He didn't take the car.
He walked out of the apartment and down to the East River, and he stepped off the edge of the FDR Drive esplanade into the black water, and the river took him like it had been waiting.
He'd never moved through water like that before. Usually he swam, or let a current carry him, or asked the sea nicely and the sea agreed. Tonight he didn't ask. He commanded, and the water obeyed the way a soldier obeys, instantly and without question, a column of current that wrapped around him and shot him north up the East River, through Hell Gate, out into Long Island Sound at a speed that would have shredded a speedboat. Fish scattered. Buoys spun. A Coast Guard cutter off Throgs Neck logged a freak surge at 12:51 a.m. and never figured out what caused it.
Percy didn't feel the cold. He didn't feel anything. He felt the water around him and the shore ahead of him and the thing at the end of it, the thing he was going to do, and that was all.
Ezra Coleman.
Son of Poseidon.
Murderer.
The current spat him out on the beach below Camp Half-Blood at 1:14 in the morning, on the same stretch of sand where he'd slept the night before. He walked up out of the surf fully dry. Riptide was already in his hand.
The barrier was there.
He could see it in a way he never had before: a faint shimmer in the air at the tree line, like heat haze, curving up over the camp in a great invisible dome. Old magic. Thalia's magic, the Fleece's magic, three thousand years of gods' promises woven together and hung over the valley like a net.
It had been keeping him safe since he was twelve.
Tonight it was in his way.
He put his palm flat against it. It pushed back, cool and firm, and he heard it in his head, not in words, but in a feeling: No. Not you. You've been cast out. You don't belong.
"Yeah," Percy said softly. "I've been hearing that a lot."
Then he reached behind him, into the Sound.
The campers on night watch said, later, that it sounded like a freight train.
They were two kids from the Nike cabin, posted on the beach lookout tower with a conch horn and a thermos of hot chocolate. They'd been half asleep. They heard the roar first, and then they turned and saw it coming in off the water: a wave. Not a tide, not a swell. A wall. Forty feet high and black as ink, curling at the top with phosphorescent white foam, rolling in from the open Sound in total silence until it was close enough that its sheer mass made a noise like the sky tearing.
It broke against the barrier.
The whole dome lit up. For one instant the entire valley was visible from above, an enormous bowl of gold light, every ward and rune and blessing glowing like neon. The Fleece on Thalia's pine blazed so bright it threw shadows a mile away. Peleus reared up and roared.
The wave pulled back.
And came again.
And again.
On the fourth wave, something in the gold light cracked. A thin black line, like a hairline fracture in a windshield, running from the beach up toward the sky.
On the fifth, Percy walked through it.
The barrier screamed around him. He felt it tear at him, felt the old magic dragging at his skin and his bones and his name, trying to shove him back out. It hurt. It hurt worse than anything he'd felt since the Styx. He walked through it anyway with seawater pouring off him in sheets and his teeth gritted and his eyes on the cabins, and when he came out the other side, the crack in the dome sealed behind him with a sound like a sob.
The Nike kids blew the conch.
Percy didn't run. He didn't have to. The camp came to him.
The first ones out were the Ares cabin, because the Ares cabin always slept in their armor during a full moon and always got to a fight first. Six of them came pounding down the path from the cabins with spears and shields, and their leader, a big son of Ares named Sherman Yang, skidded to a stop twenty feet away when he saw who it was.
"Jackson?"
"Where is he, Sherman?"
Sherman's spear came up. Uncertain. "You're banished, man. You can't be here. Mr. D said—"
"Where. Is. He."
"You need to stand down," Sherman said, and his voice shook just a little. "Just put the sword down, and—"
Percy moved.
He'd been holding back for years. He hadn't known it until that moment, but he had. Every sparring match, every capture the flag, every training session since he'd bathed in the Styx and come out the other side something more than a regular demigod. He'd held back because these were his friends and his family and his home. Because he was afraid of what he could do.
He wasn't afraid anymore.
He went through the Ares cabin in about nine seconds.
He didn't use the blade. He wouldn't, not on them. They were under some kind of spell, and they were kids, and they hadn't killed his mother. He used the flat of Riptide and his elbows and his knees and the water, and the water was everywhere. It came out of the dewy grass and the canoe lake and the air itself, and it struck like a fist. Sherman went down with a column of water slamming into his chest, flat on his back, his shield spinning away. Two of his siblings got their feet swept out from under them. One took the flat of Riptide across the helmet and dropped like a sack of flour. The last two looked at Percy, at the ocean coiling around his shoulders, and dropped their spears and backed away with their hands up.
Percy walked past them.
More came. Apollo kids with bows, firing blunt-tipped warning arrows that the water knocked out of the air. Hephaestus kids with nets and a bronze automaton that he short-circuited by flooding its chest cavity. Hermes kids trying to sneak up behind him, whom he felt coming through the moisture in the ground and slapped down without even turning around.
