"I'll just go on back."

Thirty minutes pa.s.sed before Sage came out again. It was obvious she'd been crying even when she sent Layla a brilliant smile. "Just in case you're not aware, you're working for the most amazing, most beautiful, most incredible man in the entire universe. Just in case you didn't know," she added, and ran out.

With a sigh, Layla tried to bury her own questions-and the annoyance that had been working up through them- and went back to see how Fox had weathered what must have been an emotional half hour.

He sat at his desk with the look of a man who was seriously worn at the edges. "She cried," he said immediately. "Sage, she's not much of a crier, but she sure cut loose.

Then she called Paula, and Paula cried. I'm feeling a little overwhelmed, so if crying's on your agenda, could we get a continuance?"

Saying nothing, Layla walked to his fridge, got him a c.o.ke.

"Thanks. I've got an appointment to ... Since I just had a physical a few months ago, they're sending my records to the place where they do it.

Sage, she's got a friend in Hagerstown who's her doctor. So I've got- we've got-an appointment day after tomorrow, and the day after, since Paula's going to be ..."

"Ovulating?"

He winced. "Even with my upbringing, I'm not completely at ease with all this. So day after tomorrow. Eight. I've got court, so I'll just go there after." He rose, put a dollar in the jar. "This is f.u.c.king bizarre. There, that's better. So what's up next?"

"I am. Quinn told me you were supposed to meet with Cal and Gage last night, and that you wanted to meet with them to tell them about a theory you have."

"Yeah, then I got a better offer, so ..." He trailed off. He knew that look in her eyes. "That p.i.s.ses you off?" "I don't know. It depends. But it certainly baffles me that you have an idea you think worth discussing with your men friends, and not with me."

"I would have discussed it with you, but I was busy enjoying mutual multiple o.r.g.a.s.ms."

True, she had to admit. But not altogether the point. "I was with you all day in this office, all night in bed. I think there was time in that frame to bring this up."

"Sure. But I didn't want to bring it up."

"Because you wanted to talk to Cal and Gage first."

"Partly, because I've always talked to Cal and Gage first. A thirty-year habit doesn't change overnight." The first hint of annoyance danced around the edges of his voice. "And mostly because I wasn't thinking about anything but you. I didn't want to think about anything but you.

And I'm d.a.m.n well ent.i.tled to take time for that. I didn't consider my idea about Giles Dent as foreplay, and I sure as h.e.l.l didn't consider talk about human sacrifice as postcoital conversation. Hang me."

"You should've ... Human sacrifice? What are you talking about? What do you mean?"

The phone rang, and cursing, Layla reached across his desk to answer.

"Good afternoon, Fox B. O'Dell's office. I'm sorry, Mr. O'Dell's with a client. May I take a message?" She scribbled a name and number on Fox's memo pad. "Yes, of course, I'll see he gets it. Thank you."

She hung up. "You can call them back when we're done here. I need to know what you're talking about."

"A possibility. Ann wrote that Dent intended to do something no guardian had done, and that there'd be a price. The guardians are the good guys, right? That's how we've always looked at them, at Dent. The white hats. But even white hats can step into the gray. Or past the gray. I see it all the time in my line of work. What people do if they're desperate enough, if they feel justified, if they stop believing they have another choice. Blood sacrifice. That's the province of the other side.

Usually."

"The deer, the one Quinn saw in her dream last winter, lying across the path in the woods with its throat slit. The blood of the innocent. It's in the notes. We speculated that Dent did that, that he sacrificed the fawn.

But you said human."

"Do you think that sacrificing Bambi could have given Dent the power he needed to hold Twisse for three hundred years? The power to pa.s.s what he did to me, Cal, and Gage when the time came? That's what I asked myself, Layla. And I don't think it could've been enough."

He paused, because even now it left him slightly ill to consider it. "He told Hester to run. On the night of July seventh, sixteen fifty-two, after she'd condemned him as a witch, he told her to run. That came from you."

"Yes, he told her to run."

"He knew what was about to happen. Not just that he'd pull Twisse into some other dimension for a few centuries, but what it would cost to do it."

She put a fist to her heart, rubbed it there as she stared at Fox. "The people who were at the Pagan Stone."

"About a dozen of them, as far as we can tell. That's a lot of blood.

That's a major sacrifice."

"You think he used them." Slowly, carefully, she lowered to a chair.

"You think he killed them. Not Twisse, but Dent."

"I think he let them die, which being a lawyer I could argue isn't the same by law. Depraved indifference we could call it, except for the little matter of intent. He used their deaths." Fox's voice was heavy on the words. "I think he used the fire-the torches they carried, and the fire he made, to engulf them, to scorch the ground, to draw from that act-one no guardian had ever committed, the power to do what he'd decided had to be done."

