The Hidden Oracle (20 page)

I noticed she didn’t complain about the cold herself. I wondered if she even felt uncomfortable, or if the power of Demeter kept her safe through the winter like a leafless tree or a dormant seed in the earth.

“They were my children.” It hurt me to use the past tense, but Kayla and Austin felt irretrievably lost. “I should’ve done more to protect them. I should have anticipated that my enemies would target them to hurt me.”

Meg chucked another rock at the trees. “You’ve had a lot of children. You take the blame every time one of them gets in trouble?”

The answer was no. Over the millennia, I had barely managed to remember my children’s names. If I sent them an occasional birthday card or a magic flute, I felt really good about myself. Sometimes I wouldn’t realize one of them had died until decades later. During the French Revolution, I got worried about my boy Louis XIV, the Sun King, then went down to check on him and found out he had died seventy-five years earlier.

Now, though, I had a mortal conscience. My sense of guilt seemed to have expanded as my life span contracted. I couldn’t explain that to Meg. She would never understand. She’d probably just throw a rock at me.

“It’s my fault Python retook Delphi,” I said. “If I had killed him the moment he reappeared, while I was still a god, he would never have become so powerful. He would never have made an alliance with this…this
Beast.
”

Meg lowered her face.

“You know him,” I guessed. “In the Labyrinth, when you heard the Beast’s voice, you were terrified.”

I was worried she might order me to shut up again. Instead, she silently traced the crescents on her gold rings.

“Meg, he wants to
destroy
me,” I said. “Somehow, he’s behind these disappearances. The more we understand about this man—”

“He lives in New York.”

I waited. It was difficult to glean much information from the top of Meg’s hood.

“All right,” I said. “That narrows it down to eight and a half million people. What else?”

Meg picked at the calluses on her fingers. “If you’re a demigod on the streets, you hear about the Beast. He takes people like me.”

A snowflake melted on the back of my neck. “Takes people…why?”

“To train,” Meg said. “To use like…servants, soldiers. I don’t know.”

“And you’ve met him.”

“Please don’t ask me—”

“Meg.”

“He killed my dad.”

Her words were quiet, but they hit me harder than a rock in the face. “Meg, I—I’m sorry. How…?”

“I refused to work for him,” she said. “My dad tried to…” She closed her fists. “I was really small. I hardly remember it. I got away. Otherwise, the Beast would’ve killed me, too. My stepdad took me in. He was good to me. You asked why he trained me to fight? Why he gave me the rings? He wanted me to be safe, to be able to protect myself.”

“From the Beast.”

Her hood dipped. “Being a good demigod, training hard…that’s the only way to keep the Beast away. Now you know.”

In fact, I had more questions than ever, but I sensed that Meg was in no mood for further sharing. I remembered her expression as we stood on that ledge under the chamber of Delphi—her look of absolute terror when she recognized the Beast’s voice. Not all monsters were three-ton reptiles with poisonous breath. Many wore human faces.

I peered into the woods. Somewhere in there, five demigods were being used as bait, including two of my children. The Beast wanted me to search for them, and I would. But I would
not
let him use me.

I have well-placed help within the camp,
the Beast had said.

That bothered me.

I knew from experience that any demigod could be turned against Olympus. I had been at the banquet table when Tantalus tried to poison the gods by feeding us his chopped-up son in a stew. I’d watched as King Mithridates sided with the Persians and massacred every Roman in Anatolia. I’d witnessed Queen Clytemnestra turn homicidal, killing her husband Agamemnon just because he made one little human sacrifice to me. Demigods are an unpredictable bunch.

I glanced at Meg. I wondered if she could be lying to me—if she was some sort of spy. It seemed unlikely. She was too contrary, impetuous, and annoying to be an effective mole. Besides, she was technically my master. She could order me to do almost any task and I would have to obey. If she was out to destroy me, I was already as good as dead.

