Jennifer Estep Bundle

by Jennifer Estep

  I shivered and nodded. Then, another thought occurred to me. “Um, what about ...”

  I gestured at Vic. It might be kind of hard to learn how to fight with a sword that was alive. And what would I tell Logan about what Vic was and who had given him to me?

  Metis looked at the sword, then me. “It’s your sword, Gwen. You’ll learn how to use it. I’m sure it will behave for you, as my staff does for me. As for everything else, I’ll leave that up to you.”

  Her staff must be a whole lot different from Vic, because I couldn’t imagine Vic ever obeying me. But at least she was going to let me tell Logan about the weapon and everything else in my own time, in my own way.

  “I think that covers things for now,” Professor Metis said. “It’s getting late. Go on and enjoy the rest of your day, and remember, you have another essay due next week.”

  “Yes, Professor,” I said.

  “Logan, Coach Ajax talked to you about this,” Metis said. “You are to work Gwen as hard as you need to in order to train her fast, understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Good. The two of you can go now.”

  Professor Metis grabbed a stack of papers and started shuffling through them. I slipped the photo of my mom that Metis had given me into my messenger bag, careful not to wrinkle it. Then, Logan and I left her office and walked outside the English-history building. It was after six now, and the quad was deserted except for a few students coming in and out of the dining hall and the Library of Antiquities. Twilight crept across the grass and trees, bathing them in soft shades of purple and gray.

  The two of us stood at the edge of the quad, not quite looking at each other. Awkward.

  “So,” I finally said. “You’re my combat tutor now?”

  Logan nodded.

  “Did Metis ask you? Or did she make you?”

  I asked because I wanted to know, no, because I needed some kind of clue as to how Logan felt about me. Something that would tell me whether he was interested in me or had just been forced into all of this.

  “No,” Logan said in a quiet voice. “She didn’t make me. She, Coach Ajax, and Nickamedes asked me, and I told them yes.”

  “Why?”

  For the first time, Logan looked at me, his mouth curving up into a small, sexy grin. “Somebody’s got to watch out for you, Gypsy girl. Trouble seems to follow you wherever you go. We both know that you can’t even walk around campus without running into people—literally.”

  His smile melted some of the ice in his eyes, and for a moment I felt like things had gone back to the way they were before the homecoming dance. That we were back to the teasing sort of flirting that had been going on between us. So I screwed up my courage and did something that I’d been thinking about ever since that night in the library.

  “Well, maybe you’d like to talk about it some more. Over ... coffee or ... whatever.”

  Yeah, I was totally asking him out, and he knew it.

  But he didn’t like it, because Logan immediately stiffened. The warmth in his blue eyes snuffed out, and his mouth tightened. He took a step back and shook his head.

  “That’s not a good idea, Gwen.”

  Uh-oh. He’d used my name, which meant he was serious. My heart squeezed in on itself.

  “Why not? I ... like you. A lot. And it seems like you might ... like me, too?” I winced. The words hadn’t sounded so needy, so freaking desperate, in my head.

  For a second, Logan’s face softened. “I do like you, Gwen. A lot. I think there’s something really special about you.”

  His features hardened once more. “But there are things that—that you just don’t know about me. About Spartans and what we are. Things that you don’t want to know. Especially about me. I’m not the guy you think I am. I’m not some sort of hero. Not at all.”

  Logan got that look in his eyes, that wild, hurt, desperate sort of look that Paige Forrest had had right before I’d picked up her hairbrush. Whatever secrets the Spartan had, they were biggies.

  And all that I had to do to find out what they were was reach out and touch him.

  Logan was the first boy I’d liked in, well, forever. And he was standing here telling me that, yes, he liked me, too, but that we couldn’t even go have coffee together. Much less do anything else. I wanted to know what he was hiding from me, what secret he thought was so terrible that I wouldn’t want to be with him.

  And I wanted to know right now.

  It would be so very easy to use my Gypsy gift, my psychometry, on Logan. To grab his hand and see all of his secrets. The temptation to do it was so strong.

