Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods by Michael R. Underwood

worry of blindly colliding with an equally-distracted pedestrian heading in the opposite direction.
    We approached the train station, and Antoinette handed Carter back his phone. “That does it. I’ve twinned the gems, so make sure to keep this near your phone. It’s like Bluetooth, okay?”
    Carter nodded. He slipped the onyx into his coat pocket along with the phone. He reached into a different pocket and handed Antoinette a three-inch-tall burnished statuette of the Shiva Nataraja, the lord of dance.
    “Show this to the alpha. She knows what it means.”
    Nate coughed to grab our attention, speeding ahead of the group. “This is all great mysterious portentousness, but if Slumdog Millionaire is escorting me to class, we need to start running. I can’t afford to be late again.” And then he set off down the street. Carter leaned forward and dashed after her, a short wave pointed back in our direction.
    “Well, that was bracing,” Antoinette said, turning to me. Time to catch a ferry.”
    “The boat, not the fae?” I asked for verification.
    “Yep,” she said.
    “Indeed.”
    And so we went.

CHAPTER
    TWELVE
    “S o, Staten Island?” I asked. “I admit, I’ve never been.”
    “You don’t get seasick, do you?”
    I’d never been on a boat larger than a rowboat.
    “I couldn’t say. But if it must be the ferry, then so be it.”
    Antoinette smiled. “You’ll be fine.”

    I was not fine.
    In a cruel joke that some more limited in their thinking would take to reflect the Younger Gods’ disapproval of my breaking from the fold, the rolling crash of the Hudson River made a slow-shifting, nearly tectonic display of the ferry deck and set my stomach off like it had been thrown into a tornado. It was as if the god beneath the Eastern Seaboard itself was disturbed from its fetal sleep, wary of the ritual and its imminent birth should we fail in our task.
    Antoinette was amused. She stood with feet wide, rolling with the movements of the deck, her hand on her phone.
    But I, child of the terrifying, monstrous Greene family, spent the majority of the trip with my head over the rails, stomach threatening to rebel.
    I did my best to roll with the movement of the ship, the changes in relative down pulling my stomach from side to side as the ferry cut its way through the water. But even as I moved with the vessel, my eyes locked on the horizon, my stomach still rebelled.
    “We couldn’t have taken the bus?”
    Antoinette stifled a laugh. “The Staten Island pack has very specific rules on how visitors are to present themselves. And that doesn’t include crossing to the island by bus.”
    “Alas. What else do I need to know for meeting this pack? I imagine that the Gardener’s antipathy toward my family may be mirrored by the pack, and it would be folly for my family to triumph merely due to the Greene reputation hamstringing our ability to gather allies.”
    “You might have been thinking about that when you called the Gardener a coward. Didn’t your parents teach you when to shut up?”
    “I’ve grown quite confused as to which lessons of my family I should follow, given that they’re a clan of murdering sociopaths. The result seems to involve a great deal of awkwardness.”
    I looked to the horizon, trying to calm the storm in my gut. We were pulling into the harbor.
    “When we get there, let me do the talking. They don’t react well to strangers, so we’ll need to introduce you after making our hellos. And try to keep a lid on the crazy-old-man act, can you?”
    “Sadly, I do not really know what you mean by that.”
    The ferry stopped, and the crowd started filing off the boat. “Here we are,” Antoinette said. She put a hand on my back. “Are you going to be okay?”
    “Once we get on dry land, perhaps.”
    Two more pats, and I stood, slowly, then followed my guide to the island of Staten.

    Antoinette led us to a bus stop, where we picked up the S74 bus. Apparently, a bus on the island was