Brimstone (66 page)

“Oh God.” She writhed and howled, and I stared at her, horrified at what I’d done.

Kirby hit me from behind and my body met parquet with a bone-jarring crack, driving the air from my lungs. She seized my hair and yanked; I grabbed her wrist to stop her from tearing my scalp as she hauled me across the floor, back out through the spiral. I wheezed and squirmed and
dug in my heels, desperate that she wouldn’t drag me out. If I lost this battle, it would
not
be in a girl fight.

Fumbling a hand in my bra, I found the lighter. The flame sprang to life, and I hauled myself up by my grip on Kirby’s wrist and held the fire to her arm. Flesh sizzled; she dropped me with a shriek of surprised pain and I hit the ground, leaving a hank of hair behind. In a blind rage she kicked at me, but I rolled away and scrabbled back to the bag.

She lunged, her mouth twisted in fury, her fingers raised like claws. I flung a handful of cayenne pepper into her face, and she stumbled back like I’d maced her, screaming and wiping at her eyes.

I rested my hands on my knees, panting for breath, getting my bearings. Devon and Lisa were working their way around the circle, snipping cord and waking the girls. While one came out calmly, another came out terrified and sobbing. Next, I searched for Justin, who was carrying a struggling girl toward the door while she beat on him in blind confusion. It was hard to see through the incense smoke, but it looked as though Justin’s nose was bleeding, and Lisa might have a black eye. Devon just kept cutting the cord.

“Have you gone crazy?” I looked toward Jenna’s voice and found her kneeling beside Victoria. Her mentor lay curled in a ball of pain, and Jenna pulled her head into her lap and yelled at me, as much in fear as anger. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

I resumed gathering my supplies. “Don’t even go there, Jenna.”

Her gaze was stricken, accusing, and honestly hurt. “I thought we were friends.”

“We are.” I was honest, too. “And friends don’t let friends make deals with the devil.”

“What?”

I ignored her for the moment. In all this chaos, Juliana had never stopped chanting, and the pledges stood like wax figures, transfixed, bound for the transformation.

Dropping the bundle of herbs into the wooden bowl, I flicked the lighter and set them to smoldering. Marjoram and basil, sage and clove. This was the second undoing, the retransformation.

Juliana’s incense was the scent of seduction, of perfumed harems and dark, secret places. It was the perfume of power and wealth, of worldly pleasures.

My
incense smelled of Thanksgiving dinner, of home, of protection and family. It was the scent of things bigger than ourselves, of intangible treasures. As the smoke wafted over the inner circle of pledges, I saw them quiver, as if stirring in their sleep.

Lemon oil, to restore and renew. I dripped some into my bowl and blew across the embers. Kaylee and Nikki raised hands to their eyes. Mugwort, smelling of clean, damp earth. The rest of the girls woke up, shaking off the dazed funk the way a dog shakes off water.

The process had reversed. And Juliana knew it. She stopped chanting, slammed the ornate brass censer down on the altar, and glared at me through the smoke. “You,
child
, are really beginning to piss me off.”

“I have that effect on people.” I still had to finish one thing, but I couldn’t move from my position, south to Juliana’s north, and my comrades were still freeing the last of the Sigmas.

“Holly!” Putting my trust in her, in the independent spirit under her mother’s manicured thumb, I tossed her the vial of lemon oil. She caught it, and I pointed to my forehead. “Put it here. It will cut the last connection—”

“Holly Eleanor Russell!” Juliana snapped in a very maternal voice. “Don’t you move.”

Holly whipped her eyes back and forth between us, suspended on a thread of indecision. Then, squaring her jaw, she turned from her mother and went to Kaylee, dotting the girl’s forehead with the oil. Immediate effect. The ballerina-sized brunette started cursing like a sailor and ran for the door.

The rest of the pledges didn’t question, just fled as they were released. Jenna ducked as Nikki hurtled over her and Victoria in her haste. Finally, only Holly remained, and she, too, turned to go.

“Freeze!” Juliana’s command halted her daughter as if she had rooted to the spot.

The equation, hanging in balance, tipped back to Juliana’s side. The pledges were free, and the actives were safe. The pattern was scattered, and chaos was as random as it ever had been or would be. All except here, where the inner circle remained.

“Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?” Jenna demanded.

