Hell Week (25 page)

"How come all these things that lead men to their deaths are always female? Mermaids drowning sailors, the ban- shee, this Liannan thing . . ."

Gran took a rather coy sip of her tea. "We are the dead- lier 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. "Research 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 Sig- mas 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.

F F F

"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 com- puter 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 photographed.

"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, pro- tected them from burnout. It's the why that I don't know."

I remembered the article about Peter Abbott, presi- dent 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 un- protected sex.

"So, what's the big deal 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 for- eign 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."

She didn't continue; she didn't really have to. The weight of personal history lay heavy on the line.

I said the words for her. "It's a demon."

"Yeah." She breathed easier once it was spoken. "The pages you gave me don't show its name. That's the biggest hitch in figuring out the countermeasure."

"Lisa, all you have to do is help me work it out. You don't have to be near the thing. It's my deal this time."

She didn't even address that. "How long until ini- tiation?"

"End of next week, I think. Sometime during dead days."

Ah, life's little ironies. "Dad bought me a plane ticket home for Thanksgiving," she said, "so I'll see you this weekend. We'll work it out then."

"Okay." I hung up and stared at the screen, my head full of information, unsorted and chaotic. One thought, though, lay on the surface.

Victoria had been married to Peter Abbott for eighteen years. But on the flip side of that was Juliana Baker-Russell- Hattendorf-Hughes. So it seemed they hadn't gotten rid of the black widow completely.

F F F

When I got to the journalism lab for my usual Tuesday- afternoon duty on the Report, Mike avoided my eye and sent me to see Professor Hardcastle. Somehow, I didn't think this was going to be good news.

I hitched my satchel higher onto my shoulder and headed down the hall, my sneakers squeaking on the newly polished linoleum. Dr. Hard-ass looked up as I came into his cluttered shoe box of an office, then turned back to his computer.

"Quinn. Right. That Phantom business stops now. I don't want to deal with the complaints and letters."

"Okay." I don't know why I said that, when it wasn't okay. The column had an end date. This was like canceling a TV series right before May sweeps.

But churning with the anger and disappointment in my stomach was a sudden fear. A yellow flag had just gone up. Luck is not supposed to happen in reverse.

"You can submit photos and stories for consideration," he said, "but you're off the staff. And don't expect any more favors. You were Cole's pet project, not mine." "Yes, sir."

"That's all." He waved me out, his eyes still glued to his screen.

I left the office and stood in the hall, not quite sure what to do next. Newspaper staff was the thing that kept me from going postal, kept me focused on something besides the waiting game with the Sigmas.

With the thought of the sorority, something clicked in my head. The Sigmas giveth, and the Sigmas taketh away.

Think about what you love, Magdalena Quinn.

I didn't even bother reaching for my phone. I just took off for the history building at a dead run. 34

I slid to a stop at Dad's office door, grabbing the frame to keep myself upright as my exhausted legs tried to buckle. My face burned with exertion and my heart pounded so hard, I thought my eardrums might blow out. Fitness hadn't gotten me there, only adrenaline.

Justin was at the computer, and on the phone. He glanced my way, doubtless alerted by my gasps for oxygen, and didn't look surprised to see me. Just carefully neutral and calm.

"She just came in, actually." He spoke into the phone, talking about me. "Don't worry, Dr. Quinn. I'm on it. You want me to call your mother?" I staggered into the office, worry ratcheted up to panic. "Okay," he told Dad, and hung up.

"What?" I demanded. It came out as more of a plea.

He stood up and came around the desk. "Catch your breath, Maggie."

"Is it Mom?" My stomach ached like I'd swallowed a handful of tacks. "The baby?"

"At your mom's checkup, her blood pressure was really high. They've admitted her overnight for observation and--"

I started for the door, all action, no thought. Justin caught me by the shoulders, made me stop and listen.