1
Underworld Hath No Fury Like A Child Of Aphrodite
The sight was colossal. It would have sent to his knees. Luckily, he was leaning against the rail of the vessel, so he remained standing.
Camp Jupiter looked the same. Exactly the same. There were the minimal differences, of course. The fortresses on the battlefield were different. Many were completely burned into the ground from the battle. Dust was everywhere, the remains of a thousand monsters scattered over the ground. There was an uncustomary absence of people sprinting all across the campus, made up for by the crowd of people spilling quickly from the senate complex that hadn't moved an inch. But the city was still there, glittering in the background like only a Roman capital could. The barracks sat in their correct location; the stables and forge hadn't miraculously disappeared. The temples of the gods stood in all their magnificence across the lake. And the Little Tiber still flowed straight through the valley, separating the nation of tomorrow from Rome.
"Are you okay?"
Jason jumped. Piper stood next to him on the deck, her eyes sparkling with concern. Even negative emotions were cute on her face, with her gaze. Blotting away those unhelpful thoughts, he realized her concern was warranted. He was gripping the iron guardrail of the Argo II with white knuckles. He could tell his face was flushed. He probably looked quite sickly.
With effort, he pried his hands from the metal. "Yeah. I guess… I thought it would be different."
"Is it coming back to you now?" Piper asked. She sidled up alongside him, leaning against the rail. Her hair was unbraided today, and fell like a thin veil on either side of her face. Jason looked away again before he could become enamored.
"Like it never left." He raised a hand to block the sun, and stared down at the valley. "I remember everything… every tree, every rock, every temple across that lake… I memorized every detail. Hard to believe I'd forget it."
Even as he spoke, the gravity beneath their feet shifted. Leo must have been at the helm, because it was soft enough to keep them on their feet. The ship's bow made a gradual turn towards the ground. The landing sequence had begun.
Jason sighed. "I've been getting ready for this day for half a year. I've been doing everything I can to make myself remember so I wouldn't mess up… I don't know the first thing I'm going to say to these people."
"These are your friends," Piper replied. "They know you. They want to see you, too."
"I feel like I'm about to have someone introduce me to their old friends. Except I'm also the one who's doing the introducing." Jason absent-mindedly pulled lvlivs from his pocket, turning it over and over in his right hand as the Argo IIbanked towards the Earth. Towards Gaea.
Piper glanced at him, and didn't look away. Carefully, as if she were thinking over her actions tenfold before making them, she reached over and took his hand, closing over the coin as she did. "We're with you, Jason. You're not doing this alone, and we won't let you if you try."
He didn't hear charmspeak on her voice, but she didn't need it anyway. The moment she started talking his confidence soared through the roof. That was the problem for him with Piper. It took all of two words from her to make him feel like a general of Ancient Rome.
For six months, Jason had resisted the urge to tackle her whenever their eyes met, or their hands brushed, or her laugh echoed throughout the room. Throughout his mind. Piper McLean was intoxicating, and Jason Grace was stricken. There were only a few very important things keeping him from jumping her, but even that line was so thin that his toes had nearly skirted over it on plenty a number of occasions.
Except for, you know, that one of those things was that he was afraid that the earth would swallow him whole if he tackled Piper to it.
Gaea was waking; the ancient entity of nature, the mother of everything. Literally. Gaea had been asleep for millennia, silently following nature's course, ever since her giants had been destroyed at the hands of the combined might of gods and demigods back in the age of Ancient Greece. The second defeat of the Titans of the previous summer, now nearly a year beforehand, had stirred the ancient mother in her slumber and reawakened the anger that had lied dormant for eons. Now the dame of the gods was back with a vengeance, and she was determined to succeed where her giants had failed the first time around. Only this time she was more powerful than ever. And the gods and demigods, even united, might not have the power to stop her. The earth under their own feet was their enemy.
And there was Reyna. Yeah, Reyna was another reason.
