Brimstone Read online

  The same brazier rested in the sand; no stand, just a beaten metal basin about the size of a large dinner plate, with designs of some kind engraved around the rim. The smell of the fire burning in the shallow bronze container brought to mind fireworks and made my throat ache. Underneath it, though, was the same rotten odor.

  I gathered detail with some excitement, studying the symbols. Maybe I was getting better at this vision stuff. A rolled-up piece of parchment lay on the raised edge of the brazier, and the fire crawled slowly up the scroll.

  With a courage I might not have possessed in real life, I snatched the small cylinder from the flames. It was a new element in the dream, and might be important.

  I blew on it like a match, but the fire wouldn’t go out. With the same odd lack of fear, I handled the parchment by the safe side, and unrolled it. The letters were ornate and completely foreign to me, but they made a list of some kind. I thought of my first dream, and the roll call of names. A hex maybe? A curse? That would make sense, except for the feeling of sentience that I got from the black shadow.

  The blue flames traveled more quickly across the parchment. I wondered if that was the origin of the acrid smell. Wasn’t parchment once made out of sheepskin?

  The fire singed my skin, and I dropped the list to the sand. The flames, however, stayed dancing on my fingertips. I held my hand before my face, horrified as the flesh began to blacken and blister. The choking, burning odor was coming from my hand.

  Terror shook me in its teeth. I tried to scream, but couldn’t force any sound past my throat. I could only watch the flames lick down my wrist, as the skin of my hand began to crack and peel from my bones.

  What had Justin said? That I was vulnerable in my dreams. Could I die? Could I go mad? That seemed a very real possibility, as pain and fear chased each other around in my brain, making it impossible to think, filling my head with the shriek of blind, unreasoning panic.

  My unblemished left hand went to my neck, grasped the cross that still hung there, even in my dream. Wake up. I ordered myself. Wake up, now. Wake up wake up wake …

  “Up!” I screamed, propelled out of the dream and straight up in bed.

  My chest heaved like I’d run a marathon, and my clothes and hair were clammy with sweat. My left hand still clutched Gran’s necklace—my necklace—and the tangle of bedsheets hid my right. It didn’t hurt, but I’d heard that third-degree burns didn’t, because all the nerve endings were dead.

  Trembling, I made myself let go of the cross, then reached over to flip aside the sheet. My breath whooshed out when I saw my pale skin, unblemished by anything but a smattering of freckles.

  “Maggie?” Mom’s worried voice called from below. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I croaked, but the word didn’t carry. I heard her footsteps on the stairs.

  I was still wearing my clothes from the play. Even if Dad had told Mom I’d been out, I didn’t want to wave the red flag of my disobedience in her face. Scrambling under the covers, I pulled them up to my chin just as she reached the landing. “I’m all right, Mom.”

  Her sleep-tousled head appeared around the bifold door to the bedroom. “I thought I heard you shout.”

  I pushed myself up onto my elbows. “I had a nightmare.”

  “Are you feeling all right? You sound hoarse.” Concerned, she came into the room, then hurried to the bed when she saw me. “Oh, Maggie! You’re drenched.” She laid the back of her hand against my forehead—do all mothers have a thermometer there? “And you’re burning up. Are you sure you’re not sick?”

  “No,” I rasped, lying back and tugging up the sheet. “Just a nightmare. A bad one.”

  “Oh.” She sat on the edge of the bed, her thoughts marching visibly across her face. I wondered if she was recalling, like I was, the last time we’d done this, the night her parents died. She must have been, because she seemed to waver in her curiosity, wanting to ask, not wanting to know.

  “Was it a … What did you used to call them? A gut dream?” She didn’t look at me, but at her knotted fingers.

  I hesitated, my instinct still to avoid this ground with Mom. “Kind of. Yes.”

  “Oh.” Her fingers unlaced, shifted, and knit again. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “No.” It came out harsher than I intended. I didn’t mean to reject her, exactly. My mom fell into the very reasonable, rational part of my life, and I liked it that way. Whenever I needed to think of something logically, it was my mother’s voice in my head saying, “Oh, don’t be ridiculous.”

