Andre tried his pen again. This time it worked. He handed me his paper.
“This is Sadie. She came here as a scholarship student nineteen years ago. They imprisoned her here.”
My stomach turned. Sadie was a scholarship student. So why was she down here in this hellhole, instead of part of the student body…
And then I saw.
I glanced around the room at the rest of the maintenance staff. The tough conditions had aged some of them prematurely, but they were all clearly young people. Many looked to be African American, but I saw other ethnicities, too – Hispanic, Indian, Middle Eastern…
They’re all scholarship students.
And then I remembered where I’d seen Sadie before. She had a file in Parris’ book, a picture with a slash through it – she had looked so different then – bright and full of hope.
This is what the faculty and alumni do with the sacrifices who don’t fit with their worldview. This is why they deliberately choose orphans from poor neighborhoods and ethnic communities, so they can reinforce this idea that in life there are masters and servants.
Bile rose in my throat. Just last night I’d thought that I’d come to terms with what Trey, Quinn, and Ayaz had been a part of, but that was before Andre opened my eyes to the darkest secret of Miskatonic Prep. All these people down here had been bullied by them over the years, and now they were slaves.
This was sick.
Sadie moved her hands in a series of quick signs and Andre scribbled down another note. “She says that the Kings took her to a dark cave under the school and lowered her into a dark hole where something attacked her. She hasn’t aged since. She can’t leave the school grounds. She can’t escape, and every day she has to cook and clean for the students who did this to her. Hazel, what’s going on?”
“What’s going on is—” but I couldn’t say any more. The words dried on my tongue. I couldn’t break the agreement I’d made.
Instead, I turned to Sadie, anger surging inside me for what had been done to them. How could they? How could Trey and Quinn and Ayaz and all the others swan around upstairs while this injustice went on? Why did it take them twenty years to finally try to stop this?
There were so many people down here. They could outnumber the students, overwhelm the faculty. They could have done something about this years ago, so why hadn’t they? What did Ms. West and the Eldritch Club have over them? “Why do you meekly follow what the faculty wants?” I demanded, struggling to contain my rage. ”Why don’t you try to warn others so they could spare themselves the same fate?”
Staring at me with grave defiance, Sadie opened her mouth. I gasped as she revealed the ugly scar and frightful stub where her tongue should have been.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I gulped back my revulsion at the barbaric wound. “Who did that to you?”
But I didn’t need to ask. I knew.
Sadie signed frantically at Andre. His hand whirled as he signed his reply. They signed so fast that even if I had known the language, I couldn’t have followed them. Finally, Sadie stepped back, folding her arms. She swept her accusing gaze over my body.
“You’re right,” I told her. “There’s something at this school that isn’t of this world. I’ve seen it. But I’m beginning to understand that it’s not the true evil here.”
She nodded.
“We’re going to destroy the people that did this,” I said, pointing to Andre and I. “Once and for all. We’re going to find a way to give each and every one of you your life back. Real life, not this wretched servitude.”
Sadie’s eyes widened. She shoved me hard in the chest. I stumbled back against the conveyor belt. “What was that for?” I demanded, but then I heard it. An old-fashioned bell tinkling. A Hispanic girl rushed through the room with the bell in her hands, sprinting towards the washroom with it.
A signal of some sort? Or a warning?
Beckoning us to follow her, Sadie disappeared behind the steamer. In the corner of the room was a low, narrow door. Sadie yanked it open, revealing a tiny platform and a rope pulley and a wooden stake to jam the brake. An old-fashioned dumbwaiter. She leaned inside, grabbed Andre’s collar, and pressed her lips to his in a brief, searing kiss before pulling away and slamming the door.
Dayum, Andre. He had been busy this quarter.
Inside, it was pitch black and barely small enough for us both to fit on the platform. “I should have guessed you had a girl,” I whispered to Andre, squeezing his hand. “Now I know how you managed to get that key for me.”
He didn’t reply, of course, but he did squeeze my fingers back.
A cramp shot up my leg – an old sting from my burn scar. But I didn’t dare shift. Neither of us made a move for the winch. I didn’t want the sound of the dumbwaiter to give us away. And also, I wanted to hear what was happening outside.
“What’s going on down here?” a harsh voice demanded. I recognized Professor Atwood. “Why are you away from your station? It’s not your break time for another hour.”
Of course, there was no reply.
“Two students are missing.” Atwood’s voice moved closer to us. “They didn’t show up in homeroom. They cannot find their way down here. I want three of you to stand guard on the staircases, turn anyone back you see. If you find the students, you are to restrain them and wait for me.”
The door rattled as someone tugged on the handle. I grabbed the bolt and braced my foot against the frame, holding the door shut.
“Quick,” I whispered. “Pull us up.”
Andre grunted as he yanked on the chain. I winced as the dumbwaiter creaked and the chain scraped against the pulley. We jerked off the ground. Andre yanked again. Another jerk and we sailed upward.
“What’s that noise?” the voice demanded. “Is someone in the dumbwaiter?”
A thin shaft of light appeared along the edge beside our feet as Andre gave the rope another jerk. I caught a glimpse of Professor Atwood’s cruel eyes before he disappeared below the edge of the platform.
