Touch of Frost

by Jennifer Estep

Page 5

 

  I eyed the gryphons perched on either side of the gray stone steps. The statues loomed over me, and both gryphons sat at attention, eagle heads high, their wings folded behind them, and their thick lions' tails curled around the sharp, curved claws on their front paws.

  Maybe it was my Gypsy gift, my psychometry, but I always felt like the two gryphons were watching me, tracking my movements with their lidless eyes. That all I had to do was touch them and they'd come to life, spring out of the stone, and tear me apart. It was the same feeling I had whenever I had to walk by the sphinxes down at the front gate and all the other statues on campus. I shivered again, tucked my hands into the pockets on my hoodie, hurried up the steps, and headed inside the library.

  I walked through a hallway and a pair of open double doors that led into the main space. Like everything else at Mythos, the Library of Antiquities was old, stuffy, and pretentious. But even I had to admit that it was something to see.

  The main part of the library was shaped like an enormous dome, and the curved ceiling was cut out all the way to the top. Supposedly, frescoes adorned the top arch of the dome, paintings of mythological battles accented with gold, silver, and sparkling jewels. But I'd never been able to spy any of them through the perpetual darkness that shrouded the upper levels.

  What I could see were all the gods and goddesses. They ringed the second floor of the library like sentinels watching over the students studying below. The statues stood at the edge of the curved balcony, separated by slender, fluted columns. There were Greek gods like Nike, Athena, and Zeus. Norse gods like Odin and Thor. Native American deities like the Coyote Trickster and Rabbit. All thirty feet tall and carved out of thick white marble. If you climbed up the stairs to the second floor, you could walk in a circle past them all, something that I'd never wanted to do. Like the gryphons outside, the statues seemed a little too lifelike to me.

  My eyes roamed over the gods and goddesses, staring at them one by one, until I reached the lone empty spot in the circular Pantheon-the place where Loki should have stood. There was no statue of Loki in the library or anywhere else at Mythos. I imagined it had something to do with him being such a bad guy and trying to destroy the world with his Reapers of Chaos. Not exactly the kind of god you wanted to build a shrine to.

  I pulled my eyes away from the empty spot and walked on.

  Bookshelves lined either side of the main aisle before it opened up into an area filled with long tables. A freestanding cart off to the right sold coffee, energy drinks, muffins, and other snacks so students wouldn't have to leave the library to get something to eat while they were studying. The rich, roasted smell of coffee filled the air, overpowering the dry, musty odor of the thousands of books.

  I didn't stop walking until I reached the long checkout counter that stood in the center of the library. Several glassed-in offices lay behind the counter, separating one half of the domed room from the other. I stepped around behind the counter, plopped down on the stool next to the checkout computer, and slung my bag off my shoulder. I didn't even have time to pull out my myth-history book and start on my report before a door in the glass wall behind me squeaked open and Nickamedes stepped outside.

  Nickamedes was the head guy at the Library of Antiquities. A tall, thin man with black hair, piercing blue eyes, and long, pale fingers. He wasn't that old, maybe forty or so, but he was one giant pain in my ass. Nickamedes loved the library and all the books inside, loved them with a passion that bordered on serial killer creepy. What he didn't really care for were all the students who tromped through his little kingdom on a daily basis-especially me. For whatever reason, the librarian had disliked me on sight, and his attitude hadn't improved during the two months that I'd been working here.

  "Well," Nickamedes huffed, crossing his arms over his chest. "It's about time you got here, Gwendolyn. "

  I rolled my eyes. The uptight librarian was the only one who called me by my full name, something that I'd asked him not to do, with zero success so far. I think he did it just to annoy me.

  "You're ten minutes late for your shift-again," Nickamedes said. "That's the third time it's happened in the last two weeks. Where were you?"

  I couldn't exactly tell him that I'd slipped off the academy grounds to go see Grandma Frost, since, you know, students weren't supposed to leave campus during the week. It was one of the Big Rules, after all. I didn't want to get Grandma in trouble-or worse, not be able to go see her anymore. I'd already learned that it was better to sneak around Nickamedes and the other Powers That Were at Mythos than it was to confront them head-on. So I just shrugged.

