σɾɳιƚԋαʂ (ρʝσ x ɱαʅҽ σƈ)

I Learn How it Feels to be Betrayed

Theo's POV

We were the first heroes to return alive to Half-Blood Hill since Luke, so of course everybody treated us as if we'd won some reality-TV contest. According to camp tradition, we wore laurel wreaths to a big feast prepared in our honor, then led a procession down to the bonfire, where we got to burn the burial shrouds our cabins had made for us in our absence.

Annabeth's shroud was so beautiful—gray silk with embroidered owls—I told her it seemed a shame not to bury her in it. She punched me and told me to shut up.

Seeing as I'm the son of Artemis, I didn't have any cabinmates. Luckily, the Apollo campers came through. Silver silk with crescent moons, bows, and arrows embroidered all over it.

Percy was on the same boat as me, having no cabinmates since he was the son of Poseidon. But unlike me, he wasn't so lucky. The Ares campers volunteered to make his shroud, and what did they do? They'd taken an old bedsheet and painted smiley faces with X'ed-out eyes around the border, and the word LOSER painted really big in the middle.

Percy burned it when no one was looking.

As Apollo's cabin led the sing-along and passed out s'mores, I was surrounded by my old Hermes cabinmates, Annabeth's friends from Athena, my cousins from Apollo, and Grover's satyr buddies, who were admiring the brand-new searcher's license he'd received from the Council of Cloven Elders. The council had called Grover's performance on the quest "Brave to the point of indigestion. Horns-and-whiskers above anything we have seen in the past."

The only ones not in a party mood were Clarisse and her cabinmates, whose poisonous looks told me they'd never forgive me for disgracing their dad.

I told Percy, Grover, and Annabeth everything Hermes told me. I thought they were going to shut me out, but instead, they brought me into a group, saying that it wouldn't change who I am to them. That really made me smile.

Doesn't really help when I bring up the fact that I shot him in the ass just to rub some salt in the wound.

Even Dionysus's welcome-home speech wasn't enough to dampen my spirits.

Mr. D: Yes, yes, so the little brats didn't get themselves killed and now they'll have an even bigger head. Well, huzzah for that. In other announcements, there will be no canoe races this Saturday...

I moved back to cabin 8. It didn't feel so lonely anymore. I had my friends to train with during the day. At night, I lay awake and stared at the moon and stars, knowing my mother was out there.

One day, Percy told me about a letter got from his mother. Apparently, she used Medusa's head to petrify Gabe and sell his stone ass to a collector, through an art gallery in Soho and got a lot of money for it.

Percy and I laughed about it for hours.

His mother also found a private school in New York and put a deposit in case he wanted to enroll for seventh grade.

A day later, I brought my left bracer to Beckendorf, hoping that he could fix the shield. He did that in an hour, and it came as good as new.

On the Fourth of July, the whole camp gathered at the beach for a fireworks display by cabin 9. Being Hephaestus's kids, they weren't going to settle for a few lame red-white-and-blue explosions. They'd anchored a barge offshore and loaded it with rockets the size of Patriot missiles. According to Annabeth, who'd seen the show before, the blasts would be sequenced so tightly they'd look like frames of animation across the sky. The finale was supposed to be a couple of hundred-foot-tall Spartan warriors who would crackle to life above the ocean, fight a battle, and then explode into a million colors.