I exchanged a glance with Trey and Quinn. “One of you should find Loretta and Andre, see if Ayaz is all right.”
“We’re not leaving your side.” Quinn huffed as he came up alongside me. I noticed that he still didn’t touch me, unlike Trey, who slipped his fingers through mine and squeezed. “You’re fast when you’re after a maniacal Dr. Frankenstein.”
“Quinnanigans has a point. Why are we following her?” Trey growled. “Sheshould be running with the Eldritch Club.”
“She’s got nowhere to run,” I said. “She’s just as trapped as the rest of us. And we’re following her because she has Greg and Zehra. And because she’s done something to Ayaz’s memories. Also, there’s a huge-ass obelisk in the auditorium and we need answers.”
We ducked into the darkened corridor, our feet sinking into lush red carpet as we kept our distance from Ms. West. Her swirling black skirts flicked around a corner, past locked offices and pigeonholes for internal mail, past a dusty suit of armor and her secretary’s desk to the twin wooden doors of her office. She shoved them open and beckoned us inside.
The guys flanked me as I stood in front of her desk. Ms. West shut and bolted the door. Tension plucked the air taut. I didn’t want to be here – I longed to lay eyes on Ayaz, to make sure he was okay. The guilt of what I’d done to him gnawed at my gut.
Ms. West crossed to a wooden cart and lifted a crystal decanter filled with brown liquid. “Drink?”
“I’m not touching anything poured from your hand to my lips,” I spat.
“Funny. You never have a problem with the dining hall food I supply.” Ms. West licked her lips as she sipped her drink. “Perhaps I should simply cut off the food and see how you and your friends fare.”
I snapped my mouth shut. Even now, she still had some power over us. Trey and Quinn and the Miskatonic Prep students didn’t need food, but Loretta and Greg and Andre and I still did.
“I’ll take a drink,” Quinn quipped. I glared at him. He shrugged. “What? That’s a fine Scotch, and poison can’t hurt me. Besides, I don’t want to be cut off from the bacon. It still smells amazing.”
When she handed Quinn his glass, he went to stand beside her bookshelf, where unbeknownst to her the oak paneling could slide away to reveal a secret passage. Quinn and I used it in the second quarter to sneak into her office to copy the key to her laboratory. Why did he stand there now? He wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t want to see in his eyes the reason he was avoiding touching me or standing near me.
That he was afraid of me.
I couldn’t blame him. Not after what he’d seen me do, after what he’d heard last night. Quinndiedin a fire. They all did. He’d always been jumpy around my powers, and now he knew the secret I’d tried to keep shut away – that I’d ignited the fire that killed the two people I loved most.
Fuck.
Why are you even here?I glared at the side of his head.You should be running away from me as fast as you can. I’m no good for you, Quinn Delacorte. I’m all burned up, inside and out. I don’t want to pull you into the inferno.
“Why are we here?” Trey demanded, mirroring my own thoughts as he stepped closer to me. “Did you know anything about the pillar?”
“The obelisk is a mystery to me, as it appears to be to you. But I believe the god will reveal his purpose in time.” She said nothing about his silence to her, which was more revealing to me than her total honesty. She was growing desperate, grasping at straws to try to understand why the star-devourer she’d served was suddenly changing. “As to your first question – you’re here because we can help each other.”
“What makes you think we would ever help you?” Trey said. “You didthisto us.”
He gestured to his body, to his frozen state of perpetual youth.
“I gave you the greatest gift that could ever be bestowed upon a human. And now I am just as much a prisoner as you are,” she shot back. “But I don’t expect that to convince you. We’ll help each other because I can give you what you desire.”
“And what would that be?” Quinn asked as he moved back to the cart to pour another drink. He still wasn’t looking at me.
“Your freedom, of course. The chance to step outside the school gates. A second chance at life.”
Trey’s face froze. Quinn sloshed whisky over his shoes. The thing they’d wished for twenty years, a thing they’d convinced themselves had to be impossible, and here she was dangling it in front of them like candy.
What the fuck?
“Iknewyou had a way to reverse what you did. But you’re not offering this to all the students.” I folded my arms. “Only Trey and Quinn?”
You, Hazel Waite, don’t need my help. You can walk out of the gates at any time. In fact, I expected you to be in Buenos Aires or New Zealand by now. As for the other students of Miskatonic Prep, if my plan goes as intended, they willallhave the freedom to walk unhindered out of the school grounds for the first time in twenty years. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Ms. West leaned back in her chair, crossing her long legs. I was reminded of the day I saw Ayaz fucking her, his nails digging into the curve of her ass as he bent her over an old desk. The way her neck bent back when he pulled her hair, exposing a long, pulsing vein…
Bile rose in my throat.
Unstoppable, my mind filled with another image of Ayaz – his eyes wide and his pain-soaked silence as flames engulfed his body.
