Possessed: A reverse harem bully romance (Kings of Miskatonic Prep Book 3) Read online

  Possessed

  A reverse harem bully romance

  Steffanie Holmes

  Copyright © 2019 by Steffanie Holmes

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design: Amanda Rose

  ISBN: 978-0-9951302-7-2

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Possessed

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  From the Author

  Agatha Christie meet Black Books

  Excerpt: A Dead and Stormy Night

  Ignited

  Want more reverse harem from Steffanie Holmes

  About the Author

  Possessed

  The Kings of Miskatonic betrayed me.

  Trey, Quinn, and Ayaz pulled me into their world, made me trust them.

  Now, I can’t even trust myself.

  They broke my mind,

  They shattered my heart.

  And sent me to the Dunwich Institute, where they tell me I’m insane.

  I am insane, all right.

  Insane to trust them.

  Insane to love them.

  What they don’t know is that their betrayal unleashed something

  Something that’s been hidden inside me.

  An inferno that will rain down fire and blood.

  This prison can't hold me forever.

  I'll reclaim my freedom.

  Then the Kings of Miskatonic will burn.

  HP Lovecraft meets Cruel Intentions in book 3 of this dark paranormal reverse harem bully romance. Warning: Not for the faint of heart – this story of three broken bad boys and the girl who stood her ground contains dark themes, crazed cultists, books bound in human skin, high-school drama, swoon-worthy sex, and potential triggers.

  Can’t wait to find out what happens next? Grab the final book – Ignited!

  To James,

  Who didn’t just stand up for me,

  but taught me how to stand up for myself

  But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

  his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

  his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

  so he opens his throat to sing.

  The caged bird sings

  with a fearful trill

  of things unknown

  but longed for still

  and his tune is heard

  on the distant hill

  for the caged bird

  sings of freedom.

  – Maya Angelou, “Caged Bird”, Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (1983)

  Chapter One

  I paced the length of my cell (they called it a room, but I prefer to name things what they were, and it was cold and damp and the door was locked and there were bars on the window, so it was a fucking cell), rubbing the spot on my arm where they’d injected me. It had taken me some time to realize that if I didn’t bite the nurses, they’d ease up on the drugs and I’d get my mind back to myself.

  For a while, at least.

  We just want to help you, Hazel, they said as they shot me up with something that made my head spin and tiny invisible bugs crawl under my skin.

  Poor thing. You don’t know how sick you are. But we’re going to make you better.

  I hoped so. Because I couldn’t stand the me they’d brought in here. I’d thought I was someone who knew right from wrong, who would fight tooth and nail for what she believed in and for the people she cared about. But I didn’t know how to go to war against myself.

  I might have been losing that battle for longer than I realized. Maybe that was why everything and everyone I cared for went up in fire and flames.

  Trey. Quinn. Ayaz. Greg. Andre. Dante. My mom. Their faces flashed in front of my eyes, wreathed in a halo of fire. They were all lost to me now.

  I was lost to myself.

  I turned up the cuff of my grey hoodie and rubbed the spot on my wrist where I’d once worn a tattoo of the Elder Sign. Only I’d never had that tattoo. But it felt so real – I could recall perfectly the tearing sensation as Ayaz dragged the needle over my skin. Like a cat’s claws gnashing into me.

  Only it wasn’t real. I’d hallucinated the whole thing. The tattoo, the teachers sacrificing students on behalf of the shadowy Eldritch Club, the cosmic god waiting in his prison of shadow, awakening from an eons-long sleep beneath the school where I was supposed to be getting the finest education.

  And the Kings of Miskatonic Prep – I thought they meant something to me, that we shared a bond deeper than anything I’d ever felt before. But I invented that, too. Everything else I could believe was psychosis – my garbled account of the god invading my dreams and the cavern beneath the gym and the shadows that chased me sounded pretty damn crazy. But everything I felt for those three guys still coursed through my veins. All the moments we shared when they’d let down their defenses and shown me pieces of their souls… all of that was too powerful, too raw and painful to be fake.

  But it was fake.

  Dr. Peaslee wanted to get to the bottom of what caused my psychosis, but I didn’t need inkblots and drugs and therapy to know what had fucked me up. And it was all of my own doing.

  It all went back to the fire at my Philly apartment.

  But maybe I’d imagined that, too. Maybe the fire that tore my life apart only happened inside my broken mind. Maybe the unforgivable thing that haunted my soul was simply a nightmare made real by my subconscious.

  Ayaz said we were never together. He said he’d never degrade himself to be with someone like me. But I recalled every touch, every word, every caress, as though it had happened yesterday. I could still feel the ghost of his arms around me, his teeth digging into my shoulder, his lips brushing mine. How could I have invented something that still burned in my body and turned my heart to mush?

