The Nature of a Demigod

Assailants in the Arena

[Percy's POV]

The metal door was half hidden behind a laundry bin full of dirty hotel towels. I didn't see anything strange about it, but Rachel showed me where to look, and I recognized the faint blue symbol etched in the metal.

"It hasn't been used in a long time," Annabeth said. She turned to look at Y/N. "We thought you might have gone through here to get lost."

He shrugged. "No, I took a trip to Nashville. Much worse way to almost die." I shuddered with just how casually he talked about it.

"I tried to open it once," Rachel said, "just out of curiosity. It's rusted shut."

"No." Annabeth stepped forward. "It just needs the touch of a half-blood."

Sure enough, as soon as Annabeth put her hand on the mark, it glowed blue. The metal door unsealed and creaked open, revealing a dark staircase leading down.

"Wow." Rachel looked calm, but I couldn't tell if she was pretending or not. She'd changed into a ratty Museum of Modern Art T-shirt and her regular marker-colored jeans, her blue plastic hairbrush sticking out of her pocket. Her red hair was tied back, but she still had flecks of gold in it, and traces of the gold glitter on her face. "So...after you?"

"You're the guide," Annabeth said with mock politeness. "Guide us." she grimaced. Y/N whispered something into her ear. She frowned before nodding at him and following after Rachel.

The stairs led down to a large brick tunnel. It was so dark I couldn't see two feet in front of us, but Annabeth and I had restocked on flashlights, and Y/N was given his own. As soon as we switched them on, Rachel yelped.

A skeleton was grinning at us. It wasn't human. It was huge, for one thing, at least ten feet tall. It had been strung up, chained by its wrists and ankles so it made a kind of giant X over the tunnel. But what really sent shivers down my spine was the single black eye socket in the center of its skull.

"A Cyclops," Annabeth said. "It's very old. It's not... anybody we know." Y/N patted my back in assurance. "It's too big to be our favorite son of Poseidon." he said.

It wasn't Tyson, they meant. But that didn't make me feel much better. I still felt like it had been put here as a warning. Whatever could kill a grown Cyclops, I didn't want to meet.

Rachel swallowed. "You have a friend who's a Cyclops?"

"Tyson," I said. "My half brother."

"Your half brother." she muttered.

"Trust me, Rachel. Won't the weirdest thing you'll hear or see on this trip. I can almost guarantee that." Y/N said. Whether it was meant to be a comfort, or a warning, I wasn't sure.

"Hopefully we'll find him down here," I said. "And Grover. He's a satyr."

"Oh." Her voice was unusually small. "Well then, we'd better keep moving."

She stepped under the skeleton's left arm and kept walking. My friends and I exchanged looks. Annabeth shrugged. We followed Rachel deeper into the maze.

After fifty feet we came to a crossroads. Ahead, the brick tunnel continued. To the right, the walls were made of ancient marble slabs. To the left, the tunnel was dirt and tree roots. I pointed left. "That looks like the tunnel Tyson and Grover took."

Annabeth frowned. "Yeah, but the architecture to the right, those old stones, that's more likely to lead to an ancient part of the maze, toward Daedalus's workshop."