Chapter Seven
Linus Quinn strode into the middle of the room, his gray cloak swirling around his body.
He shook hands with Takeda, eyed Ian and the other kids, and nodded to Aunt Rachel. Then he turned and studied me from head to toe. Linus’s blue eyes lingered on the sword hooked to my belt, but after a moment, he nodded to me as well.
“Hello, Miss Forseti,” he said. “You’re looking well. All things considered.”
“Mr. Quinn.” I nodded back at him, then crossed my arms over my chest. “You mean the fact that a chimera killed a girl and almost clawed me to death? Yeah, that was a great surprise for the first day of school. I thought the Library of Antiquities was supposed to be a safe place now, but I see that it’s just as dangerous as ever.”
Linus winced a bit at my snarky tone, but he couldn’t deny the truth of my words.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Where are we? Who are these people? And what does everyone want with me?”
Linus’s lips curved up into a small smile. “I see that you have the same sarcastic attitude as your cousin Gwen.”
I shrugged. “It must run in the Forseti and Frost families.”
Zoe leaned forward, her face creasing in confusion. “Wait a second. Gwen? As in Gwen Frost? She’s related to Gwen Frost?”
“Yeah,” I said. “So what?”
The Valkyrie’s hazel eyes lit up with admiration. “So Gwen Frost is a hero. Like the greatest hero ever.”
I sighed. Zoe wasn’t the first person to have this sort of reaction when she found out that I was related to Gwen. I loved my cousin, really, I did, but I wouldn’t have minded if she had been just a little less heroic. It was a lot to live up to. Since, you know, Gwen had basically saved the entire world.
Mateo stared at me with a similarly incredulous hero-worship expression, but Ian snorted. Seemed he wasn’t a Gwen Frost fan. His loss.
“Rory is a hero in her own right,” Linus said. “She and her aunt were both instrumental in helping Miss Frost and the Protectorate defeat Loki and his Reapers. They helped save us all, and you should treat them with the proper amount of respect.”
He gave Ian a pointed look, and the Viking actually winced a bit.
Linus stared at Ian a moment longer, making sure that the Viking got his point, then gestured at the table in the center of the room. “Let’s all have a seat, and I’ll bring Miss Forseti and Ms. Maddox up to speed.”
Aunt Rachel glared at Takeda one more time, but she pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. I took the chair next to her, with Ian sitting across from me. Zoe and Mateo left their desks, moved over, and plopped down beside Ian. Takeda took the seat at the head of the table, but Linus remained standing.
Mateo grabbed what looked like a TV remote from the center of the table and handed it to Linus, who hit a series of buttons on the device. A second later, photos began appearing on the monitors on the wall.
Images of the Battle of Mythos Academy.
My heart clenched as shot after shot of the North Carolina academy popped up on the screens. The grounds, the main quad, the inside of the Library of Antiquities. All littered with dented weapons, shattered statues, and bloody bodies.
So many bodies.
Reapers and Protectorate members lay crumpled next to each other on the ground. Their torn black and gray cloaks were draped over their bodies like makeshift shrouds, while their swords, staffs, and spears were stuck point-first in the grass like crude crosses marking where they had fallen. But they weren’t the only ones who had died. So had kids, professors, and other people who worked at the academy, and their bodies littered the quad like broken dolls, along with those of the Eir gryphons and other creatures that had taken part in the battle.
The photos took me right back there to that awful day. In an instant, the briefing room vanished, and I was in the midst of the fight. Yells and screams echoed from one side of the quad to the other and back again, along with the violent, continued clash-clash-clash of weapons crashing into each other. I was yelling too, swinging my sword at Reaper after Reaper, cutting down as many of them as I could, even though they just kept coming and coming and coming…
Aunt Rachel reached over and grabbed my hand, pulling me out of my memories. No doubt the same ones darkened her own thoughts. I squeezed her hand back, grateful that she was here. We might be Spartans, but that had been a battle unlike any other, and I would never, ever forget it—and all the people and creatures who had died so that we all might finally be free of Loki.
Linus hit some more buttons, and the battle scenes faded away, replaced by shots of people moving around the quad, cleaning up the destruction. Gwen appeared in several of the photos, hauling away debris with the help of Logan Quinn, her boyfriend and Linus’s son. Gwen’s other friends, including Daphne Cruz and Carson Callahan, also showed up on the screens, along with Professor Aurora Metis, Gwen’s mentor, and Nickamedes, the head librarian at the North Carolina academy.