He didn't kill anybody. He made sure of that, even then, even with his mother's voice ringing in his skull. He left them groaning and coughing and dazed on the grass behind him like the wake of a ship, and he kept walking toward the cabins.
Annabeth was waiting for him at the bottom of the cabin green.
She was in pajama pants and a camp shirt, with her bronze knife in her hand and her hair wild. Behind her, every cabin light was on. Campers crowded the porches in their sleep clothes, staring.
"Percy, stop."
He stopped. Ten feet from her.
She was shaking. He could see it. Her knife hand was trembling, and her face was white, and for just a second she didn't look like the hard stranger from the council. She looked like a fourteen-year-old girl in the Sea of Monsters, terrified of something she couldn't name.
"What did you do?" she whispered.
"What did I do?" Something in him laughed. It wasn't a nice laugh. "Annabeth. He killed my mom."
She flinched.
It was tiny. Just the corners of her eyes, just her breath catching. But he saw it. He saw it go into her, the words, past the steel and the fog and whatever Ezra had done to her, and he saw them hit something real.
Sally. He watched her lips shape the name without sound. Sally, who had braided her hair the night before the Battle of Manhattan. Sally, who had sent her a care package every month of her freshman year with a note that always said eat a vegetable, love you, S.
"No," Annabeth said. "No, he—he was here all night, he was with me, he—"
She stopped. Her eyes went unfocused. Her hand drifted up to touch her temple, the way she did when she had a headache.
"He left," she said slowly, in a strange, faraway voice. "After dinner. He said he was going for a swim. He was gone for... he came back wet. He came back and his hands were..."
"Where is he?"
She looked at him. And for one second, one terrible second, she was Annabeth, his Annabeth, and her eyes were full of tears and horror and something that might have been an apology.
"Amphitheater," she whispered.
Then she blinked, and the steel came back, and she raised her knife. But Percy was already past her.
Ezra was waiting for him at the campfire.
Of course he was. He was standing in the center of the amphitheater, in the bowl of stone benches where the whole camp gathered every night to sing and roast marshmallows, beside the great fire pit. The fire was burning, though no one had lit it. It was burning green, a sick sea-green that threw rippling light across his face. He'd changed into a clean shirt. His hair was combed. The shell pendant glittered at his throat.
He was smiling.
"Took you long enough," he said. "I figured you'd come straight here. What happened? Did you stop to cry?"
Percy came down the steps one at a time.
Campers were gathering on the benches above, a growing ring of frightened faces. Somebody was yelling for Chiron. Somebody else was praying, out loud, to Zeus.
"Why?" Percy said.
It was the only thing he wanted to know. The only question left in him.
Ezra tilted his head. For a second the smile slipped, and what was underneath it was ugly. Not crazy. Not cruel, even. Just hungry. Bottomless.
"You know what it's like," Ezra said, "growing up on a boat in the middle of nowhere, being told your dad's a god? Being told you're special? And then you finally get to camp, and everyone talks about you. Percy this. Percy that. Percy saved Olympus. Percy beat Kronos. Percy held the sky. They named a cabin rule after you, did you know that? 'No one gets left behind, Jackson rule.' And Dad, when I finally met him..." His jaw tightened. "Do you know what the first thing he said to me was? Have you met your brother yet? You'll like him."
The green fire roared higher.
"I didn't want to like you," Ezra said. "I wanted to be you. And then I got this." He touched the pendant. "A gift. From a friend who understood. And it turned out being you was easy. All I had to do was take everything you had, one piece at a time. Your cabin. Your friends. Your girl." He grinned. "Your mom was the last piece. She saw me coming. You know what she said? She stood there in front of that pathetic little man of hers and she said you're not my son and you never will be."
"Stop."
"She was so brave about it, brother. Right up until the water hit her lungs. Then she was just—"
Percy hit him.
There was no technique in it. No swordplay. Riptide was gone, dropped somewhere on the steps, and Percy didn't remember letting go of it. He just crossed the last ten feet of the amphitheater in a single stride and drove his fist into Ezra Coleman's face with all the weight of the ocean behind it.
Ezra flew back into the stone benches. The bench cracked.
He was up fast. He was strong, much stronger than he should have been for a demigod who'd been training for three months. The pendant was pulsing, and water came boiling out of the ground around him and lashed at Percy in a dozen whip-thin tendrils, each one hard enough to cut.
Percy took them. He walked through them. They opened gashes on his arms and his cheek and his chest and he didn't even slow down, because the Curse of Achilles was humming in his bones and the pain was so far away it might as well have been happening to someone else.
He reached into Ezra's water and took it.
He didn't fight it. He didn't push it back. He just reached out with his will and closed his hand around it, every tendril, every drop, and wrenched it away from Ezra like snatching a toy from a child. Ezra's eyes went wide. He tried to call more. Percy took that too. The lake answered Percy. The Sound answered Percy. The sweat on Ezra's own skin answered Percy.
