The cold from the scale was a living thing, a presence seeping into my palm. It wasn't the simple chill of metal on a cool day; it was a deep, draining cold, like a splinter of a frozen star. My fingers curled around it instinctively, a futile attempt to warm it with my own body heat. It did not warm. If anything, it seemed to drink the warmth and leave my skin numb.
A floorboard creaked in the doorway.
My head snapped up. Percy was still there, leaning against the doorframe. He hadn’t left. He’d just been standing there, watching me, his sea-green eyes clouded with something I couldn’t name. Guilt. The realization hit me like a splash of cold water. He was feeling guilty. His hand wasn't on the hilt of his sword, but it was close, his thumb resting on the pocket of his jeans where Riptide lived in its pen form. A nervous habit. A warrior’s reflex.
“You didn’t stay put,” he said. His voice was quiet, lacking the easygoing tone from before.
“You didn’t leave.” I held up my hand, uncurling my fingers to show him the scale. It lay stark and black against my skin. “Annabeth’s a little clumsy for a daughter of Athena. Or this wasn’t an accident.”
Percy’s jaw tightened. He pushed off the doorframe and walked back into the room, his footsteps heavy. He stopped a few feet away, his gaze fixed on the scale. “She didn’t drop it. I did.”
The confession hung in the air, thick and unwelcome. I stared at him, the pieces rearranging themselves in my head with a series of unpleasant clicks. He had been there. During the fight. He must have seen the hound up close, too. Close enough to pick this up after it fell.
“Why?” I asked. The word was sharp.
“I didn’t want you to see it. Or Annabeth. I was going to take it straight to the forges,” he admitted, running a hand through his hair again. This time, it was pure anxiety. “She’s already got a theory, and if she sees that… she’ll go after it. Alone, if she has to. I was trying to slow her down. Keep more people from getting hurt.”
“By lying to her? By lying to me?” The fire in my arm throbbed in time with my pulse. “What is it, Percy? What are you hiding?”
He let out a long, ragged breath. He looked older than he had ten minutes ago, the weight he always carried settling visibly onto his shoulders. He was the hero, the one who was supposed to have the answers, but right now he just looked lost.
“It’s not just this one hellhound, Kaelen,” he said, his voice dropping low. “There was a dracaena patrol near the Long Island Sound two weeks ago. Their shields had the same metal woven into them. Last week, a rogue Cyclops was captured in the woods upstate. He had a helmet made of it. They’re being armed.”
This was it. The part he’d been holding back. The problem wasn’t just a new monster; it was an old enemy with a new trick. “Armed by who?”
Percy looked at the scale in my hand, and for a second, I saw real fear in his eyes. The hero of Olympus had looked the Titan Lord in the eye, but this small piece of metal scared him.
“The metal,” he said, “is Stygian iron, but it’s been… twisted. Corrupted. Annabeth thinks it’s the Telkhines.”
Telkhines. The name tasted like ash in my mouth. Ancient, spiteful sea-demons. Master smiths who had been driven into the depths of Tartarus after the first Titan War. They hated the gods. All of them. And as a son of Poseidon, Percy had a special place on their list.
“They’re supposed to be locked away,” I said, the words feeling hollow.
“Supposed to be,” Percy echoed grimly. “But things are crawling out of the woodwork that we haven’t seen in centuries. Someone is letting them out. Arming them. Setting them on us. This isn’t a random attack. It’s a campaign.”
The scale in my hand suddenly felt a hundred times colder. Heavier. The edges seemed sharper. The pain in my bandaged arm flared, a sharp, angry spike that made me gasp. It wasn’t just throbbing anymore; it was a vicious, tearing sensation, as if the hellhound’s claws were still inside me, scraping against the bone. I looked down at the scale. The cold wasn’t just a lack of heat. It was an active presence. A poison.
I gritted my teeth. I was a son of Hypnos. My power wasn’t in swords or strategy; it was in the quiet spaces between waking and dreaming. It was influence. Control. I focused on the scale, trying to do what I had failed to do with the hellhound. I tried to push my will into it, to force a wave of lethargy into the cold, hateful thing in my palm. *Sleep.*
It was a mistake.
A terrible, agonizing mistake.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then, the scale flared. Not with heat, but with a pulse of absolute cold, a wave of pure anti-energy that shot up my arm. The dull black surface shimmered, and for a fraction of a second, it glowed with the same malevolent, mechanic blue as the hellhound’s eyes. The pain in my shoulder was blinding. It was no longer a wound; it was a gateway. The cold from the scale poured through it, flooding my entire body. My vision swam with black spots. My teeth chattered violently.
“Kaelen!” Percy lunged forward, grabbing my good arm to steady me as I staggered.
The scale clattered to the floor, breaking the connection. The intense, soul-deep cold receded, leaving behind the familiar, almost comforting agony of my shredded arm and a shivering that I couldn’t control. I leaned against Percy, breathing hard, the infirmary room tilting around me.
“Don’t… don’t touch it,” I managed to choke out.
The blue flare, brief as it was, had not gone unnoticed. The infirmary door slammed open. Standing there was not a medic, but Nyssa Barrera, the acting head of the Hephaestus cabin. Her face was smudged with grease, and she was holding a pair of bronze calipers. Her dark, intelligent eyes scanned the room, instantly dismissing me and Percy and locking onto the object on the floor.
“What was that?” she demanded, her voice sharp and practical. “I saw a pulse of energy on my cabin’s resonance scanner. It came from here.”
She took a step into the room, her eyes narrowing on the small, black scale lying between my feet. She stopped dead.
The calipers slipped from her fingers and clattered onto the floorboards. All the color drained from her face. A child of the forge god, a girl who lived and breathed metal, who could diagnose an automaton’s malfunction from across a field, was staring at that piece of iron as if it were the face of Death itself.
Her lips parted, but no sound came out. She looked from the scale to my bandaged arm, and a look of dawning, horrified understanding crossed her features.
“Oh, gods,” Nyssa whispered, her voice trembling. “It’s not just corrupted. It’s hungry.”