He did the blessing pulls on the first night back home, sitting cross-legged on his bed in the little apartment on the Upper East Side, with the window open and the sounds of the city drifting in.
His mother had made blue pancakes for dinner. Blue pancakes, at dinner, because he was home. Paul had made a speech, and Sally had cried, and the three of them had sat at the little kitchen table until almost midnight while Percy told them about the summer. The parts he could tell, anyway. Then his mother had kissed him on the forehead and said I'm so proud of you, baby, and gone to bed, and he'd sat in his room for a long time just looking at the walls, feeling something so big in his chest he didn't have a name for it.
He'd lost this once. All of it. The apartment, the pancakes, the kiss on the forehead. He'd come home from college to find it all gone.
He wasn't going to lose it again.
Okay, he thought, wiping his eyes. Okay. Work.
[PATRON BLESSING GACHA]
[Available pulls: 3.]
[Note: Blessings are drawn from the threads of gods who have taken notice of the Host. The more gods who watch, the wider the pool.]
[Current pool: 14 deities.]
Fourteen, Percy thought. Last time it was six.
[The Host has become difficult to ignore.]
He took a breath and pulled.
The first one came up silver-gray, like light through clouds, and it smelled of olive leaves and old paper.
[PATRON BLESSING ACQUIRED!]
[BLESSING OF ATHENA, Goddess of Wisdom, Strategy and Crafts]
[Athena remembers granting you this blessing. She does not question why. She finds that she keeps thinking about the problem of you, the way she thinks about a puzzle she has not yet solved.]
[Passive: STRATEGIST'S EYE — In combat, the Host perceives the flow of the battlefield: enemy formations, weak points, the likely next three moves of any opponent he has studied.]
[Passive: CLEAR MIND — Penalties to INT and WIS from all sources are halved.]
Percy stared at the second line for a long time.
Halved, he thought. Thread-Worn. That's... that's going to change everything.
[Great Sage concurs. Great Sage is also slightly offended that a goddess solved a problem Great Sage could not.]
Percy laughed out loud, and then clapped his hand over his mouth so he wouldn't wake his mother.
The second came up red and gold, hot as a forge, smelling of charcoal and hot iron.
[PATRON BLESSING ACQUIRED!]
[BLESSING OF HEPHAESTUS, God of the Forge, Fire and Craftsmen]
[Hephaestus granted this blessing freely. He remembers why. He remembers a boy who looked into a camera in a broken water park and said he was sorry.]
[Passive: FORGE-TOUCHED — Smithing and Weapon Reforging improve 50% faster. Items the Host crafts gain one additional property.]
[Passive: HEAT-SKIN — Resistance to fire and heat +50%.]
He remembered, Percy thought, and something warm and complicated settled in his chest.
The third came up silver.
Pure silver, cold and bright, like moonlight on snow. It smelled of pine needles and night air and something wild. And there was a sound with it, faint and far away, of hounds baying in a dark forest.
[PATRON BLESSING ACQUIRED!]
[BLESSING OF ARTEMIS, Goddess of the Hunt, the Moon and the Wild]
[Artemis remembers granting you this blessing. She is annoyed that she did. She is more annoyed that she cannot remember why she is not more annoyed.]
[Passive: MOONSIGHT — The Host sees in darkness as if by full moonlight.]
[Passive: HUNTER'S MARK — Once tracked, a quarry cannot hide from the Host for 24 hours. Ranged weapon accuracy +40%.]
Percy sat very still on his bed.
Artemis.
In his first life, he'd held up the sky for her. Literally. He'd taken the weight of the whole sky on his shoulders on Mount Tamalpais so she could fight. She'd been... not kind, exactly. Artemis was never kind to boys. But fair. And at the end of that night she'd looked at him with something that was almost respect.
And now she'd blessed him, in a world where she'd never met him, and was annoyed about it.
That seemed about right.
[Patron Blessings: Hestia · Apollo · Hecate · Zeus · Athena · Hephaestus · Artemis]
[Great Sage notes: The Host is accumulating Olympian attention at an unusual rate.]
[Great Sage advises caution. Attention is not always a gift.]
I know, Percy thought, lying back on his bed and looking at the ceiling. Believe me. I know.
He found Hecate four nights later, at a crossroads in Queens.
He hadn't been looking for her, exactly. He'd been looking for a way to learn something.
The Mist.
