I crouched and laced my fingers to make a foothold. “Please.”

To my left, Peaches rolled onto his back and wailed, “Linguine? Peaches!”

Meg grimaced. I could see from her eyes that she was deciding to cooperate with me—not because she trusted me, but because Peaches was suffering.

Just when I thought my feelings could not be hurt any worse. It was one thing to be betrayed. It was another thing to be considered less important than a diapered fruit spirit.

Nevertheless, I remained steady as Meg placed her left foot in my hands. With all my remaining strength, I hoisted her up. She stepped onto my shoulders, then planted one red sneaker on top of my head. I made a mental note to put a safety label on my scalp: WARNING, TOP STEP IS NOT FOR STANDING.

With my back against the oak, I could feel the voices of the grove coursing up its trunk and drumming through its bark. The central tree seemed to be one giant antenna for crazy talk.

My knees were about to buckle. Meg’s treads were grinding into my forehead. The A 440 I had been humming rapidly deflated to a G sharp.

Finally, Meg tied the wind chimes to the branch. She jumped down as my legs collapsed, and we both ended up sprawled in the dirt.

The brass chimes swayed and clanged, picking notes out of the wind and making chords from the dissonance.

The grove hushed, as if the trees were listening and thinking, Oooh, pretty.

Then the ground trembled. The central oak shook with such energy, it rained acorns.

Meg got to her feet. She approached the tree and touched its trunk.

“Speak,” she commanded.

A single voice boomed forth from the wind chimes, like a cheerleader screaming through a megaphone:

There once was a god named Apollo

Who plunged in a cave blue and hollow

Upon a three-seater

The bronze fire-eater

Was forced death and madness to swallow

The wind chimes stilled. The grove settled into tranquility, as if satisfied with the death sentence it had given me.

Oh, the horror!

A sonnet I could have handled. A quatrain would have been cause for celebration. But only the deadliest prophecies are couched in the form of a limerick.

I stared at the wind chimes, hoping they would speak again and correct themselves. Oops, our mistake! That prophecy was for a different Apollo!

But my luck was not that good. I had been handed an edict worse than a thousand advertisements for pasta makers.

Peaches rose. He shook his head and hissed at the oak tree, which expressed my own sentiments perfectly. He hugged Meg’s calf as if she were the only thing keeping him from falling off the world. The scene was almost sweet, except for the karpos’s fangs and glowing eyes.

Meg regarded me warily. The lenses of her glasses were spiderwebbed with cracks.

“That prophecy,” she said. “Did you understand it?”

I swallowed a mouthful of soot. “Perhaps. Some of it. We’ll need to talk to Rachel—”

“There’s no more we.” Meg’s tone was as acrid as the volcanic gas of Delphi. “Do what you need to do. That’s my final order.”

This hit me like a spear shaft to the chin, despite the fact that she had lied to me and betrayed me.

“Meg, you can’t.” I couldn’t keep the shakiness out of my voice. “You claimed my service. Until my trials are over—”

“I release you.”

“No!” I could not stand the idea of being abandoned. Not again. Not by this ragamuffin Dumpster queen whom I’d learned to care about so much. “You can’t possibly believe in Nero now. You heard him explain his plans. He means to level this entire island! You saw what he tried to do to his hostages.”

“He—he wouldn’t have let them burn. He promised. He held back. You saw it. That wasn’t the Beast.”

My rib cage felt like an over-tightened harp. “Meg…Nero is the Beast. He killed your father.”

“No! Nero is my stepfather. My dad…my dad unleashed the Beast. He made it angry.”

“Meg—”

“Stop!” She covered her ears. “You don’t know him. Nero is good to me. I can talk to him. I can make it okay.”

Her denial was so complete, so irrational, I realized there was no way I could argue with her. She reminded me painfully of myself when I fell to earth—how I had refused to accept my new reality. Without Meg’s help, I would’ve gotten myself killed. Now our roles were reversed.

I edged toward her, but Peaches’s snarl stopped me in my tracks.

Meg backed away. “We’re done.”