Chapter Text
I woke a few times, barely catching anything going on around me, and when I stayed awake, I found myself sitting in a deck chair on a wrap around porch gazing at green meadows. It smelled like strawberries rather than car exhaust, and I couldn’t hear any sort of traffic. There was a quilt over my legs and a pillow propping up my head. My mouth was dry and tasted nasty.
There was a drink on a side table next to me. It looked like iced apple juice with a straw which sounded amazing to me. I almost dropped the glass trying to bring it closer.
“Careful.”
I saw Grover standing by the railing, looking exhausted. He had a shoe box under one arm, and he was wearing a bright orange shirt that said CAMP HALF-BLOOD. He also had on jeans and converse rather than having goat legs.
Maybe I’d just had a really weird and too realistic nightmare.
“You saved my life,” Grover said as he approached me. “This was the least I could do. I went back up the hill, and well, I thought you might want this.”
He carefully set the shoebox in my lap. Nestled inside was a broken off bull’s horn.
It hadn’t been a nightmare.
“The Minotaur.”
“Uh, Percy, you really shouldn’t—,”
“That’s what they called him in the myths, right?” I asked. “Half man, half bull.”
Grover shuffled his feet. “You’ve been out for two days. How much do you remember?”
“My mom, is she really?”
He avoided my eyes.
I stared out past the porch railing. It was a bright sunny day. The grass was green, there were acres of strawberries, groves of trees, and a winding stream. There were rolling hills surrounding the valley, and the tallest one right in front of me had the huge pine tree I’d used to fight the Minotaur. It looked grand and beautiful with a clear sky for a background.
My mother was dead. Everything should be cold and withered. Nothing should be beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” Grover sniffled. “I’m a failure. I’m the worst satyr in the world.”
I should probably care that satyrs and Minotaurs were real, but all that mattered was that my mother really had been choked until she’d turned into glitter. I was on my own. An orphan. Would I have to live with Smelly Gabe? Definitely not. I’d do everything I could to avoid that.
Then I thought of something else. “What about that college kid?”
“College kid?” Grover asked, almost stopping his sniffling.
“The guy with the bow. What happened to him?”
“There was a guy with a bow?”
“Yeah, he was the one that carried you here.”
Grover shook his head. “They just told me you’d killed the monster. It could have been one of the campers, I guess. I’m so sorry. This was my fault. I was supposed to protect you.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I told him. “Like did my mom ask you to protect me?”
“No, but it’s my job. I’m a keeper. Or at least, I was.”
“But why,” I said, cutting off as I felt a wave of dizziness wash over me.
“Don’t strain yourself. Here, drink this,” he said, offering me the glass and putting the straw to my lips.
I almost choked on the drink not expecting it to taste like freshly baked cookies, specifically my mother’s homemade blue chocolate chip cookies. It filled my chest with warmth, better than even hot chocolate on a cold night. It felt like my mom had brushed her hand through my hair and told me everything was going to be alright. I drained the whole glass.
“Was it good?” Grover asked.
I nodded.
“What did it taste like?” he asked.
Before I could answer, three blond kids had run up to the railing.
“Hey,” the oldest looking one said, smacking one of the posts to make sure she had our attention. “We heard you saw Dad. Was he okay?”
“Your dad?” Grover asked, voice going up in pitch.
“College guy?” I asked, so confused. I could believe the kids were related to the guy since they all seemed to have the same blond hair and matching features, but there was no way some guy who was twenty at max was old enough to have what looked like a ten year old kid. “He’s your dad?”
“Did he have a gold bow?” the second kid asked.
“Yeah.”
“That was him!” the third kid shouted, all three brightening up. “Did he say anything?”
“No, sorry,” I said, feeling bad at the way their faces fell again. “But he was cool. He carried Grover to the house.”
Grover made a strangled noise as the three kids giggled.
“Come on, we need to see Chiron and Mr. D,” Grover said, helping me to my feet.
“Bye,” one of the kids called before they ran off again.
I felt like one strong breeze from being blown over trying to walk around the porch. Grover offered to carry the horn, but I refused to let it go. That little souvenir had cost me my mother. I wasn’t about to let it go.
My jaw dropped when we rounded the corner of the house. We had to be on the north shore of Long Island as I could see the water about a mile from the porch. The place had to be some sort of reenactor camp because aside from the farmhouse, everything looked like it had been plopped down straight from ancient Greece. Except there were also volleyball sandpits and a small lake where people canoed with the modern plastic ones. There was a cluster of cabins on the edge of the woods with kids riding horses on the paths behind them. Some of the horses even looked like they had wings.
At the other end of the porch, two men sat at a card table. The blond girl from the night I arrived was leaning against the railing. Just how many blond kids did this camp have?
The man facing me was short and round with curly black hair and a red nose. He wore a tiger striped Hawaiian shirt, and he looked like he could have fit right in at Smelly Gabe’s poker table.
