Jennifer Estep Bundle

by Jennifer Estep

  And now, it was time for the most difficult part, the thing I’d been dreading telling him for weeks now. “I’ve seen part of it already. Part of your secret.”

  Logan dropped his hands from around my waist and stepped back. A panicked light flared in his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  “When we kissed in the construction site at the ski resort, when I kissed you so I could tap into your fighting skills and defeat Preston, I saw more than just you battling other kids,” I said in a low voice. “I saw you as a little boy—standing over two bodies. A woman and a girl. They looked like you, and there—there was blood all over them.”

  “You saw that?” he whispered.

  I nodded. “Bits and pieces of it. First, I saw you in a closet, clutching a sword. You were so scared of what was going on outside the door, of all the shadows and screams you heard. Then, the memory shifted, and you were standing over the two bodies ... crying. That was all I saw before the kiss ended.”

  Logan turned away from me. The Spartan ran his hands down over his face, like he could scrub the memory out of his own mind with the motion. After a second, he snapped back around and stabbed his finger at me.

  “You had no right to do that. You had no right to go snooping through my head like that. No right at all, Gwen.”

  Uh-oh. The Spartan only called me Gwen when he was serious about something—or seriously pissed off like he was now.

  “I didn’t do it on purpose. It just ... happened.”

  The hard, angry look on Logan’s face told me that he didn’t believe me—that he didn’t believe the memories had just come to me and that I hadn’t gone looking for them on purpose. Yeah, sometimes I used my Gypsy gift to figure out what other people were hiding, what their secrets were, but I would never do that to Logan. Never.

  “Will you at least tell me who they were?” I asked in a soft voice, trying to reach out to him. “The woman and the girl?”

  Logan let out a bitter laugh. “I suppose I don’t have a choice now, do I? Because I know you, Gypsy girl. Once you get your teeth into something, you never let go. Once you find out someone’s keeping something from you, you’re even more determined to figure out what it is, what their precious secret is.”

  I flinched at his words.

  “You want to know what happened back then, Gypsy girl?” Logan snarled. “I’ll tell you.”

  The Spartan’s hands tightened into fists, and his whole body trembled with rage as he glared at me, his face as hard and fierce as I’d ever seen it.

  “Reapers came to our house one afternoon, and they killed everyone they could get their hands on, just like they did at the coliseum. Except, in this case, that everyone was my mom, Larenta, and my older sister, Larissa. The Reapers came in, and they butchered them like cattle, even though neither one of them even had a weapon.”

  I’d thought it must have been something like that, but my heart still twisted at his pain, at the raw, naked grief shimmering in his eyes. “Oh, Logan. I’m so, so sorry. I know what it’s like to lose your mom. To have her taken away from you. I’m sure that you did everything you could to help your mom and your sister. I’m sure you did everything you could to try and save them—”

  He let out another harsh laugh, cutting off my words. “You don’t know anything. Not a damn thing. Not about me, not about being a Spartan, nothing,” he growled. “Your mom and grandma kept you out of all this, sheltered you from Loki and Reapers and everything else. You have no idea what it’s like to grow up in our world, to deal with the threat of them every single day. To you, it’s like it’s all a big game or something. Even when Metis and Nickamedes tell you to be smart, to stay safe, you go right back to poking your nose into other people’s business. When are you going to realize this obsession you have with finding out people’s secrets is going to get you killed?”

  I opened my mouth to say it wasn’t true, that nothing he was saying was true, but the words just wouldn’t come. Because really, deep down, I was exactly like that. I’d totally scoffed at the idea of Loki and Reapers of Chaos when I’d first come to Mythos, despite all the magic I’d seen around me. Even now, when I knew the Reaper girl was targeting me, I still wanted to beat her at her own game. I wanted to find the Helheim Dagger and keep it safe from her and all the other Reapers. I wanted to be worthy of the power and trust Nike had given to me. I wanted to be as smart, strong, and brave as all the other Frost women who had served the goddess of victory.

