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  I noticed a row of lanterns and a waterproof box resting on a low shelf behind Trey. A symbol had been scrawled into the wall – the same runic symbol I’d seen tattooed on the guys’ wrists. Someone had definitely been hanging out in this cave.

  Something slapped against the wet floor. I whirled around and stared at that dark hole. Trey thrust out his arm. The lantern illuminated the muscled slope of Ayaz’s shoulders as he straightened up on one of the lower shelves.

  “They’re heading back to the cavern,” he called up to us. “We have to hurry.”

  “Hurry where?” I demanded.

  “To the place where you’ll get your answers.” Ayaz sounded exasperated, as though this was obvious.

  “Why can’t I get my answers here?” I wrenched my hip away from Quinn and folded my arms across my chest.

  “We can’t explain, Hazy. You won’t believe us.”

  “Try me.”

  “There’s no point. The whole thing is so fucking unbelievable, I barely accept it, and I’m living it.” There was a hint of a smile in Quinn’s voice. He couldn’t take anything seriously. “Perhaps ‘living’ is the wrong word.”

  “Quinn, shut up,” Trey snapped. He tried to grab my arm, but I jerked it away. “We have to go.”

  “I don’t see why I should go anywhere with you,” I shot back.

  “Fine. Go back to school and report us.” Trey gestured to the mouth of the cave above our heads. When I didn’t budge, he added, “Or, come with us and find out what’s actually going on.”

  The lantern caught a glint in Trey’s eye – a hint of his usual arrogance. As much as I hated Trey for all the times he’d burrowed into my weaknesses and exposed them, he knew me. We were bitter enemies because something inside us recognized an affinity with the other – an equal capacity for cruelty, a duplicitous desire to control, to know everything. I hated that Trey knew me without my permission, but neither of us could take back what he’d done now.

  Trey knew that if he turned away from me and started clambering down into that darkness, toward the answers, I’d follow him.

  Damn him, he was right.

  Chapter Two

  About fifty feet down the slippery rocks, I decided I wasn’t going to follow any longer. My limbs were already jelly, Ayaz’s damp t-shirt clung to my body, and my leggings were slick with sticky mud. My teeth chattered. My knee burned with pain from where I’d cracked it against one of the gravestones. Tired, scared, pissed off – something inside me shut down and I couldn’t budge.

  We’re dead, Hazel. We’re all dead.

  What did that even mean?

  Quinn tugged my arm. “Come on, Hazy. It’s not much further.”

  “Where are we going?” I demanded, folding my arms across my chest. “I’m done with this cryptic shit. I need to know things before I move another inch.”

  Quinn leaned against me, wrapping his arms around me. “You’re freezing.”

  “Duh. Ayaz pulled me out of bed in the middle of the night.” I yanked the hem of my hoodie over my knees. “I didn’t exactly dress for a spelunking adventure.”

  “Here.” Quinn shrugged off his ski jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders. I felt mildly warmer, but by now the cold had seeped into my bones. He knelt down in front of me. The lantern-light danced over his emerald eyes – they no longer appeared like smooth pools of water, but were laced with tiny shards, like shattered crystal. “Okay, Hazy, you want answers. We laid some heavy-ass shit on you tonight. Everything we told you in the cemetery was true, and if you hadn’t run we could have shown you more… but I get why you ran.”

  Quinn ran his hand through his shoulder-length surfer hair, biting his lower lip in a way that made my heart flip. Which was dumb, because I didn’t trust him, and I such as fuck didn’t want to kiss him now in the middle of this freezing cold cave, even if my body felt drawn to him and his jacket smelled like coconut and sugarcane. Probably the cold was doing things to my mind – first I lost feeling in my fingers, then I wanted to jump Quinn’s bones, then I keeled over like a Hazel Popsicle.

  “What we’re about to show you… it’s messed up.” Ayaz’s silky voice penetrated the gloom. “In the library, I told you about Thomas Parris. Do you remember? How he built the house and grounds around sacred geometry to honor his pagan gods, and he enlarged the natural caves to form tunnels and caverns where he held his rituals?”

