The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)

‘I’m sorry. What did she do?’

‘She was a drunk washed-up starlet with a spray-on tan.’

‘Ah.’ I waited for the sting of embarrassment to fade. It took several miles. ‘So why would Jason want to go to school here?’

Piper gripped the wheel. ‘After we broke up, he transferred to an all-boys boarding school up in the hills. You’ll see. I guess he wanted something different, something quiet and out-of-the-way. No drama.’

‘He’ll be happy to see us, then,’ Meg muttered, staring out of the window.

We made our way into the hills above town, the houses getting more and more impressive as we gained altitude. Even in Mansion Land, though, trees had started to die. Manicured lawns were turning brown around the edges. When water shortages and above-average temperatures affected the upmarket neighbourhoods, you knew things were serious. The rich and the gods were always the last to suffer.

At the crest of a hill stood Jason’s school – a sprawling campus of blond-brick buildings interlaced with garden courtyards and walkways shaded by acacia trees. The sign in front, done in subtle bronze letters on a low brick wall, read: EDGARTON DAY AND BOARDING SCHOOL.

We parked the Escalade on a nearby residential street, using the Piper McLean if-it’s-towed-we’ll-just-borrow-another-car strategy.

A security guard stood at the front gates of the school, but Piper told him that we were allowed to go inside, and the guard, with a look of great confusion, agreed that we were allowed to go inside.

The classrooms all opened onto the courtyards. Student lockers lined the open walkways. It was not a school design that would have worked in, say, Milwaukee during blizzard season, but in Southern California it spoke to just how much the locals took their mild, consistent weather for granted. I doubted the buildings even had air-conditioning. If Caligula continued cooking gods in his Burning Maze, the Edgarton school board might have to rethink that.

Despite Piper’s insistence that she had distanced herself from Jason’s life, she had his schedule memorized. She led us right to his fourth-period classroom. Peering through the windows, I saw a dozen students – all young men in blue blazers, white shirts, red ties, grey trousers and shiny shoes, like junior business executives. At the front of the class, in a director’s chair, a bearded teacher in a tweed suit was reading from a paperback copy of Julius Caesar.

Ugh. Bill Shakespeare. I mean, yes, he was good. But even he would’ve been horrified at the number of hours mortals spent drilling his plays into the heads of bored teenagers, and the sheer number of pipes, tweed jackets, marble busts and bad dissertations even his least favourite plays had inspired. Meanwhile, Christopher Marlowe got the short end of the Elizabethan stick. Kit had been much more gorgeous.

But I digress.

Piper knocked on the door and poked her head in. Suddenly the young men no longer looked bored. Piper said something to the teacher, who blinked a few times, then waved go ahead to a young man in the middle row.

A moment later, Jason Grace joined us in the walkway.

I had only seen him a few times before – once when he was a praetor at Camp Jupiter; once when he had visited Delos; then shortly afterwards, when we had fought side by side against the giants at the Parthenon.

He’d fought well enough, but I can’t say I’d paid him any special attention. In those days, I was still a god. Jason was just another hero in the Argo II’s demigod crew.

Now, in his school uniform, he looked quite impressive. His blond hair was cropped short. His blue eyes flashed behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Jason closed the classroom door behind him, tucked his books under his arm and forced a smile, a little white scar twitching at the corner of his lip. ‘Piper. Hey.’

I wondered how Piper managed to look so calm. I’d gone through many complicated break-ups. They never got easier, and Piper didn’t have the advantage of being able to turn her ex into a tree or simply wait until his short mortal life was over before returning to earth.

‘Hey, yourself,’ she said, just a hint of strain in her voice. ‘This is –’

‘Meg McCaffrey,’ Jason said. ‘And Apollo. I’ve been waiting for you guys.’

He didn’t sound terribly excited about it. He said it the way someone might say, I’ve been waiting for the results from my emergency brain scan.

Meg sized up Jason as if she found his glasses far inferior to her own. ‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ Jason peered down the walkway in each direction. ‘Let’s go back to my dorm room. We’re not safe out here.’





22


For my school project

I made this pagan temple

Monopoly board





We had to get past a teacher and two hall monitors, but, thanks to Piper’s charmspeak, they all agreed that it was perfectly normal for the four of us (including two females) to stroll into the dormitory during classroom hours.

Once we reached Jason’s room, Piper stopped at the door. ‘Define not safe.’

Jason peered over her shoulder. ‘Monsters have infiltrated the faculty. I’m keeping an eye on the humanities teacher. Pretty sure she’s an empousa. I already had to slay my AP Calculus teacher, because he was a blemmyae.’

Coming from a mortal, such talk would have been labelled homicidally paranoid. Coming from a demigod, it was a description of an average week.

‘Blemmyae, huh?’ Meg reappraised Jason, as if deciding that his glasses might not be so bad. ‘I hate blemmyae.’

Jason smirked. ‘Come on in.’

I would’ve called his room spartan, but I had seen the bedrooms of actual Spartans. They would have found Jason’s dorm ridiculously comfortable.

The fifty-foot-square space had a bookcase, a bed, a desk and a wardrobe. The only luxury was an open window that looked out across the canyons, filling the room with the warm scent of hyacinth. (Did it have to be hyacinth? My heart always breaks when I smell that fragrance, even after thousands of years.)

On Jason’s wall hung a framed picture of his sister Thalia smiling at the camera, a bow slung across her back, her short dark hair blown sideways by the wind. Except for her dazzling blue eyes, she looked nothing like her brother.

Then again, neither of them looked anything like me and, as the son of Zeus, I was technically their brother. And I had flirted with Thalia, which … Eww. Curse you, Father, for having so many children! It made dating a true minefield over the millennia.

‘Your sister says hello, by the way,’ I said.

Jason’s eyes brightened. ‘You saw her?’

I launched into an explanation of our time in Indianapolis: the Waystation, the emperor Commodus, the Hunters of Artemis rappelling into the football stadium to rescue us. Then I backed up and explained the Triumvirate, and all the miserable things that had happened to me since emerging from that Manhattan dumpster.

Meanwhile, Piper sat cross-legged on the floor, her back against the wall, as far as possible from the more comfortable sitting option of the bed. Meg stood at Jason’s desk, examining some sort of school project – foam core studded with little plastic boxes, perhaps to represent buildings.

When I casually mentioned that Leo was alive and well and presently on a mission to Camp Jupiter, all the electrical outlets in the room sparked. Jason looked at Piper, stunned.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘After all we went through.’

‘I can’t even …’ Jason sat heavily on his bed. ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or yell.’

‘Don’t limit yourself,’ grumbled Piper. ‘Do both.’

Meg called from the desk, ‘Hey, what is this?’

Jason flushed. ‘A personal project.’