The Trials of Apollo, Book One: The Hidden Oracle Read online

  “Leave my alley,” the girl said. “Now.”

  In the Dumpster, more trash bags burst like popcorn kernels, showering Cade and Mikey with radishes, potato peelings, and other compost material. Miraculously, none of it got on me. Despite their injuries, the two thugs scrambled to their feet and ran away, screaming.

  I turned toward my pint-size savior. I was no stranger to dangerous women. My sister could rain down arrows of death. My stepmother, Hera, regularly drove mortals mad so that they would hack each other to pieces. But this garbage-wielding twelve-year-old made me nervous.

  “Thank you,” I ventured.

  The girl crossed her arms. On her middle fingers she wore matching gold rings with crescent signets. Her eyes glinted darkly like a crow’s. (I can make that comparison because I invented crows.)

  “Don’t thank me,” she said. “You’re still in my alley.”

  She walked a full circle around me, scrutinizing my appearance as if I were a prize cow. (I can also make that comparison, because I used to collect prize cows.)

  “You’re the god Apollo?” She sounded less than awestruck. She also didn’t seem fazed by the idea of gods walking among mortals.

  “You were listening, then?”

  She nodded. “You don’t look like a god.”

  “I’m not at my best,” I admitted. “My father, Zeus, has exiled me from Olympus. And who are you?”

  She smelled faintly of apple pie, which was surprising, since she looked so grubby. Part of me wanted to find a fresh towel, clean her face, and give her money for a hot meal. Part of me wanted to fend her off with a chair in case she decided to bite me. She reminded me of the strays my sister was always adopting: dogs, panthers, homeless maidens, small dragons.

  “Name is Meg,” she said.

  “Short for Megara? Or Margaret?”

  “Margaret. But don’t ever call me Margaret.”

  “And are you a demigod, Meg?”

  She pushed up her glasses. “Why would you think that?”

  Again she didn’t seem surprised by the question. I sensed she had heard the term demigod before.

  “Well,” I said, “you obviously have some power. You chased off those hooligans with rotten fruit. Perhaps you have banana-kinesis? Or you can control garbage? I once knew a Roman goddess, Cloacina, who presided over the city’s sewer system. Perhaps you’re related…?”

  Meg pouted. I got the impression I might have said something wrong, though I couldn’t imagine what.

  “I think I’ll just take your money,” Meg said. “Go on. Get out of here.”

  “No, wait!” Desperation crept into my voice. “Please, I—I may need a bit of assistance.”

  I felt ridiculous, of course. Me—the god of prophecy, plague, archery, healing, music, and several other things I couldn’t remember at the moment—asking a colorfully dressed street urchin for help. But I had no one else. If this child chose to take my money and kick me into the cruel winter streets, I didn’t think I could stop her.

  “Say I believe you…” Meg’s voice took on a singsong tone, as if she were about to announce the rules of the game: I’ll be the princess, and you’ll be the scullery maid. “Say I decide to help. What then?”

  Good question, I thought. “We…we are in Manhattan?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She twirled and did a playful skip-kick. “Hell’s Kitchen.”

  It seemed wrong for a child to say Hell’s Kitchen. Then again, it seemed wrong for a child to live in an alley and have garbage fights with thugs.

  I considered walking to the Empire State Building. That was the modern gateway to Mount Olympus, but I doubted the guards would let me up to the secret six hundredth floor. Zeus would not make it so easy.

  Perhaps I could find my old friend Chiron the centaur. He had a training camp on Long Island. He could offer me shelter and guidance. But that would be a dangerous journey. A defenseless god makes for a juicy target. Any monster along the way would cheerfully disembowel me. Jealous spirits and minor gods might also welcome the opportunity. Then there was Cade and Mikey’s mysterious “boss.” I had no idea who he was, or whether he had other, worse minions to send against me.

  Even if I made it to Long Island, my new mortal eyes might not be able to find Chiron’s camp in its magically camouflaged valley. I needed a guide to get me there—someone experienced and close by….

