Brimstone (56 page)

“What is it?” I asked, knowing I wouldn’t like the answer.

“It’s a … Well, it
looks
like a grimoire.” I could feel the tension in him, despite his attempt to keep his tone academic.

“A grimoire is like a spell book, right?”

“More or less.” He pushed away from the desk, paced a little, came back to look again. “You said this thing was old?”

“Really old. And very creepy.”

“Authentic grimoires were written in medieval times as
kind of magical primers. Some contain astrological correspondences, recipes for mixing medicine, instructions for making talismans …”

“That doesn’t sound too bad.” It was a feeble attempt at hope; I knew it couldn’t be that simple.

“Others have instructions for spells and potions, information on angels and demons, and directions on how to summon them.”

The bottom dropped out of my stomach. “Oh.”

“Very.” He stared back at me, past traumas looming large and dark in our shared history. The air thickened with dreadful possibilities.

Someone pounded on the door. Justin jumped, and so did I, with a girly squeal to make it worse. He gave a shaky laugh, breaking the tension. “Pizza’s here.”

While he paid the driver, I turned back to the computer screen. I couldn’t make anything of the book pages. I recognized the Latin, but even the diagrams were esoteric and uninterpretable.

I drummed my fingers on the desk, thinking about rituals and artifacts. I tried not to think about summoning demons. But that was like saying “Don’t think of a purple elephant.” So I thought of a purple elephant, and picked up my phone.

Justin came out of the kitchen with a plate full of more pizza than even I could eat. “Who are you calling?”

“Lisa. We need a witch on our side.”

“No.” He took the phone from me. “We don’t.”

I stood, followed his retreat. “Maybe she can figure out what this stuff is supposed to do.”

“I can figure it out.” He held the plate in one hand, and the phone easily out of my reach.

“When?” I set my hands on my hips. “I haven’t forgotten about your thesis, and class, and teaching assistant job. You think I have no consideration, but—”

“Would you stop?” He faced me, mirrored my belligerence. “I never said you asked anything that I don’t
want
to give. Time, resources … driving your getaway car.”

“You
said
you were whipped.”

“Well, I’m not. I’m perfectly able to say no to you, Maggie.” He held up the phone. “As in ‘No, we are not calling your demon-summoning friend.’ ”

I folded my arms. “You know what, Justin? Even if you
were
my boyfriend, I would only take that under advisement.”

He stared at me for a long moment, at the stubborn set of my chin and the fight in my stance. Then, with a sigh he handed me the cell and the plate of pizza.

“Thank you.” I caught his eye, making sure he knew I meant it.

He sat on the single barstool and pulled over the pizza box. “You’d just call her when you got home, so you might as well do it where I can hear.”

At the desk, I put the phone on speaker so that I could eat and type while I talked. Lisa answered on the third ring. “Maggie?”

“Hi, Lisa. I need your help with something.”

“Fine, thank you,” she said pointedly. “And how are you?”

“Are you busy?”

“It’s ten o’clock on a Friday night. Why would I be busy?”

“Great.” I saved the photos and attached them to an e-mail. “I’m sending you some pretty big picture files.”

Silence. “Are we ignoring the fact that you haven’t returned my phone calls for the last two months?”

I felt the blood rush out of my head and pool in my stomach. “Two months? It hasn’t been that long.”

“Yes. It has.”

Oh my God. I had a vague memory of Mom telling me she’d called. Once. Was it like the Post-it notes—written, then forgotten?

“Lisa … something’s been going on.”

She sighed. Loudly. “Let me go to my computer.” I heard the squeak of a chair and the slide and click of a mouse. I took a few bites of pizza while I waited. “What am I looking at?” she asked.

“It’s a long story. There’s an incense burner, a lamp, and a …”

“I know what this is.” Another pause, another mouse click. A worried sigh. “Magdalena Quinn. How do you get into these things?”

“So, do you understand it?”

