Jennifer Estep Bundle Read online

  Mom was a little weird that way, always talking about gods and goddesses as if they were real and not just characters in the mythological stories that she’d read to me when I was a kid. Ares, Athena, some warrior chicks named Nike and Sigyn. Mom called all the gods and goddesses by name, like she knew them on a personal basis or something. Yeah, it was totally embarrassing whenever she said something about the gods in front of my friends, but I loved her too much to be mean and tell her so. Most of the time, anyway.

  “I’ll stay here and deal with the doctors,” Grandma Frost said. “You go help that poor girl, Grace.”

  My mom nodded and turned back to me. “Bye, baby. I’ll be home tonight as soon as I can.”

  She touched my cheek, and once again, I felt the warmth of her love wash over me, taking all my troubles with it. My mom smiled, then left the room.

  Grandma Frost stayed with me in the hospital. The doctors wanted to run some more tests, mainly brain scans, to try to figure out why I’d had such a freak-out in the locker room. Of course, Grandma couldn’t exactly tell them the truth—that my Gypsy gift had made me see something so awful that my brain had basically been overloaded with pain and gone haywire. They’d probably want to scan her brain then, if she started talking about my psychometry.

  Mom and Grandma didn’t hide the fact that we were Gypsies who had magic, but they didn’t exactly advertise it, either. We used our gifts, but we didn’t explain them to people or brag about the things we could do. The magic was just a part of us, along with our violet eyes and the Frost family name, and no one had ever really asked many questions about our powers—except me.

  It took some arguing on Grandma Frost’s part, but since the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me, they eventually discharged me that afternoon.

  Grandma took me to her house, which was located a few streets over from the downtown district in Asheville. I stayed with Grandma on the nights that Mom had to work late, so I had my own room there. Grandma insisted that I stay in bed for the rest of the day, but she let me call Bethany.

  “Gwen!” Bethany shrieked in my ear. “Are you okay? What was wrong with you?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m at my grandma’s house. The doctors think I had a seizure or something. They ran some tests, but they said I’ll be fine. I’ll be back at school tomorrow. I don’t even get a day off.”

  “Well, whatever it was, it was freaky,” Bethany said. “Especially since you kept right on screaming even after you passed out. You were yelling and thrashing around like you were possessed or something the whole time. Everyone at school’s talking about it.”

  I winced. “They are?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Bethany said. “Everybody was texting about it.”

  I sighed. So now I was going to be even more of a freak than I already was. Gwen Frost, the seizure girl. Great. There went any chance I had of finding a date for the sophomore prom, which was coming up in a few days. I might have dumped Drew, but I was still going to the prom, since my mom had found the perfect dress for me.

  “What about Paige?” I asked.

  “What about her?” I could hear the confusion in Bethany’s voice. “She was just as scared as the rest of us were.”

  I wondered about that, especially when I remembered the weird look Paige had given me before I’d picked up her hairbrush, but I didn’t ask Bethany any more questions about Paige. She wouldn’t know the answers, anyway.

  I talked to Bethany a few more minutes before Grandma came into my room and said that I needed to get some rest. I told Bethany I’d see her tomorrow and hung up. I spent the rest of the day lazing in bed and reading the comic books I had stashed in my messenger bag. Grandma Frost had stopped at school and picked up my bag on the way home from the hospital. She’d also gotten my homework assignments for the classes I’d missed, but I’d do those later. I figured I deserved to slack off a little.

  Grandma made a great dinner of spicy, Southwestern chicken, black bean salsa, and roasted sweet potatoes. For dessert, we had sticky-sweet apple enchiladas sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and topped with vanilla bean ice cream. I didn’t eat much, though. I was too busy thinking about Paige and what might be happening to her.

  My mom finally called late that night.

  “It’s done,” she said in a weary voice. “I told Paige that I was your mom and got her to talk to me. She told me exactly what you saw with your psychometry, and I arrested her stepdad.”

  I let out a tense breath. “So Paige is okay now?”

