I nudged Trey. “He’s excited to see you.”
“He is not. That’s just what dogs do.” Trey practically bounded across the street. Leopold knocked him back on the grass, licking his face while Trey convulsed with laughter. Deborah helped him up.
“I’d better get you all inside,” she said. “We don’t know who’s watching.”
Deborah’s room wasn’t in the hotel itself, but a cheaper motel room in an annex at the rear of the parking lot. “These were the only rooms where they’d allow me to have the dogs,” she explained as she opened the screen door and ushered us inside. “But they’re more private and none of the parents would deign to stay in such sub-par accommodations, so I think it worked out for the best.”
Trey took a seat on the faded sofa. All three dogs immediately mauled him with sloppy kisses. He laughed as he tried to scratch Leopold’s ears while Roger pawed his chest, demanding attention. Trey’s laugh was so rare.
I leaned against the kitchenette counter. I folded my arms, unfolded them, put my hands behind my back, at my sides, tucked them behind my neck. Nerves tickled my abdomen. I had no idea why. Deborah has done nothing but try to help us so far, and she’d driven all the way to give us this news.
That was it – why drive here and stay near the school where it was most dangerous, when she could have told me over the phone? I didn’t like it – I knew I didn’t have the whole picture, and that made me nervous. When I was nervous, I got fiery.
Deborah bustled around the kitchen, banging cups on the counter and opening a bag of cookies. The coffee machine beeped, the sound stabbing at my brain.
“What did you want to tell us?” I demanded. My fingers flew to the scar on my wrist.
“In a moment.” Deborah fussed with the coffee machine. “Do you want a hot drink? Trey, there’s dog treats and more snacks on the table. I figured you guys would appreciate that.”
Trey shrugged. “Not me, but Hazel should probably eat something. She’s running on adrenaline and righteous indignation.”
“Hazel, do you take your coffee black or—”
“Tell me,” I snapped.
Deborah froze, her hand gripping her cup so hard her knuckles had turned white. “Of course. I’d forgotten that you don’t have the patience for small talk. Sit down next to Trey.”
“I prefer to stand.” I didn’t like how cornered I felt in this room, as if there was no escape. I moved around the table to stand by the door.
Deborah perched on the arm of the sofa, her eyes flicking from me to Trey. She set down her cup and pulled a stack of papers from her bag. She dropped them on the table in front of me. I glanced at the first page, but all I saw was a lot of scientific jargon and graphs with wavy lines.
“I started to suspect this when you first came to visit me,” she said. “When Hazel demonstrated her powers. I didn’t want to say anything until I knew for certain because… well, you’ll see why. I didn’t want to give you something and then take it away again. But the tests confirm it, so I…”
Her voice trailed off. Her fingers traced the edge of the paper.
“What?” This is tedious. Why can’t she just say what she has to say so we can get back to the school—
“My sister Jessica ran away from home. Our father was… a monster.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “A pedophile, if you want the technical term for it. He mistreated me for years, until I got old enough to fight him off. I tried to protect Jess as much as I could, but I was only a girl myself, and you can’t understand what a master manipulator that man was. We always talked about leaving together, but we were dirt poor and we had no other family to turn to. He kept us quiet through intimidation and pain. I counted down the days until I turned eighteen. I planned to take Jess with me to another state. I’d fight for custody if I had to. But Jess couldn’t wait anymore. One day, I came home and she’d left. She’d taken her clothes and some photographs of the two of us and food and money and… she ran.” Deborah’s shoulders shuddered as she suppressed a sob. “She was sixteen years old.”
That sucks, but I don’t see what this has to do with anything. I wanted to tell Deborah to get on with it, but Trey held up a hand to silence me. “Please, Deborah. Take your time.”
No, don’t fucking take any more time.
