The Tower of Nero Read online

  “She is.”

  “So why can’t she take out this guardian and destroy the fasces herself?” he asked. “Why does she need…you know, you guys to get yourself captured?”

  Nico phrased the question diplomatically, but I heard what he meant. If Lu couldn’t take out this guardian, how could I, Lester Papadopoulos, the Not So Huge or Mighty?

  “Dunno,” Meg said. “But there must be a reason.”

  Like Lu would rather see us get killed, I thought, but I knew better than to say that.

  “Let’s assume Lu is right,” Nico said. “You get captured and put in this cell. She lets you out. You kill the guardian, destroy the fasces, weaken Nero, hooray. Even then, and I’m sorry to be a Debbie Downer—”

  “I am calling you Debbie Downer from now on,” Will said gleefully.

  “Shut up, Solace. Even then, you’ve got half a tower and Nero’s whole army of security guards between you and his throne room, right?”

  “We’ve dealt with whole armies before,” Meg said.

  Nico laughed, which I didn’t know he was capable of. “Okay. I like the confidence. But wasn’t there that little detail about Nero’s panic switch? If he feels threatened, he can blow up New York at the push of a button. How do you stop that?”

  “Oh…” Rachel muttered a curse not appropriate for priestesses. “That must be what these are for.”

  Her hands trembling, she flipped to another page of the blueprints.

  “I asked my dad’s senior architect about them,” she said. “He couldn’t figure them out. Said there’s no way the blueprints could be right. Sixty feet underground, surrounded by triple retaining walls. Giant vats, like the building has its own reservoir or water-treatment facility. It’s connected to the city’s sewer mains, but the separate electrical grid, the generators, these pumps…It’s like the whole system is designed to blast water outward and flood the city.”

  “Except not with water,” Will said. “With Greek fire.”

  “Debbie Downer,” Nico muttered.

  I stared at the schematics, trying to imagine how such a system could have been built. During our last battle in the Bay Area, Meg and I had seen more Greek fire than had existed in the whole history of the Byzantine Empire. Nero had more. Exponentially more. It seemed impossible, but the emperor had had hundreds of years to plan, and almost infinite resources. Leave it to Nero to spend most of his money on a self-destruct system.

  “He’ll burn up, too,” I marveled. “All his family and guards, and his precious tower.”

  “Maybe not,” Rachel said. “The building is designed for self-containment. Thermal insulation, closed air circulation, reinforced heat-resistant materials. Even the windows are special blast-proof panes. Nero could burn the city down around him, and his tower would be the only thing left standing.”

  Meg crumpled her empty Yoo-hoo box. “Sounds like him.”

  Will studied the plans. “I’m not an expert on reading these things, but where are the access points to the vats?”

  “There’s only one,” Rachel said. “Sealed off, automated, heavily guarded, and under constant surveillance. Even if you could break or sneak through, you wouldn’t have enough time to disable the generators before Nero pushed his panic button.”

  “Unless,” Nico said, “you tunneled your way into those reservoirs from underneath. You could sabotage his whole delivery system without Nero ever knowing.”

  “Aaand we’re back to that terrible idea,” Will said.

  “They’re the best tunnelers in the world,” Nico insisted. “They could get through all that concrete and steel and Celestial bronze with no one even noticing. This is our part of the plan, Will. While Apollo and Meg are getting themselves captured, keeping Nero distracted, we go underground and take out his doomsday weapon.”

  “Hold on, Nico,” I said. “It’s high time you explained who these cave-runners are.”

  The son of Hades fixed his dark eyes on me as if I were another layer of concrete to dig through. “A few months ago, I made contact with the troglodytes.”

  I choked on a laugh. Nico’s claim was the most ridiculous thing I’d heard since Mars swore to me that Elvis Presley was alive on, well, Mars.

  “Troglodytes are a myth,” I said.

  Nico frowned. “A god is telling a demigod that something is a myth?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean! They aren’t real. That trashy author Aelian made them up to sell more copies of his books back in ancient Rome. A race of subterranean humanoids who eat lizards and fight bulls? Please. I’ve never seen them. Not once in my millennia of life.”

