Halloween Frost Read online

  HALLOWEEN FROST

  by

  Jennifer Estep

  A Mythos Academy short story

  Halloween Frost

  Copyright 2011 and 2016 by Jennifer Estep

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual or fictional characters or actual or fictional events, locales, business establishments, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The fictional characters in this story have no relation to any other fictional characters, except those in works by this author.

  All rights reserved by the author.

  Author’s Digital Edition

  ISBN: 978-0-9861885-2-7

  Cover Art Copyright 2016 by Jennifer Zemanek/Seedlings Design Studio

  Digital Formatting by Author E.M.S.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Other books by Jennifer Estep

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  HALLOWEEN FROST

  About the Author

  Other books by Jennifer Estep

  The Mythos Academy series

  Books

  Touch of Frost

  Kiss of Frost

  Dark Frost

  Crimson Frost

  Midnight Frost

  Killer Frost

  E-novellas and short stories

  First Frost

  Halloween Frost

  Spartan Frost

  The Elemental Assassin series

  Books

  Spider’s Bite

  Web of Lies

  Venom

  Tangled Threads

  Spider’s Revenge

  By a Thread

  Widow’s Web

  Deadly Sting

  Heart of Venom

  The Spider

  Poison Promise

  Black Widow

  Spider’s Trap

  Bitter Bite

  Unraveled

  Snared

  E-novellas

  Thread of Death

  Parlor Tricks (from the Carniepunk anthology)

  Kiss of Venom

  Unwanted

  Nice Guys Bite

  The Black Blade series

  Cold Burn of Magic

  Dark Heart of Magic

  Bright Blaze of Magic

  The Bigtime series

  Karma Girl

  Hot Mama

  Jinx

  A Karma Girl Christmas (holiday story)

  Nightingale

  Fandemic

  Dedication

  To all the fans of the Mythos Academy series who wanted to read this story, this one’s for you.

  To my mom, grandma, and Andre—for everything.

  Author’s Note

  It’s Halloween at Mythos Academy, and Gwen Frost and her friends are ready to have a little fun. But when a mythological monster shows up, the night turns out to be more trick than treat.

  Halloween Frost takes place in between the events of Touch of Frost, book #1, and Kiss of Frost, book #2, in the Mythos Academy young adult urban fantasy series. The short story is about 6,500 words.

  Halloween Frost was originally published in Entangled, A Paranormal Anthology, in 2011.

  HALLOWEEN FROST

  “Don’t you think we’re a little old for trick-or-treating?”

  Daphne Cruz, my best friend, opened up a tube of lip gloss and looked in the mirror. “Are you kidding? Absolutely not. Halloween’s one of my favorite holidays.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “And why is that?”

  “Because,” Daphne said, putting some pale pink gloss on her lips, “we get to dress up, get free candy, and stay out late. What’s not to like?”

  It was a little after six o’clock, and the two of us were in my dorm room at Mythos Academy. Even though it was a school night, it was also Halloween, and Daphne was determined to drag me out trick-or-treating with her, even though I would have been just as happy staying in my room reading comic books the rest of the night.

  Daphne had meant what she said about loving Halloween, because she’d gone all out with her costume. My friend wore a gorgeous pink flapper dress covered with fringe and hundreds of tiny crystals, along with matching high heels. Several strings of real pearls hung from her neck, adding even more shine to her costume. Her blond hair was curled into flat waves against her head, and her subtle makeup made her amber skin look absolutely flawless.

  Daphne capped the tube and dropped her lip gloss into a small beaded purse, causing princess-pink sparks of magic to shoot out of her fingertips. The sparks matched the flash of the crystals on her dress before winking out a few seconds later. The magic sparks were one of the things that made Daphne a Valkyrie, along with her superstrength.

  Finally satisfied with her appearance, Daphne turned to look at me. “Aren’t you going to change? Where’s your costume?”

  “This is my costume.”

  Her black eyes flicked over my sneakers, jeans, T-shirt, and gray hoodie. “That’s not a costume. That’s just what you wear every day—every single day.”

  It was true. Jeans and hoodies were pretty much my outfit of choice, and I looked rather plain standing next to Daphne in her shimmering dress. I hadn’t even done anything different with my hair tonight, although the loose brown waves seemed to bring out my pale skin and violet eyes a little more than usual. Or maybe that was just my own wishful thinking.

  “Seriously, Gwen, aren’t you going to change into something else?” Daphne asked. “Some sort of costume?”

  “Ah, but this is a costume.” I held my hands out wide. “Right now, I’m just Gwen Frost, that weird Gypsy girl who touches stuff and see things.”

  I walked over to my desk, picked up a black leather scabbard that held a sword, and brandished the weapon at Daphne. “But now, I’m Gwen Frost, Gypsy girl, Nike’s Champion, and warrior in training. See the difference?”

  Daphne snorted. “The only thing I see is how impossible you are. Tell me again why we’re friends?”

  “Because I hooked you up with your dream guy.”

