Eye of Hecate

Jason

My eyes snap open. "Cyclops!"

"Whoa, sleepyhead," Piper sits behind me on the bronze dragon, holding my waist to keep me balanced. Leo sits in the front, driving, but between us...

I blink again, but the girl is still there. I don't know where she came from or who she is, but she offers me a friendly smile. "Good morning."

"D-Detroit," I stammer. "Didn't we crash land? I thought-"

"It's okay," Leo says. "We got away, but you got a nasty concussion. How you feeling?"

My head throbs. I remember the factory, then walking down the catwalk, then a creature looming over me—a face with one eye, a massive fist—and everything went black.

"How did you—the Cyclops—"

"Leo ripped them apart," Piper says. "He was amazing. He can summon fire—"

"It was nothing." Leo says quickly.

Piper laughs. "Shut up, Valdez. I'm going to tell him. Get over it."

And she does—how Leo single-handedly defeated the Cyclopes family; how they freed me, then the Cyclopes reformed.

"Ozzy was the really impressive one." Leo insists. "She blasted those Cyclopes in, like, seconds."

"That really was nothing." The girl in front of me says with a shrug.

"I'm sorry, who are you?" I ask her.

She and Leo give me the rundown. Old friends. Egyptian magician. Torch lady in her dreams.

"So you're the Egypt that's going to birth the giant revenge." I say.

"That's been the general consensus." She nods.

Then they tell me how Leo replaced the dragon's wiring and got them back in the air in a matter of minutes.

I'm impressed. Leo took out three Cyclopes with nothing but a tooll kit. And this Ozzy girl...whatever magic she did seems to have really impressed Leo and Piper.

It doesn't exactly scare me how close I came to death, but it does make me feel horrible. I stepped right into an ambush and spent the whole fight knocked out while my friends fended for themselves. What kind of quest leader am I?

When Piper tells me about the other kid the Cyclopes claimed to have eaten, the one in the purple shirt who spoke Latin, my head feels like it's going to explode. A son of Mercury...I feel like I should know that kid, but the name is missing from my mind.

"I'm not alone then," I say. "There are others like me."

"Jason," Piper says, "you were never alone. You've got us."

"I—I know...but something Hera said. I was having a dream...."

I tell them what I saw, and what the goddess said inside her cage.

"An exchange?" Piper asks. "What does that mean?"

I shake my head. "But Hera's gamble is me. Just by sending me to Camp Half-Blood, I have a feeling she broke some kind of rule, something that could blow up in a big way—"

"Or save us," Piper says hopefully. "That bit about the sleeping enemy—that sounds like the lady Leo told us about."

"The Dirt Lady?" Ozzy asks curiously. "From when you were a little kid?"

Leo nods and clears his throat. "About that...she kind of appeared to me back in Detroit, in a pool of Porta-Potty sludge."

I'm not sure I heard that right. "Did you say...Porta-Potty?"