The thing about coming home, Percy Jackson decided, was that it was supposed to feel like coming home.
He stood at the top of Half-Blood Hill with his duffel bag slung over one shoulder and Riptide a familiar weight in his pocket, and he waited for the feeling. The pine tree was where it had always been, its branches heavy with the Golden Fleece, Peleus coiled around the trunk like a sleepy, overgrown housecat. The valley spread out below him in a patchwork of green: the strawberry fields running down toward the Long Island Sound, the climbing wall with its lava trickling lazily in the sun, the U of cabins around the hearth, the Big House with its blue paint and the weathervane eagle on top. Somewhere down there a conch horn was sounding for the end of morning activities.
It looked exactly right. It smelled exactly right, salt and strawberries and the faint metallic tang of the forges. And yet the feeling didn't come.
"You're overthinking it," he muttered to himself. "You always overthink it."
Peleus lifted one enormous eyelid, regarded him for a long moment, and then, strangely, let out a low hiss before closing it again.
Percy blinked. "Okay. Rude. I fed you a whole cow once, you know."
The dragon didn't answer. Dragons rarely did.
He was twenty-one now. Three years at New Rome University had filled out his shoulders and given him a sense of time that had nothing to do with the next monster attack: semesters, midterms, a part-time job at a bakery on the Via Praetoria that paid mostly in day-old bread. He had come back to Camp Half-Blood every summer since he'd started, partly because Chiron asked, partly because Sally said the campers needed to see that demigods could grow up, and mostly because Annabeth spent her summers here running the architecture program she'd built from nothing.
Annabeth. That thought, at least, brought a smile. She hadn't answered his last few Iris-messages, but she'd warned him in the spring that camp was busier than ever, and there was a new design project for the amphitheater that was eating her alive. He had a ring box in the bottom of his duffel, wrapped inside three pairs of socks so she wouldn't find it if she went through his things, which she absolutely would. He'd been saving since October.
He started down the hill.
The first strange thing was the Stoll brothers.
Travis and Connor were near the camp store, arguing over what looked like a crate of stolen Greek fire, and Percy lifted a hand and called out, "Hey! Did you two finally get caught, or are you still a menace?"
They turned. For a second, Percy saw something like recognition flicker across Travis's face. Then it was gone, wiped away like chalk off a board, and Travis's lip curled.
"Look who decided to show up," Travis said.
"Uh." Percy slowed. "Yeah, summer break. I said I'd be back in June. It's June."
Connor crossed his arms. "Nobody asked you to come back, Jackson."
There was no joke in it. Percy waited for the grin, the punchline, the moment where they shoved each other and laughed and told him they'd put shaving cream in his sleeping bag. It didn't come. The two of them just stared at him with flat, unfriendly eyes until he said, slowly, "Okay," and walked on.
He told himself they were in a mood. Hermes kids had moods. Maybe they'd lost a bet.
The second strange thing was the volleyball court. A cluster of Apollo campers were playing a game, and when Percy passed, the ball came flying at his head hard enough that he had to snatch it out of the air with a reflex he'd honed against harpies. Kayla, who'd once patched up his arm after a hellhound bit through it to the bone, held out her hands for the ball without a word. When he tossed it back, she caught it and turned away. Nobody said hello. Somebody said something under their breath, and somebody else laughed.
The third strange thing was Cabin Three.
Percy had expected it to be empty. Tyson was at the forges under the sea most of the year, and Percy had been the only demigod son of Poseidon at Camp Half-Blood for so long that he'd stopped thinking of it as anything other than his. But when he came around the curve of the cabins, the door to Cabin Three was open, and there was music playing inside, some loud, bass-heavy song, and the sea-green curtains had been replaced with black ones, and someone had hung a banner over the doorway.
It said, in gold letters: THE TRUE HEIR OF THE SEA.
Percy stopped walking.
"Oh," said a voice behind him, smooth and amused. "You must be him."
The kid was maybe sixteen. He was tall, with black hair cut in a careful fade and eyes the bright, shallow green of a swimming pool. He wore a camp T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and a Celestial bronze trident pendant hung on a chain around his neck. He had a face that was good-looking in the way of people who knew they were good-looking and had arranged their whole lives around the fact. When he smiled, it was all teeth.
"Ezra," he said, and held out his hand. "Ezra Vance. Son of Poseidon."
Percy looked at the hand. Then he looked at the kid. There was something about him that made the hair on the back of Percy's neck stand up, the same way it did before a storm, except that Percy had never in his life felt that way about the sea.
He shook the hand anyway, because Sally had raised him right. Ezra's grip was too tight, deliberately so, and Percy let him have it.
"Percy," he said. "Percy Jackson. Also son of Poseidon. Guess that makes us brothers."
"Half-brothers," Ezra said pleasantly. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."
"When were you claimed?"
"February. Dad came himself, actually." Ezra's smile widened a fraction. "Didn't send a little glowing hologram. Showed up in person on the beach and everything. Told me I was exactly what he'd been hoping for." He tilted his head. "Did he do that for you? I've heard you had to go on, what was it, a whole quest before he admitted you existed?"
