Jennifer Estep: Killer Frost

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.

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.

The goddess beamed at me. “And you made the ultimate sacrifice when you gave your life to stop Loki. You have proven yourself worthy of being my Champion, of being the Champion of all Champions.”

“You and your damn trickery.” Loki spat out the words, still glaring at Nike. “I should have known it was too easy, thinking I could take over your Champion’s body and finally complete my victory. Well, I won’t stand for it. Take me back. Put me back into my own body. I demand it. Now .”

“You’re simply upset that I beat you at your own game,” Nike said, her voice as cold and harsh as I’d ever heard it. “You gave up your immortal body of your own free will, Loki. There is no going back to that body or the mortal realm for you— ever .”

“Do you mean . . . is he . . . dead?” I whispered. “Like me?”

Nike shook her head. “Not exactly.”

“But you told me I had to kill him. That’s what you and the Reapers have been saying all along. That I was going to kill Loki. Why go through all of this if that’s not what I actually did?”

“In a way, you did kill him,” Nike said. “You killed his body, and without it, he can never return to the mortal realm.”

“But how will his being . . . here . . . wherever here really is . . . help?” I asked, throwing my hands out wide in frustration. “Can’t he just escape again and go back to the mortal world? And then we’ll have to go through this all over again.”

Nike shook her head again. “No, Gwendolyn. He can’t escape. Not this time. He cannot leave this realm, not as long as he is wearing that .”

She pointed at Loki, and I noticed a thin silver bracelet gleaming around his right wrist—one that was very familiar. I glanced down at my own wrist, but the mistletoe bracelet that the laurel leaves had been attached to was gone. He was wearing it, and he kept glaring at it and grimacing, as though the mere sight of it pained him greatly, along with the feel of the silver actually touching his skin.