Jason's memories had definitely come back, and he remembered it all. How he had been intimidated by her. Impressed by her raw charisma. Destroyed by her skill with weaponry. Intrigued by her surprising and delving intellect. Utterly surprised when she seemed to befriend him, even more so when she started to smile at him. Overjoyed when she supported him for praetor.
Yes. Between Reyna and Piper, Jason was torn and confused, indeed.
"Jason."
He jumped again. Piper let go of his hand instantly. Annabeth stood behind them, at a respectful distance, speaking as if she did not want to intrude. Despite his confusion, Jason wished Piper hadn't let go.
He turned to face the daughter of Athena, goddess of wisdom. She was pale, too, at least as much as Jason. Her blonde hair was pulled back from her face, wrapped in a ponytail. She had one hand gripping the hilt of the Celestial bronze knife on her belt. The expression on her face told Jason everything he needed to know about her mental state; she was nervous and excited at the same time. If it all went right today, she would be reunited with Percy Jackson—her boyfriend of nearly a year. That was, of course, accounting for the eight months that he had been ripped from her life, the same as Jason had been ripped from his.
For the first time, Jason thought about Percy living in the Roman camp. He'd spent six months thinking about nothing but getting back to here—past the first moments, when he had to greet everybody, he hadn't thought about what came next. He hadn't considered Percy at all… he wondered, for the first time, if maybe Percy had a place in this Roman camp the same as Jason had at Camp Half-Blood. He wondered if maybe Percy had found a Pip—if Percy had found someone special in eight months of memory loss.
No wonder Annabeth was nervous.
"Leo says we'll be on the ground in three minutes. You're up, hero. You okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," Jason replied, realizing that he was quite not fine. He tried not to look at Piper, but his head betrayed him and turned sideways. The color in her eyes showed him that she knew exactly how he felt. He looked away quickly. "I'm good. Let's go."
He led the way, the two girls trailing in his wake. He climbed the steep staircase to the deck where Leo stood at the ship's wheel, a dozen different control systems and readouts arrayed around him, complete with cupholder and mini-fridge. His friend manned the wheel with a giant grin on his face, occasionally yelling an order to the couple dozen demigods rushing across the ship to prepare for landing.
Jason took up a stance beyond his control consoles, looking down at the ground as it loomed closer and closer over the side of the vessel. The crowd spilling from the Senate had turned into a mob pooling from every building of the camp. Even a number of bodies began to pour out of the distant city. They were congregating in the field Leo was aiming for, intelligently leaving a great berth of space for the Argo IIto ease into. Something stood out to Jason about their formation, but it took him a second for the familiar stance of the distant figures to click in his mind…
"Annabeth, they're armed," he said, turning to face her as she stepped up next to him. Piper and Clarisse La Rue, daughter of Ares and declared weaponsmaster of the vessel, stepped up with her. "They're in battle formation."
Clarisse swore and leaped back off the bridge, to the main deck and began shouting out for battle positions before Jason could stop her.
Annabeth was calmer; Jason had noticed that she usually waited for all the details before she began to freak out. "Will they attack?"
"I don't know," Jason replied, moving to the side of the ship, trying to see as much as he could as they moved closer to the Roman formation. "They're not necessarily in an aggressive stance, but they're definitely ready to fight."
"If they wanted to, wouldn't they already have attacked?" Piper asked.
Jason bit his lip. "Romans have never exactly had to fight a lot of winged prey. It's not like they have five million trebuchets ready to train on us right now. Most of their battles were fought on the ground, and they always have the upper hand. We can't know what they want unless they walk to us."
"Should I level out?" Leo asked. The son of Hephaestus had a steady grip on the wheel, another on the thruster controls, ready to shoot them out of descent at his word. "If I don't do it now, dude, I'll have to land and push off again to get us out. Now or never."
Annabeth looked to Jason, too. It was his decision. Down on the deck, Clarisse was barking the Greeks into their posts, at the dozen ballistas and crossbow stations spread across and belowdecks. He'd seen this picture too many times—it wasn't a time for war. If the Romans wanted a fight, if he had anything to say about it, they sure weren't going to get one. He had come too far to watch it come to fighting.
