The Lightning Thief

was gone. The tide rolled out to reveal Hades’s bronze helm of darkness. I picked it up and walked toward my friends.
    But before I got there, I heard the flapping of leathery wings. Three evil-looking grandmothers with lace hats and fiery whips drifted down from the sky and landed in front of me.
    The middle Fury, the one who had been Mrs. Dodds, stepped forward. Her fangs were bared, but for once she didn’t look threatening. She looked more disappointed, as if she’d been planning to have me for supper, but had decided I might give her indigestion.
    “We saw the whole thing,” she hissed. “So . . . it truly was not you?”
    I tossed her the helmet, which she caught in surprise.
    “Return that to Lord Hades,” I said. “Tell him the truth. Tell him to call off the war.”
    She hesitated, then ran a forked tongue over her green, leathery lips. “Live well, Percy Jackson. Become a true hero.
    Because if you do not, if you ever come into my clutches again . . .”
    She cackled, savoring the idea. Then she and her sisters rose on their bats’ wings, fluttered into the smoke-filled sky, and disappeared.
    I joined Grover and Annabeth, who were staring at me in amazement. “Percy . . .” Grover said. “That was so incredibly . . .”
    “Terrifying,” said Annabeth. “Cool!” Grover corrected. I didn’t feel terrified. I certainly didn’t feel cool. I was tired and sore and completely drained of energy. “Did you guys feel that . . . whatever it was?” I asked. They both nodded uneasily. “Must’ve been the Furies overhead,” Grover said. But I wasn’t so sure. Something had stopped Ares from killing me, and whatever could do that was a lot stronger than the Furies.
    I looked at Annabeth, and an understanding passed between us. I knew now what was in that pit, what had spoken from the entrance of Tartarus.
    I reclaimed my backpack from Grover and looked inside. The master bolt was still there. Such a small thing to almost cause World War III.
    “We have to get back to New York,” I said. “By tonight.”
    “That’s impossible,” Annabeth said, “unless we—”
    “Fly,” I agreed. She stared at me. “Fly, like, in an airplane, which you were warned never to do lest Zeus strike you out of the sky, and carrying a weapon that has more destructive power than a nuclear bomb?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Pretty much exactly like that. Come on.”

I SETTLE MY TAB
    I t’s funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality. Chiron had told me that long ago. As usual, I didn’t appreciate his wisdom until much later.
    According to the L.A. news, the explosion at the Santa Monica beach had been caused when a crazy kidnapper fired a shotgun at a police car. He accidentally hit a gas main that had ruptured during the earthquake.
    This crazy kidnapper (a.k.a. Ares) was the same man who had abducted me and two other adolescents in New York and brought us across country on a ten-day odyssey of terror.
    Poor little Percy Jackson wasn’t an international criminal after all. He’d caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterward, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus—“Why didn’t I remember him before?”). The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St. Louis Arch. After all, no kid could’ve done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo, and notified the police. Finally, brave Percy Jackson (I was beginning to like this kid) had stolen a gun from his captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach. Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson and his two friends were safely in police custody.
    The reporters fed us this whole story. We just nodded and acted tearful and exhausted (which wasn’t hard), and played victimized kids for the cameras.
    “All I want,” I said, choking back my tears, “is to see my loving stepfather again. Every time I saw him on TV, calling me a delinquent punk, I knew . . . somehow . . . we would be okay. And I know he’ll want to reward each and every person in this beautiful city of Los Angeles with a free major appliance from his store. Here’s the phone number.” The police and reporters were