Brimstone Read online

  “Don’t ask me which was more traumatic.” I stirred my coffee thoughtfully. “I feel … different.”

  “A lot has happened.”

  “I’m never going to be able to ignore my dreams again. I’m always going to wonder what is a hunch and what is, you know … the freakitude.”

  “Maybe it’ll get easier with practice. You could talk to your gran about it.”

  I watched the whirlpool in my cup. “You know what the weirdest thing is? I have to go to school on Monday. Shouldn’t I get special dispensation for saving the world?”

  “From wild dogs?” He grinned. “Probably not.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Mug in hand, I started to breeze past him. He caught the back of my T-shirt.

  “Listen. What do you say we go on a date that doesn’t involve ghostbusting or demon hunting?”

  A shy sort of smile crept to the corner of my mouth. “Just you, me, and a basket of chicken fingers?”

  “Maybe even a movie.”

  I pretended to think about it. “Okay. But not a horror one.”

  “No? I was thinking about Prom Night.”

  “Very funny.”

  “What about Carrie?”

  “Don’t make me hurt you. I’m a demon slayer now, you know.”

  “Look out, Buffy.”

  And that was how I survived the senior prom. I had faced down a demon, saved the senior class, and even managed to snag a date in the bargain. Now all I had to do was survive the three weeks to graduation.

  But that’s a story for another day.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There’s an axiom among authors that you have to write a million words of crap before you can produce publishable prose. Here’s to everyone who suffered through mine.

  But especially I’d like to thank …

  My agent, Lucienne Diver, who answers my newbie questions with good humor, and Krista Marino, who has spoiled me for all other editors. What a great way to start.

  Candace Havens, Britta Coleman, Shannon Cannard, and all the Divas. But especially Candy and Britta, for recognizing greatness underneath the stark terror.

  The Dallas–Fort Worth Writers’ Workshop and the after-hours IHOP Irregulars, especially Shawn and Dan. Rachel Caine, the LJ crew, and the Old Guard: Carole, Jennifer, et al. You may not even realize the little things you said that kept me coming back to the keyboard.

  The young thespians of Victoria Community Theatre. There’s something of each of you in this book. Hopefully you’ll never figure out which parts.

  Haley M. Schmidt, who wanted a manuscript for her graduation present.

  My husband, Tim, because you’ve seen “better” and you’ve seen “worse” and you love me anyway.

  And all my family, Mom, Peter, and Cheryl Smyth, sister of my heart. You all believed in me, even during the times when I didn’t believe in myself.

  Hell Week

  In memory of Trini—

  May heaven be full of Frisbees

  and unguarded dinner plates.

  1

  Bright teeth flashed; I fought the instinct to recoil. Perfectly white, perfectly even, possibly once human. Coral pink lips pulled back all the way to the gums, giving the smile an unfortunate equine quality. “Soooo …?” The owner of the teeth and lips drew out the word and flipped it up at the end in a question. “What’s your major?”

  “English.” An untruth. I don’t tell them, as a rule, but I’d been asked this question five times in the last hour, and the lie rolled off my tongue now with ease.

  “Gosh, you must have to read a lot, huh?” Another blinding smile; I hoped my squint passed for an answer. “So, Maggie. What made you decide to go through Rush?”

  She pronounced it with a capital R. Five rounds of the cattle call officially known as Sorority Formal Recruitment had run together in my banality-numbed brain, and I couldn’t remember where I was. I glanced around the crowded room for a clue. The noise was formidable, the chatter of a hundred or more coiffed and groomed girls like purebred dogs at a show, their yelping echoing from the walls.

  Just like every other sorority house I’d been to in this first series of parties. Here, though, the décor was Cotton Candy Pink and Tampax Box Blue. Verily, I had reached the lair of the Delta Delta Gammas.

  “Well, Ashley …” My slightly breathless drawl mimicked hers. “I thought Rush would be fun. Get to know people, you know.”

  She laughed, her eyes squinched up in two half-moons of insincerity. “Soooo? Which dorm are you in, Maggie?”

