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“By a few seconds, yeah.”

“Were you in physical contact with a Puff at the time?”

Nico remembered Jealousy prodding him with its tusks. “Yep.”

Hazel looked like she was running an equation in her head. She faced Semele. “Okay, so…as the daughter of Pluto, one of my abilities—growingabilities, I should say—is that I can manipulate the Mist.”

“I’m aware,” Semele said. “You made yourself and your comrades invisible tonight while you were on watch. It did not help.”

“Except it wasn’t really invisibility,” Hazel said. “That’s not how the Mist works.”

Johan stopped his pacing. “ ‘The Mist works more on the mind than the eyes.’ I read that in a treatise by Aristides of Pergamon!”

Nico had no idea who that was, but the comment seemed to make sense to Hazel.

“Right,” she said. “Usually, the Mist is generated when mortal minds encounter something magical that they can’t understand. That…friction, I guess you’d call it, creates alternate perceptions.”

Will frowned. “Okay, but…I thought that, as demigods, we see right through the Mist.”

“You see through it moreeasily,” Hazel corrected. “But you can still be fooled, especially if someone is actively trying to manipulate you. You’ve encountered plenty of creatures that you didn’t realize were mythical at first, right?”

Will nodded sheepishly. “Point taken.”

Frank leaned against the stone wall. He looked like he was having trouble following Introductory Mist Theory with Hazel Levesque, especially since it was one o’clock in the morning. “Sorry…how does this help us?”

“Whatever is abducting the mythics,” Hazel said, “it has to be using the Mist. To put an entire room full of people asleep, to cause disturbances all around our borders, to kidnap someone as huge as Asterion—and to do all of that at once? Terminus must be right. We’re dealing with something like a minor god.”

“Then it’s hopeless,” Johan said.

“No,” Frank said. “Terminus is a minor god. He’s not perfect.”

Until that moment, Nico had never really appreciated the power of understatement. But Frank had made his point. Everyone in the room nodded and looked thoughtful, as if imagining all the ways that a minor god might fail spectacularly.

“When multiple people are trying to manipulate the Mist,” Hazel said, “it becomes sort of like a poker game. It’s all about bluffing and calling, not necessarily who has the most powerful hand. Tonight, the intruder got the drop on me. I’d created a general illusion that I was blending in with the couch, but even that took a lot of energy. The intruder called my bluff and convinced everyone in the room that they were super tired and needed to pass out. I couldn’t respond because I didn’t know we were being attacked. But maybe if I’d had a Cocoa Puff in my lap…”

“The Puff would have warned you,” Nico said. “And being in contact with one heightens your emotions.”

“Which makes you more aware.” Hazel smiled. “That’s why you felt the intruder’s presence before anyone else did. Altogether, that should be enough warning for me to be prepared this time. At the very least, I can stay awake and put all my energy into revealing this intruder’s true form.”

Frank cracked his knuckles, which seemed like a very son-of-Mars thing to do. “And the rest of us will take them down, even if I have to throw Terminus at them.”

Orcus stomped his front two eagle feet impatiently. “I only understood about ten percent of that. But none of it explainswhyArielle, Quinoa, and Asterion were taken!”

“One step at a time, child,” said Semele. Her tone had become less irritated, more pensive. She floated closer to Hazel. “We need to figure outwhobefore we figure outwhy. Do you really think you can catch whoever has been kidnapping our friends, Praetor Levesque?”

“I do.”

“Using us as bait again,” Semele guessed.

“Not exactly.” Hazel turned toward Nico. “What did the voice in the tesserae say about me?”

The memory gave Nico goose bumps.

“That you would be next,” he said.

Frank grunted. “That’snotgoing to happen. We can wait in the principia’s vault tonight. It’s the most secure location in camp.”

Hazel nodded. “I’d like the mythics to join us there. For safety in numbers. But your people aren’t the target tonight, Semele—Iam. That gives us the edge. We know who this intruder is coming for, which means we know they will appear wherever I am. We won’t have to spread out trying to guard the whole valley.”