After a few deep breaths, Deborah continued. “I tried to find Jess for many years, but she’d hidden too well. After a while, I stopped wanting to find her. It was a selfish decision. I needed to focus on getting through college, on securing scholarships and working two jobs so I didn’t have to go to my father for anything. I wanted to believe Jess was safe somewhere and she made a better life for herself, because it made me feel good to think so. I imagined picking up the search once I finished my degree. But then came my doctorate and a demanding job and these three dogs and I… I was so secretly happy to be free of my father I wasn’t in any hurry to dive into my past, and the years ticked by and now I’m too late.”
“What does this have to do with me?” I demanded. “Does this Jessica have the same power or something?”
Deborah flashed a sad smile. “Yes, and also no. Hazel, your mother is my sister. She must have changed her name when she fled. I’m your aunt and you… you are a descendant of Rebecca Nurse.”
Chapter Seventeen
Her words were too strange to register. Sister. Aunt. Descendant. I’d never had a context for those words before. It had always just been me and Mom. No one else. Until Dante. And then I had no one.
Tears sprung in Deborah’s eyes. She watched me, expectant, hoping to see recognition or hear something profound from me. But I had nothing. I felt nothing. It was just too… too much.
“I’ve mourned Jess a hundred times since. A thousand times. Every time they wheeled in a new cadaver for me to study, a part of me expected to see her face. And now that I know you’re alive and that you have no one else, I want to give you the love and protection I was never able to give her.” Deborah opened her arms. “I’d like to hug you, Hazel. My niece. Would that be okay?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t… I needed to think about this. “I don’t need protecting. And you won’t want to love me when you find out what I did.”
“Hazel—” Trey warned.
“What’s happened? Tell me,” Deborah insisted. “Nothing you do could change how I feel about you. We’re family.”
“Hazel believes she’s responsible for her mother’s death. She caught her mother having sex with her best friend, a minor. She was angry, and we know what happens when she gets angry.” Trey mimed flames burning.
Deborah’s hands flew to her mouth. Her wide eyes studied me, hoping I’d deny it and put back the shattered pieces of her vision of me.
Too fucking bad. This is what I am. This is what your genes made me.
“Jessica,” she whispered. “What have you done?”
“It’s not her fault,” I growled.
“No, Hazel. We do no good passing blame. What my father did to her left its scars on her. Trust me – I’ve had ten years of therapy to uncover mine. Those scars thread through every future relationship, every encounter with another human. Jessica craved attention – she’d do anything for a kind word or a sign of affection. Even at a young age, she chased after the wrong kinds of men, wanting someone to treat her like a princess, to rescue her. This friend of yours, he was a good guy – protective and kind?”
“He was.” Dante’s face flashed in front of my eyes. Guilt tugged at me. I hadn’t thought of him as much since I got involved with the Kings. If I was honest with myself, I pushed Dante out of my mind because being with them felt like a betrayal to his memory. He was my first love, even if he fancied my mother instead. I remembered how he’d drop everything to walk me home from Mom’s club, or how we’d curl up together in bed and tell each other stories to distract us from the gang fight on the street outside.
Deborah continued. “That makes sense. She saw a person who could be her knight in shining armor – who could protect her an
d you better than she ever could. And she was terrified that she’d lose him, so she did the only thing she knew how to do to keep a man. Perhaps she didn’t even see it as a betrayal, because to her he was just part of the family, and she’d been taught what family did to each other and what adults you trust make you do. Violence and horror beget the same, and that heritage is passed on through generations, like your powers.”
“My mother never burned anything. I’m the only one with that curse. That’s why we moved around so much, why she couldn’t go to college and get a real job, because of me.” Heat prickled against my skin at the memory. “She was afraid of me, sometimes.”
“I never had the power, either. Like many genes carried on the X chromosome, the power will often skip a generation.” Deborah took another paper from her bag and rested it on the table. It was a newspaper article about a car that spontaneously caught fire. “My mother – your grandmother – set her car on fire while she was still inside. It could have been a mistake – she was always lighting fires accidentally. I thought it was just normal. In my darkest days, I think she did it on purpose to escape that man.”
