LUNACY; percy jackson

epilogue

[epilogue]

Camp went late that summer. It lasted two more weeks, right up to the start of a new school year, and Percy had to admit they were the best two weeks of his life.

Of course, Andromeda would kill him if he said anything different, but there was a lot of other great stuff going on, too. Grover had taken over the satyr seekers and was sending them out across the world to find unclaimed half-bloods. So far, the gods had kept their promise. New demigods were popping up all over the place—not just in America, but in a lot of other countries as well. Andromeda was helping with searching, watching from afar and scouting areas all over the East Coast, and Annabeth had been helping keep everything in order.

"We can hardly keep up," Grover admitted one afternoon as he and Percy were taking a break at the canoe lake. "We're going to need a bigger travel budget, and I could use a hundred more satyrs."

"Yeah, but the satyrs you have are working super hard," Percy said. "I think they're scared of you."

Grover blushed. "That's silly. I'm not scary."

"You're a Lord of the Wild, dude. The chosen one of Pan. A member of the Council of—"

"Stop it!" Grover protested. "You're as bad as Juniper. I think she wants me to run for president next."

He chewed on a tin can as they stared across the pond at the line of new cabins under construction. The U-shape would soon be a complete rectangle, and the demigods had really taken to the new task with gusto.

Nico had some undead builders working on the Hades cabin. Even though he was still the only kid in it, it was going to look pretty cool—solid obsidian walls with a skull over the door and torches that burned with green fire twenty-four hours a day. Next to that were the cabins of Iris, Nemesis, Hecate and several others Percy didn't recognize. They kept adding new ones to the blueprints every day. It was going so well Annabeth and Chiron were talking about adding an entirely new wing of cabins just so they could have enough room.

The Hermes cabin was a lot less crowded now, because most of the unclaimed kids had received signs from their godly parents. It happened almost every night, and every night more demigods straggled over the property line with the satyr guides, usually with some nasty monsters pursuing them, but almost all of them made it through.

Percy had noticed that Nico and Andromeda were spending a lot of time together, more than before. He had a feeling it was because they understood each other in ways that no one else could, that maybe they found comfort in their similar losses. But they also got along, Andromeda bringing out the little kid who just wanted hugs and to talk about things no one else understood, and Nico bringing out the talkative, brilliant piece of her that she tried to hide. They would exchange stories that the other didn't know, and most of the time the two could be found in the forest or sitting in the strawberry fields together. Percy liked that they had each other to talk to.