The Tyrant's Tomb (The Trials of Apollo, #4)(18)

I sighed. “Terminus, can we not?”

“No!” he barked. “No, we cannot not. I need to see identification.”

Frank cleared his throat. “Uh, Terminus…” He tapped the praetor’s laurels on his breastplate.

“Yes, Praetor Frank Zhang. You are good to go. But your friend here—”

“Terminus,” I protested, “you know very well who I am.”

“Identification!”

A cold slimy feeling spread outward from my Lemurian spice–bandaged gut. “Oh, you can’t mean—”

“ID.”

I wanted to protest this unnecessary cruelty. Alas, there is no arguing with bureaucrats, traffic cops, or boundary gods. Struggling would just make the pain last longer.

Slumped in defeat, I pulled out my wallet. I produced the junior driver’s license Zeus had provided me when I fell to earth. Name: Lester Papadopoulos. Age: Sixteen. State: New York. Photo: 100 percent eye acid.

“Hand it over,” Terminus demanded.

“You don’t—” I caught myself before I could say have hands. Terminus was stubbornly delusional about his phantom appendages. I held up the driver’s license for him to see. Frank leaned in, curious, then caught me glaring and backed away.

“Very well, Lester,” Terminus crowed. “It’s unusual to have a mortal visitor in our city—an extremely mortal visitor—but I suppose we can allow it. Here to shop for a new toga? Or perhaps some skinny jeans?”

I swallowed back my bitterness. Is there anyone more vindictive than a minor god who finally gets to lord it over a major god?

“May we pass?” I asked.

“Any weapons to declare?”

In better times, I would have answered, Only my killer personality. Alas, I was beyond even finding that ironic. The question did make me wonder what had happened to my ukulele, bow, and quiver, however. Perhaps they were tucked under my cot? If the Romans had somehow lost my quiver, along with the talking prophetic Arrow of Dodona, I would have to buy them a thank-you gift.

“No weapons,” I muttered.

“Very well,” Terminus decided. “You may pass. And happy impending birthday, Lester.”

“I…what?”

“Move along! Next!”

There was no one behind us, but Terminus shooed us into the city, yelling at the nonexistent crowd of visitors to stop pushing and form a single line.

“Is your birthday coming up?” Frank asked as we continued. “Congratulations!”

“It shouldn’t be.” I stared at my license. “April eighth, it says here. That can’t be right. I was born on the seventh day of the seventh month. Of course, the months were different back then. Let’s see, the month of Gamelion? But that was in the wintertime—”

“How do gods celebrate, anyway?” Frank mused. “Are you seventeen now? Or four thousand and seventeen? Do you eat cake?”

He sounded hopeful about that last part, as if imagining a monstrous gold-frosted confection with seventeen Roman candles on the top.

I tried to calculate my correct day of birth. The effort made my head pound. Even when I’d had a godly memory, I hated keeping track of dates: the old lunar calendar, the Julian calendar, the Gregorian calendar, leap year, daylight savings time. Ugh. Couldn’t we just call every day Apolloday and be done with it?

Yet Zeus had definitely assigned me a new birthdate: April 8. Why? Seven was my sacred number. The date 4/8 had no sevens. The sum wasn’t even divisible by seven. Why would Zeus mark my birthday as four days from now?

I stopped in my tracks, as if my own legs had turned into a marble pedestal. In my dream, Caligula had insisted that his pandai finish their work by the time the blood moon rose in five days. If what I observed had happened last night…that meant there were only four days left from today, which would make doomsday April 8, Lester’s birthday.

“What is it?” Frank asked. “Why is your face gray?”

“I—I think my father left me a warning,” I said. “Or perhaps a threat? And Terminus just pointed it out to me.”

“How can your birthday be a threat?”

“I’m mortal now. Birthdays are always a threat.” I fought down a wave of anxiety. I wanted to turn and run, but there was nowhere to go—only forward into New Rome, to gather more unwelcome information about my impending doom.

“Lead on, Frank Zhang,” I said halfheartedly, slipping my license back in my wallet. “Perhaps Tyson and Ella will have some answers.”


New Rome…the likeliest city on earth to find Olympian gods lurking in disguise. (Followed closely by New York, then Cozumel during spring break. Don’t judge us.)

When I was a god, I would often hover invisibly over the red-tiled rooftops, or walk the streets in mortal form, enjoying the sights, sounds, and smells of our imperial heyday.

It was not the same as ancient Rome, of course. They’d made quite a few improvements. No slavery, for one thing. Better personal hygiene, for another. Gone was the Subura—the jam-packed slum quarter with its firetrap apartments.

Nor was New Rome a sad theme-park imitation, like a mock Eiffel Tower in the middle of Las Vegas. It was a living city where modern and ancient mixed freely. Walking through the Forum, I heard conversations in a dozen languages, Latin among them. A band of musicians held a jam session with lyres, guitars, and a washboard. Children played in the fountains while adults sat nearby under trellises shaded with grape vines. Lares drifted here and there, becoming more visible in the long afternoon shadows. All manner of people mingled and chatted—one-headed, two-headed, even dog-headed cynocephali who grinned and panted and barked to make their points.