Jennifer Estep Bundle Page 5

“Sure,” I said in a pleasant tone. “But you might want to pull yourself together before you go to your next class, Daphne. Your lip gloss is smeared.”

  The Valkyrie’s eyes narrowed, but I ignored her venomous dirty look, unlocked the bathroom door, and left.

  Chapter 2

  I stepped out of the bathroom and into the hallway. Somewhere deeper in the building, a bell chimed, warning me that I had five minutes to get to my next class, so I fell in with the flow of students walking toward the west wing of the English-history building.

  From the outside, Mythos Academy looked like an elite Ivy League prep school, even though it was located in Cypress Mountain, just outside of Asheville, up in the high country of western North Carolina. Everything about the academy whispered of money, power, and snobbery, from the ivy-covered stone buildings to the perfectly manicured grassy quads to the dining hall that was more like a five-star restaurant than a school cafeteria. Yeah, from the outside, the academy looked exactly like the kind of place rich people would send their spoiled trust fund babies to in preparation for them going on to Yale, Harvard, Duke, or some other acceptably expensive college.

  Inside, though, it was a different story.

  At first glance, everything looked normal, if a bit stuffy and totally old-fashioned. You know, suits of polished armor lining the halls, each one clutching a sharp, pointed weapon. Stone carvings and expensive oil paintings of mythological battles covering the walls. White marble statues of gods and goddesses standing in the corners, their faces turned toward each other and hands held up over their mouths, as if they were gossiping about everyone who passed by their perches.

  And then, there were the students. Ages sixteen to twenty-one, first-year students all the way up to sixthyears, all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities, with books and bags in one hand and their cell phones in the other, texting, talking, and walking all at the same time. Each one wearing the most expensive clothes their parents could afford, including Prada, Gucci, and, of course, Jimmy Choos.

  But if you looked past the designer duds and flashy electronics, you’d notice other things. Strange things. Like the fact that so many of the students carried weapons. Swords, bows, and staffs mostly, all stuffed into what looked like fancy leather tennis bags. Color-coordinated to match the day’s outfit, of course.

  The weapons were just accessories at Mythos. Status symbols of who you were, what you could do, and how much money your parents had. Just like the colorful sparks and flashes of magic that crackled in the air like static electricity. Even the lowliest geek here knew how to chop off somebody’s head with a sword or could turn your insides to mush just by muttering a spell or two.

  It was like going to school in an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess.

  That’s what all the kids at Mythos Academy were—warriors. Real, live mythological warriors. Or at least the great-great-whatever descendants of them. The girls were Amazons and Valkyries, for the most part, while the boys tended to be Romans or Vikings. But there were other warrior types mixed in as well—Spartans, Persians, Trojans, Celts, Samurais, Ninjas, and everything in between, from every ancient culture, myth, or fairy tale that you’d ever heard of and lots that you hadn’t. Each one with their own special abilities and magic, and the egos to match.

  As a general rule, though, everyone was rich, beautiful, and dangerous.

  Everyone except for me.

  Nobody looked at me and nobody spoke to me as I trudged toward my sixth-period myth-history class. I was just that Gypsy girl, and not rich, powerful, popular, pretty, or important enough to register on anyone’s social radar. It was late October now, almost two months into the fall term, and I had yet to make a friend. I didn’t even have a casual someone I could sit with at lunch in the dining hall. But my friendless state didn’t bother me.

  Not much had, since my mom’s death six months ago.

  I slid into my seat in Professor Metis’s myth-history class just before the bell chimed again, indicating that everyone should be where they were supposed to be by now.

  Carson Callahan turned around in his seat, which was in front of mine. “Did you find it yet?” he whispered.

  Carson was a tall guy, six feet even with a bony, lanky frame. He always reminded me of a triangle, because he was all sharp angles, from his ankles to his knees to his elbows. Even his nose was straight and pointed. His hair and skin were a dusky brown, and the square frames of his black glasses made his eyes look like malted milk balls set into his face.

