With Friends Like These

This was potentially one of the worst days in Percy's demigodly life.

Sure, he was over the moon to see Annabeth safe again, and finding the Athena Parthenos was great! Annabeth had tricked Arachne and she was safe, which was also great!

Until she wasn't.

Tartarus was not a place that Percy wanted to be.

His stomach felt like it was twisting around to eat itself inside-out and he'd been gargling battery acid (really, it was fire water, but they seemed to be very similar). The temperature changed drastically – one minute he was sweating from the heat, and then the next his sweat was freezing into little icicles which hung from his chin like Grover's goatee.

Bob the friendly Titan left the way (yes, there was a friendly Titan), his broom glowing faintly and providing the trio with a little light. Percy was grateful, really. He was. Without Bob the two would have been killed by Kelli and her cohort of empousai and that wasn't how Percy wanted to die.

He glanced back at Annabeth and offered her a weak smile as he squeezed her hand in his. "We'll be fine," he promised.

In hindsight, he'd completely lied to her. Not that he knew it at the time, of course.

Percy noticed that Bob was suddenly hesitating where he hadn't before. The Titan – formerly Iapetus – was swinging his head back and forth. He blinked, silver eyes burning.

"Bob?" Percy had asked wearily. "What is it?"

"I sense..." Bob had twisted to face a faint path through Tartarus that Percy would have called an overgrown dear trail. "Something."

"That clears it up." Percy had pressed his lips together, hesitated. "We should keep moving, Bob."

"Yes," Bob agreed. He turned and strode down the little deer trail, his janitor's overalls getting caught in twisted trees. "Something feels familiar."

That was when the alarm bells started. "Bob," Annabeth had spoken up. "Aren't the Doors of Death that way?" She turned to point back onto the track they'd left behind them.

"A detour," Bob gravely told them. "Someone needs our help."

"Mortal?" Percy asked sharply.

"No."

The rusted gears in Percy's brain struggled to turn. "Not a monster?"

Bob's eyes furrowed, his nose crinkled. "Not a monster," he confirmed.

"Who is it?" Annabeth questioned with no small amount of suspicion.

"I don't know." Bob's lips turned down. "A friend?"

Friend. Yeah, right, Percy thought. Bob had at least narrowed the list down to immortals for them. A Titan, it had to be. But which Titan was the question. Bob was the only friendly Titan Percy knew.

Percy felt it then as they passed a dead and decaying spindly tree, limbs turned unhappily to the ground. It wasn't obvious, just a prickling of his neck, a churning in his gut. His hand tightened around Annabeth's and he slipped Riptide out of his pocket. Bob's grip on his broom tightened until Percy heard a low creaking coming from the wood.

It was as if the entire area – a forest of twisted and blackened trees – were dying and in pain. Sharp desperation burned in Percy's gut – it wasn't his.

Bob abruptly surged forward, soon reaching the edge of the forest. They were at the edge of a cliff, looking down into a deep gorge.

Percy was remotely surprised – he thought there was only one layer to Tartarus, but before him there was a gorge through which both the Phlegathon and – from the wails that Percy could hear where they stood – the Cocytus.