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Percy took up blackjack's offer to give him a ride down the beach and he had to admit how awesome it was. Being on a flying horse, skimming over the waves at a hundred miles an hour with the wind in his hair and the sea spray in his face - it beat waterskiing any day, not that he had tried it.
Here. Blackjack slowed and turned in a circle. Straight down.
"Thanks." He tumbled off his back and plunged into the icy sea. He'd gotten more comfortable doing stunts like that the past couple of years. He could pretty much move however he wanted to underwater, just by willing the ocean currents to change around him and propel him along, he could breathe underwater, no problem, and his clothes never got wet unless he wanted them to.
He shot down into the darkness.
Twenty, thirty, forty feet. The pressure wasn't uncomfortable. He'd never tried to push it-to see if there was a limit to how deep he could dive. He knew most regular humans couldn't go past two hundred feet without crumpling like an aluminum can. He should've been blind, too, this deep in the water at night, but he could see the heat from living forms, and the cold of the currents. It was hard to describe. It wasn't like regular seeing, but he could tell where everything was.
As he got closer to the bottom, he saw three hippocampi-fish-tailed horses-swimming in a circle around an overturned boat. The hippocampi were beautiful to watch. Their fish tails shimmered in rainbow colors, glowing phosphorescent. Their manes were white, and they were galloping through the water the way nervous horses do in a thunderstorm. Something was upsetting them.
He got closer and saw the problem. A dark shape-some kind of animal-was wedged halfway under the boat and tangled in a fishing net, one of those big nets they use on trawlers to catch everything at once. He hated those things. It was bad enough they drowned porpoises and dolphins, but they also occasionally caught mythological animals. When the nets got tangled, some lazy fishermen would just cut them loose and let the trapped animals die.
Apparently this poor creature had been mucking around on the bottom of Long Island Sound and had somehow gotten itself tangled in the net of this sunken fishing boat. It had tried to get out and managed to get even more hopelessly stuck, shifting the boat in the process. Now the wreckage of the hull, which was resting against a big rock, was teetering and threatening to collapse on top of the tangled animal.
The hippocampi were swimming around frantically, wanting to help but not sure how. One was trying to chew the net, but hippocampi teeth just aren't meant for cutting rope. Hippocampi are really strong, but they don't have hands, and they're not all that smart.
Free it, lord! A hippocampus said when it saw him. The others joined in, asking the same thing.
Percy swam in for a closer look at the tangled creature. At first he thought it was a young hippocampus. He'd rescued several of them before. But then he heard a strange sound, something that did not belong underwater; "Mooooooo!"