Perhaps Damien White…a son of Nemesis was a natural choice for backstabbing duty. Or Connor Stoll, Alice, or Julia…a child of Hermes had recently betrayed the gods by working for Kronos. They might do so again. Maybe that pretty Chiara, daughter of Tyche, was in league with the Beast. Children of luck were natural gamblers. The truth was, I had no idea.

The sky turned from black to gray. I became aware of a distant
thump, thump, thump
—a quick, relentless pulse that got louder and louder. At first, I feared it might be the blood in my head. Could human brains explode from too many worrisome thoughts? Then I realized the noise was mechanical, coming from the west. It was the distinctly modern sound of rotor blades cutting the air.

Meg lifted her head. “Is that a helicopter?”

I got to my feet.

The machine appeared—a dark red Bell 412 cutting north along the coastline. (Riding the skies as often as I do, I know my flying machines.) Painted on the helicopter’s side was a bright green logo with the letters
D.E.

Despite my misery, a small bit of hope kindled inside me. The satyrs Millard and Herbert must have succeeded in delivering their message.

“That,” I told Meg, “is Rachel Elizabeth Dare. Let’s go see what the Oracle of Delphi has to say.”

Don’t paint over gods

If you’re redecorating

That’s, like, common sense

RACHEL ELIZABETH DARE
was one of my favorite mortals. As soon as she’d become the Oracle two summers ago, she’d brought new vigor and excitement to the job.

Of course, the previous Oracle had been a withered corpse, so perhaps the bar was low. Regardless, I was elated as the Dare Enterprises helicopter descended just beyond the eastern hills, outside the camp’s boundary. I wondered what Rachel had told her father—a fabulously wealthy real estate magnate—to convince him she needed to borrow a helicopter. I knew Rachel could be quite convincing.

I jogged across the valley with Meg in tow. I could already imagine the way Rachel would look as she came over the summit: her frizzy red hair, her vivacious smile, her paint-spattered blouse, and jeans covered with doodles. I needed her humor, wisdom, and resilience. The Oracle would cheer us all up. Most importantly, she would cheer
me
up.

I was not prepared for the reality. (Which again, was a stunning surprise. Normally, reality prepares itself for
me
.)

Rachel met us on the hill near the entrance to her cave. Only later would I realize Chiron’s two satyr messengers were not with her, and I would wonder what had happened to them.

Miss Dare looked thinner and older—less like a high school girl and more like a young farmer’s wife from ancient times, weathered from hard work and gaunt from shortage of food. Her red hair had lost its vibrancy. It framed her face in a curtain of dark copper. Her freckles had faded to watermarks. Her green eyes did not sparkle. And she was wearing a dress—a white cotton frock with a white shawl, and a patina-green jacket. Rachel
never
wore dresses.

“Rachel?” I didn’t trust myself to say any more. She was not the same person.

Then I remembered that I wasn’t either.

She studied my new mortal form. Her shoulders slumped. “So it’s true.”

From below us came the voices of other campers. No doubt woken by the sound of the helicopter, they were emerging from their cabins and gathering at the base of the hill. None tried to climb toward us, though. Perhaps they sensed that all was not right.

The helicopter rose from behind Half-Blood Hill. It veered toward Long Island Sound, passing so close to the Athena Parthenos that I thought its landing skids might clip the goddess’s winged helmet.

I turned to Meg. “Would you tell the others that Rachel needs some space? Fetch Chiron. He should come up. The rest should wait.”

It wasn’t like Meg to take orders from me. I half expected her to kick me. Instead, she glanced nervously at Rachel, turned, and trudged down the hill.

“A friend of yours?” Rachel asked.

“Long story.”

“Yes,” she said. “I have a story like that, too.”

“Shall we talk in your cave?”

Rachel pursed her lips. “You won’t like it. But yes, that’s probably the safest place.”

The cave was not as cozy as I remembered.

The sofas were overturned. The coffee table had a broken leg. The floor was strewn with easels and canvases. Even Rachel’s tripod stool, the throne of prophecy itself, lay on its side on a pile of paint-splattered drop cloths.

