Author's Note: And here we go again.

And so here, almost exactly one year to the day since I began publishing Gambit, is the third book in my little series. This would have seen the light of day far sooner, were it not for the fact that it took me so long to write the first draft. A mixture of lethargy and bad time management on my part meant that it took far longer to get that first draft finished than it really ought to have done. Nevertheless, here it is at last, presented to you, my eager though often invisible readers.

At this point in the series there are few concessions for those who have not read the previous two books. While you can read this with no prior knowledge of the Piece of Darkness series and presumably still enjoy it, you will clearly not get the full effect unless you have read Rise of the Forgotten, A Knight or a Pawn and Gambit.

(Dear God, look at me, building up a back catalogue.)

This is the longest story so far, standing at twenty-five chapters. It is also the most action-packed, with a far better drama-to-conversation ratio than anything I have hitherto written.

As usual, I'll be putting up one chapter a week.

Now, read, enjoy, and do try to review. ;-)

Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson. All my fanfic writings are non-profit. 'Tis all for fun.


Piece of Darkness III - Middlegame


Chapter One


"Now," the Leanansidhe said. "If you are quite finished holding hostage my imagination, pray continue."

Jim Butcher, 'Ghost Story'


Every chess match has a particular structure.

There's the opening moves, usually the most boring stage of the match, as both players do little more than prepare their pieces for the initial forays into the opposing side of the board. Various pieces are introduced and certain positions are taken.

Then, the first gambits are played. Both players find a particular strategic stance and are ready to commit to an attack, so they make moves into each other's territory. The complexity of play increases and the first significant captures are made.

Now, the match comes into its central phase. Many pieces on the board may be trapped in deadlock, and the pressure is building on both players. Any decision made at this stage, even the smallest one, can have a huge effect on not just the next few turns, but the very outcome of the game.

This is what we call the middlegame.

"The Celts - or some of them, at least - were a brutal race," my grandfather told me. "Like many of the ancient peoples, they practiced human sacrifice for much of their history."

"'Practiced'?" I interrupted. "How exactly did they 'practice' it? Did they take a few unlucky souls out into a field and say, 'Hold still while we practice killing you'?"

My grandfather laughed, his eyes twinkling a little, the way all grandfathers' eyes should.

"That's a good point," he nodded. "Maybe 'practiced' is the wrong word to use… Or perhaps they just weren't very good at it." He trailed off, his gaze drifting up to the greyish-white sky above us, as though the right word would fall down amidst the snowflakes.

We were sitting in Grandpa's kitchen, looking out onto his snow-covered garden. The weather had changed a few days ago, as though the very air had known that we were nearing Christmastime, and the snow had fallen almost unceasingly since then. I'd arrived at my grandfather's house in Staten Island less than an hour ago, having walked from my home. I'd slipped three times on the way, and only my years of martial arts training had saved me from breaking a bone. Each time my legs had gone out from under me, I'd recalled those lessons on the correct way to fall - or ukemi, to use the Japanese term - and landed onto the hard, icy concrete with confidence.

(Although that doesn't mean it had been comfortable.)

"At any rate, human sacrifice very much went on," Grandpa resumed. "It was carried out by the priests of the Celts—"

"The Druids?"

"That's right." he said, with a nod. "The Druids were the true rulers of Celtic society. Not only were they considered men of infinite wisdom, but they were believed to be capable of astonishing feats of magic."

I nodded, turning away from the window and looking across the table at him.

Grandpa Riordan himself looked like a man of great wisdom. Like his daughter, he possessed a strength of presence which belied his small build and medium height. His face was tanned and worn from years of travel, but when you looked in his eyes you did not see the weariness of age: only the intelligence of experience. We often called him Old Scribe, because of his vast knowledge of tales, legends and myths. Of course, like his own grandfather, his mother, his daughter and his grandson, William Riordan was clear-sighted.

"They were teachers, judges, priests, warmakers, peacemakers, healers…" Grandpa said. "They didn't just get like that overnight, mind you. They had to study for up to twenty years before they became fully-fledged Druids."

