I came off the bunk like the mattress had teeth.
Blood on my hands. Blood on my face. Blood crusted in both ears and down my collar. All real. All mine. Which — respect to whoever runs the billing department down there. I get tortured in a dream, in a cave that isn't anywhere, by a Titan I can't find on any map, and the invoice still clears against my actual nose. No address, no return trip, no problem. The debt found me in my own bunk like it had my number. Efficient. Evil, but efficient.
I didn't stop to clean it. Didn't stop to think. Some animal part of me had already decided the building was on fire and hadn't bothered telling the rest.
I hit the green outside at a dead run and grabbed the first person I saw.
Some Apollo kid, arms full of bandages, headed somewhere that was now cancelled. I had two fists in his shirt before he'd finished turning around.
"The quest. Zoe. The questers — WHERE. Are they still here, did they—"
"Whoa — dude — you're bleeding, you're—"
"WHERE ARE THEY."
I was shaking him. Full-body, feet-almost-off-the-ground shaking, the kind I'd feel bad about later and did not feel bad about then. He kept trying to answer and I kept rattling it loose before it could finish, and what finally fell out, half a word at a time between shakes, was —
"—Phoebe — she's — she's in the infirmary, man, go ask Phoebe—"
I dropped him so fast he sat down in the grass.
Because my brain took that sentence and did the worst possible thing with it. It heard three words — Phoebe. Hunter. Here — and sprinted straight past every other meaning to the only one I wanted:
A quester's still at camp. The quest hasn't left.
I ran like the sky had opened a window just for me.
Hit the infirmary door hard enough to bounce it off the wall.
A Hunter. Silver jacket. Here.
And my whole chest came up off the floor —
"Stop."
Three Hunters in it.
Phoebe was flat on a cot, covered chin to wrist in hives — raised, weeping, furious red welts, like she'd been rolled in nettles and then set on fire. She was glaring at the ceiling with the focused hatred of a woman composing a eulogy. Not hers. Two other people's.
Naomi was crouched beside the cot with a notebook, radiant.
"—and it's spreading faster on the left side, which is fascinating, because your quiver strap sits on the right, so either the shirt fibers pooled or your circulation runs asymmetric, which — hold still, I want to measure the worst one—"
"Touch me," Phoebe said, "and they will find your notebook lodged somewhere the sun gave up on."
Naomi wrote that down too.
And in the corner, in the one chair, sat Atalanta. Book open. Not reading it. A woman who has not changed expression since the Bronze Age, holding a novel at a completely fixed angle, doing the single most restrained thing I have ever witnessed a person do, which was not laughing. You could see the not-laughing. It was structural. It was load-bearing. One more welt on Phoebe and the whole face was going to go.
She saw me in the doorway. Bleeding, wild-eyed, chest heaving.
She nodded. Once. Went back to not-reading her book.
That was the entire greeting. From Atalanta, it was practically a hug.
"The quest," I got out. "Zoe. The questers — where are they, are they still—"
Phoebe turned her head and looked at me. Took in the blood, the shaking, the whole disaster of my face. Something in her recalculated, filed it for later.
"Oh, good," she said. Flat. Venomous. "The one who's a little too interested. Showing up. Late. Perfect. That's exactly what this morning was missing."
"Where are they?"
"Gone." Naomi, brightly, not looking up from the notebook. "Dawn. Zoe took four west."
"Four—"
"Because someone," Phoebe bit off, "handed me a collector's shirt soaked in centaur blood. The Stolls. Travis and Connor. It's the stuff that killed Heracles and it is currently disagreeing with me." She lifted one ruined arm, considered it, dropped it. "I trained three hundred years for a quest like this. I got benched by a prank. By two boys. With a shirt."
"She was supposed to be the fifth," Naomi supplied, helpful as a landslide. "So now it's four. Which — statistically, for a prophecy that specified five, is a really interesting deviation, and I have been trying to get someone to discuss the implications with me for hours and everyone keeps threatening my life—"
"Naomi."
"—continuing observation silently."
She did not continue silently. But I'd stopped hearing her.
Four.
The math landed and the floor tilted with it. Zoe. Thalia. Two more. West. Since dawn. Toward the reaching hand, the falling fire, the whole red map a Titan had painted behind my eyes while I slept through the one morning it mattered.
