Annabeth Asks to See the Manager I had some ’splaining to do. I told Annabeth what had happened at Aeaea and Fancy Water. She shook her head. “And you didn’t even wear raincoats?” Grover splayed his hands. “Thank you.”
“We had things under control,” I said.
She marched up to me, smirked, then pulled the bow off my forehead.
“Okay. Please tell me you’re not wrapping up this naiad to send her Hermes Express to Mount Olympus.”
“Why would—Oh.” I’d momentarily forgotten about that thing with Medusa’s head and the gods. They hadn’t found it funny. “No. No tricks.
Just treats. You want some perfume?”
“I’m good.” She wiped the side of my mouth. “But I am not kissing you until you wash your face. Usually, you don’t drool when you’re awake.”
“How did you find us, anyway?”
“I got the note you left at my school. Skipped my last class and ran down here.”
“Your presentation went okay?”
“Aced it,” she said, like Duh. “Anyway, I got the feeling you didn’t have any idea what you were up against, so I came as fast as I could.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But honestly, we’re fine—”
“You’ve still got two more naiads to face. You wouldn’t have been fine.” She glanced at our gift-wrapped salesperson. “Sorry about all this, Silbe. Boys. What are you going to do?”
Silbe drooled in agreement.
Annabeth turned to me and Grover. “Come on. We’ll talk outside.”
She led us down the street, removing her raincoat as she walked. “I take it you didn’t recognize the naiads?”
“From where?” Grover asked.
“You weren’t with us,” Annabeth told him. “You were stuck in a Cyclops’s cave at the time.”
Grover shivered. “The Sea of Monsters.”
“Yep. The naiads are from the island of Aeaea.”
I rubbed my sore neck. “I think I would’ve remembered a name like Aeaea.”
Annabeth considered that. “Actually, you’re right. I don’t think anyone called it that when we were there. It’s another name for Circe’s Island.”
The smell of cedar shavings filled my nostrils. It had nothing to do with perfume. I flashed back to the time I’d spent as a guinea pig, stuck in a cage with guinea pig pirates. C.C.’s Spa & Resort had not been my favorite vacation destination.
“Oh,” I said. “That whole day is kind of a blur.”
There had been a lot of people on Circe’s Island. Two of her attendants,
Reyna and Hylla, I got to know much later. Now they were good friends of ours. But Silbe and Filomena? I didn’t remember them at all.
“Circe had four main handmaidens,” Annabeth said. “The Aeaean nymphs. They were responsible for preparing her potions. I guess when the pirates burned down C.C.’s Spa—”
“The naiads came to Manhattan,” Grover finished. “And set up competing perfume shops. As one does.”
Annabeth nodded. “You just met two of the four sisters.” “Possibly exploded one,” I said. “Gift wrapped the other.” “And we’ve got two more to go,” Grover muttered. “Super.”
“So will they recognize you on sight?” I asked Annabeth. “They sure recognized me.”
I could almost see the gears turning in Annabeth’s head.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I met them when … when Circe sent me for that makeover. But if they recognized you, we should assume they’ll recognize me, too.”
I remembered Annabeth’s makeover. That had been back when we were in seventh grade, way before we started dating. Circe had tried her best to
convince Annabeth to join her crew of super-fashionable witches, and for a hot minute, I’d thought Annabeth had given in. I remembered the way she looked in her elegant dress, with her coiffed hair and perfect makeup. I’d been a guinea pig at the time, but my little guinea-pig jaw had hit the floor of the cage.
“Right,” I said. “So, I’m going to take a wild guess that you have a plan to defeat the last two nymphs?”
“Working on it,” she agreed.
Grover and I exchanged a look of relief. Whenever Annabeth joined the chat, the odds of us doing something idiotic went way down. The odds were never zero, mind you, because I was still in the mix.
“First,” she said, “we need to dress the part. Glad it’s almost Halloween. There’s a pop-up costume store right down the street.”
“Can I be Spider-Man?” I asked.
“Can I be Spider-Goat?” Grover asked. “We could do a multiverse thing
….”
“No spiders.” Annabeth shuddered. “I have something better in mind.”
An hour later, we rolled up to Scents Forever in our new costumes, which were not better than Spider-Man.
