“Yes, dear,” the face said. “And I’m arresting you in the name of the Triumvirate!”

Up and down Washington Street, pleasant-looking pedestrians turned and began marching in our direction.

Headless guys and gals

Not loving the Midwest vibe

Oh, look—a cheese ghost

GEE, APOLLO, you may be thinking, why didn’t you simply pull out your bow and shoot her? Or charm her with a song from your combat ukulele?

True, I had both those items slung across my back along with my quiver. Sadly, even the best demigod weapons require something called maintenance. My children Kayla and Austin had explained this to me before I left Camp Half-Blood. I couldn’t just pull my bow and quiver out of thin air as I used to when I was a god. I could no longer wish my ukulele into my hands and expect it to be perfectly in tune.

My weapons and my musical instrument were carefully wrapped in blankets. Otherwise flying through the wet winter skies would’ve warped the bow, ruined the arrows, and played Hades with the strings of my ukulele. To get them out now would require several minutes that I did not have.

Also, I doubted they would do me much good against blemmyae.

I hadn’t dealt with their kind since the time of Julius Caesar, and I would’ve been happy to go another two thousand years without seeing one.

How could a god of poetry and music be effective against a species whose ears were wedged under their armpits? Nor did the blemmyae fear or respect archery. They were sturdy melee fighters with thick skin. They were even resistant to most forms of disease, which meant they never called on me for medical help nor feared my plague arrows. Worst of all, they were humorless and unimaginative. They had no interest in the future, so they saw no use for Oracles or prophecies.

In short, you could not create a race less sympathetic to an attractive, multitalented god like me. (And believe me, Ares had tried. Those eighteenth-century Hessian mercenaries he cooked up? Ugh. George Washington and I had the worst time with them.)

“Leo,” I said, “activate the dragon.”

“I just put him into sleep cycle.”

“Hurry!”

Leo fumbled with the suitcase’s buttons. Nothing happened. “I told you, man. Even if Festus weren’t malfunctioning, he’s really hard to wake up once he’s asleep.”

Wonderful, I thought. Calypso hunched over her broken hand, muttering Minoan obscenities. Leo shivered in his underwear. And I…well, I was Lester. On top of all that, instead of facing our enemies with a large fire-breathing automaton, we would now have to face them with a barely portable piece of metal luggage.

I wheeled on the blemmyae. “BEGONE, foul Nanette!” I tried to muster my old godly wrath voice. “Lay hands upon my divine person again and you shall be DESTROYED!”

Back when I was a god, that threat would have been enough to make entire armies wet their camouflage pants. Nanette just blinked her cow-brown eyes.

“Don’t fuss, now,” she said. Her lips were grotesquely hypnotic, like watching a surgical incision being used as a puppet. “Besides, dearie, you’re not a god anymore.”

Why did people have to keep reminding me of that?

More locals converged on our position. Two police officers trotted down the steps of the statehouse. At the corner of Senate Avenue, a trio of sanitation workers abandoned their garbage truck and lumbered over wielding large metal trash cans. From the other direction, a half dozen men in business suits tromped across the capitol lawn.

Leo cursed. “Is everybody in this town a metalhead? And I don’t mean the good kind of metalhead.”

“Relax, sweetie,” Nanette said. “Surrender and we won’t have to hurt you much. That’s the emperor’s job!”

Despite her broken hand, Calypso apparently didn’t feel like surrendering. With a defiant yell she charged Nanette again, this time launching a karate kick toward the blemmyae’s giant nose.

“Don’t!” I blurted out, too late.

As I mentioned, blemmyae are sturdy beings. They’re difficult to hurt and even more difficult to kill. Calypso’s foot connected with its target, and her ankle bent with a nasty pop. She collapsed, gurgling in pain.

“Cal!” Leo ran to her side. “Back off, chest-face!”

“Language, dear,” Nanette chided. “Now I’m afraid I’ll have to stomp on you.”

She raised one patent leather pump, but Leo was faster. He summoned a globe of fire and threw it like a baseball, hitting Nanette right between her huge chest-level eyes. Flames washed over her, setting her eyebrows and flowery dress ablaze.

As Nanette screamed and stumbled, Leo yelled, “Apollo, help me!”

I realized I’d been standing there, frozen in shock—which would’ve been fine if I’d been watching the scene unfold from the safety of my throne on Mount Olympus. Alas, I was very much down here in the trenches with the lesser beings. I helped get Calypso to her feet (her one good foot, at least). We slung her arms over our shoulders (with lots of screaming from Calypso when I accidentally grabbed her broken hand) and began hobbling away.

Thirty feet across the lawn, Leo suddenly stopped. “I forgot Festus!”

“Leave him,” I snapped.

“What?”

“We can’t manage him and Calypso! We’ll come back later. The blemmyae might just ignore him.”

“But if they figure out how to open him,” Leo fretted, “if they hurt him—”

“MARRRGGGGH!” Behind us, Nanette ripped off the shreds of her burning dress. From the waist down, shaggy blond fur covered her body, not unlike a satyr. Her eyebrows smoldered, but otherwise her face looked unhurt. She spat ashes from her mouth and glared in our direction. “That was not nice! GET THEM!”

The businessmen were almost on top of us, eliminating any hope that we could make it back to Festus without getting caught.

We chose the only heroic option available: we ran.

I hadn’t felt so encumbered since my three-legged death race with Meg McCaffrey back at Camp Half-Blood. Calypso tried to help, kicking along like a pogo stick between Leo and me, but whenever she jostled her broken foot or hand, she yelped and sagged against us.

“S-sorry, guys,” she muttered, her face beaded with sweat. “Guess I’m not meant to be a melee fighter.”

“Neither am I,” I admitted. “Perhaps Leo can hold them off while—”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Leo grumbled. “I’m just a repair guy who can throw the occasional fireball. Our fighter is stuck back there in suitcase mode.”

“Hobble faster,” I suggested.

We reached the street alive only because the blemmyae moved so slowly. I suppose I would, too, if I were balancing a fake metal head on my, er, head, but even without their disguises, the blemmyae were not as swift as they were strong. Their terrible depth perception made them walk with exaggerated caution, as if the ground were a multilayered hologram. If only we could out-hobble them…

“Good morning!” A police officer appeared on our right, his firearm drawn. “Halt or I will shoot! Thank you!”

Leo pulled a stoppered glass bottle from his tool belt. He tossed it at the officer’s feet and green flames exploded around him. The officer dropped his gun. He began tearing off his burning uniform, revealing a chest-face with shaggy pectoral eyebrows and a belly beard in need of a shave.