Brimstone (18 page)

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.”

“I’ve finished the gas chromotography on the sample that Silas Blackthorne gave me, and have the results for you.”

Silas
Blackthorne? Why was he teaching high school chemistry instead of penning lurid gothic novels?

“That’s great news, Dr. Smyth. I’ve been anxious to hear from you.”

“I imagine you have. You say you
sat
in something?”

Justin and Dad watched me curiously. “Uh, yeah. It’s a little complicated to explain. Can you give me the information over the phone?”

“I could, but the results are as complex as your
explanation would undoubtedly be. I’ll be in the lab for the rest of the morning. Are you busy?”

“No. I’d be happy to meet you.” She gave me the building and room number. Justin peered shamelessly over my shoulder. “I’ll be there in half an hour or so.”

“No hurry.”

I hung up and faced my audience. “I need to go to the Masterson Building. What street is that on?”

“I know where it is,” said Justin, eager curiosity lighting his face.

“Let me put on some shoes.”

Dad blocked my way to the stairs. He gave me a laser beam look, virtually identical to the ones I got from Gran. “Magdalena Quinn. What are you up to? I don’t buy that you had to take pictures for the yearbook last night.” He transferred a little of the intensity of that glare to Justin. “And I still have questions about what you two were doing on the roof.”

“I explained that, Dad.”

“You gave me a load of codswallop.”

Codswallop? I knew it wasn’t going to help my case to laugh so I forced my face into a concerned frown.

“Does this have to do with the nightmare you had last night?” he asked.

I didn’t have to fake a scowl. “Dad.”

“Your mother is worried about you. And your grandmother says to just let you be, which makes
me
worried.” We could have stayed at an impasse all day, because I definitely get my stubbornness from his side of the family. “Just tell me this,” he asked, “are you in danger?”

I paused to consider a lot of evasions. But meeting his
eye, I took the chance that he was as much like Gran as I was like him. “I don’t think so, but others are. This is something I have to do, Dad.”

This much I knew: I was in a race to learn as much as I could about the phantom before it grew any stronger.

He studied me for another long moment, then shook his head in defeat and stepped back. “All right. Go see Dr. Smyth. We’ll talk more later.”

“Thanks, Dad.” As I ran upstairs, I heard him ask Justin, “Don’t you have an anthropology paper that’s due next week?”

“I’m on top of it, sir.” Dad said something else, something that I couldn’t hear despite straining my ears. Justin answered him, “I’ll do my best.”

He could have been talking about class work, but something told me not.

Justin and I argued briefly over who should drive; I liked being in the driver’s seat—big surprise—but in the end it came down to efficiency. His car was parked behind mine.

“What were you and Dad talking about while I went upstairs?” I didn’t waste time once we were on the road. “You weren’t making some macho, keep-the-little-woman-safe pact, were you?”

He flicked me a glance but otherwise kept his eyes on the road, Mr. Conscientious behind the wheel. “I can’t imagine that any man who knows you would make that mistake.”

A dogleg of an answer if ever I heard one. I spiked a volley in another direction. “You’re not going to flunk out or
anything because I dragged you into this mess, are you? I’m not sure I can afford the karma hit if you do.”

His mouth turned up in a crooked smile. “I’m not going to flunk out. And you didn’t hold me at gunpoint.” I acknowledged that was true. “Anyway, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate wondering what you’d left out of last night’s drama.”

“Did I leave anything out?” Sleep had been dragging me down when I’d talked to him on the phone. “I can’t remember.”

“Just start from the beginning. The long version.”

I didn’t have time for the long version; Avalon isn’t that big of a town. I had just gotten to Jess Minor going postal, and the Shadow’s malicious delight, when we pulled into one of the university’s big parking lots, virtually empty on Saturday morning. Justin turned in his seat to face me, his square jaw set, one hand still grasping the steering wheel tightly.

“I wondered about the scratches.” He reached out as if to touch my face, then redirected the movement, pointing to his own cheek instead. “You’ve got a bruise, too.”

“Yeah.” I held up my hand, knuckles out. “But look! I got in a punch, at least.”

“Good for you.” I couldn’t interpret his tension, but I thought it might be that he was trying hard to restrain old-fashioned protectiveness. He confirmed my hunch when he asked, as if he couldn’t help himself, “But you’re all right? Your voice still sounds awful. I can’t believe you didn’t mention the almost dying part last night.”

“I didn’t almost die.” I refused to believe anything different. “Do you think she was really possessed? I mean,
her head didn’t spin around or anything, but it was freaky.”

