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“Let me do the thinking,” she warned.

“Gladly,” I croaked.

She took the torch.

Wow, that was a relief. Suddenly only the left side of my body felt like it was dissolving in acid. On my right I had Annabeth, which was much better. I put my free arm around her waist. We held each other tight.

The torches blazed, heating up again to a bright blue flame.

Annabeth faced our surly mob of followers. “Fix the house,” she said. “Then you’ll be free.”

Behind us, the makeshift front door blasted open. The army of spirits rushed the front porch, parting around us like we were a rock in the rapids, and swept into the manse.

“Oh,” Grover said in a small voice. “I’m sure that’s fine.”

Annabeth and I managed to turn so we could watch the spirits’ progress. Fortunately, we’d had some practice doing three-legged races at camp.

Miniature tornadoes swirled through the great room. The dead cleared the broken glass, repaired the furniture, and painted the walls with sheets of ghostly frost. Above us, more ghosts swept across the building’s facade, mending the cracked tombstones and replacing those that had fallen.

“Percy,” Annabeth said weakly, “it’s going to work!”

I tried to smile, but even lifting the corners of my mouth felt like too much effort. I stayed focused on the task:Fix the house.Otherwise, I let Annabeth do the thinking.

The ghosts did all the heavy lifting, but it felt like they were draining the life force right out of me. The more they did, the more my legs shook. Only Stuyvesant remained aloof from the uproar. He probably considered himself above menial labor. He floated here and there, monitoring repairs, hissing orders in Dutch, and letting his home-jongens do all the work.

Grover, Hecuba, and Gale stood in the front yard, stunned into silence. Nope, who must have sensed we needed support, padded behind us, wedged his head between Annabeth’s leg and mine, and rested his snout on my shoe. Honestly, that was the best cute-puppy assist I could have asked for.

I don’t know how long the process took. Hours? Centuries? My sight dimmed. My brain wobbled in my skull like a gyroscope.

Finally, Annabeth said, “It’s done.”

The ghosts belched out of the house in a flood of gray ectoplasm and reassembled in the yard.

I looked at their results. The mansion was exactly as it had been when we arrived on Monday. The windows were all fixed. The three-paneled door gleamed with a new coat of paint. The ghosts had even polished and replaced the door knockers, which looked as astonished as pieces of metal can look.

“That was incredible!” said the lion.

“That was horrible!” said the horse.

“STROOPWAFELS!” said the dog.

So the door knockers worked again. Yay.

Annabeth and I turned to survey the troops.

Hundreds of ghosts hung above the lawn like columns of campfire smoke. Stuyvesant limped back and forth in front of them, his spectral peg leg clunking against the cranium path. The dead were waiting, but I knew they were at the end of their patience. They felt no sense of accomplishment. They only wanted one thing: release. Also, revenge. Okay, they wanted two things. We needed to dismiss them quickly and send them back to their graves.

“Ready?” Annabeth asked me. “One, two, three.”

She started pulling in her torch. I did the same. The idea was simple: Do what Hecate had done. Cross the torches in front of us and hope the spirits turned to dust and went bye-bye.

The problem was, my left arm rebelled. I had nothing left. No muscles. No stuff. Just bringing the torch toward my chest felt like trying to close a rusty airplane-hangar door with one hand. I took a breath, dug deep to find whatever remained of my strength, and gave it one last shot.

“Percy?” Grover asked in alarm.

“Percy!” Annabeth said.

“Sorry…” I muttered.