  But most of all, I wanted to make the Reaper girl pay for murdering my mom.

  “I don’t know why I thought you would be different. I don’t know why I thought you might understand. I don’t know why I thought this would work,” Logan said. “I’m sorry, Gwen. I just—I just can’t do this. Not even for you. Especially not for you.”

  The Spartan turned around and stalked toward the double doors that led out of the library.

  “Logan? Logan!”

  But the Spartan didn’t stop. If anything, he quickened his pace—and he didn’t look back. Not even once.

  I stood there in the middle of the library stunned—simply stunned. By the awful thing that had happened to Logan’s family and by the awful things he’d said to me. Things that were a little closer to the truth than I would have liked them to be. Tears burned my eyes, and a sob rose in my throat, but I swallowed it down. How had Logan and I gone from talking about us and what we could be to breaking up before we even got together?

  “Ahem.” Someone cleared his throat.

  I swiped the tears from my eyes and turned to find Nickamedes standing behind me, holding my messenger bag in front of him like a shield. From the look on his face, it was obvious the librarian had heard everything Logan had said to me.

  “I bet you just loved that, didn’t you?” I snapped, trying to keep the tears from running down my cheeks. “Your nephew telling me exactly what a horrible person I am. Did you give him pointers on that little speech? Or does being mean just run in the family?”

  Nickamedes stared at me, his face blank and neutral. “I’m ready to close the library for the night, Gwendolyn. I thought you might want your things before you left.”

  He held out my bag, and I stalked forward and grabbed it from him, fully intending to run out of the library before he saw me cry. Except I didn’t get a great grip on the strap, and the bag fell to the floor, spilling my stuff everywhere. The perfect ending to a perfectly miserable night.

  I got down on my hands and knees and started scooping everything back into the bag. Pens, notebooks, the latest comic books I was reading, the bag of food for Nott. I’d just crawled over to the gryphon book I’d dropped earlier, when I heard Nickamedes shuffle on his feet behind me.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked in a low voice.

  I looked up to find the librarian clutching my mom’s diary in his hands, a strange, twisted look on his face, like the leather cover burned his skin and it hurt him just to look at the journal. I got to my feet, stalked over, and yanked it out of his fingers, wondering if the damage had already been done, if he’d already imprinted his hatred for me on the diary.

  “Give me that,” I hissed. “That was my mom’s, and I don’t want you touching it. Not for one second.”

  The librarian frowned, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe for once he realized exactly how angry and hurt I was—if he even cared about such things. Instead, Nickamedes’s gaze fell to something else on the floor, something that had slid under one of the tables, and he walked over to it and bent down.

  I stood there a second, clutching the diary and reaching out with my psychometry. Once again, all I felt was my mom’s presence, and the only images filling my mind were of her writing in the diary. Nickamedes hadn’t touched it long enough to leave any piece of himself behind. Good. I didn’t want him to ruin this for me, too.

  “Gwendolyn, wait,” Nickamedes said, still crouched down.

  But I was in no mood to be lectured or whatever else the librarian had
in mind, so I slung the strap of my bag across my chest and hurried out of the library as fast as I could.

  I stalked across campus back to my dorm, trying not to cry about what had just happened between Logan and me—and failing miserably. For once, I was glad shadows covered the upper quad and the cobblestone walkways that led to the dorms. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this, or worse, take a stupid picture with his or her cell phone and text it to everyone at the academy.

  I passed a few kids heading to their own dorms for the ten o’clock curfew, but I was able to make it back to Styx Hall without anyone’s getting a good look at my red, splotchy face. I used my student ID card to open the front door of the dorm and thumped up the stairs to my room on the third floor. I unlocked that door, too, and stepped inside. I threw my bag down on my desk, then went over and flopped onto my bed.

  On the floor, Nott let out a little whine and lashed her tail from side to side. Vic’s eye snapped open at the sound of me coming into the room. The sword stared at me for a second, his purplish gaze dark and suspicious.

