Year One: Dreamers Read online




  YEAR ONE: DREAMERS

  GRIM REAPER ACADEMY - LEGACIES, BOOK ONE

  - reverse harem romance -

  Copyright © 2020 by Cara Wylde

  Cover by Otilia Jakab

  All rights are reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in book reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real in any way. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Have you read Grim Reaper Academy?

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  Have you read Grim Reaper Academy?

  Legacies is a spin-off series to Grim Reaper Academy, which is a reverse harem bully romance featuring Mila and her four men – Sariel, GC, Pazuzu, and Francis. You can read Legacies without having read the original series first, but you will enjoy it more if you pick up Grim Reaper Academy, too.

  Available in Kindle Unlimited

  Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon AU | Amazon CA

  You thought there was only one Death? Aww, that's sweet...

  There are 22 Grim Reapers in the world, and every two hundred years, Grim Reaper Academy invites a select few to apply. On my eighteenth birthday, I received my letter. I am Mila Lazarov, and I am the only human to attend the prestigious school. To graduate, I will have to survive first. But how am I supposed to compete with mages, angels, demons, fays, vampires, and shifters? No one wants me here, because I don't belong. The queens of the Academy want me dead, and the kings can't decide if they want to kiss me or kill me.

  There's no way I can keep up with Holier-Than-Thou Sariel (cause he’s an archangel, you see), Jerkface-No-1 Pazuzu AKA Paz (cause all demons are major morons), Mr. Bow-To-Me GC Apis (ugh, false gods are the worst), and Francis (no idea what his deal is, he doesn’t talk much). They will eat me alive.

  This is the complete collection that contains the four Grim Reaper Academy books, as well as three exclusive stories you can only find in this set.

  Surviving Year One

  Exclusive Story: Prom Night

  Slaying Year Two

  Saving Year Three

  Exclusive Story: First Time a Harem

  Seizing Year Four

  Exclusive Second Epilogue: Yolanda

  CHAPTER ONE

  The cab dropped me off in front of my brownstone apartment in New York. I paid, got off, and the driver was nice enough to help me retrieve my two large suitcases from the trunk. Seeing how they were bigger than me, he got them up the stairs leading to my door, and I tipped him. He almost didn’t touch the back of his hand to mine, but I insisted. Men tended to be a little too helpful when they found themselves around me, and while sometimes I enjoyed it more, and other times less, I didn’t want to take advantage of anyone. I waited for him to get in the car, then I finally pressed my hand to the screen and went inside, pushing the two proverbial Sisyphus’ stones into the hallway. I almost tripped over a mountain of unopened mail. Humanity had made it this far into the future, and we were still cutting trees instead of moving everything to the virtual world. With a sigh, I took off my shoes, set them neatly on the rack, and picked up the envelopes. I dumped them on the coffee table and meticulously looked for the only one that mattered. It was black, decorated with red filigree on the edges. My name and address were written in gold, and above them there was a logo. The central element – a scythe.

  I looked at the envelope for a minute, wondering whether there was any point in opening it. I knew what it contained. I’d been waiting for it for exactly two hundred years. It was an invitation. An invitation I couldn’t and wouldn’t refuse. It was my destiny. I took my time to gather the rest of the mail in a neat pile, but when I was done, I still didn’t feel like opening the black envelope. So, I left it there and went to take a long, much needed shower.

  I’d been traveling the world for years, with occasional breaks because I didn’t want to lose my quaint apartment in Manhattan. Not that I really had to take care of it, since the bills were retained automatically from my account, and the self-cleaning built-in system did a perfect job of keeping it spotless. I’d spent the past year trekking through Africa, volunteering in Nigeria, cruising on the Nile, and resting in Indian ashrams when I allowed myself to take a short vacation. I didn’t travel for fun, I traveled for research. Now that I knew I was going to be bound to one place for the next three years, I felt relieved. No more cramped airplanes, crowded airports, dirty buses, and old trains. But at the same time, I could feel some anxiety rising to the surface. I’d been free for so long that I was concerned settling down might prove to be more difficult than I anticipated.

  I turned on the shower and waited for the hot water, once again forgetting that those days were long gone. I stepped in front of the mirror and gave myself a long, honest appraisal. Blond hair that reached my waist, sky-blue eyes, skin that was usually pale but now deeply tanned after I’d spent too much time in the merciless sun of Africa. Not a wrinkle on my face. No sore joints, no low energy, no loss of eyesight, no nothing that might have indicated that I was, in fact, old. So old. Given my human nature, I should have been dust by now. No, I wasn’t a vampire, nor a mage who could prolong her life. Fay blood didn’t run through my veins, and my father wasn’t the Devil. I didn’t have wings, nor any kind of powers. I was human. And yet, I didn’t age, and I certainly didn’t die. I had a secret, and only two other people knew about it. One of them wasn’t even in this dimension.

