My arm was on fire. Not the cool, metaphorical kind, but the searing, white-hot, please-chop-it-off-now kind. I blinked, and the white ceiling of the Big House infirmary swam into focus. Again. The scent of antiseptic and simmering magical stew was already making my head ache. A half-eaten square of ambrosia sat on the bedside table, sweating in the humid air. They said it was supposed to taste like your favourite thing. For me, it had always just tasted like warm honey. Overrated.
I pushed myself up with my good arm. The other, from shoulder to elbow, was a mess of bandages stained with golden ichor and something darker. A son of Hypnos, taken down because his one trick didn’t work. Pathetic. The hellhound should have been snoring in a pile of its own dog-slobber. Instead, its eyes had glowed with a cold, mechanic blue, and it had simply shaken its head, ignoring the wave of lethargy that had dropped its three pack-mates. Then it came for me.
The door creaked open. Not Percy, then. He always kicked it. Annabeth Chase stepped inside, her grey eyes already scanning, assessing, calculating. She wasn't looking at me, the patient. She was looking at a problem. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail, and she was holding a rolled-up piece of papyrus. My fingers twitched. I hate the feeling of papyrus. Like dead skin and dust. It’s a stupid, specific revulsion, but it makes my teeth ache.
“You’re awake,” she stated. It wasn’t a question. “Good. We need your account.”
“Morning to you, too, Annabeth.”
She ignored my tone, walking to the foot of my bed. She unrolled the map, and the dry rasping sound made me want to crawl out of my own skin. It was a diagram of the camp border, near Thalia’s Pine. “The other hellhounds responded to your influence. This one didn’t. Why?”
“If I knew that, I probably wouldn’t have a new collection of holes in my arm.”
Her eyes narrowed. Not with anger, but with focus. It was like being examined by a particularly sharp, predatory bird. “Describe it. Everything that was different about it. Don’t summarize.”
I closed my eyes, picturing it. “Bigger than the others. Sleeker. The eyes, they weren’t just fire. They were blue. And its hide… it wasn’t just fur. There were plates, like armor, along its spine and shoulders. Dull black metal.”
Annabeth was utterly still. She didn’t write anything down. She just absorbed the information, her gaze fixed on a point on the map. She knew something. Or she had a theory, and my description was slotting into it like the last piece of a puzzle I wasn’t allowed to see. She withheld things as a matter of principle.
“Plates,” she repeated softly, to herself. She rolled the map back up. That sound again. I visibly winced. For the first time, she looked at me, really looked, and a flicker of something—not quite sympathy, more like clinical observation—crossed her face. “The nectar isn’t working as fast as it should. Get some rest, Kaelen.”
She turned and left, leaving the silence ringing. Get some rest. From the daughter of Athena, it sounded like a command to stop being an inconvenience.
A few minutes later, the door opened again. This time it was a gentle nudge, followed by Percy Jackson’s head poking through. His sea-green eyes were shadowed with exhaustion, but they crinkled when he saw I was awake.
“Hey. You look like garbage.”
“Feel like it, too,” I croaked. My throat was dry.
He came in, holding two glasses of blue Coke. He handed one to me, and our fingers brushed. For a second, the burning in my arm was a distant hum. Percy wasn’t a strategist like Annabeth. He was the eye of the hurricane, the calm center everything revolved around. He sat on the edge of the bed, careless of the hospital-corner neatness.
“Annabeth give you the third degree?” he asked.
“Fourth and fifth, too.” I took a long sip of the Coke. It was perfect.
He sighed, running a hand through his perpetually messy black hair. “She’s worried. We lost the element of surprise. Something is arming them. A hellhound with armor… that’s new.” He wasn’t telling me the whole story. I could feel it. He was giving me the leadership summary, the part meant to inform without causing panic. He was holding back the weight of it all, the part that was keeping him up at night.
I watched him. Watched the way his thumb traced the condensation on his glass. He was trying to be the reassuring leader, but I knew him well enough to see the cracks. The weight of yesterday’s fight, of every fight, was settled deep in his shoulders. I wanted to reach out, to use my one useful, non-violent trick, and just… let him sleep. Properly. For a whole day. But I just sat there.
He finished his Coke and stood up. “Will’s going to want you to stay put. So, you know. Stay put.” He squeezed my good shoulder, a brief, warm pressure that lingered long after he’d pulled away. “Glad you’re not dead, Kael.”
He left, and the room was too quiet again. *Stay put.* Annabeth’s dismissal and Percy’s friendly command boiled down to the same thing: I was out of it. A piece of damaged equipment. But the image of that armored hound, its cold blue eyes, it wasn’t just a memory. It was a threat. And I was the only one who had seen it up close.
My own initiative. That’s what got me into this camp in the first place. I swung my legs over the side of the bed. Pain, sharp and articulate, shot up my arm and exploded behind my eyes. I gritted my teeth, breathing through it. I wasn't going to lie here and wait for the stew to get cold. I had to see the spot. I had to know if it left anything behind. As my bare feet touched the cool floorboards, my eyes caught a glint of something near the leg of the bedside table, half-hidden in the shadows. Annabeth must have dropped it.
It wasn’t a coin. It was a small, black, metallic scale, no bigger than my thumbnail. I picked it up. It was impossibly cold, a deep, unnatural cold that had nothing to do with temperature. It felt heavy, imbued with a purpose that had nothing to do with protecting the creature it came from. This wasn’t armor. It was something else.