  She kept checking my name tag. At every house, the girls had used my name exhaustively, making me feel as though I’d wandered onto a used car lot.

  “I’m living at home.” This much was certainly true. “I grew up here in Avalon.”

  “Oh.” Her smile, and I use the word loosely, was forced. “Well, at least you know your way around. You probably have a car, too. What kind is it?”

  Her segues could really use a little polish. “It’s vintage.”

  “Oh, really?” She raised her brows with renewed interest.

  “Yeah. A Ford Pinto.”

  “Really.” Beneath her carefully applied self-tanner, the corners of her mouth were white with strain. “Your parents live here in Avalon?”

  It would be hard to live at home and go to school here if they didn’t. But smart-ass wasn’t my persona here at the International House of Snobcakes, so I merely answered enthusiastically, “My dad works here at Bedivere University. He’s an engineer.”

  “Is he really? Mechanical or civil?”

  “Custodial.”

  “O-kay.” She glanced at her watch, then searched the room for rescue, or maybe just an avenue of escape. “Well, it’s been real nice meeting you, Maggie. I need to go … um … talk to these girls over here.”

  She took off; I knew from my research that leaving a rushee standing alone was a big fat no-no. Unless, of course, you’d rather invite a chimpanzee to join your sisterhood. And no one in the Delta Delta Gamma house looked like Jane Goodall to me.

  But since I’d been deserted, I reached into my purse and turned off my microrecorder. No sense in wasting megabytes.

  The Avalon Sentinel is an independent small-town paper, which is almost an anachronism in itself. The historic Main Street offices smelled of ancient cigarettes, even though the place had been smoke-free for twenty years.

  I sat in a hard wooden chair that had been squeaking beneath anxious backsides for decades. My colleagues—or rather, the guys I’d stepped and fetched for all summer during my internship—kept making excuses to walk past the office, peering into the windows as the editor-in-chief read my submission.

  Ethan Douglas was probably thirty, but he had pale skin, freckles, and flaming red hair, all of which made him look more like Opie than Spencer Tracy. Like me, he had journalistic aspirations beyond the Avalon Sentinel, but—also like me—he had to start somewhere.

  He lifted his eyes from the paper and gave me a dubious look. “You made this stuff up.”

  “I swear.” I raised a Boy Scout salute. “The only stuff I made up was the lies about my dad being a janitor. Oh, and I don’t drive a Ford Pinto.”

  In a skeptical voice, he read what I’d written: “ ‘I’m an English major,’ I said for the umpteenth time. ‘I wish I was an English major,’ said Sorority Sue. ‘I mean, I speak it already, and everything.’ ”

  Laughter from the doorway behind me. Ethan glared in that direction, not terribly menacing with his freckled choirboy face. The guys from the newsroom went back to work, and I got down to business, too.

  “You said if I brought you a story that no one else here could, you would give me a shot.”

  I was uniquely qualified to infiltrate Rush, being that I was a girl and an actual college freshman. I might as well use it to my advantage.

  Anyone who drove by the frat houses on a Friday night could tell that fraternities evaluated their future pledges based on their ability to chug beer and score
with the coeds. But the closed-door secrecy on the distaff side of Greek Row lent a certain mystery to what was, in essence, about as exciting as six successive tea parties with your grandmother and her septuagenarian friends.

  Not my grandmother, of course. When the mood struck her, Granny Quinn could put on the doily better than anyone. But tea with Gran might mean anything from an authentic Japanese ceremony to a formal reading of your tea leaves. Gran had “the Sight,” as she called it. So do I, though for most of my eighteen years I didn’t consciously acknowledge the fact.

  But then I had to rescue my senior prom from a ravenous horde of demon spawn. I learned the hard way there’s nothing like a supernatural smackdown to make you wake up and smell the brimstone.

  Ethan Douglas rubbed his chin, which was slightly red and shiny from his morning shave. “I’ll give it to Janey and see if she has a place for it on Friday.”

