Initiated

by Steffanie Holmes

  At least that got them both out of my presence for a week. I didn’t know how much longer I could deal with Trey’s penetrating gaze and Quinn’s easy smile and the tension that stretched between us.

  This year, Ayaz had opted to stay behind, which was why I now sat across from him on his Scandinavian sofa, about to get a crash course in Parris’ occult practices.

  “Are you sure you’re okay with this? That book can be pretty dark.”

  “I’ve already looked at it, remember?” I tapped my knees. “Bring it. I’m not afraid of paper cuts.”

  Ayaz frowned. “Are you going to take this seriously?”

  “As serious as this coffee,” I said, lifting the tiny cup of Turkish coffee to my lips.

  “I don’t have to help you with this, you know. I could be enjoying a party in the woods with undead girls who fuck like they have no future instead of sitting here trying to help you on your futile quest for freedom.”

  “This is your freedom, too,” I pointed out.

  Ayaz rolled his eyes. “I’ve been through all this before. This deity has controlled the most powerful people in the world for the last five hundred years. But sure, we’re going to figure out how to defeat it and bring a bunch of Edimmu back to life in just a few months.”

  “Of course we won’t with that attitude.” I pounded my fist on the table. “Bring on the book.”

  Ayaz went to the bathroom, returning a few moments later with the book. I noticed he’d removed all the scholarship students files he’d kept hidden inside it. “It’s the one hiding place the cleaning staff doesn’t look,” he said. “None of them want to touch anything in a guy’s bathroom. We have to clean them ourselves. The faculty thinks it teaches us personal responsibility.”

  “Oh, sure. Because cleaning a bathroom is totally one of life’s horrific hardships. What’s this binding?” I ran my fingers over the rough cover. “It feels like leather, but, like, not the stuff used to make jackets—”

  “It is leather, made from skin,” Ayaz said. “Human skin.”

  I jerked my hand back. “Is there anything at this school that isn’t horrifying and gross? Any idea whose skin it is?”

  “Parris, of course. He had his disciples make the binding from his skin after he died. Apparently, it imbues the spells inside with additional potency.” Ayaz opened the cover and flipped through the pages.

  “How did you come into possession of Parris’ diary, anyway?”

  “It’s called a grimoire. It’s less of a diary and more of a… spellbook, for want of a better term. It contains magic rites and sigils Parris worked on, as well as notes about some of the rituals his group performed – those are in a diary format. I got it from Trey’s dad.”

  “Why would Trey’s dad give this to you?”

  “That’s a long story.” Ayaz opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of paper and pens. “In my home country, parents with enough money often pay to send their children to receive their schooling in the West – usually in the United Kingdom but sometimes in America, Australia, or New Zealand. My father is a low-level diplomat, and there had been some political turmoil in Turkey they didn’t want me mixed up in. My family had some business dealings with the Bloombergs, and they wanted to solidify their ties with the US. Vincent wanted a way into the oil and shipping wealth of our country during a time the US was staging attacks on Turkey in the First Gulf War. To improve his reputation he offered to have me stay with his family and to sponsor my admission into Miskatonic.” A darkness passed over Ayaz’s face. “My parents were only too happy to leave me in his care.”

  “Your parents just let you live with a stranger who’d publicly admitted prejudice against your faith?”

  “It’s not at all uncommon.” Ayaz brushed it aside, but the darkness in his eyes told me he wasn’t as cool with it as he pretended to be. “If they refused to do business with Islamophobes, they’d never do business at all. Besides, I’m not a Muslim any longer. There’s nothing like being raised from the dead into a living nightmare to make you lose your faith in Allah. My parents trusted Vincent because he was rich and powerful, and he could give me a better life.”

  “Was this before or after the fire?”

