Ignited: a reverse harem bully romance (Kings of Miskatonic Prep Book 4)

by Steffanie Holmes

  My children cannot survive here. They must ascend. You are the light to guide them home.

  My head pounded. “You’re lucky you’re amorphous and inside my head, because I want to kick your ass right now. I don’t understand. Let’s try something else… why do the pillars attract me? They’re like magnets sucking me in.”

  The fire around me shifted, the smoke recoiling from my skin, giving me a view across the platform and out over the edge. Far below, volcanic activity deep below the surface reshaped the earth before my eyes, forming the fissures and peaks that would become the earth’s surface and the ocean floor. The sky crackled with fire.

  And I understood. All around the god was nothing. Not even an amoeba to talk to. He’d endured the formation of the earth alone. Completely alone.

  When the god spoke again, his voice shuddered with pain. It calls to you because I am…

  The god searched his human vocabulary for the right adjective. But he didn’t need to. I knew the word well.

  “You’re lonely.” The word choked on my lips. I gazed out into the world as it once was, to the prison where a god who traveled across space had been trapped.

  I am lonely.

  When the god spoke the word, it was as hollow as its void.

  And I saw then that the god was truly not the faceless force of terror we thought him to be. He could not help the malevolence that seeped from his core, any more than I could help the fire that poured from my fingers. He’d left his family (I guessed family was the right word? He spoke of children, so his race must have some concept of family) to journey across the universe to start anew. Sure, he’d fallen victim to the old colonial attitude of ‘bringing civilization to the savages,’ only the savages were the creatures of earth. I couldn’t blame him for that – we’d done it often enough ourselves. He was supposed to land with his godly girlfriend, do the vertical mamba god-style, and give birth to a new race. He should have been surrounded by children – proud parents birthing new gods. Instead, he’d lost the love of his life and he was alone, imprisoned, the only company human jailers who could not possibly understand his mind and hadn’t even seen that he suffered from the most human of afflictions.

  And maybe he wouldn’t have suffered if we hadn’t tried to steal his power and mix our energy with his and give him our emotions. Maybe we caused his loneliness. Or maybe we’d simply given him the only way he knew to recognize and name what he felt.

  I tried to imagine loneliness stretching over aeons, and what that might do to my mind, how that would twist me into a monster. I was already monster enough.

  That was the key. In his slumber, the god sensed me. It recognized me as one who had started to become like himself. A kindred spirit. The god had, for want of a better descriptor, fallen in love.

  As the realization coalesced in my mind, the god fed my imagination, showing me glimpses of the hell he had lived in, of the hope that Parris had raised within him, only to bury him deeper within his prison. Of how it had not known the existence of hope.

  Yessss, he hissed with his choir of tortured voices. You know my truth.

  Last quarter, when I spoke to the god, I’d asked if he could go home if I took away his feelings. I thought the feelings made the god weak. But maybe those human feelings – this loneliness, this compassion and utter humanity – were all that stopped the god from unleashing his malevolence. Maybe the cage wasn’t made of stone or magic. Maybe the god’s cage was his own conscience.

  He felt sorry for his children, because he had imprisoned them. He had made them lonely and broken, just as he was lonely and broken. That was why he was so willing to help me.

  The pillars were not a trick. The god didn’t understand tricks or lying. I truly had raised something from the deep, something that had been buried with him since the earliest days of the earth.

  Raise that which been sunk, and I shall have new children. The god’s voice shuddered inside my head. The pillar vibrated against my back, and tendrils of darkness slithered from the smoke, surrounding me, dragging me back.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  My body slammed against cool, humming stone. I groaned, raising my hand to touch the tender skin on my head where my skull had cracked against the rock. Warm hands grabbed me under the arms, lifted me, pulled me back.

  I reached out, clawing for the stone. A whimper escaped my throat. I didn’t want to be away from it. The god’s loneliness hung heavy on my heart, and it drew out the loneliness that snuck up on me as I withdrew from my Kings.

