The Sign of Seven Trilogy (73 page)

Cal's gray eyes were clear, his face and body relaxed. His dark blond hair was damp and he smelled of soap, indicating he'd showered at the gym. He doctored his coffee, then took a box of Mini-Wheats out of a cupboard.

“Want?”

“No.”

With a grunt, Cal shook cereal into a bowl, dumped in milk. “Team dream?”

“Seems like.”

“Talked to Fox.” Cal ate his cereal as he leaned back against the counter. “He and Layla had one, too. Yours?”

“The town was bleeding,” Gage began. “The buildings, the streets, anyone unlucky enough to be outside. Blood bubbling up from the sidewalks, raining down the buildings. And burning while it bled.”

“Yeah, that's the one. It's the first time the six of us shared the same nightmare, that I know of. That has to mean something.”

“The bloodstone's back in one piece. The six of us put it back together. Cybil puts a lot of store in the stone as a power source.”

“And you?”

“I guess I'd have to agree, for what it's worth. What I do know is we've got less than two months to figure it out. If that.”

Cal nodded. “It's coming faster, it's coming stronger. But we've hurt it, Gage, twice now we've hurt it bad.”

“Third time better be the charm.”

 

HE DIDN'T HANG AROUND. IF ROUTINE HELD, THE women would spend a good chunk of the day looking for answers in books and on the Internet. They'd review their charts, maps, and graphs, trying to find some new angle. And talking it all to death. Cal would head over to the Bowl-a-Rama, and Fox would open his office for the day. And he, Gage thought, was a gambler without a game.

So he had the day free.

He could head back to Cal's, make some calls, write some e-mails. He had his own research lines to tug. He'd been studying and poking into demonology and folklore for years, and in odd corners of the world. When they combined his data with what Cybil, Quinn, and Layla had dug up, it meshed fairly well.

Gods and demons warring with each other long before man came to be. Whittling the numbers down so that when man crawled onto the scene, he soon outnumbered them. The time of man, Giles Dent had called it, according to the journals written by his lover, Ann Hawkins. And in the time of man only one demon and one guardian remained—not that he was buying that one, Gage thought. But there was only one who held his personal interest. Mortally wounded, the guardian passed his power and his mission to a young human boy, and so the line continued through the centuries until there was Giles Dent.

Gage considered it as he drove. He accepted Dent, accepted that he and his friends were Dent's descendants through Ann Hawkins. He believed, as did the others, that Dent found a way, twisting the rules to include a little human sacrifice, to imprison the demon, and himself. Until hundreds of years later, three boys released it.

He could even accept that the act had been their destiny. He didn't have to like it, but he could swallow it. It was their Fate to face it, fight it, to destroy it or die trying. Since the ghost of Ann Hawkins had made a few appearances this time out, her cryptic remarks indicated this Seven was the money shot.

All or nothing. Life or death.

Since most of his visions featured death, in various unpleasant forms, Gage wasn't putting money on the group victory dance.

He supposed he'd driven to the cemetery because death was on his mind. When he got out of the car, he thrust his hands into his pockets. It was stupid to come here, he thought. It was pointless. But he began to walk across the grass, around the stones and monuments.

He should've brought flowers, he thought, then immediately shook his head. Flowers were pointless, too. What good did flowers do the dead?

His mother and the child she'd tried to bring into the world were both long dead.

May had greened the grass and the trees, and the breeze stirred the green. The ground rolled, gentle slopes and dips where somber gray markers or faithful white monuments rose, and the sun cast their shadows. His mother and his sister who'd died inside her had a white marker. Though it had been years, many years, since he'd walked this way, he knew where to find them.

The single stone was very simple, small, rounded, with only names and dates carved.

