The Tyrant's Tomb

“Okay, that’s fair,” Frank admitted. “Still, if the tomb of a Roman king
was near Camp Jupiter, why would we just be learning about it now? Why
the attack of the undead?”
I didn’t have a ready answer. I’d been so fixated on Caligula and
Commodus, I hadn’t given much thought to Tarquinius Superbus. As evil as
he might have been, Tarquin had been a minor-league player compared to
the emperors. Nor did I understand why a semilegendary, barbaric,
apparently undead Roman king would have joined forces with the
Triumvirate.
Some distant memory tickled at the base of my skull…. It couldn’t be a
coincidence that Tarquin would make himself known just as Ella and Tyson
were reconstructing the Sibylline Books.
I remembered my dream of the purple-eyed entity, the deep voice that
had possessed the eurynomos in the tunnel: You of all people should
understand the fragile boundary between life and death.
The cut across my stomach throbbed. Just once, for variety, I wished I
could encounter a tomb where the occupants were actually dead.
“So, Ella,” I said, “you suggest we find this tomb.”
“Yep. Go in the tomb. Tomb Raider for PC, Playstation, and Sega Saturn,
1996. Tombs of Atuan, Ursula Le Guin, Atheneum Press, 1971.”
I barely noticed the extraneous information this time. If I stayed here
much longer, I’d probably start speaking in Ella-ese, too, spouting random
Wikipedia references after every sentence. I really needed to leave before
that happened.
“But we only go in to look around,” I said. “To find out—”
“The right things. Yep, yep.”
“And then?”
“Come back alive. ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ the Bee Gees, second single,
Saturday Night Fever motion picture sound track, 1977.”
“Right. And…you’re sure there’s no more information in the Cyclops
index that might actually be, oh, helpful?”
“Hmm.” Ella stared at Frank, then trotted over and sniffed his face.
“Firewood. Something. No. That’s for later.”
Frank couldn’t have looked more like a cornered animal if he’d actually
turned into one. “Um, Ella? We don’t talk about the firewood.”
That reminded me of another reason I liked Frank Zhang. He, too, was a
member of the I Hate Hera club. In Frank’s case, Hera had inexplicably tied