The Tower of Nero Page 7

  Meg and I reached the summit. Peleus welcomed us with a puff of steam from his nostrils. Meg gave the dragon a hug around the neck, which I’m not sure I would have recommended. Dragons are notoriously not huggers.

  Dionysus eyed me with a mixture of shock and horror, much the same way I looked at myself in the mirror these days.

  “So, it’s true, what Father did to you,” he said. “That cold-hearted glámon.”

  In Ancient Greek, glámon meant something like dirty old man. Given Zeus’s romantic track record, I doubted he would even consider it an insult.

  Dionysus gripped my shoulders.

  I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  He looked the same as he had for the past half century: a short middle-aged man with a potbelly, sagging jowls, a red nose, and curly black hair. The violet tint of his irises was the only indicator that he might be more than human.

  Other Olympians could never comprehend why Dionysus chose this form when he could look like anything he wanted. In ancient times, he’d been famous for his youthful beauty that defied gender.

  But I understood. For the crime of chasing the wrong nymph (translation: one our father wanted instead), Dionysus had been sentenced to run this camp for a hundred years. He had been denied wine, his most noble creation, and forbidden access to Olympus except for special meeting days.

  In retaliation, Dionysus had decided to look and act as ungodly as possible. He was like a child refusing to tuck in his shirt, comb his hair, or brush his teeth, just to show his parents how little he cared.

  “Poor, poor Apollo.” He hugged me. His hair smelled faintly of grape-flavored bubble gum.

  This unexpected show of sympathy brought me close to tears…until Dionysus pulled away, held me at arm’s length, and gave me a triumphant smirk.

  “Now you understand how miserable I’ve been,” he said. “Finally, someone got punished even more harshly than me!”

  I nodded, swallowing back a sob. Here was the old, on-brand Dionysus I knew and didn’t exactly love. “Yes. Hello, Brother. This is Meg—”

  “Don’t care.” Dionysus’s eyes remained fixed on me, his tone infused with joy.

  “Hmph.” Meg crossed her arms. “Where’s Chiron? I liked him better.”

  “Who?” Dionysus said. “Oh, him. Long story. Let’s get you into camp, Apollo. I can’t wait to show you off to the demigods. You look horrible!”

  We took the long way through camp. Dionysus seemed determined to make sure everyone saw me.

  “This is Mr. A,” he told all the newcomers we encountered. “He’s my assistant. If you have any complaints or problems—toilets backing up or whatnot—talk to him.”

  “Could you not?” I muttered.

  Dionysus smiled. “If I am Mr. D, you can be Mr. A.”

  “He’s Lester,” Meg complained. “And he’s my assistant.”

  Dionysus ignored her. “Oh, look, another batch of first-year campers! Let’s go introduce you.”

  My legs were wobbly. My head ached. I needed lunch, rest, antibiotics, and a new identity, not necessarily in that order. But we trudged on.

  The camp was busier than it had been the winter when Meg and I first straggled in. Then, only a core group of year-rounders had been present. Now, waves of newly discovered demigods were arriving for the summer—dozens of dazed kids from all over the world, many still accompanied by the satyrs who had located them. Some demigods, who, evidently, had recently fought off monsters, were injured even worse than I was, which I suppose is why Meg and I didn’t get more stares.

  We made our way through the camp’s central green. Around its edges, most of the twenty cabins buzzed with activity. Senior counselors stood in the doorways, welcoming new members or providing directions. At the Hermes cabin, Julia Feingold looked especially overwhelmed, trying to find temporary spots for all the campers still unclaimed by their godly parents. At the Ares cabin, Sherman Yang barked at anyone who got too close to the building, warning them to look out for the land mines around the perimeter. Whether or not that was a joke, no one seemed anxious to find out. Young Harley from the Hephaestus cabin dashed around with a huge grin on his face, challenging the newbies to arm-wrestling contests.

  Across the green, I spotted two of my own children—Austin and Kayla—but as much as I wanted to talk with them, they were embroiled in some sort of conflict resolution between a group of security harpies and a new kid who had apparently done something the harpies didn’t like. I caught Austin’s words: “No, you can’t just eat a new camper. They get two warnings first!”

