Disclaimer: I only own the plot and my OCs. Anything you recognize as not mine belongs to Rick Riordan, Greco-Roman mythology, and/or their otherwise respective owners.

Author's Notes: Hi, everyone! Hope you're well.

I have the next chapter title listed as TBA because I haven't come up with the title for it yet/decided if I'm going to use one of the book titles. Oops, lol. Will edit it in once I do.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Until next chapter,

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis

~The Finding Home Saga~

~Finding Home~

~Chapter 95: I Scoop Poop~

I lost hope when I saw the horses' teeth.

I'd already been feeling pretty bad about my chances because of my power-exhaustion from earlier. One of my kids had helped me then, but I knew that I couldn't rely on them – it was bad, very bad to be setting up some sort of expectation of parentification from the womb. Or maybe it wasn't parentification; I don't know. All I'm saying is, I couldn't and didn't want them to be my only saving graces on this quest.

As I got closer to the fence, I held my shirt over my nose to block the smell, and I pretended the smell was what was causing my eyes to water, not my flux of emotions at the prospect of if I really would fail and what would happen to my friends, or what Luke would do when he found the remnants of my corpse if I got eaten by the horses, if there was any of me left...and our babies.

Don't think about that!

One stallion waded through the muck and whinnied angrily at me. He bared his teeth, which were pointed like a bear's.

I tried to talk with him. "Hi," I said. "I'm going to clean your stables. Won't that be great?"

"Yes!" the horse said. "Come inside! Eat you! Tasty half-blood!"

"But I'm Poseidon's son," I said. "He created horses."

Usually, this got me VIP treatment in the equestrian world, but not this time.

"Yes!" the horse agreed. "Poseidon can come in, too! We will eat you both! Seafood! And is that caviar I smell?"

"Seafood! Caviar!" the other horses chimed in as they waded through the field. Flies were buzzing everywhere, and the heat of the day didn't make the smell any better.

Despite the strain on my powers, I'd had some idea that I could do this challenge, because I remembered how Hercules had done it. He'd channeled a river into the stables and cleaned them out that way. I knew I could control the water.

But if I couldn't get close to the horses without getting eaten, that was a problem. And the river was downhill from the stables, a lot farther than I'd realized, about half a mile. The problem of the horse shit looked a lot bigger up-close.

I picked up a rusted shovel and experimentally scooped some away from the fence line. Great. Only four billion more shovelfuls to go.

The sun was already sinking. I had a few hours at best. I decided the river was my only hope. At least it would be easier to think at the riverside than it was here. I set off downhill.

When I got to the river, I found a girl waiting for me. She was wearing jeans and a green t-shirt, and her long brown hair was braided with river grass. She had a stern look on her face. Her arms were crossed.

"Oh, no, you don't," she said.

I stared at her. "Are you a naiad?"

She rolled her eyes. "Of course!"

"But you speak English. And you're out of the water."

"What, you don't think we can act human if we want to?"

I'd never thought about it. I kind of felt stupid, though, because I'd seen plenty of naiads at camp, and they'd never done much more than giggle and wave at me from the bottom of the canoe lake.

"Look," I said. "I just came to ask – "

"I know who you are," she said. "And I know what you want. And the answer is no! I'm not going to have my river used again to clean that filthy stable."

"But – "

"Oh, save it, sea boy. You ocean-god types always think you're so much more important than some little river, don't you? Well let me tell you, this naiad is not going to be pushed around just because your daddy is Poseidon! This is freshwater territory, mister. The last guy who asked me this favor – and he was better-looking than you, by the way – he convinced me, and that was the worst mistake I've ever made! Do you have any idea what all horse manure does to an ecosystem? Do I look like a sewage treatment plant to you? My fish will die. I'll never get the muck out of my plants. I'll be sick for years! NO THANK YOU!"

The way she talked kind of reminded me of the girl I'd met over break and would be attending my school next year, Rachel Elizabeth Dare – kind of like she was punching me with words. I couldn't blame the naiad. Now that I thought about it, I'd be pretty mad if somebody dumped four million pounds of manure in my home. But still...

"My friends are in danger," I told her.

"Well, that's too bad! It's not my problem. And you're not going to ruin my river."

