I Percy THE SNAKE-HAIRED LADIES WERE starting to annoy Percy. They should have died three days ago when he dropped a crate of bowling balls on them at the Napa Bargain Mart. They should have died two days ago when he ran over them with a police car in Martinez. They definitely should have died this morning when he cut off their heads in Tilden Park. No matter how many times Percy killed them and watched them crumble to powder, they just kept re-forming like large evil dust bunnies. He couldn’t even seem to outrun them. He reached the top of the hill and caught his breath. How long since he’d last killed them? Maybe two hours. They never seemed to stay dead longer than that. The past few days, he’d hardly slept. He’d eaten whatever he could scrounge—vending machine gummi bears, stale bagels, even a Jack in the Crack burrito, which was a new personal low. His clothes were torn, burned, and splattered with monster slime. He’d only survived this long because the two snake-haired-ladies—gorgons, they called themselves—couldn’t seem to kill him either. Their claws didn’t cut his skin. Their teeth broke whenever they tried to bite him. But Percy couldn’t keep going much longer. Soon he’d collapse from exhaustion, and then—as hard as he was to kill, he was pretty sure the gorgons would find a way.