Thankfully, the bus was mostly empty. We found a seat at the back. Trey dropped the satchel at his feet. It made a loud clang as it hit the metal floor.
“What you got there, son – a bag of rocks?” The man across the aisle peered at the satchel through reading glasses smeared with grease.
“Mind your own business,” Trey snapped.
No one talked to us after that, for which I was profoundly grateful. My stomach twisted in knots. We’d found a couple of paperback novels at the thrift store, but I was too stressed out to read mine. Every time the bus lurched around a corner I expected to see Vincent with a roadblock or an armored car, ready to take us both back to that hellhole. I stared out the window, thinking hard, while Trey read a fun-looking romantic heist book by Katya Moore called The Siren Job. Occasionally, he’d stop me to ask about something in the text – he was missing twenty years of cultural references and technological advances.
At some point, the gentle sway of the engine and the scent of stale potato chips shoved in the creases of the seats must’ve lulled me to sleep, because the next thing I knew I was back in the god’s cavern.
And the god was pissed.
The room groaned under the force of its fury. Slivers of rock fell from the ceiling, shattering against the polished floor. The veins of strange, alien mineral seemed even more oppressive as they loomed inward, as though at any moment they would topple like dominoes to squash me.
But I didn’t think the god was interested in me, judging by the circle of hooded figures that crouched in reverence around the scaffold, their hands attempting to shield their skulls from falling debris even as they refused to move from their vigil. Voices chanted the god’s strange tongue in high, hesitant voices, wavering with fear each time a new sliver of rock crashed to the floor.
The figure nearest the trapdoor lifted its head, rolling its body away as a particularly large lump of rock toppled down right where it had been lying. Its hood fell away and I recognized Ms. West, although she looked considerably less well-put-together than usual.
“You have to understand,” Ms. West said, her voice swooning in that dramatic tone. “She was hurting you by being here. We sent her away until it was time for you to take her. This way we’ll be able to figure out how they could affect you—”
But the god didn’t have to understand anything. From within his prison, he howled and wailed and gnashed his teeth made of galaxies. Like a child throwing his toys out of the crib, he wanted something he couldn’t have.
He wanted me.
“We gave you the other girl,” Headmistress West said. “Remember what happened after you took her? It will be worse with Hazel. We need more time to understand—”
She yelped and leaped back as a long sliver of rock fell from the ceiling and penetrated the floor directly where she had been standing, sending up a spray of shards.
“This is ridiculous,” she snapped to Dr. Atwood, who’d torn off his hood to run to her aid. “Vincent was the one who wanted to try this disastrous plan. He’s the one who lost Hazel, and yet we’re the ones answering to the god’s wrath.”
“Isn’t that the way it’s always been?” Atwood sighed.
“Well, maybe it’s time we had some changes around here.” Ms. West yanked her hood over her hair and hurried to the edge of the room, sheltering under one of the alcoves.
“What are you suggesting?” Atwood ran after her, arms over his head, shielding his face as more rock fell from the cavern. The other figures picked themselves up and raced after them.
“I’m merely saying that if Mr. Bloomberg’s power has been stripped, I see no reason why we should continue to take orders from him. if you want something done, you need to do it yourself.”
A wide grin spread across Atwood’s gaunt features. He bent his head toward Ms. West, and they whispered something together. I lurched forward, trying to hear more of their conversation, but the god buckled the ground beneath me. I pitched forward, my body jolting as the god shook me with invisible hands…
“Hazel… wake up.” Trey’s voice called me. I flung myself out of my seat with a jolt, hitting my head on the luggage rack as I stumbled down the aisle.
“Fuck! Ow.” I rubbed my head. We must’ve stopped to pick up more passengers, because twenty pairs of wary and curious eyes watched me from previously unoccupied seats.
“What happened?” Trey helped me back into my seat. “You were calling out something, and thrashing about. People were staring.”
