The House of Hades (Heroes of Olympus Book 4)

looked directly at them. He smiled, gestured over his shoulder with his ice-cream bar and dissolved into the air.
    Jason couldn’t exactly
see
him, but he’d had enough experience controlling the wind that he could track the angel’s path – a warm wisp of red and gold zipping across the street, spiralling down the sidewalk and blowing postcards from the carousels in front of the tourist shops. The wind headed towards the end of the promenade, where a big fortress-like structure loomed.
    ‘I’m betting that’s the palace,’ Jason said. ‘Come on.’
    Even after two millennia, Diocletian’s Palace was still impressive. The outer wall was only a pink granite shell, with crumbling columns and arched windows open to the sky, but it was mostly intact, a quarter mile long and seventy or eighty feet tall, dwarfing the modern shops and houses that huddled beneath it. Jason imagined what the palace must have looked like when it was newly built, with Imperial guards walking the ramparts and the golden eagles of Rome glinting on the parapets.
    The wind angel – or whatever he was – whisked in and out of the pink granite windows, then disappeared on the other side. Jason scanned the palace’s facade for an entrance. The only one he saw was several blocks away, with tourists lined up to buy tickets. No time for that.
    ‘We’ve got to catch him,’ Jason said. ‘Hold on.’
    ‘But –’
    Jason grabbed Nico and lifted them both into the air.
    Nico made a muffled sound of protest as they soared over the walls and into a courtyard where more tourists were milling around, taking pictures.
    A little kid did a double take when they landed. Then his eyes glazed over and he shook his head, like he was dismissing a juice-box-induced hallucination. No one else paid them any attention.
    On the left side of the courtyard stood a line of columns holding up weathered grey arches. On the right side was a white marble building with rows of tall windows.
    ‘The peristyle ,’ Nico said. ‘This was the entrance to Diocletian’s private residence.’ He scowled at Jason. ‘And, please, I don’t like being touched. Don’t ever grab me again.’
    Jason’s shoulder blades tensed. He thought he heard the undertone of a threat, like:
unless you want to get a Stygian sword up your nose
. ‘Uh, okay. Sorry. How do you know what this place is called?’
    Nico scanned the atrium. He focused on some steps in the far corner, leading down.
    ‘I’ve been here before.’ His eyes were as dark as his blade. ‘With my mother and Bianca. A weekend trip from Venice. I was maybe … six?’
    ‘That was when … the 1930s?’
    ‘’Thirty-eight or so,’ Nico said absently. ‘Why do you care? Do you see that winged guy anywhere?’
    ‘No …’ Jason was still trying to wrap his mind around Nico’s past.
    Jason always tried to build a good relationship with the people on his team. He’d learned the hard way that if somebody was going to have your back in a fight it was better if you found some common ground and trusted each other. ButNico wasn’t easy to figure out. ‘I just … I can’t imagine how weird that must be, coming from another time.’
    ‘No, you
can’t
.’ Nico stared at the stone floor. He took a deep breath.
    ‘Look … I don’t like talking about it. Honestly, I think Hazel has it worse. She remembers more about when she was young. She had to come back from the dead and adjust to the modern world. Me … me and Bianca, we were stuck at the Lotus Hotel . Time passed so quickly. In a weird way, that made the transition easier.’
    ‘Percy told me about that place,’ Jason said. ‘Seventy years, but it only felt like a month?’
    Nico clenched his fist until his fingers turned white. ‘Yeah. I’m sure Percy told you all about me.’
    His voice was heavy with bitterness – more than Jason could understand. He knew that Nico had blamed Percy for getting his sister Bianca killed, but they’d supposedly got past that, at least according to Percy. Piper had also mentioned a rumour that Nico had a crush on Annabeth. Maybe that was part of it.
    Still … Jason didn’t get why Nico pushed people away, why he never spent much time at either camp, why he preferred the dead to the living. He
really
didn’t get why Nico had promised to lead the
Argo II
to Epirus if he hated Percy Jackson so much.
    Nico’s eyes swept the windows above them. ‘Roman dead are everywhere