The Mystery of the Tenth

by Chantel Acevedo

  We watched as they followed the path that led out of the botanical garden, when suddenly they froze and turned to face us. Then, speaking in unison, they said, “It’s not a trap, by the way. Athena has designed a real quest. But it doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, so keep your heads about you, and thanks for the eye.”

  Then they went off for real, leaving the five of us standing there, wondering what in the world we were about to face.

  Chapter 15

  Tiny Snacks

  “Let’s go!” Ari shouted enthusiastically as soon as the Gray Sisters were out of sight.

  The rest of us paused. We needed a plan. We needed to stop and think. Didn’t we? The sun was low in the sky, and my stomach grumbled. It was five o’clock, and Papi and Laura were probably wondering where I was by now.

  “We can go find the first piece of the tapestry tomorrow. After camp, okay?” I suggested.

  Ari folded her arms. “Not okay. My life is on the line here.”

  “I agree with Ari,” Mela said.

  “And I want to go home,” Thalia added.

  Here we were again, splitting into sides. I was tired of it.

  “Well, I’m not going to be the deciding vote this time. Nia, tell us what to do.”

  Nia rolled her eyes. She glanced at the time on her phone. “Fine. It’s the middle of the night in London and New Delhi, and my dad thinks I’m at the library back home. Do you have an excuse, Callie?”

  I thought of Laura, who was probably just getting home with Rafaelito, and wondering where I was. This was more important, wasn’t it? “I’ll figure something out,” I said.

  “Then we’ll go to the bookstore,” Nia said. “We’ll get the first piece of the tapestry, then we all go home. Understood?” She’d leveled the question at Ari, who nodded, then smiled brightly.

  “Wait till you see it,” Ari said, leading us out of the garden. “The tapestry, I mean. It was my best work.”

  I hoped Ari was right. I’d already seen Athena’s tapestry, and it was amazing. It had made me feel the things that were represented in the pictures. There was magic in it, I was sure. Would Ari’s make me feel the same way?

  I glanced at my phone to check the time. Five o’clock. Papi was going to ground me for an eternity. Nervous, I gave him a call. The phone rang three times before he picked up.

  “¿Oigo?”

  “Hi, Papi. Listen, I’m still at camp with Ari. We’re working on a project.”

  In the background, I could hear men hollering directions and the squealing of machines.

  “Okay, mi’jita. I’ll text Laura. Get home by seven.”

  “I will. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Then we hung up. My entire face felt hot. I hated lying, and I especially hated lying to my parents. I watched as Ari and Mela chatted, their steps in sync, their long dark hair swinging back and forth at the same time. Mela had said that Ari’s mission was the most important thing we’d done, and Mela was almost always right. But I just didn’t see it. Out there, somewhere, was a tenth muse, someone who was like us, and we couldn’t find her. That was our assignment. Not Ari and Athena’s ages-old beef with each other.

  But Mela had trusted her instincts on this one, and I trusted Mela. Nia and Thalia, too. Like Nia had said, we were a team. We had one another’s backs.

  Ari led us to the 111th Street station, and we took the 7 train and then the D to Washington Square. Huge skyscrapers rose up in the distance, but in Greenwich Village, there were pretty three-story buildings of red brick, with flower boxes in the windows, and front stoops with flowerpots, and college kids with their backpacks, hurrying here and there.

  This was the New York I saw in movies, where people fell in love and kissed on the stoops. I thought of Corona, which looked so different, but felt like home. Ari had brought us here almost without thinking. She certainly didn’t even glance at a subway map. She just knew where we were going. I couldn’t imagine it. The city was so big!

  Finally, we were standing outside Vision Books. The exterior was painted bright red, and in the curved, leaded window sat rows of books, facing out.

  “Do we just ask where they keep the pieces of ancient tapestry, or what?” Thalia wondered.

  “Powers, remember?” Nia said. “We have them. Let’s use them.”