"Stand down," he said, stepping back up to the wheel, directly next to Leo. "Stand down!" His voice was powerful—he was the son of Jupiter. Everyone on the deck below turned and looked up at him, even Clarisse. "We're not here to fight them! Remain at your stations, but stand down!"
"We're outnumbered a hundred to one!" Clarisse shouted back, a scowl darkening her already dark expression. "If we're not ready they're going to storm us and make this a massacre without losing a single man!"
"I think I'm with her, bro," Leo said, holding the ship steady in the sky. "I don't wanna wake up on the wrong side of my spear tomorrow morning, and this is looking like a one-way ticket. This ship packs a pop, but I'm fresh out of thousand-person-wield fireballs…"
"They're not going to attack," Jason replied, his eyes still on the mass below, that, while appearing perfectly ready to rush into combat, remained stationary on the ground. A few people, still too distant to identify, had moved out in front of the mass and stood together. "Leo, you're going to land us and then I'm going to get off. Only me. You're going to keep the ship hot and blast off the instant you think they might be up to a spar. But if they wanted to attack, my gut tells me they would have already found a way. Just keep Clarisse away from the ballistas."
Leo nodded his assent, but he still glanced at Annabeth before turning the ship again towards the ground. The daughter of Athena herself took a long moment to hold skeptical eye contact with Jason before leaping down the steps to the main deck quickly and ordering everyone to stand down. Piper stepped closer to him and crossed her arms; the radiant concern was back.
"Are you sure you should go alone?" she murmured, so hopefully only Jason could hear her words.
"Anyone else might make them think I'm just issuing a warning for battle," he replied, trying to placate her with his warmest smile. "Don't worry. They know me, and I know them. It'll all be fine."
"The first time I got this thing out and we're trying to prevent war with Rome," Leo groaned. "Firing reverse thrusters."
The ship lurched gently below their feet, rapidly decelerating as their altitude dropped steeply. With a gilt Jason could only describe as fun, as if his friend was savoring the departing ability to control this mechanical masterpiece, Leo swooped the giant Argo IIinto the clearing the Romans had rimmed. The cries of surprise and shock—and probably a substantial few of fear—from the crowd rose around them now, and Jason could feel his heartbeat rising by the second.
"If this thing goes Titanic on its maiden voyage, I gotta tell you, it's not going to be pretty between you and me, Jason," Leo muttered, his focus on the ship.
They crested over the ground, close enough that Jason could pick out the blades of grass sweeping in the gust from the ship. Faces were visible now, less than fifty yards from the ship. There were five humans standing forward of the Roman legion, alongside the largest dog Jason had ever seen, an emaciated creature Jason recognized as a harpy, and a small male Cyclops, who, although Jason had never met him and judging by the unfazed nature of the Romans around him, must have been Percy's half-brother Tyson, who had been relentlessly searching for the son of Poseidon for the past six months. Octavian, the augur of the Romans, stood removed from the other humans, wearing a scowl that could have rivaled Clarisse's. Next to him stood a trio, a boy who Jason recognized from Annabeth's pictures and the camp's description as Percy Jackson, who had his arms around Jason's found Fifth Cohort friend Hazel Levesque and a strangely disproportionate boy whom Jason didn't know. The fifth and final member of the waiting party was Reyna. She stood proud and tall as she ever did, despite the toga that she was sporting with obvious distaste. Somehow the aura she projected still cause Jason's blood to suddenly run hot through his veins, even from fifty yards away.
Piper gripped his hand from where she stood next to him. Not helping.
With a grunt of effort and approval, Leo eased the Argo IIto touch down to the ground, bobbing once and sitting comfortably, as if rocking through a wave on the ocean. Jason smiled in a way that came out sickly at Leo and clapped him on the shoulder, murmuring congratulations.
