The House of Hades (The Heroes of Olympus #4)(91)

Leo opened his eyes, amazed to be alive. He was sitting in a bathtub-sized crater in the sand. A few yards away, a column of thick black smoke roiled into the sky from a much larger crater. The surrounding beach was peppered with smaller pieces of burning wreckage.

“My sphere.” Leo patted his chest. The sphere wasn’t there. His duct tape and rope halter had disintegrated.

He struggled to his feet. None of his bones seemed broken, which was good; but mostly he was worried about his Archimedes sphere. If he’d destroyed his priceless artifact to make a flaming thirty-second helicopter, he was going to track down that stupid snow goddess Khione and smack her with a monkey wrench.

He staggered across the beach, wondering why there weren’t any tourists or hotels or boats in sight. The island seemed perfect for a resort, with blue water and soft white sand. Maybe it was uncharted. Did they still have uncharted islands in the world? Maybe Khione had blasted him out of the Mediterranean altogether. For all he knew, he was in Bora Bora.

The larger crater was about eight feet deep. At the bottom, the helicopter blades were still trying to turn. The engine belched smoke. The rotor croaked like a stepped-on frog, but dang—pretty impressive for a rush job.

The helicopter had apparently crashed onto something. The crater was littered with broken wooden furniture, shattered china plates, some half-melted pewter goblets, and burning linen napkins. Leo wasn’t sure why all that fancy stuff had been on the beach, but at least it meant that this place was inhabited, after all.

Finally he spotted the Archimedes sphere—steaming and charred but still intact, making unhappy clicking noises in the center of the wreckage.

“Sphere!” he yelled. “Come to Papa!”

He skidded to the bottom of the crater and snatched up the sphere. He collapsed, sat cross-legged, and cradled the device in his hands. The bronze surface was searing hot, but Leo didn’t care. It was still in one piece, which meant he could use it.

Now, if he could just figure out where he was, and how to get back to his friends.…

He was making a mental list of tools he might need when a girl’s voice interrupted him: “What are you doing? You blew up my dining table!”

Immediately Leo thought: Uh-oh.

He’d met a lot of goddesses, but the girl glaring down at him from the edge of the crater actually looked like a goddess.

She wore a sleeveless white Greek-style dress with a gold braided belt. Her hair was long, straight, and golden brown—almost the same cinnamon-toast color as Hazel’s, but the similarity to Hazel ended there. The girl’s face was milky pale, with dark, almond-shaped eyes and pouty lips. She looked maybe fifteen, about Leo’s age, and, sure, she was pretty; but with that angry expression on her face she reminded Leo of every popular girl in every school he’d ever attended—the ones who made fun of him, gossiped a lot, thought they were so superior, and basically did everything they could to make his life miserable.

Leo disliked her instantly.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” he said. “I just fell out of the sky. I constructed a helicopter in midair, burst into flames halfway down, crash-landed, and barely survived. But by all means—let’s talk about your dining table!”

He snatched up a half-melted goblet. “Who puts a dining table on the beach where innocent demigods can crash into it? Who does that?”

The girl clenched her fists. Leo was pretty sure she was going to march down the crater and punch him in the face. Instead she looked up at the sky.

“REALLY?” she screamed at the empty blue. “You want to make my curse even worse? Zeus! Hephaestus! Hermes! Have you no shame?”

“Uh…” Leo noticed that she’d just picked three gods to blame, and one of them was his dad. He didn’t figure that was a good sign. “I doubt they’re listening. You know, the whole split personality thing—”

“Show yourself!” the girl yelled at the sky, completely ignoring Leo. “It’s not bad enough I am exiled? It’s not bad enough you take away the few good heroes I’m allowed to meet? You think it’s funny to send me this—this charbroiled runt of a boy to ruin my tranquility? This is NOT FUNNY! Take him back!”

“Hey, Sunshine,” Leo said. “I’m right here, you know.”

She growled like a cornered animal. “Do not call me Sunshine! Get out of that hole and come with me now so I can get you off my island!”

“Well, since you asked so nicely…”

Leo didn’t know what the crazy girl was so worked up about, but he didn’t really care. If she could help him leave this island, that was totally fine by him. He clutched his charred sphere and climbed out of the crater. When he reached the top, the girl was already marching down the shoreline. He jogged to catch up.

She gestured in disgust at the burning wreckage. “This was a pristine beach! Look at it now.”

“Yeah, my bad,” Leo muttered. “I should’ve crashed on one of the other islands. Oh, wait—there aren’t any!”

She snarled and kept walking along the edge of the water. Leo caught a whiff of cinnamon—maybe her perfume? Not that he cared. Her hair swayed down her back in a mesmerizing kind of way, which of course he didn’t care about either.

He scanned the sea. Just like he’d seen during his fall, there were no landmasses or ships all the way to the horizon. Looking inland, he saw grassy hills dotted with trees. A footpath wound through a grove of cedars. Leo wondered where it led: probably to the girl’s secret lair, where she roasted her enemies so she could eat them at her dining table on the beach.