Possessed: A reverse harem bully romance (Kings of Miskatonic Prep Book 3)

by Steffanie Holmes

  It turned out, I could control the fire from two feet inside my bedroom. Interesting.

  By the end of the week, I was sending up toilet paper pyres from the farthest corner of the room, without even looking in the direction of the bathroom. I no longer had to have visual sight of my target. I just needed to visualize it and BOOM – up in smoke it went.

  Inside me, the monster clawed at my skin, its fire burning bright and hot. I’d always had some sense of the monster, some inkling of a secret hidden inside me. But I’d been running from it my whole life, trying to escape its grasp. Now, for the first time, I’d deliberately dug it up and fed it on my rage.

  My mother and I had always lived on the edge of my fire, moving one step ahead of the flames. Memories flooded me as I focused on my task – Age three; I lay on the couch, listening to my mother entertain one of her clients in the tiny bedroom we shared, while down the street his car burned out. Age six; a teacher told me I wasn’t allowed a second cookie, and her hair caught fire. Age ten; Mom scrimped and saved to buy us a car, but we had to sleep in it for two weeks after her deadbeat boyfriend kicked us out. One night she couldn’t afford dinner for us. I got angry. The engine exploded. We were lucky to escape with our lives. The car wasn’t so lucky.

  I spent my whole life trying to suppress the fire, knowing that with my anger came a power that would destroy everything good that came our way. I’d never tried to test the limits of what I could do. I didn’t even know if there was a limit.

  Mom never mentioned the fires to me. We just didn’t talk about them. She kept everything light and fluffy – trying to build a fantasy world for me that would distract me from my empty stomach and the bruises on her arms from her clients. But sometimes… I’d catch her watching me with wary eyes, like she suspected me. Like she didn’t know me. I never told Dante – I never had to, because when I was around him I never felt like burning anything to the ground. He made everything better.

  Until I destroyed him, too.

  I’d already destroyed all that was good in my life. But was I, Hazel Waite, burner of things, destroyer of worlds, powerful enough to burn an entity from across space and time? It was possible, but I needed to know for certain.

  I needed to test my fire on something bigger. I needed to know how powerful I was. And I needed to know soon. The clock was ticking – just four days left until I was rushed off to have my brain sucked out through my nose.

  During breakfast, I started a grease fire in the kitchen that sent billows of smoke over the cafeteria and caused us to be evacuated into the garden. Then, I made Dr. Peaslee’s car battery explode, taking out the two cars parked either side of him in the parking lot.

  Bigger. Bigger.

  The more I burned, the more the flames crackled beneath my skin – a deep rage that had been bubbling for decades, for longer than I’d been at the mercy of Ms. West and Miskatonic Prep.

  I wanted to burn it all.

  I would have my chance.

  The next afternoon, three days before I went under the knife (and probably never came back) our schedule allowed for an hour outside. Nurses would escort us around the grounds or get us involved in games of tetherball or other inane things. I was assigned to Nurse Craig, who usually opted to hand out scraps of bread for patients to throw at the apoplectic-looking ducks while she snuck away for a cigarette. Or possibly to write a romance novel. No one had ever thought to ask.

  I crumbled my bread through my fingers while I watched Nurse Craig back away toward the path, hiding behind a topiary to light up her cigarette. A pile of dead leaves had been swept into the corner of the path by the gardeners.

  Ten feet away, Nurse Craig rolled her head back in ecstasy, the smoke dangling from her fingers.

  I turned back to the ducks. The last of my bread grew hot in my hand, the edges blackening as the heat seeped through my skin. I dropped it in the water with a splash as I flicked my hand out and aimed the flare of heat behind me. I kept walking around the lake, feigning delight as the ducks dipped and dived for the bread (clearly the institution hadn’t got the memo that bread wasn’t healthy for a duck’s digestive system) and thinking the fire into being.

  A whiff of burning caught my nostrils.

  I didn’t turn around until the commotion started. The hiss of a hose dousing the flames. The cries of the inmates, startled by orange flames leaping from the leaves. The topiary roared, as if possessed, before the flames consumed the last of their living nourishment.