"...Fuck," I said. With my whole chest. "They've left. They've been gone for hours, they're — what do I — what do I do—"
"You sit down," Phoebe said, "before you fall down and bleed on Hunter-occupied property."
I did not sit down.
"What happened to you, child?"
Chiron filled the infirmary doorway. He'd come at a canter — I could hear the last of it settling in his hooves — and he was looking at the blood on me the way you look at a thing that shouldn't be possible.
And it came out of me in a rush, because there wasn't time to be careful with it.
"A Titan got in my head last night. While you all slept, while they packed — something came into my dream and it wasn't a dream, it was his, and he sat me down in the dark and made me watch." My voice tried to crack. I shoved it back. "He gave me a prophecy. A real one, off the loom. Then tore the last line out of it and laughed, because that part's fun for him. And the rest — the rest I saw. I saw someone die, Chiron. Couldn't see who. But my whole body already knew. And they are on. That. Quest."
The infirmary had gone very quiet. Even Naomi's pen had stopped.
"So I'm going," I said. "After them. Now. No matter what it costs."
Chiron's face did something I'd never seen it do.
It closed.
"No," he said. "You are not."
Not gentle. Not the dance. Not turn around slowly, Aditya, and tell me why the sensible thing is sensible. Two thousand years of patience folded shut in a single word, and behind it stood the thing that word was protecting: a teacher who had already sent five children west this morning and would not, would not, feed the sky a sixth.
"You are bleeding from both ears. You have not slept a true hour. A Titan has been inside your mind, and you would answer that by riding alone into the exact future he built to break you — the future he wants you chasing. Think, Aditya. He showed you a death and pointed you at a door. Ask yourself who holds the door open."
It was good. It was true, even. On any other morning it would have worked.
I looked at him — really looked, the way you look at someone you love before you do the thing that's going to hurt them — and when I spoke, I kept my voice very quiet. Very level. Almost kind.
"You've taught me everything I know," I said. "I mean that. I owe you more than I can say, and I'm not going to insult either of us by pretending otherwise."
A breath.
"So please believe me when I tell you — with all the respect I have, and I have a lot — that I am walking out that door. That's decided. It was decided the second I woke up. The only thing still open is whether you and I are still on good terms when I do."
Nobody said anything.
Phoebe had stopped glaring at the ceiling. Naomi's mouth was actually shut. Even Atalanta had looked up from the book she wasn't reading.
Chiron stared at me for a long, long moment. Whatever he was looking for in my face, he did not find it. He found something else, and it was the same thing that had made him stumble at the door: a boy who was not going to be talked down. Not today. Not from this.
Something in the ancient shoulders lowered. Not agreement. Just the end of the argument.
"Then at least," he said quietly, "do not go empty-handed and half-dead."
"Wasn't planning to."
I was already moving — out the infirmary door, across the green, toward the Big House at a dead run, because everything I needed was hanging on a wall in there and the head start got longer with every breath I wasted.
My sword. My duffel. The one I keep packed.
And, in the bottom of that pocket, the two coins I had never once let myself think too hard about.
I took the Big House stairs three at a time, grabbed my sword off the wall and the duffel off the floor, and was halfway back out when I stopped.
Because there was a faster way. And I'd been carrying it for almost two years.
I dug the coin out.
Bronze. Red. War-touched — heavier than its size had any right to be, like it held something folded up tight inside it. Zoe had pressed it into my hand the day I woke up after the dragon, a second one beside it, and a look that said don't be an idiot with these.
I'd been so careful. Saved it for the right moment. The one where death was certain.
In my head, death was already certain. I'd watched it twice.
So I crossed to the hearth in the corner — the low one that never goes out, coals warm since before any of us were born — crouched, and dropped the coin in.
"Ares."
The hearth ROARED.
Red fire blasted up out of the coals — not warm, not gold, sharp, the color of a fresh wound — and the heat of it slapped the whole room. Out of the column stepped the god of war in full kit.
Spear in his fist. Xiphos on the hip. Round shield on his back, bronze scored with dents nobody lived to brag about. Sunglasses, naturally. He came out mid-stride, weight already forward, already hunting, already on.
