“It’s… interesting. What mineral is that – some type of actinolite?” she pointed to one of the throbbing veins in the wall. “Oh, it’s… I can’t see…”
“They’re impossible to focus on,” Vincent said, his tone bored. “You get used to it. And it’s not actinolite. We’ve had it analyzed, and it is not any mineral currently known on earth. We believe this room and some of the tunnel networks are built from rocks that were sent from another galaxy, perhaps as part of the god’s ship.”
“The god’s ship?” Ms. West frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Vincent. I’m a woman of science and an atheist. I don’t understand why you’ve brought me all this way to show me a musty old cave and spout off religious nonsense.”
With a start, I realized I was been shown a glimpse of the past. I was side-of-stage while Ms. West had her first personal tour of Miskatonic Prep. She wasn’t even a fake teacher yet. She worked in the mortuary at Arkham General Hospital, experimenting on cadavers in her spare time.
“It’s not nonsense.” Vincent walked over to the trapdoor, picking up a chain between his fingers and unhooking it from the lock. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
He slid the bolt free. The trapdoor slammed open, and the wave of noxious hatred rolled out across the room. Ms. West clutched her hand to her chest, pressing against her heart.
“Oh,” was all she said. “Oh, my.”
My eyes watered as the god’s presence wrapped around me, pressing and sliding against my skin, oozing obscenely into my pores. As I struggled for breath, I tasted hatred on my tongue – tart and bitter and strangely enticing. Even in this dream, I experienced the god as if I was right inside that room with him.
“It’s been trapped in there for centuries.” Vincent’s body dripped with tension, his back and shoulders rigid as he stood beside the hole, taking the brunt of the god’s oozing aura. “The man who built what is now the school discovered the god while digging his underground tunnels, and he managed to trap it inside this prison.”
Ms. West tried to peer into the hole, but Vincent slammed the trapdoor shut, his shoulders visibly relaxing as the vulgar sensation of the god disappeared. “Has the entity been studied?”
“How can a god be studied? We know that if we give him a sacrifice, he will reward us with a share of his power.” Vincent gestured to the scaffold above the trapdoor. “However, that surge of power lasts only a short time.”
“What does this power do?”
“It’s like taking on his essence,” Vincent replied. “You felt just now what it is to be in the presence of the god. But when you receive his power, you hold a piece of his godliness within yourself. You appear radiant to those around you. Everyone in a room looks to you for leadership. Whatever you say will become truth.”
“That sounds addictive.” Ms. West licked her lower lip. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to find a way to take the god’s power and give it to the Eldritch Club. Permanently. We cannot keep the school open much longer. Students are having strange nightmares and complaining to their parents. We’ve been burying the bodies in the caves under the gym, but now there’s a smell… if the school is closed down or authorities investigate, we may lose access to the deity.”
“I see. And you believe that I alone could grant what you seek?”
“I read all the eyewitness accounts of your experiments in the mortuary,” Vincent fixed her with an intense stare, “including the ones that aren’t on public or police record. I read that you raised a cadaver from the dead, that a man who expired in his bed three hours before got up from the slab and walked around the room before collapsing in a messy pile at the feet of a now mentally-impaired pathologist.”
Ms. West smiled. “If you’ve done so much homework on me, you must know that I would approach this in a scientific manner. All this talk of gods and sacrifices muddies the process, makes it okay to cut corners, and that’s not how I do things. Tell me, does the entity favor any type of sustenance?”
Vincent frowned. “I don’t understand the question.”
“Well, must this ‘sacrifice,’ as you say, be human?”
“Yes. We’ve tried with many other animals, but the effect is negligible. And the human must be freshly dead – even a body two hours old will not please the god. We now slit their throats right here, above his chamber.” Vincent jiggled the chains hanging from the scaffold. “We lower the bodies down and lift them out some time later.”
“Intact?”
“For the most part.”