  “Did it ever occur to you,” Nico said, “that troglodytes might go out of their way to hide from a sun god? They hate the light.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Did you ever actually look for them?” Nico persisted.

  “Well, no, but—”

  “They’re real,” Will confirmed. “Unfortunately, Nico found them.”

  I tried to process this information. I’d never taken Aelian’s stories about the troglodytes seriously. To be fair, though, I hadn’t believed in rocs, either, until the day one flew over my sun chariot and bowel-bombed me. That was a bad day for me, the roc, and several countries that my swerving chariot set on fire.

  “If you say so. But do you know how to find the troglodytes again?” I asked. “Do you think they would help us?”

  “Those are two different questions,” Nico said. “But I think I can convince them to help. Maybe. If they like the gift I got them. And if they don’t kill us on sight.”

  “I love this plan,” Will grumbled.

  “Guys,” Rachel said, “you forgot about me.”

  I stared at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m coming, too.”

  “Certainly not!” I protested. “You’re mortal!”

  “And essential,” Rachel said. “Your prophecy told you so. A Dare reveals the path that was unknown. All I’ve done so far is show you blueprints, but I can do more. I can see things you can’t. Besides, I’ve got a personal stake in this. If you don’t survive the Tower of Nero, you can’t fight Python. And if you can’t defeat him…”

  Her voice faltered. She swallowed and doubled over, choking.

  At first, I thought some of her Yoo-hoo might have gone down the wrong way. I patted her on the back unhelpfully. Then she sat up again, her back rigid, her eyes glowing. Smoke billowed from her mouth, which is not something normally caused by chocolate drinks.

  Will, Nico, and Meg scooted away in their beanbags.

  I would have done the same, but for half a second I thought I understood what was happening: a prophecy! Her Delphic powers had broken through!

  Then, with sickening dread, I realized this smoke was the wrong color: pallid yellow instead of dark green. And the stench…sour and decayed, like it was wafting straight from Python’s armpits.

  When Rachel spoke, it was with Python’s voice—a gravely rumble, charged with malice.

  “Apollo’s flesh and blood shall soon be mine.

  Alone he must descend into the dark,

  This sibyl never again to see his sign,

  Lest grappling with me till his final spark

  The god dissolves, leaving not a mark.”

  The smoke dissipated. Rachel slumped against me, her body limp.

  CRASH! A sound like shattering metal shook my bones. I was so terrified, I wasn’t sure if the noise was from somewhere outside, or if it was just my nervous system shutting down.

  Nico got up and ran to the windows. Meg scrambled over to help me with Rachel. Will checked her pulse and started to say, “We need to get her—”

  “Hey!” Nico turned from the window, his face pale with shock. “We have to get out of here now. The cows are attacking.”

  IN NO CONTEXT CAN THE COWS ARE ATTACKING be considered good news.

  Will picked up Rachel in a firefighter’s carry—for a gentle healer, he was deceptively strong—and togethe
r we jogged over to join Nico at the window.

  In the railyard below, the cows were staging a revolution. They’d busted through the sides of their cattle cars like an avalanche through a picket fence and were now stampeding toward the Dare residence. I suspected the cattle hadn’t been trapped in those cars at all. They’d simply been waiting for the right moment to break out and kill us.

  They were beautiful in a nightmarish way. Each was twice the size of a normal bovine, with bright blue eyes and shaggy red hair that rippled in dizzying whorls like a living van Gogh painting. Both cows and bulls—yes, I could tell the difference; I was a cow expert—possessed huge curved horns that would have made excellent drinking cups for the largest and thirstiest of Lu’s Celtic kinfolk.

  A line of freight cars stood between us and the cows, but that didn’t deter the herd. They barreled straight through, toppling and flattening the cars like origami boxes.

  “Do we fight?” Meg asked, her voice full of doubt.

  The name of these creatures suddenly came back to me—too late, as usual. Earlier, I’d mentioned that troglodytes were known for fighting bulls, but I hadn’t put the facts together. Perhaps Nero had parked the cattle cars here as a trap, knowing we might seek out Rachel’s help. Or perhaps their presence was simply the Fates’ cruel way of laughing at me. Oh, you want to play the troglodyte card? We counter with cows!

