Thanks for the reviews! And I will try to get more dialogue from the characters in there. There other chapters I wrote at like...one in the morning, but this one is being written at noon, so hopefully my brain will think of more things. Also, I'm so sorry this is so late...I have a one word excuse...school. So please bare with me as I write, because updates may come a little later than before...

Justin's POV

Confession time: I ditched Grover as soon as we got to the bus terminal.

"Dad..."Alex groaned. "Why are you stupid...?" We all got a good laugh out of that one.

I know, I know. It was rude.

"Yes it was. Grover was probably freaking out over him!" Sarah exclaimed.

"You sound like mom," I chuckled.

"Because other than mom, I'm the only one who takes other people's feelings into consideration," She snapped. Alex scoffed.

But Grover was freaking me out, looking at me like I was a dead man, muttering, "Why does this always happen?" and "Why does it always have to be sixth grade?"

"I would be scared, too. I don't blame, daddy." Elizabeth said. I didn't either, but it was still a stupid thing to do.

Whenever he got upset, Grover's bladder acted up, so I wasn't surprised when, as soon as we got off the bus, he made me promise to wait for him, then made a beeline for the restroom. Instead of waiting, I got my suitcase, slipped outside, and caught the first taxi uptown.

"East One-hundred – and – fourth and First," I told the driver.

A word about my mother, before you meet her.

Her name is Sally Jackson and she's the best person in the world,

"Yes, she is. Is she coming for Christmas?" I looked up.

"I think so...?" Sarah mumbled.

"If she is, I hope she brings us candy. Blue candy." Alex sighed.

"Candy! Candy!" Elizabeth giggled. I smiled at my sister's excitement and kept reading.

which just proves my theory that the best people have the rottenest luck. Her own parents died in a plane crash when she was five, and she was raised by an uncle who didn't care much about her. She wanted to be a novelist, so she spent high school working to save enough money for a college with a good creative-writing program. Then her uncle got cancer, and she had to quit school her senior year to take care of him. After he died, she was left with no money, no family, and no diploma.

"She's intelligent. If I didn't know better I'd say she was a daughter of Athena," Sarah said smugly.

"Please, grandma doesn't have to be a goddess's daughter to be intelligent," I stated. I remembered when she would come over and quiz me to help me study for my spelling tests. She would always make me first spell the word, tell her what it meant, and how to correctly use it in a sentence. I always aced my spelling tests and I learned new ways to use the word. I smiled at the memory.

The only good break she ever got was meeting my dad.

I don't have any memories of him, just this sort of warm glow, maybe the barest trace of his smile. My mom doesn't like to talk about him because it makes her sad. She has no pictures.

"Poor grandpa. Couldn't grandma put one picture of him up?" Elizabeth asked.

"And have dad know what he looked like? Probably even that would have been dangerous. It's also probably why Dad doesn't keep any pictures of us in his wallet," Alex mused.

"He doesn't?" I asked.

"No. His wallet is something he keeps on him at all times, if the wrong person got a hold of it..." He trailed. Ah, makes sense.

See, they weren't married. She told me he was rich and important, and their relationship was a secret. Then one day, he set sail across the Atlantic on some important journey, and he never came back.

"Set sail? More like he went into the Atlantic..." Sarah giggled.

Lost at sea, my mom told me. Not dead. Lost at sea.

Lost at sea. He actually is the sea...but I'm just being picky.

She worked odd jobs, took night classes to get her high-school diploma, and raised me on her own. She never complained or got mad. Not even once. But I knew I wasn't an easy kid.

Finally, she married Gabe Ugliano,

"Ew. Even his name sounds...ugly," Elizabeth wrinkled her nose like she had smelled Alex's gym socks.

"That's original, Liz," I laughed. Her bright, sea-green eyes narrowed toward me.

"Don't. Call. Me. Liz." She said. She hated when people nicknamed her. The only nickname she allowed was "princess" from Dad and "pumpkin" from Mom. If we tried to call her something, she'd hit us. And that is a threat. Don't let her size or age fool you, she was lethal to those that weren't kind to her or the ones she loves. What she lacks in size she makes up for in agility and her mind, most of the time, was like a teenager's.

who was nice the first thirty seconds we knew him, then showed his true colors as a world-class jerk. When I was young, I nicknamed him Smelly Gabe.

