She also happened to be my demigod master, thanks to Zeus’s twisted sense of humor. The truly sad thing about this? Meg was one of my better friends. If you cannot bring him to me alive, kill him. Capture Apollo before he can find the next Oracle. I had heard my old enemy Nero give orders to Meg: Go west. Nor could I imagine why Meg McCaffrey would be sent here to capture me. I could think of no reason why an evil triumvirate of ancient Roman emperors would take interest in such a location. And, no, Hera, why would I be talking about you?)Īfter falling to earth in New York City, I found Indianapolis desolate and uninspiring, as if one proper New York neighborhood-Midtown, perhaps-had been stretched out to encompass the entire area of Manhattan, then relieved of two-thirds of its population and vigorously power-washed. (Not the yummy kind of licorice, either the nasty variety that sits for eons in your stepmother’s candy bowl on the coffee table. Around us rose a meager cluster of downtown high-rises-stacks of stone and glass like layered wedges of black and white licorice. Indiana was flat country-highways crisscrossing scrubby brown plains, shadows of winter clouds floating above urban sprawl. “Apollo, just try, will you? Does this look like the city you dreamed about or not?” “Guys, cool it.” Leo patted the dragon’s neck. “That doesn’t mean I can pinpoint her location with my mind! Zeus has revoked my access to GPS!” Just hearing Meg’s name gave me a twinge of pain. “You said your friend Meg would be here.” “You’re the one who’s been having visions,” Calypso reminded me. “Why is it my job to sense things? Just because I used to be a god of prophecy-” Leo glanced back, his face streaked with soot. I had a flashback to the time I installed a life-size statue of the muse Calliope on my sun chariot and the extra weight of the hood ornament made me nosedive into China and create the Gobi Desert. Despite my New York State junior driver’s license, Leo Valdez didn’t trust me to operate his aerial bronze steed!įestus’s claws scrabbled for a hold on the green copper dome, which was much too small for a dragon his size. It wasn’t enough that I had to toil upon the earth doing (ugh) heroic quests until I could find a way back into my father’s good graces, or that I had a case of acne which simply would not respond to over-the-counter zit medicine.
Oh, the indignities I had suffered since Zeus stripped me of my divine powers! It wasn’t enough that I was now a sixteen-year-old mortal with the ghastly alias Lester Papadopoulos. I, the most important passenger, the youth who had once been the glorious god Apollo, was forced to sit in the back of the dragon. Cold wind blew her chestnut hair into my face, making me blink and spit. “Could we please get to the ground? Gently this time?”įor a formerly immortal sorceress who once controlled air spirits, Calypso was not a fan of flying. No blowtorching public monuments!”īehind him on the dragon’s spine, Calypso gripped Festus’s scales for balance. “Whoa, buddy!” Leo Valdez pulled the dragon’s reins. He landed on the cupola of the Indiana Statehouse, flapped his metallic wings, and blew a cone of fire that incinerated the state flag right off the flagpole. Yet for some reason, Festus decided he did not like Indiana. Ohio he tolerated, even after our encounter with Potina, the Roman goddess of childhood drinks, who pursued us in the form of a giant red pitcher emblazoned with a smiley face. Pennsylvania he seemed to enjoy, despite our battle with the Cyclopes of Pittsburgh.
We’d been traveling west for six weeks, and Festus had never shown such hostility toward a state. WHEN OUR DRAGON declared war on Indiana, I knew it was going to be a bad day. Who taught me that rules change in the Reaches
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