The Tyrant's Tomb: Chapters 1–6

Meg McCaffrey and I stretched our legs on the tarmac while the ground crew somberly removed Jason’s coffin from the Cessna’s storage bay.

I signed some paperwork, accepted the flight crew’s condolences, then shook hands with a nice undertaker who handed me the keys to the hearse and walked away.

The rest of her outfit was equally disreputable: floppy red high-tops, threadbare yellow leggings, and the well-loved knee-length green frock she’d gotten from Percy Jackson’s mother.

The Nimitz Freeway snaked through the East Bay flatlands, past warehouses and docklands, strip malls and rows of dilapidated bungalows.

Through the back window’s gauzy curtains, I saw nothing but traffic.

Above my head, two foot-shaped impressions appeared in the upholstered ceiling.

Before I could explain that this was a terrible idea while traveling fifty miles an hour on a highway, I heard a sound like a pop-top aluminum can opening—the crisp, pneumatic hiss of air through metal.

It careened across three lanes of traffic, barreled straight through the guardrail, and plummeted into the canyon below.

I’ve always believed that most sentient creatures like to be recognized.

Whether we are gods, people, or slavering ghouls in vulture-feather loincloths, we enjoy others knowing who we are, speaking our names, appreciating that we exist.

I took another look at the ghoul: its strange mottled blue-and-black hide, its milky eyes, its oversize mouth and tiny nostril slits.

It smelled of rancid meat. It wore the feathers of a carrion eater.

And when those mortals died, they rose again as what the Greeks called vrykolakai—or, in TV parlance, zombies.

Two feet away, its claws splayed to shred my face.

About ten feet away, a ragtag assortment of fauns and dryads, perhaps a dozen total, were all attempting to hide behind one gangly pink-haired young woman in Roman legionnaire armor.

Don tugged his wrist free and rubbed it, his expression aggrieved.

“Meg,” I chided, “that’s none of our business. But if I had to guess, I’d say Poison Oak is a dryad whom Lavinia here is interested in, just like you were interested in Joshua back at Palm Springs.”

The glow of Meg’s swords threw our elongated shadows across either wall, so we seemed to be walking in the midst of a spectral crowd.

Deep red gouges marred my fingers. Blisters were beginning to form on my palms.

My idea was simple: strum a sleepy tune, lull the creatures into a stupor, then kill them in a leisurely, civilized fashion.

I looked back just in time to get hit in the face with a billowing cloud of debris.

Meg did her best to stanch my bleeding with one of the extra dresses from her backpack.

We stood on a rock promontory about halfway up a hillside, with the valley of New Rome spread out below.

Just as I remembered, the Little Tiber wended across the valley floor, making a glittering curlicue that emptied into a blue lake where the camp’s belly button might have been.

It could never mean as much as Jason’s goodness, his fervent desire to honor every god and leave no one out.

Hazel’s voice shook me out of my reverie.

He’d grown taller, stronger, more imposing—though still in an adorable, cuddly, grizzly-bear sort of way.

One thing that hadn’t changed was his bearing—that slightly awkward stance, that faint perplexed frown, as if he were constantly thinking, Am I really supposed to be here?

Have you ever had an experience so painful or embarrassing you literally forgot it happened? Your mind disassociates, scuttles away from the incident yelling Nope, nope, nope, and refuses to acknowledge the memory ever again?

I thought of Piper McLean aboard Caligula’s yachts—how she’d burst into singing “Life of Illusion” in the midst of a gang of hardened mercenaries.

She had rendered them helpless, entranced by her serenade about melancholy and regret.

For the first few bars, my voice quavered. I had no idea what I was doing.

I could feel the mood of the crowd change, as palpably as a weather front, their grief hardening into steely determination.

Some nodded and murmured assent.

No one balked at the idea of rebuilding Temple Hill in a weekend.

His face was almost as I remembered: annoyingly handsome, with a haughty chiseled profile and ringlets of golden hair framing his brow.

How could he lounge there so relaxed in his ridiculous captain’s outfit—those white slacks and boat shoes, that navy jacket over a striped collarless shirt, that officer’s hat tilted at a rakish angle on his walnut curls—when only a few days before, he had killed Jason Grace?

It raised its skeletal visage, fixing me with its burning purple eyes—the same eyes that had stared out at me from the possessed ghoul in the tunnel—and began to laugh.

After Meg’s experience growing up in Nero’s Imperial Household, surrounded by Latin-speaking servants and guards in Roman armor, purple banners, all the regalia of the old empire—of course Camp Jupiter must have triggered unwelcome memories.

The pall of shock and grief seemed to have faded.