Touch of Frost (6 page)

Authors: Jennifer Estep

BOOK: Touch of Frost

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Ten minutes later, I put away the last book, grabbed the cart, and tried to steer it back to the checkout counter. But, of course, the metal contraption had a life of its own and zoomed toward yet another case. I managed to stop the cart just before it slammed into the glass.

“Stupid wheel,” I muttered.

I walked around the cart and was trying to shove it back from the other side when a wink of silver caught my eye. Curious, I looked down into the case that I was standing next to.

A sword lay inside it, one of hundreds in the library. My eyes skimmed over the glass, looking for the plaque that would tell me whose sword it was and what she’d done with it that was so freaking special. But there wasn’t a plaque on the case. No silver plate on the outside, no little white card on the inside, nothing. Weird. Every other case that I’d seen had had some sort of ID on or in it. Maybe Nickamedes had forgotten about this one, since it was way back here in the stacks in no-man’s-land.

I should have shoved the cart into the aisle, gone back to the checkout counter, and packed up my messenger bag so I could leave the very
second
that Nickamedes came back. But for some reason, I found myself stopping and looking down at the sword once more.

It was a simple enough sword—a long blade made out of a dull silver metal with a hilt that was just a little bit bigger than my hand. A small weapon, compared to some of the enormous crowbars that I’d seen in the library.

Still, something about the shape of the sword seemed . . . familiar to me. Like I’d seen it before. Maybe there had been an illustration of it in my myth-history book. Maybe some bad guy had used it in the Chaos War, if it had ever even really taken place. I snorted. Probably not.

I cocked my head to the side, trying to figure out why the sword was so interesting. And I realized that the hilt almost looked like . . . a face. Like half of a man’s face had somehow been inlaid into the metal. There was a slash of a mouth, a groove of a nose, the curve of an ear, even a round bulge that looked like an eye. Weird. But it wasn’t ugly. It looked almost . . .
alive.

There were some words on it, too. I could just see them glinting on the blade right above the hilt, like they’d been carved into the metal there. I squinted, but I couldn’t quite make out what they were.
V-i-c—Vic
something, I thought, leaning close enough to leave a nose print on the smooth glass—

CRASH!

Startled by the sudden noise, I jumped back and pressed myself against the bookshelf. Eyes wide, heart in my throat, blood pounding in my ears. What the hell was that?

I didn’t consider myself to be a scaredy-cat, and I certainly wasn’t some wimpy girly-girl who was afraid of her own shadow. But my mom had been a police detective. She’d told me lots of horror stories about people getting mugged and worse. And the Library of Antiquities wasn’t exactly as warm and friendly as a park on a summer day. Nothing was at Mythos.

Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t heard anything while I’d been shelving books. No sounds, no rustles of clothes, nothing to indicate there was anyone left but me in the entire library—

Something cold and hard dug into my palm. I looked down and found that I’d wrapped my hand around the glass case, my fingers curled around the metal clasp, a second away from opening it and grabbing the weapon inside.

But the really strange thing was that the sword was staring at me.

The cover on the bulge on the hilt had slid up, revealing a pale eye that regarded me with a cold, steady stare. It was an odd color, too, not quite purple and not quite gray either—

Then, my brain kicked in and reminded me that this was all super, super
creepy.
I shrieked and stumbled away from the glass. My shoulder hit the edge of one of the bookcases, and I hissed as the sting of it flooded my body.

But the small pain lessened some of my panic. Deep down, I knew that my imagination was totally playing tricks on me. Swords didn’t have eyes, not even in a place as crazy as Mythos Academy. And they certainly didn’t
stare
at people. Especially not someone like me, that unimportant, nerdy Gypsy girl who saw things.

And the noise? That was probably just books that some kid had stacked up crooked on a shelf, finally toppling over. Probably done on purpose just to scare whoever was in the library this late. It had happened before, usually to me.

I stood there a second more to calm my racing heart, then pushed away from the bookcase. I thought about just grabbing the cart and forcing it back to the main library desk, loose wheel and all. But I had to look at the sword first. I had to convince myself that I wasn’t going crazy. That I wasn’t actually starting to
believe
all the stuff that Professor Metis kept spouting at us in myth-history class about evil gods and ancient warriors and Chaos and the end of the world and blah, blah, blah.

So I risked a quick glance over my shoulder. The bulge that I’d thought had been an eye before was nothing more than a bump on the hilt. Completely covered, completely silver, completely normal. Nothing more. It certainly wasn’t
staring
at me.

I let out a sigh of relief. Okay. Gwen wasn’t losing her mind just yet. Good to know.

I grabbed the cart and pushed it back toward the counter. Screw Nickamedes and his pissy attitude. Creepy swords and weird noises were enough for me. I was leaving. Now.

