Midnight Frost

precious little princess from getting an arrow through her skull.”
    “Princess?” I asked.
    Rory gave a loud, derisive snort. “Yeah. You. Princess. You and your little entourage. I saw them hovering around you at the station. You’d think that you were some sort of princess or something the way they were hanging all over you.”
    My eyes widened, my lips twitched, and my shoulders started to shake. I tried to contain it—really, I did—but I couldn’t help it. I started laughing. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. I knew it was crazy, that my laughter was crazy, that I should try to bottle it up the way I had all of my other emotions lately, but I just couldn’t do it.
    My friends looked at me, then each other. Daphne shrugged. She didn’t know why I was laughing, and neither did any of the guys.
    “What’s so funny?” Rory muttered.
    “Princess!” I managed to get out the word between fits of laughter. “You think I’m a bloody princess!”
    The laughter kept coming and coming until tears streamed out of the corners of my eyes, and my stomach ached from the force of it.
    Rory glared at me again. “If I’d known you were crazy, I would have let the Reapers put you out of your misery—and mine too.”
    I wiped the tears away and finally managed to get my giggles under control. “You don’t understand. If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s definitely a princess. That’s more Daphne’s thing than mine.”
    “Hey!” Daphne snapped.
    I looked at her. “C’mon. You know it’s true. How many bags did you bring for this trip?”
    She sniffed. “Just because you want to spend the rest of your life wearing hoodies, sneakers, and ratty T-shirts doesn’t mean the rest of us should suffer.”
    I rolled my eyes. “Oh no.”
    Rory looked at the Valkyrie. “Your name’s Daphne?”
    She straightened up. “Daphne Cruz. From the North Carolina academy.”
    One by one, Daphne introduced everyone, including Coach Ajax, who’d finished his phone call.
    Rory glanced at my friends before her green eyes fixed on me once more. “And what’s the princess’s name?”
    “Gwen,” I said. “Gwen Frost.”
    Rory froze, just as I had a moment ago. A shadow passed over her pretty face, and for a moment, her whole body tensed up, like she was debating whether or not to throw herself forward and attack me. Something that looked a lot like hate blazed in her eyes, and I felt a wave of anger surge off her, as hot as a furnace blasting heat in my face.
    “Maybe you’ve heard of her,” Carson said in a helpful voice.
    “Yeah,” Rory muttered. “I’ve heard of her all right.”
    And from the sound of her voice, it hadn’t been anything good. It was bad enough that all the kids back home watched my every move now, but I’d never considered that word of who I was would make its way through the rest of the mythological world. I should have known it would, though. Sometimes, I thought Mythos kids gossiped even better than they wielded weapons. I wondered what this meant for our welcome at the academy. Ajax had wanted to pass our group off as some kids taking a field trip, but that wasn’t going to happen now—if it had ever even been possible to start with.
    Rory gave me another dark look, then plopped down on her bench, crossed her arms over her chest, and turned her head toward the windows, pointedly ignoring me and my friends. The others and I sat down, as well, making sure we were as far away from the blood and Reapers’ bodies as we could get. I tried to catch Rory’s gaze, but she stared out the windows with the same sort of intense, single-minded determination she’d shown during the fight. She might have saved my life, but it was obvious she wasn’t happy about it. I wondered why. I’d never seen or met her before today, so I had no idea why she’d have such an obvious grudge against me. Usually, I had to be around people for at least a few minutes before I pissed them off.
    Maybe it was her dislike of me or maybe it was the fact that the train was now filled with dead Reapers, but I couldn’t help feeling there was a giant ax swinging back and forth over my head. All that was left to do now was to see when it would finally fall.
     
    About fifteen minutes later, the train pulled into the station at Snowline Ridge. My friends and I grabbed our things and stepped off the car. Waiting on the platform was a group of men and women, all wearing black coveralls with the hand-and-scales