  But then, I thought about Jasmine Ashton and how the Valkyrie had used her powers, her magic, to get what she’d wanted—revenge on her best friend. I remembered what Grandma Frost had told me about the other people like us, other Gypsies. About how some of them used their powers for selfish things. About how some of them were evil.

  Slowly, I curled my hands into fists. No. I wouldn’t be like that. I wouldn’t do that. Not to Logan. Not to someone I cared about. I wouldn’t use my gift, the one that Nike had given my family, to force him to reveal his secrets. I was smarter than that now. I was better than that now. I was better than Jasmine and all the other Reapers like her, who only used their powers to hurt others.

  So I just stared at him, my feelings for him so obvious in my violet eyes. But Logan just looked away.

  “Logan!” a voice called out. “There you are!”

  A girl walked across the quad toward us—the same girl Logan had taken to the homecoming dance. The one who’d been pissed that he’d been dancing with me. Daphne had told me that her name was Savannah Warren and that she was an Amazon who lived in Valhalla Hall. I’d asked around and figured out it was her room and her window that Logan had jumped out of the day I’d run into him outside the dorm after I’d swiped Jasmine’s laptop.

  Savannah gave me a dirty look and slid past me to get to him. Logan put his arm around her. He turned his head, and she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him. Logan pulled Savannah even closer, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. My fisted hands clenched together that much tighter. If the Amazon stuck her tongue any farther down Logan’s throat, she was going to poke his brain out of the back of his skull. If there was even anything in there to start with.

  After a minute of sucking face, the two of them broke apart. Logan smiled down at her, although his eyes were still cold in his face. Savannah turned and smirked at me, and I felt my heart ice over. So this was how it was going to be. Logan Quinn, man-whore of Mythos Academy, was back in full force, and I was just that Gypsy girl to him again.

  “Are you ready, babe?” Savannah asked, putting her head on Logan’s shoulder and peering up at him through her long, perfect eyelashes.

  “Sure. Let’s go,” Logan said. “The Gypsy and I were done here anyway.”

  And then, he turned and walked away with her. He never even looked back at me.

  I stood there, feeling like my heart had just been broken without it ever having really been offered up for sacrifice in the first place.

  Chapter 26

  Later that night, Daphne came over to my dorm room with a pizza in one hand and a six-pack of soda in the other as part of our plans for a serious study session and a total gossip fest. I’d been responsible for dessert, of course, and Grandma Frost had loaded me up with chocolate, peanut butter, and pumpkin fudge when I’d seen her yesterday.

  Daphne and I spread the food out on the floor and sat down in front of the TV, which I turned to the latest Project Runway marathon, per Daphne’s request. While the Valkyrie stared at the fashions on the flickering screen, I opened the pizza box and stopped cold.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  What was inside the box didn’t look like a pizza to me. Oh, there was a crust and some mozzarella cheese under there somewhere, but the whole top of the pizza was covered with some sort of exotic meat, a suspicious spicy-smelling white sauce, and steame
d vegetables, cut into fancy shapes, of course. My eyes narrowed. Was that wilted spinach? Yucko.

  “I got it at the dining hall,” Daphne said, digging into the steaming pie and grabbing a slice. “It’s a grilled lamb Florentine pizza. It’s the latest thing on the menu.”

  “Whatever happened to plain old cheese and pepperoni? Or ham and pineapple?”

  Daphne rolled her eyes. “Pepperoni? That is so boring and so over.” Her black eyes flicked to my clothes. “Just like all those hoodies that you wear. We seriously have to go shopping, Gwen. You totally need some new threads.”

  I might not have been friends with the Valkyrie long, but I was starting to learn her moods—and that there was no point in arguing with her about my hoodies. So I sighed, grabbed a slice of pizza, and bit into it. Okay, so it was actually kind of good, spinach and all, but I wasn’t going to tell Daphne that. At least, not yet.