He'd been thinking about it ever since the Lotus Hotel. About how easy it had been to slide his shadow into that drawer, because nobody there could see anything that didn't fit the story the Lotus was telling them. About the guard at the Empire State Building, and the taxi driver in Vegas, and the motel clerk in Santa Monica. All of them glancing at a magic credit card, and seeing what the Mist told them to see.
The Mist was everywhere. It was the veil between the mortal world and the world of gods and monsters. It was what made people see a bus crash instead of a Fury, a gas leak instead of a hellhound. It covered everything, all the time.
And he was going to need it.
You couldn't build a city of demigods on an island off Long Island without the Mist. You couldn't hide a fleet of triremes, or a pegasus airfield, or a marble Acropolis full of temples, from satellites and coast guards and nosy reporters, without being very, very good at the Mist.
And right now, all he could do was see through it.
So he'd asked Great Sage. And Great Sage had said:
[The Mist is the domain of Hecate. The Host bears her blessing. Hecate is the goddess of crossroads.]
So here he was. Midnight. A crossroads in Queens, where two empty streets met under a flickering streetlight, with a shuttered laundromat on one corner and a closed bodega on another. He had a cupcake, because he didn't know what else you were supposed to offer a goddess of magic, and three candles from his mother's kitchen drawer. He felt very stupid.
He set the cupcake on the curb. He lit the candles around it. He knelt.
"Lady Hecate," he said. "I don't really know how to do this. But I'd like to talk to you. If that's okay."
Nothing happened.
The streetlight flickered.
Then it went out.
All of them went out. Every light on both streets, the streetlights and the porch lights and the neon in the bodega window, all at once, so the crossroads was suddenly black except for the three tiny flames around his cupcake.
And in the dark, where the two streets met, a woman was standing.
She was tall, and dressed in a long black gown that seemed to shift and ripple like smoke. Her hair was dark and pulled back from a pale, sharp, beautiful face. She held a burning torch in each hand, and the light from them didn't quite reach the edges of her. When Percy looked at her straight on, she was one woman. When he looked at her from the corner of his eye, she was three, standing back to back, facing down all three roads at once.
At her feet sat a large black dog with glowing red eyes. And on her shoulder, curled like a scarf, was a small brown animal with a long tail and a twitchy nose. A polecat.
The polecat looked at Percy and farted.
"Gale," said the goddess, without any particular emotion. "Manners."
The polecat looked unrepentant.
[Divine presence detected: HECATE, Goddess of Magic, Crossroads, the Mist and the Moon.]
[Relationship: Patron (Blessing freely given).]
Hecate looked down at the cupcake on the curb, surrounded by its three little candles. Then she looked at Percy.
And she smiled. It was slow, and curious, and a little bit unsettling.
"A cupcake," she said.
"I didn't know what else to bring," Percy admitted.
"Nobody has brought me a cupcake in two thousand years." She tilted her head. "They usually bring black dogs. Or honey. Or the blood of a ewe at a crossroads at the dark of the moon. It's very tiresome." She bent down, gracefully, and picked up the cupcake, and looked at it. "Chocolate?"
"Red velvet."
"Better."
She took a bite. The black dog at her feet thumped its tail on the asphalt.
"Well, Perseus Jackson," the goddess of magic said, chewing thoughtfully. "Son of Zeus. Bearer of my blessing. The boy who walked out of the Lotus Hotel with his mind entirely his own, and a pocketful of their cards." Her dark eyes glittered. "I have been waiting for you to come and find me. You took longer than I expected."
"I've been busy," Percy said.
"So I hear." She finished the cupcake and licked a smear of frosting off her thumb. "What do you want?"
Percy took a breath.
"I want to learn the Mist," he said. "Not just see through it. Use it. Shape it. Hide things with it. Big things."
"How big?"
"Two islands," Percy said. "And a city."
Hecate went very still.
The black dog stopped wagging. Even Gale the polecat lifted his head and stared.
The goddess of magic looked at him for a long, long moment. The torches in her hands burned steadily. And when she spoke again, the smile was gone. Her voice was quiet, and serious, and very interested.
"Tell me," she said. "Everything."
He told her about the city.
