Page 1 of Messenger of Death (Ouroboros Academy #2)
T he last thing I remembered was fighting throwing up my dinner as Liam swaggered towards Sage to put his nasty mouth all over her.
She started screaming, and I thought she was just coming to her senses, that she was going to allow the miscreant to kiss her, but the entire pub started losing their minds and then everything went blank.
I woke up in a dorm room, and it wasn’t mine because there were three beds and a cat in here. I wouldn’t mind a cat at all. I respected cats. If you touched them when they didn’t want it, they drew blood. People got mad if you did that as a human. I’d share a room with a cat before I had roommates.
I groaned and sat up. Sage was in one bed, and the rest of us had been spread out. Whose idea was it to put me on the loveseat and give Liam a bed? We were the same height, but I outranked him.
“What is the meaning of this?” I demanded.
I wasn’t alone. Sage’s roommate Morgana was here along with two blokes I could already tell were going to annoy me, Headmaster Mykene, and an absolutely massive man—I couldn’t tell if he was a student or a teacher.
That was tricky because, apparently, reincarnations stopped aging after a point.
I didn’t like not being able to get reads on people from looking at them.
“A student is dead,” Headmaster Mykene said grimly.
“Well, why are you in here instead of out there catching the murderer?”
She looked at me as if I were a complete moron, and I didn’t like it. I was always the smartest person in the room. I was just a little out of my element because I thought all of this was fiction before.
“Khalid is one of two death gods here right now. The other is a particular kind of death god, and Kira didn’t go to her.
The afterlife isn’t what everyone thinks.
Different cultures all came up with their own thing, but you don’t so much end up in a good place or a bad place as much as getting reincarnated as reward or punishment.
The nearest death god helps souls go to the place they will wait until the Fates spin them a new thread.
“Khalid already knows who he is and is at least smart enough to know what Sage’s scream meant. With everything that happened at the entrance exam, I’m hoping he’ll talk to the soul he’s guiding and find out who did this.”
“I don’t know what her scream meant, but Khalid is brilliant and level-headed. Why did we all pass out? I don’t give a shit about Liam; I’m asking for myself, Khalid, and Sage.”
“You’re going to have to give a shit about Liam because you’re all connected, or you wouldn’t have passed out when Sage did.”
Speak of the devil. Liam bolted awake with that stupid switchblade yelling about Sage and stabbed the massive man who was in the room with us in the thigh. He didn’t even flinch and thumped Liam on the head, which was immensely satisfying. Liam was out again, which was honestly how I preferred him.
“Hey, if I give you my blood to heal you and some money, can you punch him in the head every time he wakes up so I don’t have to listen to him?” I asked.
He just glowered at me. There were some people I was never going to fuck with, and I already knew this man was one of them.
“I’ve had worse. I’m the reincarnation of Ares, and I teach you idiots how to defend yourselves. I don’t want your blood because I have no desire to lust after a student, even if it’s temporary. I’m Professor Adamastus.”
Yeah, he said that, but he was looking right at Morgana, so he was clearly already lusting after a student. I filed that away for later just in case I needed it.
“I knew I should have taken that knife away,” Headmaster Mykene sighed.
“He’ll need it to defend himself,” Professor Adamastus said. “He was just disoriented. Honestly, I expected to knock that one out for biting,” he said, pointing at me.
Rude. Why did everyone think I was going to go around putting my mouth on people when I didn’t know their bathing habits?
I’d never let myself get so hungry that I bit someone without their consent again, either.
I was particular about people touching me without mine, so I wasn’t going to bite someone without theirs.
“When will they wake, and why did Sage pass out?”
“They will wake in their own time. Sage just confirmed who she is. I had my guesses, but this confirms it. And no, I’m not telling you before she figures it out.”
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 is helpful stalking. 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.”
What the fuck was 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. She was trying to decide whether she wanted to run or shift when everything went black.
“Kira said she couldn’t see anything and she couldn’t feel her 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.