  “So,” Daphne said, cracking open a soda with her fingernails and causing pink sparks of magic to fill the air. “I ran into Morgan at the dining hall when I went to get the pizza.”

  “And how was that?”

  Daphne hadn’t really had much to do with Morgan and the other Valkyries since she’d gone to the homecoming dance with Carson. We’d been hanging out a lot, though, and were slowly becoming real friends. I liked a lot of things about Daphne. She was cool and funny and a complete nerd when it came to talking about computer stuff. She wasn’t at all like the spoiled, selfish Valkyrie princess I’d thought she was that day when I’d first confronted her in the girls’ bathroom.

  Daphne shrugged. “About what I’d expected. Morgan tried to get me to sit with her and the others. They wanted to know all about my big date with Carson. But I knew that if I told Morgan anything, she’d make fun of me behind my back just like Jasmine did.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Daphne shrugged again. “Don’t be. I told Morgan exactly what I thought of her and what a ho-bag she was for sleeping with Samson behind Jasmine’s back. And then, I gave the other girls all the e-mails that I pulled off Jasmine’s laptop, all the ones that Morgan and Jasmine had swapped back and forth, talking about everyone.”

  I almost choked on my pizza. “You didn’t!”

  Daphne gave me a wicked grin. “I did. You should have seen their faces. They were all so pissed that they started yelling at Morgan right in the middle of the dining hall. They were all still screaming at her when I left to come over here.”

  It wasn’t the bloody, gruesome revenge that Jasmine had wanted, but I supposed it was something. Maybe now at least the other girls would know what Morgan was really like and they could steer clear of her.

  “What about you?” Daphne asked. “Did you meet with Metis like you were supposed to? What did she say?”

  I wasn’t quite ready to tell Daphne about the goddess Nike picking me to be her Champion, so I glossed over that part. But I told Daphne everything else, including the fact that Metis thought I might be in danger from Jasmine’s family since they were all Reapers.

  “I’ve met Jasmine’s family,” Daphne said. “Metis is right to be worried. Her brother is especially freaky. I always thought he was wound a little too tight, no matter how cute he was.”

  “Metis didn’t tell me that,” I said. “But she rearranged my schedule. Now I get to have private lessons with a combat tutor every morning before classes start. Metis wants me to learn how to actually use my sword.”

  I gestured at Vic, who was in his scabbard and hanging on the wall right next to my Wonder Woman poster.

  “Combat tutor?” Daphne asked. “Metis assigned you a tutor? Who?”

  “Logan Quinn.”

  Daphne’s black eyes gleamed. “Really? That’s very interesting.”

  “It’s not going to be like that at all,” I said, a bitter tone creeping into my voice. “Logan told me so himself. He pretty much gave me the I-like-you-but-we-can’t-goout-for-some-stupid-reason speech. And then, he stuck his tongue down Savannah Warren’s throat right in front of me on the quad.”

  Daphne winced in sympathy.

  I hadn’t told Daphne how I felt about Logan, but I was pretty sure that the Valkyrie had guessed. It was probably as obvious to her as her feelings for Carson had been to me.

  “I’m sorry, Gwen,” she said.

  I just shrugged.

  We ate in silence for a few minutes, before Daphne steered the conversation back to a safer subject—Carson and how wonderful she thought that he was.

  “Did I tell you that he wrote a song for me?” Daphne said in a dreamy tone. “It goes something like this... .”

  Despite my other problems, I found myself getting caught up in Daphne’s story, and soon we were laughing and giggling like we’d been BFFs forever. Once again, that sense of normalcy, of peace, crept over me. Gossiping with a friend over pizza. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the night.

  Sure, there was still a lot of stuff going on. A goddess had given me a sword and declared me to be her Champion, and Jasmine’s family and the rest of the Reaper bad guys wanted to do some pretty nasty things to me. I’d just told the boy I liked that I actually, well, liked him, and before going off with another girl he’d told me that we couldn’t be together

  My eyes went to my mom’s photo, which was on my desk right under Vic’s spot on the wall. I planned to get a frame for the picture of her and Metis and put it there as well. Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed like my mom was always smiling right at me whenever I looked at her picture now. Like she could see me from wherever she was or something. Maybe she could. Mythos Academy was a place of magic after all, where legends were real and anything could happen.

