The Dragon's Daughter

xv. briares

The good news of the day: the left tunnel they chose was straight with no side exits, twists, or turns.

The bad news: It was a dead end. After sprinting a hundred yards, they ran into an enormous boulder that completely blocked their path. Behind, the sounds of dragging footsteps and heavy breathing echoed down the corridor. Something definitely not human was on their tail.

“Tyson,” Percy said, “can you—”

“Yes!” He slammed his shoulder against the rock so hard the whole tunnel shook. Dust trickled from the stone ceiling.

“Hurry!” Grover said. “Don’t bring the roof down, but hurry!”

The boulder finally gave way with a horrible grinding noise. Tyson pushed it into a small room and they dashed through behind it.

“Close the entrance!”

They all got on the other side of the boulder and pushed. Whatever was chasing them wailed in frustration as the rock was back into place and sealed the corridor.

“We trapped it,” Percy said.

“Or we might have just trapped ourselves,” Elora said.

They were in a twenty foot square cement room and the opposite wall was covered with metal bars.

They'd tunneled straight into a cell.

“What in Hades?” Annabeth tugged on the bars. They didn’t budge. Through the bars they could see rows of cells in a ring around a dark courtyard—at least three stories of metal doors and metal catwalks.

“A prison,” Percy said. “Maybe Tyson can break—”

“Shh,” said Grover. “Listen.”

Somewhere above them, deep sobbing echoed through the building. There was another sound, too—a raspy voice muttering something. The words were strange.

“What’s that language?”

Tyson’s eye widened. “Can’t be.”
“What?”

Tyson grabbed two bars on their cell door and bent them wide enough for even a Cyclops to slip through.

“Wait!” Grover called.

But Tyson wasn’t about to wait. They ran after him. The prison was dark, only a few dim fluorescent lights flickering above.

“I know this place,” Annabeth told me. “This is Alcatraz.”

“The island near San Francisco?” Elora asked.

She nodded. “My school took a field trip here. It’s like a museum.”

“Freeze,” Grover warned.

But Tyson kept going. Grover grabbed his arm and pulled him back with all his strength.

“Stop, Tyson!” he whispered. “Can’t you see it?”

She looked where he was pointing. On the second floor balcony, across the courtyard, was a monster more horrible than anything she'd ever seen before.

The monster was sort of like a centaur, with a woman’s body from the waist up. Instead of a horse’s lower body, it had the body of a dragon—really long, black and scaly with enormous claws and a barbed tail. Her legs looked like they were tangled in vines, but then as she observed more closely, she realized they were sprouting snakes, hundreds of vipers darting around.

Yikes.

The woman’s hair was also made of snakes, like Medusa’s. The weird thing is, the part where the woman's body met the dragon part, her skin bubbled and morphed, occasionally producing the  heads of animals. A wolf, a bear, a lion.