by Cara Wylde
“That’s crazy,” Lorna said. “I can’t even wrap my head around it, and I’m a pretty smart person.”
“I don’t understand it either, Lorna. It’s frustrating, and overwhelming, and just… too much. But we can’t do shit about it for now, and with my father acting as Headmaster and messing everything up for the students and the professors, it’s even harder to find solutions. We can’t even leave the Academy grounds to investigate. I searched the entire library and couldn’t find a thing about the Great Old Ones. The only one who knows they even exist is Mr. Lovecraft, the Literature professor, and he’s already told me everything about his research, which wasn’t a lot, mind you. We’re stuck. Once we get rid of my father, though, we can teleport wherever the fuck we want, search the libraries of the world, talk to the tribes that worship other Great Old Ones. Without Morningstar suffocating us with his stupid rules, maybe we stand a chance. So, now you know why I have to retire him. Why we have to work together to retire him. It’s not because I won’t get to take his place and be a Grim Reaper if he doesn’t get out of the picture, but because he’s literally hurting the supernatural world right now. And the whole world.”
“Why do you say that?”
I looked at them, surprised they hadn’t figured it out by now.
“You’ve never asked yourself what his end goal might be? He took Mason Colin’s place, he locked us all at Grim Reaper Academy, he cut all connections with the outside world, and he’s teaching us how to fight instead of how to teleport. This isn’t just about survival. He isn’t doing all this because he wants to be a Reaper for another two hundred years.”
“Why is he doing it, then?”
I spread my arms wide, in defeat. “I don’t have the slightest idea. But I’m sure it’s bigger than we thought, because he’s going to great lengths to acquire as much power as possible. For what? I don’t know. That’s why we have to put our heads together and find a way to stop him before he accomplishes whatever he’s after.”
Finally, Lorna nodded in agreement. She stopped pacing, threw one last glance at the stone well, then walked toward where we were all standing, completing the circle we’d unintentionally formed.
“What do you want to do first?”
I puffed out my cheeks and exhaled slowly. There was so much work to be done…
“Let’s start with teaching the guys how to teleport without those stupid pins. They need to be free, like us.”
And so, it all began. A false god, a demon, a fallen archangel, a lazy mage, and a… Francis were going to learn true teleportation from two badass chicks. Yeah, that was me and Lorna. We were badass.
CHAPTER TWENTY
We practiced until early morning, it was hardcore, but when it was time for breakfast, everyone was able to teleport on their own to their rooms. We’d succeeded. In the dining hall, we ate in silence, each at his or her own table, then we went to class without exchanging as much as a glance. We had our leaves, but we’d decided not to use them unless it was something urgent. Corri was with me at all times, flying around, snoozing on my books, and bringing me snacks when I got hungry between breakfast and lunch, then lunch and dinner. Nowadays, that was pretty much all I asked her to do for me. Snacks and blue hair dye to cover my blond roots. She was a decent hair stylist.
After curfew, we all teleported down in the cavern. Patricia and Joel joined us shortly.
“Okay, what do we know so far?” Lorna asked, taking control of the conversation. She was super organized, and the more I got to know her, the more I understood why she was so good at what she did.
“A lot. Let’s get it all down. Corri, white board.”
The pixie clicked her heels and saluted me military-style, then twirled in the air three times, spread a bunch of pixie dust all around her, snapped her fingers and made a white board appear out of nowhere. With markers and all.
“Stole it from Mr. Lovecraft’s office,” she snickered. “He won’t miss it.”
Since I was the one who had gathered the most information but hadn’t yet had the chance to share it with them, I went first.
“I want to start by telling you what I found out from my adoptive parents and from Morningstar’s dream journal.”
“He kept a journal?” GC cocked an eyebrow.
“That’s your question?” Sariel shook his head in disbelief, then turned to me. “How can he dream? He’s a nephilim! He’s supernatural!”