His first words weren't hello.
"Right. Who am I gutting, dragon-kid."
Then he looked around.
Ping-pong table. Leopard head on the wall that murmured hello. A centaur, bowing low. No battlefield. No enemy. No blood but the kind drying on the kid who'd called him.
You could watch it land. The hunt-light guttering. The spear-arm dropping by degrees.
"...This is Camp Half-Blood."
"Hi—"
"You burned the Blessing of War—" climbing now "—the one-time, death-is-certain, in-case-of-emergency favor — to drag me to a REC ROOM—"
The hearth flared again.
Different. No roar. No wound-red. This fire bloomed up slow and gold and warm, the good-kind-of-tired warm, and it didn't slap the room — it filled it, gentle, like a kitchen filling with the smell of bread. The Big House went up three degrees and every one of us felt a little less like dying.
A woman stepped out of it.
Not a girl. An older woman — plain, kind-eyed, simple clothes. The kind of grandmother who's buried more grief than you'll ever carry and came out warm anyway. She looked at Ares the way you look at a big dog making a scene indoors. She looked at me the way you look at a child who's been up all night being brave about something terrible.
"The boy needs a ride," Hestia said.
And Ares' brain melted.
I watched it go. God of war, full armor, spear in hand — and behind those stupid sunglasses the whole recent chain of his life assembled into one tower and toppled:
First Kronos rents out my own skull like a storage unit. Then I lose a straight one-on-one to the sea-god's kid in sneakers. Then my dragon — MY dragon — answers all this by carving out his own heart for a stranger. And now my coins, my rare, sacred, twice-given, half-the-pantheon-lost-it coins, are being cashed for a TAXI, by a bleeding teenager, on Dionysus's floor, while HESTIA works the front desk.
He pulled it together. Barely. Turned to me, full grump, spear butt thumping the boards.
"You sure about this, kid." Gravel and steel. "You understand what that was. And you want to spend it on a head start. A ride."
I didn't have to think.
"I don't care."
He blinked behind the shades.
"If it gets me there. If it saves people I actually give a damn about." I found where his eyes were. "Then the coin's nothing. Not from you. Not from Zeus himself."
Thunder rolled across the sky. Long, low, pointed — the way it gets when it isn't weather.
"Careful, child." Hestia. Gentle. Not unkind. A warning passed hand to hand. "The king of the gods does not care to hear his name said so lightly."
I didn't react. Knew it was the wrong move. Knew it then. I was too far down the track to care what the sky thought of me.
Ares stared a beat longer. Something shifted under the grumble — the grudging nod one stubborn idiot gives another.
Then he sighed, and the fight went out of him, and what was left was almost tired.
"You know I can't directly intervene. Right?" He said it flat. "Ancient law. I can't fly you there, can't swing for you, can't lay one godly finger on your quest. The second I do, every relative I've got gets to do the same for the other side, and then it's not a quest, it's the apocalypse with a start time."
And for the first time since the noon light — since the doom dropped through me floor by floor — I hesitated.
Because he was right. And I had nothing loaded. I opened my mouth empty.
Hestia filled it for me.
"You needn't carry him at all," she said, simple as passing the salt. "Only let the boy bond with your dragon."
I watched Ares run it.
Dragon-bonded demigod. Rides my beast. Fights on my fire. Lives, probably — annoyingly hard to kill, this one. Makes a name. A name welded to MY dragon, MY blessing, MY—
...Yeah. That tracks. Good for the brand, even.
"Done," Ares said. "With conditions."
I should have known there'd be conditions. There are always conditions.
"See, here's my problem, dragon-kid." He rolled the spear once in his grip, easy, thoughtful, the way other people click a pen. "You called in a war-god's marker. A real one. Death-is-certain, break-glass, once-in-a-lifetime. And you spent it on a lift. A taxi. You want me to hand you my dragon like a set of car keys and wave you off to go be a hero two states over." The grin came back, and it had teeth in it now. "Nah. That coin buys a fight. Not a favor."
"A fight — Ares, I do not have time for—"
"Then you'd better win quick."
He whistled.
Not loud. But it went through more than air — through the floor, through my sternum, through whatever part of me still remembered dying — and somewhere high and west and closing fast, something enormous answered.
