Kiss of Frost (14 page)

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Authors: Jennifer Estep

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Action & Adventure, #Survival Stories, #Paranormal, #General

BOOK: Kiss of Frost
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Chapter 14
“Gwen! Gwen Frost!”
Someone shouting my name snapped me out of the blackness that I’d been drifting along in. I opened my eyes and realized that I was still outside on my back in what was left of the crushed, snowy thicket.
But I wasn’t cold.
Sometime while I’d been unconscious, the Fenrir wolf had lain down lengthwise next to me. It was longer than I was tall, and it had wrapped its thick, shaggy tail around my legs, like I was a cute, wayward puppy that it was cuddling with. I turned my head and almost bumped my nose into the wolf’s. The creature blinked at me, like it had been asleep, too, then yawned, showing me each and every one of its sharp, pointed teeth. It could have seriously used a breath mint.
Snuggling with a wolf? That was kind of weird. All right, really weird. But since the creature hadn’t tried to, you know,
eat me,
I wasn’t going to complain. Not one little bit. Still, I slowly scooted away from it. No point in tempting fate, the gods, or whatever crazy thing was at work here.
“Gwen!” the shout came again. This time I realized it was a man’s voice. “Can you hear me?”
“Over here!” I shouted back, although my voice came out as more of a low, strained rasp. “I’m over here!”
Silence. For a second I wondered if he’d even heard my hoarse cry, but then—
“I heard her! She’s alive!”
Scuffles sounded, and through the pulverized pine trees, I spotted someone in a black jacket running toward me, sending up sprays of snow in every direction. I turned and looked back at the wolf.
“I think you’d better go now,” I said. “They wouldn’t like you being here.”
I don’t know if the Fenrir wolf understood my words or not, but the creature rose to its feet. I noticed that its right ear had a bloody, jagged V in it, like a piece of it had been torn off during the avalanche. The creature leaned down and gently butted me with its head. I hesitated, then reached up and stroked its silky ear. My psychometry kicked in, and once again, the wolf’s warm gratitude filled my mind. Maybe it was my imagination, but the wolf almost seemed to—to
rumble
with pleasure at me petting it. Yeah, that was kind of weird, too, especially since I’d never thought of the wolf as anything but a mythological monster, a nightmare come to life.
“Gwen!” the shout came again, closer and louder this time.
The wolf let out another happy rumble, then loped off through the trees, heading away from the sound of the approaching voice. It limped a little on its injured leg, but it still moved quicker than I could ever dream of.
I put my head back down on the snow and tried to ignore the tremors that shook my body and the fact that my teeth clattered together like dried up bones. I’d just petted a Fenrir wolf—and
lived
. How twisted was that? Daphne would have probably thought it was wicked cool. I was just happy I’d survived.
Without the wolf to help keep me warm, the cold quickly seeped into my body. I knew I should fight the icy numbness, but I just didn’t have the strength. Not right now. I’d just started to drift off to sleep again when Coach Ajax burst into the thicket, his big, burly body tearing through the broken trees like they weren’t even there. He dropped to one knee in the snow beside me.
“Gwen?” he asked in a tight, concerned voice. “Are you all right?”
“I’ve definitely been better,” I said, and passed out again.
 
I was out of it for a while after that. I tried to stay awake, really, I did. You would think it would have been easy, given all the shouting, noise, and general commotion. But time after time, my eyes slid shut, and I just didn’t have the energy to stop them. All I got to see of my dramatic rescue were these little snapshots whenever I woke up for a minute or two.
Coach Ajax carrying me out of the trees and putting me on a stretcher that was attached to the back of a snowmobile. Professor Metis wrapping me in warm thermal blankets to help get my body temperature back up where it should be. Even Nickamedes was there, throwing the snowmobile into gear and racing down the mountain faster than I thought the librarian would ever dare to drive.
Finally, though, the cold, wind, and noise faded away, replaced by soft, soothing, quiet warmth. I dreamed then—strange dreams about all sorts of things. Well, they weren’t really
dreams
so much as disjointed images and old memories, not all of which were my own.
I’d had these sorts of dreams before. Thanks to my Gypsy gift, I never forgot anything that I saw or felt when I touched an object and got a vibe off it. Sometimes, when I went to sleep, my mind randomly surfed through other people’s memories, other people’s feelings. Usually I saw things that I’d already experienced, thanks to my magic. Other times the images were completely new. I didn’t always notice every little thing when I touched an object and flashed on it. But all the information was floating around in my mind, and sometimes my subconscious kicked in and showed me what I’d missed.
