“Gypsy girl?” Logan whispered in a horrified voice, slowly creeping toward me.
I could see a burning reflection in his blue gaze, and I realized that my eyes must be red—as Reaper red as his had been that day at the auditorium when Agrona had tried to put Loki’s soul into his body.
I tried to smile at Logan, tried to let him know that everything was going to be okay, this was all part of my plan, that it had to be this way, but it hurt too much, so I quickly gave up. Besides, I knew what I had to do now, and time was running out. Another minute, and Loki would have complete control of me. There would be no coming back from any of it.
Not for me—not for anyone.
Of course, I didn’t plan on coming back anyway, but if I was going to die, then I was determined to take Loki with me.
Everything felt odd and clumsy and large and heavy, as if my hands suddenly weren’t big enough for my body. But then again, it wasn’t really my body anymore— it was his.
So it took a lot of concentration and a couple of tries to bring up Vic and turn the sword around. I cut my right palm on his sharp blade, but it was a small, dull ache compared to the rest of the pain burning through my body.
I raised Vic up. His eye was still the same purple as before, and I focused on that soft twilight shade, letting it center me for what I had to do next.
“I’ll miss you, Vic,” I whispered, although it wasn’t my voice coming out of my mouth anymore. “I love you.” A single tear streaked down Vic’s hilt. “I love you
too, Gwen.”
I pointed the sword’s tip inward at my chest. In front of me, I saw Logan’s eyes bulge as he figured out what I was going to do. He ran toward me, trying to stop me, but he was going to be too late.
But he wasn’t the only one who finally realized what I was planning. Loki stopped his soft murmuring, and his burning red eyes popped up into my mind, blotting out everything else, and peering at me as if I was doing a most curious and worrisome thing.
“What—what are you doing?” Loki’s voice flooded my mind again, rising to a sharp screech on the very last word. “You—you can’t do this. Stop! I command you! Stop!”
I let out a long, loud, crazy laugh that echoed from one side of the library to the other and rose all the way up to the domed ceiling before it abruptly bounced back down again. I positioned Vic so that his tip rested against my heart. His point pricked my skin, drawing a bit of blood, and I focused on that small flash of pain. Suddenly, I could feel claws scraping down my insides and seizing onto the tendons and muscles in my arms, tearing, ripping, and trying to get me to drop the sword. But I tightened my grip and held on.
“You will stop this madness at once!” Loki hissed again. “I demand that you stop right now!”
I laughed again.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “That’s where you’ve always been wrong. This whole time. All these centuries. You can’t stop me. You can’t stop me from doing one single thing, especially not this.”
“And why is that?” he hissed.
I smiled, even though he couldn’t see me. “Free will.” Then, I rammed Vic’s point into my heart as hard as I
could.
There was a bright, blinding flash of pain. Then . . . nothing.
Chapter 30
I sucked in a breath and sat bolt upright.
At least, that’s what I thought I did. One second, I was slamming Vic into my chest and feeling all the pain of the mortal wound I’d given myself and the warm blood that slicked down my hands. The next, I was standing in the middle of the Library of Antiquities, still holding Vic.
I looked down, but I wasn’t bleeding anymore. In fact, I was perfectly clean, and my clothes showed none of the wear and tear from the battles out on the quad. I brought my hand up to my chest, and I realized that I could feel a third mark slashing over the other two scars already over my heart. The wound throbbed, but the pain felt dull and far away.
“Here we go again,” I muttered.
“Yes,” a soft voice called out. “Here we go again.” My head snapped up, and I realized that I wasn’t
alone.
A lone figure stood in front of me. Her long white gown seemed as crisp and fresh as new snow and draped around her strong, slender figure in perfect fashion. White wings rose up over her back, forming a heart shape above her head, and her hair was curled into bronze ringlets that fell past her shoulders. But it was her eyes that I could lose myself in. Beautiful, beautiful eyes that were a mix of purple and gray and lavender and silver that blended together to form one amazing twilight shade.
Even though I was dead, or mostly dead, or whatever I was, I still recognized her. Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.
She smiled, stepped forward, and clasped my hands in hers, and I felt a wave of cold power blast off her and flow into me.
“Hello, Gwendolyn,” Nike said.
I focused on the goddess, trying to make sense of things. “So I’m dead this time, right? Dead-dead. For real? Forever?”
She gave me a mysterious smile. “That remains to be seen. But you have done exactly what I asked of you, and I couldn’t be more pleased.”
I raised my eyebrows. “So you wanted me to stab myself in the chest with Vic all along? You know, you could have just told me that. It would have saved me a lot of heartache.”
The three wounds on my chest throbbed. I winced. My words were true in more ways than one.
“Yes, I suppose it would have,” Nike murmured. “But things had to happen this way, Gwendolyn. You had to get to this place and time of your own free will, and so did he.”
Nike dropped her hands from mine and stepped to one side. I blinked and blinked.
Because Loki was here.
He was on his knees in the middle of the library floor. But he didn’t look like the ruined, rotten figure that I knew. No, he looked as he must have centuries ago, before Helheim, before the Bowl of Tears, before everything.
Because he looked beautiful.
Golden hair, alabaster skin, piercing blue eyes. All of that had been restored to him, and both sides of his face were as smooth as any of the statues that lined the second-floor balcony. A long white robe rippled around his body, instead of the black one I’d always seen him wear before. The bright, pure color only made him seem that much more perfect.
He was perhaps the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, even lovelier than Nike herself. But the longer I looked at him, the less his features dazzled me and the more that I saw the cruel cunning in the sly shimmer of his eyes.
Loki glared at me, his mouth turned down into a sullen pout, before his hate-filled gaze moved over to the goddess. His eyes blazed with rage, but they remained the same blue as before and didn’t turn that awful Reaper red I’d seen so many times in my nightmares.
“What is he doing here?” I asked Nike.
“He’s here because you killed him,” she replied. “Just as you were meant to do all along with your magic.”
“My magic?” I frowned. “But I thought I was supposed to use the silver laurel leaves that Eir gave me to kill Loki. Not my magic.”
Nike shook her head. “The leaves and the candle severely weakened Loki, enough for you to allow your psychometry, your touch magic, as you call it, to pull his soul into your own body—a mortal body that you then sacrificed for the good of all your friends.”
“Self-sacrifice is a very powerful thing, especially if you do it of your own free will,” I murmured, thinking about the words Nike had once said to me.