  “No, no.” Hands grabbed me, dragged me back. I kicked and screamed and tore at my captor, caught in the fire-trance that bound me to the god. I needed the god, and he needed me. I could drive out the blackness in his heart, and he would do his best to sate the impossible void of their absence.

  Emotions rushed my body – dark lumps of coal that I’d left untouched inside me since the fire, knowing that they would ignite a horror inside me that could never be put out. Now they burned to life, sparking through my veins and pushing out flames that rolled across the floor.

  “Fuck!”

  Ayaz leaped out of the way as Trey stomped out the fire before it could reach him.

  “Hazy.” Quinn smashed me against his chest. He didn’t run away. Instead, Quinn clasped me tight, and bit by bit the warmth of his body and his beautiful big heart seeped into my skin. It cooled the flames inside me, and though the coals still smoldered, they no longer threatened to burst.

  I was under control. For now.

  Sort of.

  My cheeks felt wet. I swiped my hand through the liquid. Tears. I’d been crying.

  I never cried.

  Maybe that was a problem.

  “You are never doing that again,” Trey growled, pressing his body against me, wrapping his arms around Quinn and I. For the first time, I didn’t feel the urge to argue, to tell him that he didn’t control me.

  The scent of opium and incense invaded my senses as Ayaz joined the embrace. I rested my head on his shoulder, succumbing to the protective spell of their presence.

  What I’d just seen and experienced was too big, too terrifying, to endure without going mad. I should be a gibbering mess on the floor and yet, I was here, my heart and mind bruised and battered, but intact. And it was nothing to do with me and my strength. It was because of them.

  Because in their arms, I knew I was completely safe. And I’d never felt that before. I thought I had that with Dante, but I’d seen it stripped away in a moment by my own hand. But my Kings… they had taken the worst of me and yet they still stood to protect me.

  That was love. That was family.

  Fuck. More tears poured down my face. Trey offered the corner of his sleeve to wipe my cheeks. And just like that, a piece of the coal lodged in my heart disintegrated, because here was perfect Trey letting his clothes get all snotty. For me.

  “Where did you go?” Trey struggled to keep his voice even.

  “Back in time.” I shoved my freezing fingers into his armpits, trying desperately to warm the chill inside me. “Like, way back. I think I saw the world being formed.”

  “Shit,” Quinn swore.

  Ayaz’s fingers stroked the nape of my neck, raising the tiny hairs on my skin and a lump in my throat. “As soon as you closed your eyes, the room grew cold. So cold even we Edimmu felt it in our bones. Did you get answers?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Sort of. As much as the god is capable of giving answers.” In between shuddering gasps, I explained to them what I’d learned about the pillars, about the god’s loneliness, about what we had to do. By the time I was finished, our little group was swaying gently, and Quinn squeezed me so hard my joints cracked. “When three pillars rise, something that has been buried will be revealed. I don’t know what that something is, but I’m guessing it’s bad.”

  “The god will rise,” Trey whispered. ‘That has to be it.”

  “I don’t know. That seems like the most logical explanation, but the god said som
ething about his children. And last time I talked to him, he said he couldn’t go home because his feelings trapped him here. And—”

  Ayaz’s lips pressed against mine, crushing the words in my mouth with the force of his kiss.

  It was a kiss that drove out the loneliness in both of us. Another coal of my heart disintegrated into dust. I would wait for him across time and space on the force of that kiss.

  Ayaz yanked away, his eyes flickering. At first, I thought I saw fear there, but it wasn’t fear – it was excitement.

  “I’ve got it,” he yelled.

  “You do, you bastard.” Quinn gave him a gentle shove. “You’ve got our girl, and I think it’s my turn—”

  Ayaz shook my shoulders. “I figured it out, Hazy. I know what’s going on. I know how to stop everything. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”

  “Explain,” Trey demanded.

  “I will, but we have to go back to your room. I left my map there.” Ayaz tore himself from our embrace and darted off toward the door. Trey and Quinn started after him. I followed in a daze.

