I closed my eyes, waiting for the first sting of teeth sinking into my flesh.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I’m sorry, Quinn. I’m sorry it ends like this. I wanted so much to save you.
I squeezed Quinn’s hard body, forcing my eyes shut. I might die being eaten alive by rats, but I didn’t have to watch it happen. My mother’s face flashed before my eyes. Wreathed in light and smiling her beautiful smile, she reached out of the darkness for me. I won’t see you soon, because you’re an angel and I’m going to a very different place. But I love you, Mom. I’m sorry. I—
I waited for the first bite. I waited for the shadows to take me.
But it didn’t come.
I cracked open one eye, daring a look. The rats still surged down from the bleachers, filling their court with their ranks. But instead of swarming over us they flowed around us, leaving a five-foot circle at our feet. We stood in the center of the court, where the glowing five-pointed star I’d seen last time now lit up our feet.
“Quinn.” I shook his shoulder, bringing him back to me. “Look.”
Quinn opened his eyes and jumped as he noticed the rats, the star, the cold shadows lurking behind us. “What the fuck is this?”
A single rat stepped out from the army and scurried toward us, stopping at my feet and standing up on its hind legs. A tiny nose twitched.
Silence fell. As one, every single rat in the gym stopped moving. The scritches stopped. The shadows remained mute. My heart pounded in my ears.
What the fuck is going on?
I knelt. “You’re the rats in the walls?” I asked.
The rat nodded.
“You understand English?”
Another nod.
“And you stop the shadows from coming closer?” I pointed behind me.
More vigorous nodding. The rats scraped their claws against the wood. Scritch-scritch-scritch. It was an answer.
Quinn’s fingers dug into my shoulder. “No way.”
The rat turned its tiny nose to Quinn, and nodded slowly, as if to say, keep up.
“If you’re on Hazy’s side, why did you attack her last time she was in the gym?”
The rat shook his head. He made a little “tsch-tsch” noise with his teeth as he threw his tiny paws in the air. He seemed to be saying, you’ve got it all wrong.
“Maybe they weren’t trying to attack me,” I said. “I think they were trying to show me what was beneath the gym. I know this is insane, but I think they’ve been looking out for me the whole time.”
Quinn nodded. “Okay, sure, the rats are our friends. I’m not going to question it with all these sharp teeth around.”
I nodded to the head rat. “Thank you so much for looking out for me. I’m only sorry it’s taken me this long for me to understand. Can you help me now? I’m trying to find my friend Greg. Do you know where they’re keeping him?”
The head rat turned its head and made that “tsch-tsch” noise again. Feet skittered across the floor as the rats parted like I was Moses commanding the Red Sea. They dived and scrambled over each other to line up in perfect rows, leaving us a straight path across the gym into the darkness.
Quinn gripped my hand so tight pain shot up my arm. We stepped onto the path. Thousands of beady rat eyes watched us, unblinking, as we followed the path. I held up my hand and made a flame on my palm.
The rat path led to a small alcove with a roller door. The words ‘Weight Room’ were scrawled on a faded sign. A length of rusted chain secured the roller door to a ring in the floor, and it was locked with a shiny padlock.
A brand new padlock for a gym no one uses? Not fucking likely.
Quinn pulled out the key mold we’d taken, but of course, it was useless. Ms. West had got her hands on a new padlock. This one was stainless steel – it would take ages to burn through. But the chain was much older. More malleable.
“You might want to turn away,” I told Quinn.
He didn’t, because he was Quinn and if you told him not to do something it only made him want to do it more. I gripped the chain in my hands and drew up the spark inside me, stoking the fire with my rage and fear until my palms glowed with heat. Quinn leaped back as if I’d burned him, his eyes wide as saucers in the gloom.
“You… you…” Quinn stammered, collapsing in on himself, curling up into a ball like a porcupine.
“Yes. I can summon fire.” The chain burned hot, then turned to liquid, which dribbled through my fingers to form a molten puddle on the floor.
