The Tyrant’s Tomb by Rick Riordan

Ukulele song?

No need to remove my guts

A simple “no” works

“OH,” DON SAID INa small voice. “That’s what smells.”

“I thought you said they travel in pairs,” I complained.

“Or threes,” the faun whimpered. “Sometimes in threes.”

The eurynomoi snarled, crouching just out of reach of Meg’s blades. Behind me, Lavinia hand-cranked her manubalista—click, click, click—but the weapon was so slow to prime, she wouldn’t be ready to fire until sometime next Thursday. Hazel’s spatha rasped as she slid the blade from its scabbard. That, too, wasn’t a great weapon for fighting in close quarters.

Meg seemed unsure whether she should charge, stand her ground, or drop from exhaustion. Bless her stubborn little heart, she still had Jason’s diorama wedged under her arm, which would not help her in battle.

I fumbled for a weapon and came up with my ukulele. Why not? It was only slightly more ridiculous than a spatha or a manubalista.

My nose might have been busted from the hearse’s air bag, but my sense of smell was sadly unaffected. The combination of ghoul stench with the scent of bubble gum made my nostrils burn and my eyes water.

“FOOD,” said the first ghoul.

“FOOD!” agreed the second.

They sounded delighted, as if we were favorite meals they hadn’t been served in ages.

Hazel spoke, calm and steady. “Guys, we fought these things in the battle. Don’t let them scratch you.”

The way she said the battle made it sound like there could only be one horrible event to which she might be referring. I flashed back to what Leo Valdez had told us in Los Angeles—that Camp Jupiter had suffered major damage, lost good people in their last fight. I was beginning to appreciate how bad it must have been.

“No scratches,” I agreed. “Meg, hold them at bay. I’m going to try a song.”

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

I underestimated the eurynomoi’s hatred of ukuleles. As soon as I announced my intentions, they howled and charged.

I shuffled backward, sitting down hard on Jason’s coffin. Don shrieked and cowered. Lavinia kept cranking her manubalista. Hazel yelled, “Make a hole!” Which in the moment made no sense to me.

Meg burst into action, slicing an arm off one ghoul, swiping at the legs of the other, but her movements were sluggish, and with the diorama under one arm, she could only use a single sword effectively. If the ghouls had been interested in killing her, she would’ve been overwhelmed. Instead, they shoved past her, intent on stopping me before I could strum a chord.

Everyoneis a music critic.

“FOOD!” screamed the one-armed ghoul, lunging at me with its five remaining claws.

I tried to suck in my gut. I really did.

But, oh, cursed flab! If I had been in my godly form, the ghoul’s claws never would have connected. My hammered-bronze abs would have scoffed at the monster’s attempt to reach them. Alas, Lester’s body failed me yet again.

The eurynomos raked its hand across my midsection, just below my ukulele. The tip of its middle finger—barely, just barely—found flesh. Its claw sliced through my shirt and across my belly like a dull razor.

I tumbled sideways off Jason’s coffin, warm blood trickling into the waistline of my pants.

Hazel Levesque yelled in defiance. She vaulted over the coffin and drove her spatha straight through the eurynomos’s clavicle, creating the world’s first ghoul-on-a-stick.

The eurynomos screamed and lurched backward, ripping the spatha from Hazel’s grip. The wound smoked where the Imperial gold blade had entered. Then—there is no delicate way to put it—the ghoul burst into steaming, crumbling chunks of ash. The spatha clanged to the stone floor.

The second ghoul had stopped to face Meg, as one does when one has been slashed across the thighs by an annoying twelve-year-old, but when its comrade cried out, it spun to face us. This gave Meg an opening, but instead of striking, she pushed past the monster and ran straight to my side, her blades retracting back into her rings.

“You okay?” she demanded. “Oh, NO. You’re bleeding. You said don’t get scratched. You got scratched!”

I wasn’t sure whether to be touched by her concern or annoyed by her tone. “I didn’t plan it, Meg.”

“Guys!” yelled Lavinia.

The ghoul stepped forward, positioning itself between Hazel and her fallen spatha. Don continued to cower like a champ. Lavinia’s manubalista remained only half-primed. Meg and I were now wedged side by side next to Jason’s coffin.

That left Hazel, empty-handed, as the only obstacle between the eurynomos and a five-course meal.

The creature hissed, “You cannot win.”

Its voice changed. Its tone became deeper, its volume modulated. “You will join your comrades in my tomb.”

Between my throbbing head and my aching gut, I had trouble following the words, but Hazel seemed to understand.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “How about you stop hiding behind your creatures and show yourself!”