“A nephilim is a hybrid,” said Patty. “Like me. I can dream sometimes, too. But I’m not as good as he is.”
“Dreaming is not a skill,” Lorna huffed. Of course, just like Sariel, she didn’t like that I could do something she couldn’t.
“I’m starting to believe it is,” I smiled knowingly. “And I’m starting to believe that the more you dream, and the more consciously you try to dream, you get better at it. And you start having dreams that can show you… the past. Or the future. I have a theory.”
“Wait, what?” Pazuzu stood up, grabbed a marker, and shoved it in my hand. “Start from the beginning. Theories go at the end.”
I took a moment to put my thoughts in order, then launched myself in a long monologue. I told them everything, starting with what my adoptive dad had revealed to me. Valentine Morningstar had tried to kill me when I was merely a toddler. His scythe broke, he somehow got a new one, and two months before, he’d tried to hurt me again. His scythe cracked. If he’d tried harder, I was pretty sure the blade would have broken into a million pieces again.
So, first order of business: find out why he couldn’t kill me. Oh, and how had he gotten his scythe replaced? Questions, questions… One, this was the first time any of us had heard of a scythe breaking, and two, scythes were attuned to their original masters. If I broke my scythe today, I had no idea how to get a new one. I couldn’t just go to Mrs. Charon and ask her if she had a spare I could try to attune to my energy.
Next was young Valentine’s dream journal. But first, I told them about the dreams I’d been having all year. The one where I met the girl who looked like me and told me that she wasn’t me, but there were other universes where I could find versions of me. I wanted to add more details and theories I’d come up with after that dream, but I could see I’d already lost my audience. The white board was filled with my writing, plus a couple of drawings. So, I moved on to the next dream. I could understand why it was so hard for them to follow me when I talked about lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences. They’d never had any. Sariel was tense all through my tirade, and Lorna was silent. I was relieved to notice that GC, Paz, and Francis couldn’t give a damn that I was capable of doing something they couldn’t.
I showed them the dream journal.
“Do you keep a journal, Mila?” Klaus asked.
“N-no.”
“You should.”
“I don’t have time for it.”
“Morningstar kept one for a very good reason, I’m sure. And if your dream was real and you saw the past, it’s safe to say he kept more than one. Maybe he took them with him when he graduated.”
“And left this one behind? Why?”
He shrugged. “Maybe this was the first one, and not as important. This stuff he dreamed seems pretty random.”
“What does PU mean?” Francis asked.
“I’ve been wracking my brain… I have no idea. Maybe we can figure it out together.”
“Do you have any more clues?”
“Not really. Well, I had another dream recently, and I think it showed me the future.” I blushed. No, I wasn’t going to tell them about this one. They got the gist already, so there was no point in describing to them every dream I’d ever had. Especially not when in that dream I was dating all four of them. Lorna didn’t need to hear about it, either.
“Let me guess,” GC said. “One of your theories is that you and your dad can see the past and the future in dreams. And the ones where you travel to the future are…”
“Prophetic dreams, yes.”
“That’s how prophecies are born,” Patty came to the same conclusion I’d come weeks before.
“Maybe PU comes from prophecy something?” Lorna suggested.
Second order of business: find out why Valentine Morningstar considered dreaming so important that he started keeping dream journals.
“Okay, this is all I’ve got.” I looked at the white board. It didn’t make much sense, sadly. “Who wants to go next?”
“I’ll go.” Pazuzu stood up and pulled a crumpled paper out of his pocket.
A chill ran up my spine. “Is that… what I think it is?”
“Yeah. It’s your genealogy. Well, on your mother’s side, at least. Fucking Morningstar remains a mystery.”
“I tried to dig up dirt on him and his family, I swear,” GC said quickly. “But he cut off all communication with the outside. I asked my mother what she knew about him, she said not much, but she’d look into it. If she found out anything, maybe now I can teleport to her and get the info.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“No trouble at all, goddess. In and out. Quick.” He snapped his fingers. “No one will ever know.”
