The Mystery of the Tenth

by Chantel Acevedo

  “Three points, bro,” Fernando said.

  “You’re two for two,” Maya whispered.

  That had been easy. I hadn’t had to call my magic so much as imagine it. Was that a thing all muses did eventually? Had I, like, leveled up or something?

  I was just thinking about all that when my muse bracelet started to heat up, hotter and hotter, just as Fernando slid the van into our driveway back home.

  Perfect timing. The muses were assembling and I hated being late.

  Chapter 2

  Muse Squad Reunited

  “Home so fast?” Mami asked as we filed into the house. We were still pretty shaken, but one look from Fernando warned us not to say anything. If Mami found out Mario had almost crashed the van because of spiders, we’d all get an endless lecture, and they wouldn’t be allowed to drive the van ever again.

  “Traffic was bad, so we decided to turn back around and come home,” Mario said.

  Thankfully, Mami was distracted. She’d hauled our suitcases out into the living room and was busy refolding everything. Good thing, too, because my muse bracelet was basically on fire.

  “Run,” Maya whispered, then mouthed, I’ll cover for you. I never told her that she really didn’t have to. Clio, the Muse of history, could hold back time for a bit while we were having our meetings. If Maya knew that, she’d break her brain trying to figure out the physics of it—some things you just keep to yourself.

  I crawled under my bed, where there were still at least a dozen sticky notes from my brothers’ prank. The jerks knew I sometimes crept under my bed “to think.” The last thing I noticed before closing my eyes was the word “dork,” written in thick black marker, over and over again.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw a familiar pair of pink sneakers with hand-drawn smiley faces on them.

  “Hey, Thalia!” I said, wriggling out from under the Great Bed of Ware, which was one of the treasures of the V and A Museum, and my entrance point.

  “’Sup, dork,” Thalia said, bursting into laughter as she reached out and pulled a sticky note from my hair.

  I growled and snatched the note away. “My brothers—” I started.

  “Always liked those two,” Thalia finished. She would. She was the Muse of comedy, after all, and nobody enjoyed a good prank like Thalia did.

  Before I could say anything else, I saw Nia, the Muse of science, and Mela, the Muse of tragedy, coming toward us. Mela was wearing an Elizabethan ruff around her neck. It was a fancy collar, basically, and she’d obviously gotten it from the dress-up room. Nia was clanking around in a vest made of chain mail.

  “Hey, dork!” Nia said.

  “Come on,” I complained, “that’s the second one,” while Thalia pulled yet another sticky note off my shoulder.

  Mela looked me over very seriously. “No more dork signs, I promise,” she said.

  Nia had an app on her phone that could calculate the possibility percentage of success or failure of any action based on the position of the stars, and she could use her magic to inspire scientific breakthroughs, inventions, or even, you know, breaking the law to save a captive whale. That last one had actually happened last fall.

  Mela could make a person cry in a snap—not just sniffling cries, either, but full-on sobbing. Mela also loved country western music, probably because so many of the songs were sad. I sent Mela an old-school poster of Taylor Swift, back when she sang country, all the way to New Delhi for her birthday in April. She sent me a teary thank-you video that made me all sniffly and sensitive for hours.

  “Muse Squad, reunited,” Thalia said, then started singing, “And it feeeeeeels so gooood.”

  “Clio hasn’t called us in ages,” I said, and the others nodded.

  “Anybody know why we were called today?” Mela asked.

  The rest of us shook our heads. “We’re always the last to know anything,” Nia grumbled. She was right. The other five muses usually got the scoop from Clio, our leader, before we did. Nia, Thalia, Mela, and I were twelve years old now, the youngest muses in history. It was cool, but sometimes it felt as though the other muses didn’t quite know what to do with us.

  “I wonder if it has anything to do with the spiders,” I thought.

  “Spiders? Did you say spiders?” Mela asked.

  “I said that out loud?”

  The others nodded.

