“What could you have done, Maggie?”
Justin watched me pace his tiny apartment. Wall to wall took me only eight steps, and my legs aren’t that long.
“I don’t know.” Frustration choked the words. “Something. I should have just stolen the book. Maybe there would be something in there to tell me what the hell is going on.”
“You did the logical thing. If the Sigmas found their grimoire missing, they would have done anything to find it.”
Think of the things you love, Juliana had said. I shuddered, even in the safety of Justin’s home.
“I should have known.” Back and forth I paced. Arguing about what was done and unchangeable was easier than facing my fear of failing the next task, whatever it might be.
“Not even you see the future, Maggie.”
Forward and back, running my hands through my hair. “I should have found the spell sooner. I thought I had until initiation. It never occurred to me that someone would die while I was out partying with the Sigmas.”
He blocked my path, forcing me to look at him. I raised my eyes to his, which were warm and dark, melting with compassion that I didn’t deserve. “You did not cause this to happen. They did.”
Tears stung and blurred my vision. His handsome, earnest face disappeared behind a watery haze of guilt and grief. “I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t even see it. What’s the point of having my Sight if I couldn’t save him!”
Justin wrapped me in his arms, tucked me tight against his chest, making me feel sheltered and forgiven. “Evil is deceptive. You fight it, you do the best you can. Sometimes you fall short.”
He pulled back and met my gaze again, brushing the tears from my cheeks. “But you have to get over yourself. You can’t get back into the fight until you do.”
Think of the things you love.
I loved that he didn’t deny my feelings, he just told me to get over it. I loved that he was chivalrous to a point just shy of chauvinism, but still held me accountable to fight the good fight. I loved him for being quixotic and square, holding himself to a higher standard, but not thinking less of those, like me, who made a mess of things.
He could have stopped me when I rose up on my toes and pressed my lips to his, but he didn’t. I think he considered it, because he froze for a moment, not in horror, thank God, but indecision. And then he pulled me close, and kissed me back.
Friends don’t kiss like this.
There was nothing chaste or amiable about it. His hands cupped the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair. I wrapped my arms around him, kissed him with my whole body—my whole being. My nose was stopped up from crying, and I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t care, because if I pulled away to take in oxygen, this glorious moment might end.
It did. Justin put his hands on my waist, pushed me back just a little, his eyes dazed in what must have been a reflection of mine. “I’m still the TA for your history class.”
An incredulous laugh bubbled out of my throat. “This is your big objection?”
“No.” He drew me back in. “I’m just getting that off my chest.”
And then he kissed me again, and it didn’t seem possible that it could be better than the last one, but it was. For a lawful good square, Justin knew a lot about kissing. Granted, I didn’t have a huge basis for comparison, but I didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to recognize an explosion when I felt it.
I don’t know how we got to the couch. I don’t know how we ended up horizontal, tangled in each other, our breath loud in the silence but still drowned by the pounding of my heart. His fingers danced across my ribs, and I gasped at the tickle. He started to pull away but I caught his wrist, kept his hands where they belonged, against my skin.
I suppose that’s how I lost my shirt. The more of him I touched, skin against skin, the more I could feel him in my blood, like a drug, like a shot of tequila. The denim of our jeans rasped as we wrestled closer still. He nuzzled the curve of my neck, the line of my collarbone. I kissed his shoulder, the indentation of muscle in his bicep, and he trembled. A rush of power zinged through me. I was invincible. I could have it all.
When his fingers touched the clasp of my bra, I wanted to shout Yes. Do it. I wanted it more than anything ever, but more than that, I deserved it. I’d waited all this time and I was entitled to this.
The very foreignness of the thought was a splash of cold water. And I heard my voice like a stranger’s: “Stop.”
That was so not what I wanted to say.
Justin stopped, of course, but his hands shook. I moved away, all the way to the other end of the couch, before I could change my mind. “I need to think.”
“Yeah.” He sat up … slowly … and rested his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “Okay.”
