way back behind his desk in his dorm room. It fell down there when you grabbed the bracelet and stuffed it into your purse.”
Daphne let out a laugh, still keeping up the act. “And why would I do something like that?”
“Because you’re crazy about Carson. You don’t want him to ask out Leta. You want him for yourself.”
Daphne slumped over, her hands dropping to one of the sinks that lined the wall below the mirror. Her fingers curled around the silver faucets, which were shaped like Hydra heads, before sliding down to the basin. Her French-manicured nails scraped across the white marble, and pale pink sparks of magic shot out of her fingertips. Daphne might only be seventeen like me, but Valkyries were incredibly strong. I knew that if she wanted to, Daphne Cruz could rip that sink out of the wall easier than the Hulk could.
Maybe I should have been scared of the Valkyrie, of the weird princess pink sparks, and especially of her strength and what she could do to me with it. But I wasn’t. I’d already lost one of the people I cared about most. Everything else dulled in comparison to that.
“How do you know all that?” Daphne asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
I shrugged. “Because, as you put it, I see things. And as soon as I found this charm, I knew that you were the one who took the bracelet.”
I didn’t tell Daphne anything else about my Gypsy gift, about my ability to know an object’s history just by touching it, and she didn’t ask.
Instead, the Valkyrie kept staring at me with her black eyes. After about thirty seconds of silence, she came to some sort of decision. Daphne straightened, reached into her bag once more, and drew out her wallet. It matched her designer purse.
“All right,” she said. “How much will it take for you to give me that charm and forget about this whole thing? A hundred dollars? Two?”
This time, my hands were the ones that clenched into fists. She was trying to buy me off. I’d expected nothing less, but the gesture still made me angry. Like everyone else at Mythos Academy, Daphne Cruz could afford the very best of everything. A few hundred dollars was nothing to her. She’d spent that much on her freaking purse.
But a few hundred dollars wasn’t nothing to me. It was clothes and comic books and a cell phone and a dozen other things that girls like Daphne never had to worry about.
“Carson’s already paid me,” I said.
“So?” she said. “I’ll pay you more. However much you want.”
“Sorry. Once I give my word to somebody, I keep it. And I told Carson that I would find the charm bracelet for him.”
Daphne tilted her head to the side like I was some strange creature that she’d never seen before, some mythological monster masquerading as a teenage girl. Maybe it was stupid of me, not taking her up on the cash that she was so willing to give me. But my mom wouldn’t have taken Daphne’s money, not if she’d already made a promise to someone else. My mom, Grace, had been a Gypsy, just like me. With a gift, just like me.
For a moment, my heart ached with guilt and longing. My mom was gone, and I missed her so much. I shook my head, more to push the pain aside than anything else.
“Look, just give me the bracelet. That’s all I want. That’s all Carson wants.”
Daphne’s lips tightened. “He—he knows? That I took the bracelet? And why?”
“Not yet. But he’s going to if you don’t give it to me. Right now.”
I opened the top of the plastic bag and held it out to her. Daphne stared at the rose charm glinting inside. She bit her pink lip, smearing her gloss on her teeth, and looked away.
“Fine,” she muttered. “I don’t know why I even took it in the first place.”
I did because I’d flashed on Daphne when I’d touched the charm. As soon as my fingers had brushed the silver rose, an image of the blond Valkyrie had popped into my head. I’d seen Daphne sitting at Carson’s desk, staring at the bracelet, her fingers tightening around the metal links like she wanted to rip them in two.
And I’d felt the other girl’s emotions, too, the way that I always did whenever I touched an object or even another person. I’d felt Daphne’s hot, pulsing jealousy that Carson was thinking about asking out Leta.