Midnight Frost Read Free Page A

outside my dorm and hurried across campus. Aiko watched me go but didn’t follow, since her orders were to keep an eye on my dorm—not necessarily on me. That was Alexei’s job. I felt bad about not keeping my promise to him to stay inside, but I couldn’t sit in my room for the rest of the night. Not after the nightmare. So I headed toward Hephaestus Hall, one of the boys’ dorms.
    All of the Mythos dorms required a student ID card in order to get inside, and your card only let you in to the dorm where you lived. But if you leaned on the front bell long enough, someone would eventually get fed up enough to buzz you inside without checking to make sure you really belonged there. We kids were totally lazy that way. I only had to hold down the bell for thirty seconds before the door clicked open.
    “Enough already!” a male voice rumbled from deeper inside the dorm. “We’re trying to watch the game!”
    I grinned, opened the door, and stepped through before the guy came to investigate. Judging from the alternating cheers and groans I heard coming from the common room, everyone in the dorm was watching the game, which made it easy for me to climb the steps to the fifth floor. I paused at the top of the stairs, wondering if someone might actually be in his room, studying, but everything was still and quiet. Since the coast was clear, I crept down the hallway until I reached the last door.
    I stopped and cocked my head to the side, listening, but no sounds came from the other side. Then again, I hadn’t expected them to—I knew exactly how empty this particular room was. I reached into my messenger bag and drew out my wallet. It only took me a minute to slide my driver’s license in between the lock and the frame and pop open the door. I slid through to the other side and shut the door behind me.
    The room was dark, so I hit the switch on the wall. Lights blazed on, revealing the same furniture that all of the kids had. A bed, a desk, some bookcases, a flat-screen TV mounted on one of the walls. The only thing that was different about the room was all the trophies he’d won. Dozens of little gold men holding swords, spears, and other weapons peeped out at me from the desk, the bookcases, and a shelf above the bed. There was even a life-sized trophy stuffed in the corner, a staff clutched in his hands like the man was about to step forward and bash me over the head with it. I shivered and looked away. Somehow, the fact that none of the trophies actually had distinct faces made them even creepier.
    A loud sigh sounded, and I realized that Vic was awake. The sword had gone to sleep, as was his habit when he was in his scabbard. I pulled the sword free of the leather and held him up so that we were face-to-face. The sword glanced around the room.
    Vic sighed again. “Really? You’re going to come in here and mope again?”
    “I’m not moping,” I said in a defensive voice.
    “Really?” Vic asked again, his voice made even more sarcastic by his biting English accent. “Because I think that sitting on the Spartan’s bed and staring at his things definitely qualifies as moping. Brooding , even. Especially when you’ve done it a dozen times since he left.”
    I looked out over Logan’s room. Maybe Vic was right. Maybe I was moping over the Spartan and the fact that he’d left Mythos—that he’d left me .
    I’d first come in here two weeks ago hoping to find some clue as to where Logan had gone. He had asked me not to look for him, and I’d wanted to respect his wishes. Really, I had. I wasn’t planning to track him down and beg him to come back or anything crazy like that. But I figured that maybe my heart wouldn’t hurt quite as much if I at least knew where he was—and that he was okay. So I’d snuck into his room, determined to use my magic to flash on his things until I figured out where he’d gone with his dad, Linus. The first thing I had found had been a note propped up on his desk:

    Seriously,