But right now I wanted answers, and I knew of one way to maybe get them. My hand trembling, I brought my fingers up to the groove. I hesitated a second, then pressed them to the splintered wood, knowing that my psychometry would kick in and show me exactly what had happened.
THUNK!
An image of the arrow slamming into the bookcase filled my mind—but nothing else. No clue as to who had shot it or why. Disappointing but not surprising. I’d need the actual arrow itself for that or the bow that it had been launched from. Those were the tools the archer had touched, the things he’d used when he’d tried to kill me. The bookshelf was just where the arrow had landed. That’s why there weren’t any emotions attached to it—just the sudden violence of the arrow slamming into the thick wood.
Frustrated, I dropped my hand.
“Gwendolyn!” Nickamedes called out to me from one of the doors in the glass office complex. “You either come get your bag right this second or leave it here for the night!”
There was nothing else I could do—not tonight, not without the bow, the arrow, or some other sort of proof—so I turned away from the splintered bookshelf and headed over to the checkout counter.
I grabbed my messenger bag and slung it over my shoulder, but I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing. Instead, I was replaying the day’s events in my head. First, the SUV, and now the arrow in the bookcase. It all added up to only one conclusion.
Someone was trying to kill me. But it wasn’t in the gym this time, and it wasn’t just for practice.
No—this time, it was for real.
Chapter 6
“Someone’s trying to kill you? Really?” Daphne asked a half an hour later.
I shrugged. “Kill, maim, or injure. Isn’t it all the same thing to Reapers?”
We were in my dorm room, eating the chocolate-strawberry cookies Grandma Frost had baked earlier today. Well, Daphne was eating the cookies. I didn’t have an appetite for them. Knots still twisted and tangled together in my stomach from almost getting skewered in the library.
After Nickamedes had locked the front doors, I’d run all the way from the Library of Antiquities on the upper quad down to Styx Hall, where my dorm room was. With every step, I’d expected an arrow to zoom out of the shadows and rip through my heart.
But nothing had happened.
I’d made it to my dorm in one piece, used my student ID card to get inside, and had gone straight up to my room, which was stuck in a separate turret on the third floor. The room featured all your standard dorm furniture—a bed, a desk, some bookshelves, a TV, a small fridge—although I’d added my own personal touches. A couple of framed photos of my mom stood on my desk, along with a small statue of Nike. Vic, who was currently sleeping in his scabbard, hung on the wall above the desk, right next to my posters of Wonder Woman, Karma Girl, and The Killers.
Normally, I considered my dorm room a safe haven from the craziness that was Mythos Academy. Not tonight, though. I huddled on my knees on the floor, my purple and gray plaid comforter wrapped around me, and peered through the bottom of one of the picture windows set into the wall. There didn’t seem to be anyone lurking on the dorm’s lawn, but then again, it was pitch-black outside now.
“Why do you think it’s a Reaper who tried to kill you?” Daphne asked.
“Who else could it be? Besides, Professor Metis told me that Jasmine’s family might come after me because I was involved in her death.”
“True,” Daphne agreed. “You did spectacularly piss off her family. Not to mention Reapers in general.”
The Valkyrie lounged on my bed, eating a cookie with one hand while she typed on her laptop with the other. The motion made the charms on the silver bracelet around her right wrist jangle together. Carson had bought the bracelet for Daphne weeks ago, back when he was trying to work up the courage to ask out the Valkyrie. Now, it was one of her most prized possessions.
“Reapers don’t like it when one of their own dies,” Daphne added. “Payback is, like, their life. Are you going to tell Professor Metis what happened?”
Metis was my myth-history professor, and she’d sort of become my mentor. She’d also been my mom’s best friend, back when they’d both gone to Mythos. The professor had told me that my mom had saved her life more times than she could count and that she owed it to my mom to look out for me while I was here.
My eyes flicked to my desk, and I crawled over to it and grabbed a framed photo off the top. Two girls grinned up at me from underneath the glass, their arms around each other. My mom and Professor Metis, back when they’d been about my age.
Not too long ago, Metis had given me this photo of them as teenagers. Every time I slipped the picture out from behind the glass and ran my fingers over the slick paper, I felt all the love that my mom and Metis had had for each other. They’d been more like sisters than friends. Knowing someone else had cared about my mom as much as I did made me feel a little less alone and made my grief and guilt over her death a little easier to bear.
“What am I going to tell Metis?” I said, putting the photo back on the desk. “That somebody tried to run me over near my grandma’s house and then took a shot at me in the library? I don’t have any proof that either one actually happened. I didn’t get a look at the license plate on the car, and I don’t have the arrow. She might just think I was being paranoid.”
“I don’t think so,” Daphne said, drumming her fingers on top of her keyboard and making pink sparks flicker in the air. “Metis is more understanding than most of the profs are. I think she’d believe you.”
I shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. You should have seen the look that Nickamedes gave me—like I’d just escaped from Ashland Asylum or something. Who knows? Maybe I have.”
I tried to smile at my own stupid joke, but I couldn’t quite make my lips turn up all the way. Knowing that someone was trying to kill me didn’t put me in a smiling mood.
