COME WHAT MAY — the world's strangest dinner party
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Losing her sight had been bad enough. Being isolated from Percy had been horrible.
But now that she could see again, watching him die slowly from gorgon's blood poison and being unable to do anything about it — that was the worst curse of all.
Bob slung Percy over his shoulder like a bag of sports equipment while the skeleton kitten Small Bob curled up on Percy's back and purred. Bob lumbered along at a fast pace, even for a Titan, which made it almost impossible for Rory to keep up.
Her lungs rattled. Her skin had started to blister again. She probably needed another drink of firewater, but they had left the River Phlegethon behind. Her body was so sore and battered that she had forgotten what it was like not to be in pain.
"How much longer?" she wheezed.
"Almost too long," Bob called back. "But maybe not."
What the fuck? Rory thought, but she was too winded to say it.
The landscape changed again. They were still going downhill, which should have made traveling easier, but the ground sloped at just the wrong angle — too steep to jog, too treacherous to let her guard down even for a moment. The surface was sometimes loose gravel, sometimes patches of slime. Rory stepped around random bristles sharp enough to impale her foot, and clusters of... well, not rocks exactly. More like warts the size of watermelons. If Rory had to guess (and she didn't want to) she supposed Bob was leading her down the length of Tartarus' large intestine.
The air got thicker and stank of sewage. The darkness maybe wasn't quite as intense, but she could only see Bob because of the glint of his white hair and the point of his spear. She noticed he hadn't retracted the spearhead on his broom since their fight with the arai. That didn't reassure her.
Percy flopped around, causing the kitten to readjust his nest in the small of Percy's back. Occasionally Percy would groan in pain, and Rory felt like a fist was squeezing her heart.
She flashed back to her tea party with Annabeth, Piper, Hazel, and Aphrodite in Charleston. Gods, that seemed so long ago. Aphrodite had sighed and waxed nostalgic about the good old days of the Civil War — how love and war always went hand in hand.
Aphrodite had gestured proudly to Rory, using her as an example for the other girls: I once promised to make her love life interesting. And didn't I?
Rory had wanted to throttle the goddess of love. She had had more than her share of interesting. Years ago, Aphrodite had interrupted a quest to speak with her and Percy separately. She had come to convince Rory not to give up love by joining the Hunters of Artemis. She promised Rory that her love life wouldn't be easy. Aphrodite had been excited because it had been years since she had a proper tragic love story.
