Dark Prophecy

Four beheaded dudes

Are too much for one nightmare

Why me? Sob. Sob. Sob.

NATURALLY, I had terrible dreams.

I found myself standing at the foot of a mighty fortress on a moonless night. Before me, rough-hewn walls soared hundreds of feet upward, flecks of feldspar glittering like stars.

At first, I heard nothing but the whistling cries of owls in the woods behind me—a sound that always reminded me of nighttime in ancient Greece. Then, at the base of the stronghold, stone ground against stone. A small hatch appeared where none had been before. A young man crawled out, lugging a heavy sack behind him.

“Come on!” he hissed to someone still in the tunnel.

The man struggled to his feet, the contents of his sack clinking and clanking. Either he was taking out the recycling (unlikely) or he had just stolen a great deal of treasure.

He turned in my direction, and a jolt of recognition made me want to scream like an owl.

It was Trophonius. My son.

You know that feeling when you suspect you might have fathered someone thousands of years ago, but you’re not really sure? Then you see that child as a grown man, and looking into his eyes, you know beyond a doubt that he is yours? Yes, I’m sure many of you can relate.

I didn’t recall who his mother was…the wife of King Erginus, perhaps? She had been quite a beauty. Trophonius’s lustrous dark hair reminded me of hers. But his muscular physique and handsome face—that strong chin, that perfect nose, those rosy lips—yes, Trophonius clearly got his knockout good looks from me.

His eyes gleamed with confidence as if to say, That’s right. I just crawled out of a tunnel, and I still look gorgeous.

From the hatch, the head of another young man emerged. He must have had broader shoulders, because he was having trouble squeezing through.

Trophonius laughed under his breath. “I told you not to eat so much, brother.”

Despite his struggle, the other man looked up and grinned. He didn’t resemble Trophonius at all. His hair was blond and curly, his face as guileless, goofy, and ugly as a friendly donkey’s.

I realized this was Agamethus—Trophonius’s half brother. He was no son of mine. The poor boy had the misfortune of being the actual offspring of King Erginus and his wife.

“I can’t believe it worked,” said Agamethus, wriggling his left arm free.

“Of course it worked,” said Trophonius. “We’re famous architects. We built the temple at Delphi. Why wouldn’t King Hyrieus trust us to build his treasury?”

“Complete with a secret thieves’ tunnel!”

“Well, he’ll never know about that,” Trophonius said. “The paranoid old fool will assume his servants stole all his treasure. Now hurry up, Wide Load.”

Agamethus was too busy laughing to free himself. He stretched out his arm. “Help me.”

Trophonius rolled his eyes. He slung his sack of treasure to the ground—and thereby sprang the trap.

I knew what would happen next. I remembered the tale now that I saw it unfolding, but it was still hard to watch. King Hyrieus was paranoid, all right. Days before, he had scoured the treasury for any possible weaknesses. Upon finding the tunnel, he said nothing to his servants, his building crew, or his architects. He didn’t move his treasure. He simply laid a deadly trap and waited to find out exactly who planned to rob him….

Trophonius set the bag of gold right on the trip wire, which only became active once a thief had exited the tunnel. The king intended to catch his betrayers red-handed.

In the nearest tree, a mechanical bow fired a screaming flare skyward, cutting an arc of red flame across the dark. Inside the tunnel, a support beam snapped, crushing Agamethus’s chest under a shower of stone.

Agamethus gasped, his free arm flailing. His eyes bulged as he coughed blood. Trophonius cried in horror. He ran to his brother’s side and tried to pull him free, but this only made Agamethus scream.

“Leave me,” said Agamethus.

“I won’t.” Tears streaked Trophonius’s face. “This is my fault. This was my idea! I’ll get help. I’ll—I’ll tell the guards—”

“They’ll only kill you, too,” Agamethus croaked. “Go. While you can. And brother, the king knows my face.” He gasped, his breath gurgling. “When he finds my body—”

“Don’t talk that way!”

“He’ll know you were with me,” Agamethus continued, his eyes now clear and calm with the certainty of death. “He’ll track you down. He’ll declare war on our father. Make sure my body can’t be identified.”

Agamethus clawed weakly at the knife hanging from his brother’s belt.

Trophonius wailed. He understood what his brother was asking. He heard the guards shouting in the distance. They would be here soon.

He raised his voice to the heavens. “Take me instead! Save him, Father, please!”

