Touch of Frost Read Online Free PDF Page B

loose black pants and slippers with curled pointed toes that made her look like a genie. Not that you could really see what Grandma was wearing, since scarves covered her from head to toe. Purple, gray, emerald green. All those colors and more flowed through the thin layers of fabric, while fake silver coins jingled together on the long, fringed edges.
    Rings studded with gems stacked up on her gnarled fingers, while a thin silver chain flashed around her right ankle. Her iron gray hair fell to her shoulders, pushed back by another scarf that she was using as a headband. Her eyes were a bright violet in her tan, wrinkled face.
    Grandma Frost looked like what I’d always thought a real Gypsy should—and exactly like what her clients expected when they came to get their fortunes told. Grandma always claimed that people paid her as much for her appearance as for what she revealed to them. She said that looking the part of the wise old mysterious Gypsy always made for better tips.
    I didn’t know exactly what made us Gypsies. We didn’t act like any Gypsies I’d ever read about. We didn’t live in wagons or wander from town to town or cheat people out of their money. But I’d been called a Gypsy ever since I could remember, and that’s how I’d always thought of myself.
    Maybe it was the fact that I was a Frost. Grandma had told me that it was a tradition for all the women in our family to keep that name, since our Gypsy gifts, our powers, were passed down from mother to daughter. So even though my parents had been married, I’d inherited my mom, Grace’s, last name of Frost, instead of my dad, Tyr’s, last name of Forseti.
    Or maybe it was the gifts themselves that made us Gypsies, the strange things that we could do and see. I didn’t know, and I’d never gotten a real answer from my mom or grandma about it. Then again, I’d never even thought to ask until I’d started going to Mythos, where everyone knew exactly who they were, what they could do, where they came from, and how big their parents’ bank balances were.
    Sometimes, I wondered just how much Grandma Frost knew about the academy, the warrior kids, Reapers, and the rest of it. After all, she hadn’t exactly protested when Professor Metis had come to the house and announced my change in schools. Grandma had been more resigned than anything else, like she’d known that Metis was going to show up sooner or later. Of course, I’d told my grandma all about the weird things that went on at Mythos, but she never blinked an eye at any of them. And every time I asked Grandma about the academy and why I really had to go there, all she said was for me to give it a chance, that things would eventually get better for me.
    Sometimes, I wondered why she was lying to me—when she never had before.
    “Hey there, pumpkin,” Grandma Frost said, dropping a kiss on top of my head and brushing my cheek with her knuckles. “How was school today?”
    I closed my eyes, enjoying the soft warmth of her skin against mine. Because of my Gypsy gift, because of my psychometry magic, I had to be careful about touching other people or letting them touch me. While I got vivid enough vibes from objects, I could get major flashes, major whammies of feeling, from actually coming into contact with someone’s skin. Seriously. I could see everything that they’d ever done, every dirty little secret that they’d ever tried to hide—the good, the bad, and the seriously ugly.
    Oh, I wasn’t like a complete leper when it came to other people. I was usually okay when it came to small, brief, casual touches, like passing a pen to someone in class or letting a girl’s fingers brush mine when we both reached for the same piece of cheesecake in the lunch line.
    Plus, a lot of what I saw depended on the other person and what he was thinking about at the time. I was pretty safe in class, at lunch, or in the library, since mostly the other kids were thinking about how totally boring a