Chapter 5
I promised to call Daphne later, and she told me that she and Carson would be at weapons training in the gym in the morning just like usual. I said good-bye to my friends and followed Metis up the stairs and out of the math-science building. It was even colder now than it had been during the assembly, and the main quad was deserted. By now, the other students would have gathered in the dining hall, library, or their dorms to talk about what had happened.
The professor walked with me across campus, with Alexei trailing along behind. He didn’t speak to us. In fact, he didn’t make a sound. His clothes didn’t rustle, his boots didn’t thump on the cobblestones, his breath didn’t even steam like mine did in the cold. Creepy.
We finally reached Styx Hall and stopped outside the dorm.
“Just try to just relax and put this out of your mind as best you can, okay, Gwen?” Metis said. “And know that Nickamedes, Ajax, and I are working as hard as we can to get the charges dropped.”
I nodded. “I’ll try. Thank you. And I want to say that I’m sorry for all this. I never thought—I never thought something like this would happen.” My throat tightened once more, and that was all I could say.
“I know, and it’s not your fault, none of it, no matter what the Protectorate thinks. Remember that.”
Metis squeezed my arm, turned, and headed back up to the main quad. Alexei left too, following her, but I wasn’t alone. Inari was outside the dorm, leaning against a tree right below my dorm room windows. He still wore his gray robe, and that, along with his black hair and dark eyes, made him seem like just another shadow that had been splashed across the landscape. Looked like the Protectorate wasn’t joking when it came to keeping an eye on me twenty-four-seven.
I used my student ID card to get into the dorm and walked up the steps to the third floor where my room was, stuck in a separate turret from the rest of the building. To my surprise, an older woman was on her knees outside the door to my room, a rag in her hand and a bucket of soapy water on the floor next to her.
“Grandma?” I asked. “What are you doing?”
Geraldine Frost looked up at me with violet eyes that were the same color as mine. She must have come straight here from her afternoon readings because she was still wearing what she called her
Gypsy gear
—a white silk blouse, black pants, and soft black shoes with toes that curled up. Colorful scarves were wrapped around her body, and the silver coins on the fringed ends
jingle-jingle-jingled
together with every move she made. She usually wore a scarf as a sort of headband, but today her iron-gray hair was loose around her wrinkled face.
Grandma was a Gypsy just like I was, which meant that she had a gift just like I did. In Grandma’s case, she could see the future. She made extra money telling people’s fortunes out of her house in nearby Asheville, just like I used my psychometry to find things that had been lost, forgotten, or stolen.
Not anymore, I realized with a jolt. Given what had happened at the amphitheater, no one on campus would ever hire me to find missing items again. That shouldn’t have mattered to me, but it did. Sure, tracking down lost cell phones and stolen bracelets wasn’t the most exciting or glamorous job, but it was
mine
—it was part of my magic, it was part of me being, well,
me
. Now, it was just another thing the Protectorate had taken away by accusing me in front of the entire academy. I wondered what else I would have to sacrifice before this was all over with—and if it would really end up costing me my life.
I pushed those troubling thoughts away and stepped closer to her. “Grandma? What’s going on? Why are you scrubbing at my door with that rag . . .” My voice trailed off as I realized why.
MURDERER
.
KILLER
.
REAPER BITCH
.
Those words and other, even nastier ones had been spray painted across the door and the surrounding walls in bright paint—Reaper-red paint.
“I’m sorry, pumpkin,” Grandma Frost said, throwing the rag into the bucket and getting to her feet. “I was hoping to get it cleaned up before you saw. Don’t worry. They just painted the walls. They didn’t get into your room. I checked already.”
I stared at the door and the walls. I could feel the anger radiating from the ugly, ugly words just as I’d felt it roll off the crowd at the amphitheater. I knew that if I leaned forward and ran my fingers over the paint, that the emotion would intensify, and I’d feel what the other kids had when they’d written those words—all their terrible hatred of me.