"Twenty years?" I echoed, aghast. I'd heard of long Ph.D programs, but that was ridiculous.

"It was to give time for their beard to grow out, you see," Grandpa said sagely, the laughter in his blue eyes belying the serious expression on his face.

I shook my head, not buying into his bad joke. I glanced around the kitchen.

It was just like any other kitchen - stove, refrigerator, cupboards, you name it. It was at the back of Grandpa's house, which was a typical house, with four walls, a roof, a front door, a back door (excitement, huh?) and a few windows. It was all terribly ordinary, and didn't quite seem to fit my grandfather, who had spent much of the last thirty years traveling to the most distant corners of whichever countries you can think of.

"Unfortunately, there's no written record of what the Druids were taught," Grandpa said, peering out the window, with a touch of forlornness in his frown. "Any knowledge they had is lost, or so the scholars tell us."

"That's a shame," I murmured.

Many people have boring or dislikable grandparents, but my grandfather was one of the most interesting people I knew. He was originally from Ireland, but he'd come to America in the 1960's, where he'd met my grandmother, Michelle. The two of them had settled down and had one child - my mother, Louise.

Sounds like a pretty typical story, right? But things changed once Grandpa got into his late forties. He'd worked in the New York Police Department for twenty years, but when he wrote a thriller based on a particularly bizarre encounter he'd had with a Mafia boss from Chicago, Grandpa's fortunes changed entirely. The novel - entitled Me and Marcone - took off, and when he'd sold the film rights to it, he'd made enough money to retire.

Whenever I tell people this story, they nod and say, okay, that was it, right?

Not exactly. Grandpa had always had a big appetite for adventure, and less than a month after retiring, he'd started traveling. His life's dream had been to see as many corners of the world as possible, and he'd gotten the chance to fulfil that. He and my grandmother had gone everywhere, going to all manner of places, in every continent, at any time. There was only two rules - they never went anywhere obvious; and if at all possible, they travelled on foot.

This naturally led to a wide range of escapades and adventures. Indeed, it led to enough stories that Grandpa had material for a second novel, which provided further funds for the endless traveling. He only took a real break when my grandmother died, four years ago.

As I sat there in his kitchen, though, I wondered if there was some things Grandpa had never told us. He never spoke about his clear sight, but I had a suspicion that, all the while, he hadn't just been traveling - he'd been searching for the reason why he could see things that were hidden to others.

Whether this theory was correct, and whether he'd ever learned the truth, I had no idea. I never asked him. As far as I was concerned, he was completely separate from the crazy world of the gods, and things were staying that way.

"Of course, none of the scholars actually believe that the Druids were truly wizards," Grandpa said, looking back at me. He drummed his fingers against the side of his empty mug slowly. "They say they were just priests who tricked their semi-savage followers."

"Yeah," I nodded, draining the last drop of hot chocolate from my own mug. "But? I sense a but in there, Grandpa."

"Well, maybe I'm just a crazy old man," he said, shrugging. "But I sometimes think that there's more to those legends than just religious imagination. I'm not saying that they're all true, exactly, but…"

I watched him carefully. His brown, lined brow crinkled as he sought the next words.

"Look at it this way," he went on, looking at me steadily. "The Celts were noted specifically for their level of development. They weren't exactly the Enlightenment, but they were certainly far more advanced than your average bone-hefting savage. And yet this idea that the Druids were wizards and power-wielders seems like something that only a community of savages would believe."

My eyes widened as I realised what he meant. "So you think…"

"I don't know exactly what I think," Grandpa amended, smiling in his enigmatic way. "But I suspect that some of those old stories about the Druids have a grain of truth in them, somewhere."

I nodded slowly, pondering this. I was about to reply, when my phone, which lay on the table in front of me, rang suddenly. And loudly.

We both jumped.

"Christ," Grandpa chuckled, running a hand through his hair. "I hardly even twitched during that trek through the rain-forests of Colombia, but an overly loud ringtone makes me jump like a rabbit."

