Deion nodded. “For real. Everyone is talking about you all time. You must have noticed?”
Nico and Will exchanged a look.
“Isthatwhat the legionnaires have been whispering about?” asked Will. “I kind of assumed they were complaining about Asterion and his friends.”
“I mean…okay, that’s most of it,” Deion admitted. “But you two are a big deal!”
Savannah sipped her hot chocolate. “To be fair, we’ll gossip about anything. Don’t you guys do that over in the Greek camp? The boys areespeciallybad.”
“We are not!” said Deion. Then he glanced at Nico and mouthedWe are.
Nico smiled. It made him feel better to know that not all the whispering and gossiping he’d noticed in the mess hall was about the mythics.
He knew Asterion’s group meant no harm. The bigger problem was getting the legionnaires to believe that. If Deion and even Savannah could learn to be more open-minded, maybe there was a chance, and that could changeeverything.
Bob had done that for Nico. The Titan had chosen to be something different than what he had been destined for at birth. And wasn’t that exactly what Nico had done himself over the past six months?
He’d been known as many things over the years: Death Boy, the Ghost King, Grumpy Little Ball of Darkness. Inherent in all of them: He was different. He was not like anyone else. He certainly had no aversion to being associated with darkness. He loved that part of himself. But sometimes being on the outside was hard. It made it easy for him to empathize with Asterion and his friends, who’d been rejected by their own kind and were now struggling in a world that couldn’t see them as anything but monsters.
Nico wanted to bridge that gap. He wanted to show the Romans and mythics that it was possible to choose something better than fear and mistrust. If Bob could do it, maybe there was hope for the rest of them.
He watched the younger demigods chat while their eyes kept scanning the horizon for any threats, but there was nothing out of the ordinary within sight.
And at that moment, for no reason Nico could see, the Cocoa Puffs went into a frenzy. They raced around him, crashing into one another. Fear and Guilt grabbed on to Nico’s bootlaces. Jealousy prodded his ankle with its pointy tusks, flooding his mind with bitter images:Annabeth reaching for Percy’s hand. Sally Jackson speaking fondly about her son while handing out homemade blue cookies.
The hairs rose on the back of Nico’s neck. Jealousy’s touch seemed to sharpen his senses. He felt something moving toward them from the west, like a low-pressure zone before a storm.
“Nico?” asked Will. “Why are the Puffs so upset?”
“I sense something,” he said. “We’re being watched.”
Deion frowned. “Are you sure?”
Nico glanced down at the freeway. He didn’t see anything, but dread was building in his stomach.
“Hold on,” Savannah said, setting down her cup. “Frank’s calling.”
She raised her bracelet and listened.
The temperature dropped as if Nico had stepped into a freezer. His breath steamed. The Puffs mewled and howled.
Will shivered. “I think you’re right. I can feel it now too.”
Savannah spoke urgently into her tessera. “Hold on.What?Wait, someone else is calling.”
Nico raised his own tessera. “Terminus! We need you herenow.”
CRASH!The sound came from Nico’s tessera. A split second later, another one echoed from Savannah’s pendant. A cacophony of voices shattered the night air.“Something’s here!” “Terminus!” “Hazel!” “Where is it?” “Frank!” “Terminus!”
Deion gripped his spear, looking around wildly for some invisible foe to fight.
Light exploded from their tesserae. Every Iris-message from every pendant blazed overhead at full brightness, blinding Nico and burning the afterimage of a hundred rainbow spheres onto his eyes.
Just as suddenly, the lights flickered out. From Nico’s tessera came a noise like wet breathing into a microphone, followed by a distorted voice.
“What is this shiny toy?”The speaker sounded like an old woman…like La Befana, the Christmas witch from the fables Nico had grown up with.“Oh, how clever! I think I’ll keep it. And Hazel Levesque…interfering with a duly appointed officer of the court? Tsk, tsk. You shall be next!”
The voice went silent. The tesserae grew so hot that the demigods had to pull them off and throw them to the ground, where they lay smoking like blown fuses.
