New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

nothing
else.”
    It was sheer insanity. Christine was
experiencing two sets of feelings at the same time. She was sitting on her old
bed in her favorite Hello Kitty pajamas, the ones she had stopped wearing when
she was eleven. She was also strewn on the cold and dirty floor of a moving
vehicle – probably a van – tied up with duct tape and with her ass hanging out
of a freaking hospital gown. She forced herself to concentrate on the Hello
Kitty pajamas experience. It was a lot less traumatic that way. “What’s
happening to me?”
    “I had to see you,” Cassandra said, which
was kind of funny considering her eyes were obviously not in working order. “I
wouldn’t be able to do this if you were awake. It would be like staring into
the sun. You have so much power, child. I had to see what kind of person you
are. I had to see if you can be trusted with all that power.”
    Power? Several of Christine’s teachers
had used words like ‘gifted’ and ‘brilliant’ when describing her, but even Mr.
Gardener, the math teacher who had called her ‘a prodigy,’ had never referred
to her as powerful. So now she was having delusions of grandeur mixed in with
an abduction horror fest. It didn’t make any sense.
    Cassandra started playing a violin she
hadn’t been holding until just that moment. Trippy. Christine recognized the
tune – one of Mozart’s sonatas, Number 18, wasn’t it? Christine loved music.
She’d never quite managed to learn to play any instruments herself, but she’d
learned to appreciate music. Mozart in particular fascinated her, with all the
mathematical symmetry embedded in his work.
    Christine listened to Cassandra’s playing
and for a while she was able to deal with the other set of sensations without
panicking. The music got her through the feeling of being picked up and carried
off over someone’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She was finally dumped on
some piece of furniture, like a couch and left alone, still wrapped up in tape.
None of that seemed to matter as long as she could be in her old room listening
to the strange woman play the violin.
    Eventually, however, her brain kept
asking questions she couldn’t ignore. “Uh, Cassandra?” The music stopped and
the blind woman turned towards her. “So, what happens if I cannot be trusted
with all that power you were talking about?”
    Cassandra’s smile vanished altogether,
and all that was left was sadness and grim determination. “In that case, I
would have to make sure that power was not abused.”
    I think the nice blind lady just
threatened my life , Christine thought. That
scared her more than the whole kidnapping bit.
    “You seem like a nice young woman,
however,” Cassandra went on. “You have suffered, mostly small hurts, but they
have marked you nonetheless. You have been an outsider, an outcast. That could
be dangerous for someone with your potential: the temptation to turn against
everyone will be strong. On the other hand, your hurts and disappointments have
taught you about suffering and made you sensitive to the pain of others.”
    The patient’s deep feelings of inadequacy
and demonstrated inability to fit into normal social patterns led to the
creation of elaborate delusional constructs. She fashioned an illusory world
where she was powerful and important. The patient’s fascination with fantasy
fiction and computer games may have contributed to the development of these
delusions. Oh, yeah, the psych evaluations just
wrote themselves.
    Cassandra smiled again, and despite
Christine’s overwhelming need to believe all of this was just a weird-ass
dream, she felt a surge of relief. “You will do, I think. You have a solid
core, for which I think we must all thank your mother.”
    Back in Abduction Land, she heard a bunch
of gunshots and other loud noises she could not identify. It sounded like a
small war had broken out.
    “That’s your rescue,” Cassandra
explained. “A young friend of mine is risking his