But even here I couldn’t get away from the statues.
A thirty-foot-tall statue of a woman stood in the center of the lobby, her head and chin held high, her arms stretched up toward the sky. Strings of silver snowflakes had been wrapped around her body, making her look like she was summoning the beginnings of a blizzard. Skadi, the Norse goddess of winter. I recognized her from my myth-history book. Other smaller statues stood in the corners of the lobby and peeped out from recesses in the stone walls, like Ull, another Norse winter god, and Boreas, the Greek god of the North Wind.
Like the alpine village, the hotel had also been decorated for Christmas. Fat oranges and bags of figs gleamed like jewels in the silver bowls that had been placed at the statues’ feet, right next to goblets filled with spiced mulberry wine. Holly had been shaped into crowns and ringed the heads of the various gods and goddesses while fat balls of mistletoe dangled from their cold fingers. Cedar and juniper trees covered with twinkling white lights clustered together in groups in the lobby, the fragrant scent of their needles mixing with the sweet smoke from the fire.
The crackling flames gave everything a soft, cheery glow, but I couldn’t help but feel that the statues were all staring at me, just like the ones at the academy always did. I looked at Skadi. Maybe it was just my imagination in overdrive again, but the snowflakes twisted around her body seemed to wink at me one by one, like cold, cold eyes. I shivered and looked away.
“Isn’t this place incredible?” Daphne asked from beside me.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Incredible.”
Daphne smirked, not noticing my less-than-enthusiastic tone. “Told you. And just wait until you see the rooms. They’re just as posh, and they even have a spa, too, where you can get all kinds of facials and other treatments. Watch my stuff, and I’ll go get our room assignment and key cards so we can start exploring. Come on, Carson.”
The two of them headed over and got in the line that had already formed by the front desk. Daphne and I would be sharing a room on one of the floors that had been designated girls only, while Carson would be bunking with one of his band buddies on one of the guys’ floors.
The kids from the New York academy must have already arrived, because I only recognized about half of the students milling around the lobby. But really, they were all the same—warrior whiz kids dressed in the most expensive clothes their parents could buy. Sparks of magic cracked and flashed in the air as the students from the two schools mingled together, talking, laughing, and saying hello to old friends.
I dragged our bags over to one of the walls and stood there, just staring at everything and trying hard not to gawk. Despite the creepy statues, the hotel really was gorgeous. Back when my mom had been alive, we’d taken plenty of vacations, but we’d never stayed anywhere as nice as this. Powder was the kind of place where everything was designer this and designer that, right down to the chocolate mints they put on your pillows at night.
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” a low voice murmured beside me.
I turned my head and found myself staring at one of the cutest guys I’d ever seen. Seriously. He was just ... perfect. White blond hair, intense blue eyes, fantastic cheekbones. And if all that wasn’t enough, he had a great body, too. I could see his muscles, even underneath the black turtleneck sweater he wore. He looked to be about my age or maybe a year or two older. At first, I didn’t think he was talking to me—I mean, why would he?—but then, when he kept staring at me, I realized that he was.
“Yeah,” I said, breathless. “It’s amazing.”
“So is the view from where I’m standing,” the guy said.
And then he smiled at me.
It was like someone flipped a switch and suddenly turned on all the lights in the lobby—okay, okay, all the lights everywhere—because the guy went from cute to downright gorgeous, helped along by the two tiny dimples in his cheeks. Seriously, all that and dimples, too. He looked like a model who’d just stepped out of the page of some artsy fashion magazine. He was just that good-looking—the kind of guy you just couldn’t help but stare at.
“You here for the Winter Carnival?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yeah. You?”
He nodded back. “The same. What’s your name?”
It actually took me a second to remember it. “Gwen,” I said. “Gwen Frost.”
He smiled again. “Well, Gwen Frost, I’m Preston, from the New York academy. I take it you go to the one down here in the Carolinas? I know you don’t go to my school, because I’m sure I would have noticed you before.”
