Crystal Caves by Kristine Grayson Read Free Book Online

always pounds here, because it feels very modern and confusing and dangerous, traffic going in circles, and people trying to get to the subway entrance and people trying to cross.
    I know if I can get into Central Park, the noise will ease (a little) and I’ll calm down just a bit, but I hate standing here, surrounded by the traffic, which almost seems like those monsters my family fought in the stupid myths everyone tells about them. I’ll take a minotaur any day over traffic roaring around a circle, with more traffic behind me.
    It’s not that far from the circle to the park entrance, but it always feels scary to me. Maybe because the city is weirdly open here—with lots of choices. You can go to the building with the globe in front of it (some famous guy’s hotel) or you can go to the TV studio for CNN (which I’d even heard of before I got here) or you can go to some apartments or other tall buildings that E tried to explain to me once. And then there’s Lincoln Center, the Center of All Culture according to Danny, and across from it all Central Park, which I had heard of before I got to New York; I just didn’t know what it was.
    And I didn’t know how it was the only place I’d feel halfway comfortable. If I could get across traffic.
    The light changes and I sprint, because I don’t want to be near those cars ever , and I stop near this gigandous monument, which I kinda love, maybe because it reminds me of home.
    You see, I’m the one who told E that the gold creatures pulling the seashell chariot on the top of the monument (which we had to stand waaaaaaay back to look at) were hippocampi. He’d never heard of them. Danny looked them up on his phone and said, as snotty as Gordon could be, Why don’t you just call them seahorses? Jeez . But they’re not seahorses. They’re Greek. The statues aren’t of my family—there’s someone called Columbia and someone called Peace—but they look like they’re of my family, like the stuff you see in Greece (the real Greece) all the time. Except for the big tall brick-like box thing.
    Still, I look at the Maine memorial as a little bit of home, although I think if you need a memorial to a ship in the middle of the city, the memorial should have my uncle Poseidon riding through it somewhere.
    I go to a nearby food cart and get a knish. I’ve fallen in love with the food in this city, which is a problem, considering how Mother wants me to control everything I eat. But as I get ready to pay for the knish—which is spinach, because it, y’know, pretends at healthy—I realize I don’t have to care what Mother thinks. I order a potato knish too, and I take them, plus a bottle of water, to a bench across from the monument.
    I sit a little sideways, so I’m looking at mostly monument instead of mostly traffic. The park’s behind me, and the air smells of falling leaves. It’s not really fall yet, but it will be soon, and everyone’s warning me that it’ll get really cold here in the winter, too cold for my Mediterranean blood.
    Maybe I won’t be here in the winter. Maybe I’ll be somewhere else.
    I’m trapped here, but if Mother’s not following the rules, I don’t have to either. I mean, what’s Megan going to do to me? Empath me to death? Her magic doesn’t have lightning bolts or big magic tricks or anything. She can’t hurt me.
    No one can, not with magic. Not here.
    Ignorance might hurt me, though. I really don’t know this place.
    I bite into the potato knish. The potatoes and onions steam out of the fried dough, and some fall on my jeans. Instead of brushing the food off like I was taught by one of the au pairs, I eat it, then wipe my hands on the napkin that came in the greasy little bag the street vendor had given me.
    New York’s not that bad if I have to hole up somewhere. There’s a million great hotels, and no one would have to know why I was there. I wouldn’t have to go to school, and—
    I shiver. If I don’t go to school, what would