The Burning Maze: Chapters 16–24

She was the most brutal and power-hungry of Hecate’s followers, and also the most formidable.

I made the mistake of looking at Medea, whose eyes were as transfixing as her dragons’.

“He wants to be the center of creation, the new god of the sun. He wants to supplant me, the way I supplanted Helios.”

She interposed herself between me and Medea.

The tip of her nose was sunburn red. The harpy feather smoldered in her hair.

Nor did I have Meg’s weakness—a conflicted desire, misguided but powerful, to please her stepfather and reclaim some semblance of home and family—which Medea could and would exploit.

Besides, the idea of walking around with lupines sticking out of my ears made me queasy.

The beasts lurched in their harnesses, Right Dragon charging forward, Left Dragon stopping completely. Right stumbled, pulling Left forward so the two dragons crashed together. The yoke twisted and the chariot toppled sideways, throwing Medea across the pavement like a cow from a catapult.

Venti were fickle spirits. Without Medea keeping it on task, the air servant was likely to lose interest and fly off to find some nice pigeons or airplane pilots to harass.

I’d gone swimming in the calderas of active volcanoes.

I remembered his beardless face, eternally young and handsome, his curly dark hair crowned with a golden diadem of fire that made him too bright to look upon for more than an instant.

A white-hot maelstrom roared around Medea.

Now, I could feel how bitter he was, knowing that his role had been assumed by me, a mere dabbler in solar matters, a weekend sun-chariot driver.

She forced out a few words, interspersed with gagging.

This was sacrilege akin to setting up a big-screen TV on a church altar and having a Super Bowl party with communion wine.

How could we resist such an audacious, blasphemous party with free appetizers?

Throngs of costumed revelers moved through vast torchlit halls.

I mingled with senators who were disguised as slave girls, slave girls who were disguised as senators, a few unimaginative toga ghosts, and a couple of enterprising patricians who had crafted the world’s first two-man donkey costume.

Should they grovel? Should they laugh? It was always hard to tell with Caligula, and if you got it wrong, you usually died.

The young man was wild, powerful, unpredictable. His audacity took my breath away.

I saw Herophile again, the Sibyl of Erythraea, reaching out her shackled arms, her face lit red by the roiling lava below.

Baby Chuck sat in Piper’s lap, staring enraptured at her face as if it were the most amazing thing in the world.

Next to her sat Agave, looking dejected, though a new green spike had started to grow where her withered arm had fallen off.

Grover stared disconsolately at his hooves.

His cold voice sent ripples of revulsion through my body.

I couldn’t see him, but I could imagine his baleful amber eyes flecked with gold, his enormous dragon form, his wicked claws.

“It makes me think of game shows, tawdry parades, and drunk washed-up starlets with spray-on tans.”

But even he would’ve been horrified at the number of hours mortals spent drilling his plays into the heads of bored teenagers, and the sheer number of pipes, tweed jackets, marble busts, and bad dissertations even his least favorite plays had inspired.

Monsters have infiltrated the faculty. I’m keeping an eye on the humanities teacher.

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.

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.

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.

“Honoring the gods is a noble endeavor,” I said.

Jason studied the calluses on his hands, proof he had not let his sword skills atrophy.

Certainly, I’d never had a brother defend me in front of Father. My Olympian brethren were more likely to deflect Zeus’s fury by yelling Apollo did it!

Now, however, I had some inkling of what Jason meant.

At Camp Half-Blood, I had rashly sworn on the River Styx not to use my archery or music skills until I was a god again. Then I had quickly reneged.

Try as I might, I could not help thinking of those crimson swathes as the spilled blood of dryads, fallen in battle.

In the harbor, we found a virtual forest of single-mast boats, along with some luxury yachts, but none seemed large or gaudy enough for a Roman emperor.

Jason even flew over the water for aerial reconnaissance.