The Tower of Nero Read online

  At the corner of Eighty-First and First, I scanned the traffic. No sign of Germani yet. No monsters. No police or civilians screaming that they’d just witnessed a Gaulish warrior fall from the sky.

  “What now?” I asked, really hoping Meg had an answer.

  From her belt pouches, Meg fished out the item Lu had given her: a shiny golden Roman coin. Despite everything we’d just been through, I detected a gleam of excitement in my young friend’s eyes.

  “Now I summon a ride,” she said.

  With a cold flush of dread, I understood what she was talking about. I realized why Luguselwa had given her that coin, and part of me wished I had thrown the Gaul a few more blocks.

  “Oh, no,” I pleaded. “You can’t mean them. Not them!”

  “They’re great,” Meg insisted.

  “No, they are not great! They’re awful!”

  “Maybe don’t tell them that,” Meg said, then she threw the coin into the street and yelled in Latin, “Stop, O Chariot of Damnation!”

  CALL ME SUPERSTITIOUS. IF YOU’RE GOING to hail a chariot, you should at least try for one that doesn’t have damnation right there in the name.

  Meg’s coin hit the pavement and disappeared in a flash. Instantly, a car-size section of asphalt liquefied into a boiling pool of blood and tar. (At least that’s what it looked like. I did not test the ingredients.)

  A taxi erupted from the goo like a submarine breaking the surface. It was similar to a standard New York cab, but gray instead of yellow: the color of dust, or tombstones, or probably my face at that moment. Painted across the door were the words GRAY SISTERS. Inside, sitting shoulder to shoulder across the driver’s bench, were the three old hags (excuse me, the three mature female siblings) themselves.

  The passenger-side window rolled down. The sister riding shotgun stuck out her head and croaked, “Passage? Passage?”

  She was just as lovely as I remembered: a face like a rubber Halloween mask, sunken craters where her eyes should have been, and a cobweb-and-linen shawl over her bristly white hair.

  “Hello, Tempest.” I sighed. “It’s been a while.”

  She tilted her head. “Who’s that? Don’t recognize your voice. Passage or not? We have other fares!”

  “It is I,” I said miserably. “The god Apollo.”

  Tempest sniffed the air. She smacked her lips, running her tongue over her single yellow tooth. “Don’t sound like Apollo. Don’t smell like Apollo. Let me bite you.”

  “Um, no,” I said. “You’ll have to take my word for it. We need—”

  “Wait.” Meg looked at me in wonder. “You know the Gray Sisters?”

  She said this as if I’d been holding out on her—as if I knew all three founding members of Bananarama and had not yet gotten Meg their autographs. (My history with Bananarama—how I introduced them to the actual Venus and inspired their number one–hit cover of that song—is a story for another time.)

  “Yes, Meg,” I said. “I am a god. I know people.”

  Tempest grunted. “Don’t smell like a god.” She yelled at the sister on her left: “Wasp, take a gander. Who is this guy?”

  The middle sister shoved her way to the window. She looked almost exactly like Tempest—to tell them apart, you’d have to have known them for a few millennia, which, unfortunately, I had—but today she had the trio’s single communal eye: a slimy, milky orb that peered at me from the depths of her left socket.

  As unhappy as I was to see her again, I was even more unhappy that, by process of elimination, the third sister, Anger, had to be driving the taxi. Having Anger behind the wheel was never a good thing.

  “It’s some mortal boy with a blood-soaked bandana on his head,” Wasp pronounced after ogling me. “Not interesting. Not a god.”

  “That’s just hurtful,” I said. “It is me. Apollo.”

  Meg threw her hands up. “Does it matter? I paid a coin. Can we get in, please?”

  You might think Meg had a point. Why did I want to reveal myself? The thing was, the Gray Sisters would not take regular mortals in their cab. Also, given my history with them, I thought it best to be up-front about my identity, rather than have the Gray Sisters find out halfway through the ride and chuck me out of a moving vehicle.

  “Ladies,” I said, using the term loosely, “I may not look like Apollo, but I assure you it’s me, trapped in this mortal body. Otherwise, how could I know so much about you?”

  “Like what?” demanded Tempest.

