The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5) - Rick Riordan Page 0,41

to believe in all sorts of things that can kill me!”

The first wave of cattle reached the Dares’ retaining wall. They plowed through it and charged the house.

“We need to run!” I said, exercising my noble duty as Lord Obvious of Duh.

Nico led the way. Will followed close behind with Rachel still draped over his shoulder, Meg and me at his back.

We were halfway down the hall when the house began to shake. Cracks zigzagged up the walls. At the top of the floating staircase, we discovered (fun fact) a floating staircase will cease to float if a forest bull tries to climb it. The lower steps had been stripped from the wall. Bulls rampaged through the corridor below like a crowd of Black Friday bargain hunters, stomping on broken steps and crashing through the atrium’s glass walls, renovating the Dares’ house with extreme prejudice.

“At least they can’t get up here,” Will said.

The floor shook again as the tauri took out another wall.

“We’ll be down there soon enough,” Meg said. “Is there another way out?”

Rachel groaned. “Me. Down.”

Will eased her to her feet. She swayed and blinked, trying to process the scene below us.

“Cows,” Rachel said.

“Yeah,” Nico agreed.

Rachel pointed weakly down the hall we’d come from. “This way.”

Using Meg as a crutch, Rachel led us back toward her bedroom. She took a sharp right, then clambered down another set of stairs into the garage. On the polished concrete floor sat two Ferraris, both bright red—because why have one midlife crisis when you can have two? In the house behind us, I could hear the cows bellowing angrily, crashing and smashing as they remodeled the Dare compound for that hot apocalyptic barnyard look.

“Keys,” Rachel said. “Look for car keys!”

Will, Nico, and I scrambled into action. We found no keys in the cars—that would have been too convenient. No keys on the wall hooks, in the storage bins, or on the shelves. Either Mr. Dare kept the keys with him at all times, or the Ferraris were meant to be purely decorative.

“Nothing!” I said.

Rachel muttered something about her father that I won’t repeat. “Never mind.” She hit a button on the wall. The garage door began to rumble open. “I’m feeling better. We’ll go on foot.”

We spilled into the street and headed north as fast as Rachel could hobble. We were half a block away when the Dare residence shuddered, groaned, and imploded, exhaling a mushroom cloud of dust and debris.

“Rachel, I’m so sorry,” Will said.

“Don’t care. I hated that place anyway. Dad will just move us to one of his other mansions.”

“But your art!” Meg said.

Rachel’s expression tightened. “Art can be made again. People can’t. Keep moving!”

I knew we wouldn’t have long before the tauri silvestres found us. Along this part of the Brooklyn waterfront, the blocks were long, the roads wide, and the sight lines clear—perfect for a supernatural stampede. We had almost made it to the pineapple matcha café when Meg yelled, “The Sylvesters are coming!”

“Meg,” I wheezed, “the cows are not all named Sylvester.”

She was right about the threat, though. The demon cattle, apparently unfazed by a building falling on them, emerged from the wreckage of Chez Dare. The herd began to regroup in the middle of the street, shaking rubble from their red hides like dogs fresh from a bath.

“Get out of sight?” Nico asked, pointing to the café.

“Too late,” Will said.

The cows had spotted us. A dozen sets of blue eyes fixed on our position. The tauri raised their heads, mooed their battle moos, and charged. I suppose we could have still ducked into the café, just so the cows would destroy it and save the neighborhood from the threat of avocado bagels. Instead, we ran.

I realized this would only delay the inevitable. Even if Rachel hadn’t been groggy from her snake-induced trance, we couldn’t outrun the cows.

“They’re gaining!” Meg yelled. “You sure we can’t fight them?”

“You want to try?” I asked. “After what they did to the house?”

“So what’s their weakness?” Rachel asked. “They have to have an Achilles’ heel!”

Why did people always assume this? Why did they obsess about an Achilles’ heel? Just because one Greek hero had a vulnerable spot behind his foot, that didn’t mean every monster, demigod, and villain from ancient Greek times also had a podiatric problem. Most monsters, in fact, did not have a secret weakness. They were annoying that way.

Nevertheless, I racked my brain for any factoids I might have gleaned from Aelian’s trashy best seller On the