The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5)(36)

We were halfway down the hall when the house began to shake. Cracks zigzagged up the walls. At the top of the floating staircase, we discovered (fun fact) a floating staircase will cease to float if a forest bull tries to climb it. The lower steps had been stripped from the wall. Bulls rampaged through the corridor below like a crowd of Black Friday bargain hunters, stomping on broken steps and crashing through the atrium’s glass walls, renovating the Dares’ house with extreme prejudice.

“At least they can’t get up here,” Will said.

The floor shook again as the tauri took out another wall.

“We’ll be down there soon enough,” Meg said. “Is there another way out?”

Rachel groaned. “Me. Down.”

Will eased her to her feet. She swayed and blinked, trying to process the scene below us.

“Cows,” Rachel said.

“Yeah,” Nico agreed.

Rachel pointed weakly down the hall we’d come from. “This way.”

Using Meg as a crutch, Rachel led us back toward her bedroom. She took a sharp right, then clambered down another set of stairs into the garage. On the polished concrete floor sat two Ferraris, both bright red—because why have one midlife crisis when you can have two? In the house behind us, I could hear the cows bellowing angrily, crashing and smashing as they remodeled the Dare compound for that hot apocalyptic barnyard look.

“Keys,” Rachel said. “Look for car keys!”

Will, Nico, and I scrambled into action. We found no keys in the cars—that would have been too convenient. No keys on the wall hooks, in the storage bins, or on the shelves. Either Mr. Dare kept the keys with him at all times, or the Ferraris were meant to be purely decorative.

“Nothing!” I said.

Rachel muttered something about her father that I won’t repeat. “Never mind.” She hit a button on the wall. The garage door began to rumble open. “I’m feeling better. We’ll go on foot.”

We spilled into the street and headed north as fast as Rachel could hobble. We were half a block away when the Dare residence shuddered, groaned, and imploded, exhaling a mushroom cloud of dust and debris.

“Rachel, I’m so sorry,” Will said.

“Don’t care. I hated that place anyway. Dad will just move us to one of his other mansions.”

“But your art!” Meg said.

Rachel’s expression tightened. “Art can be made again. People can’t. Keep moving!”

I knew we wouldn’t have long before the tauri silvestres found us. Along this part of the Brooklyn waterfront, the blocks were long, the roads wide, and the sight lines clear—perfect for a supernatural stampede. We had almost made it to the pineapple matcha café when Meg yelled, “The Sylvesters are coming!”

“Meg,” I wheezed, “the cows are not all named Sylvester.”

She was right about the threat, though. The demon cattle, apparently unfazed by a building falling on them, emerged from the wreckage of Chez Dare. The herd began to regroup in the middle of the street, shaking rubble from their red hides like dogs fresh from a bath.

“Get out of sight?” Nico asked, pointing to the café.

“Too late,” Will said.

The cows had spotted us. A dozen sets of blue eyes fixed on our position. The tauri raised their heads, mooed their battle moos, and charged. I suppose we could have still ducked into the café, just so the cows would destroy it and save the neighborhood from the threat of avocado bagels. Instead, we ran.

I realized this would only delay the inevitable. Even if Rachel hadn’t been groggy from her snake-induced trance, we couldn’t outrun the cows.

“They’re gaining!” Meg yelled. “You sure we can’t fight them?”

“You want to try?” I asked. “After what they did to the house?”

“So what’s their weakness?” Rachel asked. “They have to have an Achilles’ heel!”

Why did people always assume this? Why did they obsess about an Achilles’ heel? Just because one Greek hero had a vulnerable spot behind his foot, that didn’t mean every monster, demigod, and villain from ancient Greek times also had a podiatric problem. Most monsters, in fact, did not have a secret weakness. They were annoying that way.

Nevertheless, I racked my brain for any factoids I might have gleaned from Aelian’s trashy best seller On the Nature of Animals. (Not that I normally read such things, of course.)

“Pits?” I speculated. “I think farmers in Ethiopia used pits against the tauri.”

“Like peach pits?” Meg asked.

“No, like pits in the ground!”

“Fresh out of pits!” Rachel said.

The tauri had halved the distance between us. Another hundred yards and they would smash us into road jelly.

“There!” Nico yelled. “Follow me!”

He sprinted into the lead.

I had to give him credit. When Nico chose a pit, he went for broke. He ran to the luxury-apartment construction site, summoned his black Stygian sword from thin air, and slashed through the chain-link fence. We followed him inside, where a narrow rim of trailers and portable potties surrounded a fifty-foot-deep square crater. A giant crane rose from the center of the chasm, its jib extending toward us at just about knee-level. The site seemed abandoned. Perhaps it was lunch hour? Perhaps all the workers were at the pineapple matcha café? Whatever the case, I was glad not to have mortals in the way of danger.