𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐬'𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 • 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘺 𝘫𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘴𝘰𝘯

Grayson And I Make A Dangerous Promise

Percy's Pov:

Blackjack gave me a ride down the beach, and I have to admit it was cool. Being on a flying horse, skimming over the waves at a hundred miles an hour with the wind in my hair and the sea spray in my face—hey, it beats waterskiing any day. 

Here. Blackjack slowed and turned in a circle. Straight down. 

"Thanks." I tumbled off his back and plunged into the icy sea. 

Over the past couple of years, I'd gotten more comfortable doing stunts like that. I could pretty much move, however, I wanted to, underwater, just by willing the ocean currents to change around me and propel me along. I could breathe underwater, no problem, and my clothes never got wet unless I wanted them to. 

I shot down into the darkness. 

Twenty, thirty, forty feet. The pressure wasn't uncomfortable. To see if there was a limit to how deep I could dive, I'd never tried to push it. I knew most regular humans couldn't go past two hundred feet without crumpling like an aluminum can. I should've been blind, too, this deep in the water at night, but I could see the heat from living forms, and the cold of the currents. It's hard to describe. It wasn't like regular seeing, but I could tell where everything was. 

As I got closer to the bottom, I saw three hippocampi—fishtailed horses—swimming in a circle around an overturned boat. The hippocampi were beautiful to watch. Their fishtails shimmered in rainbow colors, glowing phosphorescent. Their manes were white, and they were galloping through the water the way nervous horses do in a thunderstorm. Something was upsetting them. I got closer and saw the problem. A dark shape—some kind of animal—was wedged halfway under the boat and tangled in a fishing net, one of those big nets they use on trawlers to catch everything at once. I hated those things. It was bad enough they drowned porpoises and dolphins, but they also occasionally caught mythological animals. When the nets got tangled, some lazy fishermen would just cut them loose and let the trapped animals die. 

Apparently, this poor creature had been mucking around on the bottom of Long Island Sound and had somehow gotten itself tangled in the net of this sunken fishing boat. It had tried to get out and managed to get even more hopelessly stuck, shifting the boat in the process. Now the wreckage of the hull, which was resting against a big rock, was teetering and threatening to collapse on top of the tangled animal. 

The hippocampi were swimming around frantically, wanting to help but not sure how. One was trying to chew the net, but hippocampi teeth just aren't meant for cutting rope. Hippocampi are really strong, but they don't have hands, and they're not (shhh) all that smart. 

Free it, lord! A hippocampus said when it saw me. The others joined in, asking the same thing

I swam in for a closer look at the tangled creature. At first, I thought it was a young hippocampus. I'd rescued several of them before. But then I heard a strange sound, something that did not belong underwater: 

"Mooooooo!" 

I got next to the thing and saw that it was a cow. I mean... I'd heard of sea cows, like manatees and stuff, but this really was a cow with the back end of a serpent. The front half was a calf—a baby, with black fur and big, sad brown eyes and a white muzzle—and its back half was a black-and-brown snaky tail with fins running down the top and bottom, like an enormous eel. 

"Whoa, little one," I said. "Where did you come from?" 

The creature looked at me sadly. "Moooo!" 

But I couldn't understand its thoughts. I only speak horse. 

We don't know what it is, lord, one of the hippocampi said. Many strange things are stirring. 

"Yeah," I murmured. "So I've heard."