The Lightning Thief

about the flag. We care about a guy who made our cabin look stupid.”
    “You do that without my help,” I told them. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing to say.
    Two of them came at me. I backed up toward the creek, tried to raise my shield, but Clarisse was too fast. Her spear stuck me straight in the ribs. If I hadn’t been wearing an armored breastplate, I would’ve been shish-ke-babbed. As it was, the electric point just about shocked my teeth out of my mouth. One of her cabinmates slashed his sword across my arm, leaving a good-size cut.
    Seeing my own blood made me dizzy—warm and cold at the same time.
    “No maiming,” I managed to say.
    “Oops,” the guy said. “Guess I lost my dessert privilege.”
    He pushed me into the creek and I landed with a splash. They all laughed. I figured as soon as they were through being amused, I would die. But then something happened. The water seemed to wake up my senses, as if I’d just had a bag of my mom’s double-espresso jelly beans.
    Clarisse and her cabinmates came into the creek to get me, but I stood to meet them. I knew what to do. I swung the flat of my sword against the first guy’s head and knocked his helmet clean off. I hit him so hard I could see his eyes vibrating as he crumpled into the water.
    Ugly Number Two and Ugly Number Three came at me. I slammed one in the face with my shield and used my sword to shear off the other guy’s horsehair plume. Both of them backed up quick. Ugly Number Four didn’t look really anxious to attack, but Clarisse kept coming, the point of her spear crackling with energy. As soon as she thrust, I caught the shaft between the edge of my shield and my sword, and I snapped it like a twig.
    “Ah!” she screamed. “You idiot! You corpse-breath worm!”
    She probably would’ve said worse, but I smacked her between the eyes with my sword-butt and sent her stumbling backward out of the creek.
    Then I heard yelling, elated screams, and I saw Luke racing toward the boundary line with the red team’s banner lifted high. He was flanked by a couple of Hermes guys covering his retreat, and a few Apollos behind them, fighting off the Hephaestus kids. The Ares folks got up, and Clarisse muttered a dazed curse.
    “A trick!” she shouted. “It was a trick.”
    They staggered after Luke, but it was too late. Everybody converged on the creek as Luke ran across into friendly territory. Our side exploded into cheers. The red banner shimmered and turned to silver. The boar and spear were replaced with a huge caduceus, the symbol of cabin eleven. Everybody on the blue team picked up Luke and started carrying him around on their shoulders. Chiron cantered out from the woods and blew the conch horn.
    The game was over. We’d won.
    I was about to join the celebration when Annabeth’s voice, right next to me in the creek, said, “Not bad, hero.”
    I looked, but she wasn’t there.
    “Where the heck did you learn to fight like that?” she asked. The air shimmered, and she materialized, holding a Yankees baseball cap as if she’d just taken it off her head.
    I felt myself getting angry. I wasn’t even fazed by the fact that she’d just been invisible. “You set me up,” I said. “You put me here because you knew Clarisse would come after me, while you sent Luke around the flank. You had it all figured out.”
    Annabeth shrugged. “I told you. Athena always, always has a plan.”
    “A plan to get me pulverized.”
    “I came as fast as I could. I was about to jump in, but . . .” She shrugged. “You didn’t need help.”
    Then she noticed my wounded arm. “How did you do that?”
    “Sword cut,” I said. “What do you think?”
    “No. It was a sword cut. Look at it.”
    The blood was gone. Where the huge cut had been, there was a long white scratch, and even that was fading. As I watched, it turned into a small scar, and disappeared.
    “I—I don’t get it,” I said.
    Annabeth was thinking hard. I could almost see the gears turning. She looked down at my feet, then at Clarisse’s broken spear, and said, “Step out of the water, Percy.”
    “What—”
    “Just do it.”
    I came out of the creek and immediately felt bone tired. My arms started to go numb again. My adrenaline rush left me. I almost fell over, but Annabeth steadied me.
    “Oh, Styx,” she cursed. “This is not good. I didn’t want . . . I assumed it would be Zeus. . . .”
    Before I could ask what she meant, I heard that canine growl