pride in showing off their prowess with the sharp, pointed edges.
The weapons were one of the ways in which Mythos Academy was anything but normal.
I reached for my sword, which was stil wobbling back and forth, reminding me of my old piano teacher’s metronome slowly ticking from side to side. I reached down, but before I could tug the sword out of the mat a round silver bulge on the hilt snapped open, revealing a narrowed, angry eye.
“Another bloody defeat,” Vic muttered, his displeasure giving even more bite to his British accent. “Gwen Frost, you couldn’t kil a Reaper to save your bloody life.” I narrowed my own eyes and glared at Vic, hoping he would get the message to shut up already before Logan and the others heard him. I didn’t want to advertise the fact that I had a talking sword. I didn’t want to advertise a lot of things about myself. Not at Mythos.
For his part, Vic glared right back at me, his eye a curious color that was somewhere between purple and gray. Vic wasn’t alive, not exactly, but I’d come to think of him as that way. Vic was a simple enough sword—a long blade made out of silver metal. But what made the sword seem, wel , human to me was the fact that the hilt was shaped like half of a man’s face, complete with a nose, an ear, a mouth, and a round, bulging eye. Al put together, it looked like a real person had somehow been encased there in the silver hilt. It al added up to Vic, whatever or whoever he real y was.
Wel , that and his bloodthirsty attitude. Vic wanted to kil things—Reapers, specifical y. Until we’re both bathed in their blood and hungry for more! he’d crowed to me more than once when I was alone in my dorm room practicing with him.
Please. The only things I could kil with ease were bugs.
And even then only the tiny ones. The big ones crunched too much and made me feel al guilty and icked out. Doing the same to Reapers of Chaos, some seriously bad guys, was totally out of the question.
“What are you going to do when a real Reaper attacks you?”
Vic demanded. “Run away and hope he doesn’t chase after you?”
Actual y, that sounded like an excel ent plan to me, but I knew Vic wouldn’t see it that way. Neither would Logan, Kenzie, or Oliver, since the guys were al Spartans, descended from a long line of magical, mythological warriors. Kil ing things was as natural as breathing to them.
It was what they’d been trained to do since birth, along with al the other kids at the academy.
For the most part, the guys at Mythos were either Vikings or Romans, while the girls were Valkyries or Amazons. But tons of other ancient warrior types attended the academy, everyone from Samurais and Ninjas, to Celts, to the Spartans in front of me.
Kil ing was definitely not natural to me, but I’d been thrust into this twisted world back at the start of the school year.
That’s when I’d first started attending Mythos, after a serious freak-out with my Gypsy magic back at my old public high school. Now the academy—with al its warrior whiz kids, scary Reaper bad guys, mythological monsters, and an angry, vengeful god—was a place that I just couldn’t escape, no matter how much I would have liked to.
Especial y since there was a goddess counting on me to do something about al the Bad, Bad Things out there in the world—
and the ones hidden here on campus too.
“Shut up, Vic,” I growled, tugging the sword free of the mat.
I felt Vic’s mouth move underneath my palm like he was going to give me some more backtalk, but then he let out a loud harrumph and his eye snapped shut. I sighed again.
Now, he was in one of his moods, which meant I was going to have to cajole him to open his eye and speak to me again later in the day. Maybe I’d turn on the TV in my dorm room and see if there was some kind of action-adventure movie playing. Watching the bad guys get theirs always seemed to bring Vic out of one of his funks, and the bloodier the movie, the better he liked it.
“Who are you talking to, Gwen?”
Oliver Hector’s voice sounded right beside me, and I had to clamp my lips together to keep from shrieking