“Excellent, then we can already control one of the variables.” Ms. West walked slowly around the room, her gaze flickering from the scaffold to the other features of the cavern. “And the sacrifices need to die? Have you tried throwing in a live one?”
Vincent’s face turned dark. “We have not.”
“Hmmm. Something to ponder. And does the entity respond more favorably to a certain age group? A skin color? A mental state?”
“The only thing we have noticed is that he seems to prefer them young and when they’ve lost all hope.”
“Young and hopeless? Oh, that’s interesting,” Ms. West said. “Very interesting indeed. Thank you, Mr. Bloomberg, for your kind job offer. I think I could be very interested. Let us head up to the board room and we can discuss my terms.”
I woke in a cold sweat, Ms. West’s words like sandpaper on my tongue. Beside me, Trey snored gently, his arm draped over two snoozing poodles.
I hated to wake him, especially when his mouth curled up into such a contented smile as he slept. But this was big. It was fucking monumental. Trey would kill me if I casually told him over scrambled eggs in the morning that I’d seen his dad and Ms. West make their deal.
“Trey.” I shook his shoulder. “Wake up.”
“Mmmmmf.” He moaned, rolling over to snuggle even harder into Leopold’s fur.
“Trey!” I kicked him.
“Owwwww.” He flipped over, hugging his leg to his chest. “What was that for?”
“I had a dream. No, not a dream. The god showed me something from before you died.”
Trey bolted upright, grabbing my cheeks, his fingers shaking. “Tell me everything.”
I filled him in on as many details as I could remember about the dream, doing my best to recall the exact words used. Trey was a perfectionist – even in this, especially in this, he wanted all the details precisely as they had happened.
“This only confirms what we already knew,” he said. “Our parents planned this. They knew exactly what they were doing when they enrolled us in Derleth.”
“But it sounds as though Ms. West was the one who figured out. It also sounds as if they were killing people long before she arrived on the scene.”
“Honestly, I’m not surprised anymore,” Trey said.
“Well, what should we do about it?”
“Nothing.” Trey sighed, sinking back into his pillow. “It’s in the past. We can’t undo it. So just try not to think about it. Go back to sleep.”
In minutes he was snoring again, but I couldn’t close my eyes. I watched his chest rise, his fingers curl into Loeb’s fur as he sought her comfort subconsciously. He looked every bit like an ordinary human boy. A boy with a soul.
Trey breathed. He felt. He hurt. When he was injured, he bled. In every way, he was a living human. Except that he was trapped inside the school’s sigils and trapped inside his teenage body. Except that he had crawled out of his own grave and now didn’t have a soul.
Whatever that means. What did a soul even give him, anyway? I’d never been one for religious iconography, but I thought a soul was supposed to be your essence – the nebulous life force that made a person who they were. How could Trey be separated from his soul and yet still be vulnerable and real and whole here with me?
Zombie. Revenant. Edimmu. The students of Miskatonic Prep had given these names to themselves. But there was no word for what they were, for what had been
done to them.
They have to be young, and without hope.
I turned this over in my mind, finding no real answer. The sun broke through the trees, and the dogs rose with it. At first, they loped around the room, then they scratched at the kitchen cupboards, making pathetic whimpering noises as though they hadn’t been fed in weeks. From the staircase leading up to Deborah’s room, the terrier Roger barked and jumped at the door handle.
After a breakfast of Deborah’s chocolate chip pancakes, all six of us – me, Trey, Deborah, the two old dogs, and the excitable Roger – piled into Deborah’s pickup and headed to a private medical lab in the city. Trey warned me to keep my head down and not to look out in case anyone spotted us, but he couldn’t keep his eyes on the road. I watched him staring wistfully at an ice cream parlor and reminded myself that this was Trey’s first time outside the walls of Miskatonic Prep in twenty years. He had a lot to catch up on, and I'd be happy to help him start if ice cream was involved.
Deborah’s friend Gail – a slim brunette with a kind smile that made me feel slightly less on-edge – let us in at the back entrance to the lab and ushered us into a small utility room.