  “Nurse Craig, how could you be so careless?” Nurse Waterford shouted as she sprayed water over the ruined topiary. “You can’t smoke outside near the leaves.”

  “But I wasn’t anywhere near the leaves,” Nurse Craig shot back. “I don’t see how any ash could have possibly reached that pile.”

  “It was careless, not to mention against the rules. You shouldn’t be smoking around the patients. I’ll be informing Dr. Peaslee about this infraction.” Nurse Waterford stepped back, her sodden uniform clinging to her body. She panted hard as she stared at the charred circle on the path.

  I’d set that fire from a hundred feet away, from across the other side of the pond, and it hadn’t felt like any great effort. I was confident that I hadn’t even touched the limit of what I could do. As soon as the flames left my hand, they no longer listened to me – but I didn’t need them to.

  All I needed them to do was burn a path to freedom.

  Chapter Five

  I had two more outdoor exercise sessions before my operation. On the next one, I begged to be put into the group who would walk a circuit of the grounds. Nurse Waterford looked skeptical, but Dr. Peaslee patted me on the shoulder.

  “Hazel has been a model patient these last couple of weeks,” he said. “I think she deserves a treat before her big stay at the hospital. Isn’t that right, Hazel?”

  I hope you choke on a diseased dick. I nodded. “Sure. That’d be nice. Thank you.”

  I trailed behind the group, my arm linked with a slight girl of around twelve named Naomi who dragged her feet and stared around with vacant wide-eyed innocence. Was she a victim of Peaslee’s not-a-lobotomy? I tried not to shudder as I held her cool skin.

  “Pretty,” Naomi said in a breathless whisper, but I didn’t know what she referred to. I followed Naomi’s gaze as the nurse pointed out opening flowers and animal statues hidden in the bushes. While the other inmates exclaimed over a tiger statue they’d seen a hundred times before, I scanned the perimeter for a weakness I could exploit.

  A high stone wall surrounded the institute, overgrown in places by centuries of creeping vines. Patients must have tried to scale it in the past, because a line of barbed wire encircled the top of the wall. Yeah, right, we’re not prisoners here. I wasn’t escaping that way unless I could get my hands on some wire cutters.

  Twin iron gates barred the front entrance, and a guard on duty 24/7 checked every vehicle that came in or out. I indulged a brief fantasy of hiding out in Dr. Peaslee’s car with a weapon I’d point at his throat, forcing him to drive me out of the compound… but then we stepped into the kitchen garden to see the herbs and vegetables the inmates tended, and I saw the perfect escape route.

  The institute’s kitchen was a modern steel and concrete extension sandwiched between the old asylum building and the boundary wall. At the rear of the building, a small loading area for supplies was currently occupied with a delivery van. The kitchen staff unloaded crates of milk and instant mashed potatoes. The driver shut the doors and drove out through a small gate.

  A wooden gate.

  Beside me, Naomi whimpered. I relaxed my grip, realizing I’d been squeezing her hand so tight I’d crushed her fingers. Nurse Waterford frowned at me, and I plastered a huge smile on my face. This time, it wasn’t even a fake smile.

  Back in my room that night, I dropped my pills into the toilet again. Plink, plink, plink. For the first time since I’d been imprisoned here, I imagined the faux concern of Ms. West and Vincent Bloomberg as th
ey manipulated me to be their scapegoat, and I allowed myself a tiny smile at their expense.

  You thought you rendered me powerless, but you’re about to find out just how wrong you are.

  Trey appeared in my dreams that night, but I couldn’t reach him. I watched through a window at school as Ms. West dragged him into a classroom. Inside, his father loomed over him, his face twisted with malice. Behind him stood Damon Delacorte, grinning a smile that lacked all of his son’s warmth as he brandished a baseball bat.

  “Trey, no!”

  My fingers clawed at the window, but it was locked tight, the glass unyielding to my fists. Damon advanced, and the lights flickered out. Inside the classroom was darkness – the kind of darkness that had form and malice, that we had all been taught to fear. I banged on the window and called Trey’s name until my voice was hoarse. But I couldn’t penetrate the darkness…

  I woke in a cold sweat, my hands coiled into aching fists, my throat scratchy, not sure where my dreams stopped and reality began. Was Trey all right? Were they hurting him? Did the lights go out so Damon could have his fun in the darkness, or because the god was there in the shadows, watching and waiting?

