The Tyrant's Tomb

I blinked, still groggy, the smell of smoke, moldy straw, and sweaty
Romans lingering in my nostrils. “A toga? But I’m not a senator.”
“You’re honorary, because you used to be a god or whatever.” Meg
pouted. “I don’t get to wear a sheet.”
I had a horrible mental image of Meg in a traffic-light-colored toga,
gardening seeds spilling from the folds of the cloth. She would just have to
make do with her glittery unicorn T-shirt.
Bombilo gave me his usual Good morning glare when I came downstairs
to appropriate the café bathroom. I washed up, then changed my bandages
with a kit the healers had thoughtfully left in our room. The ghoul scratch
looked no worse, but it was still puckered and angry red. It still burned. That
was normal, right? I tried to convince myself it was. As they say, doctor gods
make the worst patient gods.
I got dressed, trying to remember how to fold a toga, and mulled over the
things I’d learned from my dream. Number one: I was a terrible person who
ruined lives. Number two: There was not a single bad thing I’d done in the
last four thousand years that was not going to come back and bite me in the
clunis, and I was beginning to think I deserved it.
The Cumaean Sibyl. Oh, Apollo, what had you been thinking?
Alas, I knew what I’d been thinking—that she was a pretty young
woman I wanted to get with, despite the fact that she was my Sibyl. Then
she’d outsmarted me, and being the bad loser that I was, I had cursed her.
No wonder I was now paying the price: tracking down the evil Roman
king to whom she’d once sold her Sibylline Books. If Tarquin was still
clinging to some horrible undead existence, could the Cumaean Sibyl be
alive as well? I shuddered to think what she might be like after all these
centuries, and how much her hatred for me would have grown.
First things first: I had to tell the senate my marvelous plan to make
things right and save us all. Did I have a marvelous plan? Shockingly,
maybe. Or at least the beginnings of a marvelous plan. The marvelous index
of one.
On our way out, Meg and I grabbed Lemurian-spice lattes and a couple
of blueberry muffins—because Meg clearly needed more sugar and caffeine
—then we joined the loose procession of demigods heading for the city.
By the time we got to the Senate House, everyone was taking their seats.
Flanking the rostrum, Praetors Reyna and Frank were arrayed in their finest
gold and purple. The first row of benches was occupied by the camp’s ten