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“Told you!” Corri chirped. Not that I didn’t believe her, but it was nice to have confirmation.
“How do you think my father can afford so many guards? I heard the fays are expensive.”
Francis had the answer again. “He can’t. The Council is sponsoring him. My father told me he sent them his new set of rules, and they approved them. Then, they ap
proved his request to hire two dozen Unseelie soldiers to enforce them.”
“Why would the Council do that? They didn’t want to appoint him Headmaster, yet they did, and now this… Why do they keep doing things they don’t want to do? My father can’t possibly be that powerful.”
“You saw him,” Francis whispered. “With your own eyes. How he transformed…”
I didn’t want to admit that every time I thought about it, my blood froze in my veins. “A circus trick. So what? It’s not like he’s the only one who can do that.”
Silence.
“Is he?”
Francis shook his head. Pazuzu leaned in closer. “I told my mother what you saw.” GC and Paz hadn’t been there when Morningstar had pulled his fancy trick on the Council members, but I’d made sure I described every detail to them. “She told me it’s because he’s been reaping for so long. For sure, the other twenty-one Grim Reapers can’t do it.”
“What did he do, exactly? He looked normal one second, and changed into a glowing skeleton the next. He banged his scythe on the floor and made the ground shake. That’s all.”
“You’re right, he didn’t do anything,” GC said in a grave whisper. “He only warned everyone that he could, if he wanted to. You know what I heard?” He looked at me, at Paz, then at Francis. When no one said a word, he continued: “My mom told me there’s only one being in the world who looks like that and can cause an earthquake at a snap of their fingers. Death.”
“Death? Like… actual Death?” I giggled stupidly. “Isn’t Death a… metaphor? A concept?”
“No, Mila,” GC said. “Death is real.”
“So, like… what? Is it a she, or a he?”
“My mom says it’s both.”
“Okay, look…” I pushed myself away from the table and crossed my arms over my chest. At this point, I didn’t care if Galio heard we weren’t talking about Professor Colin’s exercise. “If Death is an actual person, then Life has to be, too.” My guys shrugged. Since no one was going to contradict me, I took it as a sign that I was onto something. But where would it lead me? This world I’d always wanted to be a part of was getting more and more twisted each day. One morning, I’d get up and not want to be here anymore. I just hoped it didn’t happen before I found a way to rid it of my father.
“Any progress on the prophecy?” Francis asked. Pazuzu and GC already knew I’d hit a wall when Morningstar kicked my butt in scythe fighting.
“No. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. How I’m supposed to do it. If a Grim Reaper doesn’t retire on his own, then the next one has to take him out. But I suck at scythe fighting.”
“Poison him?” GC suggested.
“Seriously? Do you think it would work?”
“You can’t know until you try.”
“It won’t work,” said Francis. “Grim Reapers are untouchable. Once you graduate and become one, nothing can kill you. Well, except for another Grim Reaper. But not with poison, or magic, or… fuck if I know… by pushing you over a balcony. It has to be with a scythe going straight for the string of life.”
I blew out my cheeks. “I need to learn how to fight. And then, I need to become good at it. But it doesn’t make any sense. If that’s the way to do it, then I’m sure some of the current Reapers are skilled enough to off him. Why does it have to be me? Because of some prophecy I never even saw with my own eyes?”
Paz chuckled. “You don’t see prophecies. You hear them.”
“No one writes them down?”
“Sometimes they do, but that’s not how they start.”
I shook my head. “So many things make no sense at all.”
“Maybe it has to be you because you’re the only one who has the guts to stand up to him,” GC suggested.
Well, it was true that even the Council had pissed itself, and I was pretty much the only one who could still tell him to go fuck himself knowing for sure she’d live to tell the story. Maybe I was overthinking this whole mess. Maybe it didn’t have to make sense, and the key was to simply believe. Although I wasn’t quite sure what I believed in. The prophecy? Not really. Myself? But when I didn’t use it for reaping, I was terrible with the scythe, and no amount of believing in myself was going to change that. God? Good one. Since I’d seen both Heaven and Hell, I’d completely lost my faith. I could totally understand why none of the other students were religious and didn’t care about visiting the two chapels.
