CHAPTER 1

HYDROKINESIS

SOURCE: POSEIDON

The ability to control and move liquids. Density of liquid affects level of control. Water is the easiest liquid to manipulate because, with the exception of dramatically dry environments (i.e. Las Vegas, Sahara Desert, Australian Outback), it is always present in the surrounding air.

DYNAMOTHEOS STUDY GUIDE © Stella Petrolas

I.

Am.

A.

Goddess.

An honest-to-goodness goddess.

With superpowers and everything.

Okay, so I’m just a minor, minor, minor goddess. Technically, I’m supposed to say hematheos, which means godly blood, or part god, but goddess sounds much more impressive (to the like ten people I’m allowed to tell). There’s no percentage requirement or anything—all that matters is having a god or goddess somewhere up the line, and my great-grandmother, it turns out, is Nike. The goddess; not the shoe. That makes me a tiny leaf on a narrow branch of the massive and ancient family tree of the gods.

So I can say with only minor hesitation that I, Phoebe Castro, am a goddess. The thing is, I only learned this about myself a few months ago—when my mom married a Greek guy and transplanted me halfway around the world to the tiny island of Serfopoula.

I spent the first seventeen years of my life believing I was a perfectly normal girl from a semifunctional family with a deceased dad and a workaholic mom. Then wham-o, I find out Dad’s dead because he disobeyed some supernatural edict and got smoted to Hades and I am, in fact, part of the fully dysfunctional family of Greek gods. Talk about your issues.

Being part goddess comes with some serious perks, though. Namely powers. I can pretty much do whatever I want whenever I want so long as I don’t break any of those aforementioned supernatural edicts. These include, but are not limited to: no bringing people back from the dead (not a problem because, even though I’m dying to see my dad again, I don’t actually want to die to do it. I have a lot to live for—like my fabulous boyfriend, Griffin Blake), no traveling through time in either direction, and no using your powers to succeed in the nothos—the normal human—world.

These seem like no big deal, right? Well, they wouldn’t be ... if I could keep my powers under control. But that is way harder than I ever imagined.

My stepdad, Damian Petrolas—part god himself—says it’s going to take time and training. Everyone else at the Academy—the ultra-private school for the descendants of Greek gods where he happens to be the headmaster—has known about their powers almost since birth. They started learning how to use them properly before they could walk. But even they sometimes have trouble keeping their powers under control, like last September when my not-yet-boyfriend Griffin accidentally knotted my Nikes together during cross-country tryouts.

Like I said, I’ve only known about these powers for a few months and these things aren’t exactly easy to control. Once, I slept through my alarm and tried to zap myself to class before the bell—my first-period teacher, Ms. “Tyrant” Tyrovolas, has a zero-tolerance tardy policy—and wound up crashing a parent-headmaster conference in Damian’s office. Can you say detention?

Clearly it’s going to take a while to figure this out.

So I could spend more time on my powers training, Damian banned me from running more than five miles a day until school let out (last week, thank Nike!). Even my cross-country coach at the Academy, Coach Lenny, supported the reduced running time. He says I can never race in the Olympics if there’s a chance I might accidentally turn my competitors into molasses or something. Only the lure of the Olympics could convince me to cut back on running. That and the fear of accidentally getting myself smoted by the gods. Eternity in the underworld is a pretty big deterrent.

All the time I used to spend on cross-country I had to spend on learning to control my powers. Not that all the extra training helped much. Countless after-school sessions and weekend lessons—with Damian, Griffin, my friends Nicole Matios and Troy Travatas, various Academy teachers, or, on days when the Fates were feeling vengeful, my evil stepsister, Stella—and I’m still a menace. No matter how many times I close my eyes and concentrate on moving the book across the table, sensing my instructor du jour’s thoughts, or manifesting an apple from thin air, it inevitably backfires. Hideously.

Sure, with Griffin’s help I figured out how to turn Stella’s hair green for Mom and Damian’s wedding, but my attempt at zapping myself some new Nikes ended very, very badly. Let’s just say I like my toes and I’m thankful every day that I have all ten of them.

Now it’s summer break and I still have only limited control.

I’m back to my regular running schedule, training for the Pythian Games trials, which are just two weeks away, and wondering whether my next powers screwup will be the one that lands me in Hades.

Some days I wish I’d never learned the truth. Life would be so much less complicated if Mom had never met Damian. Right now, I’d be back in L.A. with Nola and Cesca, enjoying my last summer before college by spending hours on the beach. Maybe finally learning how to surf from some hottie surfer boy who would totally fall in love with Nola and—

“Phoebe!”

I shudder at the sound of Damian’s voice echoing through the house. He sounds really, really, really upset.

“Yes?” I answer as sweetly as possible from the relative safety of my bedroom. Not that walls hinder his ability to read minds—or sense fear.

I watch the door nervously. I know it’s a bad sign when I see water streaming under the crack, flowing into the grout lines between each tile and pooling in the depressions of the age-worn ceramic surfaces.