The Tyrant’s Tomb
“Happy birthday!” Tyson said.
“Thanks. Also, I’m not sure what a blood moon is.”
A hand shot up in the second row.
“Go ahead, Ida,” Reyna said, then added for my benefit, “Centurion of the Second Cohort, legacy of Luna.”
“Seriously?” I didn’t mean to sound incredulous, but Luna, a Titan, had been in charge of the moon before my sister Artemis took over the job. As far as I knew, Luna had faded away millennia ago. Then again, I’d thought there was nothing left of Helios the sun Titan until I found out that Medea was collecting shreds of his consciousness to heat the Burning Maze. Those Titans were like my acne. They just kept popping up.
The centurion stood, scowling. “Yes, seriously. A blood moon is a full moon that looks red because there’s a full lunar eclipse. It’s a bad time to fight the undead. They’re especially powerful on those nights.”
“Actually…” Ella stood, picking at her finger talons. “Actually, the color is caused by the dispersal of reflected light from the sunrise and sunset of earth. A true blood moon refers to four lunar eclipses in a row. The next one is on April eighth, yep. Farmer’s Almanac. Moon Phase Calendar supplemental.”
She plopped down again, leaving the audience in stunned silence. Nothing is quite so disconcerting as having science explained to you by a supernatural creature.
“Thank you, Ida and Ella,” Reyna said. “Lester, did you have more to add?”
Her tone suggested that it would be totally okay if I didn’t, since I’d already shared enough information to cause a camp-wide panic.
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “The emperors have allied themselves with Tarquin the Proud.”
The Lares in the room guttered and flickered.
“Impossible!” cried one.
“Horrible!” cried another.
“We’ll all die!” screamed a third, apparently forgetting that he was already dead.
“Guys, chill,” Frank said. “Let Apollo talk.”
His leadership style was less formal than Reyna’s, but he seemed to command just as much respect. The audience settled, waiting for me to continue.
“Tarquin is now some sort of undead creature,” I said. “His tomb is nearby. He was responsible for the attack you repulsed on the new moon—”
“Which is also a really cruddy time to fight the undead,” Ida volunteered.
“And he’ll attack again on the blood moon, in concert with the emperors’ assault.”
I did my best to explain what I’d seen in my dreams, and what Frank and I had discussed with Ella. I did not mention the reference to Frank’s unholy piece of firewood—partly because I didn’t understand it, partly because Frank was giving me the pleading teddy-bear eyes.
“Since Tarquin was the one who originally purchased the Sibylline Books,” I summed up, “it makes a twisted kind of sense that he would reappear now, when Camp Jupiter is trying to reconstruct those prophecies. Tarquin would be…invoked by what Ella is doing.”
“Enraged,” Ella suggested. “Infuriated. Homicidal.”
Looking at the harpy, I thought of the Cumaean Sibyl, and the terrible curse I’d laid upon her. I wondered how Ella might suffer, just because we’d coerced her into entering the prophecy business. Lupa had warned me: You will face more sacrifices. Death. Blood.
I forced that idea aside. “Anyway, Tarquin was monstrous enough when he was alive. The Romans despised him so much they did away with the monarchy forever. Even centuries later, the emperors never dared to call themselves kings. Tarquin died in exile. His tomb was never located.”
“And now it’s here,” Reyna said.
It wasn’t a question. She accepted that an ancient Roman tomb could pop up in Northern California, where it had no business being. The gods moved. The demigod camps moved. It was just our luck that an evil undead lair would move in next door. We really needed stricter mythological zoning laws.
In the first row, next to Hazel, a senator rose to speak. He had dark curly hair, off-center blue eyes, and a cherry-red mustache stain on his upper lip. “So, to sum up: in three days, we’re facing an invasion from two evil emperors, their armies, and fifty ships with weapons we don’t understand, along with another wave of undead like the one that nearly destroyed us last time, when we were a lot stronger. If that’s the bad news, what’s the bad news?”
“I assume we’re getting to that, Dakota.” Reyna turned to me. “Right, Lester?”
“The other bad news,” I said, “is that I have a plan, but it’s going to be hard, maybe impossible, and parts of the plan aren’t exactly…plan-worthy, yet.”
Dakota rubbed his hands. “Well, I’m excited. Let’s hear it!”
He sat back down, pulled a flask from his toga, and took a swig. I guessed that he was a child of Bacchus, and, judging from the smell that wafted across the senate floor, his chosen beverage was fruit punch Kool-Aid.
I took a deep breath. “So. The Sibylline Books are basically like emergency recipes, right? Sacrifices. Ritual prayers. Some are designed to appease angry gods. Some are designed to call for divine aid against your enemies. I believe…I’m pretty sure…if we’re able to find the correct recipe for our predicament, and do what it says, I may be able to summon help from Mount Olympus.”
No one laughed or called me crazy. Gods didn’t intervene in demigod affairs often, but it did happen on rare occasions. The idea wasn’t completely unbelievable. On the other hand, no one looked terribly assured that I could pull it off.
A different senator raised his hand. “Uh, Senator Larry here, Third Cohort, son of Mercury. So, when you say help, do you mean like…battalions of gods charging down here in their chariots, or more like the gods just giving us their blessing, like, Hey, good luck with that, legion!?”
My old defensiveness kicked in. I wanted to argue that we gods would never leave our desperate followers hanging like that. But, of course, we did. All the time.
“That’s a good question, Senator Larry,” I admitted. “It would probably be somewhere between those extremes. But I’m confident it would be real help, capable of turning the tide. It may be the only way to save New Rome. And I have to believe Zeus—I mean Jupiter—set my supposed birthday as April eighth for a reason. It’s meant to be a turning point, the day I finally…”
My voice cracked. I didn’t share the other side of that thought: that April 8 might either be the day I began to prove myself worthy of rejoining the gods, or my last birthday ever, the day I went up in flames once and for all.
More murmuring from the crowd. Lots of grave expressions. But I detected no panic. Even the Lares didn’t scream, We’re all going to die! The assembled demigods were Romans, after all. They were used to facing dire predicaments, long odds, and strong enemies.
“Okay.” Hazel Levesque spoke for the first time. “So how do we find this correct recipe? Where do we start?”
I appreciated her confident tone. She might have been asking if she could help with something completely doable—like carrying groceries, or impaling ghouls with quartz spikes.
“The first step,” I said, “is to find and explore Tarquin’s tomb—”