  “What’s wrong?” Vic asked. “Why have you been crying?”

  “It’s nothing, Vic,” I said and let out a hiccup.

  For some stupid reason, I always started hiccupping after I cried. Another thing that made me a freak, right along with my psychometry. For once, I wondered why I couldn’t have been blessed with a different kind of magic. Why couldn’t Nike have made me superstrong like a Valkyrie? Or superquick like an Amazon? My psychometry was what was keeping Logan and me apart. No, correction, it was what had driven Logan and me apart. After the way the Spartan had lashed out at me tonight, I doubted anything I said or did would make him give me another chance—would make him give us another chance.

  I didn’t understand why. I’d told Logan that I’d seen his secret, that I knew what he was hiding, what made him so achingly sad, despite the fact that he tried to hide his pain with sly teasing and devilish grins. Instead of being relieved, Logan had only become angrier when he heard my confession. I didn’t understand what was wrong with the Spartan—or me.

  Logan and I were over before we’d even gotten started. Sometimes I thought that was the story of my life. My dad, Tyr, had died when I was two, before I’d even had a chance to know him. My mom had been murdered and had never told me about Loki, Reapers, or being Nike’s Champion. And now, I couldn’t find the Helheim Dagger so I could protect it from the Reaper girl. Yep, tragic loss and epic failure definitely seemed to be the stories of my life.

  I rolled over onto my back, and Nott got up from her spot on the floor. The Fenrir wolf was so tall that she easily managed to put her head on the bed. She looked at me with her dull rusty eyes—eyes that weren’t Reaper red anymore but weren’t quite brown either—and let out another whine. Trying to comfort me, I supposed.

  I sighed, reached out, and stroked her silky ears. Nott let out a grumble of pleasure and shoved her head farther underneath my fingers. For some reason, petting her made me feel a little better—even if she was big enough to eat me. Sighing, I got to my feet. Just because I was suffering didn’t mean the wolf should, too.

  While Nott ate the meat I’d brought her from the dining hall, I took a shower, then went downstairs and grabbed some blankets and pillows from one of the closets where the extra bedding was kept. I carried the blankets up to my room and made a nest for Nott in between my bed and my desk.

  “You never made me a cozy bed like that,” Vic said from his spot on the wall. “And I’m far more useful than a bloody wolf.”

  Nott stopped eating long enough to growl at him.

  “That’s because you have a cool leather scabbard,” I told the grumpy sword. “It’s your own little nest.”

  “Hmph!” Vic snapped his eye shut once more.

  I sighed and went back downstairs, this time grabbing a bucket from underneath the sink in the common kitchen that all the girls in the dorm shared. I carried the bucket back up to my room, filled it with water, and let Nott drink as much as she wanted. Then, when most of the lights in the dorm had gone dark and everything was quiet, I snuck the wolf down the stairs and let her do her business outside the dorm before the doors automatically locked down for the night.

  Finally, we were safe in my room. I thought about cracking open the gryphon book and getting started on the essay for Metis’s myth-history class, but instead, I found myself digging my mom’s diary out of my bag and curling up with it in bed.

  Nott and Vic were both asleep, but I was too wound up to settle down, so I snapped on a light over my bed and started reading.

  Today, I started my second year at Mythos Academy. ... Those were the words on the diary’s first page. I snuggled down below my comforter a little more, ready for a long night of reading and hopefully forgetting about my own problems.

  The diary went on from there, detailing the things my mom had done when she was seventeen and a second-year student at the academy like me. She wrote of her teachers and classes and how much she disliked Mrs. Banba, the moody economics professor.

  I smiled, hearing my mom’s voice in her words, almost like she was here reading the diary to me like a bedtime story. It comforted me. I especially liked the pages that talked about her friendship with Metis. Apparently, the two of them had been quite the troublemakers during their days at Mythos. Mom even complained about getting a talking to by the Powers That Were at the academy after one of their stunts. A few photos had been stuck in the diary, too, mostly of my mom grinning at the camera or her and Metis with their arms around each other. I set those aside. I’d frame them later and put them with the other photos on my desk.

