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Authors: Jennifer Estep

BOOK: Touch of Frost
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Paige had stared at me a second, a strange emotion flashing in her eyes. “Sure.”
I picked it up, never dreaming that I’d feel anything. Despite my psychometry, I usually didn’t get much of a vibe off common, everyday objects like pens, computers, dishes, or phones. Things in public places that lots of people used or that had a simple, specific function. I only got the biggies, the deep, vivid, high-def flashes, when I touched objects that people had some personal connection to, like a favorite photograph or a cherished piece of jewelry.
But as soon as my hand had closed around the hairbrush, I’d seen an image of Paige sitting on her bed with an older man. He’d brushed her long black hair exactly one hundred times, just like everyone claims you’re supposed to. Then, when he was finished with her hair, the man had unfastened Paige’s robe, made her lie back on the bed, and started touching her before he took off his pants.
I’d started screaming then, and I didn’t stop.
After about five minutes, I passed out. My friend Bethany had told me that I’d kept right on screaming, even when the paramedics came to take me to the hospital. Everyone thought I was having an epileptic seizure or something.
I think Paige knew, though. About my Gypsy gift and what I could do. Two weeks before, she’d asked me to find her missing phone. I’d walked around Paige’s room, touched her desk, her nightstand, her purse, and her bookcases, and eventually seen an image of her little sister swiping the phone so she could snoop through Paige’s text messages. Sometimes, I wondered if Paige had put her hairbrush there on the bench just for me to pick up. Just so someone would
know,
just so someone would
feel
exactly what she was going through.
I’d woken up in the hospital later that day. My mom, Grace, was there, and I told her what I’d seen. That’s what you did when something terrible was happening to one of your friends. And because my mom was a police detective who’d spent her whole life helping people. I wanted to be just like her.
That night, my mom had arrested Paige’s stepdad for abusing her. My mom had called when she was at the police station and told me that Paige was safe now. She’d promised to be home in another hour, just as soon as she finished the paperwork.
She never made it.
My mom had been hit by a drunk driver after she’d left the police station that night. Grandma Frost had told me that she’d died instantly. That she’d never even seen the other car swerving toward her or felt the horrible, horrible pain of the crash. I hoped that was how it had happened, because my mom had been so torn up in the wreck that the casket had been closed at her funeral. What I could remember of it, anyway.
I hadn’t gone back to my old school after that. My friends had been supernice about everything, especially Bethany, but I hadn’t wanted to see anyone. I hadn’t wanted to do anything but lie on my bed and cry.
But one day three weeks after my mom’s funeral, Professor Metis had shown up at my Grandma Frost’s house. I didn’t know exactly what Metis had said to her, but Grandma had announced that it was finally time for me to go to Mythos Academy so I could learn how to fully use my Gypsy gift. I thought that I could control my psychometry just fine already, and I’d never really understood what my grandma had meant when she’d said
finally,
as if I should have been going to Mythos all along or something—
“. . . Gwen ?”
The sound of my name snapped me out of my memories. “What?”
Metis peered over the rims of her silver glasses at me. “I asked you which goddess was responsible for the Pantheon’s victory over Loki and his Reapers?”
“Nike, the Greek goddess of victory,” I said automatically.
Professor Metis frowned. “And how do you know that, Gwen? I haven’t mentioned Nike yet. Have you read ahead to the next chapter already? That’s very industrious of you.”
I’d done that very thing last night, mainly because I was bored out of my mind and there hadn’t been anything good on TV. Given my lack of friends at Mythos, it wasn’t like I had anything else to do to occupy my time here.
I don’t think Metis meant it as a jibe, but snickers rippled through the room at her words. My cheeks flamed red, and I sank a little lower into my seat. Great. Now, everyone would think that I was
that nerdy Gypsy girl
who had nothing better to do than study. It might be true, and I might be insanely proud of my 4.0 GPA, but I didn’t want the other kids to know that.
It occurred to me that I wasn’t quite sure how I knew the answer to Metis’s question. I didn’t think Nike had even been mentioned in the chapter that I’d read. But since it wasn’t the strangest thing that I’d encountered at Mythos, I pushed it out of my mind.
