The Blood of Olympus by Rick Riordan Read Free Book Online Page B

the whole city was one big ghost that had swallowed her whole.
    She couldn’t tell her friends how much she feared ghosts, or why she feared them. The whole reason she and her sister had run away from San Juan all those years ago … that secret had to stay buried.
    ‘Can you keep them at bay?’ she asked.
    Nico turned up his palms. ‘I’ve sent out that message:
Stay away
. But once I’m asleep it won’t do us much good.’
    Coach Hedge patted his tennis-racket-knife contraption.‘Don’t worry, kid. I’m going to line the perimeter with alarms and snares. Plus, I’ll be watching over you the whole time with my baseball bat.’
    That didn’t seem to reassure Nico, but his eyes were already half-closed. ‘Okay. But … go easy. We don’t want another Albania.’
    ‘No,’ Reyna agreed.
    Their first shadow-travel experience together two days ago had been a total fiasco, possibly the most humiliating episode in Reyna’s long career. Perhaps someday, if they survived, they would look back on it and laugh, but not now. The three of them had agreed never to speak of it. What happened in Albania would
stay
in Albania.
    Coach Hedge looked hurt. ‘Fine, whatever. Just rest, kid. We got you covered.’
    ‘All right,’ Nico relented. ‘Maybe a little …’ He managed to take off his aviator jacket and wad it into a pillow before he keeled over and began to snore.
    Reyna marvelled at how peaceful he looked. The worry lines vanished. His face became strangely angelic … like his surname,
di Angelo.
She could almost believe he was a regular fourteen-year-old boy, not a son of Hades who had been pulled out of time from the 1940s and forced to endure more tragedy and danger than most demigods would in a lifetime.
    When Nico had arrived at Camp Jupiter, Reyna didn’t trust him. She’d sensed there was more to his story than being an ambassador from his father, Pluto . Now, of course, she knew the truth. He was a
Greek
demigod – the first personin living memory, perhaps the first
ever
, to go back and forth between the Roman and Greek camps without telling either group that the other existed.
    Strangely, that made Reyna trust Nico more.
    Sure, he wasn’t Roman. He’d never hunted with Lupa or endured the brutal legion training. But Nico had proven himself in other ways. He’d kept the camps’ secrets for the best of reasons, because he feared a war. He had plunged into Tartarus alone,
voluntarily
, to find the Doors of Death. He’d been captured and imprisoned by giants. He had led the crew of the
Argo II
into the House of Hades … and now he had accepted yet another terrible quest: risking himself to haul the Athena Parthenos back to Camp Half-Blood.
    The pace of the journey was maddeningly slow. They could only shadow-travel a few hundred miles each night, resting during the day to let Nico recover, but even that required more stamina from Nico than Reyna would have thought possible.
    He carried so much sadness and loneliness, so much heartache. Yet he put his mission first. He persevered. Reyna respected that. She understood that.
    She’d never been a touchy-feely person, but she had the strangest desire to drape her cloak over Nico’s shoulders and tuck him in. She mentally chided herself. He was a comrade, not her little brother. He wouldn’t appreciate the gesture.
    ‘Hey.’ Coach Hedge interrupted her thoughts. ‘You need sleep, too. I’ll take first watch and cook some grub. Those ghosts shouldn’t be too dangerous now that the sun’s coming up.’
    Reyna hadn’t noticed how light it was getting. Pink and turquoise clouds striped the eastern horizon. The little bronze faun cast a shadow across the dry fountain.
    ‘I’ve read about this place,’ Reyna realized. ‘It’s one of the best-preserved villas in Pompeii. They call it the House of the Faun.’
    Gleeson glanced at the statue with distaste. ‘Yeah, well, today it’s the House of the
Satyr
.’
    Reyna managed a smile. She was starting