by Cara Wylde
I was in the dining hall. Everything looked like it once had. Four long tables, and two long wooden benches on both sides of each. I was at the VDC table, surrounded by my guys. My four guys.
GC. Pazuzu. Francis. Sariel.
Sariel was at the VDC table. Sure, that made sense. Just because he was MDC now didn’t mean he couldn’t hang out with us. But we were doing much more than hanging out…
I stepped closer to get a better look. My hair was as blue as ever, my uniform looked the same, but something was different about me. I was happy. I was sitting between Sariel and Paz, laughing, holding hands with the both of them. I must have said something silly, because Francis reached over Sariel and touched my cheek. I giggled, leaned in, and we kissed like there was no tomorrow. All the guys at the VDC table cheered. Francis broke the kiss, blushing slightly. As shy as ever… I grabbed him by the jaw and squeezed playfully until he meekly slapped my hand away. I laughed in pure, genuine mirth. Paz hugged me from behind and pulled me against his chest, desperate to get his fair share of attention. He planted wet, sloppy kisses down my neck, and I giggled and kicked my legs under the table when the tip of his tongue tickled me. GC rolled his eyes, then attacked Pazuzu from behind. The boys fake-fought for a few seconds, GC was victorious, and apparently, that meant he was entitled to a kiss. I leaned over Paz, grabbed GC by his blond, curly locks, and shoved my tongue down his throat.
What is this? What was the dream showing me? What was it trying to tell me?
The scene before me flowed like a movie, except… it wasn’t a movie. Movies were fiction. This was real. This was actually happening. That was me, Mila Morningstar, and those were my lovers. Four, not two.
Is this like… my subconscious screaming at me that I like Sariel and Francis? That I want them just as much as I want GC and Paz? Well, in that case, this was one hell of in-my-face dream.
But no. That wasn’t it. It still felt too real to be made of thoughts, feelings, and fantasies my subconscious had mixed together and was now throwing at me.
I stepped even closer.
“Graduation day,” I giggled. “I can’t wait. You guys, we’re going to be Grim Reapers!”
“Who would’ve thought year four would go by so fast?” Sariel mused.
What. The. Hell. Year four? There was no year four. Grim Reaper Academy was only three years. Three. It had always been that way, and if supernaturals were known to truly care about something, that was tradition.
“Four years with you guys,” I said, my voice trembling with emotion. “My friends, my lovers, my soul mates. Promise me we’ll never drift apart. Not even if we get super fucking busy reaping souls all over the world and the parallel universes.”
They all put their hands on me – Francis on my knee, Paz on my shoulder, GC on my arm, and Sariel over my heart. That was their promise.
The future. This must be the future. I was starting to hyperventilate. In my dream. I was waking up. Something – or someone – was sitting on my chest. I moaned, willed my arms to move and push the intruder away, but my body was trapped in sleep paralysis. I was suffocating. If I wanted to breathe again, then I had to wake up. I had to wake up.
Wake up! I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay longer, see more. Mila… No, I seemed to have such a great relationship with my four guys. I seemed to be so happy. Wake up!
I opened my eyes, but the sleep paralysis wasn’t yet gone. I counted to ten, then finally started to feel my physical body waking up. Now that I was coming to my senses, I realized that I wasn’t suffocating, and that the thing on my chest wasn’t actually that heavy. The thing was not a thing, it was a pixie. Corri.
“What the fuck, Corri? You couldn’t find another place to sleep?” I muttered.
“Comfy,” she sighed contently, and I couldn’t possibly be mad at her.
We stayed like that for a while, me staring at the ceiling, thinking about the dream I’d just had, and Corri sleeping peacefully on my chest. Eventually, the constant rumbling of my angry stomach woke her up. Grumpily, she flappity-flapped to the gothic windows and pulled the curtains open. The sun was setting.
“Great. Just in time for dinner.”
She yawned and stretched. “I never slept so much in my life!”
