The baby squirmed. A fresh wave of nausea washed over me.
I squared my shoulders and plunged into the void. Down into the gloom. Only, as soon as my foot hit the third step, a light flickered on.
“Sensors,” Greg grinned. “We don’t want anyone fumbling around in the dark.”
The dungeon wasn’t exactly as it had been. It was only around half the size, chopping off the end of the hall where the secret passage had been. I guessed Greg and Andre had no use for those old remnants.
Only, they did. Framed pictures on the walls showed some of the previous alumni and the members of the senior Eldritch Club, along with news headlines about their downfall and strange disappearance – hundreds of the most powerful people in America suddenly missing without a trace, believed to have been a mass hit by a Honduran drug cartel ripped off by the Eldritch Club. There was a whole display about the conspiracy theories abounding on the internet about the ‘weather phenomenon’ – suggesting it was everything from a UFO landing to a Russian missile test gone wrong.
Without mentioning the god or the dead students, the museum painted a sad picture of the school’s history. I peered at the letters laminated under glass, each written by past scholarship students detailing the bullying they suffered. All this next to smiling images of the school’s elitist alumni.
“I wanted to make sure we always remembered what division does to us,” Greg whispered. “That way the students knew why we do things the way we do here.”
I squeezed him back. “It’s perfect.”
His mobile phone buzzed. For a moment, I was transported back in time, and my stomach clenched, thinking a teacher would come by and punish him for breaking the rules. I grabbed Trey’s arm before remembering that Greg was the headmaster now, that he’d set the school up with world-class wifi.
Greg peeked at his phone. “They’ve all arrived now. Let’s go.”
He led us back up the stairs and through the dorms, throwing open one of the double sets of French doors leading out onto the quad. I staggered back in surprise, gripping Ayaz to steady myself.
People filled every spare inch of the quad. Familiar faces, many of whom I hadn’t seen since the day we clambered up from the grotto.
“It’s Hazel!” someone cried. Conversations broke off as faces turned toward me, beaming as if I was some famous celebrity. The guys did a good job of keeping them at bay as we moved toward the dining hall, but there was one face that surged forward whom I really wanted to see.
“Hazel.”
Her hair was shorter now and dyed a luxurious brown. But I’d recognize those feline features and that haughty mouth anywhere.
“Courtney Haynes.”
“It’s Courtney McMillan now,” Courtney flipped her hair and smirked at my Docs. “I see you haven’t changed a bit.”
I took in her designer outfit and feline features. “Likewise.”
Courtney smiled then – a genuine smile I didn’t think I’d ever seen before. “You might be surprised. I built a sustainable fashion label. All our production comes from ethical factories that pay a living wage to women in Ghana.” She glanced across the quad, nodding to Loretta. “My business partner was over there just last month setting up to fund schools and scholarships to local female entrepreneurs.”
“Wow. That’s… um… that’s…” I laughed. “For the first time ever, you’ve rendered me absolutely speechless.”
Greg rang the bell and invited us into the dining hall for dinner. The chefs had laid out an incredible banquet. No fancy food here, just good old fashioned fare. Greg had put in a special order with the chef for me – a side of bacon strips, piled up into a mountain and drenched with maple syrup.
We dug in while Nancy and Barclay delivered a short lecture. They’d taken over Vincent’s company following his disappearance and built a probe that was tracking the object now known only by its designation CTHU-LU as it tracked across the sky. “It passed out of our galaxy last month. From now on, gathering data will be much more difficult, but we’ll do what we can.”
The god was going home. With his star-mistress at his side. I wondered how the Eldritch Club enjoyed being in the bodies of rats.
I still felt as though I got away with murder. I lived with that guilt every day. Imagining my mother and Dante in their void of light helped, but not all the time. Sometimes I still dreamed of flames. Sometimes I imagined I heard the god’s voice, but it was usually just the wind whistling through the trees around our mountainside home.
A few months ago, shortly after I finished reading my mother’s diaries, my fire returned. That frightened me, especially with a child on the way. Deborah believed it was the pregnancy that ignited the flame inside me. “You have a baby to protect,” she said.
What if our baby carried the flame?
Across the room, Courtney met my eyes. She nodded her head. I nodded back, touching my fingers to the tattoo on my wrist. A few years ago, I covered the scar with anazar– protection from the evil eye. It felt appropriate.
When the plates were cleared away, Greg invited us to a dance. We carried torches and chanted words of magic that the Eldritch Club had made their own – reclaimed now as school songs – down to the old pleasure garden overlooking the ocean.
Students were allowed to join us. We danced around a bonfire, toasting Paul’s memory and congratulating each other on the positive changes made in the world. Fergus was the real star, splashing around in the grotto and rolling over to submit his belly for pats. I got into a heated argument about spontaneous combustion with an earnest young scholarship student from New Zealand. It was one of the greatest nights of my life.
After everything that Miskatonic Prep had stolen from these people, here they all were – well, most of them – to hand over the keys of power to a new generation, one that would hopefully not make the same mistakes. The blood spilled for their freedom would not be in vain.