  I nodded, my lips too cold to form words.

  “Parris dug too deep. He awoke something that has lain beneath the rocks, dead but dreaming, for millennia. This is a being without form, without a face, a being that shapes reality and devours stars, and it now exerts its malevolent force over this school. Parris was able to trap this entity, preventing it from being unleashed upon the world. Only instead of destroying it, he worshipped it as a god and dedicated himself and his cult to doing its bidding. You remember those shadows that came after you in the gymnasium?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, you’re about to get up close and personal with their master.”

  I swallowed hard. Ayaz’s words should be ridiculous to me, and yet… those shadows… I thought at first they were the rats in the walls, but they were too large, too human-like. No human could move like that, floating with silent footsteps, black cloaks billowing around them like a tornado formed of darkness…

  “How?” I managed to croak out. “How are you all dead?”

  Quinn squeezed my hand. “You found that newspaper article about the old school that used to be here – Miskatonic Prep. It was shut down twenty years ago after a tragic fire killed 245 students.”

  I nodded.

  “This is Miskatonic Prep. Everyone here – the students, some of the staff and maintenance crew – we all died in that fire.” Quinn’s voice was swallowed by the darkness. “Our parents buried us in the cemetery beyond the pleasure garden. We woke up inside our coffins, and had to dig ourselves out. Now we don’t age, we can’t be killed, and we can’t leave the grounds of the school.”

  I snorted. “You’re not a zombie, Quinn. You’ve done many evil things to me, but you haven’t yet tried to eat my brain.”

  “We’re not zombies,” Trey snapped. “We’re… I was never allowed to watch horror films. Not cultured enough for my parents. I don’t know the proper term.”

  “Revenants,” Quinn added. “I always liked ‘revenants.’ It has a biblical ring to it, like I’m going to enter a paradise of nubile virgins at the end of all this nonsense.”

  “In Turkey, we talk of the edimmu of ancient Mesopotamia,” said Ayaz. “They are the souls of the dead who are not properly buried. They rise from their graves to seek vengeance on the living.”

  “Edimmu sounds like a kind of cheese,” Quinn shot back. “I don’t want to be a cheese zombie unless they get the best virgins.”

  I rubbed my temples, smearing cold mud across my face. “You’re not explaining anything.”

  “You don’t need us to explain anything to you,” Trey muttered. “You’re clever enough to know it all already. You just don’t want to see it. If you want proof, then just look at the cave walls.”

  “I don’t see anything except rocks and… oh yeah, rocks.”

  “Try not to look. Then you’ll see.”

  I opened my mouth to say that made no sense, but I swallowed the retort as I realized Trey was right. When I tried to study his face for a sign this was all some cruel joke, slivers of sickly light pulsed through the rocks in the places where my eyes couldn’t focus. Long veins of that otherworldly substance I’d seen in my dreams wove through the stone, projecting a sliver of light in a color that didn’t seem to match anything on our spectrum.

  Yeah, okay. That’s weird. The cold is making me hallucinate.

  I dug around inside myself, storing all this nonsense about star-killing deities and shadow children in the section of my brain reserved for stuff about Derleth that didn’t make sense (it was a large swath of real estate, rapidly expanding), and pu
lled strength from some nebulous place inside me so we could continue. I grabbed Quinn’s arm and let him pull me to my feet. Down, down, down we climbed. Each step on the rock jolted through my body. The temperature dropped so low that even with Quinn’s jacket tight around my shoulders, my whole body trembled. The cold rattled in my chest, and I kept slipping on the rocks as my depth perception wavered. The mineral veins pulsed along the walls, disappearing every time I tried to focus on them.

  I pressed my fingers into the scar on my wrist and tried to think of warm things – hot chocolate, pumpkin soup, a blazing fire…

  The guys slipped down a rock shelf and stopped on the edge of a body of water. While Trey rolled up his school slacks, Quinn hoisted me onto his shoulders. The three of them splashed along the edge of a dark pool of unseen depth. I could tell from the movement of air that we were in some large cavern. The flickering light of Trey’s lantern was swallowed by the stygian gloom.

