“Right.” I cracked the spine on the book as I flipped back to the beginning. “We’re better get studying, then.”
Chapter Eight
My back pressed against cool, pulsing stone, frozen in place as I watched Dante tattooing tentacles over my mother’s naked breasts. As he finished each one they came to life and slithered over her skin, wrapping around her limbs and squeezing tight while she writhed in ecstasy. I cried out and he turned around to look at me. His eyes reflected orange flames and his mouth was a black hole hanging open, disgorging masticated stars.
My alarm rang, startling me out of another horrific nightmare. I slammed my hand into the annoying buzz, swatting Loretta’s ancient clock off the chair beside my bed. It crashed against the wall and clattered to the floor, the glass face shattering and mechanical innards bouncing across the stones. The rats in the walls skittered away from the noise.
Oh yay. The first day of the second quarter is already off to a great start.
I was back in my own dorm room, down in the dungeon with the damp and the rats. Quinn and Ayaz had “borrowed” (read, stolen) some tools from the maintenance shed and installed two new locks and a deadbolt on my door. The locks they’d cut off a couple of disused classrooms. It made me feel a little safer – it was probably enough to stop John Hyde-Jones, but not enough to hold back the god’s hate-filled visions from my dreams.
I sat up in bed, wiping sweat from my forehead with the corner of my sheet. Hanging from the doorknob of my wooden closet was my Derleth uniform – knee-length red-and-black tartan skirt, white shirt, black blazer edged with red piping, and the black-and-red striped tie. My palms itched as I slid out of bed and stood in front of it, running a finger over the embroidered star on the school crest.
How can I put this on and pretend everything’s normal when there’s a demon beneath the school and a clock ticking down to my death?
Scritch-scritch.The rat claws churned, as if sending me a reply.
I pressed my finger into the scar on my wrist. My mother’s voice rang in my ears, clear and golden.You can do anything, my love.
Like she’d know. She’d never been to a boarding school of the dead.
After everything I saw last week, it seemed impossible I was about to go back to classes and pretend everything was fine. But if it would protect Greg and Andre, then it was worth it.
Besides, I had a few plans of my own. If Courtney Haynes thought she was going to continue to torment me and my friends, she had another thing coming.
While spending the week with Ayaz, the knowledge of just what the Miskatonic students had done to the sacrifices gnawed away at me. The monarchs of this school had tormented four students a year, every year for twenty years, until the students wanted to die. Until they were so broken they wanted to be sacrificed to the god. And while it seemed like Trey and Ayaz and Quinn at least had some kind of conscience about it, Courtney and her ilk tookpleasurein their task.
I may be trying to give them their lives back, but that didn’t mean they didn’t deserve to pay for their crimes. I couldn’t just let Courtney and Tillie and the others walk out into the world as they were – they would continue the fine traditions they’d started at Derleth Academy, blazing a path of torture across the world without remorse. I needed to make them face the monsters they’d become.
It was time they experienced a little torture themselves, courtesy of Hazel Waite, the gutter whore turned newest Eldritch Club recruit.
Revenge ideas stirred in my head, sending excited jolts through my body. I didn’t know when or how yet, but I knew I’d make every last student of Miskatonic Prep pay for what they’d done, starting with Courtney and the other monarchs. I just didn’t know how the three Kings fit into my plans. They had been horrible to me and to my friends. But when I thought of Quinn’s scream when Trey threw that itching powder into his eyes, or Ayaz’s hand brushing mine when he handed me a coffee and my veins caught alight, or my lips burning with the ghosts of their kisses, How do I choose between what they were – my bullies – and what they are to me now?
I guess it depends what they do next, whether they prove to me – to us – that we can trust them.
I pulled on the uniform, struggling to get the tie straight. I always used to copy Loretta while she did hers, but she wasn’t here anymore. I twisted it into a mockery of a knot, grabbed my battered bookbag, and pulled the door open.
Here goes nothing.
Greg and Andre met me in the hallway. Andre had his sleeves rolled up, showing off his Eldritch Club tattoo. Greg’s eyes were ringed with red – I imagined that like me he was still fending off the Great Old God in his dreams.
He greeted me with one of his customary warm hugs. “Hey, honey. We ready for this?”
“We’re gonna knock ‘em dead,” I said without a hint of irony, flashing him my own not-quite-healed tattoo. “Things are going to be different this quarter.”
The three of us linked arms and took the stairs together. Unlike the sweeping marble staircases throughout the rest of the buildings, our staircase was narrow and metal, so it was a bit cramped, especially when Andre tried to squeeze his enormous shoulders around the corner.
We emerged on the dorm floor. Students fluttered between their rooms, tossing books at each other, laughing and talking, and acting like totally normal teens who weren’t at all under the power of a malevolent cosmic entity. Girls compared lipstick colors as they strutted down the hall, tartan skirts rolled up as high as they dared.
All these students are dead.
They looked so normal, but it was all a show, a farce designed specifically to break us. I shivered. Greg squeezed my hand. He thought I was afraid because of Courtney.
If only you knew, Greg. I’d give anything to go back to my worst nightmare being Courtney fucking Haynes.
Ayaz came down the staircase at the end of the hall. A couple of girls who were walking past stopped in their tracks, their jaw practically hitting the floor at the sight of the monarch in his crisp white shirt and black dress slacks. It was kind of gross, but also… I got it. Ayaz was hot as hell, with his dark hair and smoldering eyes and those cheekbones that could cut glass…
I may have been doing a bit of drooling myself.