She looked like she was ready for a fight. Her fists were balled, but I thought I heard a little quiver in her voice. Suddenly, I realized that, despite her angry attitude, she was afraid of me. She probably thought I was going to fight her for control of the river, and she was worried she was going to lose.

The thought made me sad. I felt like a bully, a son of Poseidon throwing his weight around.

I felt like the twice-over descendant of Kronos that I was.

I sat down on a tree stump. "Okay, you win."

The naiad looked surprised. "Really?"

"I'm not going to fight you. It's your river."

She relaxed her shoulders. "Oh. Oh, good. I mean – good thing for you!"

"But my friends and I are going to get sold to the Titans if I don't clean those stables by sunset. And I don't know how."

The river gurgled along cheerfully. A snake slid through the water and ducked its head under. Finally, the naiad sighed.

"I'll tell you a secret, son of the sea god. Scoop up some dirt."

"What?"

"You heard me."

I crouched down and scooped up a handful of Texas dirt. It was dry and black and spotted with tiny clumps of white rock...wait, no. Something else besides rock.

"Those are shells," the naiad said. "Petrified seashells. Millions of years ago, even before the time of the gods, when only Gaia and Ouranos reigned, this land was under the water. It was part of the sea."

It was then that I saw what she meant. There were little pieces of ancient sea urchins in my hand, mollusk shells. Even the limestone rocks had impressions of seashells embedded in them.

"Okay," I said. "What good does that do me?"

"You're not so different from me, demigod. Even when I'm out of the water, the water is within me. It is my life source." She stepped back, put her feet in the river, and smiled. "I hope you find a way to rescue your friends."

With that, she turned to liquid and melted into the river.

The sun was touching the hills when I got back to the stables and there was another crick in my side while sweat poured down the back of my neck, but I ignored all of those things. Somebody must've come by and fed the horses, because they were tearing into huge animal carcasses. I couldn't tell what kind of animal, and I really didn't want to know. If it was possible for the stables to get more disgusting, fifty horses tearing into raw meat did it.

"Seafood with caviar!" one exclaimed when he saw me. "Come in! We're still hungry!"

What was I supposed to do? I couldn't use the river. And the fact that this place had been underwater a million years ago didn't exactly help me now. I looked at the calcified seashell in my palm, then at the huge mountain of dung.

Frustrated, I threw the shell into the poop. I was about to turn my back on the horses when I heard a sound.

PFFFFFFT! Like a balloon with a leak.

I looked down where I had thrown the shell. A tiny spout of water was shooting out of the muck.

"No way," I muttered.

Hesitantly, I stepped towards the fence. "Get bigger," I told the waterspout.

SPOOOOOOOSH!

Water shot three feet into the air and kept on bubbling. It was impossible, but there it was. A couple of horses came over to check it out. One put his mouth to the spring and recoiled.

"Yuck!" he whinnied. "Salty!"

It was seawater in the middle of a Texas ranch. I scooped up another handful of dirt and picked out the shell fossils. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I ran around the length of the stable, throwing shells into dung piles. Everywhere a shell hit, a saltwater spring erupted.

"Stop!" the horses cried. "Meat is good! Baths are bad!"

Then I noticed the water wasn't running out of the stables or flowing downhill like water normally would. It simply bubbled around each spring and sank into the ground, taking the dung with it. The horse poop dissolved in the saltwater, leaving regular old dirt.

"More!" I yelled.

There was a tugging sensation behind my gut – not as bad as it had been with Kampê, though – and the waterspouts exploded like the world's largest carwash. Saltwater shot twenty feet into the air. The horses went crazy, running back and forth as the geysers sprayed them in all directions. Mountains of shit began to melt like ice.

The tugging sensation became more intense, now bordering on what it had felt like with Kampê without the help of one of my kids, but there was something exhilarating about seeing all the saltwater. I had made this. I had brought the ocean to this hillside.

"Stop, lord!" a horse cried. "Stop, please!"

Water was sloshing everywhere now. The horses were drenched, and some were panicking and slipping in the mud. The poop was completely gone, tons of it just dissolved into the earth, and the water was starting to pool, trickling out of the stable, making a hundred little streams down towards the river.

"Stop," I told the water.

Nothing happened. The pain in my gut was building. If I didn't shut off the geysers soon, the saltwater would run into the river and poison the fish and plants.

"Stop!" I concentrated all of my might on shutting off the force of the sea.

