Provided I found a way to reverse what Ms. West had done. Provided I stayed with him and became part of him. All I had to do was dive into that dark hole in the ground and allow the god to catch me.
It wasn’t even a question. Of course I would do it. For Trey and Quinn and Ayaz to have their chance to grow up. For Greg and Andre to go to college and change the world. Even for Courtney Haynes to get her modeling deal.
As I lay in Trey’s arms, knowing that sleep wouldn’t claim me, I thought about what that meant. What would happen to me in the darkness?
Would I become a soul-eater, just like him?
I’d never see Trey or Quinn or Ayaz again.
But I had to do it.
There was no other way.
The god was right – he and I were two peas in a pod. I too bore the weight of innocent souls. When compared to my sins, the Kings of Miskatonic were downright angels. I didn’t deserve to share the future with them.
I tried to put it out of my mind. I needed all my focus to enact our plan. The date of the school production loomed, and it was the perfect time to test our plan. If it worked the way I hoped, it might induce the other students to help us.
Or make them all hate me. But what else was new?
It would help if we knew something from the samples we gave to Deborah. As soon as the guys left for class the next morning, I whipped out my phone and texted her. “Any update on lab results?”
I only had to wait a few moments for a reply. “Gail sent them to me late last night. Both your blood and Trey’s blood are completely normal. No bloodborne diseases. No cellular death.”
“That tells us nothing!” Frustration licked along my spine. My fingers mashed the keys so hard I ended up with a string of gibberish and had to rewrite.
A long message came back. “It tells us that there’s nothing physical that defines Trey as dead – that is something. It tells us there’s nothing physiological that explains why he won’t age or why his wounds heal so quickly. It gives us hope, Hazel. I’m waiting on some more results and for your DNA test, but that shouldn’t be long. How are you? Have you read Rebecca’s book?”
“Parts of it. Want to know something crazy? I tried a spell and it worked. I drew a sigil on the wall and it allowed me to speak to the god through my dreams.”
“That’s not crazy at all,” Deborah wrote back. “Be careful. I will text you if I have any news.”
“Ditto. Hug the dogs for me.” I paused, then added, “And for Trey.”
That done, I cracked open Rebecca’s book and continued my studies, half-waiting for Ms. West to break down the door and drag me away. But she never came. Loretta never told and the god never revealed my return.
My life followed the same pattern for the rest of the week. I read Rebecca’s book. Deborah and I texted back and forth – I told her everything the god showed me, and she sent me a video of Leopold with his head stuck in a kibble container that Trey watched on repeat for a whole hour. She also asked me for the names of my immediate family members. Apparently, she believed I might’ve had some magical lineage. I gave her my mother’s name – Laura Waite – but I couldn’t tell her anything else. Mum never spoke about her family, and if she knew who my father was, she’d never told me.
Quinn and Andre would return to the room with more supplies for our plan. We stayed up late fashioning all the props we needed until Trey returned from late-night rehearsals. He might have been disowned, but he still carried the Bloomberg name and was expected to dance like a trained monkey for his father’s amusement.
“It says here that your friend Helen would cut pictures of the deceased from photographs and glue them onto dolls or old bits of cloth,” Quinn read from the library book on Helen Duncan’s faked ectoplasm.
I pointed to the stack of magazines he’d stolen from Courtney’s locker, for which he still had the combination. “That’s why we’ve got these.”
“But they’re all celebrities. It won’t work as well as if it were actual faces.”
“Agreed, but I don’t see how we’re going to get all actual faces. I’ve got a couple of pictures I took from the noticeboards for the main event,” I pushed Courtney’s photograph across the floor. “But I think everyone will get suspicious if they all go missing. You’ve got the projection – that should be enough.”
“We could use the photocopies we have from the student files,” Trey piped up. “They’re not students, but people would recognize them.”
I tapped my chin, remembering the day I discovered Parris’ skin book under the sink in Ayaz’s dorm. As the leaders of the student chapter of the Eldritch Club, the Kings had been given copies of the files of all the scholarship students – photographs of each of us with intimate details of our lives to make their torment more personal. Those photographs would still be there, and all the Miskatonic students would recognize those faces.
“That’s perfect.” I leaned forward, my mind spinning as I thought about everything else that was in that book. “And speaking of Parris, while Ayaz was translating the book, he would tell me about some of the spells and rituals, just in case we could connect them with something in the other books that might help. He had lists of pages that might potentially help us recover your souls.”
“Do you remember any of them?” Quinn asked.
I shook my head. “Memorizing spells didn’t seem relevant, and besides, all this magic stuff is gobbledegook to me. But Ayaz translated the instructions.”
“So all we have to do is ask our old buddy the betrayer if he’d mind spilling the beans on how we can fuck over our parents, who he is probably helping?” Quinn twirled a strand of blond hair around his fingers. “Great plan, Hazy.”
