Brimstone Read online

  The realization brought me to a halt, and in the same instant, an icy wind roared from below, whipping my hair and tearing at my skin. I pressed myself back against the spiral wall, shielding my watering eyes. In the center of the well, a frosty vapor formed; wisps of winter breath that twisted together into something …

  No. It was some thing. No shape of man or beast, but a creature nonetheless.

  The wind became sleet. I squeezed my eyes closed as ice lashed at my cheeks. Just a dream. The glacial storm flayed my skin, and I clung to that thought. A thing of spirit, not of body. My muscles cramped, my limbs drew in to protect my vital organs from the cold. I tried to scream, but the howling gale snatched the sound away as I tried to force myself to …

  Wake up.

  In my own bed, I lay curled in a tight, shivering ball, too painfully cold to move, too miserable not to. Reaching over, I grabbed the fallen quilt from the floor and pulled it around me, my teeth chattering in the silent room.

  This was what the thing on my door had kept me from seeing, this frozen well connecting the Sigmas to an infinite power. I’d been thinking Faust, and Mephistopheles. I should have been thinking Inferno. The center of Dante’s Hell was not fiery, but frozen.

  Not just capital E then. Capital, boldface, italic E. And I was going to have to find a way to stop it.

  33

  At seven the next morning, I let myself into the Sigma Alpha Xi house. The atmosphere was heavy with slumber, and I headed for the stairs. I had to maintain my cover—until Lisa finished her translation, or until initiation—only I didn’t want to lose anyone else in the meantime.

  But Devon’s room was empty.

  Not just vacant. Unoccupied. Her bed was stripped, her walls naked. Her closet and bookshelves, bare. The seaside mural was the only evidence that she’d ever been there at all.

  I stood in the doorway and cursed—mostly myself, for not coming back last night. Then I turned to go, and found Kirby standing in the hall behind me.

  “Looking for Devon?” she asked, arms folded.

  “Yes.” I kept my hands at my sides and my cloaking device set on harmless. “I was worried about her.”

  “Don’t be.” She reached around me and pulled the door shut. “She decided to go home.”

  “But there are only two weeks left in the semester.”

  “She’s devastated, as you can imagine, and she wanted to be with her family.” Kirby looked me in the eye, and I felt a Juliana-esque chill, slight but distinct. That was new.

  “Was there anything else you wanted to know, Maggie?”

  The way she phrased the question said I’d reached the bounds of justifiable curiosity, at least in the Kirby camp.

  “No, ma’am. Thank you.”

  I left the house and headed for the Jeep, unsure what to do next. Journalism class was one option, but Hardcastle was hard to listen to even when I wasn’t distracted by life-and-death matters.

  Journalism made me think of the Report, which reminded me of another inspired guy I’d talked to yesterday. It was a long shot, but I felt better about those since de-spelling myself. Grabbing my cell phone, I scrolled through my recent calls and found the number I wanted.

  He picked up on the fourth ring. “Mmph.”

  “Troy Davis? This is Maggie Quinn from the Ranger Report.”

  “Wha?” A fumbling clatter. “What time is it?”

  “I have one quick question. Do you know any Sigma Alpha Xis?”

  “Whaaa?” Still barely coherent. “None of them would have anything to do with me.”

  “What about a blond girl. Short hair, pointed chin. Bossy.”

  “Oh, her. Legally Blonde Girl. Yeah.” He sounded more sleepy than lascivious. “We just, like, hooked up last Thursday at a club, you know?”

  “Thanks.” I hung up and drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. Cole had writer’s block when he and Devon were on a break. Troy the trainer had a great idea after hooking up with Brittany—who had said she liked football guys.

  I was just closing my mental fingers around the next variable of that equation when the phone rang.

  Justin spoke as soon as I answered. “I think I’ve found something.” His voice rang with excitement, and my heart sank.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. We’d only made out. How badly could he be affected?

