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

by Steffanie Holmes

  Shit. “You’re FBI? And you know who I am?”

  He nodded. “That’s the ‘Agent’ part of my name. Don’t look so worried. Your friend Deborah Pratt contacted me some time ago. We’ve been monitoring strange activity in this area for several years. At first, her story sounded unbelievable, but as we learned more, it became clear she was at least telling the partial truth. We knew something big was happening when all the parents of past students of Miskatonic Prep started to lose their fortunes. Then, the IRS informed us that large sums of money were withdrawn from their kids’ bank accounts, all on the same night. Tonight, we witnessed something incredible, so we thought we’d better get up here.”

  My chest tightened. “What did you see?”

  “A weather phenomenon,” Agent Anderson’s eyes sparkled. “To the untrained eye, it might have looked like a cosmic deity blasting off from our planet in a ship made of black stone and powered by human souls, but that’s obviously completely ridiculous.”

  “Obviously,” I agreed, my throat tightening.

  He nodded. “As long as you and your classmates can attest that you saw a weather phenomenon, stay out of the papers, and help us curb any potential hysteria about other things that definitely didn’t happen here, we can help you. I understand these students need money, new identities, perhaps…” his gaze fell on the tattered robes hanging from my frame. “…college placement?”

  “Yes. I mean, for the others, yes. We’ve already got fake passports and visas, but if you could help them with something more official that would be amazing. But not me. You probably know me already. My name is definitely in your database from a little arson back in Philadelphia.”

  “Of course.” That kind smile never left his face. “Hazel Waite, the brave student who saved her classmates from a freak weather event.”

  “No, I mean, two people died in that fire. You need to clap me in handcuffs and—”

  But Anderson kept gazing at me with that kind expression. “Crimes go unsolved every day in this country, Ms. Waite. Arson is especially difficult to prove, and convictions are rare. I don’t see the need to waste the court’s time in this case.”

  Paramedics swarmed around me. A woman lifted my arms, studying my face. “Is anything wrong? Does anything hurt or feel broken?”

  Good question. I aimed my palm at the tree and tried to call upon the flame inside me. All I felt was a fizzing spark, like a lighter trying without enough fuel. Nothing ignited.

  I lowered my hand and smiled. “Nope. Nothing is wrong at all.”

  Epilogue

  Five years later

  EPILOGUE: FIVE YEARS LATER

  “Arf!” Fergus barked from the backseat as his face smushed against the window, tongue licking the glass.

  “I can’t believe they still haven’t fixed this road,” Quinn muttered as he yanked the wheel around the corner, sliding out the back wheels of the car.

  “Don’t fucking do that,” Trey muttered from the front seat. “We’ve got precious cargo.”

  Acting on instinct, Ayaz reached across the seat to hold his hand over my belly, which now protruded so significantly I couldn’t see my Docs over top of it. My last midwife said I shouldn’t be wearing Docs while I was pregnant, and tried to shove my feet into orthopedic horrors. Big mistake. Luckily, Trey managed to smooth things over with the agency and they agreed not to sue us. My new midwife never mentioned my choice of footwear.

  Smart woman.

  I knitted my fingers in Ayaz’s, pressing his palm against my skin just as the baby kicked. The way my Turk’s face lit up as he felt the tiny limb made the pain of it wriggling around on my spinal column worth it. This little guy or girl was a fighter, just like me.

  Even though I was in my twenty-fifth week of swollen ankles and morning sickness, I still couldn’t quite believe I was growing a real-life human inside me. Not just any human – a child of my Kings. We’d decided early on not to test for paternity unless it was medically required. I’d put Trey’s name down on the birth certificate for the associated benefits, but it could have belonged to any of them. It didn’t matter. Our baby belonged to all of us.

  We all had a new name now – the same last name. When I’d created my new identity, I’d chosen to take my mother’s maiden name, Pratt. The guys had followed suit. It wasn’t the same as being able to legally marry, but it made us feel like a family.

  Also, ‘Pratt’ described Quinn perfectly. And now our baby would share it.