  I have to get out of here. I have to save them all.

  I dressed in my grey institution slacks and hoodie, tapping my feet with impatience while I waited for the orderlies to unlock the door. At breakfast, I scraped my porridge bowl clean and asked for seconds. Naomi saw me at the table and scooted away from me. In arts and crafts, I drew a picture of a nurse burning at the stake. Let Dr. Peaslee analyze that.

  During therapy, Dr. Peaslee noted with satisfaction that he’d seen me walking around outside. “You seem to be accepting your place here, Hazel.”

  Like fuck I am. I shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about what you said, about the surgery. I’m scared, but I don’t want to fight. I want to be better.”

  He could barely keep the pleasure out of his voice. “You are remarkable, Hazel. I admire your strength and willingness to embrace the process, even when you feel afraid.”

  “Thank you, sir.” I flashed him a smile worthy of an Oscar. “After the operation, will I get to go back to school?”

  I didn’t mistake the flicker of deception in Peaslee’s eyes as he smiled again. “Of course. Maybe not right away – we’ll have to bring you back here to monitor for a few weeks. But there’s no reason you can’t finish out the year with your classmates. I bet they’ll be glad to see you’re okay.”

  You’re lying. I had no idea how much Peaslee knew about the school and what went on there, but he was definitely covering up whatever vile thing they planned for me next. Luckily, I wasn’t going to stick around to find out what it was.

  Warmth itched in my fingers as I rejoined the other inmates and we were led outside for our exercise. Again, I asked to be in the group walking the perimeter. I needed to time this just right.

  I tried to join hands with Naomi again, but she shrunk away, so I was stuck with an elderly guy named George who drooled a lot and had fits. I sat next to George in art therapy, but he gave no indication he remembered who I was.

  As we wandered down the path toward the duck pond, my hand in George’s clammy one, I drew up all the rage I’d hidden inside me. It wasn’t difficult – all I had to do was recall the horrors of Derleth Academy and heat flared along my arms, reaching into my fingers and swirling around the tips. It pooled in my palms like raindrops finding the cracks between cobbles, until it grew uncomfortable for George and he yanked his hand away. “Too hot,” he mumbled at his shoes.

  I pictured Ayaz’s face twisted with contempt, the way he’d looked at me as if I was a bug – so insignificant I wasn’t even worth squashing. They had taken one of the most precious things in my life and twisted it into something ugly, and for that, I would feel no remorse for what I was about to do. I held that image in my mind until the fire burned it to ash. When there was nothing left of me but my anger, I directed my palms toward the dormitories and remembered the way my sheets twisted around our legs as Ayaz held me in my dorm that night, the way the old mattress groaned under his weight as he’d climbed on top of me, the warmth he brought to that cold, damp cell and my even colder heart.

  I pushed with my mind, driving the memory into the flames until it smoldered with my rage. And I thought of other mattresses I’d seen – narrow beds in cells that held the broken bodies and minds of my fellow inmates. And I thought of what they might have been forced to endure under the care of Dr. Peaslee – all in the name of silencing their cries.

  And just like that, the heat burned through my palms, leaving my body and flying like a hot wind of change toward the dormitories.

  I had no way of knowing if it had done what I’d sought out to do. My fingers cooled, and I took George’s hand again, trying to resist looking up at the building as we moved along the path. We passed under an arch of roses, stopping so inmates could stoop to sniff the fragrant flowers. I lifted my chin and bent towards a red rose – the color the same crimson as the highlights in Trey’s hair when they caught the light.

  The color of blood.

  I sniffed the air. Beyond the cloying scent of the rose was something acrid – the faintest whiff of burning on the breeze.

  That was my first clue. We continued our walk, passing through the entrance to the kitchen garden. The cook stopped snipping the rosemary bushes as the alarm sounded from inside. Nurse Craig stopped in her tracks, unsure of her next move.

