by Cara Wylde
SEIZING YEAR FOUR
GRIM REAPER ACADEMY, BOOK FOUR
- reverse harem romance -
Copyright © 2019 by Cara Wylde
Cover by Otilia Jakab
All rights are reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in book reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real in any way. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
Revenant… More like ravenous.
Food. Oh my God, one burger was never enough. Double the French fries, will you? Add four hot wings. No, make it six. I started eating like the world was about to end and there would be no food left. I ate like a cow and looked like a gazelle. My body simply refused to acknowledge that I was feeding it fats and carbs, everything drenched in oil. I lost weight, in fact. Now I understood why Francis Saint-Germain was so slim. He was a revenant, too. All summer, the other guys – GC, Pazuzu, and Sariel – spent their mornings and evenings in the underground gym Sariel had built himself after he got his new, sweet place in Limbo, getting jacked. Francis and I had given up long ago. No matter how much we ate and how many hours we lifted, it just wouldn’t happen. Our revenant, ravenous bodies stayed the same. Immortal and eternally slim. Not a bad deal, if you think about it. Except… I would’ve liked to grow a booty like the fitness girls I followed on Instagram…
Sex. Oh my God, I had four lovers who could keep at it for hours, and sometimes it was enough, other times it wasn’t. My body craved, craved, craved. To be touched, to be possessed, to be fucked. I wanted love, lust… I wanted pain.
Be it food, or sex, or booze… Be it Pandora’s special herbal cigarettes, or Sariel’s stinky pills – the ones he acquired in the Third Circle of Hell, – it was never enough. Because I didn’t feel as much as I used to feel before the Great Old One took my lifeless body between its slimy tentacles and breathed life back into my bones. My senses were heightened, my taste buds exploded in pleasure when greasy pork, heavy mugwort smoke, or gooey cum hit my tongue, but my brain, my stomach, and my pussy always screamed “more, more, more”. They were in lack. I was in lack. My whole life, my whole eternity would be spent in lack. It was a curse. And a gift.
I had nightmares.
A cold blade slashing through my chest, twisting to tear my insides. Mud. Warm, wet mud crawling with worms awaiting their feast of flesh and marrow. A thin, white sheet of already drenched material to protect rotting bones and tissue from their hungry little mouths. It didn’t last long. The cheap fabric fell apart before my graying skin did. And then I was… free breakfast, lunch and dinner for the creatures that had turned my hasty grave into an all-inclusive resort. Two snacks a day, too.
I’d wake up screaming.
I had nightmares.
Cold, long appendages crawling up my legs and stomach, wrapping around my torso, my neck; dripping suction cups attaching to my face, my closed eyelids, tangling in my hair, leaving trails of slime behind.
I’d wake up crying.
After what had happened down in the cavern, after I’d climbed my way back to the dim candlelight Francis tended to day and night, I refused to sleep for days. I went two weeks without sleep, then my guys insisted I was immortal, not invincible.
“Do you still have nightmares?” I’d asked Francis.
He shook his head and evaded the question. “It gets better, I promise.”
I had to get used to it. What was done was done, they had all chosen for me, and there was no point in giving them hell about it anymore. I didn’t speak to Klaus and Patricia for a month after that. I’d never been close friends with Joel and Lorna, so it was easy to ignore them. The only reason why I still kept my guys around was because they had cocks, and as it turned out, I was a huge fan of cocks that could fuck me raw…
Okay, who was I trying to impress?
I’m not that badass… I’m not a heartless bitch who fucks a false god, a demon, a Fallen One, and a revenant for fun.
I was in love with them.
It wasn’t their cocks. It was them… Their hearts, their souls, their eyes, their hands holding mine…
Revenant. Ravenous. I was hungry and thirsty for their love, their attention, their adoration, their validation… I was hungry and thirsty for them to see me, to see Mila Morningstar, the girl I’d always been and hoped to always be, not the undead, not the idiot who’d let Valentine Morningstar go, not the useless human who wasn’t a human anymore and couldn’t fulfill a simple prophecy and rid the world of the scariest, most terrifying Grim Reaper that had ever lived. Not that, any of that. This. I wanted them to see this.
I struggled. I fought. I learned.
After Morningstar fled, I claimed my four lovers and took exactly one day to recompose some of my sanity, just enough to appear in front of the Supernatural Council and tell them what had happened. There were only nine people in the room: the four members of the Council, my guys, and me. Okay, nine people and a pixie. Except when I was up to no good with my lovers in a bed that was too small for the five of us, Corri was by my side, always. But I didn’t have to tell them much, in the end. That I wasn’t human anymore – they knew. They could see what I was, recognized it in my haunted eyes. They also knew how I’d become what I was – died and brought to life by a creature whose existence no human or supernatural could even begin to understand. Yes, they knew about the Great Old One sleeping, dreaming, and crunching on juicy bones underneath Grim Reaper Academy. They knew about Saint-Germain’s god, Yig, the tentacled monster. No, they weren’t interested in helping me kill it.
