Touch of Frost (Mythos Academy #1)(10)
Author: Jennifer Estep

I sighed. "What is it this time?"

Nickamedes crooked his finger, telling me to follow him. We walked to the left past several tables full of students. A large glass case sat in an open space in the middle of the library floor. Resting inside was a simple bowl that looked like it was made out of dull, brown clay. Boring. At least some of the swords looked cool. This? A total snooze.

"Do you know what this is?" Nickamedes said in a hushed tone, his eyes bright.

I shrugged. "It looks like a bowl to me."

Nickamedes’s face scrunched up, and he muttered something under his breath. Probably cursing my lack of enthusiasm again. "It’s not just any bowl, Gwendolyn. This is the Bowl of Tears."

He looked at me like I should have known what that was. I shrugged again.

"The Bowl of Tears is what the Norse goddess Sigyn used to collect the snake venom that dripped onto her husband, Loki, the first time that he was imprisoned by the other gods, long before the Chaos War. Whenever Sigyn emptied the Bowl, the venom would drip onto Loki’s face and burn him, making him cry out. His screams of pain were so great that the earth shook for miles around him. That’s why it’s called the Bowl of Tears. It’s a very important artifact, one of the Thirteen Artifacts that the Pantheon and the Reapers fought over and with during the last great battle of the Chaos War… ."

It was all very blah, blah, blah, and my eyes immediately glazed over. More stupid gods and goddesses. I didn’t see how Nickamedes kept them all straight. I was having a hard enough time just trying to pick one for my report that was due for Professor Metis’s myth-history class.

Finally, after five long, long minutes of spouting nonstop facts, Nickamedes wound down. A professor who’d been sitting at a nearby table came up and asked him a question, and the librarian moved off to answer the other man. I shook my head, trying to banish the drowsiness that I felt, and went back to my spot behind the counter.

For the next three hours I checked out books, answered questions, and did other menial tasks. The library was the one place where the other Mythos students were actually forced to notice and speak to me, if only so they could get their homework done.

Since students weren’t supposed to go off campus during the week, the library was also a place to Hang Out and Be Seen, and lots of kids liked to sneak off and hook up in the stacks. I’d found more than one used condom when I’d shelved books. Yucko. Doing it against a case full of musty books wasn’t exactly the way that I wanted to lose my virginity, but it was all the rage at Mythos. This month, at least.

Jasmine Ashton, Morgan McDougall, and Daphne Cruz were among those who came into the library during my shift. The three Valkyries grabbed some iced mochas and raspberry muffins, then plopped themselves at the table closest to the coffee cart so everyone coming and going would see them. Samson Sorensen was with them, too, although he seemed to be more interested in the sports magazine he was thumbing through than anything else.

After a few minutes, Jasmine moved off to circulate through the crowd and talk to the other popular kids who’d come to the library tonight. Morgan and Samson put their heads together and started talking, but evidently Daphne had actually come here to study, because she moved down the table a little away from the others.

Daphne saw me sitting behind the checkout counter. The Valkyrie gave me a dirty look, dragged her laptop out of her bag, and opened and started typing on it. I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out at her. It wasn’t my fault that Daphne had a monster crush on a band geek and that her mean-girl friends would make fun of her if she ever told them that she liked him, much less actually tried to date him.

Finally, around nine o’clock, the library emptied out as the kids packed up their books and headed back to their dorm rooms for the night and the ten o’clock curfew. Nickamedes said he had to go over to the math-science building and run an errand before he closed the library. Instead of letting me go ahead and leave, the librarian pushed a cart full of books in my direction and told me to have them shelved by the time he got back. Like I said, he was a giant pain in my ass.

But there was nothing I could do. If I left without putting the books away, they’d just be waiting here for me the next time I had to work. Nickamedes was kind of a dick that way. So I pushed the metal cart into the stacks, grabbed the books, and started putting them back where they belonged. Almost all the titles were old reference books that had been handled by hundreds and hundreds of students over the years, so I didn’t get any big vibes or flashes by touching them. Just a general sense of kids flipping through the pages and hunting for whatever obscure information they needed to finish their latest essay.

I supposed that I could have worn gloves to cut out the flashes entirely, both here in the library and everywhere else. You know, the old-fashioned white silk kind that crawled all the way up to a girl’s elbows. But that would have definitely branded me as a freak at Mythos-the Gypsy girl with the glove fetish. I might not fit in at the academy, but I didn’t want to advertise how different I was either.

I did keep my eyes and ears open for any students who might not have finished their nightly hookup in the stacks. Last week, I’d rounded a corner and had seen two guys from my English lit class going at it like rabbits.

But I didn’t hear anything and I didn’t see anyone as I roamed through the library and slid the books back into their appropriate places. The whole thing would have gone a lot faster if the cart that I was using hadn’t been old and rickety, with a loose wheel that pulled to the right. Every time I tried to turn a corner with the stupid cart, it inevitably slid into whatever antiques case happened to be nearby.

There were hundreds of them in the library, just like the one that Nickamedes had dragged me over to earlier. Shiny glass cases that contained all kinds of stuff. A dagger that had belonged to Alexander the Great. A necklace that the warrior queen Boudicca had worn. A jeweled comb that Marc Anthony had given Cleopatra to show his undying love for her before they’d both kicked it.

Some of the items were kind of cool, though, and I’d take a quick look at the silver plaque on the front or the ID card inside to see exactly what it was. I’d never tried to actually open any of the cases, as they all had some kind of magic mumbo jumbo attached to them to prevent people from stealing the stuff inside. But I always wondered how much some of the items would go for on eBay, if they were real. Probably enough to tempt even Jasmine Ashton, the richest girl at Mythos, into walking off with them in her designer purse.

Ten minutes later, I put away the last book, grabbed the cart, and tried to steer it back to the checkout counter. But, of course, the metal contraption had a life of its own and zoomed toward yet another case. I managed to stop the cart just before it slammed into the glass.