The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5) - Rick Riordan Page 0,36
than the average New York City home. The facade was concrete and steel—like a combination art museum and bombproof bunker.
I had never met Mr. Dare, the real-estate mogul, but I felt I didn’t need to. I understood gods and their palaces. Mr. Dare was operating along the same principles: Look at me, look at my massive pad, spread word of my greatness. You may leave your burnt offerings on the welcome mat.
As soon as we were out of the van, Argus floored the accelerator. He sped off in a cloud of exhaust and premium gravel.
Will and Nico exchanged looks.
“I guess he figured we won’t need a ride back,” Will said.
“We won’t,” Nico said darkly. “Come on.”
He led us to the main gates—huge panels of corrugated steel without any obvious opening mechanism or even an intercom. I suppose if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford to go in.
Nico stood there and waited.
Meg cleared her throat. “Uh, so—?”
The gates rolled open of their own accord. Standing before us was Rachel Elizabeth Dare.
Like all great artists, she was barefoot. (Leonardo would simply never put his sandals on.) Her jeans were covered in marker doodles that had gotten more complex and colorful over the years. Her white tank top was splattered with paint. Across her face, competing for attention with her orange freckles, were streaks of what looked like acrylic ultramarine blue. Some of it dotted her red hair like confetti.
“Come in quickly,” she said, as if she’d been expecting us for hours. “The cattle are watching.”
“Yes, I said cattle,” she told me, preempting my question as we walked through the house. “And, no, I’m not crazy. Hi, Meg. Will, Nico. Follow me. We’ve got the place to ourselves.”
This was like saying we had Yankee Stadium to ourselves. Great, I guess, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
The mansion was organized around a central atrium—Roman style, looking inward, so peons outside the walls couldn’t ruin your view. But at least the Romans had gardens. Mr. Dare seemed to believe only in concrete, metal, and gravel. His atrium featured a giant stack of iron and stone that was either a brilliant avant-garde sculpture or a pile of leftover building materials.
We followed Rachel down a wide hall of painted cement, then up a floating stairway into the second level, which I would’ve called the living quarters, except that nothing about the mansion felt very alive. Rachel herself seemed small and out of place here, a warm, colorful aberration padding in her bare feet through an architectural mausoleum.
At least her room had floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the neighboring railyard and the river beyond. Sunlight flooded in, illuminating the oak floors, the speckled tarps that doubled as throw rugs, several beanbag chairs, some open cans of paint, and massive easels where Rachel had six different canvases going at once. Spread across the back part of the floor was another half-finished painting that Rachel seemed to be working on with drips and splashes à la Jackson Pollock. Shoved in one corner were a refrigerator and a simple futon, as if eating and sleeping were complete afterthoughts for her.
“Wow.” Will moved to the windows to soak up the view and the sunshine.
Meg made a beeline for the refrigerator.
Nico drifted to the easels. “These are amazing.” He traced the air, following the swirls of Rachel’s paint across the canvas.
“Eh, thanks,” Rachel said absently. “Just warm-ups, really.”
They looked more like full aerobic workouts to me—huge, aggressive brushstrokes, thick wedges of color applied with a mason’s trowel, splashes so large she must have swung an entire can of paint to apply them. At first glance, the works appeared to be abstract. Then I stepped back, and the shapes resolved into scenes.
That maroon square was the Waystation in Indianapolis. Those swirls were griffins in flight. A second canvas showed flames engulfing the Burning Maze and, floating in the upper right quadrant, a string of hazy glowing ships—the fleet of Caligula. A third painting…I began to get misty-eyed all over again. It was a funeral pyre—the last rites of Jason Grace.
“You’ve started having visions again,” I said.
She looked at me with a kind of resentful yearning, as if she were on a sugar detox and I was waving around a chocolate bar. “Only glimpses. Every time you free an Oracle, I get a few moments of clarity. Then the fog settles again.” She pressed her fingertips against her forehead. “It’s like Python is inside my brain, toying with me. Sometimes I think…”