  And how could I remember something that never happened so vividly and yet have forgotten the horrible things they said I did? Did I torment Courtney and her friends? I know I used the superglue and exchanged their beauty products with chemicals that peeled their skin, but that was a pale shade of what they’d done to me, to Greg and Andre, and especially to Loretta.

  I felt nothing but satisfaction for those two acts. For months, I lived in fear of the monsters of Derleth Academy, of the bullies who hated me because I wasn’t like them. Now I knew that they were right – I was different. I was the only monster.

  Full fucking circle.

  There was a knock at the door. I didn’t move from the bed as
Nurse Waterford entered, balancing a tray piled with styrofoam cups. Behind her stood the orderly with the beefy arms they always brought to deal with me since the biting incident. Just in case I didn’t cooperate. The orderly took his place at the end of the bed while Nurse Waterford plucked a cup from the tray and handed it to me. I shook the cup, listening to the pills inside clatter against each other. She passed me a bottle of water with no lid and stood back to watch while I swallowed.

  I peered inside the cup. Today I had one red pill and two pale blue. I hated the blue pills the most. They turned my brain to sludge. The world stretched around me as I slid through time like an elastic band stretched too tight.

  The orderly’s eyes narrowed. He reached his giant flipper hand toward me. I tipped the container into my mouth, catching the pills on my tongue as they went down. I swallowed a mouthful of water and fog – but it was the fog that was supposed to make me see clearly.

  “Fifteen minutes until lights out, Hazel.” Nurse Waterford backed toward the door. I didn’t need a reminder – I’d been counting the minutes. There wasn’t anything to do in my cell. I wasn’t allowed to interact with other patients (inmates) in the TV room and I didn’t have library privileges yet (and likely wouldn’t get them. Dr. Peaslee seemed to think even a paperback could be a weapon in my hands. He wasn’t wrong.) so there was nothing to do but stare at the cell walls and pore over the remnants of my life, wondering what was real and what I’d invented.

  Was it the fire that pushed me over the edge? Did the fire even happen? Are my mother and Dante still alive somewhere? Why haven’t they come to save me?

  My cell door slammed shut – the echo clattering through the bare room. I dropped back against the sheets, tucking my knees to my chest and curling into a ball, angling my face toward the bathroom to capture the faint breeze from the vent. The fresh air feathering my face made me think of Ayaz’s kisses.

  Ayaz cupping my cheeks in his hands, bringing my face to his to sear me with his kiss. His body pressing against mine, desperate to close the space between us, to press hot skin to skin. My nails scraping his back, clawing for purchase as we slid together, trying to crawl inside each other’s fire…

  No. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the fog of the drugs to pull me under. You’re not real, I told the vision of the Turkish boy with the dazzling smile. I imagined myself wriggling out from beneath him, pushing him away, grabbing my clothes and pulling them on. I pictured him biting his lip, his dark eyes sweeping over me in concern. He reached out to grab me again, to pull me back into my delusion. I shoved Ayaz out of my room and slammed the door in his face.

  Dr. Peaslee said now that I understood my delusions, I had to confront them. I had to force myself to kick Ayaz out again and again, as many times as I needed to until I rewrote the memory into something that approached the truth.

  Because it couldn’t be true. Not if Ayaz was in Ms. West’s office, violent eyes focused on me, shoulders tense as he told me I was nothing to him.

  My bed creaked as I stretched out on the narrow foam mattress. The single lightbulb in the ceiling flickered out as the timer clicked over. Dread clenched my stomach as a familiar drug haze pooled in my toes, slithering up my legs, reaching with sickly fingers to clutch my body and drag me into sleep.

  Sleep brought fresh horrors – the nightly visitations from the god that wasn’t supposed to exist. And in the morning, I could remember nothing of my dreams except that they filled me with an unsettled horror.

  Did my dreams hide answers, or were they more lies?

  The fog slithered down my arms, touching my fingers with sickly warmth. It wrapped around my neck, glissading over the planes of my cheeks to dribble through my eye sockets into my mind. I slid into the troubled darkness of my dreams.

  But it wasn’t the god who visited me this time.

  It was Trey.

  He stood outside Derleth Academy, on the grass in front of the gymnasium wall. Behind him, the enormous penis we’d graffitied there in red paint glowed under the moonlight. He ran a hand through his dark hair, and the light streaked it with crimson. His stark beauty drew my breath – the weeks of starvation from the sight of him had made me desperate.

  But he wasn’t real – he was only my mind trying to betray me.

