The Shadow Summoner | Book Three - PJO Universe

one

APOLLO TALKS TO HIS ARROW (AGAIN)

For two days, they had traveled the Labyrinth-across pits of darkness and around lakes of poison, through dilapidated shopping malls with only discount Halloween stores and questionable Chinese food buffets.

The Labyrinth could be a bewildering place. Like a web of capillaries beneath the skin of the mortal world, it connected basements, sewers, and forgotten tunnels around the globe with no regard to the rules of time and space.

One might enter the Labyrinth through a manhole in Rome, walk ten feet, open a door, and find oneself at a training camp for clowns in Buffalo, Minnesota. (Please don't ask Apollo. It was traumatic.)

Ariana would have preferred to avoid the Labyrinth altogether. Sadly, the prophecy they had received in Indiana had been quite specific: Through mazes dark to lands of scorching death.

Fun!

The cloven guide alone the way does know. Except that theirbcloven guide, the satyr Grover Underwood, did not seem to know the way.

"You're lost." Apollo said, for the fortieth time.

"Am not!" he protested.

He trotted along in his baggy jeans and green tie-dyed T-shirt, his goat hooves wobbling in his specially modified New Balance 520s.

A red knit cap covered his curly hair. Why he thought this disguise helped him better pass for human, Ariana couldn't say.

But she couldn't complain, he had done it ever since he was sent to find and protect Percy and he never got caught out.

Percy hadn't even noticed but in his defence the boy was oblivious. He didn't even realise his feelings for Annabeth until the lot of them were fifteen.

The bumps of Grover's horns were clearly visible beneath the hat. His shoes popped off his hooves several times a day, and Apollo was getting tired of being his sneaker retriever.

He stopped at a T in the corridor. In either direction, rough-hewn stone walls marched into darkness. Grover tugged his wispy goatee.

"Well?" Meg asked.

Grover flinched. Like Apollo, he had quickly come to fear Meg's displeasure.

Not that Meg McCaffrey looked terrifying. She was small for her age, with stoplight-colored clothes- green dress, yellow leggings, red high-tops- all torn and dirty thanks to their many crawls through narrow tunnels.

Cobwebs streaked her dark pageboy haircut. The lenses of her cat-eye glasses were so grimy Ariana couldn't imagine how she could see.

In all, she looked like a kindergartner who had just survived a vicious playground brawl for possession of a tire swing.

Grover pointed to the tunnel on the right. "I-I'm pretty sure Palm Springs is that way."

"Pretty sure?" Meg asked. "Like last time, when we walked into a bathroom and surprised a Cyclops on the toilet?"

"Don't bully Grover." Ariana said, as though she was a mother lecturing her two young children not to hit the other. "He's basically a child."

"That wasn't my fault!" Grover protested. "Besides, this direction smells right. Like...cacti."

Meg sniffed the air. "I don't smell cacti."

"Meg," Apollo said, "the satyr is supposed to be our guide. We don't have much choice but to trust him."

Grover huffed. "Thanks for the vote of confidence. Your daily reminder: I didn't ask to be magically summoned halfway across the country and to wake up in a rooftop tomato patch in Indianapolis!"