My eyes bulged. My vision blurred.

“STOP!” Meg ordered.

The dryads stopped. The ficus sobbed with relief and released her hold around my neck. The others backed off, leaving me on my hands and knees, gasping, bruised, and bleeding.

Meg ran to me. She knelt and put her hand on my shoulder, studying my scrapes and cuts and my ruined, bandaged nose with an agonized expression. I would have been overjoyed to get this attention from her if we hadn’t been in the middle of Nero’s throne room, or if I could just, you know, breathe.

Her first whispered question was not the one I’d been expecting: “Is Lu alive?”

I nodded, blinking away tears of pain. “Last I saw,” I whispered back. “Still fighting.”

Meg’s brow furrowed. For the moment, her old spirit seemed rekindled, but it was difficult to visualize her the way she used to be. I had to concentrate on her eyes, framed by her wonderfully horrible cat-eye glasses, and ignore the new wispy haircut, the smell of lilac perfume, the purple gown and gold sandals and—OH, GODS!—someone had given her a pedicure.

I tried to contain my horror. “Meg,” I said. “There’s only one person here you need to listen to: yourself. Trust yourself.”

I meant it, despite all my doubts and fears, despite all my complaints over the months about Meg being my master. She had chosen me, but I had also chosen her. I did trust her—not in spite of her past with Nero, but because of it. I had seen her struggle. I’d admired her hard-won progress. I had to believe in her for my own sake. She was—gods help me—my role model.

I pulled her gold rings from my pocket. She recoiled when she saw them, but I pressed them into her hands. “You are stronger than he is.”

If I could have just kept her looking nowhere but at me, perhaps we could’ve survived in a small bubble of our old friendship, even surrounded by Nero’s toxic environment.

But Nero couldn’t allow that.

“Oh, my dear.” He sighed. “I appreciate your kind heart. I do! But we can’t interfere with justice.”

Meg stood and faced him. “This isn’t justice.”

His smile thinned. He glanced at me with a mixture of humor and pity, as if saying, Now look what you’ve done.

“Perhaps you’re right, Meg,” he conceded. “These dryads don’t have the courage or the spirit to do what’s necessary.”

Meg stiffened, apparently realizing what Nero intended to do. “No.”

“We will have to try something else.” He gestured to the demigods, who lowered their torches into the plants.

“NO!” Meg screamed.

The room turned green. A storm of allergens exploded from Meg’s body, as if she’d released an entire season of oak pollen in a single blast. Verdant dust coated the throne room—Nero, his couch, his guards, his rugs, his windows, his children. The demigods’ torch flames spluttered and died.

The dryads’ trees began to grow, roots breaking through their pots and anchoring to the floor, new leaves unfurling to replace the singed ones, branches thickening and stretching out, threatening to entangle their demigod minders. Not being complete fools, Nero’s children scrambled away from their newly aggressive houseplants.

Meg turned to the dryads. They were huddled together trembling, burn marks steaming on their arms. “Go heal,” she told them. “I’ll keep you safe.”

With a grateful collective sob, they vanished.

Nero calmly brushed the pollen from his face and clothes. His Germani seemed unperturbed, as if this sort of thing happened a lot. One of the cynocephali sneezed. His wolf-headed comrade offered him a Kleenex.

“My dear Meg,” Nero said, his voice even, “we’ve talked about this before. You must control yourself.”

Meg clenched her fists. “You didn’t have the right. It wasn’t fair—”

“Now, Meg.” His voice hardened, letting her know that his patience was strained. “Apollo might still be allowed to live, if that’s really what you want. We don’t have to surrender him to Python. But if we’re going to take that kind of risk, I’ll need you at my side with your wonderful powers. Be my daughter again. Let me save him for you.”

She said nothing. Her stance radiated stubbornness. I imagined her putting down her own roots, mooring herself in place.

Nero sighed. “Everything becomes much, much harder when you wake the Beast. You don’t want to make the wrong choice again, do you? And lose someone else like you lost your father?” He gestured to his dozen pollen-covered Germani, his pair of cynocephali, his seven demigod foster children—all of whom glared at us as if they, unlike the dryads, would be quite happy to tear us to pieces.

I wondered how quickly I could retrieve my bow, though I was in no shape for combat. I wondered how many opponents Meg could handle with her scimitars. Good as she was, I doubted she could fend off twenty-one. Then there was Nero himself, who had the constitution of a minor god. Despite her anger, Meg couldn’t seem to make herself look him in the face.

I imagined Meg making these same calculations, perhaps deciding that there was no hope, that the only possibility of sparing my life was to give in to Nero.

“I didn’t kill my father,” she said, her voice small and hard. “I didn’t cut off Lu’s hands or enslave those dryads or twist us all up inside.” She swept a hand toward the other demigods of the household. “You did that, Nero. I hate you.”

The emperor’s expression turned sad and weary. “I see. Well…if you feel that way—”

“It’s not about feelings,” Meg snapped. “It’s about the truth. I’m not listening to you. And I’m not using your weapons to fight my fights anymore.”

She tossed her rings away.

A small desperate yelp escaped my throat.

Nero chuckled. “That, my dear, was foolish.”

For once, I was tempted to agree with the emperor. No matter how good my young friend was with gourds and pollen, no matter how glad I was to have her at my side, I couldn’t imagine us getting out of this room alive unarmed.

The Germani hefted their spears. The imperial demigods drew their swords. The wolf-headed warriors snarled.

Nero raised his hand, ready to give the kill command, when behind me a mighty BOOM! shook the chamber. Half our enemies were thrown off their feet. Cracks sprouted in the windows and the marble columns. Ceiling tiles broke, raining dust like split bags of flour.

I turned to see the impenetrable blast doors lying twisted and broken, a strangely emaciated red bull standing in the breach. Behind it stood Nico di Angelo.

Safe to say, I had not been expecting this kind of party-crasher.

Clearly, Nero and his followers hadn’t, either. They stared in amazement as the taurus silvestre lumbered across the threshold. Where the bull’s blue eyes should have been, there were only dark holes. Its shaggy red hide hung loosely over its reanimated skeleton like a blanket. It was an undead thing with no flesh or soul—just the will of its master.

Nico scanned the room. He looked worse than the last time I’d seen him. His face was covered in soot, his left eye swollen shut. His shirt was ripped to shreds, and his black sword dripped with some sort of monster blood. Worst of all, someone (I’m guessing a trog) had forced him to wear a white cowboy hat. I half expected him to say yee-haw in the most unenthusiastic voice ever.