  On the other side of the pool, Quinn set me down. Trey and Ayaz moved further up the slope, grunting as they pushed at a large slab of rock covered with an etching of lines and dots that were definitely not caused by dripping water. Quinn turned to me, tucking a strand of my short hair behind my ear.

  “You’ll find your answers on the other side of that rock.” He flashed me his Quinn smile, but it was all lopsided and forced. “I hope you’re ready for this, Hazy.”

  I could barely get any words out, my teeth were chattering so badly. “Why are we in these caves? Why couldn’t I get answers back in your room, where it’s warm?”

  “You want to go back to my room?” Quinn cocked an eyebrow.

  “I’d slap you if I could move my arms,” I muttered.

  Quinn swept an arm over his head, indicating the cavern. “There are caves like this all through the peninsula. We’ve been exploring them for twenty years, and we’re barely scratched the surface of what’s down here. We’re about to walk to one of Parris’ caves – it leads directly under the gym.”

  I didn’t think it was possible for my body to feel even colder, but at the mention of the gym, a bitter chill ran up my spine.

  Trey ran back to us, holding up the lantern so I could see his face and clothes streaked with filth, less King of the school and more unfathomable creature of the deep. He held out his dirt-streaked hand.

  “I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “On the other side of this rock are your answers, but it could also be your doom.”

  “She’s scared enough as it is,” Quinn glared at Trey. “Keep talking like that and she’s going to assume we’re leading her into a trap.”

  “I’m not convinced we aren’t.” Trey’s voice was hard, devoid of emotion. “I gave her my points so she wouldn’t have to face this, but here we fucking are.”

  “I’m starting to think we shouldn’t have brought her here,” Quinn muttered.

  “Jesus H Christ,” I snapped, steadying myself against a stone as I struggled to my feet. “I’m not scared. I’m freezing cold and grumpy. I don’t care if I’m walking into a trap anymore. Anything is better than sitting here getting colder while you lot argue over what you think is best for me. Could we just get on with this?”

  “Wait,” Ayaz grabbed my hand, snapping my body against his. Fire flared through my body where we pressed together. “There’s something we have to do first.”

  “For fuck’s sake, what?”

  Ayaz’s hand stroked my cheek. His fingers seared my skin – a heat that burned through my body and right down to my toes, replacing the frightful numbness inside me with a delicious glow.

  “Those two have had the pleasure of a kiss.” Ayaz’s breath caressed my lips, melting away the numbness. “If we all end up destroyed in there tonight, I think we should have ours, too.”

  Wait, I could die in there? I—

  Ayaz brought his lips toward me, and all rational thought fled my head. A trail of heat stretched between us – drawing us together like a moth to a flame. But who was the flame, and who was the moth? Who would burn up in the other’s conflagration?

  Mentally, I fought against his approaching lips. This was the guy who put maggots in my food. Why was he hovering like he was about to kiss me? Why did I want him to kiss me?

  Ayaz paused an inch from me, the question written in his dark, ageless eyes.

  A groan of assent escaped my throat. The fire drew me forward, pressing my lips to his. Heat flared through my face as our lips touched, as his fingers slid around the back of my neck, as his tongue roused something hot and needy and primal from the dark depths within me.

  Ayaz kissed with a wild possessiveness, claiming me with his mouth. He kissed with his whole body, fitting himself against me in perfect union. He threw everything he had into that kiss, leaving me gasping, breathless, reminding me that underneath all his monarch posturing he and I were born of the same fire.

  He was a scholarship student, too. Has he had his hair tarred and rotting meat shoved in his locker? Has he been led to a rickety boat and commanded to row away as fast as he could? Has he stood here once before, unsure of what he’d find on the other side of this rock?

  He sure kissed like it, like he wanted to drive out my fear and my questions and all the unfairness of the world and replace it with this smoldering want. And with his fingers tangled in my hair and his lips made of fire and this ache pooling inside me, I would let him a hundred times over.