I smiled, and picked up the phone.

That smile died and was resurrected as a morbid grimace when I saw the caller ID.

CHB.

I swallowed slowly, watching the phone continue to ring, buzzing and blaring, for a long moment.

Then I declined the call, and stuffed the phone in my pocket.

"It can wait," I muttered in explanation to Grandpa, who looked a little curious. He nodded, and went back to staring at the falling snow. A brisk whirlwind of thoughts swept into my mind, and I sat in silence as I tried to beat down a gale of anger and unease.

"CHB" was, of course, Camp Half-Blood.

A year ago, I would've been more than eager to take the call, but after my friend Nico di Angelo had been taken by the terrible primordial being, Tartarus, my feelings towards that world of myth and monsters had changed quite a bit.

When Alice and I had gotten back to camp after our quest to the Edge of the West, far too many people seemed not to realise what we'd lost. Some did, of course - Chiron, Percy, Annabeth, a few others. But so many just didn't care. I'd known that Nico had never been popular at camp, but I hadn't realised how much antipathy there was towards the son of Hades. It wasn't that the campers hated him personally: they simply didn't care about him. I tried to see things from their point of view, tried to understand that Nico scared most of them, that their reactions were natural.

But I've always been a bad liar - I can't even convince myself.

But I could have dealt with that. Sure, most of them were uninterested in the loss of one of the most important demigods alive, but I could've gotten over that.

The other thing that had happened in the Underworld was that Hades, Lord of the Dead, had told me there was an old prophecy which foretold a time of great destruction for Olympus. This prophecy, he explained, said that one person would have the power to "hold back the shadows" when they rose to destroy the West.

Then Hades had said that many of the gods believed that said time of destruction was near, and that I was the one destined to save us all.

Initially I'd refused to believe this, thinking it was a load of mythological mumbo-jumbo. Eventually, though, my curiosity had driven me to put the pieces together. This mysterious prophecy could only be, I realised, the prontos profiteia that Jake Wilson had told me about. And if the saviour foretold by it was going to "hold back the shadows", that could only mean the terrible threat to the West would be some sort of being with dominion over shadows and darkness.

Guess what powers Tartarus - who Hades called the gods' greatest enemy - had shown when we'd encountered him at the Edge of the West.

This all made sense, certainly, but then it didn't affect me, surely? Just because we were about to have an apocalypse of apocalypses, it didn't mean I was the schmuck who was going to save the day. Someone else was bound to be sufficiently qualified to deal with that mess. Right?

Wrong.

A little conversation I'd had with Amichanos, spirit of self-knowledge, gave me evidence to the contrary. As it turned out, I had pure sight, which meant that I could see through absolutely any illusion you can think of.

(Oh, and apparently I was the first person to have the gift of pure sight since Olympus had come to America.)

I tried all manner of arguments to work around this, but the bare facts couldn't be changed. Whatever I thought about it, the idea that I was the one who could stop Tartarus was entirely plausible. A bit too plausible, if you know what I mean.

Okay, Cyrus, you say, but what the hell does all this have to do with camp?

Everything. When I got back to Camp Half-Blood and asked Chiron about what Hades had told me, the centaur refused to explain anything to me.

He was very polite about it, of course, telling me that he was forbidden by the gods to speak about the prophecy. Still, a refusal is a refusal. Maybe I was being immature, but I took great offence at this. Hades himself had told me of the prophecy - surely that was enough of a mandate for Chiron to tell me everything? What would it take for me to be told the full truth - did Zeus himself have to descend from Olympus and hand me a golden scroll?

So, the combination of these two issues meant that my feelings towards camp had greatly cooled. I still liked individual demigods, but the world of Greek myth was very definitely in my bad books. It was Christmastime now, five months since that trip to the Underworld, but my anger was still present - enough that I was hanging up on camp.