Her voice turned droll. “My Latin is a little rusty to translate on the fly.”

“But you could interpret what this is supposed to do?”

This time the pause was loaded. “Why are you asking me to do this? Where’s the square?”

“Um, the square is right here,” I said without turning around.

A beat of realization. “I’m on speakerphone, aren’t I.”

Justin called from across the tiny room. “Hello, Lisa.”

I did glare at him then and picked up the phone, turning off the speaker. “Now it’s just you and I.”

“Why, Maggie? You said I shouldn’t be studying this stuff.”

“And
you
said the whole reason you were doing it was to counter it.” I let that rest between us a moment. “Are you going to put your money where your mouth is?”

“Is that what this is? A test?”

“No. It’s strategic outsourcing.”

That made her laugh, once, and softly. “Okay. It’s going to take me a few days. I’m just a dilettante.”

“I’m relieved to hear that.”

“What are you doing with a boy in your room at ten—no, ten-thirty at night?”

“He’s not in my room. I’m in his.”

“God, Maggie. There’s hope for you yet.”

“Good-
bye
, Lisa.”

Shutting the phone, I let my shoulders sag. I didn’t realize how tense I’d been until I felt Justin’s hands on my arms. My dress was sleeveless, and his fingers were warm on my skin as he gently turned me to face him.

I stared at the top button of his shirt, the hollow at the base of his throat, shy but expectant. Giving in to my hopes, I raised my head and closed my eyes, waiting. He let go of my shoulders, and reached for …

My pledge pin.

He unfastened the clasp from my dress without so much as brushing anything important. Then he went to the kitchen counter and dropped it into a glass of cloudy water—salt water, for spell-breaking. Of course.

He glanced at me curiously. “Feel anything?”

Oh, the irony. It burns us, my precious.

“No.” I folded my arms over my chest. I felt plenty, but didn’t think that was what he meant.

“Huh.” His brows knit in disappointment. “I thought maybe that was the source of the spell.”

“What spell?”

“The one where you keep forgetting that you’re supposed to be investigating the Sigmas.”

Now I felt something. Incredibly stupid. I dropped onto the futon, pressing my fingers to my forehead. “It isn’t that I forget. It’s that I keep losing focus. Losing time.”

Justin fished the pin out of the glass and sat beside me. “There must be something else. You’ve got to search your room, Maggie. Anything Sigma-related …”

“I know.” I held out my hand and he dropped the gold pin into my palm. “This was too obvious. That’s why I didn’t think of it.”

“Sure,” he said, leaving
If that makes you feel better
unspoken.

There are two ways to sit on a futon: perched on the edge, or half-reclining. So we reclined, side by side, half friends and half something else.

“What’s next?” His baritone voice rumbled in my ear.

You realize we’re meant to be together, or I accept that we’re not
. But I wasn’t making the mistake—again—of assuming we were in the same headspace.

“I have to be with the Sigmas on the parade route at six a.m. to help put the finishing touches on the float. I don’t have to ride on it, thank God, because I’m taking pictures for the
Sentinel
.”

He turned his head to look at me. “The Avalon paper? Not the
Report
?”

“Yeah.” I gazed at the ceiling, ignoring his gaze on my profile. “The guy who was covering the Homecoming festivities came down with strep throat. Ethan Douglas called this morning and asked if I’d do it.”

“Okay.” His tone was condemningly neutral.

“I
know
!” I thumped the cushion with a frustrated fist. “But how could I leave him in a jam? Curse this SAXi luck!” Justin laughed and I sat up, thinking about the problem while I could, before I lost focus again. “It’s a karma engine or something. The probabilities always go in their favor. It’s like they’re manipulating chaos theory.”

“Nothing is without a price, especially where magic is concerned. So, what’s the trade-off? Something has to be powering this magic.”

“That’s what I’ll work on.” I flopped back down, turned my head to look at him. “You’ll remind me when I forget, right?”

