AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I studied the girl again. Frizzy brown hair, pale skin, a few freckles sprinkled across her cheeks. Her features were quite pretty, but one thing stood out: her eyes. At first, I thought they were blue, but a second look revealed that they were really a lovely shade of violet.
My gaze flicked over to her bag. It too was perfectly ordinary, although some sort of longish box was bulging up against the side of the gray fabric. Of course, I couldn’t tell what the girl might be hiding in that box, but I could clearly see what was sticking up out of the top of the bag.
“Is that a sword?” I asked.
Gwen’s hand curled around the bag in a protective gesture, and I got the distinct impression that she wanted to hide the weapon from sight. “Yeah. I go to Mythos Academy. It’s for, uh, fencing class.”
I didn’t know nearly as much about swords as I did about knives, but even I knew that wasn’t a fencing sword. The weapon was much too broad and thick for that, and the hilt was all wrong. Instead of being smooth silver, the hilt was shaped like half of a man’s face, as though an actual person was trapped somewhere deep inside the metal. Curiouser and curiouser.
“Mythos Academy, huh?” I murmured, still eyeing the sword.
“Have you heard of it?”
I shrugged. “Just in passing. It’s in Cypress Mountain, right? That fancy private boarding school where all the rich kids go?”
Gwen kept staring at me, as though she expected me to say something else. But after a few seconds, she slowly nodded. “Yeah. That fancy private boarding school for rich kids.”
My gaze flicked over her clothes. A hoodie, T-shirt, jeans, and scuffed sneakers didn’t exactly scream rich kid, but I knew even less about clothes than I did about swords. For all I knew, she was wearing a Fiona Fine designer hoodie and Bella Bulluci sneakers that cost more than the five silverstone knives I was carrying—one secured in the small of my back, two tucked up my sleeves, and two more nestled in the sides of my boots.
“So, Gin, where are you from?” Gwen asked.
Most people probably would have thought she was just making polite conversation, but her eyes narrowed, and she stared at me as though she was going to weigh my answer very, very carefully.
“Ashland,” I replied. “I run a barbecue restaurant called the Pork Pit. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, but I haven’t.”
“That’s okay.”
I reached into my jacket pocket. Gwen tensed, and her hand drifted over to the sword, as though she was going to yank the weapon out of the top of the bag. Wary and skittish. Yep, she was most definitely in some sort of trouble.
I kept my movements slow and easy as I pulled a small white card out of my pocket and held it out between us. Gwen hesitated, but she reached out and took the card. She blinked, and I could have sworn that magic flared in her violet eyes, even though I didn’t sense any elemental power rippling off her. No Air, Fire, Ice, or Stone and no offshoot elements like electricity, acid, water, or metal. Nothing like that at all.
Still, some . . . force gathered around her, like a blast of wind about to whistle in my direction, and it seemed like she saw something else besides the small white card in her hand.
Gwen blinked again, and the force—or whatever it was—abruptly vanished. She stared down at the card and rubbed the thick paper in between her fingers. “The Pork Pit, Gin Blanco, Proprietor and Purveyor of Ashland’s Finest Barbecue. Cool. I’ve never met anyone who owned a barbecue restaurant before.”
She gave me a cautious smile, and I grinned back at her. That was the magic of barbecue—talking about it almost always broke the ice with other people.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a flash of purple, and I glanced over at her bag. For a moment, I didn’t understand what I was looking at or where the odd bit of color was coming from. Then I realized that the sword’s round, bulging eye was open—and that the very bright, very purple eye was staring straight at me.
“Barbecue, eh? Well, that’s not nearly as tasty as Reaper blood and bones, but I have been known to enjoy a good barbecue sandwich on occasion.”
Shock jolted through me like an electric current. Not only did the sword seem to be talking to me, but it was also speaking in a cool English accent. But that simply wasn’t possible.
Swords couldn’t talk . . . could they?
I blinked and blinked, trying to come up with an explanation for what I was experiencing. Maybe I’d drunk too much hot chocolate at the resort this morning and was having a weird sugar-induced hallucination. Maybe someone in the train station had discreetly doused me with a powerful mind-altering poison. Or maybe there was much more to Gwen Frost and her sword than there appeared to be.
I opened my mouth to ask the sword a question, but from one instant to the next, the sword’s eye was closed again, along with its mouth, and it was still and inanimate once more. I watched it closely, but the weapon—he?—didn’t move or speak again.
Had I just imagined the sword talking to me? I rubbed my head, which was suddenly pounding. Maybe Finn was right. Maybe my constant paranoia was finally getting the better of me and making me see things that weren’t really there. That seemed far more plausible than a talking weapon.
Gwen stuck her arm in front of the sword, shielding it from my line of sight. Then she gave me a bright smile and tucked my business card into her hoodie pocket. “Tell me about your barbecue restaurant.”
I got the feeling that she was desperately trying to change the subject, but I decided to play along—for now. At least until I could wrap my mind around the idea of a speaking sword.
“Well, the Pork Pit is located in downtown Ashland, and it’s my pride and joy . . .”
