O
ur story picks up somewhere in the middle. Middle of what? you may ask. The middle of mishap, mischance, and misfortune. The middle of muck. The middle of time-altering, life-changing events that will forever transform the lives of three well-meaning but misguided teenage heroines….

ONE

O
h, poop. I’d surely done it this time.

Daddy sounded mad. Not just Medusa mad but heaven and hell mad. Don’t get me wrong; I rather enjoy it when Daddy’s a little ticked off. And that’s not to say that I enjoy seeing him unhappy. It’s just that when he does get a teeny bit mad, well, things get a little more exciting. When Daddy gets mad, the opera unfolds.

But this time it was different.

Era, Polly, and I had just woken up. We’d been summoned as we were, which meant we were wearing only our chiffon nighties. We hadn’t even had time to change into our velvet day dresses. The large room where we now knelt before our father was cavernous, cold, and damp, and goose bumps crawled up and down my legs.
Why does Daddy keep the one
room like this, anyway?
I wondered.
All cold and scary and dark?
He didn’t even have any chairs. Chairs would have been nice. It’s not easy to keep yourself poised perfectly on bended knee so early in the morning.

I looked over at my two sisters and reflected that my hair couldn’t possibly look as bad. Era’s dangling blond curls were so flattened that they resembled the straw from a stanky old mortal mattress. And although Polly had tried to pull her own long, straight hair back into a ponytail, it was smushed against the sides of her face as if a big ol’ vat of the purest Greek olive oil had been poured squarely over her head. They both looked about as icky as I felt.

The three of us had to strain to hear Daddy and Hera argue, even though they weren’t but five feet away from us, sitting on their high thrones. They were talking in these loud but echoey and unintelligible hushes, making it almost impossible to tell what they were planning for us three. The problem three.

They hadn’t even acknowledged our presence or said good morning or, better yet, apologized for waking us so abruptly. Daddy just continued to talk his nonsense, to
her.
“Well, Hera, I don’t know, dear—Tharniasfgh is neeeernddgh and quite bleak. Don’t you think raitnghh on two mojld be far treeiergh?”

“I think he said, ‘Tartarus is merry with a nice creek. Don’t you think that taking on ghouls would be eerier?’” Era whispered, her eyes widening in fear. Era is not the brightest of my sisters.

“I do
not
!” yelled my stepmom extraordinaire, Hera the Evil. And then her tones went back to muffled. “I want them flone, blanirershed, out of cly bears, trerevere!”

“Uh-oh, wait, I think she said, ‘I want them done, varnished, and with new hairdos forever,’” mistranslated Era again. “She’s sending us to the Beautorium forever! How lovely!”

For the first time Polly took her eyes off Daddy and Hera and snapped her head toward Era, glowering. “Era, don’t be such a fool—this is serious. They are not sending us to get our hair done or our nails polished or our legs waxed. They are discussing our demise. Our demise, dear sister. You’ve both really done it this time.”

“Us!” I yelled so loud, my dad and Hera stopped their bickering for a moment to look our way. I lowered my head and continued a bit more quietly. “You had just as much to do with this fiasco as we did. In fact, if I recall, this was your very own idea. I mean, most of it was. I mean, well, I didn’t come up with it all on my own. I didn’t even
know
about the bag and goat hair and the—”

“Oh, don’t you, even,” Polly interrupted. But that
was all she said. She pursed up her lips and yanked at her ponytail, then looked straight ahead, her nose tilted slightly in the air. I opened my mouth to say more about the whole “incident,” the thing that got us here, but promptly shut it. There was no use arguing with Polly.

We knelt there in our own silence, listening to our father appeal to Hera, Polly looking angry as Hades at me, and Era looking, well, half asleep and half afraid.

“But sweetie, these are my girls,” Daddy pleaded more loudly than before.

Witchy-witch Hera just sat above us on her gilded, jeweled throne with her hands crossed, not letting my father catch her eyes, which were now burrowing a small hole in my skull. Or at least that’s what it felt like. She had the evil stare of a black vulture at midnight.

I just smiled a stubborn smile at her.