  “Before. I lived with the Bloombergs since I was ten years old. Vincent took me under his wing. It started out as political posturing for him – a way for him to stand up to people on the left who opposed him and say, ‘Oh, I’m not a racist or an Islamophobe. I’m a good person. Look, I’m lifting this poor Middle Eastern kid up from the gutter.’ When really, I was a middle-class kid maneuvered into a strange country to further two families' political aims. But after a while, I fancied Vincent really did like my company. Not as much as Wilhem – that boy could do no wrong in his eyes. But he saw something in me he didn’t see in Trey. Or maybe, he saw too much of himself in Trey, and he didn’t like that. I took an interest in the occult and the Eldritch Club, and so Vincent gave me this book my first year at Miskatonic. I never understood its significance until after the fire.”

  “If Trey’s so desperate to please his father, then why doesn’t he hate you?”

  “Who’s to say he doesn’t?” Ayaz shrugged. “Trey’s always been good to me, but for all I know it’s a calculation – a chess move in the game he plays against his father.”

  Ayaz’s eyes fluttered closed, his impossibly-long lashes tangling together as his mind traveled to some other place and time. I caught a whiff of him – that incense and opium scent of forbidden pleasure – and my lips burned with memories of our kiss. The kiss he’d taken because he’d felt left out. Because somewhere inside he was still that ten-year-old boy in a big, strange house, wondering why he’d been abandoned by the people who were supposed to love him.

  But I couldn’t square away that glimpse of him with the guy I’d caught fucking Ms. West in an empty classroom. Ayaz was an enigma to me. More than anything I wanted to open him up and lay him bare.

  “Or maybe because of his loneliness, he needed a friend more than he needed someone else to loathe?” I ventured.

  Ayaz snorted. “No. He saw that his father liked me, and he thought if he befriended me then whatever magic I exerted over Vincent would rub off on him, too. Enough questions.” Ayaz’s eyes sprung open. Whatever memories that had assailed him were firmly shut away in a box again. He flattened out the book. “We need to get to work.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “We have two separate problems – getting rid of the god and bringing the edimmu back to life. The first has to be our priority, so anything that could give us a clue on how to destroy the god, or how to banish it back to its own dimension. Failing that, if we could figure out how Parris summoned and trapped it in the first place. Most magic is a kind of karmic balancing act, so performing the same spell backward is often enough to undo its effects.”

  “So all this stuff, spells and rituals and summoning, it’s all real?”

  “You’ve had your brush with the Great Old God. What do you think?” Ayaz fingered the edge of the book. I nodded. When he put it like that, I couldn’t deny what I’d felt that night, what I still felt every time I closed my eyes. “As far as I can tell, there’s no exact spell in here that correlates to, ‘here’s how to summon a Great Old God,’ but Parris has written about his research. It would help if you learned Medieval Latin.”

  “Oh sure, I’ve already got a full academic load, a leading role in the school production, and a Great Old God on my case, but whatever. I’ll learn Medieval Latin.”

  “It’s fine.” Ayaz tossed another book across the table to me. “This is an occult book from the library. It’s written by E. Eldridge, one of Parris’ students, and it’s been translated into English.”

  “How do you know Medieval Latin?”

  “I’ve been at this school twenty years,” he said. “Trey spends his time trying to stay at the top in some vain hope he’ll win his father’s approval. Quinn’s fucked his way through the entire student body. I
learn things.”

  “What things have you learned, apart from Medieval Latin?”

  “Theoretical physics. A few other dead languages. Advanced alchemy.”

  “You’re taking that stupid alchemy class?”

  “Not stupid.” Ayaz pointed to a squiggly shape on the page in front of me. “I can tell you what that means.”

  “Okay, Nostradamus, what is it? It looks like someone testing their pen to see if it’s out of ink.”

  “It’s a sigil. I told you how in magic these are considered to be pictorial signatures – like how a demon might write its own name. They can also be the map of a ritual or directions to a place of power. Or they can trap power. Parris wrote sigils like these all over the walls in the caves and cairns on the boundaries of the school. They are what keep us edimmu trapped inside. They form an invisible barrier we can’t cross. You’ll see them everywhere once you know what you’re looking for.”

