Touch of Frost Read Free Page A

many of the profs and kids at Mythos were. She was a short woman with a thick, stocky body, bronze skin, and black hair that was always pulled back into a high, tight bun. She wore a green pantsuit, and silver glasses covered her face.
    She looked all stern and serious, but Metis was one of the better professors at Mythos. She at least tried to make her myth-history class interesting by sometimes letting us play games and do puzzles and stuff, rather than just memorizing boring facts.
    “Open your books to page one thirty-nine,” Professor Metis said, her soft green gaze flicking from student to student. “Today, we’re going to talk some more about the Pantheon as its warriors battled to defeat Loki and his Reapers of Chaos.”
    But today wasn’t going to be a fun day. I rolled my eyes and did as she asked.
    In addition to going to school with all the mythological warrior kids, I also had to learn about their whole stupid history. And, of course, there was a group of good magic guys who had banded together and called themselves the Pantheon whose sole purpose was to fight a group of bad magic guys called Reapers who wanted to, well, bring about the Chaos.
    So far, Professor Metis had been pretty vague about what exactly the Chaos was, and I hadn’t exactly been paying rapt attention to all the mumbo-jumbo magic stuff. But I was guessing it involved death, destruction, and blah, blah, blah. I’d much rather read the comic books that I had stashed in the bottom of my messenger bag. At least they had some basis in reality. Genetic mutations could totally happen.
    But gods and goddesses duking it out? Using warrior whiz kids to fight some ancient battle today in modern times? With mythological monsters thrown in just for fun? I wasn’t sure I believed all that. But everyone here at Mythos did. To them, myths weren’t just stories—they were history, facts even, and they were all very, very real.
    While Professor Metis droned on once again about how absolutely evil the Reapers were, I stared out the window, looking at my reflection in the glass. Wavy brown hair, a smattering of freckles on my winter white skin, and eyes that were a curious shade of purple, made more so by the hoodie I was wearing.
    Violet eyes are smiling eyes, my mom had always said in a teasing voice. Her eyes had been the same color as mine, although I’d always thought they’d made her look beautiful and me just like a freak.
    A dull ache flooded my heart. Not for the first time, I wished that I could rewind time and go back to the way things had been before I’d come to Mythos Academy.
    Six months ago, I’d been a normal teenager. Well, as normal as a girl with a strange ability could ever be. But the Gypsy gift ran in the Frost family. My grandma, Geraldine, could see the future. My mom, Grace, had been able to tell whether or not people were lying just by listening to their words. And I had the ability to know, see, and feel things just by touching a person or an object. But our Gypsy gifts had always been just that—gifts, small things that we could do—and I hadn’t thought too much about them, where they had come from, or if other people had magic like ours.
    Until the day that I picked up Paige Forrest’s hairbrush after gym class.
    We’d been in the locker room changing after playing basketball, which I hated because I totally sucked at it. Seriously, sucked out loud at it. Like, sucked so bad that I’d managed to hit myself in the head with the ball when I was trying to shoot a free throw.
    After class, I’d been hot and sweaty and had wanted to pull my hair back into a ponytail. Paige’s brush had been lying on the bench between us. Paige wasn’t one of my close friends, but we were in the same semipopular circle of smart girls. Sometimes, we hung out when our group got together, so I’d asked her if I could use her hairbrush.
    Paige had stared at me a second, a strange emotion flashing in her eyes. “Sure.”
    I picked it