Halloween Frost Read online

  Too bad the Spartan wasn’t alone. Savannah Warren, his date, was with him. Savannah was a pretty Amazon with beautiful red hair that flowed down her back, and tonight, she was dressed in an emerald-colored sea nymph costume that brought out her green eyes. Logan said something to her, and Savannah smiled, her whole face lighting up as she looked at the Spartan.

  My heart started to burn with bitter, bitter jealousy. Why couldn’t I be the one Logan was with tonight? Why couldn’t I be the one he was smiling at? Why couldn’t he look at me the way that he was at Savannah right now?

  As if he could hear my thoughts, the Spartan turned in my direction, and our eyes met. Logan hesitated, then waved at me. I gritted my teeth, lifted my hand, and waved back, even though I didn’t really want to.

  “You okay, Gwen?” Daphne asked in a sympathetic voice. She had noticed Logan waving at me—and that Savannah was standing by his side.

  “I’m fine,” I said, deliberately turning away from the Spartan. “Just fine. Where to next?”

  We kept wandering through town. After about an hour, we’d hit all the shops on the main drag and scored all the goodies they had to offer, so we started going down some of the side streets to the smaller stores. There weren’t as many people here, and night had started to creep over the landscape, bringing blackening shadows along with it. The air was getting colder too, and I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my hoodie, trying to keep them warm. My pumpkin dangled off my arm, bumping along my thigh. Every once in a while, the plastic container would smack into Vic’s hilt, since I had the sword and his scabbard strapped to the black leather belt around my waist. Vic sniffed indignantly every time the pumpkin bumped him, but I ignored the sword’s faint mutterings. He’d quiet down sooner or later.

  We cut down another deserted side street. Daphne and Carson walked a few steps ahead of me, talking about all the goodies they’d picked up tonight and how this year’s haul compared to last year’s. I kicked at a few loose rocks and let their happy, excited words wash over me. All I wanted to do right now was go back to my dorm room, stuff my face full of the junk food I’d gotten, and try to forget about the fact that Logan was here with another girl. I sighed. Easier said than done.

  We kept walking. Eventually, we passed another statue of a Nemean prowler, probably the hundredth one that we’d strolled by tonight. Strangely enough, this one was hidden back in the shadows in one of the alleys, instead of being out on the street near the shops like all the others.

  Still, I started to look past the creature when I noticed that its tail was twitching.

  For a moment, I thought that my Gypsy gift was just playing tricks on me. It did that sometimes and made me see things that weren’t really there. But no matter how many times or how hard I blinked, the prowler’s tail kept lashing from side to side. The creature sank down onto its haunches, like it was an oversize house cat about to pounce on a mouse. A moment later, its eyes snapped open, and I noticed how red they were—such a bright, burning red.

  Cold dread filled my stomach as I realized that the statue wasn’t a statue, that it was a real, live Nemean prowler—one that was about to rip me and my friends to pieces.

  * * *

  I didn’t think—I just reacted.

  I threw myself into Daphne and Carson, knocking them both to the side and down to the ground as far away from the prowler as I could get them. My desperate act worked, because instead of leaping on top of my friends, the Nemean prowler came up short, landing in a crouch a few feet away. The creature immediately snapped its head around to us. Its thick black fur took on a reddish tinge underneath the golden glow of the street lamps, and its eyes blazed like bloody rubies in its face.

  “Gwen! What the—” Daphne sputtered, her face mashed against the cobblestone street.

  “Fight now, talk later!” I yelled, scrambling off her and getting to my feet.

  I stepped in front of my friends, who froze when they spotted the prowler crouched in the street. Daphne let out a curse, and she and Carson both struggled to untangle themselves from each other, get up, and help me.

  The creature let out an evil hiss and charged at me. I didn’t have time to draw Vic out of the scabbard that hung from my waist, but I’d managed to hold on to my plastic container of goodies, so I did the only thing that I could—I smashed the prowler in the face with the hollow pumpkin.