"Mhm!" Alex tried to, unsuccessfully, stifle his laugh. Leave it to Dad to come up with a nickname like that.

I'm sorry, but it's the truth. The guy reeked like moldy garlic pizza wrapped in gym shorts.

"To mask him," Sarah said suddenly. "Grandma needed a way to mask Dad's scent so that monsters couldn't find him."

Between the two of us, we made my mom's life pretty hard. The way Smelly Gabe treated her, the way he and I got along...well, when I came home is a good example.

I walked into our little apartment, hoping my mom would be home from work. Instead, Smelly Gabe was in the living room, playing poker with his buddies. The television blared ESPN. Chips and beer cans were strewn all over the carpet.

I looked around at our practically spotless home. Mom made sure to vacuum every week and Dad pitched in by using his power to wash the floors about three times a year. As I looked, my eyes fell on one of our many family pictures. It was the one that went on our Christmas card. As a joke, we all dressed in the ugliest Christmas sweaters and wore Santa hats. We had goofy grins and bright eyes, and our backdrop was the large Christmas tree that we always put in the corner of the living room. I smiled. My father may not have had the best childhood, but maybe that was the reason he created a wonderful and memorable one for us.

"Justin?"

I looked up to find all eyes on me. Sarah was shaking my knee. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah...yeah I am," I cleared my head and read again.

Hardly looking up, he said around his cigar, "So, you're home."

"Where's my mom?"

"Working," he said. "You got any cash?"

That was it. No Welcome back. Good to see you. How has your life been the last six months?

Gabe had put on weight. He looked like a tuskless walrus in thrift-store clothes.

"Hey...I got my last shirt at a thrift-store..." Sarah muttered.

He had about three hairs on his head, all combed over his bald scalp, as if that made him handsome or something.

He managed the Electronics Mega-Mart in Queens, but he stayed home most of the time. I don't know why he hadn't been fired long before. He just kept on collecting paychecks, spending the money on cigars that made me nauseous, and on beer, of course. Always beer. Whenever I was home, he expected me to provide his gambling funds. He called that our "guy secret." Meaning, if I told my mom, he would punch my lights out.

I gripped the book tighter. How did Dad not punch him sooner?

"I don't have any cash," I told him.

He raised a greasy eyebrow.

Gabe could sniff out money like a bloodhound, which was surprising, since his own smell should've covered up everything else.

"Like daddy!" Elizabeth exclaimed. Like I said...most of the time her brain was like a teenager.

"You took a taxi from the bus station," he said. "Probably paid with a twenty. Got six, seven bucks in change. Somebody expects to live under this roof, he ought to carry his own weight. Am I right, Eddie?"

"Whoa. Jerk much?" Sarah rolled her eyes and sunk back into the couch.

"I hope Dad kicks him where it hurts..." Alex muttered.

Eddie, the super of the apartment building, looked at me with a twinge of sympathy. "Come on, Gabe," he said. "The kid just got here."

"Am I right?" Gabe repeated.

Eddie scowled into his bowl of pretzels. The other two guys passed gas in harmony.

"Why would the super listen to a guy who lived in his apartments?! He totally could have kicked Gabe to the curb!" I exclaimed.

"Poker. Money. He's stupid," Sarah listed.

"Fine," I said. I dug a wad of dollars out of my pocket and threw the money on the table. "I hope you lose."

"Your report card came, brain boy!" he shouted after me. "I wouldn't act so snooty!"

Alex tensed at that. His eyes narrowed and he tightened his hands into fists. His report cards were probably the worst out of all of ours, but I knew he tried hard. Mom and Dad knew, too, which was way they never got after him for it, but it was still a sad situation for him. That didn't mean I liked him all the time, I mean, he's still my annoying older brother. I'm not going soft.

I slammed the door to my room, which really wasn't my room. During school months, it was Gabe's "study." He didn't study anything in there except old car magazines, but he loved shoving my stuff in the closet, leaving his muddy boots on my windowsill, and doing his best to make the place smell like his nasty cologne and cigars and stale beer.

