I woke up vibrating.
Considering nothing in Artemis's tent should've been bouncing (you know, except our hips) that immediately made me bolt upright.
"Hey, look," Clarisse said. "Sleeping Beauty lives."
We were back in our sixties-style ride. Clarisse was behind the wheel with Valentina riding shotgun. Annabeth and Lou were in the middle seats. That left me, Artemis and Emily all the way in the back.
"How did I get here?"
"I carried you," Artemis said.
I glanced down at my body. My clothes were folded next to me, conspicuously not shielding my modesty. I pictured Artemis walking purposefully through a forest hefting my naked body bridal-style. I wasn't sure how I felt about that image.
"You carried Percy?" Emily asked. "You're a very strong girl."
Artemis looked at the mortal. "I am a goddess."
"Well, then you're a very strong goddess."
"Thank you."
"We're still okay?" I asked. "No sign of monsters?"
It had been bothering me since the nymphs first blocked our path. This van was crazy fast, and with it we'd put hundreds of miles between us and the swarm that attacked the train. But monsters were nothing if not persistent. They had to be after us still, and an entire day without any westward progress was bound to have slashed our head start to ribbons.
But Annabeth said, "None but that one."
She pointed out the side window. Standing just off the road was Larry the Cyclops and his nymph lovers. All the nymphs stood with their thighs pressed together and their knees shaking. They looked happier than I'd seen them. Larry had his muscular arms around all four of them, helping them stand with his glistening muscles.
"You know, it keeps bothering me," Lou said suddenly. "All the other parts I get, but why is that Cyclops always covered in oil?"
"Fisting," I said.
"Fisting?"
"Fisting," I repeated.
Either Lou understood what I meant, or she decided she didn't want to.
The nymphs raised their hands. Branch by branch, then trunk by trunk, the forest shrunk away from the road. Our path cleared. Annabeth pressed the gas, accelerating us forward. Larry and his nymphs waved goodbye, and I waved back. Then I leaned deeper in my seat and sighed. It felt good to be moving again.
"So, Artemis," Valentina said, twisting in her seat to look at the goddess, "won't your hunters miss you."
"They are more than mature enough to act without my supervision," Artemis said. "They have done it before. I left a note."
"What did it say? I've run off to take some bomb ass dick while you muck around in the woods?"
I coughed, choking on my own spit. Clarisse laughed. Annabeth eased on more gas, glancing in the rear view mirror to keep an eye what was happening behind her. Artemis wasn't flustered.
"I've done what I had to in order to keep my Hunters healthy and safe," she said. "I do not regret that."
Valentina smiled sweetly. "Aww, that's great."
You could practically smell the sarcasm throughout the car. I sighed, rubbing my face.
I'd forgotten for a minute. Anything Aphrodite did not get along with Artemis. Even Silena, the sweetest counselor at camp when she'd been there, had been ready to start a cat fight whenever the Hunters were around.
"The curse got to the Hunters?" Annabeth asked.
"Three of them," I said. "And it did it before we were anywhere near them."
She was silent for a minute, staring at the road.
"It really is completely random," she complained finally.
"Perhaps not."
Everyone in the car turned to Artemis, except Annabeth who was driving and Valentina who would prefer looking anywhere else.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"You are confused about how the curse strikes," Artemis said.
"Well, yeah. Emily has been with us for days and she's fine. It hadn't only gotten Valentina since we left camp. But suddenly it got three hunters… there's no pattern."
"Which does not necessarily mean it is random," Artemis said. "In fact, it could mean the opposite."
Annabeth jolted in her seat. I could see the realization spread across her face in real-time.
"You think it's manual," she breathed.
"I know nothing for certain. However, that is what I suspect."
Lou raised her hand. "We're not talking about the car right now, are we?"
It was a stupid question, so I was really glad she was the one asking it since I'd been wondering the same thing.
"In failing to dispel this curse, I came to know it quite well," Artemis said. She leaned forward, auburn eyebrows set in a line. "It is unlike anything I have seen before. This is the work of something ancient and powerful, as powerful as I. It is entirely possible that the one who cast it picks when it activates, and whom it strikes."
The car got quiet, the only sound the whirr of the engine and the hum of tires. All of us thought about that, turning it over in our heads.
Without warning Annabeth punched the steering wheel, forcing a brief honk out of the van's wimpy horn. "Damn it!"
I felt for her. Randomness — a lack of a pattern and proper solution — was to Aphrodite kids what anything Artemis-related was to Aphrodite ones.
"It cannot strike too often," Artemis offered as a silver lining. "You say it was latent for multiple days. I believe that time was to save power in order to target my Hunters. There are limits to it."
