THE BATTLE OF THE LABYRINTH Percy Jackson ... - No one's invited.

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“Wait!” Grover called.
But Tyson wasn’t about to wait. We ran after him. The prison was dark, only a few dim fluorescent
lights flickering above.
“I know this place,” Annabeth told me. “This is Alcatraz.”
“You mean that island is near San Francisco?”
She nodded. “My school took a field trip here. It’s like a museum.”
It didn’t seem possible that we could’ve popped out of the Labyrinth on the other side of the country,
but Annabeth had been living in San Francisco all year, keeping an eye on MountTamalpais just across
the bay. She probably knew what she was talking about.
“Freeze,” Grover warned.
But Tyson kept going. Grover grabbed his arm and pulled him back with all his strength. “Stop, Tyson!”
he whispered. “Can’t you see it?”
I looked where he was pointing, and my stomach did a somersault. On the second-floor balcony, across
the courtyard, was a monster more horrible than anything I’d ever seen before.
It was sort of like a centaur, with a woman’s body from the waist up. But instead of a horse’s lower
body, it had the body of a dragon—at least twenty feet long, black and scaly with enormous claws and a
barbed tail. Her legs looked like they were tangled in vines, but then I realized they were sprouting
snakes, hundreds of vipers darting around, constantly looking for something to bite. The woman’s hair
was also made of snakes, like Medusa’s. weirdest of all, around her waist, where the woman part met
the dragon part, her skin bubbled and morphed, occasionally producing the heads of animals—a vicious
wolf, a bear, a lion, as if she were wearing a belt of ever-changing creatures. I got the feeling I was
looking at something half formed, a monster so old it was from the beginning of time, before shapes had
been fully defined.
“It’s her,” Tyson whimpered.
“Get down!” Grover said.
We crouched in the shadows, but the monster wasn’t paying us any attention. It seemed to be talking to
someone inside a cell on the second floor. That’s where the sobbing was coming from. The dragon
woman said something in her weird rumbling language.
“What’s she saying?” I muttered. “What’s that language?”
“The tongue of the old times.”Tyson shivered. “What Mother Earth spoke to Titans and…her other
children.Before the gods.”
“You understand it?” I asked. “Can you translate?”
Tyson closed his eyes and began to speak in a horrible, raspy woman’s voice. “You will work for the
master or suffer.”