by Cara Wylde
“If this is all…” I made to leave.
He stood up, rounded his desk, and placed his hands behind his back.
“Are you feeling alright, Mila?”
“Sure. Why are you asking?”
“You’ve lost weight…”
I laughed out loud. “The perks of being a revenant!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Supernatural Council was made up of two women – a vampire and a demoness, and two men – a gargoyle and an angel. I only liked the gargoyle, because he was old and wise, like a grandpa. The others, not so much. The angel seemed too arrogant, the vampire looked like a blonde, plastic Barbie, and the demoness had this penetrating gaze that made me shudder. She was constantly trying to read my thoughts, and every time I was summoned in front of the Council, I had to make great efforts to keep my mind shut, and not think of things that certainly didn’t concern her. Which was rather hard, this time around…
I’d called Corri back, and she had news from Bulgaria. She was going to tell me everything only after the meeting. If I didn’t know anything, then the demoness wouldn’t, either. The pixie had her ways of protecting herself from telepaths.
I was summoned in the same room where Valentine Morningstar had brought Sariel before the Council, accused Mason Colin of being incapable of running the Academy, and demanded they made him Headmaster. There had been many spectators that day, Morningstar having interrupted some public meeting. Today, there were only the four councilors at their rectangular table perched atop its dais, and two other men in a corner, hiding in the shadows. I tried to distinguish their features, but they’d strategically chosen the only seats that weren’t illuminated by the sunshine pouring through the tall, cathedral-like windows above us.
The angel pointed at a chair that had been prepared for me, and I sat down. Corri was on my shoulder – my pixie guardian. I needed her for moral support.
The old gargoyle was the one to speak first.
“We got word that your father was seen in Alaska.”
I cocked an eyebrow. Really? Then why didn’t they catch him themselves? They should have sent a team, hired the Unseelie…
“Do you know anything about this?”
I shook my head. “No. Alaska is not among my preferred travel destinations.”
The man rubbed his temple. “Miss Morningstar, we tasked you with finding him and bringing him to justice. Please tells us you haven’t been wasting our time and yours.”
I sighed. “With all due respect, you realize that catching him is a waste of time, right? Unless he’s decided that he doesn’t want to be a Grim Reaper anymore, I don’t see what we could do about him. And I promise you that whoever told you about Alaska is lying or had him confused with someone else. I am willing to bet my life that he’s not in this universe anymore. He jumped the first time he got the chance. He’s gone.”
“If we’re lucky, maybe he never comes back,” the vampire woman murmured.
“We’d be left with only twenty-one Grim Reapers,” the angel said.
“Twenty-one have been reaping for the past few months, and the world hasn’t ended.”
“The Violent Reapers are working long hours…”
“Maybe the solution is to end wars and school shootings. Then, we wouldn’t need as many Grim Reapers.”
“This conversation isn’t leading anywhere,” the gargoyle cut them off. “Miss Morningstar, if you say he’s in a parallel dimension, what have you done about it?”
“Nothing. I lost my ability to dream jump. I don’t have a solution for you. I don’t even know why you’re calling me here anymore, expecting things from me.”
“Who should we be calling, then? You’re the only one who can solve the mystery that is Valentine Morningstar. You’re his only daughter.”
The temptation to shrug and wave them off again was strong, but this was my chance. The truth was that I was bored of them. Before, in year one, and maybe even year two, I was fascinated with the Supernatural Council, thinking it was this mighty institution that watched over the supernatural world and made sure humans were safe around us, oblivious to our existence. Then my father burst in, scared the shit out of them, and then year three was such a sad mess that I finally had to accept that this Council, just like any governing body in the human world, was overrated and useless. All they did was lounge around their fancy table, listen to people complain, and spend their every waking moment talking and talking, as if moving their lips and making words come out solved anything. Still, they had power. They only had to be convinced to use it.
“There are other dream jumpers in the world. Get a team together, map the parallel universes, and find my mother. Katia Angelov knows Morningstar better than anyone. She’s been living with one of his doppelgangers for the past twenty years. She must have answers to questions you haven’t even thought of yet.”
“Dream jumpers are human,” the demoness said in a monotone voice. “We can’t bring humans into this.”
I rolled my eyes. I was so tired of hearing this excuse.
“We know how much you miss your mother, Mila,” the demoness continued. “But she chose to leave this universe for a better one. She chose to stay there even when she found out that you are still alive.”
“She didn’t choose. He forced her!”
“She can still dream jump, can’t she?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I don’t know anymore. All I know is that she can help us, if only you made the tiniest effort to get to her.”
The councilors whispered amongst themselves for a minute.
“I think I know why she hasn’t come to see you,” Corri said, her whole face pressed to my ear.
“Not now.”
“Just saying… Don’t be mad at her. She would’ve, but I don’t think she can.”
This whole thing was useless. These people were useless. We wasted some more time arguing about nothing of real importance, then they finally told me I was free to go.
“One dream jumper,” I insisted. “Just one. Okay, forget about my mother, but maybe he or she could find a parallel dimension where Morningstar was retired, and learn how.”