Trophonius’s father, Apollo, chose to ignore his prayer.

I gave you fame, Apollo was thinking. I let you design my temple at Delphi. Then you used your reputation and talents to become a thief. You brought this upon yourself.

In despair, Trophonius drew his knife. He kissed his brother’s forehead one last time, then laid the blade across Agamethus’s neck.

My dream changed.

I stood in a long subterranean chamber like an alternate image of the Waystation’s main hall. Overhead, a curved ceiling glittered with white subway tiles. Along either side of the room, where the rail pits would’ve been in a train depot, open canals of water flowed. Rows of television monitors lined the walls, flashing video clips of a bearded man with curly brown hair, perfect teeth, and brilliant blue eyes.

The videos reminded me of Times Square ads for a late-night talk show host. The man mugged for the camera, laughing, kissing the screen, pretending to be off-balance. In each shot, he wore a different outfit—an Italian business suit, a race-car driver’s uniform, hunting fatigues—each cut from the skin of a lion.

A title bounced around the screen in garish colors: THE NEW HERCULES!

Yes. That’s what he liked to call himself back in Roman times. He had that hero’s shockingly good physique, but he wasn’t the actual Hercules. I should know. I’d dealt with Hercules on many occasions. This emperor was more like someone’s idea of Hercules—an airbrushed, overly muscular caricature.

In the middle of the hall, flanked by bodyguards and attendants, was the man himself, lounging on a white granite throne. Not many emperors can look imperial wearing only lion-skin swim trunks, but Commodus managed. One of his legs was thrown casually over the throne’s armrest. His golden abs formed such a six-pack I imagined I could see the pop-top tabs. With an immensely bored expression, using only two fingers, he twirled a six-foot-long poleax that came very close to threatening his nearest advisor’s anatomy.

I wanted to whimper. Not just because I still found Commodus attractive after so many centuries, not just because we had a, er, complicated history, but also because he reminded me what I used to be like. Oh, to be able to look in the mirror and see perfection again, not a pudgy awkward boy with a bad complexion!

I forced myself to focus on the other people in the room. Kneeling before the emperor were two people I’d seen in my vision of Nero’s penthouse—Marcus the blinged-out jackal boy, and Vortigern the barbarian.

Marcus was trying to explain something to the emperor. He waved his hands desperately. “We tried! Sire, listen!”

The emperor did not seem inclined to listen. His uninterested gaze drifted across the throne room to various amusements: a rack of torture tools, a row of arcade games, a set of weights, and a freestanding target board plastered with…oh, dear, the face of Lester Papadopoulos, bristling with embedded throwing knives.

In the shadows at the back of the room, strange animals moved restlessly in cages. I saw no griffins, but there were other fabled beasts I hadn’t seen in centuries. Half a dozen winged Arabian serpents fluttered in an oversize canary cage. Inside a golden pen, a pair of bull-like creatures with huge horns snuffled at a feeding trough. European yales, perhaps? Goodness, those had been rare even back in ancient times.

Marcus kept yammering excuses until, on the emperor’s left, a portly man in a crimson business suit snapped, “ENOUGH!”

The advisor made a wide arc around the emperor’s spinning poleax. His face was so red and sweaty that, as a god of medicine, I wanted to warn him he was dangerously close to congestive heart failure. He advanced on the two supplicants.

“You are telling us,” he snarled, “that you lost her. Two strong, capable servants of the Triumvirate lost a little girl. How could that happen?”

Marcus cupped his hands. “Lord Cleander, I don’t know! We stopped at a convenience store outside of Dayton. She went to the restroom and—and she disappeared.”

Marcus glanced at his companion for support. Vortigern grunted.

Cleander, the red-suited advisor, scowled. “Was there any sort of plant near this restroom?”

Marcus blinked. “Plant?”

“Yes, you fool. The growing kind.”

“I…well, there was a clump of dandelions growing from a crack in the pavement by the door, but—”

“What?” yelled Cleander. “You let a daughter of Demeter near a plant?”

A daughter of Demeter. My heart felt like it had been launched upward in one of Britomartis’s nets. At first I had wondered if these men were talking about Georgina, but they meant Meg McCaffrey. She had given her escorts the slip.

Marcus gaped like a fish. “Sir, it—it was a just a weed!”

“Which is all she needed to teleport away!” screamed Cleander. “You should have realized how powerful she is becoming. Gods only know where she is now!”

