The Hidden Oracle (The Trials of Apollo #1)(46)

I found my mortal healing skills were passable. Will Solace far outshone me, but that didn’t bother me as much as my failures with archery and music had. I suppose I was used to being second in healing. My son Asclepius had become the god of medicine by the time he was fifteen, and I couldn’t have been happier for him. It left me time for my other interests. Besides, it’s every god’s dream to have a child who grows up to be a doctor.

As I was washing up from the shrapnel extraction, Harley shuffled over, fiddling with his beacon device. His eyes were puffy from crying.

“It’s my fault,” he muttered. “I got them lost. I…I’m sorry.”

He was shaking. I realized the little boy was terrified of what I might do.

For the past two days, I had yearned to cause fear in mortals again. My stomach had boiled with resentment and bitterness. I wanted someone to blame for my predicament, for the disappearances, for my own powerlessness to fix things.

Looking at Harley, my anger evaporated. I felt hollow, silly, ashamed of myself. Yes, me, Apollo…ashamed. Truly, it was an event so unprecedented, it should have ripped apart the cosmos.

“It’s all right,” I told him.

He sniffled. “The racecourse went into the woods. It shouldn’t have done that. They got lost and…and—”

“Harley”—I placed my hands over his—“may I see your beacon?”

He blinked the tears away. I guess he was afraid I might smash his gadget, but he let me take it.

“I’m not an inventor,” I said, turning the gears as gently as possible. “I don’t have your father’s skills. But I do know music. I believe automatons prefer a frequency of E at 329.6 hertz. It resonates best with Celestial bronze. If you adjust your signal—”

“Festus might hear it?” Harley’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Just as you could not have known what the Labyrinth would do today. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Never stop inventing, son of Hephaestus.”

I gave him back his beacon. For a count of three, Harley stared at me in disbelief. Then he hugged me so hard he nearly rebroke my ribs, and he dashed away.

I tended to the last of the injured while the harpies cleaned the area, picking up bandages, torn clothing, and damaged weapons. They gathered the golden apples in a basket and promised to bake us some lovely glowing apple turnovers for breakfast.

At Chiron’s urging, the remaining campers dispersed back to their cabins. He promised them we would determine what to do in the morning, but I had no intention of waiting.

As soon as we were alone, I turned to Chiron and Meg.

“I’m going after Kayla and Austin,” I told them. “You can join me or not.”

Chiron’s expression tightened. “My friend, you’re exhausted and unprepared. Go back to your cabin. It will serve no purpose—”

“No.” I waved him off, as I once might have done when I was a god. The gesture probably looked petulant coming from a sixteen-year-old nobody, but I didn’t care. “I have to do this.”

The centaur lowered his head. “I should have listened to you before the race. You tried to warn me. What—what did you discover?”

The question stopped my momentum like a seat belt.

After rescuing Sherman Yang, after listening to Python in the Labyrinth, I had felt certain I knew the answers. I had remembered the name Dodona, the stories about talking trees…

Now my mind was once again a bowl of fuzzy mortal soup. I couldn’t recall what I’d been so excited about, or what I had intended to do about it.

Perhaps exhaustion and stress had taken their toll. Or maybe Zeus was manipulating my brain—allowing me tantalizing glimpses of the truth, then snatching them away, turning my aha! moments into huh? moments.

I howled in frustration. “I don’t remember!”

Meg and Chiron exchanged nervous glances.

“You’re not going,” Meg told me firmly.

“What? You can’t—”

“That’s an order,” she said. “No going into the woods until I say so.”

The command sent a shudder from the base of my skull to my heels.

I dug my fingernails into my palms. “Meg McCaffrey, if my children die because you wouldn’t let me—”

“Like Chiron said, you’d just get yourself killed. We’ll wait for daylight.”

I thought how satisfying it would be to drop Meg from the sun chariot at high noon. Then again, some small rational part of me realized she might be right. I was in no condition to launch a one-man rescue operation. That just made me angrier.

Chiron’s tail swished from side to side. “Well, then…I will see you both in the morning. We will find a solution. I promise you that.”

He gave me one last look, as if worried I might start running in circles and baying at the moon. Then he trotted back toward the Big House.

I scowled at Meg. “I’m staying out here tonight, in case Kayla and Austin come back. Unless you want to forbid me from doing that, too.”

She only shrugged. Even her shrugs were annoying.

I stormed off to the Me cabin and grabbed a few supplies: a flashlight, two blankets, a canteen of water. As an afterthought, I took a few books from Will Solace’s bookshelf. No surprise, he kept reference materials about me to share with new campers. I thought perhaps the books might help jog my memories. Failing that, they’d make good tinder for a fire.