by Rick Riordan
“Don’t you dare,” I snarled.
Nero spread his hands. “Should I go on? The deaths at Camp Jupiter: Don, Dakota. The parents of that poor little girl Julia. All for what? Because you want to be a god again. You’ve whined and complained across this country and back again. So I ask you: Are you worthy of being a god?”
He had done his homework. It wasn’t like Nero to remember the names of so many people he didn’t care about. But this was an important scene. He was putting on a performance for all of us, especially Meg.
“You’re twisting everything into lies!” I said. “Just like you always have for Meg and your other poor children.”
I shouldn’t have called them poor. The seven torchbearers glared at me with disdain. Clearly, they didn’t want my pity. Meg’s expression remained blank, but her eyes slid away from me and fixed on the patterns in the carpet. That probably wasn’t a good sign.
Nero chuckled. “Oh, Apollo, Apollo…You want to lecture me about my poor children? How have you treated yours?”
He began rattling off a list of my parenting failures, which were many, but I only half listened.
I wondered how much time had passed since I’d seen Screech-Bling. How long could I keep Nero talking, and would it be enough for the trogs to disable the poison gas, or at least clear the building?
Whatever the case, with those blast doors sealed and the windows barred, Meg and I were on our own. We would have to save each other, because no one else would. I had to believe we were still a team.
“And even now,” Nero continued, “your children are fighting and dying below, while you are here.” He shook his head in disgust. “I tell you what. Let’s set aside the issue of fumigating my tower for the moment.” He placed the remote control next to him on the sofa, somehow making it seem like an incredibly generous concession that he would wait a few more minutes before gassing all my friends to death.
He turned to Meg. “My dear, you can choose, as I promised. Which of our nature spirits should have the honor of killing this pathetic former god? We will make him fight his own battle for once.”
Meg stared at Nero as if he’d just spoken backward. “I…I can’t…”
She wrung her fingers where her gold rings used to be. I wanted to give them back to her so badly, but I was afraid even to breathe. Meg seemed to be teetering on the edge of an abyss. I feared any change in the room—the slightest vibration in the floor, a shift in the light, a cough or a sigh—might push her over.
“You can’t choose?” Nero asked, his voice dripping with sympathy. “I understand. We have so many dryads here, and they all deserve vengeance. After all, their species has only one natural predator: the Olympian gods.” He scowled at me. “Meg is right! We will not choose. Apollo, in the name of Daphne, and all the other dryads whom you have tormented over the centuries…I decree that all our dryad friends will be allowed to tear you apart. Let’s see how you defend yourself when you don’t have any demigods to hide behind!”
He snapped his fingers. The dryads didn’t seem too excited about tearing me apart, but the children of the Imperial Household held their torches closer to their potted trees, and something in the dryads seemed to break, flooding them with desperation, horror, and rage.
They may have preferred to attack Nero, but since they couldn’t, they did what he asked. They attacked me.
IF THEIR HEARTS HAD BEEN IN IT, I WOULD have died.
I’ve seen actual mobs of bloodthirsty dryads attack. It’s not something any mortal could live through. These tree spirits seemed more interested in just playing the part. They staggered toward me, yelling RAWR, while occasionally glancing over their shoulders to make sure the torch-bearing demigods hadn’t set fire to their life sources.
I dodged the first two palm-tree spirits who lunged at me.
“I won’t fight you!” I yelled. A sturdy ficus jumped on me from behind, forcing me to throw her off. “We’re not enemies!”
A fiddle-leaf fig was hanging back, perhaps waiting for her turn to get me, or just hoping she wouldn’t get noticed. Her demigod keeper noticed, though. He lowered his torch and the fig tree went up in flames as if it had been doused in oil. The dryad screamed and combusted, collapsing in a heap of ash.
“Stop it!” Meg said, but her voice was so fragile it barely registered.
The other dryads attacked me in earnest. Their fingernails stretched into talons. A lemon tree sprouted thorns all over her body and tackled me in a painful hug.
“Stop it!” Meg said, louder this time.
