The Forbidden Daughter | PJO Book One

eight

SPYING

Blackjack gave them a ride down the beach, and she had to admit it was cool.

Being on a flying horse, skimming over the waves at a hundred miles an hour with the wind in her hair and the sea spray in my face hey, it beats waterskiing any day.

Even being a child of Hades and not being allowed to be in Zeus domain, she didn't feel uneasy.

Here. Blackjack slowed and turned in a circle. Straight down.

"Thanks." Percy tumbled off his back and plunged into the icy sea, holding onto Ariana.

Percy had gotten more comfortable doing stunts like that the past couple of years. He could pretty much move however he wanted to underwater, just by willing the ocean currents to change around him and propel him along.

For some reason, whenever Ariana entered under water, a bubble appeared around her head, allowing her to breathe.

They shot down into the darkness.

Twenty, thirty, forty feet. The pressure wasn't uncomfortable. Percy had never tried to push it-to see if there was a limit to how deep he could dive.

As they got closer to the bottom, Ariana saw three hippocampi-fish-tailed horses swimming in a circle around an overturned boat.

The hippocampi were beautiful to watch. Their fish tails shimmered in rainbow colors, glowing phosphorescent.

Their manes were white, and they were galloping through the water the way nervous horses do in a thunderstorm. Something was upsetting them.

They got closer and saw the problem. A dark shape- some kind of animal- was wedged halfway under the boat and tangled in a fishing net, one of those big nets they use on trawlers to catch everything at once.

She hated those things.

It was bad enough they drowned porpoises and dolphins, but they also occasionally caught mythological animals.

When the nets got tangled, some lazy fishermen would just cut them loose and let the trapped animals die.

Apparently this poor creature had been mucking around on the bottom of Long Island Sound and had somehow gotten itself tangled in the net of this sunken fishing boat.

It had tried to get out and managed to get even more hopelessly stuck, shifting the boat in the process.

Now the wreckage of the hull, which was resting against a big rock, was teetering and threatening to collapse on top of the tangled animal.

The hippocampi were swimming around frantically, wanting to help but not sure how.
One was trying to chew the net, but hippocampi teeth just aren't meant for cutting rope.

Hippocampi are really strong, but they don't have hands, and they're not (shhh) all that smart.

Free it, lord! A hippocampus said when it saw Percy. The others joined in, asking the same thing.

They swam in for a closer look at the tangled creature. At first Ariana thought it was a young hippocampus.

They had rescued several of them before. But then she heard a strange sound, something that did not belong underwater:

"Mooooooo!"

Ariana and Percy got next to the thing and saw that it was a cow. This really was a cow with the back end of a serpent.

The front half was a calf a baby, with black fur and big, sad brown eyes and a white muzzle and its back half was a black-and-brown snaky tail with fins running down the top and bottom, like an enormous eel.