CATHERINE MARY TURNER
1954 - 1982

ROSE ELIZABETH TURNER
1982

 

He barely remembered her, he thought. Time simply rubbed the images, the sounds, the
feel
of her to a faded blur. He had only the vaguest memory of her laying his hand against her swollen belly so he could feel the baby kick. He had a picture, so he knew he favored his mother in coloring, in the shape of his eyes, his mouth. He'd never seen the baby, and no one had ever told him what she looked like. But he remembered being happy, remembered playing with trucks in the sunsplash through a window. And yes, even of running to the door when his father came home from work, and screaming with fun as those hands lifted him up high.

There'd been a time, a brief time, when his father's hands had lifted him instead of knocking him down. The sun-splashed time, he supposed. Then she'd died, and the baby with her, and everything had gone dark and cold.

Had she ever shouted at him, punished him, been impatient? Surely, she must have. But he couldn't remember any of that, or chose not to. Maybe he'd idealized her, but what was the harm? When a boy had a mother for such a brief time, the man was entitled to think of her as perfect.

“I didn't bring flowers,” he murmured. “I should have.”

“But you came.”

He spun around, and looked into eyes the same color, the same shape as his own. As his heart squeezed, his mother smiled at him.

Two

SHE'S SO YOUNG. THAT WAS HIS FIRST THOUGHT. Younger, he realized, than he as they stood studying each other over her grave. She had a calm and quiet beauty, a kind of simplicity he thought would have kept her beautiful into old age. But she hadn't lived to see thirty.

And even now, a grown man, he felt something inside him ache with that loss.

“Why are you here?” he asked her, and her smile bloomed again.

“Don't you want me to be?”

“You never came before.”

“Maybe you never looked before.” She shook her dark hair back, breathed deep. “It's such a pretty day, all this May sunshine. And here you are, looking so lost, so angry. So sad. Don't you believe there's a better place, Gage? That death is the beginning of the next?”

“It was the end of before, for me.” That, he supposed, was the black and white of it. “When you died, so did the better.”

“Poor little boy. Do you hate me for leaving you?”

“You didn't leave me. You died.”

“It amounts to the same.” There was sorrow in her eyes, or perhaps it was pity. “I wasn't there for you, and did worse than leave you alone. I left you with him. I let him plant death inside me. So you were alone, and helpless, with a man who beat you and cursed you.”

“Why did you marry him?”

“Women are weak, you must have learned that by now. If I hadn't been weak I would have left him, taken you and left him and this place.” She turned, just a bit, so she looked back toward the Hollow. There was something else in her eyes now—he caught a glint of it—something brighter than pity. “I should have protected you and myself. We would have had a life together, away from here. But I can protect you now.”

He watched the way she moved, the way her hair fell, the way the grass stirred at her feet. “How do the dead protect the living?”

“We see more. We know more.” She turned back to him, held out her hands. “You asked why I was here. I'm here for that. To protect you, as I didn't during life. To save you. To tell you to go, go away from here. Leave this place. There's nothing but death and misery here, pain and loss. Go and live. Stay and you'll die, you'll rot in the ground as I am.”

“Now see, you were doing pretty well up till then.” The rage inside him was cold, and it was fierce, but his voice was casual as a shrug. “I might've bought it if you'd played more Mommy and Me cards. But you rushed it.”

“I only want you safe.”

“You want me dead. If not dead, at least gone. I'm not going anywhere, and you're not my mother. So take off the dress, asshole.”

“Mommy's going to have to spank you for that.” With a wave of its hand the demon blasted the air. The force knocked Gage off his feet. Even as he gained them, it was changing.

Its eyes went red, and shed bloody tears as it howled with laughter. “Bad boy! I'm going to punish you the most of all the bad boys. Flay your skin, drink your blood, gnaw your bones.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” In a show of indifference, Gage hooked his thumbs in his front pockets.

The face of his mother melted away into something hideous, something inhuman. The body bunched, the back humping, the hands and feet curling into claws, then sharpening into hooves. Then the mass of it twisted into a writhing formless black that choked the air with the stink of death.