That was the day I lost my faith in the Council, and they in me. I wasn’t the One, but fuck them. I didn’t want to be their hero now that I knew they condoned blood sacrifice. I’m still going to kill that fucking thing. Even if it means I die. Even if it means Francis has to die, too. It had turned into one of my many messed up mantras, but the more I repeated it, the less I believed it myself. After all, being a revenant had its perks.
Strength. I had to learn how to move, now that a harsh pull of the door meant it needed to be replaced, and an angry stomp of my foot when I argued with Pandora or Sheba meant a hole in the floor. Also, a fuckton of excuses and lies. Th
e hinges were loose. The floorboard was rotten. No one except for the Council, Headmaster Colin (who’d been reinstated), Morningstar (who was nowhere to be found), Corri, and my dear friends who’d dug me up and taken me to Yig knew that I was a revenant. The Council wanted a cover-up, so we all worked our asses off to achieve it. The official story was that Valentine Morningstar saw me excel at scythe fighting, got scared that I might actually retire him, and fled to save him life. It continued with Colin Mason atoning for his sins, and the Council giving him a second chance. All was well in the world. And I still got to be the queen of the Academy, all popular and shit, the future savior of the supernatural masses. They were all waiting for me to graduate at the end of year four, go after Morningstar, and bring back his head.
The rest of year three was suspended, of course. The former headmaster had made a mess of it, the students were behind, most of them still didn’t know how to teleport without a teleportation device, and we hadn’t visited half of the pocket universes we should have visited. We were good at scythe fighting, though. Hooray! Not that we’d ever get to practice our skills.
Grim Reapers weren’t fighters. We weren’t warriors, we weren’t supposed to save the world, protect the living, or the dead, for that matter. We. Were. Reapers. We reaped. Our sole job was to detach the soul from the body when the time came, as smoothly as possible, so our victims who’d already suffered enough wouldn’t suffer for another unnecessary minute. Okay, we had two jobs. The second was to convince those who were about to prematurely jump off a bridge that no, it wasn’t their time, and no, suicide still wasn’t cool. Nope, not in fashion. Not now, not ever.
Two jobs. Neither required throat-slashing skills. We had them, nonetheless. The only scenario where they might come in handy was if one of the old Grim Reapers refused to retire once the new generation graduated. But everyone and their mother was pretty sure I was the only unfortunate soul who’d have to deal with this situation. Valentine Morningstar would refuse to step down, just like he’d refused the last two times. He’d been reaping for nearly six hundred years, and if I didn’t manage to end his madness now, he’d be reaping for two hundred more. There was no other way around it. It was expected of me. No other student at Grim Reaper Academy had the guts to challenge him for his place. And no, the fact that he’d fled and wasn’t even doing his job anymore didn’t matter. He was still one of the twenty-two, and if I wanted a place among the new twenty-two Grim Reapers, his was the place I had to take. By force.
The prophecy said only a human could retire Valentine Morningstar. According to the prophecy then, all was lost. But the prophecy, as I’d recently discovered, was bullshit. All prophecies were. Glimpses of parallel dimensions hybrids randomly had access to when they dream jumped involuntarily. They thought they saw the future, and if two or more hybrids dreamed roughly the same thing, then they thought they were all having prophetic dreams. In reality, what was happening was that these half supernatural, half human fellows had inherited the rare skill of lucid dreaming, traveling outside of their physical body, and jumping to other dimensions from their human ancestors, but not the ability to understand it and fully control it. And what does one do when one doesn’t understand something? One misunderstands it.
Prophecies were huge misunderstandings of the way the universe worked.
I knew how it worked. But I was trapped now. More trapped than ever. The second I’d lost my humanity, I’d lost something much more precious along with it. My ability to dream. Not just dream, but dream jump. Universe jump. I’d lost my mother. I’d just found her, tucked away in a parallel dimension where Valentine Morningstar wasn’t the villain, and then I lost her again, for the second time in my short life. And my short life had now turned into a long, long one. I was twenty-one, looking at an eternity of years, decades, centuries, and millennia ahead, but did it even matter if I was never going to see my mother again? Did it matter when only GC and Francis were immortal, too? Granted that demons and fallen archangels lived super fucking long and aged super fucking slow, they still aged. They still died. And one day, only GC, Francis and I would be left… and what else? Who else?
Eternity, I finally gathered, was one scary bitch.
What’s a girl to do when she died once, then death was literally taken away from her, her mother was taken away from her, and she can’t even accomplish the one thing she is expected to accomplish: kill her evil father? Drink. Fuck. Smoke. Party. Drink more, fuck harder, smoke like a chimney, party like a crazy person.
