DIVE-BOMBING A VOLCANO was not on Reyna’s bucket list.
Her first view of southern Italy was from five thousand feet in the air. To the west, along the crescent of the Gulf of Naples, the lights of sleeping cities glittered in the predawn gloom. A thousand feet below her, a half-mile-wide caldera yawned at the top of a mountain, white steam pluming from the centre.
Reyna’s disorientation took a moment to subside. Shadow-travel left her groggy and nauseous, as if she’d been dragged from the cold waters of the frigidarium into the sauna at a Roman bathhouse.
Then she realized she was suspended in midair. Gravity took hold, and she began to fall.
‘Nico!’ she yelled.
‘Pan’s pipes!’ cursed Gleeson Hedge.
‘Whaaaaa!’ Nico flailed, almost slipping out of Reyna’s grip. She held tight and grabbed Coach Hedge by the shirt collar as he started to tumble away. If they got separated now, they were dead.
They plummeted towards the volcano as their largest piece of luggage – the forty-foot-tall Athena Parthenos – trailed after them, leashed to a harness on Nico’s back like a very ineffective parachute.
‘That’s Vesuvius below us!’ Reyna shouted over the wind. ‘Nico, teleport us out of here!’
His eyes were wild and unfocused. His dark feathery hair whipped around his face like a raven shot out of the sky. ‘I – I can’t! No strength!’
Coach Hedge bleated. ‘News flash, kid! Goats can’t fly! Zap us out of here or we’re gonna get flattened into an Athena Parthenos omelette!’
Reyna tried to think. She could accept death if she had to, but if the Athena Parthenos was destroyed their quest would fail. Reyna could not accept that.
‘Nico, shadow-travel,’ she ordered. ‘I’ll lend you my strength.’
He stared at her blankly. ‘How –’
‘Do it!’
She tightened her grip on his hand. The torch-and-sword symbol of Bellona on her forearm grew painfully hot, as if it were being seared into her skin for the first time.
Nico gasped. Colour returned to his face. Just before they hit the volcano’s steam plume, they slipped into shadows.
The air turned frigid. The sound of the wind was replaced by a cacophony of voices whispering in a thousand languages. Reyna’s insides felt like a giant piragua – cold syrup trickled over crushed ice – her favourite treat from her childhood in Viejo San Juan.
She wondered why that memory would surface now, when she was on the verge of death. Then her vision cleared. Her feet rested on solid ground.
The eastern sky had begun to lighten. For a moment Reyna thought she was back in New Rome. Doric columns lined an atrium the size of a baseball diamond. In front of her, a bronze faun stood in the middle of a sunken fountain decorated with mosaic tile.
Crepe myrtles and rosebushes bloomed in a nearby garden. Palm trees and pines stretched skyward. Cobblestone paths led from the courtyard in several directions – straight, level roads of good Roman construction, edging low stone houses with colonnaded porches.
Reyna turned. Behind her, the Athena Parthenos stood intact and upright, dominating the courtyard like a ridiculously oversized lawn ornament. The little bronze faun in the fountain had both his arms raised, facing Athena, so he seemed to be cowering in fear of the new arrival.
On the horizon, Mount Vesuvius loomed – a dark, humpbacked shape now several miles away. Thick pillars of steam curled from the crest.
‘We’re in Pompeii,’ Reyna realized.
‘Oh, that’s not good,’ Nico said, and he immediately collapsed.
‘Whoa!’ Coach Hedge caught him before he hit the ground. The satyr propped him against Athena’s feet and loosened the harness that attached Nico to the statue.
Reyna’s own knees buckled. She’d expected some backlash; it happened every time she shared her strength. But she hadn’t anticipated so much raw anguish from Nico di Angelo. She sat down heavily, just managing to stay conscious.
Gods of Rome. If this was only a portion of Nico’s pain … how could he bear it?
She tried to steady her breathing while Coach Hedge rummaged through his camping supplies. Around Nico’s boots, the stones cracked. Dark seams radiated outwards like a shotgun blast of ink, as if Nico’s body were trying to expel all the shadows he’d travelled through.
Yesterday had been worse: an entire meadow withering, skeletons rising from the earth. Reyna wasn’t anxious for that to happen again.
‘Drink something.’ She offered him a canteen of unicorn draught – powdered horn mixed with sanctified water from the Little Tiber. They’d found it worked on Nico better than nectar, helping to cleanse the fatigue and darkness from his system with less danger of spontaneous combustion.
Nico gulped it down. He still looked terrible. His skin had a bluish tint. His cheeks were sunken. Hanging at his side, the sceptre of Diocletian glowed angry purple, like a radioactive bruise.