Professor Metis speared one of the louder snickerers with a dirty look before asking him an even more obscure question about Reapers.
When I was sure Metis wasn’t going to call on me again, I went back to staring out the window and brooding about how I’d caused my own mom’s death just by picking up the wrong girl’s hairbrush.
Chapter 3
 
Myth-history was my last class of the day. As soon as the bell rang, I stuffed my textbook into my bag.
“See ya, Gwen.”
Carson Callahan called out a cheery good-bye and slid the plastic bag with the charm bracelet into one of the pockets on his designer khaki cargo pants. I nodded at him, shouldered my bag, and left.
I walked down the crowded hallway, pushed through the first door I came to, and stepped outside. Five main buildings made up the heart of Mythos Academy—math-science, English-history, the gym, the dining hall, and the library—all grouped together in a loose cluster, like the five points of a star. Even though I’d been going here for two months now, the buildings all looked the same to me—dark gray stone covered with thick, heavy vines of glossy ivy. Large, creepy Gothic structures, with towers and parapets and balconies. Statues of various mythological monsters like gryphons and Gorgons perched on all the buildings, their mouths open in silent, angry snarls.
An enormous open quad and a series of curving walkways connected the five buildings to each other before the ash gray cobblestones snaked down a hill and farther out to the student dorms and the other structures that made up the rest of the lush academy grounds. Green grass still rolled over the smooth lawns, despite the October chill. Here and there, tall maples and oaks spread their limbs wide, their leaves holding on to the last bright blazes of bloody crimson and pumpkin orange.
I zipped up my hoodie, stuck my hands in my pockets, and headed across the quad, skirting around the groups of students who’d stopped to talk, pull out their cell phones, and check their messages. I’d made it about halfway when high, trilling laughter caught my ear.
I turned my head and saw Jasmine Ashton holding court underneath the towering maple tree that stood in the center of the quad.
Jasmine Ashton was the most popular girl in my class, which was made up of the seventeen-year-old, second-year students. Jasmine was also a Valkyrie with a mane of strawberry-blond hair, bright blue eyes, and the most expensive designer clothes that money could buy. She was the kind of girl who made everyone else look plain—even her thin, gorgeous, similarly dressed friends. Jasmine sat on an iron bench underneath the maple tree, looking at something on her laptop and giggling, along with Morgan McDougall, her best friend.
With her black hair, hazel eyes, curvy body, and supershort skirts, Morgan was only slightly less beautiful and popular than Jasmine, which made her the number-two diva in our class. Morgan’s reputation for being a raging slut who’d sleep with almost anyone made her number one with the guys, though. Naturally.
Two more girls sat on either side of Jasmine and Morgan, while Daphne Cruz perched on a fleece blanket on the grass in front of the bench. All the popular Valkyrie princesses tended to stick together.
The girls weren’t alone. Samson Sorensen stood behind Jasmine, rubbing her shoulders with the rapt devotion of a slave. No wonder, since the Viking was Jasmine’s boyfriend and one of the cutest guys in school. Sandy brown hair, hazel eyes, dimples. Samson could have easily passed for a Calvin Klein model. He also happened to be the captain of the swim team. No football here. All the kids at Mythos did fancy, froufrou sports like swimming, tennis, archery, and fencing. Seriously, fencing. What was the point of that?
Seeing Jasmine and Samson together was like staring at a life-size version of Ken and Barbie. They just looked that perfect together, like they’d been made for each other.
The other students at Mythos might not pay much attention to me, but I was still able to hear plenty of juicy gossip on my own. Rumor had it that there was Big Trouble in paradise between the happy couple. Evidently, Samson was ready to go All the Way, since he and Jasmine had been dating since last year, but she wasn’t ready to cash in her V Card just yet—
I was so busy staring at them that I slammed into a guy walking the opposite way across the quad. And, of course, my messenger bag slid off my shoulder and hit the ground, spilling my books everywhere. Because that’s just what happened to girls like me.