“Did you never tell them, Juliana?” I threw it across the circle, keeping her attention on me. “You’re a lawyer. Wouldn’t lack of full disclosure invalidate the contract?”

“What contract?” demanded Kirby. Her eyes were red and swollen, and they widened as she saw Devon come into the circle of candlelight. Justin and Lisa followed her, rebalancing
the pattern: four of them, four of us, and Holly in the middle.

I looked at the woman on the floor beside Jenna. “You didn’t tell them, either, Victoria? I thought you cared about these girls.”

“I do.” Her makeup was streaked and her face contorted with pain, but she managed a veneer of composure. “Juliana found the book and set up the spell. But I was the one who worked it out so that no one had to die, and we could all of us benefit.”

“Cole died.” Devon shook with rage as she stepped toward Victoria. “Cole died because of what you Sigmas made me.”

“No. Because you couldn’t follow the rules. Your sisters tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen. Did you think love would conquer all?”

Devon still had the scissors in her hand, clutched like a weapon. Victoria’s mocking tone goaded her forward, but Lisa’s voice stayed her. “Don’t, Devon.”

She looked up at her like a lost little girl. “I’m already a killer, so what does it matter?”

Gently, Lisa took the scissors from her. “It matters. Believe me.”

“My God.” Juliana’s voice was all contempt. “Just
shut up
already. I offer you the world, and all you do is whine.”

The grimoire had, through all this, squatted like a living thing on the altar. Now Juliana pulled it closer, and flipped back the sleeves of her robe. “I was tired of sharing anyway. Holly, come here.”

The girl moved like an automaton. Her mother didn’t
glance at her, just turned to a new page in the book. Raising her arms, she started speaking again, a chanting drone of renewed vigor. The flame on the altar lamp jumped and danced, and I felt the power surge from someplace deep and elemental, beyond human reckoning.

Justin had joined me, standing close by my shoulder. “What’s going on, Maggie?”

“I don’t know.” This wasn’t in the parameters. The air was turning colder, growing thick. Devon and the Sigmas darted their eyes warily from Juliana to me as Lisa came to my other side.

With a contemptuous disregard for all of us, Juliana lifted the censer. The smell had turned bitter and noxious, like stale ice and refrigerator coolant. Cold rolled out with the smoke, raising goose bumps on my skin. It crept into my bones, along with the realization of what she was doing: calling the thing that lay hidden at the heart of the pattern.

Equal and opposite.

My backup plan was really more of a desperate improvisation. I blew across the wooden bowl in my hands, fanning the red embers to tiny flames that fought against the clammy air. Kicking the duffel to Lisa, I said, “Time to pull a rabbit out of your hat, Gandalf. Justin, there’s a piece of notebook paper in there. I need you to hold it for me.”

The glass on the pictures around the room had started to frost. Devon drew her jacket closed, Jenna and Kirby rubbed their bare arms, and Victoria huddled into herself. Standing beside her mother, Holly’s lips were turning blue.

Juliana’s voice became harsh, rasping out the sharp, cutting words of her chant. Staring across at me, she pulled
Holly’s arm to her and picked up a bronze dagger from the altar.

“Don’t!” I started forward, without a clue how I could stop her. Justin’s hand held me in place, kept the balance from tipping even farther.

“She’s mine to use,” the woman said. “They’re all mine.”

“You can’t own people,” I argued. “And Hell can’t take them—her—without her consent.”

I heard Jenna’s indrawn breath, and felt the cold intensify in answer to my naming.

“They chose to be what they are, regardless of how they were created.” Juliana paused, as if she were listening to instructions whispered through her soul on an ill wind. When she spoke again, it was with cunning. “But you can trade places with them if you like. You have real power, and I would get a lot of bonus points for you.”

“Give me a break, Ice Queen,” I said, “do I look like an allegorical lion to you?”

She smirked. “I didn’t think so.” Without warning, she put the tip of her blade to her daughter’s thumb and cut until blood flowed freely. It dripped into the censer and hissed on the embers of incense. The smoke poured out like fog, flowing down the altar and across the circle. Frost spread in the wake; it rimed the tablecloth, the floor, and came toward us like a diamond-hard tide.

I held out the bowl toward Lisa and she dropped in nuggets of frankincense and myrrh. The resin caught immediately, flared ruby and amber in the rude wooden vessel. “Paper, Justin.”

