I waited for a lull in the traffic, crossed the street, and walked down to the bus stop at the end of the block. I only had to wait five minutes before the bus rumbled by on its midafternoon route, taking tourists and everyone else who wanted to ride from Cypress Mountain down into the city. Twenty minutes and several miles later, I got off in a neighborhood that was a couple of streets removed from the artsy downtown Asheville shops and restaurants.
If Cypress Mountain was some whacked-out version of Mount Olympus with its population of rich warrior whiz kids, then Asheville was definitely where the poor mere mortals lived. Older, well-worn homes lined either side of the street, mostly two- and three-story houses that had been cut up into apartments. I knew the area well. My Grandma Frost had lived in the same house all her life, and my mom and I had only been a few miles away in one of Asheville's modest middle-class subdivisions. At least when I'd started going to Mythos I hadn't had to move across the country or anything. I don't think I could have survived being that far away from Grandma Frost. She was the only family I had left now that my mom was gone. My dad, Tyr, had died from cancer when I was two, and the only memories I had of him were the faded photos my mom had shown me.
I walked to the end of the block and skipped up the gray concrete steps of a three-story house painted a soft shade of lavender. A small sign beside the front door read:
Psychic Readings Here.
I opened the screen door, then used my key to let myself inside. A heavy black lacquered door off to my right was closed, although the murmur of soft voices drifted out from behind it. Grandma Frost must be giving one of her readings. Grandma used her Gypsy gift to make extra cash, just like I did.
I walked through the hallway that ran through the middle of the house and veered left, going into the kitchen. Unlike the rest of the house, which featured dark paneling and somber gray carpet, the kitchen had a bright white tile floor and sky blue walls. I slung my messenger bag onto the table and dug the hundred that Carson Callahan had given me out of my jeans pocket. I stuffed the money into a jar that looked like a giant chocolate-chip cookie. It matched the empty tin in my messenger bag.
Ever since I'd started going to Mythos, I always gave half of whatever money I made to Grandma Frost. Yeah, my grandma had plenty of money of her own, more than enough to take care of us both. But I liked helping out, especially since my mom was gone. Besides, giving Grandma the money made me feel like I was doing something useful with my Gypsy gift, besides just finding some girl's lost bra that she should have known better than to take off in the first place.
My eyes flicked over the other bills inside the cookie jar. Grandma had had a good week giving her readings. I spotted two more hundreds in there, along with a couple of fifties and a few twenties.
The voices kept murmuring in the other room, so I raided the fridge. I fixed myself a tomato sandwich sprinkled with salt, pepper, and just a dash of dill weed. A thick slice of sharp cheddar cheese and a layer of creamy mayonnaise completed the sandwich, along with my favorite, yeasty sourdough bread. For dessert, I sliced off a piece of the sweet, spongy pumpkin roll that Grandma had stashed in the fridge. I licked a stray bit of cream cheese frosting off the knife. Yum. So good.
In addition to our Gypsy gifts, all of the Frost women had raging sweet tooths. Seriously, if it had sugar or chocolate (or preferably both) in it, Grandma and I would totally eat it. My mom had been the same way, too. Grandma also happened to be an awesome cook and an even better baker, so there was always something gooey and sinful in her kitchen, usually fresh out of the oven.
I ate my dinner, scraping every last one of the pumpkin roll crumbs up off my plate with a fork, then cleaned up. Once that was done, I pulled out one of my Wonder Woman comic books and settled myself at the kitchen table, waiting for Grandma Frost to finish with her client.
Yeah, maybe liking superheroes made me even more of a geek than I already was, but I enjoyed reading comics. The art was cool, the characters were interesting, and the heroine always won in the end, no matter what bad stuff happened along the way. I only wished real life was like thatâand that my mom had somehow walked away from her car accident the way that I'd read about so many heroes doing over the years.
The old, familiar pain pricked my heart, but I pushed away my sad thoughts and dove into the story, losing myself in the adventure until I almost forgot about how much my own life suckedâalmost.
I'd just finished reading the last page when my grandma stepped into the kitchen.
Geraldine Frost wore a gauzy silk purple blouse, along with a pair of loose black pants and slippers with curled pointed toes that made her look like a genie. Not that you could really see what Grandma was wearing, since scarves covered her from head to toe. Purple, gray, emerald green. All those colors and more flowed through the thin layers of fabric, while fake silver coins jingled together on the long, fringed edges.
Rings studded with gems stacked up on her gnarled fingers, while a thin silver chain flashed around her right ankle. Her iron gray hair fell to her shoulders, pushed back by another scarf that she was using as a headband. Her eyes were a bright violet in her tan, wrinkled face.
Grandma Frost looked like what I'd always thought a real Gypsy shouldâand exactly like what her clients expected when they came to get their fortunes told. Grandma always claimed that people paid her as much for her appearance as for what she revealed to them. She said that looking the part of the wise old mysterious Gypsy always made for better tips.
I didn't know exactly what made us Gypsies. We didn't act like any Gypsies I'd ever read about. We didn't live in wagons or wander from town to town or cheat people out of their money. But I'd been called a Gypsy ever since I could remember, and that's how I'd always thought of myself.
Maybe it was the fact that I was a Frost. Grandma had told me that it was a tradition for all the women in our family to keep that name, since our Gypsy gifts, our powers, were passed down from mother to daughter. So even though my parents had been married, I'd inherited my mom, Grace's, last name of Frost, instead of my dad, Tyr's, last name of Forseti.
Or maybe it was the gifts themselves that made us Gypsies, the strange things that we could do and see. I didn't know, and I'd never gotten a real answer from my mom or grandma about it. Then again, I'd never even thought to ask until I'd started going to Mythos, where everyone knew exactly who they were, what they could do, where they came from, and how big their parents' bank balances were.
