Loyalties

Chapter VII

Lennie's POV

Too much happened in the last few days.

Less than a week ago, I was chilling with Jack and Carlos, eating unhealthy food and watching Tales of Arcadia.

Right now?

I was on a torn-up ship with the my brothers, Annabeth, the worst bully in Camp Half-Blood, and a dozen skeleton warriors in the middle of the Sea of Monsters. We were caught in a storm. My heart sped up as waves licked the edges of the ship hungrily, eager to swallow us whole. I tried controlling the ocean like Poseidon taught me to, but  I couldn't concentrate midst the chaos.

The engine groaned, the iron plating rattled, and the ship began to pick up speed. "Clarisse," Percy shouted over the noise, "Charybdis sucks up the sea. Isn't that the story?"

"And spits it back out again, yeah." Clarisse agreed.

"What about Scylla?"

"She lives in a cave, up on those cliffs. If we get too close, her snaky heads will come down and start plucking sailors off the ship."

"Choose Scylla then," I piped up. "Everybody goes below deck and we chug right past."

"No!" Clarisse insisted. "If Scylla doesn't get her easy meat, she might pick up the whole ship. Besides, she's too high to make a good target. My cannons can't shoot straight up. Charybdis just sits there at the center of her whirlwind. We're going to steam straight toward her, train our guns on her, and blow her to Tartarus!"

She said it with such relish I almost wanted to believe her.

The engine hummed. The boilers were heating up so much I could feel the deck getting warm beneath my feet. The smokestacks billowed. The red Ares flag whipped in the wind.

As we got closer to the monsters, the sound of Charybdis got louder and louder—a horrible wet roar like the galaxy's biggest toilet being flushed. Every time Charybdis inhaled, the ship shuddered and lurched forward. Every time she exhaled, we rose in the water and were buffeted by ten-foot waves.

I tried to time the whirlpool. As near as I could figure, it took Charybdis about three minutes to suck up and destroy everything within a half-mile radius. To avoid her, we would have to skirt right next to Scylla's cliffs. And as bad as Scylla might be, those cliffs were looking awfully good to me.

Undead sailors calmly went about their business on the spar deck. I guess they'd fought a losing cause before, so this didn't bother them. Or maybe they didn't care about getting destroyed because they were already deceased. Neither thought made me feel any better.

Annabeth stood next to Percy, gripping the rail. "You still have your thermos full of wind?"

He nodded. "But it's too dangerous to use with a whirlpool like that. More wind might just make things worse."

"What about controlling the water?" she asked me. "You're Poseidon's daughter. You could try."

She was right. I closed my eyes and tried to calm the sea, but I couldn't concentrate. Charybdis was too loud and powerful. The waves wouldn't respond.
"I—I can't," I said miserably.