The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, Book Three) (19 page)

Frank nodded. He seemed reluctant to leave.

“You know,” Annabeth said, “Leo doesn’t intend to be mean. He’s just got a big mouth. When people make him nervous, he uses humor as a defense.”

Frank frowned. “Why would I make him nervous?”

“You’re twice his size. You can turn into a dragon.”
And Hazel likes you,
Annabeth thought, though she didn’t say that.

Frank didn’t look convinced. “Leo can summon fire.” He twisted the handcuffs. “Annabeth…sometime, maybe could you help me with another problem that’s not so simple? I’ve got…I guess you’d call it an Achilles’ heel.”

Annabeth felt like she’d just had a drink of Roman hot chocolate. She’d never really gotten the term
warm and fuzzy
, but Frank gave her that sensation. He was just a big teddy bear. She could see why Hazel liked him. “I’d be happy to,” she said. “Does anyone else know about this Achilles’ heel?”

“Percy and Hazel,” he said. “That’s it. Percy…he’s a really good guy. I would follow him anywhere. Thought you should know.”

Annabeth patted his arm. “Percy has a knack for picking good friends. Like you. But, Frank, you can trust anyone on this ship. Even Leo. We’re all a team. We have to trust each other.”

“I—I suppose.”

“So what’s the weakness you’re worried about?”

The dinner bell sounded, and Frank jumped.

“Maybe…maybe later,” he said. “It’s hard to talk about. But thanks, Annabeth.” He held up the Chinese handcuffs. “Keep it simple.”

That night, Annabeth slept
without nightmares, which just made her uneasy when she woke up—like the calm before a storm.

Leo docked the ship at a pier in Charleston Harbor, right next to the seawall. Along the shore was a historical district with tall mansions, palm trees, and wrought-iron fences. Antique cannons pointed at the water.

By the time Annabeth came up on deck, Jason, Frank, and Leo had already left for the museum. According to Coach Hedge, they’d promised to be back by sunset. Piper and Hazel were ready to go, but first Annabeth turned to Percy, who was leaning on the starboard rail, gazing over the bay.

Annabeth took his hand. “What are you going to do while we’re gone?”

“Jump into the harbor,” he said casually, like another kid might say,
I’m going to get a snack.
“I want to try communicating with the local Nereids. Maybe they can give me some advice about how to free those captives in Atlanta. Besides, I think the sea might be good for me. Being in that aquarium made me feel…unclean.”

His hair was dark and tangled as usual, but Annabeth thought about the streak of gray he used to have on one side. When the two of them were fourteen, they’d taken turns (unwillingly) holding the weight of the sky. The strain left them both with some gray hair. Over the last year, while Percy had been missing, the gray streaks had finally disappeared from both of them, which made Annabeth sad and a little worried. She felt like she’d lost a symbolic bond with Percy.

Annabeth kissed him. “Good luck, Seaweed Brain. Just come back to me, okay?”

“I will,” he promised. “You do the same.”

Annabeth tried to push down her growing unease.

She turned to Piper and Hazel. “Okay, ladies. Let’s find the ghost of the Battery.”

Afterward, Annabeth wished she’d jumped into the harbor with Percy. She even would’ve preferred a museum full of ghosts.

Not that she minded hanging out with Hazel and Piper. At first, they had a pretty good time walking along the Battery. According to the signs, the seaside park was called White Point Gardens. The ocean breeze swept away the muggy heat of the summer afternoon, and it was pleasantly cool under the shade of the palmetto trees. Lining the road were old Civil War cannons and bronze statues of historical figures, which made Annabeth shudder. She thought about the statues in New York City during the Titan War, which had come to life thanks to Daedalus’s command sequence twenty-three. She wondered how many other statues around the country were secretly automatons, waiting to be triggered.

Charleston Harbor glittered in the sun. To the north and south, strips of land stretched out like arms enclosing the bay, and sitting in the mouth of the harbor, about a mile out, was an island with a stone fort. Annabeth had a vague memory of that fort being important in the Civil War, but she didn’t spend much time thinking about it.

Mostly she breathed in the sea air and thought about Percy. Gods forbid she ever had to break up with him. She’d never be able to visit the sea again without remembering her broken heart. She was relieved when they turned away from the seawall and explored the inland side of the gardens.

