The Titan's Curse

door.”
    “Right!” Dr. Chase said.
    Zoë grabbed a sandwich. “Thank you both. We should go. Now .”
    We hustled out the door and down the stairs, the Chases right behind us.
    “Percy,” Mrs. Chase called as I was leaving, “tell Annabeth . . . Tell her she still has a home here, will you? Remind her of that.”
    I took one last look at the messy living room, Annabeth’s half brothers spilling LEGOs and arguing, the smell of cookies filling the air. Not a bad place, I thought.
    “I’ll tell her,” I promised.
    We ran out to the yellow VW convertible parked in the driveway. The sun was going down. I figured we had less than an hour to save Annabeth.
    “Can’t this thing go any faster?” Thalia demanded.
    Zoë glared at her. “I cannot control traffic.”
    “You both sound like my mother,” I said.
    “Shut up!” they said in unison.
    Zoë weaved in and out of traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. The sun was sinking on the horizon when we finally got into Marin County and exited the highway.
    The roads were insanely narrow, winding through forests and up the sides of hills and around the edges of steep ravines. Zoë didn’t slow down at all.
    “Why does everything smell like cough drops?” I asked.
    “Eucalyptus.” Zoë pointed to the huge trees all around us.
    “The stuff koala bears eat?”
    “And monsters,” she said. “They love chewing the leaves. Especially dragons.”
    “Dragons chew eucalyptus leaves?”
    “Believe me,” Zoë said, “if you had dragon breath, you would chew eucalyptus too.”
    I didn’t question her, but I did keep my eyes peeled more closely as we drove. Ahead of us loomed Mount Tamalpais. I guess, in terms of mountains, it was a small one, but it looked plenty huge as we were driving toward it.
    “So that’s the Mountain of Despair?” I asked.
    “Yes,” Zoë said tightly.
    “Why do they call it that?”
    She was silent for almost a mile before answering. “After the war between the Titans and the gods, many of the Titans were punished and imprisoned. Kronos was sliced to pieces and thrown into Tartarus. Kronos’s right-hand man, the general of his forces, was imprisoned up there, on the summit, just beyond the Garden of the Hesperides.”
    “The General,” I said. Clouds seemed to be swirling around its peak, as though the mountain was drawing them in, spinning them like a top. “What’s going on up there? A storm?”
    Zoë didn’t answer. I got the feeling she knew exactly what the clouds meant, and she didn’t like it.
    “We have to concentrate,” Thalia said. “The Mist is really strong here.”
    “The magical kind or the natural kind?” I asked.
    “Both.”
    The gray clouds swirled even thicker over the mountain, and we kept driving straight toward them. We were out of the forest now, into wide open spaces of cliffs and grass and rocks and fog.
    I happened to glance down at the ocean as we passed a scenic curve, and I saw something that made me jump out of my seat.
    “Look!” But we turned a corner and the ocean disappeared behind the hills.
    “What?” Thalia asked.
    “A big white ship,” I said. “Docked near the beach. It looked like a cruise ship.”
    Her eyes widened. “Luke’s ship?”
    I wanted to say I wasn’t sure. It might be a coincidence. But I knew better. The Princess Andromeda , Luke’s demon cruise ship, was docked at that beach. That’s why he’d sent his ship all the way down to the Panama Canal. It was the only way to sail it from the East Coast to California.
    “We will have company, then,” Zoë said grimly. “Kronos’s army.”
    I was about to answer, when suddenly the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Thalia shouted, “Stop the car. NOW!”
    Zoë must’ve sensed something was wrong, because she slammed on the brakes without question. The yellow VW spun twice before coming to a stop at the edge of the cliff.
    “Out!” Thalia opened the door and pushed me hard. We both rolled onto the pavement. The next second: BOOOM!
    Lightning flashed, and Dr. Chase’s Volkswagen erupted like a canary-yellow grenade. I probably would’ve been killed by shrapnel except for Thalia’s shield, which appeared over me. I heard a sound like metal rain, and when I opened my eyes, we were surrounded by wreckage. Part of the VW’s fender had impaled itself in the street. The smoking hood was spinning in circles. Pieces of yellow metal were strewn across the road.
    I swallowed the taste of smoke out of my mouth,