Jennifer Estep Bundle

by Jennifer Estep

  I immediately backed up. The prowler growled and started stalking me again, enjoying the game of big, big cat, little, little mouse.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jasmine turn away from Morgan to stare at me.

  “You won’t get away from it again,” she said. “This one isn’t an illusion, and this time, the Spartan’s not around to save you.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” another voice called out.

  Logan Quinn stood in the doorway of the library. He still wore his tuxedo, but he’d stopped to pick up two other accessories along the way—a shield and a spear. The silver shield was strapped to his left arm, while he held the spear in his free hand. Somehow, he looked right with them, like they belonged to him and him alone. I thought about what Daphne had said about why the other kids were here. Logan knew his destiny as a Spartan, as a warrior. I just hoped that I wouldn’t be the death of him tonight.

  The prowler hissed again as soon as it saw Logan, recognizing him as the real threat. The Spartan tightened his grip on his shield, and a sort of cold calm filled his face. He wasn’t going to run away from the prowler—he was going to fight it to the death just like he had before. Only this time, the creature wasn’t an illusion. Somehow, I knew that made it even bigger, stronger, and deadlier than before.

  After a moment, Logan’s icy eyes flicked to me. “Gwen, go! Get help—”

  That was all Logan got out before the prowler threw itself at him.

  Instead of doing as he asked, I picked up the book that I’d thrown at the prowler before and ran back to the middle of the library, where Jasmine still stood over Morgan, the dagger glinting in her hand. While I would have loved nothing more than to run away, find Professor Metis, and tell her every twisted thing that was going on, I knew that if I did, Jasmine would kill Morgan and finish whatever bizarre ritual she’d started. My mom had never run from a fight when she’d been a detective, and I wasn’t going to now.

  Jasmine saw me coming and stepped away from Morgan, pointing her dagger in my direction. Not good. But I was too committed to back down now. For all I knew, the second I turned my back Jasmine would throw the dagger and kill me that way. She could do it. She was a warrior, too, and had been training to be one for years.

  “You should have just let it go, Gypsy,” Jasmine murmured, stepping up to meet me. “You should have just not paid any attention to my death the way that the others did.”

  I skidded to a stop in front of her. “Tell me one thing: Why didn’t you kill me that night in the library when you had the chance? The night you hit me on the head, I assume with that stupid dagger you’re holding, and knocked me out. Why didn’t you just slit my throat then?”

  She shrugged. “Because you were nobody. I didn’t even know your name. You didn’t have any real power, nothing that I could take or use, so what was the point in killing you?”

  My fingers tightened around the book, and for a moment I thought about Paige Forrest. She hadn’t had any power either. According to my mom, Paige’s stepdad had told her that if she didn’t do what he said, if she didn’t let him touch her, then he’d go down the hall to her little sister’s room. That’s why Paige hadn’t told anyone what was going on. So she had done the only thing that she could—she’d given me her hairbrush to touch.

  Because she knew what I could do. Paige knew that I had power, that I had magic, even if she didn’t understand it. Even if I didn’t understand it.

  “I’m not a nobody.” I ground out the words.

  Jasmine rolled her eyes. “Whatever. You’re still going to die.”

  She threw herself at me. The dagger slashed through the air with an evil hiss that matched the prowler’s. Acting on pure instinct, I brought up the book, putting it between me and the dagger. The weapon sank into the pages, its sharp tip piercing all the way through to the other side—and only stopping an inch away from my eye. Yeah, I totally screamed at that.

  Jasmine let out a loud curse and tried to pull the dagger back out of the book, but I tightened my grip and twisted it away from her, ripping the hilt of the weapon out of her hands. Then, I threw the book with the dagger still embedded in it as far as I could. It hit the slick marble floor and rolled across it, turning end over end, before finally stopping on the other side of the library underneath one of the tables.

  “Bitch,” Jasmine said. “That was my favorite dagger.”

  She had a favorite dagger? Seriously? And she thought that I was a freak.