  “Lifestyles?” I tried to tone down my unprofessional indignation. “With the pumpkin recipes and 4-H announcements?” Not to mention that Janey Cotton still displayed pictures of her college chums in a Delta Zeta picture frame. My story would run between the obituaries and the funeral home ads, if at all.

  “Where else would it go?” Ethan said, annoying me with the truth. “It’s more social commentary than scathing exposé.”

  “But …,” I sputtered, with no real argument. “The pretension and the elitism …”

  “Maggie, females of all ages have been throwing hoity-toity parties and shunning the inferior for centuries. I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

  I wasn’t sure if I’d just been insulted or commiserated with. But he was right about one thing: He didn’t have to tell me about the rabidity of the alpha bitch in defending the social hierarchy. I had the bite marks to prove it.

  “Okay, what about the perpetuation of an outdated system of stratification and false superiority …?”

  Ethan handed the copy across the desk. “If that’s your point, the story isn’t done. You’ve only been to one round of parties.”

  I stared at him in dawning horror. “You mean … I have to go back?”

  “Bring me the story that I don’t know.” He spun his chair to face his computer screen. “That is, if Professor Quinn lets you live when he finds out you made him a janitor.”

  I’d been dismissed. Folding the rejected story into thirds, I stuffed it into my satchel and headed out of the office, then down the stairs. Out in the bright September morning, I paused on the Main Street sidewalk, lifted my face to the sunshine, and breathed deeply. The too-warm breeze stirred my short, dark hair across my eyes, hiding their childish watering.

  Stupid to be so stung, when Ethan had only told me the truth. The rejection smacked me, deservedly, in the pride. Ace reporter for the high school paper was about as real-world applicable as presidency of the local Star Trek club. My first taste of Small Fish and Big Pond went down badly.

  The clock in the square struck the hour, and I blinked away self-pity, mentally squaring my shoulders. Never give up, never surrender. That was my new motto.

  Besides, what else was I going to do? I lived at home and all my friends had gone away to school, including my best friend, Lisa, who was halfway across the country. The guy I was nuts about hadn’t called me since he spent the entire summer doing an internship in Ireland, and none of my freaky intuition could tell me why not. Because that would be useful.

  My wicked psychic powers didn’t give me winning lottery numbers or insight into pork futures. No, what I got was the inspired idea to strap on a push-up bra and infiltrate the Delta Delta Gammas.

  Let’s face it. The saddest thing about this whole undercover sorority thing was that I really didn’t have to pretend to be that much of a loser.

  2

  “Maggie Quinn,” said my grandmother, her Irish accent deepening in familiar exasperation. “Saying that you are just a little bit psychic is like saying you’re just a little bit pregnant.”

  “Gran!” I glanced around the coffee shop. The overstuffed couches and scratch-and-dent-sale chairs of Froth and Java were full of Bedivere University students, but hopefully we sat far enough from the midmorning caffeine zombies that her comment had gone unheard. The last thing I needed was word getting around campus that I was psychic. Or pregnant, for that matter.

  “You either are, or you aren’t,” she continued, lifting her mug of tea. “The only question is how noticeable it is.”

  Gran had called me right after I’d left the Sentinel’s offices, before I’d even reached the Jeep; fifteen minutes later she met me in F and J, where she listened to me whine, then told me to get over myself.

  Besides being psychic, my grandmother was trim and trendy, and busy with her volunteer activities, which included the altar guild at St. Stephen’s Catholic Church and teaching yoga to senior citizens at the Spiritual Enlightenment Center. (Avalon was small but eclectic, rather like Gran.) It must have been New Age day, because she wore a sage green cotton jacket and pants, her bright red hair all perky.

  I slouched across from her, cradling a paper cup of caffeinated goodness between my hands, dressed in my least ragged jeans and a fitted oxford, shirttails out. I’d ironed both my shirt and my hair in an attempt to look more polished. The pale yellow cotton had held its press longer than my sable bob; I could feel the latter reverting to its usual cappuccino froth by the moment.