His hand covered mine. “If you promise to be careful.” He looked me in the eye, weighting his words. “They’re not really your friends, Maggie. Their goals are not your goals. You can’t trust anyone.”

That was the thing. Even knowing that this blanket of complacency was false, was laid on me somehow, it was hard to remember. Trust no one. Not even, it seemed, myself.

I
woke slowly on Sunday morning, enjoying the warm light on my eyelids, floating on the surface of sleep like a leaf on a lake, suspended between awareness above and the knowledge below. The shreds of a dream were close this time, the closest they’d been in months, but as soon as I tried to grasp them they skittered away, blown by a wind that stank of old bones. I stretched my thoughts like fingers, but the images dissolved and sank out of reach.

“Dammit!”

“Magdalena Lorraine.” Mom’s voice popped my eyes open. She stood at the open French doors, her arms full of
folded jeans that I must have left in the dryer. “That’s a hell of a word for Sunday morning.”

I groaned and sat up, pushing my hair out of my face. The only thing worse than no dream was psychic hangover with no dream. “What time is it?”

“Ten.” She stayed on the study side, viewing my bedroom with extreme displeasure. “What on earth happened in here? It looks like a tornado touched down.”

And it did. Shoes spilled out of the closet, drawers vomited out their contents. “I was looking for something.”

“Well, clean it up before tomorrow. You don’t want to start the week like this.” She used the “My house, my rules” voice, and I didn’t argue. “Did you have a good time at the game?”

“It was work. I took pictures for the
Report
.”

She found a place to set the jeans. “You were out late.”

“The game went late. Overtime. We weren’t supposed to win, but we did, with this crazy play.” Even
I
knew it was awesome, and I didn’t even like football.

“I noticed that Justin drove you home. And you sat talking in the car for quite some time.”

“Jeez, Mom. At least it was the front seat and not the back.” I wondered if I would have been so cranky if Justin and I had done anything other than talk about the Sigmas.

“Okay, okay.” Raising her hands in surrender, she turned toward the stairs. “Hurry up and get dressed. Dad said he’d take us to brunch before your pledge meeting.”

Pledge meeting. Speak of the devil.

When I walked into the Sigma house and saw Kirby and Victoria in the foyer, I thought for sure they were on to me. I mean, on to me in a way they could prove. I froze in the doorway, ready to flee, but then I saw Holly behind them giving me the thumbs-up.

“I’m afraid we have some bad news,” said Victoria, a great disparity between her sober expression and her satisfied, even gleeful, mood. I didn’t know which Sight to trust.

Kirby, on the other hand, was all displeasure. “Brittany was brought before Standards this afternoon, and asked to leave Sigma Alpha Xi.”

Behind them both, Holly was almost doing a happy dance. I let the front door close. “But, what happened? She was such an … enthusiastic pledge.”

“A little too enthusiastic.” The chapter president looked ready to spit nails; it wasn’t aimed at me in particular, but the white-hot frustration held tightly in check made me question Brittany’s safety.

“That’s not important,” said Victoria, taking my arm and guiding me toward the chapter room. “She broke the rules, she is out, and now you, as vice president, must take her place.”

I pulled away from her grasp. “What?”

She regarded me calmly, never considering I’d refuse her. “It’s time to step up, Maggie. Your sisters are relying on you.”

Placing a hand on my shoulder, she urged me through the inner doors. The temperature in the chapter room was so cold, I thought someone had left the window open. But then I saw Juliana seated in the armchair, and realized the
icicles were metaphorical. Maybe that was why Victoria was so smug. I wondered if she’d convinced the other alum to help her get Brittany out of the way, on the pretext that Holly would move up.

The other pledges were sitting in a loose semicircle, very straight-backed and uneasy. I didn’t think it would take any superpowers to pick up on the atmosphere. Tara stood between the girls and Juliana, as if she were defending her chicks.