The Tyrant's Tomb

“Oh, as in Oh, no.” I remembered a dour young man I’d met in medieval
Florence. It had been a long time ago, but I never forgot someone who
invented a new type of poetry. “It’s terza rima.”
“Who?” Meg asked.
“It’s a style Dante invented. In The Inferno. Three lines. The first and the
third line rhyme. The middle line rhymes with first line of the next stanza.”
“I don’t get it,” Meg said.
“I want a cupcake,” Tyson announced.
“Face and place rhyme,” I told Meg. “The middle line ends with ascend.
That tells us that when we find the next stanza, we’ll know it’s correct if the
first line and third lines rhyme with ascend. Terza rima is like an endless
paper chain of stanzas, all linked together.”
Meg frowned. “But there isn’t a next stanza.”
“Not here,” I agreed. “Which means it must be somewhere out there….”
I waved vaguely to the east. “We’re on a scavenger hunt for more stanzas.
This is just the starting point.”
“Hmph.”
As always, Meg had summarized our predicament perfectly. It was very
much hmph. I also did not like the fact that our new prophecy’s rhyme
scheme had been invented to describe a descent into hell.
“‘The tower of Nero,’” Ella said, repositioning her balloon display. “New
York, I bet. Yep.”
I suppressed a whimper.
The harpy was right. We would need to return to where my problems
began—Manhattan, where the gleaming Triumvirate headquarters rose from
downtown. After that, I would have to face the beast who had usurped my
place. I suspected that line didn’t mean Nero’s alter ego, the Beast, but the
actual beast Python, my ancient enemy. How I could reach him in his lair at
Delphi, much less defeat him, I had no idea.
“New York.” Meg clenched her jaw.
I knew this would be the worst of homecomings for her, back to her
stepfather’s house of horrors, where she’d been emotionally abused for
years. I wished I could spare her the pain, but I suspected she’d always
known this day would come, and like most of the pain she had gone through,
there was no choice but to…well, go through it.
“Okay,” she said, her voice resolute. “How do we get there?”