“You can’t have her!” Trey screamed. “She’s ours. Where she goes, we will follow.”
My heart tore open. Behind me, Quinn let out a furious sob, and it took everything I had not to turn around again.
I lifted a leg. It was like moving through treacle. I stretched out my hands. My fingers brushed the void, and the god’s love reached out to pull me in, to join our souls together for eternity—
Something crashed into me from the side. I staggered against the onslaught. The god flailed to catch me, but I hit the earth first. Someone kicked me in the side. I opened my eyes just as the assailant flung herself off me and raced toward the void.
Ms. West.
She stood before the god’s mouth, her fingers trailing through the miasma. Black hair streamed behind her, inky and malevolence.
“This is my reward,” she cried. “For decades I have toiled alone, my advances misunderstood by frail human minds, my experiments shunned. I was destined for greater things. I will be his star mistress.”
Her mouth opened, and the god’s screams poured into her.
“No,” I gasped, rushing at her, crashing my body into her and wrestling her hands down. “I have to save them.”
“You don’t get this honor, Hazel Waite.” Her eyes flashed with malevolence. She shoved me back, and the connection between us snapped.
As she fell into the god’s mouth, the voice in my head burned with desire.
She issssss beautiful.
He’d never seen her before, not as she wished him to see her. Until now – as his voice filled her and he found in the depth of her blackened soul a light that would guide him. A light made not of fire, but of ice.
The darkness swallowed her. A light of a new color that still didn’t exist on our spectrum shot from the three pillars. The beams crossed in the sky, writing a symbol with the light of a star.
Rebecca Nurse’s sigil. A map, charting their course across the cosmos.
The ground bucked, throwing up jagged rocks.
“Get out of the triangle!” I yelled at everyone and no one.
Students scrambled over the chairs and headed for the trees, falling over each other in their desperate race for safety. I couldn’t feel my legs, but I must’ve been running, for Trey and Quinn and Ayaz formed a triangle around me.
All I heard was the puff of their breath. All I felt were their hands on me. Skin to skin, warm, protective.Mine.
We crashed into the trees and kept on going. “Get to the garden!” Trey yelled. Students passed the shout. Balls of fire burst around us, tossing ancient trees like Pixy Stix.
Down, down, down, we slipped and skidded on the stone steps. Courtney screamed as she fell. Quinn picked her up, threw her over his shoulder, kept running.
Rock and branches rained down on us. A crack appeared down the steps as the earth cracked and splintered. We huddled together under the rotunda, necks craned to the sky. The rocks tumbled from the cliff as the crack grew, spreading like a black web across the ground.
The sigil grew and grew, its fire like a magnet pulling the pillars toward it. The earth roared as the top of the peninsula broke away. The pillars rose into the sky. Whole trees toppled off the edges. Beneath, a great cone of black stone stretched like the tail of a comet, its tip glowing with an eerie light.
The god’s ship.
A lump of solid, cyclopean stone, carrying Miskatonic Prep and all its evil away with it.
As it rose high, high, high, it dragged the heat from inside me. The last vestiges of my power tore from my fingers, pouring into the three pillars to fuel the god’s assent. My flame would go with them on their star-journey.
My legs failed me. My head swam. Faces danced in front of my eyes, but I no longer knew if they were real or imagined. A voice called my name, soft and sweet. “Hazel…”
Dante’s voice.
Calling me home.
I closed my eyes. I gave myself over to the void of my own making. My power was spent. I had nothing left but love in my heart.
