My heart did a slow roll. I really was an idiot. I’d forgotten why we were here.
I locked eyes with Camper Boy. “We’ve got to stop the crocodile. ”
“Truce,” he suggested.
“Yeah,” I said. “We can continue killing each other after the crocodile is taken care of. ”
“Deal. Now, could you please untie my sword hand from my head? I feel like a freaking unicorn. ”
I won’t say we trusted each other, but at least now we had a common cause. He summoned his shoes out of the river—I had no idea how—and put them on. Then he helped me bind my hand with a strip of linen and waited while I swigged down half of my healing potion.
After that, I felt good enough to race after him toward the sound of the screaming.
I thought I was in pretty good shape—what with combat magic practice, hauling heavy artifacts, and playing basketball with Khufu and his baboon friends (baboons don’t mess around when it comes to hoops). Nevertheless, I had to struggle to keep up with Camper Boy.
Which reminded me, I was getting tired of calling him that.
“What’s your name?” I asked, wheezing as I ran behind him.
He gave me a cautious glance. “I’m not sure I should tell you. Names can be dangerous. ”
He was right, of course. Names held power. A while back, my sister Sadie had learned my ren, my secret name, and it still caused me all sorts of anxiety. Even with someone’s common name, a skilled magician could work all kinds of mischief.
“Fair enough,” I said. “I’ll go first. I’m Carter. ”
I guess he believed me. The lines around his eyes relaxed a bit.
“Percy,” he offered.
That struck me as an unusual name—British, maybe, though the kid spoke and acted very much like an American.
We jumped a rotten log and finally made it out of the marsh. We’d started climbing a grassy slope toward the nearest houses when I realized more than one voice was screaming up there now. Not a good sign.
“Just to warn you,” I told Percy, “you can’t kill the monster. ”
“Watch me,” Percy grumbled.
“No, I mean it’s immortal. ”
“I’ve heard that before. I’ve vaporized plenty of immortals and sent them back to Tartarus. ”
Tartarus? I thought.
Talking to Percy was giving me a serious headache. It reminded me of the time my dad took me to Scotland for one of his Egyptology lectures. I’d tried to talk with some of the locals and I knew they were speaking English, but every other sentence seemed to slip into an alternate language—different words, different pronunciations—and I’d wonder what the heck they were saying. Percy was like that. He and I almost spoke the same language—magic, monsters, et cetera. But his vocabulary was completely wrong.
“No,” I tried again, halfway up the hill. “This monster is a petsuchos—a son of Sobek. ”
“Who’s Sobek?” he asked.
“The lord of crocodiles. Egyptian god. ”
That stopped him in his tracks. He stared at me, and I could swear the air between us turned electric. A voice, very deep in my mind, said: Shut up. Don’t tell him any more.
Percy glanced at the khopesh I’d retrieved from the river, then the wand in my belt. “Where are you from? Honestly. ”
“Originally?” I asked. “Los Angeles. Now I live in Brooklyn. ”
That didn’t seem to make him feel any better. “So this monster, this pet-suck-o or whatever—”