All I could do was just nod and try to keep my mouth from falling open. Was he—was he flirting with me? It sounded like it, but I wasn’t completely sure. I hadn’t had a lot of experience with this sort of thing. Before coming to Mythos, I’d had exactly one boyfriend for a grand total of three weeks. And now that I was at the academy, guys still weren’t tripping over themselves to talk to me.
“I just started going to Mythos this year,” I said. “This is my first Winter Carnival.”
He nodded, like I’d just said something cool and interesting, instead of reciting stupid boring facts. We stood there in silence for a minute, while kids moved in the lobby around us, laughing, talking, and texting on their phones. I kept sneaking looks at Preston out of the corner of my eye, waiting for his girlfriend to show up. A guy that cute? He had to be with someone already.
But no one came over to us—no girls, no guys, no professors. And I started to wonder what it would be like to flirt back. Just a little bit.
Before I could open my mouth to try, I spotted Daphne waving at me. The Valkyrie had a couple of plastic key cards in her hands, and she started threading her way through the crowd in my direction. I waved back at her.
Preston glanced down and checked his watch. “Well, I gotta go. I’m sure my roommate’s got our key cards by now.”
I nodded, even though disappointment filled me. So he hadn’t been flirting with me after all—he’d just been killing time until he could go up to his room. Of course he had. I should have known it was something like that from the start. Guys like him just didn’t flirt with girls like me. I winced, thinking I’d probably come off like a total loser.
Preston stared at me, his blue eyes bright and warm in his handsome face. “I’ve got to hang out with some friends this afternoon, but I hear there’s going to be an awesome party tonight over at the Solstice coffeehouse. Maybe I’ll see you there?”
My heart stopped, sputtered, and then thump-thump-thump ed in my chest. Okay, okay, so he wasn’t exactly asking me out, but it sounded like he wouldn’t mind if he ran into me later either. And given my stupid, unrequited, disastrous crush on Logan, I’d take what I could get.
“Maybe,” I said, trying to play it cool.
Preston smiled at me a final time, then headed across the lobby.
A few seconds later, Daphne broke free of the crowd and stepped over to me. When I didn’t immediately turn toward her, the Valkyrie snapped her fingers in front of my face, making pink sparks flash everywhere and fall to the ground like raindrops.
“Earth to Gwen. What are you looking at?”
“Oh, just this guy I was talking to.”
Daphne’s black eyes narrowed. “What guy?”
I tried to point out Preston to her, but there were too many people between us and him, and he was walking away too fast for her to really see him.
“He looks cute,” she said, standing on her tiptoes to try to get a better look. “At least from the back.”
“Believe me,” I murmured. “He is.”
Daphne elbowed me in the side. “See? I told you there would be guys here from the New York academy, and you’ve met one already. And you didn’t want to come.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, yeah. You’re my genius best friend, always looking out for me.”
“Damn straight,” Daphne crowed. “Now, come on. Let’s go dump our bags in our room. I told Carson that we’d meet him as
soon as we could.”
“Yes, master,” I sniped.
We grabbed our luggage and headed toward one of the elevators. I looked for Preston, but I didn’t see him in the crush of people hanging out in the lobby. Still, I couldn’t help but think that maybe Daphne was right—finding a cute guy to take my mind off Logan was the best thing I could do this weekend.
Chapter 8
My hopeful mood lasted until Daphne and I met Carson in one of the ski shops off the hotel lobby. The two of them wandered up and down the crowded aisles, looking at all the equipment and trying to decide if they wanted to ski today or go tubing instead.
Like everything else I’d seen so far at Powder, the shop had the best of everything. All shapes, sizes, and styles of skis stood in racks against the wall, their bright, shiny surfaces as slick and smooth as glass. Puffy coats, pants, and gloves, all branded with designer logos, took up the middle of the shop, while sunglasses, hats, and scarves crowded together in a counter next to the back wall. Neon-colored inner tubes dangled from the ceiling, looking like oversize doughnuts.
