The Lightning Thief

your status?” Luke asked me. “Chiron will be sorry he missed you.”
    I told him pretty much everything, including my dreams. It felt so good to see him, to feel like I was back at camp even for a few minutes, that I didn’t realize how long I had talked until the beeper went off on the spray machine, and I realized I only had one more minute before the water shut off.
    “I wish I could be there,” Luke told me. “We can’t help much from here, I’m afraid, but listen . . . it had to be Hades who took the master bolt. He was there at Olympus at the winter solstice. I was chaperoning a field trip and we saw him.”
    “But Chiron said the gods can’t take each other’s magic items directly.”
    “That’s true,” Luke said, looking troubled. “Still . . . Hades has the helm of darkness. How could anybody else sneak into the throne room and steal the master bolt? You’d have to be invisible.”
    We were both silent, until Luke seemed to realize what he’d said.
    “Oh, hey,” he protested. “I didn’t mean Annabeth. She and I have known each other forever. She would never . . . I mean, she’s like a little sister to me.”
    I wondered if Annabeth would like that description. In the stall next to us, the music stopped completely. A man screamed in terror, car doors slammed, and the Lincoln peeled out of the car wash.
    “You’d better go see what that was,” Luke said. “Listen, are you wearing the flying shoes? I’ll feel better if I know they’ve done you some good.”
    “Oh . . . uh, yeah!” I tried not to sound like a guilty liar. “Yeah, they’ve come in handy.”
    “Really?” He grinned. “They fit and everything?”
    The water shut off. The mist started to evaporate.
    “Well, take care of yourself out there in Denver,” Luke called, his voice getting fainter. “And tell Grover it’ll be better this time! Nobody will get turned into a pine tree if he just—”
    But the mist was gone, and Luke’s image faded to nothing. I was alone in a wet, empty car wash stall.
    Annabeth and Grover came around the corner, laughing, but stopped when they saw my face. Annabeth’s smile faded. “What happened, Percy? What did Luke say?”
    “Not much,” I lied, my stomach feeling as empty as a Big Three cabin. “Come on, let’s find some dinner.”
    A few minutes later, we were sitting at a booth in a gleaming chrome diner. All around us, families were eating burgers and drinking malts and sodas.
    Finally the waitress came over. She raised her eyebrow skeptically. “Well?”
    I said, “We, um, want to order dinner.”
    “You kids have money to pay for it?”
    Grover’s lower lip quivered. I was afraid he would start bleating, or worse, start eating the linoleum. Annabeth looked ready to pass out from hunger.
    I was trying to think up a sob story for the waitress when a rumble shook the whole building; a motorcycle the size of a baby elephant had pulled up to the curb.
    All conversation in the diner stopped. The motorcycle’s headlight glared red. Its gas tank had flames painted on it, and a shotgun holster riveted to either side, complete with shotguns. The seat was leather—but leather that looked like . . . well, Caucasian human skin.
    The guy on the bike would’ve made pro wrestlers run for Mama. He was dressed in a red muscle shirt and black jeans and a black leather duster, with a hunting knife strapped to his thigh. He wore red wraparound shades, and he had the cruelest, most brutal face I’d ever seen— handsome, I guess, but wicked—with an oily black crew cut and cheeks that were scarred from many, many fights. The weird thing was, I felt like I’d seen his face somewhere before.
    As he walked into the diner, a hot, dry wind blew through the place. All the people rose, as if they were hypnotized, but the biker waved his hand dismissively and they all sat down again. Everybody went back to their conversations. The waitress blinked, as if somebody had just pressed the rewind button on her brain. She asked us again, “You kids have money to pay for it?”
    The biker said, “It’s on me.” He slid into our booth, which was way too small for him, and crowded Annabeth against the window.
    He looked up at the waitress, who was gaping at him, and said, “Are you still here?”
    He pointed at her, and she stiffened. She turned as if she’d been spun around, then marched back toward the kitchen.
    The biker looked at me. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the red shades, but