  Nurse Waterford burst from the fire exit, a trail of black smoke snaking around her heels. She sprinted across the courtyard toward us, waving her arms.

  “Don’t go near the buildings!”

  “What’s happened?” Nurse Craig called.

  “What does it look like? Get the patients under the rotunda.” Doors banged as the orderlies and other staff exited the building, pushing patients in wheelchairs toward the rotunda that served as the emergency meeting point. I cast my eyes up to the second story, where the first tendrils of smoke curled from the narrow dorm windows, turned black from the chemicals in the mattresses. “The fire department is on their way.”

  “But what happened? How could we have a fire?” Nurse Craig seemed rooted in place, frozen by the improbability of the event.

  “It doesn’t make any sense!” Nurse Waterford cried, her usual stoic facade shattered. “Every mattress is ablaze. It’s completely impossible.”

  The scream of the alarm buzzed inside my head. The nurses shoved us back toward the lawn. I pressed my burning palms together, and the large oak tree over the rotunda burst into flame.

  What people never tell you about fire is that its power is mostly in its invisibility. Sure, the leaping flames tearing through the oak were frightening, but it was the heat that seared the air and robbed the oxygen that was the true malice. A wave of heat rolled off the tree, engulfing me, squeezing sweat from my body. It reminded me of the oppressive embodiment of the god’s darkness – the way he could be felt even though he had no form.

  The tree crackled as branches snapped and splintered off, ancient wood succumbing to immolation.

  Nurse Craig screamed. Patients and orderlies ran in all directions as a flaming branch snapped off and crashed to the ground. In the chaos, I slipped away from the group and ducked back through the gate into the kitchen garden. I crouched behind the rosemary bush and sent a ball of fire at the wooden gate. The guard on duty leaped back as the flames made quick work of the wood. He barreled across the lawn towards the others, barking orders into his walkie-talkie. I flattened myself against the wall, my heart pounding against my chest. As soon as he was out of sight, I ran for it.

  The flames had torn a hole in the wood large enough for me to pass through, if only I could get close enough to handle the heat. I sucked in a breath and lunged for the gate. Heat rolled over my body, a hand of caution pushing me back, reminding me what fire could do when it touched skin. I steadied myself, closed my eyes against the wall of flame, and sprinted through th
e hole.

  Heat engulfed me, bringing with it pain that tore at my chest and roared in my ears. I imagined I saw my mother’s face at the window, her mouth open in a silent scream as an orange halo framed her head. I reached through the flames toward her, desperate to pull her to safety. But she was unreachable. Gone to the angels, where they could place a real halo on her head while I burned up down below.

  And then I lurched forward, releasing myself from the fire’s possession.

  My eyes flew open as I rolled across gravel. I lay in the middle of a narrow access road, flanked by towering trees. Sirens screamed from the village. Behind the walls, the Dunwich Institute burned. Good fucking riddance. I was on the right side of the fence.

  I was free.

  If I wanted to stay free, I had no time to stop and smell the roses. I crawled into the shadows of the trees, checking my body over for injuries. Apart from another burn on my wrist just above the scar of the first, I was untouched. Now I had to figure out what to do next.

  It would take the firefighters some time to put out the blaze since it had started simultaneously in multiple rooms. By now the nurses would have realized I was missing, but I hoped they’d assume I’d run back inside or hid on the grounds and wouldn’t send out a search party for some time. I needed to be as far away as possible when that happened.

  I hauled myself to my feet and headed deeper into the forest, walking downhill in the direction of Arkham. The town nestled on the curve of the coast at the mouth of the peninsula, surrounded on three sides by dense forest and one side by that cold, unforgiving ocean. It was one of the earliest settlements in the area – not quite as old as Salem, but practically contemporary. In many ways, Arkham functioned much as it always had – the fishing industry provided much of the town’s employment, and I got the vibe from what Ayaz told me that the residents still regarded Parris’ home on the peninsula and the elite who came through with distrust. I could expect no help from the town, but I was never one to ask for help when I could do something myself. Arkham was closest, and it would have the supplies I needed immediately.