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

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Water shot three feet into the air and kept bubbling. It was impossible, but there it was. A couple of
horses came over to check it out. One put his mouth to the spring and recoiled.
Yuck!hesaid.Salty!
It was seawater in the middle of a Texas ranch. I scooped up another handful of dirt and picked out the
shell fossils. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I ran around the length of the stable, throwing
shells into the dung piles. Everywhere a shell hit, a saltwater spring erupted.
Stop!The horses cried.Meat is good! Baths are bad!
Then I noticed the water wasn’t running out of the stables or flowing downhill like water normally would.
It simply bubbled around each spring and sank into the ground, taking the dung with it. The horse poop
dissolved in the saltwater, leaving regular old wet dirt.
“More!” I yelled.
There was a tugging sensation in my gut, and the waterspouts exploded like the world’s largest carwash.
Salt water shot twenty feet into the air. The horses went crazy, running back and forth as the geysers
sprayed them from all directions. Mountains of poop began to melt like ice.
The tugging sensation became more intense, painful even, but there was something exhilarating about
seeing all that salt water. I had made this. I had brought the ocean to this hillside.
Stop, lord!ahorse cried.Stop, please!
Water was sloshing everywhere now. The horses were drenched, and some were panicking and slipping
in the mud. The poop was completely gone, tons of it just dissolved into the earth, and the water was
now starting to pool, trickling out of the stable, making a hundred little streams down toward the river.
“Stop,” I told the water.
Nothing happened. The pain in my gut was building. If I didn’t shut off the geysers soon, the salt water
would run into the river and poison the fish and plants.
“Stop!”I concentrated all my might on shutting off the force of the sea.
Suddenly the geysers shut down. I collapsed to my knees, exhausted. In front of me was a shiny clean
horse stable, a field of wet salty mud, and fifty horses that had been scoured so thoroughly their coats
gleamed. Even the meat scraps between their teeth had been washed out.
We won’t eat you!thehorses wailed.Please, lord!no more salty baths!
“On one condition,” I said. “You only eat the food your handlers give you from now on. Not people. Or
I’ll be back with more seashells!”
The horses whinnied and made me a whole lot of promises that they would be good flesh-eating horses
from now on, but I didn’t stick around to chat. The sun was going down. I turned and ran full speed
toward the ranch house.