Beside the car was a photograph of a woman in an old-fashioned hairstyle. My finger traced her face. She has my mother’s eyes.
My palm grew so hot it stung. The edge of the paper caught fire. Swearing, I dropped it on the floor and stamped out the flame.
Deborah placed a shoebox on the table. I peered inside at a bunch of random junk – some old cosmetics, candy wrappers, hair ties, and some battered books covered in floral paper.
“I wanted to give you this,” she said. “It’s some of your mother’s things, all I was able to save when I left home. The books in there are her diaries. Don’t rush to read them. There’s a lot of pain inside.”
I stared at the stack of books and shook my head. It was all too much. Confronted with my mother’s past – a past I’d never known about and couldn’t even imagine – brought it all back to me, all the things she’d done to keep me safe and oblivious, all the dumb decisions she made.
The way she clung to terrible men – a repeating pattern of violence and horror. How she relied on Dante almost as much as I did – she would always ask him to fix things around our flat or walk her to clients’ homes at night. How she made up stories – she liked to stand in the treehouse in the rusting playground behind our apartment block and pretend she was a damsel captured by pirates or a princess trapped in a tower. Dante and I would have to rescue her.
Or maybe it was just Dante.
My fingers traced the spines. Once I read those diaries, my mother would be forever changed in my mind. Her story would become the one she wrote for herself as a desperate, abused young woman. I wasn’t ready for that story, not yet.
I turned away from the box, but that was worse because there was Deborah, tears streaming down her cheeks. She held out her hand again, but I still couldn’t take it. “Do you think I want you to read those diaries and understand my own part to play in your mother’s torment? I should have done more. I was too afraid. That is exactly why I’m giving them to you – I can’t undo the damage I’ve done, but I can help you however I can to save your classmates.”
Take her hand. Take her hand.
Or say something. Anything.
But I couldn’t. I just stared at her while my palms grew hotter and hotter.
“Thank you,” Trey said. I wasn’t sure the words conveyed what I needed to say.
“Please, it’s what you do for family.”
“I need to talk about something else.” I stood up, stepping over Leopold and Loeb to pace the length of the room. I dug my nails into my scar so hard that a ribbon of blood snaked over my wrist, trying to drive down the gnawing urge to raze the building to the ground.
Trey must’ve seen the look in my eyes. “We’ve been busy. Hazel had a very productive conversation with the god. If he’s to be believed, we can save all the students.”
While I struggled to regain control of myself, Trey explained what we’d discovered about the god and his children. Deborah’s eyes grew wider and wider until I swore they were going to slip off her face. “As a scientist, I’m struggling to believe all this talk about souls. But this is something the scientific community has considered for a long time – just because life on earth is carbon-based, does not mean there isn’t other intelligent life out there that functions on a completely different plane.”
“How do you know so much about genetics?” I asked, my interest piqued.
“I need to stay on top of the latest research for my job. Blood also carries genetic material that can help us understand more about human life. And death.”
“What about the god using the students to create children?” Trey asked. “Does that sound… logical?”
“It’s farfetched, but not impossible, especially if Ms. West intended the student population to remain a closed system. From a population the size of the Miskatonic Prep’s student body, it would be possible to create a bottleneck situation where rapid genetic changes would occur in each new generation of children. Those children could breed with each other, and this cycle repeated through the generations. Over time and with isolation a divergent genetic race could develop, especially if helped along by external forces. Perhaps the god has done this elsewhere, on other planets, seeded a new…” she paused. “Listen to me, I sound like I’m in an Arthur C. Clarke novel.”
“The important question is – if we give this power to the parents, how do we stop them or their offspring from using it?”