  Inside, there was a young white woman behind the counter wearing an NYU sweater. There was a huge textbook open in front of her, and pages of notes. She was biting a pencil between her teeth, and in her hand she held another, which she was using to scratch her eyebrow as she read. The store was tiny, and she was the only other person in there. She glanced up at us, said “Hey,” then turned back to her work.

  “I’ve got this,” Nia whispered. We watched as Nia approached the counter, startling the girl. She had on a name tag that read AUDREY.

  “Can I help you?”

  Nia peered at the textbook. “Chemistry?”

  Audrey groaned. “Yes. This summer class is kicking my butt.”

  “May I?” Nia asked, and Audrey turned the textbook around for her to see.

  “What are you, like fifteen or something?”

  Nia slowly turned the page. “Twelve.” Then she brightened up. “See here? This is how you split the ions. On your homework, you forgot to do that.”

  Audrey glanced at her work, then groaned again.

  I watched as Nia rubbed her hands together and chewed on her cheek. That was her kódikas. It was subtle, unlike Mela’s hand waving or Thalia’s laughing out loud.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Audrey started to say, scrabbling for the pencil in her hair. “Complex ions . . . ,” she started to mutter.

  “Mind if we look around the store?” Nia asked, and Audrey only nodded, waving us all off as she completed problem after problem in her textbook.

  Thalia high-fived Nia, then we got to work. One by one, we tugged books off the shelf, hoping that a piece of tapestry might come fluttering out from between the pages. Mela rifled through the drawers behind the counter. Audrey didn’t even notice, she was so focused on her chemistry homework. Ari had made sure to lock the door and turn the Open sign over to Closed.

  We had worked through the books in the travel section, the fiction section, the poetry section, the history section, picture books, and middle grade books when I heard Thalia say, “Oh! Obviously!” and we all stopped searching.

  “The mythology section, of course,” Thalia said. We ran over and started opening up books—coffee table books, picture books, pop-up books—all about the different myths of the world.

  I heard someone suck in her breath. It was Ari. Her hand rested on the spine of a book entitled Arachne’s Revenge. The book was glowing under her touch, as if someone were shining a spotlight on it from somewhere.

  “It’s humming,” Ari said. We all reached out to touch the book—she was right.

  “Okay then. We’ve found it. Go on,” I nudged. I wanted to send a little muse courage her way, but I resisted—I knew Ari didn’t like it. These days, it was like I could always feel my magic, rumbling just under the surface of my skin, but caged up. Or leashed somehow. It was hard to explain. When I let it go, I could feel the magic all over, making my skin tingle like it always did.

  “On three,” Ari said. “One, two, three.” She pulled the book out and turned the pages. But there was nothing there. The book, in fact, was blank.

  “What the—” Nia started to say, when the entire shelf holding the mythology books slid off to the right, as if it were on wheels. Behind the shelf was a set of damp stone steps leading down into a dark hold.

  “Nuh-uh,” Thalia said, taking a step backward.

  “Now it’s a quest,” Mela whispered.

  “Monsters, remember?” Ari said. “The Gray Sisters were pretty sure about that particular point.”

  “Trap,” Thalia whispered back.

  “The Gray Sisters said it wasn’t a trap,” I said.

  “And we trust them wh
y?” Thalia insisted.

  “We’ve come this far,” Nia said. She shoved the book into her purse.

  I took out my phone, hit the flashlight feature, and aimed the light down the steps. The walls were made of stone, too, and I could hear dripping water echoing below. “Come on,” I said, taking the first step forward.

  The stairs went on for a long time. I counted thirteen steps before we hit the bottom. It was so dark that our phones only lit up the gloom a few feet ahead of us.

  My phone rang then, and we all yelped.

  “Hello?”

  It was Laura. “Hey. Your dad called, said you were busy?”

  “Sorry. Camp stuff,” I said.

  “I decided to take a walk with Rafaelito and we passed by Corona Arts. It’s all closed up for the day. Are you in there?”

  “Um. No? No. We went to Ari’s house to work on the project.”

  Ari snatched my phone away from me.

  “Hi, Mrs. Silva! Yep. Yep. She’s with me. Big project. I’ll walk her home when we’re done. Okay, bye!”

