Possessed: Paperback

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 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 our 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 black diamond eyes and 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 defenses 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 Muslims 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 dude with a gap-toothed smile and paint on his face 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
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.”

“What about Ayaz?” My breath hitched.

Trey didn’t answer. “It’s not important now. Where are you? Did you get to Zehra?”

“No. There was a cave-in. Zehra wasn’t there. She could’ve been caught in it… I waited all night. That’s why I came back.”

Trey shook my shoulders so hard my brain wobbled inside my skull. His eyes blazed. “You never should have come back. But where are you now?”

“I’m in the Dunwich Institute, of course. Because I'm cuckoo bananas.”

Trey swore. “You’ve been right here in Arkham this whole
time? Fuck my father.”

“Gross. No, thanks.”

Trey’s cold smile lit up my heart. He drew himself back from the rage that threatened to carry him over the edge, squaring his shoulders and tightening his jaw – that look he always got before he blew everyone away in class. “Agreed. Okay, so you’re at Dunwich. And they haven’t hurt you?”

“Not really. They restrained me after I bit a nurse, but it probably hurt her more. She bled everywhere.” Trey looked aghast, and I laughed. “They just give me lots of drugs. They’re fixing all my broken memories.”

“What broken memories?”

I poked him in the ribs. “Like you. Like Ayaz. He told me we’d never been together, but I have all these feelings…”

“Of course. That makes sense. They can’t hurt you physically because they don’t want to hurt the god, but if they alter your mind, they can control you.” His thumbs dug into my shoulders. “Hang in there, Hazel. We’re getting you out.”

“How do you plan on doing that? You can’t leave the school, unless that’s another of my broken memories.”

“I’ll find a way.”

He said the words with such fierce assurance that I believed him. I believed this dream boy who I’d created in my mind would come and save me. My chest soared with hope I knew I shouldn’t feel.

I shook my head. I couldn’t indulge this. Dr. Peaslee said it
wasn’t healthy. “Don’t bother. I’m here because I’m sick. They’re going to make me better. I had all these hallucinations about you, about us, about gods and monsters and rats in the walls—”

“They weren’t hallucinations. They were real.” Trey kissed me again. “What we have is real.”

“Of course you’d say that. You don’t want me to take the drugs and stop hallucinating you—”

“Is this a hallucination?” Trey grabbed my arm and swung me hard against him. His fierce kiss burned through my soul, his lips rough, possessive, burning with unchecked need, with a desperation that pulled me under his spell…

I woke up, my whole body drenched in sweat, the ghost of Trey’s kiss sizzling across my lips.

I replayed the dream in my mind. Trey’s touch had felt incredibly real. Moving slowly, swimming against the tide of drugs sweeping across my mind, I held up my wrist. My fingers trailed over crescent-shaped dents where his nails had dug into my skin.

Real .

But then, dreams always felt real, didn’t they? According to Dr. Peaslee, my whole life since I arrived at Derleth Academy was one weird-ass dream. The drugs they had me on probably made Trey seem more real, more Technicolor.

I rubbed at the crescents. A faint, familiar smell wafted across my nostrils. Spring herbs, wild-blossoms, fragrant cypress wood – light and airy and calming.

Trey’s scent.

I sucked in a breath, letting the taste of him linger on my
tongue. Through the high, barred window, the moon traced a path over the cinder-block walls, illuminating the pits and scratches from the other inmates who’d had this room before me.

For the first time, I truly saw the great deception. I’d fallen
right into their trap.

Trey was right. I wasn’t crazy. I’d been set up by Vincent
Bloomberg to get me out of the way without breaking the oath Ms. West had made with the god. By making me believe that I was insane, they could nullify me without having to hurt me at all. It was genius. Top marks to Vincent for his imagination.

I slotted the pieces together to form a grotesque image. I’d had those dreams where I’d seen myself as the bully terrorizing the school. Ms. West had convinced me that was what happened, but she did have a god who could control dreams on her side.

They knew I wouldn’t believe them unless one of the guys
turned on me. If they’d threatened Trey and Quinn, they would have put the screws to Ayaz as well. I couldn’t believe he would bow to them, but maybe he’d had no choice.

Or maybe he wanted to hurt me. Maybe this was his plan all along.

I stared down at my blank wrist, where the Elder sign tattoo had been. That was the one part of the deception I couldn’t put together. No one except the guys had touched me before they dragged me to Ms. West’s office. How could they remove a tattoo without me even noticing?

Ayaz is the one who gave me the tattoo.

I pressed my finger to the scar from the fire – that remnant of my past that reminded me of what I was capable of. I drew strength from what I knew now – that Trey and Quinn were fighting for me, that evil people thought they had beaten me, and that I wasn’t crazy. At least, not in the way they expected.

It was time for Vincent Bloomberg and the Deadmistress to learn what happened to people who crossed Hazel Waite.

Kings of Miskatonic Prep
Book 1 - Shunned
Book 2 - Initiated
Book 3 - Possessed
Book 4 - Ignited