The New Trinity -- Percy Jackson Batman Crossover -- The Olympian Heroes Book 4

25. Percy

I woke up feeling like I was still on fire. My skin stung. My throat felt as
dry as sand.
I saw blue sky and trees above me. I heard a fountain gurgling, and
smelled juniper and cedar and a bunch of other sweet-scented plants. I heard waves, too, gently lapping on a rocky shore. I wondered if I was dead, but I knew better. I’d been to the Land of the Dead, and there was no blue sky.
I tried to sit up. My muscles felt like they were melting.
“Stay still,” a girl’s voice said. “You’re too weak to rise.”
She laid a cool cloth across my forehead. A bronze spoon hovered over me and liquid was dribbled into my mouth. The drink soothed my throat and left a warm chocolaty aftertaste. Nectar of the gods. Then the girl’s face appeared above me.
She had almond eyes and caramel-color hair braided over one shoulder.
She was…fifteen? Sixteen? It was hard to tell. She had one of those faces
that just seemed timeless. She began singing, and my pain dissolved. She
was working magic. I could feel her music sinking into my skin, healing and repairing my brain.
“Who?” I croaked.
“Shhh, brave one,” she said. “Rest and heal. No harm will come to you
here. I am Calypso.”

The next time I woke I was in a cave, but as far as caves go, I’d been in a
lot worse. The ceiling glittered with different-color crystal formations—
white and purple and green, like I was inside one of those cut geodes you see in souvenir shops. I was lying on a comfortable bed with feather pillows and cotton sheets. The cave was divided into sections by white silk curtains.
Against one wall stood a large loom and a harp. Against the other wall were shelves neatly stacked with jars of fruit preserves. Dried herbs hung from the ceiling: rosemary, thyme, and a bunch of other stuff. My Alfred could havenamed them all.
There was a fireplace built into the cave wall, and a pot bubbling over the flames. It smelled great, like beef stew.
I sat up, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in my head. I looked at my
arms, sure that they would be hideously scarred, l but they seemed fine. A little pinker than usual, but not bad. I was wearing a white cotton T-shirt and cotton drawstring pants that weren’t mine. My feet were bare. In a moment of panic, I wondered what happened to Riptide, but I felt my pocket and there was my pen, right where it always reappeared.
Then I searched the room for any sign of my gloves and ring. I assumed they were lost. But the Stygian ice dog whistle was back in my pocket, too.
Somehow it had followed me. And that didn’t exactly reassure me.
With difficulty, I stood. The stone floor was freezing under my feet. I turned and found myself staring into a polished bronze mirror.
“Holy Poseidon,” I muttered. I looked as if I’d lost twenty pounds I couldn’t afford to lose. My hair was a rat’s nest. It was singed at the edges like Hephaestus’s beard. If I saw that face on somebody walking down a
highway intersection asking for money, I would’ve locked the car doors.
I turned away from the mirror. The cave entrance was to my left. I headed toward the daylight.
The cave opened onto a green meadow. On the left was a grove of cedar trees and on the right a huge flower garden. Four fountains gurgled in the meadow, each shooting water from the pipes of stone satyrs. Straight ahead, the grass sloped down to a rocky beach. The waves of a lake lapped against the stones. I could tell it was a lake because…well, I just could. Fresh water. Not salt. The sun sparkled on the water, and the sky was pure blue. It seemed like a paradise, which immediately made me nervous. You deal with mythological stuff for a few years, you learn that paradises are usually
places where you get killed.
The girl with the braided caramel hair, the one who’d called herself
Calypso, was standing at the beach, talking to someone. I couldn’t see him very well in the shimmer from the sunlight off the water, but they appeared to be arguing. I tried to remember what I knew about Calypso from the old myths. I’d heard the name before, but…I couldn’t remember. Was she a monster? Did she trap heroes and kill them? But if she was evil, why was I still alive?
I walked toward her slowly because my legs were still stiff. When the
grass changed to gravel, I looked down to keep my balance, and when I looked up again, the girl was alone. She wore a white sleeveless Greek dress with a low circular neckline trimmed in gold. She brushed at her eyes like she’d been crying.
“Well,” she said, trying for a smile, “the sleeper finally wakes.”
“Who were you talking to?” My voice sounded like a frog that had spent
time in a microwave.
“Oh…just a messenger,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“How long have I been out?”
“Time,” Calypso mused. “Time is always difficult here. I honestly don’t know, Percy.”
“You know my name?”
“You talk in your sleep.”
I blushed. “Yeah. I’ve been…uh, told that before.”
“Yes. Who is Annabeth?”
“Oh, uh. A friend. We were together when—wait, how did I get here?
Where am I?”
Calypso reached up and ran her fingers through my mangled hair. I
stepped back nervously.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just grown used to caring for you. as to how
you got here, you fell from the sky. You landed in the water, just there.” She pointed across the beach. “I do not know how you survived. The water seemed to cushion your fall. As to where you are, you are in Ogygia.”
She pronounced it like oh-jee-jee-ah.
“Is that near Mount St. Helens?” I asked, because my geography is pretty terrible.
Calypso laughed. It was a small restrained laugh, like she found me really funny but didn’t want to embarrass me. She was cute when she laughed.
“It isn’t near anything, brave one,” she said. “Ogygia is my phantom
island. It exists by itself, anywhere and nowhere. You can heal here in safety. Never fear.”
“But my friends—”
“Annabeth,” she said. “And Grover and Tyson?”
“Yes!” I said. “I have to get back to them. They’re in danger."
She touched my face, and I didn’t back away this time. “Rest first. You
are no good to your friends until you heal.”
As soon as she said it, I realized how tired I was. “You’re not…you’re not
an evil sorceress, are you?”
She smiled coyly. “Why would you think that?”
"Well, I met Circe once, and she had a pretty nice island, too. Except she
liked to turn men into guinea pigs.”
Calypso gave me that laugh again. “I promise I will not turn you into a
guinea pig.”
“Or anything else?”
“I am no evil sorceress,” Calypso said. “And I am not your enemy, brave
one. Now rest. Your eyes are already closing.”
She was right. My knees buckled, and I would’ve landed face-first in the
gravel if Calypso hadn’t caught me. Her hair smelled like cinnamon. She
was very strong, or maybe I was just really weak and thin. She walked me
back to a cushioned bench by the fountain and helped me lie down.
“Rest,” she ordered. And I fell asleep to the sound of the fountains and the smell of cinnamon and juniper.