Spartan Promise: A Mythos Academy Novel (Mythos Academy spinoff series Book 2)

by Jennifer Estep

  I had been so angry and heartbroken by their betrayal that I’d torn off the bracelet and thrown it down on their graves, although my Aunt Rachel had eventually given it back to me.

  I had started wearing the bracelet again when I joined the Midgard, as a reminder that I didn’t have to be a Reaper and that I had the free will to choose my own path in life. But my parents had had another secret. They hadn’t told me that the bracelet was actually Freya’s Bracelet, a powerful artifact that protected the wearer from other people’s magic. It had saved me from Covington and his foul ring. He might have murdered my parents, but they had still protected me from him as best they could. I would always be grateful to them for that.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated on the cool feel of the bracelet around my wrist, like a ring of hard frost kissing my skin. I let that coolness, that frost, seep into my mind and especially into my heart, until it iced over my hurt and rage that Covington was still out there, plotting against me and Team Midgard. I would hunt down the librarian and get my revenge, but today wasn’t going to be that day, and I had to accept that. When I felt calmer, I opened my eyes and looked at Zoe again.

  “Covington was the head librarian here for a long time,” I said in a quieter voice. “Linus Quinn and Takeda don’t think he knows about the Bunker or the tunnels, but I don’t want to take a chance that he does. It would be just like Covington to use the tunnels to try to sneak into the Bunker to steal the jewelry box and other artifacts. I want to be ready for all the twisted things he might dream up, and mapping the tunnels is one way to prepare.”

  More understanding and sympathy filled Zoe’s face, and blue sparks of magic dripped out of her fingertips like tears, almost as if her Valkyrie magic were crying at my obvious pain.

  “I agree with Rory,” Babs piped up from her spot on my belt. “It wouldn’t hurt to map the tunnels and see where they lead. Besides, it will be fun. Why, it reminds me of the time I was in the Ashland sewers, chasing after a nasty Nemean prowler…”

  The sword started babbling about another adventure she’d had, but Zoe and I tuned her out.

  “Please,” I said in a soft voice. “I have to do this. Even if mapping the tunnels seems silly and pointless, I have to do something other than sit around and wait for Covington to strike. Otherwise, I’ll go crazy.”

  She nodded. “All you had to do was ask.” Zoe zipped up her coveralls a little higher and held out her hand. “Give me your camera. I’ll take photos while you do your whole treasure map, X-marks-the-spot thing.”

  I grinned and passed her the camera. Then, together, we stepped into the tunnel.

  The bookcase swung shut behind us, and for a moment, everything was pitch-black. I stepped forward, and lights clicked on in the stone ceiling. The motion-activated lights turned on as we approached and clicked off as we moved past them. We walked about fifty feet before another tunnel branched off to our right. I stopped and made an X on my map.

  We went down all the tunnels, one by one, to see where they went. Five main tunnels led to the five main buildings on the Mythos quad aboveground—math-science, English-history, the dining hall, and the gym. And of course, the tunnel we had started out in led back to the Bunker and the Library of Antiquities, the final building on the quad.

  Each tunnel ended in a door, and I pressed the silver button on each one, using my thumbprint to unlock them and see where we had ended up. I already knew that the gym tunnel opened up into Takeda’s office, since he had brought us that way before, but the other secret entrances surprised me. A supply closet in the math-science building, a study room in the English-history building, a broken freezer in the dining-hall kitchen.

  By the time we’d finished with the five main tunnels, all sorts of lines, squiggles, and Xs covered my map, and I was humming a happy tune.

  “You are having way too much fun,” Zoe groused.

  I grinned. She rolled her eyes, but she raised her camera and snapped a photo of me.

  Several more secondary tunnels branched off from the five main ones, leading away from the quad and farther out onto campus. We mapped those as well. The tunnels snaked all over the grounds and opened up in all sorts of places—the girls’ dorms, the boys’ dorms, storage sheds full of landscaping and other equipment. I felt like we were exploring some cool underground spider’s web, and I couldn’t wait to see where the next tunnel led.