"Ewwww..." Elizabeth said.

"Can this guy get any worse?" I asked.

I dropped my suitcase on the bed. Home sweet home.

Gabe's smell was almost worse than the nightmares about Mrs. Dodds, or the sound of that old fruit lady's shears snipping the yarn.

But as soon as I thought that, my legs felt weak. I remembered Grover's look of panic – how he'd made me promise I wouldn't go home without him. A sudden chill rolled through me. I felt like someone –s something – was looking for me right now, maybe pounding its way up the stairs, growing long, horrible talons.

"Now that...is a scary thought," I shivered. My siblings nodded in agreement.

Then I heard my mom's voice. "Percy?"

She opened the bedroom door, and my fears melted. My mother can make me feel good just be walking into the room. Her eyes sparkle and change color in the light. Her smile is as warm as a quilt. She's got a few gray streaks mixed in with her long brown hair, but I never think of her as old. When she looks at me, it's like she's seeing all the good things about me, none of the bad. I've never heard her raise her voice or say an unkind word to anyone, not even me or Gabe.

"Aww...grandma!" Elizabeth squealed.

"Dad's so cute. I doubt any twelve year old boy would say that about their mother..." Sarah smiled.

"I know I did," Alex whispered. Our mom may was the best person in the world according to our standards. She was smart, quick, funny, kind, caring, and most of all loving. She and Dad worked well together...they swore to protect us and give us happy healthy lives, which is much more than what some demigods get unfortunately.

"Oh, Percy." She hugged me tight. "I can't believe it. You've grown since Christmas!"

"Yeah seriously. That gene passed down to me, I can't stop growing!" Alex, at sixteen, was only a couple inches below Dad. Since our father was about 6'0, Alex was around 5'9.

Her red-white-and-blue Sweet on America uniform smelled like the best things in the world: chocolate, licorice, and all the other stuff she sold at the candy shop in Grand Central. She'd brought me a huge bag of "free samples" the way she always did when I came home.

"Like she does when she visits us!" Elizabeth slid off the couch and ran upstairs to where our bedrooms were. When she came back down, she had a large bag of our grandma's "free samples". Our grandmother did not work at the shop anymore...she owned the shop after she published some of her books and got paid a lot of money. So she was able to send us large bags whenever she wanted, which was perfectly fine with us.

We sat together on the edge of the bed. While I attacked the blueberry sour strings,

"My favorite..." Alex mumbled, biting into one that Elizabeth threw to him.

she ran her hand through my hair and demanded to know everything I hadn't put in my letters. She didn't mention anything about my getting expelled. She didn't seem to care about that. But was I okay? Was her little boy doing all right?

"Now we know where Dad gets it," I smiled. Dad never worried about our grades. Well, he worried, but we had the advantage of two parents who went through dyslexia and ADHD during school. As long as we were trying, we passed in their books.

I told her she was smothering me, and to lay off and all that, but secretly, I was really, really glad to see her.

From the other room, Gabe yelled, "Hey, Sally – how about some bean dip, huh?"

"Yep. He got worse." Elizabeth muttered.

I gritted my teeth.

My mom is the nicest lady in the world. She should've been married to a millionaire, not to some jerk like Gabe.

"Or a god..." I chuckled.

For her sake, I tried to sound upbeat about my last days at Yancy Academy. I told her I wasn't too down about the expulsion. I'd lasted almost the whole year this time. I'd made some new friends. I'd done pretty well in Latin. And honestly, the fights hadn't been as bad as the headmaster said. I like Yancy Academy. I really did. I put such a good spin on the year, I almost convinced myself. I started choking up, thinking about Grover and Mr. Brunner. Even Nancy Bobofit suddenly didn't seem so bad.

Until that trip to the museum...

"What?" my mom asked. Her eyes tugged at my conscience, trying to pull out the secrets. "Did something scare you?"

"No, Mom."

I felt bad lying.

"He should. Grandma has a right to know," Sarah declared.

"Would you tell Mom if you didn't know what you were and some crazy bird thing attacked you?" Alex raised an eyebrow.