Seeing them all again made my heart squeeze tight with longing. They were my friends too—my only friends—and I missed them all terribly. More than once, I had thought about transferring to the North Carolina academy, but Aunt Rachel’s job was here, and I didn’t want to leave her. Besides, I had foolishly thought that things would be better, that the other kids might give me a chance—a real chance—after I had fought alongside Gwen and the others. But of course things hadn’t worked out that way, not at all.
“As you all know, the North Carolina academy was decimated by the final battle with Loki and his Reapers of Chaos,” Linus said. “A lot of progress was made over the summer, and the school year started as usual, but the cleanup still continues at the academy.”
“So what?” Aunt Rachel asked. “Rory and I know how damaged the academy was. We were there, remember?”
“Yes, I remember,” Linus said. “And your bravery was one of the reasons we were able to win, along with the help of the Eir gryphons that you brought to the academy.”
Aunt Rachel sat up a little straighter, and so did I. It was always nice to be recognized. Everyone else at the table nodded at us, acknowledging our contributions as well, except for Ian, who rolled his eyes. What was his problem? I didn’t even know the guy, and he already hated me. Well, the feeling was quickly becoming mutual.
“Unfortunately,” Linus continued, “what we didn’t realize at the time was that not all of the Reapers were killed or captured.”
He hit some more buttons, and several security-camera images appeared on the monitors. Each one showed Reapers sprinting across the grounds, climbing over the wall that ringed the academy, and running away.
I frowned. “I had heard that some of the Reapers had escaped, but I thought the Protectorate was working to round them up and put them in prison.”
Linus nodded. “That’s true. After Loki was defeated, the Protectorate knew there was still work to do, still Reapers to apprehend. But we wanted everyone to get on with their lives as best they could, so we’ve downplayed the danger as much as possible. Ever since the battle, we’ve been quietly hunting down the rest of the Reapers. But I’m afraid we’ve had our work cut out for us.”
“What do you mean?” Aunt Rachel asked.
“The Reapers all obeyed Agrona and her lieutenants, but now that she’s dead and the others are in prison, there’s no one left to keep the remaining Reapers in check.” Linus rubbed his head, as though it were suddenly aching. “Many of the Reapers have become bolder and more violent than ever before. Slaughtering mythological creatures to sell their fur, teeth, and talons on the black market. Kidnapping wealthy mythological citizens and holding them for ransom. Murdering Protectorate guards. Some Reapers have even been stealing from regular mortals, robbing banks, jewelry stores, and the like.” He sniffed, indicating how low-class he thought that was.
What he was saying made sense, but it certainly didn’t make me feel any better. Then again, I imagined that Linus felt worse and had more guilt about the Reapers than anyone else, since Agrona, his former wife, had only married him so she could spy on the Protectorate. Linus had finally discovered the horrible truth about Agrona but not before she had almost turned Logan, his son, into her Reaper puppet.
“But I thought that things would be better once Loki was gone,” I said. “That the Reapers would collapse without him. That we would all finally be safe.”
Linus shook his head. “I had hoped that as well, but it hasn’t turned out that way. In fact, things have gotten far worse than we ever imagined they would.”
“Worse how?” I asked.
“From what we’ve learned over the past few months, a secret group has existed within the Reapers for years, people who were never really interested in freeing Loki but just used the other Reapers as a way to hide their own evil actions,” Linus said. “These Reapers didn’t participate in the final battle against the god, even though they were at the North Carolina academy.”
“So what did they do?” Aunt Rachel asked.
“Their goal was something far more sinister: stealing as many artifacts from the Library of Antiquities as they could while everyone else was busy fighting.”
Linus hit some more buttons, and yet more security-camera photos popped up, this time showing Reapers smashing into glass display cases in the library, grabbing the weapons, armor, and other objects inside, and leaving with them.
“Given the overall destruction at the academy, we didn’t uncover the thefts for several days,” he continued. “By that point, this secret group of Reapers had completely vanished and had gone back underground to resume their normal lives in the mythological world the way they would after any battle. Only this time with the bonus of powerful magical artifacts.”
Images of weapons, armor, and more appeared on the screens, flashing by one after another. The Reapers hadn’t just stolen a few trinkets—they’d swiped dozens of artifacts from the library. A shiver slid down my spine. A single artifact could cause plenty of damage in the wrong hands. I didn’t even want to think about all the people and creatures the Reapers could hurt and kill with this many artifacts.
“Now, this secret faction of Reapers does have a leader, someone who has been pulling everyone else’s strings and slowly taking control of all the remaining Reapers,” Linus said. “We haven’t been able to identify the leader yet, but we know that it’s a man and that he goes by the code name Sisyphus.”
