The Tower of Nero

Rachel pointed weakly down the hall we’d come from. “This way.”

Using Meg as a crutch, Rachel led us back toward her bedroom. She took a sharp right, then clambered down another set of stairs into the garage. On the polished concrete floor sat two Ferraris, both bright red—because why have one midlife crisis when you can have two? In the house behind us, I could hear the cows bellowing angrily, crashing and smashing as they remodeled the Dare compound for that hot apocalyptic barnyard look.

“Keys,” Rachel said. “Look for car keys!”

Will, Nico, and I scrambled into action. We found no keys in the cars—that would have been too convenient. No keys on the wall hooks, in the storage bins, or on the shelves. Either Mr. Dare kept the keys with him at all times, or the Ferraris were meant to be purely decorative.

“Nothing!” I said.

Rachel muttered something about her father that I won’t repeat. “Never mind.” She hit a button on the wall. The garage door began to rumble open. “I’m feeling better. We’ll go on foot.”

We spilled into the street and headed north as fast as Rachel could hobble. We were half a block away when the Dare residence shuddered, groaned, and imploded, exhaling a mushroom cloud of dust and debris.

“Rachel, I’m so sorry,” Will said.

“Don’t care. I hated that place anyway. Dad will just move us to one of his other mansions.”

“But your art!” Meg said.

Rachel’s expression tightened. “Art can be made again. People can’t. Keep moving!”

I knew we wouldn’t have long before the tauri silvestres found us. Along this part of the Brooklyn waterfront, the blocks were long, the roads wide, and the sight lines clear—perfect for a supernatural stampede. We had almost made it to the pineapple matcha café when Meg yelled, “The Sylvesters are coming!”

“Meg,” I wheezed, “the cows are not all named Sylvester.”

She was right about the threat, though. The demon cattle, apparently unfazed by a building falling on them, emerged from the wreckage of Chez Dare. The herd began to regroup in the middle of the street, shaking rubble from their red hides like dogs fresh from a bath.

“Get out of sight?” Nico asked, pointing to the café.

“Too late,” Will said.

The cows had spotted us. A dozen sets of blue eyes fixed on our position. The tauri raised their heads, mooed their battle moos, and charged. I suppose we could have still ducked into the café, just so the cows would destroy it and save the neighborhood from the threat of avocado bagels. Instead, we ran.

I realized this would only delay the inevitable. Even if Rachel hadn’t been groggy from her snake-induced trance, we couldn’t outrun the cows.

“They’re gaining!” Meg yelled. “You sure we can’t fight them?”

“You want to try?” I asked. “After what they did to the house?”

“So what’s their weakness?” Rachel asked. “They have to have an Achilles’ heel!”

Why did people always assume this? Why did they obsess about an Achilles’ heel? Just because one Greek hero had a vulnerable spot behind his foot, that didn’t mean every monster, demigod, and villain from ancient Greek times also had a podiatric problem. Most monsters, in fact, did not have a secret weakness. They were annoying that way.

Nevertheless, I racked my brain for any factoids I might have gleaned from Aelian’s trashy best seller On the Nature of Animals. (Not that I normally read such things, of course.)

“Pits?” I speculated. “I think farmers in Ethiopia used pits against the tauri.”

“Like peach pits?” Meg asked.

“No, like pits in the ground!”

“Fresh out of pits!” Rachel said.

The tauri had halved the distance between us. Another hundred yards and they would smash us into road jelly.

“There!” Nico yelled. “Follow me!”

He sprinted into the lead.

I had to give him credit. When Nico chose a pit, he went for broke. He ran to the luxury-apartment construction site, summoned his black Stygian sword from thin air, and slashed through the chain-link fence. We followed him inside, where a narrow rim of trailers and portable potties surrounded a fifty-foot-deep square crater. A giant crane rose from the center of the chasm, its jib extending toward us at just about knee-level. The site seemed abandoned. Perhaps it was lunch hour? Perhaps all the workers were at the pineapple matcha café? Whatever the case, I was glad not to have mortals in the way of danger.

(Look at me, caring about innocent bystanders. The other Olympians would have teased me mercilessly.)

“Nico,” Rachel said, “this is more of a canyon.”

“It’s all we’ve got!” Nico ran to the edge of the pit…and jumped.

My heart felt like it jumped with him. I may have screamed.

Nico sailed over the abyss and landed on the crane’s arm without even stumbling. He turned and extended his arm. “Come on! It’s only like eight feet. We practice bigger jumps at camp over lava!”

“Maybe you do,” I said.

The ground shook. The herd was right behind us.

Will backed up, took a running leap, and landed next to Nico. He looked back at us with a reassuring nod. “See? It’s not that bad! We’ll grab you!”

Rachel went next—no problem. Then Meg, the flying valentine. When her feet hit the crane, the whole arm creaked and shifted to the right, forcing my friends into a surfer’s stance to catch their balance.

“Apollo,” Rachel said, “hurry!”

She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking behind me. The rumble of the herd was now a jackhammer in my spine.

I leaped, landing on the crane arm with the greatest belly flop since Icarus crashed into the Aegean.

My friends grabbed my arms to keep me from rolling into the abyss. I sat up, wheezing and groaning, just as the tauri reached the edge of the pit.

I hoped they would charge over and fall to their deaths like lemmings. Though, of course, lemmings don’t actually do that. Bless their tiny hearts, lemmings are too smart to commit mass suicide. Unfortunately, so were the devil cows.

The first few tauri did indeed topple into the pit, unable to stop their momentum, but the rest of the herd successfully applied the brakes. There was a great deal of shoving and jostling and angry mooing from the back ranks, but it appeared that the one thing a forest bull could not smash through was another forest bull.

I muttered some bad words I hadn’t used since #MinoansFirst was trending on social media. Across the narrow gap, the tauri stared at us with their murderous baby-blue eyes. The sour stench of their breath and the funk of their hides made my nostrils want to curl inward and die. The animals fanned out around the lip of the chasm, but none tried to jump to the crane arm. Perhaps they’d learned their lesson from the Dares’ floating staircase. Or perhaps they were smart enough to realize that hooves wouldn’t do them much good on narrow steel girders.

Far below, the half dozen fallen cattle were starting to get up, apparently unhurt by the fifty-foot drop. They paced around, mooing in outrage. Around the rim of the pit, the rest of the herd stood in a silent vigil as their fallen comrades grew more and more distressed. The six didn’t seem physically injured, but their voices were clogged with rage. Their neck muscles bulged. Their eyes swelled. They stamped the ground, foamed at the mouth, and then, one by one, fell over and lay motionless. Their bodies began to wither, their flesh dissolving until only their empty red hides remained.