  Still, as much as I enjoyed reading the diary, it didn’t give me any clues as to where my mom had hidden the Helheim Dagger. She never wrote anything about the artifact at all. The closest she came was when she mentioned an important mission she’d received from Nike. I thought she might have meant the dagger, and I scanned the surrounding pages, but she didn’t write anything else about the mission—not even if it had been a success or not.

  But the diary did tell me one thing about my mom: She liked to doodle. Sketches and drawings could be found on almost every page, but they weren’t the usual hearts and flowers you’d expect to find.

  Instead, my mom had drawn statues—all the statues that covered the buildings at Mythos Academy.

  Gargoyles, Minotaurs, basilisks, dragons, chimeras, Gorgons. All those and more littered the diary, peeking out at me from the tops and bottoms of the pages or stretching down the spine. For whatever reason, my mom had especially seemed to like the gryphons that guarded the library steps. There were more drawings of the two of them than there were of all the other statues combined. Maybe my mom had been given an assignment like I had to research and write about the statues. That was the only reason I could think of for why she’d drawn them over and over again.

  Despite the weird doodles and my frustration at not being able to find the dagger, just reading through my mom’s diary, just listening to her voice in my head and staring at her beautiful handwriting, made me feel a little better about, well, everything. Or maybe that was because I was holding the diary and soaking up all the images and feelings associated with it—everything my mom had felt and done. All the good times she’d had at the academy, and the bad ones, too. It was all a part of her and let me see my mom in a way I never had before, like watching old home movies of her as a teenager.

  I didn’t want the feeling to end, so when I finally quit reading and turned out the light, I slid the diary under my pillow, curling my fingers around it. And I stayed like that until I drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter 14

  The next day was exceptionally average. Except, of course, for my aching heart. I made sure I was at the gym for weapons training ten minutes early, hoping to talk to Logan before the others arrived, hoping to tell him ... something, anything that would fix this problem between us.

  For once, the Spartan didn’t show up.

>   “Sorry, Gwen,” Oliver said, slinging his bag onto the bleachers. “Logan texted me and said that he felt a little under the weather this morning.”

  “He’s not the only one,” I muttered.

  I knew the Spartan was avoiding me, and it looked like Oliver and Kenzie knew it, too, from the sympathetic looks they gave me. As if that wasn’t bad enough, we once again had an audience of first-year students, with even more kids than had been here yesterday. At least until they found out Logan wasn’t going to be training. After that, all the girls left.

  I gritted my teeth and clutched Vic so hard my fingers went numb, just trying to get through the hour of torture.

  The rest of the morning passed by in a boring blur of classes, lectures, and homework assignments until it was finally time for lunch. Carson had a special practice session to attend for the upcoming winter concert. The band geek was a Celt and had a magical talent for music, like a warrior bard. He automatically knew how to play every instrument he picked up.

  So it was only Daphne and me at our usual table in the dining hall, although the Valkyrie just picked at her curried chicken salad croissant and ambrosia fruit salad.

  “... and then he told me that I didn’t understand, that I would never understand, and basically broke up with me before we even got together. Can you believe it?” I muttered, griping about Logan.

  I waited a second, but Daphne didn’t say anything. Instead, the Valkyrie stabbed another heart-shaped strawberry on her plate, although she didn’t actually eat it.

  “And then Logan and I totally made out right there on top of one of the tables in the middle of the library,” I finished. “In front of Nickamedes. What do you think of that?”

  “Awesome,” Daphne muttered. “Just awesome.”

  I waved my hand in front of the Valkyrie’s face, finally getting her to look at me. “What is wrong with you? You’ve barely said a word during lunch, and you’re not listening to me at all.”