The Tyrant's Tomb

“Well, I—”
“Then you punished the birds that told you about it,” Reyna added, “by
turning them black, as if black was bad and white was good?”
“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound right,” I protested. “It’s just
what happened when my curse scorched them. It also made them nastytempered
flesh-eaters.”
“Oh, that’s much better,” Reyna snarled.
“If we let the birds eat you,” Meg asked, “will they leave Reyna and me
alone?”
“I—What?” I worried that Meg might not be kidding. Her facial
expression did not say kidding. It said serious about the birds eating you.
“Listen, I was angry! Yes, I took it out on the birds, but after a few centuries
I cooled down. I apologized. By then, they kind of liked being nastytempered
flesh-eaters. As for Koronis—I mean, at least I saved the child she
was pregnant with when Artemis killed her. He became Asclepius, god of
medicine!”
“Your girlfriend was pregnant when you had her killed?” Reyna
launched another kick at my face. I managed to dodge it, since I’d had a lot
of practice cowering, but it hurt to know that this time she hadn’t been
aiming at an incoming raven. Oh, no. She wanted to knock my teeth in.
“You suck,” Meg agreed.
“Can we talk about this later?” I pleaded. “Or perhaps never? I was a god
then! I didn’t know what I was doing!”
A few months ago, a statement like that would have made no sense to
me. Now, it seemed true. I felt as if Meg had given me her thick-lensed
rhinestone-studded glasses, and to my horror, they corrected my eyesight. I
didn’t like how small and tawdry and petty everything looked, rendered in
perfect ugly clarity through the magic of Meg-o-Vision. Most of all, I didn’t
like the way I looked—not just present-day Lester, but the god formerly
known as Apollo.
Reyna exchanged glances with Meg. They seemed to reach a silent
agreement that the most practical course of action would be to survive the
ravens now so they could kill me themselves later.
“We’re dead if we stay here.” Reyna swung her sword at another
enthusiastic flesh-eater. “We can’t fend them off and climb at the same time.
Ideas?”
The ravens had one. It was called all-out attack.