Jennifer Estep Bundle

by Jennifer Estep

  Disgusted, I looked away. A flash of movement caught my eye, and I spotted Preston waving at me. He leaned up against the far wall of the hotel lobby, half hidden behind a cedar tree and well away from all the other kids who’d come to gawk at me. Ajax stopped a second to talk to Coach Lir. Preston waved at me again, and I used Ajax’s distraction to slip away and walk over to him.

  “Hi, there,” I said.

  “Hi.” Preston’s face was tight with worry. “How are you? I heard what happened. I’m so sorry, Gwen. That must have been awful. I was down here waiting for you, and there was just this tremendous noise. I looked out the window and saw the avalanche rushing down the mountain. I can’t imagine how terrible it was for you to be in the middle of it.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t really want to talk about it right now, and I definitely didn’t want Preston to think of me as the girl who got caught in the avalanche. No, I wanted him to think of me as Gwen, the cute girl he’d just met. A Reaper might be trying to kill me, but I’d be damned if he’d ruin this for me, too.

  “Since we never got to have lunch, do you want to do something tomorrow?” Preston asked. “Maybe go skiing or something? If you feel like it?”

  My heart lifted at his words, but then I remembered that I was under house arrest, so to speak. I sighed. “I’d love to, but the profs want me to stay in the hotel tomorrow. . . just in case I’m more shook up than I’m letting on.”

  I winced at the lie. That sounded totally lame, but I supposed it was better than telling Preston the truth about the Reaper. Even though we were only going to be at the resort another day, I didn’t want to scare him off.

  His face darkened with disappointment. “Oh.”

  “But maybe we could have lunch tomorrow?” I suggested. “We wouldn’t have to leave the hotel to do that.”

  Preston thought about it a second, and his face brightened. “Sure. That’ll work. I’ll text you again in the morning, and we’ll figure out the details, okay?”

  I smiled at him. “It’s a date. Again. This time, I promise I’ll keep it.”

  He let out a little laugh. “Don’t worry. I know you will, Gwen. I’ll make sure of it. I won’t let you get away again.”

  A flash of movement caught my eye, and I realized Ajax had finished up his conversation and was walking through the lobby looking for me. “Well, I have to go. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  Preston nodded. “You can count on it.”

  He gave me a quick smile, then left the lobby, keeping to the edges of the crowd as he headed down the hallway where some of the restaurants were located, as well as the new construction site. Preston was probably going to have dinner with his friends. I thought it was really cool that he’d come down here to see how I was doing. Most guys wouldn’t have bothered to, not for a girl they’d just met yesterday.

  Coach Ajax finally spotted me and came over. “Who were you talking to? I didn’t get a good look at him.”

  “Oh, just a guy I met from the New York academy.”

  “Well, come on then,” Ajax rumbled. “Metis and Nickamedes want you tucked in your room for the rest of the night, and so do I.”

  Ajax rode up with me in the elevator and walked me down the hall to my room. He even made sure Daphne was waiting inside and that the room was free of Reapers before he left.

  To my surprise, Daphne had taken Vic out of his scabbard and laid him out flat on my bed. I flopped down beside the sword, and his twilight-colored eye snapped open.

  “You’re supposed to take me with you when you go off having adventures, Gwen,” Vic said in his British accent. “Not get to have all the bloody fun by yourself.”

  “Trust me, Vic, surviving the avalanche wasn’t much fun. Neither was shoving a tree branch through a Fenrir wolf’s leg.”

  “What?!” Vic and Daphne shrieked in unison.

  I sat there on the bed and told them about the wolf and how it had actually seemed to ... like me after I helped it. That was the only part of the story I hadn’t shared with Metis and the other profs, instead saying that I’d thought the wolf had been carried away by the snow. Maybe it was crazy, but I didn’t want them to hunt down the wolf and kill it, even though I knew that’s what they were determined to do. Sure, maybe the creature had wanted to make me a chew toy to start with, but I didn’t think it would hurt me now. Maybe. Probably. Well, okay, I really had no idea what the wolf would or wouldn’t do, but I didn’t want to be the cause of its death.

