The Tyrant’s Tomb by Rick Riordan

Tattoos! Get yours now!

Free, wherever books are sold

Also, a large cat

MY ADVICE: NEVER ENTERa place where a Cyclops gets his tattoos. The odor is memorable, like a boiling vat of ink and leather purses. Cyclops skin is much tougher than human skin, requiring superheated needles to inject the ink, hence the odious burning smell.

How did I know this? I had a long, bad history with Cyclopes.

Millennia ago, I’d killed four of my father’s favorites because they had made the lightning bolt that killed my son Asclepius. (And because I couldn’t kill the actual murderer who was, ahem, Zeus.) That’s how I got banished to earth as a mortal the first time. The stench of burning Cyclops brought back the memory of that wonderful rampage.

Then there were the countless other times I’d run into Cyclopes over the years: fighting alongside them during the First Titan War (always with a clothespin over my nose), trying to teach them how to craft a proper bow when they had no depth perception, surprising one on the toilet in the Labyrinth during my travels with Meg and Grover. I will never get that image out of my head.

Mind you, I had no problem with Tyson himself. Percy Jackson had declared him a brother. After the last war against Kronos, Zeus had rewarded Tyson with the title of general and a very nice stick.

As far as Cyclopes went, Tyson was tolerable. He took up no more space than a large human. He’d never forged a lightning bolt that had killed anyone I liked. His gentle big brown eye and his broad smile made him look almost as cuddly as Frank. Best of all, he had devoted himself to helping Ella the harpy reconstruct the lost Sibylline Books.

Reconstructing lost prophecy books is always a good way to win a prophecy god’s heart.

Nevertheless, when Tyson turned to lead us into the bookstore, I had to suppress a yelp of horror. It looked like he was having the complete works of Charles Dickens engraved on his back. From his neck to halfway down his back scrolled line after line of miniature bruised purple script, interrupted only by streaks of old white scar tissue.

Next to me, Frank whispered, “Don’t.”

I realized I was on the verge of tears. I was having sympathy pains from the idea of so much tattooing, and from whatever abuse the poor Cyclops had suffered to get such scars. I wanted to sob, You poor thing! or even give the bare-chested Cyclops a hug (which would have been a first for me). Frank was warning me not to make a big deal out of Tyson’s back.

I wiped my eyes and tried to compose myself.

In the middle of the store, Tyson stopped and faced us. He grinned, spreading his arms with pride. “See? Books!”

He was not lying. From the cashier’s station/information desk at the center of the room, freestanding shelves radiated in all directions, crammed with tomes of every size and shape. Two ladders led to a railed balcony, also wall-to-wall books. Overstuffed reading chairs filled every available corner. Huge windows offered views of the city aqueduct and the hills beyond. The sunlight streamed in like warm honey, making the shop feel comfortable and drowsy.

It would’ve been the perfect place to plop down and leaf through a relaxing novel, except for that pesky smell of boiling oil and leather. There was no visible tattoo-parlor equipment, but against the back wall, under a sign that read SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, a set of thick velvet curtains seemed to provide access to a back room.

“Very nice,” I said, trying not to make it sound like a question.

“Books!” Tyson repeated. “Because it’s a bookstore!”

“Of course.” I nodded agreeably. “Is this, um, your store?”

Tyson pouted. “No. Sort of. The owner died. In the battle. It was sad.”

“Ah.” I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “At any rate, it’s good to see you again, Tyson. You probably don’t recognize me in this form, but—”

“You are Apollo!” He laughed. “You look funny now.”

Frank covered his mouth and coughed, no doubt to hide a smile. “Tyson, is Ella around? I wanted Apollo to hear what you guys discovered.”

“Ella is in the back room. She was giving me a tattoo!” He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “Ella is pretty. But shh. She doesn’t like me saying that all the time. She gets embarrassed. Then I get embarrassed.”

“I won’t tell,” I promised. “Lead on, General Tyson.”

“General.” Tyson laughed some more. “Yes. That’s me. I bashed some heads in the war!”

He galloped away like he was riding a hobbyhorse, straight through the velvet curtains.

Part of me wanted to turn, leave, and take Frank for another cup of coffee. I dreaded what we might find on the other side of those curtains.

Then something at my feet said, Mrow.

The cat had found me. The enormous orange tabby, which must have eaten all the other bookstore cats to achieve its current size, pushed its head against my leg.

“It’s touching me,” I complained.

“That’s Aristophanes.” Frank smiled. “He’s harmless. Besides, you know how Romans feel about cats.”

“Yes, yes, don’t remind me.” I had never been a fan of felines. They were self-centered, smug, and thought they owned the world. In other words…All right, I’ll say it. I didn’t like the competition.

For Romans, however, cats were a symbol of freedom and independence. They were allowed to wander anywhere they wished, even inside temples. Several times over the centuries, I’d found my altar smelling like a tomcat’s new marking post.

Mrow, Aristophanes said again. His sleepy eyes, pale green as lime pulp, seemed to say, You’re mine now, and I may pee on you later.

“I have to go,” I told the cat. “Frank Zhang, let’s find our harpy.”

As I suspected, the special-collections room had been set up as a tattoo parlor.

