The Last Olympian

that night because he was checking up on May, taking care of her. He wasn’t all bad.”
    “It’s still not right,” I insisted. “Luke was just a little kid. Hermes never helped him, never stopped him from running away.”
    Thalia shouldered her bow. Again it struck me how much stronger she looked now that she’d stopped aging. You could almost see a silvery glow around her—the blessing of Artemis.
    “Percy,” she said, “you can’t start feeling sorry for Luke. We all have tough things to deal with. All demigods do. Our parents are hardly ever around. But Luke made bad choices. Nobody forced him to do that. In fact—”
    She glanced down the hall to make sure we were alone. “I’m worried about Annabeth. If she has to face Luke in battle, I don’t know if she can do it. She’s always had a soft spot for him.”
    Blood rose to my face. “She’ll do fine.”
    “I don’t know. After that night, after we left his mom’s house? Luke was never the same. He got reckless and moody, like he had something to prove. By the time Grover found us and tried to get us to camp . . . well, part of the reason we had so much trouble was because Luke wouldn’t be careful. He wanted to pick a fight with every monster we crossed. Annabeth didn’t see that as a problem. Luke was her hero. She only understood that his parents had made him sad, and she got very defensive of him. She still is defensive. All I’m saying . . . don’t you fall in the same trap. Luke has given himself to Kronos now. We can’t afford to be soft on him.”
    I looked out at the fires in Harlem, wondering how many sleeping mortals were in danger right now because of Luke’s bad choices.
    “You’re right,” I said.
    Thalia patted my shoulder. “I’m going to check on the Hunters, then get some more sleep before nightfall. You should crash too.”
    “The last thing I need is more dreams.”
    “I know, believe me.” Her dark expression made me wonder what she’d been dreaming about. It was a common demigod problem: the more dangerous our situation became, the worse and more frequent our dreams got. “But Percy, there’s no telling when you’ll get another chance for rest. It’s going to be a long night—maybe our last night.”
    I didn’t like it, but I knew she was right. I nodded wearily and gave her Pandora’s jar. “Do me a favor. Lock this in the hotel vault, will you? I think I’m allergic to pithos .”
    Thalia smiled. “You got it.”
    I found the nearest bed and passed out. But of course sleep only brought more nightmares.
    I saw the undersea palace of my father. The enemy army was closer now, entrenched only a few hundred yards outside the palace. The fortress walls were completely destroyed. The temple my dad had used as his headquarters was burning with Greek fire.
    I zoomed in on the armory, where my brother and some other Cyclopes were on lunch break, eating from huge jars of Skippy extra chunky peanut butter (and don’t ask me how it tasted underwater, because I don’t want to know). As I watched, the outer wall of the armory exploded. A Cyclops warrior stumbled inside, collapsing on the lunch table. Tyson knelt down to help, but it was too late. The Cyclops dissolved into sea silt.
    Enemy giants moved toward the breach, and Tyson picked up the fallen warrior’s club. He yelled something to his fellow blacksmiths—probably “For Poseidon!”—but with his mouth was full of peanut butter it sounded like, “PUH PTEH BUN!” His brethren all grabbed hammers and chisels, yelled, “PEANUT BUTTER!” and charged behind Tyson into battle.
    Then the scene shifted. I was with Ethan Nakamura at the enemy camp. What I saw made me shiver, partly because the army was so huge, partly because I recognized the place.
    We were in the backwoods of New Jersey, on a crumbling road lined with run-down businesses and tattered billboard signs. A trampled fence ringed a big yard full of cement statuary. The sign above the warehouse was hard to read because it was in red cursive, but I knew what it said: AUNTY EM’S GARDEN GNOME EMPORIUM.
    I hadn’t thought about the place in years. It was clearly abandoned. The statues were broken and spray-painted with graffiti. A cement satyr—Grover’s Uncle Ferdinand—had lost his arm. Part of the warehouse roof had caved in. A big yellow sign pasted on the door read: CONDEMNED.
    Hundreds of tents and fires surrounded the property. Mostly I saw monsters, but there were some human