Either way, it was like watching a movie in my head, and more often than not, I felt like Alice roaming through Wonderland and staring at all the curious things around her.
This time was no different. One after another, various flickers, flashes, and flares of memory filled my mind. The arrow quivering in the bookcase beside my head at the Library of Antiquities. The shriek of the calliope music from the Winter Carnival turning into the roar of the avalanche. The Fenrir wolf sitting in the snow staring at me with its red, red eyes. Even my mom, climbing into her car.
Somehow I knew this last memory was from the night my mom had been killed by a drunk driver—and I was watching her get into her car for the very last time before the accident. But the really bizarre thing was that it was a memory I shouldn’t even have. I hadn’t been there the night my mom had left the police station—or touched anything that would give me a vibe about the accident. At least, not that I knew of, and I think I would have remembered
that,
even in my weird, twisted dreams.
“Mom?” I mumbled.
My mom opened her car door and slid inside. Cold, sweaty panic filled me, and I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I had to stop her. I had to tell her to stay at the police station and not drive home tonight. If only she would stay put, she wouldn’t be T-boned by that damn drunk driver. She wouldn’t die and leave me and Grandma Frost by ourselves.
I raced toward my mom, my sneakers smacking against the cracked pavement, but the closer I got to her car, the fuzzier the image got, until the vehicle just faded away completely—with my mom still inside it. I stopped, gasping for air, and my heart throbbed with a dull, familiar, bitter ache. I whirled around and around, but there was no one else in the parking lot—and nothing but blackness all around me. Why did my mom always keep leaving me? Why couldn’t she stay with me for just a little while? Why was I always the one who was left behind?
“I think she’s finally coming out of it.” A soft voice interrupted my dream.
The blackness vanished, and my eyes fluttered open.
I was lying on a hard, lumpy hospital bed. To my left, a complicated-looking machine chirped out a steady tune in time to the green, squiggly lines that skipped up and down on a monitor. My heart rate, I supposed. Blankets covered me from neck to ankle, and I felt several heating pads trapped between my back and the bed. I tried to move and found that I was wrapped up tighter than a mummy. It took me several seconds to wiggle my hands out of the tight cocoon and sit up.
Everything in the room was white—white walls, white floors, white ceiling, even the blankets piled on top of me were white. The lack of color worried me, and for a second I thought I was still stuck in the snowbank before I was able to shake off my confusion.
My eyes skipped around the rest of the room, but there wasn’t much to see—except for the statue. The stone figure perched on a long table directly across from my bed, turned so its eyes stared straight into mine. It was the same statue of Skadi that I’d noticed in the lobby and then earlier today at the outdoor carnival. Only this time, the Norse winter goddess’s lips curved down, as though she was disappointed I’d survived the avalanche and was here in the infirmary, instead of buried in a cold, snowy grave. I pulled the blankets back up to my chin and looked away.
Footsteps scuffed on the floor, and Professor Metis stepped into the room. Faint lines grooved into her forehead, and weary worry darkened her green eyes. The professor looked all tired and used up, like she’d been the one out in the avalanche instead of me.
“How are you feeling, Gwen?” Metis asked in a soft voice.
“Fine,” I said. “I feel fine.”
The weird thing was that I really did feel fine. All the aches, pains, bruises, and scratches I’d gotten during the avalanche had vanished. In fact, I felt like I could hop out of bed right now and do a round of weapons training with the Spartans—and win. Which totally wasn’t like me at all.
“Of course you feel fine, Gwendolyn,” Nickamedes said in a snide tone, entering the room behind the professor. “Since Aurora just spent the better part of an hour healing you.”
Aurora? It took me a second to realize that he meant Professor Metis. Aurora, so that was her first name. Pretty. I liked it.
“Did you—did you touch me?” I asked her. “When you healed me?”
If she had, it might help explain all the crazy dreams I’d had. Although I still wasn’t sure where that memory of my mom had come from. Could it have been from Metis? She and my mom had been best friends when they were kids, so she had to have tons of memories of my mom. But the images I’d seen had been from the night my mom had died, when her car had been hit by a drunk driver. Surely, Metis would have told me if she’d been there that night. What reason would she have to keep it a secret? My head started to ache from trying to figure everything out.