  “Get out of my dreams.” I folded my arms, wondering as I did with the faint detachment of one who dreams, how I knew I was dreaming, how I thought that I had any control in this place.

  I’m dreaming because Trey is here. Not only that, but he was looking at me like he actually gave a fuck. The concern in his icicle eyes made my chest constrict. Even though I knew it wasn’t real, I couldn’t stop faint hope glimmering at the edges of my mind.

  “Hazel.” Trey’s eyes swept over me, and the look on his face called me to run to him and throw myself into his arms. It took all my self-control to cement myself in place.

  “I’m not supposed to think about you anymore. I can’t get better if I cling to this idea that you and I—”

  “Just shut up for a moment and listen. I don’t know how much time we have.” Trey strode toward me, his long, toned legs covering the field between us in a few steps. He didn’t stop until he stood in front of me – dangerously close, his body calling to me with intense heat. “You haven’t exactly been easy to reach.”

  “What do you mean?” I said the words carefully, testing them on my tongue. In the dream world, the fog no longer claimed my limbs or my mind. I could move freely, talk freely, but I wasn’t allowed to believe anything that happened here. “Why have you been trying to reach me? I’m nothing to you.”

  Trey’s eyes swam with desperate anger. “I don’t know what my father has done to you or where he’s taken you, but we’re working on a plan to bust you out. Can you tell me anything about where you are?”

  “No. You’re a figment of my disturbed mind, trying to get me to resist treatment. If I tell you anything, you’ll just twist it all around and make things worse for me, because that’s what my mind does now—”

  I yelped as Trey grabbed my wrist. He yanked me forward, dragging me off balance so I staggered against him. His chest pressed against mine and his powerful scent – his fresh blossom and cypress tang touching my tongue like a drug. My heart leaped as the heat of his body seared me through my blazer. His heart raced alongside mine, thudding in my ears. “Does this feel like a figment of your disturbed mind?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, my defense slipping. Trey’s eyes burned with a fire that consumed the ice inside him.

  “Fuck,” he growled, and his lips met mine with fury and fire. He wrapped his hand around my neck, pressing my face to his, devouring me like he’d walked across a desert and I was the first water.

  As we kissed, warmth rose through my body, starting in a deep spot between my legs and flaring through my stomach to dance across my chest. A flame inside me that had been cold and dead leaped to life once more. The flame soared through my limbs, pooling in my palms, building to a fiery force that burst through my skin, soaring across the sky.

  And I knew.

  This dream was real.

  Somehow, I was really outside the school, kissing Trey Bloomberg. He was speaking to me and touching me through my dream. His strong hands caressed my arms. His lips drew fire across mine with urgent need.

  I broke the kiss and pulled away, my eyes wide. A burning grass smell itched my nostrils, and the crackling sound distracted me from the heat in my arms. Trey turned to see what I was looking at. He jumped at the trail of flame that snaked across the grass, moving toward the wall.

  “Fuck.” He glared at me. “What have you done?”

  I put my hands on my hips. “Don’t blame me. You’re the one in my dream. How is that possible, by the way?”

  A smile tugged on the edges of Trey’s hard mouth. He dragged me toward the edge of the field, his fingers digging into my arm. “I’ve been praying.”

  “Huh?”

  That smile made the fire inside
me flicker to life again. “I prayed to the god. I figured it worked so well for Christians and Muslins all these years, it was about time the guy downstairs owed me something for what he’d taken away. I was lying out here under the stars, praying that I could talk to you, that I could know that you were alive. I must’ve fallen asleep, because the next thing I’m kind of floating through all these weird thoughts and visions that weren’t mine. It was all these random faces – Ayaz and Quinn and some black dude and a woman who looked like an older version of you, only she was screaming. And then they all kind of melted together and I was back here and so were you.”

  “The god sent you into my dreams.” I still didn’t quite believe it.

  “Yeah, and I’m never doing it again because your head is really messed up.”

  I laughed. “This is the nicest dream I’ve had in a very long time. If you really are Trey, then why are you kissing me?”

  “Because…” his mouth twisted, as though there were things he wanted to say but he couldn’t find the words. He sighed. “I don’t know how much time we have. We need to share what we know. After you jumped out the window, my father grabbed your phone off the table. He took me away to some dark corner of the school. He tried everything to get me to tell him where you were. He even tried to bargain with me. And when that didn’t work, he…” A shudder ran through Trey’s body. “You don’t want to know what he did. But neither Quinn nor I would give them anything, I swear. They didn’t like that. We’re still here at school, but they took away all our privileges – our rooms, our Club membership, our access to the common room, everything.”