The Son of Neptune

Percy turned pale. ‘Maybe I could make the boat go faster?’

‘Even if you could,’ Hazel said, ‘from what the captains tell me, it’s treacherous – icebergs, mazes of channels to navigate. You’d have to know where you were going.’

‘A plane?’ Frank asked.

Hazel shook her head. ‘I asked the boat captains about that. They said we could try, but it’s a tiny airfield. You have to charter a plane two, three weeks in advance.’

They ate in silence after that. Hazel’s cheeseburger was excellent, but she couldn’t concentrate on it. She’d eaten about three bites when a raven settled on the telephone pole above and began to croak at them.

Hazel shivered. She was afraid it would speak to her like the other raven, so many years ago: The last night. Tonight. She wondered if ravens always appeared to children of Pluto when they were about to die. She hoped Nico was still alive, and Gaia had just been lying to make her unsettled. Hazel had a bad feeling that the goddess was telling the truth.

Nico had told her that he’d search for the Doors of Death from the other side. If he’d been captured by Gaia’s forces, Hazel might’ve lost the only family she had.

She stared at her cheeseburger.

Suddenly, the raven’s cawing changed to a strangled yelp.

Frank got up so fast that he almost toppled the picnic table. Percy drew his sword.

Hazel followed their eyes. Perched on top of the pole where the raven had been, a fat ugly gryphon glared down at them. It burped, and raven feathers fluttered from its beak.

Hazel stood and unsheathed her spatha.

Frank nocked an arrow. He took aim, but the gryphon shrieked so loudly the sound echoed off the mountains. Frank flinched, and his shot went wide.

‘I think that’s a call for help,’ Percy warned. ‘We have to get out of here.’

With no clear plan, they ran for the docks. The gryphon dived after them. Percy slashed at it with his sword, but the gryphon veered out of reach.

They took the steps to the nearest pier and raced to the end. The gryphon swooped after them, its front claws extended for the kill. Hazel raised her sword, but an icy wall of water slammed sideways into the gryphon and washed it into the bay. The gryphon squawked and flapped its wings. It managed to scramble onto the pier, where it shook its black fur like a wet dog.

Frank grunted. ‘Nice one, Percy.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Didn’t know if I could still do that in Alaska. But bad news – look over there.’

About a mile away, over the mountains, a black cloud was swirling – a whole flock of gryphons, dozens at least. There was no way they could fight that many, and no boat could take them away fast enough.

Frank nocked another arrow. ‘Not going down without a fight.’

Percy raised Riptide. ‘I’m with you.’

Then Hazel heard a sound in the distance – like the whinnying of a horse. She must’ve been imagining it, but she cried out desperately, ‘Arion! Over here!’

A tan blur came ripping down the street and onto the pier. The stallion materialized right behind the gryphon, brought down his front hooves and smashed the monster to dust.

Hazel had never been so happy in her life. ‘Good horse! Really good horse!’

Frank backed up and almost fell off the pier. ‘How -?’

‘He followed me!’ Hazel beamed. ‘Because he’s the best – horse – EVER! Now, get on!’

‘All three of us?’ Percy said. ‘Can he handle it?’

Arion whinnied indignantly.

‘All right, no need to be rude,’ Percy said. ‘Let’s go.’

They climbed on, Hazel in front, Frank and Percy balancing precariously behind her. Frank wrapped his arms round her waist, and Hazel thought that if this was going to be her last day on earth – it wasn’t a bad way to go out.

‘Run, Arion!’ she cried. ‘To Hubbard Glacier!’

The horse shot across the water, his hooves turning the top of the sea to steam.

XLIII Hazel

RIDING ARION, HAZEL FELT POWERFUL, unstoppable, absolutely in control – a perfect combination of horse and human. She wondered if this was what it was like to be a centaur.

The boat captains in Seward had warned her it was three hundred nautical miles to the Hubbard Glacier, a hard, dangerous journey, but Arion had no trouble. He raced over the water at the speed of sound, heating the air around them so that Hazel didn’t even feel the cold. On foot, she never would have felt so brave. On horseback, she couldn’t wait to charge into battle.

Frank and Percy didn’t look so happy. When Hazel glanced back, their teeth were clenched and their eyeballs were bouncing around in their heads. Frank’s cheeks jiggled from the g-force. Percy sat at the back, hanging on tight, desperately trying not to slip off the horse’s rear. Hazel hoped that didn’t happen. The way Arion was moving, she might not notice he was gone for fifty or sixty miles.

They raced through icy straits, past blue fjords and cliffs with waterfalls spilling into the sea. Arion jumped over a breaching humpback whale and kept galloping, startling a pack of seals off an iceberg.

It seemed like only minutes before they zipped into a narrow bay. The water turned the consistency of shaved ice in blue sticky syrup. Arion came to a halt on a frozen turquoise slab.

A half a mile away stood Hubbard Glacier. Even Hazel, who’d seen glaciers before, couldn’t quite process what she was looking at. Purple snowcapped mountains marched off in either direction, with clouds floating around their middles like fluffy belts. In a massive valley between two of the largest peaks, a ragged wall of ice rose out of the sea, filling the entire gorge. The glacier was blue and white with streaks of black, so that it looked like a hedge of dirty snow left behind on a sidewalk after a snowplough had gone by, only four million times as large.

As soon as Arion stopped, Hazel felt the temperature drop. All that ice was sending off waves of cold, turning the bay into the world’s largest refrigerator. The eeriest thing was a sound like thunder that rolled across the water.

‘What is that?’ Frank gazed at the clouds above the glacier. ‘A storm?’

‘No,’ Hazel said. ‘Ice cracking and shifting. Millions of tons of ice.’

‘You mean that thing is breaking up?’ Frank asked.

As if on cue, a sheet of ice silently calved off the side of the glacier and crashed into the sea, spraying water and frozen shrapnel several storeys high. A millisecond later the sound hit them – a BOOM almost as jarring as Arion hitting the sound barrier.

‘We can’t get close to that thing!’ Frank said.

‘We have to,’ Percy said. ‘The giant is at the top.’

Arion nickered.

‘Jeez, Hazel,’ Percy said, ‘tell your horse to watch his language.’

Hazel tried not to laugh. ‘What did he say?’

‘With the cussing removed? He said he can get us to the top.’

Frank looked incredulous. ‘I thought the horse couldn’t fly!’

This time Arion whinnied so angrily, even Hazel could guess he was cursing.

‘Dude,’ Percy told the horse, ‘I’ve been suspended for saying less than that. Hazel, he promises you’ll see what he can do as soon as you give the word.’

‘Um, hold on, then, you guys,’ Hazel said nervously. ‘Arion, giddyup!’

Arion shot towards the glacier like a runaway rocket, barrelling straight across the slush like he wanted to play chicken with the mountain of ice.

The air grew colder. The crackling of the ice grew louder. As Arion closed the distance, the glacier loomed so