  “Fighting would be no use,” I said miserably. “Those are tauri silvestres—forest bulls, the Romans called them. Their hides cannot be pierced. According to legend, the tauri are ancestral enemies of Nico’s friends, the troglodytes.”

  “So now you believe the trogs exist?” Nico asked.

  “I am learning to believe in all sorts of things that can kill me!”

  The first wave of cattle reached the Dares’ retaining wall. They plowed through it and charged the house.

  “We need to run!” I said, exercising my noble duty as Lord Obvious of Duh.

  Nico led the way. Will followed close behind with Rachel still draped over his shoulder, Meg and me at his back.

  We were halfway down the hall when the house began to shake. Cracks zigzagged up the walls. At the top of the floating staircase, we discovered (fun fact) a floating staircase will cease to float if a forest bull tries to climb it. The lower steps had been stripped from the wall. Bulls rampaged through the corridor below like a crowd of Black Friday bargain hunters, stomping on broken steps and crashing through the atrium’s glass walls, renovating the Dares’ house with extreme prejudice.

  “At least they can’t get up here,” Will said.

  The floor shook again as the tauri took out another wall.

  “We’ll be down there soon enough,” Meg said. “Is there another way out?”

  Rachel groaned. “Me. Down.”

  Will eased her to her feet. She swayed and blinked, trying to process the scene below us.

  “Cows,” Rachel said.

  “Yeah,” Nico agreed.

  Rachel pointed weakly down the hall we’d come from. “This way.”

  Using Meg as a crutch, Rachel led us back toward her bedroom. She took a sharp right, then clambered down another set of stairs into the garage. On the polished concrete floor sat two Ferraris, both bright red—because why have one midlife crisis when you can have two? In the house behind us, I could hear the cows bellowing angrily, crashing and smashing as they remodeled the Dare compound for that hot apocalyptic barnyard look.

  “Keys,” Rachel said. “Look for car keys!”

  Will, Nico, and I scrambled into action. We found no keys in the cars—that would have been too convenient. No keys on the wall hooks, in the storage bins, or on the shelves. Either Mr. Dare kept the keys with him at all times, or the Ferraris were meant to be purely decorative.

  “Nothing!” I said.

  Rachel muttered something about her father that I won’t repeat. “Never mind.” She hit a button on the wall. The garage door began to rumble open. “I’m feeling better. We’ll go on foot.”

  We spilled into the street and headed north as fast as Rachel could hobble. We were half a block away when the Dare residence shuddered, groaned, and imploded, exhaling a mushroom cloud of dust and debris.

  “Rachel, I’m so sorry,” Will said.

  “Don’t care. I hated that place anyway. Dad will just move us to one of his other mansions.”

  “But your art!” Meg said.

  Rachel’s expression tightened. “Art can be made again. People can’t. Keep moving!”

  I knew we wouldn’t have long before the tauri silvestres found us. Along this part of the Brooklyn waterfront, the blocks were long, the roads wide, and the sight lines clear—perfect for a supernatural stampede. We had almost made it to the pineapple matcha café when Meg yelled, “The Sylvesters are coming!”

  “Meg,” I wheezed, “the cows are not all named Sylvester.”

  She was right about the threat, though. The demon cattle, apparently unfazed by a building falling on them, emerged from the wreckage of Chez Dare. The herd began to regroup in the middle of the street, shaking rubble from their red hides like dogs fresh from a bath.

  “Get out of sight?” Nico asked, pointing to the café.

  “Too late,” Will said.

  The cows had spotted us. A dozen sets of blue eyes fixed on our position. The tauri raised their heads, mooed their battle moos, and charged. I suppose we could have still ducked into the café, just so the cows would destroy it and save the neighborhood from the threat of avocado bagels. Instead, we ran.

  I realized this would only delay the inevitable. Even if Rachel hadn’t been groggy from her snake-induced trance, we couldn’t outrun the cows.

  “They’re gaining!” Meg yelled. “You sure we can’t fight them?”

  “You want to try?” I asked. “After what they did to the house?”

  “So what’s their weakness?” Rachel asked. “They have to have an Achilles’ heel!”