  “Oh. Well. My siblings and I nearly crashed the car because of them,” I explained, and realized that my legs were actually still a bit shaky. It’s funny how a scary thing can still feel scary in your body long after it’s happened. “I need to sit down,” I said, and sat on the Great Bed of Ware, which was a no-no, since it was so old and priceless.

  Thalia got a delighted look on her face and clambered on, too. Mela and Nia followed, and the bed creaked under our weight.

  “Steady on, mates,” Thalia said.

  “What do you mean spiders nearly caused a car crash?” Nia asked.

  “Mario was driving. They appeared out of nowhere on the dashboard and freaked him out. He swerved, and it nearly tipped the van over, but we were okay. The thing is, Mario isn’t scared of anything. Not even Zombie Beach!”

  “I cannot watch that show,” Mela said with a shudder.

  “I know, right?”

  The Great Bed made a groaning sound and we all grew very still.

  “It’s survived for over four hundred years,” Thalia said, patting the bed. “It can handle four twelve-year-olds.”

  “Go on,” Nia said.

  I took a deep breath. “The weird thing is that once the spiders were out of the van, I could have sworn that I saw another one, a big one, sitting on top of a traffic cone. I think it was staring at me.”

  “That is weird,” Mela said.

  “I thought so, too. Then my bracelet started heating up, so I figured the meeting was about the spiders.” I didn’t mention the other thing that had happened—how my magic had changed. Mami always said that a person’s body belongs to nobody but them. This change in my magic felt like that, like a personal thing, and a secret I should keep for a while.

  Just as we all began to climb off the bed we heard a snap underneath us. We yelped in surprise. The Great Bed seemed to have dropped half an inch.

  “Get off, get off, get off,” Mela was saying in a whisper, as if a loud voice might finish the bed off entirely.

  A moment later, we were all standing around the Great Bed, which looked a little bit disheveled, but not very different from before. I smoothed the red-and-gold bedspread with my hands, erasing our butt prints, and hoped it wouldn’t crush me when it was time to slide under it to get back home.

  Because there was no way I was telling Clio that we broke the Great Bed of Ware.

  We made our way to the theater, where we held our meetings. Outside, it was midnight in London, and the lights glimmered through the museum windows.

  “Spiders are terrifying,” Mela said as we walked.

  Nia gagged. Thalia laughed. Mela shivered all over.

  “But just because you saw creepy spiders, it doesn’t mean anything magical is up,” Mela said. “Mario likely just got scared.”

  “People get frightened all the time,” Thalia said kindly, her hand on my shoulder.

  I took a deep breath. “You’re probably right.” We were quiet the rest of the way to the theater. I was still a little nervous, though. Last fall, my science teacher and three of my classmates had turned out to be evil mythical beings. It was the kind of experience that was hard to shake, and more than once since then, Maya had accused me of “seeing shadows everywhere.”

  But wasn’t muse rule number one that a muse always trusts her instincts?

  My instincts were telling me trouble had eight legs and was coming straight at us.

  Chapter 3

  The Mystery of the Tenth

  We entered the small theater where we usually held our meetings. Normally, the theater played fifteen-minute programs about medieval church construction or
the gardens at Kensington Palace, but today, the projectors were turned off.

  Clio, the Muse of history, stood at the front of the room beside a podium. The other grown-up muses sat together in the front row. We sat just behind them.

  “Thank you all for being here,” Clio began. “My apologies for not holding more regular meetings this summer. Things have been a bit complicated.”

  Those of us in the second row looked at one another. “Complicated”? That was never a good word to describe anything.

  Clio stacked and restacked papers on the podium, and if I didn’t know any better, I would think she was anxious. But Clio was never anxious. She cleared her throat. “I’d like to ask Paola to join me.”

  Paola, Muse of the sacred, rose from her seat, jingling as she went. Paola was short. Latina like me, but Colombiana instead of Cuban. She wore long patchwork skirts, with shiny, thin chains circling her waist. Small bells hung off the belt, and they rang when she moved. Her dark hair was always up in a bun. Carefully, she stepped up to the podium.

