Chapter 69
The attic's silence felt heavier now, a thick, dusty blanket smothering the last echoes of the prophecy. The green mist was gone, the phantom poker party vanished, but the words hung in the air, sharp and cold as the pickled monster eyes in their jars. *You shall be betrayed by one who calls you guys a friend.*
We stood frozen, shoulder to shoulder, the trapdoor sealed above us. Percy's knuckles were white where he'd clenched his fists; James could feel his own heart hammering against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat syncopated with his brother's. The mummy, the Oracle, was just a shriveled husk again, her sundress a sad splash of color in the gloom. But her words were alive, slithering around in our minds, looking for a place to nest.
"What friend?" Percy finally whispered, the sound too loud in the quiet. "Who does she mean?"
James shook his head, his eyes scanning the attic's ghostly collection. The Hydra head grinned with its shark teeth. "It could be anyone. Anyone at camp. Anyone we've met."
That was the poison in it. The first two lines were a quest, clear and direct: go west, face a turned god, find something stolen. A demigod's to-do list. But the third line… it wasn't about monsters or gods. It was about the people beside you. It was a crack in the foundation, and neither of us knew how deep it went.
We remembered the feel of the mist coiling around our brains, the way Gabe's smirking face had formed from the vapor to deliver those ancient words. The Oracle had used our deepest, most familiar dread to speak to us. So what did that mean about the betrayal? Would it come from a face we already feared? Or from one we loved and trusted completely?
"We can't tell anyone," James said, his voice low and firm. "Not the specifics. If we're going to be betrayed by a friend… telling our friends the prophecy just hands them a script."
Percy nodded grimly. "So we go west. We find what was stolen. And we… we watch our backs."
The words tasted like ash. Camp Half-Blood was supposed to be safe. It was the one place where you didn't have to hide, where your siblings had your back. The Oracle had just declared that nowhere was safe.
With a final, uneasy glance at the motionless mummy, we turned to the trapdoor. It opened easily this time, as if the attic was eager to be rid of us. We climbed down, the ladder's rungs cold under our hands, the smell of mildew and snake slowly replaced by the warmer, living scents of the Big House—pine, lemon oil, and firewood.
Chiron was waiting in the living room, his tail flicking gently, his brown eyes full of a timeless patience. Mr. D was gone, probably to the porch to commune with a Diet Coke.
"You are both still in one piece," Chiron observed. "And your eyes retain their sanity. A promising start. What did the Oracle say?"
We exchanged a look. A silent agreement passed between us, forged in the green mist of the attic. We told him the first two lines.
"You shall go west, and face the god who has turned," Percy recited.
"You shall find what was stolen, and see it safely returned," James finished.
We left a heavy, deliberate silence where the third line should have been.
Chiron's brow furrowed. He stroked his beard. "The god who has turned… A god who has switched allegiance, or perhaps one who has been twisted from their purpose. 'What was stolen'… that is the objective. The backbone of your quest." He looked at us, his gaze piercing. "That is all?"
"That's all she said," James said, the lie smooth and terrible on his tongue.
Chiron was silent for a long moment. He could sense the omission; centuries of mentoring heroes had given him an instinct for half-truths. But he also knew the Oracle's ways. Some prophecies were not for the mentor's ears.
"Very well," he said at last, not sounding entirely convinced. "The 'west' is likely the American West. The gods move with the heart of civilization, and that heart has long been there. You will need to travel. And you will need to go soon."
He began outlining plans—contacts in St. Louis, safe paths through the Midwest, the ever-present danger of monsters. We listened, we nodded, but the words were a distant buzz.
Because underneath Chiron's instructions, under the weight of the journey to come, a single, icy thought looped in both our minds, a secret we now shared with a dead priestess in the attic: one of the faces in this very room, one of the voices that wished us good luck, one of the hands that might clap us on the shoulder tomorrow, was going to break us.
The quest to save something stolen had begun. But hidden within it, like a serpent in the grass, was a quieter, more terrifying mission: to spot the knife before it touched our backs, and to survive the hand that held it.