  The orange plastic exploded like a piñata, and the candy, jewelry, and all the other knickknacks that I’d picked up flew everywhere. The prowler hissed with surprise and stopped short, but it still lashed out and swiped its claws at me. I barely managed to leap back in time to keep from getting slashed to ribbons.

  The prowler swiped at me again, causing me to back up even more, and Daphne stepped in front of me to meet the creature’s charge. The Valkyrie had gotten to her feet and grabbed one of the enormous jack-o’-lanterns that lined the street. The carved pumpkin had to weigh at least seventy-five pounds, but thanks to her Valkyrie strength, Daphne hefted it up like it didn’t weigh any more than her tiny purse, lunged forward, and brought it down right on top of the prowler’s head.

  The jack-o’-lantern got stuck there for a second, giving the prowler a comical look, before the creature used its claws to rip the gourd to pieces. Daphne darted back and grabbed another jack-o’-lantern to heave at the creature. Carson did the same, although he couldn’t pick up the heavier ones like Daphne could. As a Celt, he just didn’t have her strength.

  I fumbled with my scabbard and finally pulled Vic free of the soft leather.

  “About time you remembered that you were carrying me,” the sword said, his purplish eye gleaming in the semidarkness. “Now, let’s kill us a prowler!”

  “Shut up, Vic!” I said and raised my sword.

  The prowler paced up and down the street in front of the three of us. The creature’s red eyes went from me to Daphne to Carson and back again, considering which one of us was the greatest threat and who to attack first. Me with my sword, or Daphne and Carson with their jack-o’-lanterns. Finally, it decided on Daphne since she’d beaned it in the head once before.

  The prowler sank down on its haunches, then sprang at the Valkyrie, but Daphne was ready for the attack. She waited until the creature was in range, then smashed the jack-o’-lantern against its head as hard as she could.

  “That’s for ruining my dress, you overgrown kitten!” she snapped.

  Once again, the gourd exploded on impact, but it wasn’t enough to slow down the prowler. The creature slammed into Daphne, knocking her to the ground again, then whipped around and did the same thing to Carson before he even knew what hit him. The prowler whirled around a second time, ready to pounce on my friends and rip them to ribbons, but I rushed forward and raised up Vic.

  Swing-swing-swing.

  I swung my sword at the prowler, trying to remember the moves that Coach Ajax had shown us in gym class, trying to remember how to attack the prowler without getting killed myself. But I hadn’t been using a sword very long, and all my awkward motions did was delay my death for a few seconds.

  Swipe-swipe-swipe.

  The prowler lashed out at me with its claws again, forcing me to jump away from it. My sneaker caught on a loose cobblestone, my arms windmilled, and I stumbled back. I closed my eyes, expecting to smash into the ground and feel the prowler’s teeth tearing into me a second later.

  But that didn’t happen.

  Instead, a pair of strong arms caught me and set me back up on my feet. I shrieked and jerked away, not knowing what was going on, not knowing why I wasn’t dead yet.

  “Easy, Gypsy girl,” a voice said in my ear. “It’s just me.”

  I opened my eyes, and suddenly, Logan was there. He twirled his sword and stepped in front of me, putting himself in between me and the Nemean prowler like he’d done twice before now. A smile spread across the Spartan’s face as he regarded the mythological monster, and his icy eyes began to glow in anticipation of the battle to come. Spartans
were kind of freaky that way. They actually loved to fight, especially since they had the ability to pick up ordinary, everyday objects and automatically know how to kill with them.

  The prowler stopped in its tracks at the sight of the Spartan, and it let out another yowling hiss, recognizing him as a dangerous enemy.

  Logan looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Now, what do you say we take care of this thing together?”

  I smiled at him. “Sounds good to me.”

  Logan went one way, and I went the other until we stood on opposite sides of the street. The prowler whipped its head back and forth, trying to keep both of us in sight at the same time.

  “You first, Gypsy girl,” Logan said.

  I feinted in, forcing the prowler to turn toward me. That gave Logan the chance to attack the creature from the other side. The Spartan got in a nice slice with his sword before jumping back out of the path of the prowler’s killer claws. Back and forth, we battled the prowler, with both of us feinting in and moving out, wounding the creature, until finally, we were both able to stab the prowler at the same time. The creature howled again, a terrible, terrible noise, before it slumped to the street and was still.