Not about the Fates. Not about the System, or the other world, or the tower. He wasn't stupid. But he told her about the City of the Unclaimed. About Gardiners Island and Plum Island, and the company called Argo, and the kids sleeping on the floor of Cabin Eleven. About a camp that could hold ten times as many demigods as the old one. A city where they could grow up, and go to school, and work, and have families, and grow old, without monsters coming for them every summer. A place where a demigod didn't have to choose between hiding in the mortal world and fighting in the godly one.
A home.
Hecate listened to all of it without saying a word.
When he was done, she was quiet for a long time.
"Do you know," she said finally, "what I was, in the last war? The Titan war. The first one."
Percy did. In his first life, she'd fought for Kronos.
"You sided with the Titans," he said carefully.
"I sided with the Titans." She nodded. "And when the Olympians won, they forgave me, more or less. Because they needed my magic. But they never gave me a throne. They never gave me a cabin at their camp. My children sleep on the floor of the Hermes cabin with all the other children of all the other minor gods nobody remembers." Her voice was perfectly calm. "There are a great many of us, you know. Minor gods. Forgotten gods. Gods who chose wrong once, a very long time ago, and were never allowed to forget it."
She looked at him.
"And you," she said, "are building a city where nobody sleeps on the floor."
"Yes," Percy said.
"With temples." She said it slowly, as if tasting the word. "You said there would be temples. On your acropolis. For the Olympians. And for the minor gods."
"For all of them," Percy said. "Everyone. Anyone who has kids there. That's the point."
Hecate looked at him for a very long time.
Then she laughed. It was a strange laugh, low and delighted, like three women laughing at once from three directions.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, I like you. I liked you when I blessed you. I like you much better now." She lowered her torches. "Very well, Perseus Jackson. I will teach you the Mist."
"What's the price?" Percy said. He'd learned that much, in two lives.
Hecate smiled.
"A temple," she said. "On your acropolis. A real one. With my name on it. And a cabin at your new camp for my children. With beds." A pause. "And cupcakes. On the dark of every moon."
"Deal," Percy said.
[DIVINE PACT: HECATE, GODDESS OF MAGIC AND THE MIST]
[Terms: A temple to Hecate in the City of the Unclaimed. A cabin for her children at the new camp. A red velvet cupcake at the dark of each moon. In exchange: Instruction in the Mist.]
[LEGENDARY QUEST UPDATED: CITY OF THE UNCLAIMED. A goddess has invested in the city.]
She taught him every night for two weeks.
Always at a crossroads. Always at midnight. Always in the dark, with her torches and her dog and her polecat, who Percy was pretty sure hated him.
It was the hardest thing he'd ever tried to learn.
Not because it was complicated. Because it was the opposite of everything he knew how to do. The sky, the shadows, the sword: those were all about force. Pushing. Striking. Making something happen. The Mist wasn't like that. You couldn't push it. The harder you pushed, the more it slid away from you, like trying to grab smoke.
"Stop forcing it," Hecate said, on the third night, for the twentieth time. Percy was sweating and shaking with effort, trying to make a mailbox look like a fire hydrant to a passing cab driver. The mailbox was very definitely still a mailbox. "You're trying to make him see a fire hydrant. That isn't how it works."
"Then how does it work?" Percy panted.
Hecate sighed. She came over and stood next to him, looking at the mailbox.
"The Mist," she said, "is a story. That's all it is. A story that mortals agree to believe, because the truth would frighten them too much. You don't force someone to believe a story. You offer it to them. You make it easier to believe than the truth. And then they believe it on their own."
She waved one hand, gently, toward the next cab coming down the street.
The cab driver glanced at the mailbox as he passed. He saw a fire hydrant. Percy could tell. He could feel it, somehow, the way the Mist folded around the mailbox like a sheet over furniture. The driver's eyes slid over it and kept going, and didn't think twice.
"See?" said Hecate. "He wanted to see a fire hydrant. Fire hydrants are boring. Boring things are easy to believe. Nobody questions a boring thing." She glanced at Percy. "You don't hide a city by making people believe something amazing, little hero. You hide it by making them believe something so dull they never look twice."
Percy stared at the mailbox. At the fire hydrant that wasn't there.
An abandoned government rock, he thought suddenly. Restricted. Off-limits. Nothing to see. That's what Plum Island should look like. Something so boring nobody even wants to look at it.
"Try again," said Hecate.
He tried again.
This time he didn't push. He just stood there, looking at the mailbox, and thought about how boring a fire hydrant was. How ordinary. How nobody would ever look twice at one. He let the thought sit there, quiet, like a story he was telling himself before bed. And he offered it to the next cab that came down the street.