  Ari handed my phone back. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m not good at that kind of stuff.”

  Shrugging, Ari said, “Well, I am.” But she didn’t seem too proud about it.

  A few minutes later, the tunnel we’d been walking through forked in front of us.

  “This is the worst,” Nia said, throwing up her hands.

  “Left or right?” Mela asked.

  “Both? But I don’t want to split up,” I said. Who knew where the tunnels led, or how far we’d already gone? I turned around, and the light from the bookstore was just a speck in the distance now. Plus, I’d also just straight-up lied to Laura.

  I decided I did not like quests. I really didn’t.

  Before we could make up our minds about whether to go left, right, or split up, though, the lights on our phones went out at once.

  “Too bright,” growled a deep voice just ahead of us.

  All five of us screamed as loudly as we could and started running back where we came from. I could feel whatever it was breathing hotly just at my neck. “Stop running, tiny snacks,” it was saying.

  “We aren’t your snacks!” Thalia shouted back.

  The door to the bookstore got closer and closer as we ran to it.

  “Almost there!” I heard Mela, who was in the lead, shouting.

  “TINY SNACKS!” the creature growled.

  Just as we were about to reach the door, we watched in horror as it slid shut.

  We huddled on the steps, turning slowly to face the thing that was pursuing us. One by one, we lit our phones again, pointing them at the creature.

  It was a man. A giant man, who had to bend over to walk through the tunnel. He was barefoot, but he wore shredded jeans and a green T-shirt that read GO JETS! He was completely bald, and his skin was very pale, and there, on his forehead, just above his nose, was a solitary, yellow, enormous eye.

  “Cyclops,” Ari whispered.

  The cyclops was holding a crust-covered fork in one hand and a gleaming knife in the other. Around his neck was a long napkin, and he was drooling as he stared at us.

  My knees shook, as did my hands. Could I inspire him to just not eat us? Could mythical monsters even be inspired? It hadn’t worked last year with the sirens, but I had to try. Just as I started releasing my magic, I watched as a single, smiley-faced shoe bonked the cyclops on the head.

  The cyclops roared.

  “Timing,” Nia said to Thalia, who held up her other shoe in her hand.

  “Well, what were you lot planning to do?” she responded.

  Ari surged forward then, thrust her hands out, fingers splayed, and stared down the cyclops.

  “Give me my tapestry or else,” she said, her voice low and dangerous sounding.

  That’s when I noticed it. The napkin around the cyclops’s neck wasn’t just a napkin. It was a piece of tapestry! Even in the gloom, its colors were bright, and I could just make out a piece of the intricate scene—a man sniffing a flower, his eyes closed in delight.

  “Or else what, tiny snack?” the cyclops said, a drop of drool landing on the tapestry.

  Ari made a strangled sound, lifted her hands, and suddenly millions of spiders started crawling out from the cracks in the walls. They skittered over the cyclops’s legs, up his jeans, over his T-shirt, and crept into the corners of his mouth and all over his eye until he couldn’t see a thing.

  The cyclops roared, grabbing at the spiders with his big hands. But they skittered away from his fingers, blocking us from his view.

  Ari jumped up and snatched the tapestry from around the cyclops’s neck. When she did, the door behind us slid open again. We ran through it and back into the light, shutting out the sound of the cyclops roaring, “My tiny snacks! Where did you go?”

  Bending down, I clutched my knees and tried to catch my breath. The others were doing the same. As for Audrey, she was still working on her chemistry homework, utterly unaware of what was happening just a few feet behind her.

  “Monsters under the shops in Manhattan,” Nia mused. “Unbelievable.”

  Mela was crying and Thalia was laughing, both from nerves.

  As for Ari, she was holding her piece of tapestry gingerly in the palms of her hands. “It’s been so long,” she was saying, sniffling. Carefully, she folded the cloth, which was about the size of a baby blanket, and tucked it into the waistband of her jeans.

  “One down,” I said.

  “Three to go,” Nia added.

