17. Midnight #2
Lex pushes me onto her bed and nudges Bastien into an armchair, and then she potters out into the communal kitchen, banging cupboards and doors and flicking the kettle on.
She returns with some fruit bowls and three cups of deep red tea that looks a little too much like blood for my comfort.
“Drink it, it will make you feel better,” she says as she hands it to me and I’m unable to hide my grimace.
Bastien behaves like a teenage boy and happily scoffs his fruit and guzzles the tea.
“So?” Lex says.
I sigh and lean back on her bed. “It’s a long story. But we were together for a couple of years. Went through a lot of shit together. She was there when my parents died. Anyway. She got sick, and she was the only family I had left. So I sold my soul to heal her.”
Bastien leans back in the armchair. “That sounds very benign for how pissed you were.”
“Yeah, well, after she was healed, I walked in on… She cheated on me.”
Lex winces.
Bastien’s forehead creases. “I’m sorry.”
I shrug. “It was a long time ago. So long that my time is running out. Finis really is my last chance.”
Lex pulls some journals out of her suitcase. “These are my sister’s study notes from when she was here. They’re ours now. This is going to be a tough year and I don’t want to do it alone.”
“That’s very generous,” I say, and she beams at me. “What’s your story? I said in the Hall of Unfinished Business if we made it through, I wanted to know what your stories were. What better time than now?”
She sighs.
“Is it to do with your sister?” Bastien asks.
Lex flinches and slumps against the wall. “I made a mistake.”
“We’ve all made mistakes.”
“Not like this.” Her braids fall in front of her face as she rests her head in her hands.
“I fucked up, made a deal with a lesser demon. My sister was the pride of our family. She’d made it through Finis.”
She stalls out, sits up and stares out the window. Bastien and I share a look, but he shakes his head no, so we leave the silence, and wait for her to be ready to tell us.
A moth flutters against the window, trying to reach the light in here.
“The night I was due to have my soul reaped, my sister was with me. She’d come back from some job she was on. I confessed what I’d done, and she was understandably furious.”
She turns to us, two streaks glisten down her cheeks.
Bastien gets up, moves to the bed and slides his arm around her, and then uses his other one to tug me in. He squeezes until we’re all laughing and collapse on her bed.
My head rests on Lex’s stomach. Hers on Bastien’s chest.
“When the demon arrived to take me, my sister intervened. The demon took her soul instead of mine. I still don’t know why. I don’t understand what happened that night.”
“And that’s why you want to learn the necromantic languages?” I ask.
She nods, her braids rustling against her duvet. “I have to know why. She had such a bright future. And the demon took her so fast, I didn’t get a chance to speak to her... to tell her to stop…”
We’re silent for a while. Lex’s truth lingering cold and palpable in the room.
“My story isn’t much better,” Bastien finally says, sitting up. The three of us reposition ourselves and get comfortable.
This time Bastien goes out to make tea. When he returns, it’s Lex who pushes him to talk.
“What happened to you?” she says, as he hands her a cuppa and three biscuits.
Bastien sits back in his armchair and picks at his leg bandage. “Anyone know the first rule of resurrection?”
Lex shrugs, unbothered. “Not a class I’ll be taking.”
“Don’t resurrect your family,” I say, something I’ve heard from some reapers who ended up dispatched to deal with wayward family pissed at the loss of their loved one.
“I had an older sister, too. She was a fair bit older than me. She, umm… she died.”
Lex’s face falls.
“It was natural. She had a dicky heart, she was never going to live a long life, but she was talented too, successful. Anyway, it broke my parents when she died. They disengaged. Became depressed.”
His words make my ribs ache, filled with longing and regret, and the kind of yearning for something more, something unobtainable you only find buried in the coils of grief.
“I was young and stupid.”
“Weren’t we all? That might be the one thing we all share,” I say.
Lex nods, and Bastien gives us a weak smile.
“I thought magic would be easy to control. Ora City is the gateway, right? How hard can it be?”
“Oh gods, what did you do?” Lex winces.
“Stole a resurrection text and figured I’d give it a go. If I could bring her back, even temporarily for my parents, I reasoned that they’d see she was okay and in a better place.”
Lex’s mouth hangs open. “You resurrected her?”
Bastien’s jaw hardened. “I resurrected her badly. I didn’t contain her, and I had no idea you weren’t supposed to resurrect your own family.
I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. She killed our parents.
I lost part of my sight.” He points to the scar running from above his brow, through his eye and down his cheek.
“So you’re here to learn how to resurrect properly,” I ask.
He nods, though he can’t quite bring himself to look at us. “I never want to make the same mistake again.”
Three different pasts. Three mistakes. All of them bringing us to Finis.
I wonder how many students are here because of their past mistakes. Does the campus collect them?
“We’re going to rectify them all,” Lex says.
And for the first time since being here, I think I believe it. Until I remember what I promised…
What I have to do tonight.
“I’m going to head out for a walk, guys,” I say and get up, my scythe pressing against my hip and the whisper of my name in the wind.