No, Far Worse.

As he looked through the trees at what his traps had caught, Matt’s eyes widened.

Silver showed between the trunks where there should have been nothing but wet bark and undergrowth, though very little of it was where it belonged. Bowstaves hung at useless angles, hunting knives sat beyond anyone’s reach, and dark clothing designed for moving quietly through forests had become thoroughly tangled in cord, brush and low branches. The entire party had made it inside his perimeter without leaving a single Hunter free to help the others, which took Matt a few seconds to accept because a monster would have been considerably easier to understand.

The outer trip line had taken two at the knees and dumped them into each other before either could recover. Once that happened, the scatter of dry branches beyond had ruined the obvious approach for whoever came forward next and pushed her toward the cleaner ground beside it. That route led directly into the second layer. Farther in, the snare had closed around another Hunter and somehow kept tightening until her arms were pinned to her sides, while three more had been caught where the undergrowth narrowed and the low branches gave Matt useful anchor points. Boots kicked without finding purchase, shoulders twisted against cords that only drew tighter, and one bow remained trapped behind its owner at an angle that made reaching it impossible.

Hunters of Artemis. Every one of them caught by a perimeter Matt had thrown together because he had wanted a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.

The recognition changed what he did with his own body before it changed anything else. Breathing stayed slow, the dagger remained low against his thigh, and the trunks in front of him continued hiding the male demigod who had just become the least popular person in this particular patch of woodland. He had seen the Hunters at Camp Half-Blood often enough to know better than to announce himself without thinking first. Their visits were rare, but memorable, especially when boys happened to be nearby.

Matt had never needed a conversation with them to understand the arrangement. A look across the archery range usually managed it. So did comments about clumsiness, noise, weakness, or the general inconvenience of having males occupying the same clearing. Once, near the strawberry fields, a Hunter had shouldered him aside hard enough to send him off the path and then treated it as an accident. Another time an arrow had struck the dirt beside his shoe while the girl holding the bow smiled as though she had done him a favour by missing. Older campers generally called that behaviour nasty because camp life worked better when people used polite words for things they could not do much about.

None of those memories gave Matt much reason to step out and introduce himself, especially when doing so would mean admitting that the unclaimed boy from Hermes cabin was responsible for leaving an entire party of Hunters hanging from trees and undergrowth. What bothered him more was how they had ended up there in the first place. The perimeter was competent, but hardly ingenious: trip lines at knee height, noisy approaches, snares placed where someone avoiding the obvious route was likely to move instead.

Years at camp had taught him to build traps around choices rather than individual tricks, but the Hunters should still have recognised what they were looking at long before the whole party reached the middle of it. These were people who tracked monsters across states and spent more time in the wilderness than most campers spent indoors, some of them with decades or centuries of practice behind them. Yet every cord continued holding exactly where Matt had tied it, leaving him with the uncomfortable possibility that luck had done rather more work tonight than he had.

Tyche was not a goddess he normally bothered. Depending on luck seemed like a good way to discover how much the gods enjoyed irony, but tonight she had apparently decided the Hunt belonged in his traps instead of the other way around. Matt knew enough about encounters between Hunters and lone boys to appreciate the distinction. Artemis herself being absent probably reduced the range of divine punishments available, though that still left bows, knives and several people with centuries of practice using both.

From the outer line came the sound of cord tightening again as one of the trapped Hunters shifted. “Do not struggle,” a girl warned, trying to twist far enough to see the knot holding the woman beside her. “You will only make it tighter.”

“It is already tight.”

“Then stop proving it.”

The reply came with another attempt to move, which achieved little beyond shaking rainwater from the surrounding brush. Farther in, the Hunter caught by the snare managed half a turn before the cord pulled her back against the same branch, while another tested a trapped arm and abandoned the effort once the line bit deeper into her sleeve. A knife lay in the wet leaves between them, close enough for everyone to see and far enough away to be useless.

“This should not be possible,” said the one nearest the road, her voice carrying the controlled irritation of someone unused to addressing the ground from that angle. “We do not walk into mortal cord.”

Another Hunter pulled once against the snare before answering. “Then explain why we are hanging in it.”

“The storm hid it. Some boy laid a coward’s net through the trees.”

Matt’s mouth tightened before he could stop it. That sounded more familiar. The traps had worked, the entire party was off its feet, and somehow the easiest explanation remained that whoever built the perimeter had cheated by being male.

What still refused to fit was why experienced Hunters had failed to catch the trick before the second or third person went down. The storm could have concealed one line. Water and darkness might explain a missed anchor. They did not explain an entire hunting party successively choosing every route the perimeter had been designed to punish.

