Seizing Year Four (Grim Reaper Academy 4)

“If you want to know what I think, it’s pretty simple.”

“You think I’m crazy…”

“No. I think you’re suffering of PTSD. I’ve seen it in so many people, I’ve seen it in Klaus. Our families can do this to us. I was lucky, you know, but you and Klaus… not so much. They claim they’re only concerned about your well-being, but then it’s like they do everything in their power to achieve the opposite. In your case, it was even worse, wasn’t it?”

Joel didn’t know the whole story, but he knew enough. PTSD. The moment he said it, a feeling of peace and resignation washed over me. My shoulders relaxed, and I realized just how tense I’d been the whole summer. Watching the waves caressing my feet, then retreating, I started telling him everything in a low, feeble voice.

“I guess you could say my family’s fucked up. Both families. My biological father tried to kill me twice. He succeeded the second time, in fact. My mother abandoned me when I was a baby, then vanished off the face of the Earth. I’m not saying it was her fault, but facts are facts. My adoptive father hates

me. When I was little, he used to beat me and my mother. Sometimes, he put out his cigarettes on my stomach. We’re in a better place now. I’m not sure I’ve forgiven him, though.” Joel nodded, listening to me in silence. “Then Grim Reaper Academy happened. Lorna and Sariel. The monster in the well almost ate me once. Now I’m immortal thanks to it, but I have to bring it sacrifices to sustain it. Sometimes I think this is all my fault. Me and my stupid dreams of being special.” I chuckled bitterly. “I was so miserable as a kid that I thought if a supernatural world did exist out there, then maybe I could be a part of it, maybe I could finally belong, and it would all turn out great. Maybe I could have a happily-ever-after. For sure, I’ll get an ever-after, but it won’t be happy.”

“I’m sorry. It’s not your fault, though.”

I wiped a tear off my cheek. “I don’t know what to do, Joel. I don’t know how to deal with all this.”

“You deal with it one day at a time. There’s no other way.”

I let my head fall on his shoulder. “I hope you and Klaus get back together. He needs a guy like you.”

CHAPTER SIX

One day at a time. Being a revenant had its perks. Immortality. I couldn’t suffer of PTSD forever, because if there was one thing in this universe that was certain, it was that nothing – absolutely nothing, good or bad – lasted forever. Pandora had said it once. I had a tendency to forget it, but then someone would come along to remind me.

The next weekend after Mabon, GC and I teleported to the Himalayas. It took us a while to find his grandfather, Golden Calf Apis the First. GC hadn’t visited him in centuries, and the hermit liked to move around. We ended up spending the night in a horrible tent in the middle of nowhere, in a region called Sarchu, at about 13,768 feet above sea level. Andromeda, GC’s mother, had told him she’d seen him around that area last time she and her husband had visited him. Well, it appeared the old man – who probably didn’t look like an old man at all – had moved. We asked the locals, and some of them remembered a tall, handsome man with hair the color of the Himalayan sunset having found refuge in the nearby canyon.

“Right behind that stupa you see there, across the road,” a raven-haired man with Tibetan features told us in a struggling accent.

We went there, found nothing, returned to the tents. The man gave us masala tea, hot soup, and rice over which he’d poured a mushy lentil sauce. If I hadn’t been a revenant, I would’ve probably puked my guts out later.

“Picturesque, isn’t it?” GC laughed at my misery as we sat down on the grass, looking at the reddish mountains jutting up before us.

“Shut up. You know I hate it.”

“If I knew exactly where he was, we’d teleport there. I don’t, so it’s an adventure.”

“How am I supposed to sleep here? Have you seen the toilet?”

He shrugged, amused. “I’m a guy. I can pee in nature.”

There were marmots among the rocks and bushes, and we spent an hour trying to bait them with biscuits. A big one came to eat from my hand, and I snapped pictures, saving them for the moment I’d have Internet access. There was no signal here. These people were completely cut off.

“You know marmots carry the plague…”

“Get out of here!” I wiped my hands on my jeans.

“The ones in China, though. You’re safe. And anyway, you can’t get sick even if you tried.”

“That’s reassuring…” Still, I didn’t feel like playing with the marmots after that.

I was so uncomfortable that night that I mostly stayed awake, staring at the ceiling and listening to the wind beating against the tent. That meant no nightmares, so… yay? The next day, we hitchhiked to the next human settlement – if it could be called that at all, – then the next, and the next, investigating and asking around. We found ourselves on the road to Leh, in the region of Jammu and Kashmir. It was the capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh – a green oasis in an ocean of rocks and dust. We stopped at the first Buddhist temple we saw, and asked about the young, blond man who wasn’t young at all. But we kept that tiny detail to ourselves. Finally, we got lucky. Apis the First had been there years ago, lived among the monks for a few months, then moved on. He probably lived in Leh now, which suited me just fine. At least, Leh was a city with proper houses and hotels.

God, Indian food was awful! Not Indian food in general, but the one we could find here, in the heart of the mountains, where supplies were brought by trucks that polluted the air heavily and couldn’t reach most places when the snow destroyed the roads. The water was undrinkable, and even I, an immortal, wasn’t going to risk it. We found GC’s grandfather in a small brick house at the edge of the city, surrounded by a wall of white stone. Everyone in Leh knew him as the foreign doctor whose teas and ointments could heal pretty much anything, from the common cold to a broken back. He was more sought after than the doctors at the Tibetan Institute, the ones who could tell your ailments by feeling your pulse.

He invited us inside. Not paying much attention to me, he hugged his grandson. I stood awkwardly by the door, watching them and trying to wrap my mind around the fact that even though this man was so terribly old, as old as time itself, he looked just as young and handsome as my boyfriend. Granted there were deep wrinkles around his eyes, they only made him look more interesting and mysterious. Like a wiser version of my hot-headed GC. The future looks good…

We sat around a low table, drank masala tea, and asked our questions. It took Apis the First a while to study me and decide whether I was worth the trouble or not. He was literally the first person who wasn’t impressed by my name when I introduced myself. On the contrary, the fact that a nephilim was my father seemed to disgust him.

“You were lucky you turned out human,” he said as he sipped his tea. “You could have been a nephilim, too.”