One chain destroyed. One Quinn reduced to a mess in the corner.
I went to him, cupping his cheeks in my hands even as he tried to jerk away. “Quinn, listen to me. I swear to you, I don’t know why I have this power. I’ve had it my whole life. But I taught myself to control it. I promise I will never, ever hurt you.”
Quinn grabbed my wrists, turning my hands over. His whole body trembled. “What the fuck, Hazy? How’d you not burn yourself?”
“Because I’m awesome.” I cocked an eyebrow at him.
Quinn whistled through his teeth and dropped my hands. “You’re something else.”
“Damn right.” I just wish I knew what that something else was. “I know this is hard for you, but can you hold on to your sanity a little longer? We need to see what’s inside.”
“Yeah. Okay.” The lack of a witty retort showed just how rattled Quinn was. He pulled himself to his feet and shoved up the roller door. Behind us, the rats skittered and squeaked amongst themselves. Behind the door was another vast room, and I had to send up a flame from my palm to penetrate the darkness. Quinn let out a strangled cry, but he didn’t leave my side.
It was an old weight room, but it had a new purpose. Dusty workout equipment had been pushed against the walls to make way for a long stainless steel table littered with lab equipment. I recognized some of the machines from Gail’s laboratory. Racks of test tubes lined a rack that once held hand weights, and power cables snaked across the floor. Dry ice curled from beneath a door labeled ‘sauna.’
We found Ms. West’s lab.
In the corner, chained to a squat rack, was a slumped, shadowy figure. A flash of dirty-blond hair peeked out from a torn and bloody face.
“Greg!” I raced over and dropped to my knees, grabbing his chin and pulling his head into the light. It was him. His eyes lolled in his head, and his tongue hung out the side of his mouth. Blood caked under his fingers, and his usually bright hair was streaked with dirt and clinging to his face in matted clumps.
“Greg, can you hear me?” I slapped his cheeks, but all that elicited was a low groan.
“Hazy, look.” Quinn knelt on the other side of the squat rack, cradling something in his hands. I held the flame closer to him and realized it was another body. He turned the head toward me, and a curtain of dark hair fell away to reveal another familiar face.
Zehra.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Shit.” My eyes met Quinn’s – my fear reflected in his blue orbs. He tried to shake Zehra awake, but she was even more out-of-it than Greg.
Zehra’s here! But is she alive? Please let them both be alive.
“How come she’s here?” he whispered. “I thought you said she was dead.”
I shook my head. “I never saw her body. I just assumed because of the cave-in and she never showed up to meet me, and the Eldritch Club got hold of my phone… but now that I know she’s here, it makes me think that cave-in wasn’t an accident. When they saw my text, they would know exactly where she was meeting me. I think they made the god’s shadow servants move the rocks so it would collapse the cave on her so that I couldn’t tell her what I knew. Then they dragged her out through the god’s cavern and brought her here.”
I didn’t have to ask why. I knew. They needed Ayaz to lie to me, they needed him to complete the illusion so I believed I was crazy. They drugged him to erase his memory of me, but even that wasn’t enough to make him agree to it, so they used his sister as leverage.
/> So much of this didn’t make sense. From what Ms. West was saying in the gym, she hadn’t wanted to send me away, but then why did she cooperate with Vincent’s plan? I didn’t have time to consider it further, because Greg groaned and opened one eye.
“Haze…” he murmured.
“Greg, hey.” I cupped his face in my hands. His skin felt cold, clammy. Both he and Zehra’s chains had been loosely tied so they could move their arms and legs, even stand up, but they couldn’t step more than a foot in any direction. Dog bowls beside him held water and some kind of dried food. “We’re going to get you out of here, okay? I won’t let Ms. West hurt you anymore.”
Greg lifted his chin. “The rats… you have to know…”
“It’s a long story, but don’t worry about them. They’re sort of our friends.”
“I know,” Greg whispered. His chains clanged as he pointed a shaking finger across the room, where the rats lined up along the wall and started jumping in unison. “They… visit me. Good… company. But that’s not what I meant… look.”