He jumped down the staircase three at a time, slamming to the deck with the eyes of everyone onboard trained right on him. Only Annabeth didn't look to him, for her gaze was permanently glued to the face of Percy Jackson. If it was possible for her face to be any whiter than it had been before… it was. He placed a reassuring hand briefly on her arm as he passed.
The gears creaked into motion below and the metal of the ship groaned to life as Leo engaged the ramp. It slid out from the hull of the vessel and melded into a staircase, extending and lowering until it touched the ground.
Jason watched a ripple of unease and tension flash through the Roman battalions like a wave. He sighed and simultaneously sucked in a deep breath as he carefully mounted the top step.
"Showtime."
Percy Jackson was suddenly aware that his heart rate was accelerating.
He didn't know why. He knew the people around him. Behind him. He knew the people on the vessel ahead of him. The oath he had put on his life not five minutes before hand wasn't tearing away at his chest, because he knew he was right; Jason Grace was on this ship, and so was Annabeth.
Was it his imagination, or was there a head of blonde hair rushing over the deck as the ship eased towards the ground?
As if to voice his anxiety, Frank saved him the trouble. "I'm nervous and I don't know why."
He couldn't help it. Percy laughed, knocking Frank on the side of his shoulder to show he wasn't making fun. "It's okay. I am, too. And Ihave no reason to be. These are my friends."
"What if they don't like me?" Frank added.
"Hush," Hazel said from under Percy's other arm. Her eyes were glowing as she watched the ship, but her expression didn't appear any more comfortable than either of theirs. "It's impossible not to like you. Shut up and be yourself."
"How can I be myself if I shut up?"
Tyson was jumping up and down, just like Percy's heart. The ship had entered its final descent, and was skirting the edges of the trees ending the clearing before setting down. The power off the engines and the wake of air from the ship billowed into the formations of Roman warriors behind them, trying to throw the seasoned soldiers off balance.
The ship really was a sight. It had a single mast, which probably wasn't even necessary, for three giant engines sprouted from the back and threw off a fiery glow to the surrounding forest. The hull was solid metal, and sprouted a number of armaments and weapons ranging from a mounted crossbow to something that looked like a nuclear missile. The dragon head attached the bow was moving, its gaze traversing the entire legion. The Argo IIwas a battleship, but none of its weapons were trained on the Romans.
Percy glanced over Hazel's head, where Octavian looked quite cross as he glared daggers and atomic celestial warheads at the vessel. "See?" the son of Poseidon said to the augur, earning the death glare in turn. "They didn't come to fight. They're my friends, and they've come in wartime to make peace."
"Jason." Reyna's voice wasn't steady. "Jason is on the ship. I saw him."
Percy smiled at her, though her eyes were elsewhere. "He wouldn't just leave you, would he?"
"I never thought I'd see him again," Hazel whispered next to him.
The Argo IIfloated like a cloud to the earth, where it touched down in the grass. The engines powered down in the rush of a tornado, and from over the side of the deck appeared two dozen gawking faces. Demigod faces. Greek demigod faces. The legion of Roman demigods stared back as if their visitors were made of Imperial gold, but Percy was running across them, naming them off in his head. He remembered every one. Travis Stoll. Will Solace. Clarisse
From the side of the ship an ark of metal split from the hull. It rotated outwards and began to morph, shapes sliding out of the arm in construction precision that reminded Percy of Annabeth.
The ark settled itself into a ramp, which pivoted and eased to set down in the grass as lightly as the ship. A single boy appeared at the top of the ramp, and, alone, began to walk down.
Percy had never seen him before, but he knew immediately who he was. He walked with the gait of someone who knew everyone was watching and resented the attention. His face was strong and his skin weathered. He was wearing an orange Camp Half-Blood t-shirt, but on his arm Percy could identify an outline of the tattoo identical to the one now inscribed on his own. His arms were more muscular than Percy's own, but he wore no sword and was carrying no other weapon.
Jason Grace. Son of Jupiter.
Percy's arms fell from around the shoulders of his friends, and as Jason Grace reached the base of the ramp Percy stepped out from the group and began to walk forward, across the grass, towards the former praetor of the Twelfth Legion.
