Eye of Hecate

Leo

At first, I think rocks are pelting the windshield. Then I realize it's sleet. Frost builds up around the edges of the glass, and slushy waves of ice blot out my view. Piper and Jason both wake with a start.

"An ice storm?" Piper shouts over the engine and the wind. "Is it supposed to be this cold in Sonoma?"

I'm not sure, but something about this storm seems conscious, malevolent—like it's intentionally slamming us.

Jason crawls forward, grabbing our seats for balance. "We've got to be getting close."

I'm too busy wrestling with the stick to reply. Suddenly it isn't so easy to drive the chopper. Its movements turn sluggish and jerky. The whole machine shudders in the icy wind. The helicopter probably hasn't been prepped for cold-weather flying. The controls refuse to respond, and we start to lose altitude. 

Beside me, Ozzy is chanting under her breath in another language, her eyes closed. Hieroglyphs glow faintly on the glass of the chopper, and my vision clears a little. The helicopter loses altitude slower. The controls get a bit easier. But not enough. 

Below us, the ground is a dark quilt of trees and fog. The ridge of a hill looms in front of us and I yank the stick, just clearing the treetops.

"There!" Jason shouts.

A small valley opens up before us, with the murky shape of a building in the middle. I aim the helicopter straight for it. All around us are flashes of light that remind me of the tracer fire at Midas's compound. Trees crack and explode at the edges of the clearing. Shapes move through the mist. Combat seems to be everywhere.

I set down the helicopter in an icy field about fifty yards from the house and kill the engine. I'm about to relax when I hear a whistling sound and see a dark shape hurtling toward us out of the mist.

"Out!" Ozzy screams.

We leap from the helicopter and barely clear the rotors before a massive BOOM shakes the ground, knocking me off my feet and splattering ice all over me.

I get up shakily and see that the world's largest snowball—a chunk of snow, ice, and dirt the size of a garage—has completely flattened the Bell 412.

"Ozzy?" I call. 

"Here!" I see her pulling herself up a few yards away. She runs to my side, checking me for injuries. 

"You all right?" Jason runs up to us, Piper at his side. They both look fine except for being speckled with snow and mud.

"Yeah." I shiver. "Guess we owe that ranger lady a new helicopter."

Piper points south. "Fighting's over there."

Ozzy frowns. "No...it's all around us."

She's right. The sounds of combat ring across the valley. The snow and mist make it hard to tell for sure, but there seems to be a circle of fighting all around the Wolf House.

Behind us looms Jack London's dream home—a massive ruin of red and gray stones and rough-hewn timber beams. I can imagine how it looked before it burned down—a combination log cabin and castle, like a billionaire lumberjack might build. But in the mist and sleet, the place has a lonely, haunted feel. I can totally believe the ruins are cursed.

"Jason!" a girl's voice calls.

Thalia appears from the fog, her parka caked with snow. Her bow is in her hand, and her quiver is almost empty. She runs toward us, but makes it only a few steps before a six-armed ogre—one of the Earthborn—bursts out of the storm behind her, a raised club in each hand.

"Look out!" I yell. We rush to help, but Ozzy takes care of it in a second.

She points with her bronze staff. "Ha-di."

The Earthborn promptly explodes, and Thalia's arrow sails into the fog. 

Thalia curses. "That was my last arrow." She turns to Ozzy and raises an eyebrow. "Nice moves though." She hugs Jason and nods to Piper. "Just in time. My Hunters are holding a perimeter around the mansion, but we'll be overrun any minute."

"By Earthborn?" Jason asks.

"And wolves—Lycaon's minions." Thalia blows a fleck of ice off her nose. "Also storm spirits—"

"But we gave them to Aeolus!" Piper protests.

"Who tried to kill us," I remind her. "Maybe he's helping Gaea again."

"I don't know," Thalia says. "But the monsters keep re-forming almost as fast as we can kill them. We took the Wolf House with no problem: surprised the guards and sent them straight to Tartarus. But then this freak snowstorm blew in. Wave after wave of monsters started attacking. Now we're surrounded. I don't know who or what is leading the assault, but I think they planned this. It was a trap to kill anyone who tried to rescue Hera."

"Where is she?" Jason asks.

"Inside," Thalia says. "We tried to free her, but we can't figure out how to break the cage. It's only a few minutes until the sun goes down. Hera thinks that's the moment when Porphyrion will be reborn. Plus, most monsters are stronger at night. If we don't free Hera soon—"

She doesn't need to finish the thought.

The four of us follow her into the ruined mansion.

Jason steps over the threshold and immediately collapses.

"Hey!" I catch him. "None of that, man. What's wrong?"

"This place..." Jason shakes his head. "Sorry...It came rushing back to me."

"So you have been here," Piper says.

"We both have," Thalia says. Her expression is grim, like she's reliving someone's death. "This is where my mom took us when Jason was a child. She left him here, told me he was dead. He just disappeared."

"She gave me to the wolves," Jason murmurs. "At Hera's insistence. She gave me to Lupa."

"That part I didn't know." Thalia frowns. "Who is Lupa?"

An explosion shakes the building. Just outside, a blue mushroom cloud billows up, raining snowflakes and ice like a nuclear blast made of cold instead of heat.

"Maybe this isn't the time for questions," Ozzy suggests. "Show us the goddess."

Once inside, Jason seems to get his bearings. The house is built in a giant U, and Jason leads us between the two wings to an outside courtyard with an empty reflecting pool. At the bottom of the pool, just as Jason described from his dream, two spires of rock and root tendrils have cracked through the foundation.

One of the spires is much bigger—a solid dark mass about twenty feet high, and to me it looks like a stone body bag. Underneath the mass of fused tendrils I can make out the shape of a head, wide shoulders, a massive chest and arms, like the creature is stuck waist deep in the earth. No, not stuck—rising.

On the opposite end of the pool, the other spire is smaller and more loosely woven. Each tendril is as thick as a telephone pole, with so little space between them that I doubt I could get my arm through. Still, I can see inside. And in the center of the cage stands Tía Callida.

She looked exactly like I remember: dark hair covered with a shawl, the black dress of a widow, a wrinkled face with glinting, scary eyes.

She doesn't glow or radiate any sort of power. She looks like a regular mortal woman, my good old psychotic babysitter.

Ozzy clearly recognizes her too. She scoffs as she looks into the cage, surely remembering all the crazy things she did while Tia Callida watched us.