Metis shook her head. “I didn’t know if you’d want that or not, Gwen, given your psychometry, so I didn’t actually touch you. It’s more difficult, but I can heal people just by being in close proximity to them, sort of by pushing my aura into theirs and feeding them my energy until they’re well again.”
The way she described it made me think of Daphne and the pink sparks that always flashed around her fingertips. The Valkyrie had once told me that the color of her magic was tied to her aura and personality. I wondered if Daphne would have the same healing power that Metis did when the Valkyrie’s magic finally quickened.
“So what happened?” I asked. “Up on the mountain?”
“What do you remember?” Metis asked, her voice much softer and kinder than Nickamedes’s was.
I thought back. “Well, the chair lift was on the fritz, and I was slogging down the slope to the hotel when I heard some kind of explosion. I looked up, and there were flames dancing all over the top of the mountain. Then, a few seconds later, the avalanche started, and all the snow began sliding down the mountain, coming right at me.”
I shuddered and hugged my arms around myself, as if that would somehow banish the horrible memory from my mind. I wouldn’t need my Gypsy gift to recall the avalanche. No matter how many other bad things happened to me, I’d remember the roar of the snow for the rest of my life. The shadow of it blocking out everything else, and the cold, cruel force of it trying to pull me under and bury me—forever.
Across from me, I noticed the statue of Skadi was now smiling, as if the stone figure could somehow hear what I was thinking.
Creepy
.
Then another awful thought filled my mind. “No one else was hurt, were they? By the avalanche?”
“No,” Metis said. “All the other students were either at the carnival or at the hotel. You were the only one walking down the slope at the time.”
I sighed with relief. No one else had gotten hurt. Good. That was good.
Metis and Nickamedes looked at each other. The librarian raised his black eyebrows, like he was asking the professor a question. Metis shook her head the tiniest bit, telling the librarian no to whatever it was he wanted.
“What?” I asked. “What’s going on? The two of you aren’t telling me something. Teachers and parents
always
have that guilty look when they’re holding something back.”
Metis drew in a breath. “You’re right, Gwen. I really don’t know how to say this, but there is some ... evidence that the avalanche wasn’t an accident.”
I frowned. “What are you talking about? Sure, I saw the flames and heard the explosion or whatever, but there has to be some kind of explanation right? The chair lift catching on fire or something?”
Nickamedes stared at me, his eyes as cold and hard as chips of ice. “Oh, there’s an explanation, all right, Gwendolyn. Mainly, that someone caused the avalanche—on purpose.”
Chapter 15
Despite all the craziness that had been going on the past few days, Nickamedes’s words still stunned me.
“You think it was—it was
deliberate?
” I asked, cold dread pooling in the bottom of my stomach. “Why?”
Nickamedes stared down his nose at me. “Mountains do not blow themselves up, Gwendolyn. After we got you down here safely to the infirmary, Ajax and I went back up the mountain. We found some burn marks and other things that indicate that someone deliberately set off an explosion at the top of the mountain, which was what caused the avalanche.”
The Reaper. I knew it was the mysterious Reaper who was trying to kill me. First, the SUV outside my Grandma Frost’s house, then the arrow in the library, and now, the Fenrir wolf and the avalanche. Somehow, the Reaper had seen me leave the carnival and start down the mountain. I didn’t know if he’d planned the explosion and the avalanche in advance or not, but he’d seen an opportunity to kill me, and he’d taken it.
And he’d almost succeeded. If I’d hadn’t run for the pine trees, if I’d been just a second or two slower in getting there, if I hadn’t tied myself to the tree ...
If, if, if
.
If any of those things had gone wrong, the avalanche would have swept me away—forever.
What was even worse was the fact that this time the Reaper hadn’t cared who else he might have hurt. If there had been anyone else going down the mountain the same time I had been, if Daphne and Carson had decided to have lunch with Preston and me ... My stomach twisted, and I thought I was going to be sick.
The door to the infirmary banged open, and Daphne barged inside, pink sparks of magic flashing around her, like a thousand tiny fireflies winking on and off.
“Sorry, Aurora,” Coach Ajax said, sticking his head into the room. “I couldn’t keep her out any longer.”
“Gwen!” Daphne said, rushing over to me.
She bumped Nickamedes out of the way, her Valkyrie strength pushing the librarian back several steps. He gave her a sour look, and his mouth pinched down into a frown.
