“You know what?” I forced a smile through my aching mind. “Let them do that. Let them come at us with bombs and assassins and UFOs. We’ll be ready. Bring it the fuck on.”
Chapter Eighteen
Before I could drag a protesting Trey away from the dogs, Deborah laid a hand on my knee. “I’ve taken an indefinite leave from work, so I’m here as long as you need me. Sneak down and see me any time you wish, and text or call me with information.”
“I will.” I nodded to the box under my arm. “I’ll look after this.”
I still wasn’t quite able to thank her. That might come in time. I did give her a quick side hug.
Goodbye… aunt.
What strange words.
The sun was coming up as Trey and I trudged back through the forest. My thighs burned and the box of my mother’s things weighed a hundred pounds as we scrambled up the steep slopes and pulled ourselves over rocky outcrops. I complained loudly and bitterly, as was my right as a free woman. Trey smiled wryly as he dragged my wretched body up another rock face.
“Thanks.” My foot scuffed his satchel, and I winced as pain shot through my toe. “That thing must be killing your shoulders. Want me to carry it for a bit?”
Trey shook his head, his dark hair catching the moonlight – the edges tinged with crimson, like the piping on his uniform blazer. “No thanks. I don’t think I could bear the whining. Besides, I don’t like to be separated from it.”
“Fine. I hope you and your rock are happy together.”
His breath came out in ragged gasps. I thought again how odd it was that he was supposed to be dead and yet he could get out of breath.
But that was just it – Trey wasn’t dead, not really. The god gave him immortality, and Ms. West had buried him, but that did not a true Edimmu make. I was beginning to see just how insidious the Deadmistress’ lie was – she let the students create their own mythology about themselves to prevent them from discovering the truth.
Nerves pricked at my stomach, but not about Ms. West. I knew Trey wouldn’t let me get back to the school without trying to dig inside me. Sure enough, when we reached the outer edge of the school perimeter, he turned to face me, blocking my escape with his broad chest. “Hazel, we’ve got to talk about—”
I shook my head.
“Tough,” Trey growled. “We’ve dealt with a metric ton of shit over the last couple of days, but the only thing I care about is what my girl’s going through. You’ve stood up to a cosmic god and dealt with death without batting an eye, but Deborah tells you that you’re related and you look like you’ve seen a ghost. When you walk into the dorms tonight, Quinn and Ayaz will see something is wrong, too. You either talk about it with me and I’ll get them off your back, or you can deal with all three of us.”
I folded my arms. “It’s no big deal.”
“Bullshit.”
This is the problem with people caring about you. They won’t leave you the fuck alone.
I rolled my eyes and slumped in the dirt, setting down the box beside me. “Fine. Put down your stupid rock. I’ll talk, but you might not like what I say.”
Trey grunted as he set down the satchel. He slid his legs over the edge of the rocks, pressing his leg against mine. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders. I knew I should tell him to remove it, but right then I couldn’t bear the thought of losing his touch. I rested my head on his shoulder.
We were near the top of a ridge. Through a gap in the trees, the sun rose over the violent surf, painting the sky in streaks of red and pink. A bitter wind blew off the water, slamming into our faces. But with Trey’s arm around me, I didn’t feel cold.
It struck me how alike this moment was to all the times Dante and I had curled up in the treehouse behind my apartment block, smoking weed and watching the sunrise. How alike, and yet how completely different.
“I don’t trust Deborah,” I said. “I wish I did. I know she’s trying to help us, and she’s given us every reason so far that she’s on our side. I believe what she says about my mother… that they’re sisters. That we’re family. But...”
“You don’t trust easily.” Trey pressed his lips to my hair. With my thick dreads gone, I felt his lips through my short, feathery layers. “I had to carve that stupid rock out and come after you for you to trust me, and I’m not even sure you do yet.”
“Right.” I stared at my hands. “But you get it. You don’t trust easily, either. Being joined by blood means shit and you know it.”
