Surviving Year One (Grim Reaper Academy 1)

“No, you don’t. Your aura is beautiful.” His smile turned genuine for a moment. “It has shades of pink and purple, and there are these tiny iridescent lights peppered all over it. It’s like it’s constantly moving and changing, flowing from light pink to light purple. Are you feeling joy right now?”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Not particularly. I guess I’m just relaxed.”

He nodded. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

I blushed. And there goes my taste for revenge. I just can’t stay mad at this guy. He’d just complimented my aura, of all things!

“Err… do you want me to describe yours?”

There was that bitter, forced smile again. It hit me right in the heart.

“No. I know what my aura looks like.”

“You do…?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Fair enough. Maybe I wouldn’t want to talk about it either, if my aura looked like a deadly swamp. But I couldn’t dwell on it now. I had some worth points to score. Francis’s demons were Francis’s demons. We weren’t even friends. I had been sorted into the Violent Death Cabal for a reason. I had no time to feel sadness or compassion.

I identified the place in his aura that connected his life energy to his physical body. The string, as we called it, was around his neck, coiled like a heavy necklace, as if clinging to him, as if someone had tried to sever it at least a dozen times, and each time, the string had become stronger and more stubborn, forming another coil, and another coil. Francis’s soul was holding onto him tightly. Or, it might as well have been the other way around. His body was holding onto his soul so desperately, that it had forced the string to grow in both length and thickness. This has to be the weirdest string I’ve ever seen. We’d practiced seeing other people’s auras in Anatomy of Souls before, but I’d usually been paired with someone from the Neutral Death Cabal or the Merciful Death Cabal. I even worked with Klaus twice. His life string looked absolutely normal – a thin, gracious line floating around the crown of his head. I wondered what mine looked like. At the beginning of the year, Mr. Lesage had told us we shouldn’t tell our partner what his aura and string looked like. Sometimes, with the right knowledge and information, such a description could be used to predict that person’s time of death. And that certainly was something no one wanted to know. Ever.

Francis had just described my aura. He didn’t care much about the rules. I could have asked him to tell me where my string was and how it looked, and he would have probably told me. But what if it wasn’t a good idea? What if Professor Lesage was right, and I already knew too much?

“I’m going to use my stick, okay?” Francis’s voice snapped me out of my reverie.

“Yes, sure.”

He was supposed to use the stick to slash lightly at the string that connected my soul to my body, and I’d be able to feel it. The point was not to sever it, but to touch it and pull at it. A lot of finesse was involved. For one, even if one could see the string of life, that didn’t mean one could get it on first try. And that was what we were supposed to learn in PE and Anatomy of Souls. How to see the aura, see the string, then strike just right, just where we were supposed to strike, so we’d separate the soul from the body in one clean, painless cut. And no, the fact that I was a Violent Death and not a Merciful one, had nothing to do with it. It didn’t mean that I’d give my victims a violent death. It only meant that I was strong enough, physically and mentally, to take on those jobs that meant I’d have to reap souls that had gotten themselves into a violent situation right before their time had come. I was strong and sane enough to go reaping were wars raged, were mobsters did their dirty jobs in back alleys, where serial killers finished off their victims. I was a Violent Death because I could witness violence and still

do my job with grace and dedication.

I wasn’t looking forward to my first job.

Francis swung his stick and… missed. At least, he must have missed, because I didn’t feel a thing. He couldn’t hurt me, but if he slashed at my string of life, I should have felt a tug.

“I’ll try again.”

“No. It’s my turn now.”

He furrowed his brows slightly but didn’t contradict me. That’s right, buddy. It’s not all about you.

I straightened my back and placed my feet firmly on the floor, making sure my balance was just right. His string of life was glowing eerily around his neck, waving and trembling in constant, subtle movement. That meant I had to strike right through his neck, but not his actual, physical neck. My aim was the aura field in front of his neck. Or to the side of his neck – that could also be an option. After identifying the position, length, and thickness of the string of life, it was important to figure out the best angle, the angle that would give immediate results.

I swung my stick back, then went for it. My calculations were perfect, the distance was right. The tip of the stick caught the string of life, pulled it downwards, then released it. The string bounced back and returned to its previous position.

“Ouch! That hurt.”

“Sorry. You really felt it?”

“Yes. You got a nice swing going on there.”

I giggled. “I’ve been practicing. So, how did it feel?”

He thought for a second. “Like you’d grabbed a part of me, an invisible part of me, and pulled at it, trying to separate it from the rest of me.”

“Wow!” I shuddered, suddenly not looking forward to Francis trying again and doing it right.

“Bravo, Ms. Lazarov! Bravo! If you’d had your scythe right now, that would’ve been a clean, painless cut.” Mr. Lesage clapped enthusiastically, drawing everyone’s attention to me. GC gave me the thumbs up. “Thirty worth points!”