Python lumbered closer. I wanted to grab my bow, but my arms were paralyzed.

“It was for nothing,” he said. “The deaths you caused—the deaths you will cause—they don’t matter. If you win every battle, you will still lose the war. As usual, you don’t understand the true stakes. Face me, and you will die.”

He opened his vast maw, slavering reptilian lips pulled over glistening teeth.

“GAH!” My eyes flew open. My limbs flailed.

“Oh, good,” said a voice. “You’re awake.”

I was lying on the ground inside some sort of wooden structure, like…ah, a stable. The smells of hay and horse manure filled my nostrils. A burlap blanket prickled against my back. Peering down at me were two unfamiliar faces. One belonged to a handsome young man with silky black hair cresting over his wide sepia forehead.

The other face belonged to a unicorn. Its muzzle glistened with mucus. Its startled blue eyes, wide and unblinking, fixed on me as if I might be a tasty bag of oats. Stuck on the tip of its horn was a crank-handled rotary cheese grater.

“GAH!” I said again.

“Calm down, dummy,” Meg said, somewhere to my left. “You’re with friends.”

I couldn’t see her. My peripheral vision was still blurry and pink.

I pointed weakly at the unicorn. “Cheese grater.”

“Yes,” said the lovely young man. “It’s the easiest way to get a dose of horn shavings directly into the wound. Buster doesn’t mind. Do you, Buster?”

Buster the unicorn continued to stare at me. I wondered if he was even alive, or just a prop unicorn they had wheeled in.

“My name’s Pranjal,” said the young man. “Head healer for the legion. I worked on you when you first got here, but we didn’t really meet then, since, well, you were unconscious. I’m a son of Asclepius. I guess that makes you my grandpa.”

I moaned. “Please don’t call me Grandpa. I feel terrible enough already. Are—are the others all right? Lavinia? Hazel?”

Meg hovered into view. Her glasses were clean, her hair was washed, and her clothes were changed, so I must have been out for quite a while. “We’re all fine. Lavinia got back right after we did. But you almost died.” She sounded annoyed, as if my death would have inconvenienced her greatly. “You should’ve told me how bad that cut was.”

“I thought…I assumed it would heal.”

Pranjal knit his eyebrows. “Yes, well, it should have. You got excellent care, if I do say so myself. We know about ghoul infections. They’re usually curable, if we catch them within twenty-four hours.”

“But you,” Meg said, scowling at me. “You aren’t responding to treatment.”

“That’s not my fault!”

“It could be your godly side,” Pranjal mused. “I’ve never had a patient who was a former immortal. That might make you resistant to demigod healing, or more susceptible to undead scratches. I just don’t know.”

I sat up on my elbows. I was bare-chested. My wound had been re-bandaged, so I couldn’t tell how bad it looked underneath, but the pain had subsided to a dull ache. Tendrils of purple infection still snaked from my belly, up my chest, and down my arms, but their color had faded to a faint lavender.

“Whatever you did obviously helped,” I said.

“We’ll see.” Pranjal’s frown was not encouraging. “I tried a special concoction, a kind of magical equivalent to broad-spectrum antibiotics. It required a special strain of Stellaria media—magical chickweed—that doesn’t grow in Northern California.”

“It grows here now,” Meg announced.

“Yes,” Pranjal agreed with a smile. “I may have to keep Meg around. She’s pretty handy for growing medicinal plants.”

Meg blushed.

Buster still hadn’t moved or blinked. I hoped Pranjal occasionally put a spoon under the unicorn’s nostrils to make sure he was still breathing.

“At any rate,” Pranjal continued, “the salve I used wasn’t a cure. It will only slow down your…your condition.”

My condition. What a wonderful euphemism for turning into a walking corpse.

“And if I do want a cure?” I asked. “Which, by the way, I do.”

“That’s going to take more powerful healing than I’m capable of,” he confessed. “God-level healing.”

I felt like crying. I decided Pranjal needed to work on his bedside manner, perhaps by having a better collection of miraculous over-the-counter cures that did not require divine intervention.

“We could try more horn shavings,” Meg suggested. “That’s fun. I mean, that might work.”

Between Meg’s anxiousness to use the cheese grater and Buster’s hungry stare, I was starting to feel like a plate of pasta. “I don’t suppose you have any leads on available healing gods?”

“Actually,” Pranjal said, “if you’re feeling up to it, you should get dressed and have Meg walk you to the principia. Reyna and Frank are anxious to talk to you.”

Meg took pity on me.

Before meeting the praetors, she took me back to Bombilo’s so I could wash up and change clothes. Afterward, we stopped by the legion mess hall for food. Judging from the angle of the sun and the near-empty dining room, I guessed it was late afternoon, between lunch and dinner, which meant I’d been unconscious for almost a full day.

The day after tomorrow, then, would be April 8—the blood moon, Lester’s birthday, the day two evil emperors and an undead king attacked Camp Jupiter. On the bright side, the mess hall was serving fish sticks.

When I was done with my meal (here’s a culinary secret I discovered: ketchup really enhances fries and fish sticks), Meg escorted me down the Via Praetoria to legion headquarters.

Most of the Romans seemed to be off doing whatever Romans did in the late afternoon: marching, digging trenches, playing Fortiusnitius…I wasn’t really sure. The few legionnaires we passed stared at me as we walked by, their conversations sputtering to a stop. I guessed word had spread about our adventure in Tarquin’s tomb. Perhaps they’d heard that I had a slight turning-into-a-zombie problem and they were waiting for me to scream for brains.

The thought made me shudder. My gut wound felt so much better at the moment. I could walk without cringing. The sun was shining. I’d eaten a good meal. How could I still be poisoned?

Denial is a powerful thing.

Unfortunately, I suspected Pranjal was right. He had only slowed down the infection. My condition was beyond anything that camp healers, Greek or Roman, could solve. I needed godly help—which was something Zeus had expressly forbidden the other gods to give me.

The guards at the praetorium let us through immediately. Inside, Reyna and Frank sat behind a long table laden with maps, books, daggers, and a large jar of jelly beans. Against the back wall, in front of a purple curtain, stood the legion’s golden eagle, humming with energy. Being so near to it made the hairs on my arms stand up. I didn’t know how the praetors could tolerate working here with that thing right behind them. Hadn’t they read the medical journal articles about the effects of long-term exposure to electromagnetic Roman standards?