The Blood of Olympus (The Heroes of Olympus, #5)(14)

Nico took another swig of unicorn draught. His eyes were heavy with exhaustion, but Reyna could tell he was fighting to stay awake.

‘You stumbled just now,’ he noted. ‘When you use your power … do you get some sort of, um, feedback from me?’

‘It’s not mind-reading,’ she said. ‘Not even an empathy link. Just … a temporary wave of exhaustion. Primal emotions. Your pain washes over me. I take on some of your burden.’

Nico’s expression became guarded.

He twisted the silver skull ring on his finger, the same way Reyna did with her silver ring when she was thinking. Sharing a habit with the son of Hades made her uneasy.

She’d felt more pain from Nico in their brief connection than she had from her entire legion during the battle against the giant Polybotes. It had drained her worse than the last time she’d used her power, to sustain her pegasus Scipio during their journey across the Atlantic.

She tried to push away that memory. Her brave winged friend dying from poison, his muzzle in her lap, looking at her trustingly as she raised her dagger to end his misery … Gods, no. She couldn’t dwell on that or it would break her.

But the pain she’d felt from Nico was sharper.

‘You should rest,’ she told him. ‘After two jumps in a row, even with a little help … you’re lucky to be alive. We’ll need you to be ready again by nightfall.’

She felt bad asking him to do something so impossible. Unfortunately, she’d had a lot of practice pushing demigods beyond their limits.

Nico clenched his jaw and nodded. ‘We’re stuck here now.’ He scanned the ruins. ‘But Pompeii is the last place I would’ve chosen to land. This place is full of lemures.’

‘Lemurs?’ Coach Hedge seemed to be making some sort of snare out of kite string, a tennis racket and a hunting knife. ‘You mean those cute fuzzy critters –’

‘No.’ Nico sounded annoyed, like he got that question a lot. ‘Lemures. Unfriendly ghosts. All Roman cities have them, but in Pompeii –’

‘The whole city was wiped out,’ Reyna remembered. ‘In 79 C.E., Vesuvius erupted and covered the town in ash.’

Nico nodded. ‘A tragedy like that creates a lot of angry spirits.’

Coach Hedge eyed the distant volcano. ‘It’s steaming. Is that a bad sign?’

‘I – I’m not sure.’ Nico picked at a hole in the knee of his black jeans. ‘Mountain gods, the ourae, can sense children of Hades. It’s possible that’s why we were pulled off course. The spirit of Vesuvius might have been intentionally trying to kill us. But I doubt the mountain can hurt us this far away. Working up to a full eruption would take too long. The immediate threat is all around us.’

The back of Reyna’s neck tingled.

She’d grown used to Lares, the friendly spirits at Camp Jupiter, but even they made her uneasy. They didn’t have a good understanding of personal space. Sometimes they’d walk right through her, leaving her with vertigo. Being in Pompeii gave Reyna the same feeling, as if the whole city was one big ghost that had swallowed her whole.

She couldn’t tell her friends how much she feared ghosts, or why she feared them. The whole reason she and her sister had run away from San Juan all those years ago … that secret had to stay buried.

‘Can you keep them at bay?’ she asked.

Nico turned up his palms. ‘I’ve sent out that message: Stay away. But once I’m asleep it won’t do us much good.’

Coach Hedge patted his tennis-racket-knife contraption. ‘Don’t worry, kid. I’m going to line the perimeter with alarms and snares. Plus, I’ll be watching over you the whole time with my baseball bat.’

That didn’t seem to reassure Nico, but his eyes were already half-closed. ‘Okay. But … go easy. We don’t want another Albania.’

‘No,’ Reyna agreed.

Their first shadow-travel experience together two days ago had been a total fiasco, possibly the most humiliating episode in Reyna’s long career. Perhaps someday, if they survived, they would look back on it and laugh, but not now. The three of them had agreed never to speak of it. What happened in Albania would stay in Albania.

Coach Hedge looked hurt. ‘Fine, whatever. Just rest, kid. We got you covered.’

‘All right,’ Nico relented. ‘Maybe a little …’ He managed to take off his aviator jacket and wad it into a pillow before he keeled over and began to snore.

Reyna marvelled at how peaceful he looked. The worry lines vanished. His face became strangely angelic … like his surname, di Angelo. She could almost believe he was a regular fourteen-year-old boy, not a son of Hades who had been pulled out of time from the 1940s and forced to endure more tragedy and danger than most demigods would in a lifetime.

When Nico had arrived at Camp Jupiter, Reyna didn’t trust him. She’d sensed there was more to his story than being an ambassador from his father, Pluto. Now, of course, she knew the truth. He was a Greek demigod – the first person in living memory, perhaps the first ever, to go back and forth between the Roman and Greek camps without telling either group that the other existed.

Strangely, that made Reyna trust Nico more.

Sure, he wasn’t Roman. He’d never hunted with Lupa or endured the brutal legion training. But Nico had proven himself in other ways. He’d kept the camps’ secrets for the best of reasons, because he feared a war. He had plunged into Tartarus alone, voluntarily, to find the Doors of Death. He’d been captured and imprisoned by giants. He had led the crew of the Argo II into the House of Hades … and now he had accepted yet another terrible quest: risking himself to haul the Athena Parthenos back to Camp Half-Blood.