He studied Reyna. ‘How did you do that … that surge of energy?’
Reyna turned her forearm. The tattoo still burned like hot wax: the symbol of Bellona, SPQR, with four lines for her years of service. ‘I don’t like to talk about it,’ she said, ‘but it’s a power from my mother. I can impart strength to others.’
Coach Hedge looked up from his rucksack. ‘Seriously? Why haven’t you hooked me up, Roman girl? I want super-muscles!’
Reyna frowned. ‘It doesn’t work like that, Coach. I can only do it in life-and-death situations, and it’s more useful in large groups. When I command troops, I can share whatever attributes I have – strength, courage, endurance – multiplied by the size of my forces.’
Nico arched an eyebrow. ‘Useful for a Roman praetor.’
Reyna didn’t answer. She preferred not to speak of her power for exactly this reason. She didn’t want the demigods under her command to think she was controlling them, or that she’d become a leader because she had some special magic. She could only share the qualities she already possessed, and she couldn’t help anyone who wasn’t worthy of being a hero.
Coach Hedge grunted. ‘Too bad. Super-muscles would be nice.’ He went back to sorting through his pack, which seemed to hold a bottomless supply of cooking utensils, survivalist gear and random sports equipment.
Nico took another swig of unicorn draught. His eyes were heavy with exhaustion, but Reyna could tell he was fighting to stay awake.
‘You stumbled just now,’ he noted. ‘When you use your power … do you get some sort of, um, feedback from me?’
‘It’s not mind-reading,’ she said. ‘Not even an empathy link. Just … a temporary wave of exhaustion. Primal emotions. Your pain washes over me. I take on some of your burden.’
Nico’s expression became guarded.
He twisted the silver skull ring on his finger, the same way Reyna did with her silver ring when she was thinking. Sharing a habit with the son of Hades made her uneasy.
She’d felt more pain from Nico in their brief connection than she had from her entire legion during the battle against the giant Polybotes. It had drained her worse than the last time she’d used her power, to sustain her pegasus Scipio during their journey across the Atlantic.
She tried to push away that memory. Her brave winged friend dying from poison, his muzzle in her lap, looking at her trustingly as she raised her dagger to end his misery … Gods, no. She couldn’t dwell on that or it would break her.
But the pain she’d felt from Nico was sharper.
‘You should rest,’ she told him. ‘After two jumps in a row, even with a little help … you’re lucky to be alive. We’ll need you to be ready again by nightfall.’
She felt bad asking him to do something so impossible. Unfortunately, she’d had a lot of practice pushing demigods beyond their limits.
Nico clenched his jaw and nodded. ‘We’re stuck here now.’ He scanned the ruins. ‘But Pompeii is the last place I would’ve chosen to land. This place is full of lemures.’
‘Lemurs?’ Coach Hedge seemed to be making some sort of snare out of kite string, a tennis racket and a hunting knife. ‘You mean those cute fuzzy critters –’
‘No.’ Nico sounded annoyed, like he got that question a lot. ‘Lemures. Unfriendly ghosts. All Roman cities have them, but in Pompeii –’
‘The whole city was wiped out,’ Reyna remembered. ‘In 79 C.E., Vesuvius erupted and covered the town in ash.’
Nico nodded. ‘A tragedy like that creates a lot of angry spirits.’
Coach Hedge eyed the distant volcano. ‘It’s steaming. Is that a bad sign?’
‘I – I’m not sure.’ Nico picked at a hole in the knee of his black jeans. ‘Mountain gods, the ourae, can sense children of Hades. It’s possible that’s why we were pulled off course. The spirit of Vesuvius might have been intentionally trying to kill us. But I doubt the mountain can hurt us this far away. Working up to a full eruption would take too long. The immediate threat is all around us.’
The back of Reyna’s neck tingled.
She’d grown used to Lares, the friendly spirits at Camp Jupiter, but even they made her uneasy. They didn’t have a good understanding of personal space. Sometimes they’d walk right through her, leaving her with vertigo. Being in Pompeii gave Reyna the same feeling, as if the whole city was one big ghost that had swallowed her whole.
She couldn’t tell her friends how much she feared ghosts, or why she feared them. The whole reason she and her sister had run away from San Juan all those years ago … that secret had to stay buried.
‘Can you keep them at bay?’ she asked.
Nico turned up his palms. ‘I’ve sent out that message: Stay away. But once I’m asleep it won’t do us much good.’
Coach Hedge patted his tennis-racket-knife contraption. ‘Don’t worry, kid. I’m going to line the perimeter with alarms and snares. Plus, I’ll be watching over you the whole time with my baseball bat.’