I frowned. Sisyphus was a name from my myth-history class, that of a mortal man doomed to keep pushing a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down, forcing him to start all over again. Strange name for the leader of the Reapers. Or perhaps Sisyphus had chosen that name because he knew what an enormous task it would be to resurrect the group after Gwen had decimated them.
“So what does all this have to do with the warrior band here?” I sniped, gesturing at Ian and the other kids. “What were they doing on campus today? And what was that other girl, Amanda, doing in the library earlier?”
“Over the last few months, Sisyphus has been building his group, mostly by recruiting Mythos students to join his new band of Reapers,” Linus said.
I rolled my eyes. “Seriously? Who would be stupid enough to want to join the Reapers?”
“Kids whose Reaper parents died during the battle at the North Carolina academy,” Linus said in a soft, serious voice.
He fell silent, and everyone looked at me, the girl with the dead Reaper parents. That familiar mix of guilt, shame, and embarrassment churned in my stomach, and I dropped my hands to my lap so that no one would see them tighten into fists. Even here, in this strange place, I couldn’t escape what my parents had done.
I would never escape it.
Linus cleared his throat. “Many of these kids are mixed up and hurting. They want revenge for their parents’ deaths, and Sisyphus is taking advantage of them, using them to further his own ends. But other students, well, they were already Reapers, or at least on the path to becoming Reapers, thanks to their parents and their own anger and greed. Those kids are all too happy to do whatever Sisyphus asks, no matter who they have to hurt and betray.”
“And?” Aunt Rachel asked.
“And a couple of weeks ago, we got a tip that one of those Reaper students was going to try to steal an artifact from the Library of Antiquities when the Colorado academy opened for the new school year. We didn’t know which artifact the student was targeting, but we now realize that it was Typhon’s Scepter.”
Linus hit another button, and new photos appeared on the screens, each showing a gold stick that was about as long as my forearm. Several figures were etched into the gold, and it took me a moment to realize that they were Nemean prowlers, rams, and scorpions, all curled together. A single figure, also made of gold, crouched on the top of the scepter. That figure was a combination of all the other creatures, with a prowler’s body, ram’s horns on its head, and a scorpion’s stinger on its tail. It was an ugly, monstrous thing, made even more so by the two glittering blood-red rubies that made up its eyes. I shivered. The creature was the same as the monsters I’d fought in the library earlier: a Typhon chimera.
I stared at the photos of the scepter and thought back to that glimmer of gold that I’d seen in the display case. “So that’s what the Reaper stole from the library.”
“Typhon was a Greek giant with several creatures sprouting out of his body—prowlers, rams, scorpions, and more. Typhon pulled bits and pieces of the creatures off his own body and fused them together to create one new being, the chimera.” Linus pointed at the images on the monitors. “The scepter is thought to be made of one of Typhon’s bones, which was encased in gold. All someone has to do is wave the scepter in a specific pattern, and chimeras spew forth from the end of it in clouds of dense black smoke. Chimeras cannot be reasoned with, and they are extremely dangerous. But they can be killed like any other creature, and a mortal wound makes them dissipate into a cloud of smoke.”
“Amanda would know that better than anyone,” Ian muttered.
Linus looked at the Viking, sympathy flashing in his eyes. “Yes, she would.”
We all fell silent again, thinking about the poor girl who’d lost her life tonight. And for what? So a Reaper could steal an artifact? I shook my head. What a sad, tragic waste.
“As I said before, we got a tip that a Reaper was going to try to steal an artifact,” Linus continued. “So Takeda and the others came to the academy a few days ago when the students starting moving into the dorms to see if they could figure out who the Reaper was. Our plan was to identify the student, let him steal the artifact, follow him back to his friends, and arrest all the Reapers at the same time, including Sisyphus. But, regrettably, that didn’t happen.”
“We were watching the library, and we saw the student approaching, but we lost track of him. So Amanda decided to go into the library ahead of everyone else,” Mateo said in a soft, sad voice. “I was on comms with her the whole time. I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t listen to me. Then, when she got into the library, she couldn’t find the Reaper.”
“You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” Ian glared at me, and I realized what he was really saying.
I glared right back at him. “You think that I’m somehow working with the Reapers? Viking, you are seriously off your rocker. I would never, ever work for the Reapers.”
“Really? Just like your parents couldn’t have possibly been Reaper assassins?” he shot right back at me.
