The Tyrant's Tomb

Still…I was struck by the way she said I used to be a god. She didn’t
seem to mean it as an insult. She said it almost like a concession—like she
knew what a horrible deity I had been, but held out hope that I might be
capable of being someone better, more helpful, maybe even worthy of
forgiveness.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, let me think.”
The ravens had no intention of letting me do that. They cawed and
swarmed in a flurry of black feathers and pointy talons. Reyna and Meg tried
their best to drive them back, but they couldn’t cover me completely. A beak
stabbed me in the neck, narrowly missing my carotid artery. Claws raked the
side of my face, no doubt giving me some bloody new racing stripes.
I couldn’t think about the pain.
I wanted to sing for Reyna, to prove that I had indeed changed. I was no
longer the god who’d had Koronis killed and created ravens, or cursed the
Cumaean Sibyl, or done any of the other selfish things that had once given
me no more pause than choosing what dessert toppings I wanted on my
ambrosia.
It was time to be helpful. I needed to be repulsive for my friends!
I rifled through millennia of performance memories, trying to recall any
of my musical numbers that had totally bombed. Nope. I couldn’t think of
any. And the birds kept attacking….
Birds attacking.
An idea sparked at the base of my skull.
I remembered a story my children Austin and Kayla had told me, back
when I was at Camp Half-Blood. We were sitting at the campfire, and they’d
been joking about Chiron’s bad taste in music. They said that several years
earlier, Percy Jackson had managed to drive off a flock of killer Stymphalian
birds simply by playing what Chiron had on his boom box.
What had he played? What was Chiron’s favorite—?
“‘VOLARE’!” I screamed.
Meg looked up at me, a random geranium stuck in her hair. “Who?”
“It’s a song Dean Martin covered,” I said. “It—it might be unacceptable
to birds. I’m not sure.”
“Well, be sure!” Reyna yelled. Ravens furiously scratched and pecked at
her cloak, unable to tear the magical fabric, but her front side was
unprotected. Every time she swung her sword, a bird swooped in, stabbing at