Daphne shook her head, her blond hair spilling over her shoulders. “I don’t think you’re crazy. If you think there’s a Reaper after you, then there probably is. They pretty much live to kill us, you know, just like we do them.”
“Great. Way to make me feel better.”
Daphne rolled her black eyes. “Oh, suck it up, Gwen. It’s not the end of the world. We’re all here learning how to fight Reapers. You’re just getting a crash course in it, that’s all. Some of the kids would actually be jealous of you. The Spartans certainly would. Sometimes I think Logan and his friends would go off hunting Reapers if Coach Ajax and the other profs would let them.”
In addition to being the best fighters at Mythos, the Spartans also had a reputation for being the most bloodthirsty. They actually liked to be in the thick of battle and killing things—it was part of their DNA or something. I guess that’s just what happened when you could pick up normal, everyday objects—the cookies Daphne was noshing on, the stapler on my desk, the small replica of Nike next to it—and automatically know how to kill people with them. Logan, Kenzie, and Oliver could grab any one of those things, kill me with it, and not think twice doing it. Seriously. That’s the kind of freaky stuff they instinctively knew how to do.
“Well, it’s a course I’m going to flunk,” I groused. “Maybe I’ll just hide up here in my room until Christmas break. Sooner or later, the Reaper will have to lose interest in me.”
“Reapers never lose interest. Once you’re on their hit list, they won’t stop coming until you’re dead—or they are.” Daphne shook her head again. “And you can’t stay here, especially not this weekend. Everyone’s going to the Winter Carnival, even the professors and the academy staff. You’d be on campus all by yourself. If there is a Reaper out there gunning for you, you’d just give him an early Christmas present. You know what a total joke the dorm security is.”
I sighed. “So what do you think I should do?”
“Talk to Metis,” Daphne said. “Tell her what’s going on and ask her if she’s heard anything about Jasmine’s
family. If they’re still in hiding or if the Pantheon has caught up to them yet and has thrown them in prison where they belong.”
I nodded my head, and we were silent for a few moments.
“You know, it’s just too bad that I didn’t have a bow and arrow tonight,” I finally groused. “I could have thought of you and defended myself against the Reaper.”
“What do you mean?”
I told the Valkyrie how I’d done better during archery practice this morning just by thinking of her, by calling up the memories I had of her at the tournaments she’d won.
“Really? That’s cool.” Daphne tapped her fingers against her lips, deep in thought. “I wonder if you could do that with other things, too.”
“What do you mean?”
She gestured at her bulging book bag on the floor. “I’ve been reading up on various magical theories and powers while I wait for my own magic to quicken. There are lots of stories about folks tapping into other people’s powers. Most of them have some kind of mental magic, like you do. Telepathy or something that lets them see into other people’s minds. So if you can call up the memories of my archery tournaments, who’s to say you couldn’t do that with other things? Or even with other people?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I never thought of my magic like that before. Usually I just get flashes off objects. I don’t actually do anything with the memories I see.”
“Well, maybe you should try to, to see if it works,” Daphne said. “Either way you might as well start packing your bags for the carnival. Because I’m not leaving you here by yourself, not with a Reaper lurking around. You’re going to the carnival, even if I have to drag you kicking and screaming onto the bus myself.”
Daphne’s pretty features took on a determined, stubborn look, and more pink sparks of magic flickered in the air around her. We might have only been friends for a few weeks now, but I knew she meant what she said. And with her Valkyrie strength, she’d have no problem twisting my arm—literally—to get me to do exactly what she wanted.
“All right, all right,” I groused again. “I’ll talk to Metis tomorrow, and I’ll go to the stupid Winter Carnival with you. Just don’t expect me to like it.”
Daphne grinned, and then stuffed another cookie into her mouth.
I stuck to my regular schedule the next day, Thursday; weapons training, bright and early, with Logan, Kenzie, and Oliver; breakfast in the dining hall with Daphne; then a full day of classes. I eyed all the other students, wondering which one of them might really be a Reaper, but no one paid me any more attention than usual. Which is to say, nobody noticed me at all. I wasn’t exactly one of the popular kids, and I certainly wasn’t pretty enough for the guys to check me out that way. Most people—like Helena Paxton and her snotty friends in the library last night—just thought of me as Gwen Frost, that weird Gypsy girl.
Finally, sixth period rolled around, and I slid into my seat in Professor Metis’s myth-history class. Carson’s desk was right in front of mine, and he turned around to talk to me. Carson was Daphne’s boyfriend, but he was my friend, too, since I’d helped hook them up in the first place. He was just an all-around nice, sweet guy with a tall, lanky, six-foot frame and dusky brown hair and skin. He also happened to be a total band geek, and was the drum major for the Mythos Academy Marching Band, even though he was only seventeen and a second-year student, like me. Carson was a Celt, and had a magical talent for music, like some kind of warrior bard, although I’d never really asked him about it, what kind of power he had, or what he could do with it.
“Are you excited about the Winter Carnival?” Carson asked, pushing his black glasses up his nose and peering at me with his dark brown eyes. “This will be your first one, right, Gwen?”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “And I’m just thrilled to death about it.”