  Before I could move away from Jasmine, she slapped me across the face, then punched me in the stomach, using her Valkyrie strength to her full advantage. The pain of her blows was bad enough, but her skin touched mine, and I felt all of her pent-up rage and anger at Morgan, Samson, and everyone else at school who’d ignored her fake death. It burned through me like acid. I fell to my knees, gasping for air and trying not to vomit.

  Jasmine stared down at me, shook her head, and walked back toward Morgan, who was still lying on the table and staring up at the ceiling at nothing in particular.

  The Bowl of Tears rested on Morgan’s chest, and the blood inside it began to bubble up. Even across the library, I could feel some sort of power emanating from it. If I’d thought the Bowl had been evil before, it radiated the ugliest sort of black hate now.

  Jasmine reached down and pulled a long sword out from underneath the table. Where the hell had that come from? Jasmine turned and headed back in my direction, slicing the sword through the air like she just couldn’t wait to cut into me with it.

  I was dimly aware of Logan fighting the prowler in the back of the library near the doorway. The prowler’s relentless hisses filled the room, as did the clang of its claws on Logan’s shield as it tried to rip away the barrier so it could tear into the Spartan once and for all. I even thought that I heard Logan call out my name, telling me to turn around and run, that Jasmine would cut me to pieces with the sword. I rolled my eyes. Like I didn’t already know that. I might suck at gym class, but I wasn’t completely stupid.

  So I got to my feet, turned around, and ran toward the nearest door—the side door I’d used to slip into the library. But just before I reached it, the door slammed shut. Behind me, Jasmine laughed.

  “Stupid Gypsy. Everything in here is under my control, including the doors. You can’t get out, so why don’t you just be a good girl and come here so I can kill you?”

  I didn’t know what kind of Valkyrie magic she was using, whether it was just an illusion or if the door was really and truly shut. So I ran toward the next door set into the wall. It too slammed shut just before I reached it. I wrapped my hand around the doorknob and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. Whatever magic Jasmine had, she’d sealed us all in the library with her. Or at least made us all think that she had. Which was really the same thing as actually doing it. At least, I thought that it was. This illusion stuff made my head hurt.

  Since the doors weren’t working, I scurried over to one of the windows. It was locked as well, and it wouldn’t budge. Outside on the quad, a flash of movement caught my eye, and I spotted Daphne and Carson walking hand in hand, making the same slow circle around the quad that I’d started to earlier tonight.

  “Daphne! Carson!”

  I yelled, screamed, and pounded on the glass, but they didn’t hear me. They were too caught up in each other for that. I’d have to make them hear me. Frantic now, I looked around. A study table was tucked in next to the window, along with a wooden chair. I picked up the chair and slammed it into the window.

  The glass erupted with a roar.

  Whatever magic Jasmine had, she hadn’t thought to use it to completely secure the windows, only the doors. So the chair shattered several panes of glass, leaving behind a jagged hole just above my head. I would have hoisted myself up and crawled out it, if there hadn’t been a couple of iron bars in the way. So I stood on my tiptoes and got as close to the glinting shards as I dared.

  “Daphne!” I screamed as loud as I cou
ld. “In here!”

  My voice echoed through the quad. Daphne and Carson froze, and their heads snapped in this direction.

  I waved at them, but I couldn’t tell if they saw me or not. Something whistled behind me, and I ducked. Jasmine’s sword slammed into the iron bars, throwing red sparks everywhere. I turned to stare at her. Jasmine had a wild look to her now. Her blond hair streamed down her face, and her once-blue eyes glowed that same eerie red that the prowler’s did. Creepy.

  “Stand still so I can chop off your head,” she muttered.

  Jasmine swung the sword at me again, and I ducked back out of the way. Again and again, she came at me, swinging the blade, but every time I managed to avoid it. Maybe some of the gym class training had sunk in after all, because I couldn’t believe that I was still alive.

  On her next pass, Jasmine’s sword slammed into one of the bookcases and got stuck in the thick wood. Cursing, she wrapped her hands around the hilt and tried to pull it out. Since she wasn’t focused on me, I ran around behind the bookshelf and rammed my shoulder into it as hard as I could.

