I slumped against the screen door. The handle caught against my waistband and flipped down. The door swung open, sending me toppling inside.
“She left this open?” I glanced back at the woman, but she’d wandered off to check on her fish, cackling under her breath.
I peered around Zehra’s home. Her bubbly personality came through on every surface, from the bright green and yellow flags strung across the kitchen to the half-finished crossword puzzle on the table. I pulled open drawers and cupboards, shifting through bright plastic bowls and cups and a mountain of books – art history, medical journals, popular novels in English and Turkish.
I sucked in a breath between my teeth. Zehra had left everything in a jumble, like she’d be back any moment. Her life – frozen in time. Because of Vincent, she’d never got to have a real life. She’d outsmarted assassins and lived under the radar when she should have been batting her long eyelashes at besotted guys in college.
Ayaz. She’d done all this for Ayaz.
Now she was gone, and it was up to me to pick up where she’d ended. Even if it ended up destroying me, even if it broke me into a million pieces, I had to save the boy who tried to doom me.
At least there were things here I could use. I pulled open drawers, inspecting neat piles of warm clothing – leggings, thermal sweaters, woolen socks. Boxes of condoms torn open (at least she’d been having some fun). I stuffed clothes into a backpack, adding candy bars and packets of ramen noodles. A hunting knife. A torch. Underneath her bed, I found a small, locked leather suitcase.
What’s this?
The combination lock had four rows of letters. I tried the word AYAZ. It opened with a click, revealing a stack of articles, academic papers, scribbled notes, old books, and what looked like occult drawings. A handwritten letter on top caught my eye.
If you have possession of this case, I am dead. That sucks, but I hope at least I made a beautiful corpse and no one brings me back as a zombie, like they did to Ayaz. Here is all the research I have on Rebecca Nurse and her magic and what went down at Miskatonic Prep. Please, use it to help my brother.
I spread out the documents on the floor, holding each one up and trying to discern its significance. Zehra had made it easy, sticking Post-it notes in the books to highlight certain pages and writing her notes across the documents.
Zehra had been tracing the family lineage of an occult practitioner named Rebecca Nurse – particularly along the female line, which couldn’t have been easy since history didn’t exactly keep accurate records of the lives of women. From what I could make out, Rebecca left Parris’ coven and Arkham somewhere in the 1750s. She seemed to move around a bit – there were records of her appearing all along the west coast. Rebecca wrote occult pamphlets about souls as magical energy and how magicians could manipulate them, which she distributed through underground networks. Zehra had two of the originals in the box, their corners torn, the yellowed paper crumbling to the touch. According to the receipts also nestled in the box, she’d paid a pretty price for them. Zehra had even more pages photocopied and bound together, but of course, beyond identifying the sigil I’d seen in the cave, I didn’t understand a word of it.
Rebecca was arrested at least three times on suspicion of witchcraft and blasphemy, although acquitted. She died along with twenty-five in a fire that consumed a church in the settlement of New Cambridge.
Fire. The flames always seemed to follow me.
Rebecca had two daughters who both married. I ran my finger down pages of Zehra’s loopy handwriting as she traced both family trees. I flipped right to the end of her pad and found a page of eleven names – all women, all with birthdates in the last sixty years, all alive and living in the United States. The descendants of Rebecca Nurse.
Darkness fell as I read until my eyeballs scratched against my lids, fighting against the dying light. The bottom of the box contained material about Ms. West and Miskatonic Prep – internal hospital memos about disturbing trends with flatlining patients, followed by garbled witness statements about strange things going on in the morgue. I read the dismissal letter for Ms. Hermia West, where she was promised ‘neutral references’ should she be employed by another hospital. I saw minutes of Miskatonic Prep board meetings, where Ms. West’s qualifications were discussed in-depth and it was decided to offer her the Headmistress’ job. I saw evidence from the Teachers’ Association that those qualifications were fabricated. Hermia West had never trained as a teacher.
I remembered something Trey had said last quarter. He’d wondered if the fire hadn’t been an accident, if the senior Eldritch Club members had been planning something for a long time. At the time, I dismissed it because it seemed impossible – how could so many parents conspire to do something so evil? Looking at these documents, I saw the evidence of what we’d long suspected – that Vincent and the other parents had brought Ms. West to Miskatonic deliberately, three years before the fire.
I couldn’t say anything for certain. But I knew who might be able to. I flipped back through the hospital notes, searching for a name the might denote Zehra’s contact. The forensic pathologist, Dr. Deborah Pratt, had given a particularly chilling eyewitness statement when she’d found Hermia West in the lab at night, conducting experiments on cadavers. Beside her report, Zehra had stuck a Post-it note with an address and phone number and initials.This must be her.
Deborah Pratt. The name sounded familiar. I shuffled through the other papers until I found the list of Rebecca Nurse’s descendants. Sure enough, Deborah Pratt was one of the last names on the list, along with her younger sister Jessica.That can’t be a coincidence. This is all connected in some way, but how?
I leaned against the fridge, rubbing my eyes. What was I going to do now? I could go find this Deborah woman and tell her about the icehouse laboratory, and maybe she could figure out how to reverse whatever evil Ms. West had done to the students. But that didn’t solve the problem of the god under the gymnasium, or the Eldritch Club manipulating the world behind the scenes. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t exactly want to help any of the Miskatonic Prep students right now, especially not the ones who betrayed me.
Ayaz’s dark eyes flashed before me. How had I read him so wrong? He’d convinced me he cared about me. I’d lost my virginity to him, for fuck’s sake. In the end, he had been the one to betray me. How deep was the spell Ms. West had him under?
No.I couldn’t entertain the idea that Ayaz’s betrayal was a trick. I didn’t need that kind of hope clouding my judgment. He betrayed me just as everyone else in my life had betrayed me, and I’d fallen right into his trap. That was what happened when you allowed yourself to care about people. You became weak.
I held up two of my fingers. A tiny flame danced between them. I watched the shadows bend around it. I would never be weak again.
Chapter Seven
I slept in Zehra’s RV that night, although ‘sleep’ was a wildly generous word for staring at the ceiling while wild thoughts raced around in my head. I’d placed a knife from the kitchen drawer beside my pillow, but even that didn’t make me feel safe.
At some point, I must have drifted off, because the next thing I knew I was back in the underground cavern of the god. Apart from its oppressive presence in its cage far below, I appeared to be alone. Flickers of sickly light played off the alien mineral veins crisscrossing the walls as I stepped out of the shadows and made my way to the edge of the platform.
I reached up, touching the ropes where they’d suspended Greg at Ms. West’s command. A cold hatred pulsed in the jute. These ropes had known so much pain.
Beneath my feet, the wooden boards creaked as they swelled against their bonds. The padlock jerked as the god rattled and railed against it.
This is a dream. None of it is real.
It was supposed to frighten me, but I wasn’t afraid. What could this god in this school do to me that it hadn’t already done? I wanted to fuck with them. I wanted to cause a little chaos.