Suddenly, the geysers shot down. I collapsed to my knees, exhausted. Black spots may have danced in my vision. In front of me was a shiny clean horse stable, a field of wet, salty mud, and fifty horses that had been scoured so thoroughly their coats gleamed. Even the meat scraps between their teeth had been washed out.

"We won't eat you!" the horses wailed. "Please, lord, no more salty baths!"

"On one condition," I said. "You only eat the food your handlers give you from now on. Not people. Or I'll be back with more seashells!"

The horses whinnied and made me a whole lot of promises that they would be good flesh-eating horses from now on, but I didn't stick around to chat. The sun was going down. I turned and ran at full speed, despite the jostling it caused my stomach, back towards the ranch house.

I smelled barbecue before I reached the house, and that made me madder than ever, because I really love barbecue and I was starving between my physical exertion and generally needing more calories to grow the two lives within me.

The deck was set up for a party. Streamers and balloons decorated the railing. Geryon was flipping burgers on a huge barbecue cooker made from an oil drum. Eurytion was lounging at a picnic table, picking his fingernails with a knife. The two-headed dog Orthus was sniffing the ribs and burgers that were frying on the grill. And then I saw my friends: Travis, Katie, and Annabeth all tossed in a corner, tied up like rodeo animals, with their ankles and wrists roped together and their mouths gagged.

"Let them go!" I yelled, still out of breath from running up the steps. "I cleaned the stables!"

Geryon turned. He wore an apron on each chest, with one word on each, so together they spelled out: KISS – THE – CHEF. "Did you, now? How'd you manage it?"

I was pretty impatient, but I told him.

He nodded appreciatively. "Very ingenious. It would've been better if you'd poisoned that pesky naiad, but no matter."

"Let my friends go," I said. "We had a deal."

"Ah, I've been thinking about that. The problem is, if I don't let them go, I don't get paid."

"You promised!"

Geryon made a tsk-tsk noise. "But did you make me swear on the River Styx? No, you didn't. So it's not binding. When you're conducting business, sonny, you should always get a binding oath."

I drew my sword. Orthus growled. One head leaned down next to Katie's head and bared its fangs.

"Eurytion," Geryon said, "the boy is starting to annoy me. Kill him."

Eurytion studied me. I didn't like my odds against him and that club.

"Kill him yourself," Eurytion said.

Geryon raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me," Eurytion grumbled. "You keep sending me out to do your dirty work. You pick fights for no good reason, and I'm getting tired of dying for you. You want to fight the kid, do it yourself."

It was the most un-Ares-like thing I'd ever heard a son of Ares say.

Geryon threw down his spatula. "You dare defy me? I should fire you right now!"

"And who'd take care of your cattle? Orthus, heel."

The dog immediately stopped growling at my friends and came to sit by the cowherd's feet.

"Fine!" Geryon snarled. "I'll deal with you later, after the boy is dead!"

He picked up two carving knives and threw them at me. I deflected one with my sword. The other impaled itself in the picnic table an inch from Eurytion.

I went on the attack. Geryon parried my first strike with a pair of red-hot tongs and lunged at my face with a barbecue fork. I got inside his next thrust and stabbed him right through the middle chest.

"Aghhh!" He crumpled to his knees. I waited for him to disintegrate or something, like a monster would usually do. But instead he just grimaced and started to stand up. The wound in his chef's apron started to heal.

"Nice try, sonny," he said. "Thing is, I have three hearts. The perfect backup system."

He tipped over the barbecue, and coals spilled everywhere. One landed next to Annabeth's face, and she let out a muffled scream. Travis strained against his bonds, but of course he couldn't break them. I had to end this fight before my friends got hurt.

I jabbed Geryon in the left chest, but he only laughed. I stuck him in the right stomach. No good. I might as well have been sticking my sword in a teddy bear for all the reaction he showed.

Three hearts. The perfect backup system. Stabbing one at a time was no good...

I ran into the house.

"Coward!" he cried. "Come back here and die right!"

The living room walls were decorated with a bunch of gruesome hunting trophies – stuffed deer and dragon heads, a gun case, a sword display, and a bow with a quiver.

Geryon threw his barbecue fork, and it thudded into the wall right next to my head. He drew two swords from the wall display. "Your head's gonna go right there, Jackson! Next to the grizzly bear!"