"Well...um...no."

"Thought so."

I wanted to tell her about Mrs. Dodds and the three old ladies with the yarn, but I thought it would sound stupid.

She pursed her lips. She knew I was holding back, but she didn't push me.

"I have a surprise for you," she said. "We're going to the beach."

"Montauk!" Smiles lit up all of our faces. Our grandma (and apparently grandpa) went there, our father and mother, and then us. It was one of our favorite places in the whole world. Alex and Elizabeth loved the ocean, and Dad would take them underwater and teach them all kinds of things. For me and Sarah, who couldn't breathe underwater like they could, Mom would take us on long walks on the beach and then when we found a suitable spot, we would sit and she would draw buildings in the sand. The drawings had so much detail I thought they would just pop off the page and tower above us. Then, when we were all together, our parents would train us with swords, bow and arrows, knives, the works. They would teach us strategy (Mom mostly, Dad just liked to go in there guns (swords?) blazing) and fighting techniques.

My eyes widened. "Montauk?"

"Three nights – same cabin."

"When?"

She smiled. "As soon as I get changed."

I couldn't believe it. My mom and I hadn't been to Montauk the last two summers, because Gabe said there wasn't enough money.

Gabe appeared in the doorway and growled. "Bean dip, Sally? Didn't you hear me?"

I wanted to punch him, but I met my mom's eyes and I understood she was offering me a deal: be nice to Gabe for a little while. Just until she was ready to leave for Montauk. Then we would get out of here.

"I was on my way, honey," she told Gabe. "We were just talking about the trip."

Gabe's eyes got small. "The trip? You mean you were serious about that?"

"Of course she was!" Elizabeth exclaimed.

"I knew it," I muttered. "He won't let us go."

"Of course he will," my mom said evenly. "Your step-father is just worried about money. That's all. Besides," she added, "Gabriel won't have to settle for bean dip. I'll make him enough seven-layer dip for the whole weekend. Guacamole. Sour cream. The works."

"Ooh, nicely done, grandma," Alex chuckled.

Gabe softened a bit. "So this money for your trip...it comes out of your clothes budget, right?"

"No! Not the clothes budget!" Sarah gasped. Jeez, you would think she's a child of Aphrodite...

"Yes, honey," my mother said.

"And you won't take my car anywhere but there and back."

"We'll be very careful."

Gabe scratched his double chin. "Maybe if you hurry with that seven-layer dip...And maybe if the kid apologizes for interrupting my poker game."

Maybe if I kick you in your soft spot, I thought. And make you sing soprano for a week.

We couldn't stop laughing. The way our father's mind worked sometimes...

"Why didn't he!? That would've been amazing!" Alex gasped after he finished laughing.

"And probably would result in Gabe not letting them go, Dad being grounded by Gabe, and maybe something really bad happening with Dad's abilities. But yes, that would've been...freaking...awesome." Sarah giggled.

But my mom's eyes warned me not to make him mad.

Why did she put up with this guy? I wanted to scream. Why did she care what he thought?

"I'm sorry," I muttered. "I'm really sorry I interrupted your incredibly important poker game. Please go back to it right now."

"Sarcasm. It's a wonderful tool." Alex smirked.

Gabe's eyes narrowed. His tiny brain was probably trying to detect sarcasm in my statement.

"Yeah, whatever," he decided.

He went back to his game.

"Thank you, Percy," my mom said. "Once we get to Montauk, we'll take more about...whatever you've forgotten to tell me, okay?"

For a moment, I thought I saw anxiety in her eyes – the same fear I'd seen in Grover during the bus ride – as if my mom too felt an odd chill in the air.

But then her smile returned, and I figured I must have been mistaken. She ruffled my hair and went to make Gabe his seven-layer bean dip.

An hour later we were ready to leave.

Gabe took a break from his poker game long enough to watch me

"Watch him? Not even help?" I chided.

"I think we all know he's a jerk." Elizabeth stated, biting into a chocolate bar from the candy bag.

lug my mom's bags to the car. He kept griping and groaning about losing her cooking - and more important, his '78 Camaro – for the whole weekend.