I followed his finger. The rats lined up along the wall, standing on their hind legs and scraping their claws against the wood, leaving thin marks. They must’ve done it a hundred times before, because there was already a line of scratches running along the edge of the wall…
Wait a second…
I dropped Greg’s arm and crawled toward the wall. The rats parted ways, scampering under the gym equipment to give me a view of the scratches. I ran my hand over the wall, feeling the deep cuts where the rats had dug in with their claws.
These weren’t just random claw marks.
They scratched words into the wall.
No, not words. Names.
Bridget Bishop. Sarah Good. Susannah Martin. Sarah Wildes. Elizabeth Howe…
Someone dropped down beside me. Quinn. His hand dropped onto my shoulder, warm and steadying. Not even he could stop the cold leaking into my heart as I registered the significance of the names.
“That rats wrote these,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “Is it like some rat version of a dating website?”
“I recognize these names.” I touched the edge of ‘Alice Parker.’ “I’ve read them in my research about the Salem witch trials. These are the names of the victims. The women who were burned as witches. I think, somehow, but I don’t understand it, they are the rats.”
A voice from behind us coughed. “Four men, too.”
I whirled around to see Zehra raise her head and wipe a strand of tangled hair from her eyes. In the flickering candlelight, her dark features blended into the gloom, but I could never mistake those vivid eyes or the warmth and defiance in that voice for one of the shadows.
“You’re alive!” I rushed over to her and wrapped her in a hug. She clung to me, coughing, her body brittle and far too thin.
“I’m sorry I didn’t make our meeting,” she croaked.
“Ssssh, don’t talk.” I squeezed her. “I’m just so glad you’re here to correct my history failings.”
“Indeed – get it right. Four men were killed as witches, too. Giles Covey was pressed to death.” She coughed again. “Rebecca Nurse was supposedly executed, but then she showed up at Parris’ home a few years later.”
“That’s fascinating, but not relevant right now.” I turned to Greg. “Did you see the rats write on the walls?”
He shook his head. “I think that was already here when they tied me up, but the rats were determined we notice it. Do you think it has something to do with the god eating people’s souls?”
I stared at him in shock. He’s not supposed to know about the god—
“Greg and I have had plenty of time to talk,” Zehra said. “I told him everything. Honestly, I don’t understand why you didn’t, especially after he was nearly sacrificed himself.”
“I’ll explain later.” I tugged at the bindings around her wrists.
“How did you find us?” Greg asked.
“The rats led me here. I think they wanted us to know what the teachers were discussing tonight.” Above our heads, the scritching started again. King Rat leaped down from the rafters and stood on my shoulder. Zehra jumped, but to her credit, she didn’t scream.
I reached up to give King Rat a scratch behind the ears, but he turned his head toward me and bared his teeth in a maniacal grin, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to touch him. “I think they’ve been helping me all along. We’ve got a lot to catch up on. First, let’s get you out of here.”
“There’s no point.” Zehra pulled herself up, hugging her knees to her chest. “If everything you told me is true, you lose your one advantage by taking us with you. Right now you can sneak around anywhere because you’re a ghost. But if I’m gone, Ms. West will search the school and find us both.”
“Then we’ll all go,” I said. “We’ll sneak through the forest and head for a large foreign city where we can get lost. Trey and I did it before. He cut a sigil out of the rock and took it with him, and he could walk outside the boundary. We could all run to safety.”
I didn’t intend to leave school. I couldn’t. But they didn’t need to know that.
“If you leave Derleth, you can’t come back.” Zehra’s chest heaved from the effort of crossing her arms and glaring at me in defiance. “You might be outside the walls, but you won’t be free, because they’ll never stop chasing you. Do that if you want, but I’m not going with you. I’m staying right here. This is our one chance to save my brother, and I’m not letting you waste it.”
I glanced over at Greg, and he nodded. “Go. Pretend you never came here. West has made it clear we’re more valuable to her alive right now.”
