“Now, this secret faction of Reapers does have a leader, someone who has been pulling everyone else’s strings and slowly taking control of all the remaining Reapers,” Linus said. “We haven’t been able to identify the leader yet, but we know that it’s a man and that he goes by the code name Sisyphus.”
I frowned. Sisyphus was a name from my myth-history class, that of a mortal man doomed to keep pushing a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down, forcing him to start all over again. Strange name for the leader of the Reapers. Or perhaps Sisyphus had chosen that name because he knew what an enormous task it would be to resurrect the group after Gwen had decimated them.
“So what does all this have to do with the warrior band here?” I sniped, gesturing at Ian and the other kids. “What were they doing on campus today? And what was that other girl, Amanda, doing in the library earlier?”
“Over the last few months, Sisyphus has been building his group, mostly by recruiting Mythos students to join his new band of Reapers,” Linus said.
I rolled my eyes. “Seriously? Who would be stupid enough to want to join the Reapers?”
“Kids whose Reaper parents died during the battle at the North Carolina academy,” Linus said in a soft, serious voice.
He fell silent, and everyone looked at me, the girl with the dead Reaper parents. That familiar mix of guilt, shame, and embarrassment churned in my stomach, and I dropped my hands to my lap so that no one would see them tighten into fists. Even here, in this strange place, I couldn’t escape what my parents had done.
I would never escape it.
Linus cleared his throat. “Many of these kids are mixed up and hurting. They want revenge for their parents’ deaths, and Sisyphus is taking advantage of them, using them to further his own ends. But other students, well, they were already Reapers, or at least on the path to becoming Reapers, thanks to their parents and their own anger and greed. Those kids are all too happy to do whatever Sisyphus asks, no matter who they have to hurt and betray.”
“And?” Aunt Rachel asked.
“And a couple of weeks ago, we got a tip that one of those Reaper students was going to try to steal an artifact from the Library of Antiquities when the Colorado academy opened for the new school year. We didn’t know which artifact the student was targeting, but we now realize that it was Typhon’s Scepter.”
Linus hit another button, and new photos appeared on the screens, each showing a gold stick that was about as long as my forearm. Several figures were etched into the gold, and it took me a moment to realize that they were Nemean prowlers, rams, and scorpions, all curled together. A single figure, also made of gold, crouched on the top of the scepter. That figure was a combination of all the other creatures, with a prowler’s body, ram’s horns on its head, and a scorpion’s stinger on its tail. It was an ugly, monstrous thing, made even more so by the two glittering blood-red rubies that made up its eyes. I shivered. The creature was the same as the monsters I’d fought in the library earlier: a Typhon chimera.
I stared at the photos of the scepter and thought back to that glimmer of gold that I’d seen in the display case. “So that’s what the Reaper stole from the library.”
“Typhon was a Greek giant with several creatures sprouting out of his body—prowlers, rams, scorpions, and more. Typhon pulled bits and pieces of the creatures off his own body and fused them together to create one new being, the chimera.” Linus pointed at the images on the monitors. “The scepter is thought to be made of one of Typhon’s bones, which was encased in gold. All someone has to do is wave the scepter in a specific pattern, and chimeras spew forth from the end of it in clouds of dense black smoke. Chimeras cannot be reasoned with, and they are extremely dangerous. But they can be killed like any other creature, and a mortal wound makes them dissipate into a cloud of smoke.”
“Amanda would know that better than anyone,” Ian muttered.
Linus looked at the Viking, sympathy flashing in his eyes. “Yes, she would.”
We all fell silent again, thinking about the poor girl who’d lost her life tonight. And for what? So a Reaper could steal an artifact? I shook my head. What a sad, tragic waste.
“As I said before, we got a tip that a Reaper was going to try to steal an artifact,” Linus continued. “So Takeda and the others came to the academy a few days ago when the students starting moving into the dorms to see if they could figure out who the Reaper was. Our plan was to identify the student, let him steal the artifact, follow him back to his friends, and arrest all the Reapers at the same time, including Sisyphus. But, regrettably, that didn’t happen.”
“We were watching the library, and we saw the student approaching, but we lost track of him. So Amanda decided to go into the library ahead of everyone else,” Mateo said in a soft, sad voice. “I was on comms with her the whole time. I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t listen to me. Then, when she got into the library, she couldn’t find the Reaper.”
“You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” Ian glared at me, and I realized what he was really saying.
I glared right back at him. “You think that I’m somehow working with the Reapers? Viking, you are seriously off your rocker. I would never, ever work for the Reapers.”
“Really? Just like your parents couldn’t have possibly been Reaper assassins?” he shot right back at me.
This time, my hands curled into fists on top of the table where everyone could see them. “You should shut your mouth—unless you want me to shut it for you.”
Ian’s eyes narrowed. “Bring it on, cupcake. Bring it on.”
I shoved my chair back so I could get up and lunge across the table at him, but Linus stepped forward and laid a hand on my shoulder.
“Enough,” he said. “That’s enough. From both of you. We need to work together, not fight among ourselves.”
I glared at him too, but Linus raised his eyebrows, and I shrugged his hand away and sat back down in my seat.
“Fine,” I muttered. “The Viking can keep his teeth. For now.”
“Wow. Thanks.” Ian’s voice dripped with sarcasm.
Linus might have said that I was a hero, but it was obvious that Ian didn’t believe him. Either that, or Ian hated me for some other reason. Whatever it was, I was tired of the Viking’s attitude problem.
Linus cleared his throat, wanting us to get back on track, so I looked at the monitors again, staring at the chimera scepter until I got my anger under control.
“So Sisyphus and his Reapers are stealing artifacts,” Aunt Rachel said. “But you still haven’t explained what all of this is.”