The Lightning Thief

Gabe’s spirit drifting forever in the Fields of Asphodel, or condemned to some hideous torture behind the barbed wire of the Fields of Punishment—an eternal poker game, sitting up to his waist in boiling oil listening to opera music. Did I have the right to send someone there? Even Gabe?
    A month ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated. Now . . .
    “I can do it,” I told my mom. “One look inside this box, and he’ll never bother you again.”
    She glanced at the package, and seemed to understand immediately. “No, Percy,” she said, stepping away. “You can’t.”
    “Poseidon called you a queen,” I told her. “He said he hadn’t met a woman like you in a thousand years.”
    Her cheeks flushed. “Percy—”
    “You deserve better than this, Mom. You should go to college, get your degree. You can write your novel, meet a nice guy maybe, live in a nice house. You don’t need to protect me anymore by staying with Gabe. Let me get rid of him.”
    She wiped a tear off her cheek. “You sound so much like your father,” she said. “He offered to stop the tide for me once. He offered to build me a palace at the bottom of the sea. He thought he could solve all my problems with a wave of his hand.”
    “What’s wrong with that?”
    Her multicolored eyes seemed to search inside me. “I think you know, Percy. I think you’re enough like me to understand. If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself. I can’t let a god take care of me . . . or my son. I have to . . . find the courage on my own. Your quest has reminded me of that.”
    We listened to the sound of poker chips and swearing, ESPN from the living room television.
    “I’ll leave the box,” I said. “If he threatens you . . .”
    She looked pale, but she nodded. “Where will you go, Percy?”
    “Half-Blood Hill.”
    “For the summer . . . or forever?”
    “I guess that depends.”
    We locked eyes, and I sensed that we had an agreement.
    We would see how things stood at the end of the summer.
    She kissed my forehead. “You’ll be a hero, Percy. You’ll be the greatest of all.”
    I took one last look around my bedroom. I had a feeling I’d never see it again. Then I walked with my mother to the front door.
    “Leaving so soon, punk?” Gabe called after me. “Good riddance.”
    I had one last twinge of doubt. How could I turn down the perfect chance to take revenge on him? I was leaving here without saving my mother.
    “Hey, Sally,” he yelled. “What about that meat loaf, huh?”
    A steely look of anger flared in my mother’s eyes, and I thought, just maybe, I was leaving her in good hands after all. Her own.
    “The meat loaf is coming right up, dear,” she told Gabe. “Meat loaf surprise.”
    She looked at me, and winked.
    The last thing I saw as the door swung closed was my mother staring at Gabe, as if she were contemplating how he would look as a garden statue.

THE PROPHECY COMES TRUE
    W e were the first heroes to return alive to Half-Blood Hill since Luke, so of course everybody treated us as if we’d won some reality-TV contest. According to camp tradition, we wore laurel wreaths to a big feast prepared in our honor, then led a procession down to the bonfire, where we got to burn the burial shrouds our cabins had made for us in our absence.
    Annabeth’s shroud was so beautiful—gray silk with embroidered owls—I told her it seemed a shame not to bury her in it. She punched me and told me to shut up.
    Being the son of Poseidon, I didn’t have any cabin mates, so the Ares cabin had volunteered to make my shroud. They’d taken an old bedsheet and painted smiley faces with X’ed-out eyes around the border, and the word LOSER painted really big in the middle.
    It was fun to burn.
    As Apollo’s cabin led the sing-along and passed out s’mores, I was surrounded by my old Hermes cabinmates, Annabeth’s friends from Athena, and Grover’s satyr buddies, who were admiring the brand-new searcher’s license he’d received from the Council of Cloven Elders. The council had called Grover’s performance on the quest “Brave to the point of indigestion. Horns-and-whiskers above anything we have seen in the past.”
    The only ones not in a party mood were Clarisse and her cabinmates, whose poisonous looks told me they’d never forgive me for disgracing their dad.
    That was okay with me.
    Even Dionysus’s welcome-home speech wasn’t enough to dampen my spirits. “Yes, yes, so the little brat didn’t get