Sometimes, I wondered just how much Grandma Frost knew about the academy, the warrior kids, Reapers, and the rest of it. After all, she hadn't exactly protested when Professor Metis had come to the house and announced my change in schools. Grandma had been more resigned than anything else, like she'd known that Metis was going to show up sooner or later. Of course, I'd told my grandma all about the weird things that went on at Mythos, but she never blinked an eye at any of them. And every time I asked Grandma about the academy and why I really had to go there, all she said was for me to give it a chance, that things would eventually get better for me.
Sometimes, I wondered why she was lying to meâwhen she never had before.
“Hey there, pumpkin,” Grandma Frost said, dropping a kiss on top of my head and brushing my cheek with her knuckles. “How was school today?”
I closed my eyes, enjoying the soft warmth of her skin against mine. Because of my Gypsy gift, because of my psychometry magic, I had to be careful about touching other people or letting them touch me. While I got vivid enough vibes from objects, I could get major flashes, major whammies of feeling, from actually coming into contact with someone's skin. Seriously. I could see everything that they'd ever done, every dirty little secret that they'd ever tried to hideâthe good, the bad, and the seriously ugly.
Oh, I wasn't like a complete leper when it came to other people. I was usually okay when it came to small, brief, casual touches, like passing a pen to someone in class or letting a girl's fingers brush mine when we both reached for the same piece of cheesecake in the lunch line.
Plus, a lot of what I saw depended on the other person and what he was thinking about at the time. I was pretty safe in class, at lunch, or in the library, since mostly the other kids were thinking about how totally boring a certain lecture was or wondering why the dining hall was serving lasagna for like the hundredth time that month.
But I was still cautious, still careful, around other people, just the way that my mom had taught me to be. Despite the fact that part of me really liked my gift and the power it gave me to know other people's secrets. Yeah, I was a little dark and twisted that way. But I'd learned a long time ago that even the nicest-seeming person could have the blackest, ugliest heartâlike Paige Forrest's stepdad. It was better to know what people were really like than to put your trust in someone who just wanted to hurt you in the end.
But there was nothing to be afraid of with Grandma Frost. She loved me, and I loved her. That's what I felt every time she touched meâthe softness of her love, like a fleece blanket wrapping around me and warming me from head to toe. My mom had felt the same way to me, before she'd died.
I opened my eyes and shrugged, answering Grandma's question. “The same, more or less. I did make two hundred bucks by finding a bracelet. I put a hundred of it in the cookie jar, just like usual.”
Grandma hadn't wanted to take my money when I'd started giving it to her, but I'd insisted. Of course, she wasn't actually spending any of it, like I wanted her to. Instead, Grandma put all the money that I gave her into a savings account for meâone that I wasn't supposed to know about. But I'd touched her checkbook one day when I'd been looking through her purse for some gum and had flashed on her setting up the account. I hadn't said anything to Grandma about it, though. I loved her too much to ruin her secret.
Grandma nodded, reached into her pocket, and pulled out a crisp hundred of her own. “I made a little money, too, today.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You must have told her something good.”
“Him,” Grandma corrected. “I told him that he and his wife are going to be the proud parents of a baby girl by this time next year. They've been trying to have a baby for two years now, and he was starting to give up hope.”
I nodded. It wasn't as weird as it sounded. People came to Grandma Frost and asked her all sorts of things. If they should get married, if they were ever going to have kids, if their spouses were cheating on them, which numbers they should pick to win the lottery. Grandma never lied to anyone who came to her for a reading, no matter how hard the truth was to hear.
Sometimes, she was even able to help peopleâlike
really
help them. Just last month, she'd told a woman not to go home after work but to spend the night with a friend instead. Turned out that the woman's house had been broken into that night by a guy who was wanted for rape, among other things. The police had caught the man just as he was leaving her house, a knife in his hand. The woman had been so grateful that she'd brought all her friends over to get psychic readings.
Grandma Frost sat down in the chair opposite me and began pulling off some of her scarves. The fabric fluttered down to the table in colorful waves, the coins on the edges tinkling together. “You want me to make you something to eat, pumpkin? I've got an hour before my next appointment shows up.”
“Nah, I had a sandwich. I've got to go back to the academy anyway,” I said, getting to my feet, grabbing my bag, and looping it around my shoulder. “I've got to work my shift at the library tonight, and I have a report on the Greek gods that's due next week.”
The tuition was just as astronomically expensive as everything else was at Mythos, and we just weren't rich enough to afford itâunless Grandma was holding out on me and hiding secret stacks of cash somewhere. She might be, given how vague and mysterious she'd been about me going to the academy in the first place. Either way, I had to work several hours in the library each week to help offset the cost of my stellar education and expensive room and board. At least, that's what Nickamedes, the head librarian, claimed. I just thought he liked the free slave labor and bossing me around.
Grandma Frost stared at me, her violet eyes taking on an empty, glassy look. Something seemed to stir in the air around her, something old and watchful, something that I was familiar with.
“Well, you be careful,” Grandma Frost murmured in the absent way that she always did whenever she was looking at something that only she could see.
I waited a few seconds, wondering if she'd tell me to look out for something specific, like a crack in the sidewalk that I might trip over or some books that might topple off a shelf at the library and brain me in the head. But Grandma didn't say anything else, and, after a moment, her eyes focused once more. Sometimes her visions weren't crystal clear but more like a general feeling that something good or bad was going to happen. Plus, it was hard for her to even have visions concerning family in the first place. The closer Grandma was to someone, the less objective about the person she was, and the more her feelings clouded her visions. Even if she had seen something, she'd only tell me the broad outlines, just in case her emotions were screwing up her psychic reception or making her see what she wanted to seeâand not what might actually happen.