  Daphne shook her head, her blond hair spilling over her shoulders. “You’ve been watching too many Disney movies, Gwen. Fenrir wolves are trained to kill—that’s all they know how to do. That’s all they’re good for.”

  “Well, if they can be trained to kill, then they can be trained to do other things, right?” I insisted in a stubborn tone. “I mean, they’re not born bad, are they? Metis said they weren’t necessarily evil, that they have free will, just like we do.”

  Daphne looked at me like I was spouting nonsense. Maybe I was. “Yeah, maybe Fenrir wolves have free will, but the Reapers have tortured all the goodness out of them, just like they have the Nemean prowlers, Black rocs, and all the other creatures they use. Face it, Gwen. That wolf was trained by a Reaper, which makes it just as twisted and evil as the Reaper is.”

  “Yep,” Vic chimed in. “Twisted, evil, and deserving of death. If you’d had me with you, then I could have taken care of the oversized puppy all by myself.”

  I rolled my eyes, but the sword didn’t notice. Neither did the Valkyrie. Instead, Daphne and Vic stared arguing about who was more evil, the Reapers or the mythological creatures they trained, and the best ways to kill them all. I tuned them out. They hadn’t been there, and they hadn’t seen how much pain the wolf had been in. They hadn’t felt its emotions the way I had. No matter what they claimed, the creature wasn’t all evil. Somewhere underneath all those teeth and claws was a heart that beat just like mine. No, the wolf wasn’t a complete monster, even if its Reaper master had trained it to be that way.

  Once Daphne and Vic quit arguing, the three of us spent the next hour lounging around and talking. Well, the Valkyrie did most of the talking, telling me about how she and the other kids at the Winter Carnival had heard the explosion and then seen the avalanche rush down the mountain toward me. Since the carnival had been set up back on the plateau, everyone there had been well out of the path of the roaring snow.

  “Everyone was seriously freaked out,” Daphne said. “Including Logan.”

  My heart skipped a beat, even though I kept my face calm. “Really? I find that hard to believe.”

  “Oh yeah,” the Valkyrie said. “He totally wanted to go with Ajax and start looking for you. Carson and I did too, but Metis and the other profs wouldn’t let us. They kept everyone at the carnival until the snow had settled. But Logan, man, I thought he was actually going to punch Nickamedes at one point. The two of them were screaming at each other, and Kenzie and Oliver had to grab hold of Logan to keep him from going after the librarian.”

  I laughed. “Now that I would have liked to have seen. Yeah, maybe Logan was worried about me. I mean, we are friends, in a weird sort of way. But it doesn’t matter, because I saw him hanging out with Savannah down in the lobby a few minutes ago, just like always. So nothing’s changed. Besides, I ran into Preston downstairs. We’re going to have lunch tomorrow, and I’m going to forget all about Logan—at least for the rest of the weekend.”

  Daphne opened her mouth, but her phone started vibrating on the nightstand. She bent over to see who was texting her. She hit a few buttons, and a guilty look filled her pretty face.

  “So, that was Carson and ... there’s this party tonight,” Daphne said, not quite looking at me.

  “And let me guess. I can’t go because it’s out in the alpine village somewhere and I’m not supposed to leave the hotel, right?”

  Daphne winced and nodded.

  “Go,” I said. “Have fun with your boyfriend. I’m going to stay righ
t here with Vic, read my comic books, and eat junk food for the rest of the night.”

  “Are you sure?” Daphne asked, biting her glossy lip. “I don’t mind staying here with you and just hanging out... .”

  “Go,” I repeated in a firm voice. “Go to the party, get drunk, and totally make out with Carson. I’ll be fine. I promise. Believe me, after what happened today, I have zero desire to party tonight.”

  It took some more prodding on my part, but eventually, Daphne brushed out her hair, put on some more lip gloss, and left to go hook up with Carson. As soon as the door locked behind her, I walked over to my gray duffel bag and pulled out a pen and notebook. Then I settled myself on the bed, with Vic propped up on a pillow beside me.

  “What are you doing?” the sword asked. “Because that doesn’t look like a comic book to me.”

