“Hazy here was running late to meet you, so she thought she’d take a shortcut through the gymnasium. Something attacked her and she screamed and punched me in the jaw.”
Something that might have been fear flickered through Ayaz’s dark eyes. He knelt down in front of me and started to press his fingers all over my body. “Are you hurt? Did you break anything?”
“You’re not a doctor yet,” I muttered.
“You can have a look at my jaw, though,” Quinn complained. “It really fucking hurts.”
“Sort yourself out,” Ayaz continued his examination, probing my cheeks and running his hands over my neck, where I still had bruises from Trey’s attack at the party. Ayaz picked up my arm and pressed his finger to the burn on my wrist. Fire flared through my body, the dangerous heat that came over me whenever I was around the Kings – the kind of fire that could easily rage out of control.
I snatched my hand away. “I’m fine.”
I wasn’t, but I had more important things to worry about. My elbow still smarted from where I’d wrenched it, and I was afraid my heart would never return to normal. The adrenaline was starting to flee my body, and I shivered. Ayaz shrugged off his blazer and threw it over my shoulders. Despite myself, I sucked in a deep breath of his spicy scent, letting this second olfactory sensation scrub the horror from my nostrils.
Quinn left and re-entered the room, Trey baying at his heels. The three of them crowded around me, touching me, stroking me, bombarding me with questions.
“Give me some room,” I grumbled. They all stepped back, and I wished they hadn’t. My body ached to feel the warmth of them.
Ayaz gripped my shoulders, studying me with his hard, dark eyes. “Listen, it’s really important that you tell me exactly what you saw and heard.”
“It was so weird.” I rubbed my temple, where a headache bloomed. “I think whatever chemical is causing that smell gave me hallucinations.”
“Maybe. But I need to know what happened, no matter how weird you think it is.”
In between coughing and dry heaving, I related to them every detail I could remember about the gym – the scritching in the walls, the shadowy figures that scuttled under the bleachers on all fours and then crept across the court, the eerie light that seemed to come from beneath the court and formed the five-pointed star and eye of the school’s crest.
“You seem positive that the scritching noise was rats,” Ayaz said. “But you didn’t actually see a rat.”
“No, but it was exactly the same as the scritching in the walls. If that’s not rats, what could it be?”
Quinn screwed up his face, as if he could think of lots of things it could be. “You’ve been hearing this scritching noise at night, right?”
“Yeah. Don’t you?” Then I shook my head. “Of course you don’t. You sleep in the fancy dorms. It’s only us scholarship students who get the basement rat-hole rooms.”
“Maybe not for much longer,” Trey growled. “That’s got to be some kind of health code violation. Maybe we could go to Headmistress West and—”
Ayaz shook his head. “I tried that already.”
That was right. I forgot that Ayaz had been a scholarship student. Supposedly, he’d slept in the same room I now occupied. I couldn’t picture it. Did his rise to the rank of King in the school have something in common with whatever happened to Loretta?
“Did you get my books when you carried me out?” I asked Quinn. “I had something to show you.”
“Nope, sorry. And neither of us are going back to get them, not if there are killer rats.”
“Damn. I found something really odd.” I scrambled to remember the details of the newspaper clipping. “Did you know there used to be another school here?”
Trey whistled his breath through his teeth. Quinn cocked his head to the side and flashed me a smile that was kind of tight-lipped. “That so?”
“Yeah. I found all these newspaper articles in one of the boxes in the storage room on my floor.” I told them about chasing Loretta – or who I thought was Loretta – into the room, and finding them scattered everywhere. “Apparently, this place used to be called Miskatonic Preparatory, and it burned down in a tragic fire twenty years ago. It killed 245 students. Do people not know this or do you just not talk about it?”
“You shouldn’t be reading these.” Trey looked murderous. “They’re not for your kind.”
“Mykind?I may have grown up in the Badlands, but I’m not a simpleton, Trey. So you guys knew about this fire and about Miskatonic Prep?”
“Of course we do. It’s not a secret.” Trey said, sounding exasperated. “Some of our class has family who died that night. But the school has worked hard to distance itself from what happened, and our reputation is beyond reproach.”
I shuddered. “So many people died. How is this place still open?”
“You want to be in business one day?” Ayaz’s eyes sharpened. “This school is a valuable lesson for you – behold the power of rebranding. A new name, a new intake of students, a generation of powerful people who wanted to keep their status symbol alive. Miskatonic Prep was erased from history, and Derleth Academy rose from its ashes.”