  “C’mon,” I muttered, and pushed again and again, finally managing to rock it back and forth. “C’mon! C’mon!”

  I gave it a final, vicious shove. With a loud, unhappy creak, the bookshelf tipped over. A second later, it landed on top of the Valkyrie, burying her under hundreds of books.

  For a moment, all I could hear was the sound of my own raspy, panicked breathing and the thumping rush of blood in my ears. Then, Jasmine let out another evil laugh.

  “You forgot that I’m a Valkyrie, Gypsy,” she said. “I’m strong, much stronger than you are. This will only slow me down. It won’t stop me from killing you. Nothing can do that now.”

  The heavy case began to shift back and forth, as Jasmine wiggled her way out from under it and the mountain of books I’d buried her in. I backed up, wondering what I could do now to stop her. There was nowhere to run, not really, not since I couldn’t get out of the library, and it was only a matter of time before Jasmine wormed free.

  I didn’t know what was going on with Logan and the prowler, but I could still hear the creature yowling, which meant it wasn’t dead yet. Even if Logan could kill it without dying himself, I wondered if he could defeat Jasmine, too, because she’d had the same warrior training that he’d had and if the prowler injured him, he’d be at a serious disadvantage.

  I bit my lip and looked around, trying to stay calm, trying to think what my mom would do in this situation. Okay, so maybe my mom had never gone up against a crazed Valkyrie who wanted to sacrifice her slutty best friend to an evil god, but she had faced plenty of bad guys while she’d been a detective. I remembered watching her come home sometimes, take her gun off her belt, and—

  My eyes narrowed. Of course. I needed a weapon.

  Not that I knew how to really use a weapon of any sort, but it was better than running away from Jasmine or, worse, letting her hack me into little pieces with her sword.

  My bare feet seemed to move of their own accord, and I raced back into the stacks. I didn’t even really think about where I was going until I skidded to a halt in front of the glass case.

  The Case—the one with the strange sword in it.

  I fumbled with the clasp, hoping that it wouldn’t be locked or magically sealed. To my surprise, it opened immediately and I didn’t get any unwanted vibes off it. I threw back the top of The Case, reached for the sword—and stopped. I didn’t know exactly what would happen if I picked it up. What kind of flashes or vibes that I might get off it. But I knew that it would be something—something big. Something that would change my life forever.

  Behind me, there was an enormous roar, and Jasmine’s laughter filled the library once more. She’d gotten free of the bookcase. If I didn’t pick up the sword, the rest of my life was going to be short. Very, very short.

  “Gypsy,” Jasmine hissed, her voice echoing over to me. “I’m going to enjoy killing you.”

  Quick footsteps sounded, running in my direction. Time was up, so I reached down into The Case and grabbed the sword.

  Chapter 22

  As soon as my fingers brushed the hilt, the eye snapped open and regarded me with its gray-purple gaze once more.

  “Gypsy,” an old, crusty voice seemed to murmur in my head. “At last. ”

  Okay, so apparently it talked, too. Supercreepy, but I was too far gone now to care. My fingers closed all the way around the hilt, and I yanked the sword out of The Case. The way the hilt was designed, my hand covered the lower half of the man’s face—from the mouth down. His nose hooked over my hand, a wrist guard, I think it was called, with the open eye clearly visible above that—the eye that was still staring at me. For a moment, nothing happened.

  And then, the emotions hit me.

  The sword was old—ancient even—in the way the Bowl of Tears was. So many things flashed through my mind. So many images. Battles, mostly. Hundreds, thousands of them, all happening in a single second. Big, small, quiet, loud. I smelled smoke and blood. Heard screams of rage and pain. Felt other swords, other blades, slicing into my own skin in a way that made me cry out in pain and completely furious at the same time.