“You must have needed it…”
“Absolutely not. What do you think I did the entire winter vacation? Slept, helped Patty around the kitchen, then slept some more. I only slept now because you were sleeping, Mistress, and I had nothing better to do.”
I chuckled. “What a good kitty you are.”
She flared up. “I’m no kitty! I’m a pixie!”
I stood up, stretched, then grabbed my leaf from my underwear drawer. It was the only place I could be sure no one would be looking.
“I need to find a way to meet my friends.” We’d found the perfect secret spot in the cave under the Academy last semester, but with Morningstar being such a smart asshole, we’d only managed to hold a secret meeting once, and then it got too dangerous. And nearly impossible. Nearly. “Corri, I think I figured something out. I’m getting close to the truth.”
“Huh?”
“Valentine’s dreams, my dreams… We can see the past and the future. What he wrote in the journal is true. Corri… I think that’s how prophecies are born. Dreams. But since very few people in the supernatural world can dream, – only hybrids and humans who accidentally stumble upon it, – prophecies are uncertain and fickle. No one writes them down because they think they’re just meaningless dreams, but these dreams, as crazy as they sound, have such a huge impact on them that they end up telling them to others.”
“Oh my God, Mistress! You’re right! That’s how prophecies are born.”
My hands were trembling as I started writing a message on the leaf. It might have been from the adrenaline caused by my discovery, or it might have been from sheer, simple hunger.
“Yes. Young Valentine didn’t write it in this journal, or maybe he didn’t write it in any journal. But he saw the future, and he saw that I am the one who is going to retire him. His own daughter. That’s why he tried to kill me when I was only two years old. That’s why he’s trying to find a way to kill me now.”
“He can’t. His scythe breaks when it touches you.”
“I don’t know why, but I’ll find out. Maybe… maybe I can see it in a dream.” My eyes sparked with determination. “Corri, I need to dream more. I need to see the past and the future. The answer is somewhere out there, in one of these times.”
I went back to my message: “I need you to talk to Lorna and convince her to teleport to my room. ASAP I need her help. We all do.” At the end of it, I wrote Sariel’s name. Then a second message: “Find Lorna and give her a leaf.” That one was for Klaus.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I didn’t know how they did it, and I didn’t have to. All that mattered was that Sariel and Klaus had convinced Lorna to see me, and she was now standing in the middle of my room, arms crossed over her chest, hip popped out in a power pose.
“I’m glad you found my dorm-room…”
“Don’t be stupid, I’ve been here before.”
Mages and Grim Reapers could only teleport to places they’d been to before, or places they could see from where they were standing. That was why the field trips to Heave, Hell, and all the pocket universes were so important. And Headmaster fucking Morningstar had canceled all the trips we should’ve had this semester. Professor Maat wasn’t happy about it.
“Right. Of course you have.” Why, when, or how really wasn’t important. She was Lorna Chiaramonte. It was safe to say she’d snuck in everywhere at some point in her life. Everywhere, except…
“What do you want?”
“We need your help.”
“Who’s we? You and Klaus? You and Sariel?”
I rolled my eyes. “Come on, you know we’re an entire group.” I counted on my fingers. “Me, GC, Paz, Francis, Patricia, Joel, Corri,
and yes, Klaus and Sariel. We have a place we can meet, but since Morningstar tracks the teleportation pins, and confiscates them anyway when we’re not out practicing, we can’t bloody meet.”
“I don’t get it. Why do you need to meet?”
“Lorna, the Academy has turned into a fucking prison. My father is the jailor. We have to find a way out. For all of us. For the Academy and the supernatural world. I have to find a way to retire Morningstar, but I can’t do it alone. I tried. For the past few weeks, I looked for clues, tried to find answers… I think I’ve had a breakthrough, but I need to bounce my ideas off minds that are more brilliant than mine.”
She smiled. “So you agree you’re not the smartest bitch at the Academy?”
“I never said I was.”
“Whatever. Your group’s not that bad. You chose well. I might be interested in helping you. What’s in it for me, though?”
