SEQUAL TO EVERYWHERE EVERYTHING
BOOK TWO OF THREE !!!
Mitchell didn't expect to wake up from a nightmare, only to find himself in a real one. When he finds Percy's bed empty in the middle of the night, he freaks out.
Mitchell will do whatever it tak...
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SOMEHOW HE KNEW HER. HE RECOGNISED HER dress — a flowery green-and-red wraparound, like the skirt of a Christmas tree. He recognised the colourful plastic bangles on her wrists that had dug into his back when she hugged him goodbye at the Wolf House. He recognised her hair, an over-teased corona of dyed blonde curls and her scent of lemons and aerosol.
Her eyes were blue like Jason's, but they gleamed with fractured light, like she'd just come out of a bunker after a nuclear war — hungrily searching for familiar details in a changed world.
"Dearest." She held out her arms.
Jason's vision tunnelled. The ghosts and ghouls no longer mattered. His Mist disguise burned off. His posture straightened. His joints stopped aching. His walking stick turned back into an Imperial gold gladius.
The burning sensation didn't stop. He felt as if layers of his life were being seared away — his months at Camp Half-Blood, his years at Camp Jupiter, his training with Lupa the wolf goddess. He was a scared and vulnerable two-year-old again. Even the scar on his lip, from when he'd tried to eat a stapler as a toddler, stung like a fresh wound.
"Mum?" he managed.
"Yes, dearest." Her image flickered. "Come, embrace me."
"You're — you're not real."
"Of course she is real." Michael Varus's voice sounded far away. "Did you think Gaia would let such an important spirit languish in the Underworld? She is your mother, Beryl Grace, star of television, sweetheart to the king of Olympus, who rejected her not once but twice, in both his Greek and Roman aspects. She deserves justice as much as any of us."
Jason's heart felt wobbly. The suitors crowded around him, watching. I'm their entertainment, Jason realised. The ghosts probably found this even more amusing than two beggars fighting to the death.
Piper's voice cut through the buzzing in his head. "Jason, look at me." She stood twenty feet away, holding her ceramic amphora. Her smile was gone. Her gaze was fierce and commanding — as impossible to ignore as the blue harpy feather in her hair. "That isn't your mother. Her voice is working some kind of magic on you — like charmspeak, but more dangerous. Can't you sense it?"
"She's right." Annabeth climbed onto the nearest table. She kicked aside a platter, startling a dozen suitors. "Jason, that's only a remnant of your mother, like an ara, maybe, or—"
"A remnant!" His mother's ghost sobbed. "Yes, look what I have been reduced to. It's Jupiter's fault. He abandoned us. He wouldn't help me! I didn't want to leave you in Sonoma, my dear, but Juno and Jupiter gave me no choice. They wouldn't allow us to stay together. Why fight for them now? Join these suitors. Lead them. We can be a family again!"
