angry weep-weep-weep of a car alarm.
My strength evaporated. I wobbled and fell to my knees, blood trickling down my face.
Meg stumbled over to me. Her new white leggings were soaked through from the wound on her thigh.
“Your head,” she murmured.
“I know. Your leg.”
She fumbled through her gardening pouches until she found two rolls of gauze. We did our best to mummify each other and stop the bleeding. Meg’s fingers trembled. Tears welled in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I didn’t mean to throw Lu so far. I just—I thought she was really trying to kill you.”
Meg peered in the direction of First Avenue. “It’s fine. She’s tough. She’s—she’s probably fine.”
“But—”
“No time to talk. Come on.”
She grabbed my waist and pulled me up. We somehow made it back inside, then managed to navigate the scaffolds and ladders to get out of the hollow apartment building. As we limped to the nearest intersection, my heartbeat flumped irregularly, like a trout on the floorboards of a boat. (Ugh. I had Poseidon on the brain now.)
I imagined a caravan of shiny black SUVs full of Germani roaring toward us, encircling our location to take us into custody. If Nero had indeed seen what had happened on that rooftop, it was only a matter of time. We’d given him quite a show. He would want our autographs, followed by our heads on a silver plate.
At the corner of Eighty-First and First, I scanned the traffic. No sign of Germani yet. No monsters. No police or civilians screaming that they’d just witnessed a Gaulish warrior fall from the sky.
“What now?” I asked, really hoping Meg had an answer.
From her belt pouches, Meg fished out the item Lu had given her: a shiny golden Roman coin. Despite everything we’d just been through, I detected a gleam of excitement in my young friend’s eyes.
“Now I summon a ride,” she said.
With a cold flush of dread, I understood what she was talking about. I realized why Luguselwa had given her that coin, and part of me wished I had thrown the Gaul a few more blocks.
“Oh, no,” I pleaded. “You can’t mean them. Not them!”
“They’re great,” Meg insisted.
“No, they are not great! They’re awful!”
“Maybe don’t tell them that,” Meg said, then she threw the coin into the street and yelled in Latin, “Stop, O Chariot of Damnation!”
CALL ME SUPERSTITIOUS. IF YOU’RE GOING to hail a chariot, you should at least try for one that doesn’t have damnation right there in the name.
Meg’s coin hit the pavement and disappeared in a flash. Instantly, a car-size section of asphalt liquefied into a boiling pool of blood and tar. (At least that’s what it looked like. I did not test the ingredients.)
A taxi erupted from the goo like a submarine breaking the surface. It was similar to a standard New York cab, but gray instead of yellow: the color of dust, or tombstones, or probably my face at that moment. Painted across the door were the words GRAY SISTERS. Inside, sitting shoulder to shoulder across the driver’s bench, were the three old hags (excuse me, the three mature female siblings) themselves.
The passenger-side window rolled down. The sister riding shotgun stuck out her head and croaked, “Passage? Passage?”
She was just as lovely as I remembered: a face like a rubber Halloween mask, sunken craters where her eyes should have been, and a cobweb-and-linen shawl over her bristly white hair.
“Hello, Tempest.” I sighed. “It’s been a while.”
She tilted her head. “Who’s that? Don’t recognize your voice. Passage or not? We have other fares!”
“It is I,” I said miserably. “The god Apollo.”
Tempest sniffed the air. She smacked her lips, running her tongue over her single yellow tooth. “Don’t sound like Apollo. Don’t smell like Apollo. Let me bite you.”
“Um, no,” I said. “You’ll have to take my word for it. We need—”
“Wait.” Meg looked at me in wonder. “You know the Gray Sisters?”
She said this as if I’d been holding out on her—as if I knew all three founding members of Bananarama and had not yet gotten Meg their autographs. (My history with Bananarama—how I introduced them to the actual Venus and inspired their number one–hit cover of that song—is a story for another time.)
“Yes, Meg,” I said. “I am a god. I know people.”
Tempest grunted. “Don’t smell like a god.” She yelled at the sister on her left: “Wasp, take a gander. Who is this guy?”
The middle sister shoved her way to the window. She looked almost exactly like Tempest—to tell them apart,