“And Greg and Andre? They’re okay, too?”
Trey nodded, but the storm in his ice-blue eyes bothered me.
“You’re not telling me everything.” I glared at him. “You can’t do that. This situation is dangerous enough without keeping secrets. It was a secret that led to this whole horrible mess in the first place.”
“I agree,” Trey shot back, his thumb reaching out to touch the burn on my wrist. “We can’t keep secrets from each other anymore.”
My blood turned to ice.No.
You’re not getting that secret out of me. That’s mine to take to the grave. That’s my guilt to bear.
“Fine.” I drew away. “Don’t tell me. I’m just going to find out anyway when I go back to school.”
Trey snorted. “Don’t be stupid. You can’t go back there. They’ll just throw you back in Dunwich, or worse. It’s already halfway through the year. Ms. West doesn’t have to wait much longer until your bargain comes due.”
“Don’t you think I know that? But I’m not just going to run away while all those evil things are still going on, not until I know Greg and Andre are safe and you guys are free.”
“We’ll never be free,” Trey’s jaw tightened. “You need to let go of the idea of saving us. We’re already dead – and now we’re just frozen in time. We can’t go backward, and there’s no future for me, Hazel. There’s no future forus. You need to get out while you still can.”
“Nope. Not accepting that.” I swiped my toe through Zehra’s papers on the floor. “Somewhere in here is the answer.”
Trey shook his head. “I promise we’ll get Greg and Andre out. And then the three of you will get as far away from Derleth Academy as possible. That’s the plan. It’s the only possible plan. Everything else is hopeless.”
“You have hope, Bloomberg. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here. Otherwise…” I held up the empty condom wrapper we tossed on the floor. “This wouldn’t have happened.”
“It shouldn’t have happened,” Trey growled.
“Why not?”
“You know why not.”
My heart pattered. “Because Ayaz and I…”
Trey’s fingers curled through my short hair. “I don’t care about that.”
“How do you not care? Isn’t being a King of Miskatonic all about taking what’s yours, coming first, winning at any cost?”
“It used to be. And then you arrived on campus and shot us all to hell.”
“Then why are you saying this shouldn’t have happened?”
“Because I should be stronger than this. Because you’re going to go off and have an amazing life and probably rule the world someday. Because I’ll have to say goodbye to you, and now it’s going to be so much harder.”
I shrugged his hand off my shoulder and sat up, glaring at him. “If you know me at all, you wouldn’t even say that shit. I’m not leaving you, and I’m not leaving Ms. West to continue to sacrifice scholarship students. End of discussion.”
An awkward silence descended between us. A hundred things I wanted to say beat against my lips. I bent down and grabbed a handful of Zehra’s papers, shoving them into his arms. “Can you help me make sense of all this?”
“What is it?”
“Zehra’s research. Do you remember what she told us in the cave, that she knew someone who might be able to help reverse what happened to you?”
Trey nodded.
I held out the Post-it note. “I think this is her – Dr. Deborah Pratt. She was a pathologist who worked with Ms. West at Arkham General. She’s where we need to start. But there’s so much information here, mostly about Rebecca Nurse and her family tree. I don’t know if any of it is important, or…”
I slumped down on the floor and spread out the papers around me, creating a kind of barrier between me and Trey’s fiery, magnetic presence. Unspoken between us was the fact that Ayaz would be the best person for this job. Ayaz who spoke several dead languages, who had a fascination with the occult and who knew more about the history of witchcraft and Great Old Gods than any of us.
But if I couldn’t have Ayaz, then Trey was the next best option. He bent over the papers, wearing that same hard, focused expression he had whenever he tackled any activity, whether it was getting a perfect score on an exam or tormenting some scholarship student.