“Our security cameras don’t cover this area,” Gail said, wheeling in a tray covered in needles and other medical equipment. “But we need to hurry if I want to get the sampling done before my colleagues arrive for work.”
Gail drew five vials of blood from Trey and five from me, all the while keeping a steady stream of chatter with Deborah. They threw around medical terms until my head spun, then in a moment, the conversation would flicker to gossip about a wine and painting evening at their local bar. Watching their easy friendship, I felt a flicker of something… part fascination, part wistful envy of something I’d never had. I’d hoped that maybe Zehra and I could have had the kind of friendship Deborah and Gail shared, but thinking of Zehra just made me feel all twisted up with nerves inside.
But it was part something else, too. In Deborah and Gail, I felt a sense of maybe what my life could be. An interesting career. A circle of friends. A wine and painting evening. A purpose.
Could have been, but would never be. I was still tied to my bargain with Ms. West, and it was highly unlikely I’d survive the year, let alone with any friends or boyfriends intact.
When Gail was done taking my blood, I jumped down from the chair, surprised at the spring in my step. “Can we see the lab?” I asked.
Gail glanced at her watch. “I won’t be able to take you inside, because the security camera will be operating and I don’t want you to be seen, but you’ll be able to look in the window.”
We followed Gail down the hall to a door with a narrow window. Inside were rows of white benches and steel shelves, upon which sat various gleaming machines and robotic arms that spun and jerked and beeped. Gail pointed to each machine and explained the diagnostic tests they ran and how the tests could determine if the blood carried certain diseases or matched other samples. Trey strode away, bored and anxious, but my fascination rooted me in place. I wanted to see the machines in action, to prepare samples and watch science reveal answers.
Far too soon, Gail tapped her watch and ushered us back out the service entrance. “I’ll call you as soon as I have results.”
“How long will that take?” I asked.
“I can’t say for certain, sweetie. I’m fitting this around my other work, and the DNA sequencing could take some time.”
Deborah drove us back to her house. My head buzzed with questions about the lab and Deborah’s job as a pathologist. Trey stared out the window, his mind somewhere else. Deborah had her own inquiries. She wanted to know about Ms. West’s lab, the sigils in the cave, and the restrictions placed on the students by their undead status. She was especially curious about Ayaz’s translations of Parris’ book. When I asked her why she wanted to know this stuff, she shrugged. “It’s like loose strings dangling in the wind. I’m certain some of them connect, but I’m not sure which ones yet. I have to pull at them all to find out where they go.”
“That’s accurate.” Right now we had all these questions, all these nameless fears, and no answers.
Deborah pulled into her driveway and idled the engine. “I have to get to my office. Can I leave the two of you here by yourselves? I’ll be back around 6PM, and I’ll bring home some takeout for dinner. Help yourselves to anything in the fridge, and don’t let those dogs take liberties.”
“Sure,” Trey agreed with more enthusiasm than I’d ever heard him express for anything.
She handed us a key and instructions for the alarm code in case we wanted to leave the house. I narrowed my eyes at her – it was an insane amount of trust to place on two kids she’d literally just met the night before. Trey looked equally skeptical as he climbed out of the car and Deborah showed him how to put the dogs on their leads.
“Why are you doing this?” he demanded, the question coming out as an accusation.
Deborah looked us both straight in the eye. “You’ve both been let down by people who were supposed to care for you. I don’t want you to judge the rest of the human race by their standards. I think you’ll find outside the walls of Derleth Academy people like you for who you are, not what you can do for them.”
With that, she backed out of the drive and sped away, leaving Trey and I with the keys to her house and three very excited dogs tugging at their leads.
“What do you want to do?” I asked Trey as we watched Deborah’s car round the corner of her street. Above our heads, birds sang in the trees like there wasn’t a cosmic deity threatening the world.
A sly smile tugged the corners of Trey’s cruel mouth. “I’ve been trapped inside that cursed school for twenty years. I want to party.”