Suddenly, it was all just too much. My disastrous date with Logan. The Protectorate arresting me, then announcing the charges to everyone. Linus telling me the penalty for my supposed crimes was death. It was all just too
much
. Hot, scalding tears streamed down my cheeks even as I tried to hold back the wrenching sobs that shook my body from head to toe.
Grandma’s arms closed around me, and she started rocking me back and forth. “Sshh. Sshh. It’s okay, pumpkin. I’m here now. Everything’s going to be all right.”
I held on to her that much tighter and just cried and cried and cried. Letting it all out. My worries, my fears, my anger. Slowly, my body-shaking sobs died down to a steady stream of quiet tears, and then, even those dried up. I wiped the last of the tears off my flushed face, stepped back from Grandma, and stared at the ruined door, trying to ignore the empty, hollow ache in my chest.
“I guess Metis told you what happened,” I mumbled.
Grandma nodded. “She did.”
Sighing, I opened the door, and we stepped inside. A bed, a desk, some bookcases, a TV, a small fridge. My dorm room looked like any other, but I’d added my own personal touches, like the posters of Wonder Woman, Karma Girl, and The Killers that hung on the wall, and the framed photos of my mom that stood on my desk, right next to a small replica statue of Nike.
I stared at the statue, wondering if the goddess would open her eyes and give me a sly wink like she sometimes did, letting me know that everything was going to be okay. But the figurine remained still and frozen in place. I sighed. It seemed that Nike wasn’t too happy with me right now either. At least she wasn’t bowing her head and looking away from me like all the statues had earlier.
But somebody was happy to see me—Nyx.
The Fenrir wolf pup had been snoozing in a wicker basket in the corner, but she scrambled to her feet at the sound of the door opening. Nyx had only been born a couple of weeks ago, so she was still tiny, only weighing a few pounds, but I thought she was the cutest thing with her dark gray fur and purplish eyes. She bounded out of her basket, pounced on my sneaker, and started growling and playing tug-of-war with one of my shoelaces.
I picked up the wolf pup and hugged her to my chest. Nyx playfully growled again, giving me a nose full of raunchy breath, but I didn’t care. The wolf licked my cheek, and I felt her happiness that I was finally back so I could play with her.
On the wall next to my posters, a purplish eye snapped open to glare at me.
“Well, it’s about time you got back,” a voice said in a cool English accent. “Where have you been all afternoon, Gwen?”
I walked over and looked at the eye. Actually, it wasn’t just an eye I was staring at, but half of a man’s face, complete with a nose, a mouth, and even an ear. The face was inlaid into the hilt of a silver sword that was hanging in a black leather scabbard on the wall. Vic, my talking sword, the weapon given to me by Nike.
Vic had been around a long, long time, and he had plenty of attitude, especially when it came to telling people how exceptionally awesome he was. Sometimes, the mouthy sword got on my nerves, but right now, I just wanted to hug him close the way I was Nyx.
I held the wolf pup up, and she gave Vic a lick on his metal cheek just like she had me.
“Ugh! Disgusting. Someone needs a breath mint, fuzzball,” Vic growled, but he couldn’t keep the smile off his half of a face, and neither could I.
Nyx let out another happy growl and licked him again. Vic grumbled some more, but then he spotted my Grandma Frost standing behind me, and his eye widened.
“Geraldine?”
“Vic.”
The sword’s gaze swiveled back to me. “What’s going on? Why do you both have such gloomy expressions on your faces?”
I put Nyx on the floor so she could run around and plopped down on my bed. “It’s a long story.”
“Well, I think it’s one we’d both like to hear,” Grandma Frost said, sitting in my desk chair. “Tell me everything that happened, and everything the Protectorate said to you.”
“The Protectorate?” Vic said. “What are those bloody fools doing here?”
“Apparently, deciding whether I live or die,” I mumbled.
