The Tyrant's Tomb

My mental gears weren’t turning at full speed. I had trouble wrapping
my mind around the fact that by “somebody else,” Meg meant me.
I recalled one of her early memories, which I’d witnessed in my dreams:
she’d been forced to gaze upon her father’s lifeless body on the steps of
Grand Central Station while Nero, his murderer, hugged her and promised to
take care of her.
I remembered how she’d betrayed me to Nero in the Grove of Dodona
out of fear of the Beast, Nero’s dark side, and how horrible she’d felt
afterward, when we reunited in Indianapolis. Then she’d taken all her
displaced anger and guilt and frustration and projected it onto Caligula
(which, to be honest, was a pretty good place to put it). Meg, being unable to
lash out at Nero, had wanted so badly to kill Caligula. When Jason died
instead, she was devastated.
Now, aside from all the bad memories the Roman trappings of Camp
Jupiter might have triggered for her, she was faced with the prospect of
losing me. In a moment of shock, like a unicorn staring me right in the face,
I realized that despite all the grief Meg gave me, and the way she ordered me
around, she cared for me. For the past three months, I had been her one
constant friend, just as she had been mine.
The only other person who might have come close was Peaches, Meg’s
fruit-tree spirit minion, and we hadn’t seen him since Indianapolis. At first,
I’d assumed Peaches was just being temperamental about when he decided
to appear, like most supernatural creatures. But if he had tried to follow us to
Palm Springs, where even the cacti struggled to survive…I didn’t relish a
peach tree’s odds of survival there, much less in the Burning Maze.
Meg hadn’t mentioned Peaches to me once since we were in the
Labyrinth. Now I realized his absence must have been weighing on her,
along with all her other worries.
What a horribly insufficient friend I had been.
“Come here.” I held out my arms. “Please?”
Meg hesitated. Still sniffling, she rose from her cot and trudged toward
me. She fell into my hug like I was a comfy mattress. I grunted, surprised by
how solid and heavy she was. She smelled of apple peels and mud, but I
didn’t mind. I didn’t even mind the mucus and tears soaking my shoulder.
I’d always wondered what it would be like to have a younger sibling.
Sometimes I’d treated Artemis as my baby sister, since I’d been born a few
minutes earlier, but that had been mostly to annoy her. With Meg, I felt as if