Seizing Year Four (Grim Reaper Academy 4)

I struggled. I fought. I learned.

After Morningstar fled, I claimed my four lovers and took exactly one day to recompose some of my sanity, just enough to appear in front of the Supernatural Council and tell them what had happened. There were only nine people in the room: the four members of the Council, my guys, and me. Okay, nine people and a pixie. Except when I was up to no good with my lovers in a bed that was too small for the five of us, Corri was by my side, always. But I didn’t have to tell them much, in the end. That I wasn’t human anymore – they knew. They could see what I was, recognized it in my haunted eyes. They also knew how I’d become what I was – died and brought to life by a creature whose existence no human or supernatural could even begin to understand. Yes, they knew about the Great Old One sleeping, dreaming, and crunching on juicy bones underneath Grim Reaper Academy. They knew about Saint-Germain’s god, Yig, the tentacled monster. No, they weren’t interested in helping me kill it.

That was the day I lost my faith in the Council, and they in me. I wasn’t the One, but fuck them. I didn’t want to be their hero now that I knew they condoned blood sacrifice. I’m still going to kill that fucking thing. Even if it means I die. Even if it means Francis has to die, too. It had turned into one of my many messed up mantras, but the more I repeated it, the less I believed it myself. After all, being a revenant had its perks.

Strength. I had to learn how to move, now that a harsh pull of the door meant it needed to be replaced, and an angry stomp of my foot when I argued with Pandora or Sheba meant a hole in the floor. Also, a fuckton of excuses and lies. Th

e hinges were loose. The floorboard was rotten. No one except for the Council, Headmaster Colin (who’d been reinstated), Morningstar (who was nowhere to be found), Corri, and my dear friends who’d dug me up and taken me to Yig knew that I was a revenant. The Council wanted a cover-up, so we all worked our asses off to achieve it. The official story was that Valentine Morningstar saw me excel at scythe fighting, got scared that I might actually retire him, and fled to save him life. It continued with Colin Mason atoning for his sins, and the Council giving him a second chance. All was well in the world. And I still got to be the queen of the Academy, all popular and shit, the future savior of the supernatural masses. They were all waiting for me to graduate at the end of year four, go after Morningstar, and bring back his head.

The rest of year three was suspended, of course. The former headmaster had made a mess of it, the students were behind, most of them still didn’t know how to teleport without a teleportation device, and we hadn’t visited half of the pocket universes we should have visited. We were good at scythe fighting, though. Hooray! Not that we’d ever get to practice our skills.

Grim Reapers weren’t fighters. We weren’t warriors, we weren’t supposed to save the world, protect the living, or the dead, for that matter. We. Were. Reapers. We reaped. Our sole job was to detach the soul from the body when the time came, as smoothly as possible, so our victims who’d already suffered enough wouldn’t suffer for another unnecessary minute. Okay, we had two jobs. The second was to convince those who were about to prematurely jump off a bridge that no, it wasn’t their time, and no, suicide still wasn’t cool. Nope, not in fashion. Not now, not ever.

Two jobs. Neither required throat-slashing skills. We had them, nonetheless. The only scenario where they might come in handy was if one of the old Grim Reapers refused to retire once the new generation graduated. But everyone and their mother was pretty sure I was the only unfortunate soul who’d have to deal with this situation. Valentine Morningstar would refuse to step down, just like he’d refused the last two times. He’d been reaping for nearly six hundred years, and if I didn’t manage to end his madness now, he’d be reaping for two hundred more. There was no other way around it. It was expected of me. No other student at Grim Reaper Academy had the guts to challenge him for his place. And no, the fact that he’d fled and wasn’t even doing his job anymore didn’t matter. He was still one of the twenty-two, and if I wanted a place among the new twenty-two Grim Reapers, his was the place I had to take. By force.