  Hazy. He called me Hazy.

  It was Quinn’s nickname for me, but even Trey had started using it. I’d never had a nickname before, and I held it close to my heart. For Ayaz to feel comfortable enough around me to use it…

  Ayaz darted through the empty halls. I had to jog to keep up with him. Trey unlocked the door to his room while Ayaz hopped from foot to foot, his mouth pursed in a thin line like he was trying to contain the words.

  We tumbled into the room. Ayaz scrambled to the coffee table and rolled out the map of the building and grounds. It was an older map from when the building had been a residence. We’d used it to locate Ms. West’s original lab in an abandoned icehouse. Ayaz had scribbled lines and arcs across the map, showing an arrangement of sacred geometry and the placement of sigils and other strange happenings within the school. It looked like a child had scribbled all over it, but it somehow made sense to Ayaz.

  “You saw three pillars.” Ayaz hunted around under the table for a pen. “The three corners of a sigil. I knew the building’s arrangement was significant, but I thought it was part of Parris’ cage. I never imagined—”

  “Ayaz, slow down. I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  Ayaz’s dark eyes glittered with excitement. “The god isn’t from earth. So how did he get here? We thought it was through like a crack in space-time or something, but what if he flew here the old-fashioned way?”

  “Like, in a ship?”

  “Exactly like in a ship.” Ayaz drew lines across the building, his hand moving so fast it was practically a blur. “We think of a spaceship as a metal tin can with a fuselage, but that doesn’t mean that’s how the god’s race build ships. They’d use the material they had on hand – like a creepy black stone veined with foreign matter, a stone that doesn’t exist anywhere else on earth. Maybe the shadow creatures that you control are part of the god, and they’re like worker bees… I don’t know. The important thing is, the god had to get here somehow. What if instead of rocket fuel, he used the soul-energy or whatever it was that is to power his flight? And what if that ship crash-landed into a planet and the god became trapped inside the wreckage?”

  The god said his partner was the light that went out. He’s made of darkness. Without her, he couldn’t see. He couldn’t navigate. Of course, he crash-landed. “You’re saying that the pillar is part of the god’s ship. But what about the sigil on it? How did Parris put it there?”

  “I think Paris got the sigils from the god, not the other way around. The sigils are part of the god’s ship, probably a navigation system – maps of the cosmos, or a path to lead him home. Maybe… maybe this was never meant to be a one-way trip. Maybe the god was going to fly here, poke around, take some samples, have sexy-times with his goddess, lay a bunch of god-eggs to colonize the empty planet, then go home. Only something went wrong and his goddess died and he crash-landed into the earth. If his ship was damaged, he’d have no way to fix it. Maybe he showed the sigils to Parris in the hopes he would be able to help him get home, only instead of helping the god the way he promised, Paris kept it trapped…” Ayaz’s voice trailed off as he studied the sacred geometry he’d scrawled across the map.

  And maybe Rebecca Nurse was trying to use sigils to jumpstart the god’s ship so he could go home? “But he’s been here since the earth was young. Surely he would have fixed his ship by now.”

  “Maybe it’s not the kind of thing you can do on your own. Maybe…” Ayaz’s dark eyes studied mine with an intensity that made me squirm. “Maybe he’s been waiting for the right tool to come along. Maybe he could sense there were humans out there with Hazel’s power, and he just needed one to get close enough.”

  “Rebecca Nurse’s descendants,” Trey breathed.

  My heart pounded against my chest. What Ayaz was saying sounded completely insane, like a bad episode of Startrek SG-1 or whatever it was (Dante loved sci-fi, not me). But it also… made perfect sense. It matched up exactly with what Rebecca wrote in her book (Ayaz had figured out that Rebecca was using her sigils to create a ritual, but she didn’t finish it) and what the god himself said.

  Ayaz nodded. “There probably are more, too. It would explain why he treated some humans different from others. Remember the pirates who hid their loot in the caves? The god turned them insane. He tried to give power to Parris but that backfired. But Rebecca Nurse had enough power to stop Parris, even though it killed her. Perhaps it’s something in the female genome.”