They stopped when they were about three paces from each other. Hundreds of eyes were on the pair of them.
"Hi," Percy said. "I'm Percy."
Jason grinned. "I'm Jason."
There was a pause. "Did you come to kill us?" Percy asked.
"No," Jason replied. "Are you formed up to massacre us?"
"Nope."
Jason held out his hand. "Sounds to me like you and I are going to get along just fine."
Percy took the hand and shook it. "I got your eagle back, by the way."
"What?"
Percy took Jason by the wrist and lifted their arms into the air. Turning to the legion, he cried out at the top of his lungs. "Demigods of Rome! I return to you Praetor Jason, son of Jupiter!"
The simultaneous uproar from the crowd nearly knocked the Argo IIover. The crowd's weapons dropped in one motion and they all surged forward towards Jason. A wall of Romans got to them at the same time, dozens of hands reaching to touch their lost hero. Percy barely had time to introduce Frank before he was swept away by the crowd, leaving a grinning Jason to his own devices in the middle of the pack.
He swarmed out to the edge closest to the ship, where the crew was just beginning to gingerly step down the ramp. Romans were still eyeing them warily, but a courageous few had even moved forward and were stabbing swords into the ground to offer their hands. Unfortunately, the vast majority barely got a polite hello before they made a beeline right for Percy.
The foremost was a boy who had the legs of a goat. Grover slammed into Percy with a bear hug that would have made the son of Poseidon laugh had he any breath left in his body.
"Dude!" Grover cried. "Percy, I missed you! I went everywhere, man, I looked everywhere. And when I tell you not to move, what do you do? You freaking move. You never do what I tell you to."
"I had to, G-man, I had to," Percy replied heartily, slapping the satyr on the arm happily. "World in peril, monsters coming from everywhere, same old, same old. You know how it is."
The conversation was interrupted by Travis and Connor Stoll, a limping and bandaged Jake Mason but who looked much better than the last time Percy had seen him, and Chris Rodriguez.
No sooner had he started to catch up, however, did an especially penetrating voice meet Percy's ears. His heart melted. His body froze.
"Hi?"
She stood at a few arms' lengths, her hair tied back and her expression disbelieving. Her gray eyes crackled with emotion, her mouth twisted in concentration. She was the most beautiful thing Percy had ever seen and the way she was glaring at him had him somewhere between terrified for his life and turned on.
"Hi?" Annabeth repeated. "I'm Percy? You had eight months to think about it and that's all you came up with?"
Percy blinked, and spread his arms in a helpless gesture. "You can clean the kelp out of my head later."
Then she was in his arms, and Percy forgot everything else. He forgot about the Roman legion, about his Greek friends, about Jason Grace, and about the fact that Gaea wanted to kill them all. His only thoughts were for Annabeth Chase, the girl who was in his arms and clinging to him as if he might disappear any second.
To be fair, it was a distinct possibility.
"I missed you, Seaweed Brain," she murmured into his ear. She was a good five inches off the ground, and making no attempt to return to it. To Percy's shock, she sounded close to tears.
"I was lost without you, Wise Girl," he replied. It was the truth. He sucked in her scent, the smell of flower petals flattened with fresh paper and shampoo of mist. Ocean mist. Man, he missed her so much.
She slowly relinquished her hold and he set her on the ground. Looking up at him, she said, "You grew."
"Yeah. I have." He hadn't realized it, but he could now see it was true. She used to look straight at his nose; now she looked straight at his lips. Like she was doing right now. Intently. "I guess a lot happens in eight months."
He realized how stupid of a sensitive thing to say that was exactly three seconds later, but was thankful when her only response was to grab his hand and thread their fingers through each other, moving to her side as two individuals he had only seen in his prophetic dreams stepped down the ladder.
The first was a short, dark-haired boy who looked as mischievous as a child of Apollo. He wore a sleeveless, torn shirt and holey jeans and had the largest, strangest belt Percy had ever seen wrapped around his waist. His arms were covered in dirt, but the grin on his face was friendly.
