by Nora Roberts
“They are now,” Layla murmured.
“It . . . it doesn’t understand this. It doesn’t know this. I can’t see . . .” Fox swayed, the world rocked around him. Then Layla gripped his hand, and it steadied again. “I’m holding its death.”
Nudging by Gage, Cybil edged closer. “How, Fox? How is that stone its death?”
“I don’t know. It holds all of us now. You know, from what we did. Our blood is what fused it. And this is part of what can—will—end it. We have the power to do that. We had it all along.”
“But it was in pieces,” Layla finished. “Until now. Until us—all of us.”
“We did what we came to do.” Reaching out, Quinn brushed her fingertips over the stone. “And we lived. Now we have a new weapon.”
“Which we don’t know how to use,” Gage pointed out.
“Let’s just get it home, find the safest place to keep it.” Cal looked around the clearing. “I hope nobody had anything important in their pack, because they’re incinerated. Coolers, too.”
“There go my Nutter Butters.” Fox took Layla’s hand, kissed the wounded palm. “Wanna take a walk in the moonlight?”
“I’d love to.” Could there be a better time, she thought. Could there be a more perfect time? “Good thing I left my purse at Cal’s. Which reminds me. Cal, I’ve got the keys in there, but I’d like to hang on to them if it’s okay with you and your father.”
“No problem.”
“What keys?” Fox asked as he rubbed some soot off her face.
“To the shop on Main Street. I needed them so Quinn and Cybil could look it over with me. It’s all fine for you to look at the space with carpenter eyes, or lawyer eyes, whichever, but if I’m going to open a boutique for women, I wanted women’s eyes.”
“You’re—what?”
“But I am going to need you, and hopefully your father, to go through it with me. And I’m going to charm your father into an I’m-in-love-with-your-son discount. Hopefully a deep discount because of deep love.” Fussily, she brushed at the dirt coating his shirt. “And the fact that even with the loan—and I’m counting on you to put in a really good word for me at the bank—I’m going to be on a very tight budget.”
“You said you didn’t want it.”
“I said I didn’t know what I wanted. Now I do.” Clear, green, amused, her eyes met his. “Did I forget to mention it?”
“Yeah, pretty much altogether.”
“Well.” She gave him a shoulder bump. “I’ve had a lot on my mind lately.”
“Layla.”
“I want my own.” She tipped her head to his shoulder as they walked. “I’m ready to go after what I want. After all, Jesus, if not now, when? By the way, consider this my twoweeks’ notice.”
He stopped, took her face in his hands as the others trudged and limped by them. “Are you sure?”
“I’m going to be too busy supervising the remodeling, buying stock, fighting demons to manage your office. You’ll just have to deal with it.”
He touched his lips to her forehead, her cheeks, her mouth, then grinned at her. “Okay.”
Exhausted, content, he walked with her behind the others on a path spattered with moonlight. They’d made magic tonight, he thought. They’d chosen their path, and found their way.
The rest was just details.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Epilogue
Years ago, after their blood brother ritual, Gage, Fox, and Caleb emerged from the woods, each with a piece of bloodstone. Now, it will become their weapon in the final fight against the demon they awakened. Winner take all . . .
Shared nightmares, visions of blood and fire, and random violence plague the longtime friends and Quinn, Layla, and Cybil, the women bound to them by Fate. None of them can ignore the fact that, this year, the demon has grown stronger—feeding off the terror it creates. But now the three pieces of the bloodstone have been fused back together. If only they could figure out how to use it.
A gambling man like Gage has no trouble betting on his crew to find a way. And though he and Cybil share the gift of seeing the future, that’s all they have in common. Were they to take their flirtation to the next level, it would be on their own terms, not because Fate decreed it. But Gage knows that a woman like Cybil—with her brains and strength and devastating beauty—can only bring him luck. Whether it’s good or bad has yet to be determined—and could mean the difference between absolute destruction or an end to the nightmare for Hawkins Hollow.
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THE PAGAN STONE
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
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Jove mass-market edition / December 2008
Copyright © 2008 by Nora Roberts.
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For old friends
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
—PROVERBS 29:18
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
Prologue
Mazatlán, Mexico
April 2001
SUN STREAKED PEARLY PINK ACROSS THE SKY, splashed onto blue, blue water that rolled against white sand as Gage Turner walked the beach. He carried his shoes—the tattered laces of the ancient Nikes tied to hang on his shoulder. The hems of his jeans were frayed, and the jeans themselves had long since faded to white at the stress points. The tropical breeze tugged at hair that hadn’t seen a barber in more than three months.