It turns out that Trey’s version of ‘partying’ was walking the dogs around the forest trails near Deborah’s house. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face as he stopped to sniff flowers or admire the birds while a sedate Leopold and Loeb ogled him with wide-eyed adoration. Behind them, I struggled with the overexcited Roger who wanted to chase every leaf that blew in front of his face.
“When you said you wanted to party, I pictured us knocking back shots in a dive bar,” I said as I dragged Roger away from a particularly enticing pile of deer crap. “Maybe find cocaine and hookers.”
“I did all that stuff at school,” Trey said. “Our parents made sure we had any alcohol or drugs we wanted. Anything to keep us distracted so we’d continue to do their dirty work.”
“If you could have a future, what would you want to do?”
“My parents would make me go to Harvard to study business, like every other male in my family. Then I’d go to work for my dad and—”
“That wasn’t the question. What do you want to do?”
“It doesn’t matter what I want.”
“Again, not the question.”
Trey sighed in exasperation. “Fine. I’d study engineering and go into renewable energy and cleantech. The way we burn fossil fuels and generate electricity is inefficient and wasteful. We only do it like that to make a bunch of asshole friends of my dad even richer – remember, Dad only took in Ayaz to get access to his family’s oil fortune. But it would be a big scandal in my dad’s circle if I went into that field, which is why it was pointless to dream about it even when I thought I could go to college. I try not to think about it. Right now I want air and light and dogs and ice cream and—whoa!”
A squirrel darted across the path in front of us. Leopold’s eyes widened, and he galloped after it, yanking Trey along behind him. Trey’s feet slid out from under him, and he ended up face down on the muddy path.
For a moment, he lifted his mud-smeared face and his eyes were filled with cold fury, but then he burst out laughing. A wild giggle escaped my throat as I bent down to help him up.
Trey dusted mud from the front of his t-shirt and glared at me. “Don’t you tell anyone you saw me like this.”
“Don’t worry. This is going all over soc
ial media.” I dug into my pocket for my phone to snap a picture, before remembering that I didn’t have a phone. Mine was back in Ms. West’s hands again. It was funny how an old habit like that stuck around.
It felt weird to be laughing with Trey about such a mundane thing. It was like hanging out with Dante again, only better because we had dogs, and also because I didn’t feel as though there was this power imbalance between Trey and me anymore. I’d been crushing hard on Dante for years, but he either refused to see it or he chose to ignore it for reasons that he took to his grave. Trey might be seven-million social classes above me, but he’d taken a massive risk to defy his father and find me. Even though we hadn’t talked about what happened between us, I knew the feelings I had for Trey were at least somewhat mutual.
With his mud-splattered thrifted t-shirt, ill-fitting jeans, and the wide grin he wore as he got the dogs back under control, it was easy to believe Trey was just a normal teenager. I got the feeling that Trey had never felt ‘just normal’ in his life. And then Roger barreled past them, knocking my arm against the heavy stone inside Trey’s backpack, and I remembered that neither of us was normal.
This peace we felt right now – it was an illusion. But it was something I’d had before and Trey had never experienced, so I let him have it.
After another hour or so, Trey decided he wanted to see the town. I thought it was risky since we were still so close to Arkham, but I couldn’t refuse Trey anything today. On the main drag, Trey made a beeline for the ice cream parlor we’d seen from the bus window. I stood outside with the dogs while he agonized over flavors. He came out with a big grin and two double cones groaning under the weight of multiple scoops and toppings – nuts, candy, chocolate sprinkles, seven wafers, cookie crumbs… he’d gone crazy.
“Did you leave anything in the store?” I accepted the cone with incredulity.
“A couple of wafers and some flavor called ‘rum & raisin’ that sounds awful.” Trey’s eyes closed with bliss as he licked the full length of his cone. Heat pooled between my legs as I thought of other things he’d licked like that.
Possessed: A reverse harem bully romance (Kings of Miskatonic Prep Book 3) Page 9