Wrath of the Triple Goddess

by Rick Riordan

And my favorite food cart on 86th Street was serving pumpkin-spice burritos.

Also, I’d missed my entire junior year thanks to some business we won’t get into (Hera) on account of some meddling gods (Hera) for reasons of a cosmic apocalypse (Hera).

Flaming hair. Definitely not a good sign.

“Hi,” I said. I have a way with words.

Myth Land is full of triple goddesses: The Fates. The Gray Sisters. The Furies. Destiny’s Child. I

This looks like the set of The Great Witches’ Brew Off.

Hecuba stood on her hind paws like she was feeling the Holy Spirit at a Sunday revival.

We’d left Grover in charge of an entire haunted house, and I’d known in the depths of my worst-case-scenario heart that the milkshake experiment was going to be a problem.

This one was Celestial bronze and engraved with LEO+PERCY 4EVER ♥, because Leo is a doofus.

That’s what I do anytime I have a problem I can’t solve, which happens, like, every sixty seconds. I ask Annabeth.

Grover dabbed his tears away with the end of a breadstick.

“We’re all going to die!” he sobbed. “We’re going to die with a puppy, which is always how I wanted to go, but still—”

She’d been bugging me to pick a topic for my paper on a forgotten historical figure. I’d been avoiding it, since I’d met so many forgotten historical figures and killed them all.

My sword was better at slashy-slashy than stabby-stabby, and I did not want to slashy-slashy Annabeth. That would make her mad.

I expressed this in my usual calm way. “WHAT?!” I shouted, and made the nearest fire hydrant explode (accidentally, mind you).

“Hmm?” I mumbled. “Mm. Hmm…” Eloquence is one of my superpowers.

Who would pay a thousand golden drachmas for that?” He gestured at me. I tried not to be offended. I assumed he was talking about my condition, not me as a person.

Whenever Annabeth joined the chat, the odds of us doing something idiotic went way down. The odds were never zero, mind you, because I was still in the mix.

When I came out of the dressing room, Grover frowned. “I thought you had muscles and stuff.” “Dude,” I said. “First of all, Muscles and Stuff sounds like a bankrupt fitness chain. Second, I’m a swimmer, not a bodybuilder.”

The only one who got any stares was Annabeth, and the people checking her out were lucky I didn’t poke them with my fake trident.

“Y-you’re that girl,” said Phaedra, whose name I cleverly deduced from the name tag that said PHAEDRA.

I really needed to stop manifesting my worst life.

Did she think I was dumb? Had I ever given her reason to—You know what? Forget I asked that.

Phaedra chugged her potion and yelled, “BEAST BREATH!” I didn’t know villains actually yelled the names of their special attacks in real life. Maybe the twins had been playing too much Mortal Kombat.

But if anyone ever wants to do a reality show mashup of The Great British Bake Off and Ninja Warrior, hit me up. I have ideas.

She was determined that we would finish high school together so we could go to California and do at least four more years of even harder school. Who had designed this system, anyway?

“Percy,” she said, “I don’t give you enough credit.” I blinked. “I’m sorry—can I get that in writing? Maybe on a billboard?”

“Don’t beat yourself up. A lot of people make the mistake of recommending me.”

“Let’s get the dead to paint the cracks first. Then we’ll worry about the support beams.” Annabeth chewed her lip. “That’s…really not how construction works,

“Okay,” I said. “I guess we’re good.” File that statement under Top Ten Times Percy Was Wrong.

If Annabeth was admitting she’d made a mistake, we were in serious trouble.

There might not be any I in team, but there was definitely an A for Annabeth and…three other letters that didn’t really stand for anything, so let’s forget I said that. The point was, we were great collaborators.

He danced around the edge of the mob, playing his panpipes. Once he made it to the gate, he skipped backward toward the park, blasting out the Ghostbusters theme song, which was guaranteed to enrage anyone with mortal ears.

“Go, my eels of doom!” “Go, my seventeen snakes of the apocalypse!” “KEY LIME PIE!”

(Also, if this was my prime, that was a whole’nother level of sad.)

“Who are you supposed to be, anyway?” I asked Valentina. She looked at me like I was from Mars. “Coco Chanel, obviously! Scariest problematic fashion icon ever. Boo!”

But I was thinking you’re a pretty smart guy.” “Could you say that again? I must’ve misheard you.”

We all reacted in our own particular ways. Annabeth got to her feet, rubbed her eyes, and bowed to the goddess like this was something she did every morning. I tried to rise, became entangled in my sleeping bag, and fell sideways onto a coffee table. Grover leaped into the air like a startled cat.

Hecate looked like she’d had quite a Halloween. Something red was splattered on her orange gown—maybe wine, maybe blood, maybe I didn’t want to know.

Somehow, I held the goddess’s gaze. I didn’t even wet my pants. Because heroism.

My job was ocean,

Ok Ken