Brimstone (25 page)

“I don’t believe any of that magical bullshit,” he said.
“But there’s nut jobs that’ll buy any rumor that goes around. It doesn’t have to be true to royally screw up your life.”

My stomach knotted. Witch hunts scared me. Not for the obvious reasons, but because they were so irrational that there was no defense against them. But I couldn’t actually be hanged for a witch. Could I? I wouldn’t put anything past the Republicans.

“What do you want, Brandon?” I bit the words out.

“I want those pictures to disappear. The ones you took of me and Dozer.”

“Is that all?” A smart guy would have demanded to know what was happening to his friends, or worried he might be next. But you don’t have to be smart to be a bully. “Sure. Whatever.”

“And if they show up in anyone’s e-mail—”

“It’s a stalemate. I get it.” He still had me cornered against the Explorer, and didn’t look ready to move. “Are we done?”

His eyes narrowed, summing me up, and I realized we weren’t done, because what he really wanted wasn’t for those pictures to vanish, but for me to be scared of him.

“Well,” he began, leaning in closer, “I’d like to know why Brian has been panting after you all of a sudden.” Elbows against the car, he pinned me with his weight. “You got some hidden talent, Quinn?”

I dropped my fifty-pound backpack on his foot. When he bent over, cursing, I slammed my knee up into his gut. He was lucky, because I was aiming for the place where he kept his brain.

“You bitch!” he wheezed, the wind knocked out of him.

“Oh,
I’m
the dog?” I yelled, because I
was
scared of him, and I was furious with him for making me feel that way. “I thought you were just a bully, Brandon, not an oversexed sociopath.”

“What’s going on here?” That ringing voice could only mean Halloran. Oh, yeah. The screwing continues.

“Nothing, Mr. Halloran,” said Brandon, trying to stand up straight.

“Nothing except sexual harassment,” I said, still livid. “Maybe even assault.”

“Now, Margaret. I’m sure there’s just been a misunderstanding.” The assistant principal made a placating gesture. “These mix-ups can happen between young men and women.”

I stood trapped between him and Biff, and I didn’t like the symbolism any more than the fact. “I don’t think so, Mr. Halloran.”

“And now you’ve gone and overreacted.” He oozed soothing condescension. Brandon didn’t even bother to fake innocence; he just smirked. Sure, I’d hit him, but not before he’d seen my fear.

“I’m going to overreact all the way to the school board if you don’t get out of my way.”

“There’s no need for that,” said Halloran, still trying to convince me we were all good friends.

I slung my bag over my shoulder and marched forward. He moved aside, proving he was at least a fraction of a point smarter than Brandon.

i
pulled a steaming bag of popcorn out of the microwave just as Lisa called to say she couldn’t come over. She had an appointment she couldn’t change. “Just don’t do anything stupid until we talk,” she said, with traffic noise in the background. “Other people have noticed that you’re always around when stuff happens. So stay away from Brandon, and don’t talk crazy to anyone.”

“Yes, my liege. Right now I’d rather take a chum bath in a shark tank than go near Brandon Rogers.”

“I have to shut up and drive now. See you tomorrow.”

Mom came in as I hung up. “Company coming?” she
asked, probably because I’d put the popcorn in a bowl instead of eating it out of the bag.

“Lisa was supposed to, but something came up.”

“That’s too bad.” She took it as permission to raid from the snack bowl.

“Do you want a Coke?” I asked.

“A diet. Thanks.” Mom sat on one of the barstools. She eats popcorn one piece at a time, but I prefer it by the handful. “Lisa is an interesting girl,” she said.

“That’s one way to describe her.”

“Well, I didn’t know what to think when you started hanging around with her back in junior high, when she wore nothing but black and had all that spiky jewelry.”

I popped the top on my soda. “She grew out of that phase.”

“Well, not completely. She was still wearing striped socks the last time I saw her.”

“Yes, but they weren’t
black
. And neither is her hair.”

