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"hold your breath"
THEY'D ONLY TRAVELLED A FEW HUNDRED YARDS WHEN THEY HEARD THE VOICES.
Annabeth plodded along, half in stupor, trying to form a plan. Since she was a daughter of Athena, plans were supposed to be her speciality, but it was hard to strategize with her stomach growling and her throat baking. The fiery water of the Phlegethon may have healed them and given them strength, but it hasn't done anything for their hunger or thirst. The river wasn't about making you feel good, Ariadne guessed. It just kept you going so you could experience more excruciating pain.
Her head started to droop with exhaustion. Then Annabeth heard them—female voices having some sort of argument—and she was instantly alert.
She whispered, "Ari, down!"
She pulled her behind the nearest boulder, wedging herself so close against the riverbank that her shoes almost touched the river's fire. On the other side, on the narrow path between the river and the cliffs, voices snarled, getting louder as they approached from upstream.
Ariadne tried to steady her breathing. The voices sounded vaguely human, but that meant nothing. She assumed anything in Tartarus was their enemy. She didn't know how the monsters could have failed to spot them already. Besides, monsters could smell demigods—especially powerful ones like Ariadne, daughter of Dionysus. Annabeth doubted that hiding behind a boulder would do any good when the monsters caught their scent.
Still, as the monsters got nearer, their voices didn't change tone. Their uneven footsteps—scrap, clump, scrap, clump—didn't get any faster.
"Soon?" one of them asked in a raspy voice, as if she'd been gargling in the Phlegethon.
"Oh my gods!" said another voice. This one sounded much younger and much more human, like a teenaged mortal girl getting exasperated with her friends at the mall. For some reason, she sounded delimitar to Ariadne. "You guys are totally annoying' I told you, it's like three days from here."
There was a chorus of growling and grumbling. The creatures—maybe half a dozen, Ariadne guessed—had paused just on the other side of the boulder, but still they gave no indication that they'd caught the demigods' scent. Ariadne wondered if demigods didn't smell the same in Tartarus, or if the other scents here were so powerful they masked a demigods' aura.
"I wonder," said a third voice, gravelly and ancient like the first, "of perhaps you do not know the way, young one."
"Oh, shut your fang hole, Serephone," said the mall girl. "When's the last time you escaped to the mortal world? I was there a couple years ago. I know the way! Besides, I understand what we're facing up there. You don't have a clue!"