  And I’d finally figured out something else, too. That the people you loved never really died, not as long as you kept your memories of them alive, not as long as they lived on in your heart. And my mom would always be in mine.

  Daphne snapped her fingers in front of my eyes. “Earth to Gwen!”

  “What? What did you say?”

  She gestured at the pizza box in between us. One single slice lay inside. “I asked you if you wanted the last piece of pizza.”

  I looked at her, then at my mom’s picture again and Vic and the rest of my cozy little dorm room. Finally, my eyes landed on the small statue of Nike that I’d bought from the campus bookstore. The winged figure of the goddess of victory sat on my desk, right next to my mom’s photo.

  As I stared at the statue, Nike’s eyes suddenly snapped open, just like Vic’s had done to me that first night in the library. They were the same color as Vic’s eye, the same color as the goddess’s eyes had been when I’d seen her, the same color as my eyes. A beautiful mix of purple and gray that always made me think of twilight.

  As I watched, mouth hanging open, one of the eyes slowly lowered and went back up again. Was she ... winking at me? I blinked, and the figure’s eyes were closed just like they had been before.

  But for once, the sight didn’t freak me out. Instead, I felt like I’d earned the goddess’s approval, like I’d achieved some sort of ... peace or something. Some sort of victory. At least for tonight.

  “Gwen?” Daphne asked again. “Are you okay?”

  “Tell you what,” I said, looking at my friend. “Why don’t we split the last piece?”

  Daphne smiled. “Works for me.”

  “Me too.”

  So we did.

  BEYOND THE STORY

  A Clash of Inspirations

  I blame Clash of the Titans for this book. When I was a kid, it seemed like every time we had a movie day at school we would watch one of two films—The Princess Bride (inconceivable!) or, you guessed it, Clash of the Titans (the old Harry Hamlin version, not the new one with Sam Worthington).

  Ideas for books don’t always come to me overnight. Sometimes, it seems like they are years in the making. I think this is the case with Touch of Frost and the Mythos Academy series. It all started with movie day. I remember thinking how cool the
movie made mythology seem. But more than that, I thought it was interesting how all these gods, goddesses, humans, and monsters interacted with each other.

  Over the years, I read various mythology-based works, including The Iliad and The Odyssey, among others. Mostly, I read these stories for class assignments, but I enjoyed them all the same. Well, most of them, anyway. Some are better than others. But it always amazed me just how many different stories and different versions of those stories were out there.

  And my interest in mythology didn’t stop there. I read more stories and watched more movies and more TV shows.

  Many years later, I watched my first episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. I was immediately hooked. Here were fun (and admittedly campy) stories about gods, goddesses, and the ultimate kick-ass warrior chick who could hold her own against all of them. How cool was that?

  And then came the movie 300, which was just a loud, brash, bloody, violent, visual spectacle. I enjoyed the entertaining story about warriors bravely battling on even in the face of impossible odds.

  Somewhere along the way, in the back of my mind, I thought that it would be cool to someday write my own mythology-based story and put my own spin on things with my own characters, magic, and more.

  I don’t remember the exact day that the lightbulb went off inside my head. I had been thinking about writing a young adult book for a while, but I was struggling to come up with a concept. Then I thought what if I had a smart, plucky, slightly snarky heroine and put her in a world full of ancient warriors and magic that she didn’t really believe in? What if there was an evil god who was trying to take over the world? What if my heroine was the key to stopping this evil god? What if she was stronger and more of a warrior than she ever thought she could be?

  The idea just snowballed from there until it finally became Touch of Frost and the basis for the Mythos Academy series—magic, myth, and monsters. I hope that everyone has as much fun reading the book as I did writing it—and that the gods don’t take too much offense at my reimagining of them. Happy reading!