We Find the Lair of Evil Perfume The twins had some ’splaining to do, too. Before they could even ask Why do you have scrawny gladiator boys?
Annabeth laid into them.
“Do you have any idea who I am?” Annabeth asked.
Wow, she was cycling through The Greatest Hits of Entitlement, volume one.
“Y-you’re that girl,” said Phaedra, whose name I cleverly deduced from the name tag that said PHAEDRA.
“You destroyed Circe’s Island!” cried the also name-tagged Daedra.
Annabeth laughed. “That’s perfect, coming from you two. I didn’t destroy the island. The dumb boy I was with destroyed the island by letting those pirates loose! And did you stop it? Did either of you? No!”
“How d-dare—” Phaedra spluttered. “You weren’t even—”
“Picked out personally by Circe for special training?” Annabeth demanded. “Yes, I was! And while I have gone on to great things and accomplished
huge feats, you two are hiding in Nolita selling cheap potions!” “We’re not hiding,” Phaedra insisted.
“They’re not cheap!” Daedra added.
Behind them, their employee cleared her throat. “Um, mistresses?”
“Send your minion away,” Annabeth said. “It is better she doesn’t hear what I have to tell you.”
The twins didn’t like that, but Daedra snapped her fingers. “Leave us, Madeline.”
Madeline fled. For all I knew, she was going down the street to join Green Hair on his lunch break.
“Now,” Annabeth said, “perhaps you abandoned Circe—” “Abandoned?” cried Daedra.
“—but I have gone on to even greater teachers!” “There are no greater teachers!” yelled Phaedra.
Annabeth held up her Gramercy Park house keys, with the crossed-torch keychain. “Do you know these keys? Do you know who I work for?”
Phaedra gasped. “You—the goddess—?”
“Yes,” Annabeth said. “I work for the goddess Hecate herself!”
Technically, this was true, though Annabeth made it sound a lot more serious than a week of pet-sitting.
“That’s impossible.” Daedra sounded hurt. “She closed her school a century ago. She—she turned us away when we asked!”
The twins looked so dejected I actually felt bad for them. I imagined the four sisters showing up at the manse and getting yelled at by the door knockers.
No, you can’t come in! Yes, you can! TIMBERDOODLE! Then maybe
Hecate had scolded them, telling them to get lost. I thought about the ripped- up school flyer from 1913, and all those broken eyeglasses …. What Could Have Been. Whatever had happened a century ago to make Hecate close her school, she was still working through some issues. I just wished I understood what it had to do with SEJ.
“The goddess is very discerning about her students,” Annabeth said haughtily. “They have to be, well … smart. For instance, if you were going to steal the goddess’s beloved polecat, you should at least have known better than to name your new product Gale.”
I’d heard the expression put someone on their back foot, but I’d never actually seen it happen. Both Phaedra and Daedra put all their weight on the backs of their heels, leaning away from Annabeth as if she might breathe fire. I could have knocked them over with a plastic trident.
“I—I assure you,” Phaedra stammered, “we didn’t steal Gale! She came here quite on her own!”
“And she’s here now,” Annabeth guessed. “Your sisters Filomena and Silbe have already met the goddess’s displeasure. If I find that any harm has come to Gale, I will be happy to show you what—”
“No need!” Daedra yelped. “Gale is perfectly fine. We can—we can send her home, perhaps next week?”
“Or the week after?” Phaedra said. “We do have a large order coming up.” “You will show me the polecat now,” Annabeth ordered.
The twins looked at each other. Annabeth had definitely pushed them toward fight or flight, and I guessed they were weighing their chances of either.
“Of course,” Daedra said. “Right this way.”
The twins hurried toward the back room, gesturing for us to follow. Annabeth gave Grover and me a warning look. “Be ready,” she whispered.
She didn’t say ready for what, but we followed the nymphs into their workshop.
I don’t know how mythological villains can afford so much square footage in Manhattan. Like, they always seem to have these massive multilevel lairs with plenty of space for torture chambers and luxurious dens to recline in and plot their nefarious deeds or whatever. Do their landlords take golden
drachmas? On the other hand, the air rights over the Empire State Building must’ve cost the gods of Mount Olympus several gazillion, so I guess I shouldn’t question it.
Phaedra and Daedra brought us down a winding iron staircase into a room big enough for an entire laboratory, which was good, because that’s what they had. Copper kettles spouted twenty different colors of steam.
Pipes with gauges ran along the walls, with big red handwheels to control
the pressure. In the center of the room, an honest-to-gods cauldron bubbled with golden liquid that was probably not chicken soup. Worktables were stacked with vials of herbs, spices, and desiccated parts of creatures and plants. After seeing Hecate’s more modest kitchen, this place should have looked impressive. It was way bigger and more complex. But honestly, I got the feeling these nymphs were trying too hard. Hecate’s kitchen seemed functional. This place seemed like it was saying Look how super talented we are! Soon, we will figure out what we are doing!
