The Tyrant's Tomb (The Trials of Apollo, #4)(10)

Leaning on Meg, I managed to stagger farther down the tunnel. Lavinia and Don lugged Jason’s coffin. I was in so much pain I didn’t even have the energy to yell at Lavinia to carry it like a couch.

We’d gone perhaps fifty feet when the tunnel behind us rumbled even more strongly than before. I looked back just in time to get hit in the face with a billowing cloud of debris.

“Hazel?” Lavinia called into the swirling dust.

A heartbeat later, Hazel Levesque emerged, coated from head to toe in glittering powdered quartz. Her sword glowed in her hand.

“I’m fine,” she announced. “But nobody’s going to be sneaking out that way anymore. Now”—she pointed at the coffin—“somebody want to tell me who’s in there?”


I really didn’t.

Not after I’d seen how Hazel skewered her enemies.

Still…I owed it to Jason. Hazel had been his friend.

I steeled my nerves, opened my mouth to speak, and was beaten to the punch by Hazel herself.

“It’s Jason,” she said, as if the information had been whispered in her ear. “Oh, gods.”

She ran to the coffin. She fell to her knees and threw her arms across the lid. She let out a single devastated sob. Then she lowered her head and shivered in silence. Strands of her hair sketched through the quartz dust on the polished wood surface, leaving squiggly lines like the readings of a seismograph.

Without looking up, she murmured, “I had nightmares. A boat. A man on a horse. A…a spear. How did it happen?”

I did my best to explain. I told her about my fall into the mortal world, my adventures with Meg, our fight aboard Caligula’s yacht, and how Jason had died saving us. Recounting the story brought back all the pain and terror. I remembered the sharp ozone smell of the wind spirits swirling around Meg and Jason, the bite of zip-tie handcuffs around my wrists, Caligula’s pitiless, delighted boast: You don’t walk away from me alive!

It was all so awful, I momentarily forgot about the agonizing cut across my belly.

Lavinia stared at the floor. Meg did her best to stanch my bleeding with one of the extra dresses from her backpack. Don watched the ceiling, where a new crack was zigzagging over our heads.

“Hate to interrupt,” said the faun, “but maybe we should continue this outside?”

Hazel pressed her fingers against the coffin lid. “I’m so angry at you. Doing this to Piper. To us. Not letting us be there for you. What were you thinking?”

It took me a moment to realize she wasn’t talking to us. She was speaking to Jason.

Slowly, she stood. Her mouth trembled. She straightened, as if summoning internal columns of quartz to brace her skeletal system.

“Let me carry one side,” she said. “Let’s bring him home.”

We trudged along in silence, the sorriest pallbearers ever. All of us were covered in dust and monster ash. At the front of the coffin, Lavinia squirmed in her armor, occasionally glancing over at Hazel, who walked with her eyes straight ahead. She didn’t even seem to notice the random vulture feather fluttering from her shirtsleeve.

Meg and Don carried the back of the casket. Meg’s eyes were bruising up nicely from the car crash, making her look like a large, badly dressed raccoon. Don kept twitching, tilting his head to the left as if he wanted to hear what his shoulder was saying.

I stumbled after them, Meg’s spare dress pressed against my gut. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, but the cut still burned and needled. I hoped Hazel was right about her healers being able to fix me. I did not relish the idea of becoming an extra for The Walking Dead.

Hazel’s calmness made me uneasy. I almost would’ve preferred it if she screamed and threw things at me. Her misery was like the cold gravity of a mountain. You could stand next to that mountain and close your eyes, and even if you couldn’t see it or hear it, you knew it was there—unspeakably heavy and powerful, a geological force so ancient it made even immortal gods feel like gnats. I feared what would happen if Hazel’s emotions turned volcanically active.

At last we emerged into the open air. We stood on a rock promontory about halfway up a hillside, with the valley of New Rome spread out below. In the twilight, the hills had turned violet. The cool breeze smelled of woodsmoke and lilacs.

“Wow,” said Meg, taking in the view.

Just as I remembered, the Little Tiber wended across the valley floor, making a glittering curlicue that emptied into a blue lake where the camp’s belly button might have been. On the north shore of that lake rose New Rome itself, a smaller version of the original imperial city.

From what Leo had said about the recent battle, I’d expected to see the place leveled. At this distance, though, in the waning light, everything looked normal—the gleaming white buildings with red-tiled roofs, the domed Senate House, the Circus Maximus, and the Colosseum.

The lake’s south shore was the site of Temple Hill, with its chaotic assortment of shrines and monuments. On the summit, overshadowing everything else, was my father’s impressively ego-tastic Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. If possible, his Roman incarnation, Jupiter, was even more insufferable than his original Greek personality of Zeus. (And, yes, we gods have multiple personalities, because you mortals keep changing your minds about what we’re like. It’s exasperating.)

In the past, I’d always hated looking at Temple Hill, because my shrine wasn’t the largest. Obviously, it should have been the largest. Now I hated looking at the place for a different reason. All I could think of was the diorama Meg was carrying, and the sketchbooks in her backpack—the designs for Temple Hill as Jason Grace had reimagined it. Compared to Jason’s foam-core display, with its handwritten notes and glued-on Monopoly tokens, the real Temple Hill seemed an unworthy tribute to the gods. It could never mean as much as Jason’s goodness, his fervent desire to honor every god and leave no one out.