  I couldn’t do anything but stand there and see the images and ride the waves of emotions pouring through me. I couldn’t have let go of the sword even if I’d wanted to. After a second, the images slowed down enough for me to make some sense of them. I realized that I was watching battles from throughout history. Different times, different places, different enemies. Clothes, weapons, armor, people. They all changed, becoming more and more modern with every passing fight.

  But one thing was the same in every image—in every battle, a woman wielded the sword. One after another, their faces flashed through my mind, almost too fast for me to follow. But I felt them, felt their emotions, felt all the things they had felt when they’d been wielding the sword. Pride. Power. Fear. Anger. And most of all, a sense of duty and honor.

  There were gaps, too, times when the sword wasn’t in the images, when it was just the women, one after another, being born, growing up, having daughters of their own, growing old, and finally dying. The images skipped on from one to the next, and I got the sense that this was a long, unbroken chain of women stretching back to the time when the gods themselves walked the earth.

  Among the images, I saw a familiar face—Grandma Frost. Her features flickered before me for an instant, before they were replaced by another face—my mom’s face.

  “Mom?” I whispered.

  Grace Frost smiled at me, and her mouth opened, almost as if she was trying to say something to me.

  “Mom!” I stretched out my hand to her, as if I could somehow reach into the vision and touch her.

  And I felt myself falling, falling, falling....

  With a gasp, my eyes snapped open, and I found myself standing in the middle of the Library of Antiquities, in the spot where the glass case that had once held the Bowl of Tears had been. I still had the sword in my hand, and I whirled around, looking for the others.

  They weren’t here.

  There was no Jasmine coming to kill me. No Morgan lying on the table looking at nothing. No Logan fighting off a Nemean prowler. It was just me in the library—alone.

  “Hello?” I called out. “Is—is anyone here?”

  My voice echoed through the library, a frightened lonely little sound that seemed to stretch on forever—

  “Hello, Gwendolyn,” a soft voice murmured.

  I bit back a scream and turned around. A woman stood behind me, right in front of the closed double doors. At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about her. Average height, slender, but with some muscle on her. Her hair fell to her shoulders in soft brown ringlets that seemed to shimmer with a metallic bronze sheen. She wore a gown that reminded me of a toga—long flowing fabric in a sweet lilac color. A silver belt looped around her waist, and some kind of silver flowers ringed her head like a crown. Laurels, I thought, wond
ering how I even knew that to start with.

  But the more I stared at her, the more I realized that she was simply the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Not because her features were beautiful, but because there was an aura about her, a presence, a sense of peace and serenity and eternity. For some reason, it comforted me, even now, when I probably should have been screaming my head off at all the weirdness that had happened in the last hour. In the last freaking minute.

  The woman walked closer to me, her gown flowing around her body like water. For the first time, I noticed that she had a set of soft, feathery wings attached to her back, kind of what I’d always thought an angel’s would look like. Was I dead? Was this some sort of heaven?

  The winged woman stopped in front of me and regarded me with eyes that were neither gray nor purple but the soft shade of twilight in between.

  “Who are you?” I whispered.

  She tilted her head to the side and smiled. “I think you know.”

  And suddenly I did. The knowledge filled my mind. I’d seen her picture before in my myth-history books and had heard Professor Metis talk about her. I’d even seen her statue in this very library. I looked up at the spot on the second floor where the marble statue always stood, but it was gone. Maybe because she was standing in front of me.

  “You’re Nike, the Greek goddess of victory,” I said in a small voice.

  She nodded. “That’s right. And you are Gwendolyn Frost, daughter of Grace Frost, granddaughter of Geraldine Frost, and so on and so forth.”

  “You know my mom? And my grandma?”

  A mysterious smile curved Nike’s lips. “I know all of your ancestors, Gwendolyn. The women in your family have served me since time itself began.”

  Okay, I felt like my head was going to explode. I mean, here I was, talking to a goddess. A real goddess. And not just any goddess, but Nike, the kick-ass chick who’d defeated Loki and pretty much saved the world from destruction. And she knew me and all about my family. Yeah, my brain was definitely exploding inside my skull.