The Lost Hero (The Heroes of Olympus #1)(131)

“What?” she said.

“Talk to it. Use everything you’ve got. Convince Gaea to sleep. Lull her into a daze. Just slow her down, try to get the tendrils to loosen while I—”

“Right!” Piper cleared her throat and said, “Hey, Gaea. Nice night, huh? Boy, I’m tired. How about you? Ready for some sleep?”

The more she talked, the more confident she sounded. Jason felt his own eyes getting heavy, and he had to force himself not to focus on her words. It seemed to have some effect on the cage. The mud was rising more slowly. The tendrils seemed to soften just a little—becoming more like tree root than rock. Leo pulled a circular saw out of his tool belt. How it fit in there, Jason had no idea. Then Leo looked at the cord and grunted in frustration. “I don’t have anywhere to plug it in!”

The spirit horse Tempest jumped into the pit and whinnied.

“Really?” Jason asked.

Tempest dipped his head and trotted over to Leo. Leo looked dubious, but he held up the plug, and a breeze whisked it into the horse’s flank. Lighting sparked, connecting with the prongs of the plug, and the circular saw whirred to life.

“Sweet!” Leo grinned. “Your horse comes with AC outlets!”

Their good mood didn’t last long. On the other side of the pool, the giant’s spire crumbled with a sound like a tree snapping in half. Its outer sheath of tendrils exploded from the top down, raining stone and wood shards as the giant shook himself free and climbed out of the earth.

Jason hadn’t thought anything could be scarier than Enceladus.

He was wrong.

Porphyrion was even taller, and even more ripped. He didn’t radiate heat, or show any signs of breathing fire, but there was something more terrible about him—a kind of strength, even magnetism, as if the giant were so huge and dense he had his own gravitational field.

Like Enceladus, the giant king was humanoid from the waist up, clad in bronze armor, and from the waist down he had scaly dragon’s legs; but his skin was the color of lima beans. His hair was green as summer leaves, braided in long locks and decorated with weapons—daggers, axes, and full-size swords, some of them bent and bloody—maybe trophies taken from demigods eons before. When the giant opened his eyes, they were blank white, like polished marble. He took a deep breath.

“Alive!” he bellowed. “Praise to Gaea!”

Jason made a heroic little whimpering sound he hoped his friends couldn’t hear. He was very sure no demigod could solo this guy. Porphyrion could lift mountains. He could crush Jason with one finger.

“Leo,” Jason said.

“Huh?” Leo’s mouth was wide open. Even Piper seemed dazed.

“You guys keep working,” Jason said. “Get Hera free!”

“What are you going to do?” Piper asked. “You can’t seriously—”

“Entertain a giant?” Jason said. “I’ve got no choice.”

“Excellent!” the giant roared as Jason approached. “An appetizer! Who are you—Hermes? Ares?”

Jason thought about going with that idea, but something told him not to.

“I’m Jason Grace,” he said. “Son of Jupiter.”

Those white eyes bored into him. Behind him, Leo’s circular saw whirred, and Piper talked to the cage in soothing tones, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.

Porphyrion threw back his head and laughed. “Outstanding!” He looked up at the cloudy night sky. “So, Zeus, you sacrifice a son to me? The gesture is appreciated, but it will not save you.”

The sky didn’t even rumble. No help from above. Jason was on his own.

He dropped his makeshift club. His hands were covered in splinters, but that didn’t matter now. He had to buy Leo and Piper some time, and he couldn’t do that without a proper weapon.

It was time to act a whole lot more confident than he felt.

“If you knew who I was,” Jason yelled up at the giant, “you’d be worried about me, not my father. I hope you enjoyed your two and a half minutes of rebirth, giant, because I’m going to send you right back to Tartarus.”

The giant’s eyes narrowed. He planted one foot outside the pool and crouched to get a better look at his opponent. “So … we’ll start by boasting, will we? Just like old times! Very well, demigod. I am Porphryion, king of the giants, son of Gaea. In olden times, I rose from Tatarus, the abyss of my father, to challenge the gods. To start the war, I stole Zeus’s queen.” He grinned at the goddess’s cage. “Hello, Hera.”

“My husband destroyed you once, monster!” Hera said. “He’ll do it again!”

“But he didn’t, my dear! Zeus wasn’t powerful enough to kill me. He had to rely on a puny demigod to help, and even then, we almost won. This time, we will complete what we started. Gaea is waking. She has provisioned us with many fine servants. Our armies will shake the earth—and we will destroy you at the roots.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Hera said, but she was weakening. Jason could hear it in her voice. Piper kept whispering to the cage, and Leo kept sawing, but the earth was still rising inside Hera’s prison, covering her up to her waist.

“Oh, yes,” the giant said. “The Titans sought to attack your new home in New York. Bold, but ineffective. Gaea is wiser and more patient. And we, her greatest children, are much, much stronger than Kronos. We know how to kill you Olympians once and for all. You must be dug up completely like rotten trees—your eldest roots torn out and burned.”