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.”
“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.”