"Percy," Annabeth said, "this is Leo Valdez, son of Hephaestus. He built the Argo II.Nyssa says he's the most talented mechanic and metalworker she's ever seen."
"Well, not meaning to brag," Leo said, puffing out his chest in mock pride and arrogance. He reached out his hand to Percy to shake. Percy gripped it with the hand Annabeth wasn't holding, but instantly steam shot out of their grip.
Leo let go like his hand was on fire. It took a full second for Percy to realize it was. "Dude!"
The Latino demigod glanced at it and raised his eyebrows, apparently unfazed, glancing back at Percy quick. "Dude! That's sick! Demigod of water plus demigod of fire equals steam. Bad. Ass."
"Leo inherited the gift of pyrokinesis from his father," Annabeth explained under her voice, taking the opportunity to lean in as close to Percy as she physically could. "Very rare."
"You're telling me," Percy said. "That's freaking sweet. So you don't, like, burn or anything?"
With his own eyes, Percy watched the flame seemingly extinguish itself on Leo's hand, and watched the boy flex his hand, showing soft, unblemished skin. "When I was three, Hera threw me into a fire just to see if I would live. Who knew. True story."
As Percy tried to wrap his mind around this quick divulgence of history, the second newcomer, a pleasant-looking girl, stepped forward. "Percy," Annabeth said, "this is Piper McLean, daughter of Aphrodite."
Percy blinked, obviously having misheard. There was noway this was a daughter of Aphrodite. She was effortlessly pretty, there wasn't doubt there, but her hair was curled and twisted like a hurricane and tossed carelessly around her face. There was absolutely no makeup applied around her eyes. Zilch. Nada. Jupiterian amounts of negative mascara.Nothing. Her clothes were things no daughter of Aphrodite would ever be caught dead wearing: She had on jeans over strangely colored socks, tucked into sneakers, topped off by a snowboarding jacket. A long dagger was strapped to her waist. Nothing matched. It was a love goddess' nightmare.
Percy was aware his jaw was slammed open as he shook the girls' hand. "I'm sorry, daughter of who?"
"Yeah," Piper McLean replied, nodding with pursed lips. "You heard right."
Percy abruptly became aware of how stupid he must have been looking, and frantically stuttered. "I-I'm sorry. I didn't think… it's not that your… I mean… you just, I've never met a daughter—or a son—of Aphrodite that wasn't cutthroat about wearing designer brands and checking their hair every five seconds." He checked over his shoulder, only just realizing that Aphrodite children might have been standing right next to him. Thankfully, there were none.
"It's all right," Piper replied. "I get that a lot."
Percy was saved the embarrassment of responding when Frank and Hazel approached, a combined look of apprehension and excitement on their faces. Percy immediately beckoned them closer and turned Annabeth so she and the others were facing his Roman friends. "Leo, Piper, Annabeth, I'd like you to meet Hazel Levesque, daughter of Pluto, and Frank Zhang, son of Mars."
There was a great exchange of colorful smiles and "Hi!"s. Percy felt overjoyed that he had such welcoming friends. He was glad he hadn't chosen to introduce then to Clarisse with this group.
Hazel beamed at Annabeth. "You're so lucky. Percy's an amazing person." Percy noticed her move closer to Frank as she said this. As if to reassure him that she wasn't jealous of the daughter of Athena in the slightest.
Annabeth mirrored the motion nearly perfectly. "I know," she replied, making a beautiful little smirk as she spoke.
"And you two are so cute!" Piper said, touching Hazel on the arm with a beaming smile, as if she simply couldn't resist point this out. Okay, Percy thought. Maybe sheis a daughter of Aphrodite.
Frank's face turned the color of his father's temple. "Oh, we're not… I mean to say… We're not really together."
Hazel didn't say anything. She just grinned, and Percy did, as well. "We owe Percy a lot, though. He became a leader when we short one and got the eagle of the Fifth Cohort back after it had been lose for twenty years!"