The wind blew the stench into Gage's face, but he planted his feet and stood. He had no weapon, and after a quick calculation, decided to play the odds. He bunched his hand into a fist and punched it into the fetid black.

The burn was amazing. He wrenched his hand free, jabbed again. Pain stole his breath, so he sucked more of it and struck out a third time. It screamed. Fury, Gage thought. He recognized pure fury even when he was flying over his mother's gravestone and slamming hard to the ground.

It stood over him now, stood atop the gravestone in the form of the young boy it so often selected. “You'll beg for death,” it told him. “Long after I've torn the others to bits, you'll beg. I will dine on you for years.”

Gage swiped blood from his mouth, smiled, though a wave of nausea rolled over him. “Wanna bet?”

The thing that looked like a boy dug its hands into its own chest, ripped it open. On a mad roll of laughter, it vanished.

“Fucking crazy. The son of a bitch is fucking crazy.” He sat a moment, catching his breath, studying his hand. It was raw and red with blisters, pus seeping from them and the shallow punctures he thought came from fangs. He could feel it healing as the pain was awesome. Cradling his arm, he got to his feet and swayed as dizziness rocked the ground under him.

He had to sit again, his back braced on the gravestone of his mother and sister, until the sickness passed, until the world steadied. In the pretty May sunshine, with only the dead for company, he breathed his way through the pain, focused his mind on the healing. As the burning eased, his system settled again.

Rising, he took one last look at the grave, then turned and walked away.

HE STOPPED BY THE FLOWER POT AND BOUGHT A splashy spring arrangement that had Amy, who worked the counter, speculating on who the lucky lady might be. He left her speculating. It was too hard to explain—and none of Amy's damn business—that he had flowers and mothers on the brain.

That was one of the problems—and in his mind they were legion—with small towns. Everybody wanted to know everything about everyone else, or pretend they did. When they didn't know enough, they were just as likely to make it up and call it God's truth.

There were plenty in the Hollow who'd whispered and muttered about him. Poor kid, bad boy, troublemaker, bad news, good riddance. Maybe it had stung off and on, and maybe that sting had gone deep when he'd been younger. But he'd had what he supposed he could call a balm. He'd had Cal and Fox. He'd had family.

His mother was gone, and had been for a very long time. That, he thought as he drove out of town, had certainly come home to him today. So he'd make a gesture long overdue.

Of course, she might not be home. Frannie Hawkins didn't hold a job outside the home—exactly. Her work
was
her home, and the various committees she chaired or participated in. If there was a committee, society, or organization in the Hollow, it was likely Cal's mother had a hand in it.

He pulled up behind the clean and tidy car he recognized as hers in the drive of the tidy house where the Hawkinses had lived as long as Gage remembered. And the tidy woman who ran the house knelt on a square of bright pink foam as she planted—maybe they were petunias—at the edges of her already impressive front-yard garden.

Her hair was a glossy blond under a wide-brimmed straw hat, and her hands were covered with sturdy brown gloves. He imagined she thought of her navy pants and pink T-shirt as work clothes. She turned her head at the sound of the car, then her pretty face lit with a smile when she saw Gage.

That was, always had been, a small wonder to him. That she smiled, and meant it, when she saw him. She tugged off her gloves as she rose. “What a nice surprise. And look at those flowers! They're almost as gorgeous as you are.”

“Coals to Newcastle.”

She touched his cheek, then took the offered flowers. “I can never have too many flowers. Let's go in so I can put them in water.”

“I interrupted you.”

“Gardening is a constant work in progress. I can't stop fiddling.”

The house was the same for her, he knew. She upholstered, sewed, painted, made crafty little arrangements. And still the house was always warm, always welcoming, never set and stiff.

She led him back through the kitchen and into the laundry room where, being Frannie Hawkins, she had a sink for the specific purpose of flower arranging. “I'm just going to put these in a holding vase, then get us something cold to drink.”

“I don't want to hold you up.”