Halycon Green's father IS Apollo!
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We'd left Thalia's spear downstairs, and Tia had somehow managed to lose her dagger. so we had just one weapon—my golf club. I brandished it at the old man, but he made no threatening moves. He looked so pitiful and depressed I couldn't bring myself to smack him.
"Y-you'd better explain," I stammered. "Why—how—what…?"
As you can tell, I'm good with words.
Thankfully, Tia, who was quietly snickering at my expense stopped laughing when behind the bars, the monster clacked its bone-plated jaws.
" My friend is confused, Sir" Tia said, and then the monster talked,
"I understand your confusion," it said in the old man's voice. Its sympathetic tone didn't match the homicidal glow in its eyes.
"The creature you see here is a leucrota. It has a talent for imitating human voices. That is how it lures its prey."
Tia recoiled in disgust as I looked back and forth from the man to the monster. "But…the voice is yours? I mean, the dude in the snakeskin suit—I'm hearing what he wants to say?"
Tia snickered and repeated my words " The dude in the snakeskin suit, very creative Luke" She said dryly
"That is correct." The leucrota sighed heavily. "I am, as you say, the dude in the snakeskin suit. Such is my curse. My name is Halcyon Green, son of Apollo."
Thalia stumbled backward. "You're a demigod ? But you're so—"
"Old?" the leucrota asked. The man, Halcyon Green, studied his liver-spotted hands, as if he couldn't believe they were his. "Yes, I am."
Tia was floating a few centimetres above the floor, her surprise making her forget about controlling her flight.
I understood their surprise. We'd only met a few other demigods in our travels—some friendly, some not so much. But they'd all been kids like us. Our lives were so dangerous, We had figured it was unlikely any demigod could live to be an adult. Yet Halcyon Green was ancient, like sixty at least.
"How long have you been here?" Tia asked, finally realizing she was floating and had dropped to the ground.
Halcyon shrugged listlessly. The monster spoke for him: "I have lost count. Decades? Because my father is the god of oracles, I was born with the curse of seeing the future."
Tia interrupted the old man's story with a hushed "Wow, that's so cool!"
He didn't seem to have heard her as he continued as if she didn't interrupt his story.
"Apollo warned me to keep quiet." Halcyon said "He told me I should never share what I saw because it would anger the gods. But many years ago…I simply had to speak. I met a young girl who was destined to die in an accident. I saved her life by telling her the future."
I tried to focus on the old man, but it was hard not to look at the monster's mouth—those black lips, the slavering bone-plated jaws.
"I don't get it…" Tia said, meeting Halcyon's eyes. "You did something good. Why would that anger the gods?"
"They don't like mortals meddling with fate," the leucrota said. "My father cursed me. He forced me to wear these clothes, the skin of Python, who once guarded the Oracle of Delphi, as a reminder that I was not an oracle. He took away my voice and locked me in this mansion, my boyhood home. Then the gods set the leucrotae to guard me. Normally, leucrotae only mimic human speech, but these are linked to my thoughts. They speak for me. They keep me alive as bait, to lure other demigods. It was Apollo's way of reminding me, forever, that my voice would only lead others to their doom."
Tia had a hand over her mouth, Her eyes, already aged beyond her years, seemed to turn older and sadder as I looked at angry coppery taste filled my mouth. I already knew the gods could be cruel. My deadbeat dad had ignored me for fourteen years. But Halcyon Green's curse was just plain wrong. It was evil.
"You should fight back," I said. "You didn't deserve this. Break out. Kill the monsters. We'll help you."
"He's right," Thalia said. "That's Luke, by the way. I'm Thalia. We've fought plenty of monsters. There has to be something we can do, Halcyon."
Tia nodded furiously, her eyes glinting with something shiny and wet.
"Call me Hal," the leucrota said. The old man shook his head dejectedly. "But you don't understand. You're not the first to come here. I'm afraid all the demigods feel there's hope when they first arrive. Sometimes I try to help them. It never works. The windows are guarded by deadly drapes—"
"I noticed," Thalia muttered.
The old man winced. I didn't care much if I hurt his feelings. In my backpack I had two Snickers bars, a ham sandwich, a canteen of water, and an almost full bottle for nectar. I didn't want to get killed for that.
Tia just looked sadly at the old man, as if she felt bad for what Thalia said.
"You're right to hate me," the leucrota said in Hal's voice, "but I can't save you. At sunset, those bars will rise. The monsters will drag you away and kill you. There is no escape."
Inside the monster's enclosure, a square panel on the back wall ground open. I hadn't even noticed the panel before, but it must have led to another room. Two more leucrotae stalked into the cage. All three fixed their glowing red eyes on me, their bony mouth-plates snapping with anticipation.
I wondered how the monsters could eat with such strange mouths. As if to answer my question, a leucrota picked up an old piece of armor in its mouth. The Celestial bronze breastplate looked thick enough to stop a spear-thrust, but the leucrota clamped down with the force of a vise grip and bit a horseshoe-shaped hole in the metal.
When the leucrota bit down on the metal, Tia lept about a foot in the air out of fright.
"As you see," said another leucrota in Hal's voice, "the monsters are remarkably strong."
My legs felt like soggy spaghetti. Thalia's fingers dug into my arm.
"Send them away," Tia pleaded. "Hal, can you make them leave?"
The old man frowned. The first monster said: "If I do that, we won't be able to talk."
The second monster picked up in the same voice: "Besides, any escape strategy you can think of, someone else has already tried."
The third monster said: "There is no point in private talks."
Thalia paced, as restless as the monsters. "Do they know what we're saying? I mean, do they just speak, or do they understand the words?"
The first leucrota made a high-pitched whine. Then it imitated Thalia's voice: "Do they understand the words?"
Tia floated over to Thalia and smacked her on the head, before hissing " Thalia! Not a good idea to anger the monsters!"
My stomach churned. The monster had mimicked Thalia perfectly. If I'd heard that voice in the dark, calling for help, I would've run straight toward it.
The second monster spoke for Hal: "The creatures are intelligent, the way dogs are intelligent. They comprehend emotions and a few simple phrases. They can lure their prey by crying things like 'Help!' But I'm not sure how much human speech they really understand. It doesn't matter. You can't fool them."
"Send them away," I said. "You have a computer. Type what you want to say. If we're going to die at sunset, I don't want those things staring at me all day."
Hal hesitated. Then he turned to the monsters and stared at them in silence. After a few moments, the leucrotae snarled. They stalked out of the enclosure and the back panel closed behind them.
Hal looked at me. He spread his hands as if apologizing, or asking a question.
"Luke," Thalia said anxiously,
"do you have a plan?" Tia asked
"Not yet," I admitted. "But we'd better come up with one by sunset."
It was an odd feeling, waiting to die. Normally when Thalia, Tia and I fought monsters, we had about two seconds to figure out a plan. The threat was immediate. We lived or died instantly. Now we had all day trapped in a room with nothing to do, knowing that at sunset those cage bars would rise and we'd be trampled to death and torn apart by monsters that couldn't be killed with any weapon. Then Halcyon Green would eat my Snickers bars.
What is Luke's fatal flaw?