"Yes. We all owe much to Percy Jackson, son of Neptune."
Reyna had approached without Percy noticing, and now stood only slightly off to the side, politely waiting to be welcomed into their proximity. Percy quickly gestured her forward, eager to finish the pleasantries so they could all speak plainly as comrades. "This is Reyna, daughter of the war goddess Bellona, praetor of the Twelfth Legion."
It was as if they had hopped from Phoenix to Alaska. Piper's glare was straight ice, Annabeth's not much better. Their welcoming eyes had warped into stone walls in milliseconds, and Percy suddenly felt as if his occupied hand was being squeezed into paste.
Leo, on the other hand, appeared to have forgotten he possessed a jaw. He would be spending the next year inventing a mechanism to dig it out of the ground…
"Hi," Annabeth said stonily, at least trying to make outward appearances of warmth. She tried to smile, clearly; to Percy it appeared to be a wince. "Jason's told me about you."
"Has he?" Reyna replied, raising an eyebrow.
"He has?" Piper blurted at virtually the same moment. "He hasn't mentioned you to me at all."
"Interesting," Reyna replied. Her smile was nicer than both of theirs, also appearing confident and powerful. "I'm sure there was nothing to tell. I have, of course, heard of you, Annabeth, daughter of Athena, from Percy. And Piper, your forthcoming has been foreseen by our augur. I have been looking forward to meeting you."
"You… have?" Piper's face betrayed perplexity. Percy's sympathy was immense.
"Of course. You are one of the Seven, are you not? Of the Great Prophecy? I have so many questions for you. We need to take time later to speak. We have very few children of Venus here, and none so powerful as you."
"I… I look forward to our talk," Piper replied meekly, still taken aback.
Reyna gave her warm smile, and then nodded to both Piper and Annabeth once more before turning away. She completely ignored Leo, who looked like he had been struck down by Zeus himself. He didn't blink or breathe again until the female Roman praetor was out of earshot.
Piper said a word Percy was sure Aphrodite approved of. "Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no no no."
"What?" Percy said frantically. He almost reached over and pulled Leo's jaw out of the earth for him.
"I can't compete with that…" Piper lamented, her voice tinged with agony. "What am I supposed to do that'll put me on the same level as her? She's gorgeous!"
"She is," Annabeth agreed. Her eyes were boring holes in the praetor's back. Then she looked at Percy, one eyebrow ever so slightly higher than the other. "She is quite good-looking."
"I guess so," Percy replied without thinking. The other eyebrow went up. "I mean… that is to say—she's fine, I don't know, I've never looked that way. What's wrong, Piper?"
"Jason was praetor before Hera took him, too," Piper said, her voice a mumble. "She's probably good with a sword. They probably trained together. They probably did everythingtogether. Maybe they were together before. Maybe they'll just take up where they left off. He's going to forget about me and go with her…"
"You're jumping to conclusions," Annabeth replied. Her eyes were now far away from Percy's, and he felt excessively stupid. "He never mentioned her to you, so she's obviously not that important. Besides, he's been staring at you for the past eight months like he can't decide whether to take you out to dinner or whisk you straight off to his room."
"I don't know," Piper replied. She sounded miserable.
"I want her," Leo said, speaking so fast that the words came out as a jumbled conglomerate. "Did you see her looking at me? I'll bet she likes a guy who's good with his hands." As if to demonstrate, he raised his arms and waved his fingers experimentally.
There was tension now, Percy knew, but at the moment he was so happy he could barely think. Annabeth was with him. She was holding his hands and still folded into his side, even if she was avoiding his gaze. His friends were here, in California, associating freely with the Roman demigods. Their future may look bleak, but for the moment, he couldn't help but let himself smile.
From the crowd, Jason looked over and gestured to him, and then, when Percy nodded, the son of Jupiter turned and began to weave his way, between and with the crowd, back towards the Senate building from which Percy had just come.
"Come on," Percy said. "I think we all have a lot to talk about."