The Sea of Monsters

front of a glass wall looking down into the multistory canyon that ran through the middle of the ship. At the bottom was the Promenade—a mall full of shops— but that’s not what had caught Annabeth’s attention.
    A group of monsters had assembled in front of the candy store: a dozen Laistrygonian giants like the ones who’d attacked me with dodge balls, two hellhounds, and a few even stranger creatures—humanoid females with twin serpent tails instead of legs.
    “Scythian Dracaenae,” Annabeth whispered. “Dragon women.”
    The monsters made a semicircle around a young guy in Greek armor who was hacking on a straw dummy. A lump formed in my throat when I realized the dummy was wearing an orange Camp Half-Blood T-shirt. As we watched, the guy in armor stabbed the dummy through its belly and ripped upward. Straw flew everywhere. The monsters cheered and howled.
    Annabeth stepped away from the window. Her face was ashen.
    “Come on,” I told her, trying to sound braver than I felt. “The sooner we find Luke the better.”
    At the end of the hallway were double oak doors that looked like they must lead somewhere important. When we were thirty feet away, Tyson stopped. “Voices inside.”
    “You can hear that far?” I asked.
    Tyson closed his eye like he was concentrating hard. Then his voice changed, becoming a husky approximation of Luke’s. “—the prophecy ourselves. The fools won’t know which way to turn.”
    Before I could react, Tyson’s voice changed again, becoming deeper and gruffer, like the other guy we’d heard talking to Luke outside the cafeteria. “You really think the old horseman is gone for good?”
    Tyson laughed Luke’s laugh. “They can’t trust him. Not with the skeletons in his closet. The poisoning of the tree was the final straw.”
    Annabeth shivered. “Stop that, Tyson! How do you do that? It’s creepy.”
    Tyson opened his eye and looked puzzled. “Just listening.”
    “Keep going,” I said. “What else are they saying?”
    Tyson closed his eye again.
    He hissed in the gruff man’s voice: “Quiet!” Then Luke’s voice, whispering: “Are you sure?”
    “Yes,” Tyson said in the gruff voice. “Right outside.”
    Too late, I realized what was happening.
    I just had time to say, “Run!” when the doors of the stateroom burst open and there was Luke, flanked by two hairy giants armed with javelins, their bronze tips aimed right at our chests.
    “Well,” Luke said with a crooked smile. “If it isn’t my two favorite cousins. Come right in.”
    The stateroom was beautiful, and it was horrible.
    The beautiful part: Huge windows curved along the back wall, looking out over the stern of the ship. Green sea and blue sky stretched all the way to the horizon. A Persian rug covered the floor. Two plush sofas occupied the middle of the room, with a canopied bed in one corner and a mahogany dining table in the other. The table was loaded with food—pizza boxes, bottles of soda, and a stack of roast beef sandwiches on a silver platter.
    The horrible part: On a velvet dais at the back of the room lay a ten-foot-long golden casket. A sarcophagus, engraved with Ancient Greek scenes of cities in flames and heroes dying grisly deaths. Despite the sunlight streaming through the windows, the casket made the whole room feel cold.
    “Well,” Luke said, spreading his arms proudly. “A little nicer than Cabin Eleven, huh?”
    He’d changed since the last summer. Instead of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, he wore a button-down shirt, khaki pants, and leather loafers. His sandy hair, which used to be so unruly, was now clipped short. He looked like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.
    He still had the scar under his eye—a jagged white line from his battle with a dragon. And propped against the sofa was his magical sword, Backbiter, glinting strangely with its half-steel, half-Celestial bronze blade that could kill both mortals and monsters.
    “Sit,” he told us. He waved his hand and three dining chairs scooted themselves into the center of the room.
    None of us sat.
    Luke’s large friends were still pointing their javelins at us. They looked like twins, but they weren’t human. They stood about eight feet tall, for one thing, and wore only blue jeans, probably because their enormous chests were already shag-carpeted with thick brown fur. They had claws for fingernails, feet like paws. Their noses