That was my summer vacation. After classes were suspended, all students and professors went home, desperate to see something other than the oppressive walls of the Academy. I had no home to go to. Morningstar had taken all his money with him, which meant emptying both his vault and mine, but that was fine. I didn’t need anything from him. Living at his castle in Scotland was out of the question. The staff probably had clear instructions not to receive me. Had I been smarter, I would’ve bought myself a place with his money before he decided that I was dead to him. Which I was. Dead. But that wasn’t the point. Anyway, I couldn’t go back to my adoptive parents, either. I dreaded the day when I’d have to tell them what I’d become, so I avoided the moment like the plague. That meant avoiding them. Who else was left? Who else could give me a temporary home? Pazuzu’s mother was more than happy to take me in, but I felt like it wasn’t right. I wasn’t only dating her son, and even if she was okay with it, I wasn’t okay with her seeing me with four men under her roof. Granted it was a rather big, spacious roof. GC’s parents were ready to be just as accommodating, so I refused their kindness, too. Francis’s parents were another story. His father had divorced his mother recently and gotten remarried. But that wasn’t the problem. Saint-Germain Senior didn’t like me. At all. He hadn’t liked me when I was human, and now he tolerated me even less. He and Francis had gotten into a huge fight after Francis confessed to him that he’d asked the Great Old One to bring me back to life and now I was part of their little cult. Which turned out to be not so little, after all. He knew what my intentions were because he was a trusted advisor to the Council. As I learned, Grim Reaper Academy wouldn’t have even existed without him and the Saint-Germain fortune. Many institutions in the supernatural world wouldn’t have existed, and many companies wouldn’t have thrived if Claude, Comte of Saint-Germain, hadn’t traveled to the new world and unraveled the mysteries of the Great Old Ones, if he hadn’t pledged his life to Yig, who in return gave him eternal life, then passed his legacy on to his son, Leopold Saint-Germain, who then passed it on to his son, Francis Saint-Germain the First, who then passed it on to his son, Francis Saint-Germain the Second – my Francis.
I’ll never understand why these old families can’t think of any other bloody names. First, Second, Third, and so on and on. My GC was Third, by the way. Thank God Sariel was Sariel and Pazuzu was Pazuzu, otherwise I would’ve gone insane!
So, whatever. Long story short, Francis’s family didn’t like me. Which was fine, since I didn’t like them, either. His stupid father had been the one to convince the Council that Yig had to be left alone if they wanted the Academy to remain standing where it stood, on top of the cursed well. If anything were to happen to his god, he wouldn’t only withdraw his yearly monetary contribution, but he’d make sure all hell broke loose over the Academy, until not a wall stood erect.
I was forbidden from touching Yig. Not that I could harm the wretched monster in any way. When it came to the Great Old One, I was allowed to do one thing, and one thing alone. Feed it.
I didn’t want to.
I’d have to.
So, I moved in with Sariel in Limbo. Temporarily, of course. And temporarily, Francis, GC, and Pazuzu moved in with us. Sariel’s two-story house wasn’t big enough for the five of us, plus a pixie, but we made do. The guys took care of everything, and I existed, barely, between parties, nightmares, and constant laments that I myself was getting tired of. I got more tattoos, too. Breaking my own pro
mise, I got a snake on my left arm, the tip of its tail nestled in my palm as its body wrapped around my wrist, forearm, elbow, up up up, its head resting on my shoulder. The Father of Serpents, as Mr. Lovecraft depicted Yig in his short stories. A snake, Yig was not. But I found the metaphor ironic. Like a snake, the monster had pushed its way into my life, when I wanted nothing to do with it. Nothing that didn’t involve killing it, slashing its tentacles into pieces, and sending its soul to the deepest pits of Hell. The tat was visible no matter what I wore. But that was fine. Morningstar wasn’t there to see it, and my guys were the only ones who knew why. Why I chose to scar my skin with ink the colors of the rainbow. So I wouldn’t scar it with blades.
My summer vacation was a blast. When September was just around the corner, I was almost convinced I’d beat it. The curse of the blood sacrifice, as I now called it. I was feeling fine. My senses dulled by alcohol most nights, my body preoccupied with the pleasure my men gave me… I was feeling fine. No, I wasn’t rotting from the inside. No, my pores weren’t giving off a slight odor of wet dirt and worms. I didn’t taste blood on my tongue, no. I was fine.
I was falling apart. Like Francis had told me would happen if I didn’t feed the monster. It only kept me alive if I did my part and kept it alive. Not that it was dying or anything… He had plenty of revenant servants who stopped by to feed it. Not just Francis, like I’d thought. Many had been returned to the land of the living by Yig, and there were many wells along the coast. The Great Old One’s tentacles extended far and wide, which made me wonder… How big was this creature?
A cosmic god, indeed.
“Mila, you have to,” Francis had gotten in the habit of telling me a few times a day. “You have to, or you’ll rot on your feet and die.”
“So I’ll rot and die. Because I’ll never,” I always said, emphasizing each word, “ever…”
* * *