  Our baby.

  I never thought I wanted children. The thought of a tiny parasite growing inside my belly for nine months before being unleashed in a fountain of blood sounded far too close to everything I endured at Miskatonic Prep. But the day that strip turned pink changed my life. Now, I counted down the days until we got to meet a new little human.

  Ayaz squeezed my hand. He never recovered his memories – Ms. West had been too thorough – but it was okay. We made new ones. “We don’t have to go today if it’s too much. They’ll understand. It’s not too late to turn around.”

  “Speak for yourself, Ataturk.” Quinn’s hands yanked the wheel around the next corner. The back wheel spun out again, kicking up a spray of loose gravel. “There ain’t exactly anywhere to turn around.”

  “Arf!” Fergus agreed, throwing his head over the back of the seat to lick my face.

  “I’m fine.” I forced a smile as I shoved Fergus’ head away. “Really. I want to see what they’ve done to the place.”

  It was only a half-lie. I did want to see what had become of the place that still haunted my nightmares. All these years since we were carried down from the peninsula in the back of an ambulance into the arms of the FBI, Miskatonic Prep shadowed us. It lurked in the corner of the dorm room I shared with Trey at college. It hunted in the woods where Quinn ran his wildlife safari, it watched and waited as Ayaz graduated summa cum laude with his architecture degree and opened a practice. It lay in wait as we went to the animal shelter for Trey to pick our first puppy, who now hopped around the back of the car, panting on Ayaz’s head.

  Branches scraped across the roof of the car as we rounded the last corner. I caught peeks of grey stone through the trees, and a knot twisted in my stomach. A shining new sign at the gate read. “Welcome to Miskatonic Preparatory Academy. All welcome.”

  Fuck. They even kept the name.

  The car fell silent as we all stared at that sign, as the weight of what it meant to be back sank in. We pulled into a parking lot beside a row of cars. There were the familiar fancy rides, of course – a Lamborghini splattered with dust from the road. A Porsche with a scrape down the door from where it had clung too close to the cliff. But interspersed with them were battered pickup trucks and used cars. Against the backdrop of grandeur, these vehicles seemed silly. But the fact they were there at all was a good sign.

  The new school buildings loomed above us – the classroom and faculty wings, the dorms, the gymnasium with its high stone wall. It was uncanny how alike they were to Parris’ old home. I searched the windows of the dormitory, finding those that had once housed my friends and my enemies. The tree that had let me out of Trey’s room on more than one occasion no longer existed.

  The stone steps, where I’d first laid eyes on Trey Bloomberg all those years ago, still stretched up toward twin wooden doors. The very place where he’d warned me away and laughed at my discomfort.

  A shudder ran through my body. We thought we’d banished the ghosts, but would we ever truly be free of the horrors that had chased us?

  This is a terrible idea. We should never have come.

  The baby squirmed in agreement.

  The door flung open. I half expected to see Ms. West’s Morticia Addams gown sweeping over the marble tiles, her hard eyes boring into my soul. Instead, two very familiar but very different figures bounded down the stairs toward us.

  “Hazy!”

  Greg’s academic gown fluttered around his shoulders. Behind him, Andre beamed – his broad sho
ulder blocking my view into the building behind them. Greg kissed my cheeks. “You look amazing, honey. You’re positively glowing. Pregnancy agrees with you.”

  “It doesn’t agree with that fucking access road,” I muttered, steadying myself against him as a fresh wave of nausea slammed me.

  “We’d better get her inside.” Trey took my shoulders. Ayaz came up on the other side and held the door open for me. Fergus wiggled out of the seat and bounded out first, barking in excitement as he raced to sniff the flower beds. Quinn rushed in from the car, carrying this stupid tote bag he insisted I have with me at all times, filled with heat pads and herbal supplements and whale noise that helped the baby grow.

  Honestly, what happened to my badass bullies? They used to be the Kings of the school. Now my husbands are fussing over me like old maids. When the baby comes, they’re going to be even worse.