  Why did people always assume this? Why did they obsess about an Achilles’ heel? Just because one Greek hero had a vulnerable spot behind his foot, that didn’t mean every monster, demigod, and villain from ancient Greek times also had a podiatric problem. Most monsters, in fact, did not have a secret weakness. They were annoying that way.

  Nevertheless, I racked my brain for any factoids I might have gleaned from Aelian’s trashy best seller On the Nature of Animals. (Not that I normally read such things, of course.)

  “Pits?” I speculated. “I think farmers in Ethiopia used pits against the tauri.”

  “Like peach pits?” Meg asked.

  “No, like pits in the ground!”

  “Fresh out of pits!” Rachel said.

  The tauri had halved the distance between us. Another hundred yards and they would smash us into road jelly.

  “There!” Nico yelled. “Follow me!”

  He sprinted into the lead.

  I had to give him credit. When Nico chose a pit, he went for broke. He ran to the luxury-apartment construction site, summoned his black Stygian sword from thin air, and slashed through the chain-link fence. We followed him inside, where a narrow rim of trailers and portable potties surrounded a fifty-foot-deep square crater. A giant crane rose from the center of the chasm, its jib extending toward us at just about knee-level. The site seemed abandoned. Perhaps it was lunch hour? Perhaps all the workers were at the pineapple matcha café? Whatever the case, I was glad not to have mortals in the way of danger.

  (Look at me, caring about innocent bystanders. The other Olympians would have teased me mercilessly.)

  “Nico,” Rachel said, “this is more of a canyon.”

  “It’s all we’ve got!” Nico ran to the edge of the pit…and jumped.

  My heart felt like it jumped with him. I may have screamed.

  Nico sailed over the abyss and landed on the crane’s arm without even stumbling. He turned and extended his arm. “Come on! It’s only like eight feet. We practice bigger jumps at camp over lava!�
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  “Maybe you do,” I said.

  The ground shook. The herd was right behind us.

  Will backed up, took a running leap, and landed next to Nico. He looked back at us with a reassuring nod. “See? It’s not that bad! We’ll grab you!”

  Rachel went next—no problem. Then Meg, the flying valentine. When her feet hit the crane, the whole arm creaked and shifted to the right, forcing my friends into a surfer’s stance to catch their balance.

  “Apollo,” Rachel said, “hurry!”

  She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking behind me. The rumble of the herd was now a jackhammer in my spine.

  I leaped, landing on the crane arm with the greatest belly flop since Icarus crashed into the Aegean.

  My friends grabbed my arms to keep me from rolling into the abyss. I sat up, wheezing and groaning, just as the tauri reached the edge of the pit.

  I hoped they would charge over and fall to their deaths like lemmings. Though, of course, lemmings don’t actually do that. Bless their tiny hearts, lemmings are too smart to commit mass suicide. Unfortunately, so were the devil cows.

  The first few tauri did indeed topple into the pit, unable to stop their momentum, but the rest of the herd successfully applied the brakes. There was a great deal of shoving and jostling and angry mooing from the back ranks, but it appeared that the one thing a forest bull could not smash through was another forest bull.

  I muttered some bad words I hadn’t used since #MinoansFirst was trending on social media. Across the narrow gap, the tauri stared at us with their murderous baby-blue eyes. The sour stench of their breath and the funk of their hides made my nostrils want to curl inward and die. The animals fanned out around the lip of the chasm, but none tried to jump to the crane arm. Perhaps they’d learned their lesson from the Dares’ floating staircase. Or perhaps they were smart enough to realize that hooves wouldn’t do them much good on narrow steel girders.

  Far below, the half dozen fallen cattle were starting to get up, apparently unhurt by the fifty-foot drop. They paced around, mooing in outrage. Around the rim of the pit, the rest of the herd stood in a silent vigil as their fallen comrades grew more and more distressed. The six didn’t seem physically injured, but their voices were clogged with rage. Their neck muscles bulged. Their eyes swelled. They stamped the ground, foamed at the mouth, and then, one by one, fell over and lay motionless. Their bodies began to wither, their flesh dissolving until only their empty red hides remained.