“That’s Mr. D,” Grover said quietly to me. “He’s the camp director. You have to be polite to him. The girl’s Annabeth Chase, one of the campers. She’d been here longer than just about anybody. You already know Chiron.”
The second man at the table turned to face me, and I recognized his wheelchair, brown hair, and scraggly beard.
“Mr. Brunner,” I said, surprised.
He smiled at me. “Ah, good, you’re feeling better. Now we have four for pinochle.”
He gestured to the chair to the write of Mr. D who looked at me sullenly and sighed as I sat down.
“I suppose I have to say it. Welcome to Camp Half-Blood. There. Now don’t expect me to be happy about it,” Mr. D said.
“Thanks,” I said, scooting my chair away from him. If there was one thing I’d learned from Gabe, it was how to tell when an adult had been hitting the happy juice. If Mr. D was a stranger to alcohol, I was a satyr.
“Annabeth?” Mr. Brunner asked.
She stepped forward.
“This young lady nursed you back to health, Percy. Annabeth, my dear, why don’t you go check on Percy's bunk? We’ll be putting him in cabin eleven for now.”
“Sure, Chiron,” she said.
She was around my age, maybe a couple inches taller, and a lot more athletic looking. She could have been a stereotypical California girl with her blond hair and tan, but her eyes were a stormy gray. They were pretty, but also kind of intimidating. She glanced down at the horn then back up, and I thought she might say something nice like good job or that she was impressed by me.
Instead, she said, “You drool when you sleep.”
Then she sprinted off the porch like the other kids had.
“So, you work here, Mr. Brunner?” I asked to get as far away from that topic as possible.
“I’m afraid that was a pseudonym,” he said. “You may call me Chiron.”
“Okay,” I said, bewildered. I turned to the director. “And Mr. D…does that stand for something?”
“Young man,” he said as he folded the cards. “Names are powerful things. You don’t just go around using them for no reason.”
“Oh, right, sorry.”
“Grover, sit down,” Mr. D commanded.
“Yes, sir,” he said and sat across from me right away.
“You do know how to play pinochle?” Mr. D then asked me suspiciously.
“I’m afraid not.”
“I’m afraid not, sir.”
“Sir,” I tacked on, liking him even less.
“It’s one of the greatest games ever invented by humans. I would expect all civilized young men to know the rules.”
“I’m sure the boy can learn,” Chiron said.
“Please, what is this place? What am I doing here?” I asked.
“Percy, did you mother tell you nothing?” he asked.
“She said…she was afraid to send me here even though my father wanted her to.”
“Typical,” Mr. D said as he finished dealing. “That’s how they usually get killed. Young man, are you bidding or not?”
“What?” I asked.
He explained the rules quickly, and I bid.
“I’m afraid there’s too much to tell, and our usual orientation film won’t be sufficient,” Chiron said.
“Orientation film?” I asked.
“Percy, you’re aware that Grover is a satyr, and that you have killed the Minotaur. No small feat, either, lad,” Chiron said rather than answering me. “What you may not know is that great powers are at work in your life. Gods —the ones you call the Greek gods— are very much alive.”
I stared at everyone around the table. I waited for someone to shout psych or something. No one did.
“Wait, you’re telling me there’s such a thing as God?” I asked.
“Well, capital G, God, is a different matter altogether. Gods, plural, as in great beings that control the forces of nature and human endeavors, the immortal gods of Olympus. They exist.”
“Zeus, Hera, Apollo,” I said. “You mean them.”
There was a sound of distant thunder despite the cloudless sky. The sun also seemed to get brighter for a moment.
“Young man,” Mr. D said. “I would really be less casual about throwing those names around if I were you.”
“But they’re stories, myths, to explain lightning and seasons and stuff,” I said. “What people believed before there was science.”
“Science,” Mr. D scoffed. “Tell me, Perseus Jackson—,”
I flinched at the sound of my real name. I never told it to anyone.
“—what will people think of your science two thousand years from now? They will call it primitive mumbo jumbo. That’s what. Oh, I love mortals. They have absolutely no sense of perspective.”
He said mortals as if he wasn’t one.
“Percy, you may choose to believe or not, but immortal means immortal. Can you imagine for a moment existing as you are for all of time?” Chiron asked.
“You mean, whether people believed in you or not,” I said.
“Exactly,” Chiron said with a nod. “If you were a god, how would you like being called a myth, an old story to explain lightning?”
I frowned. “I wouldn’t like it, but I don’t believe in gods.”
“Oh, you’d better start before one of them incinerates you,” Mr. D murmured.
“Please, sir, he’s just lost his mother. He’s in shock,” Grover said.
“A lucky thing, too,” Mr. D said. “It’s bad enough I’m confined to this miserable job taking care of boys who don’t even believe.”
He waved his hand and a golden goblet appeared on the table as if it was crafted from the air then it filled with red wine. I gaped at it, but Chiron hardly looked up from his cards.