  I say husbands, but we weren’t officially married. You couldn’t do that… yet. Tillie was running for senator, and she said she was going to change the law, but I doubt she’d get that one past the House. Not even she had the power to work miracles.

  Greg’s hand on my arm trembled with excitement as he led us slowly up the stairs. “I can’t wait for you to see what we’ve done with the place. It’s okay to leave the dog outside.”

  He flung open the doors and swept us into a high, airy atrium. My breath sucked in, and for a moment I imagined myself six years ago, stepping into Derleth Academy for the first time. My fingers flew to my pocket, where a brand new iPhone rested against my leg. I remembered clutching my old one for dear life on my first day here before Ms. West slipped it into her robe.

  I remembered Trey’s smirk, the way his breath brushed my skin as he christened me ‘New Meat.’

  “—tried to choose materials that closely matched the original structure,” Greg was explaining, pointing out details in the moldings. “Of course, we made improvements. The biggest one being laying cable up the peninsula so the entire school has one of the best wifi networks in the state. You can’t get lost in the woods around here, and all students have access to university databases and academic resources.”

  Trey pointed to an empty space above the stairs, where the enormous electronic scoreboards used to sit. “No merit points?”

  “Hell no,” Andre said, in his deep, rumbling voice. My skin rippled with pleasure from the sound of it. I threw my arms around him. It had been too long.

  Over the last few years, after the FBI and some of our class alumni organized enough funds to put him in therapy for his trauma, Andre started to talk. Not a lot, and not often, but every word was a gift. He and Sadie taught us all the basics of sign language so we could use our hands to speak to them as well.

  “We decided we didn’t want that kind of competitive atmosphere,” Greg said. “Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t a place for lazy kids. But we wanted students to focus on improving themselves. So instead, we track individual progress against a set of self-defined parameters. It’s more work, but it seems to be working. We have one of the best success rates for college acceptance in the country, which is unheard of in such a new school.”

  Trey smiled. “Well, new-ish.”

  “Right. If you come this way—” The bell rang, cutting Greg off. Doors banged and the entire building shook with the rumble of hundreds of feet. Students erupted into the halls.

  I noticed the changes immediately. No longer was the student body of Miskatonic Prep a sea of petulant white sameness. Now, I saw uniforms resplendent with Native American adornments, faces of all colors and shapes and sizes laughing together. Accents and languages from all corners of the earth rose through the space in a polyglot symphony. An ocean of diversity, wild for its unusualness, beautiful because of what it meant for the future.

  As students raced past on their way to their next classes, they high-fived Greg and fist-bumped Andre.

  As I followed Greg and Andre down the hall, posters advertising a school LGBT club and a multicultural celebration week jumped out at me. All things that would have been completely foreign at the school I attended. He showed us the dormitories, which had been remodeled. Instead of the sumptuous suites for the richest students, there were collaborative spaces where students worked together. There was no staff in the dorms – laundry, cleaning, and cooking was all done by the students.

  We reached the end of the hall. My hand gripped the balustrade. A hole in the floor gaped darkness, with a row of narrow stairs like sharpened teeth ready to swallow me. The basement. The dungeon.

  The baby squirmed. A fresh wave of nausea washed over me.

  I squared my shoulders and plunged into the void. Down into the gloom. Only, as soon as my foot hit the third step, a light flickered on.

  “Sensors,” Greg grinned. “We don’t want anyone fumbling around in the dark.”

  The dungeon wasn’t exactly as it had been. It was only around half the size, chopping off the end of the hall where the secret passage had been. I guessed Greg and Andre had no use for those old remnants.

  Only, they did. Framed pictures on the walls showed some of the previous alumni and the members of the senior Eldritch Club, along with news headlines about their downfall and strange disappearance – hundreds of the most powerful people in America suddenly missing without a trace, believed to have been a mass hit by a Honduran drug cartel ripped off by the Eldritch Club. There was a whole display about the conspiracy theories abounding on the internet about the ‘weather phenomenon’ – suggesting it was everything from a UFO landing to a Russian missile test gone wrong.