“Sorry,” I muttered, falling to my knees and attempting to scoop everything back into my bag before anyone got a good look at anything, especially the now-empty tin of chocolate-chip cookies that Grandma Frost had baked for me and the comic books that had slid out. The colorful pages flapped and fluttered like dragonflies in the breeze.
Instead of walking around me like I’d expected him to, the guy I’d hit decided to crouch down next to me instead. My eyes flicked up to his face. It took me a second to recognize him, but when I did, I froze. Because Logan Quinn was the guy I’d just rammed into.
Uh-oh.
Even among the rich warrior kids at Mythos, Logan Quinn was the kind of guy who scared
everyone.
He did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted to. And a lot of what he liked to do involved hurting people.
Everything about Logan screamed
bad boy,
from his thick, silky, ink-black hair to his intense ice blue eyes to the black leather jacket that highlighted his broad shoulders. Oh yeah, he was sexy, in a rough, rumpled,
I-just-climbed-out-of-some-girl’s-bed
kind of way. Apparently, Logan lived up to the hype and was well on his way to sleeping with most, if not all, of the hottest girls at Mythos. Supposedly, he signed the mattresses of the girls that he scored with just to keep track of all of them. Something that the other guys had taken to doing, although not with as much success as Logan. Except maybe in Morgan McDougall’s room.
Logan Quinn was also descended from a long line of Spartans. Yeah,
those
Spartans, the warriors who held off thousands of bad guys before most of them kicked it at the ancient battle of Thermopylae. All of which had been brought to life by Gerard Butler and his chiseled man abs in
300.
Professor Metis had let us watch the movie in class three weeks ago, before she proceeded to lecture us about the historical importance of the battle. But Gerard’s abs had been impressive enough for me to daydream about them and tune out Metis.
There were only a handful of Spartans here at Mythos, but all the other students tread carefully around them. Even the richest, snobbiest kid knew better than to piss off a Spartan. At least, to his face anyway. That’s because Spartans were hands-down the best fighters at the academy. Spartans were born warriors. That’s all they knew how to do, and that’s all they ever did.
Unlike the other kids, Logan Quinn didn’t carry a weapon with him. Neither did the rest of the Spartans I’d seen. They didn’t need to. One of the things that Spartans were known for was their ability to pick up any weapon—or any
thing
—and automatically know how to use and even kill someone with it. Seriously. Logan Quinn was the kind of guy who could stab me in the eye with a freaking Twizzler.
Sometimes, I didn’t know if I really believed all the crazy stuff around me. Like Spartans and Valkyries and Reapers. Sometimes, I wondered if I was stuck in an insane asylum somewhere, just dreaming all this. Like Buffy. But if that was the case, you’d think that I would be having a better time, that I’d at least imagine myself to be one of the popular Valkyrie princesses or something—
Logan reached for one of the Wonder Woman comics that had been in my bag. The motion snapped me out of my daze.
“Give me that!”
I snatched the comic book up off the grass. I didn’t want Logan Quinn contaminating my things with his scary, Spartan, psycho-killer vibes, which could happen if he touched them. That’s how objects got emotions attached to them in the first place—by people touching and handling and using them over time. I stuffed the Wonder Woman issue deep into my bag, along with all the others and the empty cookie tin, which was shaped like the chocolate-chip treats it had once held.
Logan raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything at my obvious freak-out.
“Sorry I ran into you,” I muttered again, getting to my feet. “Don’t kill me, okay?”
Logan also stood, and this time his mouth lifted up into something that almost looked like a smile. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “Gypsy girls make for awful easy killing. Wouldn’t take but just a second.”
His voice was deeper than I’d thought it would be, with a rich, throaty timbre. Startled, I looked up and stared into his face—and spotted the amusement sparkling in his icy gaze.
My own eyes narrowed. I didn’t like being made fun of, not even by a dangerous bad boy like Logan Quinn. “Yeah, well, this Gypsy girl happens to have a grandma who can curse you so bad that your dick will turn black and fall off, so watch your step, Spartan.”