  I tempered that rejection a little. “Nothing I want you to worry about, Mom. Just school stuff.”

  “Is the stress getting to you, sweetheart?” Her hand brushed my cheek, cool against my flushed skin.

  “Not exactly.” Mom loved to hear what was going on in my life. It was a shame that her only child was so boring, and sadder still that once my life got interesting, I couldn’t tell her about it. Whether she believed me or not, she would, as Dad put it, freak out, and take action to inhibit my girl detective responsibilities.

  “There are these girls,” I said, choosing my truths carefully. “Cheerleaders. You know the type. Beautiful. Popular. Wearing their air of entitlement like designer perfume.”

  “Oh yes.” That agreement carried a world of understanding.

  “Well, they’re making me miserable.” At least that was honest. “I’m trying to just stay above it all, but that’s harder than it should be.” Especially with a ghostly shadow forcing my involvement.

  “I know.” Mom patted my knee. “But you just have to ignore them. Remember those girls are just jealous.”

  The conviction in that cliché made me laugh. Motherless Nancy Drew might have more freedom in her investigations, but I’d trade a lot of fretting for moments like this. “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too, Magpie.” She leaned over and kissed my forehead, as though I were eight instead of (almost) eighteen. With one last frown, she tucked the covers closer around me. “But maybe you should take it easy the rest of the weekend. You don’t want to get sick this close to the prom.”

  “Oh, Mom,” I groaned. She suffered from the delusion that I might yet decide to go to the dance, and kept asking if we should go shopping for a dress, “Just in case.”

  “Oh, Maggie,” she echoed. “I don’t want you to have any regrets. It wouldn’t kill you to behave like a normal teenager once in a while.”

  Wouldn’t it? Look what happened the first time I ever snuck out of the house.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  It took so little to make her happy. She patted my knee as she rose, “That’s all I ask. Sleep tight, Magpie.”

  “ ’Night, Mom.”

  I waited until she’d had time to get to her bedroom, then threw back the covers. My clothes were strangling me. I stripped them off, pulled on my pjs, then went over to the desk. I was not eager to go back to sleep, even though, by the usual rules, I would be done dreaming for the night.

  Picking up a pencil, I began to sketch as much as I could remember of the symbols on the brazier. I found that, just like my extra sense, I couldn’t make it happen, but if I let my mind and hand drift, I could see the engravings and trace them on the page. Soon I was yawning, but I had six symbols I was reasonably sure of. They looked both familiar and strange, kind of a cross between Hebrew letters and the graffiti ciphers I saw spray-painted on buildings.

  I dropped my pencil in defeat. Great. I had probably been influenced by the Prince of Egypt portion of the dream, and the last time I drove downtown. I hated not knowing what I knew.

  At least the nightmare’s power had faded with the detective work. I belatedly brushed my teeth, then switched off all but one small lamp in the corner.

  I don’t know what made me pause at the window. Maybe I just wanted to see that the line of salt was still there, or comfort myself with those cheery red rowan berries. Brushing back the curtain, my eye immediately went to the m
oonlit street, and the amalgamation of shadows gathering under the neighbor’s big pecan tree.

  The inky darkness of the Shadow stood defined against the lesser gloom. It now had a distinct form, man-shaped, but not quite. There was a central mass, like a torso, and limblike outgrowths, and something head-shaped at the top. A breeze stirred the leaves of the pecan, and the Shadow’s form shifted like a phantom, but with a core of material solidity.

  It stepped out of the shelter of the tree, palpably obscure in the moonlight, a substance that cast no shadow of its own. The wind blew eddies of dirt and grass clippings around its half-formed feet.

  How did I know it was trying to do something, Justin had asked me. The parchment, the list of names—maybe it was a curse, or maybe it was a means to an end. But I knew in that moment where this was headed.

  Like some kind of nightmare Velveteen Rabbit, the specter was becoming real.

