“Yoooooo-hooooooo, are you in here?”
My eyelids tangled together as I struggled to open my eyes. White walls greeted me. Sunlight from an open window reflected off rows of trophies, splashing colorful prisms across the walls. Warm flesh pressed against mine. For a moment I didn’t remember where I was, and then it all came back to me in a rush – the performance, the pillar, Trey’s dad shooting at me even though I’d burned him good, sleeping in the cave, Ms. West’s confession, Ayaz in the infirmary, the god’s dream, falling into bed with Trey…
The last thing I remembered was talking about offering the god Trey’s parents as his children, and then I rested my head on his chest and we must’ve both fallen asleep. Between everything that happened in the auditorium, the cold cave, Ayaz’s uncomfortable hospital bed and the god invading my dreams, I couldn’t have slept much before. No wonder I’d crashed. But now…
“Wakey, wakey.” Quinn’s voice called from the living room.
“Mmmmph.” Trey threw his arm across my chest, pinning me to the bed. “If we ignore him, he’ll go away.”
“Have youmetQuinn?” I slid out from under Trey’s arm and threw off the covers. “If we ignore him, he’ll get five times more annoying—”
As if on cue, Quinn kicked open the bedroom door. He brandished a large frying pan and a metal spatula, which he clanged together. “Rise and shine!”
CLANG CLANG CLANG.
Trey tossed a pillow at him. “Get the fuck out.”
“Not until you get up. We don’t want to be late for class.”
I rubbed my eyes.Fuck, why was that sun so bright?“I hate you, but you’re right. Whatever goes down in school today, we need to be there. How’s Ayaz?”
“Still crispy. Loretta is watching him while I get my groove on.” Quinn gave an exaggerated twirl. “Do I look like a King again, Hazy?”
For the first time since he walked in, I noticed Quinn had changed into a uniform, but it wasn’t that of Derleth Academy. The Miskatonic Prep crest with its five-pointed star stood in sharp relief over his breast.
Instead of the red and black of Derleth, the Miskatonic colors were a soft blush pink and a strange green that seemed to be many different shades at once. It reminded me of the glowing veins in the stone of the obelisk – of all the reasons I never wanted to step into a uniform again.
And yet, on Quinn, it made me ache with desire. It might’ve had to do with the way his shoulders filled out the blazer, or how the lapels and low double-breast accentuated his narrow waist, or how he’d taped together my gold tiara from the performance and wore that lopsided on his head, or how for the first time in too long his smile reached all the way to his eyes.
Quinn danced away from me, and I knew it was because he didn’t want to touch me. But he was here, he wastrying. And I wished like hell I didn’t have to prove him right.
I was going to hurt him, only not with my fire.
“You don’t need a crown to be a King.” Trey went to his own closet and emerged a few moments later in his own Miskatonic Prep uniform. My breath caught in my throat at the sight of the two of them together. Trey was broader in the shoulders than Quinn, and when he stood with his legs slightly apart in his slacks – creased to a knife-edge, of course – and his wing-tips all shined up, he could melt panties at fifty paces. Trey smoothed the cuffs of his blazer, his eyes searing over my body.
That boy was King.
And he fuckingknewit.
All he had to do was go out there and claim his crown. And damn if I didn’t want to—
Keep it in your pants, Hazel. You can’t be weak. You can’t let what just happened with Trey happen again, or you won’t be able to leave them. It’s better this way.
Quinn had brought my Derleth uniform from downstairs. I tugged that on in the bathroom and stuffed my textbooks into my satchel. I linked my arm through Trey’s and held my other out to Quinn. He hesitated, driving the breath from my lungs.
“Quinn, stop being a loser and take the damn woman’s hand so we can do this,” Trey barked.
Quinn’s arm slipped through mine, raising the hairs on my skin. His eyes met mine, and in those amber orbs was a pleading innocence. And I realized that for all Quinn had done and seen and experienced, for all he’d reveled in every wanton fantasy he could imagine, he’d closed himself off from this particular intimacy – from placing his life in someone else’s hands.
He used humor to keep people at arm’s length because he didn’ttrust. He couldn’t. Not when his father – the very person who should protect him and love him and nurture him – raised his fists and broke his spirit. Not when his own mother let it happen, let the blows rain down on her son so she would be spared.
I gave Quinn’s arm a little squeeze. “Wait until you hear my news, straight from the mouth of the god.”
“You haven’t told him yet?” Trey looked surprised.
“Tell me what?”
“I was going to,” I said quickly. “But then we—”