“Possession is a term with a lot of baggage. Let’s say, ‘Overshadowed.’ ”

I shivered. I’d started thinking about the whatever-it-was as the Shadow, with a capital S. The word fit. “I’m cool with less implied
Exorcist
in my life.”

Justin tapped his fingers thoughtfully on the steering wheel. “I wonder why the Minor one and not the leader? Or one of the boys, who might have easily done real damage to you?”

I shrugged and reached for the door handle. “Weak-minded but mean. She was the perfect hostess.”

t
he Earth Science Building was limestone and granite, surrounded by a green lawn, spreading oaks, and tall pines. Bedivere University nestled just north of the center of town, an old, relatively small private school. A strong emphasis on arts and humanities doubtless accounted for the low enrollment. A shiny new science building was in the planning stages, but I would miss the cozy anachronism of the present one.

The chemistry lab lay on the second floor, up the stone steps and through a rabbit warren of plaster and paneled hallways. We found the room and peered in. It wasn’t much
different from the high school–rows of slate-topped lab benches, each with a sink and a gas spigot. (I’ll bet the college kids were allowed to use theirs, though.) It was bigger, and had more equipment along one wall, as well as a computer workstation where a woman typed diligently.

“Dr. Smyth?”

She looked up. “Miss Quinn?”

“Maggie,” I confirmed. “This is my friend, Justin MacCallum.”

The professor was about my mom’s age, with some of the same no-nonsense demeanor. Dr. Smyth had flaming red hair and a wildly curving figure not really hidden by her lab coat. She picked up a piece of paper and gestured us over, her expression serious. “Before we begin, I have to ask. Did Professor Blackthorne put you up to this?”

I blinked in surprise. “No ma’am. I asked him for help.”

Dr. Smyth subjected me to an exaggerated scrutiny, then clicked her tongue and nodded. “All right then.” She laid the paper on a meticulously neat lab bench. “What you have here, Miss Quinn, is a rather fragrant potpourri of organic compounds, amino acids, and a few minerals.”

I scanned the list, as indecipherable as the foreign symbols in my dream. A couple of the suffixes rang a bell, though. “Ethanethiol and methanethiol? Those wouldn’t be, ah, putrescine and cadaverine, would they?”

“No. Those are from the sulfhydryl group.” Dr. Smyth sounded a little pissed, so I tried to prove I wasn’t an idiot wasting her time.

“Dr. Blackthorne mentioned the thiols. Rotten egg smell.”

“Yes. And swamp gas and cabbage. Skunk odor, too. Down here—” She pointed to two lines on the printout I wasn’t even going to try to read, let alone pronounce. “Those are the two smelly little buggers that cost me a steak dinner.”

“You bet a steak dinner on putrescine and cadaverine?”

“What would you have bet?” she asked curiously.

“That I might never eat meat again.”

Justin had been reading over my shoulder. “I’m guessing those names are fairly descriptive?”

“Oh yes.” Dr. Smyth explained with relish. “Both are released by the breakdown of amino acids during the putrefaction of animal tissue. In small amounts, they are present in living flesh as well, but we only notice them when things die and start to rot.”

“Nice,” I said, ready to move along. “Sulfur, sulfuric acid …”

Justin took the sheet from my hands. “That’s green vitriol. It was a standard ingredient in alchemy formulas.”

“Exactly,” said the professor. “You see why I thought Silas might be pulling my leg. Especially with this one.” She pointed to the list. “
Artemisia arborescens L
. Tree wormwood.”

“Wormwood?” I asked. “Where have I heard of that before?”

“You may have heard of absinthe.”

“There’s a biblical reference, too,” Justin added. “And C. S. Lewis used it as a name for a junior demon in
The Screwtape Letters
.”

That all sounded familiar. “Isn’t it a poison?”

Dr. Smyth shook her head. “Not this variety. It comes from the Middle East, and was brewed into a medicinal tea.”

Justin spoke thoughtfully. “In Russian folklore, the literal translation for the plant is ‘bitter truth’ and it’s associated with a spell to open the eyes of deluded people.”

Dr. Smyth gave him an odd look and I explained, “His thesis.” She nodded like this clarified everything. Maybe to another academic, it did.

I took the list back. “What’s
Cinchona officinalis
?”

“That’s where your fluorescence comes from. Quinine.”

“Quinine?” Boy, which one of these was not like the others. “Like, for preventing malaria?”