The Tyrant's Tomb (The Trials of Apollo, #4)(67)

“Your girlfriend was pregnant when you had her killed?” Reyna launched another kick at my face. I managed to dodge it, since I’d had a lot of practice cowering, but it hurt to know that this time she hadn’t been aiming at an incoming raven. Oh, no. She wanted to knock my teeth in.

“You suck,” Meg agreed.

“Can we talk about this later?” I pleaded. “Or perhaps never? I was a god then! I didn’t know what I was doing!”

A few months ago, a statement like that would have made no sense to me. Now, it seemed true. I felt as if Meg had given me her thick-lensed rhinestone-studded glasses, and to my horror, they corrected my eyesight. I didn’t like how small and tawdry and petty everything looked, rendered in perfect ugly clarity through the magic of Meg-o-Vision. Most of all, I didn’t like the way I looked—not just present-day Lester, but the god formerly known as Apollo.

Reyna exchanged glances with Meg. They seemed to reach a silent agreement that the most practical course of action would be to survive the ravens now so they could kill me themselves later.

“We’re dead if we stay here.” Reyna swung her sword at another enthusiastic flesh-eater. “We can’t fend them off and climb at the same time. Ideas?”

The ravens had one. It was called all-out attack.

They swarmed—pecking, scratching, croaking with rage.

“I’m sorry!” I screamed, futilely swatting at the birds. “I’m sorry!”

The ravens did not accept my apology. Claws ripped my pant legs. A beak clamped on to my quiver and almost pulled me off the ladder, leaving my feet dangling for a terrifying moment.

Reyna continued to slash away. Meg cursed and threw seeds like party favors from the worst parade float ever. A giant raven spiraled out of control, covered in daffodils. Another fell like a stone, its stomach bulging in the shape of a butternut squash.

My grip weakened on the rungs. Blood dripped from my nose, but I couldn’t spare a moment to wipe it away.

Reyna was right. If we didn’t move, we were dead. And we couldn’t move.

I scanned the crossbeam above us. If we could just reach it, we’d be able to stand and use our arms. We’d have a fighting chance to…well, fight.

At the far end of the catwalk, abutting the next support pylon, stood a large rectangular box like a shipping container. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it sooner, but compared to the scale of the tower, the container seemed small and insignificant, just another wedge of red metal. I had no idea what such a box was doing up here (A maintenance depot? A storage shed?) but if we could find a way inside, it might offer us shelter.

“Over there!” I yelled.

Reyna followed my gaze. “If we can reach it…We need to buy time. Apollo, what repels ravens? Isn’t there something they hate?”

“Worse than me?”

“They don’t like daffodils much,” Meg observed, as another flower-festooned bird went into a tailspin.

“We need something to drive them all away,” Reyna said, swinging her sword again. “Something they’ll hate worse than Apollo.” Her eyes lit up. “Apollo, sing for them!”

She might as well have kicked me in the face again. “My voice isn’t that bad!”

“But you’re the—You used to be the god of music, right? If you can charm a crowd, you should be able to repulse one. Pick a song these birds will hate!”

Great. Not only had Reyna laughed in my face and busted my nose, now I was her go-to guy for repulsiveness.

Still…I was struck by the way she said I used to be a god. She didn’t seem to mean it as an insult. She said it almost like a concession—like she knew what a horrible deity I had been, but held out hope that I might be capable of being someone better, more helpful, maybe even worthy of forgiveness.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, let me think.”

The ravens had no intention of letting me do that. They cawed and swarmed in a flurry of black feathers and pointy talons. Reyna and Meg tried their best to drive them back, but they couldn’t cover me completely. A beak stabbed me in the neck, narrowly missing my carotid artery. Claws raked the side of my face, no doubt giving me some bloody new racing stripes.

I couldn’t think about the pain.

I wanted to sing for Reyna, to prove that I had indeed changed. I was no longer the god who’d had Koronis killed and created ravens, or cursed the Cumaean Sibyl, or done any of the other selfish things that had once given me no more pause than choosing what dessert toppings I wanted on my ambrosia.

It was time to be helpful. I needed to be repulsive for my friends!

I rifled through millennia of performance memories, trying to recall any of my musical numbers that had totally bombed. Nope. I couldn’t think of any. And the birds kept attacking….

Birds attacking.

An idea sparked at the base of my skull.

I remembered a story my children Austin and Kayla had told me, back when I was at Camp Half-Blood. We were sitting at the campfire, and they’d been joking about Chiron’s bad taste in music. They said that several years earlier, Percy Jackson had managed to drive off a flock of killer Stymphalian birds simply by playing what Chiron had on his boom box.

What had he played? What was Chiron’s favorite—?

“‘VOLARE’!” I screamed.

Meg looked up at me, a random geranium stuck in her hair. “Who?”