It was no use. Very few humans knew about the supernatural world, and they’d already interrogated them, only to find out they weren’t nearly as gifted as I used to be. Camilla Ivanov was one of them. I gave up.
On my way out, I saw the two mysterious men stand up and move out of the shadows. My heart picked up the pace, my blood boiling hot in my veins. I knew them very well. Leopold Saint-Germain and Francis Saint-Germain Senior, father and son. Leopold’s father had been the one to leave Europe in search of the elixir of life. The New World had no elixir to offer him, though, only a secret cult and a monstrous creature sleeping underneath the ground. What are they doing here? Since I became one of them, a revenant, it was as if they never wanted me to be alone with the members of the Council.
“Congratulations are in order, I believe,” my boyfriend’s father said in a nasal voice that made the hairs on my arms stand on end.
“What for?” I was still walking, eager to put some distance between me and them. They kept up with me easily. Despite their age, they looked just as young and agile as any being who’d gained immortality by nasty means. They both had mossy green eyes and brown hair.
“Your first blood sacrifice, of course,” Leopold Saint-Germain said. “My grandson told me it all went well. We were glad to hear it. I know how much he loves you, and even though I personally believe he could have found someone more suited to him and his legacy, alas…” He sighed theatrically. “As long as we only have to see each other at Thanksgiving, all’s well in the world.”
I huffed. “I’m not spending any Thanksgiving with you. Rich, filthy, murderous…” I would have gone on, but I had the feeling my anger only amused them.
“I feel like pointing out you’re describing yourself, and doing a marvelous job, too,” the other Sai
nt-Germain laughed morbidly. Then, to his father: “She may be more suited than we thought.”
I stopped and turned to face them. Corri lost her balance and regained it by pulling harshly at my hair. I winced.
“Listen, I am not like you. I didn’t choose this. I did what I had to do to survive, but that doesn’t make me…” Words failed me. “It doesn’t mean I’m part of your family. And Francis is not like you, either. He hates it! He hates you for choosing for him, for murdering him in his sleep and throwing him in your god’s lair to make him immortal. That’s right! I know. He told me what happened. How it happened. You are two horrible, sick monsters, and you don’t deserve Francis.” I was almost done. “And you know what? I’m going to find a way to kill your Great Old One. I won’t rest until I either banish Yig from this world or teach him what death is. Our universe, our rules, and we have death here. What lives must also die.” I wasn’t sure where that had come from. The two Saint-Germains weren’t impressed, but Corri clapped her tiny hands in admiration, which was still something. “I don’t even care about Morningstar. I’ve made my peace with the fact that I won’t be the one to retire him, and I have a new mission now: to retire your disgusting god.”
“That is impossible,” said Leopold, “but for argument’s sake, let’s say that you did find a way. You are aware your life belongs to the Great Old One now, yes? Francis’s, too. If anything happens to Yig, you will both rot from the inside and die. We would, too, and all the other revenants Yig has saved from the clutches of death.”
“I’m not sure saved is the right word…”
“Would you do that, Mila? Would you kill yourself? Would you kill him?”
I bit the inside of my cheek until I felt blood in my mouth. The wound healed in seconds. He’d pushed me in a corner, and now he was gloating.
“That’s what I thought.” He gave me a sinister smile. “Why don’t you give us a chance to show you this isn’t a bad life, after all? I want to invite you to a little gathering. Yig has faithful servants in Salem and the cities nearby. His wells cover a lot of land. Maybe if you meet our sisters and brothers, and see we are all just normal people trying to make the best of what the Great Old One has gifted us, you will change your opinion.”
“Never.”
“You will never want to meet them, or you’ll never change your opinion? I’m confused.”
He was mocking me. I turned on my heels and left the room. The second I was over the threshold, I teleported back to the Academy.
“Maybe it’s a good idea to meet other revenants,” Corri said as she landed on one of my pillows. She pulled out the post-it with the names I’d given her. “They might help you adapt to your new condition.”
“The condition of having to sacrifice young women every three months?” I was fuming.
The pixie shuddered. “If you put it that way…”
“I’m taking them all down with me.” I paced my dorm-room frantically, tripped over some clothes GC or Paz had left on the floor, cursed, and kicked them hatefully. “I don’t care if I die, if all the revenants on this part of the world die. That thing will not be allowed to live and eat people anymore. I won’t allow it.”
“And Francis?”
I sighed and plopped onto the sofa. “Don’t start with that…”
“Would you kill Francis, too? I thought you loved him.”
“I love him. And because I love him…” An idea occurred to me. It was probably stupid. Like all my ideas had been, lately. “Maybe the Saint-Germains are wrong and the revenants don’t necessarily have to die if the god is banished back to where he came from.”
“That seems like a stretch. We all saw how your… err… body changed when you refused to feed the creature. If he’s banished, you can’t feed him. Hence…”
“Ugh!”