  For a moment, there was only silence, mixed with the sounds of our heavy breathing.

  “Is it really dead?” Carson asked, getting to his feet and then helping Daphne do the same.

  The two of them looked a little beat up and bruised from their tumbles to the ground, but other than that, they were okay. Daphne stared down at all the rips and tears in her flapper dress and sighed.

  Logan walked over and prodded the creature with his sandaled foot. The prowler didn’t move. “Definitely dead.”

  “So,” I wheezed, still trying to catch my breath, and looked over at the Valkyrie. “Is Halloween still your favorite holiday?”

  Daphne just gave me a dirty look.

  * * *

  Carson and Daphne headed off to find Professor Metis, Coach Ajax, and Nickamedes so they could come and deal with the prowler. That left me standing in the street with Logan. I stared down at the prowler, which didn’t look nearly as scary in death. Now it just looked…broken—broken and bloody and still and defeated. I knew that the prowler had wanted to tear me, Daphne, and Carson into little bloody chunks, but part of me still felt sad that we’d had to kill it. In its own way, the prowler was a beautiful, magnificent creature, even if the Reapers had trained it to murder warrior whiz kids like us.

  “Why do you think it was here?” I asked. “The prowler?”

  Logan shrugged. “The Reapers usually let one or two of them loose every year in Cypress Mountain while school is in session, hoping that maybe the prowlers will be able to kill a student or two before they’re caught or killed themselves. This year, well, I suppose that it’s the Reapers own twisted version of trick or treat.”

  “Some trick,” I muttered.

  “Yeah.”

  I didn’t want to look at the prowler anymore, but I didn’t want to stare at Logan either, so I slid Vic back into the scabbard on my waist. Now that the battle was over, the sword had closed his eye and gone back to sleep.

  Once I had Vic secured, I crouched down and started picking up the mess I’d made when I’d swung my plastic pumpkin at the prowler. The pretzels, the brownies, the candy apples. They’d all been crushed and stomped to bits during the fight. And I’d so been looking forward to noshing on them later tonight. I sighed, gathered up as much of the mess as I could in my hands, then dumped everything in a nearby trash can. I wiped my hands off on the bottom of my hoodie, even though it was just as torn and dirty as Daphne’s and Carson’s clothes were.

  “Here. You forgot this,” Logan said in a quiet voice.

  The Spartan stepped forward, held out his fist, and uncurled his fingers. The ring that I’d picked up earlier in the jewelry store glimmered in the palm of his hand. Somehow, it had survived the fight unscathed, and the heart-shaped crystals gleamed like diamond teardrops against Logan’s skin.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I took the ring, careful not to touch his bare fingers with mine. My psychometry magic let me pick up vivid enough memories from objects, but I could get major whammies, major flashes of feelings, when I touched another person. Part of me ached to touch Logan, to see if I could figure out how he really felt about me, and what secret he was hiding that made him think that I wouldn’t like him anymore. But the other part worried about what I might see, if I might discover that Logan didn’t care for me like I did him. That would break my heart more than seeing him with Savannah tonight already had.

  “I’m glad that you’re okay, Gypsy girl,” Logan said in a soft voice.

  I nodded. “Me too. Although I have to ask, why were you on this street to start with? All the action is back over on the main drag.”

  He shrugged. “I saw you guys come down this way. I wanted to say hi, so I followed you.”

  “Good thing you did,” I said. “Or the prowler would have killed us all.”

  The Spartan shook his head. “I don’t think so. It looked to me like you were holding your own with it, Gypsy girl. Just like you always do.”

  He smiled at me—a warm, sexy, teasing grin that took my breath away. I looked into his ice-blue eyes, and suddenly, my insecurities didn’t seem to matter anymore. Nothing seemed to matter but telling Logan how grateful I was that he’d rescued me yet again, how much I appreciated it, how much I appreciated him, how much I felt for him.

  “Logan, I—”

  “Logan!” another voice called out.