This time, my hands curled into fists on top of the table where everyone could see them. “You should shut your mouth—unless you want me to shut it for you.”
Ian’s eyes narrowed. “Bring it on, cupcake. Bring it on.”
I shoved my chair back so I could get up and lunge across the table at him, but Linus stepped forward and laid a hand on my shoulder.
“Enough,” he said. “That’s enough. From both of you. We need to work together, not fight among ourselves.”
I glared at him too, but Linus raised his eyebrows, and I shrugged his hand away and sat back down in my seat.
“Fine,” I muttered. “The Viking can keep his teeth. For now.”
“Wow. Thanks.” Ian’s voice dripped with sarcasm.
Linus might have said that I was a hero, but it was obvious that Ian didn’t believe him. Either that, or Ian hated me for some other reason. Whatever it was, I was tired of the Viking’s attitude problem.
Linus cleared his throat, wanting us to get back on track, so I looked at the monitors again, staring at the chimera scepter until I got my anger under control.
“So Sisyphus and his Reapers are stealing artifacts,” Aunt Rachel said. “But you still haven’t explained what all of this is.”
She waved her hand around at the room, with all of its high-tech monitors, tools, weapons, and shelves full of artifacts.
“Not many people know this, but every single Library of Antiquities has a basement level deep underground,” Linus said. “Most of them are used to store artifacts, books, and the like from the library’s collection. The Colorado library is unique in that it has two basement levels, the second of which is not listed on any of the library schematics. Several months ago, after Loki was freed, I had this second, secret level converted into a fallback headquarters and stocked it with the Protectorate’s most powerful artifacts in case things didn’t go our way. It was going to be our last resort, our last base of resistance and operations, if we weren’t able to defeat the god.”
Now that he mentioned it, I realized that the shape and size of this room was an exact match for the main space around the checkout counter and the fireplace on the first floor. I had thought I knew every single inch of the library, but apparently not.
“And them?” Aunt Rachel asked, waving her hand at Takeda and the others.
“Sisyphus is recruiting kids and turning them into Reapers,” Linus said. “Kids who won’t talk to adults wandering around campus in Protectorate robes, much less gossip around them or share any sort of information. So I put together a group of people those kids will talk to—other students. This is Team Midgard.”
Midgard was another name I recognized from myth-history class. The term often referred to the mortal realm, but it was also the name of an enormous wall that the gods had once built to protect people from monsters and other threats.
I eyed the other kids sitting at the table. “Doesn’t look like much of a team to me. Or a guard.”
This time, Ian, Zoe, and Mateo all glared at me.
Linus ignored my snide remark and gestured at Takeda. “Hiro Takeda is the team leader. A Samurai with impressive fighting and tactical skills, as well as healing magic. Takeda has been a member of the Protectorate for more than ten years, joining as soon as he graduated from the Tokyo branch of Mythos Academy.”
Takeda was already sitting perfectly straight, but he seemed to grow even straighter at his boss’s praise. Ten years out of the academy would put him in his early thirties, a few years older than Aunt Rachel. Takeda’s dark brown gaze dropped to my arm. He must have been the one who had healed me. I tipped my head, silently thanking him. He nodded back at me.
“Mateo Solis,” Linus continued. “A Roman with remarkable quickness and even more remarkable computer skills. If it’s electronic, Mateo can hack it.”
A blush stained Mateo’s cheeks, but he too sat up a little straighter.
“Zoe Wayland,” Linus said. “A Valkyrie with an affinity for creating all sorts of interesting gadgets and weapons.”
Zoe lifted her chin and waved her hand toward her desk covered with tools. “In other words, I make all the awesome stuff around here.”
“And Ian Hunter,” Linus finished. “A Viking warrior whose family has a long history of Protectorate service.”
I expected Ian to sit up straighter too, just like Takeda and Mateo had, but he grimaced instead, as though Linus’s praise bothered him. Weird. I would think he would be chomping at the bit for Linus to tell everyone how awesome he was.
“So you guys are basically the mythological equivalent of supersecret, black-ops spies,” I said.
Linus nodded. “Something like that.”
“Well, superspies, do you know who the Reaper was in the library? The one who stole the scepter and unleashed those chimeras? Because all I could see was his black cloak.”
Linus hit another button on his remote. “We believe it was this student.”
A familiar face popped up onto the screen. Black hair, blue eyes, tan skin, great smile, perfect dimples.
Surprise shot through my body. “But…that’s Lance Fuller.”
“The guy you were getting cozy with earlier today,” Ian sniped. “I saw your little meet-cute in the dining hall.”
