The storm followed him all the way out of the city.
He didn't call it. That was the strange part, the part he would think about later. He had never been able to call a storm; that had always been Thalia's trick, Zeus's trick, the sky's business and not the sea's. But as Percy walked east through Queens with Riptide in his fist and his mother's photograph in his pocket, the clouds came down to meet him. They piled up over the East River in black towers. They rolled across Long Island in a low, grinding wall. By the time he crossed into Suffolk County, walking on the shoulder of the highway with cars swerving to avoid him, the rain was coming down in sheets so heavy that the drivers couldn't see the road, and every one of those raindrops was salt.
It was the sea. The sea had come up into the sky because he wanted it there. He could feel it, all of it, every drop of rain hanging in the air above Long Island, every wave in the Sound, every swell out past Montauk where the continental shelf drops away into the dark. He could feel the groundwater under the roads and the sap in the trees and the blood in the bodies of the people in their cars. It was like the whole world had become water, and all of it was listening to him.
He had never felt anything like it. He wasn't sure he liked it. He wasn't sure he cared.
Nobody stopped him. A state trooper pulled over once, lights flashing, and got out of his cruiser to yell at the crazy kid walking down the middle of the highway in a hurricane. Percy looked at him. The trooper got back in his car and drove away.
It was after midnight when he reached the bottom of Half-Blood Hill.
The magical borders of Camp Half-Blood were old. They had been laid down by the gods themselves, layered over the centuries with blessings and wards, strengthened by the Golden Fleece after Percy and Clarisse and Annabeth and Tyson had brought it back from the Sea of Monsters. They kept out monsters. They kept out mortals. They had never been tested by a son of Poseidon who knew exactly what they were made of, because he had stood watch over them, and walked their length, and patched their holes after the Battle of the Labyrinth with his own two hands.
And now, because Chiron had spoken the words, they kept out Percy Jackson.
He walked up the hill in the pouring salt rain. Peleus was awake, coiled tight around the pine tree, and the dragon's eyes glowed like headlamps through the storm. It lifted its head and hissed at him, a long, steaming warning that hung in the wet air.
"Move," Percy said.
Peleus did not move.
Percy raised his hand. The rain that was falling on the hill stopped falling. It hung in the air for a single second, millions of drops caught motionless between the clouds and the earth like a field of glass beads, and then every one of them turned and streamed toward the pine tree. The water slammed into Peleus like a fire hose, then like a river, then like the whole Atlantic, and it wrapped around the dragon's coils and lifted it bodily off the tree and set it down, hissing and thrashing, forty yards away on the side of the hill. Percy held it there, pinned in a shell of spinning water, and did not hurt it, because none of this was the dragon's fault.
Then he turned to the border.
He could feel it in front of him, an invisible wall like a soap bubble stretched across the top of the hill, humming with old magic. He put his palm flat against it. It stung, a hot electric bite that crawled up his arm and into his shoulder, the barrier's way of saying no, not you, not anymore.
Percy pushed.
He didn't push with his arm. He pushed with the storm. Every drop of rain hanging over Long Island fell at once, straight down onto the dome of the barrier, a weight of water that could have flattened a city block. The air shook. The hill shook. The pine tree groaned, its roots creaking in the soaked earth, and the Golden Fleece flared bright gold as the barrier drew on it for strength.
And under the rain, Percy pulled on the water in the ground. All the water. The water table under the hill, the springs that fed the creek in the woods, the brackish channels that ran up from the Sound under the strawberry fields. He pulled it up and he turned it sideways and he shoved it against the roots of the barrier where they ran into the earth, and he felt them strain, and he felt them crack.
The border of Camp Half-Blood broke with a sound like the sky splitting. A shockwave of light rolled out over the valley. Every window in every cabin lit up gold for one blinding instant, and then went dark, and the storm came down on camp like a hammer.
Percy walked through.
The conch horn started blowing before he was halfway down the hill. Lights came on in the cabins. Campers came stumbling out of doorways in their pajamas, grabbing armor and swords, shouting to each other over the roar of the rain.
The first ones to reach him were three Ares campers, big kids, the ones who always went first. Percy didn't know their names; they were new since last summer. They came at him in a wedge with spears leveled and the confidence of people who had never seen a real war.
He didn't use Riptide. He didn't need it. He stepped inside the first spear and caught the shaft and turned, and the kid holding it went flying into the second kid, and they both went down in the mud. The third one swung at his head. Percy ducked, tapped him once in the solar plexus with two fingers, and the kid folded up like a lawn chair, gasping.
He kept walking.
