"Are you okay, Gypsy girl?" Logan asked. "You look sort of distracted."
I pushed all thoughts of the creepy whispers away and focused on Logan. "I'm fine. I just thought I heard someone moving around in the library. That's why I, uh, attacked you. Or tried to, anyway."
Logan grinned at me again. "Well, no harm done, right?"
"Right."
"So," he said. "Would this be a good time to talk about ... us?"
I blinked at the abrupt change in subject. "What?"
For a second, he looked uncomfortable. "You know, us. As in you and me, and what's going on between us."
Confused, I just kept staring at him.
He sighed. "Girls always seem to want to talk about stuff like that. All the time. So I thought I'd bring it up first. For a change." He muttered the last few words under his breath.
Okay, so this wasn't exactly the starry, romantic talk I'd been hoping for, but Logan had said the word us. That would have given me a little bit of hope except for one thing-the fact that Logan had a secret he was keeping from me. One that he thought would make me stop caring about him. One that was going to come out sooner or later, once we started touching.
If we started touching.
I drew in a breath. "I'd love for there to be an us. I want that more than anything. I mean, it's kind of obvious how I feel about you. How I've felt about you for a while now. I'm crazy about you, Spartan. Even when you were with Savannah, I was still crazy about you, and my feelings haven't changed any over the holidays."
If anything, they'd only gotten stronger, but I didn't tell him that.
Logan frowned. "I'm sensing a but in there."
I drew in another breath. "But it's not that simple. You know how I feel about you, and I think I know how you feel about me. But we both know you're keeping something from me. Your big secret, remember?"
Logan's features tightened, and his face grew guarded. "What about it?"
"I'm going to find out your secret, Logan. Not because I want to," I added in a hasty voice, noticing the anger starting to cloud his face. "But because of my magic, because of my Gypsy gift. The second I touch you for any length of time, my psychometry's going to kick in, and I'll know everything there is to know about you-whether you want me to or not."
"But can't you just ... turn it off or something?" Logan asked, the frustration making his voice harsh. "At least while we're together?"
I shook my head. "I can't, and believe me, I've tried dozens of times over the years. But my magic is a part of me. It's what makes me a Gypsy, just like your killer instinct makes you a Spartan. I wouldn't be me without my magic."
And now, it was time for the most difficult part, the thing I'd been dreading telling him for weeks now. "I've seen part of it already. Part of your secret."
Logan dropped his hands from around my waist and stepped back. A panicked light flared in his eyes. "What are you talking about?"
"When we kissed in the construction site at the ski resort, when I kissed you so I could tap into your fighting skills and defeat Preston, I saw more than just you battling other kids," I said in a low voice. "I saw you as a little boy-standing over two bodies. A woman and a girl. They looked like you, and there-there was blood all over them."
"You saw that?" he whispered.
I nodded. "Bits and pieces of it. First, I saw you in a closet, clutching a sword. You were so scared of what was going on outside the door, of all the shadows and screams you heard. Then, the memory shifted, and you were standing over the two bodies ... crying. That was all I saw before the kiss ended."
Logan turned away from me. The Spartan ran his hands down over his face, like he could scrub the memory out of his own mind with the motion. After a second, he snapped back around and stabbed his finger at me.
"You had no right to do that. You had no right to go snooping through my head like that. No right at all, Gwen."
Uh-oh. The Spartan only called me Gwen when he was serious about something-or seriously pissed off like he was now.
"I didn't do it on purpose. It just ... happened."
The hard, angry look on Logan's face told me that he didn't believe me-that he didn't believe the memories had just come to me and that I hadn't gone looking for them on purpose. Yeah, sometimes I used my Gypsy gift to figure out what other people were hiding, what their secrets were, but I would never do that to Logan. Never.
"Will you at least tell me who they were?" I asked in a soft voice, trying to reach out to him. "The woman and the girl?"
Logan let out a bitter laugh. "I suppose I don't have a choice now, do I? Because I know you, Gypsy girl. Once you get your teeth into something, you never let go. Once you find out someone's keeping something from you, you're even more determined to figure out what it is, what their precious secret is."
I flinched at his words.
"You want to know what happened back then, Gypsy girl?" Logan snarled. "I'll tell you."
The Spartan's hands tightened into fists, and his whole body trembled with rage as he glared at me, his face as hard and fierce as I'd ever seen it.
"Reapers came to our house one afternoon, and they killed everyone they could get their hands on, just like they did at the coliseum. Except, in this case, that everyone was my mom, Larenta, and my older sister, Larissa. The Reapers came in, and they butchered them like cattle, even though neither one of them even had a weapon."
I'd thought it must have been something like that, but my heart still twisted at his pain, at the raw, naked grief shimmering in his eyes. "Oh, Logan. I'm so, so sorry. I know what it's like to lose your mom. To have her taken away from you. I'm sure that you did everything you could to help your mom and your sister. I'm sure you did everything you could to try and save them-"
He let out another harsh laugh, cutting off my words. "You don't know anything. Not a damn thing. Not about me, not about being a Spartan, nothing," he growled. "Your mom and grandma kept you out of all this, sheltered you from Loki and Reapers and everything else. You have no idea what it's like to grow up in our world, to deal with the threat of them every single day. To you, it's like it's all a big game or something. Even when Metis and Nickamedes tell you to be smart, to stay safe, you go right back to poking your nose into other people's business. When are you going to realize this obsession you have with finding out people's secrets is going to get you killed?"
I opened my mouth to say it wasn't true, that nothing he was saying was true, but the words just wouldn't come. Because really, deep down, I was exactly like that. I'd totally scoffed at the idea of Loki and Reapers of Chaos when I'd first come to Mythos, despite all the magic I'd seen around me. Even now, when I knew the Reaper girl was targeting me, I still wanted to beat her at her own game. I wanted to find the Helheim Dagger and keep it safe from her and all the other Reapers. I wanted to be worthy of the power and trust Nike had given to me. I wanted to be as smart, strong, and brave as all the other Frost women who had served the goddess of victory.