The color died out of her face, leaving her eyes eerily green. "If it's true, what does that make him? What does that make any of us?"

"I don't know. d.a.m.ned maybe, if you subscribe to d.a.m.nation. I've been a subscriber for nearly twenty-one years now."

"We thought, we a.s.sumed, it was Twisse who caused the deaths of all those people that night."

"Maybe it was. In part, even if my idea's c.r.a.p, it was. How many of them would have gone to the Pagan Stone, looking to kill Giles Dent and Ann Hawkins if they hadn't been under Twisse's influence? But if we tip that to the side, and we look at the grays, isn't it possible Dent used Twisse? He knew what was coming, according to the journals, he knew.

He sent Ann away to protect her and his sons. He gave his life-white hat time. But if he took the others, that put a lot of bloodstains on the white."

"It makes horrible sense. It makes sickening sense."

"We need to look at it, and maybe when we do, we'll know better what has to be done." He studied her face, the shock that covered it. "Pack it in, go on home."

"It's barely two. I have work."

"I can handle the phones for the next couple of hours. Take a walk, get some air. Take a nap, a bubble bath, whatever."

Bracing a hand on the arm of the chair, she got slowly to her feet. "Is that what you think of me? That I crumble at the first ugly slap? That I can't or won't stand up to it? It took me a while to get my feet when I came to the Hollow-hang me-but I've got them now. I don't need a G.o.dd.a.m.n bubble bath to soothe my sensibilities."

"My mistake."

"Don't underestimate me, Fox. However diluted, I have that b.a.s.t.a.r.d's blood in me. It could be, in the long run, I can handle the dark better than you."

"Maybe. But don't expect me to want that for you, or you overestimate me. Now you might have a better idea why I didn't bring this up yesterday, or you might just want to stay p.i.s.sed about it."

She closed her eyes and steadied herself. "No, I don't want to be mad about it, and yes, I have a better idea." She also had a much better idea what Quinn had meant by her warning. Working, sleeping with, fighting beside. It was a lot to ask of a relationship.

"It's hard to separate the different things we are to each other," she said carefully. "And when the lines get blurred, it's harder yet. You said, when I came in, you were feeling overwhelmed. You overwhelm me, Fox, on a lot of levels. So I keep losing my balance."

"I haven't had mine since I met you. I'll try to catch you when you stumble if you do the same for me." And didn't that say it all. She glanced at her watch. "Oh, look at that. I nearly missed my afternoon break. Only a couple minutes left. Well, I'd better put them to good use."

She walked around the desk, leaned down. "You're on break, too, by the way, so this office is closed for the next thirty seconds." She laid her lips on his, brushing her fingertips over his face, back into his hair.

And there, she thought, as strange as it was, she found her balance again.

Straightening, she took his hand between both of hers for the last few seconds, then letting it go, stepped back. "Mrs. Mullendore would like to speak with you. Her number's on your desk."

"Layla," he said when she reached the doorway. "I'm going to have to give you longer breaks."

She smiled over her shoulder as she continued out. Alone, Fox sat quietly at his desk another moment, and thought of what a good man, even the best of men might do if all he loved was threatened.

WHEN THE SIX OF THEM WERE TOGETHER THAT evening in the spa.r.s.ely furnished living room of the rental house, Fox read the pa.s.sages from Ann's journal that had flicked the switch for him. He laid out his theory, as he had for Layla.

"Jesus, Fox. Guardian." Cal's resistance to the idea was palpable. "It means he protected. He'd dedicated his life to that purpose, and all the lives he remembered before the last. I've felt some of what he felt, I've seen some of what he saw."

"But not all." Gage paced in front of the window as he often did during discussions. "Bits and pieces, Cal, and that's it. If it went down this way, I'd say that these particular bits and pieces would be ones Dent would do his best to keep hidden, for as long as he could."

"Then why let Hester go?" Cal demanded. "Wasn't she both the most innocent there, and the most dangerous to him?"

"Because we had to be." Cybil looked at Quinn, at Layla. "We three had to become, and Hester's child had to survive for that to happen. It's a matter of power. The guardian, lifetime after lifetime, played by the rules-as far as we know-and could never win. He could never completely stop his foe." "And becoming more human," Layla added. "I was thinking that through today. Every generation, wouldn't he have become more human, with all the frailties? But Twisse remained as ever. How much longer could Dent have fought? How many more lifetimes did he have?"

"So he made a choice." Fox nodded. "And used the kind of weaponry Twisse had always used."

"And killed innocent people so he could buy time? So he could wait for us?"