  Three hours later, we had mapped all the tunnels and secret entrances, except for a particularly long passageway that left campus and seemed to head over to the town of Snowline Ridge. I wanted to keep going to see where that tunnel led, but Zoe was grumbling about all the walking we’d done, so we headed back to the Bunker instead.

  We stepped into what I considered the center of the spider’s web, a large junction with the five main tunnels running out to different sections of the quad. Zoe was in front of me, and she rounded the corner and stepped into the tunnel that would take us back to the library. She looked over her shoulder and opened her mouth, probably to say how glad she was that we were finally stopping, but she tripped over something, staggered forward, and bounced off one of the walls. Her legs flew out from under her, and she sat down hard.

  “Zoe! Are you okay?” I rushed over to her.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Nothing bruised but my pride. Help me up, please.”

  She took my hand, and I hauled her to her feet. Zoe glanced around, and her gaze landed on a pile of loose bricks sitting beside one of the walls.

  “Stupid bricks,” she muttered.

  Zoe lashed out with her boot, and one of the bricks disintegrated into shards. Zoe didn’t think she had strength magic like other Valkyries did, but I thought she was far more powerful than she realized.

  I crouched down and stared at the pile of stones. “Looks like someone deliberately chipped these bricks out of the wall. See how the mortar is scraped away from them?”

  “Why would someone pull bricks out of a wall?” Babs asked.

  “Maybe because they wanted to hide something behind it,” I replied.

  “Hidden treasure?” Zoe perked up. “Now, that would be cool.”

  My heart started pounding with excitement. Discovering someone’s hidden treasure would be the perfect way to end our exploring.

  I unhooked Babs’s scabbard from my belt and propped the sword against the wall so she could see what was going on. I didn’t have Zoe’s Valkyrie strength, but the bricks weren’t very heavy, and I moved them out of the way, revealing a dark space about the size of a large book. Then I leaned down, shone my flashlight into the hole, and realized…that it was just an empty space.

  I moved the light back and forth, but nothing was in the wall. It was an empty, hollow space, with no hidden treasure of any kind.

  Disappointment rippled through me. I sighed, but I grabbed the bricks and stacked them back into the wall so they would be out of the way and we wouldn’t trip over them again.

  I had just slid the last brick into place when a loud creak sounded in the distance.

  In an instant, I was on my feet and standing next to Zoe.

  “Did you hear that?” she whispered.

  I nodded, and we peered down the tunnels, trying to figure out where the sound had come from.

  “Hey!” a low voice called out. “Down there!”

  At least that was what I thought the voice said. The weird echoes in the tunnels bounced back on each other and garbled everything together, making it hard to figure out the exact words, much less whom the voice belonged to.

  Still, I couldn’t help but think that my dire prediction from earlier had already come true and that Covington was here. That he knew about the tunnels and was going to use them to sneak into the Bunker and steal artifacts, specifically the jewelry box.

  A series of loud, steady thump-thump-thump-thumps rang out, confirming my suspicions. I might not have been able to make out the garbled words, but I recognized those sounds. Footsteps, and more than one set.


  Other people were in the tunnels—and they were coming this way.

  Chapter Two

  Zoe and I looked at each other a moment. Then we both sprang into action.

  She dropped my camera, yanked her electrodagger out of her pocket, and whipped the weapon up into an attack position. I lunged over, grabbed Babs from her spot along the wall, and pulled the sword out of her scabbard.

  “Quick!” I whispered to Zoe. “We need to get out of this tunnel and into another one!”

  She nodded and hurried into the tunnel that led to the math-science building. She stopped right inside the entrance and crouched down to make herself smaller. I tossed Babs’s scabbard aside and started to join Zoe, but she stabbed her finger at the ceiling.

  “The lights!” Zoe hissed. “We need to kill the lights!”

  The lights embedded in the tunnel ceiling were still burning brightly, clearly illuminating us, and since they were motion-activated, everything we did only kept them turned on. I scanned the tunnel, looking for something that I could throw up at the lights and break them, but I spotted something even better: a light switch.

