The Titan's Curse

pigeons.”
    We all looked at him.
    “Kidding,” he said. “Sheesh, can’t statues have a sense of humor?”
    As it turned out, there wasn’t much need to blend in. It was early morning and not many people were around. We freaked out a homeless guy on the ferry dock when we landed. He screamed when he saw Hank and Chuck and ran off yelling something about metal angels from Mars.
    We said our good-byes to the angels, who flew off to party with their statue friends. That’s when I realized I had no idea what we were going to do next.
    We’d made it to the West Coast. Artemis was here somewhere. Annabeth too, I hoped. But I had no idea how to find them, and tomorrow was the winter solstice. Nor did I have any clue what monster Artemis had been hunting. It was supposed to find us on the quest. It was supposed to “show the trail,” but it never had. Now we were stuck on the ferry dock with not much money, no friends, and no luck.
    After a brief discussion, we agreed that we needed to figure out just what this mystery monster was.
    “But how?” I asked.
    “Nereus,” Grover said.
    I looked at him. “What?”
    “Isn’t that what Apollo told you to do? Find Nereus?”
    I nodded. I’d completely forgotten my last conversation with the sun god.
    “The old man of the sea,” I remembered. “I’m supposed to find him and force him to tell us what he knows. But how do I find him?”
    Zoë made a face. “Old Nereus, eh?”
    “You know him?” Thalia asked.
    “My mother was a sea goddess. Yes, I know him. Unfortunately, he is never very hard to find. Just follow the smell.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “Come,” she said without enthusiasm. “I will show thee.”
    I knew I was in trouble when we stopped at the Goodwill drop box. Five minutes later, Zoë had me outfitted in a ragged flannel shirt and jeans three sizes too big, bright red sneakers, and a floppy rainbow hat.
    “Oh, yeah,” Grover said, trying not to bust out laughing, “you look completely inconspicuous now.”
    Zoë nodded with satisfaction. “A typical male vagrant.”
    “Thanks a lot,” I grumbled. “Why am I doing this again?”
    “I told thee. To blend in.”
    She led the way back down to the waterfront. After a long time spent searching the docks, Zoë finally stopped in her tracks. She pointed down a pier where a bunch of homeless guys were huddled together in blankets, waiting for the soup kitchen to open for lunch.
    “He will be down there somewhere,” Zoë said. “He never travels very far from the water. He likes to sun himself during the day.”
    “How do I know which one is him?”
    “Sneak up,” she said. “Act homeless. You will know him. He will smell . . . different.”
    “Great.” I didn’t want to ask for particulars. “And once I find him?”
    “Grab him,” she said. “And hold on. He will try anything to get rid of thee. Whatever he does, do not let go. Force him to tell thee about the monster.”
    “We’ve got your back,” Thalia said. She picked something off the back of my shirt—a big clump of fuzz that came from who-knows-where. “Eww. On second thought . . . I don’t want your back. But we’ll be rooting for you.”
    Grover gave me a big thumbs-up.
    I grumbled how nice it was to have super-powerful friends. Then I headed toward the dock.
    I pulled my hat down and stumbled like I was about to pass out, which wasn’t hard considering how tired I was. I passed our homeless friend from the Embarcadero, who was still trying to warn the other guys about the metal angels from Mars.
    He didn’t smell good, but he didn’t smell . . . different. I kept walking.
    A couple of grimy dudes with plastic grocery bags for hats checked me out as I came close.
    “Beat it, kid!” one of them muttered.
    I moved away. They smelled pretty bad, but just regular old bad. Nothing unusual.
    There was a lady with a bunch of plastic flamingos sticking out of a shopping cart. She glared at me like I was going to steal her birds.
    At the end of the pier, a guy who looked about a million years old was passed out in a patch of sunlight. He wore pajamas and a fuzzy bathrobe that probably used to be white. He was fat, with a white beard that had turned yellow, kind of like Santa Claus, if Santa had been rolled out of bed and dragged through a landfill.
    And his smell?
    As I got closer, I froze. He smelled bad, all right—but ocean bad. Like hot seaweed and dead fish and brine. If the ocean had an ugly side .