The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)(32)

‘So.’ I leaned on the railing next to Piper. ‘You know of Caligula.’

Her eyes shifted from green to brown, like tree bark ageing. ‘I knew someone was behind our problems – the maze, the fires, this.’ She gestured through the glass doors at the empty mansion. ‘When we were closing the Doors of Death, we fought a lot of villains who’d come back from the Underworld. Makes sense an evil Roman emperor would be behind Triumvirate Holdings.’

I guessed Piper was about sixteen, the same age as … no, I couldn’t say the same age as me. If I thought in those terms, I would have to compare her perfect complexion to my own acne-scarred face, her finely chiselled nose to my bulbous wad of cartilage, her softly curved physique to mine, which was also softly curved but in all the wrong ways. Then I would have to scream, I HATE YOU!

So young, yet she had seen so many battles. She said when we were closing the Doors of Death the way her high-school peers might say when we were swimming at Kyle’s house.

‘We knew there was a burning maze,’ she continued. ‘Gleeson and Mellie told us about that. They said the satyrs and dryads …’ She gestured at Grover. ‘Well, it’s no secret you guys have been having a bad time with the drought and fires. Then I had some dreams. You know.’

Grover and I nodded. Even Meg looked over from her dangerous experiments with outdoor cooking equipment and grunted sympathetically. We all knew that demigods couldn’t take a catnap without being plagued by omens and portents.

‘Anyway,’ Piper continued, ‘I thought we could find the heart of this maze. I figured whoever was responsible for making our lives miserable would be there, and we could send him or her back to the Underworld.’

‘When you say we,’ Grover asked, ‘you mean you and –?’

‘Jason. Yes.’

Her voice dipped when she spoke his name, the same way mine did when I was forced to speak the names Hyacinthus or Daphne.

‘Something happened between you,’ I deduced.

She picked an invisible speck from her jeans. ‘It’s been a tough year.’

You’re telling me, I thought.

Meg activated one of the barbecue burners, which flared blue like a thruster engine. ‘You guys break up or what?’

Leave it to McCaffrey to be tactless about love with a child of Aphrodite, while simultaneously starting a fire in front of a satyr.

‘Please don’t play with that,’ Piper asked gently. ‘And, yes, we broke up.’

Grover bleated, ‘Really? But I heard – I thought –’

‘You thought what?’ Piper’s voice remained calm and even. ‘That we’d be together forever like Percy and Annabeth?’ She stared into the empty house, not exactly as if she missed the old furniture, but as if she were imagining the space completely redone. ‘Things change. People change. Jason and me – we started out oddly. Hera kind of messed with our heads, made us think we shared a past we didn’t share.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That sounds like Hera.’

‘We fought the war against Gaia. Then we spent months searching for Leo. Then we tried to settle into school, and the moment I actually had some time to breathe …’ She hesitated, searching each of our faces as if realizing she was about to share the real reasons, the deeper reasons, with people she barely knew. I remembered how Mellie had called Piper poor girl, and the way the cloud nymph had said Jason’s name with distaste.

‘Anyway,’ Piper said, ‘things change. But we’re fine. He’s fine. I’m fine. At least … I was, until this started.’ She gestured at the great room, where the movers were now lugging a mattress towards the front door.

I decided it was time to confront the elephant in the room. Or rather, the elephant on the terrace. Or rather, the elephant that would have been on the terrace had the movers not hauled him away.

‘What happened exactly?’ I asked. ‘What’s in all those dandelion-coloured documents?’

‘Like this one,’ Meg said, pulling from her gardening belt a folded letter she must have filched from the great room. For a child of Demeter, she had sticky fingers.

‘Meg!’ I said. ‘That’s not yours.’

I may have been a little sensitive about stealing other people’s mail. Once Artemis rifled through my correspondence and found some juicy letters from Lucrezia Borgia that she teased me about for decades.

‘N.H. Financials,’ Meg persisted. ‘Neos Helios. Caligula, right?’

Piper dug her fingernails into the wooden rail. ‘Just get rid of it. Please.’

Meg dropped the letter into the flames.

Grover sighed. ‘I could have eaten that for you. It’s better for the environment, and stationery tastes great.’

That got a thin smile from Piper.

‘The rest is all yours,’ she promised. ‘As for what they say, it’s all legal, legal, blah-blah, financial, boring, legal. Bottom line, my dad is ruined.’ She raised an eyebrow at me. ‘You really haven’t seen any of the gossip columns? The magazine covers?’

‘That’s what I asked,’ Grover said.

I made a mental note to visit the nearest grocery store checkout and stock up on reading material. ‘I am woefully behind,’ I admitted. ‘When did this all start?’