A volley of arrows came at him out of the dark. The Apollo cabin, firing from the porch of Cabin Seven. Percy flicked his hand and a sheet of rain came up between him and the arrows, dense as a wall, and every arrow hit the water and slowed and drifted harmlessly to the ground like leaves. He flicked his hand again, and the water rolled across the grass like a wave across a beach and swept the Apollo kids' feet out from under them, and they went tumbling off the porch in a heap. A girl tried to get up and nock another arrow. A tendril of water wrapped around her bow and plucked it out of her hands and snapped it.
He kept walking.
They came at him from everywhere, after that. Hermes kids, Hephaestus kids, Demeter kids with vines that tried to tangle his legs. He didn't stop to fight any of them. He didn't stop to look at their faces, because he knew if he did he would see someone he'd taught to hold a sword, someone he'd carried off a battlefield, someone whose name he'd said at a funeral pyre, and he wasn't sure what he would do then.
So he didn't look. He just knocked them down. Water slapped swords out of hands. Water slammed people into walls just hard enough to knock the breath out of them, no harder. Water rose up out of the ground and wrapped around people's ankles and held them there. A Hephaestus kid swung a hammer at him, and Percy caught his wrist and twisted, and the hammer dropped, and Percy pushed him into the mud and stepped over him.
It was Jake Mason. Percy saw the burn scar on his arm. He kept walking.
Clarisse La Rue was standing in the middle of the path that ran between the cabins.
She was in full armor. She had her electric spear in her hand, the one her father had given her, crackling blue at the tip. Rain was running down her face. Behind her, he could see the door of Cabin Three, still hung with Ezra's black curtains. The banner was sodden and torn, but he could still make out the words. The true heir of the sea.
"Jackson," Clarisse said.
"Get out of my way, Clarisse."
"What are you doing?" She was shouting over the storm. "What the hell are you doing?"
"He killed my mom."
Clarisse went still.
"He killed my mom," Percy said again, and his voice came out so calm, so flat, that he hardly recognized it. "And Paul. He drowned them in their kitchen and he left me a note on the fridge. And I'm going to go into that cabin, and I'm going to drag him out, and nobody here is going to stop me. Not you. Not anybody."
He watched it land. He watched her face change, saw the twitch near her temple, the same flicker he'd seen on every face in camp, the thing that tried to sit down in the chair of the truth. Clarisse's jaw clenched. Her eyes narrowed. He saw her fight it, really fight, the way Clarisse fought everything, with her teeth and her fists and every ounce of her stubborn, furious, Ares-born will.
"Sally," she said hoarsely. "Sally Jackson? The one who sent cookies? To the Ares cabin. Every Christmas." She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. "She sent us cookies, Jackson, she sent the Ares cabin cookies, because she said we never got any mail—"
"Yeah," Percy said. "That was her."
Clarisse lowered her spear.
She didn't step aside. She just lowered it, the point dropping toward the mud, and her face crumpled for a second, and then it hardened into something else entirely. "He's in there," she said. "He's been in there since the barrier went down. Him and Chase."
"Is Annabeth hurt?"
"No. But he's got her in front of the door."
Of course he did.
The door of Cabin Three exploded inward.
Percy didn't touch it. He didn't need to. Every pipe in the cabin burst at once, the plumbing in the bathroom and the saltwater fountain in the corner, and the water came roaring out in a tide that tore the door off its hinges and sent it skidding across the floor.
Annabeth was standing in the middle of the room, soaking wet, dagger in hand. Ezra was behind her.
"Stay back!" Ezra yelled. His voice cracked. All that smooth confidence was gone. "Stay back, Percy, I swear to the gods—"
"Annabeth," Percy said. "Move."
She looked at him. The crease between her brows. Her dagger was shaking.
"He killed Sally," Percy said to her, very quietly. "He killed my mom. You knew her, Annabeth. She used to braid your hair. She made you that blue birthday cake when you turned sixteen because you said nobody had ever made you a birthday cake before."
Annabeth made a sound like she'd been punched.
Ezra's hand came up toward her shoulder, and Percy saw the shimmer start to gather in his fingers, the faint heat-haze glimmer of whatever he'd been doing to all of them for six months.
Percy pulled the water out of Ezra's hand.
Not the water around it. The water in it. It was the first time he had ever done that to a person, and it was terrible, and it was easy. Ezra's fingers locked up. The skin went tight and pale, and the shimmer died before it could touch Annabeth, and Ezra screamed and fell backward, clutching his wrist.
Annabeth staggered as if something had let go of her. She dropped her dagger. She put both hands over her face.
Percy walked past her, and grabbed his half-brother by the front of his shirt, and dragged him out into the storm.