“What we’re doing now is dangerous enough.” Two or three times a week, Headmaster Morningstar had the Unseelie guards check the dorm-rooms to make sure all students were where they were supposed to be – in bed. We’d learned their schedule by now, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t switch it up at any time.
“So, are you ready for this?” Paz stepped up to me, hand out waiting for me to pass the marker.
I looked at the paper in his hand. Names. Just names. People I’d never met, people who didn’t mean anything to me, even if they were my mother’s ancestors. Relatives. Some of them could still be alive.
“I don’t know, but I guess we’re about to find out.” I gave him the black marker and went to sit with the others.
Paz found a clear spot on the board and started drawing the family tree he’d put together at the end of year one, when we all found out who my real parents were, and he decided to go investigate in Bulgaria. Just as I thought, there were only names. Names that didn’t say anything to me. He reached the bottom, where he wrote Katerina Angelov and Valentine Morningstar, connected them with a line, then drew another perpendicular line and wrote Mila. I appreciated the lack of a surname.
Katia’s mother was Rositsa, and her father was Boris. Paz drew a cross next to both names. Rositsa had a sister, Natalia – another cross, – and Natalia had a daughter and a son. The son never got married, apparently, but the daughter, Anelia, had married a guy whose name Paz hadn’t been able to find, and together they had a daughter – Yolanda. There were a few more names that didn’t have crosses after them, but I’d already lost interest.
“How’s this supposed to help?” Patty asked what I was thinking. “Mila, do you know any of these people?”
“No. Not even my mother.” I was staring at the name Katerina Angelov like I was waiting for something to happen. For it to start glowing or cause a vision. Anything. This is stupid.
“I agree,” Paz said. “There are a few more names, but it doesn’t matter. There’s one thing I believe could be important. I don’t know how yet, but I have a feeling.”
“What is it?”
He fixed me with his green eyes. “Mila, there’s a disease that has run in your family for generations. Only women suffer from it. Your mother was particularly affected.”
I straightened my back. That was the last thing anyone wanted to hear. Really! A disease running in the family? Did it mean that I had it? If I didn’t have it yet, would I get sick later?
“Schizophrenia.”
“What the hell?” I jumped to my feet and started pacing. “Schizophrenia? Are you saying my mother was crazy?”
He rolled his eyes. “Schizophrenia is a real thing, Mila, and it has affected many of your female ancestors, apparently. Your mother wasn’t crazy. She was ill.”
“Well, I don’t have it. That’s for sure.”
“There’s one more thing. She never abandoned you. I believe she had every intention to get you back from Stepan and Ilena, but she had an attack and was taken to a mental hospital before she could.”
My heart jumped right in my throat. I swallowed heavily and forced myself to speak.
“Paz, is she still alive? Is she… in a mental hospital in Bulgaria?”
“N-no.” He took the cap off his marker and drew a cross next to Katia’s name. “I’m sorry, my love.”
“Fuck.” Fuck fuck fuck. I stepped away. I needed to think. I needed to breathe. Another step, and another step… The next thing I knew, I was headed down the tunnel that led to the beach.
“Mila, wait!”
“Don’t go outside! Someone might see you,” Lorna yelled after me.
“I’m fine, guys. I just need a minute.”
Corri flew after me.
“Are you okay, Mistress?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth. Tears stung at the back of my eyes. “It’s not like I ever knew her.” I wiped my eyes even if no tear had fallen yet, tightened my jaw, and walked faster.
I needed to see the ocean.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Classes, tests, presentations, sleep, dream, wake up. Classes, tests, sleep, dream…
I started a dream journal, like Klaus had suggested. Honestly, it was kind of annoying, because the last thing I wanted to do when I woke up in the morning was to take half an hour of my time to write what usually proved to be pretty nonsensical in a notebook. But Corri encouraged me, and if she and Klaus believed it would help in the long run, then who was I to argue? They were only trying to help me, and I knew that it could only work if I helped myself first.