  Even Dionysus didn’t want to get involved in that conversation. We kept walking.

  The damage from our wintertime battle against Nero’s Colossus had been mostly repaired, though some of the dining hall’s columns were still broken. Nestled between two hills was a new pond in the shape of a giant’s footprint. We passed the volleyball court, the sword-fighting arena, and the strawberry fields until finally Dionysus took pity on me and led us to camp headquarters.

  Compared to the camp’s Greek temples and amphitheaters, the four-story sky-blue Victorian known as the Big House looked quaint and homey. Its white trim gleamed like cake frosting. Its bronze eagle weathervane drifted lazily in the breeze. On its wraparound front porch, enjoying lemonade at the card table, sat Nico di Angelo and Will Solace.

  “Dad!” Will shot to his feet. He ran down the steps and tackled me in a hug.

  That’s when I lost it. I wept openly.

  My beautiful son, with his kind eyes, his healer’s hands, his sun-warm demeanor. Somehow, he had inherited all my best qualities and none of the worst. He guided me up the steps and insisted I take his seat. He pressed a cold glass of lemonade into my hands then started fussing over my wounded head.

  “I’m fine,” I murmured, though clearly I wasn’t.

  His boyfriend, Nico di Angelo, hovered at the edge of our reunion—observing, keeping to the shadows, as children of Hades tend to do. His dark hair had grown longer. He was barefoot, in tattered jeans and a black version of the camp’s standard T-shirt, with a skeletal pegasus on the front above the words CABIN 13.

  “Meg,” Nico said, “take my chair. Your leg looks bad.” He scowled at Dionysus, as if the god should have arranged a golf cart for us.

  “Yes, fine, sit.” Dionysus gestured listlessly at the card table. “I was attempting to teach Will and Nico the rules of pinochle, but they’re hopeless.”

  “Ooh, pinochle,” Meg said. “I like pinochle!”

  Dionysus narrowed his eyes as if Meg were a small dog who had suddenly begun to spout Emily Dickinson. “Is that so? Wonders never cease.”

  Nico met my gaze, his eyes pools of ink. “So, is it true? Is Jason…?”

  “Nico,” Will chided. “Don’t pressure him.”

  The ice cubes shook in my glass. I couldn’t make myself speak, but my expression must have told Nico everything he needed to know. Meg offered Nico her hand. He took it in both of his.

  He didn’t look angry, exactly. He looked as if he’d been hit in the gut not just once but so many times over the course of so many years that he was beginning to lose perspective on what it meant to be in pain. He swayed on his feet. He blinked. Then he flinched, jerking his hands away from Meg’s as if he’d just remembered his own touch was poison.

  “I…” he faltered. “Scusatemi.”

  He hurried down the steps and across the lawn, his bare feet leaving a trail of dead grass.

  Will shook his head. “He only slips into Italian when he’s really upset.”

  “The boy has had too much bad news already,” Dionysus said with a tone of grudging sympathy.

  I wanted to ask what he meant about bad news. I wanted to apologize for bringing more trouble. I wanted to explain all the tremendous and spectacular ways I had failed since the last time I had seen Camp Half-Blood.

  Instead, the lemonade glass slipped from my fingers. It shattered on the floor. I tipped sideways in my chair as Will’
s voice receded down a long dark tunnel. “Dad! Guys, help me!”

  Then I spiraled into unconsciousness.

  BAD DREAMS?

  Sure, why not!

  I suffered a series of Instagram-boomerang nightmares—the same short scenes looped over and over: Luguselwa hurtling over a rooftop. The amphisbaena staring at me in bewilderment as two crossbow bolts pinned his necks to the wall. The Gray Sisters’ eyeball flying into my lap and sticking there like it was coated in glue.

  I tried to channel my dreams in a more peaceful direction—my favorite beach in Fiji, my old festival day in Athens, the gig I played with Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club in 1930. Nothing worked.

  Instead, I found myself in Nero’s throne room.

  The loft space took up one whole floor of his tower. In every direction, glass walls looked out over the spires of Manhattan. In the center of the room, on a marble dais, the emperor sprawled across a gaudy velvet couch throne. His purple satin pajamas and tiger-striped bathrobe would’ve made Dionysus jealous. His crown of golden laurels sat askew on his head, which made me want to adjust the neck beard that wrapped around his chin like a strap.