  "Sorry," I said. "I was busy doing stuff. "

  Nickamedes's blue eyes narrowed at my vague, smart-ass answer, and his lips pressed into a thin line. "Well, let me tell you about the newest piece that I pulled out of storage this morning. Several classes have been assigned to study it this semester, so I'm sure you'll be getting a lot of questions about it. "

  The library was full of glass cases filled with dusty pieces of junk that had supposedly belonged to some god, goddess, mythological hero, or even monster. You couldn't walk down the aisles without tripping over them. Every other week, Nickamedes pulled something else out of storage and put it on display. Part of my job was to know enough about whatever it was to help the other kids find reference books and more information on it.

  I sighed. "What is it this time?"

  Nickamedes crooked his finger, telling me to follow him. We walked to the left past several tables full of students. A large glass case sat in an open space in the middle of the library floor. Resting inside was a simple bowl that looked like it was made out of dull, brown clay. Boring. At least some of the swords looked cool. This? A total snooze.

  "Do you know what this is?" Nickamedes said in a hushed tone, his eyes bright.

  I shrugged. "It looks like a bowl to me. "

  Nickamedes's face scrunched up, and he muttered something under his breath. Probably cursing my lack of enthusiasm again. "It's not just any bowl, Gwendolyn. This is the Bowl of Tears. "

  He looked at me like I should have known what that was. I shrugged again.

  "The Bowl of Tears is what the Norse goddess Sigyn used to collect the snake venom that dripped onto her husband, Loki, the first time that he was imprisoned by the other gods, long before the Chaos War. Whenever Sigyn emptied the Bowl, the venom would drip onto Loki's face and burn him, making him cry out. His screams of pain were so great that the earth shook for miles around him. That's why it's called the Bowl of Tears. It's a very important artifact, one of the Thirteen Artifacts that the Pantheon and the Reapers fought over and with during the last great battle of the Chaos War. . . . "

  It was all very blah, blah, blah, and my eyes immediately glazed over. More stupid gods and goddesses. I didn't see how Nickamedes kept them all straight. I was having a hard enough time just trying to pick one for my report that was due for Professor Metis's myth-history class.

  Finally, after five long, long minutes of spouting nonstop facts, Nickamedes wound down. A professor who'd been sitting at a nearby table came up and asked him a question, and the librarian moved off to answer the other man. I shook my head, trying to banish the drowsiness that I felt, and went back to my spot behind the counter.

  For the next three hours I checked out books, answered questions, and did other menial tasks. The library was the one place where the other Mythos students were actually forced to notice and speak to me, if only so they could get their homework done.

  Since students weren't supposed to go off campus during the week, the library was also a place to Hang Out and Be Seen, and lots of kids liked to sneak off and hook up in the stacks. I'd found more than one used condom when I'd shelved books. Yucko. Doing it against a case full of musty books wasn't exactly the way that I wanted to lose my virginity, but it was all the rage at Mythos. This month, at least.

  Jasmine Ashton, Mo
rgan McDougall, and Daphne Cruz were among those who came into the library during my shift. The three Valkyries grabbed some iced mochas and raspberry muffins, then plopped themselves at the table closest to the coffee cart so everyone coming and going would see them. Samson Sorensen was with them, too, although he seemed to be more interested in the sports magazine he was thumbing through than anything else.

  After a few minutes, Jasmine moved off to circulate through the crowd and talk to the other popular kids who'd come to the library tonight. Morgan and Samson put their heads together and started talking, but evidently Daphne had actually come here to study, because she moved down the table a little away from the others.

  Daphne saw me sitting behind the checkout counter. The Valkyrie gave me a dirty look, dragged her laptop out of her bag, and opened and started typing on it. I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out at her. It wasn't my fault that Daphne had a monster crush on a band geek and that her mean-girl friends would make fun of her if she ever told them that she liked him, much less actually tried to date him.

