“You’re twisting everything into lies!” I said. “Just like you always have for Meg and your other poor children.”
I shouldn’t have called them poor. The seven torchbearers glared at me with disdain. Clearly, they didn’t want my pity. Meg’s expression remained blank, but her eyes slid away from me and fixed on the patterns in the carpet. That probably wasn’t a good sign.
Nero chuckled. “Oh, Apollo, Apollo…You want to lecture me about my poor children? How have you treated yours?”
He began rattling off a list of my parenting failures, which were many, but I only half listened.
I wondered how much time had passed since I’d seen Screech-Bling. How long could I keep Nero talking, and would it be enough for the trogs to disable the poison gas, or at least clear the building?
Whatever the case, with those blast doors sealed and the windows barred, Meg and I were on our own. We would have to save each other, because no one else would. I had to believe we were still a team.
“And even now,” Nero continued, “your children are fighting and dying below, while you are here.” He shook his head in disgust. “I tell you what. Let’s set aside the issue of fumigating my tower for the moment.” He placed the remote control next to him on the sofa, somehow making it seem like an incredibly generous concession that he would wait a few more minutes before gassing all my friends to death.
He turned to Meg. “My dear, you can choose, as I promised. Which of our nature spirits should have the honor of killing this pathetic former god? We will make him fight his own battle for once.”
Meg stared at Nero as if he’d just spoken backward. “I…I can’t…”
She wrung her fingers where her gold rings used to be. I wanted to give them back to her so badly, but I was afraid even to breathe. Meg seemed to be teetering on the edge of an abyss. I feared any change in the room—the slightest vibration in the floor, a shift in the light, a cough or a sigh—might push her over.
“You can’t choose?” Nero asked, his voice dripping with sympathy. “I understand. We have so many dryads here, and they all deserve vengeance. After all, their species has only one natural predator: the Olympian gods.” He scowled at me. “Meg is right! We will not choose. Apollo, in the name of Daphne, and all the other dryads whom you have tormented over the centuries…I decree that all our dryad friends will be allowed to tear you apart. Let’s see how you defend yourself when you don’t have any demigods to hide behind!”
He snapped his fingers. The dryads didn’t seem too excited about tearing me apart, but the children of the Imperial Household held their torches closer to their potted trees, and something in the dryads seemed to break, flooding them with desperation, horror, and rage.
They may have preferred to attack Nero, but since they couldn’t, they did what he asked. They attacked me.
IF THEIR HEARTS HAD BEEN IN IT, I WOULD have died.
I’ve seen actual mobs of bloodthirsty dryads attack. It’s not something any mortal could live through. These tree spirits seemed more interested in just playing the part. They staggered toward me, yelling RAWR, while occasionally glancing over their shoulders to make sure the torch-bearing demigods hadn’t set fire to their life sources.
I dodged the first two palm-tree spirits who lunged at me.
“I won’t fight you!” I yelled. A sturdy ficus jumped on me from behind, forcing me to throw her off. “We’re not enemies!”
A fiddle-leaf fig was hanging back, perhaps waiting for her turn to get me, or just hoping she wouldn’t get noticed. Her demigod keeper noticed, though. He lowered his torch and the fig tree went up in flames as if it had been doused in oil. The dryad screamed and combusted, collapsing in a heap of ash.
“Stop it!” Meg said, but her voice was so fragile it barely registered.
The other dryads attacked me in earnest. Their fingernails stretched into talons. A lemon tree sprouted thorns all over her body and tackled me in a painful hug.
“Stop it!” Meg said, louder this time.
“Oh, let them try, my dear,” Nero said, as the trees piled onto my back. “They deserve their revenge.”
The ficus got me in a choke hold. My knees buckled under the weight of six dryads. Thorns and talons raked every bit of exposed skin. I croaked, “Meg!”
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
