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“It’s a distress call,” she announced. “Ganymede says he’s stuck on Olympus, and he needs the cup immediately. He says...”
Her face fell. “Oh, gods. Zeus isn’t waiting for Sunday to have a feast.”
I gulped, remembering what Ganymede had said about Zeus being unpredictable. “So... what, he’s having one tonight?”
“Worse than that,” Annabeth said. “Zeus is having his mom over for a family get-together right now. They’re havingbrunch.”
Is there anything more terrifying than brunch?
It’s an abomination among meals, a Frankenstein hybrid of clashing food choices. It evokes nightmares of soft jazz bands, kids in itchy dress clothes, ladies in strange hats, lipstick smears on champagne glasses, and the smell of croque monsieur. I am sorry. I don’t eat food with a name that translates asMr. Crunchy.
Even the wordbrunchgives me the willies. (See, I almost saidheebie-jeebies, but we don’t use that term anymore in this household.) Brunch is the mostnon-elegant term for something that is supposed to be elegant. It’s like saying,Let’s get all dressed up and go to a quack-splat.Like... why?
But now I had found something even worse than a mortal brunch: a brunch among the gods. On a Monday morning, no less. And during regular breakfast hours, but, oh, no, they had to make it a brunch anyway.
Also, Zeus was having hismomover? I’d never met Rhea, the Titan queen, and I wasn’t anxious to find out what the gods served her for her special morning meal. Probably poached demigod on toast with demigod-tear mimosas.
I hefted the chalice of the gods. “I don’t suppose we can send this Hermes Express?”
Annabeth frowned. “Percy...”
“Don’t they have one-hour delivery in Manhattan?”
“Ganymede needs itnow. Andyouhave to bring it. It’s—”
“My job.” I sighed. I was familiar with the rules of quest completion, which included white-glove delivery by the demigod in charge. It was looking increasingly unlikely that I would make it to school in time for my first-period quiz.
“Fine,” I said. “Any suggestions on how I can sneak into Olympus and infiltrate a godly brunch?”
“Um, actually?” Grover blinked like what he was about to say would be painful for me to hear. “I might have an idea.”
The easy part was getting a taxi uptown. Normally I wouldn’t have sprung for a cab, but after Grover and I said good-bye to Annabeth, it seemed like the fastest way to get to the Empire State Building, and also the fastest way to avoid Annabeth’s wrath.
With great reluctance, she had lent me her New York Yankees cap. Sheneverdoes that. The invisibility hat was a gift from her mom, so borrowing it just wasn’t something you did without a really good reason. It would’ve been like me letting another demigod use Riptide in a fight. Nope.
But when Grover pleaded that it was the only way, Annabeth had handed it over. She glared at me and said, “Youwillbring it back. Good luck. Don’t die.” Then she ran off to start her school day, since her campus was only a couple of blocks away.
In the cab, Grover tapped his hooves nervously on the floorboard as he explained the rest of his plan. I wasn’t too worried about the cabdriver listening in, because this was New York. A plan to break into Mount Olympus was not the craziest thing any cabbie would hear on any given day. Also, Grover had insisted on bringing the Hula-Hoop in the cab with us, and I had a giant chalice in my lap, so we were already unreliable narrators.
“A cloud nymph,” I said, just to make sure I’d heard him correctly.
“Yeah.” He glanced behind us, though as far as I could tell, we weren’t being followed.
“Is this the same nymph who gave you the info on Washington Square Park?” I asked.
“No, no. But cloud nymphs, man... they’re like school secretaries. They know everyone and everything. This one, Naomi—she’s been dating Maron for the past few months. She works in the kitchens of Zeus’s palace. If you can get to the side entrance, she should be able to slip you inside.”
I shivered. Maron was one of Grover’s fellow Cloven Council elders—a nice enough goat dude, but he was only slightly below Gary on the weird-old-man spectrum. The idea of him having a dating profile on Satyr-er was not something I wanted to ponder.
I curled Annabeth’s hat between my hands. “I don’t suppose the invisibility cap will fool the gods?”
“Not likely,” Grover said. “The cap is to fool any spirits or minor gods you might come across. As long as you’re not waving your arms and screaming in their faces, you should be invisible to them. But the Olympians themselves? You’d need Hades’s helm of darkness for that. The best Annabeth’s cap might do is make you look, I don’t know, unimportant?”
“Perfect,” I grumbled. I wasn’t sure how Grover knew this much about Annabeth’s hat, but since he was telling me bad news, I figured he was probably right on target. “So I get to the side door of the palace kitchen as fast as possible.”
“You do the special knock.”
“Shave and a haircut,” I said. “Because that is a knock no one would ever use.”