  Finally, around nine o'clock, the library emptied out as the kids packed up their books and headed back to their dorm rooms for the night and the ten o'clock curfew. Nickamedes said he had to go over to the math-science building and run an errand before he closed the library. Instead of letting me go ahead and leave, the librarian pushed a cart full of books in my direction and told me to have them shelved by the time he got back. Like I said, he was a giant pain in my ass.

  But there was nothing I could do. If I left without putting the books away, they'd just be waiting here for me the next time I had to work. Nickamedes was kind of a dick that way. So I pushed the metal cart into the stacks, grabbed the books, and started putting them back where they belonged. Almost all the titles were old reference books that had been handled by hundreds and hundreds of students over the years, so I didn't get any big vibes or flashes by touching them. Just a general sense of kids flipping through the pages and hunting for whatever obscure information they needed to finish their latest essay.

  I supposed that I could have worn gloves to cut out the flashes entirely, both here in the library and everywhere else. You know, the old-fashioned white silk kind that crawled all the way up to a girl's elbows. But that would have definitely branded me as a freak at Mythos-the Gypsy girl with the glove fetish. I might not fit in at the academy, but I didn't want to advertise how different I was either.

  I did keep my eyes and ears open for any students who might not have finished their nightly hookup in the stacks. Last week, I'd rounded a corner and had seen two guys from my English lit class going at it like rabbits.

  But I didn't hear anything and I didn't see anyone as I roamed through the library and slid the books back into their appropriate places. The whole thing would have gone a lot faster if the cart that I was using hadn't been old and rickety, with a loose wheel that pulled to the right. Every time I tried to turn a corner with the stupid cart, it inevitably slid into whatever antiques case happened to be nearby.

  There were hundreds of them in the library, just like the one that Nickamedes had dragged me over to earlier. Shiny glass cases that contained all kinds of stuff. A dagger that had belonged to Alexander the Great. A necklace that the warrior queen Boudicca had worn. A jeweled comb that Marc Anthony had given Cleopatra to show his undying love for her before they'd both kicked it.

  Some of the items were kind of cool, though, and I'd take a quick look at the silver plaque on the front or the ID card inside to see exactly what it was. I'd never tried to actually open any of the cases, as they all had some kind of magic mumbo jumbo attached to them to prevent people from stealing the stuff inside. But I always wondered how much some of the items would go for on eBay, if they were real. Probably enough to tempt even Jasmine Ashton, the richest girl at Mythos, into walking off with them in her designer purse.

  Ten minutes later, I put away the last book, grabbed the cart, and tried to steer it back to the checkout counter. But, of course, the metal contraption had a life of its own and zoomed toward yet another case. I managed to stop the cart just before it slammed into the glass.

  "Stupid wheel," I muttered.

  I walked around the cart and was trying to shove it back from the other side when a wink of silver caught my eye. Curious, I looked down into the case that I was standing next to.

  A sword lay inside it, one of hundreds in the library. My eyes skimmed over the glass, looking for the plaque that would tell me whose sword it was and what she'd done with it that was so freaking special. But there wasn't a plaque on the case. No silver plate on the outside, no little white card on the inside, nothing. Weird. Every other case that I'd seen had had some sort of ID on or in it. Maybe Nickamedes had forgotten about this one, since it was way back here in the stacks in no-man's-land.

  I should have shoved the cart into the aisle, gone back to the checkout counter, and packed up my messenger bag so I could leave the very second that Nickamedes came back. But for some reason, I found myself stopping and looking down at the sword once more.

  It was a simple enough sword-a long blade made out of a dull silver metal with a hilt that was just a little bit bigger than my hand. A small weapon, compared to some of the enormous crowbars that I'd seen in the library.

  Still, something about the shape of the sword seemed . . . familiar to me. Like I'd seen it before. Maybe there had been an illustration of it in my myth-history book. Maybe some bad guy had used it in the Chaos War, if it had ever even really taken place. I snorted. Probably not.

  I cocked my head to the side, trying to figure out why the sword was so interesting. And I realized that the hilt almost looked like . . . a face. Like half of a man's face had somehow been inlaid into the metal. There was a slash of a mouth, a groove of a nose, the curve of an ear, even a round bulge that looked like an eye. Weird. But it wasn't ugly. It looked almost . . . alive.