"Not a scratch on this car, brain boy," he warned me as I loaded the last bag. "Not one little scratch."

"Oh...so a twelve year old is going to drive?" Alex scoffed. I looked at him curiously.

"What?" He asked.

Like I'd be the one driving. I was twelve.

"Stop reading Dad's mind. That's scary." I said.

"Coincidence." He waved his hand in dismissal.

But that didn't matter to Gabe. If a seagull so much as pooped on his paint job, he'd find a way to blame me.

Watching him lumber back toward the apartment building, I got so made I did something I can't explain. As Gabe reached the doorway, I made the hand gesture I'd seen Grover make on the bus, a sort of warding-off-evil gesture, a clawed hand over my heart, then a shoving movement toward Gabe. The screen door slammed shut so hard it whacked him in the butt and sent him flying up the staircase as if he'd been shot from a cannon. Maybe it was just eh wind, or some freak accident with the hinges, but I didn't stay long enough to find out.

I got in the Camaro and told my mom to step on it.

"I wish I could've seen that!" Sarah giggled.

"I don't think he's even small enough to fit in a cannon!" Elizabeth laughed. We all stared at her for a moment...then burst out laughing.

Our rental cabin was on the south shore, way out at the tip of Long Island. It was a little pastel box with faded curtains, half sunken into the dunes. There was always sand in the sheets and spiders in the cabinets, and most of the time the sea was too cold to swim in.

I loved the place.

"So do we." We replied.

We'd been going there since I was a baby. My mom had been going even longer. She never exactly said, but I knew why the beach was special to her. It was the place where she'd met my dad.

As we got closer to Montauk, she seemed to grow younger, years of worry and work disappearing from her face. Her eyes turned the color of the sea.

We got there at sunset, opened all the cabin's windows, and went through our usual cleaning routine. We walked on the beach, fed blue corn chips to the seagulls, and munched on blue jelly beans, blue saltwater taffy, and all the other free samples my mom had brought from work.

I guess I should explain the blue food.

Elizabeth giggled and waved a blue saltwater taffy in the air.

See, Gabe had once told my mom there was no such thing.

"Is he stupid?" I muttered.

"Yep." My siblings replied.

They had this fight, which seemed like a really small thing at the time. But ever since, my mom went out of her way to eat blue. She backed blue birthday cakes. She mixed blueberry smoothies. She bought blue-corn tortilla chips and brought him blue candy from the shop. This – along with keeping her maiden name, Jackson, rather than calling herself Mrs. Ugliano

"Ewww. Still the grossest name ever." Sarah stuck out her tongue in disgust.

– was proof that she wasn't totally suckered by Gabe. She did have a rebellious streak, like me.

When it got dark, we made a fire. We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows. Mom told me stories about when she was a kid, back before her parents died in the plane crash. She told me about the books she wanted to write someday, when she had enough money to quit the candy shop.

Eventually, I got up the nerve to ask about what was always on my mind whenever we came to Montauk – my father. Mom's eyes went all misty. I figured she would tell me the same things she always did, but I never got tired of hearing them.

"I miss grandpa," Alex sighed. We all did. While the gods were able to come and go more frequently now, we rarely saw our grandfather. He either had some...godly business to do or something like that. We normally saw him at Camp Half-Blood, but he also tried his very best to come to all our birthdays and other celebrations.

"He was kind, Percy," she said. "Tall, handsome, and powerful. But gentle, too. You have his black hair, you know, and his green eyes."

Mom fished a blue jelly bean out of her candy bag. "I wish he could see you, Percy. He would be so proud."

I wondered how she could say that. What was so great about me? A dyslexic, hyperactive boy with a D+ report card, kicked out of school for the sixth time in six years.

"You're pretty great Dad..." Elizabeth smiled. There were so many great things about our father...so many. It was sad that back then he didn't realize that fact.

"How old was I?" I asked. "I mean...when he left?"

She watched the flames. "He was only with me for one summer, Percy. Right here at this beach. This cabin."

"But...he knew me as a baby."

"No, honey. He knew I was expecting a baby, but he never saw you. He had to leave before you were born."

