Brimstone Read online

  “Are you in a big hurry to tackle that ivory tower?”

  He smiled sheepishly. “There’s a graduate internship I want to do this summer, and I had to have some preliminary courses to apply.”

  “Why Anthropology of the Bizarre? I mean, that wasn’t something they really talked up at our Career Day.”

  An odd reserve entered his expression. “It’s a long story.”

  I leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I hear the service here is slow.”

  He seemed to be considering things on some deep level, and I realized this was not something I could tease him about. But before he could tell me—or not—I heard my name.

  “Maggie?” Instinctively, I turned.

  “Oh hi, Jennifer.” Great. The town crier, here at my table. “What are you doing here?” Besides spying on people.

  “Eating, same as you.” She addressed me, but her avidly curious gaze was on my tablemate. “Having a nice time?”

  “Yes.” I gave in to the inevitable. “Jennifer, this is Justin. Jennifer and I work on the school paper together.”

  “Nice to meet you.” He smiled amiably.

  “Same here.” She beamed back, her shining brown curls falling over her shoulder as she turned her head. I couldn’t decide if she had assumed he was my date, or assumed he wasn’t, or which notion annoyed me more.

  I shoved an unruly chunk of my own hair behind my ear. “So what’s up?” I intended only distraction. I didn’t expect her to pull up a chair and make herself comfortable, but that’s what she did.

  “I had to come tell you what I just heard, since we were talking about her the other day.”

  “Who?” A lot had happened in the last twenty-four hours.

  “Jess Michaels. She was arrested for shoplifting a D&B bag.”

  Justin glanced at me curiously, and I mouthed “Minor” to clarify. I couldn’t help him out with “D and B” though. I assumed it was a designer, and expensive. “But I thought she had money.”

  “Everyone thought so. As it turns out, her mother has the moolah, and she buys Jess stuff on her custody visits. But her dad can’t afford the newest Prada, I guess, so she took a five-finger discount.”

  My mind circled back to the day I’d played tabloid reporter in the bathroom. “With Jessica Prime telling everyone her clothes were fakes, maybe she felt she had to have something new to save face.”

  “I know. But here’s the thing.” Jennifer leaned in close, as if revealing a secret. “I saw her wearing that blue Ralph Lauren sweater in September, and I swear it was the real label. But when I saw her yesterday, it was such an obvious copy I couldn’t believe I’d ever been fooled.”

  “How strange.” I spoke noncommittally, disinterested.

  “Maybe Jess had to sell her good clothes,” she mused, “and bought cheap replacements so no one would know.”

  “That’s one explanation.” A perfectly unnatural alternative occurred to me, but why would a phantom care about fashion? “But that’s just speculation, Jennifer,” I cautioned. “I wouldn’t spread it around.”

  She pantomimed locking her lips, but I didn’t feel reassured. “I’ll get back to my friends. Just had to say hi! Nice to meet you, Justin.”

  She fluttered off while the server put our lunch on the table. I sagged back in the booth, smacking the lump on my head on the wall behind me. “Ow. What just happened?”

  “You were hypothesizing.” Justin kept his voice neutral. “In unwise company.”

  “Just say it.” I sat up and began to take the lettuce, tomato, and onion off my burger. “I was gossiping.”

  “I didn’t know you were interested in fashion.” He tested a poultry digit and found it too hot to handle.

  “I’m not.” I picked at my burger a moment longer. “It occurred to me this morning that all these people are losing what’s most important to them. Image is extremely important to Jess Minor. She’s always trying to keep up with the others. Losing status is the worst thing that could happen to her. Maybe there’s some kind of illusion on her stuff.”

  He chewed a french fry thoughtfully. “That’s why you suggested the chemistry experiment might be a curse.”

  I nodded. “I think that’s why the Shadow leaves behind that stuff. If the—recipe, spell, whatever—creates it …”

  “Or summons it,” he said, ignoring his food now.

  I didn’t much like where that thought was headed, but a good journalist stays open-minded. “Or summons it,” I allowed.