  “There was one carved into that rock you and Trey moved,” I recalled.

  “Exactly. That sigil is part of the god’s prison.” Ayaz traced a sigil on the page of his book. “See this? It’s the sigil of the demon Bael. This is Halphas, and here’s Asmodeus. By drawing these sigils, not only can the magician summon a demon, he or she can also control it. But Parris wasn’t interested in demons. He wanted more power than a demon could offer him. I think what happened is that he found the sigil that drew this god out of another dimension, only he had no control over it. He couldn’t put the god back in the box.”

  “So he trapped it here?”

  “Exactly. The void beneath the gymnasium is the god’s prison. And I think everything the god does – all the power he feeds the members of the Eldritch Club, all the sacrifices he demands – is an attempt to weaken Parris’ protections. If that god escapes—” Ayaz shuddered.

  “But that’s not going to happen, right? That god has been trapped down there at least five centuries. Surely it would have escaped by now if it could.”

  “Except that twenty years ago it started a fire that killed 245 souls,” Ayaz said. “And then it resurrected those same people to live in a time-locked prison in order to feed it more power. I can’t help but think it’s gearing up to make a move. Remember, the god doesn’t measure time the way we do. For it, twenty years isn’t even the blink of an eye.”

  “When you put it like that…” I turned the page in my book, staring down at more images of sigils and other occult symbols. “You’d think Parris would have just left a note explaining what he did, to make it easy for his disciples to figure out what he couldn’t.”

  “It’s not that easy. He couldn’t write down the sigil. Even that might have given the creature too much power. And remember, Parris wasn’t prone to altruism. He was more concerned with obtaining as much power as possible from the trapped god than with sending it back. But somewhere in this book, he’s given us clues, I’m sure of it.”

  “Uh-huh.” I turned another page. “And in the twenty years since you’ve been searching for this sigil, what have you uncovered so far?”

  Ayaz shook his head. “Absolutely nothing.”

  I glared at him.

  “What? I had to teach myself Medieval Latin. Besides, I never thought I had a deadline before.”

  “Right.” I cracked the spine on the book as I flipped back to the beginning. “We’re better get studying, then.”

  Chapter Eight

  My back pressed against cool, pulsing stone, frozen in place as I watched Dante tattooing tentacles over my mother’s naked breasts. As he finished each one they came to life and slithered over her skin, wrapping around her limbs and squeezing tight while she writhed in ecstasy. I cried out and he turned around to look at me. His eyes reflected orange flames and his mouth was a black hole hanging open, disgorging masticated stars.

  My alarm rang, startling me out of another horrific nightmare. I slammed my hand into the annoying buzz, swatting Loretta’s ancient clock off the chair beside my bed. It crashed against the wall and clattered to the floor, the glass face shattering and mechanical innards bouncing across the stones. The rats in the walls skittered away from the noise.

  Oh yay. The first day of the second quarter is already off to a great start.

  I was back in my own dorm room, down in the dungeon with the damp and the rats. Quinn and Ayaz had “borrowed” (read, stolen) some tools from the maintenance shed and installed two new locks and a deadbolt on my door. The locks they’d cut off a couple of disused classrooms. It made me feel a little safer – it was probably enough to stop John Hyde-Jones, but not enough to hold back the god’s hate-filled visions from my dreams.

  I sat up in bed, wiping sweat from my forehead with the corner of my sheet. Hanging from the doorknob of my wooden closet was my Derleth uniform – knee-length red-and-black tartan skirt, white shirt, black blazer edged with red piping, and the black-and-red striped tie. My palms itched as I slid out of bed and stood in front of it, running a finger over the embroidered star on the school crest.

  How can I put this on and pretend everything’s normal when there’s a demon beneath the school and a clock ticking down to my death?

  Scritch-scritch. The rat claws churned, as if sending me a reply.