Mom waved that aside. “Anyway. I just mean that I think it’s neat that she’s going to be valedictorian. And has a full scholarship to Georgetown. That must make her dad so proud. He worked hard to raise her on his own.”

My hand froze over the popcorn bowl. By mentioning the scholarship, had Mom just jinxed Lisa, too? She wasn’t in the bully picture, but she had AP calculus with Stanley and Karen. In my last dream, they’d been standing next to each other. Did that mean anything?

That user’s manual would come in real handy right now.

“Is Lisa going to the prom?”

I shelved my worries for the moment. “I don’t know,
Mom. We don’t talk about the You-Know-What. We made a pact.”

“You could go together, if you didn’t want to mess with dates and things.”

“I don’t want to mess with the prom at all, Mom.”

She ignored me, placidly eating popcorn, piece by piece. “Some girls in my high school class did that and had a wonderful time. They weren’t lesbians or anything. Not that it would matter if they were.”

“That’s nice, Mom. I’m glad you’re so open-minded.” I grabbed my Coke can and the popcorn bowl and headed for the stairs, because I could go my whole life without ever hearing my mother talk about lesbians again.

“Maybe you could take Justin to the prom,” she called after me, laughter in her voice. “He is such a hottie.”

Shoot me now.

I was doing the last edit of my English paper when I heard footsteps on the stairs. “Come on up.” Saving the document, I turned to greet Justin. “I didn’t hear the doorbell.”

He climbed the last steps, looking exhausted. I wondered if he’d stayed up all night working. “Your mom was heading out. She said I could come in.”

“Did you get your paper done?”

“Yeah.” He fell onto the battered sofa. A burgundy slipcover hid a multitude of sins, including burnt-orange-and-brown-striped upholstery that was older than me. “Done, turned in. Now I’m free until finals.”

“Cool.”

He opened his own backpack and pulled out a folded
sheet of paper. “I e-mailed a friend and asked him to translate the letters you drew.”

I scooted the desk chair closer to look. “That was fast.”

“He’s got a degree in biblical history, so he knew right where to look in the library.”

“Not the public library, I assume.”

“No, Henry’s in seminary, studying to be a priest.”

My eyebrows climbed. “Really?”

“Yeah. We went to high school together.”

“Catholic school?”

“Yes,” he said. My bemusement must have shown, because he asked, “Why is that surprising?”

“It isn’t. Your love of khaki trousers and oxford shirts should have been my first clue.”

He gestured to the paper, where he’d jotted down normal letters under the strange ones I’d sketched. “You want to see what I found out?”

I did, but I wasn’t done with this line of inquiry just yet. “Do you still go to Mass?”

“Sometimes.” He answered matter-of-factly, then pointed to my crucifix. “What about you?”

“Not in a long time.” I chewed my lip, uncertainly. “Do you think it matters? I believe in God. I’m just not sure about the outward trappings, you know?”

“I do know.” He contemplated my question. “I think that faith—in something bigger that yourself, no matter what form it takes—gives you a certain spiritual or psychic protection. If, say, the room caught on fire, it might not keep you from burning …”

“It did for Shadrach, Meshach, and the other guy.”

“I said it
might
not. Can I make my point here?”

“Sure.”

He seemed to reorganize his thoughts. “Bible stories aside, faith can’t keep you from burning, but it might give you calm to, say, think of a way to put the fire out or escape. If you were under spiritual attack, however …”

“Like if a demon made me think I was on fire?”

That earned me a suspicious look, justified, since that was one of those things I’d neglected to mention. “Exactly like that. You might be able to see through the illusion, and overcome it. So I guess it depends. Is your evil a spiritual or physical construct? Personally, I do believe in miracles. But physics is physics so I always wear my seat belt.”

I touched the small, gold cross that had become a talisman to me. Not of a religion, but of my strengthening conviction that if there was Evil with a capital E then there must be Good with a capital G, and I wanted to be on its side.

“Can we get back to work?” Justin asked.

