Rick Riordan
The Sea Monsters - 02
around the stands, every once in a while yelling, "Everything's under control! Not to worry.'"
We pulled up to the finish line. Annabeth got the boom box ready. I prayed the batteries
weren't dead.
I pressed PLAY and started up Chiron's favorite—the All-Time Greatest Hits of Dean Martin.
Suddenly the air was filled with violins and a bunch of guys moaning in Italian.
The demon pigeons went nuts. They started flying in circles, running into each other like they
wanted to bash their own brains out. Then they abandoned the track altogether and flew skyward in
a huge dark wave.
"Now!" shouted Annabeth. "Archers!"
With clear targets, Apollo's archers had flawless aim. Most of them could nock five or six
arrows at once. Within minutes, the ground was littered with dead bronze-beaked pigeons, and the
survivors were a distant trail of smoke on the horizon.
The camp was saved, but the wreckage wasn't pretty. Most of the chariots had been
completely destroyed. Almost everyone was wounded, bleeding from multiple bird pecks. The kids
from Aphrodite's cabin were screaming because their hairdos had been ruined and their clothes
pooped on.
"Bravo!" Tantalus said, but he wasn't looking at me or Annabeth. "We have our first winner!"
He walked to "He finish line and awarded the golden laurels for the race to a stunned-looking
Clarisse.
Then he turned and smiled at me. "And now to punish the troublemakers who disrupted this
race."
Chapter Seven
I Accept Gifts From A Stranger
The way Tantalus saw it, the Stymphalian birds had simply been minding their own business
in the woods and would not have attacked if Annabeth, Tyson, and I hadn't disturbed them with our
bad chariot driving.
This was so completely unfair, I told Tantalus to go chase a doughnut, which didn't help his
mood. He sentenced us to kitchen patrol—scrubbing pots and platters all afternoon in the
underground kitchen with the cleaning harpies. The harpies washed with lava instead of water, to
get that extra-clean sparkle and kill ninety-nine point nine percent of all germs, so Annabeth and I
had to wear asbestos gloves and aprons.
Tyson didn't mind. He plunged his bare hands right in and started scrubbing, but Annabeth
and I had to suffer through hours of hot, dangerous work, especially since there were tons of extra
plates. Tantalus had ordered a special luncheon banquet to celebrate Clarisse's chariot victory—a
full-course meal featuring country-fried Stymphalian death-bird.
The only good thing about our punishment was that it gave Annabeth and me a common
enemy and lots of time to talk. After listening to my dream about Grover again, she looked like she
might be starting to believe me.
"If he's really found it," she murmured, "and if we could retrieve it—"
"Hold on," I said. "You act like this ... whatever-it-is Grover found is the only thing in the
world that could save the camp. What is it?"
"I'll give you a hint. What do you get when you skin a ram?"
"Messy?"
She sighed. "A fleece. The coat of a ram is called a fleece. And if that ram happens to have
golden wool—"
"The Golden Fleece. Are you serious?"
Annabeth scrapped a plateful of death-bird bones into the lava. "Percy, remember the Gray
Sisters? They said they knew the location of the thing you seek. And they mentioned Jason. Three
thousand years ago, they told him how to find the Golden Fleece. You do know the story of Jason
and the Argonauts?"
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