by Alicia Rades
“Yeah, she acted like there’s something I should know, and she thought you might be able to tell me,” I said.
Grammy furrowed her brow. “What’s this girl’s name?”
“Chloe.” I cleared my throat. “Chloe Olson.”
Grammy huffed, but it was barely audible. Her lips pressed together tightly, and her eyebrow twitched, but I couldn’t read the look in her eyes. It was like she was trying hard not to give anything away. “I have no idea what she meant.”
I crossed my arms and glared at Grammy. It was obvious she was lying to me. “Are you sure? Because she seemed pretty certain you knew something.”
Grammy sucked on her teeth and hesitated. “I know that years ago, before Grampy died, he didn’t get along well with the Olson family. But that’s over now.”
My eyebrows knitted together tightly. That couldn’t be what this was about. Grampy had died over forty years ago, when Grammy was still pregnant with Mom. Whatever she was talking about had nothing to do with Chloe and me.
“What did they fight about?” I asked.
Grammy shot to her feet. There was anger etched in her eyes, like she was furious I had the nerve to ask. “That’s in the past, Nadine. There’s no reason to go opening old wounds. Stay away from this Olson girl, and you’ll be fine. Now come eat some cookies. They’re fresh.”
I gaped up at Grammy. “Actually, I’m not hungry—”
“I’m not going to ask you again, Nadine,” she snapped. “I made too many, and I need your help eating them.”
Holy crap. Grammy could get sassy when she wanted to. Talia and I shot each other wide-eyed gazes, then quickly got to our feet to follow Grammy to the kitchen. It was obvious Grammy wasn’t willing to talk about this thing with Grampy. But she couldn’t keep it from me forever.
One way or another, I’d figure out what she was hiding.
Grammy’s secret hovered at the forefront of my mind during classes the next day. I could hardly concentrate knowing she was keeping something from me, but I knew how stubborn she could be. She wouldn’t spill unless she wanted to, and it drove me nuts.
Talia and I had returned to school the night before to a clean dorm and a note from Amy and Mandy that said we could thank them with an order of Barry’s Enchanted Muffins. We’d left a dozen outside each of their dorm rooms that morning, along with a personalized thank-you note to each of them. Talia had made some inappropriate drawings inside that she assured me they’d both appreciate.
At lunch, I was filling my plate in the buffet line when I caught sight of Lucas and Grant entering the cafeteria. The school’s cafeteria wasn’t like the lunch room back at my old high school. Instead of long tables with benches and bright, fluorescent lighting, the college’s cafeteria was set up more like a restaurant, with red carpet, dark walls, and dim lighting. The room was so big that it had three full buffet lines, and the high ceiling featured beautiful black chandeliers.
Seeing Lucas brought a whole other issue to mind—one that I was going to get answers to.
I abandoned Talia and intercepted Lucas on his way to grab a plate. “Hey.”
My tone was less than friendly, but his eyes lit up when he saw me. “Hey, Nad. What’s up?”
“I need to talk to you.” I wasn’t giving him a choice this time.
Lucas shot a glance to Grant. “Um, sure…”
He filled up his plate, then followed me to a secluded corner of the room at a table set for two. Grant looked more than eager to share Talia’s company for lunch, so he didn’t seem bothered that I dragged his friend away from him.
“What do you want to talk about?” Lucas asked. His voice was steady, but I sensed a hint of uncertainty in his eyes. He wouldn’t look at me directly.
“I want to know the truth,” I stated.
He finally looked at me. “The truth about what?”
I sighed. “If you don’t like me, just tell me.”
“Whoa.” Lucas’s spine straightened. “Where’s this coming from, Nad?”
I gaped at him. Was he serious? “You said we couldn’t be together. I want to know what that means.”
He furrowed his brow. “I thought you said you knew.”
I swallowed. “I lied to you.”
His face paled. “What do you mean you lied?”