“I was there, in the god’s cavern.” A cold shiver rocketed down my spine. “The god knows that I was taken away, and he’s not happy at all. He’s about to bring the roof down on the faculty. And there’s more. It seems as if Ms. West doesn’t want to work with your father.”
Across the aisle, a woman watched me with a wary expression. She lifted her child out of the seat beside her and bounced him in her lap. The man in the seat in front of us got up and moved to an empty bench at the front of the bus.
Trey bent over so his forehead touched mine. He brushed a strand of hair from my cheek, and the tenderness of his touch made my chest tighten. Trey had never been taught how to show love, how to be caring, and so this was foreign territory for him. He was nothing if not a fast learner.
“Tell me exactly what you saw,” he whispered. “Do it quietly. We don’t know who might be listening.”
In tangled whispers, I explained about the cavern and the falling rock and the anger of the teachers. “Ms. West said that they gave him ‘the other girl.’ She had to be talking about Loretta. But the way she said it, it was as though Loretta and I were similar in some way – like Loretta had hurt the god, too.”
Trey shook his head. “Loretta’s the same as every other sacrifice. She went to the gymnasium with the teachers, and she came back one of us. Are you okay to walk? The next stop is ours.”
“I had a dream. I didn’t break my hip,” I snapped, but I gripped Trey’s shoulder as he led the way off the bus. “And there is something different about Loretta. She went back to school instead of becoming one of the maintenance staff. And she’s changed. Even though you supposedly don’t have a soul, there’s a warmth to you that shines through. You still care. You still feel. But there’s nothing behind Loretta’s eyes.”
“I thought that was just who she was. She was kind of dead inside when she arrived at school. If anything, being a revenant has made her more lively. And she’s only a student because Courtney wanted to use her to torment you. And what Courtney wants, she gets, especially from Ms. West.”
“Why is that?”
“Because Courtney’s mother has more money than any of the other Eldritch Club members, and I think she’s best buddies with the headmistress.” Trey’s expression hardened. “Gloria Haynes hardly ever visits the school, but Ayaz said he’d often heard Ms. West speaking with her on the phone, and he said there were pictures of the two of them together in her chamber.”
Thanks for reminding me that Ayaz used to do the nasty with the Deadmistress. I fought the urge to gag.
Don’t think about it. Focus on why you’re here – to find out what Deborah Pratt knows.
Deborah lived at the end of a small row of wooden houses backing onto the forest. Colorful dog statues lined the path to her door, and a green glass suncatcher tinkled in the breeze as we rang the doorbell. It certainly didn’t look like the home of a pathologist, let alone one who was involved in dark magic.
I rang the doorbell. From deep inside the house, the theme song from a Disney movie played. A short woman in her mid-forties with a round face and rosy cheeks opened the door. “Are you selling cookies for the dog charity?” she asked. “I’ll take two boxes. I just want to help all the poor puppies.”
“Are you Dr. Deborah Pratt?” I asked.
“I am, love. Who’s asking?”
“I’m Hazel Waite. You were speaking with my friend Zehra Damir. I think…” the words caught on my tongue. “I think something terrible has happened t
o her. And we need your help.”
Chapter Eleven
Deborah’s home was exactly as I expected it to look from the outside, filled with hand-stitched quilts and colorful rugs and even more dog statues. She led us into a living room with a sliding glass door overlooking a small balcony and the forest beyond. Two elderly poodles luxuriated on a giant bed by the window. Outside, a Jack Russell puppy pawed at the door, his eyes wide and as he followed Trey’s and my movements across the room.
“That’s Roger. I won’t let him inside,” she said, indicating the Jack Russell. “He’s quite excitable, and I want us to be able to speak without interruption. Please, take a seat. I’ll make us some tea.”
Trey and I sank into the sofa while Deborah bustled into a kitchen at the rear of the house. I tugged stuffing from a tear in the leather while Trey cast a disapproving eye around the dog portraits and porcelain plates hanging from the walls.