  “Nothing much,” I said. “Just trying to figure out who wants me dead.”

  Chapter 17

  For a moment, Vic peered at me with his one eye, then his slash of a mouth curved back into a full-on smile. I almost thought he would have nodded in approval if he could actually, you know, move his half of a head.

  “Finally, Gypsy,” he chirped in his English accent. “I was wondering how long you were going to let something like that slide. It’s a major breach of etiquette you know, not striking back at your enemies in a timely fashion.”

  Etiquette? What kind of etiquette was there in someone trying to murder me? Sometimes I just didn’t understand Vic at all. I shook my head.

  “It’s not that I’ve been letting it slide exactly,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t have much to go on. I couldn’t see who was driving the car that tried to hit me, and I didn’t get the license plate. The same thing happened in the library. I didn’t see who fired the arrow, and I didn’t get much of a vibe on the hole it left behind in the bookshelf. And yeah, I touched the Fenrir wolf, but not long enough to really get a major whammy off it or see who its master is. Mostly, the wolf was still thinking about the avalanche, just like I was.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Vic asked.

  I shrugged. “I thought I’d make a list of everyone who might have a grudge against me and go from there. It always works on TV.”

  Vic rolled his eye. “Why are you playing bloody detective again instead of just going out there and using me to get some answers? Put me up against someone’s throat, and I’ll make him start talking real quick.”

  I arched an eyebrow and gave the sword a look.

  “What?” he growled. “It’d be much more fun than listening to you and the Valkyrie natter on about what some other bloody girl was wearing.”

  “Shut up, Vic,” I said. “I need to think.”

  The sword let out a loud harrumph and snapped his eye shut, his mouth turning down into a pout. And people thought teenagers were moody. Please. We had nothing on ancient, bloodthirsty, talking swords.

  Vic kept his eye shut, enjoying his snit, so I sat there on the bed and started making my list. It took me about five seconds. What can I say? It was a short list with only one name on it: Jasmine Ashton’s family. Okay, okay, so it wasn’t really a name, but the Ashtons were the only ones with any reason to kill me. At least, that I knew of.

  Since my list idea wasn’t working, I decided to go back to the beginning and see if I could remember anything strange or weird, anything out of place, anything out of the ordinary. But really, there was nothing. It had just been a regular week at Mythos Academy until someone had tried to kill me.

  Well, sure, I was here at the Winter Carnival at a super-fancy resort, and I was having lunch tomorrow with a cute guy. Both of those were out of the ordinary, but not in a bad way. I needed to think harder, needed to go back to the day this had all started. Wednesday. Three days ago. What had happened then? Maybe I’d done something to set off the Reaper, or maybe I’d pissed off someone else entirely. I closed my eyes and concentrated.

  Okay, let’s see. After weapons training with Logan, Kenzie, and Oliver in the gym, I’d gone to my classes that morning, even scoring an A+ on my English lit paper. We’d had to write about the influence of myth on superheroes and modern culture, a topic that I’d totally nailed, since I was such a comic book and fantasy geek. I’d had lunch with Daphne and Carson in the dining hall, then after my afternoon classes, I’d snuck off campus to go see Grandma Frost. After I’d visited my grandma, I’d ridden the bus back to the academy and had worked my usual shift at the Library of Antiquities.

  There was nothing there. Nothing special, nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary. Well, besides the SUV almost mowing me down and the arrow almost splitting my skull open. I hadn’t even touched anything unusual that day or gotten any real vibes with my psychometry magic, except for the fuzzy flash I’d seen of Oliver’s crush when I’d picked up his notebook that morning in the gym.

  My eyes snapped open. Oliver’s notebook. Of course. How could I have been so stupid? Oliver had totally freaked when I’d picked up his notebook, and he’d realized I was getting a flash off it. I’d thought it was just because he didn’t want me to know who he was crushing on and all the teasing that would go along with that.

  But what if maybe—just maybe—he had something else to hide. Like the fact that he was really a Reaper of Chaos. I’d felt Oliver’s emotions when I’d touched his notebook. He’d been everything from bored to angry to lusting after his crush. He could have totally had some psycho-killer vibes or evil plans hidden in there, too. I just hadn’t held on to the notebook long enough to get the lowdown on them.

