Fleeced by Julia Wills Page A

them by only their poses, since each goddess was now headless.
    “What happened to the Parthenon?” said Alex.
    “Nothing’s happened to it,” said Rose flatly. “It’s still in Greece.”
    Aries looked up at Alex with wide, worried eyes.
    “And we’re not?” said Alex.
    Rose shook her head. “Okay. It’s not funny any more.”
    Alex stared at her.
    “This is the British Museum,” she added. “In London.”
    “Britannia?” gasped Alex.
    At which Aries bleated furiously and was about to shout something extremely rude, had Alex not clamped his hand around the ram’s muzzle.
    “It can’t be!” said Alex, struggling to keep Aries’ mouth closed. “That’s the caryatid Athena chosefor her portal! So, how did she move?”
    “Right! That’s enough!” Rose held her hands up in front of her. “Either stop acting weird and come with me, or take your chances with them out there!” She nodded towards the doors at the back of the room and Alex followed her gaze to see several tourists still clamouring against the glass, pushing for a better view, staring and pointing. “Your choice.”
    Five minutes later Rose had led them out of the Parthenon room and down into the basement of the British Museum. Now they followed her along underground corridors that criss-crossed like a maze and led to storerooms filled with exhibits for repair or storage. Alex looked up, fascinated by the dots of twinkling light set into the ceiling. He wanted to reach up and touch them, to see if they burned like fire or were full of lightning sparks, but knowing that it would make Rose even more annoyed he hurried on, Aries’ hoof-falls ringing in his ears.
    “In here,” said Rose finally, opening a door at the end of the corridor and stepping inside.
    Cramped and stuffy, the room was lit by dingy yellow light and filled with rows of wooden shelves that stretched almost from one wall to the other with only a narrow aisle to walk around them. Every shelf was crammed with boxes and packing cases spillingstraw. Vase-shaped bundles in bubble wrap and glass trays of pinned oily black beetles were wedged between rows of leather suitcases bearing handwritten brown labels. A mummified lizard stared balefully down at Alex from the far corner, its glass eyes dull. On the shelf below, stuffed tarantulas the size of rubber gloves arched beneath glass domes. Of course, on any other day, the sort of other day when he hadn’t been plunged into modern London, Alex would have loved this room. He’d have spent hours studying the beetles and lifting the spiders from their boxes to stroke the fur on their legs. Even the Underworld Zoo, with all its monsters, had nothing quite so hairy and marvellous 15 . But as Aries squeezed between the first two shelves and began to snuffle around in the hope of finding something to eat, Alex turned away from the spiders and looked at Rose who was pulling out a blanket from beneath a jar of desiccated bat wings.
    Now he thought about it, she had been pretty brave in standing up to the guards. And she hadn’t batted an eyelid at the rows of gigantic spiders in here. Impressive. For a girl, he quickly reminded himself,confident that she’d probably still just burst into tears and run away if he told her the real truth about who they were 16 .
    “Perhaps,” said Alex, “your husband might be able to help us?”
    “Husband?” snapped Rose and thumped the blanket onto the floor.
    Thanks to Rose’s mother’s daily lectures on antiquity she knew that ancient Greek girls were married by the age of fourteen, usually to a man in his thirties, chosen by her father. She wasn’t amused. “For the last time, snap out of this freaky Greek routine or I’m going for the guards!”
    She sat down on the blanket and drew her knees up under her chin, scowling. At which, Aries, who hadn’t eaten for at least three hours – which, as he’d have told you, in ram-terms is forever, but had now discovered a crate of tasty naval