  “I have an idea.” I stood as straight as my injuries allowed. It wasn’t easy to look confident with a bloody nose and coffee grounds dripping off my clothes. “I know someone who might help. He lives on the Upper East Side. Take me to him, and I shall reward you.”

  Meg made a sound between a sneeze and a laugh. “Reward me with what?” She danced around, plucking twenty-dollar bills from the trash. “I’m already taking all your money.”

  “Hey!”

  She tossed me my wallet, now empty except for Lester Papadopoulos’s junior driver’s license.

  Meg sang, “I’ve got your money, I’ve got your money.”

  I stifled a growl. “Listen, child, I won’t be mortal forever. Someday I will become a god again. Then I will reward those who helped me—and punish those who didn’t.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “How do you know what will happen? Have you ever been mortal before?”

  “Yes, actually. Twice! Both times, my punishment only lasted a few years at most!”

  “Oh, yeah? And how did you get back to being all goddy or whatever?”

  “Goddy is not a word,” I pointed out, though my poetic sensibilities were already thinking of ways I might use it. “Usually Zeus requires me to work as a slave for some important demigod. This fellow uptown I mentioned, for instance. He’d be perfect! I do whatever tasks my new master requires for a few years. As long as I behave, I am allowed back to Olympus. Right now I just have to recover my strength and figure out—”

  “How do you know for sure which demigod?”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Which demigod you’re supposed to serve, dummy.”

  “I…uh. Well, it’s usually obvious. I just sort of run into them. That’s why I want to get to the Upper East Side. My new master will claim my service and—”

  “I’m Meg McCaffrey!” Meg blew me a raspberry. “And I claim your service!”

  Overhead, thunder rumbled in the gray sky. The sound echoed through the city canyons like divine laughter.

  Whatever was left of my pride turned to ice water and trickled into my socks. “I walked right into that, didn’t I?”

  “Yep!” Meg bounced up and down in her red sneakers. “We’re going to have fun!”

  With great difficulty, I resisted the urge to weep. “Are you sure you’re not Artemis in disguise?”

  “I’m that other thing,” Meg said, counting my money. “The thing you said before. A demigod.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Just do.” She gave me a smug smile. “And now I have a sidekick god named Lester!”

  I raised my face to the heavens. “Please, Father, I get the point. Please, I can’t do this!”

  Zeus did not answer. He was probably too busy recording my humiliation to share on Snapchat.

  “Cheer up,” Meg told me. “Who’s that guy you wanted to see—the guy on the Upper East Side?”

  “Another demigod,” I said. “He knows the way to a camp where I might find shelter, guidance, food—”

  “Food?” Meg’s ears perked up almost as much as the points on her glasses. “Good food?”

  “Well, normally I just eat ambrosia, but, yes, I suppose.”

  “Then that’s my first order! We’re going to find this guy to take us to the camp place!”

  I sighed miserably. It was going to be a very long servitude.

  “As you wish,” I said. “Let’s find Percy Jackson.”

  Used to be goddy

  Now uptown feeling shoddy

  Bah, haiku don’t rhyme

  AS WE TRUDGED up Madison Avenue, my mind swi
rled with questions: Why hadn’t Zeus given me a winter coat? Why did Percy Jackson live so far uptown? Why did pedestrians keep staring at me?

  I wondered if my divine radiance was starting to return. Perhaps the New Yorkers were awed by my obvious power and unearthly good looks.

  Meg McCaffrey set me straight.

  “You smell,” she said. “You look like you’ve just been mugged.”

  “I have just been mugged. Also enslaved by a small child.”

  “It’s not slavery.” She chewed off a piece of her thumb cuticle and spit it out. “It’s more like mutual cooperation.”

  “Mutual in the sense that you give orders and I am forced to cooperate?”

  “Yep.” She stopped in front of a storefront window. “See? You look gross.”

  My reflection stared back at me, except it was not my reflection. It couldn’t be. The face was the same as on Lester Papadopoulos’s ID.

  I looked about sixteen. My medium-length hair was dark and curly—a style I had rocked in Athenian times, and again in the 1970s. My eyes were blue. My face was pleasing enough in a dorkish way, but it was marred by a swollen eggplant-colored nose, which had dripped a gruesome mustache of blood down my upper lip. Even worse, my cheeks were covered with some sort of rash that looked suspiciously like…My heart climbed into my throat.