"What—" Ezra stumbled back. "That's not—you can't—"
"I've been doing this for nine years," Percy said. "You've been doing it for three months. You thought you could take my life. You can't even take my water."
Then he was on him.
The campers on the benches would talk about it for years, in low voices, at night. Most of them couldn't watch. A few of them never forgot it.
Percy didn't say anything. He didn't scream or curse or cry. He just put Ezra on the ground and hit him. And hit him. And hit him. With his fists, then with the water, fists of water as hard as concrete coming down again and again while Ezra thrashed and bled and begged. Every blow was for something. For the hand on his shoulder in the arena. For the empty bunk. For the blue cookies on the counter. For Paul by the window. For her.
For her. For her. For her.
Ezra tried to crawl away. Percy dragged him back by the collar. Ezra raised his hands to shield his face, and Percy pinned them with a bar of water and kept going. Ezra's nose broke. His cheekbone cracked. His lip split open. He was sobbing now, choking on blood and seawater, saying please, please, please, brother, please.
You don't get to call me that, Percy thought, distantly. You never get to call me that.
His fist came down on the pendant.
It shattered.
It was like a bubble popping over the whole camp. A soundless crack that everyone felt in their teeth. On the benches, campers gasped and clutched their heads. Somebody screamed. Somebody started crying, loud and confused, like a little kid waking from a nightmare.
And from somewhere up the hill, a voice rang out, raw and anguished:
"PERCY!"
He didn't look up. He didn't hear it. He raised his fist again.
The sky split open.
The lightning bolt hit the center of the amphitheater ten feet from him, a column of white fire so bright it turned the night to noon and so loud it blew out every window in the Big House. The blast threw Percy off Ezra and sent him tumbling across the stone. He came up on one knee, ears ringing, half blind, with smoke pouring off his clothes.
They were all there.
Standing in a ring on the top tier of the amphitheater, twelve figures blazing with light, each one twenty feet tall. The Olympians. All of them. Zeus, with the Master Bolt crackling in his fist and his eyes like a thunderstorm. Hera, cold and beautiful. Athena, gray-eyed and unreadable, her owl on her shoulder. Ares, grinning like it was the best show he'd seen in years. Apollo and Artemis. Hermes, his face pale and grim. Demeter, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Dionysus, who had finally put down his Diet Coke.
And Poseidon.
His father stood at the edge of the circle in his Hawaiian shirt and fishing hat, and his face was something Percy had never seen before. Not anger. Not disappointment.
Grief.
Poseidon wasn't looking at Percy. He was looking at the broken thing on the floor of the amphitheater, at the son he'd only just met, coughing blood onto the stones. Then, slowly, his sea-green eyes moved to Percy. They were full of an awful question.
What have you done?
"Dad," Percy said. His voice was wrecked. He held up his hands, his knuckles split and bloody. "Dad, he killed Mom. He killed Mom and Paul. He drowned them. He drowned them in their own apartment, Dad, he—"
"Enough."
Zeus's voice rolled across the valley like thunder. The bolt in his hand flared.
"Perseus Jackson," the King of the Gods said, "you have broken a sacred barrier. You have assaulted the children of the gods on holy ground. You have very nearly murdered a son of Poseidon before the eyes of Olympus. And you did all this after your banishment was lawfully decreed." His lip curled. "I always said you would turn. Every hero does, in the end. You were only a little late."
"He killed my mother!"
"Then you will have the opportunity to say so," Zeus said, "at your trial."
Chains of solid celestial bronze rose up out of the stone floor of the amphitheater. They wrapped around Percy's wrists and his ankles and his throat, and they were warded, he could feel it, warded against water, and they pulled him down onto his knees on the cold stone.
He didn't fight them.
He was so tired. Gods, he was tired. The fury drained out of him all at once, like a wave pulling back from the beach, and what it left behind was just a hollow ache and the smell of brine and blood.
He knelt in chains in the amphitheater where he'd sung campfire songs since he was twelve, and he looked up at the ring of terrified faces on the benches above him.
Some of them were crying.
Some of them, he noticed, were looking at him differently than they had an hour ago. Will Solace had both hands over his mouth. Travis Stoll was shaking his head, slowly, over and over, like a man waking from a long dream into a worse one. Katie Gardner had sat down hard on the bench and was staring at nothing.
And at the very top of the amphitheater, a slender figure in black stood in the shadows beside the steps. Pale. Dark-haired. Breathing hard, like he'd run all the way from the Underworld. Nico di Angelo's dark eyes met Percy's across the firelight, and Percy saw that the boy's face was wet.
It was Nico who had screamed his name.
Too late, Percy thought, as the chains tightened and the world went gray at the edges. You all woke up too late.
The last thing he saw before the gods took him was his father. Poseidon had knelt beside Ezra, cradling the broken boy's head in his hands, healing him with soft green light.
He didn't look at Percy again.