Rolling bookshelves had been pushed aside, heaped with leather-bound volumes, wooden scroll cases, and clay cuneiform tablets. Dominating the center of the room, a black leather reclining chair with foldable arms gleamed under an LED magnifying lamp. At its side stood a workstation with four humming electric steel-needle guns connected to ink hoses.

I myself had never gotten a tattoo. When I was a god, if I wanted some ink on my skin, I could simply will it into being. But this setup reminded me of something Hephaestus might try—a lunatic experiment in godly dentistry, perhaps.

In the back corner, a ladder led to a second-level balcony similar to the one in the main room. Two sleeping areas had been created up there: one a harpy’s nest of straw, cloth, and shredded paper; the other a sort of cardboard fort made of old appliance boxes. I decided not to inquire.

Pacing behind the tattoo chair was Ella herself, mumbling as if having an internal argument.

Aristophanes, who had followed us inside, began shadowing the harpy, trying to butt his head against Ella’s leathery bird legs. Every so often, one of her rust-colored feathers fluttered away and Aristophanes pounced on it. Ella ignored the cat completely. They seemed like a match made in Elysium.

“Fire…” Ella muttered. “Fire with…something, something…something bridge. Twice something, something…Hmm.”

She seemed agitated, though I gathered that was her natural state. From what little I knew, Percy, Hazel, and Frank had discovered Ella living in Portland, Oregon’s main library, subsisting on food scraps and nesting in discarded novels. Somehow, at some point, the harpy had chanced across copies of the Sibylline Books, three volumes that had been thought lost forever in a fire toward the end of the Roman Empire. (Discovering a copy would’ve been like finding an unknown Bessie Smith recording, or a pristine Batman No. 1 from 1940, except more…er, prophecy-ish.)

With her photographic but disjointed memory, Ella was now the sole source of those old prophecies. Percy, Hazel, and Frank had brought her to Camp Jupiter, where she could live in safety and hopefully re-create the lost books with the help of Tyson, her doting boyfriend. (Cyclops-friend? Interspecies significant other?)

Past that, Ella was an enigma wrapped in red feathers wrapped in a linen shift.

“No, no, no.” She ran one hand through her luxurious swirls of red hair, ruffling it so vigorously I was afraid she might give her scalp lacerations. “Not enough words. ‘Words, words, words.’ Hamlet, act two, scene two.”

She looked in good health for a former street harpy. Her humanlike face was angular but not emaciated. Her arm feathers were carefully preened. Her weight seemed about right for an avian, so she must have been getting plenty of birdseed or tacos or whatever harpies preferred to eat. Her taloned feet had shredded a well-defined path where she paced across the carpet.

“Ella, look!” Tyson announced. “Friends!”

Ella frowned, her eyes sliding off Frank and me as if we were minor annoyances—pictures hung askew on a wall.

“No,” she decided. Her long fingernails clacked together. “Tyson needs more tattoos.”

“Okay!” Tyson grinned as if this were fantastic news. He bounded over to the reclining chair.

“Wait,” I pleaded. It was bad enough to smell the tattoos. If I saw them being made, I was sure I would puke all over Aristophanes. “Ella, before you start, could you please explain what’s going on?”

“‘What’s Going On,’” Ella said. “Marvin Gaye, 1971.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “I helped write that song.”

“No.” Ella shook her head. “Written by Renaldo Benson, Al Cleveland, and Marvin Gaye; inspired by an incident of police brutality.”

Frank smirked at me. “You can’t argue with the harpy.”

“No,” Ella agreed. “You can’t.”

She scuttled over and studied me more carefully, sniffing at my bandaged belly, poking my chest. Her feathers glistened like rust in the rain. “Apollo,” she said. “You’re all wrong, though. Wrong body. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, 1956.”

I did not like being compared to a black-and-white horror film, but I’d just been told not to argue with the harpy.

Meanwhile, Tyson adjusted the tattoo chair into a flat bed. He lay on his stomach, the recently inked purple lines of script rippling across his scarred, muscular back.

“Ready!” he announced.

The obvious finally dawned on me.

“The words that memory wrought are set to fire,” I recalled. “You’re rewriting the Sibylline Books on Tyson with hot needles. That’s what the prophecy meant.”

“Yep.” Ella poked my love handles as if assessing them for a writing surface. “Hmm. Nope. Too flabby.”

“Thanks,” I grumbled.

Frank shifted his weight, suddenly looking self-conscious about his own writing surfaces. “Ella says it’s the only way she can record the words in the right order,” he explained. “On living skin.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. In the last few months, I’d sorted out prophecies by listening to the insane voices of trees, hallucinating in a dark cave, and racing across a fiery crossword puzzle. By comparison, assembling a manuscript on a Cyclops’s back sounded downright civilized.

“But…how far have you gotten?” I asked.

“The first lumbar,” Ella said.

She showed no sign that she was joking.

Facedown on his torture bed, Tyson paddled his feet excitedly. “READY! Oh, boy! Tattoos tickle!”

“Ella,” I tried again, “what I mean is: Have you found anything useful for us concerning—oh, I don’t know—threats in the next four days? Frank said you had a lead?”

“Yep, found the tomb.” She poked my love handles again. “Death, death, death. Lots of death.”