The Sea of Monsters(8)

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

All around us, sirens wailed. I figured it wouldn’t be long before more cops cruised by, looking for juvenile delinquent gym-bombers. No doubt Matt Sloan had given them a statement by now. He’d probably twisted the story around so that Tyson and I were the bloodthirsty cannibals.

“Found one. Thank the gods.” Annabeth pulled out a gold coin that I recognized as a drachma, the currency of Mount Olympus. It had Zeus’s likeness stamped on one side and the Empire State Building on the other.

“Annabeth,” I said, “New York taxi drivers won’t take that.”

”Stêthi,” she shouted in Ancient Greek. “Ô hárma diabolês!”

As usual, the moment she spoke in the language of Olympus, I somehow understood it.

She’d said: Stop, Chariot of Damnation!

That didn’t exactly make me feel real excited about whatever her plan was.

She threw her coin into the street, but instead of clattering on the asphalt, the drachma sank right through and disappeared.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, just where the coin had fallen, the asphalt darkened. It melted into a rectangular pool about the size of a parking space—bubbling red liquid like blood. Then a car erupted from the ooze.

It was a taxi, all right, but unlike every other taxi in New York, it wasn’t yellow. It was smoky gray. I mean it looked like it was woven out of smoke, like you could walk right through it. There were words printed on the door—something like GYAR SSIRES—but my dyslexia made it hard for me to decipher what it said.

The passenger window rolled down, and an old woman stuck her head out. She had a mop of grizzled hair covering her eyes, and she spoke in a weird mumbling way, like she’d just had a shot of Novocain. “Passage? Passage?”

“Three to Camp Half-Blood,” Annabeth said. She opened the cab’s back door and waved at me to get in, like this was all completely normal.

“Ach!” the old woman screeched. “We don’t take his kind!”

She pointed a bony finger at Tyson.

What was it? Pick-on-Big-and-Ugly-Kids Day?

“Extra pay,” Annabeth promised. “Three more drachma on arrival.”

“Done!” the woman screamed.

Reluctantly I got in the cab. Tyson squeezed in the middle. Annabeth crawled in last.

The interior was also smoky gray, but it felt solid enough. The seat was cracked and lumpy—no different than most taxis. There was no Plexiglas screen separating us from the old lady driving … Wait a minute. There wasn’t just one old lady. There were three, all crammed in the front seat, each with stringy hair covering her eyes, bony hands, and a charcoal-colored sackcloth dress.

The one driving said, “Long Island! Out-of-metro fare bonus! Ha!”

She floored the accelerator, and my head slammed against the backrest. A prerecorded voice came on over the speaker: Hi, this is Ganymede, cup-bearer to Zeus, and when I’m out buying wine for the Lord of the Skies, I always buckle up!

I looked down and found a large black chain instead of a seat belt. I decided I wasn’t that desperate … yet.

The cab sped around the corner of West Broadway, and the gray lady sitting in the middle screeched, “Look out! Go left!”

“Well, if you’d give me the eye, Tempest, I could see that!” the driver complained.

Wait a minute. Give her the eye?

I didn’t have time to ask questions because the driver swerved to avoid an oncoming delivery truck, ran over the curb with a jaw-rattling thump, and flew into the next block.

“Wasp!” the third lady said to the driver. “Give me the girl’s coin! I want to bite it.”

“You bit it last time, Anger!” said the driver, whose name must’ve been Wasp. “It’s my turn!”

“Is not!” yelled the one called Anger.

The middle one, Tempest, screamed, “Red light!”

“Brake!” yelled Anger.

Instead, Wasp floored the accelerator and rode up on the curb, screeching around another corner, and knocking over a newspaper box. She left my stomach somewhere back on Broome Street.

“Excuse me,” I said. “But … can you see?”

“No!” screamed Wasp from behind the wheel.

“No!” screamed Tempest from the middle.

“Of course!” screamed Anger by the shotgun window.

I looked at Annabeth. “They’re blind?”

“Not completely,” Annabeth said. “They have an eye.”

“One eye?”

“Yeah.”

“Each?”

“No. One eye total.”

Next to me, Tyson groaned and grabbed the seat. “Not feeling so good.”

“Oh, man,” I said, because I’d seen Tyson get carsick on school field trips and it was not something you wanted to be within fifty feet of. “Hang in there, big guy. Anybody got a garbage bag or something?”

The three gray ladies were too busy squabbling to pay me any attention. I looked over at Annabeth, who was hanging on for dear life, and I gave her a why-did-you-do-this-to-me look.

“Hey,” she said, “Gray Sisters Taxi is the fastest way to camp.”

“Then why didn’t you take it from Virginia?”