The Tyrant's Tomb (The Trials of Apollo, #4)(85)

Then I scanned our surroundings, and I realized we were surrounded by a whole lot of not winning. Gargantuan ants trampled their way toward us, spewing acid to clear the hillside of skirmishers. Several steaming bodies in Roman armor sprawled in the underbrush, and I did not want to think about who they might have been or how they had died.

Pandai in black Kevlar and helmets, almost invisible in the dusk, glided around on their huge parasail ears, dropping onto any unsuspecting demigod they could find. Higher up, giant eagles fought with giant ravens, their wingtips glinting in the bloodred moonlight. Just a hundred yards to my left, wolf-headed cynocephali howled as they bounded into battle, crashing into the shields of the nearest cohort (the Third?), which looked small and alone and critically undermanned in a sea of bad guys.

That was only on our hill. I could see fires burning across the whole western front along the valley’s borders—maybe half a mile of patchwork battles. Ballistae launched glowing spears from the summits. Catapults hurled boulders that shattered on impact, spraying shards of Imperial gold into the enemy lines. Flaming logs—always a fun Roman party game—rolled down the hillsides, smashing through packs of Earthborn.

For all the legion’s efforts, the enemy kept advancing. On the empty eastbound lanes of Highway 24, the emperors’ main columns marched toward the Caldecott Tunnel, their gold-and-purple banners raised high. Roman colors. Roman emperors bent on destroying the last true Roman legion. This was how it ended, I thought bitterly. Not fighting threats from the outside, but fighting against the ugliest side of our own history.

“TESTUDO!” A centurion’s shout brought my attention back to the Third Cohort. They were struggling to form a protective turtle formation with their shields as the cynocephali swarmed over them in a snarling wave of fur and claws.

“Meg!” I yelled, pointing to the imperiled cohort.

She ran toward them, me at her heels. As we closed in, I scooped up an abandoned quiver from the ground, trying not to think about why it had been dropped there, and sent a fresh volley of arrows into the pack. Six fell dead. Seven. Eight. But there were still too many. Meg screamed in fury and launched herself at the nearest wolf-headed men. She was quickly surrounded, but our advance had distracted the pack, giving the Third Cohort a few precious seconds to regroup.

“OFFENSE ROMULUS!” shouted the centurion.

If you have ever seen a pill bug uncurl, revealing its hundreds of legs, you can imagine what the Third Cohort looked like as it broke testudo and formed a bristling forest of spears, skewering the cynocephali.

I was so impressed I almost got my face chewed off by a stray charging wolf-man. Just before it reached me, Centurion Larry hurled his javelin. The monster fell at my feet, impaled in the middle of his incredibly un-manscaped back.

“You made it!” Larry grinned at us. “Where’s Reyna?”

“She’s okay,” I said. “Er, she’s alive.”

“Cool! Frank wants to see you, ASAP!”

Meg stumbled to my side, breathing hard, her swords glistening with monster goo. “Hey, Larry. How’s it going?”

“Terrible!” Larry sounded delighted. “Carl, Reza—escort these two to Praetor Zhang immediately.”

“YESSIR!” Our escorts hustled us off toward the Caldecott Tunnel, while behind us, Larry called his troops back to action: “Come on, legionnaires! We’ve drilled for this. We’ve got this!”

After a few more terrible minutes of dodging pandai, jumping fiery craters, and skirting mobs of monsters, Carl and Reza brought us safely to Frank Zhang’s command post at the mouth of the Caldecott Tunnel. Much to my disappointment, there were no hors d’oeuvres or beverages. There wasn’t even a tent—just a bunch of stressed-out Romans in full battle gear, rushing around carrying orders and shoring up defenses. Above us, on the concrete terrace that stretched over the tunnel’s mouth, Jacob the standard-bearer stood with the legion’s eagle and a couple of spotters, keeping watch on all the approaches. Whenever an enemy got too close, Jacob would zap them like the Oprah Winfrey version of Jupiter: And YOU get a lightning bolt! And YOU get a lightning bolt! Unfortunately, he’d been using the eagle so much that it was beginning to smoke. Even superpowerful magic items have their limits. The legion’s standard was close to total overload.

When Frank Zhang saw us, a whole g of weight seemed to lift from his shoulders. “Thank the gods! Apollo, your face looks terrible. Where’s Reyna?”

“Long story.” I was about to launch into the short version of that long story when Hazel Levesque materialized on a horse right next to me, which was an excellent way of testing whether my heart still worked properly.

“What’s going on?” Hazel asked. “Apollo, your face—”

“I know.” I sighed.

Her immortal steed, the lightning-fast Arion, gave me the side-eye and nickered as if to say, This fool ain’t no Apollo.

“Good to see you too, cuz,” I grumbled.

I told them all in brief what had happened, with Meg occasionally adding helpful comments like “He was stupid,” and “He was more stupid,” and “He did good; then he got stupid again.”

When Hazel heard about our encounter in the Target parking lot, she gritted her teeth. “Lavinia. That girl, I swear. If anything happens to Reyna—”