Carson frowned, picking up on my sour mood, but before he could say anything else, the bell rang, signaling the start of class. A few seconds later Professor Metis stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. Metis was of Greek descent, like so many of the kids and profs at Mythos. She was a short woman with a stocky body, bronze skin, and black hair that was always pulled back into a high, tight bun. Today she wore a heavy fisherman’s sweater that was the same color green as her eyes behind her silver glasses.
“Good afternoon, everyone. Please open your books to page 251,” Metis said. “Today we’re going to focus on some of the creatures that aided Loki during the Chaos War, and some species that the Reapers still use today.”
I winced. Monster talk, in other words. Definitely not my favorite subject. Reapers were bad enough, but they were just people in the end. Okay, okay, people with magic, weapons, and seriously bad attitudes, but still, just people. It was the monsters—the mythological nightmares the Reapers trained to do their evil biddings—that really creeped me out. I’d been face-to-face with a Nemean prowler, and I’d seen exactly how big, long, and sharp the killer kitty-cat’s teeth and claws were. It was like a black panther on steroids. Prowler super-, superdangerous. Gwen not so much. That was all I really needed to know.
But there was no getting out of class, so I cracked open my myth-history book to the appropriate page.
“Now,” Professor Metis began, “you all know about the Reapers of Chaos, those who serve the evil god Loki, and how they and Loki tried to enslave everyone centuries ago. Their actions resulted in the long, bloody Chaos War, which had almost destroyed the entire world. Eventually, the members of Pantheon banded together to battle Loki and his Reapers. Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, defeated Loki in single combat, and she and the other gods trapped him in a magical, mythological prison far removed from the mortal realm.”
Metis looked at first one student, then another, making sure we were all paying attention. “We’ve also talked about how the Reapers are trying to free Loki, so the god can plunge the world into a second Chaos War... .”
As the professor started her lecture, I once again thought about Jasmine Ashton and how she’d been a Reaper, along with the rest of her family. Before she’d died, Jasmine had told me there were other Reapers at the academy—something that made my stomach quiver with dread even now. It was bad enough to know Reapers existed in the first place. It was another scarier thing to realize you went to class with them and had no idea who they were—or when they might decide to try and kill you.
Reapers were the reason why all the kids were at Mythos to start with. The students were the descendants of all the ancient warriors who’d helped defeat Loki the first time around, and they were here in case the god ever got free again. All of the Mythos students had been training since birth to learn how to use whatever skills or magic they had, so they could fight Reapers. Of course, I wasn’t a warrior like the other kids—not exactly—but I had my own magic: my psychometry, given to me by Nike herself.
I’d recently learned that all my ancestors had served Nike in some way, including my Grandma Frost and my mom, Grace. As a result, the goddess had gifted us with magic, which is what makes us Gypsies. My grandma had told me there were other Gypsies out there, other people with magic from the gods, but I’d never met any of them. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to either, since Grandma Frost had told me that not all Gypsies were good—some were just as evil as the gods they served.
Now, I was Nike’s Champion, picked by the goddess herself, and trying to carry on my family’s tradition, with no real clue how I was supposed to keep Bad, Bad Things from happening to me or anyone else.
“... the more you know about the creatures that the Reapers use, the better you’ll be able to protect yourself and your loved ones from them,” Metis finished the opening part of her lecture.
I shook off my troubling thoughts and focused on Metis’s words. For the next half hour, the professor talked about monsters—lots and lots of freaking monsters. Wyverns, basilisks, dragons, yetis, even gigantic birds named Black rocs. She called them all “creatures,” like she was being politically c
orrect or something, but really, they were monsters. Anything that had fangs longer than my fingers and that could breathe fire was definitely a monster.
“And on the next page we have one of the more interesting creatures—the Fenrir wolf,” Metis said.
Books rustled as everyone flipped over to the next page, which featured a pen-and-ink drawing of the largest wolf I’d ever seen. Everything about it was just big—big eyes; big paws; big tail; and, of course, big, big teeth and claws. All the better to eat me with. Because what kind of monster would it be if it couldn’t rip you to pieces and chew on your bones?
“These wolves are the descendants of Fenrir, the very first and most powerful wolf who fought alongside the members of the Pantheon during the Chaos War,” Metis said. “Over the years, the Reapers have managed to trap most of the wolves, but a few of them can still be found in the wild today, including right here in the North Carolina mountains.”
For a moment the drawing flickered on the page, and the pen-and-ink wolf turned its head until it was staring straight at me. The black ink oozed down, then back up, and I realized the monster was smiling—and showing me each and every one of its needle-sharp teeth.
I shivered and looked away. Sometimes my Gypsy magic went a little haywire and made me see and feel things that weren’t really there, even when I wasn’t touching an object. Or maybe it was just my own warped imagination working overtime today. Either way, it was all I could do to keep from closing the book and throwing it across the room.
“What you need to understand is that these creatures didn’t start out evil,” Metis said, her soft green gaze going from one student’s face to another. “The Reapers twisted them over the centuries, caged and tortured them until they turned into something else completely.”
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