I told them what had happened at the coffee shop, the amphitheater, and the academy prison. After I finished, they were both silent, although Vic’s eye was narrowed in thought. His eye was a strange shade, not quite purple, but not quite gray either—more like the color of twilight, that beautiful shade that softened the sky just before nightfall. Although there was nothing soft about the sword’s gaze right now. The fury in his eye made it glow as bright as a star.
“Those bloody fools,” Vic growled again. “Sometimes, I don’t think the members of the Protectorate can tell a hole in the ground from their—”
“Vic,” Grandma said in a warning tone. “That’s enough of that kind of talk.”
The sword glowered at her a little, but he kept right on grumbling about the Protectorate, although he mostly did it under his breath.
“What am I going to do?” I asked her. “Do you really think they’ll find me guilty? That they’ll actually put me in prison . . . execute me?” I had to force myself to whisper the last few words.
Grandma shook her head. “I don’t know, pumpkin. I just wonder who made these accusations against you in the first place. If we knew that, I think we’d know what was really going on.”
I got to my feet and started pacing from one side of my room to the other. “It’s got to be some plot by the Reapers. But why? To make everyone at Mythos hate me? To get me expelled? None of those things will keep me from fighting the Reapers and being Nike’s Champion. . . will they?”
“Of course not,” Vic snapped. “The goddess chose your family to give her magic to. She chose you to be her Champion, Gwen.
You
—not anyone else. There’s nothing the Protectorate can do about any of that. Not one bloody thing.”
I thought of the cold way Linus Quinn had looked at me. I wasn’t so sure about that, but I didn’t tell the sword my fears. If I did, Vic would just say something about how he could convince Logan’s dad to drop the charges—while his point was pressed against Linus’s heart. Vic was rather bloodthirsty that way. One of his favorite things to do was talk about all the Reapers we were going to kill.
Normally, I tried to ignore Vic’s Reaper rants as best I could, but tonight I thought about the one Reaper I actually wanted to take down—Vivian Holler. Once again, I flashed back to that night in the forest when Vivian had climbed on top of her Black roc, a huge, mythological bird, and had flown away with Loki riding behind her. I wondered where Vivian was right now. According to Metis, the Pantheon hadn’t heard so much as a whisper of where Vivian had gone. Something else that frustrated me. What good was it being a Champion if I couldn’t even avenge my own mom’s murder?
I stopped pacing, pulled back the curtain, and stared out one of the picture windows. My eyes scanned the lawn below, and it took me several seconds to spot Inari’s thin figure. He had his back against one of the trees and looked like just another dark shadow in the night. If I hadn’t known he was there, I wouldn’t have noticed him at all.
Grandma Frost got up and peered out the window as well. “Is that one of the Protectorate guards?”
“Yeah, his name is Inari Sato.”
She nodded. “A Ninja. I’ve heard of him. He’s supposed to be one of the Pantheon’s best warriors and one of the leaders of the Protectorate.”
“Yeah, him and Logan’s dad apparently,” I sniped and let the curtain fall back into place. “There are others who will be guarding me too. A Russian guy named Sergei Sokolov and his son, Alexei. He’s a third-year student from the London academy. Logan acted like he knew him, and Daphne met him before at some archery competition.”
Grandma didn’t say anything, but she heard the fear and frustration in my voice. She reached over and gently took my hand in hers. As always, the warmth of her love washed over me as soon as her skin touched mine. I focused on that sensation, letting it drown out everything else, all the bad things that had happened today, and all the bad ones that might come to be tomorrow.
“Don’t worry, pumpkin,” she said in a distant voice. “Everything will work out in the end. You’ll see.”
Her eyes were empty and glassy, like she was looking at something only she could see. She was having one of her psychic visions, and I felt this force stir in the air around her—something old, patient, knowing, and watchful. I stayed where I was, still and quiet, and held her hand.
“Things will be difficult for a while, but they’ll eventually get better,” she murmured. “You’ll see.”