  “She will be,” my mom said. “Paige’s mom is out of town on a business trip, so Paige and her sister are staying with some relatives. I called her mom, and she’s on her way back home right now. She was horrified by what I told her. She had no idea that was going on. Nobody did, except for Paige. Her stepdad threatened to start doing the same thing to her little sister if Paige told anyone what he was doing to her.”

  We didn’t say anything for several seconds.

  “You did a good thing today, Gwen,” my mom finally said in a gentle voice. “A really good thing. I’m proud of you.”

  “For what? Freaking out and screaming my head off?”

  “You know what I mean,” my mom said. “You used your psychometry magic to help someone else. That’s why we have our Gypsy gifts in the first place, you know. To help others—and ourselves, if we need to.”

  No, I didn’t know, because Mom and Grandma Frost never talked about stuff like that. They never mentioned why we were Gypsies or where our magic came from in the first place. On the rare times when I tried to talk to them about it, they got all vague and uptight, just like they did whenever I asked about my dad, Tyr, who’d died from cancer when I was two.

  I opened my mouth to ask my mom once again about who we were and why we could do the things we did, but she cut me off.

  “Anyway, I’ve still got a ton of paperwork to finish,” my mom said. “Don’t wait up for me. I’ll talk to you in the morning. I love you, Gwen.”

  For a second, I again thought about asking her about our magic, but I knew she wouldn’t answer me. She never did. Besides, she’d had a long day, helping Paige. My mom sounded tired, so I decided not to bother her tonight.

  “Love you, too,” I said, and hung up.

  I didn’t know then that this would be the last time I ever talked to her.

  I took a shower, threw on my pajamas, and crawled into bed. Grandma Frost came and tucked me in, just like she used to when I was a little girl. She turned out the light, and I snuggled under the covers and went to sleep.

  My dreams were strange that night, filled with swords and shadowy figures and a pair of burning red eyes that seemed to follow me no matter how hard I tried to get away from them. In my dreams, I ran and ran and ran, carrying a silver sword in my hand, but the eyes were always there, always chasing me. When I finally stopped running and turned to face them, the eyes kept coming, washing over me like clouds of choking smoke before they swallowed me whole—

  I woke up sweating, a scream lodged in my throat, my legs thrashing, my heart beating crazily in my chest. Thump-thump-thump. It took me a few seconds to realize that it had just been a dream and that I was safe and warm at Grandma Frost’s house. I shivered. For some reason, the fact that it was only a dream didn’t make it any less creepy. Not tonight.

  I rolled over and looked at the clock beside the bed. Three thirty-seven in the morning, but I knew I couldn’t go back to sleep, not with the image of those burning eyes still fresh in my head. The weird thing was, I couldn’t figure out where they had come from.

  Whenever I touched an object, whenever I flashed on the images and feelings associated with it, they became a part of me, and I could always remember what I’d seen. It was sort of like having a photographic memory. Sometimes, when I was asleep, my mind surfed through all those memories, showing me random bits and pieces of them, like I was watching clips from a dozen movies at once.

  But I’d never seen a pair of red
eyes before—and I definitely would have remembered those eyes and their cruel, burning glow.

  Still a little fuzzy with sleep, I got out of bed and headed toward the bathroom. Voices sounded from below, drifting up the stairs to me—low, soft, urgent. Mom must have finally made it home and was talking to Grandma. Good.

  When I finished in the bathroom, I headed downstairs to the kitchen, where Mom and Grandma always had their late-night conferences over homemade hot chocolate and whatever sweet treat my grandma had baked that day.

  But they weren’t in the kitchen, even though the lights were on. Weird. I didn’t hear the voices talking anymore, either, so I walked down the hallway and into the front of the house.

  Grandma Frost was slumped against the front door, her hand on the knob like she’d just closed it behind someone.

  “Grandma?” I whispered, a bad, bad feeling ballooning up in my stomach. “Is something wrong?”