  “Oh, yeah. That.” Daphne’s voice was sarcastic, but a smile creased her face.

  “I agree with Gwen,” a voice with an English accent piped up. “This is all utter nonsense if you ask me.”

  I looked down at the sword, which was where the voice had come from. Instead of being plain and featureless, the sword’s hilt was shaped like half of a man’s face, complete with an ear, a nose, a mouth, and one round, bulging eye that wasn’t quite purple but wasn’t really gray either. The weapon had been given to me by Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, when she’d chosen me to be her Champion, the girl who helped her fight Reapers of Chaos here in the mortal realm. Vic was the sword’s name, and I’d quickly learned that he had opinions and attitude to spare, along with his cool, slightly snooty English accent.

  “Halloween. It’s quite ridiculous if you ask me.” Vic sniffed. “Putting on silly costumes, asking strangers for candy, and trying to scare each other to death in the meantime. There are enough real monsters in the world, you know. You warriors don’t have to dress up like them too.”

  Yeah, Daphne and I knew all about the monsters in the world, nasty things like Nemean prowlers that could rip a person to pieces. That’s why we were here at Mythos Academy in the first place. From the outside, the academy looked like just another fancy boarding school, some place that rich parents sent their spoiled kids to so they could get a proper education and make all the right connections before going off to an Ivy League college. But really, Mythos was a school for the descendants of ancient warriors like Valkyries, Amazons, Spartans, and more.

  Daphne, me, and all
the other warrior whiz kids were here at Mythos learning how to use our magic and training with weapons so we could fight Reapers of Chaos, some bad guys who wanted to free the evil god Loki from his mythological prison and plunge the world into a second Chaos War.

  “Well, I happen to like Halloween,” Daphne said, putting her hands on her hips and glaring at the sword.

  “Hmph. I’d rather eat Reaper blood than chocolate bars any day,” Vic said.

  I winced at his words. I knew that Vic was a sword, but still, it always surprised me how totally bloodthirsty he was. Vic was always talking about fighting Reapers, cutting them to pieces, and munching on their bones. I’d barely survived going up against Jasmine Ashton, a Reaper who’d tried to kill me recently. I had no desire to run into another Reaper anytime soon or one of the Nemean prowlers they used as oversize, kitty-cat assassins.

  Daphne and Vic glared at each other a few more seconds before the Valkyrie looked at me again.

  “Come on, Gypsy girl,” Daphne said, linking her arm through mine. “Let’s go have some fun.”

  * * *

  Carson Callahan, Daphne’s boyfriend, was waiting downstairs in the common area of Styx Hall, my dorm. Carson had dressed up in a dapper black suit complete with glossy wing tips and a black fedora that covered his brown hair. The pink ribbon around the base of his hat matched Daphne’s flapper costume. Together, the two of them looked like they’d just stepped out of some movie about the Roaring Twenties. Carson’s brown eyes lit up at the sight of the pretty Valkyrie.

  “You look amazing,” he said, slipping his fingers through Daphne’s.

  She blushed. “Thanks. So do you.”

  My friends stood there staring dreamily into each other’s eyes, as though there weren’t anyone else left in the entire world but the two of them. I was all for new love, but I didn’t like being ignored, so I cleared my throat. Carson peered through his black glasses at me, like he hadn’t even noticed me until this very second.

  “Oh, hi, Gwen.” He frowned. “Where’s your costume?”

  Daphne snorted again. “You don’t want to know. Come on. I want to hit the stores before all the good candy is gone.”

  We left Styx Hall, stepped onto one of the ash-gray cobblestone paths that wound past the student dorms, and walked down to the twelve-foot-high stone wall that ringed the Mythos Academy campus. Normally, the main iron gate would be shut and locked since students weren’t supposed to leave the grounds during school nights, but the gate stood wide open tonight, and a steady stream of kids marched through, ready for an evening of Halloween fun.

  Daphne, Carson, and I stepped into the flow of traffic. Stone sphinxes perched on the wall on either side of the gate, their open eyes seeming to track the movements of the students walking by below. The sphinxes were some of the many statues at the academy, and they always creeped me out. The sphinxes seemed a little too lifelike for my peace of mind, like the stone was just a thin shell that covered a real monster underneath—one that could leap down and eat me any time it wanted to. I shivered and dropped my gaze from the statues.

  The academy was located in Cypress Mountain, North Carolina, a suburb that was up in the mountains above the city of Asheville. Daphne, Carson, and I headed across the road that wound by the academy and into the suburb itself. Tourists flocked to Cypress Mountain year-round because of all the primo shops that sold everything from designer clothes to expensive jewelry to high-end art. What the tourists didn’t know was that the boutiques were really located here to take advantage of the credit cards and limitless trust funds of the academy’s rich students.

