Chapter 5 I Get a New Cabin Mate #2
Tyson started bawling almost as bad as Annabeth.
I tried to tell them that things would be okay, but I didn’t believe it.
The sun was setting behind the dining pavilion as the campers came up from their cabins.
We stood in the shadow of a marble column and watched them file in.
Annabeth was still pretty shaken up, but she promised she’d talk to us later.
Then she went off to join her siblings from the Athena cabin—a dozen boys and girls with blond hair and gray eyes like hers.
Annabeth wasn’t the oldest, but she’d been at camp more summers than just about anybody.
You could tell that by looking at her camp necklace—one bead for every summer, and Annabeth had six.
No one questioned her right to lead the line.
Next came Clarisse, leading the Ares cabin.
She had one arm in a sling and a nasty-looking gash on her cheek, but otherwise her encounter with the bronze bulls didn’t seem to have fazed her.
Someone had taped a piece of paper to her back that said, YOU MOO, GIRL!
But nobody in her cabin was bothering to tell her about it.
After the Ares kids came the Hephaestus cabin—six guys led by Charles Beckendorf, a big fifteen-year-old African American kid.
He had hands the size of catchers’ mitts and a face that was hard and squinty from looking into a blacksmith’s forge all day.
He was nice enough once you got to know him, but no one ever called him Charlie or Chuck or Charles.
Most just called him Beckendorf. Rumor was he could make anything.
Give him a chunk of metal and he could create a razor-sharp sword or a robotic warrior or a singing birdbath for your grandmother’s garden. Whatever you wanted.
The other cabins filed in: Demeter, Apollo, Aphrodite, Dionysus. Naiads came up from the canoe lake. Dryads melted out of the trees. From the meadow came a dozen satyrs, who reminded me painfully of Grover.
I’d always had a soft spot for the satyrs.
When they were at camp, they had to do all kinds of odd jobs for Mr. D, the director, but their most important work was out in the real world.
They were the camp’s seekers. They went undercover into schools all over the world, looking for potential half-bloods and escorting them back to camp.
That’s how I’d met Grover. He had been the first one to recognize I was a demigod.
After the satyrs filed in to dinner, the Hermes cabin brought up the rear.
They were always the biggest cabin. Last summer, it had been led by Luke, the guy who’d fought with Thalia and Annabeth on top of Half-Blood Hill.
For a while, before Poseidon had claimed me, I’d lodged in the Hermes cabin.
Luke had befriended me…and then he’d tried to kill me.
Now the Hermes cabin was led by Travis and Connor Stoll.
They weren’t twins, but they looked so much alike it didn’t matter.
I could never remember which one was older.
They were both tall and skinny, with mops of brown hair that hung in their eyes.
They wore orange CAMP HALFBLOOD T-shirts untucked over baggy shorts, and they had those elfish features all Hermes’s kids had: upturned eyebrows, sarcastic smiles, a gleam in their eyes whenever they looked at you—like they were about to drop a firecracker down your shirt.
I’d always thought it was funny that the god of thieves would have kids with the last name “Stoll,” but the only time I mentioned it to Travis and Connor, they both stared at me blankly like they didn’t get the joke.
As soon as the last campers had filed in, I led Tyson into the middle of the pavilion. Conversations faltered. Heads turned. “Who invited that?” somebody at the Apollo table murmured.
I glared in their direction, but I couldn’t figure out who’d spoken.
From the head table a familiar voice drawled, “Well, well, if it isn’t Peter Johnson. My millennium is complete.”
I gritted my teeth. “Percy Jackson…sir.”
Mr. D sipped his Diet Coke. “Yes. Well, as you young people say these days: Whatever.”
He was wearing his usual leopard-pattern Hawaiian shirt, walking shorts, and tennis shoes with black socks.
With his pudgy belly and his blotchy red face, he looked like a Las Vegas tourist who’d stayed up too late in the casinos.
Behind him, a nervous-looking satyr was peeling the skins off grapes and handing them to Mr. D one at a time.
Mr. D’s real name is Dionysus. The god of wine. Zeus appointed him director of Camp Half-Blood to dry out for a hundred years—a punishment for chasing some off-limits wood nymph.
Next to him, where Chiron usually sat (or stood, in centaur form), was someone I’d never seen before—a pale, horribly thin man in a threadbare orange prisoner’s jumpsuit.
The number over his pocket read 0001. He had blue shadows under his eyes, dirty fingernails, and badly cut gray hair, like his last haircut had been done with a weed whacker.
He stared at me; his eyes made me nervous.
