The Sea of Monsters(12)

I was too stunned to answer. Annabeth grumbled, “Good to see you too, Clarisse.”

“Argh!” Clarisse screamed. “Don’t ever, EVER try saving me again!”

“Clarisse,” Annabeth said, “you’ve got wounded campers.”

That sobered her up. Even Clarisse cared about the soldiers under her command.

“I’ll be back,” she growled, then trudged off to assess the damage.

I stared at Tyson. “You didn’t die.”

Tyson looked down like he was embarrassed. “I am sorry. Came to help. Disobeyed you.”

“My fault,” Annabeth said. “I had no choice. I had to let Tyson cross the boundary line to save you. Otherwise, you would’ve died.”

“Let him cross the boundary line?’” I asked. “But—”

“Percy,” she said, “have you ever looked at Tyson closely? I mean … in the face. Ignore the Mist, and really look at him.”

The Mist makes humans see only what their brains can process … I knew it could fool demigods too, but…

I looked Tyson in the face. It wasn’t easy. I’d always had trouble looking directly at him, though I’d never quite understood why. I’d thought it was just because he always had peanut butter in his crooked teeth. I forced myself to focus at his big lumpy nose, then a little higher at his eyes.

No, not eyes.

One eye. One large, calf-brown eye, right in the middle of his forehead, with thick lashes and big tears trickling down his cheeks on either side.

“Tyson,” I stammered. “You’re a …”

“Cyclops,” Annabeth offered. “A baby, by the looks of him. Probably why he couldn’t get past the boundary line as easily as the bulls. Tyson’s one of the homeless orphans.”

“One of the what?”

“They’re in almost all the big cities,” Annabeth said distastefully. “They’re … mistakes, Percy.

Children of nature spirits and gods … Well, one god in particular, usually … and they don’t always come out right. No one wants them. They get tossed aside. They grow up wild on the streets. I don’t know how this one found you, but he obviously likes you. We should take him to Chiron, let him decide what to do.”

“But the fire. How—”

“He’s a Cyclops.” Annabeth paused, as if she were remembering something unpleasant.

“They work the forges of the gods. They have to be immune to fire. That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

I was completely shocked. How had I never realized what Tyson was?

But I didn’t have much time to think about it just then. The whole side of the hill was burning.

Wounded heroes needed attention. And there were still two banged-up bronze bulls to dispose of, which I didn’t figure would fit in our normal recycling bins.

Clarisse came back over and wiped the soot off her forehead. “Jackson, if you can stand, get up. We need to carry the wounded back to the Big House, let Tantalus know what’s happened.”

“Tantalus?” I asked.

“The activities director,” Clarisse said impatiently.

“Chiron is the activities director. And where’s Argus? He’s head of security. He should be here.”

Clarisse made a sour face. “Argus got fired. You two have been gone too long. Things are changing.”

“But Chiron … He’s trained kids to fight monsters for over three thousand years. He can’t just be gone. What happened?”

”That happened,” Clarisse snapped.

She pointed to Thalia’s tree.

Every camper knew the story behind the tree. Six years ago, Grover, Annabeth, and two other demigods named Thalia and Luke had come to Camp Half-Blood chased by an army of monsters. When they got cornered on top of this hill, Thalia, a daughter of Zeus, had made her last stand here to give her friends time to reach safety. As she was dying, her father, Zeus, took pity on her and changed her into a pine tree. Her spirit had reinforced the magic borders of the camp, protecting it from monsters. The pine had been here ever since, strong and healthy.

But now, its needles were yellow. A huge pile of dead ones littered the base of the tree. In the center of the trunk, three feet from the ground, was a puncture mark the size of a bullet hole, oozing green sap.

A sliver of ice ran through my chest. Now I understood why the camp was in danger. The magical borders were failing because Thalia’s tree was dying.

Someone had poisoned it.

Chapter Five: I Get A New Cabin Mate

Ever come home and found your room messed up? Like some helpful person (hi, Mom) has tried to “clean” it, and suddenly you can’t find anything? And even if nothing is missing, you get that creepy feeling like somebody’s been looking through your private stuff and dusting everything with lemon furniture polish?

That’s kind of the way I felt seeing Camp Half-Blood again.

On the surface, things didn’t look all that different. The Big House was still there with its blue gabled roof and its wraparound porch. The strawberry fields still baked in the sun. The same white-columned Greek buildings were scattered around the valley—the amphitheater, the combat arena, the dining pavilion overlooking Long Island Sound. And nestled between the woods and the creek were the same cabins—a crazy assortment of twelve buildings, each representing a different Olympian god.