  I could see why Daphne liked him, though. Carson was sweet and cute, in that shy, quiet way that geeks so often are. But Carson Callahan wasn’t just any kind of geek—he was a hard-core band geek and the drum major of the Mythos Academy Marching Band, even though he was only seventeen and a second-year student like me. Carson was a Celt and supposedly had some sort of magical talent for music, like a warrior bard or something. I didn’t know what exactly. For the most part, I tried not to notice such things. I tried not to notice a lot of things at Mythos—especially the fact of how very much I didn’t belong here.

  I handed Carson the bagged bracelet, careful not to let my fingers touch his so I wouldn’t flash on the band geek. Because in addition to feeling Daphne’s emotions, I’d also gotten a glimpse of Carson’s when I’d fished the rose charm out from behind his desk yesterday. I didn’t just see the person who had touched something last—I could flash on everyone who’d ever handled an object. Ever.

  Which meant that I knew who Carson really wanted to give the silver bracelet to and that it wasn’t Leta Gaston like he claimed.

  “As promised,” I said. “Now, it’s your turn.”

  “Thanks, Gwen.”

  He put a hundred-dollar bill, the back end of my finder’s fee, onto my desk. I took the money and slid it into my jeans pocket.

  As a general rule, I ignored all the other Mythos students, and they ignored me—at least until they needed something found. It was the same gig that I’d done back at my old public high school to earn extra cash. For the right price, I found things that were lost, stolen, or otherwise unavailable. Keys, wallets, cell phones, pets, abandoned bras, and crumpled boxers.

  I’d overheard an Amazon in my calculus class complaining that she’d lost her cell phone, so I’d offered to find it for her, for a small fee. She’d thought I was nuts—until I fished the phone out of the back of her closet. Turned out that she’d left it in another purse. After that, word had spread around campus about what I did. Business wasn’t exactly booming yet, but it was picking up.

  Since my Gypsy gift let me touch an object and immediately know, see, and feel its history, it wasn’t too hard for me to find or figure things out. Sure, if something was lost, I couldn’t actually, you know, touch it—otherwise, the item wouldn’t be missing in the first place. But people left vibes everywhere—about all sorts of things. What they had for lunch, what movie they wanted to see tonight, what they really thought of their so-called best friends.

  Usually, all I had to do was skim my fingers across a guy’s desk or rummage through a girl’s purse to get a pretty good idea about where he’d last left his wallet or where she’d put down her cell phone. And if I didn’t immediately see the exact location of the missing item, then I kept touching stuff until I did—or got an image of who might have swiped it. Like Daphne Cruz snatching the charm bracelet off Carson’s desk. Sometimes, I felt like Nancy Drew or maybe Gretel, following a trail of psychic bread crumbs until I found what I was looking for.

  There was even a name for what I could do—psychometry. A fancy, froufrou way of saying that I saw pictures in my head and got flashes of other people’s feelings—whether I wanted to see them or not.

  Still, part of me enjoyed knowing other people’s secrets, seeing all the things big and small that they so desperately tried to hide from everyone, including themselves sometimes. It made me feel smart and strong and powerful—and determined not to do totally stupid things, like let a guy take pictures of me in my under
wear.

  Tracking down lost cell phones might not be the most glamorous job in the world, but it was way better than slinging greasy fries at Mickey D’s. And it certainly paid much more here at Mythos than it had at my old public high school. Back there, I would have been lucky to get twenty bucks for a lost bracelet, instead of the cool two hundred that Carson had given me. The bonus cash flow was the only thing I liked about the stupid academy.

  “Where was it?” Carson asked. “The bracelet?”

  For a moment, I thought about ratting out Daphne and telling Carson about her massive crush on him. But since the Valkyrie hadn’t been overtly mean to me in the bathroom, just vaguely threatening, I decided to save that bit of information for a time when I might really need it. Since I didn’t have money, strength, or great magical power like the other kids at the academy, information was the only real leverage that I had, and I saw no reason not to stock up.

  “Oh, I found it behind your desk in your dorm room.” The rose charm anyway. It had been wedged deep down between the desk and the wall.

