Midnight Frost

different,” he said.
    Daphne snorted. “You mean, most of them were so scared that all they did was babble on about ghosts and spirits and how they barely survived.”
    “The ruins have a reputation,” Oliver added. “You don’t go up there unless you absolutely have to.”
    “Okay, so basically the ruins are some Mythos version of a haunted house,” I said. “So what? We’ve been through worse.”
    “It’s not the ruins I’m concerned about,” Metis said. “It’s the Reapers’ trap.”
    We all froze for a moment.
    Finally, Alexei spoke. “What do you mean? How could it be a trap?”
    The professor took off her silver glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Because the poison is working too slowly on Nickamedes. Serket sap is usually fatal within a few minutes, but it was longer than that before Nickamedes even showed any symptoms. And now, my magic is keeping the poison at bay, even though that’s not usually possible. I think . . . I think the Reaper gave Nickamedes a small, diluted dose of the poison—on purpose.”
    “But why would the Reapers do that?” Oliver asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”
    I thought back to when I’d seen the Reaper poison the water bottles, and I remembered something I hadn’t thought too much about before. Jason had used white pouches on the bottles, but outside on the quad, he’d had a red paper pouch. And after he’d swallowed the poison inside, he’d been dead in a few minutes, just like Metis had said. Even when Vivian had called, she’d asked him if it was done, if I’d been poisoned—not if I was actually dead yet.
    I looked at the professor, and I started to pick up on her train of thought. “Jason wanted to poison me, but he didn’t want to kill me, did he? Not right away. Instead, he wanted to give you guys enough time to figure out what kind of poison he’d used. Maybe that’s even why he kept looking at the book so much in the library—so I could flash on it and see him reading it when you guys finally found it back in the stacks. Once you did, he knew that you’d go rushing out to the ruins to find the antidote, and when you got there, the Reapers would be waiting.”
    Metis nodded. “That’s what I think. That the Reapers want to lure us out to the ruins so they can attack us.”
    I frowned. “But why? Why go to all that trouble when they could attack us here? They’ve done it before.”
    When they could just kill me, and be done with it. That was the other dark thought that filled my mind, but I didn’t share it with the others.
    “That, I don’t have an answer to.” Metis sighed again. “But even if it’s not a trap, you can’t just go find the flower. Chloris ambrosia has powerful healing properties, but there’s a catch—it has to be picked under a midnight moon. That’s the only time the flowers on the vine bloom, and the flowers are what I need to make the antidote.”
    “So let me get this straight,” I said. “Not only do we have to get to the ruins, figure out how to survive whatever creepy magic mumbo jumbo may or may not be there, and thwart a likely Reaper attack, but we also have to pick this mythological flower at precisely the right moment or Nickamedes will die anyway. Does that about sum it up?”
    Metis nodded. “Unfortunately.”
    We all fell silent once more, and the only sounds were the crinkle of Raven’s magazine as she turned another page and the faint beep-beep-beep of a heart monitor somewhere deeper in the infirmary. I wondered if that was Nickamedes’s heart beating—and how long it would be until that sound stopped altogether.
    Not for the first time tonight, I wished that Logan was here. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything—not any more than Metis was already doing for Nickamedes—but his being here would have comforted me, would have made me feel like the odds weren’t stacked quite so high against us and that we had a chance to save Nickamedes after all.
    Logan wasn’t here—but I was. And I knew what I had to do—as Nike’s Champion, and more important, as Nickamedes’s friend.
    “How long?” I asked. “How long does he have?”
    “I won’t know until we run some more tests to see exactly how much of the poison he ingested and how strong it is,” Metis said. “But I would say a week. Maybe less.”
    Silence. Complete, utter, absolute, frightening silence descended over the waiting room once more.
    I looked at Metis. The professor was putting on a brave