Daddy continued to beg. “But honey, snookums, be reasonable. Yes, the girls have been utterly wretched, but…”

Well, I wouldn’t have said we were “wretched.” I liked to think of our behavior as “delightfully disobedient.” ’Course, for once, I knew better than to say that out loud.

“…but please have some mercy on them for me.” Daddy was actually truly whining now. I’d never seen him so, so, so…weak.

My father is Zeus. Yeah,
the
Zeus. Ruler of the heavens, supreme master of the Olympians, god of the weather, black clouds, lightning bolts, blah, blah, blah. He’s a pretty good guy, although the man is so busy wreaking vengeance and overseeing all of Olympus that he hardly has time to be a real dad. He used to be a
great
dad—always taking me and my sisters down to earth to see the sea nymphs and play with the mortal children. But now he’s kind of, well, old. And he’s married to Hera, who we’ve had to put up with ever since my mother,
*
bless her soul, passed on, leaving my sisters and me behind. The nine of us, collectively, are known around town as the Muses.
**

And right now the three of us were in huge trouble. Era was chewing on her bottom lip, obviously worried now that Polly had set her straight about the whole punishment thing. “What is going to happen to us? Hera wouldn’t really send us to Tartarus, would she? They don’t
really
have nice creeks there, do they?” Her voice was now trembling with fear, and dusky roses of excitement were standing out on her cheeks, making her look even more beautiful than usual—messy hair and all.

“No, they really don’t, Era,” said Polly, rolling her
eyes. “And I wouldn’t put anything past Hera. You know, last week I watched her catch a fly in her palm and then she held it up by its little tiny wing and dropped it in her mouth. Just like that. She’s the meanest woman I know, and trust me, I have seen a lot of evil in my life. She’s so angry with us, my guess is we’ll be lucky if she just lets us wait on her hand and foot for the next two hundred years.”

“Oh, that’s a fate worse than death, don’t you think?” I said. Oops, a little too loud.

“I think death would become you, Thalia, dear,” said my demonic, sinister stepmom. I turned toward her just in time to see a cruel sneer cross her lips, and the goose bumps crept back onto my flesh. Which was really annoying—I hate it when Hera gets to me. I looked at my father and couldn’t help wondering—
How can he not see her inherent evil now?

But he just whimpered, “Now, dear…”

Oh, this was bad!

Hera continued to glare at me.

“Thalia!” hissed Polly. “You just don’t know when to quit, do you? Things are bad enough—you don’t need to make them worse. It’s Tartarus for sure. Oh, my, I will miss the others and the wood nymphs and the talking fountains and Pegasus; oh, Tartarus will surely be it….” And Polly, my dear, always composed sister, began to cry quietly. Her light blue eyes (she
has the fairest eyes of us all) just turned instantly wet and vivid bloodred. And let me tell you, red and light blue seriously clash.

Two seconds later Era’s bottom lip began to tremble. I had to admit that seeing Polly—the strong one, the practical one—cry was pretty disheartening. It made me want to cry a little bit, too. Not that I would ever let Hera see
that.

But this really was heartbreaking. The idea of us three scrubbing floors in Tartarus, deep down below the heavens and sky and earth, in the fiery belly of hate, far from everyone we love, was enough to send chills down
anyone’s
spine.

You see, Tartarus is this little slice of Hell, actually part of Hades. It’s where mortals go when they have offended us gods so severely that we punish them with death. The worst mortals end up there, and it’s governed by my three least-favorite girls: Meg, Alek, and Tizzie, otherwise known as (whisper, please) the Furies. If they hear us use that name, they’ll go berserk. They prefer to be referred to as “the Blessed Ones.”

Those three girls have tormented my sisters and me our whole lives. It seems they live to make our lives miserable. And they often succeed.
*
The thought of being on their turf, stuck in Tartarus at
their mercy, was excruciating. No, horrifyingly, hysterically hellacious. My head started to spin at that thought; my eyes started to ache, throb even; the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I felt overheated and out of breath.

