“Don’t make me regret it,” I growled. “Where am I?”
Trey swept the lantern around him, casting the warm glow of the flame against unyielding stone. Unlike the secret tunnel connecting the storage room on my floor to the pleasure garden, this cave was rough – not hollowed out by humans or machines, but formed from water being forced up from somewhere deep underground, reshaping the rock, bedding planes and fractures in the immovable chunks and creating a giant’s staircase of abutting shelves leading down into an oppressive black hole. Stalactites hung from the underside of the rock shelf above our heads – a hundred tiny swords of Damocles just waiting to drop on me.
I noticed a row of lanterns and a waterproof box resting on a low shelf behind Trey. A symbol had been scrawled into the wall – the same runic symbol I’d seen tattooed on the guys’ wrists. Someone had definitely been hanging out in this cave.
Something slapped against the wet floor. I whirled around and stared at that dark hole. Trey thrust out his arm. The lantern illuminated the muscled slope of Ayaz’s shoulders as he straightened up on one of the lower shelves.
“They’re heading back to the cavern,” he called up to us. “We have to hurry.”
“Hurry where?” I demanded.
“To the place where you’ll get your answers.” Ayaz sounded exasperated, as though this was obvious.
“Why can’t I get my answers here?” I wrenched my hip away from Quinn and folded my arms across my chest.
“We can’t explain, Hazy. You won’t believe us.”
“Try me.”
“There’s no point. The whole thing is so fucking unbelievable, I barely accept it, and I’m living it.” There was a hint of a smile in Quinn’s voice. He couldn’t takeanythingseriously. “Perhaps ‘living’ is the wrong word.”
“Quinn, shut up,” Trey snapped. He tried to grab my arm, but I jerked it away. “We have to go.”
“I don’t see why I should go anywhere with you,” I shot back.
“Fine. Go back to school and report us.” Trey gestured to the mouth of the cave above our heads. When I didn’t budge, he added, “Or, come with us and find out what’s actually going on.”
The lantern caught a glint in Trey’s eye – a hint of his usual arrogance. As much as I hated Trey for all the times he’d burrowed into my weaknesses and exposed them, heknewme. We were bitter enemies because something inside us recognized an affinity with the other – an equal capacity for cruelty, a duplicitous desire to control, to know everything. I hated that Trey knew me without my permission, but neither of us could take back what he’d done now.
Trey knew that if he turned away from me and started clambering down into that darkness, toward the answers, I’d follow him.
Damn him, he was right.
Chapter Two
About fifty feet down the slippery rocks, I decided I wasn’t going to follow any longer. My limbs were already jelly, Ayaz’s damp t-shirt clung to my body, and my leggings were slick with sticky mud. My teeth chattered. My knee burned with pain from where I’d cracked it against one of the gravestones. Tired, scared, pissed off – something inside me shut down and I couldn’t budge.
We’re dead, Hazel. We’re all dead.
What did that evenmean?
Quinn tugged my arm. “Come on, Hazy. It’s not much further.”
“Where are we going?” I demanded, folding my arms across my chest. “I’m done with this cryptic shit. I need to know things before I move another inch.”
Quinn leaned against me, wrapping his arms around me. “You’re freezing.”
“Duh. Ayaz pulled me out of bed in the middle of the night.” I yanked the hem of my hoodie over my knees. “I didn’t exactly dress for a spelunking adventure.”
“Here.” Quinn shrugged off his ski jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders. I felt mildly warmer, but by now the cold had seeped into my bones. He knelt down in front of me. The lantern-light danced over his emerald eyes – they no longer appeared like smooth pools of water, but were laced with tiny shards, like shattered crystal. “Okay, Hazy, you want answers. We laid some heavy-ass shit on you tonight. Everything we told you in the cemetery was true, and if you hadn’t run we could have shown you more… but I get why you ran.”
Quinn ran his hand through his shoulder-length surfer hair, biting his lower lip in a way that made my heart flip. Which was dumb, because I didn’t trust him, and I such as fuck didn’t want to kiss him now in the middle of this freezing cold cave, even if my body felt drawn to him and his jacket smelled like coconut and sugarcane. Probably the cold was doing things to my mind – first I lost feeling in my fingers, then I wanted to jump Quinn’s bones, then I keeled over like a Hazel Popsicle.
“What we’re about to show you… it’s messed up.” Ayaz’s silky voice penetrated the gloom. “In the library, I told you about Thomas Parris. Do you remember? How he built the house and grounds around sacred geometry to honor his pagan gods, and he enlarged the natural caves to form tunnels and caverns where he held his rituals?”
I nodded, my lips too cold to form words.
“Parris dug too deep. He awoke something that has lain beneath the rocks, dead but dreaming, for millennia. This is a being without form, without a face, a being that shapes reality and devours stars, and it now exerts its malevolent force over this school. Parris was able to trap this entity, preventing it from being unleashed upon the world. Only instead of destroying it, he worshipped it as a god and dedicated himself and his cult to doing its bidding. You remember those shadows that came after you in the gymnasium?”
