The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)(30)

There, you see? I can be a balanced observer!

Every so often I looked skyward, hoping to see Leo Valdez flying overhead on his bronze dragon, Festus. I wanted him to be carrying a large banner that said EVERYTHING’S COOL! The new moon wasn’t for two more days, true, but maybe Leo had finished his rescue mission early! He could land on the highway, tell us that Camp Jupiter had been saved from whatever threat had faced them. Then he could ask Festus to blowtorch the cars in front of us to speed up our travels.

Alas, no bronze dragon circled above, though it would’ve been hard to spot. The entire sky was bronze coloured.

‘So, Grover,’ I said, after a few decades on the Pacific Coast Highway, ‘have you ever met Piper or Jason?’

Grover shook his head. ‘Seems strange, I know. We’ve all been in SoCal for so long. But I’ve been busy with the fires. Jason and Piper have been questing and going to school and whatever. I just never got the chance. Coach says they’re … nice.’

I got the feeling he’d been about to say something other than nice.

‘Is there a problem we should know about?’ I asked.

Grover drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘Well … they’ve been under a lot of stress. First, they were looking for Leo Valdez. Then they did some other quests. Then things started to go bad for Mr McLean.’

Meg glanced up from braiding a bougainvillea. ‘Piper’s dad?’

Grover nodded. ‘He’s a famous actor, you know. Tristan McLean?’

A frisson of pleasure went up my back. I loved Tristan McLean in King of Sparta. And Jake Steel 2: The Return of Steel. For a mortal, that man had endless abs.

‘How did things go badly?’ I asked.

‘You don’t read celebrity news,’ Grover guessed.

Sad but true. With all my running around as a mortal, freeing ancient Oracles and fighting Roman megalomaniacs, I’d had zero time to keep up with juicy Hollywood gossip.

‘Messy break-up?’ I speculated. ‘Paternity suit? Did he say something horrible on Twitter?’

‘Not exactly,’ Grover said. ‘Let’s just … see how things are going when we get there. It might not be so bad.’

He said that in the way people do when they expect it to be exactly that bad.

By the time we made it to Malibu, it was nearly lunchtime. My stomach was turning itself inside out from hunger and car sickness. Me, who used to spend all day cruising in the sun Maserati, car sick. I blamed Grover. He drove with a heavy hoof.

On the bright side, our Pinto had not exploded, and we found the McLean house without incident.

Set back from the winding road, the mansion at 12 Oro del Mar clung to rocky cliffs overlooking the Pacific. From street level, the only visible parts were the white stucco security walls, the wrought-iron gates and an expanse of red-clay-tiled roofs.

The place would have radiated a sense of privacy and Zen tranquility had it not been for the moving trucks parked outside. The gates stood wide open. Troops of burly men were carting away sofas, tables and large works of art. Pacing back and forth at the end of the driveway, looking bedraggled and stunned, as if he’d just walked away from a car wreck, was Tristan McLean.

His hair was longer than I’d seen it in the films. Silky black locks swept across his shoulders. He’d put on weight, so he no longer resembled the sleek killing machine he’d been in King of Sparta. His white jeans were smeared with soot. His black T-shirt was torn at the collar. His loafers looked like a pair of overbaked potatoes.

It didn’t seem right, a celebrity of his calibre just standing in front of his Malibu house without any guards or personal assistants or adoring fans – not even a mob of paparazzi to snap embarrassing pictures.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ I wondered.

Meg squinted through the windshield. ‘He looks okay.’

‘No,’ I insisted. ‘He looks … average.’

Grover turned off the engine. ‘Let’s go say hi.’

Mr McLean stopped pacing when he saw us. His dark brown eyes seemed unfocused. ‘Are you Piper’s friends?’

I couldn’t find my words. I made a gurgling sound I hadn’t produced since I first met Grace Kelly.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Grover. ‘Is she home?’

‘Home …’ Tristan McLean tasted the word. He seemed to find it bitter and without meaning. ‘Go on inside.’ He waved vaguely down the driveway. ‘I think she’s …’ His voice trailed off as he watched two movers carting away a large marble statue of a catfish. ‘Go ahead. Doesn’t matter.’

I wasn’t sure if he was talking to us or to the movers, but his defeated tone alarmed me even more than his appearance.

We made our way through a courtyard of sculpted gardens and sparkling fountains, through a double-wide entrance with polished oak doors and into the house.

Red-Saltillo-tiled floors gleamed. Cream-white walls retained paler impressions where paintings had recently hung. To our right stretched a gourmet kitchen that even Edesia, the Roman goddess of banquets, would have adored. Before us spread a great room with a thirty-foot-high cedar-beamed ceiling, a massive fireplace and a wall of sliding glass doors leading to a terrace with views of the ocean.

Sadly, the room was a hollowed-out shell: no furniture, no carpets, no artwork – just a few cables curling from the wall and a broom and dustpan leaning in one corner.