“But why? What has she done to you?”
Greg shook his head. “There’s too much to tell, and you need to go. Zehra and I will look after each other.”
“I can’t leave you here to rot.”
“We’ll be fine – we’re being fed and watered.” Greg held up a battered paperback titled At The Mountains of Madness. “West has even provided entertainment of a sort.”
Zehra rolled her eyes. “That author can’t write for shit. So many big words. So much racism. What I wouldn’t give for a copy of Vogue.”
The rats chittered. The Rat King advanced, standing on his hind legs and tugging on my sleeve.
Zehra coughed. “I think that’s your cue to get out of here.”
“I can’t leave you.” Not when her skin on mine was so cold and clammy.
“You have to,” Zehra croaked. “But before you go, there’s one last thing…”
“Yeah?”
“On that bench over there… there’s something you should see.”
I followed Zehra’s finger to the end of Ms. West’s lab table. In a plastic tray sat a stack of newspaper articles. I started to flip through them and realized where they’d come from.
“I overheard a conversation between West and another teacher, Atwood,” Zehra said. “They found those articles I left for you in the room of a student named Loretta.”
Loretta took the articles. I’d gone to show Ayaz what I’d discovered about Miskatonic Prep, and in my haste, I hadn’t picked up the rest. When I came back to the storage room, they were gone. I’d never found out who took them or why. Loretta. If the teachers found them in Loretta’s room, that means it was probably from her that they learned about the secret passage.
Bitch.
I picked up the stack of articles. I’d never finished looking through them. The first few were about the Miskatonic Prep fire, then there were some about problems at the Arkham General Hospital morgue, although it never spoke about Ms. West by name. If I’d known all this sooner, it might’ve saved us some time.
Zehra coughed. “Find the article about Loretta.”
I flipped through the stack, scanning the tiny print for Loretta’s name. It didn’t make sense that she’d be in here. These were all articles from decades ago—
I stopped short, my breath catching in my throat.
Loretta’s face stared back at me from a small image. She wore a blue dress with a white lace collar. A Sunday School dress.
The headline read, ‘14-YEAR-OLD GIRL SUSPECTED OF MURDERING HER FATHER.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I scanned the article. It talked about her mother’s suicide, and how Loretta had been given to her father to raise after her death. The reporter in Loretta’s local town seemed to believe it wasn’t fair that Loretta’s father – who’d never wanted her – had a child thrust on him. An unstable child who ran him through with a pitchfork. Police found Loretta standing over the body of her dead father, silent and covered in blood. Her prints were on the pitchfork handle. The reporter made no secret of the fact she believed Loretta wasn’t just guilty, but evil.
A pitchfork. My eyes bugged out. That’s brutal.
Loretta was tiny. How did she even have the strength to lift a pitchfork, let alone drive it through someone’s ribcage?
Another article explained details from the court case. The defense argued that Loretta couldn’t have committed the crime because of her size and the amount of power and brutality required. They pointed out that a distraught Loretta, upon finding the body, tried to pull the handle free and ended up with blood all over her. They added witnesses who stated her father was a brutal man who had several ongoing disputes with neighbors and with a local shopkeeper. Loretta had been found not guilty, and she looked after by her grandparents.
Because we’re the murderers.
With shaking hands, I tidied the stack of articles and replaced them in the tray. Zehra watched me, her eyes swimming with pain. “Ms. West is interested in this girl,” she said. “You should talk to her.”
“Oh, I plan on it.” I hugged them both.
It felt like a betrayal to lock Zehra and Greg back in that room, to find another length of chain and wrap it through the padlock, to turn our backs on our friends and follow the rats out of the gym, but that was exactly what we did. I hated every moment of it. At the bottom of the staircase, the urge overcame me and I turned back. Quinn stopped me by grabbing my arms and turning me around again.
Possessed: A reverse harem bully romance (Kings of Miskatonic Prep Book 3) Page 18