The prophecy said only a human could retire Valentine Morningstar. According to the prophecy then, all was lost. But the prophecy, as I’d recently discovered, was bullshit. All prophecies were. Glimpses of parallel dimensions hybrids randomly had access to when they dream jumped involuntarily. They thought they saw the future, and if two or more hybrids dreamed roughly the same thing, then they thought they were all having prophetic dreams. In reality, what was happening was that these half supernatural, half human fellows had inherited the rare skill of lucid dreaming, traveling outside of their physical body, and jumping to other dimensions from their human ancestors, but not the ability to understand it and fully control it. And what does one do when one doesn’t understand something? One misunderstands it.

Prophecies were huge misunderstandings of the way the universe worked.

I knew how it worked. But I was trapped now. More trapped than ever. The second I’d lost my humanity, I’d lost something much more precious along with it. My ability to dream. Not just dream, but dream jump. Universe jump. I’d lost my mother. I’d just found her, tucked away in a parallel dimension where Valentine Morningstar wasn’t the villain, and then I lost her again, for the second time in my short life. And my short life had now turned into a long, long one. I was twenty-one, looking at an eternity of years, decades, centuries, and millennia ahead, but did it even matter if I was never going to see my mother again? Did it matter when only GC and Francis were immortal, too? Granted that demons and fallen archangels lived super fucking long and aged super fucking slow, they still aged. They still died. And one day, only GC, Francis and I would be left… and what else? Who else?

Eternity, I finally gathered, was one scary bitch.

What’s a girl to do when she died once, then death was literally taken away from her, her mother was taken away from her, and she can’t even accomplish the one thing she is expected to accomplish: kill her evil father? Drink. Fuck. Smoke. Party. Drink more, fuck harder, smoke like a chimney, party like a crazy person.

That was my summer vacation. After classes were suspended, all students and professors went home, desperate to see something other than the oppressive walls of the Academy. I had no home to go to. Morningstar had taken all his money with him, which meant emptying both his vault and mine, but that was fine. I didn’t need anything from him. Living at his castle in Scotland was out of the question. The staff probably had clear instructions not to receive me. Had I been smarter, I would’ve bought myself a place with his money before he decided that I was dead to him. Which I was. Dead. But that wasn’t the point. Anyway, I couldn’t go back to my adoptive parents, either. I dreaded the day when I’d have to tell them what I’d become, so I avoided the moment like the plague. That meant avoiding them. Who else was left? Who else could give me a temporary home? Pazuzu’s mother was more than happy to take me in, but I felt like it wasn’t right. I wasn’t only dating her son, and even if she was okay with it, I wasn’t okay with her seeing me with four men under her roof. Granted it was a rather big, spacious roof. GC’s parents were ready to be just as accommodating, so I refused their kindness, too. Francis’s parents were another story. His father had divorced his mother recently and gotten remarried. But that wasn’t the problem. Saint-Germain Senior didn’t like me. At all. He hadn’t liked me when I was human, and now he tolerated me even less. He and Francis had gotten into a huge fight after Francis confessed to him that he’d asked the Great Old One to bring me back to life and now I was part of their little cult. Which turned out to be not so little, after all. He knew what my intentions were because he was a trusted advisor to the Council. As I learned, Grim Reaper Academy wouldn’t have even existed without him and the Saint-Germain fortune. Many institutions in the supernatural world wouldn’t have existed, and many companies wouldn’t have thrived if Claude, Comte of Saint-Germain, hadn’t traveled to the new world and unraveled the mysteries of the Great Old Ones, if he hadn’t pledged his life to Yig, who in return gave him eternal life, then passed his legacy on to his son, Leopold Saint-Germain, who then passed it on to his son, Francis Saint-Germain the First, who then passed it on to his son, Francis Saint-Germain the Second – my Francis.

I’ll never understand why these old families can’t think of any other bloody names. First, Second, Third, and so on and on. My GC was Third, by the way. Thank God Sariel was Sariel and Pazuzu was Pazuzu, otherwise I would’ve gone insane!

