“Get up, Gwen!” Vic screamed. “Get up! Now!”
But I couldn’t. All I was aware of were those damn invisible fingers digging through my brain again and again, prying into every part of my mind, peering into every single corner, and rifling through all of my secrets. Still, I tried to push back. Tried to imagine my own hands forming fists and pounding at the disgusting, crawling fingers like they were worms that I was squishing, but nothing seemed to work, and the pain continued, seeming to get stronger and stronger with every breath I took.
Above me, I heard Vivian laugh. “Give it up, Gwen. You’re no match for my telepathy magic. Why, if I’d known that it was this easy to take you down with it, I would have used it right off the bat. But let’s have a little fun before I kill you. Humiliate you the same way that you wanted to humiliate me. What do you say? I’ve been wanting to do this for a long, long time. Let me show you exactly what the Reapers have planned for your precious friends and the rest of your pathetic Protectorate.”
Still reeling from the agony in my head, I huddled on the floor as Vivian showed me image after gruesome image. The first thing that popped into my mind was her driving Lucretia through my chest, the sight so vivid that I thought she’d really done it for a moment. Then, she did the same thing to each one of my friends in turn. Oliver. Alexei. Daphne. Carson. And finally, Logan.
I started to scream again, but those images vanished, replaced by one of Metis, Nickamedes, and Ajax all wearing chains, on their knees and bowing their heads as Vivian lorded it over them.
Then, that sight disappeared, and I saw Vivian raising her sword over my grandma’s head and killing her just like she had murdered my mom.
One after another, the images flooded my mind, and there was nothing I could do to stop them. But the more images Vivian showed me, the more she let me see how much she wanted to hurt my friends, the angrier I got. I grabbed hold of that anger and held it tight, using it like a shield to block out the uglier images and all of the horrible hallucinations the Reaper girl kept forcing into my mind. And slowly, bit by bit, I came back to myself, pulling my mind up out of the dark abyss of pain and terror and nightmares. Because they weren’t real, and I wasn’t about to let them come true—not now, not ever.
Finally, Vivian stopped her mental assault long enough to sneer down at me. “Well, Gwen? How does the future look to you?”
I stared up at her. “Not nearly as bleak as yours does.” I lashed out and stabbed Vic deep into her calf. Vivian screamed in surprise and fell to the floor beside me. I pushed the last of the pain away and threw myself on top of the Reaper girl, slamming my fist into her face over and over again as hard as I could. Sometime during the fight, Vic fell from my hand and skittered across the floor, and I slapped Lucretia away from Vivian before she could use the sword against me. Vivian snarled in anger and surprise, and we rolled around and around in the middle of the library floor, punching, hitting, and
clawing at each other as fiercely as we could.
I was furious, as furious as I’d ever been, but I was still no match for her Valkyrie strength. Vivian pinned me to the ground, her hands locked around my wrists.
“I was going to slice you open with Lucretia,” she said. “But now I think I’ll just choke you to death instead. That will be so much more fun.”
Before I could stop her, she reached up, wrapped her hands around my throat, and started squeezing.
I laughed in her face, although it came out as more of a rasping wheeze.
Vivian frowned. “What are you doing? Why are you laughing?”
“Because you forgot one thing, Viv,” I snarled. “You’re not the only one here with magic. I have it too, remember? And not just any magic—touch magic.”
Too late, Vivian realized that her skin was touching mine. Her eyes widened, and she started to pull her hands away from my throat, but I didn’t let her. Instead, I wrapped my hands around hers and reached for my magic.
My psychometry kicked in, and I flashed on the Reaper girl, seeing the bright red spark that burned at the very center of her being. I thought about closing my hands around that spark and slowly crushing it until it was snuffed out completely. But I couldn’t forget about all of the awful images she’d shown me, and I wanted to give Vivian a taste of her own medicine.
“You want to see something truly terrible?” I growled. “You like watching other people suffer? Well, let me show you what real suffering looks like.”
I tightened my grip on Vivian’s hands. And then I showed her exactly how much she and the other Reapers had hurt me over the last few months. Every battle we’d had, all the pain I’d felt, all the agony of realizing that she was the one who’d murdered my mom and watching her kill Nott right before my eyes. I showed her all that and more.
So much more.
Vivian started screaming with pain—my pain—but I didn’t stop. I didn’t have any mercy. Not today. Not for her. Not after everything she’d done to me. Not after everyone she’d taken away from me. My mom, Nott, and even Logan and Grandma Frost for a while.
Oh yes, I showed her my pain and all the other pain I’d experienced over the years. All the bloody memories from the artifacts I’d touched. All the cruel, petty emotions I’d felt rolling off people. All the bad things that I’d realized they’d done when I flashed on them with my magic. And then, I showed her one of the most horrible memories I had—that of a girl being abused by her stepdad.
Vivian’s screams grew louder and louder, and that red spark flickered inside her, but I kept up with my relentless assault, slamming the images into her brain one after another the same way she had done to me.
And finally, I felt something inside her mind just . . . crumble, the same way that the statues out on the quad had crumbled under the brunt of Loki’s foul magic. Her hands fell away from my throat, and this time, I let her go. Vivian scrambled away from me, wrapped her arms around her knees, and started rocking back and forth on the floor. I hurried over to grab Vic and raised up the sword, thinking this might be another one of her tricks, but Vivian didn’t even try to reach for Lucretia. She didn’t even so much as glance in my direction.
“Make it stop,” she whispered in a small, broken voice. “It hurts so much. Please, please, please make it stop.”
I tightened my grip on Vic, still suspicious, but Vivian put her hands up to her head and kept rocking back and forth on the floor, her golden eyes fixed on something far away that only she could see—all of the horrible memories I’d shown her.