As I passed, Screech-Bling and the troglodyte lieutenants stood at attention and removed their headwear—all six hundred and twenty hats. I recognized the honor. I nodded my thanks and forged on across the broken threshold before I could melt into another fit of ugly sobbing.
I passed Austin and Kayla in the antechamber, tending to more wounded and directing younger demigods in clean-up efforts. They both gave me weary smiles, acknowledging the million things we didn’t have time to say. I pushed onward.
I ran into Chiron by the elevators, on his way to deliver more medical supplies.
“You came to our rescue,” I said. “Thank you.”
He looked down at me benevolently, his head nearly scraping the ceiling, which had not been designed to accommodate centaurs. “We all have a duty to rescue each other, wouldn’t you say?”
I nodded, wondering how the centaur had become so wise over the centuries, and why that same wisdom had escaped me until I had been Lesterized. “And did your…joint task force meeting go well?” I asked, trying to remember what Dionysus had told us about why Chiron had been away. It seemed like so long ago. “Something about a severed cat’s head?”
Chiron chuckled. “A severed head. And a cat. Two different…uh, people. Acquaintances of mine from other pantheons. We were discussing a mutual problem.”
He just threw that information out there as if it wasn’t a brain-exploding grenade. Chiron had acquaintances from other pantheons? Of course he did. And a mutual problem…?
“Do I want to know?” I asked.
“No,” he said gravely. “You really don’t.” He offered his hand. “Good luck, Apollo.”
We shook, and off I went.
I found the stairs and took them. I didn’t trust the elevators. During my dream in the cell, I’d seen myself sweeping down the stairwells of the tower when I fell to Delphi. I was determined to take the same path in real life. Maybe it wouldn’t matter, but I would’ve felt silly if I took a wrong turn on my way to confront Python and ended up getting arrested by the NYPD in the Triumvirate Holdings lobby.
My bow and quiver jostled against my back, clanging against my ukulele strings. My new supply pack felt cold and heavy. I held on to the railing so my wobbly legs wouldn’t collapse under me. My ribs felt like they’d been newly tattooed with lava, but considering everything I’d been through, I felt remarkably whole. Maybe my mortal body was giving me one last push. Maybe my godly constitution was kicking in to help. Maybe it was the nectar-and-Mountain-Dew cocktail coursing through my bloodstream. Whatever it was, I would take all the help I could get.
Ten floors. Twenty floors. I lost track. Stairwells are horrible, disorienting places. I was alone with the sound of my breathing and the pounding of my feet against the steps.
A few more floors, and I began to smell smoke. The hazy air stung my eyes.
Apparently, part of the building was still on fire. Awesome.
The smoke got thicker as I continued to descend. I began to cough and gag. I pressed my forearm over my nose and mouth and found that this did not make a very good filter.
My consciousness swam. I considered opening a side door and trying to find fresh air, but I couldn’t see any exits. Weren’t stairwells supposed to have those? My lungs screamed. My oxygen-deprived brain felt like it was about to pop out of my skull, sprout wings, and fly away.
I realized I might be starting to hallucinate. Brains with wings. Cool!
I trudged forward. Wait.…What happened to the stairs? When had I reached a level surface? I could see nothing through the smoke. The ceiling got lower and lower. I stretched out my hands, searching for any kind of support. On either side of me, my fingers brushed against warm, solid rock.
The passageway continued to shrink. Ultimately I was forced to crawl, sandwiched between two horizontal sheets of stone with barely enough room to raise my head. My ukulele wedged itself in my armpit. My quiver scraped against the ceiling.
I began to squirm and hyperventilate from claustrophobia, but I forced myself to calm down. I was not stuck. I could breathe, strangely enough. The smoke had changed to volcanic gas, which tasted terrible and smelled worse, but my burning lungs somehow continued to process it. My respiratory system might melt later, but right now, I was still sucking in the sulfur.
I knew this smell. I was somewhere in the tunnels beneath Delphi. Thanks to the magic of the Labyrinth and/or some strange sorcerous high-speed link that connected Nero’s tower to the reptile’s lair, I had climbed, walked, stumbled, and crawled halfway across the world in a few minutes. My aching legs felt every mile.
I wriggled onward toward a dim light in the distance.
Rumbling noises echoed through a much larger space ahead. Something huge and heavy was breathing.
The crawlspace ended abruptly. I found myself peering down from the lip of a small crevice, like an air vent. Below me spread an enormous cavern—the lair of Python.
When I had fought Python before, thousands of years ago, I hadn’t needed to seek out this place. I had lured him into the upper world and fought him in the fresh air and sunlight, which had been much better.
Now, looking down from my crawlspace, I wished I could be anywhere else. The floor stretched for several football fields, punctuated by stalagmites and split by a web of glowing volcanic fissures that spewed plumes of gas. The uneven rock surface was covered with a shag carpet of horror: centuries of discarded snakeskins, bones, and the desiccated carcasses of…I didn’t want to know. Python had all those volcanic crevices right there, and he couldn’t be bothered to incinerate his trash?
The monster himself, roughly the size of a dozen jackknifed cargo trucks, took up the back quarter of the cavern. His body was a mountain of reptilian coils, rippling with muscle, but he was more than simply a big snake. Python