The eurynomos blinked. Its eyes turned from milky white to a glowing purple, like iodine flames. “Hazel Levesque. You of all people should understand the fragile boundary between life and death. But don’t be afraid. I will save a special place for you at my side, along with your beloved Frank. You will make glorious skeletons.”

Hazel clenched her fists. When she glanced back at us, her expression was almost as intimidating as the ghoul’s. “Back up,” she warned us. “As far as you can.”

Meg half dragged me to the front end of the coffin. My gut felt like it had been stitched with a molten-hot zipper. Lavinia grabbed Don by his T-shirt collar and pulled him to a safer cowering spot.

The ghoul chuckled. “How will you defeat me, Hazel? With this?” It kicked the spatha farther away behind him. “I have summoned more undead. They will be here soon.”

Despite my pain, I struggled to get up. I couldn’t leave Hazel by herself. But Lavinia put a hand on my shoulder.

“Wait,” she murmured. “Hazel’s got this.”

That seemed ridiculously optimistic, but to my shame, I stayed put. More warm blood soaked into my underwear. At least I hoped it was blood.

The eurynomos wiped drool from its mouth with one clawed finger. “Unless you intend to run and abandon that lovely coffin, you might as well surrender. We are strong underground, daughter of Pluto. Too strong for you.”

“Oh?” Hazel’s voice remained steady, almost conversational. “Strong underground. That’s good to know.”

The tunnel shook. Cracks appeared in the walls, jagged fissures branching up the stone. Beneath the ghoul’s feet, a column of white quartz erupted, skewering the monster against the ceiling and reducing it to a cloud of vulture-feather confetti.

Hazel faced us as if nothing remarkable had happened. “Don, Lavinia, get this…” She looked uneasily at the coffin. “Get this out of here. You”—she pointed at Meg—“help your friend, please. We have healers at camp who can deal with that ghoul scratch.”

“Wait!” I said. “Wh-what just happened? Its voice—”

“I’ve seen that happen before with a ghoul,” Hazel said grimly. “I’ll explain later. Right now, get going. I’ll follow in a sec.”

I started to protest, but Hazel stopped me with a shake of her head. “I’m just going to pick up my sword and make sure no more of those things can follow us. Go!”

Rubble trickled from new cracks in the ceiling. Perhaps leaving wasn’t such a bad idea.

Leaning on Meg, I managed to stagger farther down the tunnel. Lavinia and Don lugged Jason’s coffin. I was in so much pain I didn’t even have the energy to yell at Lavinia to carry it like a couch.

We’d gone perhaps fifty feet when the tunnel behind us rumbled even more strongly than before. I looked back just in time to get hit in the face with a billowing cloud of debris.

“Hazel?” Lavinia called into the swirling dust.

A heartbeat later, Hazel Levesque emerged, coated from head to toe in glittering powdered quartz. Her sword glowed in her hand.

“I’m fine,” she announced. “But nobody’s going to be sneaking out that way anymore. Now”—she pointed at the coffin—“somebody want to tell me who’s in there?”

I really didn’t.

Not after I’d seen how Hazel skewered her enemies.

Still…I owed it to Jason. Hazel had been his friend.

I steeled my nerves, opened my mouth to speak, and was beaten to the punch by Hazel herself.

“It’s Jason,” she said, as if the information had been whispered in her ear. “Oh, gods.”

She ran to the coffin. She fell to her knees and threw her arms across the lid. She let out a single devastated sob. Then she lowered her head and shivered in silence. Strands of her hair sketched through the quartz dust on the polished wood surface, leaving squiggly lines like the readings of a seismograph.

Without looking up, she murmured, “I had nightmares. A boat. A man on a horse. A…a spear. How did it happen?”

I did my best to explain. I told her about my fall into the mortal world, my adventures with Meg, our fight aboard Caligula’s yacht, and how Jason had died saving us. Recounting the story brought back all the pain and terror. I remembered the sharp ozone smell of the wind spirits swirling around Meg and Jason, the bite of zip-tie handcuffs around my wrists, Caligula’s pitiless, delighted boast: You don’t walk away from me alive!

It was all so awful, I momentarily forgot about the agonizing cut across my belly.

Lavinia stared at the floor. Meg did her best to stanch my bleeding with one of the extra dresses from her backpack. Don watched the ceiling, where a new crack was zigzagging over our heads.

“Hate to interrupt,” said the faun, “but maybe we should continue this outside?”

Hazel pressed her fingers against the coffin lid. “I’m so angry at you. Doing this to Piper. To us. Not letting us be there for you. What were you thinking?”