The park wasn’t crowded. Annabeth imagined that most of the locals had gone on summer vacation, or were holed up at home taking a siesta. They strolled along South Battery Street, which was lined with four-story Colonial mansions. The brick walls were blanketed with ivy. The facades had soaring white columns like Roman temples. The front gardens were bursting with rosebushes, honeysuckle, and flowering bougainvillea. It looked like Demeter had set the timer on all the plants to
grow
several decades ago, then forgotten to come back and check on them.

“Kind of reminds me of New Rome,” Hazel said. “All the big mansions and the gardens. The columns and arches.”

Annabeth nodded. She remembered reading how the American South had often compared itself to Rome back before the Civil War. In the old days their society had been all about impressive architecture, honor, and codes of chivalry. And on the evil side, it had also been about slavery.
Rome had slaves,
some Southerners had argued,
so why shouldn’t we?

Annabeth shivered. She loved the architecture here. The houses and the gardens were very beautiful, very Roman. But she wondered why beautiful things had to be wrapped up with evil history. Or was it the other way around? Maybe the evil history made it necessary to build beautiful things, to mask the darker aspects.

She shook her head. Percy would hate her getting so philosophical. If she tried to talk to him about stuff like that, his eyes glazed over.

The other girls didn’t say much.

Piper kept looking around like she expected an ambush. She had said she’d seen this park in the blade of her knife, but she wouldn’t elaborate. Annabeth guessed she was afraid to. After all, the last time Piper had tried to interpret a vision from her knife, Percy and Jason had almost killed each other in Kansas.

Hazel also seemed preoccupied. Maybe she was taking in their surroundings, or maybe she was worrying about her brother. In less than four days, unless they found him and freed him, Nico would be dead.

Annabeth felt that deadline weighing on her, too. She’d always had mixed feelings about Nico di Angelo. She suspected that he’d had a crush on her ever since they rescued him and his big sister Bianca from that military academy in Maine; but Annabeth had never felt any attraction to Nico. He was too young and too moody. There was a darkness in him that made her uneasy.

Still, she felt responsible for him. Back when they had met, neither of them had known about his half sister, Hazel. At the time, Bianca had been Nico’s only living family. When she had died, Nico became a homeless orphan, drifting through the world alone. Annabeth could relate to that.

She was so deep in thought, she might have kept walking around the park forever, but Piper grabbed her arm.

“There.” She pointed across the harbor. A hundred yards out, a shimmering white figure floated on the water. At first, Annabeth thought it might be a buoy or a small boat reflecting the sunlight, but it was definitely glowing, and it was moving more smoothly than a boat, making a straight line toward them. As it got closer, Annabeth could tell it was the figure of a woman.

“The ghost,” she said.

“That’s not a ghost,” Hazel said. “No kind of spirit glows that brightly.”

Annabeth decided to take her word for it. She couldn’t imagine being Hazel, dying at such a young age and coming back from the Underworld, knowing more about the dead than the living.

As if in a trance, Piper walked across the street toward the edge of the seawall, narrowly avoiding a
horse
-
drawn
carriage.

“Piper!” Annabeth called.

“We’d better follow her,” Hazel said.

By the time Annabeth and Hazel caught up to her, the ghostly apparition was only a few yards away.

Piper glared at it like the sight offended her.

“It
is
her,” she grumbled.

Annabeth squinted at the ghost, but it blazed too brightly to make out details. Then the apparition floated up the seawall and stopped in front of them. The glow faded.

Annabeth gasped. The woman was breathtakingly beautiful and strangely familiar. Her face was hard to describe. Her features seemed to shift from those of one glamorous movie star to another. Her eyes sparkled playfully—sometimes green or blue or amber. Her hair changed from long, straight blond to dark chocolatey curls.

Annabeth was instantly jealous. She’d always wished she had dark hair. She felt like nobody took her seriously as a blonde. She had to work twice as hard to get recognition as a strategist, an architect, a senior counselor—anything that had to do with brains.

The woman was dressed like a Southern belle, just as Jason had described. Her gown had a low-cut bodice of pink silk and a three-tiered hoop skirt with white scalloped lace. She wore tall white silk gloves, and held a feathered pink-and-white fan to her chest.

Everything about her seemed calculated to make Annabeth feel inadequate: the easy grace with which she wore her dress, the perfect yet understated makeup, the way she radiated feminine charm that no man could possibly resist.