I broke free of the stacks and rounded the end of the aisle. I was halfway back toward the counter when I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I glanced over to my left.

And that’s when I saw her.

Jasmine Ashton.

The blond Valkyrie lay on her back in front of the case that Nickamedes had shown me earlier tonight, the one with Loki’s supposed Bowl of Tears in it.

Except all the glass on the case had been shattered and there was no Bowl inside of it anymore.

And someone or something had slit Jasmine’s throat from ear to ear.

I froze, not sure what was going on. I blinked a few times, but the scene didn’t change. Broken case. Stolen Bowl. A girl with a big, bloody slash across her pale throat.

I stood there another moment, shocked and dumbstruck, before my brain kicked in and started working once more. I pushed the cart out of the way and ran over to Jasmine. My foot slipped out from under me, and I put my hand down to brace myself. Something wet and cold and sticky covered my fingers, making me flinch. I raised up my hand to find it coated with blood—Jasmine’s blood.

It was
everywhere.
Under the smashed case. Beside it. Splashed up onto the wooden tables. Puddles of the Valkyrie’s blood covered the floor like crimson water that hadn’t been mopped up.

“Oh, shit!”

I was almost hyperventilating, so I made myself take deep breaths the way that my mom had always told me to whenever I got panicked. Whenever I was in a bad, bad situation. After several seconds, I felt better. At least, good enough to pick my way through the pools of blood over to where Jasmine lay.

Strawberry-blond hair. Blue eyes. Beautiful face. Designer clothes. The Valkyrie looked the same as she always did—except for the slash in her throat and the knife on the floor next to her. A long curved gold dagger with an enormous ruby set into the hilt. The lights made the gem glint and gleam, like a giant red eye watching me. For some reason, the dagger was the only thing here that wasn’t covered with blood. Bizarre.

I crouched down beside Jasmine, trying not to stare at the horrible wound on her throat. I couldn’t tell if she was still breathing or not, and there was only one way to find out.

I had to touch her.

And I really, really didn’t want to.

As much as I liked learning people’s secrets, I knew that my Gypsy gift would kick in the second that I put my fingers on the Valkyrie’s skin. Then, I would see and feel and experience exactly what Jasmine had when her throat had been cut. It would be
horrible,
just as horrible as seeing all the awful things that Paige’s stepdad had been doing to her. Maybe even worse.

But there was no getting around it. I had to find out if Jasmine was still alive. I’d taken CPR in health class at my old school last year, so maybe I could help her—or at least run and find someone who could. I had to try, anyway. I just couldn’t stand here and do nothing, not when Jasmine looked so—so
broken.

So I crouched down and stretched out my trembling hand toward her neck. My fingers loomed closer to her pale skin, before finally jerking forward and making contact.

I closed my eyes and bit my lip, expecting to be overwhelmed with emotions and feelings. Expecting to feel all the pain and terror and fear that Jasmine just had. Expecting to be overcome with all those horrible emotions and just start screaming—

I felt nothing.

Not fear, not terror, and especially not pain. Nothing. I didn’t even get the faintest flicker of feeling off Jasmine’s body. No vibes, no flashes, nothing. I frowned and pushed my fingers deeper into her neck, placing my whole hand on her skin just above the cut on her throat.

Still nothing.

Weird. Really weird. I always saw something, always felt
something,
especially when I was actually touching someone, in this case someone who’d just had her throat brutally sliced open—

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a quick, furtive movement. But before I could turn and see what it was, something cold and heavy slammed into my temple. A bright, white flash of pain exploded in front of my eyes, before the darkness swallowed me.

Chapter 5

The first thing I was aware of was the voices. Low, steady voices that seemed to bore into my skull like a dentist’s whiny drill. They kept on talking, one after another. Each one sent another spike of pain through my head.

“. . . obviously after the Bowl; Jasmine just got in the way. . . .”

“. . . but why kill her? It doesn’t make sense. . . .”

“. . . Reapers don’t have to make sense. . . .”

“Shut up,” I mumbled.

The voices stopped, and I started to sink back down into the quiet blackness—

“Gwen?” a familiar voice murmured.

“Mom?” I mumbled again.

A hand smoothed back my hair. “No, Gwen. Not your mom. Can you open your eyes for me, please?”

Then I remembered. My mom was dead. Killed by some drunk driver. And I was stuck here at Warrior Freaks R Us. My heart squeezed in on itself, aching even more than my head did, and a hot tear trickled out of the corner of my eye before I could stop it. I missed my mom so much. I missed everything so much. My old school, my old friends, and everything else that I’d lost just because I’d wanted to know another girl’s secret—

“Gwen?” the voice asked again, more insistent this time. “Come on. Open your eyes for me, please.”

My head still hurt, but after a few seconds of concentrating I managed to crack open my eyes, letting the light trickle in.

