The Tyrant's Tomb (The Trials of Apollo, #4)(21)

As I suspected, the special-collections room had been set up as a tattoo parlor.

Rolling bookshelves had been pushed aside, heaped with leather-bound volumes, wooden scroll cases, and clay cuneiform tablets. Dominating the center of the room, a black leather reclining chair with foldable arms gleamed under an LED magnifying lamp. At its side stood a workstation with four humming electric steel-needle guns connected to ink hoses.

I myself had never gotten a tattoo. When I was a god, if I wanted some ink on my skin, I could simply will it into being. But this setup reminded me of something Hephaestus might try—a lunatic experiment in godly dentistry, perhaps.

In the back corner, a ladder led to a second-level balcony similar to the one in the main room. Two sleeping areas had been created up there: one a harpy’s nest of straw, cloth, and shredded paper; the other a sort of cardboard fort made of old appliance boxes. I decided not to inquire.

Pacing behind the tattoo chair was Ella herself, mumbling as if having an internal argument.

Aristophanes, who had followed us inside, began shadowing the harpy, trying to butt his head against Ella’s leathery bird legs. Every so often, one of her rust-colored feathers fluttered away and Aristophanes pounced on it. Ella ignored the cat completely. They seemed like a match made in Elysium.

“Fire…” Ella muttered. “Fire with…something, something…something bridge. Twice something, something…Hmm.”

She seemed agitated, though I gathered that was her natural state. From what little I knew, Percy, Hazel, and Frank had discovered Ella living in Portland, Oregon’s main library, subsisting on food scraps and nesting in discarded novels. Somehow, at some point, the harpy had chanced across copies of the Sibylline Books, three volumes that had been thought lost forever in a fire toward the end of the Roman Empire. (Discovering a copy would’ve been like finding an unknown Bessie Smith recording, or a pristine Batman No. 1 from 1940, except more…er, prophecy-ish.)

With her photographic but disjointed memory, Ella was now the sole source of those old prophecies. Percy, Hazel, and Frank had brought her to Camp Jupiter, where she could live in safety and hopefully re-create the lost books with the help of Tyson, her doting boyfriend. (Cyclops-friend? Interspecies significant other?)

Past that, Ella was an enigma wrapped in red feathers wrapped in a linen shift.

“No, no, no.” She ran one hand through her luxurious swirls of red hair, ruffling it so vigorously I was afraid she might give her scalp lacerations. “Not enough words. ‘Words, words, words.’ Hamlet, act two, scene two.”

She looked in good health for a former street harpy. Her humanlike face was angular but not emaciated. Her arm feathers were carefully preened. Her weight seemed about right for an avian, so she must have been getting plenty of birdseed or tacos or whatever harpies preferred to eat. Her taloned feet had shredded a well-defined path where she paced across the carpet.

“Ella, look!” Tyson announced. “Friends!”

Ella frowned, her eyes sliding off Frank and me as if we were minor annoyances—pictures hung askew on a wall.

“No,” she decided. Her long fingernails clacked together. “Tyson needs more tattoos.”

“Okay!” Tyson grinned as if this were fantastic news. He bounded over to the reclining chair.

“Wait,” I pleaded. It was bad enough to smell the tattoos. If I saw them being made, I was sure I would puke all over Aristophanes. “Ella, before you start, could you please explain what’s going on?”

“‘What’s Going On,’” Ella said. “Marvin Gaye, 1971.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “I helped write that song.”

“No.” Ella shook her head. “Written by Renaldo Benson, Al Cleveland, and Marvin Gaye; inspired by an incident of police brutality.”

Frank smirked at me. “You can’t argue with the harpy.”

“No,” Ella agreed. “You can’t.”

She scuttled over and studied me more carefully, sniffing at my bandaged belly, poking my chest. Her feathers glistened like rust in the rain. “Apollo,” she said. “You’re all wrong, though. Wrong body. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, 1956.”

I did not like being compared to a black-and-white horror film, but I’d just been told not to argue with the harpy.

Meanwhile, Tyson adjusted the tattoo chair into a flat bed. He lay on his stomach, the recently inked purple lines of script rippling across his scarred, muscular back.

“Ready!” he announced.

The obvious finally dawned on me.

“The words that memory wrought are set to fire,” I recalled. “You’re rewriting the Sibylline Books on Tyson with hot needles. That’s what the prophecy meant.”

“Yep.” Ella poked my love handles as if assessing them for a writing surface. “Hmm. Nope. Too flabby.”

“Thanks,” I grumbled.

Frank shifted his weight, suddenly looking self-conscious about his own writing surfaces. “Ella says it’s the only way she can record the words in the right order,” he explained. “On living skin.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. In the last few months, I’d sorted out prophecies by listening to the insane voices of trees, hallucinating in a dark cave, and racing across a fiery crossword puzzle. By comparison, assembling a manuscript on a Cyclops’s back sounded downright civilized.