It’s dark in here. He couldn’t have seen you.
The dumbwaiter shuddered as we reached the top of the shaft. Andre shoved the brake into place. We pressed all over the platform and walls, searching for some way to exit the shaft. Finally, I found a small handle in the lower right corner. I lifted it and the door popped open. It was so small I had to get down on my knees to climb out. Andre had to angle his shoulders diagonally to squeeze through.
I scrambled to my feet, grabbing Andre’s arm. We were standing in a narrow corridor of bare, undressed stone, flanked with locked doors, a glass window in each one. My boots scuffed a dirt floor. The air was so cold our breath came out as puffs of steam.
I peered into one of the windows, but a layer of ice obscured the glass. All I could make out was a couple of shelves, upon which sat long containers like meat lockers. Cold smoke curled under the door.
“Is that… dry ice?” I asked. Andre nodded.
“I think I know what’s behind these doors.” I shuddered and grabbed Andre’s hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
Our feet pounded down the hall as the dumbwaiter groaned and cranked behind us. Professor Atwood yelled something down the corridor, but like fuck we were stopping for him. We rounded a corner and crashed into another Hispanic girl, wearing the uniform of the maintenance staff.
She grabbed my arm and dragged me into a dark corner, pushing us into a small tunnel, just as Atwood came around the corner. “Where did they go?” he demanded. “Did they look in the freezers?”
The girl, of course, didn’t answer, and we didn’t stick around to find out what Atwood did next. We followed the narrow tunnel down, down, down, until we finally emerged into the sunlight, crawling out from a small warren hidden beneath a towering oak near the tennis courts.
I threw my arms around Andre, trying to force my heart rate back to normal. “Fuck. Fuck.”
He nodded, his own breath coming out in ragged gasps.
&nb
sp; I pulled away, for the first time in a long while taking a hard look at my friend. In the set of his jaw and the kindness in his eyes, I saw the risks he’d been taking all quarter, the time he’d spent learning the sign language Sadie and the other maintenance staff used to communicate, the truths about Derleth Academy he’d started to put together for himself.
And I saw something else. Strength. Defiance. Love. Exactly what we needed to win this. I wrapped my arms around him and dared a smile. “Congratulations, Lothario. I wish I could tell you more right now, but I can’t. What I can say is that you might have just discovered a way we can help your friend Sadie and everyone else at this godforsaken school.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
I stood outside Ayaz’s door, my hands in fists at my side, my blood practically boiling. I’d trusted them. I’d fucking trusted them and they hadn’t told me the whole truth.
As Andre and I snuck back into the school and made our excuses to the teachers, feigning a make-out session in the quad that got out of hand (I was the gutter whore, so that was easy for them to believe) I turned over what I should do next. My palms burned – I knew what I wanted to do. We walked into the atrium and two of the trash cans caught fire.
What I wanted was to burn the whole fucking place down. But they’d done that once before. Miskatonic Prep wouldn’t stay dead.
Andre placed a hand on my shoulder. His steady eyes calmed me, brought me back to center. I had to focus on what I’d set out to do – free my friends, free the edimmu. Although now I wasn’t doing it for the monarchs but for all the scholarship students who’d come before me, the voiceless who deserved a voice.
The mission hadn’t changed. That meant I had to keep up my friendship with the Kings, even though the thought of seeing them made me sick. And that brought me back to Ayaz’s closed door. Behind it were the three guys who flipped my life upside down and shown me that nothing was what it seemed. Now I had to throw myself in there like Daniel in the Lion’s Den and pretend everything was fine, because I needed them if I was going to make this happen.
Would that some angel would take pity on me and wire the lion’s jaws shut. Or maybe I’d just punch them. I hadn’t decided.
I sucked in a breath and knocked.
“You think you’ve found Ms. West’s laboratory?” Trey glanced up at me from his spot on the designer sofa, his icy eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“Yep.” I pretended to toss my hair over my shoulder and struck a classic Courtney pose. My jaw clenched, but I managed to turn it up into what might’ve passed for a smile. “Frankly, I’m disappointed you’ve been here twenty years and never noticed it before. It’s so obvious.”
Quinn shuddered. “Don’t do that, Hazy. You’re giving me flashbacks.”
“So is it actually obvious?” Ayaz was on his hands and knees, hunting through one of the compartments under his bed. He pulled up a series of plans and maps.
I snorted. “Maybe? It’s big, and it’s around the main school buildings, but I’m not sure exactly where it was because we accessed it from a rickety dumbwaiter from the laundry. There weren’t any windows inside and it was freezing cold, so I believe it’s underground.”
Ayaz dropped his maps on the coffee table. He tried to brush his hand against mine, but I jerked away. I sifted through the stack and unrolled one that gave a three-dimensional cutaway of the dormitory building, showing details of underground servants quarters and storage rooms. “It’s around here, but… this isn’t accurate. None of these spaces have a curved roof.”
“You mean like an icehouse?” Ayaz asked.
“A what?”