  The bathroom was slowly enveloped by steam. I stepped under the shower, wincing when the water burned my skin. I got used to it quickly, and I reached for the bottle of shampoo. It didn’t smell like I remembered, and when I checked the expiration date, I saw that I should have thrown it away two years before. Hopefully, it still worked. I stayed under the hot spray for an hour, scrubbing my body with care, making sure I got everything that was not from this continent out of my skin pores. When I reemerged, wrapped up in a bath towel, I felt like a new person. I walked over to the coffee table, sat down, and finally opened the envelope.

  I, Yolanda Aleksiev, was invited to apply to the prestigious Grim Reaper Academy. It was the only institution in the world accredited to prepare the future Grim Reapers that would grant humans and supernaturals alike the sweet kiss of death when their time came. There were only twenty-two Grim Reapers in the world, and every two hundred years, the Academy accepted one hundred students. The competition was fierce. Especially since those one hundred students would be selected only after all two hundred and something applicants took a test of wisdom and endurance. I wasn’t nervous, though. I knew I was going to pass the entry test. They wanted me at the Academy. The supernatural world wanted me more than I wanted it. Even if I chan
ged my mind and decided not to apply, they wouldn’t allow it. They would probably send another letter, or even worse – send someone to get me. The whole thing wasn’t worth the fuss.

  “Do I want to be a Grim Reaper?” I whispered. The question I’d been asking myself for years… “Do I even have a choice?” Maybe I did, in the end. Maybe I could attend Grim Reaper Academy, fulfill my duty – which, unbeknownst to them, had nothing to do with the curriculum, – and then simply walk away. With only twenty-two Grim Reaper positions, it was obvious that not everyone who graduated was going to make a career in reaping. I could go work for the Supernatural Council. I could remain at the Academy as a professor or consultant. Or, why not, I could get the fuck out of there, cut all my connections with the supernatural world, come back home, and die in peace.

  I chuckled. “Nah. They will never let me die.”

  I was getting hungry. I grabbed my phone and tried to decide what I wanted to eat. I could have gone shopping and cooked for myself, but it had been an awfully long flight. I could have taken myself out to a romantic restaurant and drank a bottle of champagne on my own, to celebrate the beginning of the end. The end of my freedom.

  It was silly, and a little bit depressing. Every supernatural dreamed of getting this invitation in the mail, and very few saw that dream come true. To attend Grim Reaper Academy was more than a privilege. If the Supernatural Council and the professors decided you were worthy to even take the entry test, it meant you were already someone. You were already more gifted and more blessed than all your peers. And here I was, in my bath towel, scratching my calf with my bare foot, contemplating the possibility of causing a shitstorm by refusing to go.

  I felt the intruder in my house before there was any sound or change in the air to alert me. I folded the letter and placed it back in the envelope.

  “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking,” came a voice from behind me.

  I grinned. “Mila. After all this time, you still haven’t learned a decent person knocks first. Hell! These days, a decent person texts first.”

  She walked around the table, taking in the house. “Love what you did with the place. You saved it!”

  “Yeah. They demolished all the other buildings in the neighborhood, did you see? Built brand new smart houses of steel and that new dark crystal that’s all the rage now. Manhattan isn’t what it used to be. If I want to remember what the world used to look like, I have to go to either Colombia, Italy, or pretty much any country in Africa and Asia, except Qatar and the Emirates.”

  “You talk like an old person.”

  I laughed. “I am an old person, cousin.”

  “I’m older than you, and I’m not a killjoy. I embrace this brave new world. Why can’t you?”

  My smile fell a little. “I don’t know. I guess it has lost its flavor sometime this last century.”

  “Meh. You think too much.” She left her scythe by the window and sat in the other armchair. “Please tell me you have coffee in the house.”

  “I literally just arrived.” I motioned at the suitcases by the door. “The kitchen is empty.”

  “Then let’s go out. Celebrate!” She grabbed the black envelope and waved it.

  I stared at my cousin for a minute. She was, indeed, older than me, yet she still looked like she was twenty-two. She wasn’t human, though. Not anymore. In her third year at Grim Reaper Academy, she’d become a revenant. Not that she wanted to, but she hadn’t had a choice, what with her dad killing her and all. Her hair was still blue, maybe a little longer than I remembered it. I knew she dyed it every month, fighting her blond roots with a vengeance. She was beautiful and radiant. My heart clenched at the thought. Radiant. My stomach rumbled a little, but it might have just been because I was hungry. Still, radiant. That word. It applied to her so well. She was undead, but as long as she was a Grim Reaper, she was granted immunity from Death herself. Yes, Death was a person. I’d met her when I was eleven. She was cool, really, and her twin, Life, was cool, too. But Mila, just like all the other Reapers in her generation, only had three more years left to reap. And once they retired, that immunity was lifted. Then, to be radiant and not literally rot from the inside out, Mila the Revenant would have to pay a horrible, horrible price every few months or so. And that was pretty much where I came in. Or wanted to come in. It was definitely not my business, and a lot of people would try to stop me, but the only reason I was going to attend Grim Reaper Academy was this: to make sure that my cousin, Mila, the only person who’d ever truly cared about me in my miserable life before I started faking immortality, didn’t have to kill again to preserve her youth and radiancy.

