What The High Tides May Bring

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

"Just tell me where the pearl is, and this can all end."

Percy blinks away the blurriness in his eyes and tries to focus on Sciron's leering face leaning over him. His head is spinning and his face stings and he's distracted by the drop of blood that he can feel rolling down the side of his face and dripping off his chin. He can barely piece together enough words to create a coherent sentence.

"If you're Dad's favorite child, why don't you just ask him where it is?"

Sciron's hand moves so fast that Percy doesn't even see it. His head is whipped to the side and he hits the side of neck painfully against the back of the chair. Of all the tortures he's endured in the past several weeks, it's almost insulting that bumping his neck hurts that much.

"You may be strong, but I will break you. I will find that pearl! I worked too hard to fail now!"

"Worked? I thought you just killed and bribed a bunch of people."

Another crack and Percy's head snaps to the other side. Sciron wraps his fingers in Percy's hair and forces his head up.

"What will it take for you to just tell me?!" Sciron screams. He's grown increasingly unstable as the weeks have gone by and neither Percy nor Beckendorf have cracked. At first he was civil, simply interrogating them for hours. Then the physical torture began, but he was still calm and controlled. Now, Percy fears he'll fly into a rage and accidentally kill him.

At least then he'd never get the information he wanted.

"I'd rather die than tell you anything," Percy spits out.

Sciron releases him, shoving his head back so that he hits the back of the chair again. Sciron paces the deck in front of Percy.

"I shouldn't have let that prissy blonde-haired girl and your crew go until I got the answers I needed! I had prime black-mail material and I just let it walk away!"

"That's called mercy," Percy supplies unhelpfully.

"And I'll never make that mistake again!" Sciron turns around in a rage. Suddenly his face lights up. Percy finds that scarier than his rage. "But not all your crew got away."

He disappears. Percy tries to pull at his restraints, but there's no use. Sciron wasn't taking any chances when he secured him. Percy closes his eyes and tries to call out to the ocean around them, but it doesn't respond.

There was once a time that Percy could sink an entire ship with his mind. Now the sea water floating around the bottom of the brig won't even heal him. It's like he lost all his powers.

It's like his father disowned him.

Percy tries not to think that way because when he does, a raging bitterness fills him. He wants nothing more than to free himself, grab a sword, and destroy every person on this ship before sailing to Mount Olympus and assaulting the gods himself. After everything he's done for them, this is how he's repaid: abandoned at the bottom of the ship, in the middle of his own father's element, left to die slowly and painfully.

A few years ago, he'd saved Olympus from some Titans who had risen from Tartarus. Among them were several demigods, one of whom Percy remembers swearing to tear Olympus down brick by brick. At the time, Percy didn't understand him. He thought that he was radical. Now, he wonders why he even bothered saving the gods.

The door bursts open and Sciron staggers in, two of his crew members dragging Beckendorf in between them. Beckendorf looks as bloody and injured as Percy; neither of them have been spared VIP (Very Important Prisoner) treatment.