“Sure.” I took the paper from him and frowned at the letters. MAELAZ. “I think it made more sense in Mesopotamian.”

Justin pulled out the copied catalog page. “The problem is, the symbols go in a circle, and you can’t tell exactly where to start reading.”

“Let’s see what happens when we Google it.” I rolled over to the desk and opened the browser. On the search engine’s main page I typed in: “maelaz.” Google helpfully asked if I meant “Maalox.”

“I guess that’s a no.” Next I typed: “Aelazm.” The Internet netted nothing.

Justin leaned on the back of my chair, peering over my
shoulder. I was distracted for a moment by the warmth of his arm brushing mine. “Keep the first three letters together,” he suggested. “Move them all to the back.”

I typed in: “Azmael.” The search engine churned for a moment and finally displayed a page of links to archaeology and anthropology sites. “Look!” I said, because I’m a dork when detective work pays off. “A site about ancient Babylon. That’s in Mesopotamia.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t look nearly as happy.

“How did you know to put the ‘ael’ at the end?”

“El was the top dog god to a lot of people in the region. The ‘ael’ would mean ‘of El.’ ”

I clicked on the link. The hard drive spun and clicked as the page tried to load. “It must have a lot of graphics. My computer hates bells and whistles.”

The whirring intensified, but the browser window remained dark. I felt Justin tense behind me. “Close the window, Maggie.”

I clicked the mouse, but nothing happened. “It’s locked up.”

“Force quit the program.”

The Internet had taken my computer hostage. “It’s not quitting.” I smelled ozone and burning plastic and my voice cracked in panic. “It’s not doing
anything
.”

Smoke poured out of the CD slot on the front of the tower and I jerked back, thinking phantom. But no. Just plain old burn-your-house-down fire.

“Get down.” Justin pulled me out of the chair as the monitor exploded in a shower of glass. He reached under the desk and yanked the surge protector from the wall, then
scrambled back as the CPU began to melt, flames licking out of the case.

The smoke detector went off, piercing my ears. I half-crawled into the bathroom and grabbed the little fire extinguisher from under the counter. I’d never used it before, so I struggled to read the instructions with the fire alarm turning my brain to Jell-O. Justin grabbed the extinguisher from me. He turned something, pointed the nozzle, pressed something else; frosty mist and foam shot out at the flames.

He emptied the entire canister, continuing to spray even after the last flicker disappeared. Finally I climbed onto the chair and turned off the screaming alarm.

My ears rang in the sudden silence. I jumped off the chair and joined him, staring at the melted hulk of the CPU. “I guess that’s what you call a physical construct.”

“Yeah.”

“At least we got the word figured out.” He turned to look at me, and I wondered if my expression mirrored his dazed look. I felt numb. “My mom is going to blow a gasket.”

He slid a comforting arm around my shoulder. “It could have been worse.”

I nodded, and rested my head against him. The desk was scorched, but otherwise the fire hadn’t gone farther than the computer. Of course, the peripherals were all shot: the printer, the scanner, and … A bone-deep chill seized me, followed by a rush of liquid-hot fury through my veins.

“My English paper was on that computer! Ten thousand words, up in flames! That bastard!”

“Didn’t you back it up?”

I blistered my fingers pulling a misshapen lump of plastic from the USB port. I held up the ex–flash drive and Justin’s dark brown eyes softened with exquisite sympathy as he echoed, “That bastard.”

i
woke facedown on the kitchen table, with Dad’s hand gently shaking my shoulder. “Hey, kiddo. Did you get your paper done?”

My thoughts struggled upstream against the current of exhaustion. Rewrites. Dad’s laptop. Parental freak-out over the fire. My paper going up in smoke. Oh yeah. I remembered that.

“Yeah.” I creaked upright and tried to straighten my neck. “Just need to print it out.”

“What time did you fall asleep?”

“More like passed out, I think.” I rubbed a desert’s worth of grit from my eyes. “Maybe four?”