“Are we sure this is the right woman?” Trey flicked his eyes to the kitchen, where Deborah hummed while crockery clattered. “She seems a few galaxies short of a cosmic god—”
“Arf!” One of the poodles loped over and placed his head on Trey’s knee, wide brown eyes staring up at him, imploring him. This interested me – dogs have an excellent sense of smell, and can even be trained to locate dead bodies. So why didn’t these dogs act as if Trey was dead?
Hope flickered in my chest, before dying again. I had all the evidence I needed that Trey was a smokin’ hot walking corpse. Just because a dog likes him doesn’t mean he’s alive like I am.
Trey recoiled, his body stiffening. “The dog is touching me.”
I laughed at the rich boy who’d never had any kind of affection in his entire life. “I think he wants you to scratch his ears.”
Reluctantly, as if he was afraid of being electrocuted, Trey reached out a hand and placed it on the dog’s head. The dog shuddered in pleasure from human touch, its tongue panting in ecstasy. Trey’s mouth wavered. He stroked his fingers through the dog’s curly fur. “He’s so soft.”
“I think he likes you,” I smiled. Trey scratched the dog behind its ear. The dog placed a second paw on Trey’s leg, lolling its head to the side. Trey’s shoulders relaxed, the tension fleeing him as he shared this moment with his new friend. All his life, any love he’d been shown had been conditional. He didn’t know what it meant not to have a price.
“Leopold is very picky about people,” Deborah said from the doorway. She set a tray of tea and homemade cookies on the table. “You must be very special for him to take a liking to you.”
“I doubt that,” Trey said, but he didn’t stop stroking Leopold’s fur.
Deborah handed me a cup of tea. I plucked a shortbread from the plate and bit into it. “Zehra has gone missing. I was supposed to meet her in a cave to share some information with her that she was going to pass on to you. There was a cave-in, and I think she was trapped or… or something else.”
“Straight to the point, I see.” The woman chuckled as she sipped her tea. “I like that. Zehra was the same – she said she’d been waiting for ten years to figure out what happened to her brother, and she wasn’t going to waste another minute.”
“When was the last time you heard from her?” I couldn’t help the flicker of hope that danced in my chest.
“She sought me out about six months ago, and we’ve had regular conversations via phone and text, which stopped about five weeks ago. I’ve tried calling her, but her phone goes straight to voicemail.”
I squeezed Trey’s knee. I didn’t want to think about what this meant. She’s not dead until I see her body, and knowing the god, maybe not even then. I won’t give up on her. “Why did she think you could help us?”
“She’d discovered I’d worked with Hermia West at Arkham General Hospital, and that I had an interest in certain types of magic.”
“That’s kind of a weird combination.” I couldn’t figure this woman out. Between the dog obsession and the library of medical textbooks lining the wall behind her, I couldn’t see any room in her life for ancient gods and spellbooks bound in human skin.
Deborah shrugged. “Not really. Magic has always been discussed in my household. My parents were both occult scholars. Just because I don’t have a bubbling cauldron over the stove or crystals around my neck doesn’t mean I don’t know my way around ancient sigils.”
“And what about Ms. West?” Trey asked.
“Hermia is a very dangerous woman. I worked with her in the morgue at Arkham General. It was her job to prepare the bodies for autopsies and for my work – I’m a pathologist, so I would study the patients who died of disease. I started noticing strange things when I went in for my shifts – bodies in strange positions inside the freezer, supplies of certain chemicals and drugs mysteriously depleted, strange marks or puncture wounds on cadavers. I knew something was going on, but I couldn’t predict what…” Deborah shuddered.
“What?” I leaned forward, my finger pressing into the burn on my wrist.
Deborah cleared her throat. “I still have trouble believing I saw it. I came in early one night and discovered Hermia had one of the fresh cadavers out of the freezer. I watched from the shadows as she injected him with something, and he sat bolt upright!”