I wanted to point out that Ian and I’d had the same sort of meet-cute on the quad earlier today, but I bit back my snarky words. I didn’t want Ian to realize how gorgeous I had thought he was—at least until he’d opened his mouth and started insulting me.
“Lance and I weren’t getting cozy,” I muttered. “We just bumped into each other. That’s all. He was actually nice enough to apologize for running into me. But that’s not surprising, since he’s practically the only person at this stupid school who will even talk to me now.”
Aunt Rachel glanced at me. She knew all about my crush on Lance, since I had pretty much gushed to her every single time he’d smiled at me or laughed at one of my stupid jokes last year.
“According to our intel, Lance is one of Sisyphus’s new recruits,” Linus said. “He joined the Reapers over the summer.”
I shook my head. “You’ve got the wrong guy. Lance’s family is totally rich and connected. His dad works for the Protectorate.”
“His father used to work for the Protectorate,” Linus said in a cold voice. “James Fuller was caught stealing weapons and armor from the Protectorate warehouse where he worked in New York. In addition to stealing the weapons, he sold many of them on the black market to Reapers. Mr. Fuller and several Reapers were killed during a Protectorate raid on that warehouse a few months ago.”
I hadn’t heard a whisper about Lance’s dad dying, much less that he’d been selling weapons to Reapers. Then again, the Protectorate would have wanted to keep it quiet that one of their own had betrayed them. Lance would have wanted to keep it quiet too. He had seen what happened to me at school last year, and he wouldn’t have wanted the same thing to happen to him. He wouldn’t have wanted to lose his golden-boy status, especially since he was so much more popular than I had ever been and had so much farther to fall.
“So you think that Lance joined up with the Reapers so he can get revenge on the Protectorate for his dad’s death,” I said.
Linus and Takeda both nodded.
“Just because Lance’s dad was a Reaper doesn’t mean that he’s one too!” I snapped.
My voice boomed out far louder and angrier than I had intended. A tense, awkward silence fell over the room, and everyone looked at me again. This time, I glared right back at all of them, including Ian. After a moment, he dropped his gaze from mine and shifted in his seat, as though he were suddenly uncomfortable.
“We understand what you’re saying, Miss Forseti,” Linus said. “But the Midgard has been tracking Lance for several days now.”
“So you actually saw him put on a Reaper cloak and break into the library.”
“No.” This time, Takeda answered me. “We spotted Lance approaching the library, but he wasn’t wearing a Reaper cloak. We tried to follow him, but he vanished.”
“So you don’t know for sure that he’s the Reaper,” I said. “He could have been sneaking around campus for some other reason.”
“It was him,” Ian muttered. “It had to be. No one else was around.”
Takeda tipped his head, agreeing with the Viking, then looked at me again. “We were expecting Lance to steal a sword or a piece of armor, since that’s what the Reapers have been targeting so far. Something far less dangerous than the scepter. That’s why we were going to let him leave the library with the artifact and then follow him back to the other Reapers. But Lance slipped away in the confusion of the battle with the chimeras.” Takeda’s voice remained calm, but anger sparked in his dark eyes. He wanted to catch Lance and make him pay for Amanda’s death. Couldn’t blame him for that.
“So you’re going to track down Lance and arrest him, right?” Aunt Rachel asked. “Before he can hurt anyone else with the scepter.”
“We don’t have to track down Lance,” Linus said. “He’s in his dorm room right now.”
Understanding filled Aunt Rachel’s face. “You’re not going to arrest him. Not yet, anyway. You’re going to let him keep the scepter and see if he’ll lead you back to the other Reapers like you originally planned.”
Linus nodded. “We think that Lance stole the scepter, but he was wearing a cloak, so we have no real proof that it was him. No security footage or anything like that, which means that we have no grounds to arrest him. But don’t worry. We have Protectorate guards discreetly watching his dorm right now to keep all the other students safe. If Lance does try to use the artifact, the Protectorate will move in and arrest him immediately.”
“And if he doesn’t use it?” I asked. “What then?”
“Letting him keep the scepter is a calculated risk, but our intel suggests that Lance will meet up with Sisyphus—or one of his trusted lieutenants—sometime in the next few days to hand over the scepter,” Linus said. “We need to find out when and where the handoff will take place, recover the scepter, and capture and arrest all the Reapers.”
He paused and looked at Takeda, who nodded. Linus turned back to me, and I knew what he was going to say next.
“And we want you to help us do it, Miss Forseti.”