Turning, she offered him his plated bagel. “We put the three pieces into one again. The Big Evil Bastard isn’t the only one with power here.”
Just a bit fascinated, Gage watched Cybil cut her half bagel in half before spreading what he could only describe as a film of cream cheese over the two quarters. While he loaded his own half, she sat and took a bite he estimated consisted of about half a dozen crumbs.
“Maybe you should just look at a picture of food instead of going to all the trouble to fix it.” When she only smiled, took another minuscule bite, he said, “I’ve seen Twisse kill my friends. I’ve seen that countless times, in countless ways.”
Her eyes met his, dark with understanding. “That’s the bitch of our precog, seeing the potentials, the possibilities, in brutal Technicolor. I was afraid when we went into the clearing to perform the ritual. Not just of dying, though I don’t want to die. In fact, I’m firmly against it. I was afraid of living and watching the people closest to me die, and worse, somehow being responsible for it.”
“But you went in.”
“We went in.” She chose an apple slice, took a stingy bite. “And we didn’t die. Not all dreams, not all visions are . . . set in stone. You come back, every Seven, you come back.”
“We swore an oath.”
“Yes, when you were ten. I’m not discounting the validity or the power of childhood oaths,” she continued, “but you’d come back regardless. You come back for them, for Cal and Fox. I came for Quinn, so I understand the strength of friendship. We’re not like them, you and I.”
“No?”
“No.” Lifting her coffee, she sipped slowly. “The town, the people in it, they’re not ours. For Cal and Fox—and now in a very real sense for Quinn and Layla—this is home. People go to great lengths to protect home. For me, Hawkins Hollow is just a place I happen to be. Quinn’s my home, and now so is Layla. And by extension, by connection, so are Cal and Fox. And so, it seems, are you. I won’t leave my home until I know it’s safe. Otherwise, while I’d find all this fascinating and intriguing, I wouldn’t shed blood for it.”
The sun beamed in the kitchen window, haloed over her hair, set the little silver hoops at her ears glinting. “I think you might.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, because the whole thing pisses you off. Wanting to kick its ass weighs on the side of you staying, seeing it through.”
She took another tiny bite of bagel and smiled at him. “Got me. So here we are, Turner, two pairs of itchy feet planted for love and general pissiness. Well. I want my shower,” she decided. “Would you mind staying at least until Quinn and Cal get back? Ever since Layla had her ‘snakes in the bathroom’ event, I’ve been leery about showering when I’m alone in the house.”
“No problem. You going to eat the rest of that?”
Cybil pushed the untouched quarter bagel toward him. As she rose to go to the sink to rinse out her coffee mug, he studied the black-and-blue cloud on the back of her shoulder. It reminded him they’d taken a beating on the night of the full moon at the Pagan Stone, and that she—unlike Cal, Fox, and himself—didn’t heal within moments of an injury.
“That’s a bad bruise on your shoulder there.”
She shrugged it. “You should see my ass.”
“Okay.”
With a laugh, she glanced over her shoulder. “Rhetorically speaking. I had a nanny who believed that a good paddling built character. Every time I sit down I’m reminded of her.”
“You had a nanny?”
“I did. But paddling aside, I like to think I built my own character. Cal and Quinn should be back soon. You might want to make another pot of coffee.”
As she walked out he gave the ass in question a contemplative study. Top of the line, he decided. She was an interesting, and to his mind, complicated mix in a very tidy package. While he had a fondness for tidy packages, he preferred simple contents when it came to fun and games. But for life and death, he thought Cybil Kinski was just what the doctor ordered.
She’d brought a gun along on their hike to the Pagan Stone. A little pearl-handled .22, which she’d used with the cold, calculated skill of a veteran mercenary. She’d been the one to do the research on the blood rituals—and she’d done the genealogies that had proven she, Quinn, and Layla were descendants of the demon known as Lazarus Twisse and Hester Deale, the girl it had raped over three centuries before.
And the woman could cook. Bitched about it, Gage mused as he rose to put on another pot of coffee, but she knew her way around the kitchen. He respected the fact that she generally said what was on her mind, and kept a cool head in a crisis. This was no weak-kneed female needing to be rescued.
She smelled like secrets and tasted like warm honey.
He’d kissed her that night in the clearing. Of course, he’d thought they were all about to die in a supernatural blaze and it had been a what-the-hell kind of gesture. But he remembered exactly how she’d tasted.
Probably not smart to think about it—or to think about the fact that she was upstairs right now, wet and naked. But a guy had to have some entertainment during a break from fighting ancient evil. And strangely, he was no longer in the mood for Atlantic City.
He heard the front door open, and the quick burst of Quinn’s bawdy laughter. As far as Gage could see, Cal had hit the jackpot in Quinn for the laugh alone. Then you added in the curvy body, the big baby blues, the brain, the humor, the guts, and his friend rang all the bells, blew all the whistles.
Gage topped off his coffee, and hearing only Cal’s foot-steps approach, got down another mug.
Cal took the mug Gage held out, said, “Hey,” then opened the refrigerator for milk.
For a man who’d likely been up since dawn, Cal looked pretty damn chipper, Gage noted. Exercise might release endorphins, but if Gage was a betting man—and he was—he’d put money on the woman putting the spring in his friend’s step.
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.”