  After a moment, Grandma Frost turned to stare at me. Tears dripped down her cheeks, filling in every single wrinkle in her skin, and she suddenly looked a hundred years old.

  I wasn’t psychic, not like my grandma was. I couldn’t see the future, but somehow, I knew what she was going to say before she opened her mouth.

  “There’s been a terrible accident,” Grandma Frost began.

  I didn’t hear the rest of her words.

  I had started screaming again.

  The next few days—no, the next few weeks—ground by in a grief-filled haze. My mom had been in a car wreck on her way home from the police station that night. A drunk driver had come out of nowhere and T-boned her car before driving off. Supposedly, my mom had died instantly. She’d been hurt so badly in the wreck that Grandma Frost refused to let me see her body, and the casket was closed at her funeral.

  Really, though, the only thing I could think about was the fact that my mom was dead—and that it was all my fault.

  If only I hadn’t picked up Paige’s hairbrush after gym class, if only I hadn’t wanted to know what she was hiding, if only I hadn’t wanted to know so badly what her secret was.

  If only I’d used Bethany’s hairbrush instead, none of this would have happened. I never would have seen what Paige’s stepdad was doing to her, and my mom would never have been out so late that night. My mom would have been home with me and not in the path of that stupid drunk driver.

  Of course, the flip side was that Paige’s stepdad would still have been abusing her and no one would have known about it. No one would have helped Paige.

  I didn’t know which idea made me sicker: my mom dying because I’d been so damn nosy, or Paige being hurt again and again because I hadn’t been. The ugly, guilty thoughts kept spinning around and around in my head, like a crazy carousel that I couldn’t stop and couldn’t get off, no matter how much I wanted to.

  I didn’t do much of anything after that. I didn’t go back to school. I didn’t do homework. I didn’t talk to my friends. I barely ate, and I hardly slept. I just stayed in my room at Grandma Frost’s house and cried.

  And cried and cried and cried some more.

  Grandma did everything she could to make me feel better. She cooked me special meals and baked me special desserts and held me when I cried. She told me over and over again that it wasn’t my fault, that it was just a quirk of the gods, a cruel twist of fate that even she hadn’t seen coming with all her psychic powers. Gods or not, fate or not, nothing she said changed my mind.

  My mom’s death was my fault—and all the guilt and blame were mine to bear.

  Alone. Forever.

  One morning, about three weeks after my mom’s funeral, a knock sounded on the front door.

  It was early and cold for May, so cold that a layer of frost had coated everything outside with a thin sheet of silver ice. The knock sounded again, but I was too busy staring out my bedroom window at nothing in particular to answer it. Besides, it was probably just one of my grandma’s clients, come to get their fortune told. Grandma Frost had started seeing people again this week, saying that she needed to keep busy, that she needed to do something besides sit around and think about the fact that her daughter was dead. She’d tried to get me to do the same—to do something, anything, to take my mind off things.

  Grandma was hurting, too, so I did my best to please her. For starters, I helped Grandma box up everything in my old house and move it over to hers, since I was living with her now. I fixed up my room just the way I wanted it, watched TV, and pretended to read my comic books, although I couldn’t remember what happened from one colorful page to the next. And when I cried, I did so in my room late at night, where Grandma wouldn’t see or hear me, even though I knew she was doing the same thing in her room down the hall.

  But nothing I did eased the ache in my heart—or helped me deal with my guilt over my mom’s death.

  “Gwen!” Grandma Frost called out several minutes later. “Come downstairs, please!”

  So it wasn’t one of her clients after all. Otherwise, Grandma would have been busy telling the person her fortune by now. I sighed, wiped the latest round of tears off my face, and plodded down to the kitchen.

  To my surprise, two people sat at the kitchen table—Grandma Frost and the woman she was drinking tea with.

  The woman lifted the blue, snowflake-covered teacup to her lips and took a small, precise sip. Then she put the cup back down, positioning it on the table just so, before looking at me. She was short, with a body that looked stocky and strong inside her black pantsuit and white shirt. Her black hair was pulled back into a bun, and her eyes were a soft green behind her silver glasses.