She looked at us as if she expected us to be surprised, but of course, we weren’t. Her knuckles were white from gripping her mug as she continued. “This man half-rolled, half-collapsed off the slab and kind of dragged his body around the room. She was talking to him, coaxing him like a child. I was so terrified, I just backed out of the lab and walked around the hospital in a daze until my shift officially started. When I came back, the man was back in the freezer, dead as a doornail, but I knew what I saw.”
“Oh, we believe you,” Trey said.
Deborah nodded. “I reported Hermia to the hospital’s ethics board. Not what I’d seen that morning, because I knew it was too sensational for them to believe, but the theft of the medical supplies, the needle marks on patients, the bodies moved around. I’d kept careful dates and records of everything. They couldn’t deny what I showed them – that Hermia was mistreating and experimenting on bodies – but they also couldn’t risk it getting into the media, so they asked Hermia if she would resign on the condition they supplied her with neutral references. The whole thing was a farce, and it destroyed my faith in the medical administration. Thanks to the work of the hospital board, Hermia West walked straight out of that job and into the headmistress role at Miskatonic Preparatory.”
“How much do you know about what’s going on at the school?” I asked.
“I know what Zehra told me, which is that her brother Ayaz, along with 244 other students, died in a fire twenty years ago when it was called Miskatonic Preparatory, but they still reside at the school as the walking dead.”
Right, okay. So she knows.
But Deborah wasn’t finished. “I also know that the school was reopened after the fire as Derleth Academy, and that every year four students are chosen to enter the school, but none ever return. I know that this is all in aid of a shadowy society of this country’s elite who are using the school as a conduit to obtain power from a being not of this world.”
“Okay, so basically everything. And you believe it?”
“Zehra was very convincing. And as I said, I’m no stranger to the occult. But no, I don’t quite know everything.” Deborah set down her cup and flicked her gaze between Trey and me, her slate-grey eyes fixing me with a calculating stare. “What I don’t know is who you both are, and how you have come to be in my living room? I assume you have information to share with me.”
I glanced over at Trey, who was absorbed in rubbing the old dog’s stomach as he lolled on the rug. Uncertainty pinched in my chest. I didn’t know anything about this woman apart from her name, and yet here we were. For a woman of science, she seemed far too comfortable discussing my revenant classmates. How did I know she wasn’t friends with Ms. West? She could rat us out as soon
as we let our guard down.
When I didn’t answer, Deborah leaned forward. “Did my perfectly reasonable question unsettle you? Or is it something else?”
“Can we trust you?” I blurted out.
“You must believe you can, otherwise why would you seek me out?”
I hesitated, unsure. I didn’t trust anyone by nature. It had taken me all this time to trust the Kings after what they’d done to me, and after what Ayaz pulled, I was more uncertain than ever. If I’d read him so wrong, I could be reading Deborah Pratt completely wrong, too. Hell, why did I even trust Zehra?
But I couldn’t help Trey or Quinn or Greg or Andre or any of the other students on my own, especially not as a fugitive from Dunwich. We needed allies, and if this woman could be one, I had to take that chance. For them.
I ran my fingers over the hard surface of Trey’s rock, still hidden in the satchel clutched tight in my hands.
“As I said, my name is Hazel Waite. I’m a scholarship student at Derleth Academy. I escaped before the faculty and alumni could sacrifice me to an ancient god that lives under the school. I tried to smuggle out a copy of the key to Ms. West’s laboratory where she conducts her experiments on students, but instead I was captured and sent to the Dunwich Institute.”
In halting, jagged sentences, I told her everything – from the day I arrived at Derleth to the bullying and Loretta’s strange disappearance and reappearance, to the discovery of the god beneath the school and my admittance to the Eldritch Club. I told her about finding Ms. West’s lab, making copies of the key to give to Zehra, and how I’d lost the keys when I was taken to Dunwich. They could be back in the box in the cave, but more than likely they were back in Ms. West’s hands. My fingers flew to my wrist, pressing into the scar that was all that remained from my life before.
Possessed: A reverse harem bully romance (Kings of Miskatonic Prep Book 3) Page 7