At the moment, he supposed he looked no more kempt than the scattering of beach bums still snoring away on the sand. He’d bunked on beaches a time or two when his luck was down, and knew someone would come along soon to shoo them off before the paying tourists woke for their room-service coffee.
At the moment, despite the need for a shower and a shave, his luck was up. Nicely up. With his night’s winnings hot in his pocket, he considered upgrading his ocean-view room for a suite.
Grab it while you can, he thought, because tomorrow could suck you dry.
Time was already running out: it spilled like that white, sun-kissed sand held in a closed fist. His twenty-fourth birthday was less than three months away, and the dreams crawled back into his head. Blood and death, fire and madness. All of that and Hawkins Hollow seemed a world away from this soft tropical dawn.
But it lived in him.
He unlocked the wide glass door of his room, stepped in, tossed aside his shoes. After flipping on the lights, closing the drapes, he took his winnings from his pocket, gave the bills a careless flip. With the current rate of exchange, he was up about six thousand USD. Not a bad night, not bad at all. In the bathroom, he popped off the bottom of a can of shaving cream, tucked the bills inside the hollow tube.
He protected what was his. He’d learned to do so from childhood, secreting away small treasures so his father couldn’t find and destroy them on a drunken whim. He might’ve flipped off any notion of a college education, but Gage figured he’d learned quite a bit in his not-quite-twenty-four years.
He’d left Hawkins Hollow the summer he’d graduated from high school. Just packed up what was his, stuck out his thumb and booked.
Escaped, Gage thought as he stripped for a shower. There’d been plenty of work—he’d been young, strong, healthy, and not particular. But he’d learned a vital lesson while digging ditches, hauling lumber, and most especially during the months he’d sweated on an offshore rig. He could make more money at cards than he could with his back.
And a gambler didn’t need a home. All he needed was a game.
He stepped into the shower, turned the water hot. It sluiced over tanned skin, lean muscles, through thick black hair in need of a trim. He thought idly about ordering some coffee, some food, then decided he’d catch a few hours’ sleep first. Another advantage of his profession, in Gage’s mind. He came and went as he pleased, ate when he was hungry, slept when he was tired. He set his own rules, broke them whenever it suited him.
Nobody had any hold over him.
Not true, Gage admitted as he studied the white scar across his wrist. Not altogether true. A man’s friends, his true friends, always had a hold over him. There were no truer friends than Caleb Hawkins and Fox O’Dell.
Blood brothers.
They’d been born the same day, the same year, even—as far as anyone could tell—at the same moment. He couldn’t remember a time when the three of them hadn’t been . . . a unit, he supposed. The middle-class boy, the hippie kid, and the son of an abusive drunk. Probably shouldn’t have had a thing in common, Gage mused as a smile curved his mouth, warmed the green of his eyes. But they’d been family, they’d been brothers long before Cal had cut their wrists with his Boy Scout knife to ritualize the pact.
And that had changed everything. Or had it? Gage wondered. Had it just opened what was always there, waiting?
He could remember it all vividly, every step, every detail. It had started as an adventure—three boys on the eve of their tenth birthday hiking through the woods. Loaded down with skin mags, beer, smokes—his contribution—with junk food and Cokes from Fox, and the picnic basket of sandwiches and lemonade Cal’s mother had packed. Not that Frannie Hawkins would’ve packed a picnic if she’d known her son planned to camp that night at the Pagan Stone in Hawkins Wood.
All that wet heat, Gage remembered, and the music on the boom box, and the complete innocence they’d carried along with the Little Debbies and Nutter Butters they would lose before they hiked out in the morning.
Gage stepped out of the shower, rubbed his dripping hair with a towel. His back had ached from the beating his father had given him the night before. As they’d sat around the campfire in the clearing those welts had throbbed. He remembered that, as he remembered how the light had flickered and floated over the gray table of the Pagan Stone.
He remembered the words they’d written down, the words they’d spoken as Cal made them blood brothers. He remembered the quick pain of the knife across his flesh, the feel of Cal’s wrist, of Fox’s as they’d mixed their blood.