  She stared at me for several seconds, her gaze lingering on my face, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. I couldn’t imagine what she saw in my bleary eyes and splotchy, red cheeks that interested her so much. Finally, the woman pushed back her chair, got to her feet, and stretched out her hand in my direction.

  “Hello, Gwen,” she said. “I’m Professor Metis.”

  I looked at her hand, hovering there in the space between us. Because of my psychometry magic, I had to be careful about touching other people or letting them touch me. I got vivid vibes off objects, but I could get major, major flashes of feeling if I touched another person’s bare skin. Sometimes I could see everything a person had ever done, from all the good things she’d accomplished to all the dark, twisted secrets she held close to her heart. As bad as it had been to see what Paige’s stepdad was doing to her, the memories, the emotions, and the intensity of them would have been that much worse if I’d grabbed Paige’s hand that day instead of her hairbrush.

  “Gwen doesn’t shake hands, Professor Metis,” Grandma Frost said in what almost sounded like a warning tone.

  “Of course not,” Metis said, dropping her hand. “I forgot. My mistake. I apologize.”

  Grandma gestured toward the third chair at the table. “Sit down, Gwen. Please.”

  I did as she asked. I’d just plopped down when I realized my grandma had used my name instead of calling me pumpkin like she usually did. I sneaked a glance at Grandma Frost and realized that her lips were pressed together into a tight, thin line. She was almost always smiling, so why did she look so serious? Even her scarves hung limp and straight around her body, the coins on the fringe still and silent, like they didn’t dare jangle together right now.

  For the first time since my mom’s death, some of the dull, aching, guilty fog lifted from my head, and I started to wonder who Professor Metis was and what she was doing here. For some reason, I didn’t think I was going to like the answer.

  Grandma Frost looked at me, her violet eyes as serious as the rest of her face. “Professor Metis is here to tell you about your new school, pumpkin.”

  I blinked. New school? I had a school already—Ashland High School—even if I hadn’t been to class in weeks or given any thought to when I was going back.

  “What new school?” I asked in a guarded tone.

  Metis smiled at m
e, her teeth white against her bronze skin. “It’s called Mythos Academy. It’s where I teach.”

  Mythos Academy? That sounded totally pretentious, like some fancy, froufrou private school that rich people sent their spoiled kids to.

  “It’s up on Cypress Mountain,” Metis continued, sitting back down. “Not too far from here.”

  I frowned. I’d actually heard of Cypress Mountain. It was a small community on the outskirts of Asheville, some suburb up in the North Carolina high country that tourists flocked to because it was full of high-end shops and boutiques that sold primo designer goods.

  But that wasn’t all I’d heard about Cypress Mountain. Last summer, Bethany and her cousin had been to a party with some kids who went to school somewhere up there. Bethany had said that all the kids were loaded, driving expensive cars and wearing designer clothes. She’d also told me that those kids had drunk, smoked, and hooked up more than everyone else at the party—combined.

  “And it’s a boarding school, so you’ll be living there on campus, come the fall,” Metis finished.

  Panic rippled through me at her words, and my head snapped around to Grandma Frost, who was already shaking her head in anticipation of what I was going to say.

  “Now, don’t you worry, pumpkin,” Grandma said. “I’ll be just fine, and you will, too.”

  “But I don’t want to leave you. I can’t.” My words came out in a hoarse, strangled rasp. Tears started burning in the corners of my eyes, but I blinked them away. “I can’t lose you, too.”

  Grandma Frost reached over and clasped my hand. Her soft, warm fingers and the matching feel of her love for me did little to drive away the cold that had suddenly seeped into my body. “You’re not going to lose me, pumpkin. I’ll be right here in this old house, telling my fortunes like normal. There’s a bus that runs from Cypress Mountain down here to Asheville every day, and you’ll be able to visit me anytime you want to. Right, Professor?”