Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods(23)

“Butch is home in Minnesota. . . .” I ran through the list of demigods I knew from Camp Half-Blood. “And there aren’t any year-rounders in the Iris cabin right now.”

“No,” Annabeth agreed. “But there is a child of Iris who lives locally. Down in Soho.”

A knot formed in the pit of my stomach, and all of Ganymede’s beverage number five started to drain into my legs. “You can’t be serious.”

“She’s already agreed to meet us at the market.”

I wondered how Annabeth had pulled that off. Favors must have been promised. Money. Firstborn children. Something.

“But . . .” I grasped for any idea that might change Annabeth’s mind. “Aren’t most quests supposed to be three people? Wouldn’t a fourth be bad luck?”

“She’s not joining our quest. She’ll just make the introduction to her mom, and hopefully convince Iris to go easy on us when we tell her . . . well, that we suspect her of being a cup thief.”

I shuddered. “Or she could make things worse. You remember what happened at the last campfire?”

Annabeth laughed. “I thought that was kind of funny, actually. Calm down, Seaweed Brain. I’ve got this under control.”

“Hmm.”

“Don’t hmm me.” She glanced behind her. “My roommate’s coming. Gotta go. Love you.”

“You too. Don’t love your plan, though.”

“Finish your homework.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She nodded, satisfied, and blew me a kiss. The Iris connection dissipated into random water droplets.

I looked at my pile of weekend homework and groaned. Another English essay to write . . . this time about that guy who liked to open cans. Plus math, science, and two chapters of history. And we had to face Iris and her daughter tomorrow. I wondered if it was too late to apply for the night shift at Monster Donut.





Grover was thrilled.

“Blanche is coming?” He patted his goat horns as if to make sure they weren’t crooked. “Do I look okay?”

He wore cargo shorts with tennis shoes over his hooves—just enough of a disguise so humans would think That kid needs to shave his legsand not That kid is half goat. His top du jour was a hand-knit green sweater-type thing with little tree designs that I was pretty sure the dryads had made him for Arbor Day.

“You look good,” I said.

“Besides, Grover,” Annabeth chided, “this is Blanche. It’s not like she’s your girlfriend.”

Grover had a girlfriend, Juniper, who would not have been pleased to see Grover acting so flustered.

“No, I know.” He blushed to the roots of his goatee. “It’s just that she’s such an artiste.”

“Not this again,” I muttered.

“She’s so cool!”

“Are we talking about the same Blanche?” I asked.

“Both of you hush.” Annabeth peered down Broadway. “Here she comes now.”

Blanche, daughter of Iris, wore a trench coat the color of night, jeans, and tactical boots, all of which matched the makeup that made her eyes sparkle like black diamonds. Her head was shaved except for a white-blond topknot. Around her neck hung a Nikon camera the size of a shoe box.

“Wow,” she said, looking around. “Uptown.”

She squinted as if she found the Upper West Side too bright, too open, too loud, too everything. Living down in Soho, she probably had to get her passport stamped to come this far north.

“Lots of stuff to photograph!” Grover said, leaning not-so-casually against a mailbox to give her a profile angle.

Blanche seemed more interested in the sick little tree on the median. “This is dying. That’s cool.” She took the lens cap off her Nikon and started to play with the focus.

Annabeth and I exchanged looks.

Really? I asked her silently.

Be patient ,she stared back at me.

I’d heard that Blanche had a one-artist show going on at a Tribeca gallery right now. Her photographs of dried leaves, rotten tree stumps, and roadkill—all in black and white—sold for like a thousand bucks each. She was the Ansel Adams of dead nature. And after our last campfire, Grover had been so impressed with her that he’d decided he wanted her to do his portrait as a present for Juniper.

What happened at our last campfire, you ask?

Ghost stories. It was a tradition. To everybody’s surprise, Blanche had volunteered to tell the last one that night. In front of sixty or seventy campers and holding a flashlight under her face for maximum creepiness, Blanche had launched into a story about this demigod who had died years ago—a son of Morbus, the god of diseases. Supposedly, nobody liked this kid at camp because, well, diseases. Eventually he had wasted away from some terrible plague, but before he died, he laid a curse on the camp so that anyone who walked over his grave would lose all their color, develop a painful rotting sickness, then crumble to nothing. The campers had burned his body and scattered his ashes, trying to avoid the curse.

“But it didn’t matter,” Blanche had told us. “Because the place where he was burned counted as his gravesite. And that gravesite . . . is right here!”

Then she’d turned her flashlight on us. We’d looked around, startled and half-blind, and realized that all our colors had faded. The entire crowd had turned monochrome like old black-and-white cartoons.