I had started wearing the bracelet again when I joined Team Midgard, as a reminder that I didn’t have to be a Reaper and that I had the free will to choose my own path in life. But my parents had had another secret. They hadn’t told me that the bracelet was actually Freya’s Bracelet, a powerful artifact that protected the wearer from other people’s magic. It had saved me from Covington and his foul ring. Covington might have murdered my parents, but they had still protected me from him as best they could. I would always be grateful to them for that.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the cold feel of the bracelet around my wrist, like a ring of snow kissing my skin. I let that coldness seep into my mind and especially into my heart, until it iced over my hurt and rage that Covington was still out there, plotting against me and Team Midgard. I would hunt down the librarian and get my revenge on him, but today wasn’t going to be that day, and I had to accept that. When I felt calmer, I opened my eyes and looked at Zoe again.
“Covington was the head librarian here for a long time,” I said in a quieter voice. “Linus Quinn and Takeda don’t think he knows about the Bunker or the tunnels, but I don’t want to take a chance that he does. It would be just like Covington to use the tunnels to try to sneak into the Bunker to steal the jewelry box and other artifacts. I want to be ready for all the twisted things he might dream up, and mapping the tunnels is one way to prepare.”
More understanding and sympathy filled Zoe’s face, and blue sparks of magic dripped out of her fingertips like tears, almost as if her Valkyrie magic were crying at my obvious pain.
“I agree with Rory,” Babs piped up from her spot on my belt. “It wouldn’t hurt to map the tunnels and see where they lead. Besides, it will be fun. Why, it reminds me of the time I was in the Ashland sewers, chasing after a nasty Nemean prowler…”
The sword started babbling about another adventure she’d had, but Zoe and I tuned her out.
“Please,” I said in a soft voice. “I have to do this. Even if mapping the tunnels seems silly and pointless, I have to do something other than sit around and wait for Covington to strike. Otherwise, I’ll go crazy.”
She nodded. “All you had to do was ask.” Zoe zipped up her coveralls a little higher and held out her hand. “Give me your camera. I’ll take photos while you do your whole treasure map, X-marks-the-spot thing.”
I grinned and passed her the camera. Then, together, we stepped into the tunnel.
The bookcase swung shut behind us, and for a moment, everything was pitch-black. I took a step forward, and lights clicked on in the stone ceiling. The motion-activated lights turned on as we approached and clicked off as we moved past them. We walked about fifty feet before another tunnel branched off to our right. I stopped and made the appropriate X on my map.
One by one, we went down all the tunnels to see where they went. Five main tunnels led to the five major buildings on the Mythos quad aboveground—math-science, English-history, the dining hall, and the gym. And, of course, the tunnel we had started out in led back to the Bunker and the Library of Antiquities, the fifth and final building on the quad.
Each tunnel ended in a door, and I pressed the silver button on each one, using my thumbprint to open them and see where we had ended up. I already knew that the gym tunnel opened up into Takeda’s office, since he had brought us that way before, but the other secret entrances surprised me. A supply closet in the math-science building, a study room in the English-history building, a broken freezer in the dining-hall kitchen.
By the time we’d finished with the five main tunnels, all sorts of lines, squiggles, and Xs covered my map, and I found myself humming a happy tune.
“You are having way too much fun with this,” Zoe groused.
I grinned. She rolled her eyes, but she raised her camera and snapped a photo of me.
Several more secondary tunnels branched off from the five main ones, leading away from the quad and farther out onto campus. We mapped those as well. The tunnels snaked all over the grounds and opened up in all sorts of places—the girls’ dorms, the boys’ dorms, storage sheds full of landscaping and other equipment. One tunnel even opened up in a stand of trees not too far away from the cottage where I lived with Aunt Rachel. I felt like we were exploring some cool underground spider’s web, and I couldn’t wait to see where the next tunnel led.
Two hours later, we had mapped all the tunnels and secret entrances, except for a particularly long passageway that left campus and ran all the way over to the town of Snowline Ridge. I wanted to keep going to see where that tunnel led, but Zoe was grumbling about all the walking we’d done, so we headed back to the Bunker instead.
We stepped into what I considered the center of the spider’s web, a large junction with the five main tunnels running out to the different sections of the quad. Zoe was in front of me, and she rounded the corner and stepped into the tunnel that would take us back to the library. She looked over her shoulder and opened her mouth, probably to say how glad she was that we were finally stopping, but she tripped over something, staggered forward, and bounced off one of the walls. Her legs flew out from under her, and she sat down hard.
“Zoe! Are you okay?” I rushed over to her.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Nothing bruised but my pride. Help me up, please.”
She took my hand, and I hauled her to her feet. Zoe glanced around, and her gaze landed on a pile of loose bricks sitting beside one of the walls.
“Stupid bricks,” she muttered.
Zoe lashed out with her boot, and one of the bricks disintegrated into shards. Zoe didn’t think she had strength magic like other Valkyries did, but I thought she was far more powerful than she realized.
I crouched down and stared at the pile of bricks. “Looks like someone deliberately chipped these bricks out of the wall. See how the mortar is all scraped away from them?”
“Why would someone pull bricks out of a wall?” Babs asked.
“Maybe because they wanted to hide something behind it,” I replied.
“Hidden treasure?” Zoe perked up. “Now, that would be cool.”
My heart started pounding with excitement. Discovering someone’s hidden treasure would be the perfect way to end our exploring. I unhooked Babs’s scabbard from my belt and propped the sword against the wall so she could see what was going on. I didn’t have Zoe’s Valkyrie strength, but the bricks weren’t all that heavy, and I moved them out of the way, revealing a dark space about the size of a large book. Then I leaned down, shone my flashlight into the hole, and realized…that it was nothing but an empty space.
I moved the light back and forth, but nothing was in the wall. It was an empty, hollow space, with no hidden treasure of any kind. Disappointment rippled through me. I sighed, but I grabbed the bricks and stacked them back into the wall so they would be out of the way and we wouldn’t trip over them again.
I had just slid the last brick into place when a loud creak sounded in the distance.
In an instant, I was on my feet and standing next to Zoe.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered.
I nodded, and we peered down the tunnels, trying to figure out where the sound had come from.