  “Horrors!” I cried. “Is that—Is that acne?”

  Immortal gods do not get acne. It is one of our inalienable rights. Yet I leaned closer to the glass and saw that my skin was indeed a scarred landscape of whiteheads and pustules.

  I balled my fists and wailed to the cruel sky, “Zeus, what have I done to deserve this?”

  Meg tugged at my sleeve. “You’re going to get yourself arrested.”

  “What does it matter? I have been made a teenager, and not even one with perfect skin! I bet I don’t even have…” With a cold sense of dread, I lifted my shirt. My midriff was covered with a floral pattern of bruises from my fall into the Dumpster and my subsequent kicking. But even worse, I had flab.

  “Oh, no, no, no.” I staggered around the sidewalk, hoping the flab would not follow me. “Where are my eight-pack abs? I always have eight-pack abs. I never have love handles. Never in four thousand years!”

  Meg made another snorting laugh. “Sheesh, crybaby, you’re fine.”

  “I’m fat!”

  “You’re average. Average people don’t have eight-pack abs. C’mon.”

  I wanted to protest that I was not average nor a person, but with growing despair, I realized the term now fit me perfectly.

  On the other side of the storefront window, a security guard’s face loomed, scowling at me. I allowed Meg to pull me farther down the street.

  She skipped along, occasionally stopping to pick up a coin or swing herself around a streetlamp. The child seemed unfazed by the cold weather, the dangerous journey ahead, and the fact that I was suffering from acne.

  “How are you so calm?” I demanded. “You are a demigod, walking with a god, on your way to a camp to meet others of your kind. Doesn’t any of that surprise you?”

  “Eh.” She folded one of my twenty-dollar bills into a paper airplane. “I’ve seen a bunch of weird stuff.”

  I was tempted to ask what could be weirder than the morning we had just had. I decided I might not be able to stand the stress of knowing. “Where are you from?”

  “I told you. The alley.”

  “No, but…your parents? Family? Friends?”

  A ripple of discomfort passed over her face. She returned her attention to her twenty-dollar airplane. “Not important.”

  My highly advanced people-reading skills told me she was hiding something, but that was not unusual for demigods. For children blessed with an immortal parent, they were strangely sensitive about their backgrounds. “And you’ve never heard of Camp Half-Blood? Or Camp Jupiter?”

  “Nuh-uh.” She tested the airplane’s point on her fingertip. “How much farther to Perry’s house?”

  “Percy’s. I’m not sure. A few more blocks…I think.”

  That seemed to satisfy Meg. She hopscotched ahead, throwing the cash airplane and retrieving it. She cartwheeled through the intersection at East Seventy-Second Street—her clothes a flurry of traffic-light colors so bright I worried the drivers might get confused and run her down. Fortunately, New York drivers were used to swerving around oblivious pedestrians.

  I decided Meg must be a feral demigod. They were rare but not unheard of. Without any support network, without being discovered by other demigods or taken in for proper training, she had still managed to survive. But her luck would not last. Monsters usually began hunting down and killing young heroes around the time they turned thirteen, when their true powers began to manifest. Meg did not have long. She needed to be brought to Camp Half-Blood as much as I did. She was fortunate to have met me.

  (I know that last statement seems obvious. Everyone who meets me is fortunate, but you take my meaning.)

  Had I been my usual omniscient self, I could have gleaned Meg’s destiny. I could have looked into her soul and seen all I needed to know about her godly parentage, her powers, her motives and secrets.

  Now I was blind to such things. I could only be sure she was a demigod because she had successfully claimed my service. Zeus had affirmed her right with a clap of thunder. I felt the binding upon me like a shroud of tightly wrapped banana peels. Whoever Meg McCaffrey was, however she had happened to find me, our fates were now intertwined.

  It was almost as embarrassing as the acne.

  We turned east on Eighty-Second Street.

