Nancy laughed as she passed me her lipstick. “Hell yeah I do. And I love it. It’s about time someone shook things up around here. This place has been the same fordecades.”
Oh, Nance. She didn’t know that I knew just how accurate that was.
“We ready?” Trey glanced around the group. He was met with shouts and cheers. Ayaz and Quinn linked arms with me. Greg and Andre took their places on the ends. The monarchs of Derleth Academy, united.
We marched through the dining hall doors as one. Strings of fairy lights hung from the rafters, making the whole room glow with twinkling light. Rock music that was twenty years out-of-date pumped from an expensive audio-visual setup on the raised platform where the teachers normally ate. Now that I knew the school’s secret, so many of its weird quirks made sense. Of course their music taste was stuck in the past; they hadn’t listened to new tunes since the fire.
Heads turned as we stalked across the room – students, teachers, and alumni followed our movements with awe, with trepidation, with barely-concealed rage. Faces of alumni flashed around me, and now that I knew the secret of this school I couldn’t help but wonder how they all remained so young, so vibrant. Their children had been teenagers twenty years ago, but nearly everyone in this room still looked barely middle-age.
Of course, the god is giving them youth as well as power.
I noticed Vincent Bloomberg standing with the Deadmistress at the front of the room. His wine glass froze at his lips. I noticed a pair of fake horns sticking out of his dark hair.
The devil.Of course.
Heat flared through my chest, a fire stoked by rage and fed with fear of tonight’s ordeal. The two of them presided like a royal couple over a room of dead teenagers frozen in time, all so they could wield a power from beyond our universe. How could Vincent Bloomberg leave the campus at the end of the day, knowing his son was trapped here for eternity? How did he sleep at night?
Like a baby on fucking four-hundred-count Egyptian cotton sheets, I bet.
The students were going to get theirs for what they’d done, and Courtney would be a quivering amorphous mess by the time I finished with her. But I reminded myself to save the majority of my hate for the orchestrators of this horror – not the Great Old God itself but the humans who were willing to do anything for its power. The parents like Vincent who hadn’t fought for their children’s lives but had instead robbed them of a future in order to feed their own vanity and lust.
You think you’re the devil, Vincent Bloomberg? I’m about to get Dante’s Inferno on your ass.
Quinn swiped drinks off the table and handed them around our group. As we toasted each other, my shoulders tensed from the burden of so many eyes on me. I raised the drink to my lips, then caught Courtney – wearing a slutty cat costume complete with glittery ears and cat-face pasties over her otherwise bare breasts – staring me down from over the rim of the cup. I set mine down without taking a sip. It would be just like her to try and poison me tonight.
Trey took my hand. “We’re having the first dance,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear.
All around us, conversations stopped. Trey’s jaw set. He took my hand, escorting me to the center of the room. People stepped aside to make room for us, until there was a wide circle around us. The music swelled – some gothic rock band sang with dark, crunchy guitars and a violin keening for forgotten souls.
Trey’s fingers laced in mine. His other hand gripped my hip with fierce possession. I had no idea how to dance like this – you’d get beaten at a Badlands party for waltzing or whatever the fuck this was – but he led me in a circle like a pro, his body sweeping me across the floor like I was a Disney princess and he was the Prince Charming. Prince of Darkness more like, with the fairy lights catching crimson strands in his hair and his fresh cypress and wildflower scent pulling me under his spell.
I knew this couldn’t be real. The way Trey looked at me, his eyes burning into mine. The tug of his haughty lips, the way his body molded into mine. This was all a production for the man in the devil horns – a song-and-dance routine for an audience of one. As Trey swung me around the room, Vincent Bloomberg’s eyes burned into the back of my skull.
I didn’t want to be a pawn in Trey’s teenage rebellion. Even if we did have this crazy, messed-up chemistry. But the violin swelled and a mournful voice cried of lost love, and Trey held me on my feet and I almost, for a moment,believed.
“Who’s this band?” I asked, trying to break the spell and bring me back to center. My voice came out breathless.
“They’re called Blood Lust,” Trey replied.
“They’re good.” I never paid much attention to music, but tonight the pounding bass and that damn violin were waking dark and hidden parts of me.
“Mmmmhm.” Trey leaned in close, his cheek resting against mine. My heart pattered in my chest. “Every girl in this room wants to be you right now. What do you think of that?”
“I think they’re all fucking idiots,” I replied. Trey chuckled, his laugh reverberating down my spine. “Why bother with this farce? Why do you all put on this show for your parents – is it so they feel better about trapping you here in this nightmare?”
“These parties are all we have to look forward to.” His breath caressed my earlobe. “Apart from torturing scholarship students.”
“If you’re trying to make me feel pity for you, you’ve failed miserably. If you’d exerted half as much effort trying to undo this curse or whatever it is as you’ve spent tormenting people, you’d be free by now.”
Trey’s fingers tightened in mine. “Don’t you think we tried? They have all the power – I’m nothing but a soulless void walking the earth, trapped out of time. If we don’t obey them, they undo the magic that binds us here, casting our spirits adrift. That’s worse than what I am now – at least here, I have some control, some agency.”
“Your father wouldn’t do that to you.”
“You think so?” Trey smirked, but there was no humor in his eyes. “We’ve saved who we could, but we can’t openly defy them. We’re powerless against them.”
We saved who we could.Did that mean they had helped others before me? I held on to that nugget, not wanting to ask more right now, to find out it was untrue. “Poor little rich boy. So you discovered what it feels like to be powerless. I’m weeping for you.”
“I don’t need your pity. You can’t run away this time,” he whispered, his voice edged with danger. “Tell me about the fire.”