The windows lit red.
And then the god of war took two steps, grabbed a fistful of my shirt, and walked me straight out the front wall of the Big House like it was a bead curtain.
We went up.
No wings, no chariot, no warning — just up, the ground dropping away, the cabins shrinking to a horseshoe of colored roofs, the whole camp tilting under my dangling feet while a Titan-killing god held me one-handed like a kitten by the scruff and did not appear to notice my weight at all. Behind us, calm as anything, a column of warm gold light rose off the Big House roof and kept pace — Hestia, unbothered, drifting up into the air after us because apparently when one god decides to ruin your afternoon the others just come along.
"I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS." I was shouting into wind now, over the treeline, watching the forest roll out green and endless beneath my kicking legs. "They left at DAWN, they are getting FURTHER AWAY every single second you spend playing — this is a DELAY, this is the opposite of a ride, you giant armored—"
"Every hero I ever respected," Ares said, not even looking at me, "could win a fight and catch a deadline. You want to be the exception, cry about it on the way down."
We cleared the last ridge of camp's border and dropped toward a stretch of ancient woods I knew far too well — older trees, wrong-shaped light, a grove down there humming at a frequency my teeth had hated since the first time I'd bled my way into it. Dodona. The whispering wood. The place that had handed me a prophecy and a truly unnecessary amount of commentary about a year ago.
And the trees remembered me.
"OH," said the forest, dozens of bark-mouths creaking open at once, delighted, "it's the SINGING one. He's BACK. And he's bleeding AGAIN. Somehow more this time—"
"—and he's being DROPPED," another trunk cackled. "From a god! Marvelous. We were just saying it had been dull—"
Not this time.
I threw a hand out mid-fall and called it — solar fire blooming down my arm, gathering white-gold at my palm, and I aimed the whole blazing fistful straight down into the grove and let them feel the heat coming.
The forest went dead silent.
One full second. The mouths froze. Every whispering voice caught in its throat at the sight of a very angry, very on-fire teenager falling toward them with intent.
Then they laughed harder.
"He brought FIRE," the grove howled, gleeful, thrilled, entirely unthreatened. "To a forest! Oh, this one, this one never disappoints—" And then, having thoroughly enjoyed me, the trees simply lost interest and went back to their own thousand-year business, leaving me falling and lit up and completely, cosmically ignored.
Right. Of course. Even the shrubbery here has jokes.
Hestia glided up alongside us, hands folded, watching Ares with the deep and total exhaustion of an older sister who has seen this exact nonsense several thousand times.
"A war god," she sighed, to no one, to the sky, "has been asked for a simple kindness. And has, of course, arranged a duel. In the sacred wood. Between a boy and a fire-drake. For 'understanding.'" She shook her head. "He cannot help himself. He has never once been able to help himself."
"It's a good test," Ares said.
"It is an excuse to watch a fight."
"Same thing, if you do it right."
Hestia looked at me then — dangling, bleeding, furious, two thousand feet over a haunted forest — and something almost kind moved in her plain warm face.
"For what it is worth, child," she said, "they will bond. I would stake the hearth on it. He simply needs to see you refuse to fall."
"That's great," I said. "That's so comforting. Can the vote of confidence maybe wait until I'm not being dropped into a—"
Ares let go.
The wind took my shout and shredded it. The grove rushed up green and whispering and full of teeth — and then the sun went out.
Not a cloud. Him.
Aethon came down out of the noon light like the sky had decided to fall on the forest personally, and everything below him flinched. The trees stopped laughing. The wind quit. Even the whispering wood, which had watched me sing and bleed and fall and never once shut up, went silent in the shadow of the thing dropping through it — because some things are older and louder than a grove of gossiping oaks, and this was one of them.
Blood-red. All of him. Every scale healed and whole and burning at the edges, no chains, no wounds, no Titan holding him down — a mountain of muscle the color of a fresh kill, wings wide enough to roof a cabin, two furnaces of molten yellow-gold where his eyes should be. Two years ago I'd found him staked to the floor of a prison, harvested and dying. Now he blotted out the sun and the whole world got smaller underneath him.
This was a dragon with something to prove. And an audience of one god, one goddess, and a talking forest to prove it to.
