THE HEALER| Heroes of Olympus

I

During the third attack, I almost ate boulder. I was peering into the fog, wondering how it could be so difficult to fly across one stupid mountain range, when the ship's alarm bells sounded.

"Hard to port!" Nico yelled from the foremast of the flying ship.

Back at the helm, Leo yanked the wheel. The Argo II veered left, its aerial oars slashing through the clouds like rows of knives.I made the mistake of looking over the rail. A dark spherical shape hurtled towards me. I thought, Why is the moon coming at us?

Then I yelped and hit the deck. The huge rock passed so close overhead it blew my hair out of my face.

CRACK!

The foremast collapsed – sail, spars and Nico all crashing to the deck. The boulder, roughly the size of a pickup truck, tumbled off into the fog like it had important business elsewhere.

"Nico!" I scrambled over to him as Leo brought the ship level.

"I'm fine," Nico muttered, kicking folds of canvas off his legs.

I helped him up, and we stumbled to the bow. I peeked over more carefully this time. The clouds parted just long enough to reveal the top of the mountain below them: a spearhead of black rock jutting from mossy green slopes. Standing at the summit was a mountain god – one of the numina montanum, Jason had called them. Or as I knew them: ourae, in Greek. Whatever you called them, they were nasty.

Like the others we had faced, this one wore a simple white tunic over skin as rough and dark as basalt. He was about twenty feet tall and extremely muscular, with a flowing white beard, scraggly hair and a wild look in his eyes, like a crazy hermit. He bellowed something I didn't understand, but it obviously wasn't welcoming. With his bare hands, he threw another chunk of rock from his mountain and began shaping it into a ball.

The scene disappeared in the fog, but when the mountain god bellowed again other ouraeanswered in the distance, their voices echoing through the valleys.

"Stupid rock gods!" Leo yelled from the helm. "That's the third time I've had to replace that mast! You think they grow on trees?"

Nico frowned. "Masts are from trees."

"That's not the point!" Leo snatched up one of his controls, rigged from a Nintendo Wii stick, and spun it in a circle. A few feet away, a trapdoor opened in the deck. A Celestial bronze cannon rose. I just had time to cover my ears before it discharged into the sky, spraying a dozen metal spheres that trailed green fire. The spheres grew spikes in midair, like helicopter blades, and hurtled away into the fog.

A moment later, a series of explosions crackled across the mountains, followed by the outraged roars of mountain gods.

"Ha!" Leo yelled.

Unfortunately, I guessed, judging from their last two encounters, Leo's newest weapon hadonly annoyed the ourae.

Another boulder whistled through the air off to their starboard side.

Nico yelled, "Get us out of here!"

Leo muttered some unflattering comments about ourae, but he turned the wheel. The engines hummed. Magical rigging lashed itself tight, and the ship tacked to port. The Argo II picked up speed, retreating north-west, as we'd been doing for the past two days.

I didn't relax until we were out of the mountains. The fog cleared. Below us, morning sunlight illuminated the Italian countryside – rolling green hills and golden fields not too different from those in northern California. It reminded me of the fields near my cabin and how the sunlight would reflect off it.