“Really?” A deep voice boomed through the house, and I turned sharply. The tornado of doom was gone and in its place was a man. A very tall man with a head full of brown hair and shoulders bigger than Hercules’s. “You threw a dagger at me?” He tipped his head back and laughed as he reached down, grabbed the hilt, and then yanked the dagger out. He dropped it on the stone floor of the foyer. “This is going to be easier than I imagined.” Then he opened his eyes. They were all black.

The man before us was a Titan.

“Oh my gods,” Josie whispered as what appeared to be recognition flickered across her face as she sat up.

“It was mostly for fun,” Solos said, his hand tightening around the slender dagger. “Just wanted to see what it would do.”

The Titan tilted its head, expression perplexed. His skin, a mixture of many different pink shades, seemed to lighten and deepen in hue every couple of seconds.

“Which one are you?” I asked, rising to my feet. I slipped in front of Josie, who was now on her feet with her blade in hand. “Mo? Curly? Definitely not Larry, because he’d be pissing himself if he was in front of us right now.”

The Titan’s lip curled. “I am Atlas, Apollyon. I do not know these deities you speak of.”

“Atlas?” murmured Deacon. “Oh boy . . .”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Luke take the same protective stance in front of Deacon, and for once the pure-blood didn’t fight it.

Atlas’s sneer turned into a mocking grin. “You know who I am. All of you know who I am. And you know how this will end. Give me what I’ve come for and I will allow each of you to live. Deny me, and each of you will die.”

I sighed. “That’s so cliché.”

The Titan’s all-black gaze slid to me. “You may be the Apollyon and you may be surrounded by demigods, but you cannot defeat me. I am not Hyperion and—”

“I’m not just any demigod. I am the Hercules and you are—”

Atlas lifted his hand, and a second later Hercules was flying backward through the air. He slammed into the wall near the staircase, cracking the plaster. “You are nothing to me,” Atlas finished as Hercules hit the floor face-first.

“I’m kind of glad you shut him up,” Alex said, her body tensing. “But we kind of need him alive.”

“Why?” Atlas queried. “So he can continuously lead us to where the remaining demigods are? We knew you would leave. We can wait.”

Not surprising. They probably had shades near the University, waiting for us to come out. That was a risk we’d had to take and now we were paying the consequences.