The Lightning Thief (19 page)

“No,” I muttered. I tried to make my legs move.

“Do you really want to help the gods?” Medusa asked. “Do you understand what awaits you on this foolish quest, Percy? What will happen if you reach the Underworld? Do not be a pawn of the Olympians, my dear. You would be better off as a statue. Less pain. Less pain.”

“Percy!” Behind me, I heard a buzzing sound, like a two-hundred-pound hummingbird in a nosedive. Grover yelled, “Duck!”

I turned, and there he was in the night sky, flying in from twelve o’clock with his winged shoes fluttering, Grover, holding a tree branch the size of a baseball bat. His eyes were shut tight, his head twitched from side to side. He was navigating by ears and nose alone.

“Duck!” he yelled again. “I’ll get her!”

That finally jolted me into action. Knowing Grover, I was sure he’d miss Medusa and nail me. I dove to one side.

Thwack!

At first I figured it was the sound of Grover hitting a tree. Then Medusa roared with rage.

“You miserable satyr,” she snarled. “I’ll add you to my collection!”

“That was for Uncle Ferdinand!” Grover yelled back.

I scrambled away and hid in the statuary while Grover swooped down for another pass.

Ker-whack!

“Arrgh!” Medusa yelled, her snake-hair hissing and spitting.

Right next to me, Annabeth’s voice said, “Percy!”

I jumped so high my feet nearly cleared a garden gnome. “Jeez! Don’t do that!”

Annabeth took off her Yankees cap and became visible. “You have to cut her head off.”

“What? Are you crazy? Let’s get out of here.”

“Medusa is a menace. She’s evil. I’d kill her myself, but . . .” Annabeth swallowed, as if she were about to make a difficult admission. “But you’ve got the better weapon. Besides, I’d never get close to her. She’d slice me to bits because of my mother. You—you’ve got a chance.”

“What? I can’t—”

“Look, do you want her turning more innocent people into statues?”

She pointed to a pair of statue lovers, a man and a woman with their arms around each other, turned to stone by the monster.

Annabeth grabbed a green gazing ball from a nearby pedestal. “A polished shield would be better.” She studied the sphere critically. “The convexity will cause some distortion. The reflection’s size should be off by a factor of—”

“Would you speak English?”

“I
am
!” She tossed me the glass ball. “Just look at her in the glass.
Never
look at her directly.”

“Hey, guys!” Grover yelled somewhere above us. “I think she’s unconscious!”

“
Roooaaarrr
!”

“Maybe not,” Grover corrected. He went in for another pass with the tree branch.

“Hurry,” Annabeth told me. “Grover’s got a great nose, but he’ll eventually crash.”

I took out my pen and uncapped it. The bronze blade of Riptide elongated in my hand.

I followed the hissing and spitting sounds of Medusa’s hair.

I kept my eyes locked on the gazing ball so I would only glimpse Medusa’s reflection, not the real thing. Then, in the green tinted glass, I saw her.

Grover was coming in for another turn at bat, but this time he flew a little too low. Medusa grabbed the stick and pulled him off course. He tumbled through the air and crashed into the arms of a stone grizzly bear with a painful “Ummphh!”

Medusa was about to lunge at him when I yelled, “Hey!”

I advanced on her, which wasn’t easy, holding a sword and a glass ball. If she charged, I’d have a hard time defending myself.

But she let me approach—twenty feet, ten feet.

I could see the reflection of her face now. Surely it wasn’t really
that
ugly. The green swirls of the gazing ball must be distorting it, making it look worse.

“You wouldn’t harm an old woman, Percy,” she crooned. “I know you wouldn’t.”

I hesitated, fascinated by the face I saw reflected in the glass—the eyes that seemed to burn straight through the green tint, making my arms go weak.

From the cement grizzly, Grover moaned, “Percy, don’t listen to her!”

Medusa cackled. “Too late.”

She lunged at me with her talons.

I slashed up with my sword, heard a sickening
shlock!
, then a hiss like wind rushing out of a cavern—the sound of a monster disintegrating.

