forest green ● jason grace

sixteen

Airplanes or cannibals? no contest.

Percy would've preferred driving Grandma Zhang's Cadillac all the way to Alaska with fireball-throwing ogres on his tail rather than sitting in a luxury Gulf stream.

He'd flown before. The details were hazy, but he remembered a pegasus named Blackjack. He'd even been in a plane once or twice. But a son of Neptune (Poseidon, whatever) didn't belong in the air. Every time the plane hit a spot of turbulence, Percy's heart raced, and he was sure Jupiter was slapping them around.

Daria looked just as uneasy as he was. Her right hand was clenching the arm rest and her left was drumming some sort of pattern. Obviously, she was the daughter of some kind of earth goddess; Demeter perhaps.

He tried to focus as Frank and Hazel talked. Hazel was reassuring Frank that he'd done everything he could for his grandmother. Frank had saved them from the Laistrygonians and gotten them out of Vancouver. He'd been incredibly brave.

Frank kept his head down like he was ashamed to have been crying, but Percy didn't blame him. The poor guy had just lost his grandmother and seen his house go up in flames. As far as Percy was concerned, shedding a few tears about something like that didn't make you any less of a man, especially when you had just fended off an army of ogres that wanted to eat you for breakfast.

Percy still couldn't get over the fact that Frank was a distant relative. Frank would be his...what? Great-times-a-thousand nephew? Too weird for words.

Frank refused to explain exactly what his "family gift" was, but as they flew north, Frank did tell them about his conversation with Mars the night before. He explained the prophecy Juno had issued when he was a baby — about his life being tied to a piece of firewood, and how he had asked Hazel to keep it for him.

Some of that, Percy had already figured out. Hazel and Frank had obviously shared some crazy experiences when they had blacked out together, and they'd made some sort of deal. It also explained why even now, out of habit, Frank kept checking his coat pocket, and why he was so nervous around fire. Still, Percy couldn't imagine what kind of courage it had taken for Frank to embark on a quest, knowing that one small flame could snuff out his life.

"Frank," he said, "I'm proud to be related to you."

Frank's ears turned red. With his head lowered, his military haircut made a sharp black arrow pointing down. "Juno has some sort of plan for us, about the Prophecy of Eight."

"Yeah," Percy grumbled. "I didn't like her as Hera. I don't like her any better as Juno." Daria tucked her feet underneath her. She studied Percy with her sharp green eyes, and he wondered how he could never get a read on her, yet trust her so much. Ever since she had found out about her boyfriend being alive, there was a new spark in her, and now, Percy would be terrified to be at the receiving end of anything his cousin could dish out.

"You're a son of Poseidon, aren't you?" she asked. "You are a Greek demigod."

Percy gripped his leather necklace. "I started to remember in Portland, after the gorgon's blood. It's been coming back to me slowly since then. There's another camp — Camp Half-Blood."

Just saying the name made Percy feel warm inside. Good memories washed over him: the smell of strawberry fields in the warm summer sun, fireworks lighting up the beach on the Fourth of July, satyrs playing panpipes at the nightly campfire, and a kiss at the bottom of the canoe lake.

Hazel and Frank stared at him as though he'd slipped into another language. Daria however, didn't look as surprised as he expected.

"Another camp," Hazel repeated. "A Greek camp? Gods, if Octavian found out — "