Kiss of Frost

'I said that was mine,' Oliver growled, yanking the notebook out of my hand and breaking my connection to it. The half-formed image abruptly vanished, along with that warm, fizzy sensation. My fingers grabbed for the notebook, but I only came up with empty air. Another second, and I would have seen who Oliver's mystery crush was. But the Spartan held the notebook up out of my reach, then grabbed his bag and shoved the notebook inside it. He was in such a hurry that he ripped the side of the bag's fabric. Oliver glanced up at me to see if I'd noticed. I smirked at him in the same cocky, knowing way he had smirked at me a few minutes ago, when he'd been making fun of my T-shirt. Oliver's face darkened.

'What are you two doing?' Kenzie asked, coming out of one of the side doors and drinking from a bottle of water in his hand.

'Nothing,' Oliver muttered, shooting me another cold look.

I rolled my eyes and ignored him. Since coming to Mythos, I'd almost been run through with a sword and mauled to death by a killer kitty cat. Dirty looks didn't faze me anymore.

'Where's Logan?' I asked.

'He'll be back in a minute. He said to get started without him,' Kenzie said, his black eyes flicking back and forth between me and Oliver, wondering what was going on. Oliver turned and stalked down to the other end of the bleachers, taking his bag along with him. Kenzie gave me another curious look, then went over to Oliver. The two of them started talking in low voices, with Oliver still glaring in my direction.

The Spartan was clearly angry at me for touching his precious notebook and teasing him about who his mystery crush might be. Whatever. I didn't care what Oliver thought about me. Besides, he'd started it by making fun of my Tshirt. I might not know how to sling a sword, but I could throw verbal daggers with the best of them. After about a minute of talking, Kenzie and Oliver broke apart. They both headed toward the archery target, and Kenzie gestured for me to follow them. Apparently, I hadn't pissed them off enough to make them forget about the rest of our training session. Too bad. Sighing, I got to my feet, ready to show the Spartans that I sucked just as much at using a bow as I did at swinging a sword.

Chapter 2

Thwang!

For the fifth time in as many tries, my arrow weakly thumped against the target, then bounced off and fell to the gym floor.

'No, no, no,' Kenzie said, shaking his head. 'How many times do I have to tell you? Using a bow is just like using a sword. You can't be timid about it, Gwen. You have to pull back the string and let the arrow go like you really mean it. Otherwise, you're not going to get enough power to make your arrow go through your target.'

'Yeah, Gwen,' Oliver sniped. 'You want to kill Reapers, not make them die laughing at you.'

I ignored Oliver's snide comment, focused on Kenzie's advice, and blew a loose strand of hair off my face. 'Power. Mean it. Right.'

I'd been practicing for the last fifteen minutes with a long, curved bow, while the Spartans had looked on and called out advice. Surprisingly, my aim was decent enough to let me hit the outer rim of the target, but I had yet to actually have an arrow stick in it. They all kept bouncing off. Kenzie claimed it was because I wasn't pulling the string back far enough and giving the arrow enough force to penetrate the target. I thought it was because I was just as bad at archery as I was at swordplay. I got good grades. Why did I have to be coordinated, too?

'Here,' Kenzie said, handing me another arrow. 'Let's try again.'

Kenzie shook his head at Oliver, who snickered. I sighed and nocked the arrow.

One of the gym doors squeaked open, and Logan stepped back inside. But he wasn't alone-Savannah Warren was with him.

Savannah was a gorgeous Amazon, with intense green eyes and a mane of red hair that blazed down her back in a sunset of ringlets. She also happened to be Logan's current squeeze-one in a long, long line if you believed the gossip around campus.

Logan had a reputation for being one of the resident man-whores at Mythos Academy-the kind of guy that girls just couldn't resist and didn't really want to anyway. He certainly looked the part with his piercing, ice blue eyes; thick, ink black hair; and muscled body. He practically oozed bad-boy charm, even when wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants like he was now. One of the rumors that had gone around campus back in the fall was that Logan signed the mattress of every girl that he slept with at Mythos, just so he could keep them all straight.

Logan stood in the gym doorway, smiling down at Savannah. The Amazon toyed with his shirt, sliding her hand back and forth across his sculpted chest. My fingers tightened around the bow, and ugly, jealous anger burned in the pit of my stomach.

Logan and I had almost had a-a-thinga few weeks back. A freakingmoment. Okay, severalmoments. The Spartan had gotten into the habit of saving my life, first when a Nemean prowler had tried to turn me into catnip, and then later on when a Valkyrie had wanted to kill me for messing up her evil plans. Bad-boy charm I could deal with, but saving my life? Twice? That was a little tougher to forget. I'd fallen hard for Logan as a result, even going so far as to ask him out.

He'd turned me down flat.

Logan had claimed that I didn't know what Spartans were really capable of, that I didn't know whathewas capable of, and that he wasn't the hero I thought he was.

Whatever. If he didn't like me, he could have just said 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 practicallyskeweredthe 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