He threw Ezra down in the mud in the middle of the cabin green, in front of all of them. The whole camp was there by now, gathered in a ragged circle in the rain, campers and satyrs and nymphs, Chiron galloping up from the Big House with his bow in his hand. Nobody came closer. Percy had put a ring of water between himself and the crowd, a churning wall of it that came up to his waist, and anyone who tried to step through it found themselves gently set back on the other side.
Ezra scrambled up onto his knees. His hand was still curled into a claw against his chest, but he managed to summon something with the other one, a pathetic little geyser out of the wet grass that splashed against Percy's chest and fell away.
Percy hit him.
It was a plain punch. No powers, no water, no tricks. Just his fist, which had held up the sky and swung a sword against Kronos and was very, very tired of being nice. Ezra's head snapped back. He went down on his side in the mud. Percy grabbed him by the collar, hauled him back up onto his knees, and hit him again.
"That," Percy said, "was for Paul."
Ezra spat red into the grass. He tried to laugh. "You think I'm scared of—"
Percy hit him again. And again. He wasn't counting. He was aware, distantly, that people were screaming his name. He was aware that someone was pounding on the water wall, that Chiron was shouting at him in Ancient Greek, that the rain was coming down harder and harder, and that lightning had started to flicker inside the clouds. He was aware of all of it the way you're aware of noise from another room.
Ezra tried to call the sea. Percy felt him reach for it, that small, hungry pull. And Percy simply took it back. He closed his will around the ocean like a fist around a rope, and he yanked, and the sea came to him, every drop, and Ezra was left reaching for nothing, a son of Poseidon with no water in the world that would answer him.
The look on Ezra's face when he understood that was something Percy would remember for a very long time.
"How," Ezra choked. Blood ran from his nose and mouth. One eye was already swelling shut. "How are you doing this, you're not, you're not supposed to be stronger, he said I was the one, he said—"
"Who said?"
Ezra just stared at him with his one good eye, wild and terrified.
Percy hit him again. Ezra crumpled into the mud and didn't get up, and Percy stood over him, breathing hard, his knuckles split and bleeding, rain running into his eyes, and he raised his fist one more time.
"That was for my mom," he said. "And this one is—"
The sky opened.
It was not lightning. Lightning was a kind of light. This was something else, a column of pure white radiance that came down out of the storm clouds and struck the earth between Percy and his half-brother, and the force of it threw Percy backward through his own wall of water and into the mud twenty feet away. The storm died instantly. The rain stopped falling mid-air, hung, and then simply vanished, as if it had never been. The clouds tore apart. Moonlight poured down onto Camp Half-Blood, cold and silver, and in the middle of the cabin green, where the light had struck, stood the gods.
Not all of them. Enough. Zeus, eleven feet tall, crackling with static, his eyes like thunderheads. Poseidon beside him, in Bermuda shorts and a fishing hat but with a face like a tidal wave about to break, staring at the son lying broken in the mud and then at the son lying stunned twenty feet away, and Percy could not tell which of them he was looking at with more horror. Athena in her armor, gray eyes blazing. Ares, grinning. Apollo, not grinning, for once. Hermes, his caduceus in his hand, George and Martha hissing softly.
And behind them, so faint in the moonlight that she was almost invisible, a slight figure in a brown dress with a hood over her hair. Hestia. She was looking at Percy, and her eyes were full of the saddest firelight he had ever seen.
Poseidon knelt beside Ezra. He touched his son's face with one hand, and seawater flowed from his fingers over the cuts and bruises, and Ezra groaned. Then Poseidon stood up and turned, very slowly, to look at Percy.
"What have you done?" the god of the sea said.
Percy got to his feet. His legs were shaking. His hands were bleeding. He looked his father in the eye, and the calm of the deep ocean was still in him, cold and total.
"What he deserved," Percy said. "Ask him about Mom, Dad. Ask him what he did to Mom."
Something moved on Poseidon's face. Something that might have been grief, or doubt, or nothing at all.
Zeus raised his hand. The master bolt was in it, humming with a power that made Percy's teeth ache.
"Perseus Jackson," the king of the gods thundered, "you have broken the sacred borders of this camp. You have attacked your fellow demigods. You have shed the blood of your own kin, under the open sky, in sight of Olympus." He lowered the bolt until it pointed at Percy's heart. "You will stand trial before the Council of the Gods. And you will be judged."
Percy looked around the circle. At Clarisse, standing with her spear lowered and her face white. At Grover, who was being held back by two dryads and was sobbing openly. At Annabeth, who was on her knees in the doorway of Cabin Three with her hands still over her face.
At Ezra, who had lifted his ruined head from the mud just enough to look at Percy with his one working eye. And even now, even broken, even bleeding into the grass in front of the gods themselves, Ezra Vance was smiling.
"Fine," said Percy Jackson. "Let's go."