  To his left stood a line of young people; demigods, I assumed—adopted members of the imperial family like Meg had been. I counted eleven in all, arranged from tallest to shortest, their ages ranging from about eighteen to eight. They wore purple-trimmed togas over their motley assortment of street clothes, to indicate their royal status. Their expressions were a case study in the results of Nero’s abusive parenting style. The youngest seemed struck with wonder, fear, and hero worship. The slightly older ones looked broken and traumatized, their eyes hollow. The adolescents showed a range of anger, resentment, and self-loathing, all bottled up and carefully not directed at Nero. The oldest teens looked like mini-Neros: cynical, hard, cruel junior sociopaths.

  I could not imagine Meg McCaffrey in that assembly. And yet, I couldn’t stop wondering where she would fall in the line of horrific expressions.

  Two Germani lumbered into the throne room carrying a stretcher. On it lay the large, battered form of Luguselwa. They set her down at Nero’s feet, and she let out a miserable groan. At least she was still alive.

  “The hunter returns empty-handed,” Nero sneered. “Plan B it is, then. A forty-eight-hour ultimatum seems reasonable.” He turned to his adopted children. “Lucius, double security at the storage vats. Aemillia, send out invitations. And order a cake. Something nice. It’s not every day we get to destroy a city the size of New York.”

  My dream-self plummeted through the tower into the depths of the earth.

  I stood in a vast cavern. I knew I must be somewhere beneath Delphi, the seat of my most sacred Oracle, because the soup of volcanic fumes swirling around me smelled like nothing else in the world. I could hear my archnemesis, Python, somewhere in the darkness, dragging his immense body over the stone floor.

  “You still do not see it.” His voice was a low rumble. “Oh, Apollo, bless your tiny, inadequate brain. You charge around, knocking over pieces, but you never look at the whole board. A few hours, at most. That is all it will take once the last pawn falls. And you will do the hard work for me!”

  His laughter was like an explosion sunk deep into stone, designed to bring down a hillside. Fear rolled over me until I could no longer breathe.

  I woke feeling like I’d spent hours trying to squirm out of a stone cocoon. Every muscle in my body ached.

  I wished I could just once wake up refreshed after a dream about getting seaweed wraps and pedicures with the Nine Muses. Oh, I missed our spa decades! But no. I got sneering emperors and giant laughing reptiles instead.

  I sat up, woozy and blurry-eyed. I was lying in my old cot in the Me cabin. Sunlight streamed through the windows—morning light? Had I really slept that long? Snuggled up next to me, something warm and furry was growling and snuffling in my pillow. At first glance, I thought it might be a pit bull, though I was fairly sure I did not own a pit bull. Then it looked up, and I realized it was the disembodied head of a leopard.

  One nanosecond later, I was standing at the opposite end of the cabin, screaming. It was the closest I’d come to teleporting since I’d lost my godly powers.

  “Oh, you’re awake!” My son Will emerged from the bathroom in a billow of steam, his blond hair dripping wet and a towel around his waist. On his left pectoral was a stylized sun tattoo, which seemed unnecessary to me—as if he could be mistaken for anything but a child of the sun god.

  He froze when he registered the panic in my eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  GRR! said the leopard.

  “Seymour?” Will marched over to my cot and picked up the leopard head—which at some point in the distant past had been taxidermied and stuck on a plaque, then liberated from a garage sale by Dionysus and granted new life. Normally, as I recalled, Seymour resided over the fireplace mantel in the Big House, which did not explain why he had been chewing on my pillow.

  “What are you doing here?” Will demanded of the leopard. Then, to me: “I swear I did not put him in your bed.”

  “I did.” Dionysus materialized right next to me.

  My tortured lungs could not manage another scream, but I leaped back an additional few inches.

  Dionysus gave me his patented smirk. “I thought you might like some company. I always sleep better with a teddy leopard.”

  “Very kind.” I tried my best to kill him with eye daggers. “But I prefer to sleep alone.”

