CHAPTER 5 (Part-1)

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(Ella's POV)

The sun was setting behind the dining pavilion as the campers came up from their cabins. Percy, Tyson & I stood in the shadow of a marble column & watched them file in.

Annie was still pretty shaken up, but she promised she’d talk to us later. Then she went off to join her siblings from the Athena cabin-a dozen boys & girls with blond hair & gray eyes like her. Annie wasn’t the oldest, but she’d been at camp more summers than just about anybody. You could tell that by looking at her camp necklace-one bead for every summer, & Annabeth had six. No one questioned her right to lead the line.

Next came Clarisse, leading the Ares cabin. She had one arm in a sling & a nasty-looking gash on her cheek, but otherwise her encounter with the bronze bulls didn’t seem to have fazed her. Someone had taped a piece of paper to herbback that said, YOU MOO, GIRL! But nobody in her cabin was bothering to tell her about it.

After the Ares kids came the Hephaestus cabin-six guys led by Charles Beckendorf, a big fifteen year old African American kid. He had hands the size of catchers’ mitts & a face that was hard & squinty from looking into a blacksmiths forge all day.

He was nice enough once you got to know him, but no one ever called him Charlie, Chuck or Charles. Most just called him Beckendorf. Rumor was he could make anything. Give him a chunk of metal & he could create a razor- sharp sword or a robotic warrior or a singing birdbath for your grandmother’s garden...

The other cabins filed in: Demeter, Apollo, Aphrodite, Dionysus. Naiads came up from the canoe lake. Dryads melted out of the trees. From the meadow there came a dozen satyrs, who reminded me painfully of Grover.
I’d always had a soft spot for the satyrs.

When they were at camp, they had to do all kinds of odd jobs for Mr. D, the director, but their most important work was out in the real world. They were the camp’s seekers. They went undercover into schools all over the world, looking for potential half-bloods & escorting them back to camp. That’s how I’d met Grover. He had been the first one to recognize I was a demigod.

After the satyrs filed in to dinner, the Hermes cabin brought up the rear. They were always the biggest cabin. Last summer, it had been led by Luke, the guy who’d fought with my sister Thalia & Annie on top of Half-Blood Hill. Before he'd...betrayed us all..

Now the Hermes cabin was led by Travis and Connor Stoll. They weren’t twins, but they looked so much alike it didn’t matter. They were both tall & skinny, with mops of brown hair that hung in their eyes. They wore orange Camp Half-Blood T-shirts untucked over baggy shorts, & they had those elfish features all Hermes’s kids had: upturned eyebrows, sarcastic smiles, a gleam in their eyes whenever they look at you-like they're about to drop a firecracker down your shirt.

As soon as the last campers had filed in, Percy led Tyson into the middle of the
pavilion. I followed behind. Conversations faltered. Heads turned. “Who invited that?” somebody at the Apollo table murmured.

I glared in their direction, but I couldn’t figure out who’d spoken.

From the head table a familiar voice said, “Well, well, if it isn’t Peter Johnson. My millennium is complete.”

Percy gritted his teeth. “Percy Jackson..sir.”

Mr. D sipped his Diet Coke. “Yes. Well, as you young people say these days: Whatever.”

He was wearing his usual leopard- pattern Hawaiian shirt, walking shorts, & tennis shoes with black socks. 

Behind him, a nervous looking satyr was peeling the skin off grapes & handing them to Mr. D one at a time. His real name is Dionysus. The god of wine. Zeus appointed him director of Camp Half-Blood for a hundred years, as punishment for chasing some off-limits wood nymph.

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