Slaying Year Two (Grim Reaper Academy 2)

“Okay, then can I gift her to someone else for a while?”

“I guess. I’ve never heard of anyone donating their pixie before, but fine. She’s yours. You can do whatever you want with her.”

While I didn’t like the way he’d put it, he’d agreed, and that was all that mattered. I told him it would only take a few minutes and ran to the kitchen before he could stop me. Whether he liked it or not, he was going to wait. I rushed in with Corri flapping her wings at lightspeed behind me, found Patty, gave her the bell, and asked her to keep the pixie safe.

“She’ll help you around the kitchen.”

“I love baking!” Corri chirped.

“Okay,” Patty looked at the bell in her hand reluctantly. “I never thought I’d have… a pixie.”

“Just for two months, so don’t get used to it,” I laughed. “Promise me you won’t ring the bell and send her away, okay?”

“Oh, God no! I wouldn’t send my worst enemy to the Blank.”

I sighed. “You know about the Blank?”

“Everyone knows.”

Great! That was so like me. To be the only stupid human who’d locked her pixie up in a cage in the darkness for weeks without knowing. I thanked Patty and rushed back to the courtyard.

“Good luck,” my best friend yelled after me.

I ran so fast that when I had to stop, my feet slipped on the gravel, and I almost knocked Sariel on his ass. He caught me and brushed my blue hair out of my eyes. Was he getting better at flirting?

“You’re late,” Valentine said in a cold tone. “You missed the teleportation training, so I guess you’ll just teleport with me, and then one of the boys can show you how to do it.”

Oh wow! He’s not kidding around. He was definitely not going to go easy on me because I was his daughter.

He gave me something that looked like a gold, swirly pin, and I looked at it with wide, confused eyes.

“It goes in your pocket for now. Someone will show you how to place it on your cloak later.

Sariel leaned in. “It’s a teleportation device. Don’t worry, I’ll help you activate it.”

“Teleportation device?”

“We’ll need them until we learn how to teleport without them.”

“Time to go,” Valentine announced. The blade of his scythe started glowing red. “Death doesn’t wait for anyone. Mila, come here.” I went to him, and he threw the side of his cloak over my shoulders. “The rest of you, set your devices and follow the glo

w.”

Follow the glow… Maybe it was better that I’d missed the training. It all sounded so complicated. Before I could ask him where we were going, we swirled inside a cloud of black smoke, and all I could see was a vortex of lights. We were traveling. How far and how fast, I didn’t know, but it felt so sudden and unnatural that my stomach twisted and knotted, and when I felt solid ground beneath my feet again, it did a somersault and bile rose in my throat. I gagged, covered my mouth with my hand, and swallowed heavily. No matter what, I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself. I opened my eyes and shielded them with my arm from the scorching sun. We were somewhere in the desert.

“Are you okay?” Francis asked me, concerned.

“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?” Probably because my face was green. I felt so sick and I needed to throw up so badly… No. I was Mila Morningstar, and I was supposed to teleport like a pro. Fake it till you make it. “Where are we?”

“West of the Sahara Desert,” said Valentine. He started walking purposefully, and we followed him. “Behind that dune.”

What dune? There were dunes everywhere! His scythe glowed redder and redder as we approached our destination, and two silhouettes appeared in the distance. A man and a woman. He was dressed in white from head to toe, with a turban wrapped on his head. She was dressed in long, gray skirts, and her long black hair was loose on her back. He was pulling her by the hand, and she was trying to resist him, fight him, make him let go of her. He was stronger.

The handle of my own scythe started vibrating in my hand, and I stopped in my tracks. I looked up at the blade and saw the runes glowing red for the first time. It was as if a mysterious power had activated the scythe. It responded to the scene before me, it knew that the woman’s time had come, and the blade ached to cut her string of life, to detach her soul from her body.

“I can’t do this,” I whispered. It was a good thing Sariel, Francis, and Merrit had followed Valentine and were too far away to hear me. I was way behind them, frozen in place, and they hadn’t even noticed. “Oh fuck, I can’t do this,” I mumbled again, my voice a bare disturbance in the stillness of the desert.

She was going to die. He was going to kill her. Why? She didn’t want to die. She was young, and beautiful, and her body was strong and healthy. This couldn’t be her time. Yet it was.