  “But where’s the next one?” Mela asked.

  “It’s a quest, right?” Thalia said. “That means you tackle one thing at a time, and the answer reveals itself to you after each portion of the quest is completed. Like in the Narnia books, when Eustace and Jill go to Cair Paravel and—”

  Mela moaned. “I beg of you, Thalia. Now is not the time for your Narnia obsession.”

  Suddenly, Ari gasped. “She’s right! Each part of a quest leads you to the next clue. The book, Nia! You have it?”

  Nia zipped her purse open, rummaged through it for a minute, tossing receipts, two packs of gum, and a phone charger onto the sidewalk before pulling out the book titled Arachne’s Revenge. It wasn’t glowing anymore—it just looked like an old, battered book.

  “But the pages were blank, remember?” Nia said, handing the book over to me.

  I opened it carefully and held my breath, thinking of an episode of Zombie Beach where a monster jumped out of a book.

  The first page was blank. I turned it, and there, in glittering gold letters, it read:

  The second piece awaits you in the small boot. Bring your appetites.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” I said, and flipped through the rest of the pages in case there was an answer key in there, too.

  “It’s a clue,” Nia said.

  Ari straightened. “At least we have this much,” she said. “Thanks, everyone. Let’s get you back to Queens.”

  We followed Ari out of the store, flipping the Closed sign back to Open as we went. Thalia had on only one shoe, but nobody around us seemed to notice. The sun was down now, and the trains were packed, and it took a long time to get back to Corona. We were silent the whole way home, each of us thinking about what we’d just gone through, trying to figure out the riddle and wondering what was ahead.

  Three more pieces of tapestry to go.

  A cyclops?

  Almost becoming “tiny snacks” for a monster under a bookstore?

  Why did I have a feeling that had been the easy part?

  Chapter 16

  A Picnic Near the Shore

  We all parted ways in front of the Hall of Science. Nia managed to give one of the security guards an idea about a new camera system for the museum and, distracted, he let the others inside after hours, back to their entrance points, which would take Nia, Thalia, and Mela home.

  Then Ari and I walked to Papi and Laura’s place.

  “You okay?” I asked. Ari had been str
oking the piece of tapestry the whole time, lost in thought.

  “Better than I’ve been in ages,” she said. “I know we’ll figure out the next step. We have to. Thank you, Callie, for using your one question to the Gray Sisters on me. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make it up to you.”

  “It’s what we do. We help others.” Behind me, the windows of my dad’s house were glowing softly. We watched as the curtains parted, and Papi’s face appeared. He looked at us both with a frown, then pointed at his watch.

  “Busted,” Ari said.

  “Totally. I’d better go.”

  “See you at camp, poet. Think ‘small boots’!” she called, then walked away.

  I unlocked the front door and climbed the steps to the apartment. I could smell what was left of dinner in the air—fish and maduros—and I could hear Laura running the vacuum cleaner. Rafaelito, for once, wasn’t crying.

  Before I could get my hand on the knob, Papi opened the door. He was holding his wristwatch, dangling it in front of my face.

  “What time is it, Callie?”

  “Eight fifteen,” I said. I could feel my voice quiver. I hated getting in trouble with Papi. He always sounded so . . . disappointed in me.

  “And you were supposed to be home when?”

  “Seven. I’m sorry, Papi. We lost track of time.”

  Inside, Papi sat on the couch, and patted the seat next to him so that I would sit, too. He ran his large hand over his face and sighed. “It’s a big city. Bigger than you’re used to. It makes me nervous when you don’t come home on time,” he said softly.

  The vacuum switched off. “It makes us both nervous,” Laura called from the other room before turning the vacuum back on again.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I hated not being able to tell him the truth. But, like Mami, if Papi knew about the muses, he’d want me to quit. He’d think it was too dangerous.

  “I know you’re sorry,” Papi said. “And I want you to know I’m not angry.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “¿Bravo? No. But disappointed? Sí. Un poco.”

  There it was.

  “You’re a good kid, and I’m a lucky dad.”