Daphne grabbed my hand, and her concern for me flooded my body. It was a nice feeling—in a panicked, anxious kind of way.
“I’m fine,” I said, squeezing her hand tight. “Really, I’m fine.”
Her face relaxed a little bit. “You’d damn well better be. You’re my best friend.”
“And you’re mine,” I whispered back, hot tears stinging my eyes. “You’re my best friend, too.”
Daphne gripped my hand even tighter, her Valkyrie strength crunching my bones together, but I didn’t pull away. I knew I’d have bruises tomorrow, but I didn’t care. Right now, I was happy to let her warm, happy relief flood my body. We stayed like that for a few seconds, before the Valkyrie’s gaze flicked around the room.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “What’s with the big professor powwow?”
Metis smoothed a stray piece of her black hair back into her bun. “Nickamedes and I were just filling Gwen in on what happened during the avalanche and what we think might have caused it.”
“You mean the
explosion,
” Daphne corrected her. “Somebody totally set a bomb off on top of the mountain, didn’t they? I mean, the flames were just shooting up and up into the air like they were never going to stop.”
Nickamedes and Metis exchanged another look, obviously debating how much they wanted to tell Daphne—and whether they thought the Valkyrie would spread the gossip around to all the other students. But they decided to trust her or just realized that I would tell her later anyway, because Nickamedes finally nodded.
“Yes, we do believe it was some kind of deliberate explosion meant to specifically cause the avalanche,” the librarian said.
Daphne rolled her eyes. “Well, of course, it was. When Reapers try to kill people, they always bring out the big guns.”
Busted. I was totally, completely busted.
I knew the second the words came out of Daphne’s mouth that there was no taking them back—or wiggling my way out of an explanation.
“Reapers?” Nickamedes asked in a sharp tone. “What Reapers?”
Daphne frowned, a puzzled expression on her pretty face. “
The
Reaper. The one who’s trying to kill Gwen. The one who almost ran her over with a car and then took a shot at her in the Library of Antiquities the other night ...”
The Valkyrie’s voice drifted off as she realized just how intently Nickamedes and Metis were staring at her. She looked at them a second before turning her gaze to me. “You didn’t tell them about the Reaper? You told me you were going to talk to Metis!”
“And I changed my mind,” I muttered. “I have the right to do that, you know. Free will and all. We talked about it just the other day in myth-history class.”
Daphne put her hands on her hips and glared at me. The pink sparks flashing around her fingertips crackled and coalesced into tiny streaks of lightning, showing me just how pissed she was at me right now.
“And
I
told
you
that you don’t mess around when it comes to Reapers, especially when one of them is trying to kill you,” the Valkyrie snapped.
Metis stepped around the hospital bed and put a hand on Daphne’s arm. “I think the two of you need to tell us what’s going on. Right now.”
Yep, there was no way out of this—not with the professor staring at me, her green eyes sharp and narrow behind her silver glasses. And especially not with Nickamedes glaring at me, his own gaze as blue and cold as the snow on the mountain.
I sighed and told them the whole story, from almost being run over outside Grandma Frost’s house to the arrow in the library to the Fenrir wolf that had been lurking around the ski resort and finally, to the avalanche. When I was finished, Metis called Coach Ajax into the room and made me repeat the whole thing over again to him.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone about this before?” Ajax asked when I was finished.
I shifted in the bed, feeling the weight of the professors’ accusing stares on my chest, as hard and heavy as the wolf’s paws had been earlier. “Because I didn’t have any proof. Nobody saw the car, the arrow, or even the Fenrir wolf but me. I didn’t want you all to think I was being hysterical or paranoid or something.”
Nickamedes crossed his arms over his chest. “Do you know how much danger you’ve put everyone in, Gwendolyn? If you even
suspected
that a Reaper of Chaos was running around the academy, you should have told one of your professors immediately. Not stupidly thought that you could handle it by yourself.”
I really, really wanted to point out the small fact that the mystery Reaper hadn’t actually, you know,
killed me yet
. That in my own way, I had handled it. At least, enough to stay alive these past few days. But then I looked at Metis. I didn’t have to touch her or use my Gypsy gift to see the disappointment and reproach in her face. She was upset I hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her about the Reaper. Somehow that made me feel worse than anything else, even almost getting buried by the avalanche.
