A 1

The undertones in Reyna’s voice took Annabeth a moment to decipher. Percy looked down,
suddenly interested in his cheeseburger.
Annabeth’s face felt hot. Oh, gods…Reyna had tried to make a move on Percy. That explained
the tinge of bitterness, maybe even envy, in her words. Percy had turned her down for Annabeth.
At that moment, Annabeth forgave her ridiculous boyfriend for everything he’d ever done wrong.
She wanted to throw her arms around him, but she commanded herself to stay cool.
“Uh, thanks,” she told Reyna. “At any rate, some of the prophecy is becoming clear. Foes bearing
arms to the Doors of Death…that means Romans and Greeks. We have to combine forces to find
those doors.”
Hazel, the girl with the cavalry helmet and the long curly hair, picked up something next to her
plate. It looked like a large ruby; but before Annabeth could be sure, Hazel slipped it into the pocket
of her denim shirt.
“My brother, Nico, went looking for the doors,” she said.
“Wait,” Annabeth said. “Nico di Angelo? He’s your brother?”
Hazel nodded as if this were obvious. A dozen more questions crowded into Annabeth’s head, but
it was already spinning like Leo’s pinwheel. She decided to let the matter go. “Okay. You were
saying?”
“He disappeared.” Hazel moistened her lips. “I’m afraid…I’m not sure, but I think something’s
happened to him.”
“We’ll look for him,” Percy promised. “We have to find the Doors of Death anyway. Thanatos
told us we’d find both answers in Rome—like, the original Rome. That’s on the way to Greece, right?”
“Thanatos told you this?” Annabeth tried to wrap her mind around that idea. “The death god?”
She’d met many gods. She’d even been to the Underworld; but Percy’s story about freeing the
incarnation of death itself really creeped her out.