Ayaz’s eyes fluttered closed, his impossibly-long lashes tangling together as his mind traveled to some other place and time. I caught a whiff of him – that incense and opium scent of forbidden pleasure – and my lips burned with memories of our kiss. The kiss he’d taken because he’d felt left out. Because somewhere inside he was still that ten-year-old boy in a big, strange house, wondering why he’d been abandoned by the people who were supposed to love him.
But I couldn’t square away that glimpse of him with the guy I’d caught fucking Ms. West in an empty classroom. Ayaz was an enigma to me. More than anything I wanted to open him up and lay him bare.
“Or maybe because of his loneliness, he needed a friend more than he needed someone else to loathe?” I ventured.
Ayaz snorted. “No. He saw that his father liked me, and he thought if he befriended me then whatever magic I exerted over Vincent would rub off on him, too. Enough questions.” Ayaz’s eyes sprung open. Whatever memories that had assailed him were firmly shut away in a box again. He flattened out the book. “We need to get to work.”
“What are we looking for?”
“We have two separate problems – getting rid of the god and bringing the edimmu back to life. The first has to be our priority, so anything that could give us a clue on how to destroy the god, or how to banish it back to its own dimension. Failing that, if we could figure out how Parris summoned and trapped it in the first place. Most magic is a kind of karmic balancing act, so performing the same spell backward is often enough to undo its effects.”
“So all this stuff, spells and rituals and summoning, it’s all real?”
“You’ve had your brush with the Great Old God. What do you think?” Ayaz fingered the edge of the book. I nodded. When he put it like that, I couldn’t deny what I’d felt that night, what I still felt every time I closed my eyes. “As far as I can tell, there’s no exact spell in here that correlates to, ‘here’s how to summon a Great Old God,’ but Parris has written about his research. It would help if you learned Medieval Latin.”
“Oh sure, I’ve already got a full academic load, a leading role in the school production, and a Great Old God on my case, but whatever. I’ll learn Medieval Latin.”
“It’s fine.” Ayaz tossed another book across the table to me. “This is an occult book from the library. It’s written by E. Eldridge, one of Parris’ students, and it’s been translated into English.”
“How do you know Medieval Latin?”
“I’ve been at this school twenty years,” he said. “Trey spends his time trying to stay at the top in some vain hope he’ll win his father’s approval. Quinn’s fucked his way through the entire student body. I learn things.”
“What things have you learned, apart from Medieval Latin?”
“Theoretical physics. A few other dead languages. Advanced alchemy.”
“You’re taking that stupid alchemy class?”
“Not stupid.” Ayaz pointed to a squiggly shape on the page in front of me. “I can tell you what that means.”
“Okay, Nostradamus, what is it? It looks like someone testing their pen to see if it’s out of ink.”
“It’s a sigil. I told you how in magic these are considered to be pictorial signatures – like how a demon might write its own name. They can also be the map of a ritual or directions to a place of power. Or they can trap power. Parris wrote sigils like these all over the walls in the caves and cairns on the boundaries of the school. They are what keep us edimmu trapped inside. They form an invisible barrier we can’t cross. You’ll see them everywhere once you know what you’re looking for.”
“There was one carved into that rock you and Trey moved,” I recalled.
“Exactly. That sigil is part of the god’s prison.” Ayaz traced a sigil on the page of his book. “See this? It’s the sigil of the demon Bael. This is Halphas, and here’s Asmodeus. By drawing these sigils, not only can the magician summon a demon, he or she can also control it. But Parris wasn’t interested in demons. He wanted more power than a demon could offer him. I think what happened is that he found the sigil that drew this god out of another dimension, only he had no control over it. He couldn’t put the god back in the box.”
“So he trapped it here?”
“Exactly. The void beneath the gymnasium is the god’s prison. And I think everything the god does – all the power he feeds the members of the Eldritch Club, all the sacrifices he demands – is an attempt to weaken Parris’ protections. If that god escapes—” Ayaz shuddered.
“But that’s not going to happen, right? That god has been trapped down there at least five centuries. Surely it would have escaped by now if it could.”
“Except that twenty years ago it started a fire that killed 245 souls,” Ayaz said. “And then it resurrected those same people to live in a time-locked prison in order to feed it more power. I can’t help but think it’s gearing up to make a move. Remember, the god doesn’t measure time the way we do. For it, twenty years isn’t even the blink of an eye.”
“When you put it like that…” I turned the page in my book, staring down at more images of sigils and other occult symbols. “You’d think Parris would have just left a note explaining what he did, to make it easy for his disciples to figure out what he couldn’t.”
“It’s not that easy. He couldn’t write down the sigil. Even that might have given the creature too much power. And remember, Parris wasn’t prone to altruism. He was more concerned with obtaining as much power as possible from the trapped god than with sending it back. But somewhere in this book, he’s given us clues, I’m sure of it.”
“Uh-huh.” I turned another page. “And in the twenty years since you’ve been searching for this sigil, what have you uncovered so far?”
Ayaz shook his head. “Absolutely nothing.”
I glared at him.
“What? I had to teach myself Medieval Latin. Besides, I never thought I had a deadline before.”
