“What about the warning?”
Her eyes flickered with green light. “Go with what your heart tells you, or you will lose all. Hades feeds on doubt and hopelessness. He will trick you if he can, make you mistrust your own judgment. Once you are in his realm, he will never willingly let you leave. Keep faith. Good luck, Percy Jackson.”
She summoned her sea horse and rode toward the void.
“Wait!” I called. “At the river, you said not to trust the gifts. What gifts?”
“Good-bye, young hero,” she called back, her voice fading into the depths. “You must listen to your heart.” She became a speck of glowing green, and then she was gone.
I wanted to follow her down into the darkness. I wanted to see the court of Poseidon. But I looked up at the sunset darkening on the surface. My friends were waiting. We had so little time.…
I kicked upward toward the shore.
When I reached the beach, my clothes dried instantly. I told Grover and Annabeth what had happened, and showed them the pearls.
Annabeth grimaced. “No gift comes without a price.”
“They were free.”
“No.” She shook her head. “‘There is no such thing as a free lunch.’ That’s an ancient Greek saying that translated pretty well into American. There will be a price. You wait.”
On that happy thought, we turned our backs on the sea.
With some spare change from Ares’s backpack, we took the bus into West Hollywood. I showed the driver the Underworld address slip I’d taken from Aunty Em’s Garden Gnome Emporium, but he’d never heard of DOA Recording Studios.
“You remind me of somebody I saw on TV,” he told me. “You a child actor or something?”
“Uh…I’m a stunt double…for a lot of child actors.”
“Oh! That explains it.”
We thanked him and got off quickly at the next stop.
We wandered for miles on foot, looking for DOA. Nobody seemed to know where it was. It didn’t appear in the phone book.
Twice, we ducked into alleys to avoid cop cars.
I froze in front of an appliance-store window because a television was playing an interview with somebody who looked very familiar—my stepdad, Smelly Gabe. He was talking to Barbara Walters—I mean, as if he were some kind of huge celebrity. She was interviewing him in our apartment, in the middle of a poker game, and there was a young blond lady sitting next to him, patting his hand.
A fake tear glistened on his cheek. He was saying, “Honest, Ms. Walters, if it wasn’t for Sugar here, my grief counselor, I’d be a wreck. My stepson took everything I cared about. My wife…my Camaro…I—I’m sorry. I have trouble talking about it.”
“There you have it, America.” Barbara Walters turned to the camera. “A man torn apart. An adolescent boy with serious issues. Let me show you, again, the last known photo of this troubled young fugitive, taken a week ago in Denver.”
The screen cut to a grainy shot of me, Annabeth, and Grover standing outside the Colorado diner, talking to Ares.
“Who are the other children in this photo?” Barbara Walters asked dramatically. “Who is the man with them? Is Percy Jackson a delinquent, a terrorist, or perhaps the brainwashed victim of a frightening new cult? When we come back, we chat with a leading child psychologist. Stay tuned, America.”
“C’mon,” Grover told me. He hauled me away before I could punch a hole in the appliance-store window.
It got dark, and hungry-looking characters started coming out on the streets to play. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a New Yorker. I don’t scare easy. But L.A. had a totally different feel from New York. Back home, everything seemed close. It didn’t matter how big the city was, you could get anywhere without getting lost. The street pattern and the subway made sense. There was a system to how things worked. A kid could be safe as long as he wasn’t stupid.
L.A. wasn’t like that. It was spread out, chaotic, hard to move around. It reminded me of Ares. It wasn’t enough for L.A. to be big; it had to prove it was big by being loud and strange and difficult to navigate, too. I didn’t know how we were ever going to find the entrance to the Underworld by tomorrow, the summer solstice.
We walked past gangbangers, bums, and street hawkers, who looked at us like they were trying to figure if we were worth the trouble of mugging.
As we hurried passed the entrance of an alley, a voice from the darkness said, “Hey, you.”
Like an idiot, I stopped.
Before I knew it, we were surrounded. A gang of kids had circled us. Six of them in all—white kids with expensive clothes and mean faces. Like the kids at Yancy Academy: rich brats playing at being bad boys.
Instinctively, I uncapped Riptide.
When the sword appeared out of nowhere, the kids backed off, but their leader was either really stupid or really brave, because he kept coming at me with a switchblade.
I made the mistake of swinging.
The kid yelped. But he must’ve been one hundred percent mortal, because the blade passed harmlessly right through his chest. He looked down. “What the…”
I figured I had about three seconds before his shock turned to anger. “Run!” I screamed at Annabeth and Grover.
We pushed two kids out of the way and raced down the street, not knowing where we were going. We turned a sharp corner.
“There!” Annabeth shouted.
Only one store on the block looked open, its windows glaring with neon. The sign above the door said something like CRSTUY’S WATRE BDE ALPACE.
“Crusty’s Water Bed Palace?” Grover translated.
It didn’t sound like a place I’d ever go except in an emergency, but this definitely qualified.
We burst through the doors, ran behind a water bed, and ducked. A split second later, the gang kids ran past outside.
“I think we lost them,” Grover panted.
A voice behind us boomed, “Lost who?”
We all jumped.
Standing behind us was a guy who looked like a raptor in a leisure suit. He was at least seven feet tall, with absolutely no hair. He had gray, leathery skin, thick-lidded eyes, and a cold, reptilian smile. He moved toward us slowly, but I got the feeling he could move fast if he needed to.
His suit might’ve come from the Lotus Casino. It belonged back in the seventies, big-time. The shirt was silk paisley, unbuttoned halfway down his hairless chest. The lapels on his velvet jacket were as wide as landing strips. The silver chains around his neck—I couldn’t even count them.
“I’m Crusty,” he said, with a tartar-yellow smile.
I resisted the urge to say, Yes, you are.
“Sorry to barge in,” I told him. “We were just, um, browsing.”
“You mean hiding from those no-good kids,” he grumbled. “They hang around every night. I get a lot of people in here, thanks to them. Say, you want to look at a water bed?”
I was about to say No, thanks, when he put a huge paw on my shoulder and steered me deeper into the showroom.
There was every kind of water bed you could imagine: different kinds of wood, different patterns of sheets; queen-size, king-size, emperor-of-the-universe-size.
“This is my most popular model.” Crusty spread his hands proudly over a bed covered with black satin sheets, with built-in Lava Lamps on the headboard. The mattress vibrated, so it looked like oil-flavored Jell-O.