Now I was the one who couldn’t meet his gaze. I poked at my food. “When you told me the other day that we couldn’t be together because you’re the Reaper’s Apprentice, I said I understood, but I didn’t. Not really. And my friends... they don’t seem to understand either.”
When I finally lifted my gaze to his, he had this sad look on his face. It was barely there, but I could sense it.
“Nad, I’m sorry,” he said softly. “It’s something we cover in Mortana Studies. I assumed others knew.”
“What does it mean?” I begged. If I couldn’t be with him, I wanted a good reason.
Lucas glanced around, and although no one was seated near us, he leaned in and lowered his voice anyway. “Nad, you have to understand that being the Reaper’s Apprentice is a very difficult calling. There’s a reason the dead leave their last thought behind with me. It’s because…”
“Because?” I pressed.
Lucas swallowed. “The nature of what I do can be a bit… morbid. Dark. And sometimes, that darkness is passed on.”
“Passed on?” I asked.
“Like, to children,” he clarified.
“Whoa!” I held my hands up and leaned back in my chair. I mean, I liked Lucas, but I wasn’t seriously thinking about having his babies just yet.
“Goddess, no,” Lucas said quickly. “I didn’t mean us. Around two hundred years ago, a Reaper’s Apprentice fathered a child, and that child was born with a darkness inside of him that no child should be burdened with. As he grew, so did that darkness. He was literally pure evil.”
I could feel the crease between my eyebrows deepening. “So you’re afraid of having kids? Lucas—”
He held up a hand to stop me. “Let me finish.”
I snapped my jaw shut and listened.
“Anyway, this kid, he grew up to resent his parents,” Lucas continued. “I don’t know the full story, but I guess all those bad emotions built up, and one night, he lost it. He…”
I leaned in closer, intrigued.
Lucas swallowed. “He snapped and murdered his own mother.”
I audibly gasped.
Lucas shuddered. “Apparently, it was so brutal that he accidentally cast a curse upon all future Reaper’s Apprentices.”
My stomach sank. Lucas was cursed?
“There must be a way to break the curse,” I said hopefully.
Lucas shook his head. “There isn’t. Without a Curse Breaker, it’s impossible. Even with one, it’d be tricky.”
A beat passed as I considered the weight of his words. “So, what does the curse do?”
“If I was with you, Nadine, you’d…” He hesitated and glanced down at his food.
“What, Lucas? I’d what?”
He cleared his throat. “You’d become the Reaper’s Shadow. I couldn’t do that to you.”
A shiver ran down my spine. “What—what’s the Reaper’s Shadow?”
He took a long breath. “The Reaper’s Shadow is the mate of a Reaper’s Apprentice. The sacrifices involved are too much.”
“What sacrifices?” I shifted in my seat. I was burning for all the answers.
Lucas hesitated, like it was too painful to even think about. “There are three stages. If the Reaper’s Apprentice has sex with the Reaper’s Shadow, she will experience a great illness.”
I snorted, and Lucas gave me a strange look. I was already sick enough to fit that description. So I was keeping sex on the table. Yeah, like, on this table. I’d like to do him on it.
What the hell? That came out of nowhere.
“Go on,” I encouraged, pushing the dirty thoughts aside.
“If the two get married, the Reaper’s Shadow will ex
perience severe trauma,” he explained.
Nothing I hadn’t gone through before. So far, he wasn’t exactly scaring me off.
“And the third stage?” I asked.
Lucas closed his eyes. He didn’t answer for a moment. “If the Reaper’s Apprentice fathers a child... the child will have no choice but to kill the mother.”
My breath stalled in my chest. So Lucas was saying that if this turned into something serious, I’d either have to give up kids or die.
That was a big decision to make, but we weren’t serious. There wasn’t any reason to worry about that right now.
“Okay,” I said slowly, mulling it all over. “I can see your hesitation. But I mean, the first stage only starts at sex. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a girlfriend—and I’m not just talking about me,” I added quickly when he looked at me.
He scoffed. “What do you think boyfriends and girlfriends do, Nad?”