And the explosion, the heat and cold, the force and fear when that mixed blood hit the scarred ground of the clearing.
He remembered what came out of the ground, the black mass of it, and the blinding light that followed. The pure evil of the black, the stunning brilliance of the white.
When it was over, there’d been no welts on his back, no pain, and in his hand lay one-third of a bloodstone. He carried it still, as he knew Cal and Fox carried theirs. Three pieces of one whole. He supposed they were the same.
Madness came to the Hollow that week, and raged through it like a plague, infecting, driving good and ordinary people to do the horrible. And for seven days every seven years, it came back.
So did he, Gage thought. What choice did he have?
Naked, still damp from the shower, he stretched out on the bed. There was time yet, still some time for a few more games, for hot beaches and swaying palms. The green woods and blue mountains of Hawkins Hollow were thousands of miles away, until July.
He closed his eyes, and as he’d trained himself, dropped almost instantly into sleep.
In sleep came the screams, and the weeping, and the fire that ate so joyfully at wood and cloth and flesh. Blood ran warm over his hands as he dragged the wounded to safety. For how long? he wondered. Where was safe? And who could say when and if the victim would turn and become attacker?
Madness ruled the streets of the Hollow.
In the dream he stood with his friends on the south end of Main Street, across from the Qwik Mart and its four gas pumps. Coach Moser, who’d guided the Hawkins Hollow Bucks to a championship football season Gage’s senior year, gibbered with laughter as he soaked himself, the ground, the buildings with the flood of gas from the pumps.
They ran toward him, the three of them, even as Moser held up his lighter like a trophy, as he splashed in the pools of gas like a boy in rain puddles. They ran even as he flicked the lighter.
It was flash and boom, searing the eyes, bursting in the ears. The force of heat and air flung him back so he landed in a bone-shattering heap. Fire, blinding clouds of it, spewed skyward as hunks of wood and concrete, shards of glass, burning twists of metal flew.
Gage felt his broken arm try to knit, his shattered knee struggle to heal with pain worse than the wound itself. Gritting his teeth, he rolled, and what he saw stopped his heart in his chest.
Cal lay in the street, burning like a torch.
No, no, no, no! He crawled, shouting, gasping for oxygen in the tainted air. There was Fox, facedown in a widening pool of blood.
It came, a black smear on that burning air that formed into a man. The demon smiled. “You don’t heal from death, do you, boy?”
Gage woke, sheathed in sweat and shaking. He woke with the stench of burning gas scoring his throat.
Time’s up, he thought.
He got up, got dressed. Dressed, he began to pack for the trip back to Hawkins Hollow.
One
Hawkins Hollow, Maryland
>
May 2008
THE DREAM WOKE HIM AT DAWN, AND THAT WAS A pisser. From experience, Gage knew it would be useless to try to find sleep again with images of burning blood in his brain. The closer it got to July, the closer it got to the Seven, the more vivid and vicious the dreams. He’d rather be awake and doing than struggling with nightmares.
Or visions.
He’d come out of the woods that long-ago July with a body that healed itself, and with the gift of sight. Gage didn’t consider the precognition wholly reliable. Different choices, different actions, different outcomes.
Seven years before, come July, he’d turned off the pumps at the Qwik Mart, and had taken the added precaution of locking Coach Moser in a cell. He’d never known, not for certain, if he’d saved his friends’ lives by those actions, or if the dream had been just a dream.
But he’d played the odds.
He continued to play the odds, Gage supposed as he grabbed a pair of boxers in case he wasn’t alone in the house. He was back, as he was every seventh year. And this time he’d thrown his lot in with the three women who’d turned his, Fox’s, and Cal’s trio into a team of six.
With Cal engaged to Quinn Black—blond bombshell and paranormal writer—she often spent the night at Cal’s. Hence the inadvisability of wandering downstairs naked to make coffee. But Cal’s attractive house in the woods felt empty to Gage, of people, of ghosts, of Cal’s big, lazy dog, Lump. And that was all to the good, as Gage preferred solitude, at least until after coffee.
He assumed Cal had spent the night at the house the three women rented in town. As Fox had done the headfirst into love with the sexy brunette Layla Darnell, they might’ve bunked at the house, or Fox’s apartment over his law offices. Either way, they’d stay close, and with Fox’s talent for pushing into thoughts, they had ways of communicating that didn’t require phones.