  The store owners in Cypress Mountain must have loved Halloween just as much as Daphne did, because they’d gone all out with the spooky decorations. Carved jack-o’-lanterns lined all the cobblestone streets, the lit candles inside them flickering and making their grins seem particularly sinister in the darkening shadows. Thick, silvery webs complete with fat, rubber spiders swooped from one doorway to the next, while ghosts, ghouls, and other classic monsters could be seen in the storefront windows, arms outstretched like they wanted to break through the glass and grab the students strolling by.

  But those weren’t the only decorations I saw. There were also statues—lots and lots of statues. But they weren’t your normal cutesy garden gnomes or other flowery lawn ornaments. Oh, no. These statues were of monsters—Nemean prowlers, to be exact.

  Prowlers were basically like black panthers, only much bigger, much stronger, and much, much deadlier. The prowlers that I’d seen in real life had seemed to be more teeth and claws than anything else, and the statues that lined the street were no exception. The stone monstrosities were all longer than I was tall, and most of the statues showed the prowlers with their lips drawn back in snarling smiles, revealing their razor-sharp teeth. I guessed the statues were just the Mythos Academy version of the black cats that other folks might use for their Halloween decorations.

  But the worst thing was that the statues’ eyes seemed to follow my every movement, my every step, my every breath even, just like the sphinxes at the academy gate had earlier. Like the prowlers were just patiently watching and waiting until I was alone so they could break out of their stone shells and kill me until I was dead, dead, dead.

  “Statues,” I muttered. “More freaking statues. Great. Just great.”

  “What, Gwen?” Carson asked, turning to look at me. “What did you say?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  We got some hollow plastic orange pumpkins that one of the stores was handing out and went from shop to shop, loading up our pumpkins with everything from gourmet pretzels to delicious brownies to candy apples bigger than my fist. I had a serious sweet tooth and quickly filled up my pumpkin, even though we hadn’t gone through half the stores yet. I popped a piece of dark chocolate fudge topped with vanilla-raspberry syrup into my mouth and sighed as the rich flavors exploded on my tongue. Yum. So good.

  To my surprise, the shops weren’t just handing out free candy tonight. Weapons, armor, clothing, jewelry. Many of the stores were giving away expensive replicas of the various artifacts that the members of the Pantheon, the good guys, had used to fight Loki and his Reapers during the long, bloody Chaos War.

  We stopped in one jewelry store that was passing out beautiful rings made of clear, sparkling, heart-shaped crystals held together with thin silver wire. Supposedly, the rings were modeled after one worn by Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love.

  “Meh.” Daphne put the ring back down on the glass counter with all the others just like it. “Last year, they were giving away necklaces with real diamonds in them.”

  Sometimes, I didn’t think that I’d ever get used to how casual Daphne and the other rich academy kids were about money—especially since I used my magic to make extra cash.

  I was a Gypsy, which meant that I’d been gifted with magic by one of the gods. In my case, that god was Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, and that magic was psychometry, a fancy way of saying that I could touch any object and immediately know, feel, and see its history. I could see every person who’d ever picked up a book or used a sword, and I could feel their emotions too—if they’d been bored or brave or scared to death. My Gypsy gift let me uncover people’s deepest, darkest secrets no matter how hard they tried to hide them from me—or even themselves.

  I also used my magic to find things that the Mythos kids lost—wallets, keys, cell phones, purses, laptops. Of course, when something was missing, I couldn’t actually touch it, but usually, all I had to do to find a girl’s cell phone was walk around her room, touch her furniture, and see where the vibes that I got off her desk and dresser led me. Most of the time, I’d flash on an image of the girl throwing her phone into a drawer, then forgetting where she’d put it. Phone found, and yours truly, Gwen Frost, was a couple hundred bucks richer.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, picking up one of the rings and putting it in my plastic pumpkin. “It may not be made out o
f real diamonds, but I still think it’s pretty. I might give it to my Grandma Frost. She wears stacks of rings.”

  Daphne shook her head, and we walked on to the next store.

  The whole town of Cypress Mountain had been closed down and taken over by Mythos students for the night, along with the professors and other folks who worked at the academy. Professor Metis, my myth-history teacher. Coach Ajax, the guy who oversaw all the weapons training and athletic programs. Nickamedes, the head honcho at the Library of Antiquities. I spotted them in the crowd of people moving in and out of shops on the main drag, along with one face that made my heart pound in my chest.

  Logan Quinn.

  The sexy Spartan warrior stood across the street outside the jewelry store that we’d been in a few minutes ago. Thick, wavy, black hair, lean, muscled body, ice-blue eyes. Logan was cute enough in regular clothes, but tonight, he’d dressed up in black leather and sandals like one of his ancient Spartan ancestors. He carried a bronze sword, and a matching shield was strapped to his left arm. He looked absolutely gorgeous—fierce and strong and brave all at the same time, just like I knew he was.

  Logan had saved my life a couple of times recently, and as a result, I’d developed a mad, mad crush on the Spartan. Even now, despite the fact that he’d told me that we couldn’t be together, part of me wanted to go over and talk to him, to see his sexy grin spread across his face, and listen to him tease me about how I wasn’t wearing a costume like everyone else.