“Right.” Dionysus held up a cream-colored piece of stationery between his fingers, like a magician producing a card. “This came for me last night via harpy courier.”

He slid it across the table so I could read the fancy print.

Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus

Requests the pleasure of your company

At the burning of

The Greater New York Metropolitan Area

Forty-eight hours after receipt of this Invitation

UNLESS

The former god Apollo, now known as

Lester Papadopoulos,

Surrenders himself before that time to imperial justice

At the Tower of Nero

IN WHICH CASE

We will just have cake

GIFTS:

Only expensive ones, please

R.S.V.P.

Don’t bother. If you don’t show up, we’ll know.

I pushed away my huevos rancheros. My appetite had vanished. It was one thing to hear about Nero’s diabolical plans in my nightmares. It was another thing to see them spelled out in black-and-white calligraphy with a promise of cake.

“Forty-eight hours from last night,” I said.

“Yes,” Dionysus mused. “I’ve always liked Nero. He has panache.”

Meg stabbed viciously at her pancakes. She filled her mouth with fluffy, syrupy goodness, probably to keep herself from muttering curse words.

Nico caught my gaze across the table. His dark eyes swam with anger and worry. On his plate, the apple started to wither.

Will squeezed his hand. “Hey, stop.”

Nico’s expression softened a bit. The apple stopped its premature slide into old age. “Sorry. I just—I’m tired of talking about problems I can’t fix. I want to help.”

He said help as if it meant chop our enemies into small pieces.

Nico di Angelo wasn’t physically imposing like Sherman Yang. He didn’t have Reyna Ramírez-Arellano’s air of authority, or Hazel Levesque’s commanding presence when she charged into battle on horseback. But Nico wasn’t someone I would ever want as an enemy.

He was deceptively quiet. He appeared anemic and frail. He kept himself on the periphery. But Will was right about how much Nico had been through. He had been born in Mussolini’s Italy. He had survived decades in the time-warp reality of the Lotus Casino. He’d emerged in modern times disoriented and culture-shocked, arrived at Camp Half-Blood, and promptly lost his sister Bianca to a dangerous quest. He had wandered the Labyrinth in self-imposed exile, being tortured and brainwashed by a malevolent ghost. He’d overcome everyone’s distrust and emerged from the Battle of Manhattan as a hero. He’d been captured by giants during the rise of Gaea. He’d wandered Tartarus alone and somehow managed to come out alive. And through it all, he’d struggled with his upbringing as a conservative Catholic Italian male from the 1930s and finally learned to accept himself as a young gay man.

Anyone who could survive all that had more resilience than Stygian iron.

“We do need your help,” I promised. “Meg told you about the prophetic verses?”

“Meg told Will,” Nico said. “Will told me. Terza rima. Like in Dante. We had to study him in elementary school in Italy. Gotta say, I never thought it would come in handy.”

Will poked at his bran muffin. “Just so I’m clear…You got the first stanza from a Cyclops’s armpit, the second from a two-headed snake, and the third from three old ladies who drive a taxi?”

“We didn’t have much choice in the matter,” I said. “But yes.”

“Does the poem ever end?” Will asked. “If the rhyme scheme interlocks stanza to stanza, couldn’t it keep going forever?”

I shuddered. “I hope not. Usually the last stanza would include a closing couplet, but we haven’t heard one yet.”

“Which means,” Nico said, “that there are more stanzas to come.”

“Yippee.” Meg shoved more pancake in her mouth.

Dionysus matched her with a mouthful of his own, as if they were engaged in a competition to see who could devour the most and enjoy it the least.

“Well, then,” Will said with forced cheerfulness, “let’s discuss the stanzas we have. What was it—The tow’r of Nero two alone ascend? That part is obvious enough. It must mean Apollo and Meg, right?”

“We surrender,” Meg said. “That’s Luguselwa’s plan.”

Dionysus snorted. “Apollo, please tell me you’re not going to trust a Gaul. You haven’t gotten that addle-brained, have you?”

“Hey!” Meg said. “We can trust Lu. She let Lester throw her off a roof.”

Dionysus narrowed his eyes. “Did she survive?”

Meg looked flustered. “I mean—”

“Yes,” I interrupted. “She did.”

I told them what I had seen in my dreams: the broken Gaul brought before Nero’s throne, the emperor’s ultimatum, then my plunge into the caverns beneath Delphi, where Python blessed my tiny brain.

Dionysus nodded thoughtfully. “Ah, yes, Python. If you survive Nero, you have that to look forward to.”

I didn’t appreciate the reminder. Stopping a power-mad emperor from taking over the world and destroying a city…that was one thing. Python was a more nebulous threat, harder to quantify, but potentially a thousand times more dangerous.

Meg and I had freed four Oracles from the grasp of the Triumvirate, but Delphi still remained firmly under Python’s control. That meant the world’s main source of prophecy was being slowly choked off, poisoned, manipulated. In ancient times, Delphi had been called the omphalos, the navel of the world. Unless I managed to defeat Python and retake the Oracle, the entire fate of humanity was at risk. Delphic prophecies were not simply glimpses into the future. They shaped the future. And you did not want an enormous malevolent monster controlling a wellspring of power like that, calling the shots for all human civilization.

I frowned at Dionysus. “You could always, oh, I don’t know, decide to help.”

He scoffed. “You know as well as I do, Apollo, that quests like this are demigod business. As for advising, guiding, helping…that’s really more Chiron’s job. He should be back from his meeting…oh, tomorrow night, I would think, but that will be too late for you.”

I wished he hadn’t put it that way: too late for you.

“What meeting?” Meg asked.

Dionysus waved the question away. “Some…joint task force, he called it? The world often has more than one crisis happening at a time. Perhaps you’ve noticed. He said he had an emergency meeting with a cat and a severed head, whatever that means.”

“So instead we get you,” Meg said.

“Believe me, child, I would rather not be here with you delightful rapscallions, either. After I was so helpful in the wars against Kronos and Gaea, I was hoping Zeus might grant me early parole from my servitude in this miserable place. But, as you can see, he sent me right back to complete my hundred years. Our father does love to punish his children.”

He gave me that smirk again—the one that meant at least you got it worse.

I wished Chiron were here, but there was no point in dwelling on that, or on whatever the old centaur might be up to at his emergency meeting. We had enough to worry about on our own.