"I'm going to kill you for this, Gwen," Daphne snarled. "Slowly."
I looked at her, but I didn't stop dragging her up the hill. "Why? You got exactly what you wanted. A date with Carson. You should be thanking me, not plotting how you can rip my face off with your sparkly fingers. The two of you might have stood there for another hour before he worked up the nerve to ask you out. I just cut through the geek speak."
Daphne's black eyes narrowed, but she didn't contradict me. "Fine. So maybe you did me a favor. But what do you want now? I'm not your freaking sidekick, you know. I don't even like you. Not the least little bit. And we're certainly not friends or anything."
"Of course we aren't," I said. "I could never, ever be friends with a rich, spoiled, wannabe Valkyrie princess like you. But since you're one of the few people at the academy who will actually speak to me, you've been elected. Now hurry up. Logan's trapped. He may be hurt, too. I don't know."
"Logan?" Daphne asked. "As in Logan Quinn? The Logan Quinn? What have you gotten yourself into, Gwen?"
We reached the top of the hill, and I took off in a run. After a moment, I heard a muttered curse and Daphne fell in step behind me, her feet smashing the dewy grass along with mine. I led her back to the library and up onto the patio.
"I need you to help me move that thing, whatever it is," I said, pointing to the panther. "Logan killed it, and now, he's trapped underneath it."
Logan waved his arm again. Evidently, he'd heard us run up onto the patio.
"Dude!" Daphne whispered, her eyes wide as she stared down at the creature. "That's a Nemean prowler!"
I looked at her. "What's a Nemean prowler?"
"How can you not know what a prowler is?" Daphne asked. "Everybody knows about prowlers."
I shrugged. "I'm new here, remember?"
She shook her head. "Well, anyway, that's a Nemean prowler. Hercules killed a whole bunch of them way back when. Today, they're kind of like the mythological equivalent of a familiar. You know, like a witch's black cat?"
I nodded. "Sure."
"Except, of course, prowlers are much more than that," Daphne said. "Bigger, stronger, tougher. Their claws can tear through almost anything, which is one of the reasons that Reapers love them. Most Reapers don't keep them so much as pets as they do to kill people. They're really just big kitty-cat assassins. Man, those things are nasty. I can't believe that he actually killed it."
"Hello," Logan muttered, waving his arm again to get our attention. "Still trapped under here."
"Oh. Sorry."
Daphne bent down and dug her hands into the creature's fur, just like I had done a few minutes ago. With her Valkyrie strength it was easy for her to shove the prowler off Logan and roll it over to the side of the patio. Daphne bent over the creature, muttering that she'd never seen a prowler in person before and how cool it was that it was dead. And she thought I was a freak.
I dropped to my knees beside Logan, who was lying on his back, trying to get his breath back after being somewhat smushed by the prowler.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
"I think so." Logan stared at me, and a smile pulled up his lips. "But maybe you should give me mouth-to-mouth, just to make sure."
I rolled my eyes and stood up. "Do you ever think about anything besides sex?"
His smile widened. "Not when you're around, Gypsy girl."
My eyes narrowed, and I bit back a retort. Probably not a good idea to criticize the guy who'd just saved your life. But still. Logan Quinn seriously needed to be taught some manners.
"Um, guys," Daphne said. "You might want to look at this."
The Valkyrie backed up until she was standing next to us. Logan and I looked over at the prowler.
Which was disappearing before our eyes-literally.
The creature's fur, which had once been so dense, thick, and black, slowly wisped up into the air like it was made out of smoke. The mist curled up, and, for a moment, I could have sworn that I saw two eyes in the middle of it. The smoky eyes seemed to glare at me before a cool fall breeze swept over the patio and carried them away.
"Is that ... normal?" I whispered.
"Not at all," Daphne murmured. "I've never seen a prowler up close before, but they're as real as we are. They aren't supposed to disappear after you kill them. Only illusions do that."
Only illusions do that. Daphne's words echoed through my mind, and I felt a memory stirring in my subconscious. Something to do with illusions. Something that I'd seen or heard or read or thought about in the last few days. Something that was important. But the harder I tried to grab onto my thought, the more I tried to call up the memory, the deeper it sank into my brain-
Logan got to his feet and rubbed his chest. "Well, whatever it was, it was very heavy and very interested in killing me."
Whatever thread that I'd been following in my head snapped at his words, and the memory sank back down into the darkness. Still, I struggled to make sense of what I'd just seen.
"But if that prowler was an illusion, then it couldn't really hurt us, right?" I asked. "And why was it even here to start with? Are illusions like ghosts or something? Do they haunt certain places?"
Logan and Daphne exchanged a look, like I should have known exactly what was going on instead of asking such obvious questions.
"No, illusions aren't like ghosts," Daphne explained. "Illusions are created by people with magic, by warriors like us. And they can hurt you just as badly as the real thing can-sometimes even worse, depending on what type of illusion it is. The only difference between the illusion of a prowler that attacked you and a real prowler is that there's no body to get rid of, now that Logan's killed it."
I still didn't really understand why the prowler would have been able to kill me, if it was just an illusion to start with, but I didn't want to look completely stupid, so I kept my mouth shut.
There was nothing else for us to do but stand there and watch the prowler evaporate. Thirty seconds later, nothing remained of it at all, except for the crushed bits of stone that had sprayed everywhere when Logan had thrown it into the patio wall.
When the last remnants of the prowler were gone, Daphne turned and stabbed me in the shoulder with her finger.
"I think you've got some explaining to do, Gwen. So talk. Now."
She wasn't going to take no for an answer, and I supposed that I owed Logan some kind of explanation since, you know, he'd almost gotten clawed to death because of me. So I told the two of them about everything that had happened tonight. About my spying on Morgan and Samson, what they'd been doing, the statue falling and almost hitting them, and then the prowler showing up and trying to take a bite out of me.