  That explains why only non-Edimmu women can see the fire flaring in the sigils.

  “When you unleashed your power, Hazy, you acted like a… a starter ignition. Your power is fire – maybe you’re the light he needs.” Ayaz drew loops and swirls radiating out from the location of the first pillar. “Look at this; this is the placement of all the sigils I know of around the school. If we account for a few we haven’t found yet, and join them together, they form two giant sigils – one made by Parris, the other by Rebecca. Parris’ sigil incorporates the entire school. The building itself is a sigil – one designed to keep the god trapped within the wreckage below. Only every renovation made to the building probably makes the god weaker. Rebecca’s sigil is laid over top of it, and it must come from the god itself because it places three points at its focii.” Ayaz jabbed his finger at the pillar in the auditorium, then pointed to the center of the gym, then finally to the grotto in the pleasure garden.

  “The three pillars?” I asked. Ayaz nodded.

  “And I’m betting if you did the same thing again in these locations, you’d call up the pillars. What has sunk will rise. The god’s spaceship will be ready for launch. He could take all his children home.”

  That’s perfect. We could send the Eldritch Club to another planet. They would go far away, back to the god’s own universe. Our planet would be safe.

  “I’ve been moving around that boundary sigil,” Trey pointed out. “Do you think that’s weakened Parris’ sigil?”

  “I’m almost certain it has.” Ayaz tapped his chin. “And there is something else… your friend said there was nothing unique about our DNA? No weirdness that set us apart.”

  “Nothing.”

  “If we were truly the start of a new race, we’d see evidence of that on a cellular level.” Ayaz the artist looked to Trey for confirmation. Trey nodded.

  “That’s my understanding. But I’m not a geneticist. We can ask Deborah to confirm.”

  “Good. Yes, we should do that. Because if our genes haven’t changed, the only thing I can conclude is that the god’s power is keeping us in this… stasis? That was probably something Ms. West was experimenting with. The god seems to be immortal, and the power he gave to our parents made them age slower. So his power makes us the Edimmu. If we can fix his spaceship and send him back to his home…”

  “…we’ll turn back into ordinary teenagers,” Quinn cried.

  “Either that, or dr
op dead,” Trey finished.

  The four of us exchanged a glance. For the first time in a very long time, true hope flickered her warmth upon us. We knew we’d cracked open the final mystery of Miskatonic Prep. We had a way forward, a plan.

  Now we just had to figure out how to repair an ancient spaceship made of stone that existed nowhere else on earth.

  No problem, right?

  None of the boys seemed daunted by the task ahead of us. Quinn rubbed his hands together with glee. “Sounds like fun. What’s the first step to freedom?”

  “We’ve got to activate the two remaining pillars,” Ayaz said. “Easier said than done, since we don’t know how Hazel activated the first one.”

  “I do have an idea,” I said. “I got angry and I lost control of the fire. The god was able to creep in under my defenses and become part of me. Like the Deadmistress said, I became the conduit for his power, and he used me to call the pillar that he couldn’t call himself.”

  Ayaz’s face looked like an expectant puppy. “So you could maybe do it again?”

  “Hazy? Get angry. Highly unlikely.” Quinn cracked up. I punched him in the arm.

  “Yes. I could do it. I’m not even sure it needs to be anger, just whatever emotion stokes my fire.”

  “And what else stokes your fire?” Quinn waggled an eyebrow. I punched him even harder.

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  “Can we find out now?” Quinn’s arm slid around my stomach, pulling me against him.

  “Keep it in your pants, Quinnanigans.” Trey turned the map toward him, studying the lines with a frown. “We’ll get the one in the gym when the parents come for graduation. It won’t be hard to make you angry then. That only leaves the one in the grotto.”

  “How are we going to get that one?” Ayaz asked.

  “The one thing Miskatonic Prep students know how to do better than anyone else on earth,” I grinned. “We’re going to party.”