  The wavy brown hair I got from my mother; the rest of me was all Quinn. In addition to the Sight, I’d inherited my grandmother’s green eyes, pixie-shaped face, and pointed chin, as well as a certain broadness in the beam I could live without.

  “I thought you’d be happy that I’ve accepted my freakitude.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Somehow I’m still sensing a lack of true commitment.”

  “I wonder why that could be. Maybe because last time, following my instincts almost got my friends and me killed?”

  Pained guilt deepened the soft lines of her face. Gran still hadn’t forgiven herself for not sensing the depth of trouble I’d been in last spring. I wished she’d cut herself some slack. The things under your nose are the hardest to see, in any sense of the word. Plus, I’d gone to some pains to keep the whole truth from her, and I suspected other forces might have been doing the same. No proof, of course. Just a hunch.

  But that was the thing about my … whatever you wanted to call it. Most of the time, it didn’t feel any different from simple—if eerily strong and accurate—intuition. I kept hoping for an instruction manual, but the best I’d been able to do was a copy of ESP for Dummies that I found on the bargain table at Barnes & Noble.

  I hunched over my coffee cup, breath running out in a sigh. Just the smell of Froth and Java usually made me feel better, and I was trying hard to follow through on my resolution to drop the drama. “I just wish I didn’t feel so stupid. When I had that dream about the Greek letters, I thought there would be a story there.” That was how my psychicness had first shown up, in the nighttime, when logic couldn’t override the subconscious. “I thought, just once, my intuition was picking up on something useful.”

  Gran clicked her tongue and cast her gaze heavenward. “What did you think you would discover in one night? Don’t they arrange these things to get more in-depth as the week goes on?”

  “Yes.” Nice of my gran to join the Maggie-is-an-idiot refrain. “It’s a good thing I didn’t burn all my bridges.”

  “See.” She smiled over her paper cup. “Your intuition did tell you something useful. So where will you go?”

  I fished in my satchel for the e-mail I’d printed that morning. Mom had been appalled. Apparently, when she went through Rush—my own mother; I’m so ashamed—their invitations to the next round of parties were delivered to their dorm rooms. On silver platters, for all I knew.

  During the past Friday’s orientation—excruciating in length and level of enthusiasm—I learned about “recs” and “bids” and “legacies.” All the talk of leadership and sist
erhood was, considering we’d all shelled out registration fees, sort of like trying to sell us a car after we’d already made a down payment.

  Rush—Recruitment, I should say—worked by double elimination. In the first round, which took two days, you went to all ten houses for the short torture sessions I’d described in my article. Then six tonight, four tomorrow, and two the last night. At each round, the sorority could choose to invite you back—or not, in which case you were “cut”—while simultaneously you had to narrow your choices. Theoretically, I could have had to choose six out of ten houses to visit for tonight’s second round. Needless to say, I faced no such quandary.

  “Maggie Quinn?”

  The speaker had a rounded, evening-news sort of voice. I turned, looked up, and up again. A tall, thin blonde stood beside our table, the light from the window behind her. I answered warily, “Yes?”

  Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, which bobbed as she looked me up and down. “Where is your name tag?”

  “Uh …” I recognized her now, and the other young woman with her, carrying a tray of drinks. Both were Recruitment guides, or Rho Gammas, as the Panhellenic Council—the organizational body of sororities on campus—called them. Which said something about the pretentiousness involved, if “Panhellenic Council” wasn’t your first clue.

  There were fifteen Rho Gammas, representing all the different houses, and though it was supposed to be a secret, some of them were easily identifiable. The blonde was Hillary, and I had her pegged for a Delta Zeta—aggressive perfectionists. Their party had been orchestrated to the millisecond with robotic efficiency. The girl with the drinks was Jenna, who wasn’t so easily pigeonholed.

  “Potential New Members are supposed to wear their name tags at all times,” said Hillary, with a gravitas that implied I’d left the space station without my helmet. I’d also noticed that the tendency to speak in capital letters seemed to be a Greek trait.