Something fell to the ground next to my foot. It took all my willpower not to look. I could feel warm ooze soaking into my sock, little dying snake heads tugging at my shoelaces.

“Oh, yuck,” Grover said. His eyes were still tightly closed, but I guess he could hear the thing gurgling and steaming. “Mega-yuck.”

Annabeth came up next to me, her eyes fixed on the sky. She was holding Medusa’s black veil. She said, “Don’t move.”

Very, very carefully, without looking down, she knelt and draped the monster’s head in black cloth, then picked it up. It was still dripping green juice.

“Are you okay?” she asked me, her voice trembling.

“Yeah,” I decided, though I felt like throwing up my double cheeseburger. “Why didn’t . . . why didn’t the head evaporate?”

“Once you sever it, it becomes a spoil of war,” she said. “Same as your minotaur horn. But don’t unwrap the head. It can still petrify you.”

Grover moaned as he climbed down from the grizzly statue. He had a big welt on his forehead. His green rasta cap hung from one of his little goat horns, and his fake feet had been knocked off his hooves. The magic sneakers were flying aimlessly around his head.

“The Red Baron,” I said. “Good job, man.”

He managed a bashful grin. “That really was
not
fun, though. Well, the hitting-her-with-a-stick part, that was fun. But crashing into a concrete bear?
Not
fun.”

He snatched his shoes out of the air. I recapped my sword. Together, the three of us stumbled back to the warehouse.

We found some old plastic grocery bags behind the snack counter and double-wrapped Medusa’s head. We plopped it on the table where we’d eaten dinner and sat around it, too exhausted to speak.

Finally I said, “So we have Athena to thank for this monster?”

Annabeth flashed me an irritated look. “Your dad, actually. Don’t you remember? Medusa was Poseidon’s girlfriend. They decided to meet in my mother’s temple. That’s why Athena turned her into a monster. Medusa and her two sisters who had helped her get into the temple, they became the three gorgons. That’s why Medusa wanted to slice me up, but she wanted to preserve you as a nice statue. She’s still sweet on your dad. You probably reminded her of him.”

My face was burning. “Oh, so now it’s
my
fault we met Medusa.”

Annabeth straightened. In a bad imitation of my voice, she said: “‘It’s just a photo, Annabeth. What’s the harm?’”

“Forget it,” I said. “You’re impossible.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“You’re—”

“Hey!” Grover interrupted. “You two are giving me a migraine, and satyrs don’t even
get
migraines. What are we going to do with the head?”

I stared at the thing. One little snake was hanging out of a hole in the plastic. The words printed on the side of the bag said: WE APPRECIATE YOUR BUSINESS!

I was angry, not just with Annabeth or her mom, but with all the gods for this whole quest, for getting us blown off the road and in two major fights the very first day out from camp. At this rate, we’d never make it to L.A. alive, much less before the summer solstice.

What had Medusa said?

Do not be a pawn of the Olympians, my dear. You would be better off as a statue.

I got up. “I’ll be back.”

“Percy,” Annabeth called after me. “What are you—”

I searched the back of the warehouse until I found Medusa’s office. Her account book showed her six most recent sales, all shipments to the Underworld to decorate Hades and Persephone’s garden. According to one freight bill, the Underworld’s billing address was DOA Recording Studios, West Hollywood, California. I folded up the bill and stuffed it in my pocket.

In the cash register I found twenty dollars, a few golden drachmas, and some packing slips for Hermes Overnight Express, each with a little leather bag attached for coins. I rummaged around the rest of the office until I found the right-size box.

I went back to the picnic table, packed up Medusa’s head, and filled out a delivery slip:

The Gods
Mount Olympus
600th Floor,
Empire State Building
New York, NY

With best wishes,
PERCY JACKSON

“They’re not going to like that,” Grover warned. “They’ll think you’re impertinent.”

I poured some golden drachmas in the pouch. As soon as I closed it, there was a sound like a cash register. The package floated off the table and disappeared with a
pop!