Classes, presentations, sleep, dream, wake up.
January slipped by, then February and March. Mrs. Charon still wasn’t allowed to teach us how to teleport, and Mrs. Maat was forbidden from organizing any field trips. Crassus was my exasperating shadow, and the Unseelie were everywhere, watching the students’ every move. I was so exhausted and bored of this charade that I was genuinely considering just barging into Morningstar’s office and asking him what his deal was. I and my Arcane Cabal, as Lorna had named our group of rebels, still hadn’t figured out what his end goal was. We were in the dark. Which meant that he was winning.
We each had our tasks. Lorna was teaching Klaus how to do serious magic, Patricia and Joel went to Salem Library each chance they got without raising suspicion, Paz researched schizophrenia (he was obsessed with the idea that it had something to do with everything), GC visited his mother, Andromeda, once a week to check in and see if she’d discovered anything new about Morningstar’s family, and I was dreaming. My main task was to dream dream dream. Oh, and Francis wasn’t doing much. Just holding it together for all of us. He was like the therapist of the group. Which was totally insane, because he was actually the crazy cultist who fed women to an ancient god. Patty and Joel were the ones digging into the matter, because Lorna had insisted we couldn’t simply ignore the tentacled monster in the well just because Morningstar was the direct threat. The Arcane Cabal had enough members to solve both problems in parallel.
Sleep, dream, sleep, dream. I had to be honest… I didn’t feel like I was making much progress. The dreams were much clearer now, I’d mastered becoming lucid the moment I entered them, and I could also stay inside longer. Corri was tasked with making sure nothing woke me up. Sleeping on my chest was out of the question now, and I didn’t care it was her favorite spot.
Sleep, dream, sleep…
* * *
The place was quiet. I was in the middle of the street; not a car in sight. A small, picturesque town in a green valley; mountains rising toward the sky all around. I dragged in a breath, and the fresh air filled my lungs. My actual lungs.
Eyes wide, I looked down at my hands, turned them over and over, touched my face, my hair… I could feel everything. But I knew it was only a dream, and I knew I was awake in it, while I was asleep in my own bed at the same time.
It’s finally happening… This was the next level. From now on, everything was going to be different. I didn’t know why or how, but there was this voice in my head that kept repeating that I was close, so close… That I’d never been closer before.
I moved from the middle of the street, and as I started walking down the sidewalk, my fingers touched the parked cars I passed by, the trees, the mailboxes. The houses here were small and quaint. Some pets playing out in their yards, and even a kid or two. A woman was kneeling in her garden, clearing the weeds. She looked up as I wend by and cocked an eyebrow. Oh my God, she can actually see me! I smiled, and she smiled back. My blue hair had gotten her attention.
This is more than a lucid dream, more than an OBE. I’m actually here. I. Am. Here. Has Morningstar ever experienced something like this? I had to keep it together. Was this the past? Was it the future? I just felt this strong pull toward the house at the end of the street.
It was bigger and wealthier than the rest. The fence was made of wood, and the gate was solid iron. To get a glimpse at the front yard, I had to climb the stone foundation upon which the fence was built. I couldn’t resist the temptation. It was as if there was something in this house – or someone – that was calling for me.
There wasn’t much to see, though. An alley leading to the front door, some random flowers here and there, and a huge bush of jasmine that spread an intoxicating scent in the air. I closed my eyes and inhaled. There was probably a larger garden in the back. I could guess it was one of those houses that looked like they were regular and boring from the street but had a lush garden and a swimming pool or a hot tub in the back.
“Can I help you, Miss?”
My eyes snapped open. I knew that voice. It was coming from one of the windows upstairs. My heart picked up the pace, beating wildly in my chest, the panicked thump thump thump reverberating down into my stomach and my gut, in my whole body. I squeezed my legs together. I needed to pee. Stupid nerves.