  I almost missed it, since it was painted the same gray as the stones, but the switch was in the library tunnel, only a few steps away from where I’d put the loose bricks back into the wall. I hurried over and slapped the switch down.

  The lights clicked off, plunging the library tunnel and the rest of the junction into darkness.

  “Rory!” Zoe hissed again. “Where are you?”

  “Over by the light switch,” I whispered. “I’m going to creep into the English-history tunnel. Stay where you are over in the math-science one. That way, we can attack them from two sides at once.”

  “Got it,” she whispered back.

  I felt along the wall until I came to the tunnel opening, then slipped inside it and crouched down. Zoe and I fell silent, but the other people started talking, and their tense, worried voices echoed off the walls.

  “What happened?”

  “Why did the lights go out?”

  I couldn’t tell how many other people were in here, but I was guessing at least two, maybe more, if Covington had brought his Reapers. Normally, facing down a bunch of bad guys wouldn’t worry me, since that was pretty much life at Mythos Academy, especially for a Spartan like me. But try as I might, I couldn’t see anything in the blackness, and I couldn’t fight what I couldn’t see—

  Wait a second. I could see something.

  A faint silver light filled this tunnel, just bright enough for me to make out the walls. I glanced around, wondering if there was an emergency light in the ceiling or if Zoe had dropped her phone. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was the source of the glow—or, rather, my sword was.

  Babs’s blade was glimmering with a faint silver light. I moved the sword back and forth, wondering if I was imagining it, but the glow remained, dim but steady. So I propped the sword against the wall and scooted back so I could get a better look at it.

  “Babs,” I whispered. “Why are you glowing?”

  Her green eye rolled down, and she examined her own blade. “Hmm. Well, that’s new. I don’t think I’ve ever glowed in the dark before.” Her half of a face perked up. “But I like it. That silver glimmer really makes the most of my features, don’t you think? It’s so much more flattering than all the other harsh lighting down here—”

  “Focus, Babs, focus.”

  She pouted at my interrupting her for a moment before staring down at her blade again. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with you breaking my curse?”

  When I’d first noticed Babs in the Library of Antiquities a few weeks ago, I’d had no idea that the sword was cursed and that any warrior who picked her up could only wield her in three battles before that warrior died. But I’d broken the curse by using Babs anyway and sacrificing myself to save my friends from some Typhon chimeras at the Cormac Museum. I loved Babs, and she was my weapon now, as well as one of my best friends, and I thought I knew everything about her. But she was right. The glowing was definitely new.

  “Or maybe it’s because I’m a Champion’s weapon now,” Babs continued. “Maybe Sigyn gave me a little extra magic when she asked you to be her Champion.”

  Champions were warriors who worked for the gods and goddesses here in the mortal realm. My cousin, Gwen Frost, served Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, so you could say that being a Champion ran in the Frost and Forseti families. Gwen had defeated Loki, the evil Norse god of chaos, and now it was my turn to be the hero, since I was working for Sigyn, the Norse goddess of devotion.

  Sigyn had tasked me with stopping Covington and his mysterious evil plot, and it was a job, a calling, that I had been happy to undertake. Of course I wanted revenge on Covington for murdering my parents, but as a Spartan, as a true warrior, I also wanted to protect people. I didn’t want anyone else to suffer the pain, misery, and heartbreak that I had, and stopping Covington and his Reapers was the best way to ensure that.

  “Yep, Sigyn probably gave me some extra magic. That has to be it,” Babs said. “Look at my runes. They’re the part of me that’s really glowing.”

  She was right. A series of runes were carved into her blade, and each one was glimmering like a dim star. To anyone else, the runes would look like random scratches, since only a Champion could read the words on their specific weapon, but I could easily make out each letter and the saying they spelled out: Devotion is strength.

  Maybe it was a message from Sigyn that Covington was here and that I would need all my fighting skills and healing magic to defeat him. Determination surged through me. I stretched out my hand to grab Babs again, and that was when I realized that the sword wasn’t the only thing that was glowing—so was my bracelet.