Trey didn’t move, didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to – his hatred of his father rolled off him, as violent as the waves crashing against the rocks below.
“Maybe family is what you make of it,” he said finally. “You. Me. Quinn. Ayaz. The other riffraff you’ve collected. Look at what you’ve built in the short time you’ve been at school – a group of people who never would have been friends all looking out for each other. That’s what family is.”
“Mmmmf.” I didn’t want to acknowledge that I’d thought the same thing. That maybe all this time I’d been filling the gap left by my mother and Dante with the intensity of my Miskatonic Prep relationships. Not just with the guys, but with Greg and Andre and Loretta, too. And now Tillie seemed to be reaching out, tentatively seeking something from me she wasn’t getting anywhere else.
“So Deborah could be a part of that family?” Hope crept into Trey’s voice. “And the dogs, too.”
“Maybe. It’ll take time.” I nodded to the box beside me. “This is a good first step.”
“Do you think you’re ready to read those diaries?”
“Nope. But I’m going to do it anyway. Mom never talked about her past. Every time I asked she’d dodge the question or distract me or invent some story about running away from an ogre…” My finger pressed into the scar on my wrist. “Maybe that part wasn’t make-believe.”
“You know that what your mother did with your friend is statutory rape,” Trey said. “Now that you know about your mother… about her past… can you see how maybe she didn’t realize that she hurt you?”
“Do we get to keep blaming the past?” I asked. “It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Your dad bullied you, so you become a bully. My mother was raped by her father, so she stole the first guy I loved. I was betrayed, so I burn the betrayers. It’s like Deborah said – just a cycle of violence and horror.”
I shuddered as I thought about the fire ripping through the auditorium, how much I wanted my bullies and their parents to burn. I was part of the cycle, whether I wanted to be or not.
Trey was silent for a long while. When he spoke, his voice was barely audible over the roar of the waves. “When I was eight years old and Wilhem was six, my dad threw this big Christmas party at our home for his investors and executives and Eldritch Club members and important people. They’d set up a big screen in the ballroom to watch the launch of a new deep-space probe the team had spent five years building – it showed a live feed from the launch site and it was really exciting. I couldn’t believe my dad built something so cool. I told him I wanted to run the company when I grew up. He beamed when I told him that – one of the few genuine smiles I’ve seen. I think it was the last time he ever smiled at me like that.
“I was expected to circle the room with my father and make small talk with the executives. At first, it was fun – I had this tiny port glass and Damon Delacorte kept refilling it. I told everyone who’d listen how proud I was of my dad and what he’d achieved. I stood with this group of executives who were all pretty plastered. During their conversation, it came out that to create the launch site, the company felled a huge chunk of native forest in Chile and displaced several endangered species. A bunch of environmentalists protested their presence, and so my dad hired a local gang to sneak into their camp and massacre them.”
The waves slammed against the cliff below. White foam rolled over rocks that jutted from the surf like rows of teeth. Dark waters swirled in wait, swallowing the horror of Trey’s words i
nto the fathomless void.
Trey continued. “My father had those people slaughtered, and he was laughing about it with his friends like it was some funny party trick. I let go of his hand. My knees went weak. I asked him if the protesters were really all dead, and he told me that of course they were, he only hired the best assassins. He said there’d been a family there with two kids and a dog, and they killed the kids so they wouldn’t ‘grow up to be a nuisance.’ They even killed the dog so it couldn’t raise the alarm.
“I started to cry right there in the middle of the ballroom. Everyone was looking at me, and my father’s face was red and stormy. He commanded me to pull myself together, but you know when you’re a kid and someone tells you to stop crying and it just makes you want to cry harder? All I kept thinking about was my dad shooting two kids and a dog. He didn’t pull the trigger but to eight-year-old me, it was the same thing.”
“It is the same thing.” I squeezed his hand.
