I let myself into Trey’s ensuite – all white marble and black chrome – and turned on the shower. Multiple heads pummeled my body with hot water while I lathered up with Trey’s expensive shampoos, washing away the mud and cold of the caves. But not even fancy-ass bath products could slough away the crawling chaos of the horrors the deity had visited upon my mind.
After I’d showered and dried myself with three of the fluffiest towels ever unleashed upon the world, I lay down in the bed, setting the shard of glass on the corner of the bedside table. I pulled the covers up to my head. Trey’s scent wafted up from the sheets – spring herbs, wild-blossoms, fragrant cypress wood – light and airy and calm.
I closed my eyes, hoping the blissful oblivion of sleep in a non rat-infested room would soon overtake me. Instead, the deity sought me on the edges of my dreams, calling me back to the cavern. Every time I felt myself slipping under, its visions crept through my skull, and my eyes flew open again.
It was as if that thing was made of hatred, as if its very constituent parts were the prejudice and rage and thirst for power it had extracted from those it consumed. I wondered what it would extract from me, what power it would draw from my own innermost thoughts.
Or would the things I’d done be too dark even for it to stomach?
Chapter Six
“Rise and shine, Hazy.”
I opened one eye. A disembodied head bobbed on the opposite wall, sandy hair sticking out in all directions and wearing Quinn’s signature smirk. Pain and fire tore through my skull.
The deity beheaded Quinn! It’s possessed his skull and sent it to torment me.
I scrambled up the bed, grabbing for my shard. My feet tangled in the sheets as I tried to escape.
“Don’t come any closer or I’ll fuck you up!” I yelled, holding the shard over my wrist, just over the Elder Sign tattoo.
“Hazy, Hazy… it’s just me.” The severed head pushed the door wider, revealing his whole body. His very taut,verynaked and tatted body.
My mouth fell open, and my tongue dried on my throat. My arm trembled as I struggled to hold it out.This isn’t how this dream usually goes…
“Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” Quinn flopped down on the bed, his muscled ass pointing to the sky as he took the shard from my hand and set it back on the bedside table. He clasped my hand in his. He felt warm, alive. But I knew that was a lie.
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “I’m not sure I’ve slept at all. I’ve been having these horrible nightmares…”
“I know. You were screaming in your sleep,” Quinn whispered. “Trey said not to disturb you, that at least you were sleeping. But I couldn’t take it anymore. I came to see if you were okay.”
The dreams flooded back to me – mere snatches of my nightmares that each held unimaginable terror. A black, slimy mass covered in eyes and mouths, a towering giant woman with branches made of flesh protruding from her body, a subterranean city made of shimmering stone and built atop the body of a slumbering god, a eyeless tortoise with a triangular head and two whip-like tails that lumbered across the earth devouring everything in its path, Quinn with his limbs torn off by monstrous tentacles, Ayaz absorbed into a towering pillar of amorphous alien flesh, Trey and Greg and Andre turned to flesh-eating zombies by a red vapor, Dante’s fingers trailing over a naked breast, my mother’s face in the window as the fire tore through the building. Flames consuming the cosmos.
Even in sleep, I couldn’t escape the horror of this school and its secret.
“I’m not okay,” I whispered. My nails dug into his arm.Quinn’s here. He feels so alive.
“Me neither.”
Quinn’s lips sought mine, hot and needy. This wasn’t anything like Quinn’s other kisses; this one was full of secret parts of himself he hid from the world. This was the Quinn buried down deep, the scared boy who just wanted to be held.
The dead boy who wanted to live.
We faced down our fears in each other’s arms. Quinn tried to force out the darkness in me, and I tried to swallow his pain.
Quinn’s hand brushed across my breasts, his touch light, searching, but tinged with need. His finger brushed my nipple, which hardened under his touch.
In the wall behind my head, I heard the faintestscritch-scritch. A warning.
I froze.
“Hazy?” Quinn’s voice was husky, breathless. He froze too, his muscles tensed.
I scrambled out from under him. “Get out of this bed.”
“As you wish.” Quinn wrapped his arm around my waist and threw me over his shoulder, sheets and all. “We’re out of bed.”
“Quinn, you bastard, let me down.” I grabbed hold of the doorframe. He sighed dramatically, set me down, and adjusted the sheet in my hands so that his fingers brushed just above my breast, sending a flush of heat through my body…
