Arielle stomped, cracking the dirt beneath her donkey hoof. “Thisis why we have to leave.” A blood tear trickled down her cheek. “I don’t care if they catch me! I don’t care if theyjudgeme—it couldn’t be worse than the judgment I’m getting right here!”
She turned and marched off toward the mythics’ quarters.
Nico filed her comments away for later. He needed to find out what she meant. But at the moment, Savannah’s condition was the bigger problem.
He knelt in front of her. As angry as he was with her for unfairly attacking Arielle, this wasn’t the moment to scold her. If her parents had been killed by empousai…no wonder Arielle’s presence had triggered her.
Her stare was unfocused. He could tell she was far away. He remembered what that felt like. A panic attack could be frightening, but it could also feel like everything was happening to someone else.
“Savannah,” he said, “I need you to breathe. In and out, slowly.”
He helped bring her back to herself with breathing exercises—the very ones that Mr. D had taught him over the past few months.
Finally, she seemed to regain her composure, but when she raised her eyes to Nico, rage still smoldered in them.
“Why is she allowed to be here?” Savannah asked. “Why are any of them? They ruined my life.”
They.
Monsters. All monsters.
Not so long ago, Nico wouldn’t have questioned Savannah’s statement. Now everything felt a lot more complicated. He thought about what Mr. D had told him—that the job of elder demigods was to help kids like Savannah adjust to their new world. Nico had botched that completely. He felt like he’d failed today worse than Asterion or Orcus or Johan.
Nico swallowed his resentment and guilt. “Let’s get you to the infirmary,” he said. “Then we’ll figure out what to do next, okay?”
He helped her to her feet, and as they walked slowly back toward camp, Nico felt lost.
He had no idea how he was going to fix this.
Dinner that night was tense. Stories about what had happened to Savannah had spread through camp, and from the whispers and snippets that Nico caught, most of them were false. One claimed that Arielle had attacked Savannah and taunted her about her parents’ death. Another said that Arielle had come to Camp Jupiter specifically to torment her victim further.
Nico did his best to set the record straight, but gossip was harder to kill than the Lernaean Hydra. As he sat at the head table with Will, Hazel, and Frank, he was angry.
He stabbed his hamburger with his fork, which wasn’t fair to the burger. “If I’d known Savannah had lost her parents to an empousa attack, I would never have asked her to train with Arielle.”
Hazel and Frank exchanged an embarrassed look.
“We didn’t know ourselves until you told us,” said Hazel. “All Savannah ever shared was that her parents died shortly before Lupa found her.”
Frank turned to Will. “Lupa’s the wolf goddess who finds Roman demigods and leads them to camp. She, ah, doesn’t usually give us much context about the recruits she brings.”
Hazel pushed around her French fries half-heartedly. “This is a disaster. What have I done?”
Will squeezed her hand. “There’s no point in trying to assign blame. We just have to figure out what to do now.”
“And what is that, exactly?” Nico grumbled.
The table fell into silence. The four demigods stared at their food.
Frank sighed. “Hazel, you know I love you, and you know that I think you did the right thing by letting Asterion and his friends stay here.”
Her face fell. “But now you think I should ask them to leave?”
“No,” he said. “I mean…Gods, I don’t know. It’s just…as praetor, I have to put the safety of our demigods first, right?”
Hazel glared at her boyfriend. “Do you think I’m not?”
“That’s not what I said!”