  “Your favorite nectar flavor is caramel crème,” I said. “Your favorite Beatle is Ringo. For centuries, all three of you had a massive crush on Ganymede, but now you like—”

  “He’s Apollo!” Wasp yelped.

  “Definitely Apollo!” Tempest wailed. “Annoying! Knows things!”

  “Let me in,” I said, “and I’ll shut up.”

  That wasn’t an offer I usually made.

  The back-door lock popped up. I held the door open for Meg.

  She grinned. “Who do they like now?”

  I mouthed, Tell you later.

  Inside, we strapped ourselves in with black chain seat belts. The bench was about as comfortable as a beanbag stuffed with silverware.

  Behind the wheel, the third sister, Anger, grumbled, “Where to?”

  I said, “Camp—”

  Anger hit the gas. My head slammed into the backrest, and Manhattan blurred into a light-speed smear. I hoped Anger understood I meant Camp Half-Blood, or we might end up at Camp Jupiter, Camp David, or Campobello, New Brunswick, though I suspected those were outside the Gray Sisters’ regular service area.

  The cab’s TV monitor flickered to life. An orchestra and a studio audience laugh track blared from the speaker. “Every night at eleven!” an announcer said. “It’s…Late Night with Thalia!”

  I mashed the OFF button as fast as I could.

  “I like the commercials,” Meg complained.

  “They’ll rot your brain,” I said.

  In truth, Late Night with Thalia! had once been my favorite show. Thalia (the Muse of comedy, not my demigod comrade Thalia Grace) had invited me on dozens of times as the featured musical guest. I’d sat on her sofa, traded jokes with her, played her silly games like Smite that City! and Prank Call Prophecy. But now I didn’t want any more reminders of my former divine life.

  Not that I missed it. I was…Yes, I’m going to say it. I was embarrassed by the things I used to consider important. Ratings. Worshippers. The rise and fall of civilizations that liked me best. What were these things compared to keeping my friends safe? New York could not burn. Little Estelle Blofis had to grow up free to giggle and dominate the planet. Nero had to pay. I could not have gotten my face nearly chopped off that morning and thrown Luguselwa into a parked car two blocks away for nothing.

  Meg appeared unfazed by my dark mood and her own wounded leg.

  Deprived of commercials, she sat back and watched the blur of landscape out the window—the East River, then Queens, zipping by at a speed that mortal commuters could only dream of…which, to be fair, was anything above ten miles an hour. Anger steered, completely blind, as Wasp occasionally called out course corrections. “Left. Brake. Left. No, the other left!”

  “So cool,” Meg said. “I love this cab.”

  I frowned. “Have you taken the Gray Sisters’ cab often?”

  My tone was the same as one might say You enjoy homework?

  “It was a special treat,” Meg said. “When Lu decided I’d trained really well, we’d go for rides.”

  I tried to wrap my mind around the concept of this mode of transportation as a treat. Truly, the emperor’s household was a twisted, evil place.

  “The girl has taste!” Wasp cried. “We are the best way around the New York area! Don’t trust those ride-sharing services! Most of them are run by unlicensed harpies.”

  “Harpies!” Tempest howled.

  “Stealing our business!” Anger agreed.

  I had a momentary vision of our friend Ella
behind the wheel of a car. It made me almost glad to be in this taxi. Almost.

  “We’ve upgraded our service, too!” Tempest boasted.

  I forced myself to focus on her eye sockets. “How?”

  “You can use our app!” she said. “You don’t have to summon us with gold coins anymore!”

  She pointed to a sign on the Plexiglas partition. Apparently, I could now link my favorite magic weapon to their cab and pay via virtual drachma using something called GRAY RYYD.

  I shuddered to think what the Arrow of Dodona might do if I allowed it to make online purchases. If I ever got back to Olympus, I’d find my accounts frozen and my palace in foreclosure because the arrow had bought every known copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio.

  “Cash is fine,” I said.

  Wasp grumbled to Anger, “You and your predictions. I told you the app was a stupid idea.”

  “Stopping for Apollo was stupider,” she muttered back. “That was your prediction.”

  “You’re both stupid!” snapped Tempest. “That’s my prediction!”

