I looked at the chair to my right. A silver sword sheathed in a black leather scabbard was propped up in the seat, but it wasn’t your average weapon. No, this sword had a woman’s face inlaid into the hilt, complete with a delicate eyebrow, a round bulge of an eye, a pointed cheekbone, a sharp, hooked nose, heart-shaped lips, and a curved chin. The sword focused on me, and I stared into her deep, dark, emerald-green eye.
“Thank you, Babs,” I said. “It’s nice to see that someone around here is excited about mapping the tunnels.”
Zoe snorted. “Babs is your sword. She goes where you go, so she has to be excited about everything you do, including exploring dusty old tunnels.”
Babs sniffed. “Don’t listen to her, Rory. It will be grand fun to map the tunnels. Why, it reminds me of a time years ago in Cypress Mountain, when one of my previous warriors was tracking a Fenrir wolf through the forest…”
And she was off, talking about that long-ago adventure. Babs liked to, well, babble. I thought it was an endearing quirk, but Zoe gave me a pointed look, grabbed a silver dagger off her desk, and pressed in on the blue stone set into the hilt, making blue-white sparks of electricity sizzle up and down the blade. Zoe gave me another pointed look, silently telling me that she was going to zap Babs with her electrodagger if the sword didn’t pipe down.
“All right,” I said, cutting into Babs’s story. “I’m ready. How about you guys?”
“Ready!” Babs chirped.
Zoe sighed again, but she got to her feet. She grabbed a glittery blue headband from the mess on her desk and used it to push her wavy black hair back from her face. Then she grabbed a compact from the jumble of items and dabbed a bit of powder on her nose, even though her lovely mocha skin was already flawless. For a final touch, she zipped up the blue coveralls she was wearing over her regular clothes. Red crystal hearts spelled out the words Valkyrie Power on the left side.
“Ready,” she muttered.
I eyed her heavy-duty coveralls. “We’re walking through the tunnels and mapping them. Not digging through the walls.”
Zoe slapped her hands on her hips, and more blue sparks of magic streamed out of her fingertips. “And I am not taking a chance on getting my new cashmere sweater dirty or getting cobwebs all over my jeans. Got it, Spartan?”
“Got it, Valkyrie.” I grinned. “Now, let’s get on with our field trip.”
She groaned. “You just had to call it that, didn’t you? Now you’ve jinxed us.”
“Just don’t puke on my boots, and we’ll be fine,” I teased.
Zoe gave me a dark look and brandished her electrodagger at me, but her lips curved up into a sheepish smile. I grinned back at her.
Whatever happened, she would always be my friend.
*
I slung my bag of supplies over my shoulder and hooked Babs’s scabbard to my belt, while Zoe stuffed her electrodagger into her pocket. Then the two of us left the briefing room and walked through a long hallway until we reached the back of the Bunker.
A door was marked with a sign that read Stairs, but instead of opening the door and going up the stairs, I went over to a bookcase along the wall and pressed a small silver button on the side of it. A green light flashed, scanning my thumbprint. A few seconds later, the light vanished, and the bookcase creaked back, revealing a stone passageway.
Excitement surged through me. I had always loved all kinds of mysteries, like the Nancy Drew books, the Sherlock Holmes adventures, and the old Scooby-Doo cartoons, but my absolute favorites were stories that featured things like secret passages and hidden compartments. Ever since I found out about the tunnels that ran underneath the academy, I had been itching to explore them. Today I’d finally roped Zoe into coming with me.
Zoe peered into the tunnel. “I still can’t believe you want to waste a perfectly good Sunday afternoon tromping through these creepy tunnels. I could be taking a nap. Inventing a new weapon. Binge-watching a fantasy show. You know, something fun.”
“This will be plenty of fun. Besides, it’s not only about exploring the tunnels.” I pulled a pen and a notebook out of my bag. “It’s also about mapping them. I want to know where every single tunnel goes and where all the secret entrances are all over campus.”
“Why? It’s not like the other Mythos kids know about the tunnels. The Midgard—we—are the only ones who know they exist.”
“Covington probably knows about them,” I said in a sharp voice. “Which means that I need to know about them too.”
Zoe winced at my harsh tone, but sympathy and understanding filled her face.
Covington used to be the head librarian at the Colorado academy, until he had revealed himself to be a Reaper of Chaos. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Covington had also murdered my parents, Rebecca and Tyson Forseti, when they had tried to leave the Reapers.
I had been so angry at my parents for hiding their involvement in the evil group, for never telling me that they were Reaper assassins, and especially for not being the noble, honest Spartan warriors I’d always thought they were. But finding out that Covington had killed my parents and blamed them for his crimes was a hundred times worse. He had taken them away from me before I’d had chance to ask them why they had been Reapers and why they had done all those horrible things.
I had thought that Covington was locked away in prison until a few weeks ago, when I discovered that he was the mysterious Sisyphus, the leader of a new group of Reapers who were determined to take over the mythological world. Covington had tried to get me to join him, to become a Reaper. He had claimed it was my destiny as a Spartan warrior. When I had refused, he had used an artifact—a jeweled Apate ring—to try to turn me into a Reaper against my will. With Babs’s help, I had managed to fight off the artifact’s magic. But the most surprising thing was that my parents had helped me too, even though they were dead and buried.
I shook my arm, and a silver charm bracelet slid down my right wrist. A silver heart locket dangled from the chain, along with two other charms—a tiny silver whistle and a silver winterbloom with a heart-shaped emerald center.
My parents had given me the bracelet for my sixteenth birthday last year, and the heart locket contained a picture of the three of us. I had loved the gift and had worn the bracelet every single day—until I found out that my parents were Reapers. I had been so angry and heartbroken by their betrayal that I’d torn off the bracelet and thrown it down on their graves, although my Aunt Rachel had eventually given it back to me.