  “So the question remains, what is the Shadow.”

  “Some kind of agent,” I hypothesized, “fulfilling the curse. Like a messenger spirit.”

  Justin caught my gaze. “Like a demon, you mean.”

  “Well, I was trying to avoid that word.” Especially in a crowded restaurant.

  “Why can you say ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit’ without flinching, but not ‘demon’?”

  Good question. I tucked my hair behind my ears. “I don’t know. Too many of those melodramatic connotations. Horns and pitchforks and things.”

  Leaning his elbows on the table, he gave me a long look. “That’s a relatively modern, Western caricature, and not what I’m talking about at all.”

  “I know.” I shook my head. “But I have to wrap my brain around this in stages.”

  The one thing I knew was this: If I was right, and someone had summoned some thing to bring down the Jocks and Jessicas, then regardless of the source, of the justness of the targets, the intent was Evil. With a capital E.

  Justin looked like he might press the issue, but after a moment he let out his breath and reached for a chicken finger. “All right. Let’s get back to Jessica Minor’s shoplifting arrest. Do you think she might still be overshadowed?”

  “No. I think that, robbed of what she valued, she’d do anything to try and recapture it.” I picked up my burger. “Besides, I broke the connection, remember.”

  “You didn’t finish telling me. How’d you do that?” he asked the instant my mouth was crammed with food. I tried to chew with undignified haste, then just picked up the saltshaker and mimed throwing it on him. He fell back against the bench, staring at me in surprised joy. “You mean it actually worked?”

  My eyes bugged out of my head. I swallowed the much-too-big mouthful of burger and choked out, “What do you mean ‘it actually worked’? You didn’t know it was going to work?”

  “Well, on paper, sure. But …” My outrage popped his bubble of satisfaction. “What? Everything I’d read said it should work as well as anything I could have given you.”

  “Everything you’ve read?” The sorority girls at the next table turned to see what I was squawking about. I lowered my voice, leaning against the table. “You mean you’ve never actually dealt with anything like this before?”

  “Not personally, no.”

  “I trusted you!” My throat squeezed out the words, trying to be quiet. “I thought you knew what you were doing.”

  He threw the chicken finger into the basket. “It isn’t as if I made this stuff up. It may be secondhand knowledge, but at least I’m not basing it on Bill Murray movies.”

  “That was just a starting place!” Indignant, I forgot about whispering. “I have been as logical and methodical as I can, under some pretty extraordinary circumstances.”

  He waved a hand in frustration. “You’re trying to force this thing to fit in a real-world box, but you won’t even fully admit it exists.”

  The truth didn’t make it any easier to swallow. “At least I admit I don’t know what I’m dealing with.”

  His eyes hardened to chips of stone. “At least I’m willing to commit to my hypothesis without closing my mind to the more unpleasant possibilities.”

  That stung. “Closed” and “minded” were fighting words for me, and I struck back below the belt. “Yeah, but you tested your hypothesis on me. Some paladin you are.”

  The angry color ran out of his face. I felt a prick of guilt for smacking him rig
ht in the self-image, for knowing how to hurt him and using it. But I was still too mad to take it back, even if I knew how. So I dropped my gaze and climbed out of the booth, digging into my pocket to pay for my burger. “I told you when we met, I didn’t want to be your research project.”

  “Maggie, sit down.”

  “No. I’m too angry to eat.”

  “Then put your money away.” He leaned on one hip to pull out his wallet. The waitress appeared as if conjured, like a pert blond genie from the lamp.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “We’re going to need some to-go boxes.” He handed her a twenty and she vanished before I could give her the wadded up bills for my half of the meal. Furious at being treated like an invisible child, I shoved them in Justin’s direction. “Here. This should cover me.”

  “Stop being such a brat, and sit down.”

  That was the final straw. My face flamed with hurt anger, and rather than prove him right by bursting into a tantrum, or tears, or both, I turned and left.

