Nero’s unspoken message seemed to hang in the air: This is all your fault, but you can still make it right.
Slowly, Meg moved to the bed. She sat, her posture stiff and guarded. I wanted to lunge between her and Nero, to insert myself in the gap and make sure he could not get any closer, but I feared his influence was worse than physical.…He was worming his way into her mind.
“Here is the good news, Meg,” he said. “We will always have each other. I will never abandon you. You can never make a mistake so great I will not take you back. Lu betrayed you when she betrayed me. Apollo was unreliable, selfish, and—dare I say—a narcissist. But I know you. I have raised you. This is your home.”
Oh, gods, I thought. Nero was so good at being evil, and so evil at being good, he made the words lose their meaning. He could tell you the floor was the ceiling with such conviction you might start believing it, especially since any disagreement would unleash the Beast.
I marveled how such a man could rise to be emperor of Rome. Then I marveled how such a man could ever lose control of Rome. It was easy to see how he’d gotten the mobs on his side.
Meg shivered, but whether from rage or despair, I couldn’t be sure.
“There, there.” Nero put an arm around her shoulders. “You can cry. It’s all right. I’m here.”
A cold knot formed in my gut. I suspected that as soon as Meg’s tears fell, the game would be over. All the independence she’d built and fought so hard to maintain would crumble. She would fold herself against Nero’s chest, just as she’d done as a little girl, after Nero killed her real father. The Meg I knew would disappear under the twisted, tortured mess Nero had spent years cultivating.
The scene lost cohesion—perhaps because I was too upset to control my dream. Or perhaps I simply couldn’t bear to watch what happened next. I tumbled down through the tower, floor after floor, trying to regain the reins.
I’m not done, I insisted. I need more information!
Unfortunately, I got it.
I stopped in front of a golden door—never a good sign, golden doors. The dream swept me inside a small vault. I felt as if I’d entered a reactor core. Intense heat threatened to burn my dream-self into a cloud of dream-ashes. The air smelled heavy and toxic. Before me, floating above a pedestal of Stygian iron, was the fasces of Nero—a five-foot-tall golden ax, bundled with wooden rods and lashed together by gold cords. The ceremonial weapon pulsed with power—exponentially more than the two fasces Meg and I had destroyed at Sutro Tower.
The meaning of this dawned on me…whispered into my brain like a line of Python’s poisoned prophecy. The three emperors of the Triumvirate hadn’t just linked themselves through a corporation. Their life forces, their ambitions, their greed and malice, had entwined over the centuries. By killing Commodus and Caligula, I had consolidated all the power of the Triumvirate into the fasces of Nero. I had made the surviving emperor three times as powerful and harder to kill. Even if the fasces were unguarded, destroying it would be difficult.
And the fasces was not unguarded.
Behind the glowing ax, his hands spread as if in benediction, the guardian stood. His body was humanoid, seven feet tall. Patches of gold fur covered his muscular chest, arms, and legs. His feathery white wings reminded me of one of Zeus’s wind spirits, or the angels that Christians liked to paint.
His face, however, was not angelic. He had the shaggy-maned visage of a lion, ears rimmed with black fur, mouth open to reveal fangs and a panting red tongue. His huge golden eyes radiated a sort of sleepy, self-confident strength.
But the strangest thing about the guardian was the serpent that encircled his body from ankles to neck—a slithering spiral of green flesh that corkscrewed around him like an endless escalator—a snake with no head or tail.
The lion man saw me. My dream state was nothing to him. Those gold eyes locked onto me and would not let me go. They turned me and examined me as if I were a trog boy’s crystal sphere.
He communicated wordlessly. He told me he was the leontocephaline, a creation of Mithras, a Persian god so secretive even we Olympians had never really understood him. In Mithras’s name, the leontocephaline had overseen the movement of the stars and the phases of the zodiac. He had also been the keeper of Mithras’s great specter of immortality, but that had been lost eons ago. Now the leontocephaline had been given a new job, a new symbol of power to guard.
Just looking at him threatened to tear my mind apart. I tried to ask him questions. I understood that fighting him was impossible. He was eternal. He could no more be killed than one could kill time. He guarded the immortality of Nero, but wasn’t there any way…?
Oh, yes. He could be bargained with. I saw what he wanted. The realization made my soul curl up like a squashed spider.
Nero was clever. Horribly, evilly clever. He had set a trap with his own symbol of power. He was cynically betting that I would never pay the price.
At last, his point made, the leontocephaline released me. My dream-self snapped back into my body.
I sat up in bed, gasping and soaked in sweat.
“About time,” Lu said.
Incredibly, she was on her feet, pacing the cell. My healing power must have done more than just soothe her amputation wounds. She wobbled a bit, but she did not look like someone who’d been using crutches and leg braces just a day ago. Even the bruises on her face had faded.
“You…You look better,”