  16

  i woke feeling like I’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson instead of a skinny WASP Princess. It didn’t help that I had slept on the ancient loveseat, as far away from the front windows as I could get. I hadn’t planned to sleep at all, but as the small hours of the night crept larger and nothing happened, unconsciousness won out over fear.

  I Frankenstein-walked to the bathroom, shedding clothes as I went. A hot shower eased my muscles but stung the scratches on my neck and arm. The joints in my right hand were stiff and I ached up to the elbow, but when I saw the bruises on my knuckles I realized this wasn’t some weird transference from the dream. I’d gotten at least one good punch on Jessica Minor.

  That happy thought gave me courage to consider my shadowy friend. The good news was the protections seemed to work at least a little, since the thing was on the street and not at the window. The question was, why was it here at all? Because I’d poked my nose into its business? From the acid words that Jess spewed while under the influence, the Shadow seemed to have a serious mad-on for me.

  Which pretty much evaporated any improvement in my mood.

  I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and let my hair do its own thing. I was just thinking I should call Karen and see how she was doing, when my cell phone rang.

  “Hi, Karen.”

  “Wow. Are you psychic or something?”

  “Caller ID.” I took the phone into the bathroom and reconsidered putting some powder on the bruise on my cheek. “How are you feeling? When do you go home from the hospital?”

  “Maybe this afternoon. It depends.” Something evasive lay under that, but she continued before I could ask. “Was that Jeff Espinoza’s Mustang on the news this morning? They said that the driver was taken to the hospital.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow.” She paused. “Is this anything like my accident?”

  I’d given up on the mirror and gone back to the study, finding myself looking at the symbols I’d sketched during the night. I worried my lip, wondering how much to tell her. “Maybe.”

  “Huh. Well, okay.” I stopped her before she could hang up.

  “Karen, are you all right? Did you really call just to ask about the accident?”

  There was another pause, a long, heavy one. “No. I don’t know. Something weird is going on.”

  I sat down. “What is it?”

  She made several attempts to start, as if getting up her courage. “I was trying to get caught up on my homework yesterday, and when I started my calculus the equations just … didn’t make any sense. It was like trying to read Chinese.”

  “You’ve forgotten how to do calculus?”

  “I can’t make sense of any numbers at all.” Her voice caught, a tiny, heartbreaking sound. “They think I may have swelling in a very localized part of the brain.”

  “Oh, Karen, that’s so …” Weird. “… awful. I know how much you love math.”

  “I do, it’s my best subject.”

  “I’m so sorry. But maybe if the swelling goes down …?” I trailed off hopefully.

  “If it does, the doctor hopes the ability will come back.” She gave a laugh, half brave and half ironic. “You know, ever since I blew the answer in the State Mathlete Finals, I’ve had this fear that one day I would just lose it.”

  “You’re not losing it,” I reassured her. “It’ll come back when the swelling goes down.”

  “I hope so. I didn’t mean to whine about that. I mostly called because of the news. The whole school knows how much Jeff loves that car.”

  “Yeah.” Something about that was important, but my brain needed time to work on it.

  “Jessica Prentice was on the news. She looked haggard.” Karen sounded only a little pleased with this report on Prime’s appearance. “Is she sick?”

  “Only in the head.”

  “Gotta go. Doctor’s here.”

  Our time was up. I wished her good luck and closed the phone slowly, my mind spinning.

  Karen loved math. Henchman Jeff loved his Mustang. Thespica loved the limelight. They had to be the first few turns of a pattern. Not enough to see what the completed shape would be, but definitely interlinked.

  I went downstairs, still wearing a distracted frown.

  “Everything all right, Maggie?” Mom and Dad had a Saturday-morning routine: sofa, bathrobes and slippers, newspaper, coffee, box of doughnuts. I grabbed one of the latter.

  “Yeah. Karen’s been out of school for a few days, so I was catching her up on the gossip.”