I followed my friends through the shop, feeling small, shabby, and lost. I’d never really been an outdoorsy type, preferring to stay in my room and read comic books or watch television. All this nature was a little tough to take. Seriously. What was so fun about standing outside in the cold, trying not to fall and break your legs as you zoomed down a mountain?
Finally, Daphne and Carson picked out some skis, boots, and clothes and then looked at me, expecting me to do the same. Which meant that it was confession time.
“I, um, don’t ski.”
Daphne frowned. “What do you mean you don’t ski?”
I cringed. “I mean, I don’t know how to ski. I’ve never been. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t really want to come to the resort this weekend.”
Her mouth dropped open. “How can you live in the mountains and not know how to ski? Practically everyone at the academy comes to Powder or flies out to Aspen at least once or twice a year... .”
The Valkyrie’s voice trailed off as she realized that I’d never been to Aspen either or to any of the other fancy places she had.
I stared at a pair of sunglasses and shifted on my feet, miserable embarrassment making my cheeks burn. The fact that the sunglasses had a twelve-hundred-dollar price tag on them didn’t help matters. Most of the time, it didn’t bother me that I didn’t have the expensive clothes, cars, and jewelry the other kids had. I understood what my mom and grandma had been trying to do, how they’d been trying to give me a normal life for as long as possible and to teach me not to take money for granted. Besides, Grandma gave me an allowance, and I made plenty of cash on my own finding lost items for the Mythos kids. I had more than enough money to buy clothes, rent skis, and do whatever else I wanted to this weekend at Powder. But when Daphne talked about jetting off to the Hamptons or the Bahamas or wherever, yeah, sometimes I got a little jealous of all the interesting places she’d been to, all the things she’d done that I hadn’t.
Carson gave me a knowing, sympathetic look, which only made me even more miserable. I didn’t want my friends to feel sorry for me, and I definitely didn’t want them to think of me as poor Gwen, that Gypsy girl who’d never been anywhere or done anything cool.
Daphne tapped her fingers against her lips, throwing pink sparks of magic everywhere. Thinking hard. “Okay, so you don’t know how to ski, but maybe we can fix that. What if we try the archery thing?”
“What archery thing?” I asked, confused.
“Come on,” she said. “I have an idea.”
“This is a bad, bad idea,” I muttered. “This is never going to work.”
“Oh, suck it up, Gwen,” Daphne said. “You haven’t even tried it yet.”
We’d left the shop thirty minutes ago and now stood on top of one of the beginner bunny slopes, outfitted with skis, boots, gloves, and goggles. Daphne looked cute in her pale pink ski suit, and Carson was perfectly at ease in his dark green one. I just felt like an oversize marshmallow. Seriously. The pants Daphne had picked out for me had so much air trapped in them that they made me feel twice my normal size, and the jacket puffed up so high that I had to keep my chin tucked down, just so I could see where I was going. The only thing good about the suit was the color, which was a pretty shade of purple.
The clothes were bad enough, but then there were the skis. I basically had two narrow, slick boards strapped to my feet, and I felt like I was going to fall down at any second. Not to mention the fact that I kept whacking myself in the legs with the stupid ski poles every time I moved. Getting on the chair lift to come up here had been an adventure by itself. And now Daphne actually expected me to take off down the hill.
Okay, okay, so it wasn’t much of a slope. The hill flowed down at a gentle angle for several hundred feet before leveling out again. The area was deserted except for the three of us. Just like Daphne had said, everyone else at Mythos knew how to ski, and the other kids had gone up to the steeper, more difficult runs. Still, I was sure I could break something on the way down the bunny slope.
“Are you ready?” Daphne asked, pulling off one of her pink gloves.
“Sure,” I muttered, and yanked off one of mine as well. “Might as well get it over with.”
Then I reached out, clasped Daphne’s hand, and waited for the images to come.