Both my sisters continued to sniffle, looking desperate and tired. And contrary to what they may sometimes think, I hate, hate,
hate
to see my sisters upset. A vision of Hera falling off her throne and breaking a leg suddenly popped into my head. It wouldn’t stop our punishment, but how could we be in any more trouble than we already were? I began to twinkle my nose. But before I even got to the part where Hera would lose her balance, Polly reached across Era and clutched my nose, nearly knocking me over.

“What in Athena’s name are you doing?” Polly demanded in a loud and angry whisper. But she didn’t wait for the answer; she just continued, “Are you insane? Do not even
think
of using your powers now, not here, no! This is Daddy and Hera, for gods’ sake!”

“Fine.” I snorted. I shook free from Polly’s grip and threw her an angry look. But she was right. I hadn’t been thinking. Even if Hera was already planning the worst punishment imaginable for us, I was sure she could somehow find a way to come up with one that was worse.

Era, meanwhile, seemed oblivious. She was thinking aloud of what punishments she could tolerate. “Perhaps Hera would take a suggestion,” she whispered. “I think I could stand it if they took Pegasus away from us—for a whole month I could, I think.”

Polly’s patience with me was already gone, and now her patience with Era’s simplicity was truly wearing thin. “That’s a paltry offering, Era, and you know it. Our punishment is going to be worse than not having our favorite pet around for a few weeks’ time. You two are insufferable. Need I remind you that Hera has a will unlike any other?”

The sound of my father clearing his throat silenced us. Era grabbed my hand and squeezed it, while Polly regained her stony composure and stared straight ahead. Daddy spoke. “Girls, you have disobeyed me, disgraced Hera, had fun at our expense, and acted like little beastlings.”

“Era.” Era started to tremble when Father spoke her name. “My beautiful daughter, while it is clear these plans were not of your devising, you have once again gone along with the crowd, forsaking what is right and just instead of standing on your own two feet and making your own decisions. You were swayed too easily yet again. You must grow up. You must realize that you are a young woman now and your actions have consequences.”

I was pretty impressed. Daddy may be oblivious
sometimes, but he seemed to have Era pinned down pretty well.

Daddy continued. “Polly, my good daughter.” Polly nodded dutifully. “What in heavens possessed you to take part in this matter? Well, I think I know. You seek to help others, but at what expense? You need to learn that there is a time and a place for helping. And perhaps even more important, you need to focus on your own life rather than trying to fix everyone else’s. This constant meddling in other people’s affairs must be supplanted by your own ambitions and desires. While I know you think your heart is in the right place, it is not. For your actions have had dire consequences. Why, look at your stepmother. Look at her!”

Did I forget to mention that Hera looked slightly green at the moment? I couldn’t help smiling at that.

“And you, Thalia, do you mock me?”

“No, Father,” I said, wiping the smile off my face. Daddy sighed.

“My precious Thalia, how could you do this to me? This is, without a doubt, your most severe stunt yet. You have wrecked lives, you have played with the Fates, you have inflicted damage on those who love you, and why? Because you think it serves you best. Because
you
wanted it so. While making your plans, did you ever spare a thought for anyone
besides yourself? No! Don’t speak—we all know the answer. You, my dear daughter, need to learn the very opposite lesson from your sister Polly—you must learn to be more selfless. You must learn to let concern for others temper your strong-headedness and selfish desires.”

Whoa, that was pretty harsh. But maybe true. A little. Maybe.

Daddy sucked in his breath, then let it out in a deep, reluctant grumble. The noise echoed in the chamber and, I dare say, the whole kingdom probably heard. His voiced reverberated as he spoke these eleven words:

“I have no choice but to banish you three to earth.”

Era shivered.

Polly shook.

I…I got a little excited.

“Athens, Greece, specifically,” Daddy added. “It is the mortal year 423
B.C
. there.”

“But for how long, Father?” asked Era, her voice barely audible.

“I cannot answer that. Only
you
can answer that.”

“Well, then, I will come home…tomorrow!” said Era. Stupidly, I might add.

“Oh no, dear, I don’t think so,” said Hera with a gurgle and a chort, a cackle and a snort.

My father then spoke. “Please, Era, take a step
forward.” Era stood and walked to the foot of my father’s throne.

“The time will arrive when you may come home.

It is not written in the stars or in any tome.