The Tyrant's Tomb (The Trials of Apollo, #4)(29)

Bombilo gave me his usual Good morning glare when I came downstairs to appropriate the café bathroom. I washed up, then changed my bandages with a kit the healers had thoughtfully left in our room. The ghoul scratch looked no worse, but it was still puckered and angry red. It still burned. That was normal, right? I tried to convince myself it was. As they say, doctor gods make the worst patient gods.

I got dressed, trying to remember how to fold a toga, and mulled over the things I’d learned from my dream. Number one: I was a terrible person who ruined lives. Number two: There was not a single bad thing I’d done in the last four thousand years that was not going to come back and bite me in the clunis, and I was beginning to think I deserved it.

The Cumaean Sibyl. Oh, Apollo, what had you been thinking?

Alas, I knew what I’d been thinking—that she was a pretty young woman I wanted to get with, despite the fact that she was my Sibyl. Then she’d outsmarted me, and being the bad loser that I was, I had cursed her.

No wonder I was now paying the price: tracking down the evil Roman king to whom she’d once sold her Sibylline Books. If Tarquin was still clinging to some horrible undead existence, could the Cumaean Sibyl be alive as well? I shuddered to think what she might be like after all these centuries, and how much her hatred for me would have grown.

First things first: I had to tell the senate my marvelous plan to make things right and save us all. Did I have a marvelous plan? Shockingly, maybe. Or at least the beginnings of a marvelous plan. The marvelous index of one.

On our way out, Meg and I grabbed Lemurian-spice lattes and a couple of blueberry muffins—because Meg clearly needed more sugar and caffeine—then we joined the loose procession of demigods heading for the city.

By the time we got to the Senate House, everyone was taking their seats. Flanking the rostrum, Praetors Reyna and Frank were arrayed in their finest gold and purple. The first row of benches was occupied by the camp’s ten senators—each in a white toga trimmed in purple—along with the senior-most veterans, those with accessibility needs, and Ella and Tyson. Ella fidgeted, doing her best to avoid brushing shoulders with the senator on her left. Tyson grinned at the Lar on his right, wriggling his fingers inside the ghost’s vaporous rib cage.

Behind them, the semicircle of tiered seats was packed to overflowing with legionnaires, Lares, retired veterans, and other citizens of New Rome. I hadn’t seen a lecture hall this crowded since Charles Dickens’s 1867 Second American Tour. (Great show. I still have the autographed T-shirt framed in my bedroom in the Palace of the Sun.)

I thought I should sit in front, being an honorary wearer of bed linens, but there was simply no room. Then I spotted Lavinia (thank you, pink hair) waving at us from the back row. She patted the bench next to her, indicating that she’d saved us seats. A thoughtful gesture. Or maybe she wanted something.

Once Meg and I had settled on either side of her, Lavinia gave Meg the supersecret Unicorn Sisterhood fist bump, then turned and ribbed me with her sharp elbow. “So, you’re really Apollo, after all! You must know my mom.”

“I—what?”

Her eyebrows were extra distracting today. The dark roots had started to grow out under the pink dye, which made them seem to hover slightly off center, as if they were about to float off her face.

“My mom?” she repeated, popping her bubble gum. “Terpsichore?”

“The—the Muse of Dance. Are you asking me if she’s your mother, or if I know her?”

“Of course she’s my mother.”

“Of course I know her.”

“Well, then!” Lavinia drummed a riff on her knees, as if to prove she had a dancer’s rhythm despite being so gangly. “I wanna hear the dirt!”

“The dirt?”

“I’ve never met her.”

“Oh. Um…” Over the centuries, I’d had many conversations with demigods who wanted to know more about their absentee godly parents. Those talks rarely went well. I tried to conjure a picture of Terpsichore, but my memories of Olympus were getting fuzzier by the day. I vaguely recalled the Muse frolicking around one of the parks on Mount Olympus, casting rose petals in her wake as she twirled and pirouetted. Truth be told, Terpsichore had never been my favorite of the Nine Muses. She tended to take the spotlight off me, where it rightly belonged.

“She had your color hair,” I ventured.

“Pink?”

“No, I mean…dark. Lots of nervous energy, I suppose, like you. She was never happy unless she was moving, but…”

My voice died. What could I say that wouldn’t sound mean? Terpsichore was graceful and poised and didn’t look like a wobbly giraffe? Was Lavinia sure there hadn’t been some mistake about her parentage? Because I couldn’t believe they were related.

“But what?” she pressed.

“Nothing. Hard to remember.”

Down at the rostrum, Reyna was calling the meeting to order. “Everyone, if you’ll please take your seats! We need to get started. Dakota, can you scoot in a little to make room for—Thanks.”

Lavinia regarded me skeptically. “That’s the lamest dirt ever. If you can’t tell me about my mom, at least tell me what’s going on with you and Ms. Praetor down there.”

I squirmed. The bench suddenly felt a great deal harder under my clunis. “There’s nothing to tell.”