I tried to square that with the fact that I seemed to remember...something about my father. A warm glow. A smile.

"He visited. That's probably why. I think a god can get into an apartment without a mortal knowing." Alex sighed.

I had always assumed he knew me as a baby. My mom had never said it outright, but still, I'd felt it must be true. Now, to be told that he'd never even seen me...

I felt angry at my father. Maybe it was stupid, but I resented him for going on that ocean voyage, for not having the guts to marry my mom. He'd left us, and now we were stuck with Smelly Gabe.

"Are you going to send me away again?" I asked her. "To another boarding school?"

She pulled a marshmallow from the fire.

"I don't know, honey." Her voice was heavy. "I think...I think we'll have to do something."

"Because you don't want me around?" I regretted the words as soon as they were out.

My mom's eyes welled with tears. She took my hand, squeezed it tight. "Oh, Percy, no. I – I have to, honey. For your own good. I have to send you away."

Her words made me even more thankful that I had two parents that I could be with, almost twenty four/seven.

Her words reminded me of what Mr. Brunner had said – that it was best for me to leave Yancy.

"Because I'm not normal," I said.

"You say that as if it's a bad thing, Percy. But you don't realize how important you are. I thought Yancy Academy would be far enough away. I thought you'd finally be safe."

"Safe from what?"

She met my eyes, and a flood of memories came back to me – all the weird, scary things that had ever happened to me, some of which I'd tried to forget.

During third grade, a man in a black trench coat had stalked me on the playground. When the teachers threatened to call the police, he went away growling, but no one believed me when I told them that under his broad-brimmed hat, the man only had one eye, right in the middle of his head.

"A Cyclops?" Elizabeth asked.

"Yeah...could grandpa have been checking up on him?" Sarah directed her question toward Alex.

"No idea. Grandpa works in mysterious ways...heck, Dad works in mysterious ways." He said.

Before that – a really early memory. I was in preschool, and a teacher accidentally put me down for a nap in a cot that s snake had slithered into. My mom screamed when she came to pick me up and found me playing with a limp, scaly rope I'd somehow managed to strangle to death with my meaty toddler hands.

"How could the teacher miss a snake!?" Sarah said.

"It's pretty easy to do, remember when that Gardner snake got into your room through the window?" I shot at her. Her face went pale and she threw a small pillow at me.

"That was not funny. That thing was huge,"

"And harmless." Alex snickered.

"I just do not like snakes, okay?" She huffed. Alex suddenly got a devious look on his face.

"Hey, Sarah," he started.

"Yes?" she narrowed her eyes at him.

"There's a spider on your leg."

"WHAT!?" Sarah leaped from the couch and started jumping and down. "Get it off, get it off, get it off!"

Alex and I were laughing our heads off and even Elizabeth with giggling.

"Sarah! There's no spider!" I said between laughs. She stopped jumping and looked around. After she was sure that really was no spider she sent a death glare toward Alex.

"That...was not funny. You know I'm terrified of spiders. Genetics!" She pointed toward the sky.

"Sorry, it was just too good to pass up!" He chuckled. I wasn't as scared of spiders as Sarah was, but I definitely didn't like them...

In every single school, something creepy had happened, something unsafe, and I was forced to move.

I knew I should tell my mom about the old ladies at the fruit stand, and Mrs. Dodds at the art museum, about my weird hallucination that I had sliced my math teacher into dust with a sword. But I couldn't make myself tell her. I had a strange feeling the news would end our trip to Montauk, and I didn't want that.

"I've tried to keep you as close to me as I could," my mom said. "They told me that was a mistake. But there's only one other option, Percy – the place your father wanted to send you. And I just...I just can't stand to do it."

"My father wanted me to go to a special school?"

"A camp," I corrected.

"Not a school," she said softly. "A summer camp."

"See? Now you're doing it," Alex pointed out.

My head was spinning. Why would my dad – who hadn't even stayed around long enough to see me born – talk to my mom about a summer camp? And if it was so important, why hadn't she ever mentioned it before?

"I'm sorry, Percy," she said, seeing the look in my eyes. "But I can't talk about it. I - I couldn't send you to that place. It might mean saying good-bye to you for good."

