Dark Frost (Mythos Academy #3)(17)
Author: Jennifer Estep

I didn’t see anything-not a thing.

No, that wasn’t quite true. I didn’t see anything suspicious. The window looked out into the backyard, where a tall maple stood guard, the tree’s branches reaching all the way over to tap against the glass. When I was a kid, I used to climb outside, sit in the tree, and read my comic books. It had scared my mom to death. Grandma, too. They’d both thought I’d slip, fall, and break my neck, but I never did. Climbing was actually something I was good at. Thanks to my Gypsy gift, I’d always been able to flash on the branches and tell which ones were the strongest and which ones would snap under my weight.

Right now, though, the branches bobbed back and forth like a tornado-force wind had just whipped through them. Weird. Nothing else was moving, and the wind wasn’t rattling the bushes in the backyard, but the tree looked like a whole flock of birds had suddenly erupted out of the top of it.

Maybe it was the idea of birds, but I looked up just in time to see a shadow move across the sky in a lazy pattern-almost like it was circling the house.

My mind flashed back to all those carvings and figures of Black rocs I’d seen when I’d picked up the Reaper girl’s map. Was it possible she’d sent a roc to spy on me? To peer in my window? Perhaps even to peck its way inside through the glass, grab the map she’d dropped, and kill me? I shivered and tightened my grip on Vic.

I peered into the night, my eyes gliding right, then left, up, then down, looking for a roc, a Nemean prowler, or any other mythological creature that might be lurking about in the clouds above or the shadows below. I didn’t see anything. It wasn’t that late, but a dark frost had already painted the landscape in cold, silvery shards. I would have thought the sight pretty, if I hadn’t known just how much the shadows could hide-

The growl sounded again.

I froze, waiting for the sound to cut off like it had before. But this time, it just kept going and going, rumbling along like a car idling by the curb. So I focused, this time really listening to the growl instead of letting myself be frightened by it, and I realized it wasn’t a Nemean prowler like I’d feared. Otherwise, the sound would have been more of a hissing yowl. No, this growl sounded more like … a dog. A very large, very angry dog.

A shadow detached itself from the garage behind the house, slinked into the bushes, and disappeared through a gap in the picket fence. Beyond that, the landscape gave way to a hill covered by a wild tangle of briars and brambles, but my eyes locked onto that one shadow, trying to figure out exactly what it was.

Something with four legs and a tail slipped into the thicket and vanished from sight. It could have been a stray dog-or a Fenrir wolf.

Not too long ago, I’d helped a Fenrir wolf when it had been injured; afterward, it seemed to regard me as almost a friend. But I hadn’t seen the wolf since I’d left the Powder ski resort. Metis and the other professors had searched for it, but the wolf had escaped into the surrounding mountains. In a way, I was glad. Even though Preston had trained, beaten, and ordered it to kill me, the wolf wasn’t all bad. I’d hoped it would find a pack of wild Fenrir wolves to run and play and live with deep in the mountains.

But why would the wolf be outside my window tonight? How would it have tracked me here all the way from the ski resort? And why now?

Then another, more chilling thought entered my mind. What if it wasn’t my wolf, the one I’d helped, but instead another one sent by the Reapers to kill me? Daphne had told me that once you pissed off the Reapers, they didn’t stop coming until you were dead. I’d done plenty to annoy them in the short time I’d been at Mythos Academy.

I crouched there by the window and watched, but nothing else moved in the tree, the sky, or the shadows below. I breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever had been out there, it looked like it had left, at least for this night.

Still, it was a long time before I went back to bed-and longer still until I finally fell asleep.

Chapter 7

Early the next morning, Grandma Frost drove Daphne and me to Mythos Academy. Normally, I would have just taken the bus that shuttled tourists from Asheville up to the posh suburb of Cypress Mountain, where the academy was located. But after the attack yesterday, Grandma insisted on driving us-and she made me promise her that I wouldn’t sneak off campus to see her during the week like I usually did. Since I didn’t want her to worry, I reluctantly agreed.

Grandma dropped us off in the parking lot behind the gym, joining a long line of limos and drivers who were doing the same. Kids got out of the cars and grabbed their designer luggage before hopping onto golf carts and zooming toward their dorm rooms across campus. By the time Daphne and I got our bags out of the trunk, all the carts were full, so we had to wait for someone to come back with an empty one.

"Everybody’s so quiet," Daphne murmured, holding her three bulging suitcases in one hand like they didn’t weigh any more than the pink purse hanging off her other arm. "It’s strange."

She was right-everyone was being quiet. Eerily so. Normally, kids would have been laughing, texting, and gossiping about who’d hooked up and split up over winter break, but this morning, all the kids had their chins tucked down into the tops of their expensive jackets and their hands shoved deep in their pockets, instead of messing with their phones. Even the kids who hadn’t been at the coliseum yesterday were feeling the fear and pain of the Reapers’ attack. It had been a brutal reminder of why we were all here at Mythos to start with.

Finally, a couple of golf carts came back, and we were able to leave. Daphne and I put our stuff in our dorm rooms, and at seven thirty that morning, I once again found myself fighting for my life. But this time, it was only in the gym with Logan and his two Spartan friends, Oliver Hector and Kenzie Tanaka.

Slash-slash-slash.

I moved Vic through a series of quick maneuvers swinging my sword a little closer to Logan’s head every single time.

"Ha!" I shouted as I flashed the blade at him. "Take that!"

Logan grinned, his blue eyes practically glowing in his face. Nothing made the Spartan happier than sparring-especially since he almost always won.

"Not bad, Gypsy girl," he said. "You’re finally learning how to attack instead of just defend. But what are you going to do against something like this?"

Clang-clang-clang.

The Spartan launched into a series of even quicker, more complicated moves, and ten seconds later, his sword hovered against my throat.

"And things were going so well up until now," Vic grumbled.

"Shut up, Vic," I said with a smile on my face.

Yeah, Logan had just mock killed me again, but for the very first time since he’d begun training me, there was a bit of color in his cheeks. The Spartan wasn’t breathing hard, but he’d actually had to put a little effort into beating me that time. I was starting to hold my own against him, and that was saying something, considering he was the best fighter at Mythos.