  By the time we reached Second Avenue, the neighborhood started to look familiar—rows of apartment buildings, hardware shops, convenience stores, and Indian restaurants. I knew that Percy Jackson lived around here somewhere, but my trips across the sky in the sun chariot had given me something of a Google Earth orientation. I wasn’t used to traveling at street level.

  Also, in this mortal form, my flawless memory had become…flawed. Mortal fears and needs clouded my thoughts. I wanted to eat. I wanted to use the restroom. My body hurt. My clothes stank. I felt as if my brain had been stuffed with wet cotton. Honestly, how do you humans stand it?

  After a few more blocks, a mixture of sleet and rain began to fall. Meg tried to catch the precipitation on her tongue, which I thought a very ineffective way to get a drink—and of dirty water, no less. I shivered and concentrated on happy thoughts: the Bahamas, the Nine Muses in perfect harmony, the many horrible punishments I would visit on Cade and Mikey when I became a god again.

  I still wondered about their boss, and how he had known where I would fall to earth. No mortal could’ve had that knowledge. In fact, the more I thought about it, I didn’t see how even a god (other than myself) could have foreseen the future so accurately. After all, I had been the god of prophecy, master of the Oracle of Delphi, distributor of the highest quality sneak previews of destiny for millennia.

  Of course, I had no shortage of enemies. One of the natural consequences of being so awesome is that I attracted envy from all quarters. But I could only think of one adversary who might be able to tell the future. And if he came looking for me in my weakened state…

  I tamped down that thought. I had enough to worry about. No point scaring myself to death with what-ifs.

  We began searching side streets, checking names on apartment mailboxes and intercom panels. The Upper East Side had a surprising number of Jacksons. I found that annoying.

  After several failed attempts, we turned a corner and there—parked under a crape myrtle—sat an older model blue Prius. Its hood bore the unmistakable dents of pegasus hooves. (How was I sure? I know my hoof marks. Also, normal horses do not gallop over Toyotas. Pegasi often do.)

  “Aha,” I told Meg. “We’re getting close.”

  Half a block down, I recognized the building: a five-story brick row house with rusty air conditioner units sagging from the windows. “Voilà!” I cried.

>   At the front steps, Meg stopped as if she’d run into an invisible barrier. She stared back toward Second Avenue, her dark eyes turbulent.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Thought I saw them again.”

  “Them?” I followed her gaze but saw nothing unusual. “The thugs from the alley?”

  “No. Couple of…” She waggled her fingers. “Shiny blobs. Saw them back on Park Avenue.”

  My pulse increased from an andante tempo to a lively allegretto. “Shiny blobs? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  She tapped the temples of her glasses. “I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff. Told you that. Mostly, things don’t bother me, but…”

  “But if they are following us,” I said, “that would be bad.”

  I scanned the street again. I saw nothing amiss, but I didn’t doubt Meg had seen shiny blobs. Many spirits could appear that way. My own father, Zeus, once took the form of a shiny blob to woo a mortal woman. (Why the mortal woman found that attractive, I have no idea.)

  “We should get inside,” I said. “Percy Jackson will help us.”

  Still, Meg held back. She had shown no fear while pelting muggers with garbage in a blind alley, but now she seemed to be having second thoughts about ringing a doorbell. It occurred to me she might have met demigods before. Perhaps those meetings had not gone well.

  “Meg,” I said, “I realize some demigods are not good. I could tell you stories of all the ones I’ve had to kill or transform into herbs—”

  “Herbs?”

  “But Percy Jackson has always been reliable. You have nothing to fear. Besides, he likes me. I taught him everything he knows.”

  She frowned. “You did?”

  I found her innocence somewhat charming. So many obvious things she did not know. “Of course. Now let’s go up.”

  I rang the buzzer. A few moments later, the garbled voice of a woman answered, “Yes?”

  “Hello,” I said. “This is Apollo.”

  Static.

  “The god Apollo,” I said, thinking perhaps I should be more specific. “Is Percy home?”

  More static, followed by two voices in muted conversation. The front door buzzed. I pushed it open. Just before I stepped inside, I caught a flash of movement in the corner of my eye. I peered down the sidewalk but again saw nothing.