  Carson frowned. “But I looked there. I know I did. I looked everywhere for it.”

  “I guess you just didn’t look hard enough,” I said in a vague tone, and pulled my myth-history book out of my bag.

  Carson opened his mouth to ask me something else when Professor Metis rapped on her podium with the old-fashioned slender silver scepter that she also used as a pointer. Metis was of Greek descent, like so many of the profs and kids at Mythos were. She was a short woman with a thick, stocky body, bronze skin, and black hair that was always pulled back into a high, tight bun. She wore a green pantsuit, and silver glasses covered her face.

  She looked all stern and serious, but Metis was one of the better professors at Mythos. She at least tried to make her myth-history class interesting by sometimes letting us play games and do puzzles and stuff, rather than just memorizing boring facts.

  “Open your books to page one thirty-nine,” Professor Metis said, her soft green gaze flicking from student to student. “Today, we’re going to talk some more about the Pantheon as its warriors battled to defeat Loki and his Reapers of Chaos.”

  But today wasn’t going to be a fun day. I rolled my eyes and did as she asked.

  In addition to going to school with all the mythological warrior kids, I also had to learn about their whole stupid history. And, of course, there was a group of good magic guys who had banded together and called themselves the Pantheon whose sole purpose was to fight a group of bad magic guys called Reapers who wanted to, well, bring about the Chaos.

  So far, Professor Metis had been pretty vague about what exactly the Chaos was, and I hadn’t exactly been paying rapt attention to all the mumbo-jumbo magic stuff. But I was guessing it involved death, destruction, and blah, blah, blah. I’d much rather read the comic books that I had stashed in the bottom of my messenger bag. At least they had some basis in reality. Genetic mutations could totally happen.

  But gods and goddesses duking it out? Using warrior whiz kids to fight some ancient battle today in modern times? With mythological monsters thrown in just for fun? I wasn’t sure I believed all that. But everyone here at Mythos did. To them, myths weren’t just stories—they were history, facts even, and they were all very, very real.

  While Professor Metis droned on once again about how absolutely evil the Reapers were, I stared out the window, looking at my reflection in the glass. Wavy brown hair, a smattering of freckles on my winter white skin, and eyes that were a curious shade of purple, made more so by the hoodie I was wearing.

  Violet eyes are smiling eyes, my mom had always said in a teasing voice. Her eyes had been the same color as mine, although I’d always thought they’d made her look beautiful and me just like a freak.

  A dull ache flooded my heart. Not for the first time, I wished that I could rewind time and go back to the way things had been before I’d come to Mythos Academy.

  Six months ago, I’d been a normal teenager. Well, as normal as a girl with a strange ability could ever be. But the Gypsy gift ran in the Frost family. My grandma, Geraldine, could see the future. My mom, Grace, had been able to tell whether or not people were lying just by listening to their words. And I had the ability to know, see, and feel things just by touching a person or an object. But our Gypsy gifts had always been just that—gifts, small things that we could do—and I hadn’t thought too much about them, where they had come from, or if other people had magic like ours.

  Until the day that I picked up Paige Forrest’s hairbrush after gym class.

  We’d been in the locker room changing after playing basketball, which I hated because I totally sucked at it. Seriously, sucked out loud at it. Like, sucked so bad that I’d managed to hit myself in the head with the ball when I was trying to shoot a free throw.

  After class, I’d been hot and sweaty and had wanted to pull my hair back into a ponytail. Paige’s brush had been lying on the bench between us. Paige wasn’t one of my close friends, but we were in the same semipopular circle of smart girls. Sometimes, we hung out when our group got together, so I’d asked her if I could use her hairbrush.

  Paige had stared at me a second, a strange emotion flashing in her eyes. “Sure.”

  I picked it up, never dreaming that I’d feel anything. Despite my psychometry, I usually didn’t get much of a vibe off common, everyday objects like pens, computers, dishes, or phones. Things in public places that lots of people used or that had a simple, specific function. I only got the biggies, the deep, vivid, high-def flashes, when I touched objects that people had some personal connection to, like a favorite photograph or a cherished piece of jewelry.

