Jennifer Estep Bundle by Jennifer Estep

layer of creamy mayonnaise completed the sandwich, along with my favorite, yeasty sourdough bread. For dessert, I sliced off a piece of the sweet, spongy pumpkin roll that Grandma had stashed in the fridge. I licked a stray bit of cream cheese frosting off the knife. Yum. So good.
    In addition to our Gypsy gifts, all of the Frost women had raging sweet tooths. Seriously, if it had sugar or chocolate (or preferably both) in it, Grandma and I would totally eat it. My mom had been the same way, too. Grandma also happened to be an awesome cook and an even better baker, so there was always something gooey and sinful in her kitchen, usually fresh out of the oven.
    I ate my dinner, scraping every last one of the pumpkin roll crumbs up off my plate with a fork, then cleaned up. Once that was done, I pulled out one of my Wonder Woman comic books and settled myself at the kitchen table, waiting for Grandma Frost to finish with her client.
    Yeah, maybe liking superheroes made me even more of a geek than I already was, but I enjoyed reading comics. The art was cool, the characters were interesting, and the heroine always won in the end, no matter what bad stuff happened along the way. I only wished real life was like that—and that my mom had somehow walked away from her car accident the way that I’d read about so many heroes doing over the years.
    The old, familiar pain pricked my heart, but I pushed away my sad thoughts and dove into the story, losing myself in the adventure until I almost forgot about how much my own life sucked—almost.
    I’d just finished reading the last page when my grandma stepped into the kitchen.
    Geraldine Frost wore a gauzy silk purple blouse, along with a pair of 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