I felt trapped. Again. God, I was trapped in so many ways! All my life, that was all I’d known. Trapped, trapped, trapped. At first, I was a human trapped in a world I felt I didn’t belong to, with a family who’d made my childhood pure hell. Then, I was a human trapped in an Academy for supernatural beings, and oh, how they’d all made sure I knew I didn’t belong here, either. Now, I belonged. Kind of. Trapped because I couldn’t dream jump, trapped because I couldn’t get to my mother, trapped because I couldn’t do shit about Morningstar, trapped because my life now depended on a monster that was anything but vegetarian.
“What do you have for me?” I changed the subject.
“I checked these people, like you wanted. You know more than half of them are dead, right?”
“I wanted to be sure.”
“Three more babies were born since Paz did your family tree. Two boys, one girl.”
“Hm.”
“Anyway, we might have two candidates. One is Sofia, a very distant cousin of your mother’s, on her father’s side, though. Sofia is forty, married to her second husband, and has two boys. She doesn’t live in Bulgaria anymore. After her divorce, she took her boys and moved to the UK, where she met a doctor and got married.”
“Too old.”
“Seriously? Because I saw her, and she doesn’t look forty. The women in your family have impeccable genes.”
“She’s got two sons and a husband. Her hands are full.” I didn’t feel like telling Corri the real reason why I was rejecting her. I didn’t need a mature woman who’d already gone through life and seen plenty. I needed someone more flexible. Someone I could… Okay, fine! Manipulate. “Who’s the other candidate?” I hoped she’d say the name that was on my mind, that had been on my mind for a while.
“Yolanda Aleksiev. Your cousin. Actually, second cousin.”
After an exhausting day, I finally felt a bit more relaxed. “Tell me about her.”
“She’s eleven, living in an orphanage.”
I blinked. Well, that was unexpected. “What happened to her parents?” I remembered Paz saying that he couldn’t discover the name of her father, but the last time he’d checked, her mother, Anelia, was alive and well.
“Bus accident. Many people died, and Yolanda’s mother was one of them. Since there was no one left to take care of the child, she ended up in the system.”
No one, indeed. Her grandparents dead, her great-grandparents just as dead, and her mother’s first cousin, Katerina Angelov, lost in a parallel universe.
“Didn’t she have an uncle? What happened to him?”
“Poof!” Corri spread her tiny arms wide. “Vanished. Some say he ran from home when he was twenty and never came back.”
“Hm.”
“You know, Mistress… your family is very sad. Not on your father’s and grandfather’s side, though. They had brothers and sisters, each with their families… They’re spread far and wide.”
“But they don’t suffer of schizophrenia.”
The pixie sighed. “Sofia does take a lot of pills.”
“What about Yolanda?”
“She’s just a kid…”
“So?”
“They don’t care about kids there. I haven’t noticed anything particularly worrisome about her, and I’m glad, really, because she wouldn’t have access to treatment if she were to need it. She seems like a normal kid. She’s introverted, spends most of her time reading, stays out of trouble…”
“Why is she a candidate if she’s so normal?”
“She sleeps a lot.”
Gotcha!
CHAPTER NINE
My plan was taking shape, but the more I worked on it, the more I built it in my head, the less appealing it was. I couldn’t tell my guys about it. They would have put an end to it before I’d get to explain it to them properly and come up with believable excuses. My guys… They were better than me. Days passed, weeks… and I sometimes slept with all of them, sometimes only with GC and Paz, sometimes I sneaked into Francis’s bed, sometimes Sariel came to spend the night in the North Tower. And the more time I spent with them, the more I started to believ
e that I didn’t deserve them at all. I had to keep silent. Corri was my pixie, so I knew I could trust her not to tell a soul. She’d carried out her mission brilliantly, and now I wanted her by my side, because she was the only one I could bounce ideas off of. She didn’t like my plan, either.
I need someone who has the guts to see this for what it is and tell me it’s right. The end justifies the means. I need someone who’s stronger than me. Except in this case, strong didn’t actually mean strong. It meant amoral. Lorna.
The mage was in the Library, buried in books. She was studying griffins for her field trip with the Righteous Death Cabal. I sat next to her. I should have been reading about scarabs myself, but I’d been distracted in the past few weeks.
“I heard Mrs. Maat almost didn’t let you go to the Carnelian City,” she snickered.
“Headmaster Colin sorted it out.”
“Wouldn’t you be much happier if everyone knew the truth? No more hiding. Less stress.”
“My father left me with no money. The only thing keeping our dear classmates from shunning me is that everyone still believes I’m the human prophesized to retire him. Imagine finding out I’m a revenant, supernatural like all of them, and I have no chance of standing up to Morningstar.”
“Yeah. You used to be special. Not anymore.” She closed the book she’d been reading, and looked up at me, amusement mixed with wickedness in her deep blue eyes. “I honestly thought the only reason the guys wanted to get into your pants was because you were a normie, and they’d never had normie pussy before.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “And I honestly thought we were past this. I didn’t hook up with Sariel and Francis until after I became a non-normie.”
“You kissed Sariel way before that.”
“It was just a kiss.”
“So it doesn’t count?”
“Count how? You’re losing me, Lorna.”
She sighed, annoyed that I wasn’t in the mood for her games.
“What do you want? You always sit with me when you want something, so spit it out. I don’t have all day.”