“I’m not sure we can, and that means they’re probably the worst candidates for the god’s progeny. I’m guessing, of course… things were different when I thought Hermia just rapidly slowed cellular decay somehow. This isn’t as simple as getting ahold of her lab notes.” Deborah shrugged. “Cosmic god-offspring is way outside of my field of expertise.”
My eyes flicked to Trey. He sat rigid, his back straight, his eyes forward. “It’s okay. We’re not doing it unless we can stop our parents from causing more damage to the world. I never expected to get out of this, anyway.”
The resignation in his voice chilled me more than anything Deborah had revealed tonight. “I’m not giving up. This whole thing happened because the Eldritch Club wanted power. I wonder if Ms. West had simply told them this in the first place, they would have volunteered to be the children themselves. But then Vincent would have got rid of her and she wouldn’t have access to the god.”
The god intended his children to colonize this planet. And I was woke enough to know that colonization was always disastrous to the first nations. In this case, the human race.
We’d be annihilated. The screams that made up the god’s voice would be inconsequential compared to the horror that would follow. It might take two-hundred years or two-thousand for the descendants of the Eldritch Club to evolve to a state where they require souls to sustain them, but it would happen, and they would gorge themselves on the entire human race.
I couldn’t be part of allowing that to happen. Nor could I condone the guys live with that on their conscience. I couldn’t let them wallow in the pain of being responsible for more horrors.
Trey’s fingers trailed over my cheek, bringing me back from my thoughts. He tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear, where it immediately flopped back – a reminder of one of the tortures the monarchs inflicted on me. Their bullying felt like a million years ago.
“What are you thinking, Hazy?”
I shook my head. These thoughts were for me alone.
“There’s something else,” Deborah said. “I might have followed Vincent Bloomberg and his friends into the woods.”
“You… you did?” I found it hard to imagine Deborah in her tailored suit and ballet flats sneaking around the pitch-black forest. But then, Trey had tried to walk down here in his blazer, so maybe it was just a thing people did – hike around in the forest wearing inappropriate clothing.
“I know you said not to, b
ut I thought it might be the only opportunity we’d have to gather information about their next plans. I left the dogs in the bedroom with enough pig’s ears to keep them quiet for hours, pulled on my sneakers, and tailed them through the wood. I know it’s getting late, but do you want to know what I saw?”
“Fuck yes.”
“The parents walked for maybe twenty minutes or so. By that stage, two of them who were surgeons had gone around and looked at all the burn victims, given them some relief. By this stage Vincent was on a stretcher. The doctors kept telling him that he needed to go to hospital, but it was like he was possessed, he was so angry. Anyway, they walked and I followed – they came to a small cabin. I noticed one of Parris’ symbols etched into the stone chimney. A meeting place known to all of them. They crowded inside, lighting lanterns that flickered in the windows and gave me a view of the proceedings. I crept up to the wall and hunched against the side of the cabin, beneath the open window. Vincent’s voice carried on the crisp breeze. He made no effort to temper his anger.
“Damon Delacorte had one arm in a sling. He used the other to wave his mobile phone around. He showed them a video the teachers sent him with Gloria Haynes, bound and held prisoner at the school. Mr. Haynes was in the cabin, but he kept yelling about extraterrestrials and a CIA conspiracy until someone punched him. They argued for a time about what to do. Someone suggested they leave Gloria to the teachers’ devices and walk away with what they had. The idea had some supporters, but Vincent had someone throw them out the door. ‘We’re going back for her, and they will regret crossing us.’ They agreed that their experiment had failed. That the students and staff at the school would need to be exterminated and new sacrifices found. There was a mention of nuclear weapons, and of assassins hired from Honduras. Vincent ordered each and every one of them to return to their homes and to call in every favor they had. Then he passed out and they called a helicopter to airlift him and the other burn victims to a hospital.” Deborah paused. “The Eldritch Club will bring down the full force of their empire on the school.”
Ignited: a reverse harem bully romance (Kings of Miskatonic Prep Book 4) Page 11