“What? You’re never going to kiss someone?”
“I’ve kissed people,” Lucas grumbled. “And I’ve done enough to know that kissing leads to other things. We almost kissed. I’m not going to risk it, Nad. I don’t care how much I want you.”
He pressed his fingers to his lips, like he hadn’t meant for the confession to spill out.
I blushed a deep pink. “You… you want me?”
Lucas’s lips twitched, but the rest of his body had gone still. “I just meant… in general.”
Fucking liar! Lucas liked me. I’d bet my ass he wanted to take me right here on this table, too. Damn it. His confession only made me want him more.
“Nadine,” he said softly. It caught my attention, because he’d used my full name.
“Yeah?” I responded past the lump in my throat.
“You have to understand why I’ve chosen to remain celibate.” He ran his fingers through his hair, looking flustered. “It’s not because I don’t want… it’s not because…” He took a deep breath. “Look, the truth is, I—”
He cut off, like he couldn’t bear to tell me the truth.
“You what?” I asked. I was dying to hear the last half of that sentence.
He dropped his hands to the table and looked me straight in the eye. “The truth is, I’ll never have a real relationship like that. I can’t do that to someone.”
There was such sorrow in his eyes. The way he looked at me, it burrowed deep down into my soul. I felt my own sadness streaming out from my chest. I just wanted to hold him in my arms and tell him that it was all going to be okay. That even if he couldn’t have someone like that, there were still people who would love him.
But I choked up, and I couldn’t say any of that. Instead, I simply smiled and said, “If that’s what you really want, Lucas.”
Even as I said it, I heard the lie in my voice. I wanted more. Lucas wanted more.
Lucas shifted in his chair, looking like he had more to say. Finally, he lifted his gaze and whispered, “All I want is for you to be safe, Nad.”
My heartbeat quickened, and my body heated. The room spun, but not in the scary kind of way. It was exhilarating, like the thrill of reaching the crest on a roller coaster. The problem was, once you stepped onto a roller coaster, you had no choice but to ride it to the end.
Something told me Lucas and I had a long ride ahead of us.
Chapter 11
Lucas
Talking to Nadine about the Reaper’s Shadow wasn’t easy.
I’ll never fall in love or have sex.
Total pick-up line. I bet she wanted me so badly right now.
At least I’d managed to finish the assignment Professor Warren had given me, to fill the page in my journal. It was all bullshit, but he didn’t look at it long enough to make sense of what I’d written.
“Good job, Lucas,” he said proudly before class one day. He handed the book back to me. “I’m glad to see you’re making progress.”
Ha! Progress.
If anything, I’d gone backward this past week. I’d considered skipping classes just to sleep all day. If it weren’t for Grant literally dragging me out of bed, I would’ve.
Professor Warren clapped me on the shoulder. “Take a seat.”
I sat in the back of the classroom as the rest of my classmates filed in for Necromancy Safety. Professor Warren started the lecture right away, while I pulled up the Miriamic Messenger on my phone.
This week had been hard on me. I never did find out how that kid died. The family probably wanted their privacy at this time.
I was scrolling through the obituaries, not really paying attention to the lesson. Professor Warren was going on and on about how necromancers had to be careful to only reanimate a soulless being. If you started playing around with the body before a reaper came to take their soul, bad things could happen. It was like that with all Mortana. Our magic was touchy, and if you didn’t do things the right way, it could backfire.
Honestly, I wasn’t even sure why I was in this class. I wasn’t a necromancer. I couldn’t create an army of zombie rats or whatever. But they didn’t have a class for reapers, and Professor Warren was my mentor, so I guess they just threw me in here with him.
I was hardly listening when a hand shot up at the front of the room.
“Theoretically, could a necromancer bring someone back to life?” a girl asked. It was Lena, my ex-girlfriend from high school. We were on good terms, but I didn’t care about her like that anymore. We’d only dated for a few months and never got past second base. “I mean, if they tried reanimating them before the reaper got there.”
