Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods(29)

I waded upstream, slipping and stumbling over mossy rocks. My head was swiveling for monsters, or Yonkers police, or ill-tempered muskrats, but no one bothered me. About halfway to the tunnel, I caught my first whiff of putrid air from the entrance, like the breath of a sleeping giant who’d been living off moldy fish sandwiches. I doubled over and gagged.

The smell did not make me think of the cleanest waters in the world.

While I was hunched over, praying to the god of not vomiting, something floated by my foot. At first I thought it was a ripped grocery bag: just a shred of milky translucent plastic. Then I noticed the honeycomb pattern on the membrane. Like scales. Like the shed skin of a snake.

That was super helpful for my nausea.

Okay . . . Iris had told us that serpents bathed in the River Elisson. Maybe the water here was not so clean because I was wading through monster bathwater drain-off. Or that snakeskin could be from a normal snake, because nature.

I took a few more steps.

When I looked down again, I saw something else in the water. Snagged in a bed of moss was a curved black pointy thing about the size of my index finger. Some impulse—maybe a death wish—made me pick it up. The broken talon glistened in the sunlight. I’d seen ones like this before on the fingertips of my sixth-grade math teacher, aka the Fury Alecto.

I stared into the dark tunnel. Whatever might be in there taking a bubble bath, I did not want to meet it alone. Also, I didn’t have Iris’s staff.

Unfortunately, that meant I’d have to come back, with help, and subject Annabeth and Grover to the wonders of the Saw Mill River Fury habitat.

I cursed my guidance counselor, Sicky Frog, and the life of a demigod in general. Then I trudged off to find the nearest train station.





The next afternoon, I came back with reinforcements.

When I told Annabeth and Grover where we were going, they looked at me funny, but they didn’t ask questions. Downtown Yonkers was well within our standard deviation for weirdness.

I’m not sure what the other passengers thought about me carrying the staff of Iris on the subway train. Maybe they figured I was a shepherd commuting to my pastures. Grover, being Grover, had brought a backpack full of snacks along with his panpipes. Because you never know when you might want to dance a jig while eating sour-cream-and-jalapeno corn squiggles. Annabeth had packed a bunch of practical things, like her knife, flashlights, and a thermos of something that I hoped was more potable than the river water.

By four o’clock, we were standing in the creek bed, peering into the mouth of the tunnel.

Grover sniffed the air. “Cleanest river in the world?”

“This is after the Furies and snakes bathed in it,” I said.

“And who knows what else,” Annabeth added.

Grover dipped his shoe in the brown water. “I guess we can’t just roll the staff around in this muck and call it a day.”

I’d had the same thought, but I was glad Grover said it instead of me.

“We’ll have to go inside,” said Annabeth, distributing the flashlights. “Hope it’s cleaner upriver. Let’s hug the bank and try to stay out of the water.”

That was advice even I could recognize as wise. But staying out of the water proved hard to do.

As we forged ahead into the tunnel, the sides turned narrow and slippery. I found it impossible not to slosh around in the stream. My shoes didn’t start smoking, and my pants didn’t catch on fire, so I guessed the water wasn’t that toxic. Still, I added really hot shower to my to-do list, assuming I made it home that evening.

About a hundred yards in, Annabeth stopped. “Check it out,” she said.

She moved the beam of her flashlight across the tunnel’s ceiling, which was coated with moss and lichen so thick I couldn’t tell if there was man-made asphalt or natural rock underneath. Wherever Annabeth’s light passed, it left behind a streak of blue-green luminescence.

“Cool.” I used my flashlight to draw a glowing smiley face on the wall.

“How old are you?” Annabeth asked.

“Eight just last week.”

That got a smile. I loved making her smile when she was trying not to. It always felt like a victory.

We spent a few minutes painting light graffiti. Grover wrote Pan 4ever. I wrote AC+PJ. Annabeth traced concentric arcs until she’d made a blue-and-green rainbow. The moss kept glowing for quite a while, filling the tunnel with a cool turquoise light.

Up ahead, the channel widened into a much larger space. The sound of the current became louder and throatier. We stepped into a cavern so massive it seemed like a different world.

Under a cathedral-high ceiling covered with glowing stalactites, the river wound north between rolling plains of yellow grass. Ash-colored trees dotted the landscape, leafless and stunted, their branches curled like arthritic fingers. The scene reminded me of the Fields of Asphodel down in Hades’s realm—and the fact that I can make that comparison the same way you might say Oh, yeah, looks like Midtown is a really sad statement about my travel history.

Here and there, outcroppings of granite made islands in the grass, but the main attraction was the river itself. It wound lazily through the cavern, making big loops as if it were in no hurry to reach the daylight. Thick stands of reeds edged its banks. The current glimmered darkly in the blue moss light. The water did look cleaner here. The putrid smell was gone. But in a pool about twenty yards upstream, dozens of slithery, slimy whiplike creatures were rolling and writhing in the shallows, making me never want to eat spaghetti again.