“Or maybe whatever they did to us is coming undone?” Amber offered up. She sat on the floor, her back against the bed, examining her own scaly arms. “Maybe it’s like, our bodies returning to their natural state—”
“Don’t say that!” Courtney sat up, her eyes ablaze. “I’m not going to be a walking corpse or going back to my grave. I refuse! They promised us everlasting youth and beauty – that was the trade-off for being trapped in this horrible place. Our bargain had no expiration date!”
“Do you think if we went to Ms. West, she’d let us out of the deal?” Amber asked, her voice hopeful. I wondered if she was thinking about those two twin girls in her picture.
“Of course not. You can just un-dead-ify yourself. We are what we are, so we should at least get something out of it.” Courtney scratched a patch of scaly skin on her arm. “Ow. I can’t believe this. Why isn’t this happening to anyone else?”
“Tell your mother,” Tillie said. “Ms. West will have to care if she makes a fuss.”
“I’m not talking to that bitch!” Courtney’s shriek rattled the windows. I heard a thump as she slid off the bed. “I’m going to have another shower. Maybe I can exfoliate the skin away.”
Tillie and Amber moved toward the door. I bolted for the main dormitory entrance, passing through onto the skyway just as they emerged in the hall. As I hurried to homeroom, I couldn’t help the wide grin that spread across my face.
Greg had done a perfect job. The shampoo, face wash, and body lotion he’d created looked and smelled exactly like the real thing. Without laboratory analysis, there would be no way to know they’d been formulated to cause exactly this effect.
I had Courtney exactly where I wanted her.
It was time to move on to phase three. And I was beginning to understand what I had to do if I wanted these spoiled, rich, dead kids to pay.
Chapter Eighteen
Under the library’s stained glass window, I slid into a seat opposite Ayaz. He’d already spread several books across the table and had one open in front of him, a handful of notes jotted down. But he wasn’t reading the book. Instead, he shaded a drawing of a girl in a flowing dress standing beneath a gnarled tree. I leaned forward, trying to get a good look at the picture. The girl had long, midnight hair. Was it meant to be Zehra—
Ayaz saw me looking and shoved his pad under one of the books.
“Hey,” I said.
He grunted in reply.
“She wasn’t wearing a dress. She had warm leggings and hiking boots. Much more sensible than what I’d been wearing,” I added, remembering my ruined velvet dress and torn stockings.
Silence.
Rage radiated off Ayaz. I could practically see waves of it bending space-time around him, sucking all the happiness out of the air into a black hole of misery.
What’s he so pissed about?This was the first time we’d spoken since the movie night when he’d seen me with Trey and Quinn. Before that, we’d been reading through our stack of occult books together almost every evening, but Ayaz hadn’t invited me to his room since. He avoided me in class and the dining hall. Finally, it was only when Dr. Morgan remarked that we seemed stalled on our research project about the Salem witches that he’d grunted out an invitation to study in the library during our free period.
If it was any other guy, I’d say he was jealous. But this can’t be about Trey and Quinn. Ayaz has no claim on me. He only kissed me in the grotto so we could talk about his sister without anyone overhearing.
Besides, he’s sleeping with the Deadmistress.
Even though it was an amazing kiss… it didn’t mean anything. So what was he so pissed about? Was it about Zehra? We hadn’t talked about her again since the grotto. Maybe he wished I’d got more from her, that I hadn’t let her disappear so quickly?
“If we’re going to study together, we have to actually speak,” I said.
“Fine.” Without looking up, he tossed a book across the table. “Dr. Morgan thinks we need to do some more work on the section of our project about the evolution of witchcraft. He suggested we look into the spiritualism movement. Here’s a book. Make some notes.”
“You don’t want to—”
“Fuck no.”
Fine.I flipped open the book and started reading, but I couldn’t concentrate with Ayaz fuming across the table. I leaned across and tapped the top of his page until he emitted a low, warning growl.
“Are you mad at me about something?”
“Nope.” He didn’t look up from his books.
“So you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, or what?”