  The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. It would also explain why Oliver had sat down next to me on the bus ride over to the resort and all the dirty looks he’d been shooting my way in the meantime. The Spartan had been fishing yesterday morning on the bus, trying to figure out exactly what I’d seen when I’d touched his notebook and who I might have told about it.

  Except now it seemed like he wasn’t going to take a chance that I hadn’t seen anything since, you know, he’d tried to kill me four times already. Oliver definitely wanted me to keep quiet about whatever was in that notebook. What else could be in there that was worth killing for if it wasn’t information that he was a Reaper or some stupid plan he’d cooked up to serve Loki?

  I had to get my hands on that notebook. That was the only way I was going to figure out what Oliver was up to—and why he felt that he needed to kill me to cover it up.

  Now, all I had to do was figure out how to swipe the notebook from him—and not get murdered in the meantime.

  The next morning, Daphne, Carson, and I grabbed some toasted cranberry-orange bagels, wild blueberry muffins, cream cheese Danish, and cherry-pomegranate juice from one of the hotel restaurants, then seated ourselves on a sofa in front of the massive stone fireplace in the lobby. The flames cracked and popped like fireworks, while the heat from the mini-explosions warmed the whole area. The sweet smell of cedar woodchips tickled my nose.

  I gobbled down the chewy bagels, scrumptious muffins, and tart juice in record time, eager to get on with my plans for the day. Daphne and Carson just picked at their food, though. The Valkyrie hadn’t stumbled back to our room until almost one o’clock this morning, and both she and Carson had a decidedly sick, green tinge to their faces. It must have been one intense party for them both to still be this hungover.

  Daphne stuffed the remains of her half-eaten bagel back into the paper bag it had come in and put it on the table at her right elbow. “If I eat one more bite of that, I’m going to be sick.”

  “Me, too,” Carson mumbled, staring down into his cup of juice. “Why did I drink so much last night?”

  “It must have tasted really, really good, considering how wasted the two of you still look,” I said in a sarcastic tone.

  “Please, Gwen,” the band geek whispered. “Don’t talk so loud. My head is killing me.”

  Daphne and Carson both shot me looks that were equal parts annoyance and misery. Y
eah, I was totally laughing at them, but they would have been doing the same to me if I’d been the one with the raging hangover.

  “I think I should go back to my room, fall onto the bed, and hope I don’t die before lunchtime,” Carson mumbled again.

  “Me, too,” Daphne muttered.

  “You can’t do that,” I said, my voice sharpening.

  Daphne had on oversize sunglasses to block the light in the lobby, and she squinted over the tops of them at me. “Why not?”

  Because if she and Carson were in the hotel all day, then I wouldn’t be able to go through with my plan to snatch Oliver’s notebook and see exactly what secrets it contained. Despite being hungover, my friends would insist on helping me—or worse, telling Professor Metis about my suspicions. That was something I didn’t want to do without concrete proof, or at least knowing that I’d seen Oliver’s true intentions for myself using my Gypsy gift. Of course, I couldn’t exactly tell the two of them that, though.

  Besides, I’d already gotten myself into enough trouble by not telling the profs about the Reaper and Fenrir wolf. And yeah, maybe part of me still wanted to take care of this myself, but I also didn’t want to drag my friends down with me—or put them in danger if my suspicions turned out to be correct.

  “Because we’re leaving tonight to go back to the academy, and you haven’t hit half the slopes you wanted to, much less gone tubing,” I said. “Besides, the fresh air and sunshine will do you good. Once you get out there, you won’t even remember how much you had to drink last night.”

  Carson groaned. “Believe me, I’ll remember.”

  It took some not-so-subtle nudging on my part, but Daphne and Carson finally headed out to go skiing. Of course, the slopes directly above the hotel were still off limits because of the avalanche, but there were some runs on the far side of the mountain that hadn’t been affected and were open to students. The three of us agreed to hook up after lunch. Hopefully, I could introduce them to Preston then. In the meantime, though, I had work to do—and a Reaper to catch.