Jennifer Estep Bundle (82 page)

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Authors: Jennifer Estep

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Daphne gave me another grin, then playfully punched me in the shoulder, her Valkyrie strength almost making me fall off the bleacher. We both started laughing, and just like that, everything was right between us again.
We were still talking and joking around when the door to the gym opened—and Logan stepped inside.
Chapter 19
Logan strode toward me, and my heart rose up in my chest. By now, the Spartan was sure to have heard what had happened with my grandma, Preston, and the Reaper girl. I hoped he, well, I didn't know exactly what I hoped. I was just glad he was here.
I got to my feet and started to smile at the Spartan—until I realized that he was trailed once more by his first-year student entourage. The kids, including several more girls than before, hurried after the Spartan, like groupie fans trailing after a rock star. I rolled my eyes.
Logan said something to one of the first-year guys, who herded everyone else over to the bleachers so they could watch us practice. Only I didn't know if we were even training today. I hung back, holding Vic, and waited for Logan to make the first move.
“Hey,” the Spartan called out, going over and grabbing a sword from one of the racks of weapons.
“Hey,” I said, playing it cool.
On the bleachers behind me, Daphne let out a loud snort. “Oh, just go ahead and kiss and make up already,” the Valkyrie said. “You know you both want to.”
I would have liked nothing better. But we couldn't kiss—not without my flashing on Logan and learning the rest of his secret. Finding out what he was so afraid to tell me, the deep, dark thing he thought would change my feelings for him. I could see the same thought filling the Spartan's eyes. That, yeah, maybe he would have liked to kiss me, but he didn't want to give up his secret just to touch me. It hurt, knowing his secret was more important to him than I was. It hurt more than I ever could have imagined it would.
Tears pricked my eyes, but I blinked them back. Once again, my Gypsy gift was what was keeping us apart. I'd always loved my magic and the secrets it revealed to me, but for the first time, I wondered what it would be like not to have it. To be able to just let go and not worry about whom I was touching and what I might see. To just step into Logan's arms without any kind of fear of learning that he didn't care about me as much as I did him or the secrets he just didn't want to share.
The Spartan swung his sword from side to side, getting a feel for the weapon as he walked over to my position in the center of one of the mats. Logan stopped in front of me. Even now, when I knew how angry he was at me, my heart thudded at the sight of him. Black hair, blue eyes, strong body. All that was missing was his usual teasing grin.
I smiled at him, hoping he'd smile back and I'd know that everything was going to be all right between us. Instead, Logan's eyes were ice-cold as he raised his sword and lightly kissed the blade against my weapon.
“Ready, Gypsy girl?” he asked in a neutral voice.
My heart quivered with pain, but I nodded and tightened my grip on Vic.
For the next hour, we sparred, with Logan mock killing me again and again. Too bad the deadly Spartan couldn't put a dagger in my feelings for him as well.
Logan left the gym as soon as we finished training, followed by his entourage. I stood in front of the bleachers and watched him push through one of the doors. The Spartan didn't look back at me—not even once.
“Don't worry, Gwen,” Oliver said as he packed up his things. “He'll come around. You'll see.”
I thought of the coldness in Logan's eyes this morning and the things he'd said to me the other night. I didn't think there was anything I could do or say to Logan to make him forgive me. Not this time.
“Gwen?” Oliver said.
“Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Logan will come around sooner or later.” I forced myself to smile at my friend, even though the lie burned my tongue like acid.
 
