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Grover and I exchanged looks again. I’d never seen Annabeth play this role before. Entitlement? Check. Arrogance? Check. Nothing saysPay attention to me because I’m horriblelike demanding to see the manager. It wasn’t part of Annabeth’s personality, but she pretended well.

The place had a few other customers. They all stopped browsing and quickly left. Nobody wanted to be caught in the cross fire of a manager-customer-gladiator throwdown.

An employee in a black pantsuit scrambled over to us. “Miss, perhaps I can help—”

Annabeth gave her a glare that could cut through titanium.

“I—I’ll get the managers,” the employee stammered. “Right away.”

She hurried off to the back room, leaving us by ourselves.

The store’s interior had glowing white walls and dark tables. Transparent tubes ran along the ceiling. Maybe they deliver your perfume in pneumatic canisters, I thought. Against the back wall sprawled a display of chemistry beakers, decanters, Bunsen burners, and bubbling copper kettles—everything the twenty-first-century witch needed to brew a good cup of organic fair-trade potion.

“No polecat,” I noticed.

“Patience,” Annabeth said. She walked over to the nearest display and picked up a bottle. She sniffed it, then set it back down.

She checked a few more tables, then zeroed in on a locked glass display case. Inside were three boxes, black and gold, with the labelGALE, BY SCENTS FOREVER.

“Aha!” Annabeth said.

“They decanted our polecat?” Grover cried. “We’re dead!”

“Stay calm.” Easy for Annabeth to say. She looked powerful. Us? We were armed with plastic weapons.

Then the managers appeared. Two women—clearly twins—marched in from the back room looking ready for a confrontation. Their dark hair was the same shade as the other two sisters’ but cut short and spiky. They wore matching black pantsuits. The only difference was that the one on the left wore silver earrings and the one on the right wore gold.

“Phaedra and Daedra,” Annabeth said.

That stopped them in their tracks. They studied Annabeth.

“I know you,” said the lady on the right.

“That’s right,” Annabeth said. “And you are both in serious trouble.”

The twins had some’splaining to do, too.

Before they could even askWhy do you have scrawny gladiator boys?Annabeth laid into them.

“Do you have any idea who I am?” Annabeth asked.

Wow, she was cycling throughThe Greatest Hits of Entitlement, volume one.

“Y-you’re that girl,” said Phaedra, whose name I cleverly deduced from the name tag that saidPHAEDRA.

“You destroyed Circe’s Island!” cried the also name-tagged Daedra.

Annabeth laughed. “That’s perfect, coming fromyou two. I didn’t destroy the island. The dumbboyI was with destroyed the island by letting those pirates loose! And did you stop it? Did either of you? No!”

“How d-dare—” Phaedra spluttered. “You weren’t even—”

“Picked out personally by Circe for special training?” Annabeth demanded. “Yes, I was! And while I have gone on to great things and accomplished huge feats, you two are hiding in Nolita selling cheap potions!”

“We’re not hiding,” Phaedra insisted.

“They’re not cheap!” Daedra added.

Behind them, their employee cleared her throat. “Um, mistresses?”