Nora Roberts: The Pagan Stone

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.

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?”