Well … maybe Annabeth’s costume was better. She was dressed as a Roman noblewoman, with a flowing white gown that draped diagonally over one shoulder. Gold costume bangles glittered on her arms. She’d also picked the gaudiest golden necklace she could find. Up close, you could tell it was plastic, but we were hoping the naiads wouldn’t get that close.
With the help of one of the costume people, Annabeth had done her hair and makeup like it had been on Circe’s Island. She looked incredible, but you don’t have to take my word for it. The costume person’s exact reaction was “You look incredible.” Then she turned to Grover and me and said,
“Now, these two are a challenge.”
We were dressed as Annabeth’s servants/bodyguards/loyal gladiators? I’m not even sure, but we weren’t rocking the look very well.
Grover wore a gladiator’s breastplate and a leather kilt sort of thing, with a big plastic sword at his side. I got dressed like a retiarius—one of those Colosseum fighters with the weighted nets and the tridents. The trident seemed a little on the nose for me, but it wasn’t my biggest complaint. My
“armor” was basically an oversize loincloth with a thick leather belt, sandals, and a weird shield-sleeve thing on my left arm that reminded me of a pizza pan. This meant I would basically be walking around Manhattan in late October in my underwear. Annabeth added a big helmet with a faceplate so nobody would recognize me unless they literally got up in my grill.
When I came out of the dressing room, Grover frowned. “I thought you had muscles and stuff.”
“Dude,” I said. “First of all, Muscles and Stuff sounds like a bankrupt fitness chain. Second, I’m a swimmer, not a bodybuilder.”
“Okay …” he said, but it was clear he was not impressed with my level of ripped-ness.
By the time we got to Scents Forever, I was shivering. I had goose bumps down my arms. At least no one on the street looked twice at us—not that they would’ve anyway, since you see all kinds in New York, but with Halloween, it was especially easy to walk around dressed as a gladiator in a plastic diaper. The only one who got any stares was Annabeth, and the
people checking her out were lucky I didn’t poke them with my fake trident.
The perfume shop looked nicer than the first two we’d terrorized. The black- marble facade was two stories high, columned like a Greek temple.
The glowing white display windows made the vials and bottles inside look like sacred relics about to float off into the heavens. I hoped I wouldn’t get spritzed with sacred floaty potion. I did not want to ascend while wearing a loincloth.
Annabeth didn’t give us any advance pep talk. She just strode right into the shop with us in tow like she owned the place, us, and everything else in the neighborhood.
“I want to see the manager!” she announced.
Grover and I exchanged looks again. I’d never seen Annabeth play this role before. Entitlement? Check. Arrogance? Check. Nothing says Pay attention to me because I’m horrible like demanding to see the manager. It wasn’t part of Annabeth’s personality, but she pretended well.
The place had a few other customers. They all stopped browsing and quickly left. Nobody wanted to be caught in the cross fire of a manager-customer- gladiator throwdown.
An employee in a black pantsuit scrambled over to us. “Miss, perhaps I can help—”
Annabeth gave her a glare that could cut through titanium.
“I—I’ll get the managers,” the employee stammered. “Right away.” She hurried off to the back room, leaving us by ourselves.
The store’s interior had glowing white walls and dark tables. Transparent
tubes ran along the ceiling. Maybe they deliver your perfume in pneumatic canisters, I thought. Against the back wall sprawled a display of chemistry beakers, decanters, Bunsen burners, and bubbling copper kettles—
everything the twenty-first-century witch needed to brew a good cup of organic fair-trade potion.
“No polecat,” I noticed.
“Patience,” Annabeth said. She walked over to the nearest display and picked up a bottle. She sniffed it, then set it back down.
She checked a few more tables, then zeroed in on a locked glass display case. Inside were three boxes, black and gold, with the label GALE, BY
SCENTS FOREVER.
“Aha!” Annabeth said.
“They decanted our polecat?” Grover cried. “We’re dead!”
“Stay calm.” Easy for Annabeth to say. She looked powerful. Us? We were armed with plastic weapons.
Then the managers appeared. Two women—clearly twins—marched in from the back room looking ready for a confrontation. Their dark hair was the
same shade as the other two sisters’ but cut short and spiky. They wore matching black pantsuits. The only difference was that the one on the left wore silver earrings and the one on the right wore gold.
“Phaedra and Daedra,” Annabeth said.
That stopped them in their tracks. They studied Annabeth. “I know you,” said the lady on the right.
“That’s right,” Annabeth said. “And you are both in serious trouble.”
