Kiss of Frost Read Free Page B

so. Instead he’d given me some lame excuse that he had a deep, dark secret that would scare me off. I’d once picked up a girl’s hairbrush and had seen her stepfather sexually abusing her. I was willing to bet Logan’s secret wasn’t nearly as horrible as that, but nothing I’d said had convinced him otherwise. Nothing I’d said had convinced him to take a chance on me—on us .
    “Gwen? You want to shoot that arrow sometime today?” Kenzie said. “We’ve only got fifteen minutes of practice time left.”
    “Sure,” I muttered, turning toward the target.
    Savannah’s soft laughter drifted across the gym, making my anger burn a little hotter. If I’d been a Valkyrie, like my best friend, Daphne Cruz, princess pink sparks of magic would have been shooting out of my fingertips. That’s what happened whenever Daphne got pissed about something—and I was plenty pissed at myself right now for still caring about Logan when he’d made it perfectly clear he didn’t feel the same way about me.
    I raised the arrow up to eye level and peered down the length of it at the target. Part of me was thinking about Logan, but the other part was thinking about Daphne and how she would have turned around and put an arrow in the Spartan’s ass from all the way across the gym. Daphne was great with a bow. In fact, she was one of the best shots at Mythos and the captain of the girls’ archery team. An image flickered in my mind then, one of Daphne using the bow, instead of me—
    “Any time now, Gwen,” Kenzie said in an impatient voice.
    “Yeah, come on, Gwen, while we’re all still young,” Oliver sneered.
    My anger flared up to supernova level at Oliver’s snarky tone, so much so that I didn’t think—I just let go.
    THUNK!
    The arrow hit the target dead center—perfectly in the middle of the black bull’s-eye. And this time it stayed there instead of thumping off and falling to the floor.
    Beside me, Kenzie blinked. “How did you do that?”
    I frowned. “I don’t know.”
    I really didn’t. Yeah, I might have been hitting the target all along, but only the outside edge, and none of my other arrows had even come close to sticking in it. But this one? It had practically skewered the target, with only the back half of the shaft now visible.
    “Well, whatever you were doing, do it again,” Kenzie said, passing me another arrow.
    “If you even can,” Oliver chimed in.
    I nocked another arrow and tried to remember what I’d just done. I’d been thinking about Daphne, of course, but it felt like more than that. It had almost seemed like I was ... channeling her somehow. Or at least my memories of her.
    My psychometry let me remember every single person and every single object I’d ever touched. Once I flashed on someone or something, those vibes, feelings, and emotions became part of me. I could think about those memories and call them up at will, replaying the images over and over again in my head with perfect color, picture, and sound every single time. That was one of the cool things about my magic. But the flip side to it and one of the not-so-cool things was that sometimes the memories just came out of nowhere and flooded my mind whether I wanted them to or not. Either way, it was like having a photographic memory, only a lot freakier—especially given some of the bad, bad stuff I’d seen.
    But they weren’t really my memories. When I’d let go of the arrow, I’d been thinking about Daphne’s memories, what she’d done and how she’d felt. I’d picked up her bow in her dorm room last week and had gotten a whole bunch of flashes of the Valkyrie competing at various archery tournaments.
    I thought about Daphne again, this time really focusing on her, picturing her at one of the competitions—how she’d held her bow, how she’d lined up her arrow and pulled back the string, the electric thrill of victory she’d felt every time her arrow had hit the target dead center. Then I lifted the bow and