Then those molten eyes found me — falling, bloody, small — and Aethon saw who it was.
ROOOOAAARRR.
It rearranged the air. Shook fruit off the trees, sent birds screaming up out of the canopy for a mile in every direction. It wasn't a challenge. It wasn't rage. It was the sound a dragon makes when the one person who ever cut it loose drops out of the sky in front of it — pure, deafening, animal joy.
Despite everything — the fall, the blood, the clock — I felt myself grin.
"Yeah," I called up at him, hoarse, wind tearing at the word. "Yeah, man. It's me. Good to see you too, you big red bastard."
"Touching," Ares said, from somewhere above and behind, unbothered, arms crossed on the air itself. "Dragon. You're not here to hug him. You're here to fight him."
The great head turned.
"Kid. You understand what's at stake here. You lose, you walk. You want the wings, you earn the wings."
I hit the ground before he did — feet under me, a hard skidding crouch in the dirt of the grove, sword already coming up.
Aethon landed across from me. The earth jumped when he did.
And he looked at me for one more second.
One.
And in that second, something passed behind those molten eyes — the orders landing, the stakes clicking into place, the exact understanding of what Ares had just asked of him. I watched a dragon do math. I watched it decide.
Then he opened his mouth, and the whole world turned to fire.
No build-up. No telegraph, no dragon-movie inhale. One second his eyes on mine —
WHOOOOOOSH.
— the next, a wall of molten red-gold roaring across the grove straight into me. Enough fire to erase a house. The wrath of the god of war made manifest, and I had nowhere to be but in front of it.
I didn't decide anything. There wasn't time to decide.
My body decided.
The Kavach SLAMMED into being — golden plates blooming across my chest, my arms, up my neck, solidified sunlight snapping shut over every inch of me between one heartbeat and the next. Sword up, flat, across the line of the fire. My own solar flame roared out through the seams to meet his, gold against red, and I crossed my blade in front of my face and braced.
The fire hit me like a train.
Not off my feet — I stayed on my feet, that mattered, I kept my feet — but it drove me. Backward, heels first, both boots plowing twin furrows through the dirt of the grove, ten feet, twenty, thirty, the ground tearing up in two long grooves behind my heels while I leaned into a river of dragonfire and refused to go down. Heat. Roar. Light. The world red-gold and screaming.
And the part of the breath that didn't fit around me — the overflow, the wash, the sheer excess of it — sailed past my shoulders and slammed into the ancient oaks behind me.
The grove lost its entire mind.
"AAAGH — HOT — HOT — YOU OVERGROWN LIZARD—" / "MY BARK — he set fire to my BARK —" / "A THOUSAND YEARS and this is how it ENDS, roasted by a REPTILE with a—" Every whispering mouth in the wood shrieking at once, panic and outrage and genuinely impressive profanity, the trees that had heckled me all afternoon now getting a taste of what they'd been laughing at.
Aethon, still pouring fire over me, slid one molten eye sideways at the screaming trees.
Just looked at them.
The grove shut up so fast you could hear the silence land.
Then the fire guttered out, and I was standing at the end of two smoking furrows, sword crossed in front of my face, armor blazing gold, breathing hard.
And completely, perfectly, unhurt.
Not a mark. Not a scorch. The armor held. The fire held. I held.
"...oi," I said. Then, with feeling: "oi oi oi. Fuck. Motherfuck a — that's a DRAGON. That is an entire DRAGON BREATH, and it just opened up on me like I owed it money—"
Across the grove, Aethon rolled his shoulders, wings settling, molten eyes bright and waiting. Ares watching. Hestia watching. The trees, sullen and singed, saying nothing at all for once.
Six-hour head start. A haunted forest. A god's bad mood. And a blood-red fire-drake that wanted, more than anything in the world, a fight worthy of it.
I set my feet at the end of the furrows. Sword out. Fire climbing gold up both arms. Every part of me lit and locked and pointed straight at the thing across the grove.
"Fine," I breathed. "Fine. We're doing it."
Fastest way to a dying friend: fight a dragon in a haunted forest while a god takes notes. Sure. Why not. This is my life now.
I raised my sword at a mountain of fire and grinned.
"Come on then, you big red bastard."