The Tyrant's Tomb (The Trials of Apollo, #4)(12)

One thing that hadn’t changed was his bearing—that slightly awkward stance, that faint perplexed frown, as if he were constantly thinking, Am I really supposed to be here?

That feeling was understandable. Frank had climbed the ranks from probatio to centurion to praetor in record time. Not since Julius Caesar had a Roman officer risen so rapidly and brightly. That wasn’t a comparison I would have shared with Frank, though, given what happened to my man Julius.

My gaze drifted to the young woman at Frank’s side: Praetor Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano…and I remembered.

A bowling ball of panic formed in my heart and rolled into my lower intestines. It was a good thing I wasn’t carrying Jason’s coffin or I would have dropped it.

How can I explain this to you?

Have you ever had an experience so painful or embarrassing you literally forgot it happened? Your mind disassociates, scuttles away from the incident yelling Nope, nope, nope, and refuses to acknowledge the memory ever again?

That was me with Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano.

Oh, yes, I knew who she was. I was familiar with her name and reputation. I was fully aware we were destined to run into her at Camp Jupiter. The prophecy we’d deciphered in the Burning Maze had told me as much.

But my fuzzy mortal brain had completely refused to make the most important connection: that this Reyna was that Reyna, the one whose face I had been shown long ago by a certain annoying goddess of love.

That’s her! my brain screamed at me, as I stood before her in my flabby and acne-spotted glory, clutching a bloody dress to my gut. Oh, wow, she’s beautiful!

Now you recognize her? I mentally screamed back. Now you want to talk about her? Can’t you please forget again?

But, like, remember what Venus said? my brain insisted. You’re supposed to stay away from Reyna or—

Yes, I remember! Shut up!

You have conversations like this with your brain, don’t you? It’s completely normal, right?

Reyna was indeed beautiful and imposing. Her Imperial gold armor was cloaked in a mantle of purple. Military medals twinkled on her chest. Her dark ponytail swept over her shoulder like a horsewhip, and her obsidian eyes were every bit as piercing as those of the eagles that circled above us.

I managed to wrest my eyes from her. My face burned with humiliation. I could still hear the other gods laughing after Venus made her proclamation to me, her dire warnings if I should ever dare—

PING! Lavinia’s manubalista chose that moment to crank itself another half notch, mercifully diverting everyone’s attention to her.

“Uh, s-so,” she stammered, “we were on duty when I saw this hearse go flying over the guardrail—”

Reyna raised her hand for silence.

“Centurion Levesque.” Reyna’s tone was guarded and weary, as if we weren’t the first battered procession to tote a coffin into camp. “Your report, please.”

Hazel glanced at the other pallbearers. Together, they gently lowered the casket.

“Praetors,” Hazel said, “we rescued these travelers at the borders of camp. This is Meg.”

“Hi,” said Meg. “Is there a bathroom? I need to pee.”

Hazel looked flustered. “Er, in a sec, Meg. And this…” She hesitated, as if she couldn’t believe what she was about to say. “This is Apollo.”

The crowd murmured uneasily. I caught snatches of their conversations:

“Did she say—?”

“Not actually—”

“Dude, obviously not—”

“Named after—?”

“In his dreams—”

“Settle down,” Frank Zhang ordered, pulling his purple mantle tighter around his jammie top. He studied me, perhaps looking for any sign that I was in fact Apollo, the god he’d always admired. He blinked as if the concept had short-circuited his brain.

“Hazel, can you…explain that?” he pleaded. “And, erm, the coffin?”

Hazel locked her golden eyes on me, giving me a silent command: Tell them.

I didn’t know how to start.

I was not a great orator like Julius or Cicero. I wasn’t a weaver of tall tales like Hermes. (Boy, that guy can tell some whoppers.) How could I explain the many months of horrifying experiences that had led to Meg and me standing here, with the body of our heroic friend?

I looked down at my ukulele.

I thought of Piper McLean aboard Caligula’s yachts—how she’d burst into singing “Life of Illusion” in the midst of a gang of hardened mercenaries. She had rendered them helpless, entranced by her serenade about melancholy and regret.

I wasn’t a charmspeaker like Piper. But I was a musician, and surely Jason deserved a tribute.

After what had happened with the eurynomoi, I felt skittish of my ukulele, so I began to sing a cappella.

For the first few bars, my voice quavered. I had no idea what I was doing. The words simply billowed up from deep inside me like the clouds of debris from Hazel’s collapsed tunnel.

I sang of my fall from Olympus—how I had landed in New York and become bound to Meg McCaffrey. I sang of our time at Camp Half-Blood, where we’d discovered the Triumvirate’s plot to control the great Oracles and thus the future of the world. I sang of Meg’s childhood, her terrible years of mental abuse in the household of Nero, and how we’d finally driven that emperor from the Grove of Dodona. I sang of our battle against Commodus at the Waystation in Indianapolis, of our harrowing journey into Caligula’s Burning Maze to free the Sibyl of Erythraea.