He looked…fractured. Angry and frustrated and hungry all at the same time.
“This boy,” Dionysus told him, “you need to watch. Poseidon’s child, you know.”
“Ah!” the prisoner said. “That one.”
His tone made it obvious that he and Dionysus had already discussed me at length.
“I am Tantalus,” the prisoner said, smiling coldly. “On special assignment here until, well, until my Lord Dionysus decides otherwise. And you, Perseus Jackson, I do expect you to refrain from causing any more trouble.”
“Trouble?” I demanded.
Dionysus snapped his fingers. A newspaper appeared on the table—the front page of today’s New York Post. There was my yearbook picture from Meriwether Prep.
It was hard for me to make out the headline, but I had a pretty good guess what it said.
Something like: Thirteen-Year-Old Lunatic Torches Gymnasium.
“Yes, trouble,” Tantalus said with satisfaction. “You caused plenty of it last summer, I understand.”
I was too mad to speak. Like it was my fault the gods had almost gotten into a civil war?
A satyr inched forward nervously and set a plate of barbecue in front of Tantalus. The new activities director licked his lips. He looked at his empty goblet and said, “Root beer. Barq’s special stock. 1967.”
The glass filled itself with foamy soda. Tantalus stretched out his hand hesitantly, as if he were afraid the goblet was hot.
“Go on, then, old fellow,” Dionysus said, a strange sparkle in his eyes. “Perhaps now it will work.”
Tantalus grabbed for the glass, but it scooted away before he could touch it.
A few drops of root beer spilled, and Tantalus tried to dab them up with his fingers, but the drops rolled away like quicksilver before he could touch them.
He growled and turned toward the plate of barbecue.
He picked up a fork and tried to stab a piece of brisket, but the plate skittered down the table and flew off the end, straight into the coals of the brazier.
“Blast!” Tantalus muttered.
“Ah, well,” Dionysus said, his voice dripping with false sympathy. “Perhaps a few more days. Believe me, old chap, working at this camp will be torture enough. I’m sure your old curse will fade eventually.”
“Eventually,” muttered Tantalus, staring at Dionysus’s Diet Coke. “Do you have any idea how dry one’s throat gets after three thousand years?”
“You’re that spirit from the Fields of Punishment,” I said. “The one who stands in the lake with the fruit tree hanging over you, but you can’t eat or drink.”
Tantalus sneered at me. “A real scholar, aren’t you, boy?”
“You must’ve done something really horrible when you were alive,” I said, mildly impressed. “What was it?”
Tantalus’s eyes narrowed. Behind him, the satyrs were shaking their heads vigorously, trying to warn me.
“I’ll be watching you, Percy Jackson,” Tantalus said. “I don’t want any problems at my camp.”
“Your camp has problems already…sir.”
“Oh, go sit down, Johnson,” Dionysus sighed. “I believe that table over there is yours—the one where no one else ever wants to sit.”
My face was burning, but I knew better than to talk back. Dionysus was an overgrown brat, but he was an immortal, superpowerful overgrown brat. I said, “Come on, Tyson.”
“Oh, no,” Tantalus said. “The monster stays here. We must decide what to do with it.”
“Him,” I snapped. “His name is Tyson.”
The new activities director raised an eyebrow.
“Tyson saved the camp,” I insisted. “He pounded those bronze bulls. Otherwise they would’ve burned down this whole place.”
“Yes,” Tantalus sighed, “and what a pity that would’ve been.”
Dionysus snickered.
“Leave us,” Tantalus ordered, “while we decide this creature’s fate.”
Tyson looked at me with fear in his one big eye, but I knew I couldn’t disobey a direct order from the camp directors. Not openly, anyway.
“I’ll be right over here, big guy,” I promised. “Don’t worry. We’ll find you a good place to sleep tonight.”
Tyson nodded. “I believe you. You are my friend.”
Which made me feel a whole lot guiltier.
I trudged over to the Poseidon table and slumped onto the bench.
A wood nymph brought me a plate of Olympian olive-and-pepperoni pizza, but I wasn’t hungry.
I’d been almost killed twice today. I’d managed to end my school year with a complete disaster.
Camp Half-Blood was in serious trouble and Chiron had told me not to do anything about it.
I didn’t feel very thankful, but I took my dinner, as was customary, up to the bronze brazier and scraped part of it into the flames.
“Poseidon,” I murmured, “accept my offering.”
And send me some help while you’re at it, I prayed silently. Please.
The smoke from the burning pizza changed into something fragrant—the smell of a clean sea breeze with wildflowers mixed in—but I had no idea if that meant my father was really listening.