BLOOD OF OLYMPUS

xv
Nico
‘WOLVES?’ REYNA ASKED.
They were eating dinner from the nearby pavement café.
Despite Hades’s warning to hurry back, Nico had found nothing much changed at the camp. Reyna
had just awoken. The Athena Parthenos still lay sideways across the top of the temple. Coach Hedge
was entertaining a few locals with tap dancing and martial arts, occasionally singing into his
megaphone, though nobody seemed to understand what he was saying.
Nico wished the coach hadn’t brought the megaphone. Not only was it loud and obnoxious but also,
for no reason Nico understood, it occasionally blurted out random Darth Vader lines from Star Wars
or yelled, ‘THE COW GOES MOO!’
As the three of them sat on the lawn to eat, Reyna seemed alert and rested. She and Coach Hedge
listened as Nico described his dreams, then his meeting with Hades at the Chapel of Bones. Nico held
back a few personal details from his talk with his father, though he sensed that Reyna knew plenty
about wrestling with one’s feelings.
When he mentioned Orion and the wolves that were supposedly on their way, Reyna frowned.
‘Most wolves are friendly to Romans,’ she said. ‘I’ve never heard stories about Orion hunting with
a pack.’
Nico finished his ham sandwich. He eyed the plate of pastries and was surprised to find he still
had an appetite. ‘It could have been a figure of speech: very little time before the wolves arrive.
Perhaps Hades didn’t literally mean wolves. At any rate, we should leave as soon as it’s dark enough
for shadows.’
Coach Hedge stuffed an issue of Guns & Ammo into his bag. ‘Only problem: the Athena Parthenos
is still thirty feet in the air. Gonna be fun hauling you guys and your gear to the top of that temple.’
Nico tried a pastry. The lady at the café had called them farturas. They looked like spiral
doughnuts and tasted great – just the right combination of crispy, sugary and buttery – but when Nico
first heard fartura he knew Percy would have made a joke out of the name.
America has dough-nuts, Percy would have said. Portugal has fart-nuts.
The older Nico got, the more juvenile Percy seemed to him, though Percy was three years older.
Nico found his sense of humour equal parts endearing and annoying. He decided to concentrate on the
annoying.
Then there were the times Percy was deadly serious: looking up at Nico from that chasm in Rome –
The other side, Nico! Lead them there. Promise me!
And Nico had promised. It didn’t seem to matter how much he resented Percy Jackson; Nico would