Page 2 of Messenger of Death
I wasn’t going to ask her to because that seemed rude and a personal thing. I just wanted to make sure she was okay. I whipped out my phone and checked her glucose monitor. She hadn’t finished her dinner when we all passed out.
“Hey, is using magic like working out?” I asked.
“It can be, why?” Morgana asked.
“Whatever happened crashed Sage’s blood sugar. Her insulin pump is doing what it’s supposed to, but she’s going to need something to eat when she wakes up.”
“Did she give you access to her glucose monitor?” some red-haired man asked. “Because if she didn’t, I can’t decide if that’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard or stalker-level felony, but either way, I want to shake your hand.”
I looked at his hand as if it were diseased because I didn’t know if it was. I didn’t know if he washed his hands every time he went to the bathroom or if he’d been scratching his arse before he entered this room.
“There’s different levels of stalking though,” a dark-haired man said. “Hacking a glucose monitor ishelpfulstalking. You aren’t going through her photos for naked selfies, right? Because that’s creepy.”
“This is Elliot and Petros,” Morgana said. “Otherwise known as Loki and Hermes in their first life. I’ve got snacks for when she wakes.”
Khalid finally started to wake, but Sage was still out. I was worried about them both, which was weird for me because I generally didn’t like people.
“Shit, someone died,” Khalid groaned. “Sage is the original banshee, isn’t she?”
“Sage is so much more than that, but that’s her story. Kira was found beaten to death. She’s a senior and a dragon. They are incredibly strong, and if you don’t disable them right away, they just shift and eat you. She was one of Professor Adamastus’s best students, so that would have been difficult. Her soul would have come to you to guide her to the afterlife. Did you find out what happened?”
“Yes, it was quite jarring, but luckily, I figured it out without making too much of an arse of myself. A lot of it was just instinct. She said she was fighting with another one of the dragons and that’s why she wasn’t at the tavern with everyone else. He wasn’t the one who killed her, though. He was naked with a fairy when Kira left him.”
“Probably Blaize Vossen,” Professor Adamastus said. “He’s dragon royalty. Kira would have been his bodyguard when they graduated. Blaize has a string of conquests across the academy, and it made her job harder because she was supposed to be vetting his bedmates so he didn’t get assassinated. He never let her do her job like he was supposed to. This might not be related to what happened in the trials. Someone could be trying to take out Blaize and needed to get rid of Kira first.”
Whatthe fuckwas going on at this school? I mean, people kept trying to kidnap me, but no one was trying to assassinate my family. We were mostly figureheads and weren’t making changes that affected people’s lives. Most royal families were like that now. They didn’t turn into dragons, but still.
“What did she say, Khalid? She hadn’t graduated yet, but she was close. Getting the jump on a future dragon guard is nearly impossible.”
“She said she was cutting through the courtyard and something felt wrong. She couldn’t hear or see any animals, and she said there are usually a lot of birds singing there. Shewas trying to decide whether she wanted to run or shift when everything went black.
“Kira said she couldn’t see anything and she couldn’tfeelher dragon anymore to shift. Whoever was in the darkness with her seemed to be able to see. Kira said Professor Adamastus teaches us to fight blindfolded and without magic, but there was something about the blackness that was unnatural, and she was never taught about it in her history classes, so she lost the fight.”
“Could that blackness have messed with Lola’s memories?” I asked.
Everyone else might think Ivar, Ari, and Alexios did it, but it just wasn’t logical. Headmaster Mykene and Professor Adamastus looked grim.
“I’m going to have to research because I’ve never heard of this blackness, which means it’s very old. If the familiars have a geas against talking about it, it means someone wanted to prevent it from being reincarnated. There are a lot of gods we found relics for, but don’t know their names. There’s power in names. They tend not to be reincarnated because of that. Whatever this power is, it wasn’t completely erased if it’s back,” Headmaster Mykene said.
“It also might have made a friend,” Professor Adamastus said.
“Take care of Sage and Liam. We need to handle Kira’s death and figure out what ended up at Ouroboros Academy.”
They acted like whatever it was, they didn’t drug it, kidnap it, and bring it here with us.
My head was pounding, I was sweaty and shaking, and I couldn’t remember what happened. That usually happened after an incident with my blood sugar that made my father furious for embarrassing him, but I’d beensocareful.
I cracked open my eyes and realized I was back in my dorm room andeveryonewas in here. I wasn’t thinking straight to even ask what had happened. It was so stupid, but instead of just asking and dealing with it, the first thing I did was burst into tears.
Khalid was on me in seconds. He picked me up and set me back down on his lap. He wrapped his arms around me, and Iknew that whatever happened, he didn’t give a shit how it made him look.
Lucian just rolled his eyes. He handed me a Coke and a bag of jellybeans.
“Food first. Snuggles later.”
I actually needed both. Both were good right now. I couldn’t remember what had happened, but I was guessing it was bad. And based on previous experience, some people were assholes to me after they saw me have a low blood sugar incident, like it was contagious.
“What happened? Was it bad?”
