The Battle of the Labyrinth (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #4)(15)

“Your armor is crooked” was her only comment, and she redid my straps for me.

“Grover Underwood,” Quintus said, “with Tyson.”

Grover just about jumped out of his goat fur. “What? B-but—”

“No, no,” Tyson whimpered. “Must be a mistake. Goat boy—”

“No complaining!” Quintus ordered. “Get with your partner. You have two minutes to prepare!”

Tyson and Grover both looked at me pleadingly. I tried to give them an encouraging nod, and gestured that they should move together. Tyson sneezed. Grover started chewing nervously on his wooden club.

“They’ll be fine,” Annabeth said. “Come on. Let’s worry about how we’re going to stay alive.”

***

It was still light when we got into the woods, but the shadows from the trees made it feel like midnight. It was cold, too, even in summer. Annabeth and I found tracks almost immediately—scuttling marks made by something with a lot of legs. We began to follow the trail.

We jumped a creek and heard some twigs snapping nearby. We crouched behind a boulder, but it was only the Stoll brothers tripping through the woods and cursing. Their dad was the god of thieves, but they were about as stealthy as buffaloes.

Once the Stolls had passed, we forged deeper into the west woods where the monsters were wilder. We were standing on a ledge overlooking a marshy pond when Annabeth tensed. “This is where we stopped looking.”

It took me a second to realize what she meant. Last winter, when we’d given up hope of finding him, Grover, Annabeth, and I had stood on this rock, and I’d convinced them not to tell Chiron the truth: that Nico was a son of Hades. At the time it seemed the right thing to do. I wanted to protect his identity. I wanted to be the one to find him and make things right for what had happened to his sister. Now, six months later, I hadn’t even come close to finding him. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.

“I saw him last night,” I said.

Annabeth knit her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

I told her about the Iris-message. When I was done, she stared into the shadows of the woods. “He’s summoning the dead? That’s not good.”

“The ghost was giving him bad advice,” I said. “Telling him to take revenge.”

“Yeah…spirits are never good advisers they’ve got their own agendas. Old grudges. And they resent the living.”

“He’s going to come after me,” I said. “The spirit mentioned a maze.”

She nodded. “That settles it. We have to figure out the Labyrinth.”

“Maybe,” I said uncomfortably. “But who sent the Iris-message? If Nico didn’t know I was there—”

A branch snapped in the woods. Dry leaves rustled. Something large was moving in the trees, just beyond the ridge.

“That’s not the Stoll brothers,” Annabeth whispered.

Together we drew our swords.

***

We got to Zeus’s Fist, a huge pile of boulders in the middle of the west woods. It was a natural landmark where campers often rendezvoused on hunting expeditions, but now there was nobody around.

“Over there,” Annabeth whispered.

“No, wait,” I said. “Behind us.”

It was weird. Scuttling noises seemed to be coming from several different directions. We were circling the boulders, our swords drawn, when someone right behind us said, “Hi.”

We whirled around, and the tree nymph Juniper yelped.

“Put those down!” she protested. “Dryads don’t like sharp blades, okay?”

“Juniper,” Annabeth exhaled. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here.”

I lowered my sword. “In the boulders?”

She pointed toward the edge of the clearing. “In the juniper. Duh.”

It made sense, and I felt kind of stupid. I’d been hanging around dryads for years, but I never really talked to them much. I knew they couldn’t go very far away from their tree, which was the source of life. But I didn’t know much else.

“Are you guys busy?” Juniper asked.

“Well,” I said, “we’re in the middle of this game against a bunch of monsters and we’re trying not to die.”

“We’re not busy,” Annabeth said. “What’s wrong, Juniper?”

Junper sniffled. She wiped her silky sleeve under her eyes. “It’s Grover. He seems so distraught. All year he’s been out looking for Pan. And every time he comes back, its worse. I thought maybe, at first, he was seeing another tree.”

“No,” Annabeth said as Juniper started crying. “I’m sure that’s not it.”

“He had a crush on a blueberry bush once,” Juniper said miserably.

“Juniper,” Annabeth said, “Grover would never even look at another tree. He’s just stressed out about his searcher’s license.”

“He can’t go underground!” she protested. “You can’t let him.”

Annabeth looked uncomfortable. “It might be the only way to help him; if we just knew where to start.”

“Ah.” Juniper wiped a green tear off her cheek. “About that…”

Another rustle in the woods, and Juniper yelled, “Hide!”