  Mom held up the local section of the Avalon Sentinel. “Is this boy one of your classmates?” Mouth full of doughnut, I nodded, and she tsked. “That section of Beltline is awful. They need more traffic lights.”

  The doorbell rang. “I’ll get it.” I snagged another doughnut on the way to the door.

  Brian Kirkpatrick stood on our front stoop, looking like he hadn’t slept all night. He skipped right past the pleasantries and demanded, “How did you know about the crash?”

  It was dumb luck I didn’t choke to death on my doughnut.

  “Who is it?” Dad called from the living room.

  “Jehovah’s Witness!” I yelled back as I stepped out and shut the door behind me. “What are you doing here? How did you find out where I live?”

  “There aren’t that many Quinns in the phone book. How did you know what was going to happen?”

  I shushed him, as if my parents could somehow still eavesdrop. “I didn’t. You haven’t told anyone what I said, have you?”

  “No. The others didn’t hear you. Jess just thinks you were coming on to me.”

  Lovely. “Is she okay?”

  “Yeah. And what the hell was that all about?”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” I said in perfect honesty. “What about Jeff?”

  “Compound open fracture of his leg is the worst of it.”

  “That’s pretty bad.”

  Brian shook his head, looking grim. “He’s lucky. And so am I. If I’d been in the passenger seat, I would have been crushed like a bug on the grill of that Hummer.”

  I glanced away, knowing it was true and unable to look at him with the mangled sports car superimposed on my memory. “Would you believe I just had a bad feeling about it?”

  He stared at me for a long moment, evaluating my sincere expression, and the impossibility of any other explanation. Then he shoved his fingers through his short mop of blond hair. “Okay. I’ll buy that.”

  I slanted a nervous glance up at him. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

  He seemed surprised at the idea. “No.”

  “Good. Because the last thing I need right now is the head cheerleader screaming, ‘I saw Goody Quinn dancing with the devil in the moonlight.’ ”

  A slow, reluctant smile turned up the corners of his mouth. “Yeah. Those girls in The Crucible. They were totally Jessicas.”

  We were laughing over that when Justin pulled up behind my Jeep in the driveway. Naturally. He climbed out of the car, pausing uncertainly when he saw me entertaining a gentleman caller on the front stoop. />
  I waved him over, trying to sober toward dignity. “Hi! I thought you had to study.”

  “I do, eventually.” He started up the walk. “I tried to call you, but your phone kept sending me to voice mail.”

  “I must have been talking to Karen.”

  Justin glanced curiously at Brian. Brian slanted a look at Justin. And then they both looked at me.

  Awkward.

  “Justin, this is Brian Kirkpatrick, from school. Brian, this is Justin MacCallum, my, um, friend.”

  Brian offered a handshake instead of his usual “Hey.” His forearm flexed handsomely during that hearty clasp, and Justin’s knuckles went slightly white. Their expressions, however, were genially inscrutable.

  See, this was when psychic mojo would come in handy. But my inner eye gave me no clue. My inner nose, on the other hand, detected the strong odor of testosterone.

  The door behind me opened. “Phone for you, Mags. It’s—” Dad stopped, looking at the two guys on our front walk. It was probably a sign of the apocalypse. “What is this? Grand Central Station?”

  Brian took it as a cue to leave. “I’d better run. See you on Monday, Maggie?”

  “Sure,” I answered blithely, then remembered that he had asked me on a date for Monday. What had I just agreed to? From Brian’s ear-to-ear grin, more than I’d intended. Consciously, anyway.

  He nodded courteously to my dad, then to Justin, and took off toward the sporty car parked beside mine in the driveway. Dad glanced at me, one brow raised. “School stuff,” I said evasively. “Can Justin come in?”

  “Sure.”

  Justin followed us into the house, and I went straight to the phone extension in the living room. “Hello? This is Maggie Quinn.”

  “Hello, Miss Quinn. This is Dr. Smyth at the university’s Chemistry Department. I hope you don’t mind. I looked up your father’s number in the faculty directory.”

  “Not at all! Thank you for calling.”