"It's horrible." Quinn reached for Cal's hand. "It's horrible to think about it, to consider it. But I guess we have to."

"So if we go with this, you're descendents of a demon, and we're descendents of a ma.s.s murderer." Cal shook his head. "That's a h.e.l.l of a mix."

"We are what we make ourselves." There was a whiff of heat in Cybil's words. "We use what we have and we decide what we are. Was what he did right, was it justified? I don't know. I'm not going to judge him."

Gage turned from the window. "And what do we have?"

"We have words on a page, a stone broken in three equal parts, a place of power in the woods. We have brains and guts," Cybil continued.

"And a h.e.l.l of a lot of work to do, I'd say, before we put everything together and kill the b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

CHAPTER Thirteen

THERE WERE TIMES, TO FOX'S WAY OF THINKING, when a man just needed to be around guys. Things had been quiet since Block had pounded him into the sidewalk, and that gave him thinking time. Of course, one of his thoughts had been Giles Dent killing a dozen people in a fiery blaze, and that one wasn't sitting well with anyone.

They were in the process of reading the second journal now. Though there'd been no stunning revelations so far, he kept his own notes. He knew it wasn't always what a person said, or wrote, but what they were thinking when they said or wrote it.

It was telling to him that while she wrote about the kindness of her cousin, the movements in her womb, even the weather, the daily ch.o.r.es, Ann Hawkins wrote nothing of Giles or the night at the Pagan Stone for weeks after the events. So he spent some time turning over in his mind what she hadn't written.

He sat with his feet on Cal's coffee table, a c.o.ke in his hand, and chips within easy reach. The basketball game was on TV, but he couldn't concentrate on it. He had a big day tomorrow, he mused, and a lot on his mind. The trip to the doctor's office would be pretty quick, all in all.

There wasn't that much for him to do, really. And it wasn't anything he hadn't done before. A man of thirty knew how to-ha-handle the job.

He was prepared for court. The docket gave them two days, but he thought they'd wrap it up in one. After that, they'd all meet. They'd read, they'd discuss. And they'd wait.

What he should do was go home, get out Cybil's notes, his own, Quinn's transcriptions. He should take a harder, closer look at Layla's charts and graphs. Somewhere in there was another piece of the whole. It needed to be shaken out and studied.

Instead he sat where he was, took another swallow of c.o.ke. And said what was on his mind.

"I'm going into the doctor's tomorrow with Sage and Paula to donate sperm so they can have a kid."

There was a very long stretch of silence into which Cal finally said, "Huh."

"Sage asked me, and I thought about it, and I figured sure, why not?

They're good together, Sage and Paula. It's just strange to know that I'm going to try to get somebody pregnant tomorrow, by remote."

"You're giving your sister a shot at a family," Cal pointed out. "Not so strange."

Just that one remark made Fox feel considerably better. "I'm going to bunk here tonight. If I go home, I'm going to be tempted to go by and see Layla. If I see Layla, I'm going to want to get her naked."

"And you want to go in tomorrow fully loaded," Gage concluded.

"Yeah. Stupid and superst.i.tious probably, but yeah."

"You've got the couch," Cal told him. "Especially since I know you won't be jacking off on it."

Yes, Fox thought, there were times a man just needed to be around other guys. THE LATE MARCH SNOWSTORM WAS ANNOYING. IT would've been less so if he'd bothered to listen to the weather before leaving the house that morning. Then he'd have had his winter coat, since winter decided to make the return trip. A thin, chilly white coated the early yellow haze of forsythia. Wouldn't hurt them, Fox thought as he drove back toward the Hollow. Those heralding spring bloomers were hardy, and used to the caprices, even the downright nastiness, of nature.

He was sick of winter. Even though spring was the gateway to summer, and this summer the portal to the Seven, he wished the door would hit winter in the a.s.s on its way out. The problem was there'd been a couple of nice days before this season-straddling storm blew in. Nature held those warm, sunny days like a bright carrot on a frozen stick, teasing.

The snow would melt, he reminded himself. It was better to remember he'd had a pretty good day. He'd done his duty by his sister, and by his client. Now he was going home, getting out of the suit, having a nice cold beer. He was going to see Layla. And after tonight's session, he would do his best to talk himself into her bed, or talk her into his.

As he turned onto Main, Fox spotted Jim Hawkins outside the gift shop.

He stood, hands on his hips, studying the building. Fox pulled over to the curb, hit the b.u.t.ton to lower the window. "Hey!"

Jim turned. He was a tall man with thoughtful eyes, a steady hand. He walked to the truck, leaned on the open window. "How you doing, Fox?"

"Doing good. It's cold out there. Do you want a ride?"