  The reasons for my long-standing dislike of the Gray Sisters were starting to come back to me. It wasn’t just that they were ugly, rude, gross, and smelled of grave rot. Or that the three of them shared one eye, one tooth, and zero social skills.

  It wasn’t even the awful job they did hiding their celebrity crushes. In ancient Greek days, they’d had a crush on me, which was uncomfortable, but at least understandable. Then—if you can believe it—they got over me. For the past few centuries they’d been in the Ganymede Fan Club. Their Instagod posts about how hot he was got so annoying, I finally had to leave a snarky comment. You know that meme with the honey bear and the caption honey, he gay? Yes, I created that. And in Ganymede’s case, it was hardly news.

  These days they’d decided to have a collective crush on Deimos, the god of fear, which just made no romantic sense to me. Sure, he’s buff, and he has nice eyes, but…

  Wait. What was I talking about again?

  Oh, right. The biggest friction between the Gray Sisters and me was professional jealousy.

  I was a god of prophecy. The Gray Sisters told the future, too, but they weren’t under my corporate umbrella. They paid me no tribute, no royalties, nothing. They got their wisdom from…Actually, I didn’t know. Rumor had it they were born of the primal sea gods, created from swirls of foam and scum, so they knew little bits of wisdom and prophecy that got swept up in the tides. Whatever the case, I didn’t like them poaching my territory, and for some inexplicable reason, they didn’t like me back.

  Their predictions…Hold on. I did a mental rewind. “Did you say something about predicting you would pick me up?”

  “Ha!” Tempest said. “Wouldn’t you like to know!”

  Anger cackled. “As if we would share that bit of doggerel we have for you—”

  “Shut up, Anger!” Wasp slapped her sister. “He didn’t ask yet!”

  Meg perked up. “You have a dog for Apollo?”

  I cursed under my breath. I saw where this conversation was going. The Three Sisters loved to play coy with their auguries. They liked to make their passengers beg and plead to find out what they knew about the future. But really, the old gray dingbats were dying to share.

  In the past, every time I’d agreed to listen to their so-called prophetic poetry, it turned out to be a prediction of what I would have for lunch, or an expert opinion about which Olympian god I most resembled. (Hint: It was never Apollo.) Then they would pester me for a critique and ask if I would share their poetry with my literary agent. Ugh.

  I wasn’t sure what tidbits they might have for me this time, but I was not going to give them the satisfaction of asking. I already had enough actual prophetic verse to worry about.

  “Doggerel,” I explained for Meg’s sake, “means a few irregular lines of poetry. With these three, that’s redundant, since everything they do is irregular.”

  “We won’t tell you, then!” Wasp threatened.

  “We will never tell!” Anger agreed.

  “I didn’t ask,” I said blandly.

  “I want to hear about the dog,” Meg said.

  “No, you don’t,” I assured her.

  Outside, Queens blurred into the Long Island suburbs. In the front seat, the Gray Sisters practically quivered with eagerness to spill what they knew.

  “Very important words!” Wasp said. “But you’ll never hear them!”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  “You can’t make us!” Tempest said. “Even though your fate depends on it!”

  A hint of doubt crept into my cranium. Was it possible—? No, surely not. If I fell for their tricks, I’d most likely get the Gray Sisters’ hot take on which facial products were perfect for my skin undertones.

  “Not buying it,” I said.

  “Not selling!” Wasp shrieked. “Too important, these lines! We would only tell you if you threatened us with terrible things!”

  “I will not resort to threatening you—”

  “He’s threatening us!” Tempest flailed. She slammed Wasp on the back so hard the communal eyeball popped right out of her socket. Wasp snatched it—and with a terrible show of fumbling, intentionally chucked it over her shoulder, right into my lap.

  I screamed.

  The sisters screamed, too. Anger, now bereft of guidance, swerved all over the road, sending my stomach into my esophagus.

  “He’s stolen our eye!” cried Tempest. “We can’t see!”

  “I have not!” I yelped. “It’s disgusting!”

  Meg whooped with pleasure. “THIS. IS. SO. COOL!”

  “Get it off!” I squirmed and tilted my hips, hoping the eye would roll away, but it stayed stubbornly in my lap, staring up at me with the accusatory glare of a dead catfish. Meg did not help. Clearly, she didn’t want to do anything that might interfere with the coolness of us dying in a faster-than-light car crash.