It took me a moment to realize she wasn’t talking to us. She was speaking to Jason.

Slowly, she stood. Her mouth trembled. She straightened, as if summoning internal columns of quartz to brace her skeletal system.

“Let me carry one side,” she said. “Let’s bring him home.”

We trudged along in silence, the sorriest pallbearers ever. All of us were covered in dust and monster ash. At the front of the coffin, Lavinia squirmed in her armor, occasionally glancing over at Hazel, who walked with her eyes straight ahead. She didn’t even seem to notice the random vulture feather fluttering from her shirtsleeve.

Meg and Don carried the back of the casket. Meg’s eyes were bruising up nicely from the car crash, making her look like a large, badly dressed raccoon. Don kept twitching, tilting his head to the left as if he wanted to hear what his shoulder was saying.

I stumbled after them, Meg’s spare dress pressed against my gut. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, but the cut still burned and needled. I hoped Hazel was right about her healers being able to fix me. I did not relish the idea of becoming an extra for The Walking Dead.

Hazel’s calmness made me uneasy. I almost would’ve preferred it if she screamed and threw things at me. Her misery was like the cold gravity of a mountain. You could stand next to that mountain and close your eyes, and even if you couldn’t see it or hear it, you knew it was there—unspeakably heavy and powerful, a geological force so ancient it made even immortal gods feel like gnats. I feared what would happen if Hazel’s emotions turned volcanically active.

At last we emerged into the open air. We stood on a rock promontory about halfway up a hillside, with the valley of New Rome spread out below. In the twilight, the hills had turned violet. The cool breeze smelled of woodsmoke and lilacs.

“Wow,” said Meg, taking in the view.

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. On the north shore of that lake rose New Rome itself, a smaller version of the original imperial city.

From what Leo had said about the recent battle, I’d expected to see the place leveled. At this distance, though, in the waning light, everything looked normal—the gleaming white buildings with red-tiled roofs, the domed Senate House, the Circus Maximus, and the Colosseum.

The lake’s south shore was the site of Temple Hill, with its chaotic assortment of shrines and monuments. On the summit, overshadowing everything else, was my father’s impressively ego-tastic Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. If possible, his Roman incarnation, Jupiter, was even more insufferable than his original Greek personality of Zeus. (And, yes, we gods have multiple personalities, because you mortals keep changing your minds about what we’re like. It’s exasperating.)

In the past, I’d always hated looking at Temple Hill, because my shrine wasn’t the largest. Obviously, it should have been the largest. Now I hated looking at the place for a different reason. All I could think of was the diorama Meg was carrying, and the sketchbooks in her backpack—the designs for Temple Hill as Jason Grace had reimagined it. Compared to Jason’s foam-core display, with its handwritten notes and glued-on Monopoly tokens, the real Temple Hill seemed an unworthy tribute to the gods. It could never mean as much as Jason’s goodness, his fervent desire to honor every god and leave no one out.

I forced myself to look away.

Directly below, about half a mile from our ledge, stood Camp Jupiter itself. With its picketed walls, watchtowers, and trenches, its neat rows of barracks lining two principal streets, it could have been any Roman legion camp, anywhere in the old empire, at any time during Rome’s many centuries of rule. Romans were so consistent about how they built their forts—whether they meant to stay there for a night or a decade—that if you knew one camp, you knew them all. You could wake up in the dead of night, stumble around in total darkness, and know exactly where everything was. Of course, when I visited Roman camps, I usually spent all my time in the commander’s tent, lounging and eating grapes like I used to do with Commodus…. Oh, gods, why was I torturing myself with such thoughts?

“Okay.” Hazel’s voice shook me out of my reverie. “When we get to camp, here’s the story: Lavinia, you went to Temescal on my orders, because you saw the hearse go over the railing. I stayed on duty until the next shift arrived, then I rushed down to help you, because I thought you might be in danger. We fought the ghouls, saved these guys, et cetera. Got it?”

“So, about that…” Don interrupted, “I’m sure you guys can manage from here, right? Seeing as you might get in trouble or whatever. I’ll just be slipping off—”

Lavinia gave him a hard stare.

“Or I can stick around,” he said hastily. “You know, happy to help.”

Hazel shifted her grip on the coffin’s handle. “Remember, we’re an honor guard. No matter how bedraggled we look, we have a duty. We’re bringing home a fallen comrade. Understood?”

“Yes, Centurion,” Lavinia said sheepishly. “And, Hazel? Thanks.”

Hazel winced, as if regretting her soft heart. “Once we get to the principia”—her eyes settled on me—“our visiting god can explain to the leadership what happened to Jason Grace.”