The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)(53)

22


For my school project

I made this pagan temple

Monopoly board





We had to get past a teacher and two hall monitors, but, thanks to Piper’s charmspeak, they all agreed that it was perfectly normal for the four of us (including two females) to stroll into the dormitory during classroom hours.

Once we reached Jason’s room, Piper stopped at the door. ‘Define not safe.’

Jason peered over her shoulder. ‘Monsters have infiltrated the faculty. I’m keeping an eye on the humanities teacher. Pretty sure she’s an empousa. I already had to slay my AP Calculus teacher, because he was a blemmyae.’

Coming from a mortal, such talk would have been labelled homicidally paranoid. Coming from a demigod, it was a description of an average week.

‘Blemmyae, huh?’ Meg reappraised Jason, as if deciding that his glasses might not be so bad. ‘I hate blemmyae.’

Jason smirked. ‘Come on in.’

I would’ve called his room spartan, but I had seen the bedrooms of actual Spartans. They would have found Jason’s dorm ridiculously comfortable.

The fifty-foot-square space had a bookcase, a bed, a desk and a wardrobe. The only luxury was an open window that looked out across the canyons, filling the room with the warm scent of hyacinth. (Did it have to be hyacinth? My heart always breaks when I smell that fragrance, even after thousands of years.)

On Jason’s wall hung a framed picture of his sister Thalia smiling at the camera, a bow slung across her back, her short dark hair blown sideways by the wind. Except for her dazzling blue eyes, she looked nothing like her brother.

Then again, neither of them looked anything like me and, as the son of Zeus, I was technically their brother. And I had flirted with Thalia, which … Eww. Curse you, Father, for having so many children! It made dating a true minefield over the millennia.

‘Your sister says hello, by the way,’ I said.

Jason’s eyes brightened. ‘You saw her?’

I launched into an explanation of our time in Indianapolis: the Waystation, the emperor Commodus, the Hunters of Artemis rappelling into the football stadium to rescue us. Then I backed up and explained the Triumvirate, and all the miserable things that had happened to me since emerging from that Manhattan dumpster.

Meanwhile, Piper sat cross-legged on the floor, her back against the wall, as far as possible from the more comfortable sitting option of the bed. Meg stood at Jason’s desk, examining some sort of school project – foam core studded with little plastic boxes, perhaps to represent buildings.

When I casually mentioned that Leo was alive and well and presently on a mission to Camp Jupiter, all the electrical outlets in the room sparked. Jason looked at Piper, stunned.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘After all we went through.’

‘I can’t even …’ Jason sat heavily on his bed. ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or yell.’

‘Don’t limit yourself,’ grumbled Piper. ‘Do both.’

Meg called from the desk, ‘Hey, what is this?’

Jason flushed. ‘A personal project.’

‘It’s Temple Hill,’ Piper offered, her tone carefully neutral. ‘At Camp Jupiter.’

I took a closer look. Piper was right. I recognized the layout of the temples and shrines where Camp Jupiter demigods honoured the ancient deities. Each building was represented by a small plastic box glued to the board, the names of the shrines hand-labelled on the foam core. Jason had even marked lines of elevation, showing the hill’s topographical levels.

I found my temple: APOLLO, symbolized by a red plastic building. It was not nearly as nice as the real thing, with its golden roof and platinum filigree designs, but I didn’t want to be critical.

‘Are these Monopoly houses?’ Meg asked.

Jason shrugged. ‘I kinda used whatever I had – the green houses and red hotels.’

I squinted at the board. I hadn’t descended in glory to Temple Hill for quite some time, but the display seemed more crowded than the actual hill. There were at least twenty small tokens I didn’t recognize.

I leaned in and read some of the handwritten labels. ‘Kymopoleia? My goodness, I haven’t thought about her in centuries! Why did the Romans build her a shrine?’

‘They haven’t yet,’ Jason said. ‘But I made her a promise. She … helped us out on our voyage to Athens.’

The way he said that, I decided he meant she agreed not to kill us, which was much more in keeping with Kymopoleia’s character.

‘I told her I’d make sure none of the gods and goddesses were forgotten,’ Jason continued, ‘either at Camp Jupiter or Camp Half-Blood. I’d see to it they all had some sort of shrine at both camps.’

Piper glanced at me. ‘He’s done a ton of work on his designs. You should see his sketchbook.’

Jason frowned, clearly unsure whether Piper was praising him or criticizing him. The smell of burning electricity thickened in the air.

‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘the designs won’t win any awards. I’ll need Annabeth to help with the actual blueprints.’

‘Honouring the gods is a noble endeavour,’ I said. ‘You should be proud.’

Jason did not look proud. He looked worried. I remembered what Medea had said about the Oracle’s news: The truth was enough to break Jason Grace. He did not appear to be broken. Then again, I did not appear to be Apollo.