"For good? But if it's only a summer camp..."

She turned toward the fire, and I knew from her expression that if I asked her any more questions she would start to cry.

That night I had a vivid dream.

It was storming on the beach, and two beautiful animals, a white horse and a golden eagle, were trying to kill each other at the edge of the surf. The eagle swooped down and slashed the horse's muzzle with its huge talons. The horse reared up and kicked at the eagle's wings. As they fought, the ground rumbled, and a monstrous voice chuckled somewhere beneath the earth, goading the animals to fight harder.

I ran toward them, knowing I had to stop them from killing each other, but I was running in slow motion. I knew I would be too late. I saw the eagle dive down, its beak aimed at the horse's wide eyes, and I screamed, No!

I woke with a start.

"Well, that could be something..." Sarah trailed.

"But what?" Elizabeth asked. Sarah thought for a moment.

"I got nothing."

"That's a first." Alex mumbled. Now the pillow was thrown at him.

Outside, it really was storming, the kind of storm that cracks trees and blows down houses. There was no horse or eagle on the beach, just lightning making false daylight, and twenty-foot waves pounding the dunes like artillery.

With the next thunderclap, my mom woke. She sat up, eyes wide, and said, "Hurricane."

I knew that was crazy. Long Island never sees hurricanes this early in the summer. But the ocean seemed to have forgotten. Over the roar of the wind, I heard a distant bellow, an angry, tortured sound that made my hair stand on end.

Then a much closer noise, like mallets in the sand. A desperate voice –someone yelling, pounding on our cabin door.

"Grover?" Elizabeth asked.

My mother sprang out of bed in her nightgown and threw open the lock.

Grover stood framed in the doorway against a backdrop of pouring rain. But he wasn't...he wasn't exactly Grover.

"Knew it." Elizabeth sighed, content that she had assumed correctly.

"Searching all night," he gasped. "What were you thinking?"

My mother looked at me in terror – not scared of Grover, but of why he'd come.

"Percy," she said, shouting to be heard over the rain. "What happened at school? What didn't you tell me?"

I was frozen, looking at Grover. I couldn't understand what I was seeing.

"O Zeu kai alloi theoi!" he yelled. "It's right behind me! Didn't you tell her?"

Alex gasped. "Grover...that is not nice language." Alex may not be completely fluent in reading English...but give him Greek and he could read and write it backwards and upside down.

I was too shocked to register that he'd just cursed in Ancient Greek, and I'd understood him perfectly. I was too shocked to wonder how Grover had gotten her by himself in the middle of the night. Because Grover didn't have his pants on – and where his legs should be...where his legs should be...

My mom looked at my sternly and talked in a tone she'd never used before: "Percy. Tell me now!"

I stammered something about the old ladies at the fruit stand, and Mrs. Dodds, and my mom stared at me, her face deathly pale in the flashes of lightning.

She grabbed her purse, tossed me my rain jacket, and said, "Get to the car. Both of you. Go!"

Grover ran for the Camaro – but he wasn't running, exactly. He was trotting, shaking his shaggy hindquarters, and suddenly his story about a muscular disorder in his legs made sense to me. I understood how he could run so fast and still limp when he walked.

Because where his feet should be, there were no feet. There were cloven hooves.

"I remember when we found out Grover was a satyr. That was the freakiest experience of my life..." I trailed.

"Half man, half goat!" Elizabeth clarified.

"And don't ever call them half donkey..." Alex chuckled. I glanced at the clock.

"I think we can fit in one more chapter before lunch...who wants to read?"

Okay...so here's a quick little question. Should I have Elizabeth or Alex read the next chapter? Because I said I was going to have every child read a chapter, but she is five and I don't think she'd be quite fluent enough to read at that level. Not saying that all five year olds can't read at that level, heck, I could make Elizabeth one of those kids that can read at excessively good rates. However, I do have an idea for Alex reading the next chapter that's been nagging at the back of my head. If I do Elizabeth next chapter, I will do Alex the one after that and put in my idea, but I just wanted to know if you guys wanted to hear Elizabeth read. Thanks! I hope there was more dialogue this time! R&R!