  The silver chain and the attached charms were glimmering just like Babs’s blade was. That must have been some of Freya’s magic at work. Either way, if I could see the glimmers, then so could whoever else was in the tunnels, so I yanked my T-shirt sleeve down over the bracelet, hiding it from sight. I also grabbed Babs and held her behind me and down by my right leg, trying to minimize the glow from her blade.

  Then I looked around for another weapon.

  If Covington had brought a bunch of Reapers here, then I was going to need everything I could get my hands on to defeat them. Thanks to Babs’s glow, I could see my bag lying in the library tunnel. Zoe had her electrodagger, but I hadn’t bothered to put any daggers in my bag. I didn’t need a bona fide weapon like other warriors did. As a Spartan, I had the innate magical ability to pick up any weapon—or any object—and automatically know how to kill someone with it. That ability was what made Spartans such great warriors and so very, very dangerous.

  My gaze scanned over my bag and the supplies that had spilled all over the floor when I had literally dropped everything, grabbed Babs, and turned off the lights. I had three choices: the digital camera Zoe had been using, the notebook that contained my map of the tunnels, or the pen I had been writing with.

  I could whack someone across the back of the head with the camera, but the plastic would break apart on impact, rendering it useless after that one initial strike. I could roll up the notebook and jab it into someone’s face, but it was too thin and flimsy to do much damage, and I didn’t have time to rip the wire out of the spine and fashion it into a weapon.

  That left the pen.

  I darted forward and grabbed the pen from the floor, then moved back into position. I started flipping it end over end in my hand, getting a feel for its weight, strength, and balance. Unlike my camera and notebook, the pen was made of metal, which meant that it would last a little longer in a fight. Oh, it wasn’t nearly as sharp and strong as Zoe’s electrodagger, but it would have to do. My fingers tightened around the pen. I would make do with it. That was the Spartan way.

  “Rory!” Zoe hissed again from the math-science tunnel. “What’s going on?”

  “Just getting ready for the fight,” I whispered
back. “Hold your position. Here they come.”

  We both fell silent.

  The other people had quit talking, but their footsteps grew louder, closer, and quicker, like they had picked up their pace and were jogging toward us. I glanced around the corner of the English-history tunnel. A small light appeared at the opposite end of the library tunnel, although the faint glow and the way it bobbed up and down made me think it was a phone someone was carrying, instead of a flashlight.

  “Hey!” one of the voices called out. “I see a bag! And some other stuff!”

  “I see it too! They must be down here!” someone else chimed in.

  The footsteps grew louder, closer, and quicker still. The Reapers were sprinting full steam ahead now, and less than a minute later, two shadowy figures rushed by the math-science tunnel where Zoe was hiding. I tightened my grips on Babs and my pen, getting ready to strike.

  An instant later, the two figures raced by the opening of the English-history tunnel where I was hiding. With a loud yell, I charged forward and attacked them.

  * * *

  For a moment, I thought Zoe yelled too. It almost sounded like she shouted Stop!, although I had no idea why she would say that. But the shadow in front of me whipped around, and I was in the thick of the fight.

  I lashed out with my pen first, trying to drive it into the shadow’s throat. But the shadow was quicker than I expected, and it blocked the blow and caught my wrist in its—his—hand.

  Usually, when I was fighting someone, I could see what the other person was going to do before he actually did it. How hard he was going to punch me, how many times, even the angle he was going to swing at me from. It was more of my Spartan magic at work. I’d always thought that being in a fight was like starring in my own personal action movie, only I had the advantage since I was always a couple of steps ahead of the other person.

  But here in the dark, I couldn’t see as well as normal, which limited that particular ability. Still, I’d been in a lot of fights, so I could guess what the guy was going to do next. Sure enough, he bent my wrist back, trying to make me drop the pen, so I obliged him and let go of my makeshift weapon. He loosened his grip for a second, giving me enough time to surge forward and ram my elbow into his stomach. His breath escaped in a loud oof! of air, and I whirled around and stepped back out of his long reach.