The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5)(75)

They may have preferred to attack Nero, but since they couldn’t, they did what he asked. They attacked me.





IF THEIR HEARTS HAD BEEN IN IT, I WOULD have died.

I’ve seen actual mobs of bloodthirsty dryads attack. It’s not something any mortal could live through. These tree spirits seemed more interested in just playing the part. They staggered toward me, yelling RAWR, while occasionally glancing over their shoulders to make sure the torch-bearing demigods hadn’t set fire to their life sources.

I dodged the first two palm-tree spirits who lunged at me.

“I won’t fight you!” I yelled. A sturdy ficus jumped on me from behind, forcing me to throw her off. “We’re not enemies!”

A fiddle-leaf fig was hanging back, perhaps waiting for her turn to get me, or just hoping she wouldn’t get noticed. Her demigod keeper noticed, though. He lowered his torch and the fig tree went up in flames as if it had been doused in oil. The dryad screamed and combusted, collapsing in a heap of ash.

“Stop it!” Meg said, but her voice was so fragile it barely registered.

The other dryads attacked me in earnest. Their fingernails stretched into talons. A lemon tree sprouted thorns all over her body and tackled me in a painful hug.

“Stop it!” Meg said, louder this time.

“Oh, let them try, my dear,” Nero said, as the trees piled onto my back. “They deserve their revenge.”

The ficus got me in a choke hold. My knees buckled under the weight of six dryads. Thorns and talons raked every bit of exposed skin. I croaked, “Meg!”

My eyes bulged. My vision blurred.

“STOP!” Meg ordered.

The dryads stopped. The ficus sobbed with relief and released her hold around my neck. The others backed off, leaving me on my hands and knees, gasping, bruised, and bleeding.

Meg ran to me. She knelt and put her hand on my shoulder, studying my scrapes and cuts and my ruined, bandaged nose with an agonized expression. I would have been overjoyed to get this attention from her if we hadn’t been in the middle of Nero’s throne room, or if I could just, you know, breathe.

Her first whispered question was not the one I’d been expecting: “Is Lu alive?”

I nodded, blinking away tears of pain. “Last I saw,” I whispered back. “Still fighting.”

Meg’s brow furrowed. For the moment, her old spirit seemed rekindled, but it was difficult to visualize her the way she used to be. I had to concentrate on her eyes, framed by her wonderfully horrible cat-eye glasses, and ignore the new wispy haircut, the smell of lilac perfume, the purple gown and gold sandals and—OH, GODS!—someone had given her a pedicure.

I tried to contain my horror. “Meg,” I said. “There’s only one person here you need to listen to: yourself. Trust yourself.”

I meant it, despite all my doubts and fears, despite all my complaints over the months about Meg being my master. She had chosen me, but I had also chosen her. I did trust her—not in spite of her past with Nero, but because of it. I had seen her struggle. I’d admired her hard-won progress. I had to believe in her for my own sake. She was—gods help me—my role model.

I pulled her gold rings from my pocket. She recoiled when she saw them, but I pressed them into her hands. “You are stronger than he is.”

If I could have just kept her looking nowhere but at me, perhaps we could’ve survived in a small bubble of our old friendship, even surrounded by Nero’s toxic environment.

But Nero couldn’t allow that.

“Oh, my dear.” He sighed. “I appreciate your kind heart. I do! But we can’t interfere with justice.”

Meg stood and faced him. “This isn’t justice.”

His smile thinned. He glanced at me with a mixture of humor and pity, as if saying, Now look what you’ve done.

“Perhaps you’re right, Meg,” he conceded. “These dryads don’t have the courage or the spirit to do what’s necessary.”

Meg stiffened, apparently realizing what Nero intended to do. “No.”

“We will have to try something else.” He gestured to the demigods, who lowered their torches into the plants.

“NO!” Meg screamed.

The room turned green. A storm of allergens exploded from Meg’s body, as if she’d released an entire season of oak pollen in a single blast. Verdant dust coated the throne room—Nero, his couch, his guards, his rugs, his windows, his children. The demigods’ torch flames spluttered and died.

The dryads’ trees began to grow, roots breaking through their pots and anchoring to the floor, new leaves unfurling to replace the singed ones, branches thickening and stretching out, threatening to entangle their demigod minders. Not being complete fools, Nero’s children scrambled away from their newly aggressive houseplants.

Meg turned to the dryads. They were huddled together trembling, burn marks steaming on their arms. “Go heal,” she told them. “I’ll keep you safe.”

With a grateful collective sob, they vanished.

Nero calmly brushed the pollen from his face and clothes. His Germani seemed unperturbed, as if this sort of thing happened a lot. One of the cynocephali sneezed. His wolf-headed comrade offered him a Kleenex.

“My dear Meg,” Nero said, his voice even, “we’ve talked about this before. You must control yourself.”