  But as soon as my hand had closed around the hairbrush, I’d seen an image of Paige sitting on her bed with an older man. He’d brushed her long black hair exactly one hundred times, just like everyone claims you’re supposed to. Then, when he was finished with her hair, the man had unfastened Paige’s robe, made her lie back on the bed, and started touching her before he took off his pants.

  I’d started screaming then, and I didn’t stop.

  After about five minutes, I passed out. My friend Bethany had told me that I’d kept right on screaming, even when the paramedics came to take me to the hospital. Everyone thought I was having an epileptic seizure or something.

  I think Paige knew, though. About my Gypsy gift and what I could do. Two weeks before, she’d asked me to find her missing phone. I’d walked around Paige’s room, touched her desk, her nightstand, her purse, and her bookcases, and eventually seen an image of her little sister swiping the phone so she could snoop through Paige’s text messages. Sometimes, I wondered if Paige had put her hairbrush there on the bench just for me to pick up. Just so someone would know, just so someone would feel exactly what she was going through.

  I’d woken up in the hospital later that day. My mom, Grace, was there, and I told her what I’d seen. That’s what you did when something terrible was happening to one of your friends. And because my mom was a police detective who’d spent her whole life helping people. I wanted to be just like her.

  That night, my mom had arrested Paige’s stepdad for abusing her. My mom had called when she was at the police station and told me that Paige was safe now. She’d promised to be home in another hour, just as soon as she finished the paperwork.

  She never made it.

  My mom had been hit by a drunk driver after she’d left the police station that night. Grandma Frost had told me that she’d died instantly. That she’d never even seen the other car swerving toward her or felt the horrible, horrible pain of the crash. I hoped that was how it had happened, because my mom had been so torn up in the wreck that the casket had been closed at her funeral. What I could remember of it, anyway.

  I hadn’t gone back to my old school after that. My friends had been supernice about everything, especially Bethany, but I hadn’t wanted to see anyone. I hadn’t wanted to do anything but lie on my bed and cry.

  But
one day three weeks after my mom’s funeral, Professor Metis had shown up at my Grandma Frost’s house. I didn’t know exactly what Metis had said to her, but Grandma had announced that it was finally time for me to go to Mythos Academy so I could learn how to fully use my Gypsy gift. I thought that I could control my psychometry just fine already, and I’d never really understood what my grandma had meant when she’d said finally, as if I should have been going to Mythos all along or something—

  “... Gwen ?”

  The sound of my name snapped me out of my memories. “What?”

  Metis peered over the rims of her silver glasses at me. “I asked you which goddess was responsible for the Pantheon’s victory over Loki and his Reapers?”

  “Nike, the Greek goddess of victory,” I said automatically.

  Professor Metis frowned. “And how do you know that, Gwen? I haven’t mentioned Nike yet. Have you read ahead to the next chapter already? That’s very industrious of you.”

  I’d done that very thing last night, mainly because I was bored out of my mind and there hadn’t been anything good on TV. Given my lack of friends at Mythos, it wasn’t like I had anything else to do to occupy my time here.

  I don’t think Metis meant it as a jibe, but snickers rippled through the room at her words. My cheeks flamed red, and I sank a little lower into my seat. Great. Now, everyone would think that I was that nerdy Gypsy girl who had nothing better to do than study. It might be true, and I might be insanely proud of my 4.0 GPA, but I didn’t want the other kids to know that.

  It occurred to me that I wasn’t quite sure how I knew the answer to Metis’s question. I didn’t think Nike had even been mentioned in the chapter that I’d read. But since it wasn’t the strangest thing that I’d encountered at Mythos, I pushed it out of my mind.

  Professor Metis speared one of the louder snickerers with a dirty look before asking him an even more obscure question about Reapers.

  When I was sure Metis wasn’t going to call on me again, I went back to staring out the window and brooding about how I’d caused my own mom’s death just by picking up the wrong girl’s hairbrush.