  He kind of laughed at the question, which was both reassuring and not. “Where are you? Do you have class?”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s meet at your gran’s place. I think she can help.”

  “Gran?”

  “Wake up, Maggie. Let’s get to work.”

  He hung up without once saying the word careful. Now I was really worried.

  Gran was not only up and finished with her treadmill time, but she also had a pot of tea steeping, with three cups set out, when Justin and I arrived.

  She poured as she listened to Justin’s question, then sat back and looked at us. Him. Then me. Then back to him. I could feel myself blushing all the way to the tips of my ears.

  It didn’t help that he looked as though he hadn’t slept at all. Not scary bad—who hadn’t pulled an all-nighter once or twice? But still.

  Finally, Gran took the spiral notebook he’d brought and peered at the handwritten entry. “Liannan Sidhe.” Then she studied us again, her eyes narrowing. “How did this come up in conversation, then?”

  “Hypothetically,” I assured her. “We just need to know more about it.”

  She made a doubtful face. “I never told you about the Liannan Sidhe?”

  “No.” She’d told me the Sidhe—“shee,” she said, slurring the sh—were Irish fairies who lived under hills and danced in fairy circles that trapped the unwary. There were the Dannan Sidhe, the bright folk, and the Bain Sidhe, who, if you saw one, you were basically screwed. But I’d never heard of this variety.

  She poured a mug of tea, added sugar, stirred it. Obviously trying to kill me with impatience.

  “Liannan Sidhe are female fairies who inspire creativity in human men who they … Well, let’s say love.”

  Granspeak for hooking up, I guess.

  “So, it’s like a muse,” I said, remembering Devon’s word.

  “To a fearsome degree.” She sipped her tea. “The inspiration of genius, but it burns the man out like a candle while the Sidhe feeds on that creative energy.”

  “Why couldn’t you have told me about that when I was a kid?”

  “Well, I didn’t want to scare you out of being creative. Besides.” She cleared her throat delicately and glanced at Justin. “There’s the sexual component.”

  He blushed, and discovered something very interesting on the ceiling. I tried to keep my own mind on the line of inquiry. “So these fairies sleep with men, feed off the creative energy, and then …”

  “The man usually dies.”

  “Dies?” asked Justin, not blushing now.

  Gran nodded, and I narrowed my eyes at her. “Are you sure this isn’t a cautionary tale? Don’t go into the woods or the big bad wolf will eat you?”

  “I’m only telling you what I heard as a girl.”

  “How come all these things that lead men to their deaths are always female? Mermaids drowning sailors, the banshee, this Liannan thing …”

  Gran took a rather coy sip of her tea. “We are the deadlier of the species, darling.”

  Justin laughed, and I gave him the hairy eyeball. “More like the stories were written down by men. When you write your book, you’d better dig up some male tempter to balance things out.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he promised, still smiling as his eyes met mine.

  More blushing, this time from me. Not that it mattered. If the Sigmas really had transformed me somehow, I wasn’t going to be able to get near Justin. Maybe ever. The Sigmas had screwed me over big-time. So to speak.

  “Why do you need to know this?” Gran had gone back to staring, now with twenty percent more suspicion.

  “R
esearch project.” Justin lied without a blink. It seemed I’d contaminated him.

  Gran knew whom to blame. “Magdalena Quinn …”

  I decided it was time to get out of there. “Gotta run. Journalism class. Hardcastle would love an excuse to throw me off the paper.”

  Justin grabbed his notebook. “Thanks, Granny Quinn.”

  She caught his hand before he could go. “You, go home and sleep at least four hours. And no more fooling around with Maggie until she fixes whatever is wrong with her.”

  “Gran!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said without hesitation.

  She let him go, and we headed out to the driveway. I couldn’t look at him; I might combust with embarrassment.

  “I’m sorry,” I said when we reached the Jeep.

  “I’m not.”

  “You would have been if I’d killed you.”

  “Maybe.”

  I shot a look up at him; he was smiling slightly, in a way that nearly had me blushing again. “It’s not funny.”