  “Have a nice day!” said the poodle-skirted hostess as I made a beeline for the door. I knew they made her say that, so I didn’t tell her exactly what kind of day I was having.

  Justin caught up with me in the parking lot. He didn’t have the to-go boxes. “Don’t even think about walking home.”

  How had I ever thought he was Mr. Nice Guy? “It’s not that far.”

  “With everything that’s happened around you? Across the street is too far.”

  “That’s not your problem.” I waved him off. “I absolve you of responsibility.”

  He clenched his jaw and ground out between his teeth, “I’ll see you back safely.” End of discussion. I ached to tell him he wasn’t the boss of me, but didn’t want to be called a brat again.

  I stomped to the car instead, fumed while he unlocked the door, then huffed into the bucket seat. Justin went to his side, but paused for several calming breaths before he climbed behind the wheel.

  He drove with tense deliberation while I sulked. The urge to scream or explode had evaporated; that only left the threat of tears. “Why don’t you just say it?”

  He kept his eyes on the road. “Say what?”

  “Whatever is making that muscle in your jaw twitch.”

  “Because I’m focusing my anger on getting to your house in one piece so I can dump your ungrateful”—He struggled a moment, then settled on—“backside, and be done.”

  I folded my arms. “Oh, just say ‘ass.’ The world won’t end if you’re rude. My universe would have imploded a long time ago if rudeness were fatal.”

  He turned off of Beltline and onto a smaller, safer street. “Really? I thought you were making an exception for me.”

  I twisted to face him. “I thought you had experience with this stuff. I trusted you.”

  “I never said that, Maggie. Sure I have a broader base of knowledge than you—though that’s not saying much. I’ve done research and interviews and studies. But it’s not like there’s some kind of paranormal lab practical.”

  Unreasonably I clung to the idea that it was his fault for projecting such confidence that, desperate to believe someone was equipped to deal with the supernatural, I’d given him more credit than he claimed.

  He turned onto the residential road that led to my house. “Why are we even arguing about this? It worked, didn’t it?”

  “It might not have.” Now I was just being stubborn.

  “But it did!” Finally he was raising his voice.

  “But you should have told me it might not work.”

  Another turn, onto my street. “Half of the power of a talisman is the belief that it will work.”

  “Like Dumbo and his stupid magic feather?”

  “Yeah.” He pulled into the driveway and stopped so abruptly that my seatbelt jerked me backward. “Exactly like Dumbo.”

  He unbuckled and got out of the car. I scrambled out after him. What kind of guy walks a girl to the door even in the middle of an argument? “What does that mean?”

  “That for a smart girl you’re acting pretty dumb, fighting over technicalities.” He faced me, arms folded across his chest. “You need me. Who else is going to believe you, let alone help you?”

  My posture mirrored his. “Apparently I can simply read a book.”

  “Great idea. Because a book will definitely give a damn what happens to you when you get in over your head. Further over your head.”

  He seemed to be waiting for me to say something else, but reeling from the fact that (a) he’d cursed and (b) he gave a damn what happened to me, I hesitated too long.

  “Fine.” He dropped his arms and turned away. “You know where to find me.”

  I needed to respond. I wanted to say something. But I didn’t know what would fix the mess I’d made of things. Except “I’m sorry” and even that wouldn’t come out past the stubborn stranglehold of emotions in my throat.

  So I just let him leave.

  19

  the real world marched along, for the moment at least. Regardless of what went on in the supernatural realm, I had an English paper due in a couple of days. As I plugged away at it without enthusiasm, my dad came halfway up the stairs and peered through the banister rail. “Mom and I are thinking about Chinese food for dinner. Are you in?”

  “Yeah.” My stomach growled at the thought. Those three bites of cheeseburger hadn’t gone far. “I want egg foo young and an order of spring rolls.”

  But instead of going back down the stairs, he came up to the study. “Did you and Justin have a fight?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The shouting on the lawn was a clue.”

  I groaned and slithered down until my butt was nearly hanging off the chair. “I was such a brat.”

