Did I want it?
I didn’t know. I wanted the Kings to show remorse for what they’d done to me and for how they’d driven Loretta to seek an end to her life. Sometimes I thought they got there, but then I learned about some new horror and I felt they could never be sorry enough. I wanted to have never come here. I wanted to burn this fucking school down and salt the earth beneath it.
But at the same time, the moon was high and Ayaz was beautiful. Tonight was Halloween, a night for ghosts to walk the earth and for witches to have their way… tonight I was the baddest motherfucking witch of them all, and I was naked in a hot spring with the ghost of a boy that in another world, another time, I could have fallen in love with.
Tonight, I embraced the darkness and the fire. I pressed my lips to his.
A soft growl rumbled in his chest as his tongue plunged into my mouth. The world faded away, everything outside me and Ayaz and our burning, singing flesh ceasing to exist. His eyes fluttered shut, those long lashes tangled together as he sank deeper into the kiss. The burn on my calf flared with heat but it was nothing on the heat burning between my legs.
This kiss waseverything. It was the whole fucking universe.
It was also nothing. It meant nothing. It was a distraction, an act for anyone who might be watching us.
So what was that other kiss? What did it mean?
“Zehra is my sister,” Ayaz whispered against my lips. His tongue ran along my teeth. “She was just a baby when I left. I used to video chat with her constantly when I lived with Vincent. Like, every day. She was so much fun, even as a little kid. Twelve years ago, my parents sent her here to enroll in Derleth. Either they lied about her family to get her in, or the scholarship committee got so greedy for an ideal applicant that they didn’t check into her background too closely. They didn’t know she’d had a brother who died at Miskatonic Prep. Zehra arrived here on the first day of the quarter. Trey had me break into her room to steal something precious from her. They always bring something precious with them. She had a photograph of my parents in her suitcase. That’s when I knew it was her.”
“Did she recognize you?” I asked, my tongue sliding against his teeth.
“I tried to stay away from her, but she ferreted me out. She was always a bright kid. Much brighter than me. I was supposed to be dead and here I was, walking the halls, no older than the day I died.”
“But wouldn’t—” Ayaz’s lips forced mine open, his tongue driving out my words. I gasped against him, kneading the flesh of his back as he drew out the fire inside me.God, his touch is magic.
If kissing a ghost is this hot, I should do it more often.
“She was angry with me at first – that I had let them all believe I was dead. But then bit by bit she put the pieces together, like you have, and then she wouldn’t leave me alone. I couldn’t just let her stay here and become a sacrifice. She deserved more. I’d been left on my own in this country with nothing by my parents expectations, and look how that worked out for me.”
Bitterness leaked into his voice. I linked my fingers behind his neck, pulling his head against mine, trying to drink in that bitterness, to draw it out of him. “At least here, you don’t have to pretend you wanted to be a doctor.”
Ayaz laughed against my lips. The sound was lyrical – music humming through my veins. “In a strange way, being stuck here, I have more freedom than I’ve ever had. I can read books. I can draw.”
“You sound as though you’re trying to convince yourself.”
“Yeah.” There was that bitter laugh again, all the music stripped away. “I am.”
“So what happened to Zehra?”
“Trey, Quinn, and I… we tried to sneak her out of the school. We took her down to that dingy and shoved her out to sea. ‘I’ll go for help,’ she said. ‘I will come back with a legion to set you free.’ She would have done that, too. Zehra could get anyone to do anything she wanted, just by smiling at them. But she never got the chance. The next day, Quinn found the boat splintered to pieces on the rocks. I thought… I thought there was no way she could survive.”
“And you never heard from her again?”
Ayaz shook his head. “That’s how I knew she was dead. She would have found a way to get a message to me. Quinn says he saw her once, hiding behind a tree, watching our lacrosse game. But when he looked again, she was gone. We looked all over the woods, calling her name, but she never showed herself.”
“Quinn thought she left those articles for me to find,” I remembered.
“But she couldn’t…” Ayaz murmured, his eyelids fluttering. He was a million miles away. “…all these years I thought she was gone… I thought I was the one who killed her, who sent her off in that boat… you swear you saw her?”
“Flesh and blood and all. She held my hand.”
Ayaz sagged against me. This King of the school trembled, wearing his vulnerability on his skin. Suddenly there was no space between us, no room to breathe.
Ayaz backed away. “I have to… I need to…”
I nodded. “I know.”
Ayaz fled the grotto, launching his body over the edge with a wave of water that splashed across the dance floor. I watched him go, jogging into the darkness without stopping to collect his clothes.
As I climbed out of the pool, Trey’s eyes swept over me, blue ice that cooled the heat in my skin. I bent down to pick up my clothes. By the time I pulled my dress over my head, Trey had disappeared.