“No,” Professor Warren said firmly. “It’s been tried many times, and each time, it fails. You are forbidden from even attempting it. That kind of magic can do great damage to the soul—and bind it here on the earthly plane.”
Another hand went into the air. This time, it was a girl named Samantha. “I heard there was a guy in the coven who was brought back to life like, two hundred years ago or something. So there must be some Mortana who can do it, right?”
Professor Warren hesitated. “I’m sure that’s just a story.”
“But if someone could do it, who’s the most capable?” she pressed.
Professor Warren paused, but I barely processed it since I was still reading my phone. “If someone could do it, it’d be very difficult—almost impossible. And they’d have to do it before the soul crossed over.”
“Who?” Lena demanded.
The room went dead quiet until Professor Warren cleared his throat and said, “The Reaper’s Apprentice.”
That finally got my attention. All eyes turned to me, and a chill ran down my spine.
“Of course, it’s just a theory,” Professor Warren was quick to clarify. “A theory one would hope they never have to test.”
His stare felt as if it bore a hole in my forehead. The look he gave me was so intense—like he was warning me not to even think about it. Of course I wasn’t thinking about it! Like hell I wanted someone to die in front of me just to see if I could bring them back. No, thank you.
Samantha raised her hand again. “So let’s say the Reaper’s Apprentice could do it. How would that work? Could they do it to anyone, or does it have to be at a special time, like during the Reaper Moon?”
My spine straightened. I’d never heard of the Reaper Moon before, but it sure sounded important. “What’s the Reaper Moon?”
Professor Warren’s lips tightened. “We don’t cover reaper lore in this class.”
I leaned forward in my seat, my hands tightening into fists. This was so unlike Professor Warren. He was the kind of guy who’d give you a lecture about anything just to hear himself talk. It was almost like he was hiding something from me.
“Tell us what the Reaper Moon is,” I demanded.
Samantha tossed her long black hair over her shoulder as she turned to me. “It’s an astronomical phenomenon that happens every hundred years or so—”
“It’s nonsense,” Professor Warren insisted, cutting her off.<
br />
Samantha acted like she didn’t hear him and continued. “When the moon aligns just right, the Reaper Veil lifts and—”
“Miss Stone!” Professor Warren snapped.
Samantha’s face paled, and she turned around to face the front of the room again.
Professor Warren crossed his arms. “The Reaper Moon is nothing more than myth, Miss Stone. You’re wasting our class time by discussing it. Now let’s get back to business.”
I didn’t hear the rest of the lecture, because I was too hung up on what Samantha said about the Reaper Moon. I wanted to know more, especially since Professor Warren thought I shouldn’t. I tried searching for it on my phone, but nothing came up.
The second class let out, I shot out of my chair and ran into the hall to catch up with Samantha.
“Hey, Samantha!” I called.
She turned. Her face fell, and she held her textbooks tight to her chest. “Hey, Lucas. Sorry about bringing up the Reaper’s Apprentice in class. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
I shook my head. “You didn’t embarrass me. Can you tell me more about the Reaper Moon?”
Samantha glanced back to the open classroom door, then nodded. “Yeah, but not here. Come on.”
I followed her to a small study area off the main hall. It was nothing more than an alcove with three plush chairs. I sat across from her and leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees.
Samantha set her books on her lap and pushed her hair behind her ears. “Let me preface this by saying I don’t know all the details about the Reaper Moon. I only know what my grandpa told me. He used to be a history professor here before he retired.”
“I want to know everything,” I said.
“The Reaper Moon is pretty rare—a once in a lifetime kind of thing,” she explained. “Usually, reapers can only step through the Reaper Veil on assignment—when someone dies and they have to step onto our plane to help them to the next.”
“Right. I know that,” I told her.
Samantha sat up straighter. “Okay, so the Reaper Moon does away with the Veil for just that night. All the reapers are free to roam our plane. Think of it like Halloween, but for reapers.”