“Actually,” said the emperor, sending a flash freeze through the room, “I’m a god. And I have no idea.”

He stopped twirling his poleax. He scanned the throne room until his gaze fixed on a blemmyae servant arranging cakes and canapés on a tea cart. She was not in disguise—her chest-face was in full view, though below her belly-chin she wore a maid’s black skirt with a white lace apron.

The emperor took aim. He casually chucked his poleax across the room, the blade burying itself between the maid’s eyes. She staggered, managed to say, “Good shot, my lord,” then crumbled to dust.

The advisors and bodyguards clapped politely.

Commodus waved away their praise. “I’m bored with these two.” He gestured at Marcus and Vortigern. “They failed, yes?”

Cleander bowed. “Yes, my lord. Thanks to them, the daughter of Demeter is on the loose. If she reaches Indianapolis, she could cause us no end of trouble.”

The emperor smiled. “Ah, but Cleander, you failed too, did you not?”

The red-suited man gulped. “Sire, I—I assure you—”

“It was your idea to allow Nero to send these idiots. You thought they’d be helpful in capturing Apollo. Now the girl has betrayed us. And Apollo is somewhere in my city, and you haven’t apprehended him yet.”

“Sire, the meddlesome women of the Waystation—”

“That’s right!” the emperor said. “You haven’t found them yet, either. And don’t get me started on all your failures concerning the naming ceremony.”

“B-but, sire! We will have thousands of animals for you to slaughter! Hundreds of captives—”

“BORING! I told you, I want something creative. Are you my praetorian prefect or not, Cleander?”

“Y-yes, sire.”

“And so you’re responsible for any failures.”

“But—”

“And you’re boring me,” Commodus added, “which is punishable by death.” He glanced to either side of the throne. “Who’s next in the chain of command? Speak up.”

A young man stepped forward. Not a Germanus bodyguard, but definitely a fighter. His hand rested easily on the pommel of a sword. His face was a patchwork of scars. His clothes were casual—just jeans, a red-and-white T-shirt that read CORNHUSKERS, and a red bandana tied across his curly dark hair—but he held himself with the easy confidence of a practiced killer.

“I am next, sire.”

Commodus inclined his head. “Do it, then.”

Cleander shrieked, “No!”

The Cornhusker moved with blinding speed. His sword flashed. In three fluid slices, three people fell dead, their heads severed from their bodies. On the bright side, Cleander no longer had to worry about congestive heart failure. Neither did Marcus nor Vortigern.

The emperor clapped with delight. “Oh, nice! That was very entertaining, Lityerses!”

“Thank you, sire.” The Cornhusker flicked the blood from his blade.

“You are almost as skilled with the sword as I am!” the emperor said. “Have I ever told you how I decapitated a rhinoceros?”

“Yes, my lord, most impressive.” Lityerses’s voice was as bland as oatmeal. “Your permission to clear away these bodies?”

“Of course,” the emperor said. “Now—you’re Midas’s boy, aren’t you?”

Lityerses’s face seemed to develop a few new scars when he scowled. “Yes, sire.”

“But you can’t do the golden-touch thing?”

“No, sire.”

“Pity. You do kill people well, though. That’s good. Your first orders: Find Meg McCaffrey. And Apollo. Bring them to me, alive if possible, and…hmm. There was something else.”

“The naming ceremony, sire?”

“Yes!” The emperor grinned. “Yes, yes. I have some wonderful ideas to spice up the games, but since Apollo and the girl are running around loose, we should move forward our plan for the griffins. Go to the zoo right away. Bring the animals here for safekeeping. Manage all that for me, and I won’t kill you. Fair?”

Lityerses’s neck muscles tensed. “Of course, sire.”

As the new praetorian prefect barked orders to the guards, telling them to drag away the decapitated bodies, someone spoke my name.

“Apollo. Wake up.”

My eyes fluttered open. Calypso stood over me. The room was dark. Nearby, Leo was still snoring away in his bed.

“It’s almost first light,” said the sorceress. “We need to get going.”

I tried to blink away the remnants of my dreams. Agamethus’s Magic 8 Ball seemed to float to the surface of my mind. Apollo must bring her home.

I wondered if the ghost had meant Georgina, or another girl whom I very much wanted to find.

Calypso shook my shoulder. “Come on! You wake up very slowly for a sun god.”

“W-what? Where?”

“The zoo,” she said. “Unless you want to wait around here for morning chores.”