“I
am
impertinent,” I said.

I looked at Annabeth, daring her to criticize.

She didn’t. She seemed resigned to the fact that I had a major talent for ticking off the gods. “Come on,” she muttered. “We need a new plan.”

WE GET ADVICE FROM A POODLE

We were pretty miserable that night.

We camped out in the woods, a hundred yards from the main road, in a marshy clearing that local kids had obviously been using for parties. The ground was littered with flattened soda cans and fast-food wrappers.

We’d taken some food and blankets from Aunty Em’s, but we didn’t dare light a fire to dry our damp clothes. The Furies and Medusa had provided enough excitement for one day. We didn’t want to attract anything else.

We decided to sleep in shifts. I volunteered to take first watch.

Annabeth curled up on the blankets and was snoring as soon as her head hit the ground. Grover fluttered with his flying shoes to the lowest bough of a tree, put his back to the trunk, and stared at the night sky.

“Go ahead and sleep,” I told him. “I’ll wake you if there’s trouble.”

He nodded, but still didn’t close his eyes. “It makes me sad, Percy.”

“What does? The fact that you signed up for this stupid quest?”

“No.
This
makes me sad.” He pointed at all the garbage on the ground. “And the sky. You can’t even see the stars.

They’ve polluted the sky. This is a terrible time to be a satyr.”

“Oh, yeah. I guess you’d be an environmentalist.”

He glared at me. “Only a human wouldn’t be. Your species is clogging up the world so fast . . . ah, never mind. It’s useless to lecture a human. At the rate things are going, I’ll never find Pan.”

“Pam? Like the cooking spray?”

“Pan!” he cried indignantly. “P-A-N. The great god Pan! What do you think I want a searcher’s license for?”

A strange breeze rustled through the clearing, temporarily overpowering the stink of trash and muck. It brought the smell of berries and wildflowers and clean rainwater, things that might’ve once been in these woods. Suddenly I was nostalgic for something I’d never known.

“Tell me about the search,” I said.

Grover looked at me cautiously, as if he were afraid I was just making fun.

“The God of Wild Places disappeared two thousand years ago,” he told me. “A sailor off the coast of Ephesos heard a mysterious voice crying out from the shore, ‘Tell them that the great god Pan has died!’ When humans heard the news, they believed it. They’ve been pillaging Pan’s kingdom ever since. But for the satyrs, Pan was our lord and master. He protected us and the wild places of the earth. We refuse to believe that he died. In every generation, the bravest satyrs pledge their lives to finding Pan. They search the earth, exploring all the wildest places, hoping to find where he is hidden, and wake him from his sleep.”

“And you want to be a searcher.”

“It’s my life’s dream,” he said. “My father was a searcher. And my Uncle Ferdinand . . . the statue you saw back there—”

“Oh, right, sorry.”

Grover shook his head. “Uncle Ferdinand knew the risks. So did my dad. But I’ll succeed. I’ll be the first searcher to return alive.”

“Hang on—
the first?
”

Grover took his reed pipes out of his pocket. “No searcher has ever come back. Once they set out, they disappear. They’re never seen alive again.”

“Not once in two thousand years?”

“No.”

“And your dad? You have no idea what happened to him?”

“None.”

“But you still want to go,” I said, amazed. “I mean, you really think you’ll be the one to find Pan?”

“I have to believe that, Percy. Every searcher does. It’s the only thing that keeps us from despair when we look at what humans have done to the world. I have to believe Pan can still be awakened.”

I stared at the orange haze of the sky and tried to understand how Grover could pursue a dream that seemed so hopeless. Then again, was I any better?

“How are we going to get into the Underworld?” I asked him. “I mean, what chance do we have against a god?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But back at Medusa’s, when you were searching her office? Annabeth was telling me—”

“Oh, I forgot. Annabeth will have a plan all figured out.”

“Don’t be so hard on her, Percy. She’s had a tough life, but she’s a good person. After all, she forgave me. . . .” His voice faltered.