  “As you wish. Seymour, back to the Big House.” Dionysus snapped his fingers and the leopard head vanished from Will’s hands.

  “Well, then…” Dionysus studied me. “Feeling better after nineteen hours of sleep?”

  I realized I was wearing nothing but my underwear. With my pale, lumpy mortal form covered in bruises and scars, I looked less than ever like a god and more like a grub that had been pried from the soil with a stick.

  “Feeling great,” I grumbled.

  “Excellent! Will, get him presentable. I’ll see you both at breakfast.”

  “Breakfast…?” I said in a daze.

  “Yes,” Dionysus said. “It’s the meal with pancakes. I do love pancakes.”

  He disappeared in a grape-scented cloud of glitter.

  “Such a show-off,” I muttered.

  Will laughed. “You really have changed.”

  “I wish people would stop pointing that out.”

  “It’s a good thing.”

  I looked down again at my battered body. “If you say so. Do you have any clothing, or possibly a burlap sack I might borrow?”

  Here’s all you need to know about Will Solace: he had clothes waiting for me. On his last trip into town, he’d gone shopping specifically for things that might fit me.

  “I figured you’d come back to camp eventually,” he said. “I hoped you would, anyway. I wanted you to feel at home.”

  It was enough to start me crying again. Gods, I was an emotional wreck. Will hadn’t inherited his thoughtfulness from me. That was all his mother, Naomi, bless her kind heart.

  I thought about giving Will a hug, but since we were clad in just underwear and a towel, respectively, that seemed awkward. He patted me on the shoulder instead.

  “Go take a shower,” he advised. “The others took an early-morning hike”—he gestured at the empty bunks—“but they’ll be back soon. I’ll wait for you.”

  Once I was showered and dressed—in a fresh pair of jeans and a V-necked olive tee, both of which fit perfectly—Will re-bandaged my forehead. He gave me some aspirin for my aching everything. I was starting to feel almost human again—in a good way—when a conch horn sounded in the distance, calling the camp to breakfast.

  On our way out of the cabin, we collided with Kayla and Austin, just returning from their hike with three younger campers in tow. More tears and hugs were exchanged.

  “You’ve grown up!” Kayla gripped my shoulders with her archery-strong hands. The June sunlight made her frec
kles more pronounced. The green-tinted tips of her orange hair made me think of Halloween-pumpkin candy. “You’re two inches taller at least! Isn’t he, Austin?”

  “Definitely,” Austin agreed.

  As a jazz musician, Austin was usually smooth and cool, but he gave me a serene smile like I’d just nailed a solo worthy of Ornette Coleman. His sleeveless orange camp tee showed off his dark arms. His cornrows were done in swirls like alien crop circles.

  “It’s not just the height,” he decided. “It’s the way you hold yourself.…”

  “Ahem,” said one of the kids behind him.

  “Oh, right. Sorry, guys!” Austin stepped aside. “We got three new campers this year, Dad. I’m sure you remember your children Gracie and Jerry and Yan.…Guys, this is Apollo!”

  Austin introduced them casually, like I know you don’t have a clue who these three kids are that you sired and forgot about twelve or thirteen years ago, but don’t worry, Dad, I got you.

  Jerry was from London, Gracie from Idaho, and Yan from Hong Kong. (When had I been in Hong Kong?) All three seemed stunned to meet me—but more in a you-have-to-be-kidding-me way, not in a wow-cool sort of way. I muttered some apologies about being a terrible father. The newcomers exchanged glances and apparently decided, by silent agreement, to put me out of my misery.

  “I’m famished,” Jerry said.

  “Yeah,” Gracie said. “Dining hall!”

  And off we trekked like one big super-awkward family.

  Campers from other cabins were also streaming toward the dining pavilion. I spotted Meg halfway up the hill, chatting excitedly with her siblings from the Demeter cabin. At her side trotted Peaches, her fruit-tree spirit companion. The little diapered fellow seemed quite happy, alternately flapping his leafy wings and grabbing Meg’s leg to get her attention. We hadn’t seen Peaches since Kentucky, as he tended to only show up in natural settings, or when Meg was in dire trouble, or when breakfast was about to be served.