The Tyrant's Tomb

the fasces, he would have already blasted me and my friends into a fine mist
of atoms.
He showed me that image in vivid color. I could tell he relished thinking
about it.
Meg tried to join our telepathic argument. At first, all she could send was
a garbled sense of pain and confusion. Then she managed to focus. I saw her
father smiling down at her, handing her a rose. For her, the rose was a
symbol of love, not secrets. Then I saw her father dead on the steps of Grand
Central Station, murdered by Nero. She sent Harpocrates her life story,
captured in a few painful snapshots. She knew about monsters. She had been
raised by the Beast. No matter how much Harpocrates hated me—and Meg
agreed that I could be pretty stupid sometimes—we had to work together to
stop the Triumvirate.
Harpocrates shredded her thoughts with rage. How dare she presume to
understand his misery?
Reyna tried a different approach. She shared her memories of Tarquin’s
last attack on Camp Jupiter: so many wounded and killed, their bodies
dragged off by ghouls to be reanimated as vrykolakai. She showed
Harpocrates her greatest fear: that after all their battles, after centuries of
upholding the best traditions of Rome, the Twelfth Legion might face their
end tonight.
Harpocrates was unmoved. He bent his will toward me, burying me in
hatred.
All right! I pleaded. Kill me if you must. But I am sorry! I have changed!
I sent him a flurry of the most horrible, embarrassing failures I’d suffered
since becoming mortal: grieving over the body of Heloise the griffin at the
Waystation, holding the dying pandos Crest in my arms in the Burning
Maze, and, of course, watching helplessly as Caligula murdered Jason
Grace.
Just for a moment, Harpocrates’s wrath wavered.
At the very least, I had managed to surprise him. He had not been
expecting regret or shame from me. Those weren’t my trademark emotions.
If you let us destroy the fasces, I thought, that will free you. It will also
hurt the emperors, yes?
I showed him a vision of Reyna and Meg cutting through the fasces with
their swords, the ceremonial axes exploding.
Yes, Harpocrates thought back, adding a brilliant red tint to the vision.