That wasn’t true, of course. My Grandma Frost saw the future. She didn’t curse people—at least, not that I knew of. It was hard to tell with Grandma sometimes. But there was no reason for Logan Quinn to know that I was bluffing.
Instead of being intimidated, his mouth made that smiling motion again. “I think I’d rather watch you walk away, Gypsy girl.”
I frowned. Was he—was he actually
flirting
with me? I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t want to stick around to find out. Keeping one eye on Logan Quinn, I carefully skirted around him and hurried on my way.
But for some reason, his soft laughter followed me all the way across the quad.
 
I left the smooth, grassy quad behind, strolled by the dorms and other smaller outbuildings, and walked to the edge of campus, where a twelve-foot-high stone wall separated Mythos Academy from the outside world. Two sphinxes perched on top of the wall on either side of the entrance, staring down at the black iron gate that lay between them.
Supposedly, the wall and the gate were enchanted, imbued with spells and other magic mumbo jumbo so that only people who were supposed to be at the academy—students, teachers, and the like—could pass through. When I’d come to Mythos, at the beginning of the fall semester, Professor Metis had made me stand in the entrance right between the two sphinxes while she’d said a few words in a low voice. The statues hadn’t moved, hadn’t blinked, hadn’t done anything but sit on their high perches, but I’d still felt like there was something inside the stone figures—some old, ancient, violent force that would rip me to pieces if I so much as breathed wrong. That had been the first creepy thing that I’d experienced at Mythos. Too bad it hadn’t been the last.
After Metis had finished her chant, spell, or whatever it had been, she’d told me that I was now free to enter the academy grounds, like I’d been given the password to the supersecret Fearless Five superhero lair or something. I didn’t know exactly what would happen if someone who wasn’t supposed to be at the academy—like, say, a Reaper bad guy—tried to slip through the gate or climb the wall, but surely those sphinxes and their long, curved claws weren’t just for decoration.
I wondered about a lot of things that I would have been better off forgetting about entirely.
Metis had also told me that the sphinxes were only designed to keep people out—not trap students inside—and that I shouldn’t be afraid of them. It was kind of hard to be afraid of something that you didn’t really believe in. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself every time I snuck off campus.
I glanced around to make sure no one else was in sight, then jogged up to the gate, turned sideways, sucked in my stomach, and slipped through one of the gaps in the bars. I didn’t look up at the sphinxes, but I could almost feel their watchful eyes on me.
They’re just statues,
I told myself.
Just statues. Ugly ones at that. They can’t hurt me. Not really.
A second later, I slid free of the bars to the other side. I let out a breath and kept walking. I didn’t turn around and look back at the statues to see if they were really watching me or not. Whether I believed in the sphinxes’ magic or not, I knew better than to tempt fate.
Students weren’t supposed to leave the academy during weekdays, which was why the gate was shut. Professor Metis and the other Powers That Were at the school liked all the warrior whiz kids to stay close by so they could keep an eye on them, at least during school nights.
But I’d been sneaking out ever since I’d gotten here two months ago, and I’d seen other kids do the same, usually on beer or cigarette runs. What was the worst they could do to me? Kick me out? After all the freaky stuff that I’d seen here, I’d be
thrilled
to go back to public high school. I wouldn’t even complain about the crappy cafeteria food—much.
Mythos might be its own little world, but what lay beyond the wall was surprisingly normal, since Cypress Mountain was a charming little suburb in its own right. A two-lane road curved around in front of the school, and a variety of shops clustered on the other side, directly across from the imposing spiked iron gate. A bookstore, some coffee shops, several high-end clothing and jewelry boutiques, even a car lot full of Aston Martins and Cadillac Escalades. And, of course, a couple of upscale wine stores that helped the academy kids party hard, despite the supposed campus ban on alcohol.
The shops were all located here to take advantage of the limitless credit cards and enormous trust funds of the Mythos students. Apparently, the gods and goddesses had all rewarded their mythological warriors with sacks full of gold, silver, and jewels back in the day and the various descendants of those warriors had kept the gravy train of wealth going, adding to their bank balances over the years, which was why all the kids at the academy were so loaded today.

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