“You will feed the eternal darkness,” Akhlys said. “You will die in the arms of Night!”
He was dimly aware of Annabeth shouting, throwing random pieces of drakon jerky at the goddess. The white-green poison kept pooling, little streams trickling from the plants as the venomous lake around him got wider and wider.
Lake, he thought. Streams. Water.
Probably it was just his brain getting fried from poison fumes, but he croaked out a laugh. Poison was liquid. If it moved like water, it must be partially water.
He remembered some science lecture about the human body being mostly water. He remembered extracting water from Jason’s lungs back in Rome. … If he could control that, then why not other liquids?
It was a crazy idea. Poseidon was the god of the sea, not of every liquid everywhere.
Then again, Tartarus had its own rules. Fire was drinkable. The ground was the body of a dark god. The air was acid, and demigods could be turned into smoky corpses.
So why not try? He had nothing left to lose.
He glared at the poison flood encroaching from all sides. He concentrated so hard that something inside him cracked—as if a crystal ball had shattered in his stomach.
Warmth flowed through him. The poison tide stopped.
The fumes blew away from him—back toward the goddess. The lake of poison rolled toward her in tiny waves and rivulets.
Akhlys shrieked. “What is this?”
“Poison,” Percy said. “That’s your specialty, right?”
He stood, his anger growing hotter in his gut. As the flood of venom rolled toward the goddess, the fumes began to make her cough. Her eyes watered even more.
Oh, good, Percy thought. More water.
Percy imagined her nose and throat filling with her own tears.
Akhlys gagged. “I—” The tide of venom reached her feet, sizzling like droplets on a hot iron. She wailed and stumbled back.
“Percy!” Annabeth called.
She’d retreated to the edge of the cliff, even though the poison wasn’t after her. She sounded terrified. It took Percy a moment to realize she was terrified of him.
“Stop…” she pleaded, her voice hoarse.
He didn’t want to stop. He wanted to choke this goddess. He wanted to watch her drown in her own poison. He wanted to see just how much misery Misery could take.
“Percy, please…” Annabeth’s face was still pale and corpse-like, but her eyes were the same as always. The anguish in them made Percy’s anger fade.
He turned to the goddess. He willed the poison to recede, creating a small path of retreat along the edge of the cliff.
“Leave!” he bellowed.
For an emaciated ghoul, Akhlys could run pretty fast when she wanted to. She scrambled along the path, fell on her face, and got up again, wailing as she sped into the dark.
As soon as she was gone, the pools of poison evaporated. The plants withered to dust and blew away.
Annabeth stumbled toward him. She looked like a corpse wreathed in smoke, but she felt solid enough when she gripped his arms.
“Percy, please don’t ever…” Her voice broke in a sob. “Some things aren’t meant to be controlled. Please. ”
His whole body tingled with power, but the anger was subsiding. The broken glass inside him was beginning to smooth at the edges.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, okay. ”
“We have to get away from this cliff,” Annabeth said. “If Akhlys brought us here as some kind of sacrifice…”
Percy tried to think. He was getting used to moving with the Death Mist around him. He felt more solid, more like himself. But his mind still felt stuffed with cotton.
“She said something about feeding us to the night,” he remembered. “What was that about?”
The temperature dropped. The abyss before them seemed to exhale.
Percy grabbed Annabeth and backed away from the edge as a presence emerged from the void—a form so vast and shadowy, he felt like he understood the concept of dark for the first time.
“I imagine,” said the darkness, in a feminine voice as soft as coffin lining, “that she meant Night, with a capital N. After all, I am the only one. ”
THE WAY LEO FIGURED IT, he spent more time crashing than he did flying.