  I pressed my finger into the scar on my wrist. My mother’s voice rang in my ears, clear and golden. You can do anything, my love.

  Like she’d know. She’d never been to a boarding school of the dead.

  After everything I saw last week, it seemed impossible I was about to go back to classes and pretend everything was fine. But if it would protect Greg and Andre, then it was worth it.

  Besides, I had a few plans of my own. If Courtney Haynes thought she was going to continue to torment me and my friends, she had another thing coming.

  While spending the week with Ayaz, the knowledge of just what the Miskatonic students had done to the sacrifices gnawed away at me. The monarchs of this school had tormented four students a year, every year for twenty years, until the students wanted to die. Until they were so broken they wanted to be sacrificed to the god. And while it seemed like Trey and Ayaz and Quinn at least had some kind of conscience about it, Courtney and her ilk took pleasure in their task.

  I may be trying to give them their lives back, but that didn’t mean they didn’t deserve to pay for their crimes. I couldn’t just let Courtney and Tillie and the others walk out into the world as they were – they would continue the fine traditions they’d started at Derleth Academy, blazing a path of torture across the world without remorse. I needed to make them face the monsters they’d become.

  It was time they experienced a little torture themselves, courtesy of Hazel Waite, the gutter whore turned newest Eldritch Club recruit.

  Revenge ideas stirred in my head, sending excited jolts through my body. I didn’t know when or how yet, but I knew I’d make every last student of Miskatonic Prep pay for what they’d done, starting with Courtney and the other monarchs. I just didn’t know how the three Kings fit into my plans. They had been horrible to me and to my friends. But when I thought of Quinn’s scream when Trey threw that itching powder into his eyes, or Ayaz’s hand brushing mine when he handed me a coffee and my veins caught alight, or my lips burning with the ghosts of their kisses, How do I choose between what they were – my bullies – and what they are to me now?

  I guess it depends what they do next, whether they prove to me – to us – that we can trust them.

  I pulled on the uniform, struggling to get the tie straight. I always used to copy Loretta while she did hers, but she wasn’t here anymore. I twisted it into a mockery of a knot, grabbed my battered bookbag, and pulled the door open.

  Here goes nothing.

  Greg and Andre met me in the hallway. Andre had his sleeves rolled up, showing off his Eldritch Club tattoo. Greg’s eyes were ringed with red – I imagined that like me he was still fending off the Great Old God in his dreams.

  He greeted me with one of his customary warm hugs.
“Hey, honey. We ready for this?”

  “We’re gonna knock ‘em dead,” I said without a hint of irony, flashing him my own not-quite-healed tattoo. “Things are going to be different this quarter.”

  The three of us linked arms and took the stairs together. Unlike the sweeping marble staircases throughout the rest of the buildings, our staircase was narrow and metal, so it was a bit cramped, especially when Andre tried to squeeze his enormous shoulders around the corner.

  We emerged on the dorm floor. Students fluttered between their rooms, tossing books at each other, laughing and talking, and acting like totally normal teens who weren’t at all under the power of a malevolent cosmic entity. Girls compared lipstick colors as they strutted down the hall, tartan skirts rolled up as high as they dared.

  All these students are dead.

  They looked so normal, but it was all a show, a farce designed specifically to break us. I shivered. Greg squeezed my hand. He thought I was afraid because of Courtney.

  If only you knew, Greg. I’d give anything to go back to my worst nightmare being Courtney fucking Haynes.

  Ayaz came down the staircase at the end of the hall. A couple of girls who were walking past stopped in their tracks, their jaw practically hitting the floor at the sight of the monarch in his crisp white shirt and black dress slacks. It was kind of gross, but also… I got it. Ayaz was hot as hell, with his dark hair and smoldering eyes and those cheekbones that could cut glass…

  I may have been doing a bit of drooling myself.

  Try to remember, he’s sleeping with the headmistress. Or, as she should be known, the Deadmistress.