That didn’t seem to reassure Nico, but his eyes were already half-closed. ‘Okay. But … go easy. We don’t want another Albania.’
‘No,’ Reyna agreed.
Their first shadow-travel experience together two days ago had been a total fiasco, possibly the most humiliating episode in Reyna’s long career. Perhaps someday, if they survived, they would look back on it and laugh, but not now. The three of them had agreed never to speak of it. What happened in Albania would stay in Albania.
Coach Hedge looked hurt. ‘Fine, whatever. Just rest, kid. We got you covered.’
‘All right,’ Nico relented. ‘Maybe a little …’ He managed to take off his aviator jacket and wad it into a pillow before he keeled over and began to snore.
Reyna marvelled at how peaceful he looked. The worry lines vanished. His face became strangely angelic … like his surname, di Angelo. She could almost believe he was a regular fourteen-year-old boy, not a son of Hades who had been pulled out of time from the 1940s and forced to endure more tragedy and danger than most demigods would in a lifetime.
When Nico had arrived at Camp Jupiter, Reyna didn’t trust him. She’d sensed there was more to his story than being an ambassador from his father, Pluto. Now, of course, she knew the truth. He was a Greek demigod – the first person in living memory, perhaps the first ever, to go back and forth between the Roman and Greek camps without telling either group that the other existed.
Strangely, that made Reyna trust Nico more.
Sure, he wasn’t Roman. He’d never hunted with Lupa or endured the brutal legion training. But Nico had proven himself in other ways. He’d kept the camps’ secrets for the best of reasons, because he feared a war. He had plunged into Tartarus alone, voluntarily, to find the Doors of Death. He’d been captured and imprisoned by giants. He had led the crew of the Argo II into the House of Hades … and now he had accepted yet another terrible quest: risking himself to haul the Athena Parthenos back to Camp Half-Blood.
The pace of the journey was maddeningly slow. They could only shadow-travel a few hundred miles each night, resting during the day to let Nico recover, but even that required more stamina from Nico than Reyna would have thought possible.
He carried so much sadness and loneliness, so much heartache. Yet he put his mission first. He persevered. Reyna respected that. She understood that.
She’d never been a touchy-feely person, but she had the strangest desire to drape her cloak over Nico’s shoulders and tuck him in. She mentally chided herself. He was a comrade, not her little brother. He wouldn’t appreciate the gesture.
‘Hey.’ Coach Hedge interrupted her thoughts. ‘You need sleep, too. I’ll take first watch and cook some grub. Those ghosts shouldn’t be too dangerous now that the sun’s coming up.’
Reyna hadn’t noticed how light it was getting. Pink and turquoise clouds striped the eastern horizon. The little bronze faun cast a shadow across the dry fountain.
‘I’ve read about this place,’ Reyna realized. ‘It’s one of the best-preserved villas in Pompeii. They call it the House of the Faun.’
Gleeson glanced at the statue with distaste. ‘Yeah, well, today it’s the House of the Satyr.’
Reyna managed a smile. She was starting to appreciate the differences between satyrs and fauns. If she ever fell asleep with a faun on duty, she’d wake up with her supplies stolen, a moustache drawn on her face and the faun long gone. Coach Hedge was different – mostly good different, though he did have an unhealthy obsession with martial arts and baseball bats.
‘All right,’ she agreed. ‘You take first watch. I’ll put Aurum and Argentum on guard duty with you.’
Hedge looked like he wanted to protest, but Reyna whistled sharply. The metallic greyhounds materialized from the ruins, racing towards her from different directions. Even after so many years, Reyna had no idea where they came from or where they went when she dismissed them, but seeing them lifted her spirits.
Hedge cleared his throat. ‘You sure those aren’t Dalmatians? They look like Dalmatians.’
‘They’re greyhounds, Coach.’ Reyna had no idea why Hedge feared Dalmatians, but she was too tired to ask right now. ‘Aurum, Argentum, guard us while I sleep. Obey Gleeson Hedge.’
The dogs circled the courtyard, keeping their distance from the Athena Parthenos, which radiated hostility towards everything Roman.
Reyna herself was only now getting used to it, and she was pretty sure the statue did not appreciate being relocated in the middle of an ancient Roman city.
She lay down and pulled her purple cloak over herself. Her fingers curled around the pouch at her belt, where she kept the silver coin Annabeth had given her before they parted company in Epirus.
It’s a sign that things can change, Annabeth had told her. The Mark of Athena is yours now. Maybe the coin will bring you luck.
Whether that luck would be good or bad, Reyna wasn’t sure.
She took one last look at the bronze faun cowering before the sunrise and the Athena Parthenos. Then she closed her eyes and slipped into dreams.
