“Yeah?” The light pushed in around me, flooding my veins. I could barely see him anymore. My head throbbed, and a pleasing numbness started in my fingers, spreading down my arms, toward my heart.
“Don’t eatallthe bacon.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but the numbness closed around my heart, and my flame became the light.
Chapter Forty-Four
“Wakey, wakey, lazy Hazy.”
A voice called me back from the white void. A dream? I had a sense that dreams didn’t belong in the place where I was, but that voice kept tugging. My mother’s face faded back into pricks of light. Stars sprinkled across my vision, even though my eyes were closed.
I opened one eye, then the other. Oh, this was so much better than a dream.
Quinn’s face hung above mine, his lips curled into a shit-eating grin.
I opened my mouth to speak, but he covered it in his. Talk about the kiss of life. Quinn’s lips on mine shot electricity straight into my veins. I felt invincible, like I could leap a tall building in a single bound or run a marathon or something.
Well, maybe not a marathon. My head was throbbing something awful. But I could at least get out of… wherever we were.
Quinn pulled away, knitting his fingers in mine. He had the same idea. “Come with me if you want to live.”
I burst out laughing. It felt good to laugh.
We crawled out from beneath the rubble. As the haze cleared, I made out the other students, coughing as they pulled each other free of the collapsed rotunda. Two faces stopped my heart – Trey and Ayaz, beaming at me. I collapsed against the guys. Hands roamed my body, squeezing me, probing me, checking I was alive. Every caress lit my veins, but the fire that burned there had no otherworldly power behind it. It was just pure, old-fashioned, totally normal – an utterlyhumanlove.
I’m alive.
“Hazy, Hazy, Hazy,” Quinn murmured my nickname over and over, like a mantra. Like a spell. Ayaz buried his lips into my hair while Trey’s arms circled us all, an immovable force against the world.
“Help me stand,” I groaned.
Hands lifted me. Not just the Kings, but others. Loretta on my left, a long cut down one side of her face. Greg on the other side, his white-blonde hair streaked with dirt. Behind him, Andre and Sadie, steadying us all. Zehra’s beautiful smile peeked in over their shoulders, as well as Deborah’s concerned features.
“Hey, Hazel,” Zehra grinned. “Deborah and I decided to stop in to witness the lift-off.”
I hung between them all, letting their love and relief wash over me. Time had no meaning in this embrace. Slowly, all around me, more students crawled over to join us, crushing me under the weight of their freedom.
“Are we alive?” Courtney asked. A bruise darkened her chest from where the bullet had penetrated. Luckily, she’d already mostly healed before the god took away her immortality.
“I propose a test.” Ayaz lifted a sliver of rock and drew it across his wrist, leaving a thin cut in his skin. After a moment, blood trickled from the wound, the red lurid against the dusting that coated all of us.
We stared at that cut, a hundred silent prayers to a departing deity swirling in the air around us.
The wound did not close. Ayaz’s body was no longer immortal – the god had gone and taken his healing power with him. The only thing that would heal Ayaz now was time. And love.
As the realization rippled through the crowd, students whooped and hollered, and all the hugging began anew.
Trey and Quinn steadied me as we picked our way back up the cliff, first collecting our bags of cash and passports from the mouth of the secret passage where we had them ready. The staircase had been obliterated and the shape of the cliff much changed. Where the grotto had once been was now a pile of rubble, which we used as a staircase to scramble up. I was surprised at how intact some things still were. There were still trees, although many of the rocky protrusions had been smoothed over. The peninsula, it appeared, had a few extra angles and dimensions, long-hidden beneath a facade of normalcy.
The woods ended on the edge of the school field. We stepped out of the shade of the trees and beheld an incredible, eerie sight.
Ayaz swore. Quinn burst out laughing. Trey’s hand squeezed mine so hard my knuckles cracked.
I’d expected a fiery pit, or the entire peninsula to have collapsed into the sea. To be fair, there were a few fires dotted here and there across the lawn, as well as some scattered shards of the black stone pushed up through the field.
But apart from these, the school grounds were exactly as we’d left them – the concrete drive snaking into the trees. The old fountain. The playing fields and hedges of rose bushes. Trees dotted the edges. Everything was exactly as it was.
Exceptfor the Miskatonic Preparatory buildings, which were nowhere to be seen.
