The Heroes of Olympus: The Demigod Diaries (12 page)

Jason knelt at the banks of a stream. He pointed to some marks in the mud. “Do those look like table tracks?”

“Or a raccoon,” Leo suggested.

Jason frowned. “With no toes?”

“Piper?” Leo asked. “What do you think?”

She sighed. “Just because I’m Native American doesn’t mean I can track furniture through the wilderness.” She deepened her voice: “‘Yes,
kemosabe
. A three-legged table passed this way an hour ago.’ Heck, I don’t know.”

“Okay, jeez,” Leo said.

Piper was half Cherokee, half Greek goddess. Some days it was hard to tell which side of her family she was more sensitive about.

“It’s probably a table,” Jason decided. “Which means Buford went across this stream.”

Suddenly the water gurgled. A girl in a shimmering blue dress rose to the surface. She had stringy green hair, blue lips, and pale skin, so she looked like a drowning victim. Her eyes were wide with alarm.

“Could you be any louder?” she hissed. “They’ll hear you!”

Leo blinked. He never got used to this—nature spirits just popping up out of trees and streams and whatnot.

“Are you a naiad?” he asked.

“Shh! They’ll kill us all! They’re right over
there
!” She pointed behind her, into the trees on the other side of the stream. Unfortunately, that was the direction Buford seemed to have walked.

“Okay,” Piper said gently, kneeling next to the water. “We appreciate the warning. What’s your name?”

The naiad looked like she wanted to bolt, but Piper’s voice was hard to resist.

“Brooke,” the blue girl said reluctantly.

“Brooke the brook?” Jason asked.

Piper swatted his leg. “Okay, Brooke. I’m Piper. We won’t let anyone harm you. Just tell us who you’re afraid of.”

The naiad’s face became more agitated. The water boiled around her. “My crazy cousins. You can’t stop them. They’ll tear you apart. None of us is safe! Now go away. I have to hide!”

Brooke melted into water.

Piper stood. “Crazy cousins?” She frowned at Jason. “Any idea what she was talking about?”

Jason shook his head. “Maybe we should keep our voices down.”

Leo stared at the stream. He was trying to figure what was so horrible that it could tear apart a river spirit. How do you tear up water? Whatever it was, he didn’t want to meet it.

Yet he could see Buford’s tracks on the opposite bank—little square prints in the mud, leading in the direction the naiad had warned them about.

“We have to follow the trail, right?” he said, mostly to convince himself. “I mean…we’re heroes and stuff. We can handle whatever it is. Right?”

Jason drew his sword—a wicked Roman-style gladius with an Imperial gold blade. “Right. Of course.”

Piper unsheathed her dagger. She stared into the blade as if hoping Katoptris would show her a helpful vision. Sometimes the dagger did that. But if she saw anything important, she didn’t say.

“Crazy cousins,” she muttered. “Here we come.”

There was no more talking as they followed the table tracks deeper into the woods. The birds were silent. No monsters growled. It was as if all the other living creatures in the woods had been smart enough to leave.

Finally they came to a clearing the size of a mall parking lot. The sky overhead was heavy and gray. The grass was dry yellow, and the ground was scarred with pits and trenches as if someone had done some crazy driving with construction equipment. In the center of the clearing stood a pile of boulders about thirty feet tall.

“Oh,” Piper said. “This isn’t good.”

“Why?” Leo asked.

“It’s bad luck to be here,” Jason said. “This is the battle site.”

Leo scowled. “What battle?”

Piper raised her eyebrows. “How can you not know about it? The other campers talk about this place all the time.”

“Been a little busy,” Leo said.

He tried not to feel bitter about it, but he’d missed out on a lot of regular camp stuff—the trireme fights, the chariot races, flirting with the girls. That was the worst part. Leo finally had an “in” with the hottest girls at camp, since Piper was the senior counselor for Aphrodite cabin, and he was too busy for her to fix him up. Sad.

“The Battle of the Labyrinth.” Piper kept her voice down, but she explained to Leo how the pile of rocks used to be called Zeus’s Fist, back when it looked like something, not just a pile of rocks. There’d been an entrance to a magical labyrinth here, and a big army of monsters had come through it to invade camp. The campers won—obviously, since camp was still here—but it had been a hard battle. Several demigods had died. The clearing was still considered cursed.

“Great,” Leo grumbled. “Buford has to run to the most dangerous part of the woods. He couldn’t just, like, run to the beach or a burger shop.”

“Speaking of which…” Jason studied the ground. “How are we going to track him? There’s no trail here.”

Though Leo would’ve preferred to stay in the cover of the trees, he followed his friends into the clearing. They searched for table tracks, but as they made their way to the pile of boulders they found nothing. Leo pulled a watch from his tool belt and strapped it to his wrist. Roughly forty minutes until the big
ka-boom
.

“If I had more time,” he said, “I could make a tracking device, but—”

“Does Buford have a round tabletop?” Piper interrupted. “With little steam vents sticking up on one side?”

Leo stared at her. “How did you know?”

“Because he’s right over there.” She pointed.

Sure enough, Buford was waddling toward the far end of the clearing, steam puffing from his vents. As they watched, he disappeared into the trees.

“That was easy.” Jason started to follow, but Leo held him back.

The hairs on the back of Leo’s neck stood up. He wasn’t sure why. Then he realized he could hear voices from the woods on their left. “Someone’s coming!”

He pulled his friends behind the boulders.

Jason whispered, “Leo—”

“Shh!”

A dozen barefoot girls skipped into the clearing. They were teenagers with tunic-style dresses of loose purple and red silk. Their hair was tangled with leaves, and most wore laurel wreaths. Some carried strange staffs that looked like torches. The girls laughed and swung each other around, tumbling in the grass and spinning like they were dizzy. They were all really gorgeous, but Leo wasn’t tempted to flirt.