And scurrying around the room, attached to a long golden chain that hung from a pulley system on the ceiling, was our old friend Gale.
The polecat did not appear to be enjoying her vacation. She ran furiously around the lab, followed by what looked like a swarm of angry metallic
bees. Gale would rummage through a box of vials, put her paw on one of them, and the bees would swarm around it, picking it up, carrying it to the cauldron, and dumping it in. Then Gale would scamper to locate her next ingredient. If Gale stopped to think or just take a breath, the bees would swarm her and sting her on the butt. Gale barked at them and farted, but the bees didn’t seem to mind. They were probably Celestial bronze automatons, unbothered by trivial things like deadly gas.
“Gale!” Grover cried, forgetting that our role was to be silent and intimidating in our plastic armor.
The polecat glared at him and chattered a series of barks so scathing I couldn’t print them—partly because I couldn’t spell them, and partly because they are not fit for sensitive audiences.
The bees stung Gale and kept her running, cutting off her list of complaints. Grover turned to the nymphs. “That polecat is not here voluntarily.”
Phaedra looked shocked. “What? No! We’ve had zero complaints from her.” “She loves it here,” Daedra agreed.
“SCREAK!” Gale yelped, pursued across a table by the swarm of bees. “She does not love it here,” Grover said.
Daedra and Phaedra huffed and feigned shock, offering all sorts of excuses about Gale’s lack of transparency when it came to expressing workplace concerns.
Meanwhile, I’d done a pretty great job keeping my mouth shut, if I do say so myself. I was scanning the room, thinking about all the helpful water sources that I could use if things turned into a disaster—and things pretty much
always turned into a disaster. I could explode the pipes and kettles. I could flood the whole basement. The problem was that a lot of the liquid in the lab was some form of potion, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be throwing around magical chemicals without knowing what they did. One sip of strawberry
crème was what had gotten us into all this trouble to begin with.
Finally, Annabeth cut off the twins with an imperious wave of her hand.
“You have retained this polecat without her consent. You’ve used her to
make potions for your own profit. Hecate will not be pleased. Release Gale into our custody right now and I won’t report you. Otherwise, you will face the wrath of the Triple Goddess!”
This sounded like a good line to me. I would have immediately said Here, have a polecat!
The twins, however, became eerily calm. Maybe it was something Annabeth had said, or Grover’s tone, or the way I was shifting nervously from foot to foot. It reminded me of when I swim with sharks—which is usually fun, when you’re a son of Poseidon—and they suddenly smell blood in the water. There is this nanosecond of frisson when they get the scent. Then they kick into death-machine, eat-everything mode.
The twins looked at each other, silently coming to agreement, and then turned to Annabeth.
“We may not be too smart,” Daedra said, “but we know Hecate would never want a disciple who failed to report the theft of her polecat.”
“You shouldn’t have offered,” Phaedra agreed. “It makes you look desperate.”
“You lost the goddess’s polecat, didn’t you?” said Daedra.
“That’s why you’re here,” added Daedra. “You’re in more trouble than we are.”
“How dare you?” Annabeth said, though it sounded too much like an actual question.
Phaedra smiled coldly. “Your performance was good. I almost believed you. But now I’m remembering how good an actor you were on Aeaea …
pretending to be on our side, right before you released the guinea pigs and destroyed our world.”
Annabeth tried to bluff it out. She clenched her fists, stepped forward, and locked eyes with Phaedra. “You have one last chance. Do the right thing or suffer the consequences.”
Even the polecat and the bees stopped moving. They seemed to be watching us, waiting to see who won the standoff. If the bees had tiny tubs of popcorn, I bet they would’ve been eating them.
“The boy you rescued,” Daedra said. “The one called Percy Jackson. I imagine you’ve brought him here in disguise!”
She marched over to Grover and tugged on his left horn. “Owww!” said Grover.
Daedra frowned. She stepped sideways and knocked off my plastic helmet. “Aha!” she cried.
“No fair,” I said. “You didn’t have a search warrant to look under my helmet. This’ll all get thrown out in court.”
Daedra snarled. “Oh, you’ll be standing trial right here, Percy Jackson.
The goddess’s wrath will not fall on us. You failed to keep her pets. We will be the servants of Hecate’s vengeance.”
“Indeed.” Phaedra pulled a vial of green fluid from her pantsuit pocket.
“We will kill you, return your bodies to Hecate, and explain how badly you failed her. We will return Gale as well, and the goddess shall reward us!”
“After Gale finishes teaching us how to make all her secret recipes,” Daedra added.
“Yes, after that, of course,” her sister agreed. “Prepare to die, demigods!” “And satyr,” Annabeth said.
“Whatever!” Phaedra threw the vial at Annabeth’s feet.