“Wilhem punched me in the arm and told me to stop being a baby, that is was ‘just business.’ He was six years old, but he was just parroting our dad. I said if assassins killed our parents would it be just business, and he laughed and said that would never happen. And he sounded so much like Dad that I ran from the room. Dad found me huddled under his desk and he dragged me into a cupboard and locked me inside. I was terrified of the dark at that age, and he knew it, so he yelled through the door, ‘you’re to sit in the dark and think about why you’re being punished.’”
“I sat in the dark for hours while the party raged all night. I banged on the door but no one came to rescue me. My stomach growled and I got angrier and angrier – at first at my Dad for locking me inside, and then at myself for being stupid enough to cry and make a scene, and then at those innocent people, because if they hadn’t been protesting then Dad wouldn’t have had to do what he did.” A shudder ran through Trey’s body. “The darkness closed in on me, and I could no longer tell reality from my nightmares. Over and over I saw my dad lift a gun to his shoulder and shoot a dog. Sometimes, the image was me. I could feel my finger squeeze the trigger as the dog panted hot breath in my face.
“Dad left me in that closet for two days. By the time I came out, I was babbling incoherently, weak from hunger and dehydration. I spent the next two weeks in bed recovering. Dad never once came to see how I was. But when I got well enough to walk around the house again, he found me and said, ‘Tell me why I punished you.’ Do you know what I said?”
I shook my head. My fingers closed around Trey’s and squeezed. I knew I didn’t want to hear the next words.
“I said, ‘You punished me because I was weak. I’ll never be weak again.’”
Yup. That was as bad as I expected.
Trey sucked in a shuddering breath. “But I didn’t understand what weakness was. That night at the party I’d stood against a powerful man for the first time, and I’d suffered for it, but I hadn’t lost. People at that party saw me break down, they heard me wailing about the family. Dad lost a couple of important investors that night, and they had to close the Chile operation. I’d won a victory against him, only I didn’t know it. From then on, every time I chose to do his bidding, I gave in to my weakness. Every time I defied him, he found new and imaginative ways to strip me of my power and freedom – but I couldn’t understand that meant I was having an impact – I was more powerful than ever. It wasn’t until you strode into Miskatonic Prep with that ‘don’t fuck with me’ look on your face that I learned what true strength was.”
Trey stood up. When he withdrew his leg, my body reacted with shock, desperate to hold him close, to tell him he never had to be afraid of the dark again. But of course, I couldn’t do that. It was a lie – the dark was coming, closing over us. Soon it would tear us apart forever.
There were so many layers to unpick – and that was only one trauma that Trey Bloomberg lived with every day, only one spoke in his own wheel of violence and horror.
I stood up on shaking legs and followed Trey along the ridge. We trudged the rest of the way in silence, arriving at school just as the sun made its final assault for freedom. The spires pierced the grey clouds – a threat of violence for any stranger who dared approach.
The front doors remained unlocked. We slipped into the atrium, my boots thudding across the marble. All was in darkness – faint grey light from the French doors illuminated the marble floor, but the stairs and hallways were cloaked in shadow.
As we sprinted up the stairs as quietly as we could, a light flared on the landing. I froze, raising my palm and thrusting it toward the other figure that stood in shadow beyond the flickering candle.
“Show yourself or I’ll light you up like a Christmas tree.” My voice carried more power than I felt.
“Wait, don’t burn me.”
The figure stepped closer. Candlelight danced over Dr. Morgan’s face. I thought about it for a moment. I lowered my hand.
“It’s best not to sneak up on me,” I said.
“I’m not the only one who’s sneaking.” Dr. Morgan gave me a half-smile that I might’ve once imagined was friendly. “Why were the two of you outside?”
“We walked down to the ocean. I wanted to see the sunrise.” I held Trey’s arm. “It was romantic.”
“I see. What have you got in that satchel, Trey?”
“Food and a bottle of Champagne,” Trey said. “For the romance.”
No way will she believe this tripe.
