The Lightning Thief

card. “Bad enough I’m confined to this miserable job, working with boys who don’t even believe!”
    He waved his hand and a goblet appeared on the table, as if the sunlight had bent, momentarily, and woven the air into glass. The goblet filled itself with red wine.
    My jaw dropped, but Chiron hardly looked up.
    “Mr. D,” he warned, “your restrictions.”
    Mr. D looked at the wine and feigned surprise.
    “Dear me.” He looked at the sky and yelled, “Old habits! Sorry!”
    More thunder.
    Mr. D waved his hand again, and the wineglass changed into a fresh can of Diet Coke. He sighed unhappily, popped the top of the soda, and went back to his card game.
    Chiron winked at me. “Mr. D offended his father a while back, took a fancy to a wood nymph who had been declared off-limits.”
    “A wood nymph,” I repeated, still staring at the Diet Coke can like it was from outer space.
    “Yes,” Mr. D confessed. “Father loves to punish me. The first time, Prohibition. Ghastly! Absolutely horrid ten years! The second time—well, she really was pretty, and I couldn’t stay away—the second time, he sent me here. Half-Blood Hill. Summer camp for brats like you. ‘Be a better influence,’ he told me. ‘Work with youths rather than tearing them down.’ Ha! Absolutely unfair.”
    Mr. D sounded about six years old, like a pouting little kid.
    “And . . .” I stammered, “your father is . . .”
    “ Di immortales , Chiron,” Mr. D said. “I thought you taught this boy the basics. My father is Zeus, of course.”
    I ran through D names from Greek mythology. Wine. The skin of a tiger. The satyrs that all seemed to work here. The way Grover cringed, as if Mr. D were his master.
    “You’re Dionysus,” I said. “The god of wine.”
    Mr. D rolled his eyes. “What do they say, these days, Grover? Do the children say, ‘Well, duh!’?”
    “Y-yes, Mr. D.”
    “Then, well, duh! Percy Jackson. Did you think I was Aphrodite, perhaps?”
    “You’re a god.”
    “Yes, child.”
    “A god. You.”
    He turned to look at me straight on, and I saw a kind of purplish fire in his eyes, a hint that this whiny, plump little man was only showing me the tiniest bit of his true nature. I saw visions of grape vines choking unbelievers to death, drunken warriors insane with battle lust, sailors screaming as their hands turned to flippers, their faces elongating into dolphin snouts. I knew that if I pushed him, Mr. D would show me worse things. He would plant a disease in my brain that would leave me wearing a straitjacket in a rubber room for the rest of my life.
    “Would you like to test me, child?” he said quietly.
    “No. No, sir.”
    The fire died a little. He turned back to his card game. “I believe I win.”
    “Not quite, Mr. D,” Chiron said. He set down a straight, tallied the points, and said, “The game goes to me.”
    I thought Mr. D was going to vaporize Chiron right out of his wheelchair, but he just sighed through his nose, as if he were used to being beaten by the Latin teacher. He got up, and Grover rose, too.
    “I’m tired,” Mr. D said. “I believe I’ll take a nap before the sing-along tonight. But first, Grover, we need to talk, again, about your less-than-perfect performance on this assignment.”
    Grover’s face beaded with sweat. “Y-yes, sir.”
    Mr. D turned to me. “Cabin eleven, Percy Jackson. And mind your manners.”
    He swept into the farmhouse, Grover following miserably.
    “Will Grover be okay?” I asked Chiron.
    Chiron nodded, though he looked a bit troubled. “Old Dionysus isn’t really mad. He just hates his job. He’s been . . . ah, grounded, I guess you would say, and he can’t stand waiting another century before he’s allowed to go back to Olympus.”
    “Mount Olympus,” I said. “You’re telling me there really is a palace there?”
    “Well now, there’s Mount Olympus in Greece. And then there’s the home of the gods, the convergence point of their powers, which did indeed used to be on Mount Olympus. It’s still called Mount Olympus, out of respect to the old ways, but the palace moves, Percy, just as the gods do.”
    “You mean the Greek gods are here? Like . . . in America ?”
    “Well, certainly. The gods move with the heart of the West.”
    “The what?”
    “Come now, Percy. What you call ‘Western civilization.’ Do you think it’s just an abstract concept? No, it’s a living force. A collective consciousness that has burned bright for