¹Royal Cries, p. jackson

008.

ROYAL CRIES
━━ chapter eight

━━ ELISA THOUGHT THEY had lost the spider until Tyson heard a faint pinging sound. The five made a few turns, backtracked a couple of times, and eventually found the spider banging its tiny head on a metal door.

               The door looked like one of those old-fashioned submarine hatches—oval with metal rivets around the edge and a wheel for a doorknob. Where the portal should've been was a big brass plaque, green with age, with the Greek Êta inscribed in the middle.

               The five looked at each other.

               "Ready to meet Hephaestus?" Grover said nervously.

               "No," Percy admitted.

               Elisa stared at the door with apprehension. She didn't like Hephaestus, not after his failed automation back in the junkyard of the gods. It didn't matter to her if that prototype of Talos was a fluke, and wasn't up to the usual standard of the God of Forges's work, it still got Bianca killed.

               "Yes!" Tyson said gleefully, and he turned the wheel.

               As soon as the door opened, the spider scuttled inside with Tyson right behind it. The rest of them followed, clearly not as excited.

               The room was enormous. It looked like a mechanic's garage, with several hydraulic lifts. Some had cars on them, but others had stranger things: a bronze hippalektryon with its horse head off and a bunch of wires hanging out of its rooster tail, a metal lion that seemed to be hooked up to a battery charger, and a Greek war chariot made entirely of flames.

               Smaller projects cluttered a dozen worktables. Tools hung along the walls. Each had its own outline on a peg board, but nothing seemed to be in the right place. The hammer was over the screwdriver place. The staple gun was where the hacksaw was supposed to go.

               Under the nearest hydraulic lift, which was holding a '98 Toyota Corolla, a pair of legs stuck out—the lower half of a huge man in grubby grey overalls and shoes even bigger than Tyson's. One leg was in a metal brace.

               The spider scuttled straight under the car, and the sounds of banging stopped.

               "Well, well," a deep voice boomed from under the Corolla. "What have we here?"

               The mechanic pushed out on a back trolley and sat up. Elisa had seen Hephaestus before, briefly last winter during the winter solstice, so the girl thought she was prepared, but the god's appearance made her falter.

               The daughter of Dionysus guesses he'd cleaned up when she saw him on Olympus or used magic to make his form seem a little less hideous. Here in his own workshop, he apparently didn't care how he looked. He wore overalls smeared with oil and grime. Hephaestus was embroidered over the chest pocket. His leg creaked and clicked in its metal brace as he stood, and his left shoulder was lower than his right, so he seemed to be leaning even when he was standing up straight. His head was misshapen and bulging. He wore a permanent scowl. His black beard smoked and hissed. Every once in a while a small wildfire would erupt in his whiskers and then die out. His hands were the size of catcher's mitts, but he handled the spider with amazing skill. He disassembled it in two seconds, then put it back together.

               "There," he muttered to himself. "Much better."

               The spider did a happy flip in his palm, shot a metallic web at the ceiling, and went swinging away.