PERCY HAD TAKEN HIS GIRLFRIEND on some romantic walks before. This wasn’t one of them.
They followed the River Phlegethon, stumbling over the glassy black terrain, jumping crevices, and hiding behind rocks whenever the vampire girls slowed in front of them.
It was tricky to stay far enough back to avoid getting spotted but close enough to keep Kelli and her comrades in view through the dark hazy air. The heat from the river baked Percy’s skin. Every breath was like inhaling sulfur-scented fiberglass. When they needed a drink, the best they could do was sip some refreshing liquid fire.
Yep. Percy definitely knew how to show a girl a good time.
At least Annabeth’s ankle seemed to have healed. She was hardly limping at all. Her various cuts and scrapes had faded. She’d tied her blond hair back with a strip of denim torn from her pants leg, and in the fiery light of the river, her gray eyes flickered. Despite being beat-up, sooty, and dressed like a homeless person, she looked great to Percy.
So what if they were in Tartarus? So what if they stood a slim chance of surviving? He was so glad that they were together, he had the ridiculous urge to smile.
Physically, Percy felt better too, though his clothes looked like he’d been through a hurricane of broken glass. He was thirsty, hungry, and scared out of his mind (though he wasn’t going to tell Annabeth that), but he’d shaken off the hopeless cold of the River Cocytus. And as nasty as the firewater tasted, it seemed to keep him going.
Time was impossible to judge. They trudged along, following the river as it cut through the harsh landscape. Fortunately the empousai weren’t exactly speed walkers. They shuffled on their mismatched bronze and donkey legs, hissing and fighting with each other, apparently in no hurry to reach the Doors of Death.
Once, the demons sped up in excitement and swarmed something that looked like a beached carcass on the riverbank. Percy couldn’t tell what it was—a fallen monster? An animal of some kind? The empousai attacked it with relish.
When the demons moved on, Percy and Annabeth reached the spot and found nothing left except a few splintered bones and glistening stains drying in the heat of the river. Percy had no doubt the empousai would devour demigods with the same gusto.
“Come on.” He led Annabeth gently away from the scene. “We don’t want to lose them.”
As they walked, Percy thought about the first time he’d fought the empousa Kelli at Goode High School’s freshman orientation, when he and Rachel Elizabeth Dare got trapped in the band hall. At the time, it seemed like a hopeless situation. Now, he’d give anything to have a problem that simple. At least he’d been in the mortal world then. Here, there was nowhere to run.
Wow. When he started looking back on the war with Kronos as the good old days—that was sad. He kept hoping things would get better for Annabeth and him, but their lives just got more and more dangerous, as if the Three Fates were up there spinning their futures with barbed wire instead of thread just to see how much two demigods could tolerate.
After a few more miles, the empousai disappeared over a ridge. When Percy and Annabeth caught up, they found themselves at the edge of another massive cliff. The River Phlegethon spilled over the side in jagged tiers of fiery waterfalls. The demon ladies were picking their way down the cliff, jumping from ledge to ledge like mountain goats.
Percy’s heart crept into his throat. Even if he and Annabeth reached the bottom of the cliff alive, they didn’t have much to look forward to. The landscape below them was a bleak, ash-gray plain bristling with black trees, like insect hair. The ground was pocked with blisters. Every once in a while, a bubble would swell and burst, disgorging a monster like a larva from an egg.
Suddenly Percy wasn’t hungry anymore.
All the newly formed monsters were crawling and hobbling in the same direction—toward a bank of black fog that swallowed the horizon like a storm front. The Phlegethon flowed in the same direction until about halfway across the plain, where it met another river of black water—maybe the Cocytus? The two floods combined in a steaming, boiling cataract and flowed on as one toward the black fog.
The longer Percy looked into that storm of darkness, the less he wanted to go there. It could be hiding anything—an ocean, a bottomless pit, an army of monsters. But if the Doors of Death were in that direction, it was their only chance to get home.
He peered over the edge of the cliff.
“Wish we could fly,” he muttered.
Annabeth rubbed her arms. “Remember Luke’s winged shoes? I wonder if they’re still down here somewhere.”
Percy remembered. Those shoes had been cursed to drag their wearer into Tartarus. They’d almost taken his best friend, Grover. “I’d settle for a hang glider.”
“Maybe not a good idea.” Annabeth pointed. Above them, dark winged shapes spiraled in and out of the bloodred clouds.
“Furies?” Percy wondered.
“Or some other kind of demon,” Annabeth said. “Tartarus has thousands.”
“Including the kind that eats hang gliders,” Percy guessed. “Okay, so we climb.”
He couldn’t see the empousai below them anymore. They’d disappeared behind one of the ridges, but that didn’t matter. It was clear where he and Annabeth needed to go. Like all the maggot monsters crawling over the plains of Tartarus, they should head toward the dark horizon. Percy was just brimming with enthusiasm for that.