  “I wasn’t thinking what you thought I was thinking,” I finally answered her question. “I’m going.”

  She scrunched up her nose. “You don’t seem very excited.”

  I smiled forcefully. “Two centuries, Mila. No one can be excited for that long.”

  “I’m relieved to hear you have no doubts about this. Truly.” And she did let out a loud sigh of relief.

  “That’s why you came to check up on me?”

  “God, no! I want to take you out for a drink, woman! Let’s go before this piece of shit starts glowing again.” She was referring to the blade of her scythe, which glowed red when she was called to reap some poor fellow’s soul. “The stupid goblins discovered some new precious metal in their mountain, and now they’re divided into two factions. One thinks gold is still the cats tits, and the other says this new metal is the future. They fucking started killing each other! And, obviously, they are violent little fuckers, so the Violent Reapers haven’t been able to catch a break in weeks.”

  “No one says the cats tits, Mila.” I couldn’t hold back a laugh. My cousin cursed like a sailor. She’d always had. I went to look for clean clothes.

  Mila grabbed her scythe, leaning on it as she waited for me. “Hey, where’s Corri?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Around.” She was talking about the pixie her father, Valentine Morningstar, had gotten her as a gift. When she became a Grim Reaper, Mila gifted her to me. I was eleven years old then, living with our adoptive parents. I was a lonely kid, and having Corri around was the best. But that had been so, so long ago. As I put on a fresh pair of pants, a tear tumbled down my cheek. Mom and Dad were gone. I’d watched over them as they gave their last breath, making sure the candles burned bright when the Reaper came to cut their string of life. Mom went first. Ilena Lazarov had been a kind woman, albeit meek and of little importance. A Merciful Reaper came for her soul. Stepan Lazarov followed soon after. He couldn’t outlive her for more than half a year. Wide awake by his deathbed, listening to his labored breath, my knees shook at the thought that Mila herself would come to reap his soul. But Mila was a Violent Reaper, and she was summoned to war zones and dark alleys where scumbags beat beggars, and kids no older than twenty overdosed. My logic told me Mila would never be the one to reap Dad’s soul, but I was young back then. I still believed in some sort of poetic justice, and even though Stepan Lazarov had been an okay father to me, I knew what he’d done to Mila when she was a child. A Righteous Reaper came. Lorna Chiaramonte. After she did her job, we drank a bottle of wine in Dad’s memory and played catch-up until dawn.

  “What do you mean around?” Mila sounded alarmed. Her raised voice snapped me out of my reverie. “Yoli, tell me she’s not in the Blank.”

  “God, Mila! No! I’d never send Corri to the Blank. She must be around somewhere.”

  “She should be with you at all times. She’s a pixie. You can’t just set her free. You know she doesn’t want that.”

  “I didn’t free her.” I rolled my eyes. Two centuries had passed, and if many things had changed in the human world, the supernatural world was still obsessed with tradition. Pixies were expensive slaves only the wealthiest could afford. When they got bored of them or simply didn’t need them for a few days, they would send the tiny, winged creatures to the Blank,
which was this dark nothingness outside of space and time where pixies waited in cages until they were needed again. “I gave her a job, and since she’s not here, I’m guessing she’s busy doing it.” I checked the time. “It’s early. She’ll probably be back at six.”

  “At six?” Mila laughed. “What is this? A nine-to-five?”

  “Kind of,” I smiled. “I think she has longer shifts, though.”

  “What the fuck? What did you ask her to do?”

  “Assist a certain neurosurgeon. Don’t worry, he doesn’t know about her and can’t see her. But she’s his shadow, using a little magic here and there to make sure the surgeries go smoothly.”

  Mila studied me for a minute. I buttoned up my shirt and started brushing my hair.

  “Who’s this guy, then? He’s not just a random neurosurgeon, is he?”

  “We dated last year. But you know me. I don’t do relationships. His work is important. He saves a lot of lives. So, I got Corri to look after him and his patients. Figured she’d be more useful in a hospital than traveling the world aimlessly.”

  “You’re not traveling aimlessly.”

  I shrugged. I put a little rose lipstick on my lips, and I was ready to go. I’d never been a fan of makeup, and I didn’t need it anyway.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Fuck.” Mila scratched the back of her head, ruffling her blue hair. “You tell me. I know the bad parts of New York, not the good ones.”

  I laughed. I grabbed the car keys and headed out the door. Mila followed me. Even though she was wearing her dark cloak and held a scythe that was taller than her, no one could see these details when they passed her on the street. Magic. Humans could only see Grim Reapers when they were between life and death. And supernaturals could see them only if the Grim Reapers wanted to. These Reapers… their job came with a lot of benefits. Immunity from Death also meant immunity from any kind of disease. How was that for a medical plan?

 

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