  “He will crush our eye,” Anger cried, “if we don’t recite our verses!”

  “I will not!”

  “We will all die!” Wasp said. “He is crazy!”

  “I AM NOT!”

  “Fine, you win!” Tempest howled. She drew herself up and recited as if performing for the people in Connecticut ten miles away: “A dare reveals the path that was unknown!”

  Anger chimed in: “And bears destruction; lion, snake-entwined!”

  Wasp concluded: “Or else the princeps never be o’erthrown!”

  Meg clapped.

  I stared at the Gray Sisters in disbelief. “That wasn’t doggerel. That was terza rima! You just gave us the next stanza of our actual prophecy!”

  “Well, that’s all we’ve got for you!” Anger said. “Now give me the eye, quick. We’re almost at camp!”

  Panic overcame my shock. If Anger couldn’t stop at our destination, we’d accelerate past the point of no return and vaporize in a colorful streak of plasma across Long Island.

  And yet that still sounded better than touching the eyeball in my lap. “Meg! Kleenex?”

  She snorted. “Wimp.” She scooped up the eye with her bare hand and tossed it to Anger.

  Anger shoved the eye in her socket. She blinked at the road, yelled “YIKES!” and slammed on the brakes so hard my chin hit my sternum.

  Once the smoke cleared, I saw we had skidded to a stop on the old farm road just outside of camp. To our left loomed Half-Blood Hill, a single great pine tree rising from its summit, the Golden Fleece glittering from the lowest branch. Coiled around the base of the tree was Peleus the dragon. And standing next to the dragon, casually scratching its ears, was an old frenemy of mine: Dionysus, the god of doing things to annoy Apollo.

  PERHAPS THAT LAST COMMENT WAS UNFAIR.

  Dionysus was the god of other things, such as wine, madness, Oscar-night after-parties, and certain types of vegetation. But to me, he would always be the annoying little brother who followed me around, trying to get my attention by imitating everything I did.

&nb
sp; You know the type. You’re a god. Your little brother pesters Dad to make him a god, too, even though being a god is supposed to be your thing. You have a nice chariot pulled by fiery horses. Your little brother insists on getting his own chariot pulled by leopards. You lay waste to the Greek armies at Troy. Your little brother decides to invade India. Pretty typical stuff.

  Dionysus stood at the top of the hill, as if he’d been expecting us. Being a god, maybe he had. His leopard-skin golf shirt matched the Golden Fleece in the branch above him quite well. His mauve golf slacks did not. In the old days, I might have teased him about his taste in clothes. Now, I couldn’t risk it.

  A lump formed in my throat. I was already carsick from our taxi ride and our impromptu game of catch-the-eyeball. My wounded forehead throbbed. My brain swirled with the new lines of prophecy the Gray Sisters had given us. I didn’t need any more things to worry about. But seeing Dionysus again…This would be complicated.

  Meg slammed the taxi door behind her. “Thanks, guys!” she told the Gray Sisters. “Next time, tell me about the dog!”

  Without so much as a good-bye or a plea to share their poetry with my literary agent, the Gray Sisters submerged in a pool of red-black tar.

  Meg squinted up at the hill’s summit. “Who’s that guy? We didn’t meet him before.” She sounded suspicious, as if he were intruding on her territory.

  “That,” I said, “is the god Dionysus.”

  Meg frowned. “Why?”

  She might have meant Why is he a god? Why is he standing up there? or Why is this our life? All three questions were equally valid.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s find out.”

  Trekking up the hill, I fought the urge to burst into hysterical sobbing or laughter. Probably I was going into shock. It had been a rough day, and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. However, given the fact that we were approaching the god of madness, I had to consider the more serious possibility that I was having a psychotic or manic break.

  I already felt disconnected from reality. I couldn’t concentrate. I didn’t know who I was, who I was supposed to be, or even who I wanted to be. I was getting emotional whiplash from my exhilarating surges of godlike power, my depressing crashes back into mortal frailty, and my adrenaline-charged bouts of terror. In such a condition, approaching Dionysus was asking for trouble. Just being near him could widen the cracks in anyone’s psyche.