“Your restrictions,” Chiron said.
“Dear me,” Mr. D said, feigning surprise before he yelled up to the sky, “Old habits! Sorry!”
There was more thunder, then Mr. D waved his hand and the wine transformed into a can of diet coke.
“Mr. D offended his father by taking fancy to a wood nymph who had been declared off limit,” Chiron explained.
“A wood nymph,” I repeated dumbly.
“Yes, father loves to punish me. The first time, Prohibition, ghastly!” Mr. D said, shaking his head as if he’d tasted something nasty. “Absolutely horrid ten years.”
“And…your father is…”
“I thought you taught this boy the basics, Chiron,” Mr. D said. “My father is Zeus, of course.”
I ran through D names from Greek mythology. “You’re Dionysus, the god of wine.”
Mr. D rolled his eyes. “Obviously. What, did you think I was Aphrodite?”
“You’re a god?”
“Yes, child.”
“A god. You.”
He turned to look me straight in the eyes. There was a sort of purplish fire there, a hint that this whiny little man was only showing a hint of his true power. I saw grape vines choking unbelievers, drunken warriors possessed by battle lust, sailors screaming as their hands turned to flippers and their faces into dolphin snouts. I knew if I pushed, Mr. D would show me worse.
“Would you like to test me?” he asked.
“No, no, sir.”
He looked away, and I felt like I could breathe more easily.
“I believe I win,” he said, referring to the card game I’d barely been paying attention to.
“Not quite, Mr. D,” Chiron said, setting down his cards. “The game goes to me.”
I thought for half a second that Mr. D would vaporize Chiron, but he sighed.
“The guy last night, with the bow,” I said. “He glowed.”
“Yes,” Chiron answered.
“He’s also a god?” I asked. “Which one is he?”
“You couldn’t guess from the bow?” Mr. D asked. “I know you at least know of his existence since you already listed him.”
“Apollo,” I said, getting a confirming nod from Chiron. “Why was he there? Was he punished, too?”
Mr. D chortled. “No, but he is a glutton for it. He does so enjoy flirting with the rules.”
“He is the god of the protection of the young,” Chiron said. “He assists the satyrs where he can in escorting children to the camp.”
I nodded slowly, still trying to sort out the three blond kids who’d called him their dad. “But he couldn’t do much. I saw his arrow go right through without doing any damage.”
“Of course,” Mr. D said as he got up from his seat. “Gods aren’t supposed to interfere in mortal affairs, especially not concerning their own children. Come on, Grover. We need to discuss your less than stellar performance.”
Grover immediately began to sweat. “Y-yes, sir.”
Mr. D shot me a look. "Cabin eleven, Percy Jackson, and mind your manners."
He strode into the farmhouse with Grover dejectedly following.
"Is Grover gonna be okay?" I asked Chiron.
"Mr. D isn't really mad," he said with a nod. "He just hates his job. He's been grounded, I guess you could say, and he can't stand waiting around another century before he's allowed to go back to Olympus."
"Mount Olympus. There's really a palace there?" I asked.
"There's the mountain in Greece, and then there's the home of the gods, the seat of their power, which did used to be on that mountain. It's still called that out of respect, but the palace moves just as the gods do."
"You mean the Greek gods are here in America?" I asked. "Not just Mr. D at this camp?"
"Certainly. The gods move with the heart of the west."
"The what?"
"What's called western civilization. It's not an abstract concept, but a living force. The gods are a part of it, maybe the source of it, but they are tied so closely to it they couldn't fade unless all of western civilization were obliterated. It started in Greece then the heart of the fire moved to Rome and so did the gods with a few name changes along the way."
"And then they died with the empire."
"Died? No. Did the west die? Besides, only the western empire collapsed. The gods actually moved east that one time to what is now Instanbul until the thirteenth century when they then moved west to Europe. They spent a few centuries in England, but now America is the heart of the flame. All you need to do is track the architecture. Every place they've ruled in the last three thousand years you can see them in paintings, statues, the most important buildings. So Olympus is here, and we are here."
He said we like I was included in all this.
"But who are you, Chiron? Who am I?" I asked.
Chiron shifted as if he was going to stand from his wheelchair. "Well, who you are is the question we all want answered, isn't it? For now, though, you will need a bunk in cabin eleven. There will be new friends to meet and time for plenty of lessons tomorrow."
Then he stood, but there was something strange about how he did it. The blanket fell from his lap, but his legs didn't move. His waist kept stretching up over his belt, and it looked like white velvet leggings until I realized it was fur. He pulled his first leg out, revealing a knobby knee and a hoof, and three more followed. He had the bottom half of a horse, and the wheelchair was left as an empty box with some fake human legs attached to the front.
I sat there staring at my half horse half man ex Latin teacher.
"What a relief," he said, shaking out one of his back legs. "Now come, Percy. Time to meet the other campers."