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“Where did you get this?” I mumbled. “How long was I out?”

“About an hour.”

“What?!”

Just saying that made my lips crack. I had a throbbing headache. I decided just to sip my Gatorade.

Grover offered me eyedrops and some lip balm. “I’ve been trying to moisturize,” he said. “Thank goodness you dehydrated us right next to a drugstore.”

I grunted. Finding a drugstore in Manhattan wasn’t hard. Most city blocks had one. Grover and I sat together on the sidewalk and tried to get our moisture back from Sahara Desert level.

“Did Filomena…? Did I vaporize her?” I asked.

The naiad hadn’t exactly been friendly, but I still didn’t like the idea of accidentally sending her to the Great Water Faucet in the Sky, or wherever naiads went to reincarnate.

Grover shuddered. “She would’ve vaporizedusif you hadn’t acted so quickly.”

I emptied the bottle of saline drops into my eyes. I felt like I’d spent the last hour staring into an oven.

“We need to figure out what she was talking about. She said she had sisters. She mentioned Gale. You think…?” I pointed to the perfumery.

“No one else has come out and tried to kill us,” Grover said. “But if Gale’s inside, we should check. Should we buy, like, protective gear first? Raincoats? Umbrellas?”

He helped me to my feet.

“Nah,” I said. “Anyone else starts throwing potions, I’ll go full hurricane on them.”

Those sounded like fighting words. How heroic did I feel marching across the street and into Aeaea, ready for battle, only to find the place empty except for a college-age sales dude with green hair, typing away on his phone while humming along to an all-violin version of “So Yesterday”?

That’s right. I felt pretty heroic.

“Hey, I love this song!” Grover said.

“Shh,” I said. “I’m trying to be intimidating.”

I marched over to Green Hair, who looked up at me and sighed, then squinted at the door like there might be somebody more interesting coming in behind me. “I thought you were my boss. She left like anhourago, and I’m supposed to go on lunch break.” He typed for another few seconds, then apparently remembered he was supposed to be working. He looked up and said, “Help you?”

Not in a friendly way. More likeObviously you won’t be buying expensive perfume, kid; can you stop bothering me?

“Your boss is Filomena,” I guessed.

“Afraid so.” He sighed. “Oh, please tell me you’re not afriendof hers.”

He said that as if it were physically impossible.

“Do her sisters work here?” I asked.

He was so shocked he actually put down his phone. “Are you kidding? She hassisters? That is so sad for them.”

“I’ll take that as a no. And I don’t suppose you have a polecat in the store?”

“A what?” asked Green Hair.

“It’s a type of mustelid,” Grover pitched in. “Kind of like a weasel, but you can tell the difference from the hair pattern around their eyes.”

I suspected Green Hair’s brain disconnected somewhere around the wordmustelid.

“Um, no,” he said. “No polecats.”