“I’m going to call your grandmother and tell her what’s happened,” Metis said in a low voice. “I’m sure she’ll want to talk to you.”
I was sure she would too. Grandma Frost didn’t get angry at me often, but when she did, watch out. My grandma was probably going to be majorly pissed I hadn’t told her what was going on. Though, in my defense, nothing had actually happened until after I’d left her house.
“Most important, you are not to leave the hotel until either we get this whole thing sorted out or head back to the academy tomorrow night,” Nickamedes said. “I mean it, Gwendolyn. You are not to set one foot outside this building. Do you understand me?”
I gave him a sullen look.
“Do you understand me?”
The librarian’s harsh tone had so much acid in it that it actually made me flinch.
“Yes, sir,” I muttered.
Nickamedes gave me another stern glare, but he didn’t say anything else. He wanted to, though. Anger made his face even pastier than normal. Instead of yelling at me some more, Nickamedes turned to Ajax, and the two of them, along with Metis, moved to the other side of the infirmary and started talking in low voices. Probably trying to figure out who the Reaper might be and how they could track down him and the Fenrir wolf. Daphne stayed by my side at the bed.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “I really didn’t mean to rat you out.”
I sighed. “I know. And you were right. I should have told Metis what was going on after class the other day, and I should have told you and Carson that I didn’t think it was just a wild Fenrir wolf I’d seen. I hate to admit it, but Nickamedes and the other profs have a right to be pissed. I put myself in danger, and everyone else here, too.”
“So why didn’t you tell them about the Reaper? Or at least get me and Carson to believe you about the wolf?”
I threw my hands up. “Because I go to a school for warrior whiz kids. Everyone else at Mythos can take care of themselves, including you and Carson. I just wanted to be able to do the same. I bet if there was a Reaper after Logan or one of the other Spartans, the profs wouldn’t make such a big deal about it. They certainly wouldn’t make Logan hide in the hotel like he was a kid. Ajax would probably give him a weapon and let Logan hunt down the Reaper by himself.”
Red-hot shame and miserable embarrassment tangled up together in tight knots in my stomach, overcoming the uneasy guilt I felt at keeping quiet. That was one reason why I’d hated the academy so much when I’d started going there—because everyone was so much
better
at everything than I was. So much braver, tougher, smarter, stronger. I was a weak little freak in comparison to everyone else at Mythos Academy, with only my Gypsy gift to rely on.
“But you haven’t had the training the rest of us have,” Daphne pointed out. “Your mom and your grandma sheltered you from all that stuff. I started using a bow when I was three years old. It took me a long time to learn how to use it and all the other weapons we train with—and even longer to think I could actually hurt someone with them.”
“Do you think you could do it?” I asked. “Do you think you could kill a Reaper if you had to?”
The Valkyrie thought about it. “I think so, after everything I’ve seen—all the other kids, parents, and professors who have been murdered by them over the years. I hope so, because I know that if I didn’t kill the Reaper, then he would kill me—without hesitating.”
Even though I was still lying under the thermal blankets, Daphne’s words made me shiver, because I knew they were true. Anybody who’d gone to all the trouble to start an
avalanche
wouldn’t hesitate to run me through with a sword if he got the chance.
“Just do what the profs want and stay in the hotel until we head back to the academy, okay, Gwen?” Daphne said, her black eyes full of concern. “I don’t want you to get hurt, and I know Metis and the others don’t either. Not even Nickamedes, even if he doesn’t act like it.”
I could have argued with her about the librarian, but I just blew out a breath and nodded. “Yeah, I’ll be a good girl from now on.”
Daphne smiled and took my hand again. “Good.”
I smiled back, even though the fingers on my other hand were firmly crossed. Yeah, maybe it was silly, but crossing my fingers made me feel a little better about lying to my best friend. But in this case, it was necessary. Because not only was I freaked out about what had happened today, but I was seriously pissed off about it, too.
Maybe I hadn’t had the warrior training the other kids had. Maybe I wasn’t as good with a sword as Daphne, Logan, and the other students were. Maybe I wasn’t as strong or quick or tough or brave. But I had my psychometry magic, and I was Nike’s freaking
Champion
. Those things had to count for something. Otherwise, what was the point of me being at Mythos Academy in the first place?
But the most important thing was the fact that the Reaper was after
me
. He wanted to kill
me
. Not anyone else, just
me
.

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