“Oh, let them try, my dear,” Nero said, as the trees piled onto my back. “They deserve their revenge.”
The ficus got me in a choke hold. My knees buckled under the weight of six dryads. Thorns and talons raked every bit of exposed skin. I croaked, “Meg!”
My eyes bulged. My vision blurred.
“STOP!” Meg ordered.
The dryads stopped. The ficus sobbed with relief and released her hold around my neck. The others backed off, leaving me on my hands and knees, gasping, bruised, and bleeding.
Meg ran to me. She knelt and put her hand on my shoulder, studying my scrapes and cuts and my ruined, bandaged nose with an agonized expression. I would have been overjoyed to get this attention from her if we hadn’t been in the middle of Nero’s throne room, or if I could just, you know, breathe.
Her first whispered question was not the one I’d been expecting: “Is Lu alive?”
I nodded, blinking away tears of pain. “Last I saw,” I whispered back. “Still fighting.”
Meg’s brow furrowed. For the moment, her old spirit seemed rekindled, but it was difficult to visualize her the way she used to be. I had to concentrate on her eyes, framed by her wonderfully horrible cat-eye glasses, and ignore the new wispy haircut, the smell of lilac perfume, the purple gown and gold sandals and—OH, GODS!—someone had given her a pedicure.
I tried to contain my horror. “Meg,” I said. “There’s only one person here you need to listen to: yourself. Trust yourself.”
I meant it, despite all my doubts and fears, despite all my complaints over the months about Meg being my master. She had chosen me, but I had also chosen her. I did trust her—not in spite of her past with Nero, but because of it. I had seen her struggle. I’d admired her hard-won progress. I had to believe in her for my own sake. She was—gods help me—my role model.
I pulled her gold rings from my pocket. She recoiled when she saw them, but I pressed them into her hands. “You are stronger than he is.”
If I could have just kept her looking nowhere but at me, perhaps we could’ve survived in a small bubble of our old friendship, even surrounded by Nero’s toxic environment.
But Nero couldn’t allow that.
“Oh, my dear.” He sighed. “I appreciate your kind heart. I do! But we can’t interfere with justice.”
Meg stood and faced him. “This isn’t justice.”
His smile thinned. He glanced at me with a mixture of humor and pity, as if saying, Now look what you’ve done.
“Perhaps you’re right, Meg,” he conceded. “These dryads don’t have the courage or the spirit to do what’s necessary.”
Meg stiffened, apparently realizing what Nero intended to do. “No.”
“We will have to try something else.” He gestured to the demigods, who lowered their torches into the plants.
“NO!” Meg screamed.
The room turned green. A storm of allergens exploded from Meg’s body, as if she’d released an entire season of oak pollen in a single blast. Verdant dust coated the throne room—Nero, his couch, his guards, his rugs, his windows, his children. The demigods’ torch flames spluttered and died.
The dryads’ trees began to grow, roots breaking through their pots and anchoring to the floor, new leaves unfurling to replace the singed ones, branches thickening and stretching out, threatening to entangle their demigod minders. Not being complete fools, Nero’s children scrambled away from their newly agg
ressive houseplants.
Meg turned to the dryads. They were huddled together trembling, burn marks steaming on their arms. “Go heal,” she told them. “I’ll keep you safe.”
With a grateful collective sob, they vanished.
Nero calmly brushed the pollen from his face and clothes. His Germani seemed unperturbed, as if this sort of thing happened a lot. One of the cynocephali sneezed. His wolf-headed comrade offered him a Kleenex.
“My dear Meg,” Nero said, his voice even, “we’ve talked about this before. You must control yourself.”
Meg clenched her fists. “You didn’t have the right. It wasn’t fair—”
“Now, Meg.” His voice hardened, letting her know that his patience was strained. “Apollo might still be allowed to live, if that’s really what you want. We don’t have to surrender him to Python. But if we’re going to take that kind of risk, I’ll need you at my side with your wonderful powers. Be my daughter again. Let me save him for you.”