Black hair, bronze skin, green eyes, silver glasses. Professor Metis’s hazy face swam before me, and I had to blink several times before she came into focus.

“Professor Metis? What’s going on?” I asked, struggling to sit up.

Metis put her hand under my back and helped me up into a sitting position. My brain swam around inside my skull for a few seconds before it snapped back into place and the world stopped spinning.

To my surprise, I was still in the Library of Antiquities, although I was now lying on top of one of the tables instead of in the middle of the cold marble floor.

Other people were in here now, too. Like Coach Ajax, the big, burly, biker-looking, tattooed guy who oversaw the athletic programs and trained all the kids. Ajax stood a few feet away talking to Nickamedes. The coach’s onyx skin glistened under the library’s golden lights, and his chiseled muscles twitched and jumped with every move he made. He looked like the kind of guy who could break concrete blocks with his bare hands.

As if sensing my stare, the two men turned and walked over to us. They both nodded to Professor Metis, who nodded back.

“Gwen,” Metis said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “I’m glad to see you’re feeling better.”

“Professor? What are you doing here?” I asked, still confused.

Metis gestured at the two men. “Ajax, Nickamedes, and I make up the academy’s security council. We’re responsible for the safety of everyone at Mythos, for protecting students and staff from Reapers of Chaos and other threats. So we really need to know what happened here tonight. Do you think you can tell me what you saw? It’s very important, Gwen. We don’t want anyone else to get . . . hurt.”

Hurt.
Well, I supposed that was a polite way of saying what had happened to Jasmine, instead of the ugly truth—the fact that she’d been brutally attacked.

Their eyes fixed on my face. Metis’s gaze green and understanding, Coach Ajax’s black and hard, Nickamedes’s blue and suspicious.

I drew in a breath and told the three of them about working in the library. How I’d been shelving the last of the books when I’d heard a crashing sound. How I’d thought it was just some books falling over, only to come out of the stacks and find Jasmine sprawled underneath the smashed glass case with her throat cut and blood everywhere.

“I went over to try to help her,” I said in a shaky voice. “I was feeling her throat for a pulse when somebody . . . somebody hit me.”

I looked over at the case, expecting to see nothing but broken glass. But Jasmine was still there, still lying in thick puddles of her own crimson blood, her sightless blue eyes staring up at the ceiling.

My throat closed in on itself. “Is she—”

“Dead,” Coach Ajax rumbled in his deep voice. “Bled out.”

Nobody said anything.

“Are you sure there’s nothing else you remember?” Professor Metis asked. “Even the smallest detail might be helpful, might help us catch the person who did this.”

I thought back, trying to remember, but nothing came to mind. My head still hurt too much for that. I reached up and touched my left temple. A lump the size of a robin’s egg thumped under my fingers, and I winced at the sharp pain that stabbed through my skull.

I dropped my hand into my lap, looked down, and realized that I was covered in blood—Jasmine’s blood. It was on my sneakers, on my jeans, and all over the front of my T-shirt and hoodie. And worst of all, dull brown bloodstains covered my hands like a coat of dried paint.

I sucked in a breath, waiting for my pyschometry to kick in and show me Jasmine’s murder, to let me feel all the horrible pain that she must have experienced. Any second now, it would start. It always did.

But the seconds slid by and turned into a minute, then another one. And still, nothing happened. I didn’t get any flashes or vibes from Jasmine’s blood. Not a single one. Just like I hadn’t gotten any from touching her body. Strange. Even for me. Maybe my psychometry was on the fritz or something because of the massive migraine that I had. For once, I was happy that I didn’t see anything. Even though I wasn’t getting any vibes from it, the sight of Jasmine’s blood on my skin and clothes still made me want to vomit. I curled my stained hands into fists and looked away from them.

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember anything else,” I said in a low voice.

“Well, I think it’s rather obvious what happened,” Nickamedes said. “A Reaper slipped into the library and stole the Bowl of Tears. Jasmine, unfortunately, got in the way and was killed as a result.”

Despite everything that had happened and the fact that my head was still pounding, I frowned. That didn’t seem right to me—not right at all. Mainly because Jasmine had already been in the library earlier. Why would she come back so late? And especially without her friends? Jasmine never went anywhere without her doting entourage of Valkyrie princesses. They were always stacked on top of her like LEGOs.

But the one thought that kept beating through my brain right along with the pain was:
Why? Why her and not me? Why had she died and I hadn’t? Why had I been spared again? Why was I always the one left behind to pick up the bloody, broken pieces?

“I told you that you were taking a risk putting it on display,” Coach Ajax said. “The Bowl of Tears is exactly the kind of thing that the Reapers would love to get their hands on. It’s one of the Thirteen Artifacts, after all.”