"In other words, just one more reason to fix this as soon as possible," I said.
"Indeed."
Consciously or unconsciously, Annabeth eased on the gas at that. We accelerated west, five women and one goddess traveling in a beat-up van with a naked man, just doing our best to keep anybody from dying.
O-o-O
Things were going too well.
I know what you're thinking. Percy, you're always complaining that your luck sucks, and now you're complaining that it's too good? The problem wasn't that the last day had been ominously easy, cruising across multiple states without spotting a single monster or stopping for anything but the bathroom. The problem was that when things went well for too long, it was always, always to warm you up from something big.
I kept reminding myself of that as we pulled into Colorado Springs.
I was driving. The day was warm and bright. The Rockies lay ahead of us, filling our windshield while out the back window we kissed goodbye to the flat plains we'd been cruising through.
Colorado Springs was a big enough city to have its own suburbs. The population sign said over four-hundred-thousand people lived here, and for the first time since leaving New York, the city kid in me felt in his element.
"The Rockies." Emily sighed nostalgically. "We used to have cabins in Vail, but I haven't seen these mountains since the divorce!"
"You mean a cabin, right?" I asked.
Emily tilted her head. "Hm? No, cabins. Three of them. Why?"
"My mistake," I said.
I forgot for a second how filthy rich her ex-husband really was.
Rachel's mom was riding in the seat beside me. Artemis sat behind us. The others were laying wherever was most comfortable, napping or catching up on sleep they missed while driving through the night.
"The Rockies are wonderful mountains," Artemis said. "So much prey. On our last visit, my hunters even caught a young dragon."
"Dragons are real too?" Emily asked.
"Oh, yes," Artemis said. "As real as jackalopes."
"I see." Emily did an impressive job of keeping her confusion out of her voice.
Reluctantly, I eased off the gas as we navigated the city. In the sparsely populated land we'd been traveling through earlier it was easy to push past a hundred. Of course, it helped that Lou could make any cop coming after us drop what he was doing and turn off for an extra donut break.
"What time is it?" Emily asked suddenly.
I glanced at the dashboard. "Noon. Why?"
She frowned. "That's strange. It feels like it's getting dark."
Now that she mentioned it, the road did look dimmer. It was almost enough to make me turn our headlights on.
"Maybe clouds rolled in?" she suggested.
Boom!
A green shape hit the road in front of us hard enough to shake the earth. The others all jolted awake, Lou and Valentina screaming in surprise as they came to
"That's not a cloud!" I shouted, crushing the brakes just fast enough for us to skid to a stop instead of crashing into the wall of scales.
"I told you they were real," Artemis said.
Emily stared out the windshield with terrified eyes, stiff in her seat at the sight of an honest-to-gods dragon.
It was bigger than Peleus, the pet dragon at Camp who guarded the Golden Fleece, but not so big as Ladon. It looked straight out of a storybook, like it should be kidnapping princesses and fighting with knights, not blocking traffic on a weekday. Semi-intelligent eyes locked on our van. Its maw opened, flames swirling inside eager to escape.
As its fiery breath erupted toward us, ready to melt our tires and turn our van to scrap, Artemis snapped her fingers.
The flames dissolved into thin air. The dragon jerked its head back. It shut its eyes, roaring and starting to thrash. It was shrinking. An antler burst out of its head above one eye. The same thing repeated on the other side as all its scales melted away. I watched as its long tail shrunk to a short bob, fur spreading across its body, and listened as its roars quieted to nearly-silent sniffles. By the time the process was complete, a Jackalope no higher than my knee stood alone in the deep impact crater it had created.
The jackalope's eyes widened. It scrambled across the median, barely dodging an oncoming truck, and fled off down an alley.
"What?" Emily said hoarsely.
Artemis giggled. "I'll tell you a secret," she whispered. "Those are only real because I make them."
"Look!" Annabeth said.
She pointed toward the horizon, and I realized that the dragon had only been the beginning.
Dark shapes were flying toward us from the mountains. Dozens of medium-sized monsters were among them, accompanied by hundreds of stymphalian birds. Something dawned on me.
"That's why they hadn't caught up with us," I said. "They went around and set a trap."
"They're over here too," Clarisse said grimly from the right side of the car.
"This side as well!" Lou said on the left.
I froze with my hand on the wheel, unsure which way to turn.
"We'll be fine though, right?" Emily said nervously. "I mean, Artemis can make them all into jackalopes!"
"I would dearly love to," Artemis said. "However, gods can only interfere so much. That dragon's breath was sufficient to be a direct challenge to me. Smaller monsters we will not be so lucky with."
