Free Touch of Frost by Jennifer Estep Page B

they kill you.”
    I’d never thought that a band geek like Carson could be so blasé about something like this. That he could talk about kids dying and killing other kids like it was all okay. Like it was the way that things were supposed to be.
    I just looked at him. “But doesn’t it bother you? What happened to Jasmine? Or at least the fact that it happened here?”
    He shrugged. “Sure it does. But nobody ever said that Mythos was a hundred percent safe. Kids sneak out past the sphinxes all the time. It’s not that much of a stretch to think that a Reaper could sneak in if he really wanted to. Besides, Jasmine wasn’t exactly the nicest girl around. She was kind of a bitch, if you really want to know, always being mean to and putting other people down just to make herself look cool. But nobody ever said or did anything about it because her parents are so loaded and so powerful.”
    “But—”
    Carson sighed. “Look, I know you’re new, Gwen, but pretty much everybody here has lost someone that they love, someone that they care about a whole lot more than a spoiled bitch like Jasmine Ashton.”
    There was a harshness in his voice now, a tightness in his face, and a strained sadness in his brown eyes that I recognized.
    “Who have you lost?”
    “My uncle,” he said. “He was killed fighting a group of Reapers last year. He was out having dinner with his girlfriend when it happened.”
    “But why? What did he do to them? Did he have an artifact or something they wanted?” I asked, thinking of the stolen Bowl of Tears.
    “Nothing,” Carson said in a cold voice. “He didn’t have a thing that they wanted. They just saw him and killed him because they’re Reapers and they like hurting people, especially warriors like us. They kill us before we can kill them because they know that we’re a threat to them, that we’re all here learning how we can stop them and Loki for good—forever. But not everyone gets to live to see that day, whenever it comes.”
    The raw pain in his face made me wince.
    “Carson, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
    “Now you do,” he said in a quiet voice, and turned back around.
     
    Carson didn’t speak to or look at me during the rest of class. I couldn’t blame him. I’d been trying to understand, trying to figure out why things were so different here, and I’d put my foot right in my mouth.
    After myth-history, I walked over to the Library of Antiquities. As I crossed the quad, I realized that the other kids had felt something over Jasmine’s murder after all. I could see it in the way that they huddled together in tight groups, in the strain on so many of their faces, in the way they talked just a little too fast and laughed just a little too loud. Yeah, they’d felt Jasmine’s death just as much as I had and were trying to deal with it—even if it wasn’t in the way that I’d expected.
    I didn’t know if that made me feel better or worse.
    Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who was curious, freaked out, or whatever, because there was a much, much larger crowd in the library than usual. Almost every table was full, and almost every student was sneaking glances at the spot where I’d found Jasmine’s body.
    There wasn’t anything to see. The broken case and the shattered glass had been cleaned up, along with Jasmine’s blood. And, of course, her body was gone, too. There was nothing there, not even some flowers, teddy bears, or a few lit candles to remember the dead Valkyrie. After David Jordan’s murder, people had turned his locker into a shrine, with photos and cards and stuff. But not here at Mythos.
    Eventually, the crowd cleared out and I found an open spot at the end of one of the long library tables. I pulled out my books and tried to study, tried to focus on the report that I had to write for Professor Metis’s myth-history class, but I couldn’t concentrate. It didn’t help that all the kids around me were still talking about Jasmine.
    “. . .