She said nothing. Her stance radiated stubbornness. I imagined her putting down her own roots, mooring herself in place.
Nero sighed. “Everything becomes much, much harder when you wake the Beast. You don’t want to make the wrong choice again, do you? And lose someone else like you lost your father?” He gestured to his dozen pollen-covered Germani, his pair of cynocephali, his seven demigod foster children—all of whom glared at us as if they, unlike the dryads, would be quite happy to tear us to pieces.
I wondered how quickly I could retrieve my bow, though I was in no shape for combat. I wondered how many opponents Meg could handle with her scimitars. Good as she was, I doubted she could fend off twenty-one. Then there was Nero himself, who had the constitution of a minor god. Despite her anger, Meg couldn’t seem to make herself look him in the face.
I imagined Meg making these same calculations, perhaps deciding that there was no hope, that the only possibility of sparing my life was to give in to Nero.
“I didn’t kill my father,” she said, her voice small and hard. “I didn’t cut off Lu’s hands or enslave those dryads or twist us all up inside.” She swept a hand toward the other demigods of the household. “You did that, Nero. I hate you.”
The emperor’s expression turned sad and weary. “I see. Well…if you feel that way—”
“It’s not about feelings,” Meg snapped. “It’s about the truth. I’m not listening to you. And I’m not using your weapons to fight my fights anymore.”
She tossed her rings away.
A small desperate yelp escaped my throat.
Nero chuckled. “That, my dear, was foolish.”
For once, I was tempted to agree with the emperor. No matter how good my young friend was with gourds and pollen, no matter how glad I was to have her at my side, I couldn’t imagine us getting out of this room alive unarmed.
The Germani hefted their spears. The imperial demigods drew their swords. The wolf-headed warriors snarled.
Nero raised his hand, ready to give the kill command, when behind me a mighty BOOM! shook the chamber. Half our enemies were thrown off their feet. Cracks sprouted in the windows and the marble columns. Ceiling tiles broke, raining dust like split bags of flour.
I turned to see the impenetrable blast doors lying twisted and broken, a strangely emaciated red bull standing in the breach. Behind it stood Nico di Angelo.
Safe to say, I had not been expecting this kind of party-crasher.
Clearly, Nero and his followers hadn’t, either. They stared in amazement as the taurus silvestre lumbered across the threshold. Where the bull’s blue eyes should have been, there were only dark holes. Its shaggy red hide hung loosely over its reanimated skeleton like a blanket. It was an undead thing with no flesh or soul—just the will of its master.
Nico scanned the room. He looked worse than the last time I’d seen him. His face was covered in soot, his left eye swollen shut. His shirt was ripped to shreds, and his black sword dripped with some sort of monster blood. Worst of all, someone (I’m guessing a trog) had forced him to wear a white cowboy hat. I half expected him to say yee-haw in the most unenthusiastic voice ever.
For the benefit of his skeleton bull, he pointed at Nero and said, “Kill that one.”
The bull charged. The followers of Nero went crazy. Germani rushed the creature like linebackers going after a wide receiver, desperate to stop it before it reached the dais. The cynocephali howled and bounded in our direction. The imperial demigods faltered, looking at each other for direction like, Who do we attack? The bull? The emo kid? Dad? Each other? (This is the problem when you raise your children to be paranoid murderers.)
“Vercorix!” Nero shrieked, his voice a half-octave higher than usual. He leaped onto his couch, madly punching buttons on his Sassanid gas remote control and apparently deciding that it was not, in fact, his Sassanid gas remote control. “Bring me the other controls! Hurry!”
Halfway to the bull, Vercorix stumbled and reversed course for the coffee table, perhaps wondering why he’d taken this promotion and why Nero couldn’t fetch his own stupid remotes.
Meg tugged at my arm, shaking me from my stupor. “Get up!”
She dragged me out of the path of a cynocephalus, who landed next to us on all fours, snarling and slavering. Before I could decide whether to fight him with my bare hands or my bad breath, Nico leaped between us, his sword already in motion. He slashed the wolf-man into dust and dog fur.
