Her spittle rolled down my cheek, hot and humiliating. I’d never wanted to hurt anyone as much as I wanted to hurt this bitch, but she had me over a barrel and she knew it.
“You got lucky, whore. You were late showing up to this party, so you miss out on the punishment you deserve. But we’ve got to run. We have the reputation of the Eldritch Club to save.” Courtney stepped back, and Derek came forward, holding a length of rope. Fresh panic surged inside me. I bucked, trying to roll away, but Tillie still had her foot on my wrist, crushing my hand.
“The guys will notice I’m gone,” I gasped, as Derek wrenched my arms behind my back, lashing my hands together.
“No they won’t,” Courtney sang in a singsong voice. “Dear Trey is trying to keep you away from us, so he hasn’t even told you about tonight’s meeting. They won’t know anything is wrong until after the meeting, and I’m sure there will be so much to discuss that by then it will be too late. You’re a disgrace to everything the club stands for, and to the name of our school,” she hissed. “You’ve been warned, but still you insist on tainting everything with your filth. We’re here to clean house.”
Courtney held up a clear glass bottle with a screw top – one of the cleaning liquids the maintenance staff used to polish the marble floors. “Open wide,Hazy.” Quinn’s nickname grated in her nasal voice.
I jerked my head away. Tillie slapped my cheek so hard tears stung in my eyes. John grabbed my jaw and wrenched it open. I bucked and struggled, but there were too many of them. The bottle came closer, closer…
I tried to picture flames engulfing my body like they had in the cave, pushing out in a giant fireball and burning Courtney fucking Haynes to ashes. But nothing came except a spasm of fear. I was too far gone, too wrapped up in the god’s visions and the pain and humiliation. I couldn’t find the flames. I couldn’t even save myself.
Burning liquid hit the back of my throat. I squeezed my eyes shut. Panic seized my body. I tried to spit the stuff back out, but they kept pouring in more and more. It burned all the way down, searing my insides with a pain so intense I knew I had only moments before I passed out. I could evensmellburning – an acrid, chemical odor that drove my panic to new heights.
Inside its void, the god howled.
Emptiness burned behind my eyes – a sickening black fog that started in my brain and spread through my whole body, taking away the pain on a cloud of oblivion.
Darkness took me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“She drank poison. Quick, you have to help her!”
My insides are on fire.
I bounced in someone’s arms as a panicked voice called over my head. I was being carried into the school infirmary. Old Waldron leapt up from her desk. The person carrying me dumped me on the bed, rolling me over onto my side, placing me in the recovery position, stroking my cheek with tenderness.
“Please.” His voice cracked. “I don’t know what to do.”
Quinn.He was here. He’d come to save me. My arms ached to reach out and hold him, but no matter how many messages my brain sent out to my limbs, they wouldn’t move. The inferno inside me raged against my skin. My vision swam. Quinn grew three heads that all spoke in unison.
“Hazy? Hazy? Hazy?”
I tried to tell him what had happened, but my lips were tendrils of flame. As they moved through the air they turned to ashes. Three Old Waldrons leered over me, three warts bobbling in my vision as she lifted my eyelids and poked around inside my mouth. “You said shedrankpoison? Why would she do a thing like that?”
“You have to do something!” The three Quinns were crying.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” a calm voice spoke from the door.
The temperature in the infirmary dropped. All I could make out was a shadow moving around the bed, trailing black robes across the floor.
“Hazel Waite has become increasingly paranoid and erratic,” Ms. West’s voice boomed through the room. She knelt down beside me, her long fingers stroking my hair. Three pale faces with red slashes for lips wobbled in my vision. “I’ve had reports from other students she’s been picking fights, tormenting, defacing school property, experiencing hallucinations. Given her history, I suspect she’s suffering from a type of delayed psychosis.”
“What would you know about it?” The Quinns demanded.
“I used to work in the mental health sector,” she replied, leaning over my bed. Her fingers felt like knives slicing through my skin. “I’ve seen cases like this before. Patients who’ve lived with years of neglect and abuse who experience trauma often fall into a pattern of paranoid psychosis. When coupled with a persecution complex, as Hazel demonstrates, we have a profoundly disturbed student who is a danger to herself, and to others.”
“They tried to kill me!” I managed to choke out. I rocked my body, trying to throw myself off the bed.
Ms. West threw me back. “Fancy drinking floor polish and then trying to blame it on another student,” she tsked. “This must stop, Hazel. I’m giving you one more chance to get this under control, because I know how much you want to be here at Derleth. But if I hear of one more incident like this, I’ll have you sent away, somewhere you can get professional help.”
Then her head exploded into a cloud of black shadow. My skin sliced open, and everything went dark as the pain dragged me under.
* * *
I woke with a start. I wasn’t in the infirmary, but on a hard stone floor with my stomach heaving.If that was a dream, then where am I now?
