“I had a dream. No, not a dream. The god showed me something from before you died.”
Trey bolted upright, grabbing my cheeks, his fingers shaking. “Tell me everything.”
I filled him in on as many details as I could remember about the dream, doing my best to recall the exact words used. Trey was a perfectionist – even in this,especiallyin this, he wanted all the details precisely as they had happened.
“This only confirms what we already knew,” he said. “Our parents planned this. They knew exactly what they were doing when they enrolled us in Derleth.”
“But it sounds as though Ms. West was the one who figured out. It also sounds as if they were killing people long before she arrived on the scene.”
“Honestly, I’m not surprised anymore,” Trey said.
“Well, what should we do about it?”
“Nothing.” Trey sighed, sinking back into his pillow. “It’s in the past. We can’t undo it. So just try not to think about it. Go back to sleep.”
In minutes he was snoring again, but I couldn’t close my eyes. I watched his chest rise, his fingers curl into Loeb’s fur as he sought her comfort subconsciously. He looked every bit like an ordinary human boy. A boy with a soul.
Trey breathed. He felt. He hurt. When he was injured, he bled. In every way, he was a living human. Except that he was trapped inside the school’s sigils and trapped inside his teenage body. Except that he had crawled out of his own grave and now didn’t have a soul.
Whatever that means.What did a soul even give him, anyway? I’d never been one for religious iconography, but I thought a soul was supposed to be your essence – the nebulous life force that made a person who they were. How could Trey be separated from his soul and yet still be vulnerable andrealandwholehere with me?
Zombie. Revenant. Edimmu. The students of Miskatonic Prep had given these names to themselves. But there was no word for what they were, for what had been done to them.
They have to be young, and without hope.
I turned this over in my mind, finding no real answer. The sun broke through the trees, and the dogs rose with it. At first, they loped around the room, then they scratched at the kitchen cupboards, making pathetic whimpering noises as though they hadn’t been fed in weeks. From the staircase leading up to Deborah’s room, the terrier Roger barked and jumped at the door handle.
After a breakfast of Deborah’s chocolate chip pancakes, all six of us – me, Trey, Deborah, the two old dogs, and the excitable Roger – piled into Deborah’s pickup and headed to a private medical lab in the city. Trey warned me to keep my head down and not to look out in case anyone spotted us, but he couldn’t keep his eyes on the road. I watched him staring wistfully at an ice cream parlor and reminded myself that this was Trey’s first time outside the walls of Miskatonic Prep in twenty years. He had a lot to catch up on, and I'd be happy to help him start if ice cream was involved.
Deborah’s friend Gail – a slim brunette with a kind smile that made me feel slightly less on-edge – let us in at the back entrance to the lab and ushered us into a small utility room.
“Our security cameras don’t cover this area,” Gail said, wheeling in a tray covered in needles and other medical equipment. “But we need to hurry if I want to get the sampling done before my colleagues arrive for work.”
Gail drew five vials of blood from Trey and five from me, all the while keeping a steady stream of chatter with Deborah. They threw around medical terms until my head spun, then in a moment, the conversation would flicker to gossip about a wine and painting evening at their local bar. Watching their easy friendship, I felt a flicker of something… part fascination, part wistful envy of something I’d never had. I’d hoped that maybe Zehra and I could have had the kind of friendship Deborah and Gail shared, but thinking of Zehra just made me feel all twisted up with nerves inside.
But it was part something else, too. In Deborah and Gail, I felt a sense of maybe what my life could be. An interesting career. A circle of friends. A wine and painting evening. A purpose.
Could have been, but would never be.I was still tied to my bargain with Ms. West, and it was highly unlikely I’d survive the year, let alone with any friends or boyfriends intact.
When Gail was done taking my blood, I jumped down from the chair, surprised at the spring in my step. “Can we see the lab?” I asked.
Gail glanced at her watch. “I won’t be able to take you inside, because the security camera will be operating and I don’t want you to be seen, but you’ll be able to look in the window.”
We followed Gail down the hall to a door with a narrow window. Inside were rows of white benches and steel shelves, upon which sat various gleaming machines and robotic arms that spun and jerked and beeped. Gail pointed to each machine and explained the diagnostic tests they ran and how the tests could determine if the blood carried certain diseases or matched other samples. Trey strode away, bored and anxious, but my fascination rooted me in place. I wanted to see the machines in action, to prepare samples and watch science reveal answers.
Far too soon, Gail tapped her watch and ushered us back out the service entrance. “I’ll call you as soon as I have results.”
“How long will that take?” I asked.
“I can’t say for certain, sweetie. I’m fitting this around my other work, and the DNA sequencing could take some time.”
Deborah drove us back to her house. My head buzzed with questions about the lab and Deborah’s job as a pathologist. Trey stared out the window, his mind somewhere else. Deborah had her own inquiries. She wanted to know about Ms. West’s lab, the sigils in the cave, and the restrictions placed on the students by their undead status. She was especially curious about Ayaz’s translations of Parris’ book. When I asked her why she wanted to know this stuff, she shrugged. “It’s like loose strings dangling in the wind. I’m certain some of them connect, but I’m not sure which ones yet. I have to pull at them all to find out where they go.”
“That’s accurate.” Right now we had all these questions, all these nameless fears, and no answers.
Deborah pulled into her driveway and idled the engine. “I have to get to my office. Can I leave the two of you here by yourselves? I’ll be back around 6PM, and I’ll bring home some takeout for dinner. Help yourselves to anything in the fridge, and don’t let those dogs take liberties.”
“Sure,” Trey agreed with more enthusiasm than I’d ever heard him express for anything.