  “No. It’s really not.” He opened the Jeep’s door for me, but his grasp on it was tight, as if he was holding on as much for support as for courtesy.

  I stared at his white knuckles, and let the thought catch up with me, the personal repercussions of all this. The Sigmas had done something to me. And I had done something to Justin.

  “Hey.” His voice drew my eyes up to meet his reassuring gaze. “I’m all right, Maggie. A nap between classes, and I’ll be good as new.”

  My mouth curved in a rueful smile. “How can you always tell what I’m thinking?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve always been good at reading people. Especially when I … know them pretty well.”

  That was interesting for two reasons: (a) “know” had more than one connotation, and (b) he definitely changed the direction of that sentence.

  We exchanged good-byes and I started the car, flexing my hands on the steering wheel the same way I gripped my renewed determination. I had to figure this out. There was no other option. Forget the long-term adverse effects of a karmic imbalance on the space-time continuum. Forget that my budding romance was now on ice. If I didn’t fix this, I was going to end my days a dried-up, lovelorn virgin with a houseful of cats.

  “It’s all about sex.”

  I’d gone to Dad’s office to confer with Lisa long-distance; it had been the only private place on campus I could think of. Dad was in class, the door was locked, but I still expected lightning to strike me for saying s-e-x while at his desk.

  “It’s always about sex, Mags.” Lisa’s tone was dry, and the sound of shuffling paper underscored her voice. “Are you just finding this out?”

  “Um, in regard to the Sigmas? Yeah.”

  The rustling stopped abruptly. “Maggie Quinn. Have you been a bad girl?”

  “No! Of course not.” Her silence was disbelieving. “Okay, not exactly.”

  Lisa sighed. “You’d better tell me what’s going on.”

  I brought her up to speed about Cole and Devon, the guy Brittany had hooked up with, and—quickly and without going into detail—about Justin. Then I told her about the legend he’d come up with in his inspired state, and Gran’s confirmation of it.

  “Okay,” Lisa said, when I finally paused for breath. “That makes what I’ve got here fall into place.”

  “You figured out the spell?” A glimmer of hope sparked in my chest, followed by a stab of irritation. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “Like it’s my fault you picked now to give up on eighteen years of chastity?”

  “Can we get back to the magic? Am I right? Is it like the Liannan Sidhe, but stealing luck instead of life force?”

  More rustling over the phone, then the slide of a computer mouse. “More or less. Are you at your laptop?”

  Swiveling in the chair, I tapped the trackpad to wake up my screen. “Okay.”

  An IM window popped up with a link. On my click, a browser window opened, showing one of the pages I’d photo graphed.

  “This is part of the initiation ritual. Luckily, you got the important stuff.”

  “Sigmas are very lucky.”

  “Whatever. These symbols at the top—the same as are on the lamp and censer—are for transformation. But there are also things in the spell for binding and amalgamation.”

  “What’s that in nonwitchspeak?”

  “It means that the individuals become part of the whole. What’s yours is mine, basically.”

  “Does it go the other way, too? What’s mine is yours?”

  “Not so much.” I got another IM link and this page showed me a diagram of a familiar looking spiral. “This is—”

  “On the floor of the Sigma house.” And in my dream. “A focaccia spiral thing.”

  “Fibonacci. It’s a representation of the golden ratio, but it’s not exact. It’s supposed to be like fractal geometry—self-symmetrical, which means that at whatever level you look at it, it’s a repeat of the smaller or bigger picture. But the Sigmas’ deal isn’t like that, exactly. It’s weighted toward the center.”

  A new diagram appeared, one of the same spiral, but three-dimensional, so it looked more like a funnel … or the well that I had seen in my nightmare.

  I ventured a guess. “So the psychic juice sort of runs to the center.”

  “Right. If these girls really are sexual karmic vampires, then what they take in goes toward the top. I’m guessing that’s the alums. The longer you’re in, the more you get.”

