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He puffed up and jerked his thumb at his chest, and I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes at the petulant tone in his voice. Brayden wasn’t the boss of anything, except being a whiny brat.
Winifred reached the end of the car, then turned around and headed back this way. She stopped and asked Rosie something, but the other Reaper shook her head, as though she didn’t know the answer. Winifred plastered another smile on her face, but it was a tight, worried expression. She chatted with a few more passengers, then strode over, bent down, and looked at Brayden, as though she was just making casual conversation.
“Where are Dennis and George?” she asked. “They haven’t texted me, and I didn’t see them get on board the train.”
“I’m not their mom,” Brayden replied, his voice even more petulant than before. “How should I know? They’re probably just in another car.”
Winifred shot him a nasty look, but she straightened up and moved on. She opened the door at the front of the car and stepped over to the next one. The whistle shrieked again, and the train slowly chugged away from the platform, heading down the backside of Pine Crest Mountain.
The other passengers, including Rosie, peered out the windows at the pretty scenery, but Brayden leaned forward and fixed his dark brown gaze on me. “Now, let’s get down to business. Where did you hide the rest of the artifacts?”
I bit my lip, thinking about the best way to get out of this mess. I didn’t want to reveal the artifacts’ location, but Winifred would figure it out soon enough. Besides, I didn’t dare fight the Reapers while innocent people were around, so maybe I needed to go where there were no innocent people around.
“Where do you think they are?” I snapped. “Where on this train is big enough to hide anything? What’s the one place that is not full of passengers?”
He gave me a blank look.
“The artifacts are in the baggage car, you idiot.”
Anger stained his cheeks a dark, mottled red. I cluck-cluck-clucked my tongue, mocking him. “Your sister’s right. You are definitely not the brains of the crew.”
Brayden growled, leaned forward, and swiped Minerva’s Dagger across the back of my left hand. Given his Roman speed, he was simply too quick for me to stop, and I didn’t even have time to try to dodge the blow. One moment, Brayden was glaring at me. The next, he was slicing the dagger through the air, the blade glinting a bright, sinister gold.
Even though it was adorned with jewels, the dagger still bit deep into my skin, and blood welled up out of the wound. I hissed in pain and surprise and started to jerk back, but Brayden clamped his fingers around my left hand. He tightened his grip and twisted, making even more pain explode in the wound, but that was a small misery compared with the sudden, overwhelming surge of my psychometry magic.
The second his skin touched mine, I saw everything there was to know about Brayden Vitales.
Images flickered through my mind one after another, almost too fast to follow. A young Brayden scurrying along after a much older Winifred, trying to keep up with her longer strides. Brayden watching with wide-eyed fascination as Winifred swung a sword and cut down a girl in front of her. Brayden struggling to lift his own sword while Winifred circled around and barked out instructions. Brayden trying to obey her directions but always tripping over his own feet or losing his grip on his sword or doing something else clumsy. Winifred mercilessly mocking every single mistake Brayden made and then mocking him even more as angry, frustrated tears slid down his cheeks . . .
“Not so tough now, are you, Gwen?” Brayden hissed.
He dug his fingers even deeper into my skin, and a fresh wave of pain and memories bloomed in my mind—including one of Minerva’s Dagger.
I reached out with my magic and latched onto that image. Brayden was in the Crius Coliseum, standing in front of a glass artifact case and staring down at the dagger, which glimmered like liquid gold.
“Soon, baby,” he murmured, stroking his fingers across the glass. “Soon you’ll be all mine, along with the other artifacts. Then I’ll have enough money to leave Winifred and the rest of these losers behind and finally start my own crew . . .”
Brayden abruptly shoved me away. I fell back against my seat, sweating, clutching my wounded hand, and gasping for breath. He smirked and waggled the dagger at me again, and my stomach roiled at the sight of my own blood glistening on the blade. Maybe it was my imagination, but the jewels embedded in the hilt seemed to glow a little more brightly than before, almost as if they approved of the pain and violence the Reaper had inflicted on me.
“Maybe that will teach you to keep your smart mouth shut.” He glared at me, although his anger quickly congealed into a cold, sadistic grin. “Although I’m happy to give you another lesson, Gwen, just in case you didn’t get the point this time around.”
His low, evil chuckles scraped against my skin like razors, and my wound throbbed in response. I glanced over at Rosie, and the other Reaper smirked, clearly enjoying my suffering.
Brayden’s laughter slowly died down. He glanced around, but no one had noticed what he’d done except Rosie, and he jerked his head at me.
“Wrap that up,” he ordered. “I can’t have you dripping blood all over the place for the mortals to see.”
Under his sharp, watchful gaze, I dug into my messenger bag, shoved my hand past a stack of Karma Girl comic books, and grabbed a roll of purple gauze. Nyx, the Fenrir wolf I was taking care of, had recently decided that she loved to chase strings, so I’d been using the gauze as a sort of toy for her.
I wrapped the gauze around the wound as tightly as I could manage with one hand and shoved the end underneath the other layers to hold it all together. My blood swiftly seeped through the purple gauze, staining it an ugly brown, but there was nothing I could do about that right now.
The other passengers kept murmuring to each other, pointing at the various trees and rocks they spotted through the windows, and generally oohing and aahing over the snowy scenery, but a tense silence descended over Brayden and me. A couple of minutes later, his phone beeped, and he pulled it out of his coat pocket and stared at the message on the screen.
“Winifred says the other employees are finally taking a break, so it’s time for us to get the rest of the artifacts.” He jerked his head at Rosie, who got up, came over, and dropped into the seat next to him.
“Watch her,” Brayden ordered, sliding Minerva’s Dagger into his coat pocket. “I need to text Winifred and let her know the artifacts are hidden in the baggage car.”
Rosie nodded, pushed her jacket aside again, and curled her hand around the hilt of her sword. She never took her eyes off me as Brayden started typing on his phone.