The cab driver glanced at the mailbox.
And for half a second, just half a second, his eyes went a little vague, and slid right past it.
[SKILL ACQUIRED: MIST WEAVING (Lv 1).]
[The Host may shape the Mist to alter mortal perception. Scope and duration grow with level.]
Hecate smiled.
"There," she said. "Now we can begin."
By the end of the two weeks, Percy could make a mortal see a dog as a cat. He could make his own face look like a stranger's, for about ten seconds, if he concentrated very hard. He could make a monster's corpse look like a pile of garbage bags to a garbage man, which came up more often than he'd expected in New York.
[MIST WEAVING: Lv 1 → Lv 4.]
It wasn't enough. Not for a city. Not even close.
"It will be," Hecate said, on the last night. They were standing at a crossroads in the Bronx, in the rain, under a dead streetlight. "In time. You're a quick learner, for a boy who thinks with his fists." A faint smile. "But you are only one person, Perseus. A city is a very large thing to hide. And you will have other things to do. Wars to fight. Floors to climb."
Percy went very still.
Floors to climb.
Hecate looked at him sideways. Her dark eyes glittered in the torchlight. She didn't say anything else about it. But she didn't have to.
She knows, Percy thought. Not everything. But something. She's the goddess of crossroads. And I came through one.
[Great Sage notes: The goddess's perception exceeds expected parameters. Great Sage recommends not lying to her.]
Wasn't planning on it.
"You will need others," Hecate went on, as if nothing had happened. "People who can weave the Mist when you cannot. People you trust. The children of my cabin, when they are old enough. And others." She paused. "The mortals."
Percy blinked. "Mortals can't use the Mist."
"Can't they?" Hecate smiled. "Some mortals are born with the sight. They see through the veil the way you do. Your red-haired friend, for one. The girl with the paint on her fingers." Her eyes gleamed. "Oh, yes. I know about her. She has a very interesting future. And your mother."
"My mom?"
"Why do you think she was able to protect you all those years, with no godly parent to help?" Hecate shrugged. "Mortals who can see through the Mist can sometimes learn to shape it, too. A little. Badly. Without training, and without any divinity in them to draw on, it's like trying to paint with your fingers." She looked at him thoughtfully. "Unless, of course, someone were to give them a little divinity to draw on."
Percy stared at her.
"Is that possible?"
"For a god?" Hecate laughed softly. "Of course. We do it all the time. A blessing, a touch, a gift of a little of our power to a favored mortal. That's how most of the old heroes began." Her dark eyes glinted. "But you are not a god, Perseus. Are you?"
She didn't wait for an answer.
The torches went out. The streetlights came back on, all at once, flickering and buzzing in the rain. The crossroads was empty.
On the curb where she'd been standing was a single red velvet cupcake, with one black candle in it, already lit.
Percy stood there in the rain for a long time, looking at it.
Unless someone were to give them a little divinity to draw on.
Great Sage.
[Great Sage is here.]
Faith. The stuff that makes my Vessel Rank go up. It's belief. It's... it's the same thing gods run on. Isn't it?
A pause.
[Faith is the substance of divinity. Yes.]
Could I give some of it away?
A longer pause. And then the screen did something Percy had never seen it do before. It flickered, and went dark, and came back again. As if the System itself had needed a moment to think.
[...Searching.]
[HIDDEN FUNCTION UNLOCKED: KINDLE.]
[The Host may sacrifice Faith to kindle a Spark of Divinity in a mortal who has chosen to follow him. The mortal gains limited access to divine power, scaled to the Faith invested. The sacrifice is permanent.]
[Minimum investment: 1,000 Faith per Spark.]
[Current Faith toward Rank C: 3,410 / 8,000.]
[Warning: Kindling three Sparks will delay the Host's next Vessel Rank by a significant margin.]
Percy looked at the number.
Three thousand Faith. Months of it. Almost half of everything he'd built toward Rank C, gone in one night.
He thought about Rachel, tearing open an envelope in her socks. About Nancy with her spiral notebook full of numbers. About Matt rolling a nautical chart out across his mother's living room floor.
About three kids who had picked him, every time, in every world.
He picked up the cupcake. He blew out the black candle.
"Thanks, Lady Hecate," he said to the empty crossroads.
Somewhere, very far away, three women laughed.