The rest of the day passed by like it always did. Classes, lectures, homework assignments, the usual froufrou food in the dining hall. Finally, the last bell rang after myth-history class. Metis glanced in my direction like she wanted to come over and make sure I was doing okay, but I didn't have time for the professor today. I had a hunch that I wanted to check out—and unfortunately, Daphne insisted on going with me.
I brushed my brown hair back off my face and jiggled my hand, shaking off a stray spark of her magic that had decided to cling to my skin instead of winking out. A second later, that princess pink spark was replaced by a dozen more. Daphne always gave off more magic when she was nervous, worried, or upset.
You'd think she'd never broken into someone's room before.
And she thought I was a freak. Please. I could totally keep my cool when the occasion called for a little breaking and entering. And blackmail. And, well, several things that weren't exactly on the up and up. My Gypsy gift and all the Bad, Bad Things I'd seen with it had made me a little jaded that way. Okay, okay,
totally
jaded that way.
“Will you hurry up with that already?” Daphne hissed. “She could come back any second. I don't see why we're even doing this in the first place.”
I slid my driver's license in between the doorframe and the lock that was keeping me out of Savannah Warren's room. “Well, it would go a lot faster if you'd keep quiet and quit asking me to hurry up. I can only concentrate on one thing at a time.”
“And here I thought you were such a brilliant multitasker,” Daphne muttered, glancing down the empty hall toward the stairs like she had ten times in the last minute.
I rolled my eyes and started to snap back at her, when my license slid exactly where I wanted it to go, and the door clicked open.
“Bingo,” I whispered, turned the knob, and stepped inside.
Daphne hovered in the doorway, an uncertain look on her face. I rolled my eyes again.
“Well, don't just stand there,” I said, grabbing her arm and dragging her inside. “The key to breaking and entering is to actually
enter
after you break. Not stand around in the hall where everyone can see exactly what you're doing.”
“Sorry,” Daphne muttered. “I haven't had quite the experience at this as you have, Gwen.”
Yeah, we were totally sniping at each other, but I didn't mind because this was as close to normal as we'd been since the Reaper attack.
“Tell me again why we're in here?” Daphne asked, tiptoeing forward to stand beside the bookcase that hugged the wall inside the door.
“Because Vivian hired me to find her ring, and the last time she remembers seeing it is when she was with Savannah.”
Yeah, yeah, I knew there were more important things I could be doing, like seeing if Metis and the others had figured out where Preston and the Reaper girl were hiding. But I'd taken Vivian's money to find her ring, and I owed it to her to try to do that, especially since it meant so much to her, since it had been her mom's ring, too. I knew what it was like to lose your mom, how you wanted to hold on to every piece of her you had left.
Besides, I wanted to do
something
right this week. Maybe finding Vivian's ring would be it. At the very least, maybe it would take my mind off all my other problems—for a little while anyway.
“So what?” Daphne said. “Savannah probably just borrowed it without telling her. Friends do that all the time.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Really? So if I was to borrow, oh, I don't know, your favorite purse without telling you, then you'd be perfectly okay with that?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I'd be okay with it, but you might not be if you wanted to live long enough to finish the semester.”
“That's what I thought,” I said, going over to the vanity table. “Now help me look for Vivian's ring.”
“Fine,” Daphne huffed, stepping forward. “But I'm doing this under protest.”
“So noted. Now shut up and start looking.”
We spent the next ten minutes tossing Savannah's room. Okay, okay, so maybe
tossing
wasn't the right word, but we did look in every cubbyhole, crack, and crevice that we could find, along with all the usual hiding spots kids thought were so clever, the places where no one would
ever
think to look for their supersecret stash of candy bars, beer, cigarettes, or whatever their vice of choice was. Under the mattress. Taped to the bottom of a drawer. Tucked in a plastic bag and stuffed into the back of the toilet. I knew all the good hiding places, and my mom had told me about even more she'd discovered as a police detective.
“Nothing,” Daphne said when we finished. “See? I told you Savannah didn't have the ring. Now, can we please get out of here before she comes back? Savannah's supposed to meet Talia and Vivian in her room this afternoon. That's what I heard her say when I was standing in line behind her in the dining hall.”
Daphne's telling me what she'd overheard at lunch was the reason I'd decided to break in here, since it was kind of hard to look for lost or stolen property when the thief was still in her room.
Frustrated, I put my hands on my hips and looked at the room again. For some reason, I felt like Vivian's ring was in here somewhere, like I could almost feel it calling out to me. I wasn't ready to give up, so I went through the room again, more slowly and methodically this time, despite the fact that Daphne threw off more and more sparks of magic the longer we stayed.
The Valkyrie was just about to forcibly drag me out into the hallway when I grabbed a book and accidently banged it into the side of the bookcase—and the ring slipped out from the case and fell to the floor.
I leaned forward, staring at the inside of the bookcase. I'd pulled out all the books and had looked through and behind them, but the ring had been wedged into a hollow space where one of the wooden shelves didn't quite meet the side of the case. Not too shabby, as far as hiding places went. Definitely a little more creative than the back of the toilet.
Daphne bent over, picked up the ring, and turned it around and around in the palm of her hand.
“This? You really think Savannah stole
this?
It's just gold. There aren't even any diamonds on it. No rubies, no sapphires, nothing. It doesn't even look like it's worth more than a couple hundred bucks. And those two faces are really ugly.” Her critique finished, the Valkyrie sniffed and handed it over to me.
Images filled my mind as soon as I touched the ring.
I'd expected to get a few vibes off the ring, especially since Vivian had told me how special it was to her and how it had been her mom's ring. And I did see those memories. A younger Vivian standing by a bed. An older woman reaching up, her bloody hand shaking as she handed over the ring. Vivian crying and slipping the gold band onto her finger. I could feel Vivian's emotions, too. Her sadness that her mom was dying, her anger at the people who'd killed her. They made my own heart ache for the other girl. I knew how hard it was to lose your mom—especially to the Reapers.
I also saw other flashes, images of Vivian wearing the ring and growing up over the years. But then, the images changed and shifted. For a second, I felt like something was wrong. Like there was some feeling, some emotion attached to the ring I couldn't quite grasp, that my Gypsy gift couldn't quite show me, for whatever reason. It was the same vague, uneasy feeling I'd had when I'd touched the map the Reaper girl had dropped in the coliseum.
Then, a new image filled my mind—one of Savannah putting on the ring.
The pretty Amazon sat at the vanity table in her room, staring down at her hand and admiring the Janus ring and the way the gold glinted. I felt Savannah's smug satisfaction that the ring was hers now, that she'd taken what she wanted and that no one was the wiser. Greed. The feeling made me sick to my stomach. So Vivian was right, and Savannah had stolen her ring after all. Some best friend she was.
I'd thought that would be the end of the memories, but the image didn't fade away. Instead, it sharpened, hammering into my head, and Savannah reached over and picked up something on top of the vanity table—a Reaper mask.
Horrified, I watched as Savannah put on the mask, then grabbed a black robe from the floor and draped it over her shoulders. She looked at her reflection in the mirror and smiled, a bit of Reaper red fire flashing in her eyes.
I recognized her then. How could I not?
I was so shocked that the rest of the vision slipped away, splintering into shards that felt like they were stabbing deeper and deeper into my brain. I gasped in pain and opened my eyes. The ring slipped from my trembling fingers and hit the floor again.
“What? What is it?” Daphne said. “Why do you have that weird, sick look on your face?”
“Because Savannah didn't just steal Vivian's ring,” I said in a whisper, staring at my best friend. “She's a Reaper, too. And not just any Reaper. She's the Reaper girl, Daphne. Loki's Champion. The one who murdered my mom.”

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