Meet the treacherous Alpheus in this twenty-eighth Goddess Girls adventure! After the sneaky river god Alpheus takes a precious cup from a river nymph, it’s up to Artemis to get it back! When Alpheus challenges Artemis to a surprisingly easy bet, with the winner getting the cup, Artemis thinks it’s too good to be true—and realizes Alpheus will stop at nothing to win. Can Artemis be a hero to her friends? Joan Holub has authored and/or illustrated over 140 children’s books, including the Goddess Girls series, the Heroes in Training series, the New York Times bestselling picture book Mighty Dads (illustrated by James Dean), and Little Red Writing (illustrated by Melissa Sweet). She lives in North Carolina and is online at JoanHolub.com. Suzanne Williams is a former elementary school librarian and the author of over seventy books for children, including the award-winning picture books Library Lil (illustrated by Steven Kellogg) and My Dog Never Says Please (illustrated by Tedd Arnold), and several chapter book and middle grade series. She also coauthors the Goddess Girls and Thunder Girls series with the fantastic Joan Holub. Visit her at Suzanne-Williams.com. Chapter 1: A Plea for Help 1 A Plea for Help AS SOON AS CLASSES WERE over on Friday afternoon at Mount Olympus Academy, the goddessgirl Artemis rushed upstairs to the girls’ dorm on the fourth floor. When she burst into her room, her three dogs wiggled and howled with joy. Arooo! Her greyhound, Nectar, named after the divine drink that kept Greek goddesses and gods immortal, was especially eager to see her. He leaped to the floor from the crumpled linens atop Artemis’s spare bed, where he’d been napping with her other two dogs. Artemis quickly threw her bag—full of scrolls for classes—onto the bed on the other side of the room as Nectar scrambled over. He began to dance around her. Leaning forward a little, she braced her hands on her thighs. “Can I have a kiss?” she asked him. The greyhound stood on his hind legs and pushed his front paws against her chest. Then he licked her cheek. Artemis kissed him back on the top of his long nose. “Love you too, boy!” Dog slobber never bothered her the way it did one of her besties, the goddessgirl Aphrodite. That, plus the mess Artemis and her dogs made, were the main reasons she and Aphrodite had stopped rooming together some time ago. The two girls’ housekeeping styles were just completely different. Artemis took a relaxed approach, whereas Aphrodite was super-duper-mega-neat. Luckily, the room split hadn’t affected their friendship. And they were also BFFs with two awesome goddessgirls named Athena and Persephone. Athena roomed in the girls’ dorm too, but Persephone mostly lived off-campus with her mom. When she did spend the night at MOA, she slept in Aphrodite’s room. “Thanks for the kiss,” Artemis told Nectar before gently lowering his front paws to the floor. Immediately she was ambushed by Amby (her beagle) and Suez (her bloodhound). The name Amby was short for ambrosia , a divine food eaten by immortals. And Suez—Zeus spelled backward—was named after MOA’s formidable principal. Also known as Athena’s dad! Laughing, Artemis kneeled to accept more kisses. “You guys act like you haven’t seen me for a century instead of just a few hours.” She scratched behind Suez’s ears with one hand and rubbed up and down Amby’s neck with the other. After greetings had been thoroughly and happily exchanged, she threaded her way past the mountains of laundry piled here and there on her floor. That morning she’d had to kick through the haphazard stacks of clothes to find a clean chiton to put on for class. The flowing gowns were standard wear for Greek mortal and immortal girls and women. The piles had been here for so long that she hardly noticed them. They were almost like furniture! And by now it was becoming hard to tell which clothes were clean and which were dirty. She supposed she’d better wash the whole lot soon. Sigh. It wouldn’t be that hard, really. It would only require her to do a bit of wash, dry, fold-up, organize, and hang-up magic spells. Still, that would take some time, and there were about a million other things she’d rather do! So… maybe later. Stepping over dog toys and old discarded school projects, she finally made it to the far corner of her room. There she bent to check that her dogs still had plenty of food and water. They did. On the way back across the room, she stepped on a doggie squeak toy and stumbled to her knees. When Artemis stood again, she found herself staring at her reflection in the mirror that hung on the outside of her closet door. She noticed that her glossy black curls had sprung loose from the gold band that held them together in a simple twist at the back of her head. She slipped the gold band out, gathered her hair high, and re-clasped the band around it. Then she noticed that her chiton was kind of wrinkly. There were some dirt spo