The Tyrant's Tomb (The Trials of Apollo, #4)(17)

I had to restrain a bitter laugh. If only my problem regarding Reyna were as simple as that.

The incident had come back to me with glass-shard clarity: Venus scolding me, warning me, upbraiding me as only she could. You will not stick your ugly, unworthy godly face anywhere near her, or I swear on the Styx…

And of course she’d done this in the throne room, in the presence of all the other Olympians, as they howled with cruel amusement and shouted Ooh! Even my father had joined in. Oh, yes. He loved every minute of it.

I shuddered.

“There is nothing with Reyna and me,” I said quite honestly. “I don’t think we’ve ever exchanged more than a few words.”

Frank studied my expression. Obviously, he realized I was holding something back, but he didn’t push. “Okay. Well, you’ll see her tonight at the funeral. She’s trying to get some sleep right now.”

I almost asked why Reyna would be asleep in the middle of the afternoon. Then I remembered that Frank had been wearing a pajama shirt when we’d encountered him at dinnertime…. Had that really been the day before yesterday?

“You’re taking shifts,” I realized. “So one of you is always on duty?”

“It’s the only way,” he agreed. “We’re still on high alert. Everyone is edgy. There’s so much to do since the battle….”

He said the word battle the same way Hazel had, as if it was a singular, terrible turning point in history.

Like all the divinations Meg and I had retrieved during our adventures, the Dark Prophecy’s nightmarish prediction about Camp Jupiter remained burned into my mind:

The words that memory wrought are set to fire,

Ere new moon rises o’er the Devil’s Mount.

The changeling lord shall face a challenge dire,

Till bodies fill the Tiber beyond count.



After hearing that, Leo Valdez had raced across country on his bronze dragon, hoping to warn the camp. According to Leo, he had arrived just in time, but the toll had still been horrendous.

Frank must have read my pained expression.

“It would’ve been worse if it hadn’t been for you,” he said, which only made me feel guiltier. “If you hadn’t sent Leo here to warn us. One day, out of nowhere, he just flew right in.”

“That must have been quite a shock,” I said. “Since you thought Leo was dead.”

Frank’s dark eyes glittered like they still belonged to a raven. “Yeah. We were so mad at him for making us worry, we lined up and took turns hitting him.”

“We did that at Camp Half-Blood, too,” I said. “Greek minds think alike.”

“Mmm.” Frank’s gaze drifted toward the horizon. “We had about twenty-four hours to prepare. It helped. But it wasn’t enough. They came from over there.”

He pointed north to the Berkeley Hills. “They swarmed. Only way to describe it. I’d fought undead before, but this…” He shook his head. “Hazel called them zombies. My grandmother would have called them jiangshi. The Romans have a lot of words for them: immortuos, lamia, nuntius.”

“Messenger,” I said, translating the last word. It had always seemed an odd term to me. A messenger from whom? Not Hades. He hated it when corpses wandered around the mortal world. It made him look like a sloppy warden.

“The Greeks call them vrykolakai,” I said. “Usually, it’s rare to see even one.”

“There were hundreds,” Frank said. “Along with dozens of those other ghoul things, the eurynomoi, acting as herders. We cut them down. They just kept coming. You’d think having a fire-breathing dragon would’ve been a game-changer, but Festus could only do so much. The undead aren’t as flammable as you might think.”

Hades had explained that to me once, in one of his famously awkward “too much information” attempts at small talk. Flames didn’t deter the undead. They just wandered right through, no matter how extra crispy they became. That’s why he didn’t use the Phlegethon, the River of Fire, as the boundary of his kingdom. Running water, however, especially the dark magical waters of the River Styx, was a different story….

I studied the glittering current of the Little Tiber. Suddenly a line of the Dark Prophecy made sense to me. “Bodies fill the Tiber beyond count. You stopped them at the river.”

Frank nodded. “They don’t like freshwater. That’s where we turned the battle. But that line about ‘bodies beyond count’? It doesn’t mean what you think.”

“Then what—?”

“HALT!” yelled a voice right in front of me.

I’d been so lost in Frank’s story, I hadn’t realized how close we were getting to the city. I hadn’t even noticed the statue on the side of the road until it screamed at me.

Terminus, the god of boundaries, looked just as I remembered him. From the waist up, he was a finely sculpted man with a large nose, curly hair, and a disgruntled expression (which may have been because no one had ever carved him a pair of arms). From the waist down, he was a block of white marble. I used to tease him that he should try skinny jeans, as they’d be very slimming. From the way he glowered at me now, I guessed he remembered those insults.

“Well, well,” he said. “Who do we have here?”