Saving Year Three (Grim Reaper Academy 3)

“You have secrets?”

“Oh, you have no idea,” I laughed stupidly. What was I doing? Did I just promise Lorna we’d tell her about the thing in the well? Francis is going to kill me… But he’d told all the others. One more person who knew about the Great Old One wouldn’t count, right? Not even when that person was Lorna Chiaramonte… My bully, my rival, my enemy. “So, are you in? You’ll know everything we know. Come on, Lorna. Yes or no. As simple as that.”

She sighed and started moving around the room, running her fingers over furniture, books, clothes, as if she were trying to get the pulse of the place. The pulse of… me.

“And what about all those times when I made fun of you? Pulled pranks on you? Tried to kill you?”

Oh, she wasn’t beating around the bush. I tensed up. All those times… I didn’t like thinking about all those times.

“Forgotten?” She pushed. “Forgiven?”

“You never apologized.”

She nodded. “How can I trust you?”

I laughed in disbelief. Corri shushed me quickly.

“Mistress, if Crassus hears you, he’ll know you have someone in here.”

I lowered my voice.

“You’re having trouble trusting me? Lorna, I never did anything to you. I never could. You’re too goddamn powerful.”

“You kissed Sariel,” she whispered.

“I didn’t do it to take revenge on you, okay? It just happened.” She didn’t seem convinced. “Look, I hate that I have to say this, I hate that I have to come to you, but we need you. We need the most skilled mage at the Academy on our side. Believe me, I’d ask Klaus if I knew he was capable of doing the complex spells that could make a difference to our cause, but he’s a lazy ass mage who’s never studied his craft as well as he should have, and now he’s way behind. I love him with all my heart, but he’s just stupid lazy. He has a procrastination problem.”

Lorna giggled. “Yeah, he does.”

“He’s a great friend, though. Don’t tell him I said all that.”

“I like his leaves. Cool trick.”

“To answer your question, all those times when you made fun of me, pulled awful pranks on me, and tried to murder me in cold blood? Not forgotten, let alone forgiven. I could never forget…”

“What if I apologized?” She’s said it in such a low, feeble voice that, for a second, I thought I hadn’t heard her right. When the words sunk in, I realized it wouldn’t help my cause to make her repeat them.

“It… would help.”

“And after I apologize, we’re cool, and you tell me all your secrets, and I help all of you sneak to your arcane meetings, and I’m part of your group?” She said the whole thing in one breath.

I blinked, slightly confused. “Is that… what you want?”

She looked at me with big, blue eyes. “Yeah. I guess.”

Oh. My. God. I’d just cracked the mystery that was Lorna Chiaramonte. All this time, she’d wanted to belong. She was in love with Sariel, and even though he’d tolerated her presence around him and even encouraged her sometimes, he’d never fully desired her. She seemed to have friends in Pandora, Kitty, Sammy, Sheba… But the truth was that the girls had welcomed her into their group just because she was a ridiculously powerful mage who came from a ridiculously wealthy family, which meant it was better to be with her than against her. Now that I knew these girls better and I knew how shallow Pandora could be, it was all clear to me. They envied Lorna. She was better than them, and they knew it, she knew it, everyone knew it.

All this time, Lorna had just wished to be wanted for who she was, not for her prestige, or her name, or her powers. Her girlfriends had lied to her, Sariel had taken advantage of her. In a way, I’d taken advantage of her, too. On Mabon, she did the cloaking spell because I’d asked her to. But I never said a word to Headmaster Morningstar, I never gave him her name, and she never lost any worth points on that account. And it struck me… She was here now, not because Sariel and Klaus had convinced her, but because my gesture hadn’t gone unnoticed. I’d covered for her, and I might just have been the first person in her life to ever do that for her. Without being asked.

If she became part of our group, it would be for real.

“Okay, deal,” I said, holding out my hand. “You apologize, I forgive you, and you’re with us from now on.”

She looked at my hand for a long minute, munching on her lower lip and bouncing from one foot to the other.

“Lorna?”

She jumped, as if I’d just snapped her out of a daydream. She took my hand and shook it.