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I laughed. “You told Francis Saint-Germain to fuck off? Who are you?”
He grinned from ear to ear. “Why, I’m Mila Morningstar’s best friend. I can afford to be a jerk now.”
“You’re not my best friend, Patty is. Anyway, I gotta run. Don’t break anything while I’m gone.”
As I was saying, my father owned a black Lamborghini. I got in and looked around as he pulled out of the parking lot and drove down the slope of the mountain, making my heart jump in my throat and my stomach do juggling tricks with my breakfast. He had his scythe in the back, and I might have stared at it for a second too long.
“Do you like it?”
I blinked at him, confused. “Y-yes. I guess so. Isn’t it like all the other scythes? I mean, attuned to your energy, of course, but similar to…”
“No,” he cut me off unceremoniously. He loved interrupting people. Okay, I made a note in his personality profile I’d drafted in my head. He didn’t think what other people said at any time was worth his patience. “I had one like yours a long time ago. The scythe I chose at the test… I used it all through the Academy years, graduated with it, and reaped with it for some hundreds of years after that. I had to replace it when it broke. I was devastated at first.” He laughed, his eyes on the road. Even if he drove a bit too fast for these mountain roads, he drove carefully. “A Grim Reaper with a broken scythe… It makes you doubt yourself, you know?”
To say that I was equally shocked and entranced by his story would’ve been an understatement. Open file, click mental pen, note down: Valentine Morningstar knew how to tell a story.
“I had no idea scythes could break,” I whispered.
“Me neither. Apparently, in certain circumstances, they can.”
“What circumstances?”
He was silent for a moment. He looked straight ahead. We were coming down the hill and entering Salem.
“When you try to reap a soul whose time hasn’t come yet.”
“Like… when someone tricks you into it? They want to commit suicide and you can’t stop them?”
“No. Like when you want to kill someone who isn’t supposed to die.”
A chill ran up my spine. I smiled at first, thinking it must have been a joke. I was ready to note that down in my invisible file: Valentine Morningstar could tell a good, albeit cruel joke. But he wasn’t laughing. The smile died on my lips.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, I am.” He turned to me and fixed me with his gaze. I suddenly felt the urge to make myself small.
“Eyes on the road,” I whispered. Anything to get him to look away.
“What? Do you think Grim Reapers are saints? We have our own agendas. We want to kill people from time to time, people who stand in our way.”
“Who could ever stand i
n your way when you’re a Grim Reaper? You are Death.”
“Death,” he chuckled darkly. “There are twenty-two Grim Reapers, and only one Death. Don’t ever use them interchangeably.”
I guessed we hadn’t yet gotten to that particular part in our curriculum. Since the differences between Grim Reapers and the one Death were so subtle, I figured we were probably going to study them in year three. Morningstar was way ahead of me. He knew things I couldn’t even imagine existed right now, with my limited experience. And I’d also skipped practice last year, so I could barely keep up with my peers in that department, let alone with him.
We drove down the main street, then took a right to a secondary one and stopped in front of an old building made of red bricks. It was the bank.
“You said you wanted to show me something.” I doubted this was it.
“We’re here. Come on.”
Oh, it was. I followed him, but instead of going into the building, through the front door, we went around it. He had his scythe with him, and I was shocked to see no one seemed to notice it. I moved to his left, so I could get a better look at it. The curved handle seemed to be older than the blade, which meant that when he’d changed it, he’d kept the handle. The blade, however, was longer and more massive than the blade of my scythe – which I’d left in GC’s room – and the runes were, of course, placed in a different sequence. What was fascinating was that when the sun hit the top of the blade just right, the runes seemed to bleed. I’d never seen anything like it before.
“It seems to be new.” He’d said he’d used his old scythe for some hundreds of years. When had he exactly broken it?
“It is,” he stated simply. “Newer than you might think.” With that, the subject was closed. I could sense from his demeanor that he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
