After sixteen years, I did not expect to be chased by two metal cows with my aunt sally, little cousin Percy Jackson, and Percy's best friend- Grover Underwood.
but the one thing I never saw coming,
Was Luke castellan.
And the war, duh.
along with t...
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Once Percy got over the fact that his Latin teacher was a horse, we had a nice tour, though I was careful to keep Percy to walk behind him. We did do pooper-scooper patrol in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade a few times, and I'm sorry, I did not trust Chiron's back end the way I trusted his front.
We passed the volleyball pit. Several of the campers nudged each other. One pointed to the Minotaur horn Percy, and I was carrying. Another said, 'That's them.'
Most of the campers were younger than me but older than Percy. Their satyr friends were bigger than Grover, all of them trotting around in orange CAMP HALF-BLOOD T-shirts, with nothing else to cover their bare shaggy hindquarters. I wasn't normally shy, but the way they stared at Percy, and I made me uncomfortable. I felt like they were expecting us to do a cartwheel or something.
I tugged Percy to my side and glared at the kids pointing at Percy, low thunder rose in the distance.
that just made them stare at me more, almost afraid.
I looked back at the farmhouse. It was a lot bigger than I'd realized – four stories tall, sky blue with white trim, like an upmarket seaside resort. I was checking out the brass eagle weathervane on top when something caught my eye, a shadow in the uppermost window of the attic gable. Something had moved the curtain, just for a second, and I got the distinct impression I was being watched.
'What's up there?' I asked Chiron.
He looked where I was pointing, and his smile faded. 'Just the attic.'
'Somebody lives there?' Percy asked.
'No,' he said with finality. 'Not a single living thing.'
I got the feeling he was being truthful. But I was also sure something had moved that curtain.
'Come along, Percy,' Chiron said, his lighthearted tone now a little forced. 'Lots to see.'
We walked through the strawberry fields, where campers were picking bushels of berries while a satyr played a tune on a reed pipe.
Chiron told us the camp grew a nice crop for export to New York restaurants and Mount Olympus. 'It pays our expenses,' he explained. 'And the strawberries take almost no effort.'
He said Mr. D had this effect on fruit-bearing plants: they just went crazy when he was around. It worked best with wine grapes, but Mr. D was restricted from growing those, so they grew strawberries instead.
I watched the satyr playing his pipe. His music was causing lines of bugs to leave the strawberry patch in every direction, like refugees fleeing a fire. I wondered if Grover could work that kind of magic with music. I wondered if he was still inside the farmhouse, being lectured by Mr. D.