“Some old houses would have a cold room or icehouse. Ice would be chipped from freshwater sources and shipped around the country, where it would be packed in special ice houses along with insulation like straw. For Parris to have one up here, the ice would have to be shipped from the nearest freshwater lake, which is a good hundred miles away. It would have been a real talking point among his circle of friends.” Ayaz swept his eyes over the drawings. “It would make sense to have it around here, near where the old kitchens were. There’s probably an entrance above-ground, too – where the workers would pack in the ice and straw without traipsing through the house.”
I bet that was the tunnel we crawled out. I squinted at the lines, but couldn’t see anything that resembled the complex I’d seen. “Is it strange that it isn’t on the map?”
“I honestly don’t know. This map wasn’t made during Parris’ tenancy, but about a couple hundred years later, when the building was being renovated to turn into a school. It’s possible there were rooms underground the workers and architects never found. But an icehouse would be the ideal place to have a laboratory – it would be naturally chilled, and being underground, it’s insulated from sound.”
“There were all these smaller rooms, with what looked like giant freezers inside,” I remembered. “But they were locked. She must keep a key somewhere.”
“She’s not going to let that key out of her sight,” Ayaz said. “It’s probably on her person.”
“We have a very easy way to get under her clothes, right?” A knife twisted in my gut at the thought of Ayaz with the Deadmistress, but I had to remind myself that I couldn’t care now. Not knowing that Ayaz had been a part of what was going on downstairs.
Ayaz’s face darkened. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. She doesn’t tell me anything.”
“I’m not surprised. You’re not exactly a pillow talker. Isn’t that right, Hazy?” Quinn looked at me. A hot blush crept over my cheeks. If Quinn only guessed at the truth about me and Ayaz, he knew now. And his expression…
He looked hurt.
But why would he even care if I slept with Ayaz? Quinn didn’t care about me, not really. He was all about living in the moment, about chasing the next big thrill, without a care for who got hurt in the process. And I was the ultimate thrill – the forbidden fruit. I thought all this, and yet seeing those amber eyes look away tore me up inside in ways I didn’t understand.
I wanted badly to trust them. Part of me still did, but… but… the stub of Sadie’s ruined tongue burned into my skull.
“She hasn’t… called on me since the first quarter,” Ayaz muttered, avoiding my eyes.
I hated how relieved I was to hear that.
“So?” Quinn crossed his feet on the table, putting a giant crease right through the middle of Ayaz’s map. “Go to her. Work your Turkish mojo and riffle through her pockets when she’s in the bathroom.”
“Don’t you think I’ve already done that?” Ayaz gritted his teeth. “She’s too smart. She doesn’t trust any student, especially not one who’d sleep with a teacher.”
“But she’d have a spare key, right?” I said. “Evil geniuses don’t accidentally lock themselves out of their lairs because they left the key in their other bra. Especially not Headmistress West. She wants a second copy of everything, just in case.”
“And we have a secret passage that leads right to her office,” Quinn declared, uncrossing and re-crossing his feet, screwing up the maps even worse. Ayaz balled his hands into fists. “And the most perfect distraction to lure West out of her office.”
“This isn’t a good idea,” Trey said. “If we locate this key, we risk West finding it missing and figuring out we’re trying to get into her lab. She’s going to know we want to destroy the god. Hazel’s deal will be off and all the charity cases will be fair game.”
At the words ‘charity cases,’ a chill ran down my spine.
“I agree with Trey,” Ayaz said. “There are risks.”
“You’re just saying that because you don’t want to put your dick into her again,” Quinn said.
“This might be our only shot,” I said. “I can’t believe you’re both chickening out. You know what’s at stake.”
Trey held up his hands. His cuff slid down, revealing his burned-off tattoo. “If we get caught, I can’t protect you anymore.”
�
�You’ve never protected me,” I shot back, the anger flaring inside me. “You hurt me. You tried to throw me off a cliff.”
Trey’s jaw clenched. He stood up without a word and stormed off. A moment later, the wall shook as he slammed the door.
Quinn and Ayaz exchanged a look. I glared at them. “What?”
“Nothing.” Quinn shrugged. “Trey hates being called out.”
“Or, an alternative explanation is…” I hedged.
Quinn put his feet down and leaned forward, his amber eyes gleaming. “See, the thing is, Trey won’t admit it because… well, because he’s Trey. But he’s been protecting you from the start.”
I snorted. “That’s bullshit.”
“Nope. All those things he’s done, he did to stop something worse from happening.”
“That’s completely fucked up.”
Quinn shrugged. “This is Miskatonic Prep – it’s where you come to get a first-class education in fuckedupitude.”
“Why can’t he just find a less shit way of protecting people?” Why couldn’t he save any of those poor people downstairs?
“Because he’s Trey. He doesn’t think like that.” As Ayaz stood up to gather the maps, he glanced over his shoulder at the door. “Trey believes that the only way to prevent someone worse from taking over this school was to be the big bad wolf. And his greatest nightmare has just come true – the wolf has been dethroned, and a panther is in his place. Her fangs and claws are sharp and deadly. Honestly, he’s not taking this whole being kicked out of the presidency position with grace and decorum. But we can’t worry about him now. We’ve got a key to find.”
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