The Titan's Curse

this sunken fishing boat. It had tried to get out and managed to get even more hopelessly stuck, shifting the boat in the process. Now the wreckage of the hull, which was resting against a big rock, was teetering and threatening to collapse on top of the tangled animal.
    The hippocampi were swimming around frantically, wanting to help but not sure how. One was trying to chew the net, but hippocampi teeth just aren’t meant for cutting rope. Hippocampi are really strong, but they don’t have hands, and they’re not (shhh) all that smart.
    Free it, lord! A hippocampus said when it saw me. The others joined in, asking the same thing.
    I swam in for a closer look at the tangled creature. At first I thought it was a young hippocampus. I’d rescued several of them before. But then I heard a strange sound, something that did not belong underwater:
    “Mooooooo!”
    I got next to the thing and saw that it was a cow. I mean . . . I’d heard of sea cows, like manatees and stuff, but this really was a cow with the back end of a serpent. The front half was a calf—a baby, with black fur and big, sad brown eyes and a white muzzle—and its back half was a black-and-brown snaky tail with fins running down the top and bottom, like an enormous eel.
    “Whoa, little one,” I said. “Where did you come from?”
    The creature looked at me sadly. “Moooo!”
    But I couldn’t understand its thoughts. I only speak horse.
    We don’t know what it is, lord , one of the hippocampi said. Many strange things are stirring.
    “Yeah,” I murmured. “So I’ve heard.”
    I uncapped Riptide, and the sword grew to full length in my hands, its bronze blade gleaming in the dark.
    The cow serpent freaked out and started struggling against the net, its eyes full of terror. “Whoa!” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you! Just let me cut the net.”
    But the cow serpent thrashed around and got even more tangled. The boat started to tilt, stirring up the muck on the sea bottom and threatening to topple onto the cow serpent. The hippocampi whinnied in a panic and thrashed in the water, which didn’t help.
    “Okay, okay!” I said. I put away the sword and started speaking as calmly as I could so the hippocampi and the cow serpent would stop panicking. I didn’t know if it was possible to get stampeded underwater, but I didn’t really want to find out. “It’s cool. No sword. See? No sword. Calm thoughts. Sea grass. Mama cows. Vegetarianism.”
    I doubted the cow serpent understood what I was saying, but it responded to the tone of my voice. The hippocampi were still skittish, but they stopped swirling around me quite so fast.
    Free it, lord! they pleaded.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I got that part. I’m thinking.”
    But how could I free the cow serpent when she (I decided it was probably a “she”) panicked at the sight of a blade? It was like she’d seen swords before and knew how dangerous they were.
    “All right,” I told the hippocampi. “I need all of you to push exactly the way I tell you.”
    First we started with the boat. It wasn’t easy, but with the strength of three horsepower, we managed to shift the wreckage so it was no longer threatening to collapse on the baby cow serpent. Then I went to work on the net, untangling it section by section, getting lead weights and fishing hooks straightened out, yanking out knots around the cow serpent’s hooves. It took forever—I mean, it was worse than the time I’d had to untangle all my video game controller wires. The whole time, I kept talking to the cow fish, telling her everything was okay while she mooed and moaned.
    “It’s okay, Bessie,” I said. Don’t ask me why I started calling her that. It just seemed like a good cow name. “Good cow. Nice cow.”
    Finally, the net came off and the cow serpent zipped through the water and did a happy somersault.
    The hippocampi whinnied with joy. Thank you, lord!
    “Moooo!” The cow serpent nuzzled me and gave me the big brown eyes.
    “Yeah,” I said. “That’s okay. Nice cow. Well . . . stay out of trouble.”
    Which reminded me, I’d been underwater how long? An hour, at least. I had to get back to my cabin before Argus or the harpies discovered I was breaking curfew.
    I shot to the surface and broke through. Immediately, Blackjack zoomed down and let me catch hold of his neck. He lifted me into the air and took me back toward the shore.
    Success, boss?
    “Yeah. We rescued a baby . . . something or other. Took