It was a needle, and Percy felt it go in. He kept his face calm. "Something like that."
"Must have been rough." Ezra clapped him on the shoulder and walked past him toward Cabin Three. "Anyway. I moved some of your stuff into the back corner. You weren't using the good bunk, so." He paused at the door. "Oh, and Percy? Everybody here knows what you did. Just so you're not surprised."
"What I did?"
But Ezra had already gone inside, and the music got louder, and the door swung shut.
Percy found Grover at the edge of the woods, which was the first good thing that had happened all day.
His best friend was sitting on a stump with a half-eaten tin can in one hand and a reed pipe in the other, playing something mournful that made the nearby dryads lean toward him from their trees. He'd grown into his horns over the years. He was a Lord of the Wild now, a member of the Council of Cloven Elders, with a beard that was finally, triumphantly, more than three hairs, and he looked up when Percy's shadow fell across him and his whole face lit.
"Percy!"
Then the light faltered. Something passed over Grover's features, the same thing Percy had seen with Travis, a shiver like a TV losing its signal. Grover's eyes went unfocused. He pressed one hand to his temple.
"Grover?"
"Sorry," Grover said. He shook his head hard, the way he did when he smelled a monster. "Sorry, I just. Weird headache. It's been doing that all spring." He looked up again, and the warmth came back, a little uncertain but real. "Percy. Hey, man. You're here."
Percy sat down on the grass next to the stump. "Grover. What's going on?"
Grover didn't pretend not to understand. That was the thing about an empathy link; even after it had faded with time, they'd never really learned how to lie to each other. He set his tin can down, which was how Percy knew it was serious.
"I don't know," Grover said. "I mean, I know some of it. I just don't understand it. That kid, Ezra. He showed up in February. And at first it was fine, he was arrogant, but plenty of new campers are arrogant. And then stories started going around."
"About me."
"About you." Grover swallowed. "That you were the reason Beckendorf died. That you let Luke turn so you could be the hero. That you've been taking credit for things that Annabeth and Clarisse and Nico did. That you, um." He grimaced. "That you hurt people. In New Rome. Campers who came back say they heard it from Romans. Nobody can ever say exactly which Romans."
Percy stared at him. "That's insane."
"I know."
"Grover, people were there for half of that. People watched it happen. Clarisse watched it happen."
"I know," Grover said again, and his voice cracked. "That's the part that scares me. Because I know it's wrong, Perce. I know it. But every time I think about it too hard, my head starts hurting, and it's like there's this other version of the story sitting right next to the real one, and it keeps trying to sit down in my chair." He rubbed his eyes. "It's not just me. I think it's happening to everyone. Only most of them stopped fighting it."
Percy felt cold, the way he had felt at the bottom of the river Styx, the way he'd felt staring up at the black throat of Tartarus. "Magic," he said. "Some kind of Mist manipulation. Hecate's kids could do something like that, maybe, but not on a whole camp—"
"I tried telling Chiron," Grover said miserably. "He said I was stressed. He said I should take a break from council work." He looked at Percy with huge, wet eyes. "He said it kindly. That was the worst part."
Percy put a hand on his friend's shoulder. "Hey. It's okay. We'll figure it out. We always do."
Grover nodded, but his lip was trembling. "There's something else," he said. "About Annabeth."
The cold in Percy's chest spread.
He found her in the amphitheater, which was how he knew Grover hadn't been lying.
Not because she was there; she was always there, this summer, bent over blueprints with her pencil behind her ear and her curls tied back with a bandana. That was the part he'd been looking forward to, the part he'd replayed during finals week when he couldn't sleep: walking up behind her, putting his chin on her shoulder, watching her pretend to be annoyed while she leaned back against him.
The part he hadn't pictured was Ezra Vance sitting on the edge of her drafting table, one hand on her knee.
They were laughing at something. Annabeth's head was tipped back, her gray eyes bright, and Ezra was leaning close to say something else, and she swatted his arm, and he caught her wrist and kissed the inside of it, and she let him.
Percy didn't remember deciding to walk down the steps. He just found himself standing at the bottom of the amphitheater with his duffel bag still on his shoulder and the ring box sitting in the bottom of it like a stone.
"Annabeth."
She turned. And for one heartbeat, one single, merciful heartbeat, she looked at him the way she had looked at him in the Sea of Monsters, at the Hoover Dam, on the Princess Andromeda, at the edge of the pit. She looked at him like he was the one fixed point in a world that kept trying to kill them both. Her lips parted. She said, very softly, "Percy—"
Then her face shuttered. It was like watching a window go dark.
"You're back," she said. Her voice was perfectly level.
"I'm back," Percy said. "I sent you IMs. You didn't answer."
"I've been busy."
"I can see that."
Ezra slid off the table. He didn't let go of Annabeth's wrist. "Bro," he said, in the tone people used when they were about to be very reasonable at you. "Let's not make a scene. It's not a good look."