"We punch straight through them," Annabeth said from the back. "Our van is still faster. If we can get to the other side, we can outrun them."
I wasn't so sure. This was the mountains, not the flat straight roads of the Midwest. We might have a higher top-speed, but could we use that going over steep passes and around sharp curves?
We'd just have to see.
I let off the brakes and hit the gas to the floor. We zoomed through the city, weaving between cars and pedestrians while accelerating directly toward our possible doom.
So, you know, a Thursday.
The first monster to reach us was a Stymphalian Bird. It dive bombed, desperate to get the first bite of these tasty demigods.
It didn't really think that plan through. The van smashed through it like a bug on the road, and the monster's body bounced to the ground in a broken heap. That was a good start for us, but it was far from over. Five more birds pulled the same stunt, getting the same result as their friend, but the sixth managed to hit the glass with its bronze beak.
Hairline cracks spread across the surface in a flash. Lou muttered a spell and the windshield held out through the next impacts, but I was already struggling to see. Puffs of black feathers, splotches of blood, and long glass fractures combine for some awful visibility conditions. They never warn you about the important stuff when you're taking your driver's test.
A harpy pulled alongside Lou's window. She swiped with her claws, trying to break the class to reach the daughter of Hecate, but Annabeth stretched across and spun the window crank to lower the glass. As soon as there was a gap, Clarisse thrust a spear out, vaporizing the monster instantly.
"Where did you get that?" I shouted.
"It was under the seat!" she said happily. "And it's in my size!"
That window was covered now, Clarisse using it like she was part of a phalanx, but it was only a matter of time before the monsters made it in. They were on all sides. I could hear heavy footsteps; the ones not lucky enough to be able to fly were getting close. The only thing keeping the swarm from forcing us to crash was restraint on their part. They wanted us alive.
Me, specifically.
"Go right!" Annabeth shouted.
I couldn't even see what was right anymore, but I banked when she told me to. Anything was better than here.
We turned a couple more evil pigeons into roadkill and tore into a huge empty parking lot. It was big enough to service a football stadium, but the only building was three stories and an eye-catching shade of purple.
I think I knew what about it caught Annabeth's eye. There were no windows, and the walls were sturdy concrete. It was practically a bunker in the middle of the city. The tires squealed as I braked hard on the sidewalk in front of the entrance.
"Go! Go! Go!" I said. "Get inside!"
A harpy crashed through the windshield from directly above, breaking both Lou's spell and the glass. She clawed at me, only to get a faceful of Riptide. All four doors were hurled open, and we jumped out into the swarm.
It was only a few feet to the entrance. I let Emily go first, swinging Riptide to fend off more nasty winged beasts. At the entrance to the parking lot, I saw giants and multiple oversized cows like the one from New York charging toward us.
Artemis moved slowly, walking behind the others as they ran. I was going to yell at her to hurry up when a Stymphalian Bird made the mistake of dive-bombing her.
As soon as I saw her smile, I realized that was exactly what she'd been hoping for.
"It seems I've been attacked," she said.
Every monster within fifty feet spontaneously turned to dust. Waves fell to the ground like sooty rain as Artemis reached the rest of us.
"You saw it," she said. "That bird attacked me. I'm afraid the rest just happened to get caught up as I dealt with it."
There were more monsters to replace the ones she took care of. Many more. But it had bought us enough time to get inside at least. All of us ducked through the door, into what the sign advertised as LION STUDIOS: HOME OF THE HOTTEST SHOWS AROUND!
It was dark on the inside from the lack of windows. No lights were on. Clarisse grabbed the front desk and hauled it in front of the door as a makeshift barricade. Then we all forged deeper.
The others huddled behind me while I raised Riptide in the air, using the sword's natural light to give us something to see by. It reminded me of traveling in the Labyrinth, if the Labyrinth smelled like cleaning products and old wax.
We walked up a flight of stairs and out into a cavernous room big enough for our steps to echo. The floor changed from linoleum to polished wood. No matter how high I lifted Riptide, we couldn't see more than a sliver of the massive room.
Then there was a soft ping! and my vision turned white.
I heard the others growling and moaning behind me, blinded the same way I was. I managed to get a hand up, blocking my face, and that helped a little bit.
"Welllllllllllcome, ladies and gentleman, to your favorite show on the air!" A female voice exclaimed over the loudspeaker. "That's right! It's time for, Hole in the Wall: Couple's Edition, the show with more plunges and penetration than any other! Today, your lovely contestants will be playing for the most valuable prize we've ever offered: survival."