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. Quinn died in 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 did this to 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?
“I knew you 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 will all have 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.
Please be okay.
“We’d be fully human again?” Quinn asked in an awed voice. “We’d be able to age?”
She shook her head. “There is no reversing the gift, but what I can offer is even better. You would be immortal and free. You would never age, nor could you be killed by any conventional means. You would not get sick. You would not even need to eat to survive. At least, not conventional food. All would be the same as it is now, except that you could roam the earth, untethered to this school. Not only would you be free, but you would have the means to enjoy that freedom to its fullest extent.”
This is pointless. She’s not reversing what she’s done, only enabling them to walk outside the grounds, which we already know we can do by carrying around the sigils. But she doesn’t know that.
One glance at Trey’s face and a new fury burned inside me. She offered them nothing they didn’t already have for themselves and acted as if it was some great boon. Trey’s hands curled into fists. “We don’t want to be immortal. We want normal lives.”
“Why be normal when you are extraordinary?” She licked her lips. “You can sup of the riches and wonders of life at your own pace, over and over again until the sun swallows this feeble planet. What you see as a curse is truly a gift – the greatest gift the god has given us.”
“You’re immortal, too,” I blurted out.
“Not exactly. Your parents’ power and the longevity granted me is nothing on what you are capable of. The god extended my life – and the lives of the faculty – but we cannot heal ourselves, nor do we possess the powers you haven’t even touched yet… such as the ability to walk in dreams.”
Hmmmm. I thought of Trey speaking to me through my dream when I was trapped in Dunwich. Little does she know…
“That’s not true.” Quinn’s eyes darted to me briefly before flicking away. “Even if the god isn’t giving them power anymore, they’ve been drinking his Kool-Aid for a long time. The god is where the real power comes from, and to him we’re nothing but a tasty snack.”
That mirthless smile spread across Ms. West’s lips. “No, no. You are so much more than that. How much do you know about the human soul?”
I narrowed my eyes. “I thought you were a scientist.”
“I am a scientist – one with an academic interest in souls as a body of energy.” Her eyes swiveled to the ceiling, a smug smile playing across her lips. “The concept of a soul is unique in that it is present across practically all earth religions and cultures. On some innate level, we all know that while our human body can die, our consciousness – what makes us who we are – lives on as a separate entity. Souls are key to our belief in a future after death. Without the soul, the world can only possibly exist in the moment. The soul gives us subjectivity. While we believe that the world has an objective truth, when observed through the lens of our own experiences and biology the world will present a subjective truth, unique to each person. Subatomic experiments bear out this fact. The universal rules we’ve bound ourselves to – rules of space and time and gravity and relativity – are tools we’ve designed to hold the subjective together. Some members of the scientific community, myself included, believe this is because the soul itself is made of a kind of energy not found elsewhere in our universe – energy that arrived on earth from somewhere or somewhen else entirely.”