The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5)(19)

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.