I straightened my back and scratched my neck nervously. I threw Corri a quick glance, and she shrugged.
“You get to be a part of it? You’ll free the Academy and rid the world of Morningstar with us.” My offer was feeble, to say the least. No wonder she pursed her lips and took her time to think about it. “We’ll let you in on all our secrets.”
“You have secrets?”
“Oh, you have no idea,” I laughed stupidly. What was I doing? Did I just promise Lorna we’d tell her about the thing in the well? Francis is going to kill me… But he’d told all the others. One more person who knew about the Great Old One wouldn’t count, right? Not even when that person was Lorna Chiaramonte… My bully, my rival, my enemy. “So, are you in? You’ll know everything we know. Come on, Lorna. Yes or no. As simple as that.”
She sighed and started moving around the room, running her fingers over furniture, books, clothes, as if she were trying to get the pulse of the place. The pulse of… me.
“And what about all those times when I made fun of you? Pulled pranks on you? Tried to kill you?”
Oh, she wasn’t beating around the bush. I tensed up. All those times… I didn’t like thinking about all those times.
“Forgotten?” She pushed. “Forgiven?”
“You never apologized.”
She nodded. “How can I trust you?”
I laughed in disbelief. Corri shushed me quickly.
“Mistress, if Crassus hears you, he’ll know you have someone in here.”
I lowered my voice.
“You’re having trouble trusting me? Lorna, I never did anything to you. I never could. You’re too goddamn powerful.”
“You kissed Sariel,” she whispered.
“I didn’t do it to take revenge on you, okay? It just happened.” She didn’t seem convinced. “Look, I hate that I have to say this, I hate that I have to come to you, but we need you. We need the most skilled mage at the Academy on our side. Believe me, I’d ask Klaus if I knew he was capable of doing the complex spells that could make a difference to our cause, but he’s a lazy ass mage who’s never studied his craft as well as he should have, and now he’s way behind. I love him with all my heart, but he’s just stupid lazy. He has a procrastination problem.”
Lorna giggled. “Yeah, he does.”
“He’s a great friend, though. Don’t tell him I said all that.”
“I like his leaves. Cool trick.”
“To answer your question, all those times when you made fun of me, pulled awful pranks on me, and tried to murder me in cold blood? Not forgotten, let alone forgiven. I could never forget…”
“What if I apologized?” She’s said it in such a low, feeble voice that, for a second, I thought I hadn’t heard her right. When the words sunk in, I realized it wouldn’t help my cause to make her repeat them.
“It… would help.”
“And after I apologize, we’re cool, and you tell me all your secrets, and I help all of you sneak to your arcane meetings, and I’m part of your group?” She said the whole thing in one breath.
I blinked, slightly confused. “Is that… what you want?”
She looked at me with big, blue eyes. “Yeah. I guess.”
Oh. My. God. I’d just cracked the mystery that was Lorna Chiaramonte. All this time, she’d wanted to belong. She was in love with Sariel, and even though he’d tolerated her presence around him and even encouraged her sometimes, he’d never fully desired her. She seemed to have friends in Pandora, Kitty, Sammy, Sheba… But the truth was that the girls had welcomed her into their group just because she was a ridiculously powerful mage who came from a ridiculously wealthy family, which meant it was better to be with her than against her. Now that I knew these girls better and I knew how shallow Pandora could be, it was all clear to me. They envied Lorna. She was better than them, and they knew it, she knew it, everyone knew it.
All this time, Lorna had just wished to be wanted for who she was, not for her prestige, or her name, or her powers. Her girlfriends had lied to her, Sariel had taken advantage of her. In a way, I’d taken advantage of her, too. On Mabon, she did the cloaking spell because I’d asked her to. But I never said a word to Headmaster Morningstar, I never gave him her name, and she never lost any worth points on that account. And it struck me… She was here now, not because Sariel and Klaus had convinced her, but because my gesture hadn’t gone unnoticed. I’d covered for her, and I might just have been the first person in her life to ever do that for her. Without being asked.