  “Two weeks ago, early in the morning, I came to headquarters for a bite to eat. You all know how much I love the cafecito they serve here. With a scone, ay que rico,” Paola said, going off topic. Clio nudged her. “Ah, sí. I was in the café, when I heard a clock chiming. It was the muse finder.”

  Clio had shown me the clock last year. Whenever a muse retired or passed away, the muse finder clock went to work seeking the one who would replace her. It’s a beautiful clock, with a globe held up by muse figurines. When a new muse uses her magic for the first time, the globe spins and spins, and then points to where the muse can be found. Clio told me that when the clock found me, the globe spun for eight hours, and that it had never done that before.

  She’d said, “There’s more goddess in you than the rest of us.” I didn’t know what that meant. I really didn’t feel special, but what had happened with my magic earlier made me nervous, and also a little bit excited. My magic had worked differently. Maybe that’s what happened to all the muses when they got used to their powers. There was one other weird thing about me. Muses didn’t inherit their roles. It was all sort of random. But my tia Annie was the Muse of epic poetry before I was, and when she died, there were only eight muses for a long time.

  That is, until the clock found me.

  Clio said that Tia Annie went to Mount Olympus before she got sick—but Tia Annie never told the other muses what she’d gone to ask for. Was it for her health? That didn’t seem like something she’d do. If Tia Annie had made that trip to see the gods, it wouldn’t have been for herself.

  Sometimes I wondered if she’d asked the gods to make me a muse in her place.

  And I wondered why she would ever think that was a good idea.

  I saw Tia Annie after she died. There’s a portal to the other side here at the V and A. It’s an old dog tomb, of all things. Last year, I crawled inside and met Tia Annie—or her spirit, I guess. She helped us defeat the sirens and Ms. Rinse. But she also said not to come looking for her again.

  I have so many questions.

  Plus, I miss her a lot.

  The bells tinkling around Paola’s waist brought me back to the present. “I went to the clock gallery and saw that the clock was spinning and spinning. And then it stopped,” she was saying.

  Tomiko interrupted, “Where is it pointing?”

  “New York City,” Paola said.

  “Queens, to be specific,” Clio added.

  I gasped. Queens! I’d be there tomorrow, staying with my dad in a neighborhood called Corona.

  “Will the new muse be old enough to vote?” Elnaz asked snarkily, and I heard Mela huff beside me.

  “None of you are asking the right question,” Clio said.

  That’s when Nia raised her hand, clearing her throat.

  “Nia?”

  “There are nine of us. Nobody has quit or retired. So why would we need another muse? That’s the question,” she said.

  Silence fell over the room like a wet blanket.

  Clio nodded. “Excellent question, Nia.” I watched Elnaz sink in her seat a little bit. Clio shut off the projector. “Thank you, Paola,” she said, and Paola took her seat, jingling as she went. Clio folded her arms and took a deep breath before continuing.

  “There have always been nine muses. Just nine. The clock has only chimed after a muse has quit the job or died. Never before,” Clio said.

  I felt a chill all of a sudden, so I rubbed my arms. It didn’t help.

  Tomiko’s hand rose in the air, shaking a little.

  “Tomiko?”

  Tomiko cleared her throat, looking pale. “Does this mean the clock has turned prophet? Is it saying that one of us is going to—”

  “I don’t know what it means,” Clio interrupted. “Let’s not jump to conclusions, everyone.”

  Elnaz’s hand went up next, sturdy and straight as an arrow. “What if the rules have simply changed? Where there were once nine, there will be ten. Simple.”

  “Not simple,” Etoro said softly. “The rules of the gods do not change. Never has a god or goddess altered their mind once they’ve made it up. We are meant to be nine. Somehow, nine we will be.”

  My imagination raced on to places where I did not want it to go. The muses were my friends. The Muse Squad, especially, were some of my best friends. If one of them got hurt, or worse . . .

  Clio interrupted my thinking, thank goodness. “The mystery of the tenth is our primary mission. It may be the biggest mission the muses have ever had. But let’s not dwell on dark thoughts. There are answers to our questions and we must seek them out. To that end, I’ve been to Queens many times this summer, have followed up on all unusual cases of people performing acts of heroism, and cannot locate the new muse. All we have is a general indication that somebody in New York City has been identified by the muse finder clock, but no idea who or where this person might be.”

