TERRIFIED . . . annabeth chase

forty six.

THEY FOLLOWED THE River Phlegethon, stumbling over the glassy black terrain, jumping crevices, and hiding behind rocks whenever the vampire girls slowed in front of them.

It was tricky to stay far enough back to avoid getting spotted but close enough to keep Kelli and her comrades in view through the dark hazy air. The heat from the river baked Val's skin. Every breath was like inhaling sulfur-scented fiberglass. When they needed a drink, the best they could do was sip some refreshing liquid fire and send their bodies into shutdown for a second. How fun.

At least Annabeth's ankle seemed to have healed. She was hardly limping at all. Her various cuts and scrapes had faded. She'd tied her blond hair back with a strip of denim torn from her pants leg, and in the fiery light of the river, her gray eyes flickered. Despite being beat-up, sooty, and dressed like a homeless person, she looked great to Val.

So what if they were in Tartarus? So what if they stood a slim chance of surviving? Despite her earlier thoughts, Val liked that they were together.

Even though it was just the three of them. Percy looked better. His blisters and scrapes had disappeared. His clothes looked horrible, as if he'd been cut with broken glass, which of course he had because the ground was broken glass. His eyes stood out so much that Val was drawn to them whenever he looked back to make sure she was still behind them.

She hated that he cared about her that much, and she'd grown to care for him, despite the bitterness in her chest. She was fond of him now.

Time was impossible to judge. They trudged along, following the river as it cut through the harsh landscape. Fortunately the empousai weren't exactly speed walkers. They shuffled on their mismatched bronze and donkey legs, hissing and fighting with each other, apparently in no hurry to reach the Doors of Death.

Once, the demons sped up in excitement and swarmed something that looked like a beached carcass on the riverbank. Val didn't want to know what it was, because then the empousai attacked it with relish.

When the demons moved on, Val, Percy, and Annabeth reached the spot and found nothing left except a few splintered bones and glistening stains drying in the heat of the river. Val had no doubt the empousai would devour demigods with the same gusto.

"Come on." Percy led Annabeth gently away from the scene. "We don't want to lose them."

"I wish we didn't have to follow them in the first place," Val muttered.

After a few more miles, the empousai disappeared over a ridge. When they caught up, they found themselves at the edge of another massive cliff. The River Phlegethon spilled over the side in jagged tiers of fiery waterfalls. The demon ladies were picking their way down the cliff, jumping from ledge to ledge like mountain goats.

Val's heart crept into her throat. Even if she, Percy, and Annabeth reached the bottom of the cliff alive, they didn't have much to look forward to. The landscape below them was a bleak, ash-gray plain bristling with black trees, like insect hair. The ground was pocked with blisters. Every once in a while, a bubble would swell and burst, disgorging a monster like a larva from an egg.

All the newly formed monsters were crawling and hobbling in the same direction — toward a bank of black fog that swallowed the horizon like a storm front. The Phlegethon flowed in the same direction until about halfway across the plain, where it met another river of black water. The two floods combined in a steaming, boiling cataract and flowed on as one toward the black fog.

The longer Val looked into that storm of darkness, the less she wanted to go there. It could be hiding anything — an ocean, a bottomless pit, an army of monsters. But if the Doors of Death were in that direction, it was their only chance to get home.