  “Probably.”

  “You’re not supposed to agree with me.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because you’re my father.”

  He bent over and kissed the top of my head. “That only guarantees that I’ll love you when you’re a brat, not that I’ll never think you are one.”

  I sighed, deeply. “That’s fair, I guess.”

  His curious glance fell on my desk. “What’s this?”

  I spun the chair with my foot. “My theory that the microcosm of the American high school is represented in the lands that Gulliver encounters in his travels.”

  “Interesting theory, but I was talking about this.” He held up the sketch I’d made that morning, of the symbols engraved on the brazier.

  “Oh.” How much to tell him? If I spilled it all, he might believe me. And then he’d lock me in my room and call for a priest. That would put an end to my Nancy Drew–ing.

  So I parceled out a little of the truth. “I dreamed about an oasis, with tents, and a woman at the well. There was a campfire, and those symbols were carved in the brazier that held the coals.”

  Dad raised his brows. “Interesting. They look Assyrian, or maybe Babylonian. That’s not really my area.”

  “I thought they looked Hebrew.”

  He considered them again. “Perhaps the same family. I can ask Dr. Dozer if you like. She’s done a lot of work in the Middle and Near East. Went on some expeditions there, before the first Gulf War.”

  I stopped listening after the name “Dozer.” Stanley. How could I not have seen it before?

  Dad had stopped talking, expecting an answer. I backtracked to his question. Thank God for mental TiVo. “No, thanks. Let me do a little more research, okay? It could be just nonsense.”

  He laid the paper back on the desk. “Okay. You know I’ll help you however I can.”

  I smiled up at him. “I know.”

  He headed for the stairs. “Egg foo young and spring rolls,” he confirmed before he left.

  I rooted through piles of paper and books until I found the flash drive where I’d stored those pictures from the week before. I plugged it in and clicked on the folder marked “in_case_of_death.”
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br />   The first photo popped open, showing Stanley’s face frozen in terror, his long legs hooked over the brick wall of the elevated walkway, while Brandon and Jeff, laughing like maniacs, held him suspended over the two-story drop. Brian stood back, looking torn and miserable, and the Three Original Jessicas pointed and twittered like the birdbrains they were.

  Of the seven people in the snapshot, four had something strange happen to them. Only Karen wasn’t in the picture. Did she not fit the pattern, or was I not seeing the whole thing?

  I clicked “print” and picked up the phone to call Justin. Then I stopped. I wasn’t angry with him anymore, but my pride still stung. We’d both thrown a lot of darts, and maybe his were more just than mine. It was all very complicated, even more so because I was unsure if this was a friends and colleagues argument, or a guy/girl thing.

  I had guy/girl thoughts about Justin, but I had no idea if he thought about me that way. When he met Brian today, his careful neutrality could have meant anything from “Me, Tarzan. You in my tree,” to “Maggie’s like a sister to me.”

  Brian, on the other hand, hadn’t quite thumped his chest, but when I accidentally agreed to Monday’s date, he was pretty clearly thinking “guy wins girl.” If only I didn’t have this picture of him, standing by and doing nothing while his friends terrified Stanley.

  I stared at the photo, studying the faces, frozen in that pivotal moment. Stanley Dozer. “You’ll all be sorry,” he’d said. Had he found some otherworldly alternative to a black trench coat and an AK-47?

  I tossed restlessly in bed. Time had dilated somehow, and my paper was due tomorrow. Besides the Swift theme, I needed to write an article about Jeff Espinoza’s accident, finish two chemistry lab reports, and compose a one-page essay for civics. No wonder my brain felt feverish and overheated.

  I didn’t remember getting up, but abruptly found myself at my computer, facing a blank document on the screen, my paper not even begun. I wondered briefly how I could have forgotten to start the darned thing; some deep, muted voice in my head said that wasn’t right. Something was off about this whole scenario. But the immediate panic of the looming deadline drowned out all logic. I had to get cracking.