“And what about Ms. West?” Trey asked.
“Hermia is a very dangerous woman. I worked with her in the morgue at Arkham General. It was her job to prepare the bodies for autopsies and for my work – I’m a pathologist, so I would study the patients who died of disease. I started noticing strange things when I went in for my shifts – bodies in strange positions inside the freezer, supplies of certain chemicals and drugs mysteriously depleted, strange marks or puncture wounds on cadavers. I knew something was going on, but I couldn’t predict what…” Deborah shuddered.
“What?” I leaned forward, my finger pressing into the burn on my wrist.
Deborah cleared her throat. “I still have trouble believing I saw it. I came in early one night and discovered Hermia had one of the fresh cadavers out of the freezer. I watched from the shadows as she injected him with something, and he sat bolt upright!”
She looked at us as if she expected us to be surprised, but of course, we weren’t. Her knuckles were white from gripping her mug as she continued. “This man half-rolled, half-collapsed off the slab and kind of dragged his body around the room. She was talking to him, coaxing him like a child. I was so terrified, I just backed out of the lab and walked around the hospital in a daze until my shift officially started. When I came back, the man was back in the freezer, dead as a doornail, but I knew what I saw.”
“Oh, we believe you,” Trey said.
Deborah nodded. “I reported Hermia to the hospital’s ethics board. Not what I’d seen that morning, because I knew it was too sensational for them to believe, but the theft of the medical supplies, the needle marks on patients, the bodies moved around. I’d kept careful dates and records of everything. They couldn’t deny what I showed them – that Hermia was mistreating and experimenting on bodies – but they also couldn’t risk it getting into the media, so they asked Hermia if she would resign on the condition they supplied her with neutral references. The whole thing was a farce, and it destroyed my faith in the medical administration. Thanks to the work of the hospital board, Hermia West walked straight out of that job and into the headmistress role at Miskatonic Preparatory.”
“How much do you know about what’s going on at the school?” I asked.
“I know what Zehra told me, which is that her brother Ayaz, along with 244 other students, died in a fire twenty years ago when it was called Miskatonic Preparatory, but they still reside at the school as the walking dead.”
Right, okay. So she knows.
But Deborah wasn’t finished. “I also know that the school was reopened after the fire as Derleth Academy, and that every year four students are chosen to enter the school, but none ever return. I know that this is all in aid of a shadowy society of this country’s elite who are using the school as a conduit to obtain power from a being not of this world.”
“Okay, so basically everything. And you believe it?”
“Zehra was very convincing. And as I said, I’m no stranger to the occult. But no, I don’t quite know everything.” Deborah set down her cup and flicked her gaze between Trey and me, her slate-grey eyes fixing me with a calculating stare. “What I don’t know is who you both are, and how you have come to be in my living room? I assume you have information to share with me.”
I glanced over at Trey, who was absorbed in rubbing the old dog’s stomach as he lolled on the rug. Uncertainty pinched in my chest. I didn’t know anything about this woman apart from her name, and yet here we were. For a woman of science, she seemed far too comfortable discussing my revenant classmates. How did I know she wasn’t friends with Ms. West? She could rat us out as soon as we let our guard down.
When I didn’t answer, Deborah leaned forward. “Did my perfectly reasonable question unsettle you? Or is it something else?”
“Can we trust you?” I blurted out.
“You must believe you can, otherwise why would you seek me out?”
I hesitated, unsure. I didn’t trust anyone by nature. It had taken me all this time to trust the Kings after what they’d done to me, and after what Ayaz pulled, I was more uncertain than ever. If I’d read him so wrong, I could be reading Deborah Pratt completely wrong, too. Hell, why did I even trust Zehra?
But I couldn’t help Trey or Quinn or Greg or Andre or any of the other students on my own, especially not as a fugitive from Dunwich. We needed allies, and if this woman could be one, I had to take that chance. For them.
I ran my fingers over the hard surface of Trey’s rock, still hidden in the satchel clutched tight in my hands.
“As I said, my name is Hazel Waite. I’m a scholarship student at Derleth Academy. I escaped before the faculty and alumni could sacrifice me to an ancient god that lives under the school. I tried to smuggle out a copy of the key to Ms. West’s laboratory where she conducts her experiments on students, but instead I was captured and sent to the Dunwich Institute.”
In halting, jagged sentences, I told her everything – from the day I arrived at Derleth to the bullying and Loretta’s strange disappearance and reappearance, to the discovery of the god beneath the school and my admittance to the Eldritch Club. I told her about finding Ms. West’s lab, making copies of the key to give to Zehra, and how I’d lost the keys when I was taken to Dunwich. They could be back in the box in the cave, but more than likely they were back in Ms. West’s hands. My fingers flew to my wrist, pressing into the scar that was all that remained from my life before.
“Don’t worry about the key – the two of you are much more important.” Deborah glanced over at Trey as if seeing him for the first time. “If you are as your friend says, then how are you sitting here now? You are supposed to be trapped at the school.”
Trey took the satchel from me and flipped back the blanket covering his rock. Deborah traced her fingers over Parris’ sigil. To my surprise, a trail of blue flame followed the line of her finger.
I leaned back, startled. The rock rolled off my lap and crashed onto the floor.
Trey scrambled to pick it up. “We’ve gotta be careful with this. I don’t know what will happen to me if it breaks.”
“Do you see it too?” I whispered.
“See what?” Trey frowned at the stone.
“The flames?” Deborah fixed me with a strange look. “I see them.”
“Do you know what they mean? I keep seeing them – they were on another sigil I saw back at Derleth.”
