You’re the only person who might be able to get him to listen.”
    “That’s a depressing thought.” Nico sighed. “All right. I’ll do my best. Besides, he’s still hiding something from me about my mom. Maybe I can find out what.”
    “Good luck. Now Mrs. O’Leary and I have to go.”
    “Where?” Nico said.
    I looked at the cave entrance and thought about the long climb back to the world of the living. “To get this war started. It’s time I found Luke.”

NINE

TWO SNAKES SAVE
MY LIFE
    I love New York. You can pop out of the Underworld in Central Park, hail a taxi, head down Fifth Avenue with a giant hellhound loping along behind you, and nobody even looks at you funny.
    Of course, the Mist helped. People probably couldn’t see Mrs. O’Leary, or maybe they thought she was a large, loud, very friendly truck.
    I took the risk of using my mom’s cell phone to call Annabeth for the second time. I’d called her once from the tunnel but only reached her voice mail. I’d gotten surprisingly good reception, seeing as I was at the mythological center of the world and all, but I didn’t want to see what my mom’s roaming charges were going to be.
    This time, Annabeth picked up.
    “Hey,” I said. “You get my message?”
    “Percy, where have you been? Your message said almost nothing! We’ve been worried sick!”
    “I’ll fill you in later,” I said, though how I was going to do that I had no idea. “Where are you?”
    “We’re on our way like you asked, almost to the Queens–Midtown Tunnel. But, Percy, what are you planning?
    We’ve left the camp virtually undefended, and there’s no way the gods—”
    “Trust me,” I said. “I’ll see you there.”
    I hung up. My hands were trembling. I wasn’t sure if it was a leftover reaction from my dip in the Styx, or anticipation of what I was about to do. If this didn’t work, being invulnerable wasn’t going to save me from getting blasted to bits.
    It was late afternoon when the taxi dropped me at the Empire State Building. Mrs. O’Leary bounded up and down Fifth Avenue, licking cabs and sniffing hot dog carts. Nobody seemed to notice her, although people did swerve away and look confused when she came close.
    I whistled for her to heel as three white vans pulled up to the curb. They said Delphi Strawberry Service , which was the cover name for Camp Half-Blood. I’d never seen all three vans in the same place at once, though I knew they shuttled our fresh produce into the city.
    The first van was driven by Argus, our many-eyed security chief. The other two were driven by harpies, who are basically demonic human/chicken hybrids with bad attitudes. We used the harpies mostly for cleaning the camp, but they did pretty well in midtown traffic too.
    The doors slid open. A bunch of campers climbed out, some of them looking a little green from the long drive. I was glad so many had come: Pollux, Silena Beauregard, the Stoll brothers, Michael Yew, Jake Mason, Katie Gardner, and Annabeth, along with most of their siblings. Chiron came out of the van last. His horse-half was compacted into his magic wheelchair, so he used the handicap lift. The Ares cabin wasn’t here, but I tried not to get too angry about that. Clarisse was a stubborn idiot. End of story.
    I did a head count: forty campers in all.
    Not many to fight a war, but it was still the largest group of half-bloods I’d ever seen gathered in one place outside camp. Everyone looked nervous, and I understood why. We were probably sending out so much demigod aura that every monster in the northeastern United