OLYMPUS REBORN — BOOK ONE: ZEUS REINCARNATED AS A TEENAGER
Volume: Two — Monsters on the Road
We were making excellent time.
In my experience, a smooth road is just the universe's way of clearing its throat before it ruins your afternoon.
We were an hour north of the last motel, the PCH unspooling before us like a grey ribbon someone had carelessly dropped along the ragged edge of the continent. Demi was behind the wheel, her hands at ten and two, driving with the clinical precision of a getaway driver. Ares was a black streak on the asphalt ahead. The hippocampus had surfaced twice already—once in a pristine coastal cove and once, inexplicably, in a flooded drainage ditch near a fruit stand. It was either an incredible feat of aquatic navigation or a concerning commentary on California's plumbing.
Everything was fine. Until it wasn't.
The man walked out of a dilapidated gas station and directly into the center of the road. He didn't look for traffic; he moved as if he had forgotten that roads were anything other than a different texture of earth.
Demi slammed on the brakes. The car skidded, the scent of burning rubber filling the cabin. The man turned and looked at us through the windshield.
I felt it instantly.
The sensation was divine and ancient, but it was wrong—like a clock whose gears had been forced back together by an amateur. It was ticking, but the hands weren't landing where they were supposed to.
Fractured.
"Don't hit him," I said, my hand instinctively reaching for the dash.
"I wasn't going to hit him, Jason," Demi said, her voice tight.
"I know. I'm saying it for my own peace of mind."
His name—at least for this lifetime—was Walt.
He looked to be in his fifties, with white hair and the kind of deep, leathery tan that only comes from decades of salt air and sun. But his eyes were the tell; they kept losing focus, sliding off reality in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with a scrambled frequency.
He leaned down by my window, staring at me with the piercing intensity of someone who recognizes a face from a dream but can't quite place the name.
"Storm," he rasped.
"Yes," I said.
"You're looking for the water. The deep water."
"Also yes."
He nodded, his hands shaking with a rhythmic tremor. It wasn't fear; it was static. The divine current inside him was misfiring, the power trying to find neural pathways that had been scorched by the void.
I stepped out of the car. Up close, the wrongness was more specific. Walt wasn't hostile; he was just a compass that had been kept too close to a magnet for too long. He was still functional, but he was pointing at a North that didn't exist.
"You know where he is," I said. It wasn't a question; the current between us hummed when I mentioned Poseidon. He'd felt a surge. A ripple.
"South," Walt said, his voice certain. "Big surge. Three days ago. The water answered him. It was like a bell ringing in the dark."
Something in my chest twinged. Poseidon. A surge. South.
I looked at Demi. She was already out of the car, her notebook open. She hadn't said a word, but she had drawn a single, bold arrow on the page.
It was pointing North.
I looked back at Walt. He believed every word he was saying. Whatever he had felt—an echo of the hippocampus, a harmonic ripple of Poseidon's frequency bouncing off the coastal shelf—he had experienced it as a genuine signal. He wasn't lying.
He was just broken in a way that made his truth unreliable.
"Thank you, Walt," I said, placing a hand on his shoulder for a brief second to ground the static. "That's useful information."
Ares had circled back on the motorcycle, watching the exchange with those blood-colored eyes. As we got back into the car and Demi pulled away, he pulled up alongside the window.
"South?" Ares asked, his voice muffled by the wind.
"We're going north," I said.
"The old man said south. He sounded sure."
"I know what he said, Ares. I'm contextualizing him."
Ares looked at Walt in his side mirrors—the man was still standing in the middle of the road, a lonely figure against the vastness of the coast. "He believed it."
"He did. But he's a broken instrument."
"And you aren't?" Ares countered.
I looked at the dashboard. I looked at the Poseidon hoodie in the back seat. I looked at the needle in my chest that had been pulling toward the northern horizon since Nevada and hadn't wavered once.
"I know my brother," I said. "And my brother doesn't head south when the storm is gathering in the north."
Ares stared at me for a beat, then gunned the engine and roared ahead.
But here's the thing about doubt: it doesn't show up as an announcement. It shows up as a What if? and an Are you sure?
Twenty miles later, I was second-guessing. Walt had felt a genuine divine surge. Poseidon was powerful—not just in the supernatural sense, but in the physical, auditory sense of his presence. When he exerted his domain, the planet noticed. Maybe the surge really was to the south. Maybe the hippocampus was a lure.
"Stop," I said.
Demi pulled onto a dirt overlook. Below us, the Pacific was doing its eternal, churning dance.
I got out and stood at the very edge of the cliff. I reached. Not for the current, but for the compass. The one thing that had been my only reliable instrument for three thousand miles. I held my breath and waited for the needle to settle.
It swung.
North.
Not with a frantic jerk, but with the steady, quiet certainty of a fundamental law of physics. It was absolutely sure of itself.
I exhaled, the tension leaving my ribs. I got back in the car.
"North," I said.
Demi put the car in gear. "You had a moment," she noted. Not an accusation. An observation.
"I had a moment. The information was compelling."
"How are you sure he was wrong?"
"Because doubt is just fear wearing a costume," I said, looking at the sky that was mine, even when I didn't feel like I deserved it. "And I'm the King. I don't get to be afraid of the wrong direction."
Demi was quiet for a long time. "You absolutely get to be afraid, Jason," she said softly. "You just don't have to listen to it."
She was almost never wrong. It was, as always, deeply annoying.
We stopped that night at a motel in a town whose name vanished from my mind the moment we checked in. I gave Daniel's number to the clerk to pass on to Walt if he came through. It wasn't a fix, but it was a lifeline.
I stood outside in the cool night air and looked north. I thought about Walt's surge.
The hippocampus. It was a fragment of Poseidon's power, moving through the coastal systems, the drainage ditches, the hidden rivers. Walt hadn't felt my brother. He'd felt the guide.
Which meant the hippocampus wasn't just pointing the way. It was keeping pace. It was tracking us, making sure the King and the Strategist and the Soldier didn't get lost on the way to the party.
You absolute disaster, I thought at the darkness. You sent a sea-horse to babysit me.
Somewhere very far to the north, I was almost certain I felt a ripple of amusement in the air.
I went inside.