“It’s not that. My grandmother…she always told me that seven was an unlucky number. It was a ghost number. She didn’t like it when I told her there would be seven demigods on our quest. And July is the seventh month. ”
“Yeah, but…” Leo tapped his fingers nervously on the table. He realized he was doing the Morse code for I love you, the way he used to do with his mom, which would have been pretty embarrassing if his friends understood Morse code. “But that’s just coincidence, right?”
Frank’s expression didn’t reassure him.
“Back in China,” Frank said, “in the old days, people called the seventh month the ghost month. That’s when the spirit world and the human world were closest. The living and the dead could go back and forth. Tell me it’s a coincidence we’re searching for the Doors of Death during the ghost month. ”
No one spoke.
Leo wanted to think that an old Chinese belief couldn’t have anything to do with the Romans and the Greeks. Totally different, right? But Frank’s existence was proof that the cultures were tied together. The Zhang family went all the way back to Ancient Greece. They’d found their way through Rome and China and finally to Canada.
Also, Leo kept thinking about his meeting with the revenge goddess Nemesis at the Great Salt Lake. Nemesis had called him the seventh wheel, the odd man out on the quest. She didn’t mean seventh as in ghost, did she?
Jason pressed his hands against the arms of his chair. “Let’s focus on the things we can deal with. We’re getting close to Bologna. Maybe we’ll get more answers once we find these dwarfs that Hecate—”
The ship lurched as if it had hit an iceberg. Leo’s breakfast plate slid across the table. Nico fell backward out of his chair and banged his head against the sideboard. He collapsed on the floor, with a dozen magic goblets and platters crashing down on top of him.
“Nico!” Hazel ran to help him.
“What—?” Frank tried to stand, but the ship pitched in the other direction. He stumbled into the table and went face-first into Leo’s plate of scrambled eggs.
“Look!” Jason pointed at the walls. The images of Camp Half-Blood were flickering and changing.
“Not possible,” Leo murmured.
No way those enchantments could show anything other than scenes from camp, but suddenly a huge, distorted face filled the entire port-side wall: crooked yellow teeth, a scraggly red beard, a warty nose, and two mismatched eyes—one much larger and higher than the other. The face seemed to be trying to eat its way into the room.
The other walls flickered, showing scenes from above deck. Piper stood at the helm, but something was wrong. From the shoulders down she was wrapped in duct tape, her mouth gagged and her legs bound to the control console.
At the mainmast, Coach Hedge was similarly bound and gagged, while a bizarre-looking creature—a sort of gnome/chimpanzee combo with poor fashion sense—danced around him, doing the coach’s hair in tiny pigtails with pink rubber bands.
On the port-side wall, the huge ugly face receded so that Leo could see the entire creature—another gnome chimp, in even crazier clothes. This one began leaping around the deck,
stuffing things in a burlap bag—Piper’s dagger, Leo’s Wii controllers. Then he pried the Archimedes sphere out of the command console.
“No!” Leo yelled.
“Uhhh,” Nico groaned from the floor.
“Piper!” Jason cried.
“Monkey!” Frank yelled.
“Not monkeys,” Hazel grumbled. “I think those are dwarfs. ”
“Stealing my stuff!” Leo yelled, and he ran for the stairs.
LEO WAS VAGUELY AWARE OF HAZEL SHOUTING, “Go! I’ll take care of Nico!”
As if Leo was going to turn back. Sure, he hoped di Angelo was okay, but he had headaches of his own.
Leo bounded up the steps, with Jason and Frank behind him.
The situation on deck was even worse than he’d feared.
Coach Hedge and Piper were struggling against their duct tape bonds while one of the demon monkey dwarfs danced around the deck, picking up whatever wasn’t tied down and sticking it in his bag. He was maybe four feet tall, even shorter than Coach Hedge, with bowed legs and chimp-like feet, his clothes so loud they gave Leo vertigo. His green-plaid pants were pinned at the cuffs, and held up with bright-red suspenders over a striped pink-and-black woman’s blouse. He wore half a dozen gold watches on each arm, and a zebra-patterned cowboy hat with a price tag dangling from the brim. His skin was covered with patches of scraggly red fur, though ninety percent of his body hair seemed to be concentrated in his magnificent eyebrows.
Leo was just forming the thought Where’s the other dwarf? when he heard a click behind him and realized he’d led his friends into a trap.
“Duck!” He hit the deck as the explosion blasted his eardrums.
Note to self, Leo thought groggily. Do not leave boxes of magic grenades where dwarfs can reach them.
At least he was alive. Leo had been experimenting with all sorts of weapons based on the Archimedes sphere that he’d recovered in Rome. He’d built grenades that could spray acid, fire, shrapnel, or freshly buttered popcorn. (Hey, you never knew when you’d get hungry in battle. ) Judging from the ringing in Leo’s ears, the dwarf had detonated the flash-bang grenade, which Leo had filled with a rare vial of Apollo’s music, pure liquid extract. It didn’t kill, but it left Leo feeling like he’d just done a belly flop off the deep end.
He tried to get up. His limbs were useless. Someone was tugging at his waist, maybe a friend trying to help him up? No. His friends didn’t smell like heavily perfumed monkey cages.
He managed to turn over. His vision was out of focus and tinted pink, like the world had been submerged in strawberry jelly. A grinning, grotesque face loomed over him. The brown-furred dwarf was dressed even worse than his friend, in a green bowler hat like a leprechaun’s, dangly diamond earrings, and a white-and-black referee’s shirt. He showed off the prize he’d just stolen—Leo’s tool belt—then danced away.
Leo tried to grab him, but his fingers were numb. The dwarf frolicked over to the nearest ballista, which his red-furred friend was priming to launch.