"I wonder, how many times," Grandpa said suddenly, his eyes flickering towards me and away again, "have I had to do something that I absolutely hated? Probably more than anyone could count. I used to fight it, but one day I realised that life is not really about what you want to do - it's usually about what you need to do. Sometimes those two things are the same but… not often."

I didn't reply. I couldn't. Grandpa had, probably without realising it, cut right to the core of my issues. Maybe I did feel angry towards camp, towards the world of the gods, but was it right to let that affect my judgement? If I insisted on being standoffish with Chiron just because I had a grievance, did that make me any nobler than Jake Wilson himself?

The phone rang again.

The direction of the wind in my emotional storm changed direction, and a sudden pang of guilt struck me. What, I thought uneasily, if something awful was happening, and I was the only one who could help? Someone's life could depend on whether or not I was able to swallow my goddamn pride.

On the third ring, I pushed my chair back and stood up, murmuring, "Excuse me." As I turned away from the table, I thought I saw a small smile curl across my grandfather's face.

I left the kitchen and went into the hall, where I took the call.

"Hi," I said, leaning against the wall.

"Cyrus," Chiron's voice said immediately, sounding tight with anxiety. "How are you?"

"Uh," I said slowly, slightly surprised by the small talk. "I'm fine…"

"Nothing strange is happening where you are?"

"Um, no," I said. "Everything's fine here. No monsters or anything. Should there be… something?"

I heard an exhalation, one that sounded like a sigh of relief. After a brief pause, Chiron said, in a more relaxed tone than before, "Not necessarily, no. Ah. Do you think you could get to the Empire State Building?"

I blinked. I'd been anticipating a summons to camp, so this was puzzling. "The Empire State Building… when? Why?"

"As soon as you can," Chiron replied. "Something rather, ah, unusual is happening."

"What do you mean?"

"Well…" Chiron paused, and there was a note of caution to it, as though he was trying to approach an awkward topic. "I don't wish to alarm you, but there's an army of ghosts moving across New York, heading towards the Empire State Building."

"Oh," I said slowly, finding it hard to process what I was hearing. "Um."

"Yes," the centaur went on, in an almost apologetic tone. "The strange thing is that they don't seem to be doing anything or trying to kill anyone. They're simply marching through the city. Intelligence reports suggest that they're too weak to be of any danger to anyone, but we're sending a few people to guard the entrance to Olympus, just in case."

"Okay," I replied, trying to take in the idea of a large but apparently unthreatening army of ghosts winding its way through the streets of New York. No wonder Chiron sounded so baffled. "Why do you need me?"

"They don't seem to be a threat, but there's always the chance that something is being veiled by illusions. I think you'll be able to see the situation more clearly ."

My stomach lurched a little. Chiron always avoided acknowledging that my sight was something useful. He saw that it was a sensitive subject for me, and so he always steered around it. Perhaps he was only trying to make me feel valued, but the lack of concealment showed that the situation could be more serious than he was letting on.

"Okay," I said. "I'll be there in about an hour."

"Great. Thank you," he replied, sounding relieved. "Good luck."

He hung up.

I stood there for a moment, contemplating things in the cool, calm quiet of the dark hall. Then I put my phone away and walked back into the kitchen, to tell Grandpa that I had to go.

"Something's sort of come up," I said, with an apologetic tone that belied the feeling of excitement stirring in my stomach. "I have to go, unfortunately."

"Ah, that's a shame," Grandpa replied easily, pushing back his chair without getting up. "I hope everything's okay?"

I thought of the army of ghosts that was apparently streaming across the city at that very moment. I wondered if the mortals could see them, and if Olympus itself was about to be attacked.

"Yeah," I nodded steadily. "Everything's fine."

"Alright," he said, rubbing his chin with a regretful air. "Mind yourself."

"I will."

I turned to leave the kitchen, and was about to close the door behind me, when my grandfather spoke again.

"Oh, and Cyrus," he said. I looked back at him. His eyes were twinkling again, but now there was a hint of mischief in them. Grandpa smiled, and said, "Tell Chiron I said hello."