Most disturbing was the state of the walls. Ever since taking up residence, Rachel had been painting them, like her cave-dwelling ancestors of old. She had spent hours on elaborate murals of events from the past, images from the future she’d seen in prophecies, favorite quotes from books and music, and abstract designs so good they would have given M. C. Escher vertigo. The art made the cave feel like a mixture of art studio, psychedelic hangout, and graffiti-covered highway underpass. I loved it.

But most of the images had been blotted out with a sloppy coat of white paint. Nearby, a roller was stuck in an encrusted tray. Clearly Rachel had defaced her own work months ago and hadn’t been back since.

She waved listlessly at the wreckage. “I got frustrated.”

“Your art…” I gaped at the field of white. “There was a lovely portrait of me—right there.”

I get offended whenever art is damaged, especially if that art features me.

Rachel looked ashamed. “I—I thought a blank canvas might help me think.” Her tone made it obvious that the whitewashing had accomplished nothing. I could have told her as much.

The two of us did our best to clean up. We hauled the sofas back into place to form a sitting area. Rachel left the tripod stool where it lay.

A few minutes later, Meg returned. Chiron followed in full centaur form, ducking his head to fit through the entrance. They found us sitting at the wobbly coffee table like civilized cave people, sharing lukewarm Arizona tea and stale crackers from the Oracle’s larder.

“Rachel.” Chiron sighed with relief. “Where are Millard and Herbert?”

She bowed her head. “They arrived at my house badly wounded. They…they didn’t make it.”

Perhaps it was the morning light behind him, but I fancied I could see new gray whiskers growing in Chiron’s beard. The centaur trotted over and lowered himself to the ground, folding his legs underneath himself. Meg joined me on the couch.

Rachel leaned forward and steepled her fingers, as she did when she spoke a prophecy. I half hoped the spirit of Delphi would possess her, but there was no smoke, no hissing, no raspy voice of divine possession. It was a bit disappointing.

“You first,” she told us. “Tell me what’s been going on here.”

We brought her up to speed on the disappearances and my misadventures with Meg. I explained about the three-legged race and our side trip to Delphi.

Chiron blanched. “I did not know this. You went to Delphi?”

Rachel stared at me in disbelief. “
The
Delphi. You saw Python and you…”

I got the feeling she wanted to say
and you didn’t kill him?
But she restrained herself.

I felt like standing with my face against the wall. Perhaps Rachel could blot me out with white paint. Disappearing would’ve been less painful than facing my failures.

“At present,” I said, “I cannot defeat Python. I am much too weak. And…well, the Catch-88.”

Chiron sipped his Arizona tea. “Apollo means that we cannot send a quest without a prophecy, and we cannot get a prophecy without an Oracle.”

Rachel stared at her overturned tripod stool. “And this man…the Beast. What do you know about him?”

“Not much.” I explained what I had seen in my dream, and what Meg and I had overheard in the Labyrinth. “The Beast apparently has a reputation for snatching up young demigods in New York. Meg says…” I faltered when I saw her expression, clearly cautioning me to stay away from her personal history. “Um, she’s had some experience with the Beast.”

Chiron raised his brows. “Can you tell us anything that might help, dear?”

Meg sank into the sofa’s cushions. “I’ve crossed paths with him. He’s—he’s scary. The memory is blurry.”

“Blurry,” Chiron repeated.

Meg became very interested in the cracker crumbs on her dress.

Rachel gave me a quizzical look. I shook my head, trying my best to impart a warning:
Trauma. Don’t ask. Might get attacked by a peach baby.

Rachel seemed to get the message. “That’s all right, Meg,” she said. “I have some information that may help.”

She fished her phone from her coat pocket. “Don’t touch this. You guys have probably figured it out, but phones are going even more haywire than usual around demigods. I’m not technically one of you, and even
I
can’t place calls. I was able to take a couple of pictures, though.” She turned the screen toward us. “Chiron, you recognize this place?”