So, whatever. Long story short, Francis’s family didn’t like me. Which was fine, since I didn’t like them, either. His stupid father had been the one to convince the Council that Yig had to be left alone if they wanted the Academy to remain standing where it stood, on top of the cursed well. If anything were to happen to his god, he wouldn’t only withdraw his yearly monetary contribution, but he’d make sure all hell broke loose over the Academy, until not a wall stood erect.

I was forbidden from touching Yig. Not that I could harm the wretched monster in any way. When it came to the Great Old One, I was allowed to do one thing, and one thing alone. Feed it.

I didn’t want to.

I’d have to.

So, I moved in with Sariel in Limbo. Temporarily, of course. And temporarily, Francis, GC, and Pazuzu moved in with us. Sariel’s two-story house wasn’t big enough for the five of us, plus a pixie, but we made do. The guys took care of everything, and I existed, barely, between parties, nightmares, and constant laments that I myself was getting tired of. I got more tattoos, too. Breaking my own pro

mise, I got a snake on my left arm, the tip of its tail nestled in my palm as its body wrapped around my wrist, forearm, elbow, up up up, its head resting on my shoulder. The Father of Serpents, as Mr. Lovecraft depicted Yig in his short stories. A snake, Yig was not. But I found the metaphor ironic. Like a snake, the monster had pushed its way into my life, when I wanted nothing to do with it. Nothing that didn’t involve killing it, slashing its tentacles into pieces, and sending its soul to the deepest pits of Hell. The tat was visible no matter what I wore. But that was fine. Morningstar wasn’t there to see it, and my guys were the only ones who knew why. Why I chose to scar my skin with ink the colors of the rainbow. So I wouldn’t scar it with blades.

My summer vacation was a blast. When September was just around the corner, I was almost convinced I’d beat it. The curse of the blood sacrifice, as I now called it. I was feeling fine. My senses dulled by alcohol most nights, my body preoccupied with the pleasure my men gave me… I was feeling fine. No, I wasn’t rotting from the inside. No, my pores weren’t giving off a slight odor of wet dirt and worms. I didn’t taste blood on my tongue, no. I was fine.

I was falling apart. Like Francis had told me would happen if I didn’t feed the monster. It only kept me alive if I did my part and kept it alive. Not that it was dying or anything… He had plenty of revenant servants who stopped by to feed it. Not just Francis, like I’d thought. Many had been returned to the land of the living by Yig, and there were many wells along the coast. The Great Old One’s tentacles extended far and wide, which made me wonder… How big was this creature?

A cosmic god, indeed.

“Mila, you have to,” Francis had gotten in the habit of telling me a few times a day. “You have to, or you’ll rot on your feet and die.”

“So I’ll rot and die. Because I’ll never,” I always said, emphasizing each word, “ever…”

* * *

Pazuzu had found her for me. He was a demon, and demons were in the business of sinful people. She was petite, with black hair and brown eyes, dressed in designer clothes. Nothing about her betrayed that she recruited barely legal girls from poor eastern countries to work in the west as dancers. That was what she told them. Once they got to the US, they soon realized their new job had nothing to do with dancing.

Francis had tied her up good, blindfolded her, and stuffed a rag in her mouth. As he and Paz pushed her to her knees in front of the well, she whimpered.

I was shaking. My head was throbbing, my skin burned hot with fever, sweat gathered at the edges of my hair, dripping down my temples. I felt sick to my stomach. Bile rose in my throat, and I swallowed heavily, forced it back down. It tasted bitter. I’d already vomited twice. My ears buzzed. I could barely hear GC’s meek encouragements. What the fuck was he even saying? How could he be encouraging me? He was… telling me about her misdeeds, something about sex traffic statistics in North America alone. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to hear any of it. Sariel asked me if I wanted to know her name, and I yelled at him. What did I yell? Did I even use words?