I had a crazy idea. I dropped Riptide and grabbed the bow off of the wall.

I was the worst archery shot in the world. I couldn't hit targets at camp, much less a bullseye. But I had no choice. I couldn't win this fight with a sword. I prayed to Apollo and Artemis, my half-siblings and the twin gods of archery, hoping they might take pity on me or at least understood the need my friends and I had for completing our quest. Please, guys. Just one shot. Please.

I notched an arrow.

Geryon laughed. "You fool! One arrow is no better than one sword."

He raised his swords and charged. I dove sideways. Before he could turn, I shot my arrow into the right side of his chest. I heard a THUMP, THUMP, THUMP as the arrow passed clean through each of his chests and flew out his left side, embedding itself in the forehead of the grizzly bear's trophy.

Geryon dropped his swords. He turned and stared at me. "You can't shoot. They told me you couldn't..."

His face turned a sickly shade of green. He collapsed to his knees and began crumbling into sand, until all that was left of him were three cooking aprons and an oversized pair of cowboy boots.

I got my friends untied. Eurytion didn't try to stop me. Then I stoked up the barbecue and threw the food, all of it besides what was already on the son of Ares' plate and what he must've thrown into Orthus' food bowls, because the two heads were chomping down happily on some smoked meat, into the flames as a burnt offering for Artemis and Apollo.

"Thank you," I said. "I owe you one."

The sky thundered in the distance, so I figured maybe the burgers smelled okay.

"Nice job, Percy," Travis congratulated me, though his face was a little pale.

"Yeah," Katie said.

"What are we going to do now?" Annabeth asked.

I looked at Eurytion, who was relaxing at the picnic table. He hadn't touched his food yet.

"How long will it take him to reform?" I asked him.

Eurytion shrugged. "A hundred years? He's not one of the fast reformers, thank the gods. You've done me a favor."

"You said you'd died for him before," I recalled. "How?"

"I've worked for that creep for thousands of years. Started as a regular half-blood, but I chose immortality when my father offered it. Worst mistake I ever made. Now I'm stuck here at this ranch. I can't leave. I can't quit. I just tend the cows and fight Geryon's fights. We're kinda tied together."

"Maybe you can change things," I said.

Eurytion narrowed his eyes. "How?"

"Be nice to the animals, for starters. Take care of them. Stop selling them for food. And stop dealing with the Titans."

Eurytion thought about it. "That'd be alright."

"Get the animals on your side, and they'll help you. Once Geryon gets back, maybe he'll be the one working for you this time."

The son of Ares grinned. "Now, that I could live with."

"You won't try to stop us leaving?"

"Shoot, no."

Annabeth rubbed her bruised wrists. She was still looking at Eurytion suspiciously. "Your boss said earlier that somebody paid for our safe passage before he renegaded on that deal. Who?"

...Wait, what?

It must've happened when I wasn't around.

The cowherd shrugged. "Maybe he was saying that just to fool you."

"What about the Titans?" I asked. "Did you Iris-message them yet?"

"Nope. Geryon was waiting until after the barbecue. They don't know about you being here." He casted his eyes out towards the horizon. "The sun's going down. How about you all stay for the night?"

Annabeth didn't want to, I could tell that much. She was opening her mouth, obviously to say that we had to go.

But I was more than just tired, I was practically dead on my feet. My legs felt like jelly. If I stood or walked for much longer, I had the feeling that I was going to end up collapsing from everything.

"Do you promise that you won't tell anyone we're here until sunrise at the earliest?" I said. I ignored how Annabeth glared at me. "Do you swear it on the River Styx?"

I wasn't naïve enough to believe that he would swear to not telling anybody we were here ever. If whatever Annabeth had been talking about was the case, it was possible that he'd end up telling whoever had wanted our safe passage through here that we'd gotten it, if only to cash in on the money. But I'd learned from my mistakes with Geryon.

"I swear on the River Styx that I won't tell anyone you were here until after you leave tomorrow morning," Eurytion said.

For the second time in recent memory, thunder boomed.

I nodded. "Thank you. Now, I'm going to get something to eat from my pack, and then I'm going to pass out for at least nine hours straight. Today's been a day."

In the background, Travis snorted.

Word Count: 3,473

Next Chapter Title: Annabeth Outsmarts The Sphinx