“Where did you go?” Trey struggled to keep his voice even.
“Back in time.” I shoved my freezing fingers into his armpits, trying desperately to warm the chill inside me. “Like,wayback. I think I saw the world being formed.”
“Shit,” Quinn swore.
Ayaz’s fingers stroked the nape of my neck, raising the tiny hairs on my skin and a lump in my throat. “As soon as you closed your eyes, the room grew cold. So cold even we Edimmu felt it in our bones. Did you get answers?”
I rolled my eyes. “Sort of. As much as the god is capable of giving answers.” In between shuddering gasps, I explained to them what I’d learned about the pillars, about the god’s loneliness, about what we had to do. By the time I was finished, our little group was swaying gently, and Quinn squeezed me so hard my joints cracked. “When three pillars rise, something that has been buried will be revealed. I don’t know what that something is, but I’m guessing it’s bad.”
“The god will rise,” Trey whispered. ‘That has to be it.”
“I don’t know. That seems like the most logical explanation, but the god said something about his children. And last time I talked to him, he said he couldn’t go home because his feelings trapped him here. And—”
Ayaz’s lips pressed against mine, crushing the words in my mouth with the force of his kiss.
It was a kiss that drove out the loneliness in both of us. Another coal of my heart disintegrated into dust. I would wait for him across time and space on the force of that kiss.
Ayaz yanked away, his eyes flickering. At first, I thought I saw fear there, but it wasn’t fear – it was excitement.
“I’ve got it,” he yelled.
“You do, you bastard.” Quinn gave him a gentle shove. “You’ve got our girl, and I think it’s my turn—”
Ayaz shook my shoulders. “I figured it out, Hazy. I know what’s going on. I know how to stop everything. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”
“Explain,” Trey demanded.
“I will, but we have to go back to your room. I left my map there.” Ayaz tore himself from our embrace and darted off toward the door. Trey and Quinn started after him. I followed in a daze.
Hazy. He called me Hazy.
It was Quinn’s nickname for me, but even Trey had started using it. I’d never had a nickname before, and I held it close to my heart. For Ayaz to feel comfortable enough around me to use it…
Ayaz darted through the empty halls. I had to jog to keep up with him. Trey unlocked the door to his room while Ayaz hopped from foot to foot, his mouth pursed in a thin line like he was trying to contain the words.
We tumbled into the room. Ayaz scrambled to the coffee table and rolled out the map of the building and grounds. It was an older map from when the building had been a residence. We’d used it to locate Ms. West’s original lab in an abandoned icehouse. Ayaz had scribbled lines and arcs across the map, showing an arrangement of sacred geometry and the placement of sigils and other strange happenings within the school. It looked like a child had scribbled all over it, but it somehow made sense to Ayaz.
“You saw three pillars.” Ayaz hunted around under the table for a pen. “The three corners of a sigil. I knew the building’s arrangement was significant, but I thought it was part of Parris’ cage. I never imagined—”
“Ayaz, slow down. I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
Ayaz’s dark eyes glittered with excitement. “The god isn’t from earth. So how did he get here? We thought it was through like a crack in space-time or something, but what if he flew here the old-fashioned way?”
“Like, in a ship?”
“Exactlylike in a ship.” Ayaz drew lines across the building, his hand moving so fast it was practically a blur. “We think of a spaceship as a metal tin can with a fuselage, but that doesn’t mean that’s how the god’s race build ships. They’d use the material they had on hand – like a creepy black stone veined with foreign matter, a stone that doesn’t exist anywhere else on earth. Maybe the shadow creatures that you control are part of the god, and they’re like worker bees… I don’t know. The important thing is, the god had to get here somehow. What if instead of rocket fuel, he used the soul-energy or whatever it was that is to power his flight?Andwhat if that ship crash-landed into a planet and the god became trapped inside the wreckage?”
The god said his partner was the light that went out. He’s made of darkness. Without her, he couldn’t see. He couldn’t navigate. Of course, he crash-landed.“You’re saying that the pillar is part of the god’s ship. But what about the sigil on it? How did Parris put it there?”
“I think Paris got the sigilsfromthe god, not the other way around. The sigils are part of the god’s ship, probably a navigation system – maps of the cosmos, or a path to lead him home. Maybe… maybe this was never meant to be a one-way trip. Maybe the god was going to fly here, poke around, take some samples, have sexy-times with his goddess, lay a bunch of god-eggs to colonize the empty planet, then go home. Only something went wrong and his goddess died and he crash-landed into the earth. If his ship was damaged, he’d have no way to fix it. Maybe he showed the sigils to Parris in the hopes he would be able to help him get home, only instead of helping the god the way he promised, Paris kept it trapped…” Ayaz’s voice trailed off as he studied the sacred geometry he’d scrawled across the map.
And maybe Rebecca Nurse was trying to use sigils to jumpstart the god’s ship so he could go home?“But he’s been here since the earth was young. Surely he would have fixed his ship by now.”
“Maybe it’s not the kind of thing you can do on your own. Maybe…” Ayaz’s dark eyes studied mine with an intensity that made me squirm. “Maybe he’s been waiting for the right tool to come along. Maybe he could sense there were humans out there with Hazel’s power, and he just needed one to get close enough.”
“Rebecca Nurse’s descendants,” Trey breathed.
My heart pounded against my chest. What Ayaz was saying sounded completely insane, like a bad episode of Startrek SG-1 or whatever it was (Dante loved sci-fi, not me). But it also… made perfect sense. It matched up exactly with what Rebecca wrote in her book (Ayaz had figured out that Rebecca was using her sigils to create a ritual, but she didn’t finish it) and what the god himself said.