  “Like a psychic pyramid scheme.”

  “Essentially. The younger girls—meaning the college students—have more sex and there are more of them. While the bulk of the energy comes from them, the load is spread out, so that no one girl draws too much from one hookup.”

  Before I’d called her, I’d looked through my pledge book, noting which actives had boyfriends, and which of those had any particular status or accomplishments. A few seniors and juniors had steadies—guess which fraternity they were in—but the rest of the girls were … let’s say shopping.

  I checked my understanding. “So, as long as a Sigma just hooks up with a guy once or twice, he’s okay.” Lisa confirmed this. “But if she goes too often to the same well …”

  “Don’t think water,” she said. “Think electricity. The sex generates psychic energy potential; the Sigma draws it off, creating a current. If you exceed the capacity of the human design, the wiring burns out.”

  Talk about metaphysics.

  “And the inspiration before the burnout?” I asked.

  “The part of the generated potential that isn’t drawn off.”

  My headache kept getting worse. It seemed that for every question answered, three more popped up. “So … that’s what happened twenty years ago? The jinx, I mean?”

  “I’m sure. It might have started with just a few girls who somehow found this book and did the transformation spell—either not knowing or not caring that they were screwing guys over in more ways than one. Then someone got the idea of sharing the wealth to reduce the current, and modified the arrangement to include the whole sorority.”

  “Victoria, I think.” Eavesdropping behind Devon’s door, I’d heard her talk about long-term plans. “It was probably not so much about sharing as about not attracting so much suspicion.”

  “True. Not to mention that whoever’s at the center of that spiral gets the most bang for her buck.”

  “Then, how is Gamma Phi Epsilon immune?”

  “It looks like Victoria pulled them into the pattern, protected them from burnout. It’s the why that I don’t know.”

  I remembered the article about Peter Abbott, president of his fraternity. “Victoria’s future husband was a Gamma Phi Ep.”

  “Of course. A little old-fashioned, but does get rid of the black widow problem.”

  That explained why everyone was so freaked that Devon was going steady with Cole; it was the ultimate unprotected sex.

  “So, what’s the big dea
l about pledge celibacy?” I’d given this some thought. “If we’re the youngest, and we haven’t gone through the initiation spell, then we shouldn’t draw much current at all, right?”

  “Finally, you get around to asking me that. Or didn’t you wonder why you whammied Justin just by making out?” She left a leading pause. “You did just make out, right?”

  “Yes! You’re not my mother. Why would I lie?” Except in leaving out about how easy it would have been to let that foreign hunger slip its leash. “Well?”

  “First, tell me more about this pledging ceremony. You were at the center of the spiral, right?”

  “Yes.” I stared at the funnel diagram on the screen. “Oh my God. Where the energy is strongest.”

  “Right. That ceremony set in motion the transformation part of the spell. It takes a lot of power, so you’re connected to the center until the change is complete. Think of it like a negative electrical potential in the middle of a highly charged dynamic—”

  “Lisa, let’s pretend I’m not, on a good day, almost as smart as you. Just cut the crap and tell me what that means.”

  “Sure. It means you guys suck the most.” I rolled my eyes, even though she couldn’t see it. “Next question?” she said sweetly.

  “How do I break the spell?”

  She sighed. “I’m still working on that.”

  “Can we just destroy the grimoire?” I asked. “If nothing else, it would stop the ritual. Stop them from making any more Sigmas.”

  “But it wouldn’t put everything, or every one, back to normal. It would only destroy the power-sharing structure, which would make things worse, not better.” I heard more fidgeting noises from her end; not industry this time, but stalling. “There’s one more thing, and you’re not going to like it.”

  “Unless you’re about to tell me there’s no way to reverse the transformation—”

  She made a short, derisive sound. “Please. No one out-evil-geniuses me. We’ll break the spell.”

  We, she’d said.

  “No. It’s about the power source. Not the karma suck, but the transformative and binding power.”