“Hey, guys.” Nico’s swollen eye made him look even fiercer than usual. “You should probably find some weapons.”
I tried to remember how to speak. “How did you—? Wait, let me guess. Rachel sent you.”
“Yup.”
Our reunion was interrupted by the second wolf-headed warrior, who loped toward us more cautiously than his fallen comrade, edging sideways and looking for an opening. Nico fended him off with his sword and his scary cowboy hat, but I had a feeling we’d be getting more company soon.
Nero himself was still screaming on his sofa while Vercorix fumbled with the tray of remote controls. A few feet away from us, the Germani were piling on top of the skeleton bull. Some of the imperial demigods ran to help them, but three of the more devious members of the family were hanging back, eyeing us, no doubt pondering the best way to kill us so they could get a gold star from Daddy on their weekly chore chart.
“What about the Sassanid gas?” I asked Nico.
“Trogs still working on that.”
I muttered a curse that would not have been appropriate for the ears of a youngster like Meg, except that Meg had taught me this particular curse.
“Has Camp Half-Blood evacuated?” Meg asked. I was relieved to hear her join the conversation. It made me feel like she was still one of us.
Nico shook his head. “No. They’re fighting against Nero’s forces on every floor. We warned everyone about the gas, but they won’t leave until you guys leave.”
I felt a surge of gratitude and exasperation. Those stupid, beautiful Greek demigods, those brave, wonderful fools. I wanted to punch them all and then give them a big hug.
The cynocephalus lunged.
“Go!” Nico told us.
I sprinted toward the entrance where I’d dropped my supplies, Meg right beside me.
A Germanus flew overhead, kicked into oblivion by the bull. The zombie monster was about twenty feet from the emperor’s dais now, struggling to make it to the goal line, but it was losing momentum under the weight of a dozen bodies. The three devious demigods were now prowling in our direction, paralleling our course toward the front of the room.
By the time I reached my possessions, I was gasping and sweating like I’d just run a marathon. I scooped up my ukulele, nocked an arrow in my bow, and aimed at the approaching demigods, but two of them had disappeared. Perhaps they’d taken cover behind the columns? I fired at the only demigod still visible—Aemillia, was it?—but either I was weak and slow, or she was exceptionally well trained. She dodged my shot and kept coming.
>
“What about weapons for you?” I asked Meg, nocking another arrow.
She chin-pointed toward her foster sibling. “I’ll take hers. You concentrate on Nero.”
Off she ran in her silk dress and sandals like she was about to lay waste to a black-tie event.
Nico was still dueling with the wolf-dude. The zombie bull finally collapsed under the weight of Team Nero, meaning it wouldn’t be long before the Germani came looking for new targets to tackle.
Vercorix tripped and fell as he reached the emperor’s sofa, spilling the entire tray of remote controls across the cushions.
“That one! That one!” Nero yelled unhelpfully, pointing to all of them.
I took aim at Nero’s chest. I was thinking how good it would feel to make this shot when someone leaped out of nowhere and stabbed me in the ribs.
Clever Apollo! I had found one of the missing demigods.
It was one of Nero’s older boys—Lucius, perhaps? I would have apologized for not remembering his name, but since he had just driven a dagger into my side and now had me locked in a death embrace, I decided we could dispense with formalities. My vision swam. My lungs refused to fill with air.
Across the room, Meg fought bare-handed against Aemillia and the third missing demigod, who had apparently also been waiting in ambush.
Lucius drove his knife in deeper. I struggled, sensing with detached medical interest that my ribs had done their job. They’d deflected the blade from my vital organs, which was great except for the excruciating pain of having a knife embedded between my skin and rib cage, and the massive amount of blood now soaking through my shirt.
I couldn’t shake Lucius. He was too strong, too close. In desperation, I yanked back my fist and gave him a big thumbs-up right in the eye.
He screamed and staggered away. Eye injuries—the absolute worst. I’m a medical god and they even make me squeamish.