Annabeth realized that her jealousy was irrational. The woman was
making
her feel this way. She’d had this experience before. She recognized this woman, even though her face changed by the second, becoming more and more beautiful.

“Aphrodite,” she said.

“Venus?” Hazel asked in amazement.

“Mom,” Piper said, with no enthusiasm.

“Girls!” The goddess spread her arms like she wanted a group hug.

The three demigods did not oblige. Hazel backed into a palmetto tree.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Aphrodite said. “War is coming. Bloodshed is inevitable. So there’s really only one thing to do.”

“Uh…and that is?” Annabeth ventured.

“Why, have tea and chat, obviously. Come with me!”

Aphrodite knew how to do tea.

She led them to the central pavilion in the gardens—a white-pillared gazebo, where a table was set with silverware, china cups, and of course a steaming pot of tea, the fragrance shifting as easily as Aphrodite’s appearance—sometimes cinnamon, or jasmine, or mint. There were plates of scones, cookies, and muffins, fresh butter and jam—all of which, Annabeth figured, were incredibly fattening; unless, of course, you were the immortal goddess of love.

Aphrodite sat—or held court, rather—in a wicker peacock chair. She poured tea and served cakes without getting a speck on her clothes, her posture always perfect, her smile dazzling.

Annabeth hated her more and more the longer they sat.

“Oh, my sweet girls,” the goddess said. “I do love Charleston! The weddings I’ve attended in this gazebo—they bring tears to my eyes. And the elegant balls in the days of the Old South. Ah, they were lovely. Many of these mansions still have statues of me in their gardens, though they called me Venus.”

“Which are you?” Annabeth asked. “Venus or Aphrodite?”

The goddess sipped her tea. Her eyes sparkled mischievously. “Annabeth Chase, you’ve grown into quite a beautiful young lady. You really should do something with your hair, though. And, Hazel Levesque, your clothes—”

“My clothes?” Hazel looked down at her rumpled denim, not self-consciously, but baffled, as if she couldn’t imagine what was wrong with them.

“Mother!” Piper said. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“Well, I don’t see why,” the goddess said. “Just because
you
don’t appreciate my fashion tips, Piper, doesn’t mean the others won’t. I could do a quick makeover for Annabeth and Hazel, perhaps silk ball gowns like mine—”

“Mother!”

“Fine,” Aphrodite sighed. “To answer your question, Annabeth, I am
both
Aphrodite and Venus. Unlike many of my fellow Olympians, I changed hardly at all from one age to the other. In fact, I like to think I haven’t aged a bit!” Her fingers fluttered around her face appreciatively. “Love is love, after all, whether you’re Greek or Roman. This civil war won’t affect me as much as it will the others.”

Wonderful, Annabeth thought. Her own mother, the most levelheaded Olympian, was reduced to a raving, vicious scatterbrain in a subway station. And of all the gods who might help them, the only ones not affected by the Greek–Roman schism seemed to be Aphrodite, Nemesis, and Dionysus. Love, revenge, wine. Very helpful.

Hazel nibbled a sugar cookie. “We’re not in a war yet, my lady.”

“Oh, dear Hazel.” Aphrodite folded her fan. “Such optimism, yet you have heartrending days ahead of you. Of
course
war is coming. Love and war always go together. They are the peaks of human emotion! Evil and good, beauty and ugliness.”

She smiled at Annabeth as if she knew what Annabeth had been thinking earlier about the Old South.

Hazel set down her sugar cookie. She had a few crumbs on her chin, and Annabeth liked the fact that Hazel either didn’t know or didn’t care.

“What do you mean,” Hazel asked, “heartrending days?”

The goddess laughed as if Hazel were a cute puppy. “Well, Annabeth could give you some idea. I once promised to make
her
love life interesting. And didn’t I?”

Annabeth almost snapped the handle off her teacup. For years, her heart had been torn. First there was Luke Castellan, her first crush, who had seen her only as a little sister; then he’d turned evil and decided he liked her—right before he died. Next came Percy, who was infuriating but sweet, yet he had seemed to be falling for another girl named Rachel, and then
he
almost died, several times. Finally Annabeth had gotten Percy to herself, only to have him vanish for six months and lose his memory.

“Interesting,” Annabeth said, “is a mild way of putting it.”

“Well, I can’t take credit for
all
your troubles,” the goddess said. “But I do love twists and turns in a love story. Oh, all of you are such excellent stories—I mean, girls. You do me proud!”