Untitled Part 12
BROOKLYN.
Normally, the greatest dangers there are congested traffic, expensive poke bowls and not enough tables at the local coffee shops for all the aspiring screenwriters. That morning, however, I could tell that our shuttle driver, Argus the giant, was keeping his eyes open for trouble.
This was a big deal for Argus, since he had a hundred sets of eyes all over his body. (I had not actually counted them, nor had I asked if he ever got black eyes on his posterior from sitting too long.)
As we drove down Flushing Avenue, his blue peepers blinked and twitched along his arms, around his neck and on his cheeks and chin, trying to look in every direction at once.
Clearly, he sensed that something was wrong. I felt it, too. There was an electric heaviness in the air, like just before Zeus hurled a massive lightning bolt or Beyoncé dropped a new album. The world was holding its breath.
Argus pulled over a block from the Dare house as if he feared to get any closer.
The harbour-front area had once been working docklands for local fishermen, if I recalled correctly from the 1800s. Then it had been populated mostly by railyards and factories. You could still see the pilings of decayed piers jutting out of the water. Redbrick shells and concrete smokestacks of old workhouses sat dark and abandoned like temple ruins. One open stretch of railyard was still in operation, with a few heavily graffitied freight cars on the tracks.
But, like the rest of Brooklyn, the neighbourhood was rapidly becoming gentrified. Across the street, a building that looked like a one-time machine shop now housed a café promising avocado bagels and pineapple matcha. Two blocks down, cranes loomed from the pit of a construction site. Signs on the fences read HARD HAT AREA, KEEP OUT! and LUXURY RENTALS COMING SOON! I wondered if the construction workers were required to wear luxury hard hats.
The Dare compound itself was a former industrial warehouse transformed into an ultra-modern estate. It occupied an acre of waterfront, making it approximately five billion times larger 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 got more complex and colourful 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, pre-empting 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 inwards, 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, colourful aberration padding in her bare feet through an architectural mausoleum.
At least her room had floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the neighbouring 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 colour 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 ...' She faltered, as if the idea were too disturbing to say aloud. 'Just tell me you're going to take him down. Soon.'
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. It was one thing for Python to squat in my sacred caverns of Delphi. It was another for him to invade the mind of my chosen Pythia, the priestess of my prophecies. I had accepted Rachel Elizabeth Dare as my most important Oracle. I was responsible for her. If I failed to defeat Python, he would continue to grow stronger. He would eventually control the very flow of the future. And since Rachel was inextricably linked to the Delphic ... No. I couldn't bear to think what that might mean for her.
'Whoa.' Meg surfaced from Rachel's refrigerator like a diver with gold doubloons. In her hand was a Yoo-hoo chocolate drink. 'Can I have one?'
Rachel managed a smile. 'Help yourself, Meg. And, hey, di Angelo –' she pushed him playfully away from the canvas he'd been ogling – 'don't brush against the art! I don't care about the paintings, but if you get any colour on you, you'll ruin that whole black-and-white aesthetic you've got going.'
'Hmph,' said Nico.
'Now what were we talking about ...?' Rachel mused.
Over at the window, Will tapped his knuckles against the glass. 'Are those the cattle?'
'Oh, right!' Rachel steered us in that direction.
About a hundred yards away, between us and the river, a line of three cattle cars sat on the railway tracks. Each car was occupied, as evidenced by the bovine snouts that occasionally poked out between the bars.
'Seems wrong to just leave them parked there,' Will said. 'It's going to get hot today.'
Rachel nodded. 'They've been there since yesterday. The cars just kind of appeared overnight. I've called the freight company, and the animal cruelty hotline. It's like the cars don't exist. Nobody has any record of them. Nobody will come out to check on them. Nobody's brought the animals any food or water –'
'We should free them,' Meg said.
'That would be a very bad idea,' Nico said.
Meg frowned. 'Do you hate cows?'
'I don't hate –' Nico paused. 'Well, okay, I'm not super fond of cows. But that's not the point. Those can't be ordinary animals.' He glanced at Rachel. 'You said they just appeared. People don't recognize they exist. You said the cattle were watching?'
Rachel edged away from the window. 'Sometimes I can see their eyes between the bars. They'll be looking right at me. And just about the time you arrived, they went crazy, rocking the cars like they were trying to get out. That's when I checked the security cameras and saw you guys at the front gate. Normally, I am not paranoid about cattle. But these ... I don't know. Something doesn't feel right. At first, I thought it might have something to do with our neighbours ...'
She gestured north along the waterfront to an unremarkable cluster of old residential towers. 'They do strange things sometimes.'
'In the housing project?' I asked.
She arched her eyebrows. 'You don't see the big mansion?'
'What mansion?'
She glanced at Will, Nico, Meg, who all shook their heads.
'Well,' Rachel said, 'you'll have to take my word for it. There's a big mansion over there. Lots of weird goings-on.'
We didn't argue with her. Though fully mortal, Rachel had the rare gift of clear sight. She could see through the Mist and other magical barriers better than most demigods, and apparently better than most Lesters.
She muttered, 'Once I saw a penguin waddling around their back deck –'
'A what-now?' Nico asked.
'But leaving cows in boxes like that for days without food or water, that seems like something different,' she said. 'Crueller. Those cows must be bad news.'
Meg scowled. 'They seem peaceful enough now. I still say we free them.'
'And then what?' Nico asked. 'Even if they're not dangerous, we just let three carloads of cattle wander around Brooklyn? I'm with Rachel. Something about this ...' He looked like he was trying to dredge something from his memory with no luck – another feeling I knew well. 'I say we leave them alone.'
'That's mean!' said Meg. 'We can't –'
'Friends, please.' I stepped between Nico and Meg before things escalated into the biggest Hades/Demeter smackdown since Persephone's wedding shower. 'Since the cattle seem to be calm at the moment, let's circle back to that subject after we've discussed what we came here to discuss, yes?'
'The Tower of Nero,' Rachel surmised.
Will's eyes widened. 'Have you seen the future?'
'No, William, I used simple logic. But I do have some information that might help you. Everybody grab a Yoo-hoo and a beanbag, and let's chat about our least-favourite emperor.'
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