  Ayaz drew away, his dark eyes sweeping over me. His rich scent clung to my lips, and the force that pulled us together was stronger than ever.

  Quinn whistled. “That was hot.”

  I touched my finger to my lips, now scorched by his touch. Yes, yes it was.

  “We’re wasting time,” Trey snapped.

  “That was not a waste,” Ayaz muttered. His hand lingered on my arm before falling away.

  I swallowed hard, trying to bring my hammering heart back into line. “Clearly, all this stuff you told me about being dead is bullshit. You’re not an eskimo—”

  “Edimmu—” Ayaz corrected.

  “—because no way do zombies kiss like that.”

  Ayaz grinned, holding my arm as we scrambled up the side of the cavern and squeezed through the hole Trey had made. On the other side was a sheer drop. Quinn went first, sliding on his ass down the smooth stone. He turned around and held his hands up toward me.

  This whole cave trip felt like a pointless exercise to force me to trust the guys. I had to take Quinn’s jacket or freeze. I had to allow them to lift me across the water and toss me between them down this drop, or I’d fall and break my neck. I was reserving judgment until we got wherever we were going, but there was going to have to be some serious fuckery at the other end of this tunnel to make me believe all of this wasn’t some messed up attempt to get me to like them.

  Part of me still wondered if I’d walked into another of their traps, but then I caught a glimpse of Trey’s ice-blue eyes – wide and frightened, the edges ringed with silver fire. In the flickering lantern light, his hair shimmered with crimson highlights. He nudged me, but it was surprisingly gentle. “After you.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut as I slid forward, toppling off the edge of the shelf. A yelp escaped my throat as I fell, before Quinn’s powerful hands gripped my sides and he lowered me down.

  “Oof,” he grunted as he lowered me to the ground. “You might want to lay off the bacon in the future, Hazy.”

  “You’re such a cock,” Trey said as he slid down beside us.

  I remembered Quinn at that party a few weeks ago, watching me scarf down potato chips and remarking about how cool it was to see a girl eat food with gusto. I knew he wasn’t being serious. Quinn Delacorte was never serious, not even when he was trying to convince me he was some kind of zombie revenant eskimo. My skin still burned where he had touched me. My whole body was both ice and fire – confused, just like me. How in the frigid cold of this cave and the horror of what I’d already uncovered did these guys still make my blood run h
ot?

  We walked along a wide tunnel, the ground mostly even and the walls hewn smooth – too smooth, like shimmering glass. I caught glimpses of more veins in the walls, crossing each other in a lattice. Each step fell heavy as we walked into darkness – the kind of darkness that had form and mass, that pushed back against you as you stumbled into it, oppressive and tangible.

  The tunnel widened, and we stood on the edge of a vast cavern – ten, twenty, fifty times the size of the last. Only instead of being a natural cavern formed by the movement of water, this had been wrested from nature and turned into the kind of cyclopean architectural statement someone like Dracula would appreciate. Everything was too smooth, too perfect; the angles seemed to bend and shift in the flickering light of a series of candles in niches spaced around the walls. The fires barely penetrated the vast space, but illuminated small sections of the shimmering stone walls and the eerie veins that arced and crossed to form a delicate and decidedly too-regular pattern through the dome.

  In the center stood a wooden structure flanked by glowing torches and strung with a scaffold and ropes. It looked a little like a gallows. I could just make out the edges of a trapdoor in the floor of the platform. The lock clattered, as if something pushed up against it from beneath. A cloak of dread shrouded the space – a creeping sensation that crawled over my skin the longer I looked at that trapdoor.

  “This is impossible,” I breathed.

  “If you’re referring to the structural integrity of the cavern,” Ayaz said. “I can assure you it’s stood for at least five hundred years.”

  “Thanks for the architecture lecture, Mr. van der Rohe. I meant that I’ve dreamed about this place.”

  “We all have, at one time or another,” Trey said. “That’s why it always feels familiar.”

  I turned to him in confusion. “You mean… everyone in this school?”

  “Everyone on the planet,” Trey corrected. I didn’t expect that. “This place is… it’s sort of part of our collective subconscious.”