The Blood of Olympus (The Heroes of Olympus, #5)(19)

She finished her meal as a group of Chinese tourists shuffled past the courtyard. Reyna had been awake for less than an hour and already she was restless to get moving.

‘Thanks for breakfast, Coach.’ She got to her feet and stretched. ‘If you’ll excuse me, where there are tourists, there are bathrooms. I need to use the little praetors’ room.’

‘Go ahead.’ The coach jangled the whistle that hung around his neck. ‘If anything happens, I’ll blow.’

Reyna left Aurum and Argentum on guard duty and strolled through the crowds of mortals until she found a visitors’ centre with restrooms. She did her best to clean up, but she found it ironic that she was in an actual Roman city and couldn’t enjoy a nice hot Roman bath. She had to settle for paper towels, a broken soap dispenser and an asthmatic hand dryer. And the toilets … the less said about those, the better.

As she was walking back, she passed a small museum with a window display. Behind the glass lay a row of plaster figures, all frozen in the throes of death. A young girl was curled in a fetal position. A woman lay twisted in agony, her mouth open to scream, her arms thrown overhead. A man knelt with his head bowed, as if accepting the inevitable.

Reyna stared with a mixture of horror and revulsion. She’d read about such figures, but she’d never seen them in person. After the eruption of Vesuvius, volcanic ash had buried the city and hardened to rock around dying Pompeians. Their bodies had disintegrated, leaving behind human-shaped pockets of air. Early archaeologists had poured plaster into the holes and made these casts – creepy replicas of Ancient Romans.

Reyna found it disturbing, wrong, that these people’s dying moments were on display like clothes in a shop window, yet she couldn’t look away.

All her life she’d dreamed about coming to Italy. She had assumed it would never happen. The ancient lands were forbidden to modern demigods; the area was simply too dangerous. Nevertheless, she wanted to follow in the footsteps of Aeneas, son of Aphrodite, the first demigod to settle here after the Trojan War. She wanted to see the original Tiber River, where Lupa the wolf goddess saved Romulus and Remus.

But Pompeii? Reyna had never wanted to come here. The site of Rome’s most infamous disaster, an entire city swallowed by the earth … After Reyna’s nightmares, that hit a little too close to home.

So far in the ancient lands, she’d only seen one place on her wish list: Diocletian’s Palace in Split, and even that visit had hardly gone the way she’d imagined. Reyna used to dream about going there with Jason to admire their favourite emperor’s home. She pictured romantic walks with him through the old city, sunset picnics on the parapets.

Instead, Reyna had arrived in Croatia not with him but with a dozen angry wind spirits on her tail. She’d fought her way through ghosts in the palace. On her way out, gryphons had attacked, mortally wounding her pegasus. The closest she’d got to Jason was finding a note he’d left for her under a bust of Diocletian in the basement.

She would only have painful memories of that place.

Don’t be bitter, she chided herself. Aeneas suffered, too. So did Romulus, Diocletian and all the rest. Romans don’t complain about hardship.

Staring at the plaster death figures in the museum window, she wondered what they had been thinking as they curled up to die in the ashes. Probably not: Well, we’re Romans! We shouldn’t complain!

A gust of wind blew through the ruins, making a hollow moan. Sunlight flashed against the window, momentarily blinding her.

With a start, Reyna looked up. The sun was directly overhead. How could it be noon already? She’d left the House of the Faun just after breakfast. She’d only been standing here a few minutes … hadn’t she?

She tore herself from the museum display and hurried off, trying to shake the feeling that the dead Pompeians were whispering behind her back.

The rest of the afternoon was unnervingly quiet.

Reyna kept watch while Coach Hedge slept, but there was nothing much to guard against. Tourists came and went. Random harpies and wind spirits flew by overhead. Reyna’s dogs would snarl in warning, but the monsters didn’t stop to fight.

Ghosts skulked around the edges of the courtyard, apparently intimidated by the Athena Parthenos. Reyna couldn’t blame them. The longer the statue stood in Pompeii, the more anger it seemed to radiate, making Reyna’s skin itchy and her nerves raw.

Finally, just after sunset, Nico woke. He wolfed down an avocado and cheese sandwich, the first time he’d shown a decent appetite since leaving the House of Hades.

Reyna hated to ruin his dinner, but they didn’t have much time. As the daylight faded, the ghosts started moving closer and in greater numbers.

She told him about her dreams: the earth swallowing Camp Jupiter, Octavian closing in on Camp Half-Blood and the hunter with the glowing eyes who had shot Reyna in the gut.

Nico stared at his empty plate. ‘This hunter … a giant, maybe?’

Coach Hedge grunted. ‘I’d rather not find out. I say we keep moving.’

Nico’s mouth twitched. ‘You are suggesting we avoid a fight?’

‘Listen, cupcake, I like a smackdown as much as the next guy, but we’ve got enough monsters to worry about without some bounty-hunter giant tracking us across the world. I don’t like the sound of those huge arrows.’

‘For once,’ Reyna said, ‘I agree with Hedge.’