The Sea of Monsters

waiting for me to get to the point.
    “Uh, well, Annabeth and I are half-bloods,” I said. “We’re like . . . heroes-in-training. And whenever monsters pick up our scent, they attack us. That’s what those giants were in the gym. Monsters.”
    “Yes.”
    I stared at him. He didn’t seem surprised or confused by what I was telling him, which surprised and confused me. “So . . . you believe me?”
    Tyson nodded. “But you are . . . Son of the Sea God?”
    “Yeah,” I admitted. “My dad is Poseidon.”
    Tyson frowned. Now he looked confused. “But then . . .”
    A siren wailed. A police car raced past our alley.
    “We don’t have time for this,” Annabeth said. “We’ll talk in the taxi.”
    “A taxi all the way to camp?” I said. “You know how much money—”
    “Trust me.”
    I hesitated. “What about Tyson?”
    I imagined escorting my giant friend into Camp Half-Blood. If he freaked out on a regular playground with regular bullies, how would he act at a training camp for demigods? On the other hand, the cops would be looking for us.
    “We can’t just leave him,” I decided. “He’ll be in trouble, too.”
    “Yeah.” Annabeth looked grim. “We definitely need to take him. Now come on.”
    I didn’t like the way she said that, as if Tyson were a big disease we needed to get to the hospital, but I followed her down the alley. Together the three of us sneaked through the side streets of downtown while a huge column of smoke billowed up behind us from my school gymnasium.
    * * *
    “Here.” Annabeth stopped us on the corner of Thomas and Trimble. She fished around in her backpack. “I hope I have one left.”
    She looked even worse than I’d realized at first. Her chin was cut. Twigs and grass were tangled in her ponytail, as if she’d slept several nights in the open. The slashes on the hems of her jeans looked suspiciously like claw marks.
    “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