She didn’t. Dr. Morgan lowered the lantern and gave me that ‘I’m smarter than you’ smile of hers. But she wasn’t of a mind to punish us – perhaps Ms. West had said that I had certain privileges. She indicated we follow her into the darkened hallway. “Come to my office. I want to talk to you both.”
“We can talk right here.” I yawned. “But we’re pretty tired. What with the romance and all that.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “I can’t risk it. You don’t know who might be listening.”
“That’s right. We don’t. And that’s why we’re not going anywhere.”
She grabbed my arm, pulling me so close that her breath hissed against my ear. “Fine. But you must listen, because I can’t risk repeating this. The teachers know you’re having your little party on Friday night. They’re planning a little shindig of their own, in the faculty lounge, to celebrate the successful capture of Gloria Haynes.”
“So?”
“So…” Dr. Morgan pressed something into the palm of my hand. “If you can get your friend on the maintenance staff to slip that into the staff coffee machine before last period, you’ll find them indisposed for at least three hours. Hermia replaced the lock with one that’s not supposed to melt, and the key hangs from a loop on her belt. Dr. Atwood has another in his pocket. You’ll need both of them to unlock the weight room.”
My mind whirred. The whole faculty would be out like a light for three hours. Provided Zehra was in any shape to move, we could get her quite far away by then.
Trey squeezed my hand. We exchanged a glance. Can we trust her? The vial feels real enough, but I don’t understand why Dr. Morgan would want to help free Zehra.
I slipped the vial into my pocket. “Why are you helping me?”
“You’re not the only one who thinks Hermia’s let the god get into her head.” Dr. Morgan ran a finger through her auburn curls. For the first time, I noticed how pretty she was. She had to have been only in her late twenties when she agreed to become one of our jailers. Now she wore her youthful face like a mask. Only her eyes gave away her true age – glinting with the horrors she’d witnessed and been forced to partake in. “At first, I thought it was so exciting, being part of witnessing the birth and evolution of a new race. But after twenty years in this cursed place, I’m done. You students weren’t the only ones who left a life behind. I don’t have a family, either – most of the faculty members are either orphans or estranged. I fought with my parents over my college major – my dad wanted me to become a surgeon, like him
, but I wanted to teach history. He disowned me and we hadn’t spoken in five years when Ms. West sought me out. What she offered was so amazing… the chance to be part of something bigger than myself, of complete freedom to create a curriculum that would do so much more than help students pass tests – to teach the possibility of actually learning from history, to make sure this new race didn’t repeat humanity’s mistakes. But it was all a lie. Ms. West didn’t want the students to think – she wanted to cultivate their cruelty and avarice. I’d traded one overlord for another, only at least my parents came from a place of love. They just wanted what was best for me. I hated my dad so much for trying to control me and now I want nothing more than to fall into his arms. I don’t even know if they’re still alive…” her words broke into a shuddering gasp.
Heat flared in my palms at the sound of her sob. I’d thought little about the faculty since I’d discovered the truth about Miskatonic Prep. They were the ones who tossed students to the god. They plotted to hurt me and the people I loved most. For the first time, Dr. Morgan gave me a glimpse into what might have brought them here to become pawns in Ms. West’s game.
Freedom. Power. Revenge – all desires I could relate to.
Dr. Morgan sucked in a breath and rallied herself. “I’ve seen Hermia try to extract information from Zehra Demir. She tried to sacrifice Zehra, but the god wouldn’t take her. Hermia’s now convinced Zehra is here as an agent of Vincent – since her brother is his favorite. Your friend is strong, but she won’t last much longer. Use that vial. Get Zehra out of the school, before she becomes the next casualty of Hermia’s megalomania.”
“And then what happens?”
“You tell me, Hazel Waite.” Dr. Morgan’s lips curled back into something that resembled a smile. “There are teachers on your side, even if they remain in hiding for now. You’re the one who’s really in control of Miskatonic Prep, and everyone except Hermia knows it.”
Ignited: a reverse harem bully romance (Kings of Miskatonic Prep Book 4) Page 12