Piper sighed. “They’re just nymphs, Leo.”

Leo gestured frantically at her to stay down. He whispered, “Crazy cousins!”

Piper’s eyes widened.

As the nymphs got closer, Leo started to notice odd details about them. Their staffs weren’t torches. They were twisted wooden branches, each topped with a giant pinecone, and some were wrapped with living snakes. The girls’ laurel wreaths weren’t wreaths, either. Their hair was braided with tiny vipers. The girls smiled and laughed and sang in Ancient Greek as they stumbled around the glade. They appeared to be having a great time, but their voices were tinged with a sort of wild ferocity. If leopards could sing, Leo thought they would sound like this.

“Are they drunk?” Jason whispered.

Leo frowned. The girls
did
act like that, but he thought there was something else going on. He was glad the nymphs hadn’t seen them yet.

Then things got complicated. In the woods to their right, something roared. The trees rustled, and a drakon burst into the clearing, looking sleepy and irritated, as if the nymphs’ singing had woken it up.

Leo had seen plenty of monsters in the woods. The camp intentionally stocked them as a challenge to campers. But this was bigger and scarier than most.

The drakon was about the size of a subway car. It had no wings, but its mouth bristled with daggerlike teeth. Flames curled from its nostrils. Silvery scales covered its body like polished chain mail. When the drakon saw the nymphs, it roared again and shot flames into the sky.

The girls didn’t seem to notice. They kept doing cartwheels and laughing and playfully pushing each other around.

“We’ve got to help them,” Piper whispered. “They’ll be killed!”

“Hold on,” Leo said.

“Leo,” Jason chided. “We’re heroes. We can’t let innocent girls—”

“Just chill!” Leo insisted. Something bothered him about these girls—a story he only half remembered. As counselor for Hephaestus cabin, Leo made it his business to read up on magic items, just in case he needed to build them someday. He was sure he’d read something about pinecone staffs wrapped with snakes. “Watch.”

Finally one of the girls noticed the drakon. She squealed in delight, as if she’d spotted a cute puppy. She skipped toward the monster and the other girls followed, singing and laughing, which seemed to confuse the drakon. It probably wasn’t used to its prey being so cheerful.

A nymph in a blood-red dress did a cartwheel and landed in front of the drakon. “Are you Dionysus?” she asked hopefully.

It seemed like a stupid question. True, Leo had never met Dionysus, but he was pretty sure the god of wine wasn’t a fire-breathing drakon.

The monster blasted fire at the girl’s feet. She simply danced out of the kill zone. The drakon lunged and caught her arm in its jaws. Leo winced, sure the nymph’s limb would be amputated right before his eyes, but she yanked it free, along with several broken drakon teeth. Her arm was perfectly fine. The drakon made a sound somewhere between a growl and a whimper.

“Naughty!” the girl scolded. She turned to her cheerful friends. “Not Dionysus! He must join our party!”

A dozen nymphs squealed in delight and surrounded the monster.

Piper caught her breath. “What are they—oh, gods. No!”

Leo didn’t usually feel sorry for monsters, but what happened next was truly horrifying. The girls threw themselves at the drakon. Their cheerful laughter turned into vicious snarling. They attacked with their pinecone staffs, with fingernails that turned into long white talons, with teeth that elongated into wolfish fangs.

The monster blew fire and stumbled, trying to get away, but the teenage girls were too much for him. The nymphs ripped and tore until the drakon slowly crumbled into powder, its spirit returning to Tartarus.

Jason made a gulping sound. Leo had seen his friend in all sorts of dangerous situations, but he’d never seen Jason look quite so pale.

Piper was shielding her eyes, muttering, “Oh, gods. Oh, gods.”

Leo tried to keep his own voice from trembling. “I read about these nymphs. They’re followers of Dionysus. I forget what they’re called—”

“Maenads.” Piper shivered. “I’ve heard of them. I thought they only existed in ancient times. They attended Dionysus’s parties. When they got too excited…”

She pointed toward the clearing. She didn’t need to say more. Brooke the naiad had warned them. Her crazy cousins ripped their victims to pieces.

“We have to get out of here,” Jason said.

“But they’re between us and Buford!” Leo whispered. “And we’ve only got—” He checked his watch. “Thirty minutes to get the syncopator installed!”

“Maybe I can fly us over to Buford.” Jason shut his eyes tight.

Leo knew Jason had controlled the wind before—just one of the advantages of being the über-cool son of Zeus—but this time, nothing happened.

Jason shook his head. “I don’t know…the air feels agitated. Maybe those nymphs are messing things up. Even the wind spirits are too nervous to get close.”

Leo glanced back the way they’d come. “We’ll have to retreat to the woods. If we can skirt around the Maenads—”

“Guys,” Piper squeaked in alarm.

Leo looked up. He hadn’t noticed the Maenads approaching, climbing the rocks with absolute silence even creepier than their laughter. They peered down from the tops of the boulders, smiling prettily, their fingernails and teeth back to normal. Vipers coiled through their hair.

“Hello!” The girl in the blood-red dress beamed at Leo. “Are you Dionysus?”

There was only one answer to that.

“Yes!” Leo yelped. “Absolutely. I am Dionysus.”

He got to his feet and tried to match the girl’s smile.

The nymph clapped her hands in delight. “Wonderful! My lord Dionysus? Really?”

Jason and Piper rose, weapons ready, but Leo hoped it didn’t come to a fight. He’d seen how fast these nymphs could move. If they decided to go into food-processor mode, Leo doubted he and his friends would stand a chance.