  Without mentioning the god or the dead students, the museum painted a sad picture of the school’s history. I peered at the letters laminated under glass, each written by past scholarship students detailing the bullying they suffered. All this next to smiling images of the school’s elitist alumni.

  “I wanted to make sure we always remembered what division does to us,” Greg whispered. “That way the students knew why we do things the way we do here.”

  I squeezed him back. “It’s perfect.”

  His mobile phone buzzed. For a moment, I was transported back in time, and my stomach clenched, thinking a teacher would come by and punish him for breaking the rules. I grabbed Trey’s arm before remembering that Greg was the headmaster now, that he’d set the school up with world-class wifi.

  Greg peeked at his phone. “They’ve all arrived now. Let’s go.”

  He led us back up the stairs and through the dorms, throwing open one of the double sets of French doors leading out onto the quad. I staggered back in surprise, gripping Ayaz to steady myself.

  People filled every spare inch of the quad. Familiar faces, many of whom I hadn’t seen since the day we clambered up from the grotto.

  “It’s Hazel!” someone cried. Conversations broke off as faces turned toward me, beaming as if I was some famous celebrity. The guys did a good job of keeping them at bay as we moved toward the dining hall, but there was one face that surged forward whom I really wanted to see.

  “Hazel.”

  Her hair was shorter now and dyed a luxurious brown. But I’d recognize those feline features and that haughty mouth anywhere.

  “Courtney Haynes.”

  “It’s Courtney McMillan now,” Courtney flipped her hair and smirked at my Docs. “I see you haven’t changed a bit.”

  I took in her designer outfit and feline features. “Likewise.”

  Courtney smiled then – a genuine smile I didn’t think I’d ever seen before. “You might be surprised. I built a sustainable fashion label. All our production comes from ethical factories that pay a living wage to women in Ghana.” She glanced across the quad, nodding to Loretta. “My business partner was over there just last month setting up to fund schools and scholarships to local female entrepreneurs.”

  “Wow. That’s… um… that’s…” I laughed. “For the first time ever, you’ve rendered me absolutely speechless.”

  Greg rang the bell and invited
us into the dining hall for dinner. The chefs had laid out an incredible banquet. No fancy food here, just good old fashioned fare. Greg had put in a special order with the chef for me – a side of bacon strips, piled up into a mountain and drenched with maple syrup.

  We dug in while Nancy and Barclay delivered a short lecture. They’d taken over Vincent’s company following his disappearance and built a probe that was tracking the object now known only by its designation CTHU-LU as it tracked across the sky. “It passed out of our galaxy last month. From now on, gathering data will be much more difficult, but we’ll do what we can.”

  The god was going home. With his star-mistress at his side. I wondered how the Eldritch Club enjoyed being in the bodies of rats.

  I still felt as though I got away with murder. I lived with that guilt every day. Imagining my mother and Dante in their void of light helped, but not all the time. Sometimes I still dreamed of flames. Sometimes I imagined I heard the god’s voice, but it was usually just the wind whistling through the trees around our mountainside home.

  A few months ago, shortly after I finished reading my mother’s diaries, my fire returned. That frightened me, especially with a child on the way. Deborah believed it was the pregnancy that ignited the flame inside me. “You have a baby to protect,” she said.

  What if our baby carried the flame?

  Across the room, Courtney met my eyes. She nodded her head. I nodded back, touching my fingers to the tattoo on my wrist. A few years ago, I covered the scar with a nazar – protection from the evil eye. It felt appropriate.

  When the plates were cleared away, Greg invited us to a dance. We carried torches and chanted words of magic that the Eldritch Club had made their own – reclaimed now as school songs – down to the old pleasure garden overlooking the ocean.

  Students were allowed to join us. We danced around a bonfire, toasting Paul’s memory and congratulating each other on the positive changes made in the world. Fergus was the real star, splashing around in the grotto and rolling over to submit his belly for pats. I got into a heated argument about spontaneous combustion with an earnest young scholarship student from New Zealand. It was one of the greatest nights of my life.