Percy ignored him. He was watching Annabeth, watching her eyes, because he knew those eyes better than he knew the sea, and something was moving behind them. There was a crease between her brows that only showed up when a problem didn't add up. She was looking at him and frowning like he was an equation with a missing variable.
"How long?" he asked.
"Percy, I don't think this is—"
"How long, Annabeth."
She lifted her chin. "Since March."
March. He'd sent her a care package in March. He'd driven down from New Rome on a three-day weekend in March and she'd said she couldn't see him, that she had a deadline. He'd spent the weekend helping Paul repaint the apartment instead and told himself it was fine.
"You could have told me," he said. "That's all. You could have just told me."
Something flickered in her face again. For a second he thought she might cry. Annabeth Chase never cried in front of people, not if she could help it, and he watched her fight it now, watched the crease between her brows deepen, watched her open her mouth.
Ezra squeezed her wrist. Percy saw it, a tiny pressure of his fingers, and he saw the faint shimmer that went out from Ezra's hand, so faint it might have been heat haze off the stone, like light seen through water.
Annabeth's face smoothed. The almost-tears were gone.
"I didn't owe you an explanation," she said coolly. "After what you did? You're lucky anyone here is still speaking to you at all."
Percy looked at Ezra. Ezra looked back at him, and smiled.
"Well," Ezra said. "That's that, I guess."
At dinner, Percy sat alone at the Poseidon table, because Ezra had chosen to sit with the Athena cabin.
Nobody had ever said that was allowed, but nobody stopped him, either. Chiron, standing at the head table in his centaur form, glanced over at Ezra once and away again, and that was all. Mr. D, flipping through a wine magazine with a Diet Coke at his elbow, didn't look up at all.
Percy scraped part of his dinner into the brazier and said, quietly, "Dad. If you're listening. I could really use a sign right now."
The smoke rose straight up, smelling of grilled fish and barbecue. Nothing happened. No warm breeze. No smell of the sea.
Across the pavilion, Ezra raised his goblet and said something, and the whole Athena table laughed. Annabeth laughed with them.
Percy ate without tasting anything. He watched the camp, the way he'd once watched the shadows in the Labyrinth for movement. He counted faces. Most of the campers wouldn't meet his eyes. A few glared openly. The Ares cabin was strangely quiet; Clarisse, who'd come back from her own college to run the combat program, sat at the end of her table with her arms folded and her jaw tight, staring at nothing. When Percy caught her eye, she held his gaze for a long time before she looked away, and he couldn't read what was in it.
At the Hades table, there was no one. Nico had been in the Underworld since April, helping his father with some reorganization of the Fields of Asphodel. Percy found himself wishing, fiercely, that Nico were here. Nico would have known what this was. Nico would have smelled the wrongness on it.
At the Zeus table, there was also no one. Thalia was with the Hunters, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest the last Percy had heard.
After dinner, he went down to the beach. He took off his shoes and walked into the surf up to his knees and stood there while the sun went down, and he waited for the sea to say something to him.
The water lapped at his legs, cool and calm. It was the same water it had always been. It still felt like his. When he reached out with his will, the waves rose obediently, curling up into a wall that glittered gold in the sunset, then collapsed back down at his word.
But there was something else out there, too. A second presence, small and bright and hungry, threaded through the currents near the shore. It felt like Ezra. And it felt like it was pulling, the way a riptide pulls, drawing the sea's attention away from him and toward itself.
"Huh," said a voice behind him. "Look at you. Talking to the water like it still listens."
Percy didn't turn around. "Hey, Ezra."
His half-brother came down to the water's edge, stopping just short of the foam, as if he didn't want to get his sneakers wet. "You know, I almost feel bad for you," Ezra said. "Almost. I've read about you, did you know that? Before I came here. My mom had a friend, a clear-sighted mortal, she kept clippings. Percy Jackson, the boy who held up the sky. Percy Jackson, who turned down godhood. Percy Jackson, the hero of Olympus." He laughed softly. "And you know what I thought, reading all that? I thought, what a waste. All that power and you spent it being nice."
"It wasn't a waste," Percy said.
"No? Look around you." Ezra spread his arms to take in the beach, the cabins, the glowing windows of the Big House. "Six months. That's all it took. Six months, and nobody remembers you the way they used to. They remember you the way I tell them to." His smile was a thin, pleased crescent in the dusk. "Dad doesn't need two sons, Percy. He needs one good one. He needs one who's actually willing to use what he's got."
Now Percy did turn. The water around his legs went still and flat as glass.
"What did you do to them?" he asked quietly.
"Me?" Ezra put a hand over his heart. "I didn't do anything. I just told the truth. My truth." He backed up a step, toward the dunes. "Get some sleep, big brother. Tomorrow's going to be a big day for you."
He walked away, whistling.
Percy stood in the ocean until the stars came out. The sea murmured around him, uneasy, and for the first time since he was twelve years old, he could not tell whether it was trying to comfort him or warn him.
In the bottom of his duffel bag, wrapped in three pairs of socks, the ring box sat where he had left it, and he did not take it out.