His eye scanned the handwritten page. “Are you out of your
mind
?”

“Look.” I used enough bravado to convince both of us. “I don’t even
want
to know what she’s summoning over there. So excuse me if I go straight for the big gun.”

Jenna dragged Victoria away from the encroaching frost; Devon—after palpable indecision—ran forward and grabbed Kirby, pulling her behind Justin, Lisa, and me—a strange sort of trinity if there ever was one.

Raising the bowl, I breathed across the smoke, sending it out carrying the first words of my own spell.

“Veni, Sancti Spiritu.”

Come, Holy Spirit
.

Justin crossed himself, and Lisa whispered, “Amen.”

T
he frost slowed, but kept creeping toward us. Juliana gritted her teeth and growled a guttural string of words. She could have been ordering a metaphysical pizza for all I knew. I had just enough Latin to get through my own invocation. Catechism class was finally paying off.

“Veni, Creator Spiritus!”

I said it more strongly now, since the first tentative whisper hadn’t called down a bolt of lightning at my audacity.

The infringing ice covered the floor, a sea of frosty white. We stood on a shrinking peninsula, and my bare feet cringed from the burning chill.

“Mentes tuorum visita.”

Come Creator Spirit. In our souls take Thy rest
.

The incense in my bowl glowed, as if fanned by intangible breath.

“Imple superna gratia.”

Come with Thy grace and heavenly aid …

The frost stopped, inches from my toes.

“Quae tucreasti pectora.”

And fill the hearts which Thou hast made
.

Holly crumpled, like a puppet whose strings had been snipped. Just as abruptly, the ice retreated, a fast-motion thaw melting the ground for the coming spring.

It converged on Juliana, ran up her robe and over her chest to her bare arms and neck. For a moment she was encrusted, like spun-sugar candy. Then the frost sank into her skin, and what looked out of her eyes was no longer human.

“Uh, Lisa?” I held the bowl in two shaking hands. “Did she just absorb that … whatever … into herself?”

“Yeah.” She sounded as poleaxed as I felt. “That’s unexpected.”

“Why isn’t it cancelled out?”

Justin answered. “The blood. You’ve got to—”

“You
bitch
.” Victoria had gained her feet, lurching on her wretched knee, eyes fixed on Juliana’s face. “You’re still hogging all the power for yourself. You were never satisfied with an equal share.”

Juliana—or what was left of her in there—stared at the other woman with disdain. “Like you would know what to do with it, Vicky. You never did want to go all the way with anyone
really
powerful.”

Jenna tried to pull her back, recognizing the danger—maybe even Seeing it for what it was. “Victoria, please. She’s not …”

Victoria shook the girl off, limping forward. “We were partners when we started this. And while I’ve nurtured this sisterhood, built it into something lasting and strong, you do nothing but take take take …”

Juliana’s hand came up in a dismissive gesture. “Whatever. Most people
like
instant gratification. Peter, for example.”

“What?”

Now her expression was just catty. “You don’t really think
you
inspired his meteoric political success, do you? With your prissy little pantsuits and your camera-friendly hair?”

Victoria slapped Juliana across the face. The Julianathing reciprocated by flinging her across the room with one hand. The congressman’s wife hit the wall with a plaster-cracking thud and fell to the floor.

The thing turned her—its—gaze, blazing with cold, on us. Distantly, I heard fire trucks approaching. Had they taken that long, or had that little actual time passed? It seemed as if we’d been waging battle for days.

“Still have those scissors, Lisa?” I held my thumb over the bowl.

Justin pushed my hand away, put his in its place. “She didn’t use her own. You shouldn’t, either.”

“I’m not sure I can hurt you,” I said honestly.

Lisa opened the scissors and put the silver point to Justin’s thumb. “Get on with it.”

“What are you doing?” The transformed Sigma Prime demanded an answer, but I heard alarm thrumming through the voice.

Her agitation renewed my confidence. “Basic math, Juliana. An equal positive and an equal negative equals zero. A gift for a theft.”

Lisa cut the pad of Justin’s thumb and I caught three drops of blood in the bowl. They flashed as they hit the incense, and the resin heated up, red-hot, then glowing white. The bowl itself caught fire, and I dropped it.