  “Aren’t you going to New York, like, tomorrow?” Nia whispered to me.

  I nodded.

  “Convenient,” Mela added, overhearing us. Her headphones rested around her neck, and she twiddled with the cord. They were new ones—super shiny, with a mirrorlike surface. Every once in a while, Mela would use them to check her lip gloss.

  “Muse Squad time,” Thalia said, rubbing her hands together.

  My heart started racing. Suddenly, going to New York for the summer didn’t feel like a drag. It felt like a job. A really important one. There was a mysterious tenth muse to locate, and my Muse Squad friends would be coming along for the action.

  “It will take some time to plan our next steps, so I ask for your patience,” Clio said. A wrinkle formed between her eyes, and her mouth was turned down farther than usual. “We will get to the bottom of this.”

  A loud bang resonated through the theater, startling all the muses. For a moment, I wondered if the Great Bed of Ware had fallen completely apart.

  “That sound brings me to my next announcement,” Clio said with a sigh. “You may have wondered why we haven’t met in a while. What you are hearing is a construction crew beginning the process of dismantling the museum flooring. All of it has to come up, thanks to mold, so the V and A is closing for the next few months. Which means headquarters is changing places, and I’ve been drowning in paperwork.”

  “Oh no,” Thalia said. She lived just around the corner, in Kensington.

  The rest of us perked up. New headquarters? They could be anywhere! Egypt! Moscow! Hong Kong! Athens!

  “Don’t keep us waiting,” Etoro said from her wheelchair in the front of the room. She’d been fanning herself throughout the meeting and whispering now and again to Paola.

  “Of course,” Clio said. “It seems to me that our current, shall we say, mystery makes our choice obvious. The next time we meet will be in the New York Hall of Science, in Queens.”

  Suddenly, everyone was talking at once, putting in entrance point requests—“No closets this time,” Mela shouted, ha
ving once been stuck with a custodian’s supply room as her entrance point—asking about time zone changes, and how far Queens was from Times Square.

  Clio clapped her hands to quiet us. “I realize that you will leave today’s meeting full of questions. But please know that I believe you all belong here, that you are the muses the world was meant to have.” Clio looked at each of us, then she smiled. But it was the saddest smile I’d ever seen on a person. Maybe Clio was thinking that our group of nine wouldn’t be the nine for much longer. My throat tightened. “We’ll see one another in New York soon,” Clio said, and passed around a plate full of brownies.

  Mela, Nia, Thalia, and I chewed our brownies and talked with our mouths full as we left the theater.

  “So I’m terrified. Anyone else feel that way?” Thalia said.

  Nia shook her head. “Not me. I trust Clio to figure it out.”

  Mela handed half her brownie to Thalia. “I’ve lost my appetite,” she said. “I’m only twelve. I have a whole life to live,” she muttered.

  Thalia slung an arm around Mela’s shoulder. “Hey, I know tragedy is your thing, but maybe settle down a bit?”

  “But what if one of us is in danger?” Mela asked.

  “Then we have to protect one another,” Nia said.

  A thought sprang to mind, and I blurted it out before I could stop myself. “What if one of us is . . . broken? Like, not meant to be a muse.”

  The others stilled. We could hear the construction crews working on the V and A, and our own breathing.

  “You are all thinking very loudly right now,” Thalia muttered.

  “Haven’t you ever wondered?” I asked. “That maybe you didn’t belong here? That the clock picked you by mistake?” These were secret thoughts, ones I’d never said out loud, though I’d been thinking about them from the beginning, when Clio first told me I was a muse. It felt good to say them now.

  “All the time,” Nia said. “Remember last year, when I couldn’t get my magic to work without an app?”

  Mela nodded. “Me, too. Back in January, remember? When I ruined the meeting because I couldn’t stop thinking about my favorite TV show being canceled, and then everybody started crying?”