If she became part of our group, it would be for real.
“Okay, deal,” I said, holding out my hand. “You apologize, I forgive you, and you’re with us from now on.”
She looked at my hand for a long minute, munching on her lower lip and bouncing from one foot to the other.
“Lorna?”
She jumped, as if I’d just snapped her out of a daydream. She took my hand and shook it.
“Deal.” It took her another minute to say the words. “Mila, I’m sorry for what I did to you.”
I nodded. “Apology accepted.”
And just like that, Lorna and I were… allies.
* * *
“There’s a flesh-eating monster under the Academy, and you’re concerned about Morningstar?”
We’d just told Lorna about the Great Old One, and she was freaking out. Understandably.
“Morningstar is a direct threat to us, the Academy, and the Council,” I explained. “First things first. Once he’s gone, we’ll figure out what to do with the ancient god.”
She huffed, shook her head, and started pacing the cavern frantically, her eyes never leaving the well. After we’d made our deal, Lorna and I teleported into my old room, and from there we sneaked around, found the hidden staircase, and went down into the caves. I needed to show her the place first, so she’d be able to teleport in and out of there. It was all pretty easy after that. The twenty-two Grim Reapers could teleport other people with them. I hadn’t learned how to do that yet, because Morningstar thought I was way ahead already, but Lorna knew. If there was one thing to be truly admired about her was that she was one hundred percent dedicated to her craft. So, she teleported everyone in. Except for Patricia and Joel, who could roam around as much as they wanted and didn’t need our assistance. Corri was with us too, but I still didn’t let her do too many illegal stuff. Better safe than sorry. She’d already done a week in the Blank for nothing.
Francis told Lorna about Yig, about the history of his family, and about the blood sacrifices. If she was going to be part of our little army, then she had to know everything we knew. To my surprise, she didn’t take it quite as well as the others had. For how cruel she could be, I’d have expected her to shrug it off. Instead, she wanted to know details.
“How many women have you fed the monster so far? And why women? Doesn’t it like men?”
Francis sighed. “I don’t know how many… It has to eat every three months, or so. My father fed it, my grandfather fed it… Impossible to count, and I never wanted to, either
. I don’t want to know their number, their names… It’s better this way.”
“I’m not asking about how many women your family sacrificed. I’m asking about how many you’ve sacrificed. Who were they? Human? Supernatural?”
“Both. I try…” He swallowed heavily. He knew that whatever he said, it was bad and would never paint him in a good light. “I try to find people who don’t want to live anymore, or who have a horrible life and… do horrible things. Most of the women who ended up at the bottom of the well were thieves, mothers who’d killed their babies, prostitutes, criminals…”
“Being a prostitute is not a sin,” I said weakly, thinking of my own mother.
“No, of course not. They did bad things…”
“Katia Angelov did bad things,” I insisted. “She was a sex worker, and she abandoned me. Would your family have sacrificed her to your god? Would you, Francis?”
“N-no. Of course not.”
“Oh my God, this is insane!” Lorna yelled. The echo of her voice bounced off the walls. “Okay, stop. Forget I asked anything. Just stop.” She looked at Sariel, GC, and Pazuzu. “And you all knew about this? You knew, and you didn’t do anything?” She turned to Klaus, Patty, and Joel. “Seriously, guys? I honestly thought you three were better than any of us. I thought you were the sane ones. Turns out I was wrong…”
“Mila’s right,” Klaus said. “Headmaster Morningstar is our priority. This monster, or god, or whatever it is, has been here, sleeping, dreaming, eating, pooping for ages! As long as it’s fed, it plays nice and keeps Francis’s family alive. It keeps him alive. And we want him alive, right?”
I nodded. “I tried to find a way to kill him,” I said. “I read books, asked around… The only expert in this type of being that I found told me gods like Yig can’t be killed. They came to our universe from somewhere else, from a world where beings just are. They’re not born, they don’t have a beginning, so they don’t have an end, either. No birth, no death.”
