The Hidden Oracle: Chapters 13–20

He pantomimed all sorts of chaos with his hands.

The Labyrinth is a malevolent sentient creation! It can’t be mapped or trusted.

A guttural howl interrupted the proceedings.

Then the glow became brighter: a holographic golden sickle with a few sheaves of wheat, rotating just above Meg McCaffrey.

That first generation of gods could be a stuffy bunch (I’m looking at you, Hera, Hades, Dad), but Demeter had always been a kind and loving presence—except when she was destroying mankind through pestilence and famine, but everyone has their bad days.

Now here I was—a servant to Meg McCaffrey, the most ragamuffin daughter of Demeter ever to swing a sickle.

Kayla and Austin stood over Connor, debating the need for a hair graft.

And underarm deodorant—what a ghastly idea that I should need enchanted salve to keep my armpits from producing stench!

When I was done with my morning ablutions and dressed in clean clothes from the camp store—sneakers, jeans, an orange Camp Half-Blood T-shirt, and a comfy winter coat of flannel wool—I felt almost optimistic.

I promised myself that once I achieved immortality again, I would assemble the Nine Muses and together we would create an ode, a hymnal to the power of bacon, which would move the heavens to tears and cause rapture across the universe.

I felt as if I’d been standing on the deck of a ship when an enormous, dark, and dangerous shape passed beneath the hull—a shape almost discernible, then simply gone.

Part of me took perverse satisfaction in the way he stomped the guitar until it was reduced to kindling and wires.

Maybe I would waste my time on skills I didn’t care about—like sword fighting or badminton—but I would not sully the memory of my once-perfect music and archery.

It would have been foolhardy to run after him, straight into the most dangerous part of camp.

I imagined the branches turning to arms; the leaves undulated like green hands.

I stood forlornly in a corner of the pavilion and ate a sandwich.

I watched the sun wane in the winter sky and I thought about my chariot, my poor horses stuck in their stables with no one to take them out for a ride.

His saxophone skills were so formidable, I was certain he would become the foremost jazz instrumentalist of his generation, and if you think it’s easy to get half a million views on YouTube playing jazz saxophone, think again.

I was tempted to add especially when I am tied to a small child named Meg, but my natural diplomacy won out.

As my eyes adjusted, I realized the tunnel’s dim light emanated from a glowing piece of fruit about thirty yards away.

In the old days, you couldn’t take a step inside Daedalus’s Labyrinth without sensing its all-consuming desire: I will destroy your mind and your body. Now the atmosphere was sleepier, the message not quite as virulent: Hey, if you die in here, that’s cool.

The bronze bands around my leg began to chafe.

The cliff wall opposite was only ten feet away, but the crevasse seemed to plunge downward forever.

Python’s voice was jagged with contempt.

She looked as if she’d just gone through Hades’s haunted house. (Pro tip: DO NOT.) Her face was pallid.

Chiron had sent search parties of dryads into the forest, on the assumption that they would be safe in their home territory, but he adamantly refused to let demigods join the hunt.

I told them to be quiet or I would never allow them to wear laurel wreaths again. (As the guy who held the patent on laurel wreaths, that was my prerogative.)

Truly, it was an event so unprecedented, it should have ripped apart the cosmos.

The gesture probably looked petulant coming from a sixteen-year-old nobody, but I didn’t care.

Under different circumstances, I might have written a poem about it. In my present state of mind, I could only have managed a funeral dirge, and I did not want to think about death.

I became aware of a distant thump, thump, thump—a quick, relentless pulse that got louder and louder.

I wondered what Rachel had told her father—a fabulously wealthy real estate magnate—to convince him she needed to borrow a helicopter.

Miss Dare looked thinner and older—less like a high school girl and more like a young farmer’s wife from ancient times, weathered from hard work and gaunt from shortage of food.

The sofas were overturned. The coffee table had a broken leg. The floor was strewn with easels and canvases. Even Rachel’s tripod stool, the throne of prophecy itself, lay on its side on a pile of paint-splattered drop cloths.

She waved listlessly at the wreckage.

They found us sitting at the wobbly coffee table like civilized cave people, sharing lukewarm Arizona tea and stale crackers from the Oracle’s larder.

I shook my head, trying my best to impart a warning: Trauma. Don’t ask. Might get attacked by a peach baby.

“That is the building you described last summer,” Chiron said, “where you parleyed with the Romans.”

“A triumvirate is a ruling council of three,” I said. “At least, that’s what it meant in ancient Rome.”

“You think these men are ancient Romans? How is that possible? Hades is quite good at tracking down escaped spirits from the Underworld. He would not allow three men from ancient times to run amok in the modern world for centuries.”