“There is a boy involved,” the Hunter in the snare continued while trying unsuccessfully to work one shoulder free. “There is always a boy when something is this stupid.”

A second voice answered from nearer the outer line. “When I get a hand loose, he is going to regret putting this across a Huntress’s path.”

“If he is still in these woods, he will not leave them walking.”

Someone farther back gave a short, humourless laugh. “He will not leave them at all.”

Whatever sympathy Matt had been considering became substantially harder to maintain. None of them could currently reach a weapon, yet the conversation still proceeded on the assumption that the unknown person responsible for the traps owed them obedience and possibly his life for having inconvenienced them.

For all that, leaving them hanging there indefinitely did not sit especially well either.

The decent solution would have been straightforward. Step out slowly, keep both hands visible, explain that the perimeter had been built around a campsite rather than across some sacred hunting ground, then cut enough cord to let them sort themselves out. Matt actually considered it for several seconds, mostly because he knew how miserable it was to remain trapped in wet woods with circulation slowly disappearing from a limb.

Then memory supplied the arrow buried beside his shoe at camp, followed closely by the smile of the girl who had fired it.

Helping people who already disliked him was one thing. Walking voluntarily into bow range of several Huntresses who had just promised to kill whoever trapped them required a much looser definition of generosity.

One of the women near the centre stopped fighting the cord and turned her head as far as the snare allowed. “He is watching.”

The others quieted enough that the dripping canopy became audible again.

“They always watch,” she added.

A Hunter hanging closer to the road pulled against her restraints once before giving up on reaching the knife below her. “Then he can come out and undo this before I lose patience.”

“He will come undone first,” another replied.

That settled the immediate question without requiring Matt to contribute anything.

Remaining concealed no longer depended on old grudges from camp or assumptions about how the Hunters might react. They had supplied their opinion of the unknown trapper themselves, without knowing his name, parentage, cabin or anything beyond the possibility that he was male. Walking into view after hearing that would have been less an act of courage than volunteering to become a cautionary story in Hermes cabin.

The cords continued to hold while the Hunt tested them with varying degrees of patience. Matt kept the dagger low and stayed behind the cover already working in his favour, watching for any sign that one of them had found enough slack to reach a weapon. If Tyche wanted credit for arranging matters so that the Hunters were the ones hanging helplessly tonight, she was welcome to it.

His earlier thought about monsters returned with considerably more weight now. A monster would have attacked, been trapped, and remained an obvious problem until somebody killed it or escaped from it. The Hunters had managed to become caught in his perimeter and still make freeing them sound like something he might be punished for doing incorrectly.

For the moment, Matt saw very little reason to introduce himself. Staying hidden and slipping away kept things simple, and simple was usually preferable when the alternative involved several armed immortals who had already decided the unknown person responsible for their predicament deserved punishment. The difficulty was that leaving only worked if he treated the next hour as the whole problem.

He could retrieve the duffel, put as much distance between himself and these woods as the remaining darkness allowed, and leave the Hunters to sort themselves out. In the short term, that sounded excellent. Afterward came the less appealing possibilities: they freed themselves, found the campsite, worked out where he had been heading, and decided the person who trapped them had deliberately left Artemis's maidens hanging in the woods. Matt knew enough about the goddess to dislike where that chain ended. Artemis did not make a habit of helping demigods outside her Hunt, especially boys, but anything involving one of her Hunters seemed to produce considerably more enthusiasm.

Whether the Hunters had walked into the traps themselves would probably matter less than Matt wanted it to. Neither would several of them threatening the trapper before they even knew who he was. Gods had never impressed him as particularly interested in hearing both sides once family became involved, and explaining to Artemis that her immortal huntresses had collectively lost an argument with camp cord sounded like a poor foundation for his defence.

Looking over the perimeter again changed the problem. Five minutes ago, the important question had been whether the lines would hold. Now it was how to release them without dropping anyone headfirst into the mud or putting himself within immediate bow range. Cutting everything at once was out; too many lines were carrying weight. Waiting for the Hunters to free themselves kept him safer for the next few minutes, but every extra minute also made it easier for them to interpret the whole thing as deliberate once they discovered somebody had been watching.

That left him with an irritatingly narrow set of choices. Helping them meant stepping into reach of people who already wanted the trapper punished. Walking away meant gambling that Artemis would never become interested in who had left her Hunters strung through the trees.

Which meant one thing, getting an oath out of them o nthe River Styx.....that sort of oath.

Somewhere in the tangle, one of the lines creaked as a Hunter tested it again, then settled exactly where Matt had tied it. The traps were holding perfectly.

Which was becoming less useful by the second.