Saving Year Three (Grim Reaper Academy 3)

I placed the notebook on my nightstand. Corri’s bell caught my attention. With a sigh, I rang it three times, hoping my pixie would show up. I missed her so much! Today, her one-week sentence in the Blank expired, but I’d totally forgotten the exact hour, minute, and second Morningstar had banished her, so I’d been ringing the damn bell all evening. I plopped on the bed, stared at the ceiling for a few minutes, then sat back up and grabbed the notebook again.

“There has to be something in here.” I couldn’t accept defeat. I couldn’t accept that I was isolated from my friends, my lovers, from my parents, and Corri, that I was all alone trying to solve this, and that the only clue I’d found was no clue at all. “I’m just going to read it over and over until I figure it out.”

One thing that was clear was that Valentine Morningstar could lucid dream, just like me. He’d categorized his dreams according to what he believed they were. He called some of them lucid, others out-of-body experiences, a few were under the tag “regurgitated thoughts” (I had a pretty good idea about what that meant, but still… ugh! that name!), and then there were the dreams categorized as PU. What the hell does PU stand for? Of course, there was no glossary, because why would there be one? He certainly didn’t expect his dream journal to be found and read. I thought these were the most interesting ones, and not because they were marked with an abbreviation I would probably never decipher.

In the PU dreams, he usually met people he knew in real life. He talked about some professors that I knew because they were still teaching, like Mr. Curio from Rhetoric. Lovecraft was mentioned, too. He once dreamed about a girl he liked from the Righteous Death Cabal, and in this dream, he saw himself hanging out with her. “It was as if I was a spectator watching a scene from my own life,” he wrote. “I was myself, but at the same time, I knew the boy before me was me, as well. I could only see the scene through my own eyes, though, not through his.” The dream ended when the two kissed, and Valentine realized he couldn’t feel her lips on his. He got mad, and that woke him up.

The last entry was a dream in which he saw himself again, years older, reaping high up in the snowy Alps. Two climbers had gotten lost, and no one had found them. Their time had come. The dream was marked as PU, but it ended with an almost unintelligible scribble. “Is this my future?”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“Hm. Strange.”

It was then that I noticed the PU mark must have been added later. I turned the pages back and looked for it. Indeed, it seemed to have been added in blue ink that was slightly darker than the one he’d written his dreams in. The only explanation was that the ink was fresher.

“So, he thought the dream showed him the future, but then he changed his mind and called it PU. Whatever the fuck that means…”

His experiences were consistent with mine, though. I’d found his dream journal after having an OBE that had showed me the past. So, both he and I could see the past and the future in our dreams. Neat.

I reached for the bottle of water I’d left on my nightstand, and my hand found Corri’s bell instead. I rang it out of habit. Poof! The pixie materialized out of nowhere, right on top of the notebook.

“Oh my God, Corri! You’re back!” I grabbed her by the waist and smushed her against my cheek. “I’m so sorry. My stupid father is stupider than I thought. I tried to convince him you didn’t do anything.”

“Don’t worry about me, Mistress. I’m fine.” She beamed at me, but I could see it in her eyes that she was far from fine. She looked haunted.

I bit the inside of my cheek. I wanted to promise her so badly that it would never happen again, but I’d done it before, and it hadn’t meant a thing. Morningstar had made it his mission to make my life hell, a hell where I couldn’t keep my promises to my friends.

“What’s this? Have you started a diary?” It was so obvious she wanted to change the subject that it hurt.

“Err… no. It’s Valentine’s dream journal. I found it in his room. He wrote it when he was at the Academy. Maybe year two or three.”

“Oh. That’s odd.”

“What’s odd?”

She shrugged, as if it was evident. “He’s a hybrid. Half archangel and half human, but still… supernatural. Supernaturals don’t dream.”

My jaw dropped. She was right! Supernaturals could not dream. How could I have forgotten?! Sariel had almost killed me over it. I still had no idea why they all thought dreaming was cool, but Sariel was well-known for being petty and jealous just because I could do something that he couldn’t, no matter how useless that something was. He’d changed, though. Since he’d lost his wings and told me he was in love with me, I was pretty convinced he’d changed.

“Stay here,” I told the pixie. “There’s only one way to find out if hybrids dream. I’m going to see Patricia.”

“No, Mistress. I’m coming with you this time.”

“Dude, we’re not allowed to leave the room after curfew. If my father finds out, he’ll send you to the Blank again.”

“I don’t care. He’s going to send me again and again, no matter what I do. I’m done being good and playing by the rules. I’m your pixie, not his. I’m going to help you from now on, even if I spend a whole year in the Blank after that.”

“Oh, Corri… I wish you really were my pixie. Because he bought you for me, he’s got more power over you than I have. Fuck him! But are you sure?”

She fixed me with a confident gaze. “Let’s go see Patty.”

* * *

“Yeah, I have dreams sometimes.” Patty was putting away the clean dishes. She had her long hair pinned on top of her head and stuffed inside a white cap.

“Wow,” I whispered. “I learn something new every day. Hybrids can dream.”

“Well, we are half human, after all.” Her mother was a succubus and her father was human. She’d never met him. “But I don’t dream like you. You’ve told me some crazy shit. I rarely remember my dreams, and I’m never aware that I’m dreaming. Why are you asking, though?”