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my hands. I tightened my grip, yanked the sword out, then plunged it into his stomach. The Reaper screamed again and stumbled back. He sprawled to a stop on the floor below the dais, and he didn’t get back up.
    “Nicely done, Gwen!” Vic shouted, his mouth moving underneath my sweaty hand.
    “Shut up, Vic!” I screamed back at him.
    On the other side of the dais, Carson battled another Reaper, parrying the Reaper’s sword with the staff he’d grabbed earlier. Daphne stood a few feet behind him, her bow up and ready, just waiting to put an arrow into the Reaper as soon as she got a clear shot. Across the room, Logan had killed the Reaper he’d stabbed before and was battling the second one.
    My head whipped around to the seventh and final Reaper—the girl who’d murdered my mom. She stood in the same spot as before, a long, curved sword in her black-gloved hand. She stared at me, and through the slits in her mask, I saw the faintest glint of her eyes—and the spark of red that flashed in their depths. The angry, hate-filled flicker burned like a match underneath the twisted rubber covering her face.
    “Well, well, well,” the Reaper girl hissed. “If it isn’t Nike’s Champion, slinging a sword like she actually knows how to use it. I was hoping I might run into you here.”
    Her words made my stomach twist with fear, but I pushed the feeling aside. I knew the Reaper girl wanted to kill me. She’d threatened to do so in the memory I had of her stabbing my mom. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised that she knew who I was and what I looked like. Professor Metis had once told me that Champions could recognize other Champions, that we were inevitably drawn to each other, attracting and repelling like magnets.
    “Yeah, it’s me. Gwen Frost,” I snapped. “Nike’s Champion in the flesh. I know what you did to my mom.”
    The girl threw back her head and laughed. She just—laughed. Low, long, and loud. Like it was funny that she’d killed my mom in cold blood. Like it was the most hysterical thing ever that she and her Reaper friends had just done the same thing to a museum full of innocent people.
    “Well, I should certainly hope so,” she said. “Killing your weak, sniveling mother was the most fun I’ve had in ages. ”
    Rage once again filled my heart, blocking out everything else. All my questions, all my worries, all my fears. There was only me and her and my desire for revenge, this burning, burning need I had to make her pay, to make her suffer for taking my mom away from me.
    With a roar, I leaped off the dais, raised my sword, and rushed forward—and the Reaper girl stepped up to meet me.

Chapter 3
     
    I swung Vic in a vicious arc at the Reaper girl, trying to separate her head from her shoulders with one blow, trying to avenge my mom with one quick strike, trying to do something, anything to ease this intense ache in my heart.
    It didn’t work.
    She easily blocked my attack and let out another mocking laugh. “Is that the best you can do, Gypsy? Pathetic. No wonder the Pantheon is doomed to fail, with you as Nike’s Champion.”
    Then, the Reaper girl snapped up her gloved hand and hit me in the face. Yep, I thought, staggering back as pain exploded in my jaw. Definitely a Valkyrie with a punch like that .
    I barely had time to blink the flashing stars out of my eyes before the Reaper girl came at me with her own sword. I lurched to one side, just managing to get out of the way of the whistling blade. The weapon stuck in the wooden base of one of the glass artifact cases I’d smashed. The sudden, jarring stop made the Reaper girl lose her grip on her weapon and stumble away.
    Eyes wide, I stared down at the other girl’s sword, which was a foot away from where my head had been a second before. Strange symbols gleamed on the surface of the blade, just below the hilt, each one of them outlined in the blackening blood that already coated the sword there.
    Metis had told me that all