  The Spartan looked over my shoulder. I turned and saw Savannah Warren in the street behind us, hurrying toward Logan. The Spartan stared down at me, something almost like regret flashing in his eyes, before he walked past me toward the other girl. My heart sank like a stone dropping to the bottom of a river, drowning the words that I’d been about to say right along with it.

  Savannah reached Logan’s side and threw her arms around his waist. “Are you okay?”

  Logan hugged her back. “I’m fine. It was just a prowler. Nothing too dangerous.”

  Relief filled the Amazon’s face, and she put her head against Logan’s chest. My stomach clenched, and I looked away from them.

  A few seconds later, Daphne and Carson hurried back down the street, along with Professor Metis, Coach Ajax, and Nickamedes. I’d seen the adults earlier, but I hadn’t really noticed their costumes until now.

  Metis was dressed up like Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, since that’s whose Champion she was. The professor looked pretty tonight, her long, elegant gown hanging off one shoulder and draping over her body. The silvery color of the fabric brought out the bronze tint of her skin, along with her black hair. Metis’s eyes were a bright green behind her glasses.

  Ajax was clad like an ancient Spartan warrior just like Logan was, his skin, hair, and eyes almost the same color as the black leather that covered his body. But the coach wasn’t carrying a sword or any sort of shield. He was so big and burly that he didn’t need to. Ajax looked like the kind of person who could crush diamonds with his bare hands.

  But it was Nickamedes’s costume that made me do a double take. The librarian was dressed in bright purple silk from head to toe, with jangling bells on the ends of his shirt sleeves and shoes. A ridiculous hat with four floppy points on it, all capped with bells, hid his black hair from sight. He looked like a reject from a Renaissance fair, and it took me a moment to realize that he was supposed to be an old-fashioned court jester. The joke was definitely on him tonight with that outfit.

  “Nice costume,” I said in a snarky tone.

  Nickamedes glared at me, his blue eyes frosty in his pale face, but that was nothing unusual. The librarian liked me as little as I did him, despite the fact that I worked for him several hours a week at the Library of Antiquities as sort of an after-school job.

  “At least I bothered to dress for the occasion, Gwendolyn,” Nickamedes snapped. “Unlike you.”<
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  My eyes narrowed, and I opened my mouth to snap back at him, but Metis held up her hand, playing the role of peacekeeper like she so often did.

  “Tell us what happened,” Metis said. “From the beginning.”

  Daphne told the three of them about the prowler attacking us. Metis, Ajax, and Nickamedes were on the academy’s security council and were responsible for student safety, among other things. Once the adults realized that we were all okay, they told us to leave and that they’d handle disposing of the prowler’s body, as well as making sure that there weren’t any more of the creatures lurking in the shadow-filled alleys.

  Logan looked at me a final time, before he and Savannah turned and walked down the street back toward the main drag.

  “Are you okay, Gwen?” Daphne asked in a soft voice, pink sparks of magic streaming out of her fingertips in sympathy.

  “I’m fine,” I said, pulling my eyes away from the Spartan’s retreating figure and trying to ignore the pulsing ache in my heart. “Let’s go back to the academy. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m all tricked out for the night.”

  * * *

  Daphne, Carson, and I walked back through Cypress Mountain. We stopped at a few shops and picked up some items to replace the ones we’d lost, but my friends were as tired and exhausted as I was. Fighting for your life against a mythological monster will do that to you. Forty-five minutes later, I said good night to Daphne and Carson outside of Styx Hall and headed up to my dorm room.

  I took a shower, put on a pair of soft, flannel, purple-plaid pajamas, and got ready for bed. I hung Vic on his usual spot on the wall. The sword let out a yawn, finally waking up from his nap, and opened his one eye.

  “What? We’re back in the bloody room already? How disappointing,” Vic muttered.

  “Why is that so disappointing?”

  Vic gave me a put-upon look, like the answer should be obvious. “Because we should be out killing more prowlers. And Reapers too. Why, I bet there are dozens of them still lurking around the shops and alleys, just waiting to strike.”