A few weeks ago, Daphne and I had sat down and done this very same thing. She was my best friend, after all, and we were always brushing up against each other. Since I hadn’t wanted my psychometry to kick every single time I accidentally touched her, I’d decided to just get it all over with in one major whammy.
It was another quirk of my magic. If I flashed on someone all at once, or often enough over a period of time, I sort of got used to their vibes and could touch them more freely. Oh, I’d still flash on Daphne if my skin was in contact with hers for more than a few minutes, but I wouldn’t get a major whammy unless she was really upset or emotional about something.
So Daphne had come over to my dorm room one night, and we’d sat on my bed and clasped hands. She hadn’t seen or felt anything, since she didn’t have that kind of magic—touch magic, it was sometimes called.
But I had.
All sorts of images of the Valkyrie had filled my mind, everything from her growing up to her first day at Mythos to her French-kissing Carson after one of their recent dates. Yeah, that last one had kind of grossed me out a little.
And I’d felt all of Daphne’s feelings, too—every last one of them. I’d felt how strong she was, how fierce, how brave, how loyal. And yeah, even how she could be a total, rich-girl snob and a major bitch from time to time. But all those images, all those feelings, good and bad, added up to Daphne—and I was glad she was my best friend.
“Are you seeing anything?” Daphne asked.
Carson looked back and forth between us.
“Not yet,” I growled, tightening my grip on her hand and closing my eyes. “Now quit talking and start concentrating.”
“But you should be able to see something by now,” Daphne said, totally not listening to me. “If you can use my memories to help you with archery, why can’t you use them to help with something else? I know I’m right about this. I’m always right.”
The reason we were standing on the bunny slope and holding hands in the first place was because of Daphne’s theory about my psychometry—her idea that I could use my magic to pick up other memories and other skills from people, just like she’d talked about in my dorm room two nights ago. Basically, the Valkyrie figured if I could use my psychometry to tap into her archery prowess, then maybe I could pick up some of her skiing skills, too. That way, she, Carson, and I could go skiing together, instead of them leaving me behind on the bunny slope all by myself.
Daphne’s theory made sense, I supposed. Thanks to my Gypsy gift, I remembered every single thing I’d ever seen from touching an object or another person—all the images, all the vibes, a
ll the lights, sounds, and flashes of feeling. I’d just never really thought about using them in this specific way before, about trying to specifically call them up like this—
Suddenly an image popped into my head of Daphne standing on top of a tall slope. She let out a loud whoop, pushed off with her poles, and raced down the mountain. And I felt all the things that she had: her knees moving from side to side, the spray of snow against her legs, the cold air burning her lungs, even the blur of the ice-crusted pine trees as she zipped past them.
And then, as quickly as it had come, the image vanished, leaving nothing behind but the empty echo of the wind in my head.
I opened my eyes to find Daphne and Carson staring at me.
“Well?” Daphne asked. “Did it work?”
“We’re about to find out,” I said.
I let go of her hand, put my glove back on, and plodded over to the edge of the hill.
“Come on, Gwen. You can do it,” Carson called out in an encouraging voice.
I didn’t know about that, but I was going to at least try. And if I broke something on the way down, well, Daphne said the resort had awesome hot chocolate.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered, dug my poles into the snow, and pushed off.
And immediately wished that I hadn’t. Everything happened so freaking fast. The snow was so packed and slick that it seemed like I was going a hundred miles an hour down the slope the second I took off. Plus, the sun glinted on the snow just so, throwing out dazzling sprays of light in every direction.
For a moment, hot, sweaty panic filled me, but I pushed it away and forced myself to focus, to call up Daphne’s image, just like I had during archery practice with Kenzie and Oliver. I could do this. I would do this.
Daphne, Daphne, Daphne—I chanted the Valkyrie’s name in my head and once again pictured her in her ski suit, sliding down that steep hill and loving every second of it.
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