Nickamedes shrugged. “There are dozens of things here that the Reapers would love to get their hands on, and there are security spells on all of them to keep them from being taken out of the library. I just don’t understand how the Reaper could have gotten the Bowl out of the library without sounding the alarm—much less slipped onto campus to start with. None of the alarms were tripped on the outer wall, at the main gate, or here in the library. I thought that the perimeter security spells were strong enough, and I double-checked the ones on the Bowl myself this morning.”

“Obviously not,” Ajax muttered.

The two men glared at each other, and Professor Metis stepped in between them.

“Enough,” she said. “I’ll call the cleanup crew and alert the others. I’m sure the academy board will want to increase campus security, magical and otherwise, at least for a few days, until we’re sure that whoever did this isn’t coming back for more artifacts.”

Coach Ajax and Nickamedes glared at each other a few more seconds before they both nodded. Then, the two of them, along with Metis, moved off a few feet and started talking about what to do and who to notify.

They weren’t as upset by this as I’d thought they’d be. It almost seemed . . .
normal
to them. Like something that had happened before. At my old school, the teachers would have
freaked out
if a girl had been murdered in the library. But here, it didn’t seem that shocking. More like . . . an inconvenience. With paperwork to do, calls to make, and blood to clean up. Or something like that.

Well, it wasn’t normal to me, not at all, and all I could do was stare down at Jasmine. So pretty, so popular, so rich, and what had it gotten her? Nothing but an early death. I thought about Paige Forrest and how she’d been the same way. Pretty and popular, but with this horrible secret, with this horrible thing that had been happening to her that nobody knew about.

I wondered if Jasmine was the same way. If she’d had some secret reason for coming back to the library tonight. If there was something more to this than just some mysterious anonymous bad guy stealing a magical, mythological bowl—

“Gwen?” Professor Metis’s voice made me jump. “I’ll take you back to your dorm room now, if you like.”

I stared down a final time at Jasmine’s lifeless body and the sticky crimson puddles all around her. It almost looked like the Valkyrie was resting on a giant red pillow, instead of being cold, bloody, and dead. I shuddered and looked away.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like that a lot right now.”

Metis said something else to Coach Ajax and Nickamedes; then the two of us left the library. It was after ten now, and the quad was deserted. Moonlight frosted everything a bright, glittering silver, even the two gryphons that sat at the base of the library steps. My breath steamed in the cool night air, and I put my bloody hands into my pockets, trying to protect them from the chill. But no matter what I did, I just couldn’t get warm.

We didn’t speak until we were halfway across the quad.

“I know this must be difficult for you, Gwen. Finding Jasmine the way that you did,” Professor Metis said. “But this isn’t the first time something like this has happened at Mythos.”

My eyes widened. “You mean students have been murdered before? Here at the academy?”

She nodded. “A few.”

“How? Why?”

“By Reapers mostly. The students had something that they wanted or got in their way, just like Jasmine did tonight. Or the students were working for the Reapers and did something wrong, something that got them killed. In a few cases, students have actually been Reapers themselves.”

Kids my age? Working for the bad guys? Being Reapers themselves? I didn’t know what to make of that.

Metis stared at me. “I know that the academy, this world, is new to you, that you don’t really believe in any of this. In the gods, the warriors, the myths, the Chaos War, any of it. I can tell by the way you’re always staring out the window during my class. You recite the facts to me, but your mind’s not really there.”

Her voice was gentle, but I still winced. I thought that I’d hid my disbelief a little better than that. Since my mom had died, I’d gotten pretty good at faking things. Like telling Grandma Frost that everything was fine at my new school. Or convincing myself that I didn’t really care that I didn’t have any friends. That it didn’t bother me that no one would talk to me. That I was as tough and strong and brave as my mom had been, when all I really wanted to do was curl up on my bed and cry myself to sleep every night. I might be able to see other people’s secrets, but I had some of my own, too—ones that I desperately wanted to keep hidden.

“But it’s real, Gwen. All of it. Whether you believe it or not,” Metis continued. “Reapers of Chaos are everywhere, even here at Mythos. They can be anyone—parents, teachers, your fellow students. And they will do whatever it takes to get what they want.”

“What is it that they want, exactly?” I asked. “Why are they the bad guys?”

Metis sighed. “You really haven’t been paying attention in class, have you?”

I winced again.

“The Reapers want one thing—to free Loki from the prison realm that the other gods have placed him in. And we, the students and teachers here, the members of the Pantheon, are at war with them, trying to prevent that from happening. That’s what all the students here are being trained for. To learn how to fight with whatever skills and magic that they have to keep Loki from escaping from his prison. That’s why losing the Bowl of Tears is such a big blow. It’s an old artifact with a lot of magic, with a lot of power, and it can help the Reapers get closer to freeing Loki.”

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