I’d reduced him to one-word answers. Which was fair, I guess, because I was incoherent myself.
“This feels weird. I mean, I want to do this, but my head feels strange.”
“I know.” He sat back, looked at me with an expression of chagrin. “Too fast,” he said, still monosyllabic. Still breathless.
That was only part of it. I was old enough to vote and in love with the guy, so it wasn’t as if I would cry if my untested virtue died a timely death tonight. Except that I was getting a feeling—maybe it was my intuition, back in the game after two months on the bench—that I knew why the pledges had a proscription against sex. The strangeness of my thoughts, driving and hungry, made me think this wasn’t solely between Justin and me.
“Let’s get out of here.” He rolled to his feet. Handing me my shirt, he pulled on his own. “I can’t think with you sitting there.”
Probably one of the nicest things he’d ever said to me.
As I don’t go to church much on Sunday, it seemed particularly weird to be there on a Monday night. Especially after the way I’d spent the last hour of it.
“You pick the weirdest places to take a date.”
Justin looked down at me in amusement as he pulled open the heavy, carved wooden doors. “You’re one to talk.”
Good point. When you almost die on your first date, you shouldn’t cast stones. I ducked under his arm to enter. Automatically, my hand went to the font just inside, and I dipped my fingers and crossed myself. Some things were just like riding a bicycle, I guess. Spectacles, testicles, watch and wallet. Jimmy Lopez had taught me that when we were kids. He’d thought it was the funniest thing ever, but I guess you do when you’re an eight-year-old boy.
I’d grown up in this church, and the wooden pews and stained-glass windows formed my idea of what a sanctuary should look like. It was a warm, solid place, and despite my lingering feeling of trespass, I was aware of a peaceful welcome, too.
Footsteps echoing on the stone floor, I followed Justin down the side aisle to an alcove. Under an icon of the Madonna and Child was a rack of votive candles, each in a red glass holder. A few already burned; I reached out a finger and touched the fluted glass edge of one, then another. Someone’s mother, dying in hospice care. A husband, lost to cancer.
This was becoming natural, the sixth sense integrating with my others. The thought came to me that this may be a Sigma gift, too. Maybe not the Sight itself—I’d had that already, except the Dead Zone thing—but the skill I’d developed. Or maybe it was because I’d gotten so much practice around them. Nothing like battlefield training.
The strike of a match made me look up at Justin as he lit two candles, side by side. They flared brightly as he touched the match to the wick, then flickered in tandem. His parents. I glanced up at him, but his gaze was turned inward; not sad, exactly, but poignant. My fingers reached for his, and he squeezed my hand tightly.
“Have they been gone long?” I asked. He’d never spoken of them.
“Since I was ten.”
“Does it help?”
He handed me the matchbox. “It can’t hurt. Sometimes rituals have deeper power, sometimes they just give us comfort.”
I thought about Cole as I shook out a match and struck it. Remembering his friendly nature and his talent and potential, I held the match and let the flame creep closer to my fingers.
I hope you’re at peace, Cole. Forgive me for not seeing until it was too late. I swear, I’m going to stop these girls from harming anyone else.
It did help. But not as much as solving this mystery would.
That night, it was as if the dream had been waiting for me, long past patience. It drew me down swiftly, as soon as I closed my eyes, with no time to prepare.
I stood in the empty Sigma Alpha Xi chapter room; the phi spiral on the floor, instead of being flat, inlaid wood, descended into the ground. Standing at the outside arm, I felt the cold reaching up from below, from the dark well of earth.
Okay, Maggie. You’re not going to find out what’s going on from up here.
I stepped onto the path, spiraling down and down; I kept to the outer edge; the other side dropped into nothingness. The cold intensified as I descended and the natural light faded, until I was seeing only by the frigid